I have previously published detailed ethnohistorical critiques of the narratives of d’Entrecasteaux’s subsequent sojourn in New Caledonia and shall not rehearse the details (Douglas 1970, 1999a: 73–83). Enough to say that Kanak actions – attacking and stealing from the French; and providing “incontestable proofs” that they were “anthropophagous: [that] they are avid for human flesh and do not hide it” – quickly pushed the authors of both narratives into angry disenchantment with the favourable accounts of Kanak behaviour, character and appearance published by Cook and Georg Forster (1754–94). The Kanak practice of cannibalism particularly appalled d’Entrecasteaux and drove him to “reclassify [them] amongst the most ferocious of peoples,” reconstituting Cook’s “good-natured” Kanak as “barbarous men” and “ferocious savages” (Cook 1777, 2: 114; d’Entrecasteaux 1808, 1: 332–4, 358–9; La Billardière 1800a, 2: 191).

Piron’s neoclassical pencil drawing of a “Man of Balade”^[24] was engraved by Copia (figure 6.4) for La Billardière’s Atlas as “Savage of New Caledonia hurling a spear” (1800b: pl. 35). Copia’s figure is at once as rampant as the original, but more ferocious in expression. “Hard” primitivist in style, neither figure is at all naturalistic – though the bodily proportions of the engraving are somewhat more realistic – since the classical ideal precluded depiction of the drought-induced emaciation of the people described in the texts. “They have little corpulence,” said d’Entrecasteaux, “their arms and legs are very spindly: an excessive thinness betrays their wretchedness. … [T]heir means of subsistence are very insufficient” (1808, 1: 330). In an earlier paper I argued that the symbolic significance of the “Savage of New Caledonia” is considerably more than ethnographic (Douglas 1999a, 73–83). It is the only engraving out of forty-six in La Billardière’s Atlas, which represents an indigenous person in aggressive pose and one of only two in which male genitals are prominently displayed – the other being the Admiralty Islander. The “Savage” is an intensely confrontational representation, surely intended to be so by the artist, the engraver, the publisher and, presumably, the author. I maintain, moreover, that the drawing is also a countersign of confrontational collective agency on the part of many of the Kanak of whom this figure was meant to be an ideal type. This case is sustained by a parallel scrutiny of the written texts.

La Billardière’s Atlas conveys strongly discordant visual messages about Kanak and Tongans, which might be seen to oppose New Caledonian cannibalism and violence to Tongan beauty and sociality, thereby anticipating Dumont d’Urville’s categorical opposition of Melanesians and Polynesians (Thomas 1997, 139–41). Forty-two percent (11 out of 24) of the objects representing “Effects of the Savages of New Caledonia” are weapons or things associated by the Europeans with war and cannibalism; in contrast, only 15 percent (6 out of 41) of the “Effects of the Inhabitants of the Friendly Islands” are weapons. The Atlas also contains several portraits of Tongan individuals as well as three elaborate scenes of Tongan social interactions (La Billardière 1800b, plates 8, 26–33, 37–8; my emphasis). On the other hand, any such disjunction is far less marked in the written texts which express profound ambivalence about Tongan actions and recount repeated instances of cross-cultural friction and violence during the French visit – as exemplified above. D’Entrecasteaux called Tongans “less wicked” than Kanak, but that was hardly strong approval given his opinion of Kanak (1808, 1: 359).

Artist, Piron; Engraver, Jacques-Louis Copia. Source: La Billardière 1800b: pl. 35. Photograph: Bronwen Douglas.

Within the total textual corpus of this voyage, visual and verbal, the apparent polarity in visual representations of Tongans and Kanak clearly did not signify the racialisation of observed human differences in the Pacific Islands and should not be taken as a precursor to Dumont d’Urville’s named racial types. It was not pro-“Polynesian” prejudice that inspired these eighteenth-century voyagers to represent Tongans as less violent than Kanak. Rather, their antithetical representations are countersigns of dominant motifs in the collective self-presentations of significant numbers of Tongans and Kanak respectively. As d’Entrecasteaux (1808, 1: 308) acknowledged, Tongans generally dissimulated their intentions the better to plunder the visitors, using force as required, while many Kanak endeavoured openly to intimidate and control them. Indeed, what prejudice there was favoured Kanak, thanks to the precedents set by Cook and Forster, and inflected the d’Entrecasteaux voyage narratives with the added bitterness of thwarted expectations. In contrast, ambivalence was the norm in European voyagers’ accounts of meetings with Tongans, a countersign of Tongan unpredictability as judged by European standards of propriety, consistency and order. Years later, de Rossel, who had sailed with d’Entrecasteaux and edited his dead captain’s journal for publication, wrote an official report on Dumont d’Urville’s voyage of 1826–29. He found Dumont d’Urville’s relations with Tongans painfully familiar:

Nearing the end of his voyage and, indeed, his life, d’Entrecasteaux’s optimistic curiosity to engage with natural man on a friendly, mutually beneficial basis had dissolved into despair in the face of cumulative indigenous intransigence, unpredictability, seemingly unprovoked violence, or cannibalism in Tonga, New Caledonia and, subsequently, in islands further north toward New Guinea. By this stage rumour alone sufficed for him to damn whole groups as “cannibals” and to deplore “the excesses in which the human species can indulge when customs are not moderated and softened by civilisation” (1808, 1: 422–3). It was a far cry from d’Entrecasteaux’s “simple and good,” “natural” Tasmanians and his early strictures against the corrupting “vices of the state of civilisation” (1808, 1: 242). Indigenous agency – their largely inscrutable demeanour, actions and desires – forced d’Entrecasteaux to confront the paradox and the dilemma of the Enlightenment vision of peaceful, philanthropic, scientific encounters with so-called “savages” who were also regarded as fellow human beings: that ethnocentric, hierarchical, paternalist, prescriptive and acquisitive strands in Enlightenment humanism would not accommodate other people’s assessments and exercise of their rights, desires and autonomy. “[I]t seems certain to me,” he wrote on leaving New Caledonia, “that [either] we must renounce visiting [Pacific Islanders] … , or we must inspire respect in them by very great severity” (1808, 1: 359). This was a chilling portent.