WAVES ACROSS THE SOUTH
A New History of Revolution and Empire
Sujit Sivasundaram

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Sujit Sivasundaram 2020

Cover images © The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo; josefstuefer/Getty Images; DEA/BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA/Getty Images

Sujit Sivasundaram asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007575541

Ebook Edition © August 2020 ISBN: 9780007575558

Version: 2020-07-13

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

A Note on Transliteration and Images

List of Images

Timeline

Maps

Introduction

1 Travels in the Oceanic South

2 In the South Pacific: Travellers, Monarchs and Empires

3 In the Southwest Indian Ocean: Worlds of Revolt and the Rise of Britain

4 In the Persian Gulf: Tangled Empires, States and Mariners

5 In the Tasman Sea: The Intimate Markers of a Counter-Revolution

6 At India’s Maritime Frontier: Waterborne Lineages of War

7 In the Bay of Bengal: Modelling Empire, Globe and Self

8 Across the Indian Ocean: Comparative Glances in the South

Conclusion

Afterword

References

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

A Note on Transliteration and Images

This is a work of world history that spans a wide terrain of culture and I have done my best to highlight indigenous and non-European names, given the intent of the work to consider the age of revolutions from the oceanic South. When a colonial name is used for the first time, the equivalent vernacular or indigenous term is highlighted in square brackets. I aim to move between indigenous, colonial and post-colonial names as I move across historical periods. Diacritics, ‘okina and other marks have been used where possible.

The images used in this book form a central part of the argument; many of them are colonial images. Some of these depict colonial invasion. Other images are of Indigenous peoples who have been racialised and gendered. They have been included here to destabilise and expose the colonial vision that gave rise to them and to make space instead for Indigenous peoples and their perspectives in the history of the age of revolutions.

The beautiful cover for Waves Across the South was inspired by the maps used by Pacific islanders, to find their way across the vast expanse of the Pacific. These long voyages are discussed in the introduction. These maps consisted of various natural materials including coconut fronds and shells, denoting, for instance, the position of islands or currents. It is an appropriate cover for a book which considers world history from a ‘sea of islands’ in the global South. Each of these seas found its place within the rise and fall of the waves which indigenous navigators moved across.

List of Images
Introduction

0.1 ‘Fishing Boats in the Monsoon, northern part of Bombay harbour’ [Mumbai] (1826), from Victoria and Albert Museum, IS:4: 18-1955.

0.2 ‘Surf boat landing European passengers at Madras [Chennai]’ from National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, PAD1842.

0.3 ‘Landing [Waler] horses from Australia; Catamarans and Masoolah boat’, Madras, c.1834, the Mitchell Library, Sydney, Australia, DG SV*/Hors/1(a–b).

0.4 ‘Catamaran on Madras [Chennai] Roads’, by Augustus Earle, copy from National Library Canberra, PIC: Solander Box A40, NK 12/126.

0.5 ‘Tuki’s map’, National Archives, Kew, MPG1/532.

0.6 Bugis nautical map, 1816, [1231], Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, KAART: VIII.C.a.2 (Dk 39-8).

Chapter Two

2.1 ‘Sauvages des îles de l’Amirauté’, Jacques-Louis Copia after Piron, reproduced in La Billardière’s Atlas (Plate 3), British Library.

2.2 ‘European ships as depicted on a Tongan clapping stick’ from the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (RV-34-6), likely to have been modelled on either the voyage of La Pérouse or the voyage of d’Entrecasteaux.

2.3 A fragment of sisi fale, ‘Coconut fibre waist garment, in all likelihood collected during the voyage of d’Entrecasteaux’ from the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, 71.1930.54.153.D.

2.4 George I of Tonga (1880s) in his eighties; photographed by James Edge-Partington, British Museum, Oc, A58.2.

2.5 ‘Mr. Mariner in the Costume of the Tonga Islands’ (1817), was used as frontispiece in a book edited by John Martin, An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, in the South Pacific Ocean: With an Original Grammar and Vocabulary of their Language (London: John Murray, 1816).

2.6 Port au Prince Memorial, Tonga and the beach where the massacre is alleged to have happened. Author’s photographs.

2.7 ‘Tepoanah Bay of Islands New Zealand a Church Missionary Establishment’ (watercolour, Augustus Earle, 1827), National Library of Australia, Canberra, NK 12/139.

2.8 ‘War speech’ by Augustus Earle (published 1838); Earle wrote of a ‘council for war’, ‘a rude parliament’, National Library of Australia, Canberra, PIC vol. 532 U2650 NK 668.

2.9 ‘King George. N. Zealand Costume’ by Augustus Earle (1828), National Library of Australia, Canberra, PIC Solander Box A37 T122 NK 12/84.

2.10 ‘The wounded chief Honghi [Hongi Hika] & his family’ by Augustus Earle (London: Lithographed and Published by R. Martin, 1838), National Library of Australia, PIC vol. 532 U2643 NK 668.

2.11 ‘Waikato, Hongi Hika and Thomas Kendall’ by James Barry, 1820, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, G/618.

Chapter Three

3.1 A later image of a man with mixed ancestry with a racialised title, published in an account of the French voyage of Nicolas Baudin. ‘Afrique Australe: Bastaard-Hottentot, ou Hottentot métis, revetu de ses habits de peau de mouton’ [Bastard Hottentot or mixed blood Hottentot, wearing his sheepskin clothes], in Voyage de Découvertes aux Terres Australes [Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands], (Paris: Arthur Bertrand, 1824), 2nd edn, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2010.96.56.

3.2 ‘A View of Table Mountain and Cape Town, at the Cape of Good Hope’, 1787, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, PAH2821.

3.3 ‘Bush Men Hottentots Armed for an Expedition’, in Samuel Daniell, A Collection of Plates Illustrative of African Scenery and Animals (London, 1804), British Library, 458.h.14, part 1.2.

3.4–5 Bo-Kaap in Cape Town, formerly known as the Malay Quarter, showing coloured housing, and where Awwal Mosque, shown below, was built in 1798. Author’s photographs.

3.6 Tipu Sultan of Mysore, a half-length portrait, c.1792, most likely by an unknown Indian artist, British Library.

3.7 ‘Isle of France, No.1: View from the Deck of the Upton Castle Transport, of the British Army Landing’, 1813, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, PW4779.

3.8 ‘Isle of France, No.5: The Town, Harbour, and Country, Eastward of Port Louis’, 1813, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, PW4783.

Chapter Four

4.1 ‘The Troops Landing at Rus ul Kyma [Ras al-Khymah] in I. Clark, W. William Haines and R. Temple, ‘Sixteen Views of Places in the Persian Gulph’, National Maritime Museum, PAF4799.

4.2 ‘The Storming of a Large Storehouse near Rus ul Kyma [Ras al-Khymah]’ in I. Clark et al., ‘Sixteen Views’, National Maritime Museum, PAF4800.

4.3 ‘Rus ul Kyma [Ras al-Khymah] from the S.W. and the Situation of the Troops’ in I. Clark et al. ‘Sixteen Views’, National Maritime Museum, PAF4801.

4.4 ‘Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia [Jamshedji Bamanji Wadia] (c.1754-1821)’, by J. Dorman, oil on canvas, c.1830, National Maritime Museum, BHC2803.

4.5 ‘Nourojee Jamsetjee [Naoroji Jamshedji] (1756–1821)’, by an unidentified artist, likely J. Dorman, c.1830, British Library.

Chapter Five

5.1 ‘Cora Gooseberry, Freeman Bungaree, Queen of Sydney & Botany’, brass breastplate, Mitchell Library, Sydney, R251B.

5.2 ‘Natives of New South Wales’ (undated, thought to be pre-1806), attributed to George Charles Jenner and William Waterhouse, the Mitchell Library, Sydney, Australia, DGB 10.

5.3 ‘Portrait of Bungaree, a native of New South Wales, with Fort Macquarie, Sydney Harbour in background’ by Augustus Earle, c.1826, The Art Archive.

5.4 ‘Bungaree, a native of New South Wales’ in Augustus Earle, Views in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land: Australian Scrapbook (London: J. Cross, 1830).

5.5 ‘The annual meeting of the native tribes of Parramatta’ by Augustus Earle, watercolour thought to depict 1826 meeting, National Library of Australia, Canberra, PIC Solander Box A35 T95 NK 12/57.

5.6 W. H. Fernyhough, A Series of Twelve Profile Portraits of Aborigines of New South Wales, Drawn from Life (Sydney: J. G. Austin, 1836). These lithographs are of Cora.

5.7 Elephant seals at King Island off Tasmania. Victor Pillement, ‘Nouvelle-Hollande, Île King, l’elephant-marin ou phoque à trimpe, vue de la Baie des Elephants’ (Paris: Arthur Bertrand, 1824), National Library of Australia, PIC vol. 599, PIC/11195/62 NK 1429.

5.8 Papers of George Augustus Robinson, vol. 8, part 2, Van Diemen’s Land, 30 September–30 October 1830’, Mitchell Library, Sydney: A7029, part 2.

Chapter Six

6.1 ‘One of the Birman Gilt War Boats Captured by Capt. Chads, R.N. in his successful expedition against Tanthabeen Stockade’, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, PAG9121.

6.2 Parabaik image, showing royal festival on water, British Library, Or 16761, f. 28r.

6.3 ‘The Conflagration at Dalla’, from Joseph Moore, Rangoon Views and Combined Operations in the Birman Empire, 2 vols (London: Thomas Clay, 1825-6), vol. 1, no. 17.

6.4 Shwedagon Pagoda, Author’s photograph.

6.5 ‘Sketch of Napoleon Bonaparte after his death at St Helena’, by Captain Frederick Marryat, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, F4154.

6.6 ‘The late King of Kandy from a drawing by a Native’, in John Davy, An Account of the Interior of Ceylon and of Its Inhabitants with Travels in that Island (London, 1821).

Chapter Seven

7.1 Length of Pendulum Experiment at Madras, in J. Goldingham, Madras Observatory Papers (1827).

7.2 ‘View of the Island of Gaunsah Lout [Gangsa Laut] with the Observatory and Encampments’, from John Goldingham, Report of the Length of the Pendulum at the Equator … Made on an Expedition … from the Observatory at Madras [Chennai](Madras, 1824), figure 11, at Royal Society, RS.10694.

7.3 ‘Plan of the Island of Gaunsah Lout on which the Experiments for ascertaining the Length of the Pendulum were made’, from Goldingham, Report of the Length of the Pendulum, figure 10, at Royal Society, RS.10693.

7.4 Horsburgh Lighthouse today, File 9/21, October 2012, from www.lightphotos.net.

7.5 J. T. Thomson, Chinese Stonecutters, 1851, from Thomson’s sketchbook, University of Otago Heritage Collections, 92/1239.

7.6 Waterspouts off Barbukit Point, 1851, from Thomson’s sketchbook, University of Otago Heritage Collections, 92/1217.

Chapter Eight

8.1 ‘Vue de la ville du Port Napoleon prise de la Montagne du Pouce’, from J.G. Milbert, Illustrations de Voyage pittoresque à l’Île de France (Paris: Nepveu, 1812), Bibliothèque nationale de France.

8.2 Thomas Bowler, ‘Cape Town and Table Mountain from Table Bay’.

Maps

Introduction

There is a quarter of this planet which is often forgotten in the histories that are told in the West. This quarter is an oceanic one, pulsating with winds and waves, tides and coastlines, and islands and beaches. The Indian and Pacific Oceans – taken as a collection of smaller seas, gulfs and bays – constitute that forgotten quarter, brought together here for perhaps the first time in a sustained work of history. These watery spaces of the south, studded with small strips of land, facing gigantic landmasses, occupy centre stage in what follows. They are cast as the makers of world history and the modern condition.[1]

The decades straddling the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which historians call the ‘age of revolutions’, traditionally encompass an Atlantic triangle of grand events. This triangle of events includes the American Revolution, the French Revolution and revolts in the Caribbean, such as the Haitian Revolution, and then independence movements in Latin America in the early nineteenth century.[2] Many things changed dramatically in the midst of these revolutions and the wars that accompanied them. Among what was made anew are the organisation of politics, the conception of equality and rights; the mechanics of governance and empire; the status of labour and enslaved people; the workings of technology, industry and science; and characterisations of nation and self as well as public consciousness. By looking to the forgotten quarter of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the intent is to turn the story of the dawn of our times inside out. It is to insist on the critical significance of the peoples and places in this oceanic tract in shaping the age of revolutions and so our present; and, accordingly, the need to meditate on this part of the world in considering the human future.

The age of revolutions is one of the most long-lasting labels of historical writing. It was used in the period and has carried on being used to describe the set of decades at the end of the eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth centuries. To look at this historical period again with a focus on the Indian and Pacific Oceans challenges the dominance of the West and Europe in the history we remember. This is especially important when what is at stake in descriptions of an age of revolutions is the lineage of our very rights and selfhood, and the memory of the contests and standoffs that gave rise to the world we inhabit. Approaching the past like this displaces the pernicious assumption that the soul of the world was crafted in the West and then travelled east; it rejects the notion that political subjectivity was forged in the Atlantic and that people elsewhere followed in the same tracks. The objectionable sentiment was phrased like this by one important early historian of the age of revolutions, R. R. Palmer: ‘[a]ll revolutions since 1800, in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa, have learned from the eighteenth-century Revolution of Western Civilisation.’[3] The history that follows refuses to cast Western and Atlantic Civilisation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the font of revolutionary sentiment. Nor was the West or the Atlantic the single origin of the modes of economic, technological, military and cultural expression that accompanied revolution.[4]

When the age of revolutions is reconceptualised from the oceanic south, an uncertain and violent tussle appears. Within the Indian and Pacific Oceans there was a contest between revolution and an imperial system which perverted the course of revolution and constituted a counter-revolution. Neither one of the forces of revolution and empire wiped the other out, but the balance shifted as the British empire in particular became the chief victor over these seas by the middle of the nineteenth century. While there were certainly other ideological, cultural and political impulses which drove the nineteenth-century British empire, one intent of this work is to track its origins as a counter-revolution.[5] The manner in which this empire suppressed the many possibilities of this time points to sinister imperial manoeuvring in the global South.

In these two oceans, the age of revolutions should be seen first and foremost as a surge of indigenous and non-European politics which met the invaders and colonists who washed ashore. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the inhabitants of the Indian and Pacific Oceans adopted and at times forcibly took from outsiders new objects, ideas, information and forms of organisation, all of which were used for their own purposes. One might think here of notions of monarchy, weapons, political association, science and medicine, and debate in the press. Oceanic peoples also recalibrated existent traditions and beliefs, modes of governance and war and relations with neighbours, in order to meet these new times. Here one might bring to mind Islamic or Buddhist reform or the changes in established long-distance relations for migration and trade. All this constituted the Indian and Pacific Oceans’ age of revolutions. As a term of description, ‘indigenous’ has to be defined expansively in these seas. For oceanic peoples were often on the move and may be better described as diasporas than indigenous populations; they had complex cultural heritages. Settlers and indigenous peoples could also at times borrow from each other, making it difficult to draw a clear distinction between who and what was indigenous and who and what fell outside the category.

A sequence of voices across the sea embody an energetic indigenousness: Pacific Islander, Māori, Aboriginal Australian, Arab, Qasimi, Omani, Parsi, Javanese, Burmese, Chinese, Indian, Sinhalese, Tamil, Malay, Mauritian, Malagasy and Khoisan perspectives come into view below.[6] These and other peoples took passage as sailors, partners, fighters, labourers and travellers in these decades of unprecedented globalisation. Indeed, the most enjoyable part of researching this book was discovering links across the water through regions and territories that have not been cast together.

In addition to a surge of indigenous and non-European politics, the age of revolutions in these oceans saw a reconfiguration of political organisation. Empires, political units, kingdoms and chieftaincies were realigned or reorganised from Oman to Tonga and from Mauritius to Sri Lanka. Political tussles over water were poised such that relatively new forces could find their own way, acting as independent states or reacting to a colonial definition of what could count as a state. Venerable Eurasian empires, Ottoman, Mughal and Qing, were transformed at their maritime frontiers. New political formations, including monarchies inaugurated in the Pacific, could also cohere through the adoption of the maritime and military techniques of warring Europeans. Refugees of the Napoleonic wars could serve as advisers, for instance in Burma [Myanmar] to the kingdom of Ava as it fought Britain, or in Tasmania to a heavily militarised British colonial state. Oceanic peoples, including Asian sailors called lascars at the time, could establish a political pathway within the British empire’s need for allies and collaborators without finding full meaning within empire. Those who took passage on European ships, or who worked on grand projects as labourers and technicians, could use this moment of opportunity to contemplate their selfhood and futures in radically new ways.

The British empire sought to neutralise or adopt the ideas, people, structures and modes of organisation which arose from the age of revolutions. It moved from sea to land and saw itself as an empire for liberty in sites as different as Singapore and Mauritius. In addition to seeing itself as spreading liberty, there were many ways in which the British empire acted in reactionary fashion in the age of revolutions. There was a lineage of wars over water across the first half of the nineteenth century, all of which employed the period’s characteristic ‘total war’, including looting and wide-scale bloodshed.[7] In the Bay of Bengal, for instance, these wars drew military men and techniques from the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars linking them to the global warfare of this moment. Britain’s invasive missions to the Gulf in 1809–10 and 1819–20 stood against a brand of Islamic reform which was compared with revolutionary sentiment elsewhere. The British fear of republicanism motivated invasions in Java and Mauritius in 1810–11. In all of these cases, British colonial and maritime war in these years was forged out of the age of revolutions in relation to tactics, ideology, motivation and forms of comparison.

Another way in which empire was made anew in the age of revolutions was through new classifications of peoples and kinds.[8] Scientific and natural historical classifications were linked with the surveillance regime of the expanding colonial state. The relation between science and colonialism can seem paradoxical; for new sciences were seen in the period as the harbingers of an age of reason. The way people engaged with water, from how they fished, to how they communed with sea creatures, to how they navigated the sea, or the artefacts they used or descriptions of their allegedly nomadic existences, easily led into colonial classifications of race and gender. The possibility of intensive comparison around neighbouring islands and settlements, which imperial writers cast as self-contained sites despite long histories of migration, meant that these oceanic basins became ideal for working through ideas of difference and for policies of segregation.

The consolidation of Britishness and whiteness in the new port cities from Port Louis to Sydney, which symbolised the forward march of this maritime Britannia, depended on sea-facing mariners, alleged pirates and private traders transforming themselves into respectable shore residents with families in situ and under Christian marriage. These colonists moved from itinerant sea-trades to settled interests in land and pasture. The moral duties of white maleness could overtake other ways of organising race and gender near the sea. Sporadic colonisation across the sea, for instance through escaped convicts, missionaries or private traders and slavers was made more ‘systematic’ for instance in New Zealand. The veto power of the slogan of ‘free trade’ was useful here. Maritime patriotism also became part and parcel of this transformation and its forward charge came partly from such enterprises as anti-slavery and anti-piracy and their legacy in more extensive land-based colonial enterprises. Such patriotism is often missed in existing retellings of this era which focus on large continental hinterlands and which point to ‘agrarian patriotism’, the glorification of land and agriculture, as an ideology which supercharged the British advance in the East.[9]

It is fitting, given the setting of this story in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, to describe this contest between revolution and empire as a clash of waves. To think with waves is to think with the push-and-pull dynamic of globalisation. It is to consider the surging advance of connection across the sea as well as turbulent disconnection and violence across waters.[10] It is to contemplate the formation of crests as well as the breaking of waves on the beach. All this was the case for revolution and empire, for both of these were susceptible to breakage and could never come to full success in these decades.

Thinking with waves is also apposite in reminding ourselves that the physical setting of this story matters. The physicality of rain, storms, squalls, cyclones, waterspouts, fevers and earthquakes had to be combatted to make global empire work, through regimes of study, tabulation, mapping, modelling, medicine and urban fortification and planning.[11] The irregular shape of the Earth itself had to be managed to allow ships on the sea to navigate their course and to lubricate free-trade empire, for instance between India and China or Australia. Surveying of the sea and the coastline was a first task that ran ahead of empire at a time when new scientific disciplines were being forged. Such surveying fed into the establishment of bases, transit points, ports and settlements across these oceans as definitions of sovereignty travelled from ship to shore and were transported into the interior.

The sea was not easily passed: ships featured here disappeared, caught fire, exploded, or were tossed into the air together with horses and fighting men, or ran aground in coral reefs. Ships were rebooted after being taken over by warring nations at a time of global war or pirated. In this sense too the ship was an unstable platform. The port city of these oceans was a place of meditation on shipwrecks, as the remains of vessels lined the shore. Water had to be safely navigated for purposes of colonial war, and the intersecting terrain of land, sea and rivers, close to the shore and leading inland, could be deadly for the British in terms of health and given the ill-suitedness of their techniques and logistics of conflict to such terrain. Conflict over water did not automatically privilege Europeans versus non-Europeans, though these two groups were erroneously separated as maritime versus land-based.

The significance of the physical setting to the history can be seen in some intriguing images. Take, for instance, ‘Fishing Boats in the Monsoon, northern part of Bombay harbour’ (1826), which is right in the middle of the period covered here. [Fig. 0.1] Produced in India, it was based on a sketch by Colonel John Johnson of the Bombay Engineers and shows two Indian craft battling the foaming waves.[12] It was not only fishermen such as those depicted here who used Indian craft. Take another image from another Indian port showing what it took to disembark, ‘Surf boat landing European passengers at Madras’ (c.1800) [Fig. 0.2]. Notably, there are just two Europeans in the foreground of this picture. Britons in red uniform feature in the ship behind. It is the Indians who battle the waves through their labour and this labour is co-opted to make an empire practicable. A good partner image for this one, which is in keeping with the uncharted connections across the Indian and Pacific Oceans in view in this book, is ‘Landing Horses from Australia; Catamarans and Masoolah boat, Madras’ (c.1834) [Fig. 0.3]. Though an incongruous European in hat and beard and jacket stands in the waters, it is the Indians who work with the animals in the boat who make it possible for poor horses to travel across vast distances of water. These images compare Indians with Europeans, but they also demonstrate an interest in Indian craft as well as European vessels. Notice Augustus Earle’s ‘Catamaran on Madras Roads’ [Fig. 0.4].

Fig. 0.1 ‘Fishing Boats in the Monsoon, Northern part of Bombay [Mumbai] Harbour’ (1826)

0.1 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Fig. 0.2 ‘Surf boats landing European passengers at Madras [Chennai]’, c.1800

0.2 © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

It is the ingenuity of the seafarers of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, so strikingly illustrated in these images, which motivated me to write Waves Across the South. The book takes a chronological journey through these critical decades, from the dramatic voyages in the 1790s to the energetic debates in the press and in civil associations in the burgeoning port cities of the 1840s. As it does this, it tours the misplaced histories of the southern seas in the age of revolutions and follows the rise of the British empire. Along the path from revolution to empire, our travels take into account the meeting of cultures, indigenous and colonial revolt, imperial annexation, conceptions of race and gender, conflict across the seas, global knowledge and the growth of public sentiment around programmes of liberal reform. Each of these seas had separate stories in the age of revolutions but the expansion of the British empire created dense connections between these distant realms.

Fig. 0.3 ‘Landing [Waler] horses from Australia; Catamarans and Masoolah boat’, Madras, c.1834

0.3 © State Library of New South Wales

Fig. 0.4 ‘Catamaran on Madras [Chennai] Roads’, by Augustus Earle, 1829

0.4 © Augustus Earle, National Library of Australia, NK12/126.

Though spanning less than seventy years, these decades sit within a long and brilliant tapestry of history in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. European intrusion appears here as a late entry.

Long-distance voyages undertaken by so-called Austronesians saw the settlement of the vast realms of the Pacific Ocean, including more than 500 islands, from west to east from present-day Taiwan, and beginning from around 6,000 years ago.[13] Much before this, around 65,000 years ago or longer before human beings had migrated from the landmass called Sunda to Sahul, the latter of which linked today’s New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania. Austronesians reached Aotearoa or New Zealand around 1300 CE and the distant foothold of Rapa Nui or Easter Island around 300–400 CE. They travelled in single outrigger or large double-hulled canoes, taking with them water, and fermented breadfruit, which could last for about three months. Sometimes they would take plants that could be grown on landing, and livestock, domesticated pigs, dogs and chickens. Settlers who roamed further into Oceania formed the ‘Lapita’ sphere of settlement; Lapita settlers valued obsidian or glass-like stone and took it to the region of the Pacific which was far distant from Asia. The styles of their pottery spread with them. There was a great deal of migration between these islands. As one archaeologist writes: ‘Within the Lapita sphere you might have met the same man or woman one year in Tonga, and the next on New Britain or in Vanuatu. It would seem that about 3,000 years ago people from New Guinea Islands and out as far as Tonga and Samoa were more interconnected than at any time until the age of mass transportation began some two centuries ago.’[14]

There then arose a triangle of settlement across the vast Pacific, which had as its points Hawai‘i, Rapa Nui and Aotearoa. This zone of settlement is huge; it is about the size of Europe and Asia put together. The ‘Polynesian’ and ‘Micronesian’ systems of navigation aided these successful voyages. The islanders relied on star positions at night and the sun during the day, the speed of wind and current, the swell of the sea caused by different kinds of winds, and the signs of birds and other natural elements. They waited for the right winds. They calculated their position by dead reckoning. But from about 1300, voyages became less frequent, and a series of islands in the triangle were abandoned. It was into an intricate world of shared language and politics that early modern European voyagers arrived: Spanish, Portuguese, English and French. And it was these voyages which once again reconnected indigenous peoples across the wide span of Oceania. Islanders recalled their historic migrations. The vibrant non-European politics of the seventy years covered in this book were shaped by these memories and the renewed connections with oceanic neighbours that European vessels brought.

The Indian Ocean too was long known from multiple cultural perspectives.[15] Coastal and regional trade was well established prior to the common era: by 2000 BCE there was contact between the civilisations of the Red Sea, the Gulf and the Indus Valley. South Asian merchants, Malay mariners and Buddhist monks, set a template for the Indian Ocean in the first centuries of the common era, as did the eventual emergence of empires like the Sasanians in Persia, the Guptas in India, and Funan in Southeast Asia.

South Asia has often been seen as a pivot of the Indian Ocean world, as it served as a stepping stone from east to west and the other way around. But connections across the ocean also involved the Middle East, East Asia and Africa. Islam should not be seen as the only factor which wove the ocean together from the seventh century; for the spread of Buddhist and Hindu doctrines to Southeast Asia occurred in the first five centuries of the common era. Trade and commerce were important to the making of the Indian Ocean world. Prior to the arrival of European empires, companies and private traders, there was a pattern of commerce across this sea which was under the control of sea-facing states, port cities and merchant diasporas. Trade was modulated by the seasons of the monsoon. Among the traded items were spices, precious stones and pearls, as well as rice and grain and indeed enslaved peoples.

Historians see the first European imperial enterprises as operating within this world, through partnerships with indigenous political elites, lenders and merchants. The Portuguese sought to reorganise trade through an insistence on the protection afforded by their licences and taxes. The Dutch, who were drawn to South Asia for cottons, indigo, saltpetre, silk, cinnamon and pepper, sought to follow in their tracks. Yet with the Dutch and the English came a new structure, the world-spanning joint-stock company. In India, this meant that Europeans established strategic settlements at ports. For the British the main bases became Madras, Bombay and Calcutta, around which their control of the Indian Ocean radiated. Even this quick sketch of the long histories of the Indian and Pacific Oceans points to the need to analyse the advent of the Europeans and the significant bridge between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which marked the powerful ascent of Europe in these oceans.

It is the starting premise of this book that revolution and counter-revolutionary empire did not obliterate these long-term histories. But the juxtaposition of new and old quickened with the extent of contact and globalisation making it difficult at times to differentiate what already existed from what had newly arrived. And with that quickening, the way that people thought of themselves, their territories and the globe itself was shifting. This was another characteristic feature of this age of revolutions and of the rise of empire.

The impact of the times as a phase of globalisation is evident in how indigenous peoples saw their seas, their histories and their place on the globe. Two treasures bear this out.

The First Fleet, the first detachment of convicts, arrived to found a colony at New South Wales in 1788, the year before the French Revolution. In 1793, two kidnapped Māori were brought to Norfolk Island off the coast of Australia, in order to teach convicts how to work the flax that grew on many of the island’s coastal cliffs. These two kidnapped men are now commonly called Tuki and Huru. They came to Norfolk Island on the Shah Hormuzear, which was crewed by lascars, and which had arrived at Port Jackson [now in Sydney] from Calcutta.[16] On their way to Norfolk Island they travelled in the company of 2,200 gallons of wine and spirits, six Bengal ewes and two rams. They were the first Māori to live in a European community, and the kidnapped Tuki, a priest’s son, and Huru, a young chief, became close to the commandant of the convict settlement, Philip Gidley King. King was unable to discern much about flax-working from the pair, given that it was women who worked the flax in their communities. Yet he got Tuki to a draw a map.

One commentator noted the extent of Tuki’s interests: ‘Too-gee [Tuki] was not only very inquisitive respecting England & c. (the situation of which, as well as that of New Zealand, Norfolk Island and Port Jackson, he well knew how to find by means of a coloured general chart).’ If Tuki’s use of the coloured general chart indicated his adoption of European cartography and his interest in locating his home in relation to neighbouring territories, he was also ‘very communicative respecting his own country … Perceiving he was not thoroughly understood, he delineated a sketch of New Zealand with chalk on the floor.’[17]

Tuki’s map of his ‘country’ is extraordinary not only because it is thought to be the oldest map drawn by a Māori. It shows ‘Ea-hei-no-maue’ and ‘Poo-name-moo’ which should be read as He Ahi Nō Maui or Mauis’s fire, the North Island; and Te Wai Pounamu or Greenstone Water, the South Island.[18] It combined a rich variety of elements: a double-dotted line across the North Island shows the road taken by the spirits of the dead or wairua and the place for leaping off into the underworld. On the map, this road ends with the representation of a sacred pōhutukawa tree. Within this map, and in the conversations that happened around its making, Tuki attended to population, harbours, the concentration of fighting men and the availability of water. All this demonstrates that there was an intermixing of Māori topography with European cartographic interest, which was driven for instance by the need to discover stopping places for their ships.[19] Tuki’s map sits within a larger set of Māori maps made for interpreters, surveyors, explorers and whalers among others. On their return to New Zealand, Tuki and Huru became important intermediaries between Māori and the British.[20]

If Tuki’s map may stand here at the start of Waves Across the South for the Pacific, from the Indian Ocean comes a second intriguing map, once more showing how people were responding to this age of dramatic change by attempting to find and place themselves in a world in flux. This is a Bugis map, inscribed with Muslim era date AH 1231 (1816), shortly after the end of the Napoleonic wars, and it is worth noting here that British Singapore was established in 1819. The home of the Bugis is Celebes in south Sulawesi in today’s Indonesia and their wide circuit of sailing included northern Australia, where their vessels were known to Aboriginal Australians who traded with them. They converted to Islam from the seventeenth century.

Fig. 0.5 ‘Tuki’s map’

0.5 © The National Archives, ref. MPG1/532 (5)

The tattered and browned cowhide Bugis map, with coasts and islands in green and red ink, is one of a very rare set.[21] It has place names in Bugis script and records sea depths. It marks Dutch places of colonisation with flags, including Manila, which in fact was not Dutch but Spanish. It even shows a small section of the coast of Australia, and the Andaman and Nicobar islands. Once again, like Tuki’s map, this chart can’t be read purely as an indigenous artefact because it shows clear evidence of the impact of European traditions. (One possible theory is that it was heavily influenced by a map of the region drawn by a French captain, Jean-Baptiste d’Après de Mannevillette.[22]) The map includes the sign of a compass, now an object which plays a critical role in Bugis navigation today. The compass was already in use by Bugis by the eighteenth century.[23]

Fig. 0.6 Bugis nautical map, 1816

0.6 © Bugis nautical map on cowhide, AH 1231, c.1816, Kaart: VIII.C.a.2, Special Collections, Utrecht University Library.

Despite pointing to the adoption of European techniques, this map is consistent with established Bugis skills of navigation. Bugis navigators had to contend with the intersecting terrain of many islands and seas in Southeast Asia, a different challenge to that faced by Pacific islanders, including Māori, who navigated the open Pacific.[24] Noteworthy then is how the maritime fringe is presented in heavy and exaggerated detail, and islands and creeks are closely studied. This contrasts with the interiors of the land, where mountains alone are placed on the map, as they would have been seen from the sea.[25] These mountains probably helped with navigation.

The Bugis controlled Riau in the eighteenth century and made it a centre of trade between Europe, the Chinese and the Malay archipelago. Eventually, in 1784, the Riau Sultanate was taken over by the Dutch, like Makassar, another Bugis stronghold, which had fallen to the Dutch in 1667. This led to Bugis spreading across the region, roving the seas as traders, where they would be categorised as pirates by the British into the nineteenth century. They fought against the British in the fall of the Yogyakarta in Java in 1812.[26] However, the British relied on Bugis to connect up the early port of Singapore to regions further east as intermediaries, and the arrival of the Bugis fleet in Singapore, consisting of several thousand men, was a notable event in the port’s calendar.[27]

As these two objects demonstrate, Europeans did not have a monopoly over mapping, a form of knowledge which is often cast as the centrepiece of European imperial expansion. These maritime maps demonstrate the creativity and confidence of indigenous perspectives in the age of revolutions. While these Māori and Bugis maps cannot be read for pure indigenous traditions, they provide evidence of exchange and tension with European knowledge, at a time of dramatic flux.[28] Fittingly then, in another Bugis map a European steamboat appears in the lower left corner; even one of the proudest tokens of progress in the era, the steamboat, could be placed within Bugis sensibility.[29] Across the waves of the south, it is these unexpected features of indigenous politics, knowledge and practice that this book hopes to establish. Despite the powers of mechanised steamboats, indigenous and non-European peoples could find their paths in these waves of the southern hemisphere.

1
Travels in the Oceanic South

‘I will stick you on the Forecastle and set the Otaheiti men to shoot you.’[1] This was one of Peter Dillon’s favourite expressions. He captained the 400-ton St Patrick as it sailed from Valparaiso in Chile, in October 1825, to Calcutta (now Kolkata), the bustling hub of the new British empire. Dillon had a penchant for storytelling. He was full of detail about the grand European voyages across the Pacific in the centuries that had just passed.[2] Dillon named one of his sons after Napoleon, whom he venerated: the son was nicknamed Nap. Seen from this perspective, perhaps his threat to use Tahitian men against his white crew was Napoleonic. The aim was to stem the possibility of mutiny.

Dillon was an erratic maritime adventurer and private trader with aspirations of greatness, an Irishman born in French Martinique in 1788. If he is to be believed, he had served in the Royal Navy at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.[3] He then sailed for the Pacific. He was known to foster close relationships with South Pacific islanders, an attachment which began when he was resident in Fiji in 1808–9, when he made ‘considerable progress in learning their language’.[4] Pacific islanders called him ‘Pita.’[5] From 1809, he set himself up in Sydney, using it as a base for his private trade across the Pacific. He moved to Calcutta in 1816 and traded between Bengal and the Pacific. By this time, he had married. Mary Dillon accompanied him on his voyages from Calcutta.

In these journeys, Dillon linked many of the sites of the Waves Across the South together. This is why his life is a good starting point for our travels. His voyage of 1825–6 falls squarely in the middle of the age of revolutions and Dillon’s career is a telling gauge of changing times. For the British empire followed in the wake of people who may be placed next to Dillon, namely private traders, sailors, castaways, missionaries and so-called pirates. This new empire sought to reform their activities with more systematic colonisation, ‘free trade’ and liberal government.[6] In keeping with this shift to formal empire, Dillon spent the later phase of his life in Europe. He now combined a new set of interests, presenting plans for the settlement of the Pacific to the governments of France and Belgium and publishing a proposal for the colonisation of New Zealand by the British. In the 1840s, he was an active member of a characteristic association of reform in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the Aborigines Protection Society, which was tied up with the humanitarian heritage of anti-slavery. He also set out a plan for sending Catholic missionaries to the Pacific.[7] He died in Paris in 1847.

ASTOUNDING ITINERARIES FROM REVOLUTION TO EMPIRE

To return to Dillon’s voyage of 1825–6, the link to the age of revolutions becomes clear through the history of Dillon’s ship and its crew. According to its third mate, the St Patrick had been ‘taken and retaken by different belligerents’ involved in the independence struggles across Latin America in the early nineteenth century.[8] Under Dillon’s command, it sailed under Chilean colours to Calcutta and on leaving Valparaiso, the Europeans on board were recorded in the port register as ‘naturalised Chileans’.[9] The crew of the St Patrick thought it to be the second vessel to enter India under Chilean colours.[10] Dillon was entered in the register as ‘Don Pedro Dillon’. The ship also had an ‘enormous green flag with yellow Irish harp in it’. This meant that it could also fly Irish colours.

Around twenty British sailors who joined the crew had served in Chile’s war of independence against Spain, under the command of Thomas Cochrane, a British naval officer who played a pivotal role in the rebel navies of Chile, Peru and Brazil in the 1820s.[11] These men and others combined with a crew who had laboured under Dillon’s command in a previous voyage, in the Calder, from Sydney to Valparaiso. The Calder’s crew had included ‘eight Europeans and four Tahitians’.[12] Now, on the St Patrick, eleven Pacific islanders were said to be part of the crew.[13] In an act of mockery of the imperial establishment, Dillon named the Tahitians ‘Governor Macquarie’, after the governor of Sydney; ‘Major Goulborn’, after the colonial secretary of New South Wales, and so on.[14]

The Calder also had on board a Chinese cook and a Bengali steward.[15] Dillon’s fondness for Pacific islanders did not extend to the Bengali. The captain kept a sheet headed ‘Crimes’ on which he listed the Bengali’s wrongs, such as the breaking of crockery or the loss of spoons overboard.[16] Outbound from Valparaiso, a Marquesan on board the St Patrick died on the voyage, despite sailing for twelve months in the hope of returning to Tahiti, from where he could get back home.[17] When the St Patrick reached Calcutta, four of the eleven Pacific islanders who were part of the ship’s crew died.[18]

Also on the St Patrick was the son of the governor at Valparaiso, Miguel Zenteno. A disturbing story told by George Bayly, the third mate, who kept a record of his time with Dillon, involves Dillon’s wife Mary: ‘His wife lived on board and he very frequently gave her a thrashing …’[19] Bayly himself later wrote of his release from Dillon’s aggressive captaincy in reaching Calcutta: ‘never was a captive bird more pleased to get its liberty than I was.’[20] There were other captives on board: horses and donkeys bound for Tahiti were also on the St Patrick.[21]

The crew of the St Patrick illustrates the unlikely comradeship which was typical of this period.[22] These ship-board relationships were unstable, unpredictable and violent and based on gender, status and race and this too was pretty characteristic of this time. Despite being so typical, the St Patrick’s journey became important. Before docking in Calcutta, Dillon and Bayly solved one of the greatest mysteries of their age, the fate of the French navigator La Pérouse whose expedition had vanished in the Pacific. It was last sighted at the newly found colony of New South Wales in 1788.

When Dillon came to the island of Tikopia, the remains of an extinct volcano remotely located in the south-west Pacific, he looked for some old friends, whom he had left there when an officer on a different ship, the Hunter, in 1813. These friends had disembarked at Tikopia after a dramatic and now controversial episode. The Hunter had called in at Fiji to collect sandalwood and bêche de mer on a voyage between Calcutta and New South Wales.[23] Dillon resorted to force on that occasion in order to procure the goods. In a letter to the East India Company authorities of Bengal in 1826, Dillon noted that ‘all the Europeans [on the Hunter] were killed except myself, a man named Martin Buchert, a native of Staten [Stettin?] in Prussia, who had been on the island, and one of the ship’s Company, William Wilson.’[24] Elsewhere and sensationally, he noted that the Fijians were ‘cannibal monsters’ who wished to eat the bodies of those slain.[25] Dillon’s account of cannibalism in Fiji was exaggerated in retrospective retellings and there is much to recommend a recent interpretation which casts it as a narrative of self-delusion; some self-delusion certainly characterised much of Dillon’s life. [26] Cannibalism was too easily projected onto Pacific islanders in this era.

Now, fifteen years after the Hunter’s visit, when the St Patrick came to Tikopia in 1826, several canoes approached Dillon’s ship and there appeared a man called Joe, a ‘lascar’, who kissed Dillon’s hands and feet. He was the informant who helped solve the puzzle of the disappeared La Pérouse. The Hunter had dropped Joe off at Tikopia on Dillon’s previous visit.[27] Buchert, the Prussian, had also decided to stay on in Tikopia on that previous occasion together with ‘his wife, a Feejee [Fijian] woman.’ Between the time when Dillon dropped Joe and Buchert at Tikopia and the visit of the St Patrick, only a couple of British whalers had touched at Tikopia and they had visited relatively recently.[28]

Trade conducted by the likes of Dillon opened up the Pacific to new connections in these years, and the sudden appearance of whalers makes sense in this context. Joe himself is representative. ‘Lascar’ was a racialised term for non-white seamen, which originated from Persian via Portuguese. Joe’s South Asian heritage is clear from how Bayly told the story: ‘He appeared to have almost forgotten his native language and spoke at random, Bengallee, English, the Fijee and Tucopean.’[29] Elsewhere he was described as ‘married on the island and comfortably settled’.[30] Bayly noted that Joe’s own ‘countrymen’, presumably South Asians on board the St Patrick, could not understand him. Buchert himself was an example of the unexpected figures one could encounter in the Pacific of the early nineteenth century. Bayly noted: ‘His only garment now was a mat round his middle. He was tattooed all over his body and had several marks on his face.’[31]

The artefact which solved the mystery of the lost navigator was around Joe’s neck. It was an old silver guard, which in Bayly’s account he managed to buy for a bottle of rum. According to Dillon, Joe sold it for ‘a few fishing hooks to some of my people’.[32] When it was examined, Dillon thought he could decipher the initials of La Pérouse.[33] The sword guard was taken back to Calcutta. In writing to the powers that be in India, Dillon reported that the sword guard had come from a neighbouring group of islands, ‘a large group of islands under the general name of Mallicolo’. It was a two day canoe sail to the leeward of Tikopia and the islanders of Tikopia ‘were frequently in the habit of making Voyages’ to it. Joe had been there and reported that he had met two Europeans who spoke the language of the islanders, a tantalising account for anyone in search of a lost expedition. Dillon wrote:

‘[Joe] also saw in the possession of the Natives, this Sword Guard, several chain plates belonging to a Ship, also a number of Iron bolts, five Axes, the handle of a Silver fork, a few Knives, Tea Cups, Glass beads and Bottles, one Silver spoon with a crest and a cypher and a Sword; all of French manufacture.’[34]

In Calcutta, the sword guard was inspected by the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal; the society stood at the head of intellectual inquiries, scientific, geographical and ‘oriental’, undertaken in India. It was formed in 1784 by William Jones, an orientalist and judge. One of the society’s meetings was attended by Dillon. The society responded to Peter Dillon’s report by urging that all means be used to discover whether any of La Pérouse’s crew were still alive so that they could be restored to their home country. This was consistent with the ‘motives of humanity’, a resonant phrase of the age of revolutions, which they alleged were shared by ‘the whole Indian community’. The Royal Asiatic Society saw itself as presiding over such inquiries in ‘this quarter of the Globe’. It also set forth its motivation, in confident imperial rhetoric, to ‘extend our knowledge of the earth and its inhabitants, and to spread through yet barbarous lands the blessings of civilization’.[35]

It was not only this relic which created a stir in Calcutta when the St Patrick moored. Two Māori men who were sons of chiefs had taken passage with Dillon after the St Patrick stopped in New Zealand for timber, adding even further to the incredible itineraries which lace this story. The press coverage was larded with hype. The Calcutta newspaper the Bengal Hurkaru noted that the ship had on board Brian Boroimbe, a ‘New Zealand Prince, who considers and by his genealogical tree can prove himself to be a lineal descendant from his namesake, the celebrated King of Ireland [Brian Boru], who died gallantly fighting for his country against the Danes at Clon’. Boroimbe’s appearance was said to be ‘prepossessing’ and his ‘demeanor in every respect indicative of the ancient and noble blood that flows through his veins’.[36] This description is in keeping with the way Europeans cast Pacific-islander elites as ‘noble savages’, indigenous peoples untouched by the corruption of civilisation. Māori were particularly in danger of being cast like this. Also among the arrivals was ‘His Excellency Morgan McMurroch, aid-de-camp’. The so-styled Prince was feted in Calcutta, taken to breakfast, to dinner with the merchants in the settlement, and to a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. He was received by the Acting British governor general in the official country residence in Barrackpore, where the Pacific islanders with Dillon had to perform dances and chants. Boroimbe was given a captain’s uniform, a sword, and a medal carrying the likeness of George IV, which he proceeded to wear around his neck.[37]

Even as the Indian and Pacific Oceans were being brought together by the likes of Dillon, on the same ships, indigenous peoples were making unprecedented long-distance travels. They were using these voyages for their own purposes. At Aitutaki, for instance, a ‘great number’ of Pacific islanders came aboard the St Patrick wanting to join the crew; ‘they all had a great desire to see the world’.[38] This demonstrates the agency of the peoples of the Indian and Pacific Oceans within the age of revolutions and on expeditions like Dillon’s voyage.

In 1826, Calcutta was gripped by its war in Burma with the kingdom of Ava. Anxieties connected to this war in Calcutta saw Morgan attacked as he landed from the St Patrick. According to a newspaper report, onlookers were ‘struck with the form of the man, which combined Herculean strength with perfect ease, grace and symmetry’.[39] When he landed the chaukidars or gatekeepers drew their scimitars, thinking that Morgan was a Burmese general coming to Calcutta as a spy. Dizzying globalisation could generate mistaken identity. The gatekeepers thought it ‘not improbable that his army would follow in the night, and storm Fort William’.

Some Europeans, or in another account, Peter Dillon’s clerk, ‘promptly interfered and [Morgan’s] hand was arrested in the act of dealing a death-blow’.[40] Morgan was marched to the police, followed by what the newspaper recorded to be three thousand Indians. This story was surely embellished by the Bengal Hurkaru, in keeping with the newspaper’s other comments on Morgan. It reported that Morgan had a ‘very just idea of the initiatory principles of Political Economy’ and that he was ‘determined to perfect himself in the science before he leaves the Presidency [of Bengal]’. He had asked, it was alleged, for instruction in the making of railroads, steam coaches, wheels and the principles of phrenology, the science of the head. The India Gazette, meanwhile, poked fun at Boroimbe, noting the rumour around town of the cannibal propensities of New Zealanders, which once again highlights the currency of the idea of cannibalism. ‘[A]t least during the time that he has been on shore here, [he] has fed very much like a good Christian.’[41]

Dillon’s travels with Māori indicate the reach of Pacific islanders, including Māori serving on board sealers and whalers, into the heart of the Indian Ocean.[42] The way in which indigenous peoples used these encounters is evident elsewhere too. Before the St Patrick had reached Calcutta or indeed Tikopia, it had called at Tahiti. Here, Dillon was surprised to find two other friends, Takai and Langi. Takai and Langi had met Dillon in Tongatapu on a previous voyage. They had served as intermediaries and Takai had even navigated the Calder, taking charge of the ship’s passage. Dillon had last seen the pair in Sydney where they had attracted commentary in the press.[43] They had converted to Christianity, come to Tahiti with a British missionary and now hoped to return to their own islands to convert their peoples.[44]

The trade that Dillon undertook also fed into indigenous politics. When the Calder was lost in Valparaiso Dillon recouped some of the cost by selling a collection of Pacific weapons which were on board the ship.[45] In the opposite direction of exchange, Dillon brought muskets and gunpowder into the Pacific and especially to New Zealand. When the St Patrick reached New Zealand, Bayly wrote: ‘for Muskets or Gunpowder we could procure anything that the Island produced’. The acquisitive Dillon busied himself in procuring spars which were valued for the making of masts. Yet, the trade in spars for muskets had the potential to misfire, and Bayly wrote of a conspiracy:

All of our crew were employed in the Hold stowing away the spars as fast as they came off, except when a number of canoes more than ordinary came off; when all hands were immediately called to quarters, Captain D. having been lately informed by a native (who had been in on the whole plan) of a conspiracy which had been formed on the St. Patrick’s former voyage, to take the Ship and murder all hands on board; and that the Chief whom Captain Dillon had behaved so kindly to in taking him to South America and procuring him a vast quantity of presents [perhaps muskets?] was at the head of it.[46]

In turn, the Māori who visited Calcutta were travelling in the shadow of an important leader and fighter, Hongi Hika. In 1820, Hongi had visited London from New Zealand. His story is a clear indicator of how these new voyages were opening up a terrain of new politics for indigenous peoples. Hongi was presented to the king and finally returned home with muskets, powder and shot. ‘After [Hongi] returned to his native country,’ Bayly noted, ‘he gave out that he would never desist from killing and eating his countrymen till they made him King the same as King George in England.’[47] Accordingly, Boroimbe and Morgan too were to ‘try their fortunes in obtaining Muskets and Gunpowder from the Merchants of Calcutta’.[48] Beyond New Zealand, at various other locations, Dillon got into conversations with indigenous elites and was enrolled, as in New Zealand, within local power structures and contests. Bayly noted how Dillon entertained ‘Queen Pomarrè Vahine’ and ‘all the Royal Family’ of Tahiti when the St Patrick called there to find Takai and Langi. ‘They were received with a salute of musketry, and escorted down to the state-room. Here I was instructed to exhibit all our treasures.’[49]

The spread of the European musket across the far reaches of the Pacific in this period indicates how European wars and Pacific island contests were interrelated; the techniques and scale of war were shifting in the early nineteenth century. Those who went to war with Europeans as well as those fighting neighbouring regimes or political elites had to arm themselves as Europeans did. British imperial war was tied together with an extractive state and new ways of gathering information. In New Zealand, the rate of exchange adopted by the St Patrick was twenty spars for one musket or a proportionate quantity of gunpowder; on one occasion, however, 166 spars were purchased for 58 pounds of gunpowder and fifteen hatchets.[50] It is important not to romanticise the encounters between people like Dillon and the residents of Asia, Africa and Oceania because of the consequences that followed in their wake.

Note, for instance, the conversation between Boroimbe and Dillon at Budge Inn in Calcutta. Why, Boroimbe pondered, did the staff treat Dillon with such attention? When it was explained to him that this was because Britain had taken the country, Boroimbe observed: ‘You will come and take my country too, I have no doubt, as you have taken this.’[51] Boroimbe was absolutely correct: these wandering maritime paths, which traversed the Indian and Pacific Oceans, were closely connected to colonisation. The Bengal Hurkaru, in reporting Boroimbe’s visit to Barrackpore, imagined him returning home to New Zealand and providing a safe haven for British ships which would touch in any territory under his control. It added this line in support of Boroimbe’s credentials as a friend of Britain: ‘The dominions over which Boroimbe’s father presides extend from Cape Palliser to the River Thames, and the largest, straightest and most durable spars in the world are easily procurable there …’[52] The reception accorded to Māori on Dillon’s voyage pointed in turn to the prospect of an empire of trade riding the waves, an empire that would counter the age of revolution’s many possibilities.

Elsewhere what would happen to Māori lands was part of the discussion. The India Gazette hoped that Boroimbe would be sent back not with weapons but with ‘the instruments of agriculture and husbandry, and duly instructed in their use, and be provided with the means of raising in his own country, grains, vegetables, and fruits, that are not now indigenous to it’. Dillon, himself, in advocating the further colonisation of New Zealand in 1832 sketched the possibilities of a web of commerce. He envisaged that New Zealand would be a base for Pacific trades, including sandalwood, sperm oil and coconut oil, and mother-of-pearl, which was in demand on the China coast and in Manila. Timber could be traded from New Zealand to Chile and Peru. Empty convict ships arriving in New South Wales, he envisaged, could be filled with products like sandalwood, bêche de mer, shark fins and rope, which could be sent to India or Europe.[53]

It would be wrong to see the Calder and St Patrick as passing without company across the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The seas were becoming populated in new ways as Europeans were added in greater numbers and with greater reach. While the number of official British vessels in these seas was still small, nevertheless ships of all kinds came upon each other, private and official, British and non-British.[54] Valparaiso had a series of American and British vessels in harbour at the start of the voyage of the St Patrick, and during Bayly’s time there a Spanish brig was brought to harbour by a crew that had mutinied, murdered their officers and wished to deliver the vessel to the patriots of Chile.[55] This episode was the talk of Valparaiso. At Tahiti, the St Patrick came across a British whaler, the Fawn, in addition to some American whalers and a merchant ship; at Huahine they encountered a 300-ton American whaler and in New Zealand they met the Emily, another whaler, the Larne, a British ship of war and the Sir George Osborne, on the way to pearl in the Marquesas.[56] In the East Indies, while between Papua New Guinea and Christmas Island, the St Patrick came across an American ship trading between Philadelphia and Canton.[57] After escaping the St Patrick as a freed bird, Bayly took up work on the Hooghly bound for London via Colombo and the Cape of Good Hope.[58]

Across these seas in the early nineteenth century ships kept track of each other and spoke with each other. Ships compared their passages between ports and determined which arrived earlier. Private traders watched the prospect of rival traders. They scrutinsed what the British colonial state was up to, in shipping convicts to Australia and making British bases in the Cape, Ceylon and Mauritius. They also watched and even participated as the British pushed against rival empires, political elites and private agents. On St Helena, Bayly wrote of how his vessel ‘kept company’ with another ship the Harriet; there was also an American vessel bound to Amsterdam with coffee from Batavia. On the way back home it came upon a French ship bound to Nantes.[59]

By the date of the Hooghly’s journey home, British fears of rivals were certainly abating. Yet in these busy seas, aggression and anxiety about the French still lay under the surface. There was a site which reassured the British of how they were overtaking the French in these oceans of the south. It was the tomb of Napoleon on St Helena. As soon as the Hooghly anchored at St Helena, the passengers went en masse to see the tomb. Napoleon had been exiled here after his defeat at Waterloo in 1815. He died on St Helena in 1821.[60] If Dillon named his child after Napoleon, a host of other Britons sought in this way to take up the legacy of the Napoleonic wars. The British empire adopted some of the features of the Napoleonic empire, a militarised logic of integrating territories combined with a rhetoric of free trade.[61]

Yet anxiety and aggression about the French could sit together with Anglo-French friendship. Indeed Dillon’s return voyage from Calcutta to the Pacific, to the site of the disappearance of La Pérouse, attracted ‘grateful acknowledgement’ on the part of the French authorities at Chandernagore [Chandannagar], which was a French foothold in India returned by the British to the French in 1816. Dillon now took on board a representative of the French regime in India.[62] The Hobart Town Gazette of 7 April 1827 noted the docking of Dillon’s vessel, which arrived with the official patronage of the East India Company:

Yesterday arrived for refreshment, the Honorable East India Company’s ship Research, P. Dillon, Esq. commander (mounts 16 guns and carries 78 men), from Calcutta, 23d of January, on a voyage of discovery to the South Pacific, in search of the survivors of the French frigates La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, under the late Count de la Perouse. Passengers, His Royal Highness Brian Boru, a New Zealand prince, Morgan M’Murrah a New Zealand nobleman, secretary and aide de camp to the prince; Captain Speck of the Bengal Army, who remains here for the recovery of his health, and Monsieur Chaigneau of the French Consulate department.[63]

Despite the fact that this was an official voyage, it also had on board 100 muskets intended for ‘the ships armament and [as] presents to native chiefs’.[64] The official instructions were set out in careful detail with the intent of restraining Dillon’s entrepreneurial spirit. They also stated that firearms should be used against islanders only in ‘cases of extreme danger’. Dillon was warned against too much interaction with the Pacific islanders on board and also on shore: ‘The Board deem it proper to warn you against placing too much confidence in the Natives who accompany you from this Port.’[65] This new expedition also had within its aims the charting of this unknown stretch of the Pacific. Once again there was a link to the war in Burma: a medical ‘dresser’ who had also served in Burma was attached to it.[66] Dillon was instructed by his patrons to supply the naturalist on board the vessel at noon each day with the latitude and longitude of the ship. This proved a point of tension in a major disagreement between Dillon and this naturalist, Dr Robert Tytler, which led to a trial in Van Diemen’s Land [Tasmania].[67]

As Dillon’s story proceeded then – and as the grand voyages of the Pacific such as La Pérouse’s gave way to the early nineteenth-century dispersal of settlers, traders, missionaries, governors and judges too – empire came into the space of revolution. To trace the trail of the St Patrick in 1825 and the voyages of Dillon and Bayly on either side of this journey is to find indigenous politics; dizzying and unexpectedly global itineraries spanning Latin America, the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand, India and Africa; the expansion of knowledge and reason and their relation to colonialism; the spread of British trade and rhetorical commitments to humanity and civilisation; and the spread of war, weapons and violent contests. This is all characteristic of the age of revolutions. Yet as we move across this tale, we move from revolution to empire, and the British empire emerges as a counter-revolutionary force that sought to adopt within itself the language and politics of what went before it. Indeed, this empire took charge of the very coordinates of this part of the Pacific. Even eccentric Dillon sought to insert himself within this new imperial structure.

Pacific islanders’ assertiveness and their attempt to forge a new politics for themselves is evident in the detail of Dillon’s life. Yet their voices and politics are difficult to extract because of the density of colonial rhetoric in these sources, including even in the names they were given. Telling here was how the people of Vanikoro (called Malicola in the commentary of the period) where La Pérouse disappeared, were racialised in press commentary. This offensive line comes from the Colonial Times and Tasmanian Advertiser of 1827: ‘The Malicolans differ from almost all of the other islanders in the South Seas. They are as black as Negroes with wooly hair, and negro features.’[68]

The limitations of the sources and their ideological biases necessitate a different perspective to understand the history of this oceanic quarter in the age of revolutions.

PERSIAN WRITERS IN A WORLD OF WATER

South Asian writers and travellers who left accounts of voyaging across the south in this set of decades provide a good alternative lens, though they too were not without biases.[69] One such was Mirza Abu Talib Khan Isfahani, who was styled in a colonial idiom by British observers as being a ‘Persian Prince’, like the so-called Māori Prince who travelled with Dillon. Abu Talib noted: ‘I never assumed the title’.[70] It was in 1799 and from Calcutta that Abu Talib departed for Britain. The ship he boarded was like the St Patrick in having an unusual registration and a diverse crew, including South Asian seamen. Abu Talib sought to distance himself from the band of sailors:

On the 1st of Ramzan, A.H. 1213 (Feb. 8. 1799), we took leave of our friends, and embarked at Calcutta … We found the ship [a Danish vessel] in the greatest disorder composed of indolent and inexperienced Bengal Lascars; and the cabins small, dark, and stinking, especially that allotted to me, the very recollection of which makes me melancholy … The Captain was a proud self-sufficient fellow. His first officer, who was by birth American, resembled an ill-tempered growling mastiff …[71]

Abu Talib left Calcutta on the advice of an Scottish friend, in a bid to visit the West to dispel his despondency. As a young man, he had lived in Lucknow, in northern India. Lucknow was a magnet for scholars and he was educated by them. Earlier in the eighteenth century, his ancestors had come to India from Persia; his father had worked for the ruling elite of both Oudh [Awadh] and Bengal. The later eighteenth century created yet another phase of uncertainty for these scholar officials who relied so heavily on patronage. This uncertainty arose from repeated regime changes and from the ascent of British power.

Abu Talib’s travel narrative in Persian, Masir-i Talibi fi bilad-i afranji or ‘Talib’s travels in the Land of the Franks’, needs to be understood in this light. For his is an unsettled voice, that of an elite man trying to find his way in the midst of the age of revolutions, which was changing the world as he knew it. According to some authorities, these texts may have been encouraged by the British, though Abu Talib’s view of Britain ‘was not always flattering to the English, but congenial enough’.[72] After being dismissed from his work as revenue officer or amildar in Oudh, Abu Talib had taken up work under the British, serving as assistant to Colonel Alexander Hannay, who was in charge of revenue at Gorakhpur. He had also worked in Lucknow, once again for the British, tasked for instance with the suppression of a rebellion. He had been out of work for about a decade when he boarded the Danish ship in 1799 and all kinds of mishaps had overtaken him by this time: ‘all my dependants and adherents, seeing my distress, left me; and even some of my children, and the domestics brought up in my father’s family, abandoned me.’[73] His story did not end well. After returning from his travels in 1803, he died in 1806 without seeing a substantial change in his lot.

His writings reflect his literary skills as a poet; he was known for his recitation and writing of poetry. Note for instance his comparison of whales with elephants, from his sea journey to London:

Several fishes called whales approached so close to the ship, that we could view them distinctly. They were four times the size of the largest elephant, and had immense nostrils, whence they threw up the water to the height of fifteen yards.[74]

Abu Talib was close to the Cape of Good Hope when he observed these creatures. At this point in the voyage, the ‘sight of land brought tears to [his] eyes.’ Meanwhile in the next paragraph, he described how he felt being confined on board, in terms which were contrasted with those he used for the roaming whales:

In short, we passed our time like dead bodies shut up in dark and confined cells; and had it not been for the incessant noise and jarring elements, we might have supposed ourselves inhabitants of the nether world.[75]

While on his journey, Abu Talib paid a lot of attention to nature. This is unsurprising, for in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, people everywhere were changing their ideas of natural history. He tasted flying fish: ‘I thought them good food, and fancied they had somewhat the flavour of a bird.’[76] At the Cape, he commented on the horses and their ‘Arab blood’, dogs and cats ‘which run wild in the woods’ and ostriches. He also wrote of coastlines and places, for instance noting that St Helena, where Napoleon was later to be buried, had cliffs which appeared ‘black and burnt up’.[77] In the course of his voyage, Abu Talib was also very much aware of the stars. Close to the Nicobar Islands he was puzzled when he looked through a telescope and saw an island at sea, even though it was below the horizon.[78]

This interest in nature worked itself out in a commitment to classifying animals, landscapes and geography. All these were tabulated one against the other. On the classification of geography, he set out the following rules in keeping with how strips of the world’s ocean were being defined on the globe in this period of expansive and regular globe-spanning navigation:

A Channel means a narrow part of the sea, confined between two lands, but open at both ends.

A Bay extends far into the land, is of circular form, and open only on one side.

A Sea (sometimes called a Gulf) is a large extent of the ocean, but nearly surrounded by land; as the Mediterranean Sea, the Gulf of Persia, the Red Sea etc.[79]

And even as places and other creatures were tabulated and located like this, people were too. Abu Talib was interested in skin colour, in origin and descent and in status and he was especially interested in women. In Cape Town, he wrote disapprovingly that ‘all the European Dutch women’ were ‘very fat, gross, and insipid’, but then added, ‘but the girls are well-made, handsome, and sprightly; they are also good natured, but require costly presents.’ He flirted with these younger women at Cape Town, wishing to give his handkerchief to the handsomest at a party. On his own account, in doing this he was attempting to adopt the practice of the ‘rich Turks of Constantinople’ who ‘throw their handkerchief to the lady with whom they wish to pass the night’.[80] When in Britain, he wrote of a ‘Miss Combe’ to whom he took a particular fancy to and whom he once met at a masquerade. She was ‘like the bright moon surrounded with brilliant stars’.[81]

Regardless of how these women interpreted his interest, Abu Talib’s narrative is framed by the biases of status, rank, race and gender and their active defence. When describing Nicobar islanders, he wrote that they were ‘very muscular’ and resembled the ‘Peguers [of Burma] and Chinese in features but [that these Nicobar islanders] are of a wheat colour, with scarcely any beard’. He showed no empathy, however, for South Asian seamen despite the fact that these sailors were ‘much disgusted with the treatment they received on board’. While at these islands, these seamen deserted the ship and hid themselves in the woods.[82] Lascar revolt was a common feature of these years in the Indian Ocean during the age of revolutions.[83] But this revolt was pushed to the margins in Abu Talib’s prose. On this particular occasion at the Nicobar islands, the deserting sailors were caught and brought back on board.

Despite his starting point as a non-European Abu Talib’s writing, as with Dillon’s, needs to be teased and taken apart in order to see the conflicts of the age. We see this with an intriguing argument that he penned about the ‘liberty’ of Asian women. It was written during his time in Britain and was first published in the Asiatic Annual Register in 1801 and then in other places.[84] He explained the origin of this essay:

An English lady, addressing herself to me, observed, that the women of Asia have no liberty at all, but live like slaves, without honour and authority, in the houses of their husbands; and she censured the men for their unkindness, and the women, also, for submitting to be so undervalued.[85]

In response Abul Talib insisted on the greater liberties enjoyed by Asian women when compared with British women, but his reasoning fell back on patriarchal ideas and his position as an elite man. He reasoned that there were far fewer servants in houses in Britain due to the higher cost of labour. However, Asian women could have their own apartments and households and they could be released from their husband’s company for several days and ‘send [the husband’s] victuals to him in the murdannah (or male apartments)’. In Abu Talib’s view there were ‘people of various nations’ dwelling in the same cities in Asia, much more so than in Britain, and this necessitated segregated living arrangements between men and women; for to ‘allow the women such a liberty [to live with their husband], where there is such a danger of corruption [from foreigners], would be an encroachment upon the liberty of the men’. Women in Asia were said to have more leisure, ‘repose from the fatigue of motion’ and the ability to preserve ‘their honour, by not mixing with the vulgar’. On polygamy, Abu Talib wrote that it increased the freedom of the first wife. On those who didn’t have the privilege of being the first wife, he wrote: ‘those women who submit to marry with a married man are never of high or wealthy families’.

Abu Talib wrote in this way of liberty, a key concept of the age of revolutions. But like other writers of the time he twisted it in order to justify rather than tear down differences of gender, class and race. His argument about the women of Britain and Asia was an attempt to relativise liberty and to make it subjective and culturally particular. Whereas his interlocutor, ‘the English lady’ perhaps, held that Asian women did not have the liberty to choose their husbands, Abu Talib replied:

On this head nothing need be said, for in Europe this liberty is merely nominal, as without the will of the father and mother, the daughter’s choice is of no avail; and whatever choice they make for her, she must submit to; and in its effects, it serves only to encourage running away (as the male and female slaves in India do).

Abu Talib’s travel narrative and his interactions in London and India were an attempt to insert himself within British class hierarchy even as he sought to defend the social structures and customary practices of South Asia.[86] It is important to note that he sold an enslaved person while in Cape Town whose ‘manners and disposition’, he wrote, ‘had been so much corrupted on board ship’.[87] If his analysis of society, nature and the globe itself is in keeping with the times, this is also the case for his account of law and government. Here too were the characteristic contradictions of the time. He praised the use of trial by jury but had a generally negative view of British laws which often ‘overruled equity’, so that ‘a well-meaning honest man was frequently made the dupe of an artful knave’. The law was a means, in this telling, of making money. He feared the insolence of Englishmen, exemplified in the assembly of ‘mobs’ in London, and was incensed at the increase in taxes and the price of provisions, seeing it as akin to that seen in France before the revolution.[88]

Abu Talib presented an account of the French Revolution: people ‘disgusted with the tyranny of government, sent petitions and remonstrances to their King’. The king became a ‘useless member’ as is typical of a ‘republican form of government’:

After this event, a complete revolution of affairs took place in France. The powerful were reduced to weakness, and the base raised to power. The common people elected representatives from the lowest classes; and appointed officers of their own choice, to defend their territories.[89]

If indigenous politics lay beneath the surface of Dillon and Bayly’s accounts, Abu Talib’s writing bears the evidence of European politics and Anglo-French tensions. Before the Danish vessel set off from Calcutta, it was delayed by more than twenty days when a French frigate was found cruising outside the port. The firing of cannons was heard. An English ship fell to the French. An Arab vessel flying French colours ‘suspended under the English’ was also spotted. The end of this contest was determined by an English ship from Madras which captured the French frigate.[90] Close to Mauritius, there was the fear that the ship would fall to the French. Abu Talib found that Cape Town had just been taken by the British, with sixteen vessels protecting the harbour from the French, and he wrote of five thousand soldiers garrisoned under General Dundas.[91]

The link to the age of revolutions lies in how Abu Talib narrated and interpreted these events of European politics and also in how he took on board and internalised the new knowledge and ideas of this time. The age of revolution’s unprecedented globalisation is evident in the possibilities of travel which Abu Talib’s journey exemplifies. But other clues to the fundamental changes of this era followed later. On his return journey, Abu Talib travelled overland from Britain to India. In the Middle East, Abu Talib described the Wahhabi movement, and noted that ‘people could talk of nothing else’. At the hands of the Wahhabi, in his words, there had been ‘sacrilegious plunder’ of the cities of Mecca and Medina with the aim of eliminating idolatry. This Wahhabi reform of Islam was connected with the political changes across the Middle East, as we will soon see. It had within it a sense of revolution which was different to the European sense of revolution even as Europeans cast it as revolutionary. The concept of ‘Wahhabism’ as used today still carries with it a series of stereotypes about Islamic purism and fundamentalism. It is problematically traced back to the age of revolutions in an uninterrupted story of continuity. Abu Talib described the movement:

Although the Vahabies possess great power, and have collected immense wealth, they still retain the greatest simplicity of manners, and moderation in their desires. They sit down on the ground without ceremony, content themselves with a few dates for their food, and a coarse large cloak serves them for clothing and bed for three years. Their horses are of the genuine Nejib breed, of well-known pedigrees; none of which will they permit to be taken out of the country.[92]

The idea of revolution also appeared in the writings of the class of Persianate chroniclers to which Abu Talib belonged. The word inquilab appeared frequently among Persian writers of this age, to mean ‘revolution’ or ‘subversion’; it was used to describe the changes brought about by the invasion of the British too. According to one authority on these texts, this word ‘literally meant turning’.[93] This means that these writings sit very squarely within the compass of the age of revolutions. In summary, the world around Abu Talib was turning in political terms; but there was also a churning in what it meant to live life. This was evident in his commentary on so many spheres, from nature to society and from gender to cultural difference.

This engagement with the turning of the times is also evident among those who may be seen as his compatriots. For instance there is the epic and valuable history of eighteenth-century India penned by Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba‘i, Sair al-muta’akkhirin. It stretched from the death of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1707 to the advance of the British in the early 1780s. Published in English translation in Calcutta, in the year prior to the French Revolution, it was written by a politician and landholder, whose aristocratic family hailed from Persia and who had served as a clerk to the East India Company.[94] Ghulam Husain presented an account of the American Revolution: settlers joined forces to resist the authority of the king of England, ‘spreading full open the standard of rebellion and defiance’. In turn they called in the French, upon whom the English declared war.[95] Another writer, Mirza I‘tisam al-Din, from a line of Muslim service gentry in Bengal, described the American revolution as the rise of the wealthy nobility of America against the English, and interpreted it as part of a broader conflict between the English and the French.[96] Ghulam Husain meanwhile wrote that the Spanish and the Dutch joined against the English. ‘Time alone will point out what may be the final intention of providence in this diversity of concerns and interests; and time alone will discover what it has ultimately predestined on those obstruse points.’[97]

Yet before closing his story with this resort to a long view of time Ghulam Husain paused for another revealing reason. He gave his readers a lesson in astronomy. This was in keeping with Abu Talib’s interest in the stars and seas. ‘The circumstance and figure of land and water in our globe are not as they were thought heretofore. They say that the latter seems to encompass the former as a girdle.’[98] According to Ghulam Husain, the New World was a hemisphere that had yet to be fully explored and examined. He was aware of how medicinal drugs, fine woods and gold and silver were to be found there. Would the feet of the inhabitants of the two hemispheres meet ‘sole to sole’, if the earth were taken away from them, he pondered. Even as their feet met like this, would their heads still face the heavens? For this Persian chronicler, the changes of the world sat together with changing knowledge of it; the rise of Britain in India and its wars with France were tied together with events on a further hemisphere. At the same time as these changes were unfolding, Ghulam Husain was trying to find his own place in a world that was shifting, and where new norms of patronage, government and rule were emerging in India. For this reason, his voice, like Abu Talib’s, was an unsettled one that moved between old and new.

This uncertainty is clear yet again in the account of I‘tisam al-Din’s journey to Britain. He too had moved between employment for Indian and British masters. He had fought for the British in wars which led to the 1765 grant to the British of the diwani of Bengal, the right to collect taxes and decide civil cases. This was a key moment in the consolidation of British expansion in India. He helped the British with the suppression of unrest, just as Abu Talib would do. He left on a voyage to England in 1767 as part of a diplomatic mission sent to the British king by the Mughal emperor.

I‘tisam al-Din’s account of travel was titled Shigarf-nama-i vilayet or ‘Wonder Book of England’. It was written in 1785 two decades after his journey. It charted a history of exploration from the early attempts of the Portuguese to reach India. Now, the British had taken the lead on the seas above all the other ‘hat-wearing nations of Europe’.[99] His account of travel then proceeded with sections on the sea, the compass, ships and winds, indicating a consistent and deep curiosity throughout. The sea was the conduit of European expansion but a mysterious medium: ‘the blue of the sea is a reflection of the sky. A simple proof of this is that sea-water scooped up with the hand appears whitish, if not colourless.’[100] Contemplating the sea in turn brought with it the need to think of the earth itself, which was consistent with the prose of other Persian writers and in keeping with the nature of this age of revolutions and its concern with astronomy and other sciences. In poetic language, he wrote: ‘The earth is a floating egg amidst the sea’s immensity.’ There followed the story that a European king had sought to find the depth of the sea by dropping a rope: ‘millions of yards disappeared and yet the rope didn’t touch the bottom.’[101]

He embraced western technologies of navigation, writing in detail for instance of the use of the compass, and describing ships which generally had ‘five storeys’: ‘The topmost storey is aft and is occupied by the Captain and its officers.’ During high winds a ship could be assailed by waves that could ‘rise as high as palm trees’. In the midst of all this detail, I‘tisam al-Din’s refrain was to praise Allah. On the seabed ‘complete knowledge of the secrets of the sea’s depths belongs to Allah alone’.[102] In this way, there was a determined attachment to tradition and established ways despite his wide-ranging interest in the new. The twinning of these two, the old and the new, was beautifully expressed when he described European sailors climbing the masts during a storm as having the ‘agility of Hanuman’, the Hindu figure who appears in the epic Ramayana, and hanging from the masts ‘like bats’. ‘Their courage and industry’, he noted, ‘have made them the most powerful race on earth.’[103]

As for the voyage itself, his account of Mauritius, where the ship stopped, saw the appearance of Muslim lascars.[104] He was intrigued by how they had ‘married into slavery’, with wives who were enslaved to French masters. ‘These slaves are brought as adolescents from Bengal, Malabar, the Deccan [all in India] and other regions and sold for fifty to sixty rupees each.’ He benefited from the hospitality and advice of the lascars, who served as intermediaries in the market, enabling him to purchase ‘mangoes, water-melons, cucumbers, musk-melons and several other varieties of fruits peculiar to the Bengali summer’. But he ‘grieved inwardly’ that these Asian seamen had forsaken ‘their own land’. His description of Mauritius, an island that was taken by the British in 1810, partly in fear of republicanism and piracy, was attentive to people, settlement, history and nature.

I‘tisam al-Din set Mauritius within a broader view of Indian Ocean territories. His passage to Mauritius had taken him near many interesting ‘islands and coasts’. He incorrectly identified Batavia as Portuguese. Two months’ journey from Bengal, he reported that there was ‘an island, which is a part of the Chinese kingdom and is famous for its Chinaware’. There followed an account of Pegu in Burma. ‘As we sailed down the Bay of Bengal,’ he wrote, ‘Malacca showed as a thin black line on the horizon … South-west of Madras, at a distance of one-hundred miles – or a day’s sailing – from Pondicherry lies Ceylon, which Indians call Serendip.’ The Maldives came next in this account, ruled by someone who was less than a zamindar or landlord of Bengal, and yet who had the affectation of sovereignty. And then an island where the inhabitants were said to be ‘human’ and yet they ‘dress in the skins of wild beasts and eat half-raw meat’.

I‘tisam al-Din’s writing was as maritime as those of Pacific voyagers in its attention to ships, seas, islands, coasts and sailors; it also demonstrated some of the same predilections displayed by travellers like Dillon. He wrote of an island of cannibals:

The inhabitants of this island are human, yet their physiognomy is diabolical. They dress in the skins of the wild beasts and eat half-raw meat. They crave human flesh, and there being gold mines on the island, they will gladly barter gold for men. When they espy a vessel in the distance, they light a fire on a hill in order to lure the ship to their shores.[105]

It was not only the figure of the cannibal which united this travel account with colonial renditions of seaborne adventure. There were also mermaids in I‘tisam al-Din’s story: ‘May Allah in his infinite mercy prevent anyone from seeing a mermaid, for it is a kind of genii.’ And in keeping with Abu Talib’s prose, there were of course flying fish and whales too. Whales were described by I‘tisam al-Din in almost the same terms as were used by Abu Talib:

[A whale] is at least equal in bulk to two full-grown elephants; often it is larger. Its neck resembles an elephant’s, and its nose too is rather like an elephant’s trunk, only much smaller. Its nostrils are on the crown of its head.[106]

Though separated by so much including their own subject positions, there are many parallels in the content and concerns of this set of sources which arise from the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The travels of Dillon and Bayly as well as Abu Talib and I‘tisam al-Din show us many if not most of the places that we will travel to in this book. Their stories encompass the breadth of the forgotten quarter and many of the scenes of what will follow. They also span the decades from the late 1760s to the late 1840s, a perfect introduction to the stories that are still to come. For these years constitute the age of revolutions as it turned to empire.

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS

Dillon and Bayly as well as Abu Talib and I‘tisam al-Din reveal how difficult it is to find an indigenous perspective in the age of revolutions. The surge of indigenous politics, for instance of Tongans or Māori, arose in response to the infiltration of invaders and the new possibilities of this period. Some colonial biases and ideologies were taken up to forge this politics. The revolts, warfare and reformist movements of non-Europeans in the Indian and Pacific Oceans should occupy centre stage for once in this book; they were formed with one eye on global politics. Note the references to the American Revolution or French Revolution among Persian writers or how these travellers interpreted political changes in India with respect to a broader sense of the age of revolutions. Despite the problems in identifying a pure ‘indigenous’, the standard narrative of this era of change needs to be reordered, starting with the Indian and Pacific Oceans and their peoples, if this period is to be understood more fully. Otherwise oceanic peoples become simple recipients rather than active agents in crafting the modern world.

It is too easy to see how revolutionary currents flowed through the Atlantic and then moved outwards to spaces including the waterways of the south charted by the travellers we have considered. Accordingly, the declaration of American independence in 1776 served as a template for the global dispersal of assertions of the rights of states and the freedoms of individuals and communities.[107] The anti-monarchical offensive launched by the French revolutionaries in 1789 spread ideas of patriotism and liberty and called for self-government. There was a stirring of independence movements in Spanish America with the Peninsular War, which saw the French occupation of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808, the dissolution of the Bourbon monarchy and the establishment of the Spanish Cortes from 1810 to 1814,. In Chile, the 1818 statement of independence held that ‘the Continental Territory of Chile and its adjacent Islands, form in fact and right, a free, independent and sovereign State’.[108] Meanwhile, Haiti declared itself to be a ‘black republic’, drawing on the rhetoric of the French Revolution and rumours of slave emancipation in the late 1790s. These waves of revolt in turn were inescapably bound to the war between France and Britain, even as revolution and war have had intertwined lives to the present. The French supported the Americans, and the British government stood against not only French republicanism, but also Irish, Dutch and Belgian revolt. Britian went to war with France in 1792.

Yet if we are to leave this sequence of Atlantic events to one side, the age of revolutions needs to be defined less by grand moments and more by changing ideology, self-understanding, warfare, labour and political organisation. All these were being reinvented, but continuously so rather than at specific junctures or turning points. This reinvention occurred in small islands as much as it did in large states and nations in the global North. Each of these spheres of experience – political, economic, cultural, military and intellectual – was increasingly calibrated with respect to the rise of empire. The globalisation of the age was making people feel like the very world was shifting. The shift from plural revolutionary possibilities to the consolidation of empire saw imperialists who were naturalists, surveyors, astronomers and time-keepers seeking to control the shape of the globe and knowledge of it.[109] Writers in this space of water, like those just encountered, were reconsidering their sense of the globe and how bits of sea and land fitted together or how hemispheres were bound.[110] They were doing this while reconsidering themselves and others in relation to notions of race, gender and status which were unpredictable and yet powerful.

The flux of the age which gave rise to our times operated at many levels – the individual, the state, the region and even the globe itself – and if so this is in keeping with the multiple senses of the word revolution itself. Indeed, at the end of the eighteenth century, while ‘revolution’ was said to inaugurate a change for all humankind, it was nevertheless also seen as a return to the preordained status quo, a revolving back.[111] It was a naturalised process – commentators discussed it, like those who follow them to the present, in the language of currents, waves, winds and lava. There was also the sense of a perpetual revolt, rather than an identifiable event in a bounded window in time and with a definite goal in prospect. Revolution worked across deep time, linking past and future and intervening in the natural condition of humans everywhere. It is clear that indigenous peoples and certainly Persian writers in transit across the seas had a wide sense of revolution.

Given all this, empire was a counter-revolt not only in its attempt to adopt the ideology, knowledge, restlessness and mobility of the age of revolutions.[112] It was also so in substantially closing down the width of possibilities of the age of revolutions. The British empire was in this sense an invasive corrective, a force which countered its alternatives: republicanism and the dream worlds of so-called ‘pirates’, pilgrims and private traders, in other words the Dillons and Abu Talibs of this age. The outburst of republican feeling in Mauritius, with the formation of revolutionary committees and clubs; the diplomatic connections of Oman, ranging from Dutch Batavia to France via the so-called republican regime of Tipu Sultan of Mysore in South India; the traders involved in sealing and whaling on Tasmania, including Americans and Frenchmen, with links across the far south of the Indian and Pacific Oceans; the rise of millenarian religious fervour, for instance among the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, as they faced the Gulf; the spread of republican ideas and Napoleonic government in Batavia; the building of ships in Rangoon: these were some of the symptoms of the age of revolutions in the Indian and Pacific Oceans before the rise of the British empire. In each case another future was in view; waters were traversed for religion, politics and trade, bypassing empire, or feeding into other visions. The success of the British lay in altering the course of this turbulent world of change, association, debate and protest. The British empire co-opted the dreams of the global South and sent these dreams into reverse gear.

2
In the South Pacific: Travellers, Monarchs and Empires

Four days had passed and there was yet no news of Comte de Trobriand. It was October 1793 and the French ships, La Recherche and L’Espérance lay impatiently moored twenty-five miles outside the Dutch foothold of Surabaya, now the second largest city of Indonesia.

The years of the French Revolution and the revolutionary wars saw a series of French exploratory voyages to the Pacific under dramatically different circumstances. To take three examples: first, there was an expedition under the command of Comte de La Pérouse (1785–8) and with the authority of an absolute monarch, Louis XVI; second came a voyage under de Bruni d’Entrecasteaux (1791–4), with the sanction of the National Assembly, and to search for the lost La Pérouse; and third, there was an expedition commanded by Nicolas Baudin (1800–3), under instruction from Napoleon. The Recherche and Espérance made up the second of this set of three voyages. The ships began their journey under the command of d’Entrecasteaux. But d’Entrecasteaux died about three months before the expedition reached Surabaya. Now the impact of the European age of revolution was about to overtake this voyage, for it too would soon be dissolved.

Waiting outside Surabaya, such was the crew’s state of mind that any European might have become ‘a compatriot’; ‘any Frenchman would have been welcomed as a member of [their] families’.[1] With two-thirds of the crew ill, mostly with scurvy, they longed for refreshment and comforting assurances. Alexandre d’Hesmivy d’Auribeau, now the commanding officer, also very sick from an unknown ailment, and in all likelihood under the influence of laudanum, sent out another boat, this time flying a white flag as a sign of peace. Eventually a Javanese chief brought out the news of the age of revolutions: Louis XVI had been executed and France was at war with its European neighbours, including the Dutch. A republic had been declared. All the men on the voyage – and unbeknown to many, one disguised woman – were Dutch prisoners of war. The European family had been torn apart, and the diplomatic etiquette surrounding the provisioning of ships in the Pacific no longer held.

What could d’Auribeau do? One option was to make the six-week journey across the Indian Ocean to Île de France [Mauritius], and this would certainly be the most honourable option and that preferred by his crew. Yet d’Auribeau was a royalist and Île de France was known for republican sentiment. Add to this, his crew were in tatters and the prospect of another long sea voyage must have been unpalatable. After at first giving the order to sail to Île de France, d’Auribeau’s quandary was solved in the nick of time. It was Comte de Trobriand, a naval officer on the expedition, bearing better news at last. The governing elite of Surabaya had contacted their superiors in Batavia, alarmed at the arrival of the French frigates at a time of war. Trobriand brought news of Batavia’s ruling that the ships were to be received as normal. But the conditions stipulated by the Dutch became tighter with the passage of time: d’Auribeau’s crew had to swear that they would not fight the Dutch and had to make themselves harmless by landing their armament. D’Auribeau also gathered all the crew’s journals and papers.

Over the months of 1793–4 that the expedition waited in limbo in Surabaya, the new commander became more and more compliant to the Dutch. Perhaps it was his fear that if he returned to republican France he would be executed. His complicity was perceived as a sign of conservatism among some others of his crew who had more republican leanings, and this was especially the case among the large group of savants, or men of science, who were on the expedition, with the egalitarian aim of adding to human knowledge. While some of the crew of L’Espérance refused to give up their weapons, the pilot, from Brest, where republicanism flourished, threw his journal into the sea; others attempted to hide or make copies of their papers. This concern with keeping their papers arose partly from their interest in owning the discoveries which had been dutifully recorded in them. The Dutch were alarmed at the prospect of a ship-board revolution and took over the vessels. The expedition’s termination came after an attempt was made by d’Auribeau to raise the royal flag.[2] It also came after the circulation of a rumour of secret orders from the National Assembly to some members of the crew.[3]

In December 1794, as the Frenchmen’s debts had by this time mounted, La Recherche and L’Espérance were sold by auction in Batavia.[4] D’Auribeau himself died from dysentery before republican envoys from Île de France could take him captive as a traitor. In a token of the times to come, and where British explorations would overtake French missions in these seas, the papers of the d’Entrecasteaux/d’Auribeau expedition were seized in St Helena by the British. They were eventually kept in London under the protection of Élisabeth-Paul-Édouard de Rossel, who was the final commander of the expedition, after d’Auribeau’s death. The British were particularly keen to detect any important material which they could use for their own imperial purposes.[5] Rossel was a royalist. He found London a good home in these tumultuous years until the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, after which he returned to France. Yet this was not the whole story. The republican Jacques-Julien Houtou de La Billardière, one of the surviving naturalists from the d’Entrecasteaux expedition, returned to Paris and ingeniously arranged with Joseph Banks, the British man of science, for the expedition’s natural history cases to be transferred there.[6] The remains of the voyage were broken up in this way between the British and French, between royalist and republican commitments.

To track what happened to this voyage is to consider the impact of news from Europe on the other side of the planet; it is to turn the history of the age of revolutions inside out. This set of expeditions as a whole demonstrates how a new French nation and people were coming into being and what the values were for which they stood. Unlike the explorations of the land-hungry British, these Pacific voyages by the French were generally characterised by a lack of interest in territory; science took on a greater and greater significance, as each successive voyage had a larger number of individuals devoted to scientific discoveries. The philosophical residents of these ships increasingly conceived of themselves as citizens and contributors to humanity at large rather than as grandees out on a pleasure cruise of discovery. The transition from La Pérouse and d’Entrecasteaux to Baudin is itself revealing: for unlike the two aristocrats who went before him, Baudin was the first French captain without noble birth to sail through the Pacific.[7]

Beyond the decks of these ships, however, indigenous peoples were actively reworking their politics. In this era of unprecedented globalisation debates about authority and government had a parallel life in the Pacific. Indigenous elites, referred to as ‘little Napoleons’ by dismissive Europeans, used this moment to extend their domain of rule. They used alliances with Europeans as well as the material objects, weapons and ideas that came from their encounters with them.

So here’s the argument to follow. Not only can the European age of revolutions be traced in these distant seas in the impact of the news from Europe, for instance at Surabaya, or even in the changing social composition and captaincy of crews. Once such a perspective is taken, it becomes possible to stand in the waves of the Pacific to see another more fundamental pattern of transformation in the waters of the South. Particularly striking is how these years saw the consolidation of Pacific monarchies.

Once Pacific royal lines were consolidated, as will be seen below, they could serve as the point of focus for colonial manoeuvring and diplomacy. Yet islanders could also use the notion of the monarch as a rallying symbol both for new politics and for resistance to invasion. Different conceptions of monarchy taken up by colonisers and indigenous peoples became a ground of controversy. The chapter ends with the controversial 1840 Treaty of Waitangi in Aotearoa/New Zealand and how Britain’s maritime empire came into the Pacific and sought alliances with Māori rangatira (chiefs).[8] Alliances between colonists and indigenous elites set in place definitions of sovereignty which were colonial; these definitions encompassed land fit for ‘improvement’ and people in need of ‘protection’. But Pacific islanders displayed their creativity in responding to intrusion of this kind.

FRENCH AND BRITISH VOYAGES IN THE PACIFIC AGE OF REVOLUTIONS

To return to the d’Entrecasteaux expedition, it was an impatient national interest that prompted its failed attempt to search for La Pérouse. A petition drawn up early in 1791 from the Société d’Histoire Naturelle bemoaned how France had waited for two years for the return of its famous explorer:

Perhaps he has run aground on some island in the South Seas from whence he holds out his arms toward his country, waiting in vain for his liberator … And the decent nation that expected to reap the benefits of his labors also owes him its concern and its assistance.[9]

La Pérouse hailed from a family of provincial nobles in Albi, far from the sea. He had seen action in the Seven Years War, against the British off the American coast and in the Caribbean and also in India against the Marathas. His instructions were driven by one of the recurrent themes in Pacific exploration of the eighteenth century. This was the idea that there were still large landmasses and strategic passages to be discovered in the Pacific. British Captain James Cook, who died in 1769 in Hawai‘i, had done his best to put to rest the idea of a great undiscovered Southland. Nevertheless, La Pérouse was still set the mammoth task of roaming the Pacific in its widest extent, including the north as well as the south; Louis XVI took a personal interest in the itinerary.[10] His agenda included the search for a north-west passage across America, linking the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. It included the survey of the coasts of Japan and Korea, and the exploration of the relatively unknown western side of Australia right up to Tasmania in case there lay there a continent rather than a large island. Tahiti, which was idealised as a paradise among Europeans, would have seemed a dominating landmark in La Pérouse’s mind. He was given detailed instructions to leave plants there which could be propagated to add to the comforts of other voyagers who would pass through this point of luxurious passage, known for its sexual liberty and lavish hospitality.[11] These were tall orders in the programme of settling European geographical knowledge of the Pacific. Before they could be accomplished La Pérouse’s expedition met with calamity.

La Pérouse’s ships were as solid and heavy as those chosen by Cook; and this was appropriate given that he was chosen to be France’s response to Cook. A French spy, taking the guise of a Spanish trader named Don Inigo Alvarez, sought out information about Cook’s expedition for La Pérouse’s mission. Alvarez found John Webber, Cook’s artist, a particularly useful source of information. He sat for a portrait by Webber. The expedition’s connection to the politics of the time is also nicely illustrated by one contemporary diarist who held that Napoleon Bonaparte expressed an interest in joining the voyage, along with one of his compatriots at the École Militaire.[12]

While the voyage was under way, the multiple eyes that watched it clearly bore heavily on La Pérouse. He wrote home in 1787: ‘The care we have taken to preserve our crews’ health has been so far crowned with even more success than that enjoyed by that famous navigator [Cook] … no one has died on board the Boussole and we do not have a single man sick in either vessel.’[13] And commenting on his geographical exploits, he wrote of ‘a new strait leading out of the Sea of Tartary’, of presenting to geographers ‘two islands as large as the British Isles’ and of reaching ‘in the same year’ Mt St Elias after visiting Easter Island [Rapa Nui] and the Sandwich Islands [Hawai‘i].[14] And on another occasion earlier in 1787: ‘I am sure His Majesty will not fail to realise that his vessels will have been the first to undertake this navigation.’[15]

La Pérouse was anxious about whether his discoveries would be overtaken by the British successors of Cook, and wrote home of six vessels sent from India to the north-west coast of America. This was in keeping with the competitive spirit of this era, which related not only to politics but also to intellectual exploits. In commenting on this news, La Pérouse noted that British exploration showed ‘evidence of the large means the English dispose of rather than of their judgement.’[16] Given the range of expectations heaped on it, the displeasure that arose when La Pérouse lost the whole of his crew – quite to the contrary of his boast about the lack of death to scurvy and other diseases – is indeed understandable. As the compiler of his journal, published from records sent home, wrote: ‘our new Argonauts have all perished.’[17] And an English compiler who had sailed with Cook noted that La Pérouse had operated in a state of continual anxiety because of the enormity of the task combined with over-ambitious timetabling which created ‘perpetual hurry’.[18]

D’Entrecasteaux, whose ships eventually ended up in Surabaya, came agonisingly close to success in his search for La Pérouse. Rumours had spread by this time that the navigator’s end had come at British anti-republican hands.[19] La Pérouse himself had touched at Botany Bay, now in Sydney, just five days after the First Fleet had reached New South Wales in 1788 to found a convict colony there. There he had met the British captain John Hunter. Could contrasting modes of engaging with the Pacific world, tied to French philosophy and British colonisation, indicate antipathy to French voyagers on the part of the British and so explain the disappearance? From Botany Bay came La Pérouse’s fateful last official letter, dated February 1788, promising to do ‘exactly what my instructions require me to do … But in such a way as to enable me to go back north in good time to reach the Isle de France [Mauritius] in December.’[20]

A monument commemorating the place from where the last news of the navigator was received was later erected at Botany Bay. Fish and chip shops and couples having their wedding photographs taken at the weekend vied for attention with the monument when I saw it. La Pérouse had made a plan to end his voyage in Mauritius, his second home, where he had bought land, and from where his wife Éléonore Broudou originated. He had married her against his father’s wishes.[21] The first news of La Pérouse reached d’Entrecasteaux in January 1792 while he was in Cape Town. In his journal he recorded a testimony received there via Mauritius of what had been seen by British captain John Hunter, in the Admiralty Islands, north of present-day New Guinea. Hunter later gave this account of his observations when at the Admiralty Islands:

Five large canoes came off from the nearest island, in each of which were eleven men; six paddled, and five stood up in the center of the boat … they held up various articles, which they seemed desirous of exchanging; such as lines, shells, ornaments of different kinds, and bundles of darts or arrows … One of them made various motions for shaving, by holding up something in his hand, with which he frequently scraped his cheek and chin; this led me to conjecture, that some European ship had lately been amongst them, and I thought it not improbable, that it might have been Mons. de la Perouse, in his way to the northward of Botany Bay.[22]

D’Entrecasteaux believed that his compatriots in Mauritius, where he had served as governor general, had misunderstood or exaggerated the news. Surely Hunter would have persevered in a rescue if he sincerely believed that he had discovered shipwrecked Frenchmen or at least the signs of their influence? The ‘sacred duties of mankind’ would have overruled other considerations of weather or even national difference.[23] Regardless of his doubts, d’Entrecasteaux made up his mind; he would sail to the Admiralty Islands. When he finally got there, in July 1792, he decided that the reports of La Pérouse were uncorroborated. The islanders, he wrote, wore ornaments of white shells and dark red belts, and these could have been mistaken for sword-belts. He also noted that the colour of their skin was distinctly similar to the colour of the uniform of the French navy.[24] An engraving drawn up by the voyage’s artist, Piron, shows an Admiralty islander, devoid of any context, except for a shell on his penis, a woven belt above his waist as well as on his arm, and woven wrist ornaments.[25] La Billardière, the naturalist, wrote that the most ‘inflated part’ of the shell was opened in order to lodge the penis, and that wearing the shell gave rise to ‘very conspicuous tumour’ of a white colour.[26] [Fig. 2.1].

Fig. 2.1 ‘Sauvages des îles de l’Amirauté’, Jacques-Louis Copia after Piron, reproduced in La Billardière’s Atlas, 1800

2.1 © Pictures from History / Bridgeman Images

In the forty years of uncertainty that followed the disappearance, the fate of La Pérouse led to much speculation across Europe, inspiring plays, pantomimes and books, some with far-fetched romantic plot-lines.[27] The solution eventually came from Peter Dillon and through his meeting with Joe, the lascar in 1826. In a book published to cement his fame as the problem solver and to add to his pocket, Dillon provided this account of an interview with islanders on Vanikoro in late 1827:

Q. ‘How were the ships lost?’ – A. ‘The island is surrounded by reefs at a distance off shore. They got on the rocks at night, and one ship grounded at Wannow, and immediately went to the bottom.’

Q. ‘Were none of the people from the ship saved?’ – A. ‘Those that escaped from the wreck were landed at Wannow, where they were killed by the natives. Several also were devoured by the sharks, while swimming from the ship.’

Q. ‘How many people were killed at Wannow?’ – A. ‘Two at Wannow, two at Amma and two more near to Paiow. These were all the white men who were killed.’

Q. ‘If there were only six white men killed on shore, how, or from whence, came the sixty sculls [sic.] that were in the spirit house at Wannow, as described by Ta Fow, the hump-backed Tucopian, and others?’ – A. ‘These were the heads of people killed by the sharks.’

…

Q. ‘How was the ship lost near Paiow?’ – A. ‘She got on the reef at night, and afterwards drifted over it into a good place. She did not immediately break, for the people had time to remove things from her, with which they built a two-masted ship.’

…

Q. ‘Had these people no friends among the natives.’ – A. ‘No. They were ship spirits; their noses were two hands long before their faces. Their chief used always to be looking at the sun and stars, and beckoning to them. There was one of them who stood as a watch at their fence, with a bar of iron in his hand, which he used to turn round his head. This man stood only upon one leg.’[28]

So what is the headline? La Pérouse’s ships had come to their end in the midst of a hurricane. Though some of the crew remained, most of them sailed away in a small vessel they built never to be seen again. Evidently, before they left, their astronomical interests and their manners had bewildered the inhabitants of Vanikoro.

If the tragic ends of the expeditions of La Pérouse and d’Entrecasteaux are in keeping with the age of revolutions, the third French expedition, commanded by Nicolas Baudin and commissioned by Napoleon in 1800 at a different political moment, was relatively more successful. Baudin had sailed widely across the Indian and Pacific Oceans as a merchant captain. He focussed on precision rather than breadth and was instructed to concentrate on Australia. The need now was for voyages ‘restricted to specific pre-determined, points, directed to the least-known coastlines’.[29] However there were still squabbles on board which were typical of the broader character of this period. The commoner Baudin was seen as a social inferior by some of the scientists, and his first lieutenant even challenged him to a duel.[30] Social and ideological differences merged with scientific disputes: ‘sketchers’ and ‘anatomists’ on board, two classes of researchers, argued over the ownership of a dead porpoise; there was a similar fight about who got the right to dissect the first shark.[31]

Freycinet, who sailed with Baudin, published the first complete map of Australia in 1811. The credit for putting Australia in its place on a map belongs, however, to a Briton, Matthew Flinders. After securing British passports for the Baudin mission, the leading British man of science of this period, Joseph Banks, had the idea of a competing British mission. He arranged for Flinders to be sent off to chart south west Australia in a race with Baudin. Despite their common scientific interests, and the fact that Flinders had advised Baudin to stop in Port Jackson (the ria of what is now Sydney) when in need of refreshment, the impact of the revolutionary era dictated the outcomes for these two.

Before Baudin died from tuberculosis in Mauritius in September 1803, he wrote to the French Minister of Marine: ‘I have enough strength left at the moment to assure you that the intentions of the Government have been fulfilled and that this voyage will be honourable to the French.’[32] Flinders pulled into Mauritius in December 1803, just after the death of Baudin, in urgent need of supplies and took confidence from his French passport, which asked all French agents to give him protection as the commander of a purely scientific expedition. Yet Governor Decaen, who reined in Mauritius’ republicanism, took him captive for six and a half years, until the eve of the taking of Mauritius by the British in 1810. Flinders’ books and papers were initially impounded and Flinders was accused of being an imposter. The navigator wrote that his daily routine consisted of learning Latin, writing up his ship’s log, music and billiards; he was later transferred to a more relaxed residence on a plantation, where he worked at translations between English and French.[33] The British got wind of his captivity, via American traders who enjoyed a healthy commerce with Île de France in this period. Such traders allowed Flinders to keep up a regular correspondence home, while also sending scientific materials through them to London, including to Banks.[34] Flinders’ health deteriorated while in captivity and though he returned to Britain, he did not live to see the publication of the account of his voyage.[35]

The French Revolution and its aftermath did not simply disrupt the passage of French and British voyages of exploration in the Pacific. The politics of the era certainly changed the nature and goals of voyaging. Gentlemanly culture still dominated British voyaging, but changing social orders were evident in the commoner Baudin’s leadership of a French voyage, though aristocratic commanders did follow him. While scientific cords bound the missions of the French and the British together, the tensions of these years dictated that friendly assistance was no longer guaranteed, as is evident in the fate of the d’Entrecasteaux/d’Auribeau expedition. Even navigators – like Flinders – could become captives. As the British started to annex territory and build bases in the Pacific they used the tumult of the age to their benefit. The French had to find their own way to create an imperial presence, while coming to terms with their distinctive commitments to revolution and nation-building.[36]

Despite differences, these two national modes of engaging with the Pacific were interlinked too: not all Frenchmen were republicans after all, and neither were all Britons anti-French. Even Flinders wrote to his wife Ann: ‘I am not without friends even amongst French men. On the contrary, I have several, and but one enemy [Governor Decaen].’[37] It was a story of a dance of European cousins. The French and British were trying to tame the Pacific, mindful of their related but different goals.

THE MAKING OF PACIFIC MONARCHS

The age of revolutions is evident not simply on the decks of vessels traversing these vast swathes of water, coming to terms with the news from Europe and working out the local outcomes of that news. To keep the story to that would still be to make the Pacific a distant planet orbiting Europe. In the exchanges between voyagers and islanders in the age of revolutions is a surge of indigenous politics and the rise of a counter-revolutionary British empire. At the heart of such exchanges was an eclectic range of ideas, techniques and materials and all of this made it possible for old systems of rule by chiefs to evolve into more centralised systems of monarchy right across the Pacific. Tonga is a good place to track this. It was here while in search of La Pérouse that d’Entrecasteaux had some of his most charged ethnographic encounters.

James Cook left a long shadow over those voyagers who followed in his wake in the two decades after his dramatic death at the hands of alleged cannibals in Hawai‘i in 1779. D’Entrecasteaux referred to Cook’s observations throughout the course of his journal, and sought to fill any gaps left by a man immortalised for his mapping of the Pacific. Remarkably, European voyagers through the Pacific were already starting to leave their debris strewn across the islands as a mark of their passage through them. For the likes of d’Entrecasteaux, items of European trade, European clothing or even the remains of wrecked ships became symbols of those who had passed before: points of comfort as well as melancholic tokens of disaster. In Adventure Bay in Tasmania, d’Entrecasteaux saw signs of what he took to be ‘temporary British establishments’; and suspected that there were remains of ‘several wooden stands destined to hold instruments in place for astronomical or trigonometrical observations’. By deciphering inscriptions found on trees, he worked out that William Bligh, who had served with Cook and who would later govern New South Wales, and who is now remembered for the mutiny that overtook his own expedition on the Bounty in 1789, had left some plants in Adventure Bay. D’Entrecasteaux made a point of determining whether these trees had prospered, sending his gardener, who later turned into a rebel outside Surabaya, to inspect them. While some pomegranate trees, a quince tree and fig trees were found, they were not doing well: ‘A five-and-a-half foot apple tree was found on the east coast of Adventure Bay which must have been planted several years before Captain Bligh’s visit; it was struggling, and its chances were not very promising.’[38] Despite the tense intellectual competition between the French and British voyagers, the responses to the litter left by rivals across the landscape of the Pacific point to how these European cousins felt that they were following related paths across the sea.

In Tongatapu, the main island of what is now Tonga, there was the same French interest in whether British attempts at improvement had succeeded. While in Tongatapu from March to April 1793, d’Entrecasteaux reported that Cook’s and Bligh’s voyages were ‘perfectly recollected’ by Tongans, but that no account of La Pérouse was forthcoming even from ‘the most intelligent’ of them.[39] This was despite the fact that La Pérouse had made a brief stop in Tonga. Later investigators such as Peter Dillon and a French expedition under Dumont d’Urville were able to gather recollections in Tonga of the La Pérouse mission.[40] D’Entrecasteaux detected a large number of items of British manufacture but none of French manufacture. He quickly arranged for French medals to be given out, as if to rectify the imbalance and to test whether they brought La Pérouse to mind. When a feast was held in d’Entrecasteaux’s honour by a chief called Tupou, the navigator took a billy goat and a pregnant nanny goat along as a gift, as well as a pair of male and female rabbits. But d’Entrecasteaux regretted Tupou’s indifference in receiving them and turned the conversation to the cattle that Cook had left in Tonga. The sheepishness of the Tongans’ response indicated that something was amiss.[41] Was it that they worried that he would ask for the cattle as gifts? This was a minor particular for d’Entrecasteaux to devote such energy to while exploring the other side of the world. But towards the end of the mission’s time in Tonga, the royalist d’Auribeau (who later took over from d’Entrecasteaux) wished to solve the puzzle. He visited a chief, Fuanunuiava, whose father had received the cattle from Cook, only to discover ‘a kind of mausoleum, which [Fuanunuiava] offered to dig open, so that the bones of these animals could be recognized’.[42]

This nicely illustrates the keen competition between French and British voyagers over natural husbandry. Such competition was tied to a shared commitment between these rival explorers to the idea that agricultural improvement was central to the making of settled and progressive societies in the Pacific. As empire moved from sea to land, maritime missions like this set the terms for commercial exchange of crops and plants and also for further schemes of land-based control. It was not coincidental that European voyagers themselves required replenishment when they called at islands.

D’Entrecasteaux was troubled by the nature of authority on the island of Tongatapu. He wrote: ‘I believe, like Cook, that this government has a lot in common with the old feudal regime, where the inconveniences increase in proportion to the weaknesses of the principal chief.’[43] Tonga was seen to be in anarchy; what was needed was proper governance tied to the agricultural uplift of the land. For d’Entrecasteaux anarchy was evident in the prevalence of theft, which arose from the insecurity of property. The chiefs owned all the property and could demand from their inferiors anything that they wished. The chiefs’ privilege lay also in how they had the right to multiple wives. D’Entrecasteaux noted the appearance of these women in heavily patronising terms:

Most of the women of the class in which the chiefs belong have very good looks: their aspect is interesting; they are expressive, without being flirtatious. They usually have beautiful hands, and their fingers could easily be used as models.[44]

Yet d’Entrecasteaux was plagued by the riddle of identifying the monarch of Tongatapu. Between Cook’s visit and his own, he would have expected that the throne would have passed to Fuanunuiava, the son of the man denoted as sovereign by Cook.[45] Perhaps it was because of Fuanunuiava’s youth, he pondered, that this had not occurred. D’Entrecasteaux also puzzled over the fact that Queen Tiné, whom he now took to be the head of state, could not confer the throne on her death to her immediate relations. For d’Entrecasteaux the complicated rules of succession were part of the problem. There was too much confusion in ‘distinguishing men who exercise power and to whom respect is given’.[46] D’Entrecasteaux was a man who wished for authority, but for the kind of authority held up by rules and constitutions and hemmed in by a market in trade and land and also by familiar gender norms. D’Entrecasteaux’s naturalist de La Billardière, later one of the leaders of the republican faction, wrote meanwhile of ‘King Tuoobou’ or Tupou of Tonga.[47] Tupou was in fact the Tu‘i Kanokupolu, one of three paramount titles in Tonga; the highest ranking however held another title, Tu‘i Tonga. Fuanunuiava was named as Tu‘i Tonga in 1795. La Billardière also observed how Queen Tiné was conscious of her privileges as the paramount authority on Tonga. Lower ranking chiefs including Tupou were obliged to pay their respects by taking her right foot to their heads.[48]

D’Entrecasteaux’s portrait of Tonga reveals more of himself than the Tonga of this period. Despite how the terms of King and Queen pepper so many European reports of the Pacific, in this era, until the arrival of Europeans, there were no European-style kings and queens. In Tongatapu, the status of chiefs was determined on the basis of descent from a chosen ancestor, where age and gender were important as in Europe; but in Tonga sisterhood was ranked as a higher privilege than brotherhood in determining succession.[49] The differences between chiefs and others did not lie in the labour they undertook, if any, and so the language of class that d’Entrecasteaux used to observe Tonga was misplaced. Objects were not sold and did not retain a value on the basis of the work that had been put into making them. Rather value was determined primarily by the rank and status of the creator of the object: it was no wonder that Tongans wished to possess European objects. Yet those whom the Tongans called papalangi, or men from the sky, introduced into these islands a new language of politics, class and organisation. It was through a European insistence on the value of labour, the market and industry, together with a supplanted language of kingship, that political change was ushered in. Such change was consistent with the broader political transformations across the world in this age. In this region, these changes counted as a firming up of monarchy whereas elsewhere it could see monarchies torn down. Items like d’Entrecasteaux’s medals – and European weapons in particular – fed into the intense wars and political instability in early-nineteenth-century Tonga. Chiefs quarrelled over the arrival of European ships, trying to attract them to their harbours. [Fig. 2.2] And those who resided at ports inevitably did better than those based elsewhere. As Europeans sought for kings and queens, islanders reinvented their politics.

Fig. 2.2 ‘European ships as depicted on a Tongan clapping stick’

2.2 © Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen. Coll.no. RV-34-6

Sexual favours also became part of this market and a means of establishing strategic friendship with Europeans. La Billardière’s account of the d’Entrecasteaux expedition includes an image titled ‘Dance of the Friendly Islands in the Presence of the Queen Tiné’, showing bare-breasted women draped from their waists down in what is probably bark cloth. D’Entrecasteaux entertained Tiné with the music of a violin and cittern and she returned the favour, instructing Tongan women to sing of the great deeds of warriors. Some of the younger women wear girdles around their waists, probably sisi fale, worn by high-born women in dances in honour of the Tu‘i Tonga.[50] [Fig. 2.3] Yet Tiné desired to firm up her relationship with the commander. She invited him to reside in her house: ‘the Admiral had no opportunity of appreciating justly the motive for these obliging offers, for he did not accept her invitation.’[51] This report of Tiné’s invitation to d’Entrecasteaux was in keeping with how ‘Queen Oberea’ was alleged to have greeted Cook’s voyage and had sex with Joseph Banks, the gentlemanly naturalist, who later went on to organise papers for Baudin.[52] When the reports of Cook’s journey went to press, this supposed queen of Tahiti became an emblem of the exotic in Europe. As she slept with Banks, she was seen to have given her kingdom to her lover. Despite the differences between Europe and Polynesia, between monarchic and chiefly systems of rule, sex crystallised powerful unions.

Fig. 2.3 A fragment of sisi fale, ‘Coconut fibre waist garment, in all likelihood collected during the voyage of d’Entrecasteaux’

2.3 © Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais

In an age of revolutions that saw active debate about the nature of politics and about monarchies and republics, it is striking to see how indigenous peoples created centralised Pacific kingdoms. Pacific islanders participated in and crafted the age of revolutions too, a point which historians have struggled to see. These new monarchies made identifiable representatives of island societies, who could serve as the point of focus for collaboration with British and other foreign agents as well as resistance against invading imperialists. In Tonga, at the same time as the arrival of a range of European settlers in the 1790s, including traders, evangelical missionaries as well as those who had escaped from the convict settlement in Australia, there came a long civil war between rival chiefs. The investiture of the paramount chief, Tu‘i Tonga, was laid aside and there was a conflict between the lineages of the Tu‘i Tonga and Tu‘i Kanokupolu.[53] Chiefs fought over tribute and connections to missionaries and other Europeans. The wars between chiefs were attended by the spread of European diseases and weapons, and the fleeing of many chiefs to neighbouring Fiji or Samoa. One chief fled with his wife to British Sydney.[54] In the midst of these radical changes, there was a loss of cohesion and the chiefly system of rule was in crisis.

If Pacific notions of monarchy drew from contact with Europeans in political and material terms, religion also played a vital role in the new order of politics that then arose in a place like Tonga. The work of Protestant missionaries is notable here. A new age dawned in Tonga with the conversion of the uninstalled paramount chief Taufa’ahau to Protestantism through the work of Wesleyan missionaries who arrived in 1822. This man changed the political make-up of Tonga and transformed it from a competitive set of chiefdoms to a united monarchic polity. Taufa’ahau took the name George I at his baptism in 1831 and used the support of British missionaries to unify Tonga. The change in religion signified a drastic change in political organisation: for where chiefs had received their sanction from lineages tied to gods, the spread of Christianity now brought a different relationship between political and sacred authority. Now the missionaries were the purveyors of the Word, and George I was the keeper of the law. Taufa’ahau’s opponents feared that soon the missionaries themselves would become chiefs. Many of George I’s followers adopted Christianity, though there continued to be a great deal of wavering and movement in and out of Christian faith and church attendance. George I boasted: ‘I am the only Chief on the Island … When I turn they will all turn.’[55] He was right: George I’s monarchic line has survived till today, priding itself on never being formally colonised. [Fig. 2.4]. Tonga is a microcosm of changes which were afoot across the wide expanse of the Pacific.

Fig. 2.4 George I of Tonga (1880s) in his eighties

2.4 © The Trustees of the British Museum

In Tahiti, where Banks had apparently slept with his lover, the queen, Cook used the vocabulary of royalty in ordering his observations. In contrast with d’Entrecasteaux’s comments on Tonga, Cook noted that Tahiti’s was a benevolent monarchy. All had free access to King Tu in Tahiti: ‘I have observed that the chiefs of these islands are more beloved by the bulk of the people, than feared. May we not conclude from hence that the government is mild and equitable?’[56] By the time that Bligh arrived the Tahitians knew the line themselves: the Pomare family had established a kingly lineage. Pomare II invited Bligh to a ceremony allegedly involving human sacrifice, where the victims were the violators of some tabu (taboo). The ceremony ended with a prayer for the British monarch. When Bligh celebrated the birthday of the British monarch, George III, with fireworks, free alcohol and a twenty-one-gun salute, the alliance of monarchs was complete. European weapons were central to the consolidation of this monarchic line.[57] Further to the east in Hawai‘i, a dynasty was founded by Kamehameha, who was also visited by Cook and other European navigators. By the 1820s, the monarchy of Hawai‘i could be idealised as perfect for a post-revolutionary world. As the Russian commander Otto von Kotzebue explained in arriving in Hawai‘i, Kamehameha had got the right balance between tradition and change. He was already preparing for succession.

The intertwined changes in politics between Europe and the Pacific in the age of revolutions run across commitments to monarchy, agriculture, land, gender and sex. These changes seem unexpected because the Pacific is so far away from Europe. How did they become possible in practical terms? The entanglement of Europe and the Pacific might be described through the image of raiding. Islanders raided Europe for everything that came on their ships, from political ideas to animals and plants, and used them for their own purposes in the light of the old.

RAIDING EUROPE

In 1806, more than a decade after d’Entrecasteaux’s time in Tonga, an Englishman called William Mariner was taken captive in the Tongan islands, at the age of fifteen, to the north of where d’Entrecasteaux made his observations. Mariner arrived on the Port au Prince, a private English ship, which was formerly French, and which was now deployed to raid French or Spanish vessels. The sailors on board were allowed to keep the booty. The ship was ‘nearly 500 tons, 96 men, and mounting 24 long nine and twelve pounders, besides 8 twelve-pound carronades on the quarter-deck’.[58] It was because of vessels like this that the French feared that La Pérouse had met a death at the hands of English anti-republicans. Spanish bases in the Americas were particular targets of the Port au Prince but so were the whales that roamed the Pacific and which were valued for their oil.

In Tonga, the Port au Prince was taken over by about 300 islanders who went aboard the ship and attacked the surprised crew. This was in spite of the warnings that there was a conspiracy to take over the vessel; these warnings were issued by some Hawai‘ians (who understood Tongan) and who were part of the Port au Prince’s crew. The Tongans eventually grounded the ship. Gunpowder, carronades, guns and stripped iron were taken ashore, and after the ship had been summarily looted for everything that was deemed valuable it was burnt. About half of the crew were massacred by the Tongans in what followed. According to Mariner, the attack was led by a Hawai‘ian, who probably arrived in Tonga on an American ship.[59] Mariner wrote evocatively of the noises that were let off by the guns on board:

In the evening they set fire to her, in order to get more easily afterwards at the iron work. All the great guns were loaded, and as they began to be heated by the general conflagration they went off, one after another, producing a terrible panic among all the natives.[60]

The survivors, their skills and their possessions were recycled in the wars that gripped Tonga around the decline of chiefly lines and before the consolidation of George I’s monarchic state. The story goes that the future George I was himself involved in the raid of the Port au Prince, when he was about nine, and that he nearly drowned in the whale oil in the hold of the vessel.[61] Mariner was a key asset. He was so liked by the chief Finau ‘Ulukalala II – who raided the ship – that he was adopted by one of his wives. Another of the survivors of the Port au Prince was serving as ‘prime minister’ to a chief on Vava‘u as late as 1830.[62]

From his base in the Ha’apai islands ‘Ulukalala wished to attack the political centre of these islands in Tongatapu from where he had been driven away. In seizing the Port au Prince he was arming himself for his wars with the powers that be in Tongatapu. Mariner and fifteen other Britons participated in the raid that followed on Tongatapu, undertaken with the use of a fleet of canoes and the carronades looted from the Port au Prince.[63]

In the end one of the most important forts at Nuku’alofa, now the capital of Tonga, fell into the hands of ‘Ulukalala’s forces. Mariner described the fort as made of walls of wicker-work supported by posts, making nine-foot high fences; it had stood for eleven years but was now ravaged. It was a truly awful rout: ‘The conquerors, club in hand, entered the place in several quarters and slew all they met, men, women and children.’[64] These inhabitants were awe-struck by the new weapons used by their assailants. They described balls as if they were alive, entering houses, going around their dwellings looking for someone to kill, rather than exploding straight away. While the battle was in progress, ‘Ulukalala sat himself in an English chair taken off the Port au Prince and surveyed the scene from the reef.[65] After this attack, his further attempt to take the fort in Vava‘u harbour was not as successful.

Despite using European articles of war, ‘Ulukalala preferred Tongan military customs and did not take the advice that Mariner gave him on how to consolidate his power. When at peace, he took up the opportunity for conversation with Mariner to learn about the outside world, and one topic that was particularly interesting was that of politics. He wished to be the king of England. This again highlights how islanders were taking up new notions of monarchy:

Oh, that the gods would make me king of England! There is not an island in the whole world, however small, but that I would then subject to my power: the King of England does not deserve the dominion he enjoys; possessed of so many great ships, why does he suffer such petty islands as those of Tonga continually to insult his people with acts of treachery? Where [sic.] I he, would I send tamely to ask for yams and pigs? No, I would come with the front of battle; and with the thunder of Bolotane [the noise of the guns of Britain].[66]

A central component in the spread of the global market into Tonga was also tied up with these conversations. For Mariner explained the role of money to his patron. He explained that the silver discs that had been taken off the Port au Prince by the Tongans and which had been thrown and bounced across the surface of the sea, and called flat stones or pa’anga, were in fact money. Pa’anga is now the currency of Tonga; it was introduced as such in 1967.[67]

When ‘Ulukalala died, Mariner was also highly favoured by ‘Ulukalala’s son, Moengangongo.[68] Mariner finally escaped in 1810. Though wishing to escape before this point, he had not been at the right place at the right time to intercept a vessel. When he left, it was a painful parting because he had integrated himself into Tongan ways.

In 1832, Mafihape, Mariner’s adoptive mother in Tonga, sent him an intriguing letter.[69] In her letter, written or probably transcribed for her by someone very familiar with Tonga, she notes that ‘everyone has become a Christian’. She asks Mariner to send a ship:

If you have genuine affection [for me] it would be wonderful if you could send your younger brother, if you have one – or your son, if you have one, so I can see him, and also so that you be shown, in the Lord, to be manly – if you are so determined not to come yourself and see me. He can come and live here instead.[70]

Mafihape herself had by this time converted to Christianity but wanted Mariner to know that she was ‘very poorly off’. Despite the spread of a new religion, and its associated trappings of paper and writing, as also new conceptions of behaviour, Mafihape still hoped to utilise the customs of chieftaincy, where chiefs adopted powerful sons, to circumvent her allegedly lowly situation. Her plan was to arrange for a rerun of William Mariner’s time in Tonga, by asking for the arrival in Tonga of Mariner’s younger brother or son, and perhaps even hinting that Mariner himself should return. Her letter points back to patterns of chiefly rule, which pre-dated contact, while also bearing the markers, in the use of ‘in the Lord’ in the extract, of newly Christianised Tonga.

In the course of investigating the disappearance of La Pérouse in the mid 1820s, Peter Dillon records meeting this woman and showing her the portrait of Mariner. Dillon writes that she exclaimed ‘it is Tokey’, the name that ‘Ulukalala gave to Mariner, in remembrance of a favourite child of his who had died. She ‘wept bitterly’ at the sight of the image. In Tonga today the story is told that she may have been Mariner’s concubine rather than his adoptive mother.[71]

Sadly, Mariner could not read Mafihape’s letter having forgotten most of his Tongan. He complained that the ‘orthography’ of his mother’s letter was in too unfamiliar a form, indicating the impact of the English missionaries, perhaps.[72] After returning to England, he gave up his life of adventure and became a stockbroker in London, married and fathered eleven children and, rather unfittingly, drowned in Surrey Canal at the age of fifty-three.[73] In the Pacific meanwhile there is a line which carries the name Mariner, from Mariner’s son George, who settled in Samoa with a Tongan wife. As for Mariner’s own end in the canal, a speculative Tongan theory is that he committed suicide, being unable in the end to come to terms with his life in England.[74]

Fig. 2.5 ‘Mr. Mariner in the Costume of the Tonga Islands’ (1816)

2.5 © The History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

William Mariner’s account of travels was written up for him by a doctor, John Martin, citing the excuse that Mariner had become so accustomed to Tongan ways that he had been out of the habit of writing and reading in English. The image facing the title page is a full-length view of Mariner, which was shown by Dillon to his Tongan mother, dressed in Tongan clothes and bare-bodied above the waist like the women who danced for d’Entrecasteaux. [Fig. 2.5.] Mariner had straddled worlds. A product of the European age of revolutions, and its commitment to global war at any price, he had been taken captive to fight in a series of other wars, which were Tongan tussles in aid of monarchy. These wars too, arose within the changing political currents of this period. The age of revolution had bred a surge of indigenous monarchism in the Pacific.

Fig. 2.6 The beach where the ship is said to have been raided (above) and the Port au Prince Memorial (below), Tonga

2.6a © Sujit Sivasundaram

2.6b © Sujit Sivasundaram

The dispersal of European weapons was critical to the story around the Port au Prince; so it is appropriate that three of the cannon from the Port au Prince are today placed in front of the former site of the British High Commission in Tonga. Other cannon are dispersed elsewhere including on Ha’ano where, according to one story told by the inhabitants of this island in the Ha’apai group, the ship was finally taken.[75] In 2012, the discovery of a sunken ship thought to be the Port au Prince gave rise to a treasure hunt in the waters off Tonga.[76] Today, in Ha‘apai, which I visited in 2017, stories still circulate about the site of the Port au Prince wreck, together with accounts of how the Japanese mafia as well as New Zealand criminals had found gold from the wreck and taken it out without the knowledge of the Tongan government. A monument has been erected close to the beach where the Port au Prince was raided. It is overtaken by the lush vegetation of Ha‘apai. [Fig. 2.6]

The beach itself is simply a thin strip of sand, bearing no evidence of its history. However, perhaps fittingly, given the history of exchanges on Tonga, including of animals brought by voyagers, there was a dead pig floating in the water when I walked its sands. The carcass was accompanied by plastic bottles, broken coral and fallen coconut trunks rotting in the water. The signs of modern consumption – part of the history that followed the whale oil on the Port au Prince – were evident on the beach.

When published, Mariner’s account was one source of inspiration for the poet Byron’s idyllic description of South Pacific island culture. ‘The Island’ was written in 1823. In Byron’s telling of the politics of Tonga, republicanism is rife on the island of Toobonai, the fictional island where the poem is set. It is the ‘equal land without a lord’.[77] Here nature is bountiful and the islanders are relatively uncorrupted by sin. Labour is unnecessary because of what nature provides:

Where all partake the earth without dispute,

And bread itself is gather’d as a fruit;

Where none contest the fields, the woods, the streams: –

The goldless age, where gold disturbs no dreams,

Inhabits or inhabited the shore,

Till Europe taught them better than before:

Bestow’d her customs, and amended theirs,

But left her vices also to their heirs.[78]

This is a telling fact of the contradictory effects of the age of revolution on either side of the world: European literary representations, full of romanticism, could be utterly disconnected from the reality of the Pacific. If Tongans raided Europe to remake their politics, Europeans in turn often missed the import of what was happening in the Pacific in the age of revolutions.

The need to challenge European depictions of this sequence of events is clear in the writings of recent Tongan historians. They react against a view of the burning of the Port au Prince as indicative of the ‘treachery’ of Tongans: instead they hold that the crew of this vessel behaved ‘like pirates and robbers’ in the first place.[79] In other words, these were two systems of raiding, European and Tongan, which faced each other around the Port au Prince. The two-way exchange included materials, ideas and culture, too.

AOTEAROA AND THE IMPERIAL MONARCHS

This indigenous language of political consolidation and monarchy usefully fed into the advance of the British empire. In looking further south, to Aotearoa/New Zealand, the forward march of the British is in full show. The story from New Zealand that follows corresponds with some of the features of the transformation in Tonga with the consolidation of monarchy.

First, customary forms of warfare, chieftaincy and decision-making evolved in contact with British traders and missionaries. Second, warfare spread in range and intensity as exchanges with Europeans deepened and as weapons and affiliations proved politically useful as signs of mana (status) to Māori rangatira (chiefs). Third, and in contrast with Tonga, the British state came in claiming to protect Māori through the introduction of law and bureaucracy. There were plans for flags and discussions of constitutional arrangements, set piece indicators of the age of revolutions and the dawn of our times. Fourth, Māori asserted their standing as political agents able to resist the British, sometimes picking up on the tactics of the revolutionary era, for instance through the identification of a Māori monarch. If the articulation of monarchy occurred across the Pacific, this in turn allowed bigger monarchs or the British empire to rise up as a counter-revolutionary force. The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi saw the status of the political elites of New Zealand tied up with that of the British monarch.

In general terms across the Pacific, the number of settled Europeans was dramatically increasing as the nineteenth century began. In Hawai‘i, while there had been ten European residents in 1790, there were nearly a hundred by 1806.[80] In Tonga a visiting captain wrote in 1830 that there were many Englishmen in the islands, who had been treated with great kindness, and who had married, settled and accommodated themselves to Tongan manners and customs.[81] By the late 1830s there were as many as two thousand Europeans settled in New Zealand, including missionaries, and ‘beachrangers’, meaning people who were cast out of sealing and whaling missions for various crimes, and escaped convicts. The greatest concentration of these settlers resided in the Bay of Islands district in the North Island.[82] Occasional and exoticised encounters gave way to more sustained contact, and formal imperial takeover was just around the corner.

After the British established a base for themselves in Australia in 1788 and in Tasmania by 1803 the game of imperial takeover had begun. This game saw New Zealand following a different course to Tonga. One vital difference between the two was the closeness between Australia and New Zealand, which made New Zealand a resource frontier for Australia. The significant turning point for imperial advance was the British signing of the Treaty of Waitangi with Māori chiefs in 1840, which the colonists interpreted as a deed of cessation. The French responded by annexing the Marquesas in 1842 and Tahiti in 1843. Though a tit-for-tat battle for islands marked Anglo-French relations in the Pacific through the course of the mid to late nineteenth century, the convict colony that the British had established in Australia in the eighteenth century meant that the Pacific came increasingly under the purview of the British.

One source for the early history of New Zealand is the travelling writer and painter Augustus Earle, who visited in 1827–8. Despite the increasing presence of Europeans, Earle’s watercolours of the Bay of Islands show romanticised scenes of nature and Māori going about their business while paying no attention to arriving European ships. These visual illustrations do not exaggerate the impact of styles of European settlement on Māori habitation and deserve scrutiny for revealing indigenous social and political features which sometimes go missing in the textual sources kept by Europeans.[83] One large watercolour shows Te Puna in the Bay of Islands. Māori canoes and a large tree in the foreground play a bigger role than the missionary settlement behind the beach: no Europeans are in sight. [Fig. 2.7][84] A pa or Māori defence fortification appears at a height on the hill above the bay. In keeping with such a reading of this image, it is important to insist that prior forms of organisation, navigation and politics in New Zealand set the terms for early encounters with Europeans. For instance, existent systems of patronage allowed missionary work to proceed under the powerful auspices of Māori chiefs.[85]

Fig. 2.7 ‘Tepoanah Bay of Islands New Zealand a Church Missionary Establishment’ (watercolour, Augustus Earle, 1827)

2.7 © Augustus Earle, National Library of Australia, NK12/139

Fig. 2.8 ‘War speech’ by Augustus Earle (published 1838)

2.8 © Augustus Earle, National Library of Australia, NK 668

In one offensive myth, these islands are a nation founded by Captain Cook. It is true that the Endeavour voyage gave rise to remarkably accurate charts of the coast of New Zealand in 1769–70.[86] Yet this is an offensive narrative because ideas of people were long extant in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Iwi denoted people of common descent, a fundamental identity, tied up with the arrival of Māori from a place denoted as Hawaiki. In political terms Māori also organised for warfare in hapu, groups subordinate to chiefs, fighting as units.[87] Plans for war were made and discussed in various kinds of ceremonial meetings, which early missionaries called ‘councils of war’ and which Earle called ‘a rude parliament’.[88] [Fig. 2.8][89] Whakapapa are Māori genealogies. Teachers and experts in Māori genealogy possessed genealogical staffs that were notched with references to their ancestors, providing a means for keeping up a sense of their past.

European observers were quick to interpret and exaggerate traditional styles of Māori war – caused by the resolution of wrongs that resulted from the killing of high-ranked individuals, or from offence to the sacred or untouchable status of elites. Europeans saw these conflicts as signs of the ‘savagery’ of Māori. The resulting view of the ‘heathen’ Māori was central to the early colonisation of New Zealand. As time passed there was also the trope of the enfeebled Māori, which justified liberal protectionist empire.[90] Religious encounter and rapacious trade oiled these tropes.

The taking of the Gospel to New Zealand was pushed through by Rev. Samuel Marsden, an Anglican cleric and a Yorkeshireman who engaged in extensive agricultural pursuits in Paramatta, now a suburb of Sydney. Under Marsden’s auspices, the first evangelical contact with New Zealand was made in 1814, in a vessel captained by Peter Dillon who appears again in our story.[91] Marsden was troubled by the brutality of European–Māori interaction and stated his agenda as a making of peace.[92] He took a liking to Māori who came to Sydney and saw their land as a ‘great emporium of the South Seas’.[93]

In 1809 the Boyd, a vessel on its way to London with sixty Europeans, was returning a Māori chief Te Aara to New Zealand when it was raided at Whangaroa in the Bay of Islands district. Its passengers were killed by Māori, including women and children. Another vessel under the command of the Sydney trader Alexander Berry, who was procuring spars for the Cape Colony, was only able to rescue a woman, two children and a boy from among the Boyd’s passengers.[94] Marsden presented his own view of the violent episode around the Boyd in the Sydney Gazette, using the account of a Tahitian called ‘Jem’ who deserted a European ship.[95] Berry’s and Marsden’s views of the civilisational capacity of the Māori differed; authoritarian settler politics were aligned against reformist Christianity in these two alternative renditions.[96]

One contemporary explanation of the cause of the attack is that the master of the Boyd had been especially harsh to the returning Māori chief, Te Aara, in the course of the voyage. In conversation, Earle noted that one of his interlocutors, ‘King George’ [Te Uri-Ti], mimicked the ill-treatment of the returning chief on board the ship, ‘his cleaning shoes and knives; his being flogged when he refused to do this degrading work’.[97] Another explanation is that Te Aara was dismayed by the death of his relatives in New Zealand, brought about by the spread of European diseases.[98] Cultural misunderstanding ran ahead of the Boyd’s problems. This included a pocket watch accidentally dropped into the waters by a visiting captain, which Māori believed cursed the coast with disease. A group of two hundred whalers decided to exact revenge, massacring the settlement of Marsden’s friend Te Pahi, who had spent time in Sydney, meting out their revenge on the wrong group of islanders.[99] Such dramatic altercations changed Māori–British politics.

Yet the idea of the violence of Māori culture and its interaction with ruthless and unthinking Europeans, in a cycle of revenge and counter-revenge, is a rhetorical relic of the period. To the contrary, Māori were mobile peoples who undertook war in order to restore their integrity and status.[100] If there was no possibility of war against offenders, war could be undertaken against distant non-kin to this end of restoration. The arrival of Europeans expanded these customary forms of politics in new directions, making wars more intense and wider in their radius. As in Tonga, the appropriation of European weapons was significant. Newer styles of war, sometimes termed ‘muskets wars’, unified and concentrated power.[101] They generated unprecedented fatalities and a decline in population. But they transformed what already existed by way of conflict rather than giving rise to a simplistic fatal impact with no room for indigenous response.

The physical power of muskets was not the sole determining factor of these wars. Some historians have cast the new culture of the potato as equally significant as muskets to the unfolding of these wars – in providing food to enable long-range war parties. [102] In the words of the first British Resident of New Zealand in 1837: ‘there seems to be good reason to doubt whether their wars were less sanguinary before Fire Arms were introduced.’[103] Established military tactics involving close combat, evolved in order to accommodate these new long-distance weapons.[104] The symbolism of these muskets was critical too. Particular chiefs, who acquired weapons, were cast as great leaders and warriors; they could be seen as operating within pre-existent modes of righting wrongs. Gradually, over the decades that followed, and beyond the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the concept of the Māori monarch appeared as a result of this entanglement between old and new, the Pacific and Europe. As an example of the attribution of monarchy, Earle drew ‘King George’ or ‘Shulitea’ (Te Uri-Ti), who served as his friend and protector in New Zealand.[105] [Fig. 2.9]

Fig. 2.9 ‘King George. N. Zealand Costume’ by Augustus Earle (1828)

2.9 © Augustus Earle, National Library of Australia, NK12/84

Fig. 2.10 ‘The wounded chief Honghi [Hongi Hika] & his family’ by Augustus Earle, 1827

2.10 © Icas94 / De Agostini / Bridgeman Images

The so-called ‘Māori Napoleon’, Hongi Hika (1772?–1828), was an early initiate to the power of European muskets. Hongi used muskets in the wars between Nga Puhi and Ngati Whatua in the Bay of Island district of North Island.[106] The loss of the Nga Puhi in a battle of 1807 or 1808, which killed two of his brothers and many chiefly kin, was a formative moment in his life. Travelling to Sydney, on a missionary ship, he supported the first missionary settlement in New Zealand. This missionary settlement was later criticised for being under his personal monopoly.[107] Hongi’s relationship with the missionaries lasted until his death.

As a Māori account holds, Hongi operated within established ways of avenging the wrongs against kin:

The primary reason Hongi set himself up as a war leader killing people was the wrongs of former times, that is the farewell requests (concerning them) of those who died earlier, which Hongi carried out to honour the words of his ancestors who died.[108]

Yet Hongi innovated and changed these traditions. Following the Europeans’ advice he grew wheat and corn, and potatoes, that he could use to buy muskets and gunpowder from arriving vessels, and he put the captives he took in war to work on these plantations.[109] As a result of these wars, and the interplay of new and old, Hongi’s people came increasingly to refer to themselves using a larger collective name, ‘Nga Puhi’.[110]

Hongi created quite a stir when he arrived in London in 1820 accompanied by the evangelical Thomas Kendall and an aide, Waikato [Fig. 2.11]. Global travel supercharged Māori customary practice. Tellingly he was presented to the British monarch, George IV. He allegedly observed: ‘There is only one king in England, there shall be only one king in New Zealand.’[111] He also spent some time at the University of Cambridge, was entertained by the Vice Chancellor and helped create a Māori dictionary.[112] In the oral tradition of his descendants, he is said to have taken a great interest in maps of the Napoleonic wars deposited in Cambridge.[113] A representation of Hongi’s face had arrived in England prior to his person. Marsden had asked him to carve a likeness of himself; a copy of the carving was later published in the Missionary Register of 1816.[114] One MP wrote of Hongi’s appearance in the House of Lords and compared his face to a carved specimen:

Fig. 2.11 ‘Waikato, Hongi Hika and Thomas Kendall’ by James Barry, 1820

2.11 © Barry, James, active 1818-1846. Barry, James: [The Rev Thomas Kendall and the Maori chiefs Hongi and Waikato]. Ref: G-618. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23241174

I went round, and got near enough to touch his Majesty; when I found his royal face to be one of the very finest specimens of carving I have ever beheld. The Chamberlain’s face [Waikato] was fair; the sunflowers on it were highly respectable; but the King’s nose, which surpassed the average size, was one blaze of stars and planets.[115]

When he returned to New Zealand, the fact that he came with gifts and patronage and a personal bond with the British Crown allowed him to immediately mount a series of campaigns to consolidate his power. He traded many of his presents in Sydney on the way back to New Zealand, preferring muskets, powder and shot. (He had hundreds of muskets in his possession when he returned to New Zealand.) He retained a suit of armour which was presented to him.[116]

Hongi’s story is reminiscent of that from Tonga: local wars were part and parcel of the global contests of the age of revolutions. For the spread of armament, political consolidation and notions of community arose at the intersection of Māori traditions and British imperialism in a mutually reinforcing dynamic. Such a dynamic was evident with respect to the interpretation of Hongi’s face: it was a product of Māori carving as much as European notions of race. Hongi Hika’s wars in the 1820s covered a wide area, allowing hundreds of people to leave the Bay of Islands, and, according to one historian, ‘set almost the whole of the North Island on the move, caused numerous wars and expeditions in both the North and South Islands, and eventually brought about a major redistribution of population’.[117]

In extensive and often negative European commentary appeared another iconic fighter of the musket wars.[118] Te Rauparaha (?–1849), the Ngati Toa leader, was involved from the late eighteenth century in a series of war parties to right the wrongs done to his people. He extended his expeditions south, in order to find a home for his people. His iconic status is illustrated in how his dance of war and welcome, ‘ka mate’, is now used widely by the All Blacks rugby union team, a signifier in its original sense of the triumph of life over death that has now become a cultural symbol of the Māori to millions of rugby fans. He reached down to Kapiti Island, close to today’s Wellington at the southern end of North Island, and established a base there.

It was partly as a result of European assistance that Te Rauparaha’s migratory wars spread into the South Island though he came from the North Island. His son, Tamihana, a Christian convert and one of the first Māori to enter a missionary school, wrote of the events which unfolded when John Stewart of the Elizabeth arrived at Kapiti island in 1830. Te Rauparaha asked the captain whether he would transport him and a war party to Akaroa, close to today’s Christchurch on the South Island, to right the wrongs caused by some murders. Te Rauparaha took seventy fighting men with him aboard the Elizabeth, and Stewart participated in a scheme whereby the offending chief Tamaiharanui was lured aboard. Stewart called out to Tamaiharanui’s people: ‘Go and bring him to get some gunpowder.’ In Tamihana’s words:

When his canoe reached the ship, Tamaiharanui, his wife and daughter came aboard and went below to the captain’s quarters. When Tamaiharanui had sat down Te Rauparaha tied his hands and took him and his family to another cabin. Nothing was said. Then Rauparaha came up on deck with his warriors to capture the 30 men who had accompanied Tamaiharanui; not one escaped. When it was dark the 70 warriors got in the canoes and went ashore. They entered the villages at dawn, the slaughter began.[119]

With time, the extent of Te Rauparaha’s contact with whalers expanded greatly and Europeans readily transported his canoe aboard their ships.[120] Widening his reach by foreign assistance, Te Rauparaha followed the path earlier trodden by Hongi and other Māori, arriving in Sydney and meeting Marsden in 1830. He also came into dispute with the New Zealand Company, formed to create settlements for British migrants. Te Rauparaha attacked land surveyors, ending with the killing of the Company’s Captain Arthur Wakefield (1799–1843).[121] These disputes over land point to the connection between this period of war and trade which pitted Māori against outsiders and what was to come in terms of colonial settlement, when Te Rauparaha signed a copy of the Treaty of Waitangi.[122]

So far, two steps in the sequence of change in New Zealand are clear. First, the encounter with the British transforms existent customs connected to righting the wrongs of the past. Second, the spread of weapons and the entrenchment of violence make their impact on these existent customs. Warriors and monarchic figures emerged who used the British to expand their ambitions. Te Rauparaha employed the transport provided by the invaders in this way. And at the same time British bureaucracy and law arrived in New Zealand. It presented itself as keen on protecting Māori, even from the effects that Europeans were having on their land.

In 1814, the year of his arrival in New Zealand, as part of the first contingent of missionaries, Thomas Kendall was appointed Justice of the Peace.[123] The British created a position of Resident to New Zealand, taken up by the Tory James Busby in 1833, who was seen by the Māori as the British ‘king’s man’, just as men-of-war were called the ‘king’s ships’ and their sailors the ‘king’s warriors’.[124] The British empire could in this way project the language and symbolism of monarchy for its own imperially benevolent purposes. Busby’s letter of appointment from the governor in Sydney made specific reference to how the Elizabeth had contributed to the wars of New Zealand. He came to New Zealand in the direct context of that violent episode in 1830.[125] Busby arranged for a Māori flag, previously used by the missionaries, to be flown by vessels built in New Zealand as they entered Sydney, as ‘the Flag of an Independent State’. A declaration of Māori independence was also signed by fifty-two chiefs by the end of the 1830s in the name of ‘The United Tribes of New Zealand’.[126] It was first signed by Māori chiefs in 1835.

The 1835 declaration was conceived by Busby as a ‘Magna Carta of New Zealand Independence’, though it was clearly a first step on the way to formal British control.[127] Busby saw a confederation of chiefs as the constitutional body of the Māori people and wrote soon after his arrival that he wished to build a Parliament House for the Māori chiefs.[128] His view was that they were the ‘aristocrats’ of their society, under the absolute power of the primary chief, who functioned like a king.[129] He hoped to school these chiefs in keeping the peace and in moral principles of government. In return they were to be awarded a salary and a medal marking their distinction.[130] The Resident, the post that Busby filled, would legislate and present the congress of chiefs with the laws needing approval. This British representative would seek the advice and information of missionaries and other settlers. A militia, composed of settlers who could act in an emergency or a trained ‘native force’, were also part of Busby’s vision. In conceiving of his post in these terms, Busby took up the role played by Marsden’s religious mission. He bitterly complained at times that the missionaries of New Zealand did not defer to him.[131] He also diverged from his orders from Sydney. The governor in New South Wales criticised the 1835 declaration for vesting exclusive legislative power in the confederation of chiefs.[132]

Despite the liberal humanitarian discourse, the 1835 declaration arranged by Busby was partly a strategic response to the manoeuvring of a French aristocrat, Baron Charles Philip Hippolytus de Thierry, from a family who had fled the French Revolution, who threatened to found a colony in New Zealand, free from taxation. The baron planned for marriage and collaboration between Māori and Europeans. Before the 1835 proclamation, in the early 1830s, a direct petition had been drawn up by the Māori chiefs and addressed to the British king, William IV and it specifically referred to French plans:

We have heard that the tribe Marian [a reference to Marion du Fresne, the French explorer who was killed by the Māori in 1772] is at hand coming to take away our land, therefore we pray thee to become our friend and the guardian of these islands, lest the teasing of other tribes should come near to us, and lest strangers should come and take away our land. And if any of thy people should be troublesome or vicious towards us (for some persons are living here who have run away from ships), we pray thee to be angry with them that they may be obedient, lest the anger of the people of this land fall on them.[133]

In the mid 1830s Thierry sailed through the Pacific, after offering a colony to both the Netherlands and France, and he wrote from Tahiti to the British Resident of New Zealand, styling himself ‘Sovereign Chief of New Zealand and King of the Island of Nukahiva [in the Marquesas, which he had claimed in the course of his voyage]’. It was in response to this eccentric French bid, and the growing worry about both French and American interests in New Zealand, exemplified by French Catholic missionaries and by American whaling, that Busby presided over the proclamation of the sovereignty of the united tribes.[134]

Busby also noted how two Belgian brothers were buying land in New Zealand and how a ‘Polish Count’ was writing of his travels in the country.[135] French Catholics in New Zealand, meanwhile, were said to be joining forces with the Irish; and a Catholic bishop was alleged to be plotting the arrival of a vessel of ‘Soldiers and Missionaries and traders’ for the formation of a French settlement.[136] The way in which humanitarianism cloaked strategic imperial calculations is especially evident in Busby’s bid to educate ‘half-caste children’ lest they fall into the grip of Roman Catholics in Aotearoa/New Zealand and be educated in ‘sentiments and principles adverse to British interests’.[137] In one instance of the prevalent paranoia, which in this case was linked to revolt in the Americas and was racist, Busby wrote to his brother of ‘American negroes from the whalers’ who he had found teaching voodoo to Māori in the bush:

Here were some twenty or thirty Natives of New Zealand seated round the side, and in the middle was a sort of brushwood altar with some articles on it, and busy about it three or four Negroes, who were, by signs, apparently instructing a New Zealand tohunga in some mystic rite. With the New Zealanders were four or five white men from near Hokianga who were known to me as being undesirable characters, and these men were already under the influence of an intoxicant.[138]

With such a dizzying range of global interests at play, which are consistent with the age of revolutions, the scene was now set for the controversial Treaty of Waitangi of 1840. Like the treaty arranged by Busby in 1835, the Treaty of Waitangi was framed with a dual purpose: while establishing the legal independence of New Zealand, it also sought to bring the islands under British protection. The balance between these two aspects of the treaty is what has caused protest ever since it was signed, resonating until this day in rival land claims. The most debated words of the treaty are: ‘to the Chiefs, the Tribes, and all the people of New Zealand, the entire supremacy of their lands, of their settlements, and of all their personal property’.[139] At the heart of the paradox lies the relationship between ideas of kinship and kingship.

Māori imagined that they were binding themselves to a familial relationship with the British, and choosing them over the French, the ‘tribe of Marion’. Māori kinship with the British was seen to come from shared ancestry and religion. This relatedness allowed them also to become kings. In 1839 they had the idea of a meeting ‘for the election of a king’.[140] In commenting on Māori bids for kingship, however, Busby wrote: ‘I believe we are all agreed that a King from amongst themselves is quite out of the question.’[141] To his brother he noted that a Māori chief had alluded to how Busby himself may be their king: ‘I told him that the “ritenga” [custom] of this land was not to have a King, that the authority must be in the confederation of chiefs.’[142]

The 1835 declaration called upon the British king to be ‘the parent of their infant state’.[143] This language arose directly from the Māori chiefs.[144] The reason Busby did not support a Māori king or even himself as king, was because for the British, who were now annexing territory, ultimate sovereignty did not reside with Māori chiefs. Rather it lay far away with Queen Victoria, now the British monarch, and was delegated by her to her representatives in New Zealand and Sydney. Chieftaincy could continue but only under subordination to Victoria. Notions of independence were a façade that propped up a counter-revolutionary empire, an empire which reactively adopted the language of politics and independence of this period.

In the decades that followed, it was no wonder then that Māori involved themselves in a series of skirmishes with the British. They too could be monarchs. The ‘King Movement’ or Kīngitanga appointed the first Māori king in the late 1850s and opposed the take-up of ancestral land by the British empire. It successfully mounted armed resistance against the British. It declared the boundaries of the Kīngitanga, or kingdom in 1858. The movement expected to govern alongside the settler state. Intriguingly, Kīngitanga could creatively adopt the narrative of the age of revolutions: for instance, the Haitian Revolution became a point of reference to the Kīngitanga movement. Haiti was interpreted from a Māori cosmology: Haitians had built a pa on a hill (fortification), from where they had flown their kara (flag), calling the French to attack them. ‘Now that island possesses law and its independence [rangatiratanga] is established; its flags have been raised; also, the councils [runanga] of that place are working for the good of the country. The chiefs [rangatira] have united their word; the law has effect; its many harbours are rich.’[145]

A change in the order of politics had come to pass in slow motion and through the evolution of established concepts such as iwi, hapu and intra-tribal identity, as well as war and Māori attempts to respond to British and global ideas and events. When the British state intruded it did so by cleverly adopting the instruments of the age of revolutions to counter their revolutionary power, from declarations of indigenous independence to flags. And Māori too adopted the mantle of monarch and the legacy of the age of revolutions, including on one occasion events in Haiti, to respond to the British. Yet the fact that similar types of political consolidation were occurring elsewhere in the Pacific makes this more than a Māori story. It is a feature of these years in the Pacific. Arms and ideas, Christianity and the British state, Anglo-French rivalries and shared aims forged these changes. But these changes were not created simply by outside forces; rather change drew in Māori and Pacific political vocabularies. The British were able to use the result of these encounters for imperial gain.

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