Journals

Pacific Worlds A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures

Matt K. Matsuda

,,CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

13 THE WORLD THAT CANTON MADE

Off the coasts of Vanua Levu, Fiji, during the reign of Naulivou, voyaging chiefs from the Bau region one day regarded a strange vessel from beyond the coastal arrowroot and tobacco weeds. The outlanders made shore and offered iron hoop, knives, and hatchets, and unknown animals like geese, a monkey, and a cat. The chiefs had long traded canoes, woven mats, and spears with Tongans, but the outsiders wanted only croppings of heavy trees with rough, mottled bark, unsuitable for canoes, which they cut, scored, and loaded into their vessel. The boat would be only one of many to follow, and in a few years, the chiefs were not only trading, but negotiating contracts for their forests and the work gangs to cut and haul them. 1

Many of the ships then made port in a place largely unknown to the chiefs of Bau. In April r8o5, the governor of New South Wales wrote from Sydney, relating "the circumstances of a small Vessel belonging to an Individual being sent in quest of the Beche-de-Mer. That Vessel is returned, and altho' they failed in that Object, yet they acquired another of not less Value, namely; Sandalwood." It had been long known, according to the Governor, that the aromatic wood "was a production of some of the Feejee Islands, which are a Group hitherto not much known." He induced an expedition to survey, barter, and harvest some tons of the wood, pleased that "it may hereafter be an advantageous Object of Commerce with China. " 2

Ship crews putting in at Sydney made port and provision, but it was not their final destination, for Australian sailors and merchants had little local market for joss sticks, incense, and fragrant furniture: the

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cargoes continued on to their final destination: the South China coast and the famed Pearl River. Upriver from the Delta lay the entrepot of Pacific trade for generations: Guangzhou, the port of Canton.

Sailing the channels and the wide river delta in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, here were waters plowed by hundreds of craft, sails and rigging billowing in the winds, that tied together col- onies, chiefdoms, Europeans, islanders, and Asians. Tea, silk, spices, had long moved out into the China Sea and up from the delta from around Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Now, a newer island trade began, bringing goods and also islanders and Europeans in Oceania directly into renewed contact on boats and in foreign trading colonies.

The port was like nowhere else. Guided upriver, captains could observe the shoals, treacherous for craft of large draft, and the sampans following ships offering rice, fish, and vegetables. Other traders moved along the banks unloading heavy cargoes of wood, calicos and silver, trepang and manufactures, chasing downriver pilots, laborers, or supply boats among the junks and the dhows. The river front was covered with warehouses and stations - the famous factories of the foreign merchants - flying international flags and surrounded by storage yards. Around them were the competing companies and the palatial gardens of the agents, Chinese managers, and stock account intermediaries for Asian, American, and European trading companies.

The crossing of worlds was nothing new here. Foreign mer- chants had traded in the region for a millennium, and Arab connections were reported from the Tang Dynasty. Centuries later, as Ming traders expanded throughout island Southeast Asia, a thriving junk trade carried the commerce of foreigners into Chinese waters. Zheng He's great treasure fleets also patrolled these sea lanes. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive by sea, establishing tight control over (O!xternal commerce, b,ut they were expelled from the mainland and finally settled around Macao in r 5 57· They were largely unrivaled as 1nasters of foreign trade, challenged only when Dutch carriers began to itppear in the seventeenth century.

, Foreign trade also expanded after Taiwan came under Chinese ~uthority in r683 and Qing rulers encouraged commercial exchanges. ~long with the Portuguese, the port of Canton centered the Spanish :trade out of Manila, Muslim merchants from India, and the ships of

17B I Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures

the French and English East Indian Companies. Dutch, Swedish, and Danish traders also set up factories, along with Prussians, and, by the r78os, Americans and Australians. The port was a raucous world of Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, pidgin English, Malay, and Indian languages, peppered with words from all of Europe and Oceania.

The Spanish connection is particularly notable, for the fabled galleons that dominated Pacific-wide crossings for centuries were largely transshipments. Some goods originated in the Philippines or came from the Spice Islands, but detailed ship manifests show that the Manila- Acapulco cargoes of silk and porcelain were heavily requisitioned in China. Indeed, traders of the time often called the Spanish galleons naos de China - China Ships - because of the textiles, glazed pottery, gold, jade, and other riches of the Celestial Empire that made the cargoes so valuable.

The silver coins that poured into Canton from Peruvian and Mexican mines were standard currency of trade, and the port grew into a global marketplace. The Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish brought the wealth of the Indies and the Americas. In the late eighteenth century, English, French, and American ships explored the routes established by Captain Cook and connected the northwest coast of the Canadian and Oregon territories to the Hawaiian Islands on a fur trading circuit. In Polynesian ports, merchant ships anchored beside whalers, sandalwood boats, trepang sellers, and tea-traders that had looped through Papeete or the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, or Queensland, Australia with cargoes for China.

The empire was accessible only through the intricate formalities and administration of the "Canton system." Concerned about foreign expansion, the Qing emperor had issued a 1757 decree explicitly limiting foreign commerce to Guangzhou - Canton - at the head of the Pearl River estuary where it meets the South China Sea. There, foreigners were restricted to a special zone outside of the main city walls built on a riverbank and crowded with warehouses or "factories." A trading season from October to March guided their lives with con- tracts and deals, and summer months meant obligatory withdrawal to the European colony at Macao.

In high season, Canton could be an extraordinary experience, a world of global, trans-local exchanges. Hundreds of foreign ships, their masts extending for miles downriver, crowded the outer port and the

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available landings. With them came the thousands of local suppliers and workers who built their livelihoods around the ships and crews, brandishing baskets of fish and fruit, offering labor for repairs, hawking small trade items to captains and sailors. As ships made their way upriver, sampans and launches crowded with chickens, vegetables, grains, cloth, and people covered the water as floating marketplaces.

Ashore, foreign crews were hustled along waterfront lanes to tea houses and sellers of rice wine. On the western side of the Factory district, shopkeepers with storehouses of writing desks, lacquered chests, elegant carvings, and artworks bargained with captains. Some of the neighborhoods were well known, such as around Thirteen Factory Street, where lay "a maze of narrow, winding streets crowded with sightseers, peddlers, and porters ... each street with one trade, dried foodstuffs, edible bird's nests and trepang, cloth, silk, painted glass; herbal medicine." In these neighborhoods, traders and visitors from all over the world made deals, passed along tips, and exchanged fragments of languages and tall tales. Both Chinese and foreign agents wrote up signs and newsletters in major languages, publishing recommendations and stories, and offering advice and services. 3

Out on the water, exchange and negotiation also defined every- thing from hiring helmsmen to simple provisioning. Foreign ships needed pilots to navigate the shoals and sandbars of the Pearl River, and linguists to translate documents, confirm cargoes, and arrange meetings with inspectors. Purchasers and agents oversaw the ships and crews coming and going and the provisions necessary for crews - cattle, fowl, wine, also timber and tar, and cordage for repairs. Laborers called tidewater men waited at the docks for the loading and unloading. Ships had papers checked by the Chinese officials and could proceed only if they were carrying cargo- silver alone or empty holds were signs of likely smuggling. Political and profit disagreements were enacted daily along moorings or in the holds of covered boats loaded with contraband merchandise.

Foreign ships anchored in the port called Macao Roads and were required to hire a pilot for passage to a customs house at Boca Tigris, the mouth of the river. At Boca Tigris, ships were inspected by Chinese officials and allowed to proceed to Whampoa Roads, upriver. From there, ships had to be measured to determine port fees and all cargoes unloaded orito Chinese sampans called "chop boats," then transported through tollhouses and customs points to Canton and the Factories.

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Surveying all this was the powerful customs superintendent known as the "Hoppo." He sailed in among the traders on a regal junk, accompanied by a small fleet of forty or fifty other vessels. Adorned in dignified formal costume, the Hoppo determined what government levies ships would pay to trade and invited captains to offer gifts to the Emperor. Foreigners saluted him, and he responded by sounding a large gong mounted on his deck.

As his officials took to the task of measuring ships and assessing fees, the Hoppo made speeches and shared ritual toasts of wine and dishes of candied fruit and sweetmeats with ships' officers. Chinese musicians played fanfares along with sailor bands, and the crews some- times performed plays. The official port linguists would translate both conversations and documents. After signing a bond for fees, duties, and guarantees of conduct, the Hoppo often received mechanical clocks or music boxes to be turned over to his own Qing superiors in the imperial bureaucracy. 4

The Hoppo was not the only authority to reckon with as trade expanded. During the long period from 17 57 to I 842, all official commercial activities had to go through Chinese houses licensed to trade with Westerners. These were supervised by the Hoppo and known as the Hong merchants. In the eighteenth century, the mer- chants formed a cartel which foreigners called the Co-Hong, and fixed monopolistic prices for cargoes in and out of Canton; with trade increasing, the imperial court, the Co-Hong merchants, and the traders all competed for rising revenues. In the mid-eighteenth century, tea replaced silk as the most significant export, along with items carried from Madras, Calcutta, and Malacca. In the nineteenth century, cotton and opium began to dominate, raising new opportunities and challenges.

Some of the powerful Hong merchants amassed stupendous fortunes to their firms and trading accounts. Stories tell of fires at their warehouses that melted down precious metals stocks into rivers of silver that ran through city streets. Better verified are accounts of the opulent banquets of bird's nest soup with trepang and shark fins they held for each other, attended by innumerable servants and accompanied by per;formances of Chinese opera. Sandalwood furniture and fans perfumed the air. Their residences were staggering compounds of carved and tiled interlocking pavilions built around terraced gardens and private canals serviced by boatmen in decorated gondolas. 5

182 I Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures

Of the Co-Hong merchants, one in particular had a clipper ship christened in his name: this was Wu Bingjian, known to Westerners as "Howqua." The ship featured a figurehead and a design "as sharp as a pair of Chinese shoes." Portraits show his long, thin face, slight mous- tache, and courtly demeanor, "dressed luxuriously in a dragon robe and an expensive fur-lined overrobe with insignia badges and long beads."

Both officials and merchants derided him as "The Timid Old Lady" for his willingness to pay ransoms and extortions to mandarins and, later, British gunboats, but it was all the cost of doing business. And he could easily afford it. The richest and most powerful of the Co-Hong merchants, Wu Bingjian was the third son in a family com- pany. A shrewd businessman, he was heavily engaged in tea and silk, supplying both the British East India Company and American firms in Boston.

He was also a leader in credit ventures, advancing capital to weak merchants for considerable interest, and single-handedly paying off debts - including that of the Chinese government - in impressive displays of patronage. His wealth, invested in trading and banking concerns around the world, was many times that of the Rothschild family dynasty, his contemporaries in commerce and finance. In par- ticular, he is noted for advancing American interests, creating a part• nership with Russell & Company, the major American tea and silk trader, and donating buildings for missionaries and hospitals. Chinese newspapers in San Francisco (I 8 55) reported on Howqua as a "master of international trade," and some historians claim that he was a major stockholder in American railroad companies, the great intercontinental transport lines built with so much immigrant Chinese labor. 6

In Canton itself, such global connections would be most regu- larly incarnated in the single figure of the comprador. The compradors were merchant house agents charged with contracting stewards, supc pliers, cooks, cleaners, and laborers, and with ferrying sampans laden with pigs, cattle, grains, fruit, cloth, wild ducks, and chickens to anchored traders. From the eighteenth century, they were one of many port functionaries, but when the Co-Hong system declined in the 184os, the comprador became the key Chinese collaborator of foreign merchants.

Chinese stewards had long run the daily maintenance of offices and living quarters - hiring servants and purveyors, renting and repairing properties, purchasing land. The comprador increasingly also

183 I The world that Canton made

took on the role of a business manager, drafting and confirming bank orders, maintaining a firm's treasury, examining coinage, and being informed about shipping schedules, local business deals, and future prices on everything from rice to wood oil. He also guaranteed loans and credit for business partners and arranged entertainments and dinners for Chinese officials. In many cases, the compradors would be charged with large sums for inland journeys, where foreigners were not permitted, to make purchases of tea and silk.

Trading on their own accounts, some compradors built up small fortunes. Somewhat like the Hong merchants, but in the service of foreign firms, they were products of a multicultural, international world, envied for their privileges, reviled for serving the interests of Western companies. Many were necessarily cosmopolitan. The com- pradors moved in family circles of Confucian and Buddhist practice and morals, while sending their own children to instruction in church schools, using Western education in grammar, geography, and math- ematics to maintain political and social status at the intersection of worlds.

One Wang I-t'ing was a classical Chinese calligrapher and painter while serving a foreign firm; another comprador spent his fortune spiritually situating his ancestors' tombs. Others adopted hybrid identities in names like "Robert" Ho Tung. As a profession, the compradors managed and promoted schools and new businesses, headed district relief campaigns, worked with regional governors on political and policing questions, and created for themselves unique and profitable roles at the meeting of Sino-Occidental culture. 7

Such overlapping of commercial pursuit with foreigners and adherence to Chinese practices was present from the beginning of the Canton system. In fact, visitors often reported business practices that were also commentaries on culture: customs, manners, and new knowl- edge gained in Canton. The world of Chinese compradors, merchants, and officials created a , dense network of exchanges, and in some cases, those at the center were not Europeans but Pacific Islanders voyaging into unknown worlds along with the Westerners.

From the late eighteenth century, one was Lee Boo, from Micron.esia. He crossed from Oceanian to Asian worlds with Captain Henry Wilson of the East India Company, whose merchant ship had been wrecked off Palau, and whose crew was stranded while rebuilding a schooner to reach Canton. Wilson became a friend of King Abba

184 I Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures

Thulle, who was impressed by the captain's technology, knowledge, and descriptions of England, and requested that his son, Lee Boo, be taken on the continuing voyage.

The young prince impressed the foreign traders with his manners and disposition, and demonstrated his skill at spear-throwing. In turn, he learned about tea, European women, and the Chinese marketplace, and was fascinated by the high-rising houses and streetlife in Canton. In 1784, Lee Boo arrived in Portsmouth, met with the directors of the East India Company, and was an object of curiosity and admiration before succumbing to smallpox after just five months. His patrons penned him an epitaph, and his story of noble and simple generosity entered into English schoolbooks.

The Chief Ka'iana, younger brother of the king of Kauai, Hawai'i, did not leave a sentimental legacy, but he certainly made a strong impression in Canton. Traveling with Captain John Meares, a fur trader crossing from the Pacific Northwest to China, Ka'iana was by all accounts an imposing presence - tall, muscular, proud, "hand- some and haughty," with a feathered cape, helmet, and toa wood spear. Crowds gathered around and shrank from his presence. Over several months in Macao and Canton he demonstrated contempt for the Chinese, whom he regarded as small and servile, and the merchants in turn scorned him for being unable to make use of coins, instead trying to barter with iron nails.

In Macao he followed the rituals of the Catholic mass with great interest, and was moved by the plight of beggars in sampans; impressed by the ships and ports, he could not comprehend the spec- tacle of poverty and daily hunger that he witnessed. He eventually returned to Hawai'i bearing a cache of weapons and, finding the islands at war, became a strong ally of Kamehameha. 8

By the first decades of the nineteenth century, such ennobled visitors to Canton were but single faces in an increasing population of largely anonymous islanders, not guests under the patronage of cap- tains, but common labor kanakas, joining the lascars, the Kru-men, and the Manila men in a Pacific circuit of ships and trade cargoes.

The clamor of markets at Canton reverberated in Pacific worlds thousands of miles from China's shores. Small groups and individual islanders joined whaling and sealing crews and signed on for fur trapping, voyaging from their homes to the Americas, around the north and south Pacific, and across the ocean in search of goods for

185 I The world that Canton made

the South China Sea. For them, life onboard ships was an adventure and a brutal servitude, circumscribed by the strict hierarchies and rites of life at sea, beatings, abuse, insults, and the tensions of different groups working, earning, and often dying together. 9

Whaling was the most famous, notorious, and romanticized of the trades. The first ship sailed from London in 1787, but the majority of the business would quickly belong to Americans out of New Bedford and Nantucket. By the 184os, some 675 American whaling ships were hunting the north and south Pacific, chasing prey and provisioning in an Oceanian circuit from the Solomon Islands across the Central Pacific, where the cachalot - the sperm whale - crushed giant squid ,in its jaws and moved in great migrating pods from the waters of Micronesia and Japan and north to the Arctic. . In all these environments, whaling ships sailed with white crews :iuixed with, and sometimes specifically manned by, islanders, the latter ~specially noted for their swimming, rowing, and spear-throwing ~alents. Generically called Kanaka, islander whalemen suffered wasting diseases and climates, brutal work, and regular dangers to life and limb. In this, they fared not much differently than other crewmen. Ship's records of passage preserve the not quite anonymous Kanakas, with islands of origin and English names given by captains to a Joe Bal and Jack Ena, a John Jove! and a Sam How. Io

At the same time, passage on whalers meant unusual oppor- tunities to travel the oceans, often in the track of gods and ancestors, to trade and learn new languages and customs. While learning the ways of shipboard life, including rites of passage and sea-stories, islanders like Hawaiians brought their own ancient chants and tales. Oral traditions across Polynesia spoke of whales carrying humans on spiritual journeys to become religious leaders or priests. Only high chiefs and chiefesses wore sacred whale-tooth necklaces. These legends and practices became part of maritime lore, exchanged across Ocean- ian circuits.

The business itself could be thrilling, and was always danger- ous and dirty. The Reverend Henry Cheever recorded a kill: "the huge creature rose hard by the captain's boat, and all the harpooner in the. bow had to do was to plunge his two keen cold irons, which are always secured to one tow-line, into the monster's blubber-sides. This he did so well as to hit the 'fish's life' at once, and make him spout blood forthwith." Boats were spun, tossed, and often overturned.

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25 Chasing the leviathan: global crews and whalers at sea.

A successful hunt concluded with an exhausted whale, bleeding and wrapped in lines, struck at close range. Towed by the whaleboats and secured to the ships, the great carcasses were stripped of blubber and rendered in flaming, smoky pots while the crew butchered the flesh on decks running with oil and blood. n

This world was canonized by the sailor, adventurer, customs agent, and writer Herman Melville, whose tales of South Sea island encounters like Typee, and his classic Moby Dick, were inspired by his own voyaging and a historical case of a ship rammed by a whale in the South Seas. From this, Melville fashioned a genuinely international literature populated by characters from a Yankee seafaring world like Captain Ahab and Ishmael seeking prey and serving destiny along with multi-ethnic crews.

Such literature not only recorded in exquisite nineteenth- century detail the toils of an encroaching American commercial presence in Pacific waters, but shaped a greater vision of the global novel, characters like the harpooner Queequeg transiting and making port with crews from Africa, the West Indies, Oceania, and the Americas around Atlantic and Pacific worlds, held in shipboard hierarchies dominated by maritime authority. x2

187 I The world that Canton made

Less immortalized than whaling, but critical to the initial con- nections between North America, the Hawaiian Islands, and Canton, was the fur trade. The sea otter is a large cousin to the terrestrial weasel or badger, but itself a fully marine mammal like the whale. Inhabiting the coastal North Pacific Ocean in kelp beds and feeding on urchins and clams, its fabulous pelt made it in turn prey to the interests of English, American, Spanish, Russian, and islander traders who de- scended especially on the Nootka Sound, vying to gain cargoes for sale in Macao and Canton.

From the seventeenth century, Russian traders had come from Kamchatka to establish camps across the Aleutian Islands and Alaska for the trade, meeting now and again, as they headed south, with Spanish captains who considered the coastline to be part of their domain. In 1769, the Spanish sent expeditions and set up a colonial administration in Monterey over a new colonial province they called Alta California. The bay of San Francisco was its border. There was little they could do, however, about the increasing presence of European intrusions further north or, after 1776, interest from the Americans.

After James Cook's exploration of the region and the recog- nized Hawaiian transit to and from Asia, commercial ships began to arrive in numbers to the Pacific Northwest. The first, which gained a stupendous cargo of nearly six hundred pelts, was launched from Canton by an English businessman, John Henry Cox, in 1785. The tremendous profit ensured more would follow, often flying false colors to evade the monopolies of the mercantile trading companies.

The primary anchorage in the 178os and 1790s was in the territory of the Nuu-chah-nulth people of the Nootka Sound, Canada, a "local" place with global resonance. Different villages vied for advan- tage, but one, Yuquot, became dominant under the powerful chief Maquinna. He himself wore otter fur dress under a conical, feathered hat, and led settlements of sturdy wooden houses, canoe fleets, and a thriving population fed by salmon and herring.· As the British estab- lished their presence in his territory, the Spanish Crown quickly sent ships and soldiers to map territorial claims and establish a fortress. The British entrepreneur-seaman John Meares established his own trading post, .,and conflicts led to possible war between Britain and Spain, a showdown known in European history as the Nootka crisis.

Maquinna and his people were forced to move their village because of the incursions, but the chief did not allow himself to be

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sidelined: he played an important role engaging both the Spanish envoy Juan Francisco de Ia Bodega y Quadra, and the British representative, Captain George Vancouver. Maquinna also translated their episodes into histories of his own, mimicking the Europeans with plays and dialogues using imagined or invented versions of their languages and actions, rendered in the theatrical potlatch style of the Northwest Coast.

He was also a shrewd warrior and saw the utility of some white prisoners, notably holding blacksmith John Jewitt as a well-treated slave for three years after massacring the crew of the vessel Boston in reprisal for conflicts with Spanish and American parties. Maquinna weighed his allies and enemies, carefully distributing the valuable fur that his trappers hunted down from the powerful otters, some as big as men. 13

Meanwhile, in Canton, traders continued to conspire for the profits. Among the British, the monopoly exercised by the East India and South Sea Companies was resented, even by some of their employees. Charles Barkley, an East India Company naval captain, resigned his position and ran up Austrian colours for an illegal Canton factory, hoping to earn a personal fortune . His wife Frances sailed with him, and during a Hawaiian stopover, employed Winee, a Hawaiian woman, as her maid. In June I787 they became the first European and Island women to follow the trade at the Nootka Sound. In November of the same year they discharged almost nine hundred pelts in Macao. 14

Just months earlier, the tireless John Meares had also returned to the South China Sea. In Canton, he hired carpenters and outfitted a new trip and sailed again for the Northwest, this time carrying the Hawaiian warrior Ka'iana, whom he was returning to Kauai. He also picked up Winee from the Barkleys' ship and a man named Comekela, who was going home. He was the brother of Maquinna and had left Nootka Sound on his own voyage to Canton the previous year. He had reasons to see for himself the distant place where all the otter of his seas were being taken and traded.

Indeed, the chiefs of the Northwest Coast, like those in Hawai'i where the trade ships laid over, were always curious about the handling and profits of the cargoes that passed from and by them on the way to China. In some cases they took control directly. In Hawai'i, Kamehameha notably bargained with haole - white - traders, made

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deals, and also assembled his own fleets. Upon unifying all of the islands under his rule, Kamehameha created a monarchy resembling a feudal state, granting lands and tying chiefs to him by common interest. One great priority for Kamehameha was increasing foreign trade, and he had a royal monopoly on an important resource: Hawaiian sandalwood.

For each major cargo or contract he exacted a brig or schooner to build up his navy, adding half a dozen vessels along with European and American wares like silverware and crystal, wardrobes of jackets, carriages, and Canton export china. He assembled workteams of carpenters to build him dozens of sloops, and hired foreigners and lower-ranked chiefs with language skills to aid him as business agents and negotiators, setting taxes and duties on a developing Pacific entrepot! 5

But Hawaiian sandalwood was a limited resource and by the death of Kamehameha in I8I9 it was dwindling and soon gone. A decade later in I829, Captain Samuel P. Henry pulled together a work crew of Tongans and landed in Erromanga, the New Hebrides, to explore a more recently discovered source. News of the developments reignited Hawaiian Pacific-wide ambitions .

The governor of Oahu, Boki, had just a few years earlier sent his aide Manui'a to Manila and Canton from Honolulu with sealskins and sandalwood to pay off royal debts to traders. Now, he had grander designs, commanding two vessels with four hundred Hawaiians and one hundred Rotumans to sail south not only to cut and ship the wood to China, but to fight the Erromangans and annex "Certain Islands in the South Seas which are now in an Uncultivated State." Boki's ship was lost at sea, and most of the remaining crew were killed by disease and warfare with the Erromangans. 16

Fijian chiefs also benefited from these decades of sandalwood trade, which developed and declined in their islands much as in Hawai'i. By the I 8 20s, the acqessible stands were gone from their shores, but the Canton connection was not played out. In about I 828 a ship from Salem came into the Fijian islands looking for any undiscovered sandalwood, and instead found an astonishing abundance of holothuria- the trepang that Matthew Flinders had learned about from Pobassoo in northern Australian waters . As it happened, the captain had just been cruising the Moluccas where he learned the techniques of harvesting and curing from Malay fishermen.

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As practiced for centuries by the Makassan traders and Australian Aborigines, the trepang enterprise was a delicate operation requiring sometimes hazardous collections from coastal ebb tides and by diving, followed by saltwater cleaning and removal of slime, repeated parboil- ing, and lengthy drying and smoking. The last necessitated on-site construction of enormous drying sheds, watertight and up to a hundred feet long, with clay embankments, wooden racks, and reed filters upon which the trepang were arranged for slow, smoky curing from constant smoldering fires. Errors or bad luck meant the fish would turn into gelatinous masses, become rotten from exposure, or be simply lost when the tinderbox sheds would occasionally catch sparks and go up in flames.

As with sandalwood, to produce a cargo for market of any value required enormous amounts of labor, for the fishing and preparation, for timber cutting to provide construction materials and smoking wood, and for security - operations were highly vulnerable to raiding parties. This created alliances between the Canton traders and Fijian chiefs, particu- larly the long-standing rival clan regions of Bau and Rewa. 17

Out of the conflict between these two chiefdoms rose the dom- inant political figure of the mid-nineteenth century, paramount leader Ratu Seru Cakobau. The chiefs of Fiji had, from the sandalwood days, a loose system of trade and tribute to deal with strangers, traders, and other useful interlopers. There was no such thing as a European pres" ence at the time; there were only the occasional ships in search of wood, copra, and seals. The chiefs closely guarded their prerogatives and, as around other Pacific islands, constantly struggled against each other.

Now Cakobau learned that the white strangers wanted the dri- the sea cucumber that luxuriated in Fijian waters. The Canton con- nection was not Cakobau's concern, but the European and American captains were willing to bargain for what he wanted, paying out exchanges of woolens, metal, and cargoes of muskets and powder. Over the years, the number of firearms in the Fijian islands would be estimated at nearly five thousand, and would tip the balance of power between the warring chiefs. In exchange, Cakobau used his authority and conscripted entire villages to work the reefs and gather the creatures for the traders.

Captains were pleased; their attempts to entice islanders dir- ectly with small trade items had been rebuffed. Cakobau, however, had the authority to command entire clans to the tidal waters for the

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difficult collections and processing labor. He used his revenue to buy trade articles and build a small war fleet. Over the decades, as marine stocks were depleted and harvests declined, Cakobau famousl y sent out his entire army to scour the waters. In r 8 p, his forces employed more than a hundred canoes to drag in a catch for Cakobau to sell in exchange for two American ships, part of his continuing attempts to build a navy. 18

It was American ships, in fact, though not under Cakobau's control, that would reshape Fijian history. Having no central govern- ment, the dominant chiefs struck their own land deals with European and American settlers. In I 846, John Brown Williams, lately of the Bay of Islands, became American commercial agent in Fiji and belligerently held Cakobau responsible for the personal loss of his residence, which he himself had accidentally burned down during a July 4 celebration. American warships backed Williams' claims. At the same time, Cakobau was facing pressures from rival chiefs in northern Fiji, and by I 8 58 he began to propose cession of the islands to Britain as a means to maintain his authority.

Such maneuverings over commercial and strategic alliances rippled across the Pacific around the mid-nineteenth century. The British declared sovereignty over New Zealand in I84o. That same year Tahitian Queen Pomare Vahine faced bombardment by the French Admiral Abel Dupetit-Thouars over the establishment of a French protectorate. Cakobau looked to a deal with Britain to save his kingdom from the Americans. In dealing with foreigners, monarchs no longer negotiated with supplicant parties, but faced the increasing strategic and military power of Western naval forces, backed by nation states. Nowhere did this become more resonant than back at the port of Canton itself.

Though extremely lucrative, the sandalwood, fur, and trepang trades of the Pacific were small fare compared to the great addictions that would drive the , British and Chinese into conflict: tea and opium. Whereas the luxury trade could make fortunes for savvy traders, the tea and opium trades changed the chemical habits of millions and threatened to bankrupt the treasuries of empires.

.. Already, from the early eighteenth century, the English had embraced tea as a therapeutic drink, then as a social and cultural tradition, thanks to royal patronage and the initiative of tea-sellers like Thomas Twining and his family. In Australia the anthem

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Waltzing Matilda would describe a colony embracing tea not only as a popular drink, but as an essential daily ration for convicts and settlers alike.

Yet tea was not easily cultivated, and Chinese growers were secretive about their processes. Harvested by pickers in season, espe- cially in Fujian and Guangdong, the rough camellia sinensis leaves were rolled in bamboo containers to release their oil and fired in iron woks to halt their oxidation. Storehouses dried the leaves and infused other scents such as pine, while batches were sent to tasters, blended, and stamped into the wooden chests known to clipper captains. One of the earliest samples, about two pounds, had left China for Britain in 1664. By the 183os, it was 30 million pounds a year. The trade imbalance was of mortal concern. r 9

Neither England nor Australia, however, had substantial prod" ucts to sell to China in return. They made accounts with woolens, some crops, manufactures and devices spawned by the Industrial Revolution, calico from India, and the wood, furs, and marine products of the Pacific . But most payment was silver. When Lord Macartney arrived in Beijing in 1793 to expand trading opportunities, the Qing Emperor famously responded, "We possess all things. I see no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufac- tures." Subsequent missions did not change this view.

The imperial court regarded other countries and rulers as tributary vassals. Visitors were expected to kowtow by prostrating themselves three times before the Emperor; there were no such things as diplomatic negotiations or trade agreements. Strangers were wel- come to be awestruck by the Celestial Empire and engage in commerce through the Hoppo and the Co-Hong, but for the imperial household a top British envoy was no more than "The English barbarian chieftain. " 20

The tea addiction drained the royal exchequer in London of silver. English traders began to counter with rival tea growing in India and Ceylon, but developing exports would take decades. To pay for Chinese tea, they turned to another trade product from their Indian colony that the Chinese would buy when all else had failed: opium.

Though the East India Company knew opium trading was restricted in China, the non-company traders, operating unofficially, pursued a lucrative contraband and smuggling trade. Opium had been known in the empire since it began to arrive with Arab traders in the

193 I The world that Canton made

seventh century. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, along with tobacco, it was diluted, combined, and smoked as a stimulant, and for treating some cases of malaria and dysentery. It was widely recognized as a medicinal painkiller, but also by Confucian officials as a moral poison and was interdicted in the 1720s.

By the 1790s, as smoking opium became habitual across a broad population, new rules in China banned trading and growing completely, calling the drug "a destructive and ensnaring vice." Offi- cials closed down some operations, but traders and merchants con- tinued to collude and profit. In I8II, Americans began to ship in opium from Turkey, and by the .182os European companies openly maintained huge funds to pay bribes to officials and publish market prices for arriving shipments .

The stakes rose higher. By 1830, the fiscal position of British India was dependent on selling opium in China, and in England manu- facturers and private traders agitated against the East India Company monopoly and adopted the motto "freedom of commerce." With sup- port from some Members of Parliament, the Company monopoly was broken and powerful private merchants, industrialists, and speculators crowded into the China trade, lobbying for aggressive reform of taxes, duties, and, indeed, all commercial codes and practices they deemed unfair.

The British sent an envoy to pressure the Chinese trade offi- cials, but they responded by shutting down all Canton trade, forcing him to retreat . It was traditional Chinese policy: tame the foreigners. As the Governor politely yet contemptuously informed the English traders, "It is unnecessary again to appoint a barbarian headman, thereby causing friction and trouble . " 2 r

These episodes were closely watched by Commissioner Lin Zexu, a brilliant and strict administrator. Methodical, organized, and willing to take strong action, Lin was chosen by the Qing Emperor in 1839 to take direct control of the opium trade in Canton. He was the paragon of a virtuous Confucian official. With a long, white beard and serious gaze, he traveled soberly in a sedan chair, paid his own expenses, and maintained only a small retinue. He ordered and studied tomes on English law and culture, reading for insights, and paid a visit to Macao to see the workings of the foreign- barbarian- communities and firms there. He had his subordinates buy a British armed merchant- man so he could understand the strangers' maritime technology.

194 I Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures

He then enforced the law, quickly. Within weeks, smokers and suspect Chinese merchants groveled before him, and thousands of pipes were taken and storehouses raided. The British traders, however, refused to comply, so Lin cut them off in their compounds until Super- intendent Charles Elliot himself demanded the stocks be surrendered. It was a financial loss worth an entire year's trade, and to mollify the traders he implicitly promised that the British Crown would com- pensate for the seizures, making the government in London both responsible and liable for the trade. Lin had his agents dig a special canal, contaminated the opium with salt and lye, and washed or dumped the remains into the sea.

Lin also wrote an extraordinary letter directly to Queen Victoria in a high Confucian moral register, asking "Let us suppose that foreign- ers came from another country and brought opium into England, and seduced the people of your country to smoke it. Would you not, the sovereign of said country, look upon such a procedure with anger?" The letter was likely never delivered and the government could not respond to its implication, instead accusing Lin of property destruction and interference in open trade. 22

Despite Lin's careful preparations, his actions had devastating consequences. The barbarian traders and missions had always backed down before; this time they sent a British Indian army from their crown colony and huge, mobile warships. From I84o, they launched the Opium Wars. Heavy gun platforms devastated Chinese coastal defenses and well-armed and drilled troops landed and overtook the positions of Qing forces.

The British soon controlled Canton, and continued the battle up the Yangtze River, seizing tax barges and forcing the Qing to sue for peace in the Treaty of Nanjing, negotiated in I 842. China was obliged to pay an indemnity, open more coastal ports to foreign traders, and cede the island of Hong Kong as British territory. Shortly, the Qing rulers also had to concede the unthinkable: recognition of Britain as an equal, with extraterritorial rights in all treaty ports.

The results were momentous. Other Western nations, par- ticularly France and the United States, also demanded and gained similar concessions. The new treaty ports like Hong Kong and Shanghai became permanent bases for settlements, foreign offices, and missionary establishments. Compradors took over the business

195 I The world that Canton made

26 Power and profit: the Opium Wars.

rule of the abolished Co-Hong. Thousands of Chinese migrated out from coastal cities on overseas labor contracts in mines and planta- tions in Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, and out toward Hawai'i and California.

The incursions, upheavals, and demonstrated incapacity of the government stirred unrest against foreigners and especially against the ethnically Manchu Qing dynasty itself. Demands for social reform were accelerated by peasant rebellion and attacks on Qing authorities. These found a charismatic voice in Hong Xiuquan, a student of mis- sionaries who had failed the traditional state examination system, and claimed to be the brother of Jesus Christ. He led the messianic move- ment known as the Taiping Rebellion against the government from I 8 50 to I 864 as China plunged into a titanic civil war. In the middle of those years, continuing conflicts over trade and sovereignty also led to a Second Opium War, which resulted in the British sailing on Beijing and gaining even greater concessions from a weakened and fragmenting Chinese state. 2 3

Lin had not stopped the opium trade. He had prepared well, but never saw the Europeans as more than barbarians, nor compre- hended the growing scope of their national and global colonial powers. A furious Qing Emperor blamed him for the humiliating

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results, and sent him off to provincial exile. Generations later, however, Lin would be lauded as a national anticolonial hero and commemorated as a patriot, wise and decisive - if overmatched, of Chinese grandeur and virtues at the beginning of an encroaching age of global European empire.

14 FLAGS, TREATIES, AND GUNBOATS

In 1812, Tengku Hussein, heir to the Sultan of Johor on the Malay peninsula, was in Pahang getting married when his father died. As he waited for monsoon winds to return to Johor he received word that his younger brother had become the new Sultan. It was a contested claim, but Hussein remained in exile.

Seven years later, Hussein and Thomas Stamford Raffles, British lieutenant governor of the British colony of Bencoolen on western Sumatra, landed at a small Malay settlement near ancient Temasik, where Srivijaya had once ruled and Parameswara came as a pirate king before moving to Malacca . The area had a superb natural harbor, timber strands, and fresh water spreading out from the mouth of a river. Here, at Singapore, Raffles came with an ambition. He wanted the British to establish a port to overcome Dutch dominance in the region, a goal underscored by the critical importance of China routes for the British India trade, and growing interests in the opium market. The Dutch had been resisting the British with high tariffs and port restrictions.

The current , Sultan of the Singapore region, Tengku Abdul Rahman, was, however, already allied with Dutch interests; a British base was not possible. So Raffles and the local governor instead brought older brother Tengku Hussein back from exile with a plan: Raffles would recognize Hussein as the legitimate Sultan of Johor in exchange for rights to a British trading post. Museums and dioramas portray them signing their agreements in gold silk gown, head wrap, and scarlet British officer's uniform. Both Hussein and the governor

198 I Pacific Worl~s: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures

accepted annual stipends, and the younger brother conceded. Hussein established himself in royal fashion under British protection. r

In the nineteenth century, Asian and Oceanian peoples saw new colors flying from the mastheads of ships that crossed the circuits of Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch authority they had known for generations: the British and the French were arriving in force. From East and Southeast Asia to Melanesia and Polynesia, British claims developed from invasion at Canton, patronage deals at Singapore, and adventurism in Sarawak, Borneo. New Zealand was different yet again, part warfare, part treaty arrangement.

The French brought gunboats to the Marquesas and Tahiti, built up a complex colonial society in Vietnam, and founded a penal colony in New Caledonia. There was no singular model for what happened between local peoples and the new interlopers, but all territories would soon become places on maps that European states would claim as possessions of empire, often pressing upon or pushing out former empires to do so. Earlier generations of trade, beachcombers, and dominant chiefs and island rulers were increasingly replaced by unequal contracts and European strategic dominance.

As Raffles and Hussein demonstrated, clever deal-making was one route to power. Singapore was a modest base, but also a major challenge to the Dutch and sultans in the region, indicative of a oncec again shifting course of empire. As had been the case from Srivijaya to the Majapahit, from the Portuguese to the Dutch, a new system and new players were coming to the fore. Raffles gave settlement com- mand to Major William Farquhar and a small Indian military regi- ment, along with a mandate to establish a free trading port without duties. The strategy proved effective, as traders looking to avoid Dutch control and taxes began to unload goods carried from Chinese, Bugis, and Arab trade routes. Population and revenues in Singapore soared.

Expectedly, the Dutch protested. In the seventeenth century, after torturing and massacring rival traders at Ambon, they had rather easily forced the English to all but abandon the archipelago. But a markedly different situation faced them in the nineteenth century; By this time, the great Dutch East India Company was gone and Britain was the rising power. The VOC had built its power on clove and cinnamon monopolies, but global products of the nineteenth century like tea, coffee, and pepper could not be controlled in the same way.

199 I Flags, treaties, and gunboats

For tea, Chinese plantations were the key source of supply. Where the Dutch built up wealth in pepper, the British set up a factory at Bencoolen and traded directly for pepper from carriers in the Sunda Strait, including pirates, who bargained for arms and supplies. Over- seas Chinese also established rival plantations, using their own circuits from Brunei to the Malaysian peninsula to find buyers in Canton or among the British. Batavia was marginalized. Dutch losses became unrecoverable, exacerbated by corruption, lack of investment, and crushing bureaucratic expenses.

Back in the Netherlands, internal revolutionary struggles and war in the Atlantic and Caribbean with England made all VOC ships targets. With the French Revolution collapse was foretold, as Dutch territories were invaded and annexed by Napoleon. The VOC, already in decline, reached a breaking point and was declared bankrupt in I799· The once formidable power of the Company languished as the British moved to control Dutch colonial territories, including the island of Java itself, by r8rr. At the end of the Napoleonic wars in Europe, the British withdrew and Dutch colonial rule, minus the VOC, returned to the archipelago.

From the early days, a Dutch force could still easily have conquered the small, rival Singapore settlement. But after Anglo-Dutch wars across the eighteenth century, both sides were willing to be circumspect, and Singapore trade and settlements continued to grow. By r823, Raffles negotiated a new treaty with the Sultan that gave the British authority not only over the trading port, but over most of the island. Chinese populations rapidly expanded. These included Perana- kans who traced their ancestral lines to early traders and settlers, and common laborers escaping from hardship in southern China. Malays also built lives in fishing and wage labor, building up traditional timber and thatched stilt houses, the kampungs. Raffles organized the sectors of the colony into ethnic and trade neighborhoods.

Raffles' impact was also felt in the Dutch territories. During the brief British occupat,ion of Java, he had instituted a new land-tenure system that diminished the customary, feudal services owed by villages to rulers . When the Dutch returned, elites were short of revenue and farmers were left trying to satisfy changing administrations and the exactions of their traditional rulers. The discontent awaited a spark to ignite major unrest.

In r825, Pangeran Dipanagara, the first son of the Yogyakarta Sultan, protested a Dutch road-building project, which would cross his

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domain at the site of a sacred tomb. Inspired by a vision of the Goddess of the Southern Ocean promising he would be a king, Dipanagara rose in defiance, rallying a popular force against the Dutch.

He cut a striking figure with his white turban and ceremonial kris dagger tucked into an embroidered sash. As an aristocrat he appealed to an embittered elite; raised in a rural village in traditional Islamic schools by his grandmother, he spoke well to common villagers and farmers, as well as religious mystics who followed his vision. The grievances fueled a deep-seated conflict that went on for five years, leading to the deaths of up to 2oo,ooo Javanese. The Dutch established fortresses and eventually defeated Dipanagara, who was exiled to Makassar. Yogyakarta was reduced and his compound today, with a broken wall where the Dutch reportedly made siege, is a place of reflection.

Dipanagara would later be commemorated as an anticolonial hero, though his goals were not for a revolutionary society, but tradi- tional rule without the Dutch. After the Java War, however, it was the colonial system that was returned to its old ways, with Javanese regents administering districts backed up by Dutch officials. 2

In 1830, the policies known as the Cultivation System also began. In an effort to be profitable where the VOC had failed, the Cultivation System mandated export cropping, particularly coffee, tea, sugar, indigo, spices, tobacco, cotton, and cochineal. These were sold to the government at fixed prices, and a balance was supposed to be struck with rice production for local consumption. The actual practice was foreseeable. The export trade was extremely lucrative for the regents, officials, and Chinese traders, and so export growing became an obligation. As profits increased, so did district taxes and forced labor. Without support for local rice growing, shortages, famines, and epidemics spread among farmers and villagers in the 184os. Officials and Javanese regents continued to prosper. 3

Not all parts of the Indonesian territories were under such strict colonial rule as on Java. Around Borneo, Dutch policy was desultory in general, held together by customary treaties with sultans, and small garrisons guarding coastlines and waterways, negotiating with Chinese settlements and watching out for Iranun pirates. The northwestern regions under the domain of the Sultan of Brunei were independent of European control.

Such places attracted East India company employee James Brooke, who was inspired by Raffles, a man he took to be an adventurous

201 I Flags, treaties, and gunboats

empire builder. With a family inheritance, Brooke purchased a schooner and set out for Kalimantan, the island of Borneo. In I 8 3 9, as the Opium 'Wars were breaking out in China, and the Cultivation System pushed [villages to famine, Brooke sailed his schooner up the Sarawak River, a 'world of mangrove, nepa palm, creepers, frigate birds, and crocodiles.

Rajah Mudah Hassim of Sarawak received Brooke with offer- .~ngs of tea and tobacco, surrounded by officials in velvet jackets and (red sarongs. Knowing of Brooke's schooner, the Rajah was looking for ,someone to intimidate members of a "rebellion" against his authority ),in the interior, and was interested in whether the English would come to !his aid if the Dutch tried to take over his domains.

With indirect assurances made, Brooke sailed upriver, meeting with Bidayuh Dayak chief Sejugah, making notes on spirits, Allah, courtship, and head-hunting, and staying in a customary longhouse some six hundred feet long. The longhouse was an entire elevated village built on piles under one roof, with common livestock areas, cots formed from hollowed trees, bamboo balconies, and partitioned quarters like apartments for the married. Brooke took an interest in Sejugah's world of ritual harvests, in which rice was the embodied spirit of ancestors, and interiors of river systems defined the regions where Dayak and Malay intermarried in systems of alliances, friendships, and tributary regard. 4

Finally meeting up with armed raiders and their stockade, Brooke used artillery to support a clamorous party of Malay, Dayak, and Chinese warriors and routed the Rajah's rivals. Mudah Hassim made offers to continue the alliance, but Brooke was not content to be the advisor or protector of the local aristocracy, and in fact described himself as a champion of the "wretchedly oppressed" hill Dayaks. He threatened sympathies with the Rajah's dissatisfied subjects unless given real authority. "I explained to the Raja that several chiefs and a Jarge body of Siniawan Dayaks were ready to assist me, and that the only course left ro prevent bloodshed was immediately to proclaim me governor." In September 1841, Brooke became the White Rajah of Sarawak. 5

The Sultan of Brunei recognized that Brooke might help con- tain the expansion of Dutch influence, and confirmed his rajah status. Brooke found himself with authority over a land that he believed might be very rich in mining and trade concessions for the Singapore market. As his seizure of power indicated, however, his regime depended upon

202 I Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures

the support of chiefs and Dayak leaders. He created councils, and adopted local knowledge of semargat - a quality of power with an- alogies to mana in Oceania - by exploiting his title for wealth and patronage, creating circles of loyalty around his person.

His subjects helped him establish trading posts, courts, and codes, and schools for religious instruction, taking advantage of oppor- tunities in education and foreign contacts. The Bidayuh Dayaks, not quite as helpless as he made them seem, supported Brooke's state but also resisted his inevitable taxes and labor exactions. Malay elites instigated plots to overthrow him, and Chinese miners, never impressed with his title or power, forced him to flee his capital in I 8 57, regarding him as little more than another barbarian.

Brooke's position was commanding, but tenuous. As a private citizen, his rulership caused friction with the British Foreign Office. Political enemies disliked his adventuring and the British government refused to recognize his claims until I 8 6 3. After family struggles, Brooke left Sarawak rule to his nephew, and the Brooke name con- tinued on for two more generations. Brooke remains the romantic paragon of the colonial adventurer, establishing empire as the charis- matic white leader of a private kingdom. Certainly, he presented him- self as one who could, after all, just sail away, at one early frustrated point claiming, "In that case I will collect the remnants of the money I have laid out, and cry, 'Hey, for 0-Tahiti,' or New Zealand. " 6

Had Brooke, in fact, sailed to New Zealand in I 840 rather than stay in Sarawak, he would have come upon British Empire once more: here, claiming sovereignty over the islands with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. In New Zealand, empire was not the tale of a single adventurer, but an intricate drama of common and competing interests among traders, land speculators, rival chiefs, missionaries, and colonial governors.

Depictions of the treaty signing show a vast and fascinating gathering of Maori chiefs from around the North Island, and the officials of a British party led by Lieutenant Governor William Hobson and Resident James Busby in ceremonial costume under strings of colorful banners. The treaty is one of the most studied documents in Pacific history, for it stipulates that the Maori signatories cede all of their lands to the Queen of England, while at once confirming that the Queen guarantees full Maori possession of their own lands and homes.

203 I flags, treaties, and gunboats

27 Documented dispute: signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.

The Queen enjoys the privilege of selling land between consenting parties, and also grants protection to the Maori and the rights of British subjects. In fact, there was not actually a single document, but parallel Maori and English language versions. "Sovereignty" in the English version was translated kawanatanga, or "governance," in Maori by missionary Henry Williams, and along with many other terms, left plenty of room for interpretation. 7

The chiefs signed the Maori version, led by Hone Heke, who would take it upon himself to embody all of the treaty's promises and limitations. He was already heir to the generation of contact and conflict that had led to the meeting at Waitangi. The first port for most Europeans in New Zealand had long been the Bay of Islands, controlled by the Nga Phui people. Ruatara, the friend of missionary Samuel Marsden, ha1 been chief there. When Ruatara died, the mission feared the consequences, but the chief's nephew, Hongi Hika, took over and continued to protect the mission and its connections to Australia, where he voyaged to study the Europeans, returning with tools and planr.s to grow potatoes for trade.

He never thought much of Christianity as a faith, but did look after the missionary Thomas Kendall, who abandoned the Church and

204 I Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures

took Maori wives. In r 8 20, Hongi Hika voyaged to England on a whaling ship and spent almost half a year in London and Cambridge, where he had an audience with King George IV and helped Professor Samuel Lee assemble a Maori and English dictionary.

Hongi Hika returned to the Bay of Islands by way of Australia, where he sold off all of the gifts showered on him by admirers, except for a suit of armor given him by King George. He purchased hundreds of muskets and other weapons, more than had ever been seen in New Zealand, and upon returning proceeded to slaughter his enemies and rivals. His infamous Tamaki raid killed an estimated two thousand men, women, and children. Subsequent "musket wars" over the next eight years devastated entire communities and led to mass retreats and relocations. The wars led to unsolvable disputes about territorial boundaries and traditional land ownership.

Meanwhile, the majority pakeha - white - settlements were also increasingly chaotic. Against a backdrop of war, effective lawless- ness, disease, and crime were on the rise and missions were over- whelmed. Transient populations of whalers and traders came through the Bay of Islands, joined by a good percentage of former and escaped convicts from Australia who had gotten passage on ships. With them came land speculators, especially Edward Gibbon and William Wakefield, who rapidly built up enormous claims on Maori land with suspect trades of guns and ammunition, tools, tobacco, and liquor. 8

In r84o, when the Treaty of Waitangi was presented, land tenure and political rule were insecure in many regions. The British sought order and land for a settler colony. The Maori chiefs had different aspirations. The smart and ruthless Hongi Hika had already died, famously inviting supporters to listen to the wind whistle through a bullet hole in his chest. The first Maori signature on the Treaty was his nephew, Hone Heke.

Heke had good reasons to favor the Treaty. It seemed to prom- ise the protection of a powerful ally, hinted at lucrative land and trade deals, and the mere signing of a ceremonial document in the presence of so many chiefs and dignitaries gave him tremendous mana. He was very favorable to the Christian missionaries from whom he had received a good education. Heke is most remembered, how- ever, for soon becoming the most vocal critic of the British failure to carry through on the promises and protections of the treaty. He was

205 I Flags, treaties, and gunboats

a warrior, and had a tactical genius for knowing how to make his point and rattle the empire: destroy its flag.

Heke was not anti-pakeha; in fact, his first complaint was for the revenues he lost from whaling ships that no longer stopped at the Bay of Islands and instead berthed at the colonial capital, Auckland. In many ways, he wanted more interaction with whites, not less. But the trade and land deals he expected to fill his coffers were instead diverted to government commissions.

In 1844, two American whalers were fined for smuggling, and their angry representative let out a tirade against the British, telling Heke that the flagstaff overlooking the town of Kororareka was the means by which the Queen had taken over the Maori lands. In July r844, Heke and his men marched up the hill and cut it down. Some chiefs objected, but others, sharing Heke's indignant sense of grievance, began to plunder settlers. Heke felt in his rights, as he wrote to the governor: "Let your soldiers remain beyond the sea and at Auckland. Do not send them here. The pole that was cut down belonged to me. I made it for the native flag, and it was never paid for by the Europeans. " 9

The British, though, replaced the flagstaff and the following year Heke once again cut it down. The Colonial Secretary and members ef the Waka Nene clan, who feuded with Heke, vowed to stop him. But ten days after a new flagstaff went up, Heke walked through the Nene guards, daring them to lay a hand on him. The flagstaff fell again. Now the symbolics of empire escalated as the government immediately raised a new flagstaff, this time protected by two blockhouses and artillery, and a combined force of 140 soldiers, sailors, and marines.

The morning of March II, 1845, Kororareka awoke to shots and chaos as Maori raiding parties descended into the streets. Surprised troops pulled back, and panicked residents evacuated to ships. Reports dispatched to Auckland indicated a general Maori uprising against Europeans and a British sloop bombarded the town itself. In fact, there was no uprising. It was all a diversion from the real objective: to give Heke and his men a chance to advance up the hill and cut down the flagstaff.

Now war began. Heke and his ally Kawiti retreated to establish a pa, an earthen and wooden palisade fort, and battled with British troops sent from Australia as well as Maori rivals backed by the Governor. Skirmishing continued for a year before Heke sued for

206 I Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures

peace. Nene gained him an official pardon, but Heke insisted on submitting formally to the governor and retired from the field.

The dynamics of Maori and Pakeha in alliance and at odds, however, had just begun. Further south, chief Te Rauparaha and his son-in-law Te Rangihaeta were already battling with settlers and the Wakefield family over land claims. In the r8sos and r86os, assemblies of chiefs would try a "king movement" to consolidate Maori authority; and prophetic movements like the Hau Hau, led by visions of the angel Gabriel, came to embrace both religious renewal and anti-pakeha violence. Across the islands, some settlers and iwi created communities; while some slaughtered each other. But neither was going away. r o

Heke's battles were, in some ways, just what he had tried to avoid by signing at Waitangi with the promises of British protection. He was especially suspicious of what another power might do, "the tribe of Marion," who had slaughtered so many Maori back in 1772i That incident, retaliation against an entire village, had taken plac~ when warriors had killed and eaten the party of French explorer Marion du Fresne.

Heke was not the only one with concerns about the French. In 1835, a Baron de Thierry, like Brooke in Sarawak but without real ability, had tried to declare himself a Maori monarch. Even as the Waitangi treaty was making its rounds through the North Island for. signatures, a ship of French settlers was heading for the South Island; with reports they would try to colonize and annex it. A French warship appeared in the Bay of Islands. If the British perceived threat, however, the French could point to it directly: by the Treaty of Waitangi, the British now ruled the dominant territories of Australia and New Zealand in the South Pacific. In the north, Anglo-American interests dominated Hawai'i. With few colonies or settlements, and little time to develop them, French ministers would move to acquire a Pacific Empire under the sails of admirals.

They began in r842 in the Marquesas Islands, seeking a land- fall between South America and Asia. Admiral Abel Dupetit-Thouars made his presence known with hundreds of troops and familiar European protocol: he raised a flagstaff and had the Marquesan Errata chiefs sign an official document of cession. Yet, the admiral had only a few missionaries, no settlements to protect, and no obvious population to command. In search of someone to rule, the French called at Vaitahu and declared the leader Ioete the "king." They had him sit for drawings,

207 I Flags, treaties, and gunboats

pressed into an ill-fitting red coat with gold braid and epaulettes and a crown of glass beads and feathers. French troops occupied his valley, and his people were made into servants and died of dysentery. Ioete took those who remained and climbed towards the mountains, leaving the conquerors behind. rr

The French force complained, but soon moved on to the valley of Taiohae on the island of Nukahiva where they engaged Temoana as a new king. He had already traveled the British circuit from

·New Zealand to Australia to London, and knew the ways of Europeans. Taken as a cook on a whaling ship, he hated being a tattooed man for ·English curiosity, and eventually made his way back to the Marquesas. The French maintained they would restore Temoana's "royal" status 'and helped him build a cottage filled with furniture outside of which he ' flew the French tricolor. He met with officials, sold them local land at <good prices, took to liquor, and became a favorite son of the Roman Catholic church. The Colonial Bureau paid him a pension, and his wife

h]anguished among nuns. As always, there was no singular response to colonial invasion.

' Ioete tolerated, and then withdrew; Temoana gained what he could. ' It was another chief, Pakoko, who agitated to revive the Enata ways 'and came to symbolize violent resistance. Aggrieved by disrespect ' shown to their customs and practices, his men seized and killed six \french sailors, sacrificing at least one to local gods . Some accounts say they had trespassed on a sacred area; other traditions claim a sailor ihad raped a local woman who needed to be purified in the blood of 'her aggressor.

French reports say Pakoko was angry about restrictions on his people made by Temoana and colonial officials. All agree that he was pursued by a massive French military response, and surrendered upon recognizing the extent of retribution and reprisals against his people's villages. After a summary trial, he requested to die by firing squad, and was executed with h1mdreds looking on from mountain ridges. Local lore recognizes thunder as a sign of his return. r 2

Despite its claims of empire, the French base remained as marginal as ever. Dupetit-Thouars did not wait to see what would develop in the Marquesas, if indeed he believed anything would. In command of his formidable warships, he had decided to sail where he knew of a strategic commercial port with an inviting reputation: Tahiti. The French creation of Tahiti was already legendary by the

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time Dupetit-Thouars arrived, shaped by generations immersed in Bougainville's images of sensual women and paradisical tropical climes. Missionaries and traders had made their claims on the political and commercial institutions of the islands, yet apart from the vociferous English missionary George Pritchard, there was no foreign colonial authority. The Pomare dynasty still ruled.

Dupetit-Thouars landed his soldiers and seized authority; French government newsletters maintained that in I842 Queen Pomare IV and her chiefs recognized French authority and requested that the islands be put under a protectorate. It was an inviting narrative, consist- ent with the imagination of a tropical idyll, but far from the truth. The Queen was not the adoring and reverent Purea so lovingly detailed by Bougainville generations earlier, but the scion of a conquering dynasty, well educated by missionary teachers.

She kept her own records, and used her government ministers to send out detailed indignant letters protesting the French actions and requesting assistance, even directly addressing Queen Victoria iri England as a sister monarch. She and the Tahitian chiefs denounced the documents produced by the French and the allegedly peaceful protectorate, pointedly noting that Dupetit-Thouars' threats of force meant that his authority would "begin by murdering the people!'" 3

The Queen used her best diplomacy, calling on visiting British naval officers for shipboard dinners, painting scenarios of conflict, bloodshed, and injuries to national pride both for herself and the British Crown if the French aggression were to stand. Britain declined to intervene, and the Queen, in alliance with chiefs from around the islands, prepared for conflict.

Tahiti was not an imaginary paradise. Rising resistance led to military violence in a Franco-Tahitian War of I843-6, as Pomare's warriors took to mountains, valleys, and canoe fleets, dodging, skir- mishing with, and battling French patrols with spears and muskets. The fighting soon echoed across other island chains, and in the Leewards would continue well into the I88os and I89os. The French navy sent frigates and steamers to support their efforts around Papeete, the only region they clearly controlled, building fortifications and sending out landing parties into the nearby archipelagos. As Tahiti was occupied by troops from the French warships, campaigns turned to other island monarchs like Queen Teri'itaria on Huahine, who massacred a French military detachment trying to claim her territories.

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French battleships pounded coastal regions with cannon, and hundreds of troops made their way from beaches to interiors. Ultim- ately, Tahitians retreated to the valley of the Fautaua River, protected by tropical forest and rock escarpments. As with many conflicts, out- comes remained inconclusive until the French gained the cooperation of other islanders, notably Mairoto from Rapa, a rival of the Tahitians. With his knowledge of the terrain, French marines managed to gain strategic high ground on mountain ridges, forcing the Tahitians, now decimated by injury, famine, and diseases, to surrender.

Throughout, Pomare had contended with fractures in her own alliance, and in many cases the long memory of her conquering family and its collusion with European missionaries was not well regarded. Some rivals, such as Paraita, who was commissioned as a functionary in the new protectorate government, simply saw more benefit in aligning their fortunes with those of the French. 14

What most marks Tahitian history, however, is the remarkable way in which the anticolonial wars were erased. This had begun with Dupetit-Thouars' fictional claim of a peaceful submission, and it was accelerated not by politics, but by the power of culture. With French rule came the authority of French art and literature, and the stories and images of Bougainville were revived once more, this time to embrace those of writers like Pierre Loti, Victor Segalen, and the painter Paul Gauguin.

From the late nineteenth century, the naval officer and author Loti penned a popular tale of a young Tahitian girl who falls into a liaison with a French officer and pines away after his departure. Naval doctor and scholar Segalen wrote with an almost ethnographic fervor of traditional societies losing their culture to traders and missionaries by focusing on an esteemed Tahitian storyteller who begins to forget his people's tales and genealogies.

Paul Gauguin was known as a bourgeois stock-trader with yearnings to live a s"'vage life and be an artist. A sometime friend of the tempestuous Vincent Van Gogh, he struggled for recognition and voyaged to French colonies from the Panama Canal concession to Tahiti and the Marquesas, seeking images of other worlds. Gauguin's vibraQ.t paintings are steeped in allegorical symbols and spiritual mysteries, presenting a French Polynesia of somberly exotic faces and lovely bodies merged with ancient statuary and luxuriant tropical backgrounds.

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Through their writings, Segalen and Gauguin expressed their dismay with the colonial Pacific, and Gauguin authored blistering tracts against local administrators. Yet it was the power of the images that triumphed. Tahiti would be a story of lost love and melancholy longing for beauty, a timeless tale of inevitable corruption rather than an episode of violent imperial conquest.' 5

Tahiti developed as a strategic base, but the most expansive French Pacific response to other European powers was along the coast· line of Southeast Asia. "Indochina" was the keystone of French Empire in the Pacific, a colonial domain pieced together over decades from conquered territories and collaborations with local potentates from regions that today comprise Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

European knowledge of Vietnam dated back to histories of trade and exchange shared with the rest of Asia, from medieval trav-· elers and spice contacts to pirate havens and Portuguese missionaries. Like most of Asia, the rulers of Vietnam had warred for their territories against Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century and Ming occu- pation in the fifteenth, finally pushing the Chinese out in 1428 under the aristocratic landholder Le Loi. Wielding a sword reportedly given him by a mystical golden turtle, Le Loi defeated the Ming armies and seated himself as first Emperor of the Le Dynasty, organizing a strongly Confucian state, codifying laws, and building monuments.

From the early seventeenth century new forces came to bear as1 other powerful dynastic families struggled for power, effectively divid- ing the country into a north ruled by the Trinh Lords drawing on ~ Portuguese alliance, and a south dominated by the Nguyen, supported by Dutch arms and maritime power. By the late eighteenth century French interests were on the rise, when a Catholic Bishop raised a military force to support the Nguyen, who tolerated the religion and agreed to take on European advisors. The arrangement was neven secure, however, and Confucian Nguyen rulers soon repudiated the French missions, which in turn agitated for a Catholic Vietnamese emperor.

Struggles continued across the nineteenth century and in the r8sos the French Emperor Napoleon III claimed to protect the lives and interests of French Catholics by sending warships to the Nguyen territories. Troops ultimately controlled the Mekong Delta in r867, and landed in the north in the r87os and r88os under succeeding French governments now engaged in a global European race for

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empire. The regions of Cochin China (southern), Annam (central), and Tonkin (northern) were bound together with Laos and figurehead emperors and kings into the Union of Indochina in r887.

Over the decades, an extensive settler society developed, with land concessions, plantations, and a divided urban plan of European Gompounds and Vietnamese neighborhoods set among boulevards, eolonial offices, and clubs. The city of Hanoi became a colonial capital with an Opera House, banks that financed merchants and overseas businesses, and a bureaucracy to move laborers around Southeast Asia and into French colonies in Oceania. 16

Under colonialism not only social and political, but personal a nd intimate relations had to be negotiated. Traders and soldiers took local women as congai mistresses and wives, and civil records trace the ways in which the colonial administration approved or denied requests for marriage based upon presumed moral character and possibilities for £inancial support. Mixed couples were not unusual, so long as the man was the European master and the woman the colonial subject.

When European women began to join soldiers and adminis- trators in the colonies, distinctions intensified. One such woman wrote of her role bringing tea-services and grand moral sentiments to the c:olonies - a traditional woman's role of "civilizing" men - and also the "ferocious jealousy" and disdain that so many European women held for men's Asian concubines.

Children born from mistress liaisons lived in a world of uncer- tain legal status. Hai-Loc, a woman from Annam, had a child with a Frenchman, a Captain Poirot. They seem to have lived well enough on his earnings, but when he died the support disappeared. Hai-Loc brought a petition to court, yet found her case dismissed. The court judged that no "act of recognition drawn up at the request of this officer " had ever been made, rendering her child Annamese, with no claims on French entitlements. Men alone could give their children rights and status; women and children without them continued to live in the status of "natives. " 17

With its long history of resistance to foreign domination, it was impossible that Vietnam would simply acquiesce. Raids, skirmishes, and battles developed across the territories called Indochina. Some, predictably, were led by former court officials and mandarins who had lost power to the French. Others were popular uprisings led by peasants and bandits. Few were organized enough to be sustained, and

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2.8 Uneasy attachments: colonials visit an Annamese Mandarin household, French Indochina .

a generation of leaders began to look for more Asia-wide alliances. Among the most determined was a political activist who sailed to Paris in 1911 and adopted numerous aliases, finally calling himsdf Ho Chi Minh.

Questions of marriage, alliance, and resistance also haunted French imperial projects in Melanesia. Naval ministers wanted to1 build island settler colonies of farmers, miners, and traders, bm developing local economies quickly needed more land and an imme- diate, captive labor force - of the sort that only a penal colony could provide. The French government had long been envious of Australia, where Sydney was thriving; the British seemed to be expanding whil~ prisons in French Guiana, South America, were malaria-ridden. Emboldened by a tenuous Marist missionary presence and the over,- seas exile of undesirables of the European r848 revolutions, the French government sent Admiral Febvrier Despointes to New Caledo- nia and the Isles of Pines, and in r 8 53 he carried out ceremonies t0 annex the archipelago.

New Caledonia, the ancient land of La pita pottery and home to hundreds of mountain, valley, and coastal clans, was somewhat known

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to explorers, traders, and evangelists. A decade earlier, Ta'unga had peen in the south, teaching for the London Missionary Society, about the time that French Marist missionaries landed in the far north, looking for a territory without Protestants. In Balade, they set up a shaky mission, alternately preaching, starving, or fleeing over the next years . Some chiefs, like Bwarat at Hienghene, offered land, looking to see whether the new holy men could attract traders and also protect his territories from and with French warships.

He may also have been curious about French and English dynamics; one report said that he had been to Sydney. After annexation he was labeled "hostile" to the French, who brought in Tahitian troops to battle and deport him to Papeete, where he reportedly spoke with efficials in English, French, and Tahitian.

For the first decade, governors established military posts and effered concessions of land to promoters who would bring immigrants, an approach modeled on New Zealand. The consequences were simi- lar: the local clans, collectively called Kanaks, resisted settlement parties. The noted governor Charles Guillain hoped for conciliation. He traded with Kanak leaders and brought socialist philosophy to the establishment of a utopian farm and workshop project. A small colony of miners, masons, carpenters, bakers, planters, and merchants were banded together to become a self-sufficient community. They built dwellings and set about their tasks to plan for a society of charitable sharing, but lack of investment, arguments, and natural disasters wrecked their crops, businesses, and dreams within a few years.

After r864, the utopian enthusiasms gave way to the Australian model of establishing a settlement with a penal colony. Shiploads of male prisoners arrived in the bay of Noumea, an assortment of cri- minals, vagabonds, and political convicts. Those with long sentences were relegated for life and charged with agricultural or construction work to build up the colony. Military guards and justice maintained order, and Noumea developed into a colonial outpost with dwellings and stores set around a dusty coconut tree park and a penitentiary, where shiploads of convicts crossed the waterfront along with whalers and sandalwood traders. Over the years a town grew around the bay. Some of the convicts finished their sentences and began to cohabit with Kanak women.

Condemned French women were also part of this imperial network, routed to New Caledonia under the care of nuns and armed

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escort specifically to be put to labor in workhouses and married off to the men. The colonial government's hope was to create French couples who would find lives together, forget about returning to Europe, and instead dedicate themselves to becoming homestead farmers plowing fields, raising livestock, and supporting the colony with their agricul- tural produce.

At the heart of this was, as in Australia, a growing need of land for homesteads, farms, ranches, and grazing. But the grants and con"' cessions given by governors took little heed of Kanak farms and reserved areas. In 1878, French colonials awoke to news of a major. revolt across the New Caledonian islands, the slaughter of settlers, and the terrifying alliance of Kanak clans they had always feared. Though' the scope of the violence took the colony by surprise, a report to the government by an investigating General Arthur de Trentinian blamed the settlers' own "invasion of territories indispensable to the nativesj for the crops necessary for their existence."

The first to die in 1878 were an emblematic group, a man,. woman, and two children. What is notable is that the man, Jean Chene, was a former convict who had served out his sentence and established: <1. homestead, making him the very incarnation of the colonial project; More, his wife Mendon was a Kanak woman who had left her own group and the children were therefore of mixed parentage. Colonial violence was never as simple as European against Melanesian.

The leader of the revolt was the great chief Atai, who had confronted French governors and settlers for years. Illustrations show his sharp, bearded features, thin frame, and smoking pipe. Atai was known for fiery speeches to warriors, ferocity in battle, and also a marriage proposal to a lovely colonial widow whose home he protected: through the Kanak attacks and the French reprisals. Anticolonial insur· gency and personal sentiments remained distinct to him.

The rebellion went on for almost a year until Atai was speared and decapitated by rival clans loyal to the French. He had already made his view of empire clear, when one day he had confronted the governol." with a sack of earth and one of rocks and a mordant declaration, "here is what you have taken, and here is what you have left us."r 8

"What remained" had in fact been very much a French concern. as well throughout the middle nineteenth century, scrambling to annex. strategic and settler colonies not claimed by other Western powers, This included almost all of the islands around Tahiti, the Marquesas,

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the Union of Indochina, and those territories where rival British and French settlements were developing, as in the New Hebrides, now Vanuatu.

The New Hebrides developed with two distinct European communities vying for political and commercial dominance. In 1878, as Kanak rebellion broke out in New Caledonia, France and Britain declared the Hebrides a neutral territory, a decade later establishing a joint naval commission to protect their respective interests. In 1906, they formed the awkward Condominium, a colonial state with two administrations, commercial systems, coinages, and cultural habits and holidays joined only by a common legal court presided over by a Spanish judge.

The New Hebrides government was the political comic-opera that overlay the complex histories of ancient domains, chief Roy Mata, and Quiros' New Jerusalem in Vanuatu. In the nineteenth century, the islands would also gradually become known to new actors repre- senting religious missions and sandalwood and plantation schemes. Already, from the 184os, the islanders of the New Hebrides, along with those of the Solomons, joined the migrations, contracts, adventuring, kidnapping, and slaving that would mark a staggering people trade across the entire Pacific.