Personalities in the 19th century Pacific

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32494, 2 January 1971, Page 10

Personalities in the 19th century Pacific

Pacific Islands Portraits, edited by J. W. Davidson and Deryck Scarr. 299 pp. with additional references. Reed. As one of the subjects of these portraits is quoted as writing, “a history is not a panegyric; to be useful a history must tell everything, the good and the bad.” The authors, all of them historians attached to universities in the South Pacific, show themselves faithful to this essential of the discipline. Therefore, the dozen portraits are rewarding reading for the seeker of facts as opposed to legend. Although New. Zealanders’ interest in the Pacific has accelerated recently, this has been from an almost standing start, and most of the subjects of these essays will be unknown to the nonspecialist reader. Cakobau of Fiji, King George Tupou of Tonga, the biackbirders and sandalwood traders, of

these something in general is known; but for mfcny it will be an introduction to the missionary Henry family of Tahiti, Baiteke and Binoka of the Gilberts, Xavier Montrouzier, the Marist missionary of Melanesia. The editors state their purpose to show the diversity of situations existing in the Pacific, in roughly the century before World War I, and the diverse

responses to them of men of varying backgrounds and interests. Australian Victorianism with its “characteristic belief in racial

superiority” arrived in Fiji with the planters, later-comers among the Europeans in the Pacific. Their needs helped create the labour trade, and this traffic, as reported in the portrait of “Recruits and Recruiters,” was the

most powerful agent of acculturation to be known in much of the area. The methods of gathering the human cargoes varied (the recruiting agents who most consistently used trickery and outright force were those obtaining labour for Samoa and New Caledonia) and work on a large sugar plantation meant death to a high proportion of raw recruits. While there is

not, at present "... sufficient material to enable the effect of plantation life to be stated” there is an indication that “for some people plantation life had become preferable to their original existence.” Furthermore, social and economic changes in the home islands, in the cautious words of the historian, “seem to have been caused by the returned labourers.” An Islander actively associated with the labour trade—his services to the recruiters were many—was Kwaisulia of the Solomons. His portrait-essay is a study of the authority structure and politics of his area into which he introduced some novel features.

In Samoa, Lauaki mixed easily with Europeans; he accepted the benefits of a money economy, but as a politician he was “wholly guided by Samoan tradition.” His role in the civil war and the struggle to establish a Samoan confederacy, also vis-a : vis the German Governor Solf, is fully explored. The book appears at a time when, plainly, more must be known of the history of the Pacific. These portraits, nominally of central characters of the later nineteenth century, provide the essentials of a jigsaw that the reader can put together himself to gain a good picture of the period.