European intrusions in the Pacific

Press, 24 September 1988, Page 27

European intrusions in the Pacific

Voyages of Discovery: Captain Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific. By Lynne Withey. Century Hutchinson, 1988. 464 pp. Notes, index. $49.95. (Reviewed by Naylor Hillary) The planned settlement of New South Wales in 1788 was probably the single most important event in the crowded 40- years of Pacific exploration between 1760 and 1800. That makes it especially appropriate that Lynne Withey’s book should appear in 1988, even though the convict settlement in Sydney Cove plays only a small part in her story. Withey has retold, in thorough and elegant fashion, the deed of the European explorers of the vast Pacific Ocean, from Byron’s voyage in the Dolphin in 1764, which was prompted by the Earl of Egmont’s vision of the Falkland Islands as “the key to the whole Pacifick Ocean.” She ends with Vancouver’s departure from the Californian coast in 1794 once he had completed Cook’s work in charting the west coast of North America from San Diego to the Alaskan Peninsula and laid claim, after a fashion, to the Hawaiian Islands. In between, pride of place goes to retelling the three voyages of Captain Cook, his unhappy death in Hawaii, and the wealth of information that the labour of Cook, his botanists, and his scientists, provided for the rest of the world. Much of this may be familiar ground, though the events in Tahiti, Tonga, New Zealand, Hawaii, and a score of other places 200 years ago have seldom been better told. This account gets its special flavour from the author’s success in setting the voyages of Cook and others in the political and scientific context of the late eighteenth century. She is curious to know what the explorers themselves, and their sponsors, thought they were doing; and how their discoveries changed their perceptions of the world. She is equally concerned to reconstruct how the intrusions of Europeans affected Polynesian societies from Hawaii to Fiordland. Here she is not merely summarising remote events; she cannot avoid, by implication, saying a good deal about the shape of communities such as Tahiti or New Zealand in modern times. Eighteenth-century Europeans were sharply divided in the way they

viewed Polynesian communities. On one hand the islanders were seen as examples of the Classical ideal of Nature — “innocents pure in their simplicity and free from the corruptions of civilisation.” On the other hand they were “savages, addicted to thievery, practitioners of infanticide and cannibalism.” The truth, not surprisingly, lay somewhere in between, a point that men such as Cook and Sir Joseph Banks were able to recognise with varying degrees of sensitivity. The best of the Europeans might deplore the prostitution and slavery they encountered in parts of the Pacific, but they were also well able to see how the impact of Europeans, with their superior technology, was upsetting ancient ways and generating new pressures in traditional societies. The same polarised attitudes can be

found today in New Zealand in response to the resurgence of things Maori. One school seems to find special merit in a vision of a lost Maori world, a vision of peaceful people living in harmony with one another and with Nature. Another school sees a very different Maori past, a world of slavery and cannibalism, of constant war, and of hunger and uncertainty. The truth, again, must surely lie somewhere between the two. But when revivals of Maori language and culture are becoming fashionable, often among people with little claim to be Maori, it is important to have a book such as this — a sensitive summary of how relations between Europeans and Polynesians began, and what the Pacific societies were really like when the Europeans first intruded.