Waves Across the South

A New History of Revolution and Empire

Sujit Sivasundaram

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780007575572
• eBook ISBN: 9780007575558
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

‘Helps re-centre how we look at the world and opens up new perspectives on how we can look at regions, peoples and places that have been left to one side of traditional histories for far too long’ PETER FRANKOPAN

1

Travels in the Oceanic South

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

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

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

ASTOUNDING ITINERARIES FROM REVOLUTION TO EMPIRE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1826, Calcutta was gripped by its war in Burma with the kin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Praise
• Contents
• A Note on Transliteration and Images
• List of Images
• Timeline
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1   Travels in the Oceanic South
• 2   In the South Pacific: Travellers, Monarchs and Empires
• 3   In the Southwest Indian Ocean: Worlds of Revolt and the Rise of Britain
• 4   In the Persian Gulf: Tangled Empires, States and Mariners
• 5   In the Tasman Sea: The Intimate Markers of a Counter-Revolution
• 6   At India’s Maritime Frontier: Waterborne Lineages of War
• 7   In the Bay of Bengal: Modelling Empire, Globe and Self
• 8   Across the Indian Ocean: Comparative Glances in the South
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• References
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About the Publisher