George Robertson - The Discovery of Tahiti - review by Anthony Nanson

I’ve had an active interest in the Pacific islands and their peoples since I travelled in that region in 2007 with plans for a new novel in mind. I had wanted to island-hop by air between several archipelagos, but the airline routes didn’t really allow this; in the end I visited just two archipelagos, both French-speaking: the Society Islands and New Caledonia. The main island of the former is Tahiti, which enjoys a fame in world history out of all proportion to its size: it’s about the size of the Isle of Mull, but with a much larger population and with mountains more than twice as high.

Although the subsequent visits of French and British vessels commanded by Bougainville and Cook are better known, the first European ship to chance upon Tahiti was HMS Dolphin, commanded by Samuel Wallis, in 1766. The best account of this discovery is the Tahiti section of the journal of George Robertson, the Dolphin’s sailing master – edited by Oliver Warner as An Account of the Discovery of Tahiti. The edition I read is a beautiful little Folio Society hardback with wood engravings by Robert Gibbings and superbly designed typography that made the book a pleasure to read in spite of Robertson’s eighteenth-century prose, random Capitalisation of words, and diligent listing of the food and water supplies the ship’s crew managed to obtain each day.

What makes this book especially important is that it provides an eye-witness account of Tahitian society as it was before it was changed by European contact. Indeed, we witness this change beginning to happen in the course of the five weeks the Dolphin was anchored there; Bougainville and Cook arrived at an island where people already knew about Europeans and their iron and firearms. With Stone Age technology, the Tahitians had developed a very sophisticated culture of house-building, boat-building, crop-growing, artwork, social organisation, and religion, including the large stone temples called ‘marae’. All of this Robertson describes with interest, if not deep insight. You’re struck by the mutual incomprehension between British and Tahitians about deeper matters of metaphysics and ethics, and yet a simultaneous sense of common understanding with respect to more tangible things like food, furniture, clothing, and dancing.

The discovery of Tahiti sits within the larger global story of European conquest and brutality. Very soon after the Dolphin’s arrival, there is a military challenge by the Tahitians: a flotilla of canoes carrying thousands of warriors attempts to take the ship, but the use of muskets and cannon soon persuade them they cannot defeat the British in battle. Very friendly relations ensue thereafter, to the benefit also of the ships that came later. Robertson emphasises that the British were very reluctant to use violence, and did so only by way of making an example when they believed they had to do so in order to protect their own lives. This procedure cost a number of Tahitian lives, whose mourning by their relatives Robertson graphically observes.

The British sailors, of course, were transported by the attractiveness of the Tahitian women, their scanty clothing, and their openness to sensual pleasures. I’ve read feminist and postcolonial studies that reinterpret these dynamics – for example, as involving coercion and/or only a certain class of women – but this is not what comes across from Robertson’s astonished and coyly disapproving eye-witness account. The ‘old trade’, as he calls it, takes place on a large scale, despite the officers’ efforts to stop it. There’s rapid inflation in the numbers of iron nails the women demand, which drives inflation also in the prices the British must pay to obtain food supplies. The sailors resort to using the iron hooks of their own hammocks, so they all end up sleeping on the deck. They even steal the iron spikes that hold together the ship’s timbers. It’s a wonder the whole ship didn’t fall apart. Robertson, like other officers, does allow himself to receive a massage from the women; something he clearly enjoyed and had never experienced before.

There’s much sadness on both sides, no doubt for different reasons, when the Dolphin finally ups anchor to sail on. The local Queen, a very large and powerful woman, whom Captain Wallis treats with great respect, sheds many tears pleading with the British not to go. Robertson has no basis for comprehending this beyond that of human affections. I imagine it had to do with local political rivalries that became more evident to Captain Cook during his repeated visits to this island. Such was the beginning of Tahiti’s incorporation into imperial geopolitics, leading eventually to the Society Islands’ status as a French territory, which they continue to be today.