Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles: Americans in Nineteenth-Century Fiji

PURSUING RESPECT IN THE CANNIBAL ISLES

Americans in Nineteenth-Century Fiji

Nancy Shoemaker

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Why Go a Fiji Voyage?

1. Butenam: Knowledge

Part I: The Beachcomber: David Whippy

2. Mata ki Bau: Respect Vakaviti

3. Chief of All the White Men: Character

Part II: The Sea Captain’s Wife: Mary D. Wallis

4. By a Lady: Moral Authority

5. Marama: Social Class

Part III: The Merchant: John B. Williams

6. This Hell upon Earth: Competence and Wealth

7. Tui America: Power

Epilogue: Continuity and Change in U.S.-Fiji Relations

Appendix A: Sandalwood Voyages

Appendix B: Bêche-de-Mer Voyages

Appendix C: Foreign Naval Vessels in Fiji to 1860

Abbreviations

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by a residential fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I thank Conrad Wright, Kate Viens, and others at that remarkably resource-rich and friendly institution for the supportive and intellectual camaraderie they provide to all their research fellows. I also received crucial research travel funds from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation.

The majority of written records related to Fiji history before 1860 are at the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. I shamelessly overworked the staff with my requests. They were always prompt, gracious, and welcoming, and I feel supremely grateful for their patience and endurance. I also owe special thanks to the staff at the National Archives at Boston, John Thomson of the First Baptist Church of Beverly, Joan Duffy in Special Collections at the Yale Divinity School Library, the staff of the National Archives of the Fiji Islands, and the University of Connecticut interlibrary loan office.

The several opportunities I had to present portions of this work were extraordinarily fruitful in prodding me to think through my objectives. For anyone who may have contributed suggestions or questions along the way, I appreciated your engagement with the history of a place that, for nearly all of you, was far outside your own areas of expertise. To Seth Rockman, who invited me to speak at the Nineteenth-Century History Workshop at Brown University; Konstantin Dierks, who invited me to participate in an early American globalism workshop at Indiana University; and the organizers of the Human Trafficking Conference at the McNeil Center, thanks for allowing me to share my work in these venues as these discussions greatly influenced the course taken by various chapters in the book.

Other historians sharing my interest in the Pacific, the role of maritime trade in the history of America and the world, and history in general supported this project with advice and encouragement. I particularly thank Ann Fabian, Edward Gray, Vicki Luker, Brian DeLay, Emily Conroy-Krutz, Ann Plane, Brian Rouleau, Susan Sleeper-Smith, and my University of Connecticut colleagues Peter Baldwin, Martha Cutter, Cornelia Dayton, Shawn Salvant, and Chris Vials. When I first conceived of this project, I had an opportunity to speak with Ian Campbell and David Routledge while in Fiji, and I greatly appreciated their insights and recommendations.

Michael McGandy (acquisitions editor at Cornell University Press), Amy Greenberg (coeditor of Cornell’s United States in the World book series), and two anonymous manuscript reviewers also offered invaluable suggestions that have found their way into the book. I thank them for the attention they showed the project.

Map 1. Fiji and the Southwest Pacific

Map 2. Fiji Islands

Map 3. Leading matanitu of nineteenth-century Fiji

Introduction

Why Go a Fiji Voyage?

For Americans today, Fiji evokes paradise, from the tropical-themed FIJI water on grocery store shelves to the islands’ luxury beach resorts.¹ This is the opposite of how Americans thought of Fiji in the nineteenth century, when the islands reputedly harbored the most horrid specimens of humanity. As Captain John B. Knights remarked in 1833, if a friend expressed "a desire, to view, human nature, in its most disgusting colours, pass a considerable portion, of his own life, in intense anxiety, subsist entirely on oily pork, and yams, without, a shadow of pleasure, to cheer his dull hours, Knights would say to him, ‘Go! my friend Go! a Fegee voyage.’"² But if Fiji was so horrible, why did Americans go there? Several thousand of them voyaged to Fiji on merchant, whaling, and naval vessels in the decades before British colonization of the islands in 1874. And more than a hundred Americans lived and died there.

From a macro perspective, explaining the American presence in Fiji seems simple. Their rationale was economic: Americans went to Fiji to extract resources to sell in China. In 1804, a castaway American sailor broke the news that the aromatic sandalwood tree grew plentifully on Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second-largest island. American and British ships rushed to harvest this commodity highly valued by the Chinese as incense. A second boom targeting the sea slug bêche-de-mer, a food delicacy esteemed in Chinese cuisine, flourished a generation later and attracted another wave of traders to the islands, this time almost entirely from Salem, Massachusetts. Thus Fiji became one leg in the U.S.-China trade and a source of great wealth for the American merchants who gambled their fortunes on it.³

Zoom in closer, and it becomes apparent that the foot soldiers of early U.S. global expansion, the individual Americans who ventured overseas, did so for more complicated reasons. They were not mere cogs in a U.S. foreign relations history that treats big-picture abstractions—capitalism, resource extraction, or imperialism—as the motor. Rather, an assortment of personal ambitions impelled Americans to travel to distant locales. Their motivations, albeit multiple and divergent, often derived from a desire to be respected by others and thereby attain a sense of self-worth, or so I propose in this book. Their strivings to rise in others’ estimation influenced the course of Fiji’s history and, albeit more subtly, the history of the United States.

To study this phenomenon up close, I delve into the Fiji experiences of the three Americans who left the deepest imprint on the islands’ history: Fiji’s most respected foreign resident, David Whippy, a runaway Nantucket whaleman and beachcomber (the term used in Pacific studies for foreigners who settled in Oceania); sea captain’s wife Mary D. Wallis, author of Life in Feejee: Five Years Among the Cannibals, By a Lady (1851), an essential source for nineteenth-century Fiji history; and Salem merchant John B. Williams, whose greed is often cited as a factor in Britain’s accession of the islands.⁴ In three sections, with two chapters devoted to each person, I explore the different paths they took to earn others’ respect and the larger consequences of their activities on two places half a world apart.

Differing in their social backgrounds, personalities, and objectives, these three individuals otherwise had characteristics in common. They came from Massachusetts port towns and identified as American, even the expatriate Whippy. They had a stake in the extractive economy, which altered local environments and transformed Fiji’s material culture by introducing muskets, gunpowder, metal tools, and machine-woven cloth. They meddled in internecine affairs by siding with one of Fiji’s multiple polities in wars against another, and though forced to ally with Fijians to further their own ends, they wished to see Fijians reduced to tractability. Their persistent belittling of Fijians as the world’s most savage people helped push Fijians to abandon various traditions and accept Christianity, monogamy, and other foreign practices in their stead. In short, all three whittled away at Fiji’s economic, political, and cultural autonomy and thereby opened up the archipelago to further foreign encroachment.

These three Americans figure large in histories of nineteenth-century Fiji. But their collective story falls outside the usual scope of American history and the paradigms prevailing among historians at this moment: this book is not about empire, borderlands, or settler colonialism. It may look like empire to those historians who use that word to signal expansionist power, but I prefer limiting empire to mean formal, administrative control over a stretch of territory.⁵ By that definition, there never was a U.S. empire in Fiji. During the peak years of American activity in the islands, the 1800s through the 1850s, Americans ceded deference to Fiji’s power structure. Infiltrating Fijian polities in a piecemeal fashion—along with the British, Tongans, and to a lesser extent the French—Americans exerted influence from within until, made vulnerable by the multitude of forces angling for supremacy, Fiji ultimately fell to British subjugation and became part of the British Empire.

For the same reason, Fiji cannot be considered an American borderland. Popularized by Greg Dening’s Islands and Beaches, a history of European-native encounters at the Marquesas (on the other side of the South Pacific from Fiji), and Richard White’s The Middle Ground, which deals with European-native encounters in the Great Lakes region, a borderlands approach imagines people meeting at the edges of sovereign territories or at places in between that no one polity controls. However, casting parts of the American West or the Pacific as European borderlands risks denying natives sovereignty over land and sea.⁶ The cross-cultural exchanges and political contestations mediating encounters between Americans and Fijians might resemble what Dening described for the Marquesas or White for the Great Lakes, but Fijians had the upper hand in Fiji at least into the 1850s, when they began to lose political control over parts of the archipelago to Tongans, and later to the British.

As for settler colonial theory, in a short essay published in 2016, A Typology of Colonialism, I addressed my concerns about how it has become dogma in indigenous studies and shut out other lines of inquiry. Settler colonial theory sheds light on the egregious dispossession and depopulation of native peoples as European settlers became the majority. It has little to say about Fiji, where today about 85 percent of the land is deemed Native Land and remains in possession of ethnic Fijians (Itaukei), who make up over half the islands’ population. The second-largest demographic group consists of ethnic Indians, descendants of plantation workers imported by the British.⁷

If colonialism is defined as interference by outsiders, Fiji experienced colonialism, just not settler colonialism. In A Typology of Colonialism, I sketch out twelve forms of colonialism differentiated by colonizers’ intentions: settler, planter, extractive, imperial power, trade, transport, legal, missionary, romantic, rogue, not-in-my-backyard, and postcolonial. Many of these forms of colonialism swept through Fiji at some point in the country’s history. The first major foreign intervention occurred with the extractive colonialism of the sandalwood and bêche-de-mer trades: over five decades, about one hundred trading vessels, most of them American, spent months, sometimes years, in Fiji harvesting natural resources.⁸ Missionary colonialism began in the 1830s with the founding of the English Wesleyan Methodist mission.⁹ In the 1850s, Tongans from the neighboring archipelago to the east invaded in a bid to aggrandize Tonga’s domains and sphere of influence, which I categorize as imperial power colonialism.¹⁰ Planter colonialism took hold in the 1860s when the collapse of cotton markets during the U.S. Civil War brought aspiring planters, mostly British, to the islands.¹¹ Fiji remained a planter colony after British annexation, when sugar replaced cotton as the islands’ leading export.¹² Transport colonialism also shaped Fiji’s history, first whale ships, then steamships, then airplanes, all needing replenishment of food or fuel.¹³ Fijian independence in 1970 initiated postcolonial colonialism as the British legacy continued to inform Fiji’s fraught politics, race relations, and international allegiances.¹⁴ Finally, even though Fiji is an independent nation today, tourism, or romantic colonialism, has become the mainstay of the islands’ economy and a force for change as Fijians adapt to meet outsiders’ desires.¹⁵ If the only framework we had was settler colonialism, there would be no way to comprehend the large-scale changes in Fiji brought about by an assemblage of adverse foreign intentions.

If this book is not about empire, borderlands, or settler colonialism, then what is it about? It is one example, perhaps the most extreme example, of the vast global reach of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. From the nation’s origins, Americans could be found nearly everywhere. Some lived overseas. Most just worked there. The usual term for such people is Americans Abroad, but that is so insipid a phrase, I prefer extending the legal term extraterritorial. I elaborate on the extraterritorial United States as a non-territorial yet still national space constituted by mobile Americans in a 2018 essay in the journal Diplomatic History. This article compares five of the most common vectors drawing nineteenth-century Americans outside the country—the China trade, whaling, missionizing, the consular service, and the navy—and illustrates how early U.S. foreign relations bubbled up from the bottom. Extraterritorial Americans’ varied initiatives gave global expansion its momentum, and the federal government enlarged its overseas presence and authority to meet their needs.¹⁶

The extraterritorial United States deserves more notice as a place where American history happened. Two impulses explain why it has been under-studied. First, a territorial bias leads us to favor events occurring inside the nation’s current borders. Many histories of the United States in the world represent the nineteenth century as a period of continental consolidation and mark U.S. entrance onto the world stage with the territorial acquisitions of Hawai‘i, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico in 1898.¹⁷ Multiple history books deal with the massacres of Native Americans at Sand Creek in 1864 and Wounded Knee in 1890, yet there is no book, not even a single research article, on the massacre at Malolo (see figure I.1), where in 1840 the U.S. Navy went on a rampage, slaughtering about one hundred men, women, and children, destroying their houses, planting fields, and fruit-bearing trees.¹⁸

Figure I.1. Alfred T. Agate, one of the artists employed by the U.S. Exploring Expedition, made this drawing of the expedition’s July 1840 assault on Malolo, which resulted in the deaths of about one hundred Fijians. Courtesy of Navy Art Collection, Naval History and Heritage Command.

Lately, historians have begun addressing U.S. history’s territorial myopia with a burgeoning literature on early globalization, the Pacific, and the connections between foreign relations and indigenous histories. Instead of conceptualizing global expansion as westward expansion’s successor, more historians are pointing out their concurrence and symmetry. In the American West and the Pacific, the same tactics—a discourse of native savagery, extortion, violence, the application of Euroamerican legal traditions, and a sense of entitlement—characterized Americans’ economic and political engagements.¹⁹

This similitude between westward and Pacific expansion does not mean that they were identical processes. Without articulating why, the nation’s leaders delegated continental and overseas regulatory responsibility to different branches of the federal bureaucracy. The army defended Americans from Indians; the navy defended Americans from Pacific Islanders. In 1824, the War Department created the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which in 1849 moved to the Department of the Interior; the State Department managed the problems posed by U.S. nationals, including American Indians, who traveled, lived, or worked abroad. Most important, land acquisition and settlement predominated on the continent whereas few Americans overseas planned to settle there permanently. The majority were employed at some other endeavor—resource extraction, commerce, or proselytization—that did not aim at the acquisition of territory for settlement but nonetheless bore heavily on indigenous people.²⁰

The second reason why the extraterritorial United States rarely makes it into the history books is because U.S. foreign relations history has in the past been told more from the top down than from the bottom up. This, too, is now changing as more foreign relations scholars look for protagonists beyond the small cadre of high-level officials headquartered in Washington, D.C. As actors in U.S. foreign relations history, ordinary Americans are sometimes called non-state actors. This is misleading, however, since they were as embedded in the state as their elected and appointed leaders.²¹

This is especially evident in the early American period, when extraterritorial Americans constituted the vanguard of U.S. global expansion. Their activities greatly benefited the nation as a whole. Most tangibly, the federal government depended on commercial shipping for its operating funds. By 1833, the U.S. Treasury had taken in $624 million in customs duties, more than ten times the second-largest source of federal income, the $45 million gleaned from the sale of lands previously in Indian possession.²² One ship-owner involved in Fiji’s bêche-de-mer trade, Salem merchant Joseph Peabody, was credited at his death with having paid a remarkable $1.8 million in customs duties to the federal treasury in the period from 1825 to 1833. How much Fiji by itself contributed to the U.S. economy would be impossible to calculate. But it can safely be said that Peabody was not the only merchant magnate who made money in Fiji and brought those profits home.²³ Capital acquired abroad financed westward expansion and domestic improvements as merchants active in global commerce invested in banks, insurance companies, railroads, and textile mills.²⁴ Extraterritoriality’s rewards also trickled down to consumers. Luxury imports and produce extracted from the sea and tropics enriched the daily lives of stay-at-homes.²⁵ And a prolific literature detailing the strange customs of distant lands based on extraterritorial Americans’ firsthand observations allowed Americans at home to imagine themselves as a distinct and superior people.²⁶

Fiji similarly had a role in the political evolution of the United States. The U.S. government oversaw extraterritorial space with a growing and at times heavy-handed infrastructure of consuls, diplomats, and naval forces. These government agents acted under the obligation to protect Americans who ventured outside the nation’s borders. American shipping in the Pacific, especially the whaling industry and China trade, made that region a special concern. In 1821, the government commissioned the Pacific Squadron, a naval fleet stationed off Chile, and charged it with periodically touring hot-spot archipelagos where Americans had gotten into trouble. From 1838 to 1842, the United States Exploring Expedition, or Ex Ex, plied Pacific waters to chart reefs, shoals, and safe harbors. It spent three months in Fiji in 1840 conducting the first extensive survey of the islands. Six years later, anticipating the British by more than ten years, the U.S. government, at merchant Williams’s request, appointed him its consular representative in Fiji. Every few years thereafter, U.S. warships visited the islands to redress a proliferating litany of American grievances against Fijians.²⁷ As one British writer put it, In those days the American Eagle ‘screeched considerable’ throughout the Great South Sea and enforced the demands of its subjects almost indiscriminately.²⁸ The value of extraterritoriality and the government protection afforded extraterritorial Americans pushed the United States to enlarge its global scope and power.

With extraterritorial Americans as the motor, it can be difficult to make sense of how U.S. foreign relations worked in the early American period. It looks like an uncoordinated mess of individuated ambitions. In the contentious politics of nineteenth-century Fiji, for example, Americans often took opposite sides and aligned with like-minded people regardless of national affiliation: Whippy with other beachcombers, Wallis with the English missionaries, and Williams with whoever was expedient. Even though they set about realizing their objectives through different means, this concatenation of divergent intentions cumulatively advanced American expansion overseas, albeit in uneven, often contradictory, ways.

Their underlying motivations were self-serving, not because they were inordinately selfish but because they were human. Other studies in U.S. foreign relations history and in the history of the Pacific offer parallel observations. Frank Costigliola, my colleague at the University of Connecticut, has highlighted emotions as factors in the foreign policy of Franklin Roosevelt, George Kennan, and other American officials.²⁹ If the inner selves of twentieth-century politicians and diplomats impinged on policymakers’ decisions, as Costigliola delineates, then the same could be assumed for early nineteenth-century foreign relations when extraterritorial Americans spearheaded expansion from the bottom up. Personal emotions shaped British expansion into the Pacific as well, according to literary scholar Jonathan Lamb. In Preserving the Self in the South Seas, he delved into the mental worlds of familiar figures usually depicted as rational, confident, and decisive. Captain James Cook and other European explorers of the Pacific, Lamb contends, were instead anxious, confused, and prone to spontaneous fits of unruly passions.³⁰

In the case of Whippy, Wallis, and Williams, the aspect of their inner selves most conspicuous in their words and deeds is how they sought others’ respect. Respect has yet to be recognized as a causal factor in historical change. The closest historiography is on respectability, which is typically cast as an obsession of the middle classes, as in studies about consumption and politeness in Britain and the United States or about the politics of respectability among African Americans. In this literature, respectability invokes a host of cultural ideals related to taste, manners, and virtue. Believing oneself to be a respectable person or trying to pass as a respectable person required self-regulation of public behavior while offering individuals in return a language for asserting moral authority and a higher social status.³¹ I see respect as serving a similar social function but without the class connotations. The term resists concrete definition because it is an intangible human striving lacking uniform, stable criteria. Being respected means that one has others’ approval, admiration, or deference. But the traits making someone worthy of others’ respect vary across time, space, culture, personality, and context.

If the pursuit of respect is fundamental to the human psyche, the Americans in Fiji could be considered unexceptional. Yet, they were a bit peculiar since their ambitions took them to the geographic and cultural antipodes. One would expect Fiji’s dangers, deprivations, and cannibal notoriety to keep outsiders away. Instead, Fiji offered Americans a unique platform to express social superiority. Hobnobbing with cannibals, people in American society deemed undeserving of others’ respect, could have made self-enhancement seem easy.

On the issue of cannibalism, scholars have disagreed strenuously as to whether any society has ever condoned it. Fiji features prominently in this debate. Some writers take the view that descriptions of cannibalism in historic records are mere cannibal talk, European fabrications intended to dehumanize natives. Other writers, cultural relativists, point to the preponderance of evidence showing that Fijians conceived of cannibalism as a perfectly normal social institution and that to argue otherwise privileges European morality as a universal standard.³² This narrowly conceived debate ignores the many other Fijian customs foreigners castigated and ridiculed— widow strangling, euthanistic burials of the sick and elderly, and elaborate hairstyles—to compose a tableau of savagery against which to assert precedence.³³

Yet, more than any other Fijian custom, cannibalism constituted the idea of civilization as its antithesis. Sensationalist accounts of Fijian cannibalism sanctified economic exploitation and military interventions while buttressing Americans’ self-identification as civilized people. After the Malolo massacre, Ex Ex midshipman William Reynolds likened the expedition’s three months in the islands to some hideous dream: Ye who read or hear of Cannibals in your quiet Homes can have but a faint idea of the absolute & nervous horror & the loathsome disgust that oppresses one who has been among them & witnessed the foul traits that place them below the beasts.³⁴ Reynolds saw no cannibalism while in Fiji, yet the specter of it afforded him a foil against which to measure himself and his compatriots so as to come out on top. Such stigmatizations of Fijian culture barred Americans in Fiji from pondering the moral implications of their actions, since the absolute savagery of Fijians legitimated whatever Americans did there.

Civilization, like respect, was a system of social one-upmanship, a means to assess people’s value and to determine whether they were better or worse than other people. But the ideology of civilization starkly distinguished good from bad whereas respect was more ambiguous and contestable. Who among the civilized most deserved others’ respect and why? Antebellum Americans could not agree. They saturated their speech and writings with respect and respected as though the meaning of these words was patently obvious to all, but they never specified exactly what conditions or behaviors would guarantee others’ respect. As Americans, along with the British and French, coalesced around a collective identity as civilized people in opposition to Fijians, the pursuit of respect enmeshed them in a hornet’s nest of animosity, backbiting, and recrimination.

The key figure and lens through which to see the consequences of their jostling for self-esteem is Cakobau, ruler of Bau at midcentury and the most powerful person in precolonial Fiji. One of many independent polities making up the Fijian archipelago before unification under British colonization, Bau began its rise to power at the start of the nineteenth century by gaining an advantage in the sandalwood trade. In 1845, the English missionary John Hunt estimated that Bau had only 15,000 of the islands’ 300,000 people under its authority, yet it was revered and feared throughout the Fiji group. Cakobau’s aggrandizement of his domains through military conquest and strategic alliances made him the Napoleon of Feejee.³⁵ Under Cakobau’s leadership, Fiji seemed on the verge of consolidating into a kingdom as King Kamehameha I had accomplished at Hawai‘i, the Pomare dynasty at Tahiti, and King George Tupou I at Tonga.³⁶ Then, in the 1850s, amid a crescendo of warfare, resistance from his people at the imposition of new labor demands, and convoluted political realignments that involved Whippy, Wallis, Williams, the English missionaries, and the Tongans King George and Ma‘afu as major players, Cakobau’s ascendancy faltered. For years, he had defended Fijian customs. To abandon tradition would entail losing the respect of other Fijians. But foreigners despised cannibalism and widow strangling, and the pressures to accept what these foreigners called civilization mounted. To save his crumbling empire, he became Christian and outlawed polygamy, widow strangling, and cannibalism.³⁷ Cakobau also wished for respect, but to preserve his status and authority, he had to adjust to new criteria introduced by outsiders.

Before turning to the microhistories of Whippy, Wallis, and Williams, I set the stage with an overview of the sandalwood and bêche-de-mer trades, which brought the majority of Americans to Fiji and through which much of the earliest information about Fiji spread to the rest of the world. To assist readers in keeping track of the many foreign vessels visiting Fiji, I provide three appendixes listing the voyages of sandalwood traders (A), bêche-demer traders (B), and foreign naval vessels prior to 1860 (C). In accord with how later chapters focus on individuals and one form of respect, the first chapter uses as focal points two Salem sea captains, William P. Richardson and Benjamin Vanderford, with knowledge as the avenue by which they pursued others’ respect. Overtly, Richardson and Vanderford came to Fiji to make money by extracting the islands’ natural resources, but simultaneously, possession of a rare and specialized knowledge offered them the means to elevate their social status. Other Americans in Fiji also deployed knowledge as a way to gain respect.

The remaining chapters are organized in approximate chronological order but also overlap since these three Americans knew each other well and participated in some of the same events. Chapter 2 recounts how Whippy initially accommodated to Fijian customs to earn respect vakaviti (according to Fijian ways). Certain Fijian customs he derided, however, and tried to change. Chapter 3 is about Whippy’s turn away from dependence on Fijians as he engineered the emergence of an independent foreign community. Increasingly, he sought the regard of other foreigners and made himself the helpmate of missionaries, traders, and naval commanders. His knowledge of Fiji now satisfied their needs, and they commended him for his usefulness and good character, ironically so since he lived in polygamy with a large family of half-Fijian children. Chapter 4 analyzes Life in Feejee to illustrate how Wallis challenged the double standard of gendered respectability in her own society by claiming the credentials to speak about Fijians’ moral inequities. Chapter 5 documents how her comfortable middle-class status sprung from the forced labor of Fijians, which became increasingly oppressive with the rise of foreign trade and from which all Americans in Fiji benefited. Chapter 6 details Williams’s frustrated efforts to live up to the legacy of Salem’s mercantile culture. Even though he failed to acquire other Salemites’ respect for his business acumen, he achieved a different kind of respect by marshaling U.S. warships to attack and threaten Fijians on his behalf, events described in Chapter 7. As Whippy, Wallis, and Williams pursued respect in different ways, they became party to the many changes taking place in Fiji due to foreign influence.

Although I see this book as contributing mainly to U.S. history by spotlighting the global reach of the early United States and the role extraterritorial Americans played in bringing that about, I have tried to do right by the history of Fiji. To convey a person’s social position or a cultural practice that has no English-language equivalent, I use Fijian words, which are defined in the text when they first appear and also in a glossary in the back of the book. Except when quoting, I adhere to the Fijian orthography developed by Wesleyan Methodist missionaries David Cargill and William Cross in the late 1830s, which is the country’s official orthography today: C=th, B=mb, D=nd, G=ng, Q=ngg. Note that in writings from the time period, the spellings are more random but accord with how English speakers pronounced words. For example, Bau usually appears in the documents as Ambow, Mbau, or Bow; Cakobau as Thakombau; Nadi, a place name on both of Fiji’s largest islands, as Nandy; Gavidi, head of the Lasakau fishing clan and Cakobau’s great friend and henchman, as Navinde; and Qaraniqio, Cakobau’s foe during the Bau-Rewa war, as Naringio.³⁸

Fiji had a complex political structure in which the largest unit was the matanitu, a confederated polity usually called in English-language texts territory, district, state, or kingdom (see Map 3). Bau referred both to the islands’ most powerful matanitu and to that matanitu’s headquarters, the small island of Bau situated off Viti Levu’s southeastern coast. Rewa was a large and important town on Viti Levu and the name for another powerful matanitu, which embraced satellite peoples on the islands of Viti Levu, Kadavu, and Beqa. Other matanitu that saw a lot of American ship traffic were Bua, Cakaudrove, Lau, Macuata, and Ba. The Americans in Fiji were usually able to figure out who belonged to which matanitu even though diplomacy and war put allegiances between allied and subject peoples in constant flux.³⁹

Individuals’ political roles and titles also have no direct match in the English language. Americans in Fiji usually called ruling men kings and chiefs. Chiefs were elite men, turaga, who inherited a high rank from their mothers; marama was the female equivalent and translated into English as queen or queens. A ruler over a territory, or king, was tui, as in Tui Levuka, ruler of Levuka, or Tui Cakau, ruler of Cakaudrove. The title did not always match the place. For instance, Tui Dreketi ruled Rewa, and Tui Nayau ruled at Lakeba. A turaga levu was a great chief, very likely the same man as tui. The majority of Fijians were kaisi, which English speakers in nineteenth-century Fiji interpreted as commoners, poor people, or slaves. The willingness of kaisi to heed the turaga class without question or complaint made their status appear akin to slavery, but more precisely kaisi meant someone without rank or land and subject to turaga. Kaisi carried with it "a dash of contempt" and often appears in the documentary record as an insult regardless of a person’s actual rank.⁴⁰

The overarching social, or ethnic, division operating in island politics broke the population into three groups: Kai Viti (Fijian people), Kai Toga (Tongans), and Kai Papalagi (foreign people). Papalagi encompassed Americans, British, French and, as best as can be discerned from scattered remarks in the documents, Filipino, Lascar, and Pacific Islanders who were neither Fijian nor Tongan, men who had arrived as sailors on trading vessels and stayed on as beachcombers. The term papalagi occurs throughout the Pacific and has uncertain origins, meaning perhaps ghosts, spirits, ships and their sails, musket fire bursting through the sky, clothed people, or people trading in certain manufactured goods such as cloth or beads. Those who translated the word into English in the nineteenth century usually treated it as a synonym for white, white men, or Europeans, but given the racial and ethnic diversity of people who came by ship, its meaning best approximates foreigners.⁴¹ I use papalagi frequently because it is the term people at the time employed and because it frees me from having to resort to the wordier Americans and Europeans or the word whites, which would be a misnomer since Fiji’s foreigners included several African Americans and the Seminole Indian John Sparr, about whom I have written in Native American Whalemen and the World.

I do not say much about Sparr in this book since I have told his story elsewhere, but he associated closely with the merchant Williams. As consul, Williams advocated for Sparr’s rights as a U.S. national as did U.S. naval commanders. From the Fijian perspective, Williams and Sparr were both papalagi. Besides their shared status as foreigners in Fiji, their nationality as Americans also shaped their experiences, since that was the pretext for the protections the U.S. government extended to Sparr in his complaints against Fijians. Sparr’s race mattered to some extent since Americans and Britons often attached Seminole or Indian to his name when mentioning him in their writings. But as I argued in Native American Whalemen and the World, the racial divides among Americans lost valence overseas.⁴²

Even though the ideology of civilization had a racial cast in that light-skinned people typically claimed civilized superiority over dark-skinned people, the racial diversity among Americans in Fiji limited race’s potency as a weapon to diminish others. And so even though Americans sometimes referred to Fijians as blacks or used more derogatory racial epithets, race was not as powerful a dynamic in nineteenth-century Fijian social relations as was indigeneity versus foreignness, nationality, and culture. Cannibalism especially became the hallmark of Fijians’ savage natures. Fijians had complexions bordering close to the Negro, bêche-de-mer trader John H. Eagleston noted when speaking of his first glimpse of them upon arrival in Fiji on the Peru in 1831. With more drama, he penned, the long talked of Savage and Cannibal was now before us.⁴³

Chapter 1

Butenam

Knowledge

The American seafarers who came to Fiji for sandalwood and bêche-demer earned a slight share of the wealth generated but derived additional satisfaction from their time in the islands. Their unique experiences granted them a rarefied, socially elevating expertise. Returning home with fantastic stories and curiously wrought souvenirs, they became knowledge brokers whose firsthand observations shaped American perceptions of Fiji and Fiji Islanders for decades to come. They produced two kinds of knowledge, one pragmatic and logistical, the other ethnographic and ideological.

Practical knowledge made navigation safer and faster, fostered commercial networks and routines, and identified exploitable natural resources. In the mercantile culture of the early republic, this kind of knowledge was critical. Merchants advised younger generations that knowledge is power and that they should learn foreign languages and customs regulating the conduct of business unique to each country. They corresponded incessantly with family, friends, and strangers to ask about current prices at Batavia, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Canton, and other places around the globe, to inform associates of the availability or impossibility of obtaining certain cargos at certain ports, and to maintain channels of sociability through which news of commercial value flowed. Accurate and timely information decided the fate of financial speculations.¹ This was especially so for the carrying trade, which derived profit from the differential value of things: buying low in one place, selling high somewhere else. Cultural differences in consumer tastes and demand created the large gaps in value that made the triangular trade between the United States, Fiji, and China immensely profitable.²

Ethnographic knowledge intersected with pragmatic knowledge but resulted in more than monetary rewards. By reporting on the bizarre customs of Fijians, Americans consigned its people to the opposite end of the humanity spectrum and affirmed for a larger public Americans’ cultural superiority. Americans who traveled overseas occupied a singular position from which to demonstrate intellect, initiative, and worldliness. Their esoteric knowledge attached them to the enlightenment traditions that celebrated knowledge accumulation as the epitome of civility and progress. To know what men are and may be in a savage state was bound up with the effort to comprehend the human character in a civilized state to thereby arrive at a better knowledge of human nature in the abstract.³ To know the other was to know oneself.

Both pragmatic and ethnographic knowledge production were fundamental to U.S. global expansion. In Fiji, American traders had to learn to navigate the archipelago’s island-studded, reef-ridden geography; what sandalwood and bêche-de-mer were, where to find them, and how to process them so as to meet the quality standards of Chinese consumers; and how to negotiate with Fijians to access their knowledge, territory, and labor. American traders could not harvest Fijian resources without Fijian help, so they needed to figure out how to communicate with Fijians, what trade items appealed to Fijian consumers, and who held power over whom. At the same time, Fijians became knowable in American popular culture as ethnographic objects, the ultimate savages. Two traders nicknamed Butenam exemplify the practical and ethnographic rewards awaiting Americans who entered the Fiji trade. When in 1811 Captain William Putnam Richardson of the Active came to Fiji after sandalwood, Fijians called him by his middle name because Richardson was too cumbersome to pronounce. Benjamin Vander-ford, second mate on the Active and later a captain and supercargo in the bêche-de-mer trade, inherited Richardson’s nom-de-trade.⁴ Richardson and Vanderford hailed from Salem, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the United States due to its preeminence in global commerce. Salem was also home to the nation’s most renowned maritime knowledge repository, the East India Marine Society. The society encouraged its members to deposit