Abstract
In March 1797, a group of six missionaries disembarked from the ship Duff on the island of Tongatapu to establish the first Missionary Society station in the Friendly Islands. Within a short time of going ashore, the missionaries encountered the three Europeans known to be living in Tonga. Two were Irishmen, John Connelly and Morgan Bryan, while the third was an Englishman, Londoner Benjamin Ambler. Connolly and Ambler lived on Tongatapu, while Bryan travelled by canoe from the neighbouring island of Nomuka to meet the newcomers. While surprised and pleased to hear the English language, the missionaries were taken aback by the appearance and demeanour of the men who stood before them. Connelly and Ambler appeared so unkempt that ‘in England a well-disposed person would shun them as he would a swindler or a pickpocket’.1 Morgan Bryan, even more so, appalled the missionaries. Near naked, tattooed and vulgar, he was to God’s messengers an unwelcome distraction from the serious tasks of building a mission and winning souls. ‘He came and staid for some time, but during our interview gave such specimens of depravity as excited a wish for him never more to come under our roof’, the missionaries complained in their journal.2 As George Vason, one of the Society’s missionaries wrote later in his memoir of the Tongan mission, these island dwellers were ‘base and wicked characters’, men whose main desire was to ‘indulge, without restraint, in those habits of idleness and profligacy, to which they had been addicted’.3
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Notes
George Vason, An Authentic Narrative of Four Years Residence at Tongataboo, ed. Rev. S. Piggott (London: Longman, 1815), 68.
H. E. Maude, ‘Beachcombers and Castaways’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 73, 3 (1964), 294–93: 274. The first whaler arrived in Sydney soon after the establishment of the penal colony in 1788 but the War of 1812 retarded the frequency with which American ships visited ports in the Western Pacific. Numbers of voyages increased dramatically from the late 1810s.
See I. C. Campbell, Gone Native’ in Polynesia: Captivity Narratives and Experiences from the South Pacific (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 13.
Rhys Richards, ‘On Using Pacific Shipping Records to Gain New Insights into Culture Contact in Polynesia Before 1840’, Journal of Pacific History, 43, 3 (2008), 376, 379.
See also Rhys Richards, ‘Pacific Whaling 1820s to 1840s: Port Visits, “Shipping Arrivals and Departures” Comparisons, and Sources’, Great Circle, 24, 1 (2002), 25–39.
See Jane Samson, Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Pacific Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawai Press, 1998), 25; Maude, ‘Beachcombers and Castaways’, 274.
LMS, Missionary voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean, 85–8; Caroline Ralston, Grass Huts and Warehouses: Pacific Beach Communities of the Nineteenth Century (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1977), 24–5;
Susanne Williams Milcairns, Native Strangers: Beachcombers, Renegades and Castaways in the South Seas (Auckland: Penguin Books, 2006), 97–104.
J. C. Beaglehole, ‘On the Character of Captain James Cook’, Geographical Journal, 122 (1956), 428.
See Malcolm Campbell, ‘Tribal Kings and Tattooed Chiefs: The Hidden Irish of the Pacific World’, in MícheálÓh Aodha and MáirtínÓ Catháin (eds), Irish Migrants in New Communities: Seeking the Fair Land (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 3–14.
Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774–1880 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980), 129–30. On beachcomber narratives, see Campbell Gone Native’ in Polynesia, passim.
Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects:Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 84.
On beachcombers and transculturation, see Thomas Bargatzky, ‘Beachcombers and Castaways as Innovators’, Journal of Pacific History, 15, 2 (1980), 93–101.
H. E. Maude, Of Islands and Men: Studies in Pacific History (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1968), 13–40.
HRNZ, I, 278. On links between sailors and Irish protestors, and proposals to escape by sea, see Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2009), 97, 178;
and Grace Karskens, ‘“This Spirit of Emigration”: The Nature and Meanings of Escape In early New South Wales’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 7 (2005), 1–34.
John Coulter, Adventures on the Western Coast of South America and the Interior of California: Including a Narrative of Incidents at the Kingsmill Islands, New Ireland, New Britain, New Guinea, and Other Islands in the Pacific Ocean 2 Vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman, 1847), Vol. 2, 160–80.
William Beresford, A Voyage Round the World; but More Particularly to the North-west Coast of America: Performed in 1785, 1786, 1787, and 1788, in the King George and Queen Charlotte, Captains Portlock and Dixon. Dedicated, by permission, to Sir Joseph Banks. By Captain George Dixon (London: George Goulding, 1789), 231–3.
John Coulter, Adventures in the Pacific, with Observations of the Natural Productions, Manners and Customs of the Natives of the Various Islands (Dublin: William Curry, 1845), 403.
Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841 and 1842 5 vols. (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard), iii, 68. On the expedition, see Nathanial Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842 (New York: Viking, 2003).
Niel Gunson, ‘The Deviations of a Missionary Family: The Henrys of Tahiti’, in J. W. Davidson and Deryck Scarr (eds), Pacific Island Portraits (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1976), 31–4.
In particular, Gunson, ‘The Deviations of a Missionary Family’, passim; William Tagupa, ‘Missionary Lamentations: Early Educational Strategies in Tahiti 1800–1840’, Journal de la Société des Océanistes 36, 68 (1980), 165–72.
Emily Manktelow, Missionary Families: Race, Gender and Generation on the Spiritual Frontier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 165–7.
Neil Gunson, ‘The Coming of Foreigners’, in Noel Rutherford (ed.), Friendly Islands: A History of Tonga (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1977), 96–9.
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Campbell, M. (2015). ‘Base and Wicked Characters’: European Island Dwellers in the Western Pacific, 1788–1850. In: Jackson, W., Manktelow, E.J. (eds) Subverting Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465870_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465870_5
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