ONE

Island Stories of the Cannibal Kind

“Cannibal” is a metonym for “savage,” a proxy word for that which appears culturally incomprehensible, disgusting, or dangerous. The strangeness of cannibalism—its assault on what modern societies regard as civilized behavior—continues to shock us. As if the horrors of World War Two had not already been documented in minute detail, recent additions to this grim literature have emphasized cannibal particulars. The consumption of corpses (and less often, murder for human meat) during the siege of Leningrad drives home as perhaps no other revelations could how harrowing these 872 days truly were. Similarly, the news that eating both prisoners of war and indigenous peoples was a “systematic and organized military strategy” of Japanese soldiers in the Asian-Pacific theater lends weight to the argument that this global conflict constituted the greatest human-made disaster in history.1 Archaeologists continue to unearth disturbing evidence of cannibalism in earlier eras. It now seems likely, for example, that some English settlers at Jamestown, in Virginia, survived the harsh winter of 1609–10 by preying upon their weaker neighbors. Desperation drove such savagery.² But what could be said in defense of Armin Meiwes, the German computer expert who in early 2001 honored the wish of an internet acquaintance to be slaughtered and swallowed? Less certain if no less troubling have been the periodic reports of rebel troops in northeastern Congo consuming the hearts, livers, and lungs of rival ethnic groups.³

Why does cannibalism still transfix modern readers and viewers? The late-Victorian reflections of Alfred St. Johnston may provide a clue. A genteel English wanderer who toured Melanesia in the 1880s, St. Johnston associated man-eating with bygone times when constant vigilance was the price of survival. Traditional Fijian life, St. Johnston supposed, had been invigorating mainly because it was so precarious:

This subject of cannibalism has a terrible sort of fascination for me, and I have been making the skipper to-night tell me all the awful things he has seen or heard of the “old” Fijians . . . ; and although he has made me shudder with some of his ghastly tales, . . . yet—queer is it not?—I have enjoyed them thoroughly . . . I should have gloried in the rush and struggle of old Fijian times—with my hand against everybody, and everybody against me—and the fierce madness of unchecked passion and rage with which they went to battle, and the clubbing of my foes, and I am sure I should have enjoyed the eating of them afterwards.

At once Hobbesian and Darwinian, this nostalgic yearning for an imagined Pacific past “when every restraint was laid aside” thrilled St. Johnston.4

A postcolonial reading of his fantasy would pounce on the admission that the “ghastly tales” of a veteran skipper constituted the evidence for Fijian man-eating. Anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, among others, has dismissed much of what Europeans claimed to know about Pacific cannibalism as phony “sailors’ yarns.”⁵ We will shortly return to the epistemological fog surrounding cannibal allegations. For now, though, it is enough to note that the modern scholarly impulse to deconstruct—and thereby to discredit—such stories derives in large part from a tendency to view cannibalism not as a behavior so much as a metaphor for racial difference; accusations of man-eating, some scholars hold, serve mainly to distance the civilized from the savage. Yet at the same time that it reifies difference, the rhetoric of cannibalism literally dissolves difference. For just as the cannibal act dramatically juxtaposes the eater and the eaten, so it must also suggest the incorporation of two into one.⁶

Whatever may explain cannibalism’s capacity to shock, it is clear that the figure of the man-eater has long provided a screen on which to project the shifting fears of dominant cultures. The process whereby the word “cannibal” emerged as the signifier of unrestrained appetite illustrates the utility of libel. Prior to the late fifteenth century, he who ate human flesh earned the label “anthropophagite,” a relatively neutral (if clumsy) melding of the Greek words “anthropos” (man) and “phagein” (to eat). Columbus’s voyages of the 1490s produced not only sightings of a new world but also the far more accusatory word we use today. On his first voyage, Columbus visited islands inhabited by an indigenous people called the Arawak. Hospitable to their European visitors, the Arawak had only vile tales to tell about a murderous folk located in the south, the Caribs. Although neither the great navigator nor his surgeon on the second voyage, Diego Alvarez Chanca, ever witnessed the alleged man-eating and blood-drinking of the Caribs, this missing proof did not stop Dr. Chanca from writing a report for the municipality of Seville that treated wild rumor as fact.

Such wholesale invention, we may reasonably infer, helped justify the taking of Caribbean peoples as slaves—just in case the anticipated gold and spices failed to materialize. Through faulty translations, the tribal designation “Carib” eventually emerged as “caniba.” And as Peter Hulme has explained, by a haphazard “augmentative process” European commentators viewed the Caribs’ resistance to Spanish authority as presumptive evidence of human depravity in its most grotesque form.7 Etymologically speaking, then, the word “cannibal” is a colonial creation.

Especially pernicious has been the rhetorical use of man-eating to affix racial boundaries. From the late eighteenth century down to the present, cannibalism and blackness have been mutually reinforcing. After living in the West Indies for twelve years, the historian Edward Long regarded himself as an authority on “African” physiology and culture. Besides their dark skin, thick lips, and hair “like bestial fleece,” Africans, Long declared in 1774, were keen “devourers of human flesh, and quaffers of human blood.”⁸ Hegel agreed. Africans supposedly lacked the instinctive dread of cannibalism normally found in white people. Hence, “to the sensual Negro, human flesh is but an object of sense—mere flesh.”⁹ Five generations later, the protagonist in George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939) needs only to glimpse a newspaper headline—“King Zog’s Wedding Postponed”—to descend into racial reverie: “King Zog! What a name! It’s next door to impossible to believe a chap with a name like that isn’t a jet-black cannibal.”¹⁰

Yet when this dark creature entered the literature of Pacific exploration, a taxonomic problem arose. Although Pacific cannibals were fully Other, not all of them were black. The amateur anthropologists of Victorian times sought to draw a cannibal map of Oceania, a racial cartography that strained to explain why man-eating flourished on some islands and not on others. Skin color offered the most obvious marker of difference. Thus, the “clear olive” complexion of Polynesians was “comely,” declared one supporter of missionary work in 1840, even when deepened through exposure to sun and wind.¹¹ Toward the end of the nineteenth century, another champion of British missions abroad observed that “light-skinned” Polynesians belonged to “a mild easy-tempered race.” Fond of stealing perhaps and no doubt “terribly impure,” Polynesians were still far superior to Melanesians, “a dark, treacherous, murderous people, great cannibals and skull hunters.”12 It behooved missionaries and their well-wishers to dwell on Melanesian wildness: wilder savages opened fatter purses. But many Victorians outside the evangelical ranks also accepted these racial profiles. The “Negro races of the Pacific” were an “undeniably . . . brutish and unintellectual people,” thought John Crawfurd, the blinkered president of London’s Ethnological Society. Small wonder that these Melanesians embraced cannibalism “in the fulness of its atrocity.” R.L. Stevenson put it more succinctly: “All Melanesia appears tainted,” declared the novelist.¹³ Where black bodies mingled with brown, as for instance in Tonga and along the southeastern coast of New Guinea, cannibal lust allegedly survived only among the former. In what most Europeans regarded as the epicenter of Pacific cannibalism, Fiji, its people struck one white settler as “dark in every sense of the word.”¹⁴

Given this equation of blackness with man-eating, it is worth recalling that Europe’s first exposure to Pacific anthropophagy involved a “copper-colored” Polynesian race, the Maori. In November of 1773, during Captain Cook’s second voyage, the Resolution anchored off Totara-Nui, a long beach located at the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. Quite by accident several crewmembers discovered while ashore that local Maori men were used to consuming parts of the enemies they had recently killed in battle. Cook soon came to accept that this was a common practice:

That the New Zealanders are Canibals can now no longer be doubted, the account I gave of it in my former Voyage was partly founded on circumstances and was, as I afterwards found, discredited by many people . . . [T]he New Zealanders are certainly in a state of civilization, their behaviour to us has been Manly and Mild, shewing always a readiness to oblige us; . . . they are far less addicted to thieving than the other Islanders and are I believe strictly honist among them-selves. This custom of eating their enemies slain in battle . . . has undoubtedly been handed down to them from the earliest times and we know that it is not an easy matter to break a nation of its ancient customs let them be ever so inhuman and savage.¹⁵

Not all members of Cook’s second voyage shared their captain’s detached view of man-eating among the Maori. James Burney, a young second lieutenant aboard the companion vessel, Adventure, was aghast to discover at Grass Cove the roasted remains of ten sailors from his own ship. So traumatic did Burney find these “most horrid proofs” of cannibalism that thereafter he “always spoke of it in a whisper, as if it was treason.”16

Most of Britain’s early visitors to New Zealand, however, managed to excuse, or at least contextualize, man-eating. In 1778, Johann Reinhold Forster, one of the Resolution’s “botanical gentlemen,” called the Maoris’ cannibal habit an unsurprising product of primitive social development made worse by a meager diet: people who possess “no other animal food, than a few stupid dogs and fish, will soon reconcile themselves to human flesh.”¹⁷ Later commentators cited a thirst for revenge as another mitigating drive. Whatever had predisposed the aboriginal Maori to eat one another, British chroniclers praised the speed with which these “superior” brown people gave up their wild ways and embraced Christian civilization.¹⁸

That the imaginary locus of Pacific cannibalism shifted after about 1830 from New Zealand to other parts of Oceania is evident. One modern anthropologist has pointed out that with the coming of European settlers to New Zealand, the pakeha (whites) and the Maori often found themselves living in close proximity. Since “it is not pleasant to have cannibals as neighbors and members of the same state,” there was, he reasons, an incentive to crown a new man-eating capital.¹⁹ Neighborly considerations aside, a far simpler explanation for the relocation of cannibalism’s heart of darkness involves pervasive racial stereotypes. The so-called “Cannibal Islands” of Victorian lore were nearly all Melanesian. Their dark inhabitants and sparse European settlement made them better palimpsests on which to inscribe and re-inscribe the faces of savagery. Because Fiji, the New Hebrides, and the satellite islands of New Guinea were so seldom visited during the early nineteenth century, they could better support a gothic “language of panic.” In Howard Malchow’s persuasive account, this gothic sensibility sought out the secret and the taboo, emphasizing that which repulsed or terrified.²⁰ And acting to unify these images was the dusky cannibal.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Recent scholarship, mostly in anthropology, links the subject of cannibalism to a broader debate over the meanings of non-Western cultural practices. Indeed, “cannibal studies” has sometimes been treated as a distinct field within this debate.²¹ Like much postcolonial theory, the historicizing of cannibalism seeks to reveal the unequal power relations that sustain a “defamatory” discourse about subject peoples. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions of man-eating, by contrast, rarely aimed to expose social injustice. Yet both these older discussions and modern, postcolonial criticism have recognized in the cannibal trope a useful starting point for probing the nature of violence. Just as Robert Darnton’s French peasants of the Old Regime found folktales “good to think with,”22 so cannibal stories have served to illuminate a wide range of campaigns. From missionary work among the heathen to the adoption of a flesh-free diet, from rationalizing the use of force against “savages” to detecting an indigenous voice in the past, cannibalism continues to provide rich food for thought.

Anthropologists in particular have sought to understand this practice as a behavior with highly diverse ritual meanings. As early as 1896, the German ethnologist Rudolf Steinmetz distinguished between the eating of relatives (endokannibalismus), an effort to bind the living to the dead, and the eating of strangers (exokannibalismus), usually a gesture of contempt for enemies. Steinmetz’s dichotomy won over both French and British ethnologists and, with minor modifications, remains accepted today.²³ Otherwise, though, contention has ruled among theorists of cannibalism. Psychoanalytic readings seek to explain man-eating as a response to primal needs. Building on Freud’s suggestion that “oral incorporation” is the most basic reaction to anger and frustration, one scholar has suggested that cannibalism met the psychosexual needs of primitive social groups.²⁴ More often asserted—because its logic so neatly meshes with a “rational choice” view of decision-making—is the materialist model of cannibalism. Simply put, this model holds that humans do what they must to survive; when necessary, they will adapt to severe calorie deficits by eating one another. Marvin Harris’s Cannibals and Kings (1978) applied a version of this logic to the case of Aztec cannibalism. What Harris termed the Aztec “torture-sacrifice-cannibalism complex” allegedly derived not from blood lust but from protein hunger. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of prisoners were annually butchered atop Aztec pyramids, their still-beating hearts held aloft by priests. Bodies then rolled back down the steep pyramids did not go to waste, however. For according to Harris, all edible parts of these corpses “were used in a manner strictly comparable to the consumption of the flesh of domesticated animals.” True, the protein obtained through sacrifice could not have transformed the diets of a million Aztecs then living in the Valley of Mexico. But such “cannibal redistributions” would have been sufficient, Harris argued, to prevent “political collapse” if the release of this meat had been “synchronized to compensate for [periodic] deficits in the agricultural cycle.”25 So construed, Mesoamerican man-eating was reduced to a political cost/benefit calculation on the part of Aztec rulers.²⁶

Scholars who could not otherwise agree among themselves about the ritual significance of cannibalism came together in condemning Harris’s reductionist thinking. To ignore complex cultural traditions in favor of crude functionalism, Marshall Sahlins complained, was to trade thoughtful assessment of non-Western customs for a “Western business mentality.” Such thinking undermined the very foundations of anthropology, Sahlins charged.²⁷ But beyond forming a united front against Harris’s “vulgar” assertions, anthropologists have been less than kind to one another where cannibalism is concerned.

Highly controversial, for example, was Walter Arens’s accusation that racial and cultural prejudices have shaped most discussions of cannibalism. Too many anthropologists and historians, Arens announced, have “felt the need to create and recreate savagery in its most gruesome form by calling into existence man-eaters at the fringes of our time and space.” These scholars have an “investment” in preserving cannibalism as a cultural category: no more potent libel of non-Western societies exists.²⁸ Published in 1979, Arens’s The Man-Eating Myth went further, declaring that the historical evidence for nearly all cannibal acts is, and must remain, suspect. If Arens aimed to provoke, he succeeded. One of his targets, fellow anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, lashed out at the ad hominem style of Arens’s case. No less irresponsible was Arens’s fixation with the idea that anthropology itself had exoticized and therefore marginalized cultures believed to be cannibalistic.²⁹

Academic jousting over man-eating might have faded from public view had Arens’s argument not received postcolonial reinforcement. It was above all Gananath Obeyesekere, a Sri Lankan by birth, who resumed the assault on those “naïve” scholars who trusted eyewitness accounts of cannibalism.³⁰ Obeyesekere did not categorically reject all historical evidence of man-eating. But the vehemence of his attack on most cannibal texts invited counterattack. Especially acerbic have been the words of Sahlins. The exchange between these two anthropologists has been all the more heated because of their previous quarrel over the meaning of Captain Cook’s death on a Hawai‘ian beach in 1779. How did indigenous peoples regard Cook? What were they thinking when they first honored and later killed him? And how can we, strangers to this Pacific culture, know what “natives” thought? Others have dissected this epistemological feud.31 Clearly though, both the earlier dispute over Cook’s status in Hawai‘ian eyes and the more recent clash over depictions of cannibalism have hinged on the question of authority. That is, who may speak for whom? Obeyesekere, raised in a nation still grappling with its colonial past, assumed that he possessed a special sensitivity to the disruptions created when alien cultures collide.³² Sahlins denounced what he saw as special pleading based on racial identity. As for his opponent’s suggestion that European accounts of Pacific cannibalism must insult the dignity of Islander peoples today, Sahlins had nothing but scorn.³³

Fortunately, the rancor of the Sahlins-Obeyesekere exchange has since faded from prominence. Although unwavering in his commitment to the “genealogical exhumation” of cannibal texts, Obeyesekere has confessed that some such texts are “simply impossible to interpret.”³⁴ Sahlins, confident that the attempt by “post-modernist types” to drown evidence of cannibalism in an “epistemic murk” had failed, reminds us simply that man-eating in the western Pacific was “always ‘symbolic,’ even when it [was] ‘real.’”³⁵ Some of the most promising recent work on Oceanic cannibalism belongs to Tracey Banivanua-Mar. From her vantage point as a Fijian scholar at an Australian university, she has reconsidered the colonial context within which some of her ancestors may have consumed human flesh. Insofar as tales of Fijian cannibalism enabled colonial action, she reminds us, literary production and the application of military force became “irrevocably entwined.” Thus, the “alterity” of man-eating—its profound strangeness—served to demonize indigenous Fijian resistance to British rule.³⁶

Unlike modern anthropologists and historians disputing the purpose of “cannibal talk,” British citizens of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had no professional turf to defend. The generations that immediately preceded and followed Cook’s voyages nonetheless carried on their own debates over man-eating. The changing depictions of anthropophagy in early editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica help chart these debates. In its first edition (1768–1771), the Britannica offered enlightened skepticism: “It is greatly to be doubted if ever such a custom existed” on a widespread scale, readers learned. The underlying authority here was not Cook (whose first voyage only commenced in 1768) but rather William Dampier, whose New Voyage Round the World had appeared in 1688. At that time, Dampier assured his public that he “did never meet with any such [cannibal] People.”37 By 1778, the Britannica’s second edition, which appeared well after the return of Cook’s second voyage, had accepted the existence of cannibalism. Yet it was a relativistic acceptance, one that viewed man-eating as a common characteristic among societies at an early stage of their development.³⁸ Not until the third edition (1788–1797), however, did cannibalism acquire the meaning of a social danger, a class-based vice that threatened to destroy “the chief security of human life,” namely respect for the person.³⁹ The Britannica’s third edition paid particular attention to evidence of distant cannibal practices among the Maori of New Zealand and the Battas of Sumatra. But it seems likely that dangerous folk much closer to home had heightened anxieties about the poor. Largely unrestrained, the Parisian mob of 1789 struck Burke as “reeking with . . . blood”—precisely the sort of murderous rage that was said to possess many South Sea man-eaters.⁴⁰

Victorian editions of the Britannica not surprisingly played down the anarchic nature of cannibalism and played up its material basis. In the encyclopedia’s ninth edition (1878), for example, ethnologist E.B. Tylor offered an evolutionary account of this custom. Since humans are by nature carnivorous, Tylor reasoned, what demanded explanation was not why people occasionally ate one another but instead why this behavior was not more common. Britain’s leading armchair ethnologist identified six pressures that, singly or in combination, could induce humans to overcome the horror with which most societies regarded cannibalism. Chief among these pressures were famine, the “fury of hatred” against enemy tribes, and a “morbid kindness” reserved for dead kin.⁴¹ The act had not lost its power to shock, certainly, but it was now being viewed as one of several savage customs destined to disappear before the advance of civilization.

A revived moral relativism accompanied this thinking. Herman Melville put the exculpatory case with memorable directness. In Moby-Dick (1851), he challenged his readers:

Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? [W]ho is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for the provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras.42

Melville was by no means alone in chiding those who would demonize the man-eater. R.L. Stevenson recognized that “nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism.” Yet:

We consume the carcases of creatures of like appetites, passions, and organs with ourselves; we feed on babies, though not our own; and the slaughterhouse resounds daily with screams of pain and fear. We distinguish, indeed, but the unwillingness of many nations to eat the dog . . . shows how precariously the distinction is grounded.⁴³

The Scot Stevenson, like the American Melville, cautioned against condemnation based on a narrow acquaintance with the world. Such normalizing of humanity’s most spectacular depravity could assume strange forms. Thus, one British colonial officer stationed in the western Pacific maintained that some cannibal tribes did not even qualify as savage. For he knew “inveterate” man-eaters who had proved “friendly and useful people to the whites.”⁴⁴

The pronouncements of colonial servants aside, how ordinary British citizens thought of cannibalism must be inferred from scattered shards of evidence. The immense popularity of Defoe’s Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe must have focused public attention on the phenomenon of man-eating. Well over a century after its publication in 1719, even readers on the fringes of literacy continued to delight in the allegorical richness of this tale about epic individualism, the dignity of labor, and the weight of solitude. Over the course of two centuries, Robinson Crusoe went through literally hundreds of editions and abridgments.⁴⁵ Many contemporaries apparently knew that Defoe’s novel built on accounts of real-life maroonings, notably that of a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk, who had been stranded on a remote island in the eastern Pacific between 1704 and 1709.⁴⁶ But what seems to have captivated virtually all readers was the book’s treatment of man-eating. As Dickens would later confess, when he thought of Robinson Crusoe he always thought of cannibals: cannibals chasing Friday across the creek, cannibals grounding their canoes on the beach.⁴⁷

Readers searching for moral relativism in Defoe’s story could find it. During one of his many mental debates, for example, Crusoe realizes that the cannibals who had shattered his illusions of safety ought not to be judged by civilized standards, since “They do not know it [man-eating] to be an Offence.”48 Yet it was this castaway’s visceral fear that surely haunted most readers. After fifteen years alone on the island, Crusoe’s discovery of a single footprint (wider than his own) in the sand terrified him “to the last degree.” Later, finding a stretch of beach “spread with Skulls, Hands, Feet, and other Bones of humane Bodies” triggers an ineffable “Horror of . . . Mind,” as well as violent vomiting. Crusoe may defer to God on moral judgments, but he quickly assumes the role of executioner when invading “monsters” prepare to kill and consume several of their prisoners, among them a European. Defoe spoke to a wide eighteenth-century audience when he explained that “Fear of Danger is ten thousand Times more terrifying than Danger itself.”⁴⁹

Robinson Crusoe has been aptly described as a colonial romance. After all, it recounts how a confirmed cannibal becomes a trusty servant to his white master; social progress occurs under the benign eye of a civilizing agent.⁵⁰ But the novel also invites a reading less supportive of colonial ambitions. Consider Friday. Reliable enough to bear firearms, this once-wild, now-docile creature nevertheless retains “the Relish of a Cannibal’s Stomach.” Crusoe manages, eventually, to wean Friday from his savage taste by substituting goat flesh for human. Friday’s full rehabilitation is nevertheless slow and uncertain. A similar experience, this one purportedly “real,” involved the American whaler Samuel Patterson, shipwrecked on a Fijian coast in 1808. Patterson reported that the “greediness” of the local Islanders for human meat was “astonishingly great.” “[P]erhaps,” he ventured, “there is no evil habit so hard to be eradicated as this inhuman one.”⁵¹ Patterson may or may not have read Robinson Crusoe. Indeed, he may not even have witnessed the cannibal greed he deplored. At the very least, though, Patterson had learned to view “native” behavior through the lens of appetite. The western Pacific in particular seemed to teem with people whose pacification by civilized authority would prove difficult.

British representations of cannibalism in the eighteenth century were not limited to novels. The imagery in William Hogarth’s The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) left little to the imagination. Plate four, “The Reward of Cruelty,” depicts a murderer being dissected alive while at his feet a cauldron boils human skulls and bones into a ghastly broth. Georgian street literature—ballads, broadsides, chapbooks, and cartoons—lured plebeian readers with tales of legendary fiends. Of these, the career of one Sawney Beane held lasting interest. Supposedly a contemporary of Shakespeare, this Scottish brute found early on that he preferred robbing the unwary to toiling in the fields. What distinguished Beane from other highwaymen was the fate of his victims: all were killed, taken to his cave on the Galloway coast, and pickled for future enjoyment. Aided by a huge, incestuous progeny, he and his “cursed tribe” allegedly defied the law for a quarter century. It took King James himself and four hundred soldiers to end Beane’s cannibalistic reign of terror.52

Thus, well before Britain’s print industry began celebrating the discoveries of Captain Cook, a homegrown demand for news about man-eating had already been created. From the late eighteenth century onward, the two questions most often asked of Britons stationed in “primitive” lands were “Does cannibalism prevail?”; and if so, “Are any reasons assigned for it?”⁵³ This morbid curiosity about all things anthropophagous increasingly assumed a Pacific form. Melanesia appeared to contain a disproportionate share of the world’s cannibals. There was also a geographic irony to be savored: Britain, a proud and self-consciously insular nation, soon found itself entangled with other Islanders whose savage pride appeared to be their ruin. “The King of the Cannibal Islands,” a ballad at once comic and deeply racist, reflected the British public’s desire to know the Pacific Other, but only within the confines of stereotype.

KING OF THE CANNIBAL ISLANDS

The rediscovery of Britain’s “island-ness” was an eighteenth-century development closely linked to Cook’s three voyages. That said, one needs only a passing familiarity with Shakespeare to know that the supposed relationship between insularity and national character long predated Cook’s voyages. “[T]his sceptred isle,” we know from Richard II, had been specially blessed because it was “set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands.”⁵⁴ Extending the metaphor, Britain’s “wooden walls”—its navy—completed the defense that Providence had set in place.

Islands, of course, are never entirely insular. That is, islands exist in relation to other physical bodies such as seas, continents, and neighboring islands; they serve as the synapses in oceanic networks, making both trade and cultural exchange possible.55 Despite the rapid spread of British commerce during the eighteenth century, however, an increasingly outward-looking people welcomed the fictions of insularity to explain their favored place among nations. As John Gillis has noted, the word “insularity” entered common usage around 1755, and at first carried none of the pejorative meaning that would later adhere to it. On the contrary, this word helped to anchor a renewed geographical determinism. William Falconer, a prosperous physician and prolific author, declared in 1781 that “The inhabitants of islands . . . have a higher relish for liberty than those of the continent; and therefore are, in general, free.”⁵⁶ Borrowing from Montesquieu’s reflections on terrain and law, Falconer explained why island living nurtured freedom: since tyranny often balked at crossing the sea, Islanders “preserve their laws more easily” than continental folk. Because islands tended to be cooler than continents, moreover, Falconer reckoned that denizens of the former were typically “less timid, indolent, and servile.”⁵⁷

It was presumably the confluence of an invigorating climate and a long seafaring tradition that yielded Captain Cook’s practical “genius” for exploration. Georgian Britain’s paragon of the island race, Cook offered an intriguing contrast between style and substance. His biographer reminds us that this matter-of-fact man—precise, even severe, in his approach to navigation—methodically “changed the face of the world.”⁵⁸ That Cook’s fame rested in part on charting South Sea islands whose savage inhabitants enjoyed none of the supposed benefits of insularity was an irony that escaped those who wished to canonize him. Perhaps the strangest homage was a play, actually a pantomime, entitled Omai, or a Trip Round the World, first performed at Covent Garden in December 1785. By then, the British reading public knew of Cook’s fate in Hawai‘i. This stage tribute reviewed the sainted captain’s exploratory career—even though the title character, Omai, a Raiatean who reached London aboard HMS Adventure in mid-1774, had been the product of Cook’s second voyage. As a specimen of the Pacific primitive, Omai had disappointed. For despite the exotic blackness of his “velvet skin,” this South Sea visitor seemed so thoroughly “well bred” that no vestige of savagery clung to him. Still, an actor playing this now-familiar Polynesian joined a large and whimsical cast of characters who enlivened scene changes during the pantomime romance of Harlequin and his lover Columbine. Omai provided a visual feast for audiences with its elaborate costumes, Tahitian landscapes, and wondrous flying balloon.59 Through calculated contrast, then, the extravagance of this production would have reminded viewers of Cook’s defining modesty.

The apotheosis of Captain Cook was serious business, even when it amused audiences. Less serious but likewise reflective of an emerging racial inventory of Pacific cultures was a ballad (and later a theatrical production) called The King of the Cannibal Islands. Published in 1830 by A.W. Humphreys, a London composer of topical parodies, it quickly became the key text in an accretion of popular images about cannibalism and the Pacific peoples allegedly addicted to it. Over time, the stereotypical cannibal would acquire specific physical features. In 1872, for example, All the Year Round imagined the classic man-eater as a “wild South Sea Islander, with face painted vermilion, a brass ring through his hideous nose, and the thigh-bone of a man stuck horizontally through his matted hair.”⁶⁰ As of 1830, however, Humphreys had not yet embraced this stereotype. Nor did he write for the comfortable classes. He aimed instead to entertain the sort of common folk who bought cheap broadsides in the streets or frequented “saloon” theaters, concert-rooms, and lesser pantomime houses. The well-to-do people of Victorian times often sniffed at the “inanity” of these compositions. But broadside ballads, whether chanted by street performers called “patterers” or set to music indoors, remained very popular during the first half of the nineteenth century.⁶¹

Humphreys’s ballads often did more than amuse. The King of the Cannibal Islands dressed mass murder in comic rhyme. Set to a tune known previously as “Vulcan’s Cave,” the ballad recounted the barbarism of a six-foot, six-inch Pacific island ruler named “Poonoowingkeewang Flibeedee-buskeebang.” To feed one and all at a grand feast, this monstrous monarch ordered half his hundred wives to be roasted as the main course. The other fifty wives fared no better. Having dared to flee their husband’s grotesque banquet, they lost their heads. A catchy chorus offered some relief from the gore:

Hookee pokee wongkee fum,

Puttee po pee kaibula cum,

Tongaree, wongaree, ching ree wum,

The King of the Cannibal Islands.⁶²

Dirty, crude and vengeful, Humphreys’s Pacific tyrant had nothing in common with the urbane Omai of Cook’s day, save his blackness.

“Hookee pokee wongkee fum” would soon become a trigger line, a widely recognized code for rank savagery in a benighted sea of islands. Within a generation this ballad would penetrate popular culture throughout the English-speaking world. When in 1840 the Fijian chief Tanoa stepped aboard the flagship of American Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, a naval band struck up “King of the Cannibal Islands.” (The insult presumably escaped Tanoa.) Dickens, on the other hand, aimed merely to amuse when he urged a friend to consult this Oceanic “Majesty.”63 Remnants of the ballad found their way into Melville’s Typee, Thoreau’s Walden, Joyce’s Ulysses, and a best-selling crime novel; invaded pantomime productions of Robinson Crusoe; enriched a “travesty burlesque” of Hamlet; somehow seeped into the musical repertoire of a remote Mexican convent; and inspired a famous nursery rhyme.⁶⁴ The 1832 broadside catalog of James Catnach, then London’s most prolific publisher of street ephemera, lists Humphreys’s ballad as just one of some 720 “songs.” Yet the imaginative hold it gained over citizens set it apart. Parodies of this parody appeared with remarkable speed. Among them, the “Queen of the Cannibal Islands” (1832) acknowledged the original’s almost instant success:

Oh, have you heard,—I’m sure you must,

A song which on your ear has burst,

. . . The King of the Cannibal Islands . . .

Rich and poor, and old and young,

It has taken root to every tongue.

It told you of sad doings done,

Of savage men and uncouth fun,

But I’ll tell you of another one,

. . . The Queen of the Cannibal Islands.⁶⁵

What might account for the original ballad’s remarkable popularity?

Victorian commentators were themselves unsure about the inspiration for Humphreys’s comic defamation of Pacific cultures. King George I of Tonga, who embraced Christianity and took an English name, struck one analyst as a likely model. But King George’s conversion and his Anglicized name postdated the ballad’s publication. Another authority observed that rumors emanating from any one of several Pacific island groups—Tonga, the Marquesas, the “Soo-loos,” or the “Feejees”—could have caught the balladeer’s notice.66 A mix of distant sensations and local alarms would have encouraged the attribution of cannibal tendencies to these and other Islanders. Basil Thomson, a magistrate in Edwardian Fiji, proclaimed the miraculous escape of Peter Dillon from the clutches of Fiji’s “Vilear people” as “the most dramatic passage in Polynesian literature.”⁶⁷ Dillon was an experienced sea captain and trader who in 1812 joined an expedition to solve the mystery of La Pérouse’s disappearance in the Pacific twenty-four years earlier. Dillon would eventually conclude that the French explorer and his ships had been wrecked on reefs in the Solomon Islands. What probably left a deeper impression on readers of Dillon’s narrative, however, was his harrowing account of holding out against a horde of crazed man-eaters (Figure 1.1). Their ammunition exhausted and the prospect of torture imminent, Dillon and his two European friends considered suicide. But before all hope vanished, their capture of a cannibal “priest” allowed them to bargain for freedom. The besieging Islanders of Vilear Bay embodied savagery in its most brutal form. Dillon knew this to be true because he claimed to have watched from his hillside redoubt the baking and eating of several prisoners. Being taken alive terrified Dillon above all else, for the “cannibal monsters” surrounding him allegedly enjoyed skinning the soles of their victims’ feet and slicing away their eyelids before turning them to face the tropical sun.68

Figure 1.1   Peter Dillon and two white companions witness the cannibal rites of Fiji’s “Vilear people” in 1823.

SOURCE: Dillon, Narrative . . . of a Voyage in the South Seas (1829). Courtesy, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.

It may well be true, as one modern skeptic has insisted, that Dillon’s tale served as a form of self-invention rather than qualifying as credible ethnography.69 What matters most for our purposes, though, is the timing of Dillon’s revelations. Not published until 1829, his lurid narrative would have been newly available to the balladeer Humphreys just as he was conjuring The King of the Cannibal Islands.

Coincidentally, that same year saw a widely reported panic seize the inmates of one East London workhouse. A recently admitted pauper had smuggled into the facility details of the first Anatomy Bill in Parliament—details that suggested to his apprehensive audience that they might soon be legally compelled to satisfy the hunger of predatory anatomists. This rumormongering pauper also denounced his workhouse lunch: the broth, he believed, contained human remains along with bits of kitten and donkey.⁷⁰ As hysterical as these fears over “Natomy Soup” may seem today, they reflected a pervasive fear among the poor that doctors in particular and the rich more generally had unleashed a new weapon in an unfolding class war. The residents of the workhouse at St. Paul’s, Shadwell, worried that they had been tricked into cannibalism by cruel Poor Law functionaries. We cannot know whether A.W. Humphreys learned of the paupers’ fears through the Morning Chronicle’s reportage. We may reasonably speculate, however, that like Peter Dillon’s narrow escape from Fijian man-eaters, the 1829 “Natomy Soup” panic would have invited translation into broadsides and ballads.

Indeed, the idea of cannibalism, freighted as it was with such dangerous states as desperation, vengeance, and total loss of restraint, found many applications in Victorian culture. Thomas Carlyle, for instance, chose cannibal imagery to dramatize the hazards of a meager peasant diet. Carlyle hinted that if scarcity continued to stalk English laborers, they might one day resort—as the “squalid” Irish poor had supposedly done before—to eating one another.⁷¹ The New Poor Law, still more than the Old, found itself condemned through anthropophagous association. Thus, at the center of the 1845 Andover workhouse scandal lurked the specter of man-eating. Chronic semi-starvation had reportedly driven its inmates to gnaw the rancid animal bones that had been supplied to them for grinding into fertilizer. Worse, these bone shipments “occasionally” contained churchyard remains. Such desperation served to invert the Malthusian model of causation, for at Andover it appeared that heartless Poor Law officials, not feckless paupers, had caused this sorry state of affairs.72

Whereas “accidental cannibalism” (as these incidents were often labeled) involved unwitting victims, newspaper reports of “cannibal” violence in public emphasized the ungovernable fury of the rougher classes. Anticipating by forty years William Booth’s “Darkest England” exposé, The Times in 1850 noted that “Wilder and more uncultivated savages do not exist in any part of Africa than are to be found within a few miles of our own homes.” Entitled simply “Cannibalism,” this short notice recounted a beer-house brawl near Halifax in which the aggressor had chewed a four-inch hole in his victim’s cheek and then bit off his nose.⁷³ Body parts need not have been chewed and swallowed for the “cannibal” designation to adhere. Severe finger- and breast-biting allegedly predominated among women, whereas men favored noses, cheeks, and ears. More often than not alcohol fueled these assaults, which would explain why restraint vanished during them. Impulsiveness therefore linked the “real” man-eaters of hot climates with their less lethal if no less “vicious” cousins among the home island’s poor.⁷⁴ Such rhetorical affiliation created what might be termed a savage feedback loop wherein monsters local and distant constantly referenced one another. They were, in this sense, mutually constituent.

The circulation of cannibal images between temperate core and tropical periphery might at first glance appear to have involved mainly marginal actors. Dietary reformers, for example, made frequent use of cannibal tropes. As early as the 1730s, the nerve doctor George Cheyne had urged his patients to purge their diets of flesh; meat-eaters, Cheyne believed, were all potential cannibals.⁷⁵ A generation later, the militant vegetarian Joseph Ritson left even less room for doubt: “those accustom’d to eat the brute, should not abstain from the man,” especially “when toasted or broil’d.”⁷⁶ (One wonders how Ritson knew.) While British vegetarians continued to warn of the slippery slope separating meat-eating from man-eating, other iconoclasts turned the forbidden act into a bohemian badge of honor. London’s “Cannibal Club,” founded in 1863, brought together such cultural contrarians as the explorer and orientalist Richard Burton, the atheist Charles Bradlaugh, and the “decadent” poet Algernon Swinburne to drink heavily and subvert Victorian convention. Discussions of pornography, anthropology, and Christian doctrine enlivened meetings—whose chairman kept order by banging on the floor a mace decorated with the figure of an African gnawing a human thighbone.77 By the close of the nineteenth century, it was even possible to depict cannibalism as an engine of evolutionary progress. For in the struggle to survive, killers of their own kind must have possessed special “ferocity and brutality,” attributes essential to the emergence of a “dominant race.”⁷⁸

Yet cannibal imagery suffused not only these cultural back channels but also the British mainstream. And it was the ocean, an island’s captor as well as its shield, that most often abetted the man-eater. Shipwrecks provided the classic cannibal setting. On some remote shores, as in some boats set adrift, desperate white men could be forced to butcher and consume their weakest members. “Survival cannibalism” had comic potential. Thackeray’s “Little Billee,” his 1845 parody of a traditional French song (“La Courte Paille”—“the Short Straw”), featured three English sailors who, on reaching the equator, find they have nothing left to eat but a single split pea. The youngest of this desperate trio, Little Billee, having drawn the short straw, spies a rescue ship moments before becoming nourishment for “fat Jack” and “guzzling Jimmy.”⁷⁹ Victorian Britain’s most famous case of survival cannibalism, however, drew few smiles. In 1884, the yacht Mignonette foundered in an Atlantic gale somewhere south of the line. Its small crew barely had time to cast off in a dinghy. When their pitiful food supply—two pounds of tinned turnips plus the meat of a turtle—gave out, three grown men reluctantly killed and ate the cabin boy, who appeared to be at death’s door in any case. Because this terrible act had clearly been the consequence of extreme want, the British public tended to sympathize with the survivors during their subsequent trial. Hastening another’s death, that trial determined, meant murder all the same. The defendants ultimately received pardons from Queen Victoria, but not before the moral boundaries of what one journal oxymoronically termed “civilized cannibalism” had been closely reviewed.⁸⁰

Shipwrecks in the nineteenth century, as Brian Simpson reminds us, warranted close press coverage because, like airplane crashes today, they could destroy large numbers of people at one time: “Disasters at Sea” was not by chance a regular news category in The Times.81 But shipwrecks that featured nonwhite man-eaters evoked a very different set of assumptions. And such racialized predation did much to harden stereotypes of Pacific Islanders as the world’s most savage people. Granted, not all reports of flesh-craving Islanders withstood scrutiny. For instance, the wreck of the brig Sterling Castle in 1836, off what is today Queensland’s southeastern coast, gave rise to a tale of female pluck that proved too good to be true. Eliza Fraser, the pregnant English wife of the ship’s Scottish captain, was reportedly beaten, burned, and used as target practice for indigenous boomerangs. Unlike a few of her fellow “captives,” however, Mrs. Fraser was not roasted over an Aboriginal fire. Rescued after a six-week ordeal, she returned to Sydney, whose kind citizens presented her with the substantial sum of £400. Upon reaching Britain, Eliza’s now-thoroughly rehearsed tale of woe fetched a further subscription of £553—charity that the Lord Mayor soon wished he had not encouraged.⁸² Increasingly, the Aboriginal peoples of coastal Queensland looked to be the aggrieved party.

In the majority of cases, however, the grim fates that reportedly befell those shipwrecked on Pacific shores aroused less skepticism. Thus, the only survivors of the Charles Eaton, a merchant vessel that in 1836 ran aground on a Torres Strait reef, were two English “lads.” The rest of the crew, they claimed, had been beheaded, their skulls used to decorate a heathen idol.⁸³ James Oliver, a sailor aboard the Salem trader Glide, published in 1848 a detailed account of Fijian cannibal lust. His ship having been blown over in a storm off the island of Vanua Levu, Oliver found unwelcome free time to observe such “horrible” rites as the spinning of the “sacred cocoa-nut” to determine which strangers would be eaten. Gananath Obeyesekere has specified several grounds upon which to doubt the accuracy of Oliver’s narrative. Published in London as well as New York, The Wreck of the Glide nevertheless would have confirmed popular assumptions about Islander appetites.⁸⁴

For sheer scale of horror, though, priority must go to the loss of the St. Paul at Rossel Island in late September 1858. There, 140 miles off the southeastern tip of New Guinea, 326 Chinese “coolies” being carried from Hong Kong to Sydney struggled ashore as their ship sank. The captain and eight of his crew set out promptly to get help, which they eventually received from French officials on New Caledonia. But when the French steamer Styx reached Rossel Island four months after the St. Paul’s sinking, just one man remained to describe the methodical slaughter of his countrymen and women: carefully guarded by night, the “coolies” dreaded morning, when a few at a time would be clubbed, gutted, roasted, and eaten. From Sydney, news of this catastrophe spread to London, to Britain’s provincial cities, and finally to Paris.85 This “wholesale butchery” had been so thorough that several decades after the reported slaughter, British colonial administrators would feel compelled to visit the island and interrogate its people. Sir William MacGregor preferred to believe what some “natives” told him in 1888: that most of the marooned Chinese had built rafts that they launched in a northerly direction (the only direction possible at that season). Twenty years later, Hubert Murray found few grounds for MacGregor’s optimism. “The whole incident is a depressing one,” Murray allowed, “and I should like to think it was untrue, but I am afraid I cannot. Every one comes out of [the incident] so badly”—even the lone eyewitness who would later be arrested for selling liquor without a license.⁸⁶ Given these contradictory findings, it is unsurprising that as late as 1934 a chronicler of British rule in the Pacific could still brand Rossel “The World’s Worst Cannibal Island.”⁸⁷

Some Enlightenment intellectuals, Diderot chief among them, saw islands blessed with tropical abundance as “natural” sites for cannibalism. After all, abundance bred overpopulation, and overpopulation summoned into existence various natural “checks” to reproduction such as infanticide and man-eating. Whether cannibalism was “insular in origin,” as Diderot supposed,⁸⁸ remained a matter for conjecture. Much less theoretical was the nineteenth-century European tendency to juxtapose Pacific island beauty with the supposed habits of the Islanders themselves. For R.L. Stevenson, the “flamboyant” flora of the Marquesas could never quite expunge the “ominous” realization that man-eating had once flourished there.⁸⁹ And the western Pacific isles were deemed to be addicted still to this wretchedness. By the 1860s, The King of the Cannibal Islands called to mind a geographical realm far more distinct than had the ballad of 1830.

CANNIBAL LATITUDES

In the generation after Cook’s death, Britons came to associate cannibalism with heat, primitive social organization, and southern latitudes. There were of course noteworthy exceptions. Man-eating had not always been a tropical phenomenon, for example. One prominent ethnologist believed that cannibalism was a “Stone-Age” custom, and that the ancient Scots, whose land had never seen a coconut palm, were probably keen consumers of human meat.90 Nor did it always follow that the earth’s most “primitive” peoples ate one another. The indigenous Tasmanians, reportedly too backward to survive in a modern world, nonetheless expressed “great horror” at the mention of cannibalism.⁹¹ When calculating “grades of atrocity,” moreover, most Britons would have agreed with Hume Nisbet that cannibal acts paled beside the villainies of Jack the Ripper.⁹²

These exceptions noted, the Victorian mappers of human depravity spent a good deal of time and energy locating earth’s anthropophagous center. That center was indeed tropical, but it did not lie in Africa, as Europe’s preoccupation with the savage nature of black-skinned people might suggest. African cannibalism in the nineteenth century was entwined with the continent’s seemingly endless expanse of jungle. It served William Booth’s purpose to dwell on the unrelieved gloom of Africa’s rain forests. This vast darkness, in H.M. Stanley’s account, bore no resemblance to the pleasant shade of an English oak on a warm summer’s day. “General” Booth was quick to connect Africa’s deadly umbrage with the unenlightened conduct of its people:

In all that spirited narrative . . . nothing has so much impressed the imagination, as [Stanley’s] description of the immense forest, which offered an almost impenetrable barrier to his advance. The intrepid explorer, in his own phrase, “marched, tore, ploughed, and cut his way for one hundred and sixty days through this inner womb of the true tropical forest.” The mind of man with difficulty endeavours to realize this immensity of wooded wilderness, covering a territory half as large again as the whole of France, where the rays of sun never penetrate, where in the dark, dank air, filled with the steam of the heated morass, human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalised into cannibals lurk and live and die.⁹³

Booth, cofounder of the Salvation Army, went on to depict the brutalized denizens of “Darkest England.” Stanley himself shared little of Booth’s evangelical zeal; the explorer instead focused on advertising his transcontinental slog. Intriguingly, he reported stumbling upon preparations for a “cannibal dinner” near the Ituri River, a tributary of the Congo. He was generally eager to emphasize the “devilish malice” of the jungle folk whom his party encountered.⁹⁴

Both before and after Stanley’s epic treks became famous, the presumed existence of cannibalism in Africa fascinated armchair ethnologists. The French-American zoologist Paul Du Chaillu spent much of the late 1850s hacking his way through the “gloomy solitude” of West African jungles in what is today Gabon. Roughly 50 miles from the coast Du Chaillu made contact with a people then nearly unknown to Europeans, the Fan. Tall, strong, and intelligent, the Fan warriors characteristically filed their teeth, giving them “a ghastly and ferocious look.” Although Du Chaillu claimed to respect these forest dwellers, he seasoned his widely read narrative with the news that Fan men were “regular ghouls” who ate corpses.95 This zoologist never actually witnessed the custom he condemned. Nor, much to his regret, did Richard Burton, who explained that this curious form of cannibalism occurred “secretly.” The mere rumor of corpse eating was enough, however, to confirm Burton’s racial presumption—that there was in the “African brain” an impulse to destroy.⁹⁶

By century’s end, the list of African man-eaters had lengthened as European commercial interests pushed inland. Officials of the Royal Niger Company treated the discovery of human remains near Akassa in 1895 as proof that a “cannibal feast” had been celebrated there. Better publicized was the Congo basin, whose remote interior featured “the wildest cannibal country to be found anywhere.” In late 1898, news reached Belgium that four agents of the Antwerp Trading Company had been killed and eaten on the Upper Ubangi River. Judging by the absence of further comment on this “massacre,” neither Belgian nor British officials found it surprising. For as the British Association had learned three years earlier from Captain G.L. Hinde (“a traveller of the bold fighting type”), the Congo’s black tribes carried on a brisk traffic in human flesh.⁹⁷ Reformers such as missionaries John and Alice Harris compiled a damning photographic record of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, a colony whose police and private “rubber sentries” were beginning to earn international infamy. What the humanitarians’ photos could not capture, though, was the psychic impact of colonial terror. Thus, as news of Belgian atrocities spread among the Congolese, a myth gained credence that the tins of corned beef seen in European homes actually contained chopped-up hands.⁹⁸

Still, the volume of references to African cannibalism paled beside that of the Pacific. Both locales attracted European explorers, missionaries, and voyeurs. Writing in the early 1860s, W.W. Reade could have been referring to New Guinea rather than equatorial Africa when he described his leisurely aims: “to flaner in the virgin forest; to flirt with pretty savages; and to smoke [a] cigar among cannibals.”99 But Old World toffs such as Reade followed in the wake of explorers and missionaries. And these earlier agents of European culture turned their attention to the indigenous people of Oceania first. Completing the ethnographic map that Captain Cook had painstakingly drawn in outline became an enterprise at once patriotic and salvific.

Some of the widely scattered islands of Polynesia, where Cook began his ethnographic survey, certainly harbored cannibals. Why some Polynesian cultures practiced man-eating while others did not was a question that perplexed nineteenth-century students of race theory. The boldest answer involved New Zealand. The Maori, as their language and physical appearance made plain, were racially Polynesian. Their anthropophagous ways, however, could not easily be attributed to ancestral custom alone, since in the eastern Pacific hub of Polynesian culture, cannibalism was far from universal. Instead, vast distance appeared to be the explanatory key for New Zealand. Enormously long voyages through open ocean must often have exhausted food supplies. It seemed to follow, therefore, that “absolute necessity” had driven the first Maori voyagers to cannibalism at sea. Necessity begat habit.¹⁰⁰

Why Polynesian island groups far to the east did, or did not, countenance man-eating received less imaginative speculation. Tahiti and the Society Islands greeted the first European ships with nearly naked “maidens” but no trace of the fiendish hunger. By contrast, the Marquesas group, located some 850 miles northeast of Tahiti, clung to its cannibal traditions until repeated French naval bombardments in the 1860s and 70s discouraged the custom.¹⁰¹ Sailing southwest from Tahiti, nineteenth-century ships often replenished food and water at Raratonga, largest of the Cook Islands group. Here, too, cannibalism persisted until the late 1840s, during which decade intense missionary pressure successfully demonized it.¹⁰² Still further west, where Polynesian and Melanesian peoples began to mix, both Samoa and Tonga stood accused of owning cannibal pasts.¹⁰³

A ship sailing east across the Indian Ocean toward the South Pacific would have passed by more man-eating lands en route to Sydney. Australia did not at first strike Europeans as cannibal country. Kay Schaffer notes in her study of the Eliza Fraser captivity stories that, prior to the late 1820s, “It is difficult to find even one reference to native cannibalism in the local Australian press.” But as white settlement expanded west, beyond the Blue Mountains, the Sydney Gazette began to publish letters from settlers who “confirmed” indigenous cannibalism. Such reports helped to justify “colonial practices of extermination.”104 George Angas, a self-styled “disinterested observer” of ethnographic curiosities, embellished these accounts. Angas assured his readers in 1847 that the interior of New South Wales contained savages who routinely devoured the bodies of their dead friends and relatives. A generation later, his outback ghouls would serve to support J.G. Frazer’s landmark analysis of totemism.¹⁰⁵ So comfortably did the idea of Australian man-eating sit with late-Victorian readers that Carl Lumholtz’s fictive study of North Queensland Aborigines, Among Cannibals (1889), could dazzle both The Spectator and the Edinburgh Review.¹⁰⁶

Separated from the northern tip of Queensland by the reef-strewn Torres Strait, New Guinea hid man-eaters who posed a greater threat to unwary sailors. Some never made it past the beach. Given such welcomes, early European navigators approached the New Guinea mainland with great caution. Protestant missionaries, who later established spiritual beachheads along this huge island’s southeastern shore, portrayed the threat of attack as proof of New Guinea’s heathen depravity. But the good news, these godly pioneers assured their backers, was that even cannibals could be won for Christ.¹⁰⁷ A similar blend of moral condemnation and evangelical optimism flavored the missionary accounts of New Ireland and New Britain, two long, jungle-clad islands lying off New Guinea’s northeastern shore. British and Australian Methodists wrote often about the cannibal atrocities of these remote peoples.¹⁰⁸

Once a ship had cleared the Torres Strait and entered the Coral Sea, more savagery awaited. To the northeast stretched the Solomon archipelago, better known in Europe for its headhunters than for its cannibals.¹⁰⁹ Alternatively, a course bearing east by southeast might have brought three notorious island groups into view: New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, and Fiji. It is noteworthy that the Pacific’s man-eating centers, New Zealand excepted, lay in a narrow band between the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn (the southernmost location where the sun can shine directly overhead). What could be termed the cannibal latitudes thus suggested an imaginary geographic and cultural coherence within Oceania. Having long since embraced the homogenizing term “South Seas,” most Britons were disposed to regard Pacific cannibalism as a lamentable triumph of race over place. A newspaper review of John Coulter’s Pacific Adventures (1847) noted the morbid enthusiasm for man-eating in an earthly “paradise”:

The prevalence of cannibalism in the islands of the Pacific, especially those lying between the tropics, is fearfully . . . proved by this book. . . . The fruits of the earth abound in these islands, the domestic animals have multiplied ad infinitum, among these people; the sea teams with fish of which the natives are expert snarers; . . . and yet these savages still banquet on the bodies of their fellow men. . . . 110

In reality, prior to the 1770s, most of these Islanders would never have seen a land mammal larger than a rat or a fruit bat.

The cannibal latitudes contained nearly all of what Europe’s racial classifiers had been calling “Melanesia” since the 1830s. While recognizing the cultural diversity within this classification, Victorian ethnographers—and the travel writers who raided ethnography for sensational details—persisted in its use. As late as 1911 the Encyclopaedia Britannica could assert that “certain common characteristics” set Melanesians apart from other Pacific peoples:

Their civilization is lower. The Melanesians are mostly “negroid,” nearly black, with crisp, curly hair elaborately dressed; their women hold a much lower position than among the Polynesians; their initiations, social, political and religious, are simpler their manners ruder; they have few or no traditions; cannibalism, in different degrees, is almost universal; but their artistic skill and taste . . . are remarkable, and they are amenable to discipline and fair treatment.¹¹¹

This unflattering profile would endure across very different forms of colonial government in Melanesia.

New Caledonia, which served as a French penal colony between 1863 and 1896, had to contend with a serious uprising of “Kanak” clans in 1878. The need to kill over a thousand of these rebels did not cause French officials to rethink their heavy-handed dose of “civilization”; the inveterate savagery (and presumed cannibalism) of the indigènes was to blame. Tales of enthusiastic man-eating, Bronwen Douglas notes, had an “explosive” impact on the early French visitors to New Caledonia. Most of the 4,500 Communards exiled following the ill-fated Paris Commune of 1871 found the Islanders no more sympathique.¹¹²

A similar preoccupation with the “terrible hunger” was evident in nineteenth-century accounts of the New Hebrides island group. As will be discussed in the next chapter, the 1839 slaughter of British missionary John Williams on an Erromango beach did much to vilify the entire archipelago. Williams’s martyrdom was of course far from the first proof of New Hebridean “treachery.” As British evangelizing societies never tired of reminding their patrons, ever since Captain Cook encountered the hostile folk of Erromango and Tanna in 1774, “a fatality ha[d] attached” to these and their neighboring islands.113 “Barbarous,” “depraved,” “disgusting,” “horrid,” and “execrable”: such were the adjectives routinely used to describe the people of the New Hebrides.¹¹⁴ There were mitigating circumstances, to be sure. “Humanitarians,” as they anointed themselves, insisted that white sandalwood hunters and sea slug collectors had shot their way to profits, leaving these Islanders thirsting for revenge. Such considerations could not erase the cannibal stain, however. What saved the New Hebrides from coming first on the league table of savagery was Fiji.

Located at the eastern edge of Melanesia, the Fijian archipelago impressed most Europeans as the citadel of man-eating. Its distance from Britain helped harden rumor into fact. That is, the interval between the alleged commission of a cannibal act and its exposure in a British newspaper (or government office) rendered a careful examination of the original allegation nearly impossible. Until 1872, there was no telegraphic communication between Britain and Australia. Prior to that date, and to the opening of the Suez Canal in late 1869, it took between sixty and eighty days for a letter posted in London to reach Sydney. Depending on the sailing schedules of the small ships that called at Fijian ports, another month could easily be added to this journey. Thus occupying the “back of beyond,” as a former colonial servant put it, Fiji was a place where knowledge was the sum of temporal disruption, self-replicating gossip, and outright fantasy. These elements of “truth” acquired what Edward Said has termed a “sheer knitted-together strength” when circulated simultaneously.¹¹⁵

Some basic features of Fiji’s pre-colonial past remain unclear. For example, we cannot be certain about this island group’s population on the eve of European settlement, although an estimate of 150,000 seems plausible. We are further still from knowing the extent and frequency of cannibal acts. Where internecine war led to the sacking of large towns, such as when Bau warriors overran Rewa in December 1845, hundreds might die—yielding more bodies (bakola) than could be eaten at one time. “Lust” and “addiction” were the most common characterizations of Fiji’s defining habit. Yet even allowing for hyperbole, a few of these Islanders do appear to have been formidable eaters. The infamous chief of Rakiraki, Ratu Udreudre, alone consumed 872 people, or so the Methodist missionary Richard Lyth claimed.116

It is not the case, as modern skeptics have implied, that nineteenth-century reports of Fijian cannibalism were invariably expressions of cultural loathing. On the contrary, a good deal of this literature sought to exculpate, or at least relativize, Fiji’s man-eating tradition. Before consigning these Islanders to “perpetual barbarism,” argued Captain John Erskine in 1853, Britain’s reading public ought to recall the fearful deeds of Alexander Pearce. A petty criminal from the North of Ireland, Pearce had been transported to Van Dieman’s Land, where, during the early 1820s, he escaped into the bush four times. Lacking food (except, on one occasion, for his kangaroo skin coat, which he ate), this fiend “banqueted” on six fellow escapees, three of whom Pearce hacked into meal-size portions. His widely reported confession and execution at Hobart Town in November 1823 had shown that a taste for human flesh was not limited to certain dark races.¹¹⁷ The Fijians, other defenders observed, were “manly,” intelligent, and, for the most part, “kind.” Their political system, “hallowed by age and tradition,” derived its legitimacy from a “gentry” class; despots (as in Humphreys’s comic ballad) violated indigenous ideals of good government.¹¹⁸ Indeed, cannibalism itself may have been an alien practice. One British colonial administrator with long experience in the archipelago suggested that ancient strangers from Tonga had introduced both cannibalism and the art of war to Fiji.¹¹⁹

It is nevertheless true that the European critics of Fijian customs made more noise. Their denunciations held that these Islanders were not mere man-eaters but “inveterate” man-eaters. Fijian parents supposedly took care to ensure that a taste for bakola was acquired early on in life: these “unnatural” mothers and fathers rubbed “human flesh over the lips of their little children” and placed juicy bits in their mouths.¹²⁰ Fijian cannibalism tended to be fixed within a matrix of savage customs, among them infanticide, widow-strangling, live burial, and the ceremonial mutilation of fingers and ears. The “curious” conceits of these people served to heighten their moral perversity. Thus, the care lavished on chiefly hairstyles only underscored these leaders’ callous disregard for the bodies of others. Similarly, the ceremonial subtleties associated with the exchange of whales’ teeth (tabua) stood in revealing contrast to a wild enthusiasm for battle.121 Beautifully carved war clubs owned “high-sounding” names (e.g., Kadiga ni damuni: “Damaged beyond hope”) for their low purpose. So-called “cannibal forks” (iculunibakola) fascinated the Victorian public, linking as they seemingly did artifact with wretched practice.¹²²

The manner in which these Islanders were maligned had consequences. Consider the British missionary agenda. The Methodist pioneers stipulated that the Fijians’ “moral malady” was “deplorable” but “not incurable.”¹²³ Such calibration of defect was essential. For if portrayed as either too degraded or not degraded enough, this mission field stood to lose vital public support. As Patrick Brantlinger rightly notes, there is no evidence that British missionaries in the Pacific “suffered from some sort of collective delusion about cannibalism.” Yet it is also true that Victorian evangelists, whether toiling in Melanesia or slumming in London, tended to regard truth as that which led sinners to God’s saving grace, rather than as the sum of secular evidence.¹²⁴ A thin line also separated courtesy from aggression in the conduct of ships visiting Fiji. After spending nearly two peaceful months cruising among these islands in 1840, the American Exploring Expedition received a sudden shock. On 3 July, responding to a request for proof of man-eating, canoes from the Naloa Bay village of Fokasinga came alongside the USS Peacock. The villagers had brought the freshly roasted arms and legs of an enemy, his limbs arranged on a bed of plantain leaves. It was no coincidence that soon thereafter a quarrel over ownership of a wrecked American cutter escalated into the burning of villages, the payback murder of Commander Wilkes’s own nephew, and ultimately, the slaughter of over a hundred Malolo people. Wilkes had taught the cannibals what he termed a “salutary lesson.” That lesson, in turn, convinced Britain’s naval establishment to issue sailing instructions urging the “greatest circumspection” when dealing with Pacific Islanders.¹²⁵

Fijian cannibalism therefore emerged early on as a political as well as a moral question for Islanders and white visitors alike. After Fiji became a British crown colony in 1874, indigenous resistance to that colonial government assumed the form that white men had done so much to decry. The rebels, as we will see, both embraced, and were demonized by, the “cannibal” name.

MEASLES, MOUNTAINEERS, AND COLONIAL DISCIPLINE

It is strange yet true to say that Fijian cannibalism was “known” to Europe before Europeans knew these islands. In 1643, the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman sighted, but dared not explore, a part of the archipelago: foul weather and lethal reefs had made Tasman wary. Over 140 years would pass before the next European arrivals, Cook and the crew of the Resolution, learned anything about “Fidgee.” In early July 1774, Cook’s flagship anchored off a coral speck in the Lau group, naming it Turtle Island (Vatoa). Several Islanders clutching clubs and spears could be seen ashore. A few crewmembers landed on the islet, staying only long enough to leave a knife and some nails. Cook sailed away the next day, having recorded in his journal that these Islanders seemed “a Docile people.”126

The captain did not then realize that he had brushed the southeastern fringe of Fiji. If Cook had understood where he was, it is unlikely that he would have sent sailors ashore to greet armed savages. After all, the people of Tonga—which island cluster the Resolution would visit on several occasions, the first in October 1773—had warned him that the Fijians were inveterate cannibals. Cook actually met several of these formidable people in Tonga. They looked “a full shade darker than any of the other islanders,” and did not deny their man-eating custom. Cook wondered, “[W]hat it is that induceth them to keep it [cannibalism] up in the midst of plenty?” One fact at least was certain: the Tongans to whom Cook spoke dreaded their martial neighbors.¹²⁷ William Bligh, the Resolution’s sailing master on Cook’s third voyage, also took these warnings to heart. Therefore, in 1789, when Bligh and the nonmutinous remnant of his crew were set adrift in an open boat, the prospect of becoming a meal ranked high among his fears. Wherever he could, Bligh steered clear of large islands. (In fact, the wide passage between Fiji’s two largest islands is still known as “Bligh Water.”) And when local “sailing cannoes” began chasing him on 7 May, Bligh gave the “out oars” command “to get from them.”¹²⁸ Fiji’s grim reputation reached a far broader audience when Cook’s journals became best sellers back home.

Captain Cook’s secondhand observations of Fijian man-eating launched a publishing competition among supposed witnesses to this horror. The ships of sandalwood hunters, whalers, and bêche-de-mer collectors brought men eager to malign the Islanders. Right behind the first trading vessels came the missionaries, most of them British and nearly all Methodist. These godly men and women proved particularly skilled at defamation. The Reverend Walter Lawry, supervisor of Methodist missions in New Zealand, spoke for many of his agents when he branded Fiji’s people “the most barbarous and hateful of human beings.”129 White visitors to Fiji could not agree on what motivated man-eating there. A hunger for revenge appeared to be one powerful inducement, although that hunger was not the “patient” hatred that allegedly expressed itself as scalp taking among North America’s “Red Indians.”¹³⁰ Then again, perhaps barbarism was the inevitable product of a society that had endured the “double yoke” of chiefs and priests. The pioneering sociologist Herbert Spencer thought so, citing Fiji as the “extremist” form of despotic rule. Where slaves were buried alive in postholes to consecrate a chief’s new dwelling, or where their living bodies served as “rollers” over which heavy war canoes were dragged up the beach, could cannibalism fail to follow?¹³¹

Such reasoning, or rather imagining, united missionaries, traders, and drawing room ethnologists. The island stories reaching Britain did not agree about how bodies for eating were served, or which morsels went to those of high rank. Sahlins sums up what little can be generalized about Fijian man-eating: people of all ages and both genders were consumed; chopped-up body parts were typically cooked overnight in underground ovens; and a “priest” presided over these preparations.¹³² Nor did European reports settle on the number of victims sent to the ovens each year. Writing at midcentury, Rev. Thomas Williams, for thirteen years a keen observer of Fijian customs, estimated that the total loss of life from fighting of all sorts ranged between 1,500 and 2,000 persons per year. These figures, Williams added, did not include the widows who were strangled upon the passing of their chiefly husbands. What percentage of these war dead ended up being baked, Williams does not say. But he does reckon, counterintuitively, that the introduction of firearms to Fiji during the first decade of the nineteenth century “tended to diminish” fighting: because bullets are promiscuous, striking chiefs as well as commoners, the former began to pick their fights more carefully.¹³³

Other observers, though, emphasized the ease with which ceremonial requirements could trigger deadly disputes. On the basis of Rev. David Cargill’s account of the Bau-Verata war of 1839, Fergus Clunie notes that the hunt for human sacrifices needed to celebrate the erection of a single spirit-house quickly escalated into a regional conflict that killed around 350 Islanders. Bullet-averse chiefs notwithstanding, the 1850s found Fiji highly unstable, Tongan rulers threatening invasion from without while local chiefs skirmished within. The state of Fijian society was “frightful,” remarked an English ship’s captain in 1853: “No man moves . . . for any cause whatever without his club.”134

It would be wrong nonetheless to imply that such self-destruction finally convinced Britain to annex Fiji in 1874. British government officials took care to characterize this act as a “cession”—a reluctant yielding to Fijian pleas for intervention—rather than as adventurism. The anti-colonial mood still palpable in Britain encouraged such distinctions. But a complex amalgam of guilt, pressure from white settlers, and wishful thinking undergirded the Cession. Britain’s humanitarian activists frequently reminded their fellow citizens that white “beachcombers” had done much to roil Fijian society. Beginning about 1804, it was said, escaped convicts from New South Wales, some carrying muskets, had sold their services to rival Fijian rulers. These mercenaries, according to one missionary, were “regarded as monsters even by the ferocious cannibals with whom they associated.”¹³⁵ Fiji’s most demonic beachcomber was a shipwrecked sailor who bore the all-too-appropriate surname of Savage. How much he contributed to the rise of Bau as a regional power remains in dispute. Still, British humanitarians insisted that Charles Savage and his ilk left Fiji more “vindictive and cruel” than they had found it.¹³⁶ Residual guilt over their nation’s role in the degradation of these isles thus drove some Britons to urge annexation as a form of penance.

But more numerous were the white settlers in Australia and New Zealand who worried about geopolitics. Imperial inaction, they feared, would encourage foreign meddling in the archipelago. At the center of uncertainty stood the enigmatic Thakombau. Named “Seru” at his birth in 1817, this son of Tanoa, chief of Bau, mastered the art of revenge at an early age. Violence surrounded him. A chiefdom whose capital was a tiny, twenty-acre islet located a mile off the southeastern coast of Viti Levu, Bau had long skirmished against such neighboring states as Rewa and Verata. Seru was about fifteen when rebels forced his father into exile and murdered most of his family. Deemed too young to pose a threat, the boy began plotting against the rebels. Five years later he not only restored Tanoa to power but also devised gruesome lessons in loyalty. A widely circulated story, for example, told of a rebel prisoner whose tongue Seru ordered cut out and then ate raw “while joking the unhappy wretch.” Some Europeans saw Tanoa’s heir—now called Thakombau, meaning “Evil to Bau”—as the “Napoleon of Fiji” (Figure 1.2). Others regarded him as the Pacific cannibal incarnate.¹³⁷

Figure 1.2   Sketch of Thakombau, the so-called “King of Fiji.”

SOURCE: Illustrated Melbourne Post (23 December 1865).

Thakombau eventually did lotu (embrace Christianity) and proclaim the end of cannibalism. But he fell into a costly war with the Tongans and deeply into debt with the American government. Harassed on several sides, Thakombau in 1859 offered Fiji’s sovereignty to Britain provided that his debts be paid and his grandiloquent title, Tui Viti (King of Fiji), be retained. Britain’s government initially balked at acquiring another distant dependency. The suggestion that Fiji was a cotton-growing heaven begging for settlers left Colonial Office leaders cold. Besides, gauging the “well ascertained and deliberate wish” of these Islanders for annexation seemed an impossible task.138 Yet the influx of European speculators—small merchants as well as cotton planters—continued. Painfully aware that both lawful commerce and racial harmony demanded far more attention than one British Consul could provide, the government in London unhappily recognized the need to fill a political vacuum.¹³⁹ These remote policymakers wished to believe that Thakombau commanded loyalty throughout the Fijian group. With the blessings of the Tui Viti and a council of chiefs, therefore, what had once been a cannibal hell might soon become a model of interracial harmony under benign British administration.

This cautious optimism flowed in large part from flawed assumptions about the structure of traditional authority. It has often been remarked that British depictions of Thakombau as the “King of Fiji” functioned to legitimate the subsequent transfer of sovereignty from this semi-savage ruler to a white governor and his minders back in Britain. The trappings of Thakombau’s “kingship” had to be created. By the eve of Cession in 1874, he had acquired a royal flag, a tinsel crown, and a dysfunctional Legislative Assembly. To signal his allegiance to the new colonial order, Thakombau shipped his war club to Queen Victoria.¹⁴⁰

In reality, however, the Tui Viti had never commanded archipelago-wide obedience, nor did all of his putative subjects welcome British rule. According to the version of Fiji’s pre-colonial past favored by most of its leaders since independence in 1973, the people of these islands had once lived in several hierarchically arranged tribal groups. Each tribal group had its traditional chief who presided over a system of communal land ownership.¹⁴¹ Social scientists have since called this model into question. These revisionists have argued that prior to sustained contact with Europeans, the Fijian people had lived in many small groups scattered across the larger islands. These communities differed in their customs, thereby rendering it “unlikely that any one system of government and social legislation would have been acceptable as a ‘Fijian’ institution in all areas.”¹⁴² Nowhere did this heterogeneity show itself more dramatically than in the “stubborn” resistance to colonial rule of certain highland tribes. Enter the “mountaineers.”

As they took up their new colonial posts, British administrators assumed that the system of indigenous government common to some eastern parts of Fiji had gradually been adopted throughout. Yet compelling evidence to the contrary lay close at hand. Fiji’s Kai Tholo (literally, people “from the mountains”) looked and acted unlike coast-dwellers. The Kai Tholo often refused to shear off their “fuzzy-wuzzy mops of hair,” or to trade their scanty bark and grass coverings for the decorous sulu.143 Many of them remained heathen. True to their name, these people occupied the steep terrain found at the center of islands such as Ovalau, Vanua Levu, and especially Viti Levu. By nearly all accounts, cannibalism flourished among them. And tellingly, Fiji’s mountaineers were conspicuous by the absence of their marks on the Deed of Cession. As Deryck Scarr reminds us, nobody signed for the upland valleys of Viti Levu, for the villages at the head of the rushing Sigatoka River, or for the fortress of Matanavatu, “where for generations people had defied successive coastal intrusions at the top of a sheer rock wall.”¹⁴⁴

The mountaineers’ organized resistance to encroachments on their lands began well before the Deed of Cession was drafted. These people had never been integrated into the coastal alliances that dominated pre-colonial Fiji; they saw themselves as the stewards of tradition, not rebels. But it is surely true that the colonial encounter metaphorically “produced” Fijian cannibalism.¹⁴⁵ Put differently, the collision of indigenous customs with foreign cultural imperatives sustained the demonizing of a practice that was already in decline. We might push this point further. From the mountaineers’ defiant embrace of man-eating rituals, we could infer that they sought to supplement their literal control of the high ground with psychological intimidation. That is, once these folk realized the white man’s dread of cannibalism, they began exaggerating their own fondness for bakola. So viewed, the Kai Tholo become active agents in a war of gestures as well as clubs and muskets.

This varied weaponry went on display as early as 1871, when the so-called “Lovoni cannibals” attacked a rival tribe in the highlands of Ovalau. A relatively small island that contained “rum-soaked” Levuka, center of European influence in the archipelago, Ovalau now embarrassed Thakombau, to whom both of the warring tribes owed allegiance. But the Lovoni nursed old grudges against Bau and its ruler.¹⁴⁶ When the chief of highland Yarovudi was intercepted, therefore, he was immediately clubbed, butchered, and baked. No gesture of defiance could have been more potent than eating this vassal of Bau. That Thakombau understood the depth of the insult is suggested by the terrible vengeance he wreaked on the Lovoni. Indigenous memory and European reports agree: most of the tribe, wasted from hunger, was marched down to Levuka and auctioned off to white planters. Having also confiscated all Lovoni land, Thakombau used the combined profits to fund his new government. Four vanquished men suffered what may have been the ultimate humiliation. Sold to an American circus company, they were exhibited in traveling sideshows as cannibal freaks.147

If the Lovoni disruption of 1871 proved brief, Viti Levu’s mountaineers worried both planters and coastal tribes for a decade prior to the start of colonial rule. Easily the most celebrated victim of highlander violence during these years was Thomas Baker. A headstrong Methodist missionary who underestimated the threat of the Kai Tholo, Rev. Baker and most of his party managed to get axed and eaten in July of 1867.¹⁴⁸ To Viti Levu’s cotton planters, however, the more troubling “outrages” involved cannibals descending on their farms. The year 1873 confirmed white fears. February saw the Burns family annihilated on their property twelve miles from the mouth of the River Ba. If the slaughter of husband and wife seemed brutal, bashing the two Burns children against the wooden supports of their bungalow appeared wholly evil.¹⁴⁹ In July, two more planters from the Ba region fell to highlander clubs. A literal tug-of-war for the limbs of Mr. Gresham reportedly occurred, the cannibals failing to wrest their prize from the slain man’s friends.¹⁵⁰ In February 1871, the Fiji Times backed the formation of a “Volunteer Corps” to deal with the “semi-barbarous natives who surround us.” A year later, the British Subjects’ Mutual Protection Society vowed to pursue this end—and to resist the collection of taxes by a “native” government.¹⁵¹ Plainly, one of the first tasks of Britain’s new colonial regime would be the building of a peacekeeping force.

Before a colonial police could be organized, however, British officials found themselves facing the worst demographic crisis in Fijian history. By European standards the Cession appeared well intended, perhaps even altruistic. Commodore J.G. Goodenough, one of two commissioners sent from London in 1873 to assess Fiji’s need for Imperial guidance, never doubted Britain’s moral obligation: annexing this remote island group would enable his nation to save “a very amiable aboriginal race who cannot protect themselves against the inroads of white planters.”¹⁵² The new crown colony’s first governor, A.H. Gordon, struck some planters as a pawn of the “Exeter Hall party,” a mawkish evangelical. The aristocratic Gordon was neither. He did, though, distance himself from those European and American settlers who wished above all else to “clear out the ‘damn niggers.’”¹⁵³ Governor Gordon reached Fiji toward the end of June 1875. The archipelago he had been appointed to rule greeted him with waterlogged crops and, far worse, a measles epidemic that had already destroyed between a quarter and a third of Fiji’s aboriginal population. As the new governor soon discovered, this medical catastrophe would compel some of its survivors to resume man-eating.

In some British possessions, most notably India, it is possible to speak of doctors attempting to “colonize” indigenous bodies. The professional surveillance of medical men, it has been argued, often entailed the deployment of a disciplinary regimen designed to civilize as well as heal.154 But such theorizing cannot take us very far where the Fijian measles epidemic is concerned. First, as of early 1875 there existed no “medical service” in the archipelago—unless one counts the palliative care dispensed at some missionary outposts. Second, the speed with which this acutely infectious virus tore through an immunologically defenseless community spread over 300 islands left no time to devise treatment strategies. Small wonder the Fijians saw this swift killer as the work of a curse. For measles can spread as if by magic—not only through direct physical contact, but also through airborne droplets.¹⁵⁵

The tale of transmission still makes one shudder. Sir Hercules Robinson, governor of New South Wales, had negotiated the Deed of Cession. Shortly after its signing in late 1874, Robinson invited “King” Thakombau to visit him in Sydney. HMS Dido was duly sent to collect the one-time cannibal chief, his two sons, and a retinue of uncertain size. While in Sydney, Thakombau contracted measles. By the time the twenty-two-day return voyage left him in Levuka, Thakombau, the Fiji Times observed, looked “anything but well.” He had ceased to be contagious, however. His sons, regrettably, had not. In epidemiological terms, they and other infected passengers remained “disease vectors” (Figure 1.3). Although the illness had been reported to the Dido’s surgeon en route, no yellow flag (signaling quarantine) flew atop its mast, nor was there any attempt to prevent the mixing of passengers with a large welcoming crowd. High-ranking chiefs among this crowd soon returned to their island homes, carrying the virus with them. And on 22 January 1875, sixty-nine dignitaries from the mountain villages of Viti Levu gathered at Navuso on the Rewa River to learn what “cession” meant. So began the devastation of highland society.¹⁵⁶

In 1876, one of the colony’s new medical officers noted that the case mortality rate for measles in England hovered around five percent. Because the Fijians conducted their funeral rites in private, and given the absence of systematic census data, measles mortality among these Islanders could not be calculated. But the death toll of 1875, he ventured, may have been “greater than any epidemic on record.” What might explain such losses, apart from the virus’s “fresh . . . field for its ravages”?157 All too often European planters, merchants, and visitors blamed the victims. The Fijians in general and the mountaineers in particular had allegedly reverted to their superstitious traditions, refusing medicine and hospitalization. They rejected food even as starvation loomed. They threw themselves into creeks and rivers, “desperate to cool their burning fever[s],” and thereby contaminated their only source of potable water. Overwhelmed with corpses, these Islanders supposedly buried the dying as well as the dead. Proponents of the “vanishing races” theory found here terrible proof of their assumptions.¹⁵⁸

Figure 1.3   Despite knowing that measles had already appeared aboard HMS Dido in mid-1875, the ship’s surgeon allowed healthy visitors to mix with the sick. A viral catastrophe ensued.

SOURCE: The Graphic (17 July 1875).

Beyond this crude social Darwinist script a still more perverse narrative was emerging. The Fiji Times helped shape it. Beginning in late February 1875, letters to this newspaper lashed out at “the authorities” for their “absolutely culpable apathy” in responding to the epidemic. “Very strange” had been the failure of a British Navy captain to quarantine a ship he knew to contain a deadly illness. The editorial of 24 February did more than hint at conspiracy. John Bates Thurston, an Englishman long committed to guarding Islander interests against European commercial greed, was all but charged with “the careful fostering of measles.”159 Under normal circumstances this absurdity would never have been entertained beyond the saloons of Levuka. But with Fiji turning into “a vast charnel house,” rumors about white sorcery suddenly gained credence among some indigenous communities. Ignoring Western medical advice represented one form of Islander resistance. Renewed highlander attacks on both European farms and Christianized Fijian villages represented another.160 Especially in the western hills of Viti Levu, the Kai Tholo who launched these raids also sought bodies to eat. The “old spirit” of cannibalism had awakened. When Sir Arthur Gordon began his colonial governorship in June of 1875, therefore, he faced an outbreak of man-eating as well as measles.¹⁶¹

Earning the trust of a people whom Gordon placed somewhere between “cultivated” and “savage” on the evolutionary continuum would prove difficult but not impossible, he believed. As he assured the chiefs gathered at Bau on 10 September, their lands were secure. For Gordon himself would block foreign speculators from “eat[ing] the soil,” and chiefs from recklessly selling it. “My eyes shall always be upon you,” he promised. These words suggested more than fatherly solicitude, of course; they also invoked the unrelenting gaze that would see all “great crimes.” The sale of wives, ritual infanticide, and cannibalism must cease immediately, Gordon stressed.¹⁶² That Fiji’s new colonial ruler felt obliged to issue this veiled threat surely puzzled some British readers. After all, in mid-July, London’s Graphic magazine had proclaimed “Cannibalism Abandoned in Fiji” and had offered sketches of the pacified.¹⁶³ When toward the end of 1875 some of Viti Levu’s mountaineers resumed raiding lowland targets, Gordon chose to enforce colonial discipline by overawing the rebellious. He understood that the mountaineers had cause to feel aggrieved. They “not unnaturally supposed the pestilence to have been purposely introduced by the new rulers to weaken their strength.” “Tribal jealousies” and the “injudicious meddling” in highland life of “unauthorized agents” had also helped to convulse the interior.¹⁶⁴ Gordon saw this ferment as a direct challenge to Britain’s colonial presence. Cannibalism, in his view, was an illegality, an instrument of defiance but not its driving force. Most of his white contemporaries, however, wished to locate man-eating at the center of the insurrection; the highlanders’ “cruel” bamboo mantraps and tough wickerwork stockades constituted the martial face of cannibalism.¹⁶⁵

Arthur Gordon’s dismissively named “Little War” of 1876 brought down a colonial hammer on the mountaineers. In some white eyes, the alleged man-eating mania of these remote tribes did de-politicize indigenous resistance to British rule.166 Whether Sir Arthur deserves credit for restraint in suppressing the tevoro (“devil people”) of the hills will long stir debate. It is unlikely that the fifteen highlanders hanged or shot at Sigatoka on 30 June 1876 would have praised the governor. Before they died, these men learned through an interpreter that they must feel the “terror of the law.” They had defied Britain’s government. They had “murdered and eaten peaceable . . . people.” And so they had “forfeited” their lives.¹⁶⁷ The conclusion of Gordon’s Little War marked the end of cannibalism as an anti-colonial weapon in Fiji. It marked the start of colonial nostalgia for an imaginary time when appetite had ruled Oceania.

CANNIBAL SHOWS

Except in New Guinea, European efforts to suppress man-eating among the Islanders of Melanesia had generally succeeded by 1880. To white settlers, this accomplishment seemed an unqualified victory for civilization over savagery. But for Europeans who came to inspect “tamed” cannibals, the victory appeared somehow hollow. Had the domestication of these once fierce predators emasculated them? Could their sense of self-worth survive the cultural shock of peace? Lest the cannibals vanish forever before they could be studied, curious whites had two options. They could visit the pacified man-eaters in situ or else attend exhibitions of these wild people in the metropole. Both options involved projecting Western fears and fantasies onto dark bodies.

What aroused those who sought out the cannibals in their Pacific lairs was a whiff of danger, a blend of hope and worry that the savages might succumb to their old “lust” in the right ceremonial setting. James Edge Partington, a confessed English “globe-trotter,” was much taken with the Fijian dances he observed near Levuka in 1879. The distinction between dancing and killing soon blurred for Partington.

No description that could be written would give any adequate idea whatever of this wild savage entertainment. Weird and terrible did it look, the dusky forms of the savages decorated with huge head-dresses made out of tapa. . . . The first performance was to be a war dance, so they were all armed with clubs, and their faces in full war-paint, being daubed over with red and black stuff . . . which gave them a most diabolical look. So weird was it, that one could almost see back some ten years, when in the midst would have been the body of a slaughtered foe, roasting over a huge fire. . . . One thing which struck me most forcibly was, that here we were, only six whites, three of whom were ladies, in the midst of over 100 wild savages, who as late as 1876 were cannibals, and really at heart are still so, as in talking with them they smack their lips at the mere mention of human flesh.168

Partington’s eerie experience on Ovalau presupposed that cannibalism was a racial sickness, not easily cured.

Other Western fantasies allowed that this sickness could be masked if not eradicated. Published in 1888, “The Confessions of a Reformed Cannibal” acquainted an American readership with one Andrew Keller, the tall and “very dark” Scot who owned a successful meat-canning business. Although dignified, Keller had a “kind of weirdness” about him, a “sullen, savage impatience” with the world. He eventually admits to owning no Scottish blood. The offspring of a shipwrecked English father and a South Seas mother, Keller had been raised a man-eater. No surprise, then, that every spring Keller endures a longing for the “old savagery,” a “maniacal desire” to discard civilized ways.¹⁶⁹ Melville, of course, held that the wildness propelling cannibalism transcended race. As Ishmael reasons before slipping into Queequeg’s bed, “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”¹⁷⁰

But Pacific Islanders made better exhibits. Between 1831 and 1892, several supposed cannibals impressed paying audiences in the United States and Britain. American showmen were especially keen to display their wares. In the autumn of 1831, New York City’s Morning Courier and Enquirer announced the arrival of Pacific man-eaters at Tammany Hall. These Islanders clutched the expected clubs and spears. Quite unexpected, however, was “one of the seamen who [had been] wounded by these people.” For an admission fee of twenty-five cents (children half price), curious citizens could learn about the cannibals’ “habits and character” from the white man they had nearly killed.¹⁷¹ One year later, another pair of alleged man-eaters dubbed “Sunday” and “Monday” toured the American Northeast. Their story required considerable suspension of disbelief. An enterprising ship’s captain, Benjamin Morrell, had supposedly discovered them on two Pacific island groups whose location he refused to disclose. Morrell explained that he had brought these men to New York so that they might learn English and later help him form a joint stock company. He eventually lured some investors although not before Monday, constantly cold and terrified that he would be eaten, died of tuberculosis.172

More heralded still were the arrivals on American soil of the Fijian captive “Vendovi” in 1842 and the extended tour of P.T. Barnum’s “four wild Fiji Cannibals” in the early 1870s. Vendovi reached New York City on 10 June 1842, living proof that the United States Exploring Expedition had begun the task of imposing American morality on the Cannibal Islands. As Tony Adler has argued, Vendovi’s capture signaled America’s emergence as a nation with Pacific aspirations. This alleged outlaw died of pneumonia mere hours after glimpsing New York.¹⁷³ P.T. Barnum’s prized Fijian “man-eaters” survived longer, if no more comfortably. How America’s impresario of the bizarre came to obtain these attractions remains unclear. We know that the opportunistic W.C. Gardenhire, late of Texas, happened to be scouting Fiji for savage souvenirs when the 1871 Lovoni revolt roiled the highlands of Ovalau. Gardenhire capitalized on the misery of the soon vanquished Lovoni, buying four of them from Thakombau.¹⁷⁴ Within a year, these Fijians had become fixtures in Barnum’s American Museum and Travelling Show. At a moment in Anglo-American history when the illustration of human taxonomies excited popular interest, Barnum’s cannibal tableau was a showman’s dream.¹⁷⁵

Beyond the epidemiological dangers and cultural traumas that faced such performers, the question of coercion bulked large. When Sara Baartman—a Khoikhoi woman displayed in London between 1810 and 1811 as “the Hottentot Venus”—intrigued metropolitan audiences, had she given informed consent to such treatment?¹⁷⁶ Roslyn Poignant has observed that aboriginal peoples whose cultures had collapsed under the weight of colonialism may sometimes have agreed to join traveling shows as the least bad choice. Britain abolished slavery throughout its empire in 1833. Yet fifty years on, the North Queensland “Boomerang Throwers,” whose cruel fate Poignant has revealed, were in every meaningful respect “abducted.”¹⁷⁷ P.T. Barnum had a hand in this as in many other ethnographic displays. For it was one of Barnum’s agents, Robert A. Cunningham, who removed these Aborigines in 1883 and 1892, featured them in his employer’s “Ethnological Congress of Strange Savage Tribes,” and later presented them at anthropological meetings in London, Paris, Brussels, and Berlin. At least one of Cunningham’s pamphlets promised British audiences a peek at “Ranting Man Eaters.”¹⁷⁸

Save perhaps for displays of Fijian males, the cannibal label served mostly to enhance the strangeness on offer. Topical issues often took precedence over anthropophagy. Advanced billing for “The Most Extraordinary Exhibition of Aborigines ever seen in Europe!” greeted the citizens of Birmingham in April 1847. Building on the 1842 publication of Robert Moffat’s celebrated Missionary Labours and Scenes in South Africa, this show harped on the near extinction of the “Bushmen,” five of whom awaited public inspection.179 A generation later, another African people, the Zulus, aroused interest on different grounds. Having wiped out a British garrison of 1,600 at Isandhlwana in January 1879, the Zulus commanded attention. Thus, the showman G.A. Farini imported a few members of this martial tribe for visual consumption; displays featuring “Genuine Zulus,” “Friendly Zulus,” “Umgame, the Baby Zulu,” and “Cetewayo’s Daughters,” among others, beckoned to the curious. Soon there were not enough Zulus to go around. By the close of the nineteenth century, so many fake Africans worked Britain’s fairground circuit that the name “Zulu” had grown to signify artifice and disguise.¹⁸⁰

Fakery also suffused the exhibition of “cannibals.” But if there was one man-eating ritual that begged for illustration, one ceremony above all others that showmen and ethnographers longed to authenticate, it was the so-called “cannibal feast.” One can speculate about the roots of this obsession. Perhaps the pairing of a pleasant custom, namely eating in social groups, with the most antisocial of acts must disturb? If so, the disturbed fail to recognize that sharing human meat is no less commensal than gathering to eat a Christmas goose. We need not speculate about other charges brought against feasting cannibals. Their eagerness to eat could go beyond lip-smacking to “limb tearing.” But even when “quietly and skillfully” served, this flesh triggered “double savage” behavior in some diners.¹⁸¹ Western observers of these “hideous banquets” also risked getting caught up in a “frenzy resembling intoxication.” For the cannibal feast was simultaneously a “fearful and a wonderful thing.”¹⁸² Traders with a literary bent embellished such reports. William Wawn, the captain of a labor-recruiting vessel, wrote about witnessing “the assimilation of an unfortunate bushman” on Duke of York island, a slice of rain forest wedged between New Britain and New Ireland. The presiding chief revealed his people’s meat preference: “Man o’-bush good; Man-Sydney no good . . . too much salt.”¹⁸³ Thomas Andrew, a New Zealand-born photographer of Pacific exotica, applied modern technology to an old trope. Around 1894, Andrew shot a staged scene of seven ostensibly Fijian warriors dragging their lifeless prey toward an unseen oven. Entitled “The Vanquished,” this image recalled an earlier age when cannibals carried murderous clubs, covered their loins in bark cloth, and had yet to meet a missionary.184

To modern eyes, Andrew’s man-eaters look thoroughly unconvincing. Lacking facial detail, they appear to be what they are—mere props for one Westerner’s idea of savages at their most bestial. For sheer absurdity, though, Andrew’s scene must defer to Edward Reeves’s image of cannibals dismembering their victims. Declaring himself bored by the “stiffly posed, unnatural groupings” of Islanders in Western drawings, Reeves sought truth through his camera. It is therefore peculiar that “A Cannibal Feast in Fiji, 1869” should appear so contrived as to be comic. Occupying page three of his travel narrative, Brown Men and Women, or the South Sea Islands in 1895 and 1896 (1898), Reeves’s scene features three very pale bodies being poked and pulled by six very dark warriors. The atmosphere is hazy; the warriors seem unsure about the next step in their ritual (Figure 1.4).¹⁸⁵ One can almost hear Reeves imploring his actors to behave authentically.

Figure 1.4   “A Cannibal Feast in Fiji, 1869.” The photographer of this staged slaughter, Edward Reeves, imagined pre-colonial Fiji as overrun with man-eaters.

SOURCE: Reeves, Brown Men and Women (1898).

Such clumsiness does not mar a remarkable oil painting by Charles Gordon Frazer (1863–1899).186 Born and trained in London, Frazer gained recognition as a competent minor artist who specialized in portraits of civic leaders and “Colonial School” landscapes. Easily his best known work, then and now, is “Cannibal Feast on the Island of Tanna, New Hebrides” (Figure 1.5).¹⁸⁷ Sketched on this famously volatile island during 1890, “Cannibal Feast” contains nearly a hundred figures and, as one enthusiastic reviewer phrased it, “all the horrible details are reproduced with startling fidelity.” The same “strange somber light” about which Henry Morton Stanley had written found its painter in Frazer. Two victims, slung on poles, occupy the oil’s visual center. One body is clearly dead. The other has entered a “stupour approaching death” as suggested by its muscular relaxation.¹⁸⁸ At seven feet wide, this evocation of the abject Islander is hard to ignore.

Nineteen months after leaving Melbourne for Melanesia, Frazer returned to Victoria’s capital. Entirely by chance, the first showing of “Cannibal Feast” coincided with H.M. Stanley’s lecture tour in Melbourne. The explorer drew “enormous” crowds to several venues. Fittingly, his last lecture on 24 November 1891 discussed “Cannibals and Pigmies.” By then, “Stanley Africanus” had already pronounced himself “greatly impressed” with Frazer’s oil, then hanging in the National Gallery of Victoria.189 The painter and the explorer, it appears, recognized in one another an impulse to naturalize the grotesque. Frazer probably admired Stanley’s gift for treating risk as high-mindedness. Not coincidentally, just two days after Stanley left Melbourne, Frazer published an account of his trials on Tanna. Witnessing the nocturnal glow of an active volcano, tramping through jungle “where sunlight never penetrated,” “treacherously” watched by “stalwart blackfellows”: Frazer sought to depict “Cannibal Feast” as the product of physical danger as well as technical skill. His most audacious claim, however, was that he had sketched a real cannibal “fete” while peering through thick foliage.¹⁹⁰ Even Stanley could not top this tale.

Figure 1.5   Charles Gordon Frazer’s oil painting “Cannibal Feast on the Island of Tanna, New Hebrides” (1891) fascinated gallery-goers in Melbourne and Liverpool.

SOURCE: Courtesy, Bonhams.

In the spring of 1893, Frazer packed up the “barbaric treasures” of his studio and left Melbourne for London.191 Although “Cannibal Feast” was not displayed in the Metropolis, Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery did show it during that institution’s Autumn Exhibition of 1895. By the early 1890s, this major provincial gallery was attracting some 600,000 visits per year.¹⁹² On Merseyside, as in distant Melbourne, visitors must have been drawn to Frazer’s oil, which dominated the gallery’s “Final Soiree” on 23 November. The artist’s brief lecture described cannibalism as a dying custom and his painting as a form of ethnographic preservation:

I would like just to say that in choosing this subject, it was not from any desire for sensation, nor from any sense of morbidness but from the fact of having by accident witnessed a scene of superstition so ancient, a custom that must soon become extinct all over the world before the great march of civilization, that I considered it my duty to illustrate this dark and terrible phase in the history of man. . . . I have endeavoured to treat the subject in a way that will create as little repulsion as possible. It is chosen at a time when the bodies of the enemy are carried on poles into the clearance while the warriors around sit down, occasionally joining in the strange chant [that] those of the procession are droning.¹⁹³

After recounting the sights, sounds, and smells that reached him behind his jungle curtain, Frazer concluded with “a few kind words” for the maligned cannibal. Properly disgusted by the man-eating he had supposedly watched, yet able to perceive a “subtle charm” in the savages of Tanna, Frazer mesmerized his audience.194

Instead of trading on this success, however, the artist soon returned to his pursuit of the exotic. After further wanderings in Melanesia and South America, Frazer found himself in Siam painting portraits of the Siamese royal family. And it was there that he died of blackwater fever in 1899, at the age of thirty-six.¹⁹⁵

Did Charles Gordon Frazer witness anything even vaguely resembling cannibalism on the island of Tanna? As with most Western accounts of a “cannibal feast,” untangling truth from fiction is a task bound to confound. So is the attempt to trace the derivation of most cannibal jokes. How, for example, did the farcical image of the missionary in a cannibal pot originate? The pot, at least, is explicable. The early nineteenth-century ships built to hunt sperm whales extracted the coveted oil at sea, rendering the whale’s blubber in huge iron “try-pots.” Melville notes that each of an American whaler’s two try-pots could easily hide a sailor looking for a private place to nap. The observant Berthold Seemann proposed an equally plausible cooking vessel: the great iron cauldrons in which the sea slugs prized in China were boiled. Some of these receptacles could hold “two men entire.”¹⁹⁶ Explaining how missionaries came to occupy them requires more imagination. Perhaps the juxtaposition of self-righteous clergymen keen to save souls with hungry Islanders eager to enjoy the body without the Book was too striking to ignore? Recall the doggerel attributed to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1805–1873):

If I were a cassowary

On the plains of Timbuctoo,

I would eat a missionary,

Cassock, band, and hymn-book too.¹⁹⁷

With apologies to Freud, one might say that where earnest was, there mocking must be.¹⁹⁸

Beyond question is the fact that Pacific cannibalism has had a long afterlife. “Progress,” “civilization,” and “modernity” would become the watchwords for Fijian exhibits at various inter-colonial exhibitions mounted during the late-Victorian years. Despite efforts to sell Fiji as a paradise for the cultivation of cotton, sugarcane, and coffee, however, visitors to these exhibits apparently brought with them the old man-eating associations; the idea of Fiji remained rooted in a bygone era.199 Curiously, the passing of this era fueled a fixation with its remnants. Beginning in the late 1870s and extending into our century, Western reports about assorted “last” cannibals continued to surface. Thus, in 1901, America’s “last cannibal tribe,” the Tonkawas of south-central Texas, had reportedly shrunk to an unsustainable fifty members. Three decades later, Fiji’s oldest known inhabitant, Chief Takalaigau, was said to regard his cannibal youth with “wistful fondness.”²⁰⁰ During the 1960s and 1970s, Papua New Guinea’s remote highlands yielded the disturbing news that members of the Fore tribe routinely ate the brains of their departed relatives. This practice, most anthropologists agreed, stemmed from the Fore belief that a loved one’s spirit could literally be consumed. The medical consequences looked dire. Epidemiologists identified “kuru,” a Fore word meaning trembling or fear, as a virus closely related to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Tribe members with kuru progressed from an initial shivering tremor to complete motor incapacity and death within a year of infection. Although William Arens would subsequently admonish his fellow anthropologists for their uncritical acceptance of Fore testimony, the equation of this terrible illness with cannibalism has helped to assure Western audiences that man-eating remains a fact among earth’s hidden peoples.²⁰¹

Since the late twentieth century, cannibalism itself has been commodified. Cannibal treks—“niche tourism” for the well-heeled or the well-sponsored—hold out the promise of encounters with the authentically primitive. In Dennis O’Rourke’s documentary Cannibal Tours (1987), wealthy Westerners, dripping with cameras and swaddled in safari garb, cruise up New Guinea’s Sepik River in search of man-eating vestiges. Capitalism, it would seem, is delighted to market that which derives its value from being beyond markets.²⁰² Some leisured Victorians, as we have seen, were no less determined to observe “real savages.” These connoisseurs of wildness longed to meet Pacific Islanders who had so far evaded the missionaries and their preaching. Yet Britain’s Protestant missionaries were often the first Europeans to settle on Melanesian islands. The work they undertook forever changed both the Islanders’ and Britain’s sense of itself.