CONCLUSION

Savage Inversions

Savagery in the colonial Pacific meant different things to different people at different times. Western constructions of Melanesia, especially British stereotypes of its “natives,” grew less defamatory over the course of six generations. But as this book has argued, the shift in emphasis from denouncing savage acts to lamenting the domestication of those who committed them should not be confused with racial enlightenment. Nor did the substitution of social science for religious enthusiasm always represent an empathetic advance. Theorizing the ritual role of cannibalism among island peoples, for instance, did not necessarily mark the theorist as superior to the missionary in understanding the Other. We must therefore be cautious about assuming that relations between Europeans and Melanesians improved as the Victorian past gave way to twentieth-century modernity.

An example of what could be called a savage inversion reminds us that images of the Pacific Islander continued to defy neat classification long after Melanesia had been pacified. As used here, an “inversion” refers to a reversal of order, position, sequence, or relation. By extension, an inversion can also refer to a confounding of expectation.1 White commentary on the conduct of Pacific Islanders during World War Two was noteworthy in this regard. British, Australian, New Zealander, and American accounts lauded the loyalty of “primitive” peoples throughout this testing time. In the words of Sir Philip Mitchell, governor of Fiji from 1942 to 1944, “simple, ignorant, often savage” Islanders proved their “devotion” to Britain under the most trying circumstances.² Such commentary was itself fractured. British and Australian accounts of their Islander allies stressed the latter’s affection for pre-war colonial rule. American gratitude to these same Pacific peoples ignored the supposed virtues of colonialism, preferring instead to treat the comradeship of “natives” and Yanks as a brotherhood forged in battle.³ Still, these were variations on a shared narrative. That narrative positioned Pacific Islanders as key allies precisely because their latent savagery could be mobilized against an equally savage foe, the Japanese.

Both the Pacific and the Southeast Asian theaters of conflict generated several stories of one-time headhunters reverting to their martial specialty in dealing with a cruel enemy. Thus, with the catastrophic surrender of Singapore to the Japanese in February 1942, the road to British India lay open save for the hill tribes of Nagaland—tribes whose residual fondness for taking heads at first worried colonial administrators. Fortunately for Britain, the Nagas and kindred peoples spread along the rugged frontier between Burma and Assam mostly became porters and road-builders.4 Similarly, the Dayak tribes of central Borneo risked their lives to rescue downed American airmen. (A decade after he had tried to “go cannibal” on Malekula island in the New Hebrides, Tom Harrisson, now Major Harrisson, found himself in Borneo coaxing its forest dwellers to report Japanese troop movements.) The Igorots of central Luzon in the Philippines proved no less skilled as jungle fighters. Despite two mistitled books about the Igorots and Dayaks at war, decapitation was for both a rare indulgence.⁵

Although historically linked to man-eating rather than headhunting, Fijians earned a reputation as lethal guerrillas supporting American forces in the Solomon archipelago. British colonial officials seized on the swift recruitment of Fijian volunteers as proof of their affection for “King and Country.” Other, less noble, impulses were also at work. For instance, Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna, Oxford educated and widely respected, told young men that “Fijians will never be recognized unless our blood is shed first.” (Eda na sega ni Kilai na i taukei Kevaka e na sega mada ni dave e liu na noda dra.) This high chief reckoned that if the political demands of Fiji’s Indian community were to be resisted, a strong show of loyalty to the Empire would help.⁶ White officers—at first British and New Zealanders, later Americans—provided their Fijian recruits with the basics of military discipline and handling small arms. When it came to “bushcraft,” though, the young men selected for scout and commando duty often taught their teachers.⁷ Later, operating behind enemy lines in such danger zones as Guadalcanal, New Georgia, and Bougainville, these troops excelled at silent killing. Mark Durley, a U.S. Army lieutenant on Bougainville in early 1944, enlisted the help of Fijian scouts with a vital mission: to find a prisoner-of-war camp where captives from the fall of Singapore had been languishing. Whether this camp was ultimately located, Durley does not say. But his scouts certainly found the enemy:

While on patrol one of the Fijians motioned for us to stop. They stripped down to their shorts and went off into the jungle barefoot. Sometime later they returned. Soon we saw that they had wiped out a Japanese patrol without making a sound. We estimated that they killed seventy Japanese on our trek.8

The deadly skills of Fijian scouts would later be turned against “communist terrorist[s]” in the rain forests of Malaya.⁹

Such stories appear to confirm that the alleged “treachery” of Melanesians had been transformed through colonial discipline into fidelity. On closer inspection, however, this savage inversion proved far from complete. Along steep New Guinea trails and amid the sweltering bush of Guadalcanal, European doubts about Islander capacities would linger.

ISLANDER “ANGELS” AT WAR

Seventy-odd years after the fact, it is rarely noted that Pacific Islanders did not always embrace the Allied cause. Long-standing tribal animosities sometimes expressed themselves through proxy slaughter. Thus, acting under Japanese orders, in early 1944 several middle Sepik River (New Guinea) villages massacred nearly a hundred rival villagers at Timbunke—punishment for alleged collaboration with the Australians.¹⁰ Elsewhere, Fijians fought Bougainvilleans, Pohnpei people engaged New Guineans, and Islanders without clear affiliations hid their food stores from troops wearing any uniform. Despite much American praise for loyal Solomon Islanders, U.S. planes did not hesitate to strafe villages on Choiseul and Malaita where support for the Japanese was merely suspected. And at least some of the Papuans who hauled vital equipment and wounded Australian soldiers resented the loads they shouldered.¹¹

Even so, the burdens they bore, particularly up and down the seemingly vertical slopes of southeastern Papua, served to invest these men with a qualified heroism. Prior to the start of the Pacific War, white planters, missionaries, and adventurers referred to Papuans by a variety of disparaging names: “boys,” “coons,” “smokes,” and “abos.”¹² Once they recognized the strategic value of reliable carriers in a war of endurance, however, Australian troops repurposed an old acknowledgment of savage competence. “Fuzzy-Wuzzy,” one of Kipling’s most famous poems, appeared in his 1892 collection, Barrack-Room Ballads. A salute to Sudanese warriors who had smashed through a supposedly impregnable British formation at the battle of Abu Klea (1885), Kipling’s verse linked wild courage with wild hair:

So ’ere’s to you Fuzzy-Wuzzy at your ’ome in the Soudan;

You’re a pore benighted ’eathen but a first-class fightin’ man;

An ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your ’ayrick ’ead of ’air—

You big black boundin’ beggar—for you broke a British square.13

Apart from the elaborate coiffures of some Islanders, the analogy was weak, not least because Papuan carriers seldom engaged in hand-to-hand combat. But to wounded soldiers from Australia’s 39th Infantry Battalion hauled out of harm’s way, or to American pilots plucked from behind enemy lines, their jungle-wise rescuers seemed more angelic than savage.

The Kokoda Track campaign of 1942 showed Papua’s “Fuzzy-Wuzzy Angels” at their best. The strategic stakes were high. By mid-July, Japanese forces had landed near Gona on the northern side of the Papuan peninsula. From this site, the Allied stronghold in Papua, Port Moresby, lay less than eighty miles to the south. A single-file miner’s trail, the Kokoda Track could have been Japan’s gateway to Moresby. Had it been captured, the enemy would have won an excellent base from which to strike Australia’s populous eastern seaboard. But first there was the Track itself to negotiate. Where it passed through the Owen Stanley mountain range, the Track rose to over 7,000 feet. In addition to braving its torrential rains, knee-deep mud, and dense bush, therefore, both soldiers and porters had to cope with frigid nights. An initial force of between 600 and 800 porters, many of them recruited from local rubber plantations, began carrying supplies to Australian troops stationed in forward areas, then returning for fresh loads. Once the fighting began, however, empty backs vanished; having delivered food and equipment to the shifting front, “Angels” now returned with the sick and wounded strapped to stretchers (Figure C.1). One eyewitness marveled at these porters swinging from branches and clinging to the sides of cliffs “like flies.”¹⁴ Since Kokoda’s rugged terrain largely ruled out evacuation of the disabled by air, Australia’s ability to block advancing Japanese units hinged on the willingness of exhausted Papuans to carry on while their own villages and gardens were being bombed or requisitioned.

Figure C.1   Salamaua, New Guinea, September 1943. Five “fuzzy wuzzy angels” carry a wounded Australian soldier down a steep trail on Buoisi Ridge.

SOURCE: Courtesy, Australian War Memorial, collection number 015758.

Through a series of tactical retreats along the Track, Australian resistance finally convinced Japan’s military planners that an overland assault on Port Moresby was not worth the time and blood it would cost. Between late July and mid-November 1942, Australian casualties on or near the Kokoda Track totaled just over 600 officers and men killed, with another thousand wounded. Sickness probably removed at least twice this number from combat. Compared with Australia’s losses at Gallipoli during World War One, the carnage in southeastern Papua proved quite limited.15 But the latter campaign possessed the distinction of being an exclusively Australian ground action. Not surprisingly, then, Australian veterans and the politicians attentive to them fashioned “Kokoda” into a code word for national valor. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of this campaign in 1992, Australia’s theatrical prime minister, Paul Keating, literally kissed the ground next to a memorial on the Track.16 Only recently have the contributions of Papuans to Australia’s success at Kokoda received official notice. And that recognition has retained its colonial tone: honor to the “strength, ingenuity and compassion displayed by the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels.”¹⁷

This paternalism has lingered in part because no unified voice exists to challenge it. Although independent since 1975, Papua New Guinea remains a polyvocal and culturally diverse state. While Australians have shaped Kokoda into a confident national narrative, the peoples of PNG have tended to regard the dramatic events of 1942 as belonging mainly to the ethnic groups living near the Track.¹⁸ If there has been a reconsideration of the savage stereotypes once central to European images of New Guinea, therefore, it has been partial. In 1944, when news of brave Papuan porters was still fresh, a “New Deal for the Fuzzy Wuzzies” seemed unlikely among “primitives” reputedly unable to grasp that murder is a crime. By 1960, little had changed within some Australian minds. “We know these natives are utterly incapable of anything like self-government,” declared a contributor to the Pacific Islands Monthly.¹⁹ Although vital to the Allied cause in Papua, they remain in Australian memory as stoic beasts of burden.

Not far to the east of Papua, the Solomon Islands and their people saw still fiercer combat in 1942 and 1943. Here the course of the war unexpectedly turned one of Britain’s most remote colonies into the stage upon which Japan and the United States fought for control of the South Pacific. The Battle of Midway in June of 1942 had damaged Japanese naval power. Deprived of its superiority at sea, Japan now aimed to protect and if possible enlarge its Pacific island “screen” by building well-defended air bases. One move in this direction was the construction of an airfield on Guadalcanal, a base from which the New Hebrides and New Caledonia could be bombed. To counter this threat, American Marines landed on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in early August 1942. By the end of that year some 80,000 soldiers, an estimated 30,000 of them Japanese, were engaged in vicious bush fighting.²⁰ On both Guadalcanal and the western Solomon islands, American troops received crucial information about enemy movements from British and Australian “coastwatchers.” But watching and protecting them were Islander scouts whose help proved essential.

When the Australian Navy’s coastwatcher service began operating in 1919, it guarded only the home waters. Improvements in radio technology made possible the extension of this shield to Papua, the Territory of New Guinea, and the Solomons. By late 1939, further recruitment had extended the service over most of Melanesia west of Fiji.21 Anticipating the invasion of Tulagi, government headquarters for the Solomons, Resident Commissioner William Marchant moved his staff across Indispensable Strait to the larger and densely forested island of Malaita. Nearly all the archipelago’s European settlers had been evacuated to Australia by the end of January 1942. Yet a small contingent of colonial officials and plantation owners chose to melt into the jungle on several islands, most importantly Guadalcanal. Some ninety miles long, thirty miles wide, and in its center formidably mountainous, Guadalcanal offered many places to hide, but also many sites for enemy ambush. Only the island’s indigenous people could reliably distinguish between refuge and trap. Admiral Halsey, commander of the South Pacific, minced few words when it came to operating behind Japanese lines: “The Coast Watchers saved Guadalcanal, and Guadalcanal saved the Pacific.” General Douglas MacArthur allowed that the coastwatchers rendered “spectacular service.”²² Nearly all the “watchers” who have left memoirs depict Islanders as full partners in the dangerous game they played with the Japanese.

But that credit is retrospective. At the start of fighting on Guadalcanal, its people did not inspire confidence among Europeans. The Annual Report on . . . the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, 1938, reminded readers that the “natives” had recently occupied “the Neolithic stage of civilization.” Before the war, Islanders had led “wild, secluded lives.” Some of them supposedly still hunted heads.²³ Even the Scot Martin Clemens, a district officer on Guadalcanal at war’s start and eventually the most celebrated of all coastwatchers, did not know what to expect from the local men who agreed to help him. As recently as April 1942, he found himself investigating the murder of an elderly European prospector. In his unpublished diary for 10 April, Clemens wrote: “See photographs of Wilmot’s corpse. Badly bashed over the head—queer incident, and rather ominous.” Was this an isolated crime or did it presage mass unrest following the flight of most European settlers?²⁴

Such doubts vanished once Islander scouts swung into action. Some endeared themselves to American forces by rescuing downed pilots and stranded sailors. In mid-August 1942, for example, two teenage scouts, Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, chanced upon the starving survivors of an American patrol boat that had sunk after colliding with a Japanese destroyer off Kolombangara island. Risking execution if caught assisting U.S. personnel, these young men beached their dugout canoe, shared what little food they had with the strangers, and built them a fire. The survivors of patrol torpedo boat 109 owed their lives to Biuku and Eroni; none knew this more clearly than the skipper of PT-109, Lt. John F. Kennedy.25 Other scouts proved their worth through direct action as guerrillas. Around New Georgia in the west of the Solomons, former district officer Donald Kennedy built an insurgent force out of colonial policemen and sympathetic locals. These men would not only find the beach near Munda Point later used for Admiral Halsey’s surprise landing but also turned the jungle of southern New Georgia into a no-go zone for all save the largest Japanese patrols.²⁶

On Guadalcanal as on New Georgia, Western accounts of the coastwatchers have emphasized the speed with which Europeans converted fractious Islanders into obedient soldiers. The official history of the Pacific islands at war notes, “[Martin] Clemens had to conjure [local] troops into existence as best he could.”²⁷ Such depictions of the Solomon Islanders minimize their initiative, reducing them to primitive clay waiting for their betters to sculpt them. This is, to say the least, a peculiar portrait. For when we consider the most decorated Melanesian soldier of the war, we find an Islander whose fame rested on his ability to improvise no less than on his willingness to suffer. If anything, the legendary Sergeant-Major Vouza proved rather too independent for his superiors’ comfort.

Long after the Pacific War had ended, U.S. General Alexander Vandegrift, formerly commander of the 1st Marine Division during the Battle of Guadalcanal, remembered Vouza, inaccurately, as “a black and bandy-legged little fellow.” This Islander had nonetheless rendered “superb service” to the Americans.²⁸ Clemens, Vouza’s coastwatcher boss, was less restrained, anointing him “the greatest Solomon Islander in recorded history.” Vouza’s defiant loyalty under torture—“Better I die 100 times than Marine friends die”—assured him an honored place in Allied accounts of the Pacific War.²⁹

Vouza’s path from belligerent youth to war hero looks improbable in hindsight. “Sale,” as his parents called him at first, was born around 1898 in the Guadalcanal village of Pappanggu, near Koli Point. Later receiving the Christian name of Jacob Charles Vouza, he early on earned a reputation for fighting. At seventeen or eighteen, however, this village malcontent made his way to nearby Tulagi island, headquarters of the British Solomon Islands Armed Constabulary. Vouza liked what he saw there: uniforms, drilling, rifles, and strict order. So began his twenty-five-year career as a colonial policeman.30 The disruptive boy became the rigidly disciplined man. In 1927, when some 200 Kwaio tribesmen slaughtered District Officer W.R. Bell and more than a dozen in his tax-collecting party on Malaita, revenge obsessed those policemen whose relatives had died in this ambush. Vouza, though, forbade his men to shoot prisoners or desecrate their ancestor shrines.³¹ Eight years later and now in command of the Santa Cruz District Constabulary, Lance-Corporal Vouza impressed the new British administrator: “You could see at a glance that Vouza was a magnificent specimen of humanity.” Perhaps it was this policeman’s “perfectly respectful air” that won over District Officer Macquarrie? Perhaps Vouza’s eyes—“a little hard and uncompromising when he was not smiling”—set him apart? These eyes “offered a hint that hardly more than a generation earlier his forebears were savages who might live only if they were strong and alert.” As with so many British colonial officials posted to “primitive” lands, Macquarrie mixed praise with condescension. After all, Vouza “made a quaint picture” as he strode across the beach in his tartan lava-lava, gazing with “childlike delight” at the wristwatch he had been given.³²

Vouza at war, however, proved far from child-like. Having retired to grow yams on Malaita in 1941, the sergeant-major returned to his home island shortly after the Japanese threat materialized. At first Martin Clemens did not know what to do with this volunteer. When Clemens labeled Vouza a “startling individualist, who overcame difficulties in original ways,” no compliment was intended. These initial concerns never entirely disappeared. As Clemens would later write, Vouza “fought his war as he saw fit.”³³

Nothing better exemplified his stubborn individuality than Vouza’s capture in mid-August 1942. By now Clemens’s most trusted scout, the sergeant-major fell into Japanese hands while on patrol. The miniature American flag he carried left no doubt about his allegiance. Determined to extract information about Marine defenses, Vouza’s tormentors began by baking him in the tropical sun. There followed rifle butts smashed into his face, bayonets thrust into his throat and chest, and staking over a nest of red ants. Left for dead, he somehow managed to chew through the grass ropes that bound him and then crawl three miles to the entrance of a Marine outpost. Vouza had revealed nothing. Against very long odds, he not only recovered but also returned to the detachment of scouts he led.³⁴

The narrative of Islander valor—the “ordeal of Vouza”—that built upon these revelations served two purposes. Obviously it celebrated the remarkable courage of one man. The governments of Britain and the United States vied to honor Vouza. Major General Vandegrift personally pinned the Silver Star medal, signifying gallantry in action, to his hospital gown. From the British government he received the George Medal for exceptional devotion to duty and earned membership in the Order of the British Empire (MBE) (Figure C.2). And it would be Vouza who represented the Solomon Islands Protectorate at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953. As late as 1968, the embassies of Britain and Australia made plain their wish to join the planning for this hero’s American visit.³⁵

But alongside such adulation lay another concern. Colonial Office logic held that if the son of savages could acquit himself so honorably, then British (and Australian) rule in Melanesia must have been enlightened. It was of course worrisome that colonial loyalties in the Solomons had frayed considerably during 1942 and 1943, as Britain’s inability to halt the Japanese advance grew all too clear. America’s brand of militarism, linked as it was in Islander eyes with wealth, generosity, and the visible mixing of black and white troops, appeared comparatively benign.36 Britain’s residual prestige in the western Pacific now rested on a more abstract discourse about its civilizing mission. Reflecting on that work in 1962, Charles E. Fox, missionary-anthropologist and historian, saw social change in the Solomons as evidence of colonial goodwill: “Fifty years ago there was killing everywhere, killing for cannibal feasts, killing for money, killing for glory and revenge.” The passing of these homicidal days was a blessing, Fox declared.³⁷

Figure C.2   Sergeant-Major Jacob Vouza, the most decorated Islander in the South Pacific War. The target of Japanese torture on Guadalcanal, Vouza refused to answer any question concerning Allied troop movements.

SOURCE: Courtesy, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, PXA 644, 433-453, item 447.

Yet the suppression of such violence earned little gratitude from the “natives.” Instead, the advent of the Pacific War had intensified political ferment across the archipelago. Beginning in 1946, the “Maasina [Brotherhood] Rule” movement, partly a quest for cultural regeneration and partly a push for independence from Britain, gave focus to a wide range of local grievances.38 Set against Maasina Rule demands, Vouza’s selflessness would have seemed especially important to honor. Inconveniently for the Solomons’ colonial government, however, Vouza was for a time sympathetic to the nationalists’ program. Indeed, the war hero was arrested (although never charged) on account of these sympathies.³⁹ Assorted ceremonial duties kept him too occupied to cause trouble thereafter. Over the rest of a long life—which ended in 1984, six years after the Solomons gained independence—the story of his valor remained compelling in part because Western images of the savage South Sea Islander, like Vouza himself, proved hard to kill.

.   .   .

Jacob Vouza could hardly qualify as a typical Solomon Islander. His celebrity nevertheless serves to complicate what savagery signified during the late colonial era. If the Pacific during the 1970s became “the last bastion of [Anglophone] colonialism,”⁴⁰ it did so partly because in British, Australian, New Zealander, and American eyes, Melanesians retained the “primitive” cultural sensibilities for which they had been both feared and patronized. The key question, as civil servants in London saw it, had become: Who could best look after these still semi-wild people? Such solicitude, rooted in a persistent underestimation of Islander capacity, remains common among European elites today. Their condescension rankles Pacific people. And it hinders cross-cultural cooperation at a time of crisis for all Oceania. The deniers of climate change notwithstanding, Pacific island nations now face environmental catastrophe in the form of rising sea levels and bleached coral reefs. Swift action to mitigate such threats demands that the West’s long-held views of Pacific “natives” be reconsidered.

It will be difficult to jettison some of these views. Consider, briefly, the fate of an American aristocrat who disappeared into the wilderness of New Guinea. This unlucky adventurer, twenty-two-year-old David Rockefeller, vanished somewhere along the coast of Dutch New Guinea (known today as West Papua) in 1961. Rockefeller’s catamaran may have capsized close to the tribal territory of the Asmat people. The Asmat, widely suspected of headhunting as well as cannibalism, may have seized him. We simply do not know. Yet ever since Rockefeller’s disappearance nearly sixty years ago, public confidence in the guesswork of sensationalists has not wavered: this young man must have been eaten. What would explain such faith in rank speculation? There is of course the guilty pleasure of contemplating the mighty brought low. Few of the super rich go missing in tropical backwaters, after all, and fewer still become meals for fierce primitives. Another possibility merits mention, however. Perhaps some fraction of the reading and viewing public clings to the idea that our planet still supports enclaves of wildness? Mere criminality, in the Western sense of that word, will not do; criminals are too familiar to us, and too numerous, to qualify as exotic. We wish instead to learn about the culturally outlandish, about “true” savages. We share more than most of us realize with the English-speaking mariners, missionaries, and explorers who reckoned that landing on uncharted Pacific shores would prove worth the risk.

This book has emphasized the damaging force of misrepresentation. Since the time of Captain Cook, European visitors to Melanesia have been quick to condemn the customs of Pacific Islanders. Voracious cannibals and stealthy headhunters, strangled widows and ambushed sailors: these were the most recognizable figures in a tableau that served to justify colonial intrusion. The colonizers of Melanesia, one might say, required monsters to banish.