14 
In which the Reverend Daniel Tyerman and Mr George Bennet attend a tea party in Raiatea, the Society Islands (4 December 1822)
How the spread of European provisions colonised taste
On 4 December 1822, the Reverend Daniel Tyerman and Mr George Bennet were delighted to take part in a ‘public festival’ held at the City of David settlement on the island of Raiatea, one of the Society Islands, north-west of Tahiti. The two men had come to the South Pacific on behalf of the London Missionary Society as part of a world tour of the society’s various mission stations. The festival, held on a large stone pier stretching out into the sea, made a picturesque spectacle. The ‘rough coral pavement’ had been strewn with a carpet of grass and awnings of bark had been rigged up in order to provide shade. The two visitors counted ‘two hundred and forty-one sofas, and about half as many tables’, ‘loaded with the rich provision which Nature throws from her lap at the feet of her children in these remote nurseries’.1
The missionaries remarked that the food was ‘principally vegetable’, although a few families brought along ‘baked hogs and fish’.2 But they were less interested in what the party was eating than in their table manners and general conduct. The two men were impressed by the islanders’ tablecloths fashioned out of native bark cloth, and the fact that cheerful family groups were seated on chairs and stools they had made themselves. They dismissed the dinner services as ‘motley’, but praised the hats and bonnets everyone wore, made out of plaited bark and, in the case of the women, decorated with colourful bark ribbons.3 Many of the islanders, they noted with satisfaction, were ‘decently’ dressed, and some even ‘gracefully clad’, although a few wore a ‘mongrel mixture of European and native habilments’; an aged chief had put his white shirt on over his black coat, ‘taking care that… the laps fall below the linen behind’.4 Various chiefs gave after-dinner speeches comparing the islanders’ ‘former gluttony, nakedness, riot, brutality, filthy customs, and obscene talk’ to their ‘present manner of feasting… dress… purer enjoyments… more courteous behaviour, the cleanliness of their persons, and the delicacy of their language’.5 Tyerman and Bennet were convinced that the islanders had been transformed by their missionaries into respectable Christians.
In 1822, the concept of respectability was still relatively new. The word had only just begun to be used to imply good character and that a person was ‘worthy of respect… by reason of moral excellence’, rather than simply describing someone’s position in the social hierarchy.6 Within the new definition, to be respectable was to be conversant with genteel behaviour. The London Missionary Society’s representatives were pleased to note that the Raiateans had embraced a range of behaviours that allowed them to claim entrance into the global community of respectable, God-fearing Christians.7 Their missionary had taught them well. Their manners were pleasant, they were clean and decently clad; they gathered together in family groups, the nineteenth century’s ideal social instrument for instilling moral behaviour; and they had adopted one of the central rituals of respectable British family life: tea-drinking.
Once the feast had been eaten, speeches had been made, and everyone had sheltered from a rain shower, the assembly reconvened to take tea, or, as the islanders called it, pape mahauahana, meaning ‘warm water’. Their ‘equipage for tea-drinking was quite as heterogeneous as the dinner-services… some had kettles, and others had tea-pots; these could manage very well together, if, in addition, one could raise a cup, a second a saucer, and a third a porringer. A few–a few only–had got tea, many had no sugar; but everyone had something–whether an ingredient or a utensil–employed in preparing or partaking this favourite refreshment.’8 The visiting missionaries were amused to notice that ‘one party heated water in a frying-pan’. The majority of the company collected their drink from ‘a large vat, or sugar-boiler, which was brought down to the shore, and filled with water slightly sweetened, but without any infusion of the Chinese plant’. The variety of drinking vessels included ‘pots, plates, delft-ware, porringers, cans, glasses, and even bottles’, but most used ‘their own native and elegantly-sculptured cups’ made from coconut shells.9 Tyerman and Bennet were so impressed by the sober yet joyous nature of the occasion that they were convinced that even the missionary society’s enemies would have been won over.10
‘The Reception of the Reverend J. Williams at Tanna the Day Before He Was Massacred’ (and eaten). In 1841 the islanders of Tanna put a sudden end to Williams’ mission to introduce South Sea islanders to tea, time-keeping and Christianity.
According to the resident missionary, John Williams, a more effective tool for conversion than a succession of prayer meetings was to instil in the islanders a number of civilised habits. He installed a large clock on the island and expected them to organise their lives according to its chimes.11 He gave them lessons in furniture-and dress-making, and he was a particularly firm believer in the civilising power of tea-drinking. Soon after he came to live on Raiatea, he made a trip to Sydney, returning not only with cows, calves, sheep, two chapel bells, decent clothes for the women, shoes and stockings, but also a selection of kettles, cups and tea itself. ‘When they have Tea,’ he explained, ‘they will want Sugar, Tea Cups–they will want a Table… then they will want seats to set on. Thus, we hope that European customs in a very short time will be wholly introduced in the leeward stations.’12
In Britain, the ritual of afternoon tea allowed middle-class women to participate in a respectable form of consumption. The purchase of a china tea service was not the profligate spending of the aristocracy but the measured acquisition of goods to make the home a comfortable sanctuary. When Josiah Wedgwood began to manufacture porcelain tea sets in his Staffordshire factory in the 1760s, the middle-class housewife’s respectable habits contributed to Britain’s economic growth.13 Williams was attempting to set a similar process in motion in the South Pacific. He brought a young man back from Sydney with him to instruct the islanders in the arts of growing tobacco and boiling sugar. Just as a craving for sweetness and smoke had encouraged industriousness among the British labouring classes, Williams hoped that a liking for these small luxuries would encourage the islanders to work hard enough to earn the money to buy them. The desire to consume would inextricably link them to the outside world, reinforcing their newly learned habits and providing constant motivation to continue to behave respectably. The missionary hoped that, eventually, belief would follow and that the habits of respectability would become the outward manifestation of the islanders’ inward transformation.14 He used tea as a bait to draw them into the capitalist economy. Throughout the Empire, colonial administrations used rations in the same way: to draw native peoples into their sphere of control.
In Australia, settlers began moving inland from their coastal settlements in the 1830s and 1840s, bringing with them flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. Prospecting for new sheep runs north of Melbourne along the Murray River in the 1840s, Edward Curr gazed out over ‘open, grassy, forest land’ extending as far as he could see. ‘The grass underfoot, as yet undefiled by flock or herd… as green and fresh as Eden, and the landscape generally bathed in a sort of hazy sunlight.’15 His vision of the country as untouched and empty was an illusion, of course. The area was home to the Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung and Walthaurong people, who had managed the grassland–and the animals that grazed on it–for centuries. In a series of violent spats and skirmishes, the Aborigines were dispossessed of their land. As the settlers created new sheep runs and cattle ranches, they wiped out traditional food sources, shut the Aborigines out of their hunting and foraging ranges, and cut them off from water holes.16
On the other side of the continent, the Yalonga people, who managed the land around the Swan River settlement that would eventually become Perth, tried to continue using their land according to their time-honoured seasonal pattern, despite the arrival of European sheep farmers on the high alluvial terraces. The grasslands were dotted with yam patches marked by thickets of dogwood. The Yalonga had been careful to preserve them from the fires they used to burn off the undergrowth, as yams were their chief food during the rainy season, when the earth softened sufficiently for them to dig out the long, thin, tasty roots. In 1833, George Fletcher Moore allowed them onto his upriver farm to harvest yams despite his disquiet that digging them out of the ground left it pitted with deep holes dangerous to his sheep. When the group arrived the following year, they discovered that the animals had eaten the yam vines to the ground. Instead, they began harvesting red gum blossoms to make into a festive drink. In May, the group were still on what Moore thought of as his land, now digging the root of a swamp flag to make a starchy flour that they baked into damper. Moore summoned the army, whose mere arrival drove the Aborigines away. They were now regarded as trespassers on their own land.17 When a Yalonga woman went onto William Leeder’s farm in 1836 to harvest reed rhizomes, the settler declared her ‘a notorious thief’.18
Recognising that agricultural settlement had encroached on native hunting grounds to the extent that it was no longer feasible for the continent’s Aboriginal inhabitants to live by hunting and gathering, the Australian administration felt obliged to hand out food rations.19 On outback farms the itinerant white workforce were paid ‘Ten, ten, two & a Quarter: 10 lb flour, 10 lb meat, 2 lb sugar, ¼ lb tea’. Out of these supplies, the men made the signature frontier meal of meat fry and damper, swallowed down with copious amounts of sweet tea.20 The Aboriginal feeding stations the government set up in frontier districts doled out similar rations–1 lb bread, 1/3 oz tea, and 1½ oz sugar–in return for ‘good behaviour’. Even though the ration did not include meat, when the Aborigines were found to have speared livestock, the rations were withheld. Tobacco was given out as a reward for compliance.21
Cattle and sheep stations were perennially short of cheap labour. In an effort to persuade Aborigines to come and work as shepherds and cattle herders, the ranchers began doling out rations to their dependants.22 In this way, the Aborigines were transformed into resident station workforces. In Queensland, the natives watched the cattle ranchers and learned how to train their dogs to round up the livestock and corral them in pens built out of scrub. Using these techniques, they were able to run off large numbers of the settlers’ cattle.23 To persuade them to desist, the ranchers included beef in the rations they gave out. In the end, it was easier to have a stationary population of natives living in a camp on the ranch than to deal with bands of Aborigines roaming about the property. Therefore any newcomer who wandered in was given a small parcel of food rations to entice them to stay.24
As we have seen with the Wychwood farm labourers who settled in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, land hunger–the desire to secure a stake in the land that could then be passed on to the children–was a major driving force propelling the nineteenth-century surge of European emigration. As Europeans began to move out onto the Canadian prairies in the 1870s, the native peoples watching gangs of men dragging chains, sighting straight lines between landmarks, and hammering posts into the ground must have felt the same sense of dread as the Catholics in Cromwell’s Ireland, where William Petty’s Down Survey presaged the arrival of English and Scottish settlers. Petty’s scaled maps, accurately showing the acreage, rental value and ownership of every scrap of land, set the standard for the many colonial surveys that were to follow.25 Demoralised by European diseases, alcoholism and malnutrition, the Canadian First Nations did not have the strength to defend their territories, unlike their compatriots to the south, who met American encroachment with violence.26 On the prairies west of Winnipeg, they did, however, show their contempt for the annexation of their land by ‘defecat[ing] on the top of every available stake’.27 The First Nations were corralled into reserves. Here, like the Australian Aborigines, they became dependent on handouts of meat, flour, sugar and tea. The government manipulated the rations shamelessly, withdrawing them when the people refused to co-operate and increasing them to encourage compliance.28
The same ration was doled out throughout the Empire to natives who worked as porters, servants and labourers. The universal distribution of the ration accustomed native peoples to British foodstuffs. Like the working classes in Britain, they fell under the spell of tea and sugar: those addictive groceries that staved off hunger and provided empty calories. In 1896, the issuer of rations at Mount Serle, about 600 kilometres north of Adelaide, made a desperate appeal for supplies of sugar and tea to be sent post-haste. Although he had plenty of flour, this did not appease the Aborigines. It was no use, he explained, ‘telling them I have no tea & sugar, they expect their usual ration every Week’.29
Not all indigenous peoples were reduced to abject subjugation by their encounter with white settlers. The New Zealand Maoris acquired white men’s boats for themselves and used them to go muttonbirding, gathering tasty fledgling shearwater from their nests on sea cliffs. They took to stock-raising and integrated the white potato into their diet, which helped to make them such ferocious warriors that the British had trouble defeating them. But even the Maoris were seduced by the white man’s foods, which needed far less time to prepare, and began to reserve their traditional foods for special occasions.30
The deluge of white settlers eventually obliterated the indigenous ways of life. By 1900, a brewery stood on the site of the Yalonga clan’s favourite campsite, and city blocks covered the ground where they had hunted for wallabies, lizards and crayfish and gathered yams and zamia nuts.31 The beans, squash and maize of the North Americans; the cured buffalo of the Plains Indians; the fern root, taro and kumara preparations of the Maori; the reed rhizome dampers and grilled frog of the Australian Aborigines–all were vanquished by the bland and unsophisticated frontier meal.32 During the nineteenth century, a comprehensive colonisation of taste took place. Salt-beef stew and damper or salt pork and doughboys were the first truly global meals.33 Made with foodstuffs sourced from all over the world, the British diet tied an ever-increasing proportion of the world’s population into the trading system of the British Empire.
On the tables of the colonial elites, canned salmon, tinned mushrooms, bottled peas, Carr’s Captain’s Thins, and Crosse & Blackwell’s pickles, sauces, jellies and jams were the tools of prestige that, as we saw in the previous chapter, enabled colonial officials to put on a theatrical performance of their British identity at their dining tables. The importance colonial officials placed on preserving their national eating habits meant that the dismal, pseudo-British colonial cuisine was accorded more respect than it warranted. Margery Hall was given a taste of her own medicine in Phutipura when a local Indian dignitary invited the Halls to dine. As we have seen, rather than serving some visiting civil service officials the family’s usual semi-Indian-style dinner of chapattis and pumpkin curry, Margery had concocted an English dinner out of roast pigeon, tinned vegetables and fruit. Likewise, her Indian acquaintance wished ‘to show off his skill and sophistication’ by demonstrating that he was capable of emulating British eating habits. Margery arrived hoping for a ‘nice curry’ only to be confronted with a ‘terrible soup, terrible roast meat–looked like fried entrails which I think it was–followed by very, very old cheese, and biscuits with little walkies [weevils] and their eggs clinging to the sides’.34 A number of other locals were invited to the dinner and ‘were presented with knives and forks for the first time… the food was shot all round the plates, the tables, themselves, their beards, and us. The cowards abandoned the chase and ceased to eat; the brave abandoned the knives and forks and used their fingers.’35
Margery’s account sought to entertain rather than disparage, but a lofty tone of distanced amusement was the standard British response towards any Indian who adopted British manners and habits. The London Missionary Society’s representatives displayed this attitude when they described the Pacific Islanders’ motley tea services and their eccentric use of European garb. For Tyerman and Bennet the islanders were children whose savagery could be glimpsed through the holes in their armour of respectability. That they should strive to emulate European ways was laudable, but the prospect of actually giving these ‘natives’ full admission to the club of respectable Christian gentlemen made the two men palpably uneasy. In India, Western-educated Indians fully conversant with British manners and customs posed a particular challenge. By mastering the outward symbols of British superiority, they claimed to also possess the inner qualities of an Englishman, and this strengthened their claim to political and social equality. As the Indian elite took on one British habit after another, officials engaged in an unedifying struggle to put them in their place, objecting, for example, when Indians in their presence did not remove their European lace-up shoes as they would have done if they had been wearing sandals, and poking fun at those who swapped their turbans for brimless caps so as to be able to doff them.36
Even though the British routinely dismissed the idea that the ‘natives’ might be able to produce a proper English meal, colonial elites persisted in their efforts. In British Honduras, the indigenous middle classes denigrated local ‘bush’ foods and favoured the consumption of imported European produce. As a result, they eschewed game and freshly caught shellfish in favour of tinned Australian rabbit and cans of American lobster. The ultimate absurdity was their purchase of ‘English’ boxes of imported tapioca (cassava granules) to make ‘shape’, a bland and archetypical colonial dessert, when cassava grew in the colony in abundance.37 Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, food imports made up 60 per cent by value of all the goods imported into British Honduras.38
Some upper-class Indian households employed an ‘English’ and an ‘Indian’ cook. When he was studying in Hyderabad in the 1930s, Prakash Tandon was invited to dine with a friend. He was disappointed when in succession watery soup, chops, fried fish, roast mutton and steamed pudding appeared on the table. However, he had mistaken for the meal itself what in fact was simply a demonstration that the family were au fait with British customs. As the servants were removing the dishes, his host turned to him and explained that this part of the meal was just a ‘touch of modern formality’. Prakash regretted that he had politely swallowed down the insipid fare, as now the servants brought in ‘an unbelievable succession of… pullaos, biryanis, naans and famaishes, rogan joshes and qormas… quails and patrtridges’. Having picked at the British dishes, the family fell upon these with gusto.39 Indian state banquets today mirror the practice of this Hyderabadi family. Although the majority of the dishes are a medley drawn from India’s different regions in an effort to showcase Indian culture to the visiting dignitary, the first course is always a European-style soup.40
In Africa, the influence of Western eating habits was at its greatest in the cities. Bread and rice were much easier to prepare than indigenous grains, and urban Africans became increasingly reliant on industrially processed wheat flour, white rice, mealie (maize) meal and sugar, all imported by colonial wholesalers.41 In the twentieth century, West Africa began importing rice from Indochina and wheat from the United States.42 Tinned sardines, condensed milk and white sugar penetrated deep into the African countryside. In Northern Rhodesia in 1939, the anthropologist Audrey Richards observed four young Bemba men who lived in a village close to a white settlement eating ‘white’ foodstuffs ‘apparently entirely for their kudos value’. After their customary meal of porridge and relish, they sat down at a table in full view of the rest of the community and shared a tin of sardines.43 Colonial contact inexorably drew peripheral areas into its sphere of influence, undermining indigenous eating cultures and integrating them into the commercial food world of the Empire. Richards commented: ‘it is an unfortunate fact that the diet of many primitive peoples has deteriorated in contact with white civilization rather than the reverse’.44