and China was fraught with reefs and islands, whereas the Outer Passage contained uncharted reefs and islands, which made sailing on a wooden boat particularly interesting.
In 1788, after delivering the very first convicts to Sydney Cove, Capt. Thomas Gilbert of the Charlotte and Capt. John Marshall of the Scarborough were chartered by the East India Company to ferry tea from China to England. On the way, they passed Aranuka, Kuria, Abaiang, Tarawa, and Butaritari. Gilbert and Marshall decided to call these islands the Gilbert Islands. They did this because they could. The next island group they encountered to the north was called the Marshall Islands. Why not, they figured. In the 1820s, the name Gilbert Islands was validated by the Russian cartographer Adam von Krusenstern, and so to this very day, the islands retain the name of Gilbert, which I think is a great shame. When it comes to naming things, vanity and flattery are dull motivations best suited for deciding on a child’s middle name. Much more interesting are the descriptive names that suggest a story or happening of interest. Captain Cook was pretty good about this. From him, we have Cape Good Success, Cape Deceit, Cape Desolation, Adventure Cove, Devil’s Basin, Great Black Rock, and Little Black Rock, all in Tierra del Fuego, names that suggest that rounding Cape Horn in the late eighteenth century was probably a fairly up and down experience. So too was getting stuck within the Great Barrier Reef—Cape Tribulation, Thirsty Sound, Isle of Direction, Wednesday Island, Thursday Island, and finally, Providential Channel. In New Zealand, Captain Cook was good enough to leave us with Hen and Chicken Island, Cape Kidnappers, Poverty Bay, Murderer’s Bay, Cannibal Cove, Cape Runaway (clearly, this was an eventful trip), and, my favorite, Young Nick’s Head. In 1777, Cook found himself spending Christmas on an uninhabited atoll, and so it was inevitable that he would call it Christmas Island, the only island he visited that would one day become part of Kiribati. The crew caught fish and turtles, but Cook was not much impressed with Christmas Island. “A few Cocoa nut trees were seen in two or three places, but in general the land had a very barren appearance.” No doubt, early Pacific explorers came to the same conclusion, which is why Christmas Island would remain uninhabited until well into the modern era.
Gilbert and Marshall were a little more taken by what they saw, particularly the I-Kiribati sailing canoes, which Marshall called “lively, ingenious and expert.” Still, they could not persuade the I-Kiribati to come aboard, nor did they think it wise to seek an anchorage. With no reason to tarry, they sailed on to China, which they called Gilbertland. In 1799, the explorer George Bass, traveling aboard the Nautilus, reached Tabiteuea and Abemama. He described the I-Kiribati as “a brown, handsome and courteous people.” James Cary, captain of the American ship Rose, wrote of his encounter with the I-Kiribati off Tamana in 1804: “By their behavior, we suppose they never saw foreigners before. They were inoffensive and knew not the use of firearms and seemed pleased with the reception they met with from us.”
By 1826, when the American whaler John Palmer alighted upon Beru and Onotoa, all of the Gilbert Islands had encountered, in one manner or another, the world of the I- Matang. These first encounters were almost always benign, though they no doubt left the I-Kiribati perplexed. In the book Kiribati—Aspects of History, which is the only book on Kiribati written by I-Kiribati, Ahling Onorio recounts the arrival of the I-Matang on Makin:
It is said on Makin that the coming of the I-Matang was foretold many days before the actual voyage by old men who could interpret signs in the rafters of the maneaba, which was then under construction. When the strange sailing ship approached the island, the people were frightened and called upon Tabuariki (the god of thunder) to cause a great storm to blow the ship away. It is said that Tabuariki succeeded two times in preventing the ship from approaching Makin, but the third time the ship arrived safely and anchored off the island.
The people of Makin were both frightened and astounded at what they saw. They had their weapons ready, but were mostly curious about the strange object. Because of its U-shape, they called the boat “te ruarua” (babai pit), and when several boats were lowered into the sea they exclaimed “te ruarua has given birth.” When several oars came out from the sides of the boats, the bewildered people shouted, “Look, its fingers are falling off.” They hid when the boats landed and the men inside came ashore.
According to the story, the people were even more astounded at what they then saw. The gleaming white beings with strange color hair began to rub their bodies with something that, when mixed with water, made white foam like the waves breaking on the shore. Then they wrapped their bodies in clothes—very strange to the Gilbertese since they were used to going naked. When the strangers put on their shoes the people later compared them to hermit crabs—they hid their feet inside things which looked like shells.
Curiosity finally overcame the Gilbertese. They came out of their hiding places to investigate more closely these new beings and the strange things which they had brought with them. As the story goes, they were especially interested in the slippery, fragrant substance which formed white foam when wet. It is said that several people started biting bits off and soon several became sick. Thus, this first contact with the Europeans had a dramatic ending—the soap victims became the patients of these strange beings.
What this story illustrates, of course, is how really sick and tired people were of eating fish. Nothing else could explain the peculiar urge to eat a bar of soap that had just been used to wash the critter-ridden body funk of a pale and hairy sailor. But as first contacts go, these early encounters between I-Matang and I-Kiribati were remarkably untroubled, particularly when compared to elsewhere in the Pacific, where often enough it was cannon shot that marked the beginning of a new era for the islands. This would not last, of course. The islands of Kiribati, as became apparent after even the most cursory exploration, had almost nothing of value to the early-nineteenth-century I-Matang. They lacked fresh food, potable water, gold, silver, spices, fur, fabrics, sandalwood, just about everything that drove trade and exploration during that era. What Kiribati did have, however, was women.
By the 1830s, whalers had begun cruising the waters of the southern Gilberts. They were after sperm whales, and after months of hunting sperm whales, the whalers got to thinking and they drifted over Kiribati-way. I-Kiribati women soon became renowned for their beauty, and fortunately for the whalers, some of the islands had a class of women called nikiranroro, fallen women who were not quite married and not quite virginal, and these were made available to the whalers. The cost for their services was typically one stick of tobacco, and it was not long before the I-Kiribati became mad for the weed. Soon, whenever a ship was spotted nearby, the I-Kiribati would yell te baakee, te baakee! They gorged themselves on any tobacco that made it to the islands, smoking it, chewing it, even swallowing it, and here things began to go wrong. The whalers soon discovered that there weren’t that many women of the nikiranroro class and that the licentious reputation of Tahiti was well deserved, and like apparently every other male who rounded Cape Horn in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the whalers too began seeking most of their entertainment in Polynesia.
This was good for Kiribati, which was not nearly as afflicted by the epidemic of venereal diseases that racked Tahiti. But, as I can attest, nicotine withdrawal can make one decidedly grumpy. This is why the crew of the Columbia found themselves taken hostage one day by nic-fitting I-Kiribati, who refused to release them until they received one hundred pounds of tobacco. Soon the I-Kiribati developed a reputation as devious marauders, a reputation that was no doubt enhanced by the local custom of considering anything and anybody to wash ashore, ships included, as fair game. In addition to the assault on the Columbia in 1846, raids were conducted on the Triton (1848), the Flying Fox (1850), and the Charles W. Morgan (1851), among others, and whalers soon began to avoid particular islands all together, including Tarawa, no matter how great their lust or hunger. A number of these attacks, however, could probably be attributed to simple misunderstandings. Stealing or borrowing? There can be a gray area. The I-Kiribati perceived property differently than the Americans and the English, two societies whose very foundations were based on property. And being surrounded by canoes does not necessarily mean one needs to blast them with cannon shot, which is what the captain of the Charles W. Morgan ordered when he found himself becalmed off Nonouti.
Nonetheless, the I-Kiribati reputation for forging cunning attacks on visiting ships proved to be well deserved. It wasn’t the ships themselves they wanted, but their tobacco and their parts. If taken, the vessel was stripped of iron and nails, weapons and wood, tools and sails, and what was considered useless was allowed to rot on the reef.
