Wallis had been months at sea and needed water and fresh food. He sent a boat to the shore. It was stoned by tribesmen. As a warning, he fired a nine-pound cannon ball across the water and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Furneaux, fired buckshot at the stone throwers, wounding one of them in the shoulder. In search of safe anchorage Wallis then sailed to another part of the island. Again he tried to send a boat to the shore, again islanders threatened it with clubs and paddles, and again Wallis’s men fired. They killed one man and grievously wounded another.
There was a day’s silence, then a few Tahitians approached the ship in canoes. They bartered hogs, fowl and fruit, for nails, knives and trinkets. But then two thousand of them paddled out in three hundred canoes and circled round. Women made alluring gestures to the Dolphin’s crew, men sang, blew conches and played flutes. From a canopied canoe a chief handed up a bunch of red and yellow feathers for Wallis, while large canoes filled with men converged. Another chief held up a coconut-tree branch. There was a ‘Universal Shout’ and the men in the canoes showered the Dolphin with stones. Again Wallis ordered fire. He sprayed small shot indiscriminately at the Tahitians, who panicked, retreated, then reconverged. Wallis fired the ship’s great guns. The canoes scattered, regrouped, hoisted white streamers, and tribesmen armed with slings hurled two-pound stones at the ship.
Wallis smashed the force of the ship’s cannon at the islanders until they fled from the sea and into the forest. Next morning a party of English sailors landed in Matavai Bay. It was deserted. Close to the river’s estuary Lieutenant Furneaux stuck a British flag into the ground and in the name of His Majesty declared this land King George the Third’s Island.
A dozen Tahitians paddled out to the ship and in supplication offered gifts of hogs and green plantain leaves and made a speech which was not understood. Unchallenged, Wallis sent boats to the shore for water. When the islanders again dared approach the ship in canoes filled with stones, he ordered tremendous fire from all the ship’s guns. He bombarded the canoes, the woods, the hills where the women and children were hiding. Within minutes no creature was to be seen. He then sent armed boats to destroy all the moored canoes. Many were sixty feet long and had taken years of painstaking work to build.
Defeated, the Tahitians gave the English all they wanted: water, hogs, sex, fruit, vegetables. In exchange they were given nails, bits of iron and beads. A woman was brought to the cutter where this barter was taking place. Two men had to support her, for she kept collapsing. She stared in wonder at the English strangers, then wept. Her husband and three of her sons had been killed by their gunfire. She shook Wallis’s hand and gave him two hogs but would accept nothing from him in return.
8
Because supply ships called so rarely at Pitcairn and there were no shops, I wanted the blouse I’d bought in London to be a memorable present, stylish and special. Bligh, when he sailed to Tahiti, took cheap gifts to buy favours – a hundred pounds of glass beads, 168 mirrors, 72 shirts. But he knew that above all else the islanders wanted iron, for they had none of their own. ‘For traffic with the natives’ he took 1000 lbs of nails, 576 cheap knives, 2808 custom-made axes and boxes of saws, drills and files.
All that the Tahitians made came from their island. Their most effective armament was a slingshot of plaited coconut fibre, filled with stones and swung with terrific force round their heads. They made clubs, lances and spears from wood and shell, chisels from bone, nails from wood, needles from bamboo or fishbone and hammers and anchors from stone. They used conch shells as megaphones and built ocean-going boats from trees hollowed to hulls and joined by transverse beams. The largest of these accommodated 150 paddlers, surpassed any western boat for speed, and could withstand the most violent seas.
They fished at night by moonlight, their canoes illuminated by candle-nuts,* with lines made from coconut fibre and hooks of mother-of-pearl. They used the glittering hooks as artificial flies without bait. In the reefs they speared fish with sharpened bamboo. If they caught a large fish they hauled it with ropes from the sterns of the canoes on to an outrigger.
When weird-looking sailors arrived from nowhere in a magnificent floating town, they saw at first encounter how transforming iron might be. On his visit in the Dolphin, Wallis described a test he devised. He laid out a Johannes (a twenty-two-carat gold coin), a golden guinea, a silver crown, a Spanish dollar, a few shillings, some brass halfpennies, and two large nails, then invited the Tahitians to choose. They always took the nails first, then the halfpennies. They had no particular interest in the other coins. ‘Their thirst after iron is irresistible,’ he wrote. His crew then stripped the ship of its nails because they could buy any imaginable sexual favour for the price of a nail. ‘The men even drew out of different parts of the ship those nails that fastened the cleats† to her side.’
Bligh, in return for nails, wanted a thousand breadfruit plants from the Tahitians, he didn’t tell them why. His crew, like Wallis’s, wanted every imaginable sexual favour, as well as fresh water, wood, fruit, fish and hospitality in the sunshine. I, with my blouse for Rosie, signalled my desire for friendship with her in the hope she’d treat me well.
* The kernels of spurgewort, Aleurites triloba, the candleberry tree.
† Wedges of wood for securing ropes etc.
9
On Tahiti Bligh
