Waves Across the South

ASTOUNDING ITINERARIES FROM REVOLUTION TO EMPIRE

To return to Dillon’s voyage of 1825–6, the link to the age of revolutions becomes clear through the history of Dillon’s ship and its crew. According to its third mate, the St Patrick had been ‘taken and retaken by different belligerents’ involved in the independence struggles across Latin America in the early nineteenth century.[8] Under Dillon’s command, it sailed under Chilean colours to Calcutta and on leaving Valparaiso, the Europeans on board were recorded in the port register as ‘naturalised Chileans’.[9] The crew of the St Patrick thought it to be the second vessel to enter India under Chilean colours.[10] Dillon was entered in the register as ‘Don Pedro Dillon’. The ship also had an ‘enormous green flag with yellow Irish harp in it’. This meant that it could also fly Irish colours.

Around twenty British sailors who joined the crew had served in Chile’s war of independence against Spain, under the command of Thomas Cochrane, a British naval officer who played a pivotal role in the rebel navies of Chile, Peru and Brazil in the 1820s.[11] These men and others combined with a crew who had laboured under Dillon’s command in a previous voyage, in the Calder, from Sydney to Valparaiso. The Calder’s crew had included ‘eight Europeans and four Tahitians’.[12] Now, on the St Patrick, eleven Pacific islanders were said to be part of the crew.[13] In an act of mockery of the imperial establishment, Dillon named the Tahitians ‘Governor Macquarie’, after the governor of Sydney; ‘Major Goulborn’, after the colonial secretary of New South Wales, and so on.[14]

The Calder also had on board a Chinese cook and a Bengali steward.[15] Dillon’s fondness for Pacific islanders did not extend to the Bengali. The captain kept a sheet headed ‘Crimes’ on which he listed the Bengali’s wrongs, such as the breaking of crockery or the loss of spoons overboard.[16] Outbound from Valparaiso, a Marquesan on board the St Patrick died on the voyage, despite sailing for twelve months in the hope of returning to Tahiti, from where he could get back home.[17] When the St Patrick reached Calcutta, four of the eleven Pacific islanders who were part of the ship’s crew died.[18]

Also on the St Patrick was the son of the governor at Valparaiso, Miguel Zenteno. A disturbing story told by George Bayly, the third mate, who kept a record of his time with Dillon, involves Dillon’s wife Mary: ‘His wife lived on board and he very frequently gave her a thrashing …’[19] Bayly himself later wrote of his release from Dillon’s aggressive captaincy in reaching Calcutta: ‘never was a captive bird more pleased to get its liberty than I was.’[20] There were other captives on board: horses and donkeys bound for Tahiti were also on the St Patrick.[21]

The crew of the St Patrick illustrates the unlikely comradeship which was typical of this period.[22] These ship-board relationships were unstable, unpredictable and violent and based on gender, status and race and this too was pretty characteristic of this time. Despite being so typical, the St Patrick’s journey became important. Before docking in Calcutta, Dillon and Bayly solved one of the greatest mysteries of their age, the fate of the French navigator La Pérouse whose expedition had vanished in the Pacific. It was last sighted at the newly found colony of New South Wales in 1788.

When Dillon came to the island of Tikopia, the remains of an extinct volcano remotely located in the south-west Pacific, he looked for some old friends, whom he had left there when an officer on a different ship, the Hunter, in 1813. These friends had disembarked at Tikopia after a dramatic and now controversial episode. The Hunter had called in at Fiji to collect sandalwood and bêche de mer on a voyage between Calcutta and New South Wales.[23] Dillon resorted to force on that occasion in order to procure the goods. In a letter to the East India Company authorities of Bengal in 1826, Dillon noted that ‘all the Europeans [on the Hunter] were killed except myself, a man named Martin Buchert, a native of Staten [Stettin?] in Prussia, who had been on the island, and one of the ship’s Company, William Wilson.’[24] Elsewhere and sensationally, he noted that the Fijians were ‘cannibal monsters’ who wished to eat the bodies of those slain.[25] Dillon’s account of cannibalism in Fiji was exaggerated in retrospective retellings and there is much to recommend a recent interpretation which casts it as a narrative of self-delusion; some self-delusion certainly characterised much of Dillon’s life. [26] Cannibalism was too easily projected onto Pacific islanders in this era.

Now, fifteen years after the Hunter’s visit, when the St Patrick came to Tikopia in 1826, several canoes approached Dillon’s ship and there appeared a man called Joe, a ‘lascar’, who kissed Dillon’s hands and feet. He was the informant who helped solve the puzzle of the disappeared La Pérouse. The Hunter had dropped Joe off at Tikopia on Dillon’s previous visit.[27] Buchert, the Prussian, had also decided to stay on in Tikopia on that previous occasion together with ‘his wife, a Feejee [Fijian] woman.’ Between the time when Dillon dropped Joe and Buchert at Tikopia and the visit of the St Patrick, only a couple of British whalers had touched at Tikopia and they had visited relatively recently.[28]

Trade conducted by the likes of Dillon opened up the Pacific to new connections in these years, and the sudden appearance of whalers makes sense in this context. Joe himself is representative. ‘Lascar’ was a racialised term for non-white seamen, which originated from Persian via Portuguese. Joe’s South Asian heritage is clear from how Bayly told the story: ‘He appeared to have almost forgotten his native language and spoke at random, Bengallee, English, the Fijee and Tucopean.’[29] Elsewhere he was described as ‘married on the island and comfortably settled’.[30] Bayly noted that Joe’s own ‘countrymen’, presumably South Asians on board the St Patrick, could not understand him. Buchert himself was an example of the unexpected figures one could encounter in the Pacific of the early nineteenth century. Bayly noted: ‘His only garment now was a mat round his middle. He was tattooed all over his body and had several marks on his face.’[31]

The artefact which solved the mystery of the lost navigator was around Joe’s neck. It was an old silver guard, which in Bayly’s account he managed to buy for a bottle of rum. According to Dillon, Joe sold it for ‘a few fishing hooks to some of my people’.[32] When it was examined, Dillon thought he could decipher the initials of La Pérouse.[33] The sword guard was taken back to Calcutta. In writing to the powers that be in India, Dillon reported that the sword guard had come from a neighbouring group of islands, ‘a large group of islands under the general name of Mallicolo’. It was a two day canoe sail to the leeward of Tikopia and the islanders of Tikopia ‘were frequently in the habit of making Voyages’ to it. Joe had been there and reported that he had met two Europeans who spoke the language of the islanders, a tantalising account for anyone in search of a lost expedition. Dillon wrote:

‘[Joe] also saw in the possession of the Natives, this Sword Guard, several chain plates belonging to a Ship, also a number of Iron bolts, five Axes, the handle of a Silver fork, a few Knives, Tea Cups, Glass beads and Bottles, one Silver spoon with a crest and a cypher and a Sword; all of French manufacture.’[34]

In Calcutta, the sword guard was inspected by the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal; the society stood at the head of intellectual inquiries, scientific, geographical and ‘oriental’, undertaken in India. It was formed in 1784 by William Jones, an orientalist and judge. One of the society’s meetings was attended by Dillon. The society responded to Peter Dillon’s report by urging that all means be used to discover whether any of La Pérouse’s crew were still alive so that they could be restored to their home country. This was consistent with the ‘motives of humanity’, a resonant phrase of the age of revolutions, which they alleged were shared by ‘the whole Indian community’. The Royal Asiatic Society saw itself as presiding over such inquiries in ‘this quarter of the Globe’. It also set forth its motivation, in confident imperial rhetoric, to ‘extend our knowledge of the earth and its inhabitants, and to spread through yet barbarous lands the blessings of civilization’.[35]

It was not only this relic which created a stir in Calcutta when the St Patrick moored. Two Māori men who were sons of chiefs had taken passage with Dillon after the St Patrick stopped in New Zealand for timber, adding even further to the incredible itineraries which lace this story. The press coverage was larded with hype. The Calcutta newspaper the Bengal Hurkaru noted that the ship had on board Brian Boroimbe, a ‘New Zealand Prince, who considers and by his genealogical tree can prove himself to be a lineal descendant from his namesake, the celebrated King of Ireland [Brian Boru], who died gallantly fighting for his country against the Danes at Clon’. Boroimbe’s appearance was said to be ‘prepossessing’ and his ‘demeanor in every respect indicative of the ancient and noble blood that flows through his veins’.[36] This description is in keeping with the way Europeans cast Pacific-islander elites as ‘noble savages’, indigenous peoples untouched by the corruption of civilisation. Māori were particularly in danger of being cast like this. Also among the arrivals was ‘His Excellency Morgan McMurroch, aid-de-camp’. The so-styled Prince was feted in Calcutta, taken to breakfast, to dinner with the merchants in the settlement, and to a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. He was received by the Acting British governor general in the official country residence in Barrackpore, where the Pacific islanders with Dillon had to perform dances and chants. Boroimbe was given a captain’s uniform, a sword, and a medal carrying the likeness of George IV, which he proceeded to wear around his neck.[37]

Even as the Indian and Pacific Oceans were being brought together by the likes of Dillon, on the same ships, indigenous peoples were making unprecedented long-distance travels. They were using these voyages for their own purposes. At Aitutaki, for instance, a ‘great number’ of Pacific islanders came aboard the St Patrick wanting to join the crew; ‘they all had a great desire to see the world’.[38] This demonstrates the agency of the peoples of the Indian and Pacific Oceans within the age of revolutions and on expeditions like Dillon’s voyage.

In 1826, Calcutta was gripped by its war in Burma with the kingdom of Ava. Anxieties connected to this war in Calcutta saw Morgan attacked as he landed from the St Patrick. According to a newspaper report, onlookers were ‘struck with the form of the man, which combined Herculean strength with perfect ease, grace and symmetry’.[39] When he landed the chaukidars or gatekeepers drew their scimitars, thinking that Morgan was a Burmese general coming to Calcutta as a spy. Dizzying globalisation could generate mistaken identity. The gatekeepers thought it ‘not improbable that his army would follow in the night, and storm Fort William’.

Some Europeans, or in another account, Peter Dillon’s clerk, ‘promptly interfered and [Morgan’s] hand was arrested in the act of dealing a death-blow’.[40] Morgan was marched to the police, followed by what the newspaper recorded to be three thousand Indians. This story was surely embellished by the Bengal Hurkaru, in keeping with the newspaper’s other comments on Morgan. It reported that Morgan had a ‘very just idea of the initiatory principles of Political Economy’ and that he was ‘determined to perfect himself in the science before he leaves the Presidency [of Bengal]’. He had asked, it was alleged, for instruction in the making of railroads, steam coaches, wheels and the principles of phrenology, the science of the head. The India Gazette, meanwhile, poked fun at Boroimbe, noting the rumour around town of the cannibal propensities of New Zealanders, which once again highlights the currency of the idea of cannibalism. ‘[A]t least during the time that he has been on shore here, [he] has fed very much like a good Christian.’[41]

Dillon’s travels with Māori indicate the reach of Pacific islanders, including Māori serving on board sealers and whalers, into the heart of the Indian Ocean.[42] The way in which indigenous peoples used these encounters is evident elsewhere too. Before the St Patrick had reached Calcutta or indeed Tikopia, it had called at Tahiti. Here, Dillon was surprised to find two other friends, Takai and Langi. Takai and Langi had met Dillon in Tongatapu on a previous voyage. They had served as intermediaries and Takai had even navigated the Calder, taking charge of the ship’s passage. Dillon had last seen the pair in Sydney where they had attracted commentary in the press.[43] They had converted to Christianity, come to Tahiti with a British missionary and now hoped to return to their own islands to convert their peoples.[44]

The trade that Dillon undertook also fed into indigenous politics. When the Calder was lost in Valparaiso Dillon recouped some of the cost by selling a collection of Pacific weapons which were on board the ship.[45] In the opposite direction of exchange, Dillon brought muskets and gunpowder into the Pacific and especially to New Zealand. When the St Patrick reached New Zealand, Bayly wrote: ‘for Muskets or Gunpowder we could procure anything that the Island produced’. The acquisitive Dillon busied himself in procuring spars which were valued for the making of masts. Yet, the trade in spars for muskets had the potential to misfire, and Bayly wrote of a conspiracy:

All of our crew were employed in the Hold stowing away the spars as fast as they came off, except when a number of canoes more than ordinary came off; when all hands were immediately called to quarters, Captain D. having been lately informed by a native (who had been in on the whole plan) of a conspiracy which had been formed on the St. Patrick’s former voyage, to take the Ship and murder all hands on board; and that the Chief whom Captain Dillon had behaved so kindly to in taking him to South America and procuring him a vast quantity of presents [perhaps muskets?] was at the head of it.[46]

In turn, the Māori who visited Calcutta were travelling in the shadow of an important leader and fighter, Hongi Hika. In 1820, Hongi had visited London from New Zealand. His story is a clear indicator of how these new voyages were opening up a terrain of new politics for indigenous peoples. Hongi was presented to the king and finally returned home with muskets, powder and shot. ‘After [Hongi] returned to his native country,’ Bayly noted, ‘he gave out that he would never desist from killing and eating his countrymen till they made him King the same as King George in England.’[47] Accordingly, Boroimbe and Morgan too were to ‘try their fortunes in obtaining Muskets and Gunpowder from the Merchants of Calcutta’.[48] Beyond New Zealand, at various other locations, Dillon got into conversations with indigenous elites and was enrolled, as in New Zealand, within local power structures and contests. Bayly noted how Dillon entertained ‘Queen Pomarrè Vahine’ and ‘all the Royal Family’ of Tahiti when the St Patrick called there to find Takai and Langi. ‘They were received with a salute of musketry, and escorted down to the state-room. Here I was instructed to exhibit all our treasures.’[49]

The spread of the European musket across the far reaches of the Pacific in this period indicates how European wars and Pacific island contests were interrelated; the techniques and scale of war were shifting in the early nineteenth century. Those who went to war with Europeans as well as those fighting neighbouring regimes or political elites had to arm themselves as Europeans did. British imperial war was tied together with an extractive state and new ways of gathering information. In New Zealand, the rate of exchange adopted by the St Patrick was twenty spars for one musket or a proportionate quantity of gunpowder; on one occasion, however, 166 spars were purchased for 58 pounds of gunpowder and fifteen hatchets.[50] It is important not to romanticise the encounters between people like Dillon and the residents of Asia, Africa and Oceania because of the consequences that followed in their wake.

Note, for instance, the conversation between Boroimbe and Dillon at Budge Inn in Calcutta. Why, Boroimbe pondered, did the staff treat Dillon with such attention? When it was explained to him that this was because Britain had taken the country, Boroimbe observed: ‘You will come and take my country too, I have no doubt, as you have taken this.’[51] Boroimbe was absolutely correct: these wandering maritime paths, which traversed the Indian and Pacific Oceans, were closely connected to colonisation. The Bengal Hurkaru, in reporting Boroimbe’s visit to Barrackpore, imagined him returning home to New Zealand and providing a safe haven for British ships which would touch in any territory under his control. It added this line in support of Boroimbe’s credentials as a friend of Britain: ‘The dominions over which Boroimbe’s father presides extend from Cape Palliser to the River Thames, and the largest, straightest and most durable spars in the world are easily procurable there …’[52] The reception accorded to Māori on Dillon’s voyage pointed in turn to the prospect of an empire of trade riding the waves, an empire that would counter the age of revolution’s many possibilities.

Elsewhere what would happen to Māori lands was part of the discussion. The India Gazette hoped that Boroimbe would be sent back not with weapons but with ‘the instruments of agriculture and husbandry, and duly instructed in their use, and be provided with the means of raising in his own country, grains, vegetables, and fruits, that are not now indigenous to it’. Dillon, himself, in advocating the further colonisation of New Zealand in 1832 sketched the possibilities of a web of commerce. He envisaged that New Zealand would be a base for Pacific trades, including sandalwood, sperm oil and coconut oil, and mother-of-pearl, which was in demand on the China coast and in Manila. Timber could be traded from New Zealand to Chile and Peru. Empty convict ships arriving in New South Wales, he envisaged, could be filled with products like sandalwood, bêche de mer, shark fins and rope, which could be sent to India or Europe.[53]

It would be wrong to see the Calder and St Patrick as passing without company across the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The seas were becoming populated in new ways as Europeans were added in greater numbers and with greater reach. While the number of official British vessels in these seas was still small, nevertheless ships of all kinds came upon each other, private and official, British and non-British.[54] Valparaiso had a series of American and British vessels in harbour at the start of the voyage of the St Patrick, and during Bayly’s time there a Spanish brig was brought to harbour by a crew that had mutinied, murdered their officers and wished to deliver the vessel to the patriots of Chile.[55] This episode was the talk of Valparaiso. At Tahiti, the St Patrick came across a British whaler, the Fawn, in addition to some American whalers and a merchant ship; at Huahine they encountered a 300-ton American whaler and in New Zealand they met the Emily, another whaler, the Larne, a British ship of war and the Sir George Osborne, on the way to pearl in the Marquesas.[56] In the East Indies, while between Papua New Guinea and Christmas Island, the St Patrick came across an American ship trading between Philadelphia and Canton.[57] After escaping the St Patrick as a freed bird, Bayly took up work on the Hooghly bound for London via Colombo and the Cape of Good Hope.[58]

Across these seas in the early nineteenth century ships kept track of each other and spoke with each other. Ships compared their passages between ports and determined which arrived earlier. Private traders watched the prospect of rival traders. They scrutinsed what the British colonial state was up to, in shipping convicts to Australia and making British bases in the Cape, Ceylon and Mauritius. They also watched and even participated as the British pushed against rival empires, political elites and private agents. On St Helena, Bayly wrote of how his vessel ‘kept company’ with another ship the Harriet; there was also an American vessel bound to Amsterdam with coffee from Batavia. On the way back home it came upon a French ship bound to Nantes.[59]

By the date of the Hooghly’s journey home, British fears of rivals were certainly abating. Yet in these busy seas, aggression and anxiety about the French still lay under the surface. There was a site which reassured the British of how they were overtaking the French in these oceans of the south. It was the tomb of Napoleon on St Helena. As soon as the Hooghly anchored at St Helena, the passengers went en masse to see the tomb. Napoleon had been exiled here after his defeat at Waterloo in 1815. He died on St Helena in 1821.[60] If Dillon named his child after Napoleon, a host of other Britons sought in this way to take up the legacy of the Napoleonic wars. The British empire adopted some of the features of the Napoleonic empire, a militarised logic of integrating territories combined with a rhetoric of free trade.[61]

Yet anxiety and aggression about the French could sit together with Anglo-French friendship. Indeed Dillon’s return voyage from Calcutta to the Pacific, to the site of the disappearance of La Pérouse, attracted ‘grateful acknowledgement’ on the part of the French authorities at Chandernagore [Chandannagar], which was a French foothold in India returned by the British to the French in 1816. Dillon now took on board a representative of the French regime in India.[62] The Hobart Town Gazette of 7 April 1827 noted the docking of Dillon’s vessel, which arrived with the official patronage of the East India Company:

Yesterday arrived for refreshment, the Honorable East India Company’s ship Research, P. Dillon, Esq. commander (mounts 16 guns and carries 78 men), from Calcutta, 23d of January, on a voyage of discovery to the South Pacific, in search of the survivors of the French frigates La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, under the late Count de la Perouse. Passengers, His Royal Highness Brian Boru, a New Zealand prince, Morgan M’Murrah a New Zealand nobleman, secretary and aide de camp to the prince; Captain Speck of the Bengal Army, who remains here for the recovery of his health, and Monsieur Chaigneau of the French Consulate department.[63]

Despite the fact that this was an official voyage, it also had on board 100 muskets intended for ‘the ships armament and [as] presents to native chiefs’.[64] The official instructions were set out in careful detail with the intent of restraining Dillon’s entrepreneurial spirit. They also stated that firearms should be used against islanders only in ‘cases of extreme danger’. Dillon was warned against too much interaction with the Pacific islanders on board and also on shore: ‘The Board deem it proper to warn you against placing too much confidence in the Natives who accompany you from this Port.’[65] This new expedition also had within its aims the charting of this unknown stretch of the Pacific. Once again there was a link to the war in Burma: a medical ‘dresser’ who had also served in Burma was attached to it.[66] Dillon was instructed by his patrons to supply the naturalist on board the vessel at noon each day with the latitude and longitude of the ship. This proved a point of tension in a major disagreement between Dillon and this naturalist, Dr Robert Tytler, which led to a trial in Van Diemen’s Land [Tasmania].[67]

As Dillon’s story proceeded then – and as the grand voyages of the Pacific such as La Pérouse’s gave way to the early nineteenth-century dispersal of settlers, traders, missionaries, governors and judges too – empire came into the space of revolution. To trace the trail of the St Patrick in 1825 and the voyages of Dillon and Bayly on either side of this journey is to find indigenous politics; dizzying and unexpectedly global itineraries spanning Latin America, the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand, India and Africa; the expansion of knowledge and reason and their relation to colonialism; the spread of British trade and rhetorical commitments to humanity and civilisation; and the spread of war, weapons and violent contests. This is all characteristic of the age of revolutions. Yet as we move across this tale, we move from revolution to empire, and the British empire emerges as a counter-revolutionary force that sought to adopt within itself the language and politics of what went before it. Indeed, this empire took charge of the very coordinates of this part of the Pacific. Even eccentric Dillon sought to insert himself within this new imperial structure.