Waves Across the South

[A whale] is at least equal in bulk to two full-grown elephants; often it is larger. Its neck resembles an elephant’s, and its nose too is rather like an elephant’s trunk, only much smaller. Its nostrils are on the crown of its head.[106]

Though separated by so much including their own subject positions, there are many parallels in the content and concerns of this set of sources which arise from the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The travels of Dillon and Bayly as well as Abu Talib and I‘tisam al-Din show us many if not most of the places that we will travel to in this book. Their stories encompass the breadth of the forgotten quarter and many of the scenes of what will follow. They also span the decades from the late 1760s to the late 1840s, a perfect introduction to the stories that are still to come. For these years constitute the age of revolutions as it turned to empire.

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS

Dillon and Bayly as well as Abu Talib and I‘tisam al-Din reveal how difficult it is to find an indigenous perspective in the age of revolutions. The surge of indigenous politics, for instance of Tongans or Māori, arose in response to the infiltration of invaders and the new possibilities of this period. Some colonial biases and ideologies were taken up to forge this politics. The revolts, warfare and reformist movements of non-Europeans in the Indian and Pacific Oceans should occupy centre stage for once in this book; they were formed with one eye on global politics. Note the references to the American Revolution or French Revolution among Persian writers or how these travellers interpreted political changes in India with respect to a broader sense of the age of revolutions. Despite the problems in identifying a pure ‘indigenous’, the standard narrative of this era of change needs to be reordered, starting with the Indian and Pacific Oceans and their peoples, if this period is to be understood more fully. Otherwise oceanic peoples become simple recipients rather than active agents in crafting the modern world.

It is too easy to see how revolutionary currents flowed through the Atlantic and then moved outwards to spaces including the waterways of the south charted by the travellers we have considered. Accordingly, the declaration of American independence in 1776 served as a template for the global dispersal of assertions of the rights of states and the freedoms of individuals and communities.[107] The anti-monarchical offensive launched by the French revolutionaries in 1789 spread ideas of patriotism and liberty and called for self-government. There was a stirring of independence movements in Spanish America with the Peninsular War, which saw the French occupation of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808, the dissolution of the Bourbon monarchy and the establishment of the Spanish Cortes from 1810 to 1814,. In Chile, the 1818 statement of independence held that ‘the Continental Territory of Chile and its adjacent Islands, form in fact and right, a free, independent and sovereign State’.[108] Meanwhile, Haiti declared itself to be a ‘black republic’, drawing on the rhetoric of the French Revolution and rumours of slave emancipation in the late 1790s. These waves of revolt in turn were inescapably bound to the war between France and Britain, even as revolution and war have had intertwined lives to the present. The French supported the Americans, and the British government stood against not only French republicanism, but also Irish, Dutch and Belgian revolt. Britian went to war with France in 1792.

Yet if we are to leave this sequence of Atlantic events to one side, the age of revolutions needs to be defined less by grand moments and more by changing ideology, self-understanding, warfare, labour and political organisation. All these were being reinvented, but continuously so rather than at specific junctures or turning points. This reinvention occurred in small islands as much as it did in large states and nations in the global North. Each of these spheres of experience – political, economic, cultural, military and intellectual – was increasingly calibrated with respect to the rise of empire. The globalisation of the age was making people feel like the very world was shifting. The shift from plural revolutionary possibilities to the consolidation of empire saw imperialists who were naturalists, surveyors, astronomers and time-keepers seeking to control the shape of the globe and knowledge of it.[109] Writers in this space of water, like those just encountered, were reconsidering their sense of the globe and how bits of sea and land fitted together or how hemispheres were bound.[110] They were doing this while reconsidering themselves and others in relation to notions of race, gender and status which were unpredictable and yet powerful.

The flux of the age which gave rise to our times operated at many levels – the individual, the state, the region and even the globe itself – and if so this is in keeping with the multiple senses of the word revolution itself. Indeed, at the end of the eighteenth century, while ‘revolution’ was said to inaugurate a change for all humankind, it was nevertheless also seen as a return to the preordained status quo, a revolving back.[111] It was a naturalised process – commentators discussed it, like those who follow them to the present, in the language of currents, waves, winds and lava. There was also the sense of a perpetual revolt, rather than an identifiable event in a bounded window in time and with a definite goal in prospect. Revolution worked across deep time, linking past and future and intervening in the natural condition of humans everywhere. It is clear that indigenous peoples and certainly Persian writers in transit across the seas had a wide sense of revolution.

Given all this, empire was a counter-revolt not only in its attempt to adopt the ideology, knowledge, restlessness and mobility of the age of revolutions.[112] It was also so in substantially closing down the width of possibilities of the age of revolutions. The British empire was in this sense an invasive corrective, a force which countered its alternatives: republicanism and the dream worlds of so-called ‘pirates’, pilgrims and private traders, in other words the Dillons and Abu Talibs of this age. The outburst of republican feeling in Mauritius, with the formation of revolutionary committees and clubs; the diplomatic connections of Oman, ranging from Dutch Batavia to France via the so-called republican regime of Tipu Sultan of Mysore in South India; the traders involved in sealing and whaling on Tasmania, including Americans and Frenchmen, with links across the far south of the Indian and Pacific Oceans; the rise of millenarian religious fervour, for instance among the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, as they faced the Gulf; the spread of republican ideas and Napoleonic government in Batavia; the building of ships in Rangoon: these were some of the symptoms of the age of revolutions in the Indian and Pacific Oceans before the rise of the British empire. In each case another future was in view; waters were traversed for religion, politics and trade, bypassing empire, or feeding into other visions. The success of the British lay in altering the course of this turbulent world of change, association, debate and protest. The British empire co-opted the dreams of the global South and sent these dreams into reverse gear.

2

In the South Pacific: Travellers, Monarchs and Empires

Four days had passed and there was yet no news of Comte de Trobriand. It was October 1793 and the French ships, La Recherche and L’Espérance lay impatiently moored twenty-five miles outside the Dutch foothold of Surabaya, now the second largest city of Indonesia.

The years of the French Revolution and the revolutionary wars saw a series of French exploratory voyages to the Pacific under dramatically different circumstances. To take three examples: first, there was an expedition under the command of Comte de La Pérouse (1785–8) and with the authority of an absolute monarch, Louis XVI; second came a voyage under de Bruni d’Entrecasteaux (1791–4), with the sanction of the National Assembly, and to search for the lost La Pérouse; and third, there was an expedition commanded by Nicolas Baudin (1800–3), under instruction from Napoleon. The Recherche and Espérance made up the second of this set of three voyages. The ships began their journey under the command of d’Entrecasteaux. But d’Entrecasteaux died about three months before the expedition reached Surabaya. Now the impact of the European age of revolution was about to overtake this voyage, for it too would soon be dissolved.

Waiting outside Surabaya, such was the crew’s state of mind that any European might have become ‘a compatriot’; ‘any Frenchman would have been welcomed as a member of [their] families’.[1] With two-thirds of the crew ill, mostly with scurvy, they longed for refreshment and comforting assurances. Alexandre d’Hesmivy d’Auribeau, now the commanding officer, also very sick from an unknown ailment, and in all likelihood under the influence of laudanum, sent out another boat, this time flying a white flag as a sign of peace. Eventually a Javanese chief brought out the news of the age of revolutions: Louis XVI had been executed and France was at war with its European neighbours, including the Dutch. A republic had been declared. All the men on the voyage – and unbeknown to many, one disguised woman – were Dutch prisoners of war. The European family had been torn apart, and the diplomatic etiquette surrounding the provisioning of ships in the Pacific no longer held.

What could d’Auribeau do? One option was to make the six-week journey across the Indian Ocean to Île de France [Mauritius], and this would certainly be the most honourable option and that preferred by his crew. Yet d’Auribeau was a royalist and Île de France was known for republican sentiment. Add to this, his crew were in tatters and the prospect of another long sea voyage must have been unpalatable. After at first giving the order to sail to Île de France, d’Auribeau’s quandary was solved in the nick of time. It was Comte de Trobriand, a naval officer on the expedition, bearing better news at last. The governing elite of Surabaya had contacted their superiors in Batavia, alarmed at the arrival of the French frigates at a time of war. Trobriand brought news of Batavia’s ruling that the ships were to be received as normal. But the conditions stipulated by the Dutch became tighter with the passage of time: d’Auribeau’s crew had to swear that they would not fight the Dutch and had to make themselves harmless by landing their armament. D’Auribeau also gathered all the crew’s journals and papers.

Over the months of 1793–4 that the expedition waited in limbo in Surabaya, the new commander became more and more compliant to the Dutch. Perhaps it was his fear that if he returned to republican France he would be executed. His complicity was perceived as a sign of conservatism among some others of his crew who had more republican leanings, and this was especially the case among the large group of savants, or men of science, who were on the expedition, with the egalitarian aim of adding to human knowledge. While some of the crew of L’Espérance refused to give up their weapons, the pilot, from Brest, where republicanism flourished, threw his journal into the sea; others attempted to hide or make copies of their papers. This concern with keeping their papers arose partly from their interest in owning the discoveries which had been dutifully recorded in them. The Dutch were alarmed at the prospect of a ship-board revolution and took over the vessels. The expedition’s termination came after an attempt was made by d’Auribeau to raise the royal flag.[2] It also came after the circulation of a rumour of secret orders from the National Assembly to some members of the crew.[3]

In December 1794, as the Frenchmen’s debts had by this time mounted, La Recherche and L’Espérance were sold by auction in Batavia.[4] D’Auribeau himself died from dysentery before republican envoys from Île de France could take him captive as a traitor. In a token of the times to come, and where British explorations would overtake French missions in these seas, the papers of the d’Entrecasteaux/d’Auribeau expedition were seized in St Helena by the British. They were eventually kept in London under the protection of Élisabeth-Paul-Édouard de Rossel, who was the final commander of the expedition, after d’Auribeau’s death. The British were particularly keen to detect any important material which they could use for their own imperial purposes.[5] Rossel was a royalist. He found London a good home in these tumultuous years until the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, after which he returned to France. Yet this was not the whole story. The republican Jacques-Julien Houtou de La Billardière, one of the surviving naturalists from the d’Entrecasteaux expedition, returned to Paris and ingeniously arranged with Joseph Banks, the British man of science, for the expedition’s natural history cases to be transferred there.[6] The remains of the voyage were broken up in this way between the British and French, between royalist and republican commitments.

To track what happened to this voyage is to consider the impact of news from Europe on the other side of the planet; it is to turn the history of the age of revolutions inside out. This set of expeditions as a whole demonstrates how a new French nation and people were coming into being and what the values were for which they stood. Unlike the explorations of the land-hungry British, these Pacific voyages by the French were generally characterised by a lack of interest in territory; science took on a greater and greater significance, as each successive voyage had a larger number of individuals devoted to scientific discoveries. The philosophical residents of these ships increasingly conceived of themselves as citizens and contributors to humanity at large rather than as grandees out on a pleasure cruise of discovery. The transition from La Pérouse and d’Entrecasteaux to Baudin is itself revealing: for unlike the two aristocrats who went before him, Baudin was the first French captain without noble birth to sail through the Pacific.[7]

Beyond the decks of these ships, however, indigenous peoples were actively reworking their politics. In this era of unprecedented globalisation debates about authority and government had a parallel life in the Pacific. Indigenous elites, referred to as ‘little Napoleons’ by dismissive Europeans, used this moment to extend their domain of rule. They used alliances with Europeans as well as the material objects, weapons and ideas that came from their encounters with them.

So here’s the argument to follow. Not only can the European age of revolutions be traced in these distant seas in the impact of the news from Europe, for instance at Surabaya, or even in the changing social composition and captaincy of crews. Once such a perspective is taken, it becomes possible to stand in the waves of the Pacific to see another more fundamental pattern of transformation in the waters of the South. Particularly striking is how these years saw the consolidation of Pacific monarchies.

Once Pacific royal lines were consolidated, as will be seen below, they could serve as the point of focus for colonial manoeuvring and diplomacy. Yet islanders could also use the notion of the monarch as a rallying symbol both for new politics and for resistance to invasion. Different conceptions of monarchy taken up by colonisers and indigenous peoples became a ground of controversy. The chapter ends with the controversial 1840 Treaty of Waitangi in Aotearoa/New Zealand and how Britain’s maritime empire came into the Pacific and sought alliances with Māori rangatira (chiefs).[8] Alliances between colonists and indigenous elites set in place definitions of sovereignty which were colonial; these definitions encompassed land fit for ‘improvement’ and people in need of ‘protection’. But Pacific islanders displayed their creativity in responding to intrusion of this kind.

FRENCH AND BRITISH VOYAGES IN THE PACIFIC AGE OF REVOLUTIONS

To return to the d’Entrecasteaux expedition, it was an impatient national interest that prompted its failed attempt to search for La Pérouse. A petition drawn up early in 1791 from the Société d’Histoire Naturelle bemoaned how France had waited for two years for the return of its famous explorer:

Perhaps he has run aground on some island in the South Seas from whence he holds out his arms toward his country, waiting in vain for his liberator … And the decent nation that expected to reap the benefits of his labors also owes him its concern and its assistance.[9]

La Pérouse hailed from a family of provincial nobles in Albi, far from the sea. He had seen action in the Seven Years War, against the British off the American coast and in the Caribbean and also in India against the Marathas. His instructions were driven by one of the recurrent themes in Pacific exploration of the eighteenth century. This was the idea that there were still large landmasses and strategic passages to be discovered in the Pacific. British Captain James Cook, who died in 1769 in Hawai‘i, had done his best to put to rest the idea of a great undiscovered Southland. Nevertheless, La Pérouse was still set the mammoth task of roaming the Pacific in its widest extent, including the north as well as the south; Louis XVI took a personal interest in the itinerary.[10] His agenda included the search for a north-west passage across America, linking the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. It included the survey of the coasts of Japan and Korea, and the exploration of the relatively unknown western side of Australia right up to Tasmania in case there lay there a continent rather than a large island. Tahiti, which was idealised as a paradise among Europeans, would have seemed a dominating landmark in La Pérouse’s mind. He was given detailed instructions to leave plants there which could be propagated to add to the comforts of other voyagers who would pass through this point of luxurious passage, known for its sexual liberty and lavish hospitality.[11] These were tall orders in the programme of settling European geographical knowledge of the Pacific. Before they could be accomplished La Pérouse’s expedition met with calamity.

La Pérouse’s ships were as solid and heavy as those chosen by Cook; and this was appropriate given that he was chosen to be France’s response to Cook. A French spy, taking the guise of a Spanish trader named Don Inigo Alvarez, sought out information about Cook’s expedition for La Pérouse’s mission. Alvarez found John Webber, Cook’s artist, a particularly useful source of information. He sat for a portrait by Webber. The expedition’s connection to the politics of the time is also nicely illustrated by one contemporary diarist who held that Napoleon Bonaparte expressed an interest in joining the voyage, along with one of his compatriots at the École Militaire.[12]

While the voyage was under way, the multiple eyes that watched it clearly bore heavily on La Pérouse. He wrote home in 1787: ‘The care we have taken to preserve our crews’ health has been so far crowned with even more success than that enjoyed by that famous navigator [Cook] … no one has died on board the Boussole and we do not have a single man sick in either vessel.’[13] And commenting on his geographical exploits, he wrote of ‘a new strait leading out of the Sea of Tartary’, of presenting to geographers ‘two islands as large as the British Isles’ and of reaching ‘in the same year’ Mt St Elias after visiting Easter Island [Rapa Nui] and the Sandwich Islands [Hawai‘i].[14] And on another occasion earlier in 1787: ‘I am sure His Majesty will not fail to realise that his vessels will have been the first to undertake this navigation.’[15]

La Pérouse was anxious about whether his discoveries would be overtaken by the British successors of Cook, and wrote home of six vessels sent from India to the north-west coast of America. This was in keeping with the competitive spirit of this era, which related not only to politics but also to intellectual exploits. In commenting on this news, La Pérouse noted that British exploration showed ‘evidence of the large means the English dispose of rather than of their judgement.’[16] Given the range of expectations heaped on it, the displeasure that arose when La Pérouse lost the whole of his crew – quite to the contrary of his boast about the lack of death to scurvy and other diseases – is indeed understandable. As the compiler of his journal, published from records sent home, wrote: ‘our new Argonauts have all perished.’[17] And an English compiler who had sailed with Cook noted that La Pérouse had operated in a state of continual anxiety because of the enormity of the task combined with over-ambitious timetabling which created ‘perpetual hurry’.[18]

D’Entrecasteaux, whose ships eventually ended up in Surabaya, came agonisingly close to success in his search for La Pérouse. Rumours had spread by this time that the navigator’s end had come at British anti-republican hands.[19] La Pérouse himself had touched at Botany Bay, now in Sydney, just five days after the First Fleet had reached New South Wales in 1788 to found a convict colony there. There he had met the British captain John Hunter. Could contrasting modes of engaging with the Pacific world, tied to French philosophy and British colonisation, indicate antipathy to French voyagers on the part of the British and so explain the disappearance? From Botany Bay came La Pérouse’s fateful last official letter, dated February 1788, promising to do ‘exactly what my instructions require me to do … But in such a way as to enable me to go back north in good time to reach the Isle de France [Mauritius] in December.’[20]

A monument commemorating the place from where the last news of the navigator was received was later erected at Botany Bay. Fish and chip shops and couples having their wedding photographs taken at the weekend vied for attention with the monument when I saw it. La Pérouse had made a plan to end his voyage in Mauritius, his second home, where he had bought land, and from where his wife Éléonore Broudou originated. He had married her against his father’s wishes.[21] The first news of La Pérouse reached d’Entrecasteaux in January 1792 while he was in Cape Town. In his journal he recorded a testimony received there via Mauritius of what had been seen by British captain John Hunter, in the Admiralty Islands, north of present-day New Guinea. Hunter later gave this account of his observations when at the Admiralty Islands:

Five large canoes came off from the nearest island, in each of which were eleven men; six paddled, and five stood up in the center of the boat … they held up various articles, which they seemed desirous of exchanging; such as lines, shells, ornaments of different kinds, and bundles of darts or arrows … One of them made various motions for shaving, by holding up something in his hand, with which he frequently scraped his cheek and chin; this led me to conjecture, that some European ship had lately been amongst them, and I thought it not improbable, that it might have been Mons. de la Perouse, in his way to the northward of Botany Bay.[22]

D’Entrecasteaux believed that his compatriots in Mauritius, where he had served as governor general, had misunderstood or exaggerated the news. Surely Hunter would have persevered in a rescue if he sincerely believed that he had discovered shipwrecked Frenchmen or at least the signs of their influence? The ‘sacred duties of mankind’ would have overruled other considerations of weather or even national difference.[23] Regardless of his doubts, d’Entrecasteaux made up his mind; he would sail to the Admiralty Islands. When he finally got there, in July 1792, he decided that the reports of La Pérouse were uncorroborated. The islanders, he wrote, wore ornaments of white shells and dark red belts, and these could have been mistaken for sword-belts. He also noted that the colour of their skin was distinctly similar to the colour of the uniform of the French navy.[24] An engraving drawn up by the voyage’s artist, Piron, shows an Admiralty islander, devoid of any context, except for a shell on his penis, a woven belt above his waist as well as on his arm, and woven wrist ornaments.[25] La Billardière, the naturalist, wrote that the most ‘inflated part’ of the shell was opened in order to lodge the penis, and that wearing the shell gave rise to ‘very conspicuous tumour’ of a white colour.[26] [Fig. 2.1].