The South Seas : A Reception History from Daniel Defoe to Dorothy Lamour 9780739193365, 9780739193358

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The South Seas

The South Seas A Reception History from Daniel Defoe to Dorothy Lamour Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brawley, Sean, 1966The South Seas : a reception history from Daniel Defoe to Dorothy Lamour / Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-9335-8 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-9336-5 (electronic) 1. Oceania--In literature. 2. Oceania--In art. 3. Oceania--History. 4. Oceania--In motion pictures. I. Dixon, Chris, 1960- II. Title. PN849.O26B73 2015 700'.45895--dc23 2015001597 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For J. B., G. C. D., and Nikki.

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xi

1

Beginnings: Defoe, Dampier, and Discovery

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

America’s South Seas Herman Melville’s Pacific Imaginings San Francisco, Art, and Robert Louis Stevenson Finding New Guinea The Colonial Endeavor and Australia’s South Seas The Fair, the Stage, and the Song The Great War and the Lost Generation A South Seas Education: Platform Speakers, National Geographic, and Margaret Mead South Seas Tourism Hollywood Encounters the South Seas Cinematic Escapes: The South Seas Adventure Film HMAV Bounty and the Great Depression Pardon My Sarong: The Arrival of Dorothy Lamour

10 11 12 13 14

Conclusion: The South Seas and Tides of Favor Bibliography Index About the Authors

vii

1 11 25 43 59 75 91 115 135 157 171 193 215 237 255 259 287 301

Acknowledgments

As with our previous projects, the completion of this book provides a welcome opportunity to acknowledge the assistance we have received along the way. At Massey University (New Zealand) in the early 1990s Barrie Macdonald and Kerry Howe helped pique our interest in the ways in which the Pacific has been represented and understood. We’re grateful to Patricia O’Brien (Georgetown/Australian National University) for providing an incisive and constructive reading of this manuscript. Sean’s colleagues, initially at the University of New South Wales and then at Macquarie University, and Chris’s colleagues, firstly at the University of Newcastle (Australia) and, more recently, at the University of Queensland, have proved that collegiality survives despite ever-diminishing resources and the plague of “administrative restructures.” We owe an enormous debt to librarians and archivists at various institutions, in both Australia and the United States: in Canberra, the Australian War Memorial and the National Archives of Australia; in Sydney, the Fisher Library (University of Sydney) and the Mitchell Library; the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.); the New York Public Library; the Rare Book and Manuscript Collections Library, Duke University (Durham, North Carolina); the Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City, Iowa); the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Los Angeles); the Special Collections and Rare Books section, Irwin Library, Butler University (Indianapolis); Grinnell College Libraries, Grinnell (Iowa); and the Bernice P. Bishop Museum (Honolulu). For their help with procuring items on interlibrary loan, we’re grateful to staff in the libraries at the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University, the University of Newcastle, and the University of Queensland. Thanks are due too, to the editorial team at Lexington Books: Erin Walpole, Scott Lutsky, Brian Hill, and Brighid Klick have shown great patience, good cheer, and efficiency as we brought the project to completion. We’re also grateful to Doug Miller, at the Pan Am Historical Foundation, for his assistance in procuring the George Lawler image used on the front cover of this book. Above all, we wish to acknowledge the support provided by friends and family. Our children, Nat, Caitlin, and Alex (Sean), and Sam (Chris) continue to inspire us to be better men and fathers. Sean offers special thanks to Shawn Ross, Erik Nielsen, Matt Radcliffe, Richard Travers, ix

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Mina Roces, Nick Doumanis, Ruth Balint, Lisa Ford, and Stuart Upton. For their friendship and care, Chris says a big “thank you” to Paul Stephenson, Andrew Robertson, Selina Ward, Alan Peacock, Chris McCormack, Ian Hood, Malcolm Quekett, Chris Horwood, and James Warden. Chris would also like to thank Nikki Percival, whose love and support mean more than she probably knows. Sydney and Brisbane, December 2014.

Introduction

Writing in 1944, as the Pacific War neared its bloody apogee, Charles William “Will” Beebe of the New York Zoological Society asked American servicemen bound for the South and Southwest Pacific Theaters of Operations what they thought of the region commonly referred to as the “South Seas.” Assuming that Americans had scant knowledge of the area, yet certain that the Pacific would somehow seem familiar, Beebe reflected upon the ways in which Americans—like other Western visitors to the wartime Pacific—had come to “know” about the South Seas. “It’s funny when you come to think of it,” he wrote, “what fragments and bits of knowledge we take with us when, for the first time in our life, we go to a place like the South Seas.” For Beebe, and others of his generation, “our ideas about these islands” had “come chiefly from books, such as Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, Nat the Naturalist, In Eastern Seas, Typee, and from the singing world of Robert Louis Stevenson.” Those “texts,” he concluded, were foundations upon which generations of Westerners had first “learned” about the South Seas. In the period preceding World War II, however, a new and even more influential cultural medium had emerged: “thanks to the vividness of the movies,” concluded Beebe, the “men of World War II” also had “pictures” of the South Seas in their minds. Consequently, “these islands seem fairly familiar when you first see them.” The men serving in World War II, hypothesized Beebe, “will think of Dorothy Lamour before Captain Cook,” and those “who have seen Moana and Mutiny on the Bounty” will have “intensely vivid pictures of coral atolls, coconut groves, thatched huts and languorous or ferocious natives.” “Those of us who can recall both the written descriptions and the motion pictures,” he concluded, “are doubly fortunate.” 1 For Allied service personnel dispatched to the Pacific theater during World War II, the South Seas they hoped to find had been largely constructed by Hollywood. 2 As Glenn K. S. Man has asserted, “Hollywood’s images of the Pacific formed and reflected the popular attitude of American audiences toward the South Seas.” 3 Although film was a new medium, by the 1930s Hollywood had grown to become for the general public the foremost source of “knowledge” about the South Seas across the English-speaking world—and beyond. Yet Hollywood’s approach to the South Seas was hardly novel. Cinema’s representations were derivative of ideas that had long since conceived, and then sustained, what has xi

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sometimes been labeled the “South Seas tradition” or the “idea of the South Seas.” 4 Thus while the medium of film was new, the images Hollywood was presenting reinforced long-held assumptions. In recent years cultural historians have joined other scholars to explore the past through “reception history” or rezeptionsgeschichte. Emerging from literary studies in the 1960s and 1970s, reception history was constructed as an attempt to “bridge the gap between literature and history.” 5 It has become a means of illuminating the process by which ideas and images are disseminated and perpetuated. 6 This current study is situated within that broad theoretical and methodological paradigm. Our intention, put simply, is to explore the ways in which “the South Seas”— as a set of constructed ideas, images, and myths—was relayed through the English-speaking world from the beginning of the Western enterprise in the Pacific in the sixteenth century to the eve of the Pacific War—from Daniel Defoe to Dorothy Lamour. 7 Jeffrey Geiger has provided a succinct and purposeful definition of the idea of the South Seas, employing “the term essentially to suggest a varied discourse of written and visual evocations of beaches, coral reefs, lagoons, coconut palms, and alluring native bodies, all holding the promise of sensual indulgence for western audiences.” 8 Of course the South Seas has a geographical association with the Pacific, although, as we show at various points in this study, its imagined physical boundaries have always been flexible, and while there are occasions when the South Seas expands to include regions as far away as Southeast Asia, in other instances the phrase connotes a region as specific as Polynesia. Scholars of the “real” Pacific and scholars of the imagined South Seas have always been quick to problematize the relationship between their two areas of study. Many scholars share Rod Edmond’s concern that studies representing the South Pacific, including his own accounts, have always run the risk of “ignoring the actuality of what was represented.” 9 Writing from a postcolonial perspective, Albert Wendt pointed out the problems for indigenous historical research and scholarship when the “whole mythology” of the Pacific subsumed the indigenous voice and revealed nothing more than white “fantasies.” 10 Such tensions persist, and continue to be played out in the reception of works exploring the idea of the South Seas. Reviewing Geiger’s Facing the Pacific, Rob Wilson raised the issue as a fundamental concern regarding the book’s value: was it saying something substantial, or was it simply adding more of the same to the history of this white fantasy? In reviewing Hollywood’s South Seas and the Pacific War, Judith Bennett felt obliged to warn readers that the book was not a work of “Pacific History.” 11 Such preoccupations can reflect as much about academic territoriality as they do about the merits of particular studies. This book is, in essence, a work of American cultural history that also acknowledges British, Antipodean, and other contributions to the idea of the “South Seas.” Nevertheless, we still find Marga-

Introduction

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ret Jolly and Serge Tcherkézoff’s observation on the relationship between the South Pacific and the South Seas compelling: “Metropolitan imaginaries and Oceanic experiences were surely always in dialectical relations of mutual influence, and the borders of European fictional fantasies and factual accounts were permeable.” 12 For much of the period under investigation, the principal means by which notions of the South Seas were transmitted from generation to generation was through literary texts. Many of these texts and their authors have received considerable scholarly attention, both as studies in their own right and as evidence in analyses of the Western imperial endeavor. 13 Textual analysis, however, is not the organizing principle underlying this book. To reiterate, we approach this study as historians, not as literary scholars, nor as students of the other cultural productions that inform our narrative. At the same time, however, scholars from these disciplines have provided us with a platform from which to launch our own study. Mindful of the fact that travelers are always compelled to resort to “descriptive strategies derived from pre-existing ideas,” a number of scholars have emphasized the significance and value of the approach being employed in this study. 14 Examining the evolution from travel writing to ethnology, Justin Stagl and Christopher Pinney have explained that the “rules governing the production, distribution, and consumption of such texts determine the nature of the shared knowledge of other societies.” 15 In analyzing travel, representation, and colonial governance, Robert Dixon has emphasized the importance of “the reception history of the text.” 16 This is not to suggest, however, that we are slavish adherents to Roland Barthes’s notion that the reader rather than the author creates the meaning of a work. 17 One of the most powerful routes through which a text can exert influence is in the inspiration it provides to future cultural producers and their productions. Without disregarding the significance of the public response to specific texts at the time of their dissemination, we suggest that the ways in which earlier cultural producers “haunt” the works of those who follow are an important imperative in perpetuating the notion of the South Seas. 18 Other scholars, principally from the disciplines of history and literature, have contemplated many of the questions and issues we explore in this study. What makes this work different, however, is the range of cultural forms that underpin this study and the exploration of them over a longue durée. Other works in the field have been confined to more restricted spatial and/or temporal boundaries. 19 The reception history of the South Seas can be traced through an eclectic range of popular cultural productions, not just literature. As this study reveals, exploring this range of productions enables a deeper understanding of the allure and reach of the idea of the South Seas. Accordingly, we

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explore representations of the South Seas in an extensive array of cultural forms, from literature and travel writing, to artistic depictions and presentations of the region by shipping companies, to music and musical productions, to fairs and platform speakers, and in film. While this study is transnational in its reach, examining a diverse range of cultural productions from a number of nations, and through their reception across national boundaries, the reception history and the consumptive practices focus on the English-speaking world—particularly the United States, and, to a lesser extent, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. We contend that the productions of these English-speaking nations were instrumental in articulating and extending the idea of the South Seas across the world. This work is a prequel to our earlier monograph, Hollywood’s South Seas and the Pacific War: Searching for Dorothy Lamour. 20 What was originally envisaged as the first section of that book—a foundational chapter tracing the rise of the idea of the South Seas in Western cultural discourse—grew into a reception history of the idea of the South Seas. This book is organized as a collection of chapters analyzing episodes in that reception history; most chapters are chronological, but, from time to time, ideas are explored both backward and forward over the temporal boundaries of the work, before returning to the original departure point to continue the narrative. Before exploring the range of representations of the South Seas, it is necessary to examine Europeans’ earliest encounters with the region. These encounters were critically important in establishing the foundations of a legacy of myth, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation. Chapter 1 explores these early engagements. The next two chapters trace the beginnings of the American enterprise in the South Seas, from the earliest encounters and their reception, before turning to Herman Melville—the most significant nineteenth-century figure in literary engagement with the South Seas. Chapter 4 considers the role of artists alongside the enduring influence of Robert Louis Stevenson and the relocation of the spiritual home of the American South Seas from New England to California. The disjuncture between Polynesia and Melanesia is an important consideration in any study of the South Seas. Chapter 5, exploring the literary engagement with the idea of New Guinea in the 1860s and 1870s, provides an opportunity to consider how disparate parts of the region were accommodated in the narrative. That New Guinea continued to loom large in Australians’ South Seas imaginings can be seen through chapter 6’s focus on Australian cultural productions in the late nineteenth century, when the South Seas played a part in emerging ideas on nationhood that culminated in 1901 with the Federation of the Australian colonies.

Introduction

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Chapter 7 returns to a broader canvas, considering new cultural productions including world fairs, the stage, and song. One of the enduring ideas associated with the South Seas was that the region functioned as a counterpoint to, and a potential respite from, civilization. As chapter 8 explains, this idea gained renewed potency during the Great War and into the 1920s. The interwar period also witnessed the highpoint of efforts to “educate” the general public about the South Seas. Chapter 9 explores this phenomenon through the cultural productions of platform speakers, popular scientific periodicals (such as National Geographic), and the scholarly/popular crossover power of certain anthropologists, particularly Margaret Mead and Bronislaw Malinowski. Earlier hauntings of the South Seas figured prominently in these interwar educational/scientific endeavors, and were perpetuated with renewed authority. From the late nineteenth century, tourism functioned as a means by which members of the public were invited to experience their own South Seas adventure. The construction of Hawaii as a tourist destination informs part of this story but it is not the only element. By the interwar period shipping lines had opened up large parts of the South Pacific to the tourist gaze. The growth of South Seas tourism, and the ways in which this industry was haunted by earlier cultural productions, forms the focus of chapter 10. The final four chapters focus on Hollywood and cinema’s important role in perpetuating the South Seas on the eve of the Pacific War. During the 1920s cinema emerged as the most significant cultural form for conveying the idea of the South Seas. Its pedagogical power was immense. Chapter 11, tracing the emergence of cinema’s fascination with the South Seas, explores the form of this early engagement, both in terms of style and content. Soon an identifiable South Seas cinematic genre emerged, perpetuating many of the misunderstandings and misinterpretations inherent in Western fantasies. The rise of this genre is the focus of chapter 12. With the Great Depression posing discomforting questions about the nature—and, indeed, the very notion—of civilization, the pedagogical power of Hollywood to construct an escape for millions of cinemagoers was crucial in perpetuating many of the most enduring ideas associated with the South Seas. Chapter 13 explores the importance of Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, and the mutiny on the Bounty, during the difficult years of the Great Depression. On the eve of the Pacific War the South Seas figured prominently in popular culture across the Englishspeaking world. The book concludes with an examination of the ways in which Dorothy Lamour came to embody the South Seas, exciting the attentions of millions of moviegoers and leaving hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen misinformed as they prepared for wartime service in the Pacific. As the first chapter reveals, however, servicemen’s South

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Seas fantasies owed their origins to ideas that were established long before Lamour—in all her seductive, sarong-clad sensuality—graced movie screens across the United States, and elsewhere. NOTES 1. William Beebe, “Introduction,” in Henry Fairfield Osborn, The Pacific World: Its Vast Distances, Its Lands and the Life upon Them, and Its Peoples (New York: W. W. Norton, 1944), 1–2. See also Carol Grant Gould, The Remarkable Life of William Beebe: Explorer and Naturalist (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004). 2. See Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon, Hollywood’s South Seas and the Pacific War: Searching for Dorothy Lamour (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 3. Glenn K. S. Man, “Hollywood Images of the Pacific,” East-West Film Journal 5 (July 1991): 16. See also Norman Douglas, “Electric Shadows in the South Seas: The Pacific Islands in Film—A Survey,” in Moving Images of the Pacific Islands: A Guide to Films and Videos, comp. Diane Aoki and Norman Douglas (Honolulu: Center for Pacific Island Studies, 1994), 3–19. 4. See Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 5. Daniel Salinas, Latin American Evangelical Theology in the 1970’s: The Golden Decade (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2009), 21. 6. For a brief but useful background discussion see Salinas, Latin American Evangelical Theology, 20–22. The approach has been often used in theological studies. See for example W. M. Schniedewind, Society and the Promise to David: The Reception History of 2 Samuel 7:1–17 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Peter Thacker Lanfer, Remembering Eden: The Reception History of Genesis 3: 22–24 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Examples of the use of reception history in literary studies include David Hill Radcliffe, Edmund Spenser: A Reception History (Columbia: Camden House, 1996); Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene: A Reception History of His Major Works, 1805–1828 (New York: Routledge, 2013). See also Martyn P. Thompson, “Reception Theory and the Interpretation of Historical Meaning,” History and Theory 32 (October 1993): 248–72. 7. This is not to suggest that the engagement with the South Seas in the Englishspeaking world was unique. Other nations enjoyed similar engagements, often influenced by English-language cultural productions. For an example relating to the eighteenth century, see Christiane Kuechler Williams, “Die Entdeckung des erotischen Paradieses. Eine Untersuchung der europäischen Südseerezeption im 18. Jahrhundert” (“The Discovery of an Erotic Paradise. An Investigation into the European Reception of the South Pacific Islands in the 18th Century”) PhD Thesis, Northwestern University, 2001. 8. Jeffrey Geiger, Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 1. 9. See Rob Wilson’s review of Geiger’s Facing the Pacific in American Studies 50, no. 1/2 (2009): 181. 10. For a pertinent discussion of Wendt consult Paul Sharrad, “Albert Wendt and the Problem of History,” Journal of Pacific History 37, no 1 (2002): 109–16. 11. Wilson’s review of Geiger’s Facing the Pacific, 181; Judith A. Bennett’s review of Brawley and Dixon, Hollywood's South Seas and the Pacific War, in Journal of Pacific History, 2014, DOI: 10.1080/00223344.2014.944335. 12. Margaret Jolly and Serge Tcherkézoff, “Oceanic Encounters: A Prelude,” in Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence, ed. Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkezoff, and Darrell Tryo (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2009), 8.

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13. Mary Louise Pratt’s work, set within a theoretical framework constructed by Edward Said and Homi K. Bhabha, remains seminal in this area. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 14. Sarah Johnson, “Missionary Positions: Romantic European Polynesias from Cook to Stevenson,” in Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century: Filling the Blank Spaces, ed. Tim Youngs (London: Anthem Press, 2006), 179. 15. Justin Stagl and Christopher Pinney, “Introduction: From Travel Writing to Ethnography,” History and Anthropology 9, nos. 2–3 (1996): 121. 16. Robert Dixon, Prosthetic Gods: Travel, Representation and Colonial Governance (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 3. 17. See Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” Image-Music-Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 42–48. 18. This notion of texts being “haunted” by the works of earlier writers is borrowed from Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 12. The idea has been explored elsewhere and with other cultural productions. See, for example, Marvin A. Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theater as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); and David Latham, ed., Haunted Texts: Studies in Pre-Raphaelitism (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2003). Within the context of the South Seas, Jeffrey Geiger acknowledged its usefulness as a methodology, and observed that “texts are always haunted by their ancestors: as much as they are of their time, postwar US fantasies of Polynesia can be seen to have adapted and renewed much older—and primarily European—connotations, myths and legends about the South Seas.” See Geiger, Facing the Pacific, 16. 19. Further studies that explore themes examined in this current study include Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000); Patricia O’Brien, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Michael Sturma, South Sea Maidens: Western Fantasy and Sexual Politics in the South Pacific (Westport: Greenwood, 2002); Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Diane Loxley, Problematic Shores: The Literature of Islands (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990); Vanessa Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth Century Textual Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Sarah Johnson, “View in the South Seas: Writing Pacific Nature, Culture and Landscape, 1700–1775” (PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2005); Jennifer Fuller, “From Robinson Crusoe to Dr. Moreau: Nineteenth Century Pacific Island Narratives and Their Contexts” (PhD Thesis, University of Tulsa, 2013). Studies that have explored these themes over a longue durée include Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts, and Paul Lyons, American Pacifism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2005). 20. See Brawley and Dixon, Hollywood’s South Seas and the Pacific War.

ONE Beginnings Defoe, Dampier, and Discovery

From the sixteenth century, European ships traversed the body of water that Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, looking west from the Isthmus of Panama, had erroneously labeled the Mar del Zur or “South Sea” and which Magellan subsequently named, incorrectly for him, “Pacific.” Despite Balboa’s misguided sense of direction, and notwithstanding Magellan’s new label, the term “South Seas” persisted. The ideas underpinning the “South Seas,” however, predated this age of “discovery.” Even before the journeys of travelers such as Abel Tasman and William Dampier, the Western world knew—almost instinctively—what would be found in these lower latitudes. What would be found was what was always found on the periphery of the known world—a “new location” inhabited with the “old nostalgic fictions” that could be traced back to classical times as well as to the more recent “discoveries” of the “New World.” 1 Embedded within these nostalgic fictions was an unrelenting search for “Utopia.” “Paradise” existed and the South Seas was one of the few remaining places on the Earth where it could possibly be found. 2 Early Western travelers to the Pacific, therefore, went forth not so much to “discover,” but to “find,” and to reinforce ideas they had long assumed to be true. 3 In the process, they also reinforced ideas about the European self. 4 The degree to which early European voyagers popularized an idea of the “South Seas” is important to an understanding of this tradition. In the English-speaking world the buccaneer William Dampier played an essential part in this process. At a time when the South Seas represented not only the South Pacific but also the Pacific Coast of the New World, the western half of “New Holland,” the Southeast Asian archipelago, and Japan, Dampier traversed the Pacific and lived to have his adventures 1

2

Chapter 1

published. It has been argued that it was “Dampier’s books,” rather than “his exploits,” that “made him famous,” and that in a literary sense, his travelogues discovered the South Seas for England. 5 By the late Restoration period the publication of such travel literature was second only to theological writings in terms of popularity. 6 Dampier’s tales stimulated a number of public responses. Notably, he inspired others, such as the privateers Edward Cooke and Woodes Rogers, to record their South Seas experiences for eager readers. 7 An early consequence of the public interest and acceptance of the authenticity of these tales was the famous South Seas “bubble” of 1720, when the English government–chartered South Seas Company collapsed in the wake of dramatically inflated stock prices. 8 Investors, and the government, had accepted the stories that easy riches for little investment were to be obtained in the South Seas. Perhaps most important for the popular imagination, Dampier’s exploits inspired those who had not traveled to the South Seas to engage the region with their pens. The most important of these writers was Daniel Defoe. With his interest in the South Seas sparked by Dampier’s adventures, in 1712 Defoe wrote his Essay on the South Sea Trade. The interest in the region also inspired his fiction writing. 9 In 1719 Defoe published The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, a story inspired by Dampier’s and Cooke’s accounts of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk’s decision to be cast off on Juan Fernandez Island, where he remained until his rescue four years later. In writing his fictional account, Defoe employed the first-person literary device of suggesting the story was written by the fictional Crusoe. 10 The novel’s plain and unpretentious style—which reflected Dampier’s prose style—was seen to reflect the literary ability of the character. 11 Defoe thus engaged in a practice that subsequently proved popular in the genre of South Seas fiction, whereby authors utilized a first-person diary, or memoir accounts of the South Seas by fictional characters. 12 Reading accounts that reflected a style not dissimilar to travelogues, many readers assumed they were reading a life story, rather than a work of fiction. This blurring of the line between “fiction” and “fact” remained an enduring dimension of South Seas cultural productions. Writers, and others, who set about compiling South Seas fantasies would frequently seek to find an audience for their work by seeking legitimation and popularity through allusions to authenticity. Complementing Defoe’s literary style, which would be emulated by other authors, he reinforced the notion of a utopic “other,” which became a central tenet of the South Seas tradition. Crusoe’s island, a bountiful Arcadia that allowed carefree living with nature, functioned as a stark contrast to the stresses and demands associated with civilization. 13 By embodying the notion of the “noble savage” in the character of “Man

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Friday,” Defoe also extended “one of the most popular myths of the Enlightenment” to the South Seas. 14 Defoe’s success encouraged other writers to engage with the South Seas. 15 Robinson Crusoe influenced Irishman Jonathan Swift, whose 1726 parody of eighteenth-century travelogues, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. By Lemuel Gulliver, became another of the most influential early South Seas texts. The South Seas became the geographic home to Swift’s fantastical nations. Realizing that an aura of authenticity would facilitate the commercial success of his parody, Swift embraced the style and pace of the travelogue with its eye for detail and repeated references to navigational positions, weather conditions, and other maritime minutiae. Furthermore, the fictional and the factual were interwoven. Gulliver, for example, claims he is the cousin of Dampier. Of course, authorship was bestowed on Gulliver and, initially at least, Swift went to some effort to ensure he was not recognized as the author. His work was so true to the form of the eighteenth-century travelogue that some readers were convinced it was an authentic account of alternate lands with six-inch and sixty-foot inhabitants, and flying islands. 16 Establishing a solid bedrock for the South Seas literary genre, Robinson Crusoe captured the imaginations of generations of readers. According to an 1891 contributor to the American Catholic World, the readership of Robinson Crusoe was matched only by the readership of “Bible Stories.” 17 A contributor to the New Orleans De Bow’s Review insisted the book would “no doubt live as long as the English language is spoken,” and the Reverend J. D. Bell, writing in the Cincinnati Ladies Repository in 1864, placed both works within a list of the five “modern” works of genius: Robinson Crusoe—who was he? Ah! Do you not remember how you read about him in your childhood? How your imagination fondly attended him . . . and how out of the history of his crooked, queer, interesting life, your juvenile memory, like a bee, sipped the wild honey of romance, that honey which lasts forever? 18

Discussing the role of a “thumb-worn” copy of the book in encouraging a young William R. Grace (shipowner and New York mayor) to leave Ireland for adventure on the high seas, a 1904 report in the Washington Times claimed Robinson Crusoe “had sent more young boys running away to sea than any other story ever printed.” 19 Although Robinson Crusoe’s story was set thousands of miles away, for those who made it to the South Pacific his story remained a point of comparison into the late nineteenth century. Heading for Apia in the 1890s, American artist John La Farge noted the “new and strange sensation, a realizing of the old pictures in books of travel and child traditions of Robinson Crusoe.” Entering into the harbor at Apia, he noted, was “like one of the places we have always read of in ‘Robinson Crusoe.’” 20

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Defoe’s significance was reaffimed when Robinson Crusoe was rebadged as children’s literature. Its popularity was undiminished. Serializing the story in 1907 the San Francisco Call placed it in the category of “Children’s Stories that Never Grow Old.” 21 These connections between the South Seas and Robinson Crusoe persisted despite the fact that Defoe had moved Crusoe Island from the Pacific to the Caribbean. 22 The location is made quite clear in the text. Yet readers continued to situate the adventure in the South Seas. Robert Louis Stevenson, whose “indebtedness to Defoe was lifelong and varied,” had reputedly been motivated in his desire to visit the South Seas from a boyhood fascination with Crusoe. And like La Farge, he was fond of making connections to Crusoe after his arrival in the Pacific. Like so many others, Stevenson saw the book as a story of the South Seas. As one American commentator noted in the 1940s, Stevenson “seems never to have realized that Juan Fernandez . . . was not Crusoe’s Island (an imaginary place near Venezuela), or that Alexander Selkirk was only a partial prototype of Crusoe.” 23 Because of its connections to Defoe’s story, the obliteration of Juan Fernandez Island by an earthquake in 1906 captivated Americans. “At some time in the lives of those of the present generation,” it was noted in the Scranton Republican, “this little island held a place second often to home itself, and its disappearance below the surface” of the ocean would “hardly prove a trifling incident.” 24 The stylistic template for South Seas fiction that Defoe and then Swift had devised remained influential well into the nineteenth century—and beyond. South Seas tales were almost invariably written in realistic style as memoirs or travelogues. In particular, the power of Robinson Crusoe was evidenced by the work of those authors who sought to tell their own stories of South Seas survival, but who regarded allusions to Robinson Crusoe as a useful marketing technique. The publication in 1792 of Hannah Hewit, or, the Female Crusoe was an early example of Crusoe’s significance. While Hannah Hewit was badged as an authentic account, purportedly written by Hewit herself, it was the work of the English writer and musician Charles Dibdin. 25 Probably the most famous example of such poetic license was the work of Swiss pastor Johann David Wyss, who used Defoe’s work as the inspiration for a series of bedtime tales for his sons. Elevating the imitation to a status that rivaled the original, Wyss’s work was described in 1906 as “the only survivor of many imitations.” 26 Wyss’s son, Johann Rudolph, subsequently secured the story’s publication. It first appeared in German in 1814 and was translated into English and published the same year by M. J. Godwin. The Family Robinson Crusoe was reprinted in 1816, and again in 1818 when the name of the work was changed to The Swiss Family Robinson.

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The Swiss Family Robinson emulated the style of Defoe in its attempts to represent itself as a true account. The fact that the book ended without the rescue of the family prompted the British publishers to suggest that the journal upon which the book was based had fallen into the hands of an English sea captain during an unsuccessful attempt to rescue the family. 27 One departure from Defoe’s account was the menagerie of creatures with which Wyss inhabited “New Switzerland.” His was the first South Seas fiction to inhabit the South Seas with one of its most enduring creatures—the monkey. Wyss’s bedtime tale in turn inspired another generation of writers to consider the South Seas survival narrative. Most notable among those successors was Jules Verne, who published a number of works with South Seas themes, including his 1861 story entitled The School of Crusoes. Also known as The School for Robinsons, this work explored the desert island genre. 28 In the wake of the “South Sea bubble,” literary journeys such as Defoe’s and Swift’s dominated South Seas literary discourses in the Englishspeaking world. Although Pascoe Thomas had published A True and Impartial Journal of a Voyage to the South-Seas, and Round the Globe, in His Majesty’s Ship the Centurion, under the Command of Commodore George Anson in 1745, travelogues with a South Seas focus had by then become a rarity. When Captain John Byron sailed across the Pacific in the 1760s he was reputedly the first Englishmen to visit the South Seas in twenty-five years. Influenced by the British Admiralty’s 1766 decision to search for Terra Australis Cognitas, Byron’s journey marked the beginning of a new phase of British “exploration.” 29 The following year, 1767, Captain Samuel Wallis, while searching for the Australian continent, “discovered” Tahiti—the “heart” of the South Seas. Wallis’s “discovery” was of profound significance for the Western conception of the world. As Rod Edmond has noted: From this moment western representations of the Pacific were to form important chapters in the history of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, of nineteenth-century Christianity, science and social theory, of modern painting, anthropology and popular culture. 30

British and French navigators’ early interactions with the Tahitians helped narrow the notion of the South Seas to the South Pacific, and incidents such as the 1789 mutiny of the crew of HMS Bounty helped create and perpetuate themes integral to the idea of the South Seas. The search for Paradise was over. As the noted botanist Sir Joseph Banks remarked, the South Seas held “the truest picture of an Arcadia” that “the imagination can form.” 31 The “discovery” of the South Seas by the European navigators of the late eighteenth century established another pillar of the South Seas tradition: the region, it was widely believed, was replete with attractive and

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sexually available Islander women. Indeed, the worship of what Patricia A. O’Brien has labeled the “Pacific Muse,” and Michael Sturma the “South Seas Maiden,” was central to European visions of the South Seas. 32 While this muse, like the South Seas itself, and the associated notions of paradise and the noble savage, predated European encounters, its cultural currency became more significant in Europe in the wake of the navigators. The South Seas were purported to be veritable Edens, inhabited by noble savages and beautiful and sexually available women. As O’Brien has noted, not only were “women” the “particular focus of Pacific voyagers,” but with “the assistance of artists, writers, and theorists in Europe, these voyagers generated the popular conception of the Pacific as a sexually alluring woman.” 33 The gendered nature of the South Seas was an important part of its attraction. Significant, too, was the volume of material that referred to the region. The “discoveries” by seafarers such as James Cook captured the public imagination through the publication of diaries and travelogues that were then often reproduced elsewhere. Such travelogues were often ghostwritten. In the case of Cook’s first voyage to the South Seas, Dr. John Hawkesworth—a “literary man”—was commissioned to produce the account of not only this voyage but a number of others as well. Capitalizing on the popularity of the South Seas and the travelogue genre, he sold his three-volume project to booksellers for the substantial sum of £6,000. Hawkesworth played an important part in defining and popularizing Western ideas of the South Seas. 34 The European literati read of Cook’s travels with great interest. Voltaire found “nothing more instructive” than Voyages around the World and felt “great pleasure” in the knowledge that Cook’s accounts confirmed Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s descriptions of Tahitian sexual practices. Revealing another aspect of the emerging European idea of the South Seas, Immanuel Kant wondered whether the laws of nature as evidenced in the South Seas must steal the talents of men and leave them to a life of “idleness, indulgence and propagation.” 35 Several commentators concluded that the frank discussions of sexual matters were fictional, and a consequence of Hawkesworth’s intervention. By embellishing Cook’s words for literary effect, Hawkesworth had built upon a tradition that had already done much to mislead readers on both sides of the Atlantic. 36 It was subsequently claimed that the work “met with very severe and deserved censure, owing to the glowing representations and the licentious picture it presented of the manners and customs of the islanders of the South Seas.” 37 Despite such criticism, both Cook and Bougainville exercised an enduring legacy in British and American popular culture during the nineteenth century. Discounting the earlier work of travelers and writers such as Dampier and Defoe, Dennis Porter has claimed that Cook and Bougainville were “principally responsible for launching the myth of the

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South Seas island,” off “which the western imagination has lived.” 38 Reviewing James Jackson Jarves’s History of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands, the editor of the North American Review noted in 1843 that the “subject which he treats must be somewhat familiar to our readers; for it is not long since Cook’s voyages held a kind of rivalry with Robinson Crusoe in the love of the young; and anyone who was a schoolboy ten years ago, will recollect Owyhee as readily as his village play ground.” 39 The legacies of Dampier and Defoe, and those who followed in their wake, literary as well as nautical, were profound. As well as establishing the framework within which subsequent writers, artists, and others would represent the South Seas, their accounts—“factual,” fictional, and everything in between—were instrumental in popularizing the South Seas for generations to come. As the next chapter explains, for nineteenth-century Americans those cultural influences were concomitant with a growing awareness of the missionary and commercial opportunities in the South Pacific. NOTES 1. Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Ideas of the South Seas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 1–45. O. R. Dathorne has asserted that “Europeans did not merely ‘discover’ the so-called New World—they invented it.” See Dathorn, Imagining the World: Mythical Belief Versus Reality in Global Encounters (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1994), 1. 2. While a South Seas utopia had still not been found, a number of writers postulated on what such a utopia might look like. See, for example, James Harrington’s 1656 treatise on the imagined Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (published in Latin in 1624 and English 1627). Such works were mostly critiques of England by advocates of a republic. 3. Sarah Johnson has remarked that these early travelers “resorted to descriptive strategies derived from pre-existing ideas.” See Johnson, “Missionary Positions: Romantic European Polynesias from Cook to Stevenson,” in Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century: Filling the Blank Spaces, ed. Tim Youngs (London: Anthem Press, 2006), 179. 4. Jonathan Lamb has noted that, at least initially, the South Seas had the opposite effect. Uncertainties that troubled the stability of the European self during the early Enlightenment period were intensified by the South Pacific, where the self became a doubtful reference point. See Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 5, 165. 5. William Hallam Bonner, Captain William Dampier: Buccaneer-Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1934), 36; Rennie, Far-fetched Facts, 59. Martin Edmund has noted how much of the book was developed after Dampier’s return with assistance and embellishments from a number of sources. See Edmond, Zone of the Marvellous: In Search of the Antipodes (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010), 116. Dampier captured further public interest with the transporting to Europe of the “painted prince” “Jeoly”/“Giolo.” The Filipino’s tattooing played a significant part in reintroducing the art to Europe. Soon after he was placed on exhibit he died of smallpox, and his “owners” lost their moneymaking enterprise. See Edward E. Leslie, Desperate Jour-

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neys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 54. 6. Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters 1570–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 7. Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World (London: A. Bell and Lintot, 1712). 8. See Jonathan Lamb, “Eye-Witnessing in the South Seas,” Eighteenth Century 38 (1997): 201–212. For an exploration of the South Seas Bubble consult John Carswell, The South Seas Bubble (London: Cresset Press, 1960); Julian Hoppit, “The Myths of the South Seas Bubble,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2001): 141–65; and Alexander Deguise, “Defoe’s Review and the Language of Eighteenth-Century Information” (PhD Dissertation, McGill University, 2009), esp. chapter 3. 9. Robert Markley, “So Inexhaustible a Treasure of Gold: Defoe, Capitalism, and the Romance of the South Seas,” Eighteenth-Century Life 18 (November 1994): 148. 10. It has been suggested that Defoe was also inspired by Henry Neville’s earlier work of castaway fiction. See Neville, Isle of Pines (London: G. S. for Allen Banks, 1668). See Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship and ‘Robinson Crusoe’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 144. While constructed as a critique of Stuart England, the work has been seen to have embraced many utopic visions that would have been associated with the new world and the South Seas. See Gaby M. Mahlberg, “The Critical Reception of The Isle of Pines,” Utopian Studies 17 (2006), 133–42. Sandra Sherman has suggested that Defoe was writing at a time when there was substantial “resistance to fiction” in English culture and that Defoe himself was “withdrawing from an overdose of fiction.” This resistance, she has contended, shaped “market forces” and explains the style adopted in works such as Robinson Crusoe. See Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1. 11. Edward E. Leslie, Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 48. 12. Again, Henry Neville’s legacy appears significant. He had used a style that suggested an authentic story was being presented rather than a work of fiction. It has subsequently been constructed as a “literary hoax” and its translation into many languages used to problematize the concept of reception. See Gaby M. Mahlberg, “Authors Losing Control: The European Transformations of Henry Neville’s Isles of Pines (1668),” Book History 15 (2012): 1–25. For a broader discussion of Defoe, the genre of “travel fiction,” and the book’s influence far beyond works on the South Seas, consult David Fausett, The Strange Surprising Sources of Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994). 13. See Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 69. 14. Stelia Cro, The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990), 22. Brian Murray Fagan has suggested it was not until the mid-eighteenth century, long after Aztec civilization was largely forgotten, that this paradisiac land was located in the South Seas and that it would “change European perceptions of savagery for generations.” See Fagan, Clash of Cultures (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 127, 94. 15. Arguing that Robinson Crusoe was one of the “two narratives that underpin all subsequent British Pacific fiction,” Jennifer Fuller has contended that Defoe’s book was “arguably the most lasting and powerful adventure novel of the British imagination.” The other works, examined later in this chapter, were the journals of Captain Cook. See Fuller, “From Robinson Crusoe to Dr. Moreau: Nineteenth Century Pacific Island Narratives and Their Contexts” (PhD Dissertation, University of Tulsa, 2013), 11, 18. 16. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, eds., The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. 9, From Steel and Addison to Pope and Swift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 33.

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17. A. F. Hewit, “Juvenile Literature and the Formation of Character,” Catholic World 53, no. 316 (1891): 477. 18. “Immortal Fiction,” DeBow’s Review 11 (November 1866): 456; Rev. J. D. Bell, “Lessons from Robinson Crusoe,” The Ladies Repository 24 (August 1864): 459. 19. Washington Times, April 3, 1904. Andrew Thompson has suggested that homes in working-class Victorian Britain held three books: The Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Robinson Crusoe. See Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 53. 20. John La Farge, Reminiscences of the South Seas (New York: Doubleday, 1912), 69. 21. San Francisco Call, December 8, 1908. 22. Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 52. Defoe himself identified the “South Seas” with the “Southern Ocean” of the Pacific. See Martin W. Lewis, “Dividing the Ocean Sea,” Geographical Review 89 (April 1999): 188–214. 23. John Robert Moore, “Defoe, Stevenson, and the Pirates,” English Language History 10 (March 1943): 38. 24. Scranton Republican, October 3, 1906. In his influential Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., identified Juan Fernandez as “the most romantic spot on earth”: “It was partly, no doubt, from its having been the first land that I had seen since leaving home, and still more the associations every one has connected with it in his childhood from reading Robinson Crusoe.” See Dana, Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative (Boston: Houghton, 1840), 50. 25. See Charles Dibdin, Hannah Hewitt: or, the Female Crusoe. Being the history of a woman of uncommon, mental, and personal accomplishments; who, After a variety of extraordinary and interesting adventures in almost every station of life, from splendid prosperity to abject adversity, was cast away in the Grosvenor East-Indiaman: and became for three years the sole inhabitant of an island, in the South Seas. Supposed to be written by herself (London: C. Dibdin, 1792). 26. The Salt Lake Herald, October 14, 1906. 27. Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard, eds., The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 510. 28. See Peter Costello, Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978). 29. Pascoe Thomas, A True and Impartial Journal of a Voyage to the South-Seas, and Round the Globe, in His Majesty’s Ship the Centurion, under the Command of Commodore George Anson (London: S. Birt, J. Newbery and J. Collyer, 1745). 30. Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7. J. C. Beaglehole noted that the “unreal was to mingle with the real, the too dramatic; the shining light was to become a haze in which every island was the one island, and the one island a Tahitian dream.” Beaglehole, cited in Rennie, Far-fetched Facts, 84. John Gascoigne has made a range of contributions on this theme. See Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific in the Age of Enlightenment (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2014). An alternative reading contends that “Enlightenment reason and science” proclaimed the death of paradise and thereafter paradise on earth was transformed from a place to a “state of consumption” intimately entwined with colonial exploitation. For an examination of this idea and other discourses around the idea of paradise, consult Sharae Grace Deckard, “Exploited Edens: Paradise Discourse in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature” (PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2007), esp. 1–4 and 21–28. 31. Cited in Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992): 221. 32. See Patricia O’Brien, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Michael Sturma, South Sea Maidens: Western Fantasy and Sexual Politics in the South Pacific (Westport: Greenwood, 2002). 33. O'Brien, The Pacific Muse, 17–18. 34. John L. Abbott has observed that to “the inhabitants of chilly climates the South Seas have had a continuing appeal and as travel agents entice with visions of island

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delights, airlines compete to secure routes for those eager to savour the attractions of the South Seas. In a way this drive to the Pacific began with Captain Cook, and Cook, at least as South Seas exploits were rendered in permanent print began with John Hawkesworth.” See Abbott, “John Hawkesworth: Friend of Samuel Johnson and Editor of Captain Cook’s Voyages and of the Gentleman’s Magazine,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (Spring 1970): 341. James Wood has argued that Hawkesworth’s redaction of Cook’s (and Sir Joseph Banks’s) journals embraced the “anecdote” which was a central literary form of the Enlightenment genre. See J. R. Wood, “Anecdote and Enlightenment, 1700–1800” (PhD Dissertation, Stanford University, 2012), esp. chapter 3. 35. Arthur Coleman Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago: Open Court Publishing 2003), 43. For a further examination of Kant and the South Seas see Vanessa Agnew, “Pacific Island Encounters and the German Invention of Race,” in Islands in History and Representation, ed. Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith (London: Routledge, 2003), 81–94. 36. Wilson Menard, The Two Worlds of Somerset Maugham (Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1965), 12. See also Philip Edwards, The Story of Voyage: Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 80–101. 37. Charles Dexter Cleveland, A Compendium of English Literature (Philadelphia: E. C. and J. Biddle and Co., 1858), 609. 38. Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 91. 39. North American Review 57 (July 1843): 256.

TWO America’s South Seas

While at least two Americans—John Ledyard and James Mario Matra— had accompanied James Cook on his journeys through the South Pacific, American interaction with the South Seas did not begin in earnest until the 1790s and was dominated by commercial imperatives. 1 American whalers made long journeys from their New England homes to chase the “great fish” that abounded in the South Seas. Port Jackson (Sydney), on the east coast of the Australian continent, quickly became a home away from home for scores of American ships—whalers, as well as the socalled “sandalwooders” who had come seeking the precious wood. 2 Five hundred of the subscribers to Cook’s first volume had come from the American colonies, and through the early nineteenth century, Americans remained avid readers of British and translated French travelogues of the South Seas. 3 Although John Ledyard’s diary was published in New Haven in 1783, Americans were initially slow to write their own accounts of the South Seas. An article in a 1808 edition of the Philadelphia American Register, based on the experiences of trader William Shaler in Hawaii in 1804, was reputedly the first South Seas travelogue to appear in an American periodical. 4 It was not until 1815 that Americans began writing in earnest of the South Seas. 5 In that year Captain David Porter published the journal of his cruise through the South Pacific during the War of 1812 in the warship Essex. 6 Porter’s book, and the public response it provoked, revealed that while the American naval officer had few kind words for James Cook, Americans more generally had accepted European constructions of the South Seas that had been most recently endorsed by the navigators. Although some South Seas Islanders were treated very poorly by Porter and his men, the journal spoke of “handsome” and “friendly people.” 7 A review of the work in the Boston North American Review demonstrated 11

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that Americans shared British and French observers’ positive views of the South Seas as Arcadia and the inhabitants as “noble savages”: Though there have been so many expeditions by different nations, so many scientifick [sic] voyagers, and such copious accounts published of the islands and coasts of the Pacifick [sic] Ocean, yet the distance, the grandeur, the beauty of those countries, the magnificent serenity of the climate, the wonderful productions of animate and inanimate nature, and the still uncivilized state of mankind in that part of the globe make us open upon every new description with avidity. 8

Islanders were purportedly imbued with “the general characteristics of beauty of person, of gentleness and goodness of character.” Americans, moreover, had a point of ready comparison. Porter’s travelogue supported an emerging belief that the “savages” of the American continent contrasted sharply to the “gentle and in some respects superior qualities” of South Seas Islanders. Most significantly, it was possible that “civilization” might be “gradually introduced to” Islanders—an option apparently ruled out for Native Americans. The Islanders’ taste for bread, for example, was regarded as a positive sign of their prospects for advancement. 9 Porter’s observations were followed, two years later, by the recollections of Amasa Delano, who had experienced the South Seas as both a sealer and as a member of a British naval expedition. His preface asserted his unique position: “No seaman from the United States had enjoyed the same opportunity for observation and discussion of the eastern ocean.” 10 Delano’s Narrative of Voyage and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres offered Americans the first account of the Bounty mutineers in book form: one tale contained therein would subsequently inspire Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno, in which Delano would appear as a central character. 11 Delano’s work was followed by the recollections of American sailor Samuel Patterson. Patterson’s experience of the South Seas held none of the romance to which earlier authors had often alluded. Traumatized by his South Seas experience, his “sufferings” and “privations” had left him unable to furnish his cautionary tale. It was left to Ezekiel Terry as “compiler” to write the travelogue and assure its readers that Patterson’s reminscences were “credible.” Patterson’s papers were nonetheless insufficient to complete the study, compelling Terry to consult “[o]ther publications” to make the “narrative of more utility.” 12 Patterson had visited the region over a decade earlier. Of Hawaii he provided an early account of local politics before offering a positive endorsement of the physical beauty of the local women. His journey thereafter eventually took him to Port Jackson, where he left his British ship and joined an American sandalwooder bound for Tonga and the Fiji Islands. His sufferings and privations continued on this voyage. After his

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ship saved two sailors imprisoned by Tongan “savages”—who had captured the British vessel Port-au-prince and “massacred” the crew—Patterson’s vessel narrowly escaped a similar fate, before being wrecked on a reef in the Feejees. While he escaped being murdered by the local inhabitants, Patterson reported that “these savages are cannibals, and eat the bodies of their own malefactors, and all those of their prisoners.” He eventually escaped to share his story. 13 Five hundred Americans subscribed to the first edition of Patterson’s travelogue and a second edition appeared in 1825. 14 The work introduced Tonga and Fiji to American readers and was a significant corrective to the paradisal accounts of the South Seas that had dominated American literature to that time. Furthermore, the work inspired stories, that persisted through the nineteenth century, that a pirate treasurer worth thousands of Spanish dollars was sitting lost in these islands and that the prospect of finding the treasure had been the motivation of many a castway. 15 Patterson’s account also tapped into the darker elements of the South Seas tradition which had existed since Defoe. Arcadia may have been found but the savages were not always noble. The circumstances regarding the death of Captain Cook had been one important corrective in this regard. Another influence was noted author and poet George Keate’s account of the wreck of the Antelope off Pelew (Palau). Unlike Hawkesworth’s account, Keate’s book presented a more ambivalent, ambiguous depiction of the South Seas. Contradicting earlier Spanish accounts of “inhuman” cannibals, the salvation of Captain Wilson and his crew was due “solely to the benevolent character” of the Islanders they encounted. 16 Yet Keate acknowledged that not all South Seas Islanders were noble. Some South Seas Islanders remained “under that darkness and absolute barbarism” while others had “nearly attained . . . the essence of real civilization.” “Those who are acquainted with the voyages to the SOUTH SEAS,” he wrote, “must have remarked a great familitude in the manners of the islands scattered over that immense ocean; at the same time it cannot have escaped their notice, that there are customs and characters peculiar to almost every particular group.” 17 With the absence of the salaciousness associated with Hawkesworth, and a clear indication of how Wilson’s Christian faith had helped secure the positive outcomes that resulted in the crew’s return home, Keate’s book became very popular with a wide cross-section of the community, including those who saw in the story solid evidence of the need for Christian ministry in the South Seas. 18 The continuing questioning and rejection of the “noble savage” became a justification for the London Missionary Society’s decision to minister to the Tahitians in the early 1790s, marking the commencement of the South Seas missionary endeavor. The Hawaiian Islands soon became an important destination for the spiritual redemption of benighted natives. That religious imperative was

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concomitant with a growing awareness of the island group’s commercial significance. Along with the whaling and sandalwood trades, which became the most profitable commercial activities in the region from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, and which provoked a general interest in the South Seas, America’s burgeoning trading interests with China had produced a particular interest in Hawaii. 19 Honolulu, moreover, was increasingly regarded as a useful port of call for ships engaged in the China trade. Furthermore, the island group’s own store of sandalwood made it an attractive commercial destination. In 1820 the Congregationalist American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions established a Christian missionary presence in the island group, and began replicating the earlier and continuing endeavors of the London Missionary Society in Tahiti. 20 From the time of the London Missionary Society’s foundation in 1792, with its mission to minister to the Tahitians, the emerging South Seas tradition was challenged. To justify their ministry, missionaries rejected the notion of Arcadia, with its praise of the noble savage. A contrary narrative was both a prerequisite and justification for the missionaries’ redemptive intervention. In justifying their ministry American missionaries thus portrayed Islanders in the same ways as Patterson. South Seas Islanders were understood and depicted as Godless heathens, in need of Christian redemption. American missionary societies were quick to amplify the emerging negative image of Polynesia. An important example of the emerging missionary impact on American perceptions of the South Seas was the idea of “tabu,” connoting the prohibition of something because of its sacred nature. For David Porter, writing in the second decade of the nineteenth century, the idea of “taboo” was associated with notions of restraint, and was, therefore, considered very favorably in his travelogue. 21 It had been Europeans, rather than Islanders, who had been unable to restrain themselves in the South Seas. The emerging missionary discourse was congruent with this idea. By submitting to their own savage “appetites,” the first Europeans to visit the South Seas had further debased the native populations: “It is melancholy to know,” Porter reflected, that the “vices of civilization have made their way, in too many instances, more rapidly than its improvements and comforts.” 22 Increasingly, however, missionaries found evidence that the debasement of the native population had preceded the arrival of Europeans. The tabu system was in fact a clear example of the Islanders’ underlying depravity: rather than a sign of restraint, tabu was an evil superstition that served to enslave. The “tabu system,” wrote one observer, “so universal throughout all the Polynesian islands,” was “the most terrible instrument of human tyranny, which” had “ever been known.” 23 In terms of both personnel and resources, the American missionary enterprise in the South Seas began modestly. But the publication of the

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missionaries’ experiences was soon identified as an important device for publicizing and popularizing their endeavors. 24 In 1825 a “deputation” of missionaries in Hawaii published a book-length account of the American missionary endeavor in Hawaii, entitled Journal of a Tour around Hawaii, the Largest of the Sandwich Islands. 25 The Journal of a Tour around Hawaii reflected the paradox that would long characterize missionary writing on the South Seas. At the same time as the Hawaiians’ depravity was being explained in detail, the islands themselves were being encoded with romantic appeal. W. Patrick Strauss has argued it was the book’s romantic appeal—evidenced by the publication of three editions in quick succession—that ensured its popularity. 26 One member of the “deputation” that compiled the Journal of a Tour around Hawaii was the Reverend William Ellis. Ellis, an Englishman, had first ministered in Tahiti before joining his American brethren in the Sandwich Islands in 1822. Returning to England Ellis wrote what became perhaps the most influential missionary tract of the nineteenth century: Polynesian Researches (1828). The book soon gained a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic, and was republished several times in both Britain and the United States. 27 Such was its popularity, and so detailed were its descriptions, that some writers who followed saw little point in even talking about certain parts of the South Seas. Writing in 1845 one contributor to the North American Review noted that the “Society islands are so well known through Mr. Ellis’s ‘Polynesian Researches,’ that we shall pass at once to the Samoan group.” 28 While American ships continued to traverse the South Pacific through the 1820s, calls continued within and outside Congress to secure funds and the required vessels and crew for specific American exploration of the South Seas. Although President James Madison had commissioned Captain Edmund Fanning to lead an “Exploring and Discovery Expedition” to the South Seas in 1812, the war with Britain curtailed the plan and postwar calls for the resumption of the expedition were never heeded. Private commercial interests had been left to support such enterprise in the hope of reaping further financial rewards. At the center of such private explorations was Edmund Fanning. He acted as a promoter and agent for seventy such missions during the 1820s and 1830s. Among the most notable of these private expeditions was the 1834 enterprise led by Captain Benjamin Morrell. In 1832 Morrell’s public profile had increased dramatically in the wake of the publication of his travelogue A Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Seas, North and South Pacific Ocean, Chinese Sea, Ethiopic and Southern Atlantic Ocean, Indian and Antarctic, which chronicled his earlier journeys to the region. 29 The book’s popularity challenged Morrell’s main rival Fanning to record his journeys. Fanning’s Voyages around the World was published the following year. Quickly attracting a large readership, the book was republished five

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times in as many years. 30 The popularity of Morrell’s and Fanning’s books, along with their claims for the untapped wealth of the South Seas, excited business interests in New York City who decided to fund Morrell’s 1834 “expedition.” Resurrecting ideas that had emerged at the time of the South Seas “Bubble,” and which would remain powerful in the United States through succeeding decades, Morrell identified the South Seas as a source of wealth and potential prosperity. 31 In the wake of Morrell’s and Fanning’s publications, public demand grew in the United States for a government-funded “exploring expedition” to the “Pacific and South Seas.” Public agitation took the form of petitions from business interests in a number of America’s commercial cities that pointed to the economic advantages such exploration would bring. Memorials from “sundry citizens of Connecticut” to the Congress encouraged an investigation of the subject by the Congressional Committee on Naval Affairs. The Committee’s Report, completed in March 1836, supported an “exploring expedition.” Identifying a number of factors in favor of the expedition, including the commercial advantages, the Report stated boldly: “No part of the commerce of this country is more important than that carried on in the Pacific Ocean.” 32 The Report relied heavily on the evidence provided in an 1828 submission from Jeremiah N. Reynolds. 33 Variously a lawyer, editor, and explorer, Reynolds had earlier been introduced to the work of a former army officer and hero of the War of 1812, Captain John Cleves Symmes. Inspired by the rings of Saturn, the many hollow structures in nature, and the earlier pronouncements of Edmond Halley, Symmes had postulated that the earth was hollow, containing a number of “concentric spheres,” all of which were accessible from enormous openings at the North and South Poles. Within these spheres were other worlds inhabited by other peoples. From 1818 Symmes’s ideas appeared as published notices and in journal articles. Under the pseudonym “Adam Seaborn” he sought to popularize his ideas in Symzonia—a novel considered by some observers as the first work of science fiction. 34 Chronicling a journey to one of the Poles, and an ensuing encounter with an alien people, Symzonia reflected the traditional use of binary opposites typically associated with new frontiers in European exploration. In 1826 a more detailed explanation of the theory was published as Symmes’s “theory of concentric spheres and polar voids.” 35 Symmes sought financial help to travel to Siberia and find the “hole” in the North Pole. Failing to secure such funds, during the early 1820s he sought support from the United States government. In January 1823 a petition on his behalf was presented to Congress: since the petition requested support for the establishment of “commerce with the interior inhabitants” there was some debate within Congress as to whether the document should be sent to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, or to the

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Committee on Commerce.” 36 The petition failed to bring action, but Symmes was undeterred. A convert to the theory of concentric spheres, Reynolds joined Symmes on the lecture circuit and renewed Symmes’s earlier efforts to secure government funding for an expedition. Tapping into the general public interest in the South Seas, Reynolds identified an opportunity. An expedition to the South Pole hole might be an addendum to a general expedition to the South Seas—hence his 1828 submission to the Naval Committee. Government funds were not forthcoming, but Reynolds gained support from private sources, and in 1829 he sailed for the South Pole. Unable to find Symmes’s “Hole,” Reynolds’s ship began its return to the United States via Chile, where his crew mutinied. Reynolds later joined the United States frigate Potomac on its circumnavigation of the globe. His official account of the cruise included a very critical examination of the missionary endeavor in those “celebrated islands” of Hawaii. Reynolds’s Voyage of the US Frigate Potomac under the Command of Commodore John Downes was published in 1835. 37 Such journeys steeled Reynolds’s resolve. Into the 1830s he continued to publicly advocate an exploring expedition to the Pacific and South Seas. While he was not explicit in his public pronouncements, Reynolds continued to hope that such an expedition, with himself at the head, could sail on to Antarctica and prove once and for all the truth of Symmes’s theory. In the wake of the Naval Committee’s report Reynolds renewed his efforts and a few days after it was tabled in 1836 he delivered another public address in New York City calling on the government to act. Alluding to the general support for the proposal within the community, he asked “have not societies for the collection and diffusion of knowledge, town and legislature, and the commanding voice of public opinion, as seen through the public press, sanctioned and called for this enterprise?” 38 One supporter of Reynolds and his mission was Edgar Allan Poe, editor of the Richmond, Virginia, Southern Literary Messenger. Having already used Symmes’s theory as the inspiration for an 1833 short story “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” there is little doubt Poe knew of Reynolds and his efforts. 39 In a June 1835 edition of the Messenger Poe had also reviewed Reynolds’s Voyage of the US Frigate Potomac, noting its author’s connection to Symmes. 40 Poe used the pages of the Messenger to endorse Reynolds and support the plan. Devoting considerable space to the report of the Naval Committee, and to Reynolds’s New York City response, Poe insisted that the “public mind is at length thoroughly alive on the subject” of the South Seas. The motivations for such a mission were twofold. First, there were tangible economic benefits. Borrowing heavily from the Naval Committee’s Report he noted that no “part of the whole commerce of our country is of more importance than that carried on in the regions in question.”

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The second factor was less tangible but arguably more significant in the long term. American exploration in the South Seas, declared Poe, went to the heart of national prestige and character: “In matters of mere nautical or geographical science, our government has been hitherto supine, and it is due to the national character that in these respects something should be done. We have now a chance of redeeming ourselves in the South Sea.” 41 Those sailors who had traversed the South Seas had a “hardihood and daring” that had “almost become a proverb.” In an era when constructions of masculinity were frequently associated with explicitly patriotic imperatives, it was contended that such worthy national characteristics should be nurtured: “It is in this class [South Seas sailors] we meet the largest aggregate of that cool self possession, courage, and enduring fortitude, which have won for us our enviable position among the great maritime powers.” Exposure to the South Seas was thus improving the American national character. “We have now a chance,” asserted Poe, “of redeeming ourselves in the Southern Sea.” In language suggestive of the clamorous mid-nineteenth-century expressions of Manifest Destiny, he contended that government support for explorations of the South Seas enhanced national prestige: “It is our duty, holding as we do a high rank in the scale of nations, to contribute a large share to that aggregate of useful knowledge, which is the common property of all.” 42 The editor of the Boston North American Review concurred. Reflecting on the popularity of primarily British accounts of the region he noted the continuing interest around the Western world in the South Seas. “It is a proof of the interest excited by these relations,” he wrote, “that hardly a year has passed since the days of Cook, without producing narratives of discovery and adventure in the Pacific of all kinds, from the brief simple story of the shipwrecked sailor to the ponderous quarto of a national expedition, all of which have met with an eager reception.” The most interested of all Western peoples, he suggested, were Americans: “At present time there are none to whom the Pacific is a source of greater interest than to the inhabitants of the United States.” As it was for Poe, one explanation for that interest was the “revenues” flowing to the United States from the region, as evidenced by the fact that one-tenth of all American fishing vessels were plying the waters of the South Seas, along with those vessels involved in the sandalwood and beche de mer trades. Echoing Poe’s words, The North American Review noted there was “no branch of industry of more vital importance to the whole nation.” 43 Commerical considerations thus coincided with patriotic and cultural imperatives. Meanwhile, in Richmond, Edgar Allan Poe turned his literary skills to a South Seas tale. Sections of the story first appeared in the January 1837 edition of the Southern Literary Messenger, but the work was not completed when Poe left the Editor’s chair. Entitled “Arthur Gordon Pym, No. 1,” Poe’s story, reputedly a memoir of a Nantucket sailor, and his

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journeys to the South Seas, opened with the assertion: “My name is Arthur Gordon Pym.” 44 In the same edition, Poe offered an enthusiastic endorsement of Jeremiah Reynolds, and printed excerpts from his New York City address. After leaving the Southern Literary Messenger Poe turned his attention to collecting Pym’s tales into a book. In 1838 Harper Brothers published Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Comprising the Details of a Mutiny and Atrocities of Butchery on Board the American Brig Grumpos, on Her Way to the South Seas. 45 Although it has been suggested that Poe’s only novel was inspired by the story of the Bounty, other influences were also significant. 46 The decision to write the novel was inspired by the prevailing public interest in the South Seas. Some sections of the book, moreover, were copied almost verbatim from Morrell’s Narrative of Four Voyages. Claudia Silverman has argued that Pym had “much in common with, and in places, plagiarized contemporaneous narrative of exploration.” 47 This deliberate blurring of fact and fiction, however, was not, as Silverman implies, a new literary technique. As noted, the practice rested comfortably with earlier fictional accounts of South Seas adventure. Audiences craved “facts” in their South Seas “fiction.” Poe’s work was particularly significant because it demonstrated the degree to which ideas about the South Seas had permeated the American imagination by the 1830s. Pym, raised in the New England seaport of Nantucket, could not help but hear stories and dream of his own adventures: “At last I could not help being interested . . . and by degrees I felt the greatest desire to go to sea.” 48 In relaying the events of the almostinevitable mutiny of the crew of Pym’s ship, Poe highlighted several perceptions common among his contemporaries: The representations of Peters, who had frequently visited these regions, had great weight, apparently, with the mutineers, wavering as they were between half-engendered notions of profit and pleasure. He dwelt on the novelty and amusement to be found among the innumerable islands of the Pacific, on the perfect security and freedom from all restraint to be enjoyed, but more particularly on the deliciousness of the climate, on the abundant means for good living, and on the voluptuous beauty of the women. 49

Although Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym enthralled future generations of writers, including Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, the novel did not immediately capture the American public imagination. Burton’s Gentlemen’s Magazine labeled it an “impudent attempt at humbugging the public.” 50 Readers, apparently, would not be duped about the South Seas. The real author had no personal experience of the South Seas. Furthermore, the fact that Poe included an interlude toward the South Pole in which Pym found a “chasm” to the underworld and encountered strange natives who were black, and who had black teeth,

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stretched the plausibility of the work and undermined its popularity. The book, moreover, compared unfavorably to novelist John H. Amory’s 1837 novel, Old Ironside. Amory utilized a not dissimilar storyline to Pym— shipwrecks, hostile natives, and a mutiny—but generated a greater appeal among reviewers and readers. By 1841 the publishers were preparing to publish the fourth edition of Old Ironside. 51 Another possible explanation for the failure of Poe’s Pym to capture the public imagination, when there was widespread fascination with the South Seas, was that its publication coincided with the sailing of the longawaited American exploring expedition. Americans would soon have “facts” rather than Poe’s “fiction.” The expedition was placed under the control of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes. For Jeremiah Reynolds the expedition’s departure was bittersweet. After securing Congressional approval in 1836, delays in launching the expedition saw Reynolds’s protracted haranguing of the Secretary of the Navy result in his removal from the expedition. His only lasting connection with the Mission’s actual work was a newly discovered genus of Samoan ivy that a botanist on the trip named “Reynoldsia.” As one commentator noted in 1871, Symmes’s theory had “so many of the elements that are woven into Munchausen stories, that few men could consider it with any degree of seriousness.” With Symmes’s “hole” already a term in the popular vernacular, connoting absurdity, incredulity, or fakishness, Reynolds’s grand ambition was unrealized. 52 Denied passage to the South Seas he journeyed there with his pen, and in 1839 the New York Knickerbocker magazine published his reputedly true account of the pursuit and capture of a great white sperm whale off the New Zealand coast. Mocha Dick: or The White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal provided inspiration to another young American who was drawn to the South Seas, and who would write what was arguably the most significant South Seas story of the nineteenth century. 53 Americans’ interest in and engagement with the South Seas can be traced to the latter decades of the eighteenth century. It was during the early decades of the nineteenth century, however, that Americans began expressing a growing and wide-ranging curiosity about the South Seas. Variously driven by religious, commercial, and scientific imperatives, their curiosity about the South Seas could encourage what appeared— even at the time—to be far-fetched or even implausible depictions of the region. Yet while the line between reality and myth was always indistinct when Westerners contemplated the South Seas, these early American representations reflected and reinforced ways of the thinking about the region that exercised a deep hold over the cultural landscape in the United States, and elsewhere, for decades to come.

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NOTES 1. See Ernest S. Dodge, “Early American Contacts in Polynesia and Fiji,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107, no. 2 (1963): 102–106. 2. For a discussion of these interests consult Donald D. Johnson, The United States in the Pacific: Private Interests and Public Policies, 1784–1899 (Westport: Praeger, 1995). 3. W. Patrick Strauss, Americans in Polynesia, 1783-1842 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1964), 148. Accounts of La Perouse’s voyages were published in Boston in 1801. 4. Strauss, Americans in Polynesia, 152. 5. John Ledyard, A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and in Quest of a North-west Passage between Asia & America, Performed in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, and 1779 (Hartford: Printed and sold by Nathaniel Patten, 1783). 6. David Porter, “Journal of a Cruise to the Pacific Ocean,” North American Review 1 (July 1815): 247–75. 7. David Porter, Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean (New York: Wiley & Halsted, 1822), 11. 8. Porter, “Journal of a Cruise,” 247–48. 9. Porter, “Journal of a Cruise,” 248, 273. 10. See Delano, Narrative of Voyage and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (Boston: E. G. House, 1817), 16. 11. An American edition of Bligh’s A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board his Britannic Majesty’s Ship Bounty had been published by William Spotswood in Philadelphia in 1790. 12. Ezekiel Terry, Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of Samuel Patterson, experienced in the Pacific Ocean and many other parts of the world with an account of Feegee and Sandwich Islands (Palmer, Rhode Island: The Press, 1817), iii. 13. Terry, Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of Samuel Patterson, 68–70, 88, 123. 14. See Terry, A Narrative of the Adventures, Sufferings and Privations of Samuel Patterson, a Native of Rhode-Island Experienced by Him in Several Voyages to Various Parts of the World, Embracing a Short Account of the Numerous Places Visited by Him in His Eventful Life, and a Particular Description of the Manners, Customs, &c. of the People of the Sandwich & Fejee Islands (Providence: publisher not identified, 1825). 15. On this legacy see Michael A. H. B. Walter, “A 40,000 Dollar Question, or Some Remarks on the Veracity of Certain Ancient Mariners, Beachcombers and Castaways,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 83, no. 1 (1974): 58–83. 16. George Keate, An Account of the Pelew Islands (Basil: J. J. Tourneison, 1789), vii and xi. 17. Keate, Account of the Pelew Islands, vii and xvi. Bernard Smith has emphasized the importance of Keate’s 1788 account of the Pelew Islands. While Keate still spoke positively of his subjects he did raise the possibility that not all South Seas Islanders were noble savages. See Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Harper and Row, 1984), 133. 18. For further discussion around this theme consult Smith, European Vision, 133–36. 19. On whaling’s significance and its growing domination by American whalers consult Kerry Howe, Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), 93. 20. See Dana Lee Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996); Rufus Anderson, History of the Missions of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to the Oriental Churches (Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1872). For further insights into Anderson and the Hawaii Mission consult Paul William Harris, Nothing but Christ: Rufus Anderson and the Ideology of Protestant Foreign Missions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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21. Porter, “Journal of a Cruise,” 269. Patterson’s account used the term “taboo” but without any explanation, suggesting his audience understood the term. See Terry, Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of Samuel Patterson, 71. 22. Review of “Journal of a Tour around Hawaii,” North American Review 22 (April 1826): 336. A notorious incident occurred in Hawaii in 1826, when the captain of the USS Dolphin, Lieutenant “Mad Jack” Percival, demanded sexual relations with Hawaiian women, in defiance of the Christian teachings of the missionaries. Percival demanded that local chiefs abolish the missionary-inspired law that stopped Islander women from visiting ships. See Hiram Bigham, A Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands: or, the Civil, Religious, and Political History of Those Islands, 2nd ed. (Hardford: Hezekiah Huntington, 1848) 283–89; and S. C. Bartlett, “Anderson’s Histories of Foreign Missions,” New Englander and Yale Review 36 (January 1877): 138; The Living Age 40 (March 18, 1854): 329–56. 23. “Review of Journal of a Tour around Hawaii,” North American Review 22 (April 1826): 337. 24. For an examination of American missionary activity in Hawaii within the wider context of the American enterprise in the South Seas, see Arthur Power Dudden, The American Pacific: From the Old China Trade to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 49–77. 25. William Ellis, A Journal of a Tour around Hawaii: The Largest of the Sandwich Islands (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1825). 26. Strauss, Americans in Polynesia, 157. 27. Rod Edmond has claimed that the “influence of William Ellis’s Polynesian Researches on nineteenth-century writing about the Pacific is comparable to that of Cook and Bougainville in the later eighteenth century.” See Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 104. 28. Anon., Review of Charles Wilkes’s Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition during the Years 1838–1842, in North American Review 61 (July 1845): 61. While Polynesian Researches was one of the more enduring South Seas missionary texts its popularity at the time was overshadowed by Charles S. Stewart’s A Residence on the Sandwich Islands. By 1838, having been “revised and enlarged,” it had undergone its fifth edition. See Strauss, Americans in Polynesia, 158. 29. Benjamin Morrell, A Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Seas, North and South Pacific Ocean, Chinese Sea, Ethiopic and Southern Atlantic Ocean, Indian and Antarctic (New York: Harpers, 1832). Members of Morrell’s crew also published accounts of the voyage. See Jack Halliard, Voyages of Jack Halliard with Captain Morrell (Boston: Russel, Odiorne, and Co, c. 1833); and Thomas Jefferson Jacobs, Scenes, Incidents, and Adventures in the Pacific Ocean; or The Islands of the Australasian Seas During the Cruise of the Clipper Margaret Oakley under Captain Benjamin Morrell (New York: Harper & Bros., 1844). 30. Fanning published his recollections of several South Seas voyages in Voyages Round the World; With Selected Sketches of Voyages to the South Seas, North and South Pacific Oceans, China, etc. Performed Under the Command and Agency of the Author. Also, Information Relating to Important Late Discoveries; Between the Years 1792 and 1832 (New York: Collins and Hamay, 1833). Fanning noted that reading authors such as Drake, Byron, Bougainville, Anson, and Cook had instilled within him a desire to “add some new discoveries” and the “no less flattering hope of realizing a fortune.” See Fanning, Voyages Round the World, 66. 31. Fanning, Voyages Round the World, 17. 32. Report of the Congressional Committee on Naval Affairs, 2, in The Senate of the United States, First Session of the Twenty-Fourth Congress, begun and held at the City of Washington, Deecmber 7, 1835, and in the Sixtieth Year of Indpendence of the United States Vol. III (Washington, 1836), 262.

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33. Reynolds had reputedly been “seduced by books of travel and discovery long before he ever saw the ocean.” See Granville Allen Mawer, Ahab's Trade: The Saga of South Seas Whaling (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999), 183. 34. The inhabitants of Symzonia had a place where those who had “degenerated” into vice would be sent. The heat was intense and white skin would become dark. The exile land was compared to the “external tropic.” See Symmes, Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (New York: Printed by J. Seymour, 1820), chapter 3. 35. See Symmes, The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres, Demonstrating That the Earth is Hollow, Habitable Within, and Widely Open about the Poles. Compiled by Americus Symmes from the Writings of His Father, Capt. John Cleves Symmes (Louisville, KY: Printed by Bradley & Gilbert, 1878); P. Clark and Silverman, “The Symmes Theory of the Earth,” Atlantic Monthly 31 (April 1873): 471–81. 36. See Annals of Congress, 17th Congress, 2nd Session, January 1823, 698. 37. See Reynolds, Voyage of the US Frigate Potomac under the Command of Commodore John Downes, During the Circumnavigation of the Globe in the Years 1831–32–33 and 34: Including a Particular Account of the Engagement at Quallah-Battoo, on the Coast of Sumatra (New York: Harper and Bros., 1835), 399. 38. Reynolds, Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836). See also Harris, Nothing but Christ. 39. “MS. Found in a Bottle” was first published in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, on October 19, 1833. See Johan Wijkmark, “‘One of the Most Intensely Exciting Secrets’: The Antarctic in American Literature, 1820–1849” (PhD diss., Karlstadt University, 2009), 153. 40. Poe noted that Reynolds “will be remembered as the associate of Symmes in his remarkable theory of the earth, and a public defender of that very indefensible subject.” See “Literary Notices,” Southern Literary Messenger 1 (June 1835): 594. 41. See Poe, “Critical Notes” on J. N. Reynolds, Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas,” Southern Literary Messenger 3 (January 1837): 69. 42. See Poe, “Critical Notes,” 69. 43. “Navigation of the South Seas,” North American Review 45 (October 1837): 363. 44. Edgar Allan Poe, “Arthur Gordon Pym No 1,” Southern Literary Messenger 3 (January 1837): 13–16. 45. See Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Comprising the Details of a Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas (New York: Harper Bros., 1838), iii. 46. On the influences on Poe, see Susan F. Beegel “‘Mutiny and Atrocious Buthery’: The Globe Mutiny as a Source for Pym,” in Poe’s Pym: Critical Explorations, ed. Richard Kopley (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 7–19; Frederick S. Frank and Diane Long Hoeveler’s accompanying notes to their edition of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (Peterboro, Ontario: Broadview, 2010), 97. Ronald Clark Harvey asserts that both Reynolds and Morrell influenced Poe’s South Seas fiction. See Harvey, The Critical History of Edgar Allan Poe's the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: A Dialogue With Unreason (London: Routledge, 1998), 107. 47. See Silverman, “The Strange Dis/Appearance of Arthur G. Pym: Poe’s Tale of Exploration” (Masters Dissertation, University of Virginia, 1998). 48. Poe, Pym, 10. 49. Poe, Pym, 68. 50. Cited in Stanley Kaplan, “An introduction to Pym,” in Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Regan (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 146. 51. See Amory, Old Ironside: The Story of a Shipwreck (1837; repr. Kessinger Publishing, 2010); Strauss, Americans in Polynesia, 161.

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52. B. St. J. Fry, D. D., “Captain John Cleves Symmes,” Ladies Repository 31 (August 1871): 136. 53. See Reynolds, “Mocha Dick, or The White Whale of the Pacific. A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal,” Knickerbocker 13 (May 1839): 377–92; and Reynolds, Mocha Dick: or The White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal (New York: Clark and Edson, 1839).

THREE Herman Melville’s Pacific Imaginings

By the 1840s New England whalers had been traversing the South Pacific for over fifty years, and the return of each ship to its home port brought tales of romance and adventure, as well as artifacts ranging from the ornamental to the living. 1 South Sea Islanders stood on New England soil, as tangible evidence of American enterprise in the South Pacific. 2 While Edgar Allan Poe had earlier noted how the “moral, political and commercial interests” of New England ports such as New Bedford, New London, and Nantucket had been shaped by their relationship with the South Seas, from the mid-nineteenth century, New England’s South Seas tales, particularly the work of Herman Melville, exercised a new and powerful hold on the wider American cultural landscape—and elsewhere. 3 In 1841, at the same time as Charles Wilkes and his expedition were traversing the South Pacific, a young New Yorker by the name of Herman Melville headed back to the sea. Melville had first gone to sea in 1839 on a short trip to Liverpool. With his prospects no better after his return, and with a copy of Richard Henry Dana’s recently published and popular Two Years Before the Mast as inspiration, Melville returned to New England. 4 At New Bedford in January 1841, he signed aboard a new whaler the Acushnet. In October 1844, after more than three years at sea, and after visiting various South Seas locales, he was discharged from the frigate United States. Returning to Albany, New York, Melville regaled his family with his own South Sea tales. Encouraged to write down some of his experiences, he contemplated life as a writer. By the time of Charles Wilkes’s return to the United States in 1842, however, public interest in the South Seas had waned. Having supported the dispatch of the “exploring expedition” to the South Seas, Americans then seemed uninterested in what it had discovered. Commenting on an 25

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address by Wilkes to the National Institute in Washington, D.C., the editor of the North American Review noted that “this narrative of achievement so honorable to the navy, so useful to the commerce and navigation of the country, so credible to its projectors, and so beneficial to science,” had “excited less public attention in the United States than any of the hundred tales of misery and crime which daily” occupied “the columns of our papers in all their disgusting detail.” 5 Despite such a response, the Secretary of the Navy, John Young Mason, directed Wilkes to produce a travelogue of his experiences for the general public, along with the numerous volumes that were planned on specific scientific issues. By 1845, when Melville had completed the draft of his first book and was looking for publishers, the publication of Wilkes’s travelogue had gone some way to rekindling interest in the South Seas. 6 Yet this renewed interest in the South Seas presented Melville with the same problem that had confronted Edgar Allan Poe: the American reading public remained indifferent to South Seas fiction. Melville’s manuscript told the story of a sailor named “Tommo” and his experiences on a New England whaler, and in the Typee Valley in the Marquesas Islands. Much of the book’s narrative centered around Tommo’s experiences on land. Encountering “Fayaway,” a beautiful blueeyed Islander, Tommo experiences the sensual pleasures of the South Seas of which he had hitherto only dreamed. In the end, however, realizing that he is unsuited to paradise, he seeks to escape back to civilization. 7 While the manuscript offered more than just a romanticized view of the South Seas, the work has been regarded as a lament to the lost Arcadia that had been “found” by the European navigators of the late eighteenth century and rejected by the missionary endeavor. 8 Melville’s first choice to publish his manuscript was the New York firm Harpers, whose interest in the South Seas had included the publication of Poe’s Pym and Jeremiah Reynolds’s earlier treatise on the South Seas exploring expedition. Perhaps having learned a lesson from Poe’s failure, Harpers rejected the manuscript on the grounds that it was too fantastic to be true. Although the manuscript was compared favorably to Robinson Crusoe “it was impossible that it could be true and therefore was without real value.” 9 Undeterred, Melville passed a copy of the manuscript to his brother Gansevoort, who had been appointed Secretary of the American Legation in London. The manuscript was then presented to the British publisher John Murray, whose popular “Colonial and Home Library series” relied on “wholesomely factual” books. 10 To deal with the main criticism that had been made by Harpers, Melville added three new chapters to his manuscript to make it appear more authentic. In this endeavor he drew heavily on Captain David Porter’s 1815 journal. 11 The published title—Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life During Four Months’ Residence in a Valley in the Marquesas, with Notices of the French Occupation of Tahiti and the Provisional Cession of the Sandwich Islands to Lord Paulet—was

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the creation of the publisher and constituted a further attempt to convey authenticity. Murray published the book in London in February 1846. American publisher G. P. Putnam soon heard of the manuscript, thanks in part to the efforts of author and diplomat Washington Irving, read it, and decided to secure the American rights. An American edition was published in New York by Wiley and Putnam in March 1846. Typee became an immediate sensation on both sides of the Atlantic and within a few months new editions followed in both London and New York. The New York Daily Tribune printed a range of American and English reviews in August 1846. The London Sun enthused that “from the first line in the first page to the last in the last, interest, information, and the most genial freshness of description, pervade the whole volume.” Comparisons with Robinson Crusoe were almost immediate. The Albany Evening Journal claimed it “a work of even greater interest than Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,” and Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine wondered what their “juvenile readers” would “say to a real Robinson Crusoe and a real man Friday.” 12 To build on the success of Typee Melville promptly wrote a second manuscript, purporting to document his experiences aboard a troubled Australian whaling barque. Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, was published by Murray in March 1847. An American edition was published by Harpers two months later. While one reviewer noted that Typee and Omoo were “books that made the multitude crazy with delight,” John Murray’s original fears were vindicated. 13 Many reviews of both works were preoccupied not with their literary merits but with their authenticity. 14 The New York National Anti-slavery Standard noted that Typee’s “adventures and hairbreadth escapes are highly wrought and exciting, and the whole narrative more entertaining, not so much for the style as the facts, than Robinson Crusoe. We can honestly say of this book that it is curiously charming, and charmingly instructive.” 15 The London Times disagreed with that assessment but still emphasized the importance of authenticity: “The evidence against the authenticity of the book is more than sufficient to satisfy a court of justice.” 16 In Britain the fact that the book was reputedly written by a common sailor was considered clear proof of its fiction. 17 The skeptical British response to Typee, however, helped confirm many Americans’ belief in the story’s authenticity. A review in the New York Living Age emphasized the egalitarian principles that Americans celebrated during the so-called “Age of the Common Man.” If “this work” had “been put forward as the production of an English common sailor,” the reviewer argued, “we should have had some doubts of its authenticity, in the absence of distinct proof.” “But in the United States,” the review continued, “it is different,” since “social opinion does not invest any employment with caste discredit; and it seems customary that young men of respectability serve as common seaman . . . as a mode of

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seeing life.” Dana’s Two Years before the Mast was presented as conclusive proof of this American tradition. Although Melville’s work was considered “not beyond the range of invention, especially by a person acquainted with the islands, and with the fictions of Defoe,” the Living Age reviewer concluded that “many of the incidents” seemed “too natural to be invented by the author.” 18 Melville’s efforts to authenticate his South Seas voyage persuaded many critics and readers. For other readers, they made the work more plausible, while still leaving questions unanswered. One English reviewer noted of Omoo: Its chief fault, almost its only one, interferes little with the pleasure of reading it, will escape many, and is hardly worth insisting upon. Omoo is of the order composite, a skillfully concocted Robinsonade, where fictitious incident is ingeniously blended with genuine information. Doubtless its author has visited the countries he describes, but not in the capacity he states. He is no Munchausen. There is nothing improbable in his adventures. 19

For some readers, too, Melville’s work reinforced their earlier (premissionary) assumptions and readings on the South Seas. As one reviewer in John Bull observed: “Since the joyous moment when we first read Robinson Crusoe, and believed it all, and wondered all the more because we believed, we have not met with so bewitching a work as this narrative of Herman Melville’s.” 20 Melville’s position was further strengthened by the emergence of the real-life “Toby”—Tommo’s companion in the book. A letter from a “Richard Tobias Green” appeared in a number of newspapers and journals identifying the writer as Melville’s companion and confirming the veracity of many of the stories. 21 Yet some reviewers remained unconvinced that Melville’s books were anything but works of fiction. A review of Omoo in the Living Age disputed the journal’s earlier claims for Typee. Omoo was full of “perversions of the truth” and “instead of being esteemed as faithful pictures of Polynesian life”—as “some of our leading contemporaries” had “pronounced them to be”—Melville’s stories “should at once take their place beside the equally veracious pages of Baron Munchausen.” 22 In part, such criticisms were reactions to Melville’s critical judgments on the Christian missionary endeavor in the South Seas—which had earlier led John Wiley to cut thirty-six pages from the second edition of Typee, and refuse to publish Omoo, even after Melville had moderated his claims. 23 Criticism of the missionary endeavor in Tahiti and—particularly— Hawaii, grew during the late 1820s, through a variety of published accounts, mostly by British and American naval personnel. While missionaries and sailors were quick to agree on the friendliness of the Hawaiians, correcting a “most unfavorable impression of their character . . . made by

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the murder of our celebrated Navigator [Cook],” the two groups differed over the benefits of the missionary presence. Claims were variously made that the missionaries created “mischief among these simple-minded islanders” and were “laying waste” to “the whole country.” Missionaries responded to the “great injustice done” and defended their actions through their own accounts and the publications of their organizations and supporters at home. 24 One of the more stinging rebukes was provided by Russian naval officer Otto von Kotzebue. His critique of the missionaries was translated into English in 1830. Kotzebue argued: True, genuine Christianity, and a liberal government, might have soon given to this people, endowed by nature with the seeds of every social virtue, a rank among civilized nations. Under such a blessed influence, the arts and sciences would soon have taken root, the intellect of the people would have expanded, and a just estimation of all that is good beautiful, and eternally true, would have refined their manners and ennobled their hearts. Europe would soon have admired, perhaps even envied Tahaiti [sic]: but the religion taught by the Missionaries is not true Christianity. 25

Against such criticism, the aforementioned missionary pioneer and Polynesian Researches author William Ellis felt compelled to respond. Following a pattern which became a familiar model for critiquing works that criticized the missionary endeavor, he averred that a “more complete tissue of misrepresentations and mistakes” was “scarcely to be found, in an equal number of pages, within the whole compass of our language.” Identifying errors of fact (unrelated to the central accusations) suggested that the Russian was, more generally, misleading his reader. Consequently, “confidence in his statements is destroyed, and even the parts of his work entitled to belief, are received to strong suspicion.” 26 By the mid-1830s, thanks in part to new and influential studies such as the Reverend Charles S. Stewart’s A Residence on the Sandwich Islands, the missionary accounts had seen off the naval attacks. 27 Another observer of the South Seas was Francis Warriner, who had served on the USS Potomac during the early 1830s, and whose 1835 book not only reflected the influence of earlier cultural productions, but also the differing imperatives underpinning Americans’ interest in the South Seas. His “feelings” on approaching the Hawaiian Islands, he wrote, were “of a mingled nature”: I was near a country not only painfully memorable for the fate of Cook, but still more remarkable for the unexampled success which has attended the efforts of the American missionaries. How much, thought I, while promenading the quarter-deck, have I been interested in description of these islands, and how often have I wished to visit them. That such a wish could ever be gratified, was not among my day dreams; yet it was now on the eve of accomplishment. I felt that I was among friends, and it seemed like home. 28

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Warriner’s first reactions, however, reflected the enduring disjuncture between South Seas expectation and Pacific encounter. “At the first distant glance of Oahu,” he was “disappointed.” Instead of the “paradise which had been floating” in his “imagination,” the island “presented a barren and sunburnt appearance, like the high land before entering Table Bay at the cape of Good Hope.” “Thousands of natives, presenting a most motley appearance,” awaited their landing. 29 Rather than the earlier writers and navigators, Warriner held missionaries responsible for the disjuncture between expectation and encounter. Their writings, he concluded, had created expectations that were both unrealistic and, ultimately, deceptive. “In accounts of missionary operations,” he contended, “we are liable to have the brightest side presented.” Authors such as the Reverends Stewart and Ellis, he noted, had “been less accurate in some of their accounts of the Pacific islands, than could have been desired.” “Their style is sometimes so warm and glowing,” concluded Warriner, “as to give the wrong impressions of the things they describe.” 30 Critiques of the missionary endeavor persisted. William Samuel W. Ruschenberger shared his experiences of the South Seas in an 1838 memoir. The U.S. Navy surgeon believed the missionary endeavor had had a deleterious impact on the people of Hawaii. After critiquing the danger of seeing the Christian worldview as the natural condition for humanity’s judgment of right and wrong, Ruschenberger observed: A change has taken place in certain customs which must have influenced the physical development of the islanders. I allude to the variety of athletic exercises, such as swimming, with or without the surf-board, dancing, wrestling, throwing the javelin, &e, all of which games, being in opposition to the severe tenets of Calvinism, have been suppressed, without the substitution of other pursuits to fill upon the time. . . . these exercises and games affect the health and longevity of the people, because, being deprived of these sports they labor only to obtain food, which may be two days in the weeks and having no mental relaxation the remainder of the time is devoted to sleeping, or drinking, and other vicious practices. . . . Would these games have been suppressed had the missionaries never arrived at the islands? It is fair to presume that they would have continued in use. Can missionaries be fairly charged with suppressing these games? I believe they deny having done so. But they write and publicly express their opinions, and state these sports to be expressly against the laws of God. 31

Ruschenberger went on to suggest that what he saw in Hawaii was “oppression.” The missionaries’ activities were not only “highly ill-judged and impolitic,” but were also “opposed to the advancement of civil and political knowledge among the people and their rulers.” 32 Ruschenburger’s work, like that of others before him, was widely attacked by advocates of the missionary endeavor and its supporters. U.S.

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Navy chaplain Fitch Waterman Taylor was able to consider both sides and compared them against his own experience of Hawaii. In Honolulu he met missionaries and “Dr Ruschenberger’s book in relation to the islands was very naturally made the topic of conversation.” Contrasting Ruschenberger’s account against Stewart’s, Taylor found that while Stewart’s account was not necessarily “less accurate” or Ruschenburger’s “correct,” he did express some surprise that the missionary impact was not as far reaching as he had been led to believe, as evidenced by the “promiscuous assembly of the natives” he encountered on arrival. Nevertheless, he was equally surprised by the degree of Americanization that had resulted from the missionary presence. 33 By the time of the Exploring Expedition’s departure the missionary frame for understanding the South Seas dominated public understandings of the region. 34 As the commander of the Exploring Expedition, Charles Wilkes’s views of missionaries and their impact in the South Seas were far removed from the position of his predecessor John Percival. Wilkes observed that “if the missionaries had effected nothing else, they would deserve the thanks of all those who roam over this wide expanse of ocean, and incur its many unknown and hidden dangers. Here all shipwrecked mariners would be sure of kind treatment.” “No savage mistrust and fear,” he contended, “were seen here.” 35 This change in perception was further evidenced by the activities of the Exploring Expedition. Although not an issue in public debate prior to Congress approving the expedition, following that approval considerable emphasis was placed on finding American “castaways” in the South Seas. It was suggested that the South Seas were full of shipwrecked American sailors who had been “unfortunately left or cast away upon shores inhabited by a race of savages.” 36 An important aim of the mission became to “release those unhappy men who are detained in captivity on those islands.” 37 These descriptions contrasted starkly to the earlier public perception that had long been associated with the mutinous crew of the Bounty. Herman Melville took a keen interest in these issues. In writing Omoo, he consulted both sides of the debate, explicitly mentioning in the final version Frederick William Beechey, Ruschenberger, and Kotzebue on one side of the debate, and Ellis, Daniel Wheeler, and Michael Russell on the other. 38 Like his fellow sailors, Melville considered that the missionary endeavor’s negative consequences for local populations outweighed the positive outcomes. Through his writings Melville thus reinvigorated the notion of “fatal impact.” 39 The paradise that was the South Seas, it was contended, was being harmed by its encounter with civilization, and missionaries were the latest harbingers of much of the doom. 40 In Typee Melville warned that the untouched paradise was exposed; in Omoo he affirmed the negative impact of the West.

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Many missionaries and their supporters discounted Melville’s views as “prejudiced and unfounded”—just as they had earlier critiqued the views of Kotzebue, Ruschenberger, and Beechey. 41 It was suggested, moreover, that if Melville’s perceptions of the missionary endeavor in the South Seas were misguided, his understandings and depictions of other aspects of the South Seas enterprise might be similarly askew. Like Ellis’s critique of Kotzebue, Melville’s erring in judgment on the missionary impact was considered sufficient reason to criticize the general credibility of the work. Furthermore, public interest in the South Seas had been sustained in more recent times by the missionary endeavor. The stories of the South Seas conveyed in church pulpits and fellowship meetings had maintained public interest in the region, and helped Melville find a willing audience. Melville’s critics suggested he was biting the hand that fed him. Critics, moreover, warned of the dangers of Melville’s writings. Reflecting the prevailing sexual mores, many commentators objected to Melville’s frank discussion of sexual matters. The well-known newspaper publisher Horace Greeley spoke for many Americans in this regard. Writing in the New York Weekly Tribune, Greeley proclaimed Melville a “born genius,” whose work ranked in interest with Robinson Crusoe. But he also contended that Typee and Omoo were unmistakably “defective if not positively diseased in moral tone, and will be fairly condemned as dangerous reading for those of immature intellects and unsettled principles.” 42 In New York, Putnam’s partner, John Wiley, was deeply concerned about the explicit references to sexual matters and ensured much of this material was removed from the second American edition of Typee. 43 While many reviewers of Melville’s work noted the significance of the theme of sexuality in his writings, their assessments, and their critiques, ranged more widely. Writing on “Missionary Operations in Polynesia” the editor of the New Englander noted: These attractive descriptions of Polynesian character and life, however, are in great measure qualified by the existence of manners and customs which cast a shade upon the fairer portions of the pictures. . . . Some travelers have expended their powers of description in representing the happiness of the Polynesians when first discovered by Europeans, and in some of the least frequent isles at the present day; but these people were in fact the slaves of fear, the victims of debasing superstitions, and of demoralizing rites and customs which originated in their native Po. . . . There is no picture of human life so well calculated to deceive, as that which clothes in beauty the life of “the child of nature.” 44

Some critics went even further. Melville was not only representing Islander life as beautiful: he was, by implication, also suggesting it was preferable to civilized existence. Insisting that the “most predominant

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and most objectionable characteristic of this book” was the “obstructive earnestness with which its author supports a favorite notion that savage is preferable to civilized life,” the London Critic concluded that seldom “have savages found so zealous a vindicator of their morals; rarely too, has Christianity owned so ungrateful a son.” 45 Across the Atlantic, a contributor to the New York Evangelist concurred: “The book abounds in praises of the life of nature, alias savagism, and in slurs and flings against missionaries and civilization.” 46 Another reviewer, writing in the New York Evangelist, asserted that Typee was “redundant with bitter charges against the missionaries, piles obloquy upon their labor and its results, and broadly accuses them of being the cause of the vice, misery, destitution, and unhappiness of the Polynesians wherever they have penetrated.” 47 From the center of the American missionary enterprise in the Pacific, the editor of the Honolulu newspaper The Polynesian, Charles E. Hitchcock, offered an extended critique of both Typee and Omoo. Hitchcock disagreed with the Blackwood’s review of Omoo. It might have been a “Robinsonade,” but it was not built on “genuine information,” and if “all the incidents which he relates as having befell him, are truthful narrations of the fact, no one in this barbarous part of the world is inclined to believe.” While Hitchcock was “not disposed to detract from Mr. Melville’s literary fame,” he derided Melville’s “pretentions to accuracy as a historian, or claims for his writings credibility as truthful relations.” “So far as” Melville “pretends to narrate matters of fact,” Hitchcock continued, “we do not hesitate to pronounce his work a tissue of falsehood and misrepresentation.” Indeed, Melville “appears to be utterly ignorant of the history of which he pretends to treat.” 48 In contrast to such interpretations Melville reads today as being far more circumspect on such matters. The Typee valley is proven not to be the Garden of Eden, and Tommo expresses some disillusionment that the South Seas is not all he expected. Such caveats, however, went unnoticed by Melville’s critics and it is in this misrepresentation of Melville, as much as in his work, that Western perceptions of the South Seas continued to be shaped during the mid-nineteenth century. Melville’s escape from civilization had not brought him the freedom he had sought. Nevertheless, his work endorsed the idea that the South Seas provided an escape from the rigors of civilization. In a short notice announcing the publication of Omoo in May 1847, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s editor Walt Whitman observed that the “question of whether these stories be authentic or not has, of course, not so much to do with their interest.” Insisting that Melville’s works afforded “most readable reading,” thanks to their “richly good natured style,” Whitman concluded that Omoo had much to recommend it “as thorough entertainment.” 49 Typee and Omoo were indeed entertaining, and Melville had taken great dramatic license to ensure that was the case. However, the

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public’s determination that the South Seas were only the subject of factual reporting complicated public receptions of Melville’s works. One reviewer noted that Melville was “at liberty to introduce fictitious adventure into what professes to be a narrative of real events.” But because of the way in which the reading public received his books, the author was “perverting truth, and leading into error the simple persons who put their faith in him.” 50 Supposedly tired of the criticism concerning the authenticity of his work, Melville’s third novel, Mardi, was conceived as a self-parody—a totally fictionalized account of the South Seas. 51 Melville again borrowed heavily from David Porter’s 1815 study, as well as, perhaps ironically, the work of missionaries Stewart and Ellis. Mardi, moreover, was also influenced by Wilkes’s narrative of the exploring expedition; by Russian George H. von Langsdorff’s 1813 Voyages and Travels; and by Reynolds’s Voyage of the Potomac. While it introduced a theme that became common in South Sea tales—the image of a white women being prepared for native sacrifice—Mardi was one of Melville’s least successful books. Perhaps weary of the criticism, Melville’s focus in his subsequent works, such as White Jacket and Moby-Dick, was on the minutiae of shipboard life, rather than the more controversial matter of Westerners’ experiences on land. Melville’s influence was nevertheless profound. An article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in August 1849 announced the arrival of a new literary genre: A NEW school of novelists is evidently springing up in the western shores of the Atlantic. The pioneers are already in the field—and the main body, we suppose, will shortly follow. The style of these innovators seems a compound imitation of Gulliver, Munchausen, the Arabian Nights, and Robinson Crusoe; the ingredients being mixed in capricious proportions, well stirred, seasoned with Yankee bulls and scraps of sea-slang, and served with a hors d’oeuvre of puffs. We know not how such queer ragouts affect the public palate; but we are inclined to prefer dishes of an older fashion. Mr. Herman Melville, of New York, and the Pacific Ocean, common sailor, first introduced the newfangled kickshaw. . . . We venture to calculate that it takes a fullblooded Yankee to write in this strain. 52

Melville’s work renewed public interest in the South Seas on both sides of the Atlantic and encouraged other authors to offer their own tales—both real and imagined—of the South Seas. Although John Coulter’s recollections were now over ten years old, he was inspired by Melville to write of his Pacific adventures. 53 Providing a restorative for the missionary cause, Hiram Bingham had published his A Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands in 1848. 54 Although some reviewers warned that works “treading this closely upon the heels of Mr. Melville” would not be “largely perused,” Typee

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and Omoo fostered a general interest in the South Seas that could be exploited by other writers. 55 In 1851 Harpers published the Reverend Henry T. Cheever’s The Island World of the Pacific; Being . . . Travel through the Sandwich or Hawaiian Islands and Other Parts of Polynesia. Cheever explained his work in terms of the growing public interest in the South Seas: To the mind of eager youth and sober manhood almost alike, there is an imaginative charm in the very word island; and when you add South Seas or Pacific, the fascination is complete and irresistible. Implying as it does remoteness, solidarity, solitude, separateness and linked as it is with romance and fable adventure and song it takes a powerful hold on the human imagination. 56

The following year, Mrs. E. M. Wills Parker published The Sandwich Islands as They Are, Not as They Should Be. Like Cheever, Parker was motivated by the great public interest in the South Seas. Presenting her monograph as a response to the “thousands of questions I am daily asked regarding the Sandwich Islands since my return,” she identified “a general desire manifested by the community, just at this time, to know something definite of their past and present history.” 57 By 1855 George Colvocoresses’s 1852 account of the Wilkes expedition, Four Years in a Government Exploring Expedition, was in its fifth edition. 58 This public interest in the South Seas owed much to Herman Melville. Parker centered many of her observations on issues made contentious by the public response to Melville’s works: “We are apt to associate something of romance with the inhabitants of the Pacific Isles, especially after reading Melville’s happy delineations; but I have looked in vain for his noble warriors, or graceful Fayaway.” Those omissions notwithstanding, she agreed with Melville on the potential damage to Islander life posed by missionaries. Tapping into the contentious antebellum debates regarding slavery, she noted that missionaries in Honolulu were living in idle luxury, in “luxurious houses, filled with native slaves”—conditions far removed from those of the Islanders. And although Islanders had a “distant idea of chastity,” and while “their licentiousness” was “incredible,” she agreed with Melville that the missionary presence had only accelerated the debasement of Islanders. 59 Writing on the Melville phenomenon in 1857, a commentator in Putnam’s Magazine was quick to note that Melville’s Typee had been republished numerous times since its initial publication: It is long, now, since we first sailed with Melville to Typee, but we shall never forget the new sensations of that voyage. . . . The tropic island into whose delicious glades we wandered was not, indeed, wholly new to us; for we had been there before, partly in the way of business and partly on a pleasure trip with Bougainville and La Perouse, with Foster and Cook. But the manner of our being there was intensely new. It was

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By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, many details of the pre-Melville American engagement with the South Seas had faded for many Americans. Writing in the 1890s Charles Dudley Warner labeled Typee “the first of the long line of books of travel, adventure and romance about the South Seas; and Fayaway was the first of the Polynesian maidens to attract the attention of the world.” Melville’s “beauteous nymph Fayaway” was a “peculiar favorite” of Warner. “Her free pliant figure,” he wrote, “was the very perfection of female grace and beauty.” 61 Others, too, acknowledged the significance of Typee. Artist John La Farge, for instance, acknowledged the influence of Defoe but it was Melville and his muse Fayaway that had most captured his imagination. During his South Seas sojourn with historian Henry Adams he looked for Fayaway on every island he visited. Then, and later back at home, he painted her often. One such work graced a reprint of Typee in the 1890s while another rendition of her on a boat in Tahiti (not in Melville’s Marquesas but clearly reminiscent of a scene in Typee) became the centerpiece of an 1895 exhibition titled “Records of Travel” which was shown in both New York and at the Paris Salon. 62 Writing in 1890, one commentator insisted it had been Melville who had introduced Americans to the Tongan word “taboo,” a term that had become “indispensable” in American conversation. 63 Melville’s “Fayaway” also entered the wider lexicon for examining the female Other. Writing of his “Wild Life in Oregon” in the early 1850s, William V. Wells alluded to South Seas Islander women to counter his impression of Native American women: “[S]everal young squaws accosted us in broken English. One of them was really pretty, and but for some barbarous tattooing, nose and ears pendants and a villainous smell of decayed salmon would have been very Fayaway.” 64 Fayaway was also a source of comparison with white women. Fayaway’s dress was compared favorably with the complexities of modern Parisian female attire. 65 Another author noted of a female friend: “Just now no Fayaway, no naked girl of South Sea islands, could be more thoroughly pagan than my graceful and pretty friend Lilla Lyndon.” 66 Later in the century French naval officer and author Julien Viaud, writing under the nom de plume Pierre Loti, borrowed heavily from Melville to produce La Marriage de Loti, wherein he detailed a French ensign’s relationship with a Tahitian woman, and showed the corruption of South Seas life brought by “civilization.” The translated English version “produced quite a sensation in the literary world” before Loti, in a

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second work, transposed the basic plot from Tahiti to Japan and renamed the tale Madame Chrysanthème. 67 Despite the story’s removal from the South Seas the Melville legacy remained apparent. The editor of Harpers claimed that “Loti’s heroine” (which in time would become even better known through Giacomo Puccini’s operative adaptation, Madame Butterfly) was “simply another Fayaway.” 68 Herman Melville’s influence was profound and played an enduring role in shaping Western understandings of the Pacific region and its peoples. In 1848 the English commentator John Sterling noted that the “missionaries have done a great deal for us in clearing up our notions about savage nations. What an immense deal of harm Captain Cook’s ‘Voyages’ did in that way!” 69 Melville almost single-handedly saved the South Seas’ “noble savage” from the ignominy of the missionary imagination, leaving the two worldviews to engage in protracted struggle into the next century, and beyond. Most significantly, the pedagogical power of Melville’s text endured. Even indigenous tales appeared to be recast in the wake of Melville. Visiting the Big Island of Hawaii in the late nineteenth century, John La Farge felt a sense of déjà-vu when hearing some of the local lore: a story “about Nukahiva,” he noted, had “a flavor of Melville about it.” 70 Writing about Typee during a “Melville revival” in the early to mid-1920s one anthropologist could still claim that “the modern ethnologist does not hesitate to record the observations of its author with the same assurance that he would feel in quoting from a work of scientific scholarship.” 71 Herman Melville was the single most significant figure in shaping American popular perceptions of the South Seas that would endure through the second half of the nineteenth century. Although MobyDick was Melville’s magnum opus, Typee and Omoo, and the debates and controversies they provoked, were instrumental in sustaining Americans’ fascination with the South Seas. As the United States continued to reach across the Pacific, Americans carried with them many of the optimistic assumptions that characterized the march of “American civilization” across the western frontier. NOTES 1. John Gascoigne has explored earlier examples of South Seas artifact collecting in Europe. See Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific in the Age of the Enlightenment (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 230–35, 408–10. 2. South Seas islanders became members of American crews. See Edward Byers, The “Nation of Nantucket”: Society and Politics in an Early American Commercial Centre, 1660–1820 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 255. 3. See John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 77–96.

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4. Melville wrote to Dana sharing his thoughts on the book. Melville biographer Hershell Parker suggests his decision was also influenced by Reynolds’s Mocha Dick. See Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 181. 5. Anon., “The Exploring Expedition,” North American Review 56 (April 1843): 257. 6. See Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842 (London: Whittaker and Co, 1845). Wilkes’s book was widely reviewed and a number of journals printed extracts. See for example: The Living Age 30 (May 1846): 430–38. For general discussions of the expedition and its reception consult William Ragan Stanton, The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) and Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory: The Epic South Seas Expedition, 1838–1842 (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). Other members of the expedition also shared their experiences. See for example George Musalas Colvocoresses, Four Years in the Government Exploring Expedition: Commanded by Captain Charles Wilkes, 5th ed. (New York: J. M. Fairchild and Co., 1855). Others to take advantage of this rekindled interest in the South Seas during this period included Thomas Jefferson Jacobs, who wrote Scenes, Incidents, and Adventures in the Pacific Ocean; or The Islands of the Australasian Seas During the Cruise of the Clipper Margaret Oakley under Captain Benjamin Morrell (New York: Harper & Bros., 1844). 7. Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life during Four Months’ Residence in a Valley in the Marquesas, with Notices of the French Occupation of Tahiti and the Provisional Cession of the Sandwich Islands to Lord Paulet (London: John Murray, 1846). 8. Jeffrey C. Geiger has even gone so far as to suggest that Melville was “peddling a well-worn ‘cliché’ of Edenic paradise already mapped by eighteenth-century exploration narratives such as those of James Cook and Louis-Antonie de Bougainville.” See Geiger, “America’s White Shadows: Modernist Ethnography and the South Pacific” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, 1997), 1. 9. The quote is cited by Leon Howard, “Historical Note,” in Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesia Life (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 278. Charles Roberts Anderson’s Melville in the South Seas was the first major academic monograph to chart the boundaries between Melville’s experiences and his fiction. See Anderson, Melville in the South Seas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939). The theme was also pursued by Paul Witherington, “The Art of Melville’s Typee,” Arizona Quarterly 26 (1970): 136–57. 10. A. Robert Lee, Herman Melville: Critical Assessments, Volume 1 (East Sussex: Helm Information, 2001), 184. 11. See Carl Randall Cluff, “Salvaged Cargo: Herman Melville, John Wiley, and the Revised Edition of Typee” (PhD Thesis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1997), 86–87. Cluff has concluded that Melville made the changes of his own volition, rather than, as had been assumed by earlier Melville scholars, as a consequence of Murray insisting on the changes. 12. Cited in New York Daily Tribune, August 10, 1846. 13. Anon., “Melville’s Mardi,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 25 (July 1849): 44. 14. John Samson has also discussed Melville’s work, its inspirations and the boundaries of the genre. See Samson, White Lies: Melville's Narratives of Facts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 15. National Anti-slavery Standard, April 2, 1846, cited in Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 37. 16. London Times, April 6, 1846. For a recent discussion of this theme see Hester Blum, “‘No Life You Have Known’: Or, Melville’s Contemporary Critics,” Leviathan 13 (March 2011): 10–20. 17. See Cluff’s discussion of Murray’s decision to publish, “Salvaged Cargo,” 85–87. 18. E. Littell, “Herman Melville Residence in the Marquesas,” Living Age 9 (April–June 1846): 83.

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19. The review first appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 61 (June 1847): 754. The review was reprinted in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 21 (August 1847): 118. The Munchausen reference is to Baron Munchausen, whose adventures were published in the 1790s as yet another parody of the travelogue in the Swift tradition. Tying into the world of Gulliver’s Travels, Munchausen travels to the South Seas. Another review which used the allusion to Munchausen and which concerned Melville, appeared in the Courier and New York Inquirer. See Cluff, “Salvaged Cargo,” 99. 20. Cited in A Descriptive Catalogue of Mr. Murray’s Home and Colonial Library (London: John Murray, 1851), 14. 21. See Daniel Paliwoda, Melville and the Theme of Boredom (Jefferson: McFarland and Co, 2010), 38. 22. Cited in Higgins and Parker, Herman Melville, 187. 23. Carl Cluff has suggested that Wiley was influenced in his decision by evangelicals in his social circle, rather than—as earlier scholars had suggested—by either his own personal beliefs, or as a way to broaden the book’s appeal to ensure a return on investment in the new author. Cluff also provides an engaging examination of the impact of the revisions on the author’s subsequent approach to Omoo and more generally to his ideas about truth and fiction. See Cluff, “Salvaged Cargo,” esp. chapters 3 and 4. 24. See for example “Sandwich Islanders,” Quarterly Review 35, no. 70 (1827): 419–44; Missionary Herald 23, no. 9 (1827): 271; Frederick William Beechey, Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Berings Strait to Co-operate with the Polar Expeditions, 1825–1828 (1831; repr. Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1832), esp. 146, 174, 175, 186, 353; Maria Callcott, R. B. Bloxham and George Anson Byron, Voyage of His Majesty's ship Blonde to the Sandwich Islands in the Years 1824–1825 (London: John Murray, 1826). 25. See Kotzebue, A New Voyage around the World in the Years, 1823, 24, 25 and 26 (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1830), 176. 26. See A Vindication of the South Seas Missions from the Misrepresentations of Otto Von Kotzerbue, Captain in the Russian Navy (London: Frederick Westley & A.H. Davis, 1831), 1–3. 27. See Charles S. Stewart, A Diary of a Residence in the Sandwich Islands during the Years 1823, 1924 and 1925 (New York: John P. Riley, 1828). By 1839 Boston publisher Weeks, Jordan and Company was publishing an enlarged fifth edition of the book. After his return from Hawaii, Stewart became a Chaplain in the United States Navy. “USN” appeared after his name in several later editions of the work. 28. Francis Warriner, Cruise of the United States Frigate Potomac Round the World: During the Years 1831–34 (New York: Leavitt, Lord, and Co., 1835), 220. 29. Warriner, Cruise of the United States, 221. 30. Warriner, Cruise of the United States, 240. 31. William Samuel W. Ruschenberger, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, During the Years 1835, 36, and 37 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1838), 484–85. 32. Ruschenberger, Narrative of a Voyage, 486. 33. Fitch Waterman Taylor, A Voyage Round the World, and Visits to Various Foreign Countries, in the United States Frigate Columbia; Attended by her Consort, the Sloop of War John Adams, and Commanded by Commodore George C. Read (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1842), 213. This discussion had not been included in the original 1840 edition. 34. New contributions that supported the missionary viewpoint included Daniel Wheeler, Extracts from the Letters and Journal of Daniel Wheeler: While Engaged in a Religious Visit to the Inhabitants of Some of the Islands of the Pacific Ocean, Van Diemen's Land, New South Wales, and New Zealand, Accompanied by His Son, Charles Wheeler (Philadelphia: Joseph Rakestraw, 1840) and Memoirs of the Life and Gospel of the Late Daniel Wheeler (London: Harvey & Dutton; 1842); and Michael Russell, Polynesia, Or, An Historical Account of the Principal Islands in the South Seas . . . (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1842).

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35. Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, 326. W. Patrick Strauss has suggested that Wilkes’s “cultural observations” were “heavily influenced by the observations and opinions of previous explorers,” but that missionaries were also significant influences. Strauss has contended that this “literature had already created a climate of opinion that not only affected Wilkes, but also predetermined the attitude toward the area of the literate American public.” Strauss, Americans in Polynesia 1783–1842 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1963), 148. 36. The quote was from a Michigan congressman reported in the Congressional Globe and reproduced by Edmund Fanning. See Fanning, Voyages Round the World; With Selected Sketches of Voyages to the South Seas, North and South Pacific Oceans, China, etc. Performed Under the Command and Agency of the Author. Also, Information Relating to Important Late Discoveries; Between the Years 1792 and 1832 (New York: William H. Vermilye, 1838), 307. 37. “South Seas Exploring Expedition,” North American Review 45 (October 1837): 371. 38. See Herman Melville, Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas (London: John Murray, 1847), ix, 178, 185 188, 191, 192, 210. George Anson (Lord) Byron’s visit in the Blonde was also noted. 39. For discussions of the notion of “fatal impact,” consult Alan Morehead, The Fatal Impact: An Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific, 1767–1840 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); and K. R. Howe, “The Fate of the ‘Savage’ in Pacific Historiography,” New Zealand Journal of History 11, no. 2 (1977): 137–54. 40. For an introduction to this theme consult John Samson, “Profaning the Sacred: Melville’s Omoo and Missionary Narratives,” American Literature 55, no. 4 (1984): 496–509. 41. See Watson G. Branch, ed., “Introduction,” Herman Melville (London: Abingdon, 1974), 6. 42. New York Weekly Tribune, June 23, 1847, cited in Higgins and Parker, Herman Melville, 130. 43. The creation of the “expurgated” second edition by John Wiley has been examined in depth by Carl Cluff. See Cluff, “Salvaged Cargo.” 44. “Missionary Operations in Polynesia,” The New Englander 6 (January 1848): 42–43. 45. London Critic 7 (March 1846): 251–54, cited in Higgins and Parker, Herman Melville, 15. 46. New York Evangelist, April 9, 1846, cited in Nicholas M. Lawrence, “Riding Waves of Dissent: Counter-Imperial Impulses in the Age of Fuller and Melville” (PhD Dissertation, Texas A&M University, 2009), 187. For a discussion suggesting Melville deliberately attempted to distance himself from “Western attitudes” of the time, see Leonard Cassuto, “‘What an Object he Would Have Made of Me!’: Tattooing and the Racial Freak in Melville’s Typee,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 234–35. 47. Christian Parlor Magazine, July 3, 1846, 74–83, cited in Higgins and Parker, Herman Melville, 55. 48. Polynesian, March 18, 1848. 49. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 5, 1847. 50. “Across the Atlantic,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 66 (November 1849): 567. 51. Herman Melville, Mardi: A Voyage Thither (New York: Harper Brothers, 1849). The book was published in two volumes. 52. “Jonathan in Africa,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 66 (August 1849): 182. 53. See John Coulter, M.D., Adventures on the Western Coast of South America (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1847). Coulter had made his journey in 1836. 54. Hiram Bingham, A Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands, 2nd ed. (Hartford: Hezekiah Huntington, 1848).

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55. “Coulter’s Cruise,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 62 (September 1847): 323. 56. Rev. Henry T. Cheever, The Island World of the Pacific; Being . . . Travel Through the Sandwich or Hawaiian Islands and Other Parts of Polynesia (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851). 57. E. M. Wills Parker, The Sandwich Islands as They Are, Not as They Should Be (San Francisco: Burgess, Gilbert and Still, 1852), 3, 6–8. 58. See Colvocoresses, Four Years in the Government Exploring Expedition. The book had originally been published in New York by Cornish, Lampert and Co. 59. Parker, The Sandwich Islands, 7–8. 60. “Our Authors and Authorship,” Putnam’s 9 (April 1857): 384–94. 61. Charles Dudley Warner, A Library of the World’s Best Literature—Ancient and Modern, Vol. XXV; Masques-Mitford (New York: R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill, 1897), 9867. 62. The South Seas themes became a strong focus La Farge’s work. Founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Henry Lee Higginson, purchased thirty-five South Seas themed paintings from La Farge. In 1895 La Farge still held sixty-five of his own South Seas paintings. See Hudson River Museum of Westchester, John La Farge, Watercolours and Drawings (New York: Printmore Press, 1990), 61. 63. “Editor’s Drawer,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 81 (June-November 1890). 64. William V. Wells, “Wild Life in Oregon,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 13 (October 1856): 588. 65. Charles W. Elliott, “Life in Paris,” Putnam’s Monthly 12 (July 1868): 17. 66. Justin McCarthy, “My Enemy’s Daughter,” Harper’s 38 (February 1869): 373. Charlene Avallone has argued that the image of Fayaway came to offer American women the hope of independence and freedom. See Charlene Avallone, “Women Reading Melville/Melville Reading Women,” in Melville and Women, ed. Elizabeth A. Schultz and Haskell S. Spinger (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2006), 48. Michelle Keown has also discussed the enduring power of Fayaway. See Keown, Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 43. 67. The Living Age 161 (12 April 1884): 75. As a boy, Viaud had dreamed of visiting Tahiti. In 1858 his brother Gustav had the opportunity and before he departed gave Viaud a copy of a French work Voyage en Polynese. See Clive Wake, The Novels of Pierre Loti (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), 67. 68. “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 85 (October 1892): 798. 69. John Sterling, Essays and Tales, by John Sterling, Collected and Edited, with a Memoir of his Life, by Julius Charles Hare (London: J. W Parker, 1848). See Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Harper and Row, 1985), 147. 70. John La Farge, Reminiscences of the South Seas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1912), 47. 71. “The Romance of Science in Polynesia,” National Geographic 48 (October 1925): 357.

FOUR San Francisco, Art, and Robert Louis Stevenson

From the mid-nineteenth century, the abiding American curiosity with the South Seas was paralleled by a growing recognition of the importance of the Pacific region for America’s national endeavor, and the emergence of San Francisco as the nation’s natural gateway—cultural as well as commercial—to the Pacific. Endorsing the 1836 Report of the Congressional Naval Affairs Committee, and urging Americans to learn more about the Pacific, Edgar Allan Poe was gripped by the possibilities of America’s ebullient Manifest Destiny: “Who can say, viewing the present rapid growth of our population, that the Rocky Mountains shall forever constitute the western boundary of our republic, or that it shall not stretch its dominion from sea to sea.” 1 By the late 1840s America’s conquests during the Mexican-American War had secured the Californian coastline for the United States. The discovery of gold precipitated a rapid influx of settlers and heralded the rapid development of San Francisco as a commercial center and port. Arrell Gibson has argued that during the nineteenth century the South Seas became an extension of the American frontier. 2 Long before Frederick Jackson Turner articulated his famous Frontier Thesis, the frontier was a powerful trope in American nation building: “the dominating word in the American nationhood epic.” 3 With the consolidation of the American presence in California, some Americans believed that Manifest Destiny now extended beyond the nation’s western shores and into the islands of the South Seas. In an 1855 article entitled “Islands of the Pacific,” one correspondent to De Bow’s Review contended: The progress of civilization since at least the earliest periods of authentic history has ever been westward. . . . Every barrier to advancement 43

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Chapter 4 westward—of “Westward ho!” is still the cry—has been overcome, and as a last step—for this must certainly be the last—we now see the advancing column of human beings precipitating itself upon the isles of the Pacific, and eagerly stretching forth their arms towards Asia’s. 4

Hawaii, which had been deemed “Christianized” by the early 1850s, was hailed as an example of the benefits of “Americanization.” With America’s continuing trade with China, and the subsequent “opening” of Japan to the West, the islands of the Pacific assumed renewed importance as the “Stepping stones to Asia.” 5 Moreover, the Australian Gold Rushes, following soon after the Californian boom, encouraged a strong connection between the two continents that, by necessity, traversed the South Seas. As one commentator recalled of that period, the Australian rushes “doubled the number of keels that formerly ploughed the Polynesian world. . . . The Gold of Australia has whitened the Pacific with sails.” 6 And while the promise of the South Seas remained lucrative for American enterprise, “this land and this gold in its bosom are nothing to the power gained by the Republic in having its grasp upon the waters of the ocean, that bathes the Indies and the islands of the South Seas.” 7 Following the development of San Francisco as a major American port, and with the gradual decline of whaling as a viable economic activity during the 1860s, New England’s place as the physical and symbolic home of America’s South Sea enterprise declined. San Francisco became the new center for such engagement. The publication in 1852 of Wills Parker’s travelogue in San Francisco marked the beginning of an enduring literary engagement between the city and the South Seas, that was at its apogee during the second half of the nineteenth century. 8 Exploring the role of literature in the creation of an American South Seas frontier, John S. Whitehead has noted that “the lure of paradise in literature emerged as a constant foil and escape from the increasing commercialization and industrialization of America.” “While” the South Seas frontier “served as an escape,” he noted, it “also functioned as an extension of the American mainland, reflecting the tensions and anxieties of American society at any given time as much as it did life in paradise.” 9 Such analysis helps to explain why Herman Melville’s works were interpreted as a rejection of Western civilization and its ills. As one contemporary wondered: Was the charming romance, after all, intended to be a satire upon the world in which we habitually live? Were these strange and beautiful pictures painted to strike us into thought and develop in us that vague universal conviction of needed and impending change, which now pervades all Christendom? 10

Melville’s literary escape excited and enticed some intrepid travelers to experience the South Seas firsthand. By the 1860s the South Seas were again being perceived as a desirable place to which one might escape,

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rather than a place from which any good Christian would seek rescue. One of the first writers to articulate this view of the South Seas was the poet Charles Warren Stoddard. Stoddard’s family had moved from Rochester, New York, to San Francisco in 1855. As part of his education Stoddard had become well versed in South Seas literature, particularly the narrative of Captain Porter. 11 Seeking to escape from the stress of his urban existence, Stoddard traveled to Hawaii and Tahiti in 1864. Describing his decision to escape, he later recalled: “Do you remember dear C____, the day that you and I sat alone in the glass house and heaved a stone at civilization, business, worry and the world in general?” 12 As well as writing a number of works with South Seas themes, both fictional and travelogue, Stoddard contributed to journals in both Australia and the United States. His poetry was described by one critic as “perfect word paintings of scenes in the tropics.” 13 One of his more famous poems was “South Seas Bubble”: I long for a palm thatch cover. Where chattering parrots hover. I hate these dreary fields and folk. And sigh for a South Sea lover. 14

Stoddard’s reference to South Seas lovers was particularly significant, given his homosexuality. Although Western images of the South Seas focused on heterosexual encounters with Islander women, for Stoddard, as for a number of other writers, the sexual freedoms associated with the South Seas included homoerotic possibilities, free of the opprobrium attached to such encounters in the West. Moreover, while Lee Wallace overstates that the “male body” is a “more sexually resonant figure” than that of the Islander woman within the “representational archive of the Pacific,” she is right to note the significance of male-male relationships in Pacific cultures, as well as the homoerotic dimension of Westerners’ imaginings of the South Seas. 15 Many of Stoddard’s readers, of course, would have been unaware of his homosexuality, and would instead have read his works as more literal endorsements of the South Seas as a counterpoint to the unwelcome aspects of industrializing, urbanizing societies. Indeed, his best-known work, South Sea Idylls, was a travelogue that reinforced images of the South Seas as a site of escape from civilization’s woes: “Through league of verdure I wandered, feasting my senses and finding life a holiday at last.” 16 The story recounted the writer’s decision to stop traveling, and stay in a village “alone with cannibals.” 17 Describing a prominent American publisher’s description of South Seas Idylls as the best work on the Pacific since Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast, a former associate of Stoddard noted: I remember with what earnestness he insisted that the railroads could do themselves an immense service by distributing cheap editions of

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Chapter 4 that book around the world. He said if railroads would give up their tiresome map and emigration schemes and put a few millions of that book out in place of them, then the people would read and believe and want to see California and the isles of fire beyond. 18

A close personal friend of Stoddard’s was the writer Mark Twain. During the mid-1860s Twain journeyed from San Francisco to Hawaii, as a special correspondent for the Sacramento Union Recorder. In another repudiation of the ills of Western civilization, Twain reputedly looked to the South Seas as restorative for his health. 19 While Twain had an “ambivalent” relationship with the South Seas, over time he expressed increasing fondness for the region. 20 Whitehead has argued that Twain was so confronted by Hawaiian society that the clash of cultures he observed there inspired him to write the novel that was eventually published as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The work was inspired not by an American confronting old English society, but by his encounters with “Hawaiian feudalism.” 21 Twain encountered a Hawaii that maintained aspects of the South Seas tradition but which was in many respects already Americanized. Islander women might still provide a “gay and graceful and exhilarating spectacle,” especially when performing the “lascivious hula hula.” But such displays, he regretted, were “dying out.” 22 By 1875 Charles Nordhoff—the grandfather of the later South Seas writer—proclaimed Hawaii “civilized.” “No intelligent American,” declared Nordhoff, could “visit the islands and remain there even a month, without feeling proud that a civilization which has been created in so marvelously short a time was the work of his country men and women.” 23 Visiting in the 1890s American artist John La Farge and historian Henry Adams found Honolulu “somehow too civilized.” 24 Twain lamented the Americanized Hawaii he had found. He had sought adventure, but much of the adventure of Hawaii had apparently dissipated. All that remained was to dream of what might have been. Such backward glances were often embellished to emphasize either the magnitude of Christian conversion, or to create the impression that the author still worked in a land of interest and romance. Twain, for example, told his readers that before the arrival of the missionaries human sacrifices had been a daily occurrence. 25 Twain exemplified the contradictions inherent in many Americans’ conceptions of the South Seas in the period following Melville and his disagreements with the missionaries. The positive images of the South Seas that rested with the Melville legacy coexisted with the negative stereotypes that the missionary endeavor had initially created. Importantly, the negative stereotypes that had justified the missionary endeavor during the first half of the nineteenth century were being recast, following the missionaries’ successes in conversion. If the Hawaiian Islands

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were now civilized their indigenous inhabitants could hardly be heathens with all the negatives formally associated with a God-less existence. Negative images endured, but they were pushed to the frontiers of the South Seas beyond the missionary influence—particularly Melanesia. The missionary rhetoric, moreover, accepted the power of the South Seas’ allure to the West. The physical beauty of the South Seas could not be denied, but that beauty was lost on the locals because they did not know God. 26 “Nature,” along with the natural state, was no longer a source of derision. Nature could be a force for good but for some South Seas Islanders, a fear of evil spirits made them “act contrary to nature.” 27 The contradiction for many Americans was that a Christianized and civilized South Seas locale lost much of the romance that had first encouraged many to engage with it in the first place. Just as the written word played a crucial role in devising and maintaining the South Seas tradition, artists and illustrators were also intimately involved in its construction. Although early artistic representations had been the work of expedition artists, or literary illustrators realizing the image from the word pictures of authors, several prominent American and European artists subsequently sought to explore the South Seas in their own right. Two of the most influential South Seas artists in the latter half of the nineteenth century were San Francisco residents Joseph Strong and Jules Tavernier. Strong was the son of a Congregational clergymen who had taken his family to Hawaii for missionary work when Joseph was a child. By the age of sixteen Joseph Strong was back at home in Connecticut, but he then traveled to San Francisco, where his artistic skills caught the attention of John D. Spreckels, a local businessman. Spreckels sponsored the young artist and sent him back to Hawaii to paint. Strong stayed in Hawaii for five years before beginning a slow tour of the South Pacific visiting Samoa, the Gilberts, and on to Sydney where, contradicting the experiences of Charles Warren Stoddard and Mark Twain, “he went for two winters to regain his health weakened by the long sojourn in the tropics.” 28 Leaving Sydney, he returned to San Francisco, where he established a studio that was described by one visitor as “a strange mingling of Samoa and San Francisco. . . . Savage chiefs look at the visitor from its walls. Palms and tropic sunsets, and the deep blue of equatorial ocean, give color to the room.” 29 The South Seas were considered “the inspiration of most of Mr. Strong’s work . . . putting the dreamy life of the tropics on his canvas.” The “glories of the tropic sunset, the deep blue of the tropic sea and the tangle of the tropic bush, live on his canvasses in a way that makes one long to see the places themselves even more than do his fine portraits of island chiefs and warriors and fair South Seas maidens.” 30

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Strong spent some of his time in Hawaii with Frenchman Jules Tavernier, who had previously shared a studio in San Francisco with Strong and who had quickly become part of the local “bohemian” set. Unlike Stoddard or Twain, however, Tavernier’s escape from San Francisco was due to another of civilization’s maladies—debt. Reunited in Hawaii, Tavernier’s and Strong’s landscape paintings were influential in the establishment of a new artistic movement that became aptly known as the “Volcano School.” Within the United States, Strong’s and Tavernier’s artwork helped popularize the Hawaiian Islands, and rekindled the public’s association of the Pacific with images of adventure and romance. Hawaii might be Americanized but civilization would never tame an angry volcano. The Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser noted the impact of the two artists in promoting Hawaii: “This method of advertising our attractions abroad, especially when aided by competent pens, is a very solid and lasting one, for it increases our tourist travel. In the persistent advertising of their charms and resources lies the future prosperity of the Hawaiian Islands.” 31 Arguably, Joseph Strong’s most important contribution to the South Seas tradition was not his own work but the encouragement he offered to Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who became the late nineteenth century’s most influential advocate of the South Seas. Strong and Stevenson’s friendship reflected family connections as well as their shared interest in the South Seas: Stevenson had pursued divorcee Fanny Osbourne to California, where they were subsequently married; Strong was the husband of Fanny’s daughter from her first marriage, Isobel (“Belle”). 32 Prior to the early 1880s, when he became enthralled by the South Seas, Stevenson had already exhibited a passing interest in the region. As a boy he had been fascinated by the book of another Scotsman, R. M. Ballantyne, who penned The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean. 33 First published in 1857, The Coral Island quickly gained a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the first examples of “boy’s own” literature, the book was a “Robinsonade” about three English youths shipwrecked in the South Seas. The work, befitting the South Seas genre, was written as a factual memoir by the protagonist “Ralph Rover.” Although Ballantyne had never traveled to the South Seas, the preface to The Coral Island made clear that readers would be informed as well as entertained: I was a boy when I went through the wonderful adventures herein set down. With the memory of my boyish feelings strong upon me, I present my book specially to boys, in the earnest hope that they may derive valuable information, much pleasure, great profit, and abounded amusement from its pages. 34

Ballantyne utilized the old castaway tradition, most recently shaped by Melville, which presented the South Seas’ removal from civilization in positive terms:

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For many months after this we continued to live on our island in uninterrupted harmony and happiness. Sometimes we went out afishing [sic] in the lagoon, and sometimes went ahunting [sic] in the woods, or ascended to the mountain-top, by way of variety, although Peterkin always asserted that we went for the purpose of hailing any ship that might have chance to heave in sight. But I am certain that none of us wished to be delivered from our captivity, for we were extremely happy, and Peterkin used to say that as we were very young we should not feel the loss of a year or two. 35

Stevenson had the opportunity to meet Ballantyne and as one biographer has suggested: “It is perhaps not hyperbole to say that the Samoa where Stevenson ended his days was the world already distantly glimpsed forty years before through the window of the nursery or sickroom.” 36 Stevenson’s interest in the South Seas had also been evident during his university days, when he contributed to a theatrical piece in which a Samoan island became the setting for the establishment of a new commonwealth by Cambridge undergraduates—clear evidence of Ballantyne’s influence, and a hint that the future writer would see the South Seas as a suitable site to escape the maladies of civilization. 37 That idea was reinforced in 1875 when Stevenson had encountered a New Zealander who advised him that for those with respiratory complaints Samoa offered the chance to find good health. 38 Arriving in San Francisco in 1879, Stevenson was introduced to Joseph Strong’s friend, Charles Warren Stoddard. Stevenson was reputedly “fascinated” by Stoddard’s tales of the South Seas. Stoddard also introduced Stevenson to the writings of Herman Melville, which, perhaps surprisingly given his earlier interest, had hitherto escaped Stevenson’s attention. 39 Stevenson later recalled the profound influence of both Stoddard and Melville: “There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard.” 40 Through his discussions with Strong and Stoddard, and through his own readings about the South Seas, Stevenson was able to “piece together in” his “head some image of the islands and the islands life.” Included in this mindscape was the idea that the South Seas were restorative to his congenital poor health, and a belief that Islander women were “lovelier than Eve.” 41 Stoddard encouraged Stevenson to make his own South Seas journey. Another acquaintance, William Churchill, offered more specific suggestions. A South Seas author and former American consul to Samoa, Churchill suggested the precise island in the Samoan group from where Stevenson should base himself. 42 With the emergence of pleasure cruises to the South Seas during the 1880s, Fanny Osbourne was able to hire a “fashionable yacht,” in which Stevenson and his family set sail for the South Seas on a course chosen by Stevenson to retrace the steps of Her-

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man Melville. 43 Stevenson settled in Samoa, where he remained until his death in December 1894. Stevenson’s life and death in the South Seas produced a body of work that rivaled Melville’s in quality and influence. 44 Like those before him, Stevenson’s fiction utilized the traditional South Seas memoir style. 45 This was no doubt partly the result of his desire to write ethnographical accounts of the South Seas—a desire resisted by both his wife and his publisher. 46 Despite such constraints Stevenson compiled a large body of nonfiction work during his time in the South Pacific, including a memoir (In the South Seas) along with his study of the political machinations of the Western powers in Samoa (A Footnote to History). 47 True to his inspirations, Stevenson was enchanted by the South Seas: “my voyages had passed like days in fairyland.” 48 The South Seas offered an escape from the ills of civilization. Discussing his own decision to remain in the South Seas, he noted that few “men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die.” Insistent that no “part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor,” Stevenson believed his “task” was to: communicate to fireside travelers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars. 49

Alarmingly for Stevenson, however, civilization was fast encroaching, to the detriment of paradise. Suggesting that the changes taking place throughout the South Seas were a consequence principally of the clash of colonial ambitions, rather than a result of the missionary endeavor, Stevenson warned that paradise might soon be lost. 50 Despite his editor’s reluctance for Stevenson to write nonfiction, and notwithstanding its poor sales, his “beguiling and informing” In the South Seas helped mark the beginning of the next chapter of the “South Seas cult.” The “Melville epoch” thus gave way to the “RLS” epoch. 51 Published posthumously, In the South Seas was the subject of what Laavanyan Ratnapalan has called “textual mutilation and reediting,” which “significantly altered the meaning of Stevenson’s original writing.” Ratnapalan’s suggestion that In the South Seas was manipulated to cater to “a Victorian readership’s desire for sentimental voyaging” accords with Barry Menikoff’s claim for Stevenson’s fiction, particularly the novella The Beach at Falesa. 52 Stevenson’s influence ranged widely. In 1890–1891, when the American historian Henry Adams visited the South Pacific with artist John La Farge, he saw himself “imitating Robert Louis Stevenson.” Although both men felt that the Scotsman had forgotten his boyhood inspi-

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rations, and had therefore failed to engage the region with the necessary levels of “boyish fun and frolic,” Stevenson exerted a powerful influence in terms not only of itinerary but also in Adams’s decision to engage with the political situation in the South Pacific with the same ambition, if all be it in a different locale—to “save the [Tahitian] past from the wreckage of civilization.” 53 Stevenson’s influence also extended to the Antipodes. Australian writer Catherine Spence visited Samoa in 1893 with her expectations shaped by Stevenson. 54 More important, the power of Stevenson’s words endured. Standing beside Melville, Stevenson inspired a new generation to experience and write of the South Seas. In 1921 Australian commentator Frank Reid noted: Islands and reefs and palms—how we all loved them in our school days! How devotedly all the boys and many of the girls hoped some day to wonder away in a long, low raking ship with many sails, discover pirate hoards, purchase handfuls of pearls for a few yards of gaycolored cloth, see sharks and flying fish, pick up coral and coconuts and have adventures like we read in the never to be forgotten books of Robert Louis Stevenson and others!

Stevenson’s influence persisted. Inspired by Stevenson and French artist Paul Gauguin to visit the South Seas, English poet Rupert Brooke wrote on the eve of the Great War that he wanted “to see Stevenson’s place,” and “hunt up traces of Gauguin, the painter.” 55 Later, he wrote that he was becoming “indistinguishable from R.L.S., both in thinness and literary style and in dissociation from England. God have mercy on my soul! I have crossed the Equator and so am a man at last.” 56 During the 1920s, having been inspired by Stevenson, Alain Gerbault, a lone yachtsman, sailed the South Pacific. 57 Robert James Fletcher, writing under the nom de plume “Asterisk,” and whose Isles of Illusion: Letters from the South Seas were published in 1923, claimed he had responded to the “siren-like call of Robert Louis Stevenson.” 58 Australian travelers who utilized Stewart’s Handbook of the Pacific Islands found in its short bibliography the author’s indebtedness to Stevenson’s In the South Seas for much of the information provided. 59 Writing of his own experiences in Tahiti in the early twentieth century, New Zealander Hector MacQuarrie insisted that it had been the “spirits” of both Stevenson and Melville that had first drawn him to Tahiti, the “fairyland” of the South Seas. 60 MacQuarrie also accepted Stevenson’s claim that the South Seas could help overcome illness. He had journeyed to Tahiti with “an uncertain spot on one of my lungs and feeling hopeless and ill. . . . I went to the South Seas to get well. I did.” 61 Introducing Agnes Gardner King’s Islands Far Away, Sir Everard im Thurn noted that a 1912 journey to the South Seas had been an effective antidote to a period of “great bodily and mental strain.” 62

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Americans were no less enamored of Stevenson. Robert Dean Frisbie, a native of Ohio, idolized Stevenson; this adulation encouraged Frisbie to head for the Pacific. He spent time in the Cook Islands, where he ran a trading company, affirmed his reputation as a travel writer, and made his own contribution to South Seas literature with The Book of Puka Puka (1929) and My Tahiti (1937). 63 Another American who found inspiration in Stevenson’s words and who would himself inspire yet another generation was Jack London. A San Franciscan, London had begun writing of the Arctic north for Overlander Magazine, before his attentions were drawn south. One of London’s pleasures as a boy had been reading stories of Captain Cook’s voyages. 64 As he matured he was also introduced to Melville, whom he came to admire: When I was a little boy, I read a book . . . Herman Melville’s “Typee”; and many long hours I dreamed over its pages. Nor was it all dreaming. I resolved there and then, mightily, come what would, that when I had gained strength and years, I, too, would voyage to Typee. The years passed but Typee was not forgotten. 65

As a young man London had attempted to gain passage to the South Seas on the brig Galilee (“bent on finding another Fayaway”) but the ship’s complement was complete. Again “came the rush of years . . . but Typee was not forgotten.” 66 Finally, accompanied by his new wife, Charmian, London decided to embark on his own South Seas adventure and set sail in the Snark. His ship’s small library contained works of other South Seas authors—from Ellis’s Polynesian Researches to Twain’s Roughing It—which he would use for guidance, inspiration, and comparison. 67 The Pacific Monthly proclaimed London’s South Seas adventures were “the most extraordinary voyage ever undertaken by a literary man.” 68 Visiting Hawaii, London shared Melville’s disquiet with the missionary endeavor. The material wealth and status enjoyed by the missionaries alarmed him. Noting that the missionary endeavor had played its part in making the “kanaka . . . practically extinct,” he suggested that the missionaries themselves had taken over the islands: “The missionary who came to give the Bread of Life remained to gobble up the whole heathen feast.” The status of missionaries led London to consider the Hawaiian Islands “Topsy-Turvy” (a label that had been used to describe Japan in the late nineteenth century). 69 Of the Hawaiians who had survived American colonization, London found the women “sun-ripe Junos” and the men “bronzed Apollos.” Concluding, however, like Twain, La Farge, and Adams before him, that the Hawaiian Islands were too “Americanized,” and, inspired by Melville and Stevenson, London and Charmian embarked on a South Pacific pilgrimage. 70 Like Stevenson, London thought of the South Seas as a “fairyland.” Retracing the steps of Melville and Stevenson, London

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“scoured” the islands for their literary ghosts. Comparing Cook’s observations of Marquesans with their own experiences, London and Charmian found the path from which Toby had escaped Typee. They rejected the map’s spelling of “Taipi” because that was not the way Melville had spelled it. London and Charmian concurred with Stevenson that life in the islands was rotting away, in part because of the diseases, “white men imported in their ships.” 71 London played an important role in further distinguishing the Polynesian South Seas from its Melanesian counterpart. Discussing the issue of cannibalism and its associated practices Stevenson had noted that while the practice had vanished from Polynesia before the time of Cook or Bougainville (except for the “inveterate savages like New Zealanders and Marquesans”), all of “Melanesia appears tainted.” 72 London visited Melanesia and confirmed this judgment, a view that was also expressed by Joseph Conrad, who had also hinted at a dark vision of the region in his turn-of-the-century work, Lord Jim. 73 For these writers, Polynesia could be a fairyland but Melanesia still required a white man to be armed to the teeth and prepared to defend his life against “true head-hunting cannibals” who could be described as “niggers.” 74 The danger and adventure which had hitherto been associated with the South Seas was increasingly confined to Melanesia. After his South Seas cruising, London wrote a number of articles regarding his adventures. This body of work culminated in book-length compilations, South Sea Tales and The Cruise of the Snark, both of which were published in 1911 and both of which received widespread critical and public acclaim. 75 While London—undoubtedly because of his time in Melanesia—offered a darker vision of paradise, with typhoons, cannibalism, and the brutality of whites, his work did not dampen enthusiasm for the South Seas. Readers enjoyed both visions of the South Seas and indeed saw them as mutually inclusive. The often-contradictory images of the South Seas, which at once confused and conflated Melanesia and Polynesia, and for which the public appeared to have an insatiable fascination, showed no sign of abating during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The work of Robert Louis Stevenson was key to that continuing interest, but his writings were part of the wider interest in the Pacific, which also found expression in the art of his son-in-law, and Jules Tavernier, who provided evocative, visual form to the South Seas—the power of which foreshadowed the later, even more persuasive and tempting images presented by Hollywood. While the celebrated and romanticized images of Polynesia continued to attract the attention of writers, artists, and others, and although the West’s impact on the region remained contentious, Melanesia was understood and presented as a very different, but equally compelling destination for Western attention. During the late nineteenth and early

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twentieth centuries, the island of New Guinea epitomized the unknown, menacing Melanesia that simultaneously lured and repelled generations of Westerners. NOTES 1. Edgar Allan Poe, “South-Sea Expedition,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (August 1836): 588. 2. Arrell Gibson, Yankees in Paradise: The Pacific Basin Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 3–4. 3. Gibson, Yankees in Paradise, 3. 4. “Islands of the Pacific,” De Bow’s Review 18 (January 1855): 79–80. 5. “Islands of the Pacific,” 79. 6. “Islands of the Pacific,” 80. 7. John Reese Kenly, Memoirs of a Maryland Volunteers: War with Mexico in the Years, 1846–7–8 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1873). 8. E. M. Wills Parker, The Sandwich Islands as They Are, Not as They Should Be (San Francisco: Burgess, Gilbert and Still, 1852). 9. John S. Whitehead, “Writers as Pioneers,” in Gibson, Yankees in Paradise, 379. 10. “Our Authors and Authorship,” Putnam’s 9 (April 1857): 384–94. 11. Jeffrey C. Geiger “America’s White Shadows: Modernist Ethnography and the South Pacific” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, 1997), 158. 12. “Lazy letters from a Low Latitude,” Overland Monthly 10 (October 1883): 337–44. 13. “Charles Warren Stoddard,” Overland Monthly 28 (August 1896): 230. 14. “South Sea Bubble,” Overland Monthly 8 (April 1872): 310. 15. Lee Wallace, Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 1. 16. Whitehead, “Writers as Pioneers,” 395; Stoddard, “A South Sea Idyll,” Overland Monthly 3 (September 1869): 257–64. See also Stoddard, “How I Converted My Cannibal: The Sequel to a South Seas Idyll,” Overland Monthly 3 (November 1869): 455–60; Stoddard, “My South Seas Show,” Overland Monthly 4 (June 1870): 557–63. The works was eventually consolidated in book form. See Stoddard, South Sea Idylls (Boston, James R. Osgood, 1873). 17. For an example of his South Seas fiction see “Prodigal in Tahiti,” Atlantic Monthly 30 (November 1872): 610–21. 18. Joaquin Miller, “Charles Warren Stoddard, Overland Monthly 26 (October 1895): 378. 19. The notion that a South Seas cruise might be restorative to one’s health had existed for some time. William Cheever supposedly embarked on a South Seas “whaling voyage” in the late 1840s “on account of his health.” See Notes and Queries 2 (December 28, 1850): 524. 20. Whitehead, “Writers as Pioneers,” 393. 21. Whitehead, “Writers as Pioneers,” 394. 22. Sacramento Daily Union, May 21, 1866. For a general cultural history of the hula consult Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2012). 23. Charles Nordhoff, Northern California, Oregon and the Sandwich Islands (New York: Harper and Bros., 1874), 24. 24. See also Linus B. Kafka, “Cosmopolitan Connections: Henry Adams, His Circle, and the Global Gilded Age” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2007), 257–60. 25. Sacramento Daily Union, April 19, 1866. 26. Catherine M. A. Deck, Son of the Solomons (Melbourne: S. John Bacon, 1944), 8. The author was a member of the South Sea Evangelical Mission.

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27. Deck, Son of the Solomons, 9. 28. Charles Greene, “California Artists, Joseph D. Strong,” Overland Monthly 27 (May 1896): 506–507. 29. Greene, “California Artists,” 501. 30. Greene, “California Artists,” 507. 31. Pacific Commercial Advertiser, September 8, 1885. Houston Wood has observed of the Volcano School: “This work served as the fine arts equivalent of the nearly concurrent work of missionaries, travel writers, and scientists who were simultaneously constructing anti-Pele, ‘naturalistic’ views of this traditional Hawaiian site.” See Wood, Displacing Natives: The Rhetorical Production of Hawai'i (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 82. 32. Isobel “Belle” Osbourne Strong Field wrote her own South Seas fiction. See, for example, Isobel Field, The Girl from Home: A Story of Honolulu (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co, 1905). 33. Martin Green has suggested that Ballantyne’s book was one of the stories “England told itself as it went to sleep at night.” See Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Keegan Paul, 1980), 3. 34. R. M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1858), Preface. There were, however, errors in Ballantyne’s book, including his claim regarding soft-skinned coconuts. The mistake prompted him, in his subsequent works, to ensure he had firsthand experience of the situations he described, rather than assuming that their popularity was a guarantee of their veracity. See Nicholas Tucker, The Child and the Book: A Psychological and Literary Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 167–68. Two recent examinations of the ideas of the South Seas in children’s literature in the nineteenth century are Michelle Beissel Heath’s “Cooks and Queens and Dreams: South Sea Islands as Fairy Islands of Fancy” and Richard D. Fulton’s “The South Seas in Mid-Victorian Children’s Imagination,” in Oceania and the Victorian Imagination: Where All Things Are Possible, ed. Peter H. Hoffenberg and Richard D. Fulton (London: Ashgate, 2013). 35. Ballantyne, Coral Island, 56. 36. Frank McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1993), 28, 30. Roslyn Jolly had also suggested that there was a belief that Pierre Loti’s work had also “drawn” Stevenson to the Pacific and reviewers of his work often used Loti as a “point of orientation.” See Roslyn Jolly, “South Seas Gothic: Pierre Loti and Robert Louis Stevenson,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 47, no. 1 (2004): 28. 37. See J. C. Furnas, Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 447. Stevenson may well have also been familiar with the tradition dating back to Francis Bacon and James Harrington, which had constructed the South Seas as a site for political experimentation. In his own lifetime he may have also read Margaret Oliphant’s short story Zaidee: A Romance, which was originally published in several issues of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Journal in 1855. Tiring of modern society, the main character concludes that he “cannot shut” his “eyes to the fact that communism is the true state of civilization.” Seeking “some company of special brethren,” he hopes to head for a “South Seas Island, for example—if such a paradise should be in the market—with a heavenly climate, fertile soil, and a refined community.” “Why should I be such a fool,” he asks, “as to keep my house here, with a pack of servants to look after, and appearances to keep up, and all the rest of it, when a free mind, and a life according to the rules of Nature, would make another man of me?” See Oliphant, “Zaidee: A Romance. Part VII,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 77 (June 1855): 678. 38. See Alana Knight, The Robert Louis Stevenson Treasury (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1985), 176; and Reginald Charles Terry, ed., Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), xii. 39. McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson, 310-11. 40. Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (1896; London: Sovereign, 2013), 24. 41. See Furnas, Voyage to Windward, 268.

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42. See Furnas, Voyage to Windward, 269. Churchill’s large body of work, nonfiction as well as fiction, included his novel, A Princess of Fiji (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co, 1893). 43. McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson, 312. 44. Stevenson is without question the most examined of all South Seas writers. Yet the amount of work undertaken and the variety of approaches have perhaps obscured rather than clarified Stevenson’s contribution. “In recent studies of his Pacific writing,” observed Laavanyan Ratnapalan, “Robert Louis Stevenson’s critics have uncovered such a range of interests and motivations that they appear almost irreconcilable.” See Ratnapalan, “Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Seas Writing: Its Production and Context within the Victorian Study of Culture” (PhD Dissertation, Goldsmith College, University of London, 2007), 43. For a discussion of interracial sexual relations and Stevenson consult Mark G. Doyle, “Race, Romance, and Imperialism: Interracial Relations and Victorian Literature” (PhD Dissertation, Indiana University, 2011), esp. 85–132. 45. Richard A. Boyle has asserted that in a departure from Stevenson’s earlier work, his South Seas fiction employed a mode of writing closer to realism than romance. See Boyle, “Robert Louis Stevenson and Realism” (PhD Dissertation, Indiana University), 1984. 46. Laavanyan Ratnapalan has noted that Stevenson himself questioned whether his readership would buy his nonfiction. See Ratnapalan, “Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Seas Writing,” 22. 47. Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas: Being an Account of Experiences and Observations in the Marquesas, Paumotus and Gilbert Islands in the Course of Two Cruises, in the Yacht “Casco” (1888) and the Schooner “Equator” (1889) (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1896); A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (London: Cassell, 1892). 48. Stevenson, In the South Seas, 2. This is not to suggest that Stevenson did not see the South Seas as being beyond danger. Jolly shows how Stevenson, in common with Loti, displayed aspects of a South Seas Gothic. She notes, for example, that like Loti, Stevenson engaged with aspects of Polynesian supernatural lore and enmeshed it with European literary influences—such as the six Polynesian sirens who appear in The Beach at Falesa. See Jolly, “South Seas Gothic,” 35. 49. Stevenson, In the South Seas, 2. 50. Ann Colley has observed that “although Stevenson knew that these missionaries had contributed to the destruction of island cultures, he also understood that in the context of the 1800s, when Pacific communities were increasingly threatened by other foreign invasions, the missionary and his culture had paradoxically become a buffer against these new incursions, helping to protect the integrity of the island life.” See Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 11. Diana Loxley has observed that before Stevenson and the late nineteenth century, British discourses on the South Seas portrayed an “idealized, sanitized account of European colonial history.” See Diana Loxley, Problematic Shores: The Literature of Islands (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 102. 51. Robert Cushman Murphy, “The Romance of Science in Polynesia,” National Geographic 48 (October 1925): 357. 52. Ratnapalan also notes that Stevenson’s book has been mostly misunderstood within the wider context of his work. See Ratnapalan, “Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Seas Writing,” 2, 19. See also Barry Menikoff, Robert Louis Stevenson and “The Beach of Falesá”: A Study in Victorian Publishing, with the Original Text (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984). Jolly challenges such a conclusion, noting that in the case examined by Manikoff, Stevenson was still alive and approved the publisher’s changes. See Jolly, “Note on the Texts,” in Robert Louis Stevenson, South Sea Tales (Oxford: OUP, 1996), xxxv. 53. Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Letters of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co, 1930), 403. The work produced was The Memoirs of Ari’i Taimai often re-

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ferred to as Tahiti. For a discussion of the work see Robert Langdon, “A View on Ari’i Taimai’s Memoirs,” The Journal of Pacific History 4 (1969): 162–65. Stevenson had not sown the seed but he had influenced the way Adams approached the South Seas when he finally traveled there. Adams had expressed a desire to head to the Pacific as early as 1869 and Pierre V. Lagayette suggests his South Seas ideas were haunted by Typee, Robinson Crusoe, Mutiny on the Bounty, and even One Thousand and One Nights. See Lagayette, “The Edge of Life: Henry Adams in the South Seas” (PhD Dissertation, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1978), 9. Adams had also read and been inspired by Cook’s Voyages, and he shared Melville’s belief that the missionary endeavor in the South Seas helped explain the region’s demise. Stevenson, La Farge, and Adams would meet near Apia. See Kafka, “Cosmopolitan Connections,” 261, 273, 275. 54. Catherine Spence, Autobiography (Adelaide, South Australia: W. K. Thomas, 1910), 68. 55. Cited in Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Letters of Rupert Brooke (London: Faber, 1968), 523. 56. Cited in Christopher Hassall, Rupert Brooke: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 419. 57. Phillip Callow, Louis: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (London, Constable, 2001), 234. 58. Robert James Fletcher, Isles of Illusion: Letters from the South Seas (London: Constable, 1923). 59. P. S. Allen, Stewart’s Handbook of the Pacific Islands (Sydney: P. S. Allen, 1922). 60. Hector MacQuarrie, Tahiti Days (New York: George H. Doran, 1920), 266. 61. MacQuarrie, Tahiti Days, Foreword. 62. Everard F. im Thurn, “Foreword to Agnes Gardiner King,” Islands Far Away (London: Sifton, Praed and Co, 1920). Im Thurn had built a vast South Seas library that benefited many British authors interested in the region. 63. For an introduction to Frisbie’s work consult Natasa Potocnik, “Robert Dean Frisbie: Writer of the South Seas: His Contribution to Pacific Literature,” 大阪大学世界 言語研究センター論集 Osaka University Research Institute for World Language Studies: Departmental Bulletin Paper 5 (2011): 119–41, http://hdl.handle.net/11094/6663 . 64. Ninetta Evans, “Jack London,” Overland 35 (May 1900): 418. For an introduction to London consult A. Grove Day, Jack London in the South Seas (New York: Four Winds Press, 1971). 65. Jack London, The Cruise of the Snark (1908, New York: Macmillan, 1913), 144–45. 66. London, The Cruise of the Snark, 156. 67. Ellis was cited in “The High Seat of Abundance,” Women’s Home Companion 35 (November 1908) 13–14; and Twain in “Riding the South Seas Surf,” Women’s Home Companion 34 (October 1907): 9–10. 68. “Through the South Seas with Jack London,” The Pacific Monthly, December 1909, http://carl-bell.baylor.edu/JL/ThroughTheSouthSeas.html. Accessed September 15, 2011. 69. Jack London, “Good Bye Jack,” Red Book Magazine, June 1909. http://carl-bell. baylor.edu/JL/GoodByeJack.html. Accessed September 15, 2011. 70. Whitehead, “Writers as Pioneers,” 403. 71. London, The Cruise of the Snark, 170. 72. Stevenson, In the South Seas, 110, 99. 73. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim: A Romance (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1905), 361. 74. Jack London, “The Proud Goat of Aloysius Pankburn,” Saturday Evening Post, June 24, 1911. 75. See David Farrier, Unsettled Narratives: The Pacific Writings of Stevenson, Ellis, Melville and London (New York: Routledge, 2007), 173.

FIVE Finding New Guinea

One part of the South Seas that continued to hold the promise of unbounded adventure during the 1870s was the southwestern Pacific island of New Guinea. Following the publication of Herman Melville’s work, the idea of the “South Seas” had become almost synonymous with the Polynesian world. During the 1870s, however, it expanded once again to encompass New Guinea, as well as the neighboring islands of Melanesia, and even the Indonesian archipelago. New Guinea became a convenient site for many of the negative images of the South Seas that had seemingly been eradicated from the Polynesian world after the missionary endeavor. Although the Portuguese navigator Jorge de Menezes had been the first European to see the island of New Guinea in 1526—first appearing on European maps from 1569—the island remained virtually unknown for over three hundred years. While “Papua”—or “New Guinea” as it became known—had a long history of European visitation between the late sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries, most Europeans stayed only briefly, and rarely ventured beyond the coastal fringe. 1 As late as the mid-nineteenth century New Guinea remained shrouded in mystery. The coast had been charted to a significant, albeit often unreliable degree, but the interior of the large island remained “almost unknown” to Europeans. 2 One American suggested the interior of the underexplored island was “less known to us than the interior of Africa or Asia.” 3 Although much had been written regarding the famous “Bird of Paradise” that resided in New Guinea and its nearby surrounds, there was less written about the estimated half a million human inhabitants. 4 What had been written had often concentrated on their level of “barbarism.” 5 New Guinea “natives” had always been seen as “true savages.” In Jules 59

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Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Seas the coast of New Guinea was “regarded as no less dangerous for its bristling reefs than for the savage inhabitants of its coast.” 6 New Guinea’s inhabitants were frequently used by Western authors as a literary device. When allegations were made that the Russian army had not abided by the “law of nations” during an engagement of the Crimean War, the Russians’ actions were depicted as “more worthy of the naked savages of New Guinea than of a crack regiment in a European uniform.” 7 The children of Australian convicts appeared “as hopeless of receiving instruction in better things as the Bushman or the New Guinea savage.” 8 One critique of nineteenth-century Britain and its missionary endeavor inverted this common perception of New Guinea natives. In the short story “Additional Chapters from the History of John Bull,” a local village (representing England) is overrun by foreign missionaries including the “Vicar-Apostolic of New Guinea—a most agreeable and accomplished gentlemanly man.” 9 As well as being “savages,” the physical appearance of the “Papuans” of New Guinea compared unfavorably to both Europeans and Polynesians. One American text described the Papuans as “a negro race . . . hideously ugly.” 10 Their only positive trait, according to another author, was that while they were “negroes of very ferocious manners,” they were “more civilized than the New Hollanders.” 11 Some observers sought to counter such representations but their efforts met with little success. Verne suggested that the “true Papuan” was a man of “fine stock, athletic in build, forehead high and broad, nose large but not flat. Teeth white.” 12 The 1872 edition of Chambers’s Encyclopedia suggested that in general, “the men are better-looking than the women, but neither are repulsively ugly, as has been repeatedly said.” 13 While Jules Verne, quoting adventurer and illustrator G. L. Domeny de Rienzi, saw New Guinea as the “heartland of the blacks who occupy all Malaysia,” most commentators distinguished them from both “Malays” and “Polynesians” with ethnographic labels such as “Oriental Negroes,” “Oceanic Negroes,” and “Oceanic Mongolidae.” 14 A distinction was also made between coastal “Papuans” and those who inhabited the “unknown” interior. 15 Chambers’s claimed that only the coastal peoples were “Papuans”; the inhabitants of the interior were “Alfoers” who, while not differing much in appearance, were “lower sunk in the savage life” and were “independent nomads, warlike and said to be in some districts cannibals.” 16 The geography of New Guinea was considered to hold great potential. Its “rich and magnificent” country offered “one of the finest spots of territory on the face of the globe.” Such potential, however, was countered by great dangers from both the inhabitants and the country itself. 17 In an 1849 article on physical geography in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine the negative images of the island were tempered by its potential:

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To the north of Australia, and almost within sight—another vast and lovely region, and another contrast to the great continent—lies New Guinea, fourteen hundred miles long, and two hundred broad. Its appearance from the sea is magnificent—an immense undulation of luxuriance covering the coasts, and rising up the sides of mountain ranges loftier than Mont Blanc. But the tropical excess of vegetation may render it dangerous to European life: at all events, it will be only wisdom to people Australia before we intrude on the naked foresters, and do battle against the more fatal enemy, the swamps of New Guinea. 18

New Guinea’s potential and inherent dangers were the main theme of the first fictional work to examine the island in any detail. In 1863 Irishborn and America-traveled Mayne Reid, writing under the pseudonym Charles Beach, published his story of the exploits of an American adventurer—Andrew Deverel: The History of an Adventurer in New Guinea. Set in the 1850s, the story followed the adventures of the young New Yorker of the book’s title. Infused with the mid-nineteenth century spirit of Manifest Destiny, and recognizing there were few opportunities on the East Coast, Deverel heads for California with the assistance of a wealthy benefactor. Traveling west, his aim is to make his fortune at the diggings. But after meeting a sailor who had visited New Guinea, he is tempted by his “old love of seeing strange lands.” Undeterred by the fact that his new acquaintance had barely escaped the island with his life, Deverel’s interest was piqued. Already aware that “it had long been opinion that New Guinea” was “one of the richest countries on the globe,” the discovery of gold in New South Wales enhanced the island’s appeal—presumably its proximity to the Australian colony made the tasks of exploration and exploitation more feasible. 19 The young American decides, therefore, to organize a gold-seeking expedition to the “unexplored paradise” of New Guinea. 20 While Deveral fails to achieve his goal and, like his original informant, barely escapes with his life, the work’s Preface was insistent: “That beautiful country offers a virgin field of enterprise which would well repay the dangers and difficulties of exploration.” 21 Bearing in mind that the author had purportedly visited New Guinea, the ambiguous boundary between “fact” and “fiction” was once again blurred under the guise of an apparently authentic voice that could speak authoritatively of the Pacific region and its peoples. There is little to suggest that Andrew Deverel had a significant impact upon the reading public. But the ideas about New Guinea that had informed it had captured the Western imagination and were particularly enticing for Australians: did the Australian colonies neighbor “one of the richest countries in the world”? In an Antipodean version of Manifest Destiny, by the mid-1860s some Australians were actively projecting their hopes and dreams upon New Guinea. Indeed, for some observers, the island was regarded as part of the Australian frontier. New Guinea was increasingly seen as offering a “testing-ground for the strength of the

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Australian character” in the same way the South Seas had supposedly tested and refined the American character in the first half of the nineteenth century. 22 During the late 1860s, in scenes reminiscent of those that accompanied the famous “South Seas Bubble,” Australians became fixated with claims of the vast wealth New Guinea apparently offered. Sydneysiders packed the city’s Masonic Hall in April 1867 to hear A. Keith Collins’s “Lecture on New Guinea.” The public interest that followed the address culminated in the creation of a “New Guinea Company,” that was registered in Sydney and London in 1867, and which advertised for shareholders in the venture through a public prospectus. 23 The prospectus sought to raise £50,000, in 5,000 shares of £10 each. Provisional directors included the noted theologian and Australian nationalist Rev. Dr. John Dunmore Lang. New Guinea was presented as a “valuable but hitherto uncultivated field for commercial enterprise and colonization.” 24 As was the case for many Americans, some Australians believed the colonizing endeavor could address commercial as well as Christian imperatives. Regrettably for the New Guinea Company their enterprise was not rewarded, and as late as 1872 Chambers’s lamented that “it has been said that Papua produces gold, but it is as yet unknown.” 25 The evidence for which the encyclopedia was waiting, however, had reached Sydney the year before. The report came from Samuel MacFarlane and Archibald Murray, members of the London Missionary Society, who had been sent to fulfill a plan, first mooted in 1826, to establish a missionary presence in New Guinea and the islands of the Torres Strait. Upon visiting one Papuan tribe, McFarlane and Murray were presented with an earthen gift that contained large amounts of gold dust. With new discoveries in northern Queensland having reinvigorated gold fever in the colonies, word of the New Guinea possibilities quickly excited public interest in the island. A number of private syndicates were formed among adventuresome young Australians to travel to New Guinea and make their fortunes. These efforts, however, were uniformly unsuccessful. The first attempt, launched in January 1872 by sixty members of the New Guinea Prospecting Association, failed when their ship the Maria was wrecked on a reef before reaching its destination. 26 The fate of the Maria was still being discussed the following year when H.M.S. Basilisk, under the command of Captain John Moresby, returned to Sydney from a surveying mission around the waters of New Guinea. Moresby and his crew had not penetrated the interior, but their depiction of New Guinea as an “unknown land of enchantment” deepened public and commercial interest in the island. 27 Attempts to penetrate New Guinea had, therefore, been singularly unsuccessful before 1873, when Melbourne bookseller Edward William Cole published articles in the Melbourne Herald (subsequently republished in pamphlet form in 1875) that claimed to be an account of a

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journey into the island’s interior by one Thomas Jones. Published under the title Mr. Jones’s Account of a Race of Human Beings with Tails, Discovered by Him in the Interior of New Guinea, Cole sought to capitalize on the public fascination with the island to Australia’s north. Responding to both the interest in New Guinea, and to evolutionary theory that had most recently been extended to the human race through Charles Darwin’s 1871 Descent of Man, Cole’s story centered on the claim that a race of human beings “with tails” could be found within the New Guinea interior. 28 Like so many South Seas works that had preceded it, Cole’s satirical story enmeshed itself in contemporary scientific assumptions and vernacular, and emphasized the bona fides of the work and the man who had made the startling discovery—the noted “Traveler” Mr. Thomas Jones. The previously unheard-of Jones was purportedly “well known” for his “high standing” and “integrity” while the “character” of the scientific journal to which he had first told his story—the Calcutta Anthropological Review—was beyond reproach: “with such authorities before us, strange as is the fact, our doubts must cease.” 29 These efforts to convince readers of the accuracy of the account were not intended to be taken seriously, and a closer inspection revealed the story was nothing more than a marketing stunt concocted by Cole for his bookshops. The New Guinea names cited in the pamphlet were anagrams of the names of Cole’s staff, while he used his own name for the name of the tailed people—the Elocweans. 30 Cole’s work was followed in 1874 by a contribution from the noted Australian author Marcus Clarke. Inspired by the story of the Maria, and reflecting the enduring image of New Guinea, Clarke’s “Bajau; or, Gypsies of the Sea” portrayed the “unknown island” as full of possibilities but also grave dangers for the unwary. 31 In Clarke’s story, a group of adventurers set off believing that the “only place left to be explored is New Guinea.” Expecting to find not only a “paradise” but also great wealth through gold discoveries, they encounter a former colleague who had established himself there on a small property: “I am the owner of the place, that is all. I am rich and I prefer to live here than to die of civilization in London.” Traveling to the interior, the adventurers discover that the dangers of people and geography on the coastline are partly a device to protect a South Pacific “Eldorado” from Europeans. Contradicting the notion that the interior held even more savage and uncivilized inhabitants, the men visit the sacred city of Pakaho and its civilized inhabitants, and encounter briefly the island’s enormous wealth. The wealth of the interior, however, is jealously protected by this advanced civilization which is not prepared to tolerate the selfish and materialistic Europeans. Eventually, and in a testament to their greed, all but one of the adventurers are captured and killed to protect the secret of New Guinea’s interior. 32 Presumably, Clarke was

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compelled to spare one of his adventurers, who could recount the fate of his companions. Six months after the publication of Clarke’s story the first Australian scientific expedition to another country (privately funded by politician and naturalist Sir William John Macleay) left Sydney for the Torres Strait and New Guinea in the barque Chevert. The expedition secured a range of specimens but it also fueled public controversy regarding its success or otherwise when “the exploration of New Guinea” had “been uppermost in the public mind.” 33 There were reports that the expedition had been beaten back by the “hostile” New Guinea coast. 34 Although Cole’s and Clarke’s stories captured the attention of Australian, especially Victorian, readers, their accounts were overshadowed by the publication of a work that influenced the discussion of New Guinea for many years to come. In 1875 the English publishers Chapman and Hall published Captain John A. Lawson’s Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea. The mysterious Captain Lawson had traveled into the interior of New Guinea in 1871 and found a fantastical land, the centerpiece of which was the snow-covered “Mount Hercules,” which at 32,783 feet was the tallest in the world. Lawson suggested, moreover, that the island not only had waterfalls higher than Niagara, and fantastic animals including “man-like apes,” but that its interior was home to “civilized” inhabitants. 35 Lawson’s book caused a sensation in both Britain and the Australian colonies and was also widely examined and discussed in the United States. 36 The Evening Standard considered that on “the whole,” it was “the most valuable contribution to the literature of travel that has appeared for years.” 37 The Brisbane Courier described it as “a most attractive book, full of exciting incidents, described in a most graphic manner, and in a picturesque style.” 38 Although Lawson repeated many of the general beliefs regarding New Guinea—Papuans, for example, were “very repulsive looking having coarse and ugly features”—many of his claims for the interior were treated skeptically by the scientific community. Significant “facts” contained in the story did not add up. 39 Along with the incredible creatures encountered, how could any human being climb a mountain taller than Mount Everest in a day? Moreover, there were no Customs records of the ship Lawson cited as the one that took him from Sydney to New Guinea, and no record of a Captain John A. Lawson on either the Army or Navy lists. Such evidence suggested either a fraud or a hoax. 40 The first serious challenge to the book appeared in April 1875 in the English journal The Athenaeum. The reviewer’s criticism of the work was tentative, reflecting the very real problem that those who queried the work had little with which to refute it. Many reviewers had felt compelled to reserve judgment on the work until further information was available; one reviewer lamented that a “skeptical generation” needed

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further supporting evidence. 41 Most significantly, the work was treated as a serious scholarly undertaking, rather than as a work of fiction. Perpetuating the work’s nonfiction bona fides, “Lawson” responded to, and engaged in, a discussion with the reviewer through the pages of The Athenaeum. Going even further, a paper written by Lawson was presented in his absence to the Royal Anthropological Institute on “The Papuans of New Guinea.” 42 Lawson’s claims for the veracity of his work, however, were dealt a blow with the appearance of two reviews by individuals with recent personal experience of New Guinea. The first, by A. R. Wallace, appeared in the noted scientific journal Nature. Wallace had visited the western coastline of New Guinea before completing his influential 1869 work The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise. Wallace commenced his critique of Lawson’s book by noting that it was “not often that a work of fiction calls for notice in the pages of NATURE; but we have here an exceptional case.” Pointing out that the work had become seen as a “genuine narrative” he felt it “a duty to inform our readers that it is wholly fictitious.” 43 The second critique appeared in The Athenaeum in the form of correspondence from Captain John Moresby, who had recently returned to England after spending several years charting New Guinea and its surrounds. Moresby felt compelled to write because Lawson’s book “was beginning to be accepted in some quarters as an authority.” 44 While Wallace and Moresby did much to discredit Lawson’s book, such was the nature of the controversy that it served to ensure that the work became the authoritative account of New Guinea in the mind of the general public. Some commentators even came to Lawson’s defense. The Brisbane Courier, for example, aired Moresby’s critique of Lawson but then proceeded to attack what it saw as Moresby’s own errors. If Moresby was factually incorrect in his own assertions, how qualified was he to question Lawson? Furthermore, there was little unanimity on the subject of New Guinea. Many of those who castigated Lawson had contradicted each other. They themselves had also spoken of fantastic occurrences and discoveries. Was Lawson’s claim for the “moolah-tiger” significantly different from Moresby’s claim that rhinoceroses were part of New Guinea’s fauna and he had seen their tracks? Italian naturalist Luigi M. D’Albertis, who subsequently played a role in debunking many of Lawson’s assertions through several expeditions to New Guinea during the 1870s, noted, in hindsight, his mistake in ruling against Lawson out of hand: Although I had thrown aside with contempt the book relating Captain Lawson’s travels across New Guinea, still I actually had perused it; and it will not be wondered at that when I came to converse with the people who had actually beheld the huge birds, and seen the tracks of buffaloes, and when, moreover, I heard of the probable existence of the rhinoceros, as asserted by Captain Moresby, my unbelief was stag-

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Contributing to the ongoing controversy surrounding Lawson’s account were two 1876 contributions to New Guinea literature. The first was another work claiming to be the testimony of a European, this time a French sailor, who had journeyed through New Guinea’s interior. Adventures in New Guinea: the Narrative of Louis Trégance, a French Sailor. Nine Years in Captivity among the Orangewoks. A Tribe in the Interior of New Guinea was published in London and purportedly edited by the Reverend Henry Crocker of Weremai, New Zealand. Crocker, whose full name was Henry Crocker Marriott Watson, was a Tasmanian who had migrated to New Zealand in 1873. 46 While the book’s theme reflected Lawson’s narrative, the most noticeable influence on the work was G. W. Earl’s The Eastern Seas. 47 Watson’s book never matched the popularity of Lawson’s, but it did perpetuate suggestions that the interior of New Guinea held great mineral wealth and that a more advanced civilization was shielded from Europeans by coastal cannibals. If John Moresby had been disinclined to publish the diary of his explorations in New Guinea, the Lawson controversy now ensured its inevitability. In 1876 Moresby’s Discoveries and Surveys in New Guinea was published as a corrective for Lawson’s public misinformation. The corrective, however, failed. The general public was less appreciative of Moresby than it was of Lawson. The editors of the Edinburgh Review were not surprised that such would be the case: “Truth, it is well known, is often stranger than fiction; but we can hardly hope that Captain Moresby’s modest and sober narrative will prove so fascinating to the general reader as the marvels related by Lawson. . . . How can an honest British sailor compete in fiction?” 48 That Moresby failed to counter Lawson’s impact on the popular imagination was confirmed by the fact that into the twentieth century Lawson continued to influence works on New Guinea. His legacy was perhaps most enduring in “boy’s own” literature. 49 In Britain the boy’s own story played an important role in educating young Britons in their imperial responsibilities, while in the United States and other English-speaking settler societies they chronicled the skills required to tame new frontiers. Such fiction often tapped into, and fictionalized, adult travelogues to render them more entertaining for younger audiences. The noted boy’s own author W. H. G. Kingston, for example, relied on both Wallace and Lawson as sources of information and inspiration when writing of New Guinea. 50 Kingston’s Three Admirals, published in 1878, borrowed heavily from Lawson’s work. Kingston’s most popular work was thus also his least authentic. 51 George Manville Fenn was another boy’s own author, whose Nat the Naturalist attained a wide readership throughout the English-speaking

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world. Although he looked first to Wallace for inspiration, his next New Guinea adventure—Bunyip Land: The Story of a Wild Journey—describing a young man’s attempts to free his father who was a prisoner of “New Guinea savages”—also owed a great deal to Lawson’s earlier work. 52 Whether inspired by Wallace or Moresby, Lawson, or D’Albertis, the significance of these boy’s own works rested on their continued representation of New Guinea as a dark and mysterious land with “fierce and cruel” inhabitants. 53 At the same time as New Guinea was increasingly seen as part of the now Polynesian-centered South Seas rather than as part of the Malay world, the recently coined ethnographic and regional term “Melanesia” constituted an important imaginative divide within the South Seas. 54 Papuans might be described as “South Sea Islanders,” and D’Albertis’s desire to see and describe them in their “natural” state might be reminiscent of earlier representations of Polynesia, but the term “Melanesia” represented both the blackness of its people (and therefore their distance from the white West) and the darkness of its existence. 55 By the 1880s New Guinea fiction was being written by men who had visited the island. But this was no guarantee that the fantasy trend in fiction writing would become more restrained. One popular author who had visited New Guinea was the former gold prospector Robert M. Macdonald. Rather than using his personal experience to mediate the work of Lawson and others who had not visited the island, Macdonald’s tale sought to perpetuate the belief that a great civilization existed in New Guinea’s interior. 56 The ongoing publication of conflicting stories of New Guinea ensured that although the general public was able to read widely about the island, it remained a largely unknown land for most people. Addressing the Manchester Geographical Society in 1886 on the subject of his “explorations and experiences in New Guinea,” Samuel MacFarlane lamented it was “unfortunate that so many conflicting reports have appeared on the subject.” Such contradictory reporting, he averred, meant that New Guinea remained “the largest, darkest, most neglected, and in many respects most interesting island in the world.” 57 That interest was further sustained by James Chalmers, an English missionary, whose impressions of and experiences in New Guinea were recounted in various lectures and writings. Chalmers, whose twentythree years in New Guinea left him better qualified than many commentators to describe the island and its people, counted Robert Louis Stevenson among his friends. 58 Stevenson, in turn, described Chalmers as a hero, and claimed his influence on him was similar to that of David Livingstone on Henry Stanley. 59 Chalmers was no less prolific than many of his contemporaries, and his 1885 Adventures in New Guinea, was followed in 1887 by Pioneering in New Guinea, and then, in 1895, by Pioneer Life and Work in New Guinea 1877–1894. Although Chalmers died in 1901, at the hands of hostile natives as he sought to establish a mission on

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Goaribari Island, in the Gulf of Papua, he left a significant legacy, both through his missionary activities, but also through his publications, which continued to attract popular audiences for many decades to come. Into the twentieth century, New Guinea continued to loom large in the Western consciousness. The London publisher Seeley and Co. maintained a continuing interest. Writing in 1906 naturalist A. E. Pratt conveyed his two years of exploration in “Unexplored New Guinea.” Referring to the “extraordinary value of Papua to the man of science,” he suggested the island was “a vast unopened field for British trade. 60 In 1915 Irish author and ship’s surgeon Henry De Vere Stacpoole published Gold Trail: A Romance of the South Seas (also known as Reef of Stars). In a familiar narrative premise, five adventurers leave Sydney to find their fortune in New Guinea. They return with a ship full of gold and a “halfbreed Dyak girl,” but with two of their number dead after encounters with scorpions, gorillas, and headhunters. During the postwar period, and fifty years after the publication of John Lawson’s book, J. M. Walsh wrote Overdue: A Romance of Unknown New Guinea. 61 Still publishing in the area, Seely, Service, and Co. would also posthumously publish the work of Australian colonial official Wilfred N. Beaver under the volubly titled Unexplored New Guinea: A Record of the Travels, Adventures, and Experiences of a Resident Magistrate Amongst the Head-hunting Savages and Cannibals of the Unexplored Interior of New Guinea. After an introduction from noted Cambridge anthropologist Alfred Haddon, in part explaining Beaver’s earlier life and his death at the Battle of Polygon Wood in September 1917, the Australian’s own introduction commenced with the observation: New Guinea has usually been looked upon as a land of mystery and a potent breeding-place of travellers’ yarns. “Africa semper aliquid novi” (“From Africa always something new”) runs the phrase, but omit Africa and insert Papua and you may grasp the ideas expected of the country. It is not so many years ago—as the present day popular imagination is hazy enough as to where New Guinea really is—that the country was regarded as a place where, if a man escaped dying of fever within the first three weeks of his arrival, he was eaten by cannibals within the fourth. But quite apart from such ideas as to the unhealthiness of the country and the dietary fancies of its inhabitants, any story[,] however weird[,] ran an excellent risk of being believed. 62

Among the late Captain Beaver’s stories were claims of “tailed tribes” and “villages of Amazons.” The Amazonian story, first been relayed by the crew of the Chevert, continued to fascinate audiences. The Sydney press reported that among the “wondrous tales from New Guinea” the expedition brought home with them was the fact that “close to Hood’s Point is an island inhabited by Amazons.” Men from neighboring islands, it was claimed, were rarely allowed intercourse, the women were fighters

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who possessed “great strength,” and all male babies were killed at birth. 63 Perpetuating the notion of Papuan Amazons, in the 1880s Chalmers’s Adventures in New Guinea reported: At Port Moresby, I had heard of a woman’s land, a land where only women—perfect Amazons—lived and ruled. These ladies were reported to be excellent tillers of the soil, splendid canoeists in sailing or paddling, and quite able to hold their own against attacks of the sterner sex, who sometimes tried to invade their country. To find so interesting a community was of great moment, and everywhere we went we inquired, but only to be laughed at by the natives; sometimes asked by them, “How do they continue to exist?” 64

Claiming he found a village inhabited by “dusky damsels,” Chalmers stated that he was “fully convinced that this is the Woman’s Land, and can easily account for its being called so by stray canoes from the westward.” He called the area “Amazon Bay.” 65 Although Beaver refuted the idea of an Amazonian community in New Guinea, the idea was still being explored as late as 1938. In that year the Australian newspaper The Land ran a serial called “Amazon Island,” which followed the activities of “gentlemen adventurers” on the schooner Seaflower, led by a Captain Darnell. Darnell raised a crew in Sydney to travel to New Guinea and find “mineral and other wealth.” Having found great wealth, they are about to return to Australia when a missionary tells them the story of an island of women. An illustration for the series showed the women in very Europeanised Polynesian form, with leis placed strategically over their topless forms. Darnell was convinced that these women were like sirens and held a treasure once owned by William Dampier. In the same year the that readers of the Land where being told of Papuan Amazons, and again in defiance of Beaver’s corrective, Cole’s enduring myth of the tailed tribe produced an extraordinary response from the Australian government. The Australian parliament was told that Minister for External Affairs W. M. Hughes was soon to travel to the Australian territory of Papua, where he would investigate the claim that men with tails resided in the “wilds of Papua.” 66 Into the 1920s Lawson’s work was still being read by officers of the Australian colonial endeavor in Papua. Indeed, chief administrator Sir Hubert Murray liked to lend copies of the book to newly arrived officers. 67 Significantly, too, prospective tourists to the region were cautioned about the potential dangers lurking in the New Guinea jungles. During the 1930s the Pacific and Orient (P & O) liner Maloja offered passengers the opportunity to experience “savage Papua.” “The real New Guinea of mountain, jungle, gold and mystery,” it was claimed, was “withheld, perhaps mercifully, from the happy tourist.” 68 The continued

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(mis)representation of New Guinea into the twentieth century highlights that on the eve of the Pacific War, when the island would become a bloody battlefield, there was still little or no distinction between the real and imaginary South Seas. 69 Moreover, popular, as well as purportedly “scientific,” accounts of New Guinea also highlighted the conflation of Polynesia and Melanesia, a merging that continued to shape perceptions of the amorphous and still-mythical South Seas. The persistent fascination with New Guinea also reflected the prospect of quick riches, and the opportunity to extend the Western civilizing mission—in those ways, too, Westerners’ views of the island had much in common with their representations of other, more appealing parts of the South Seas. And while Western depictions of Papuan “Amazons” were far removed from the common representations of Polynesian pulchritude, both images said more about Westerners than they did about those they sought to depict. NOTES 1. While Europeans first called the island “Papua,” the name “New Guinea” was attached to it by the Spanish navigator Ynigo Ortiz de Retez in 1545. Chris Ballard has noted that “before the mid-nineteenth century” exploration of New Guinea “consisted of little more than sporadic landing for water and victuals, or attempts to map routes circumventing the island.” See Ballard, “The Art of Encounter: Verisimilitude in the Imaginary Exploration of Interior New Guinea, 1725–1876,” in Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence, eds. Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkezoff, and Darrell Tryo (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2009), 225. 2. Richard Swainson Fisher, The Book of the World, 3rd ed. (New York: J.H. Colton, 1852), 687. 3. Samuel G. Goodrich, A History of Asia and Oceanica (Louisville, KY: Morton and Grisworld, 1850), 213. See also Ballard, “‘The Art of Encounter’: Verisimilitude in the Imaginary Exploration of New Guinea, 1725–1876,” in Jolly, Tcherkézoff, and Tyron, eds., Oceanic Encounters, 226–27. 4. See Alfred Russell Wallace, The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang–utan, and the Bird of Paradise. A Narrative of Travel, with Sketches of Man and Nature (London: Macmillan, 1869). 5. Goodrich’s estimation meant New Guinea was the most heavily populated area in “Oceanica.” New Guinea’s population exceeded that of “New Holland” with its 110,000 “white” population and 60,000 “native population” and New Zealand with its 250,000 “native population.” See Goodrich, Asia and Oceanica, 213. 6. Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Project Gutenberg. Web. May 14, 2010, Chapter 20. 7. “The New Peace Party,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 79 (January 1856): 31. 8. “Ticket of Leave,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 81 (February 1857): 186. 9. “Additional Chapters from the History of John Bull,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 69 (January 1851): 84. 10. Fisher, Book of the World, 688. 11. Goodrich, Asia and Oceanica, 214. 12. Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, chapter 21. 13. “Papua,” Chambers’s Encyclopedia (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1872). 14. Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, chapter 20. See James Bryce, The Students’ Atlas of Physical Geography: Consisting of Twenty Maps (New York: GP Putnam, 1873), 73; John Charles Hall, Interesting Facts Connected with the Animal Kingdom, with Some

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Remarks on Unity of Our Species (London: Whittaker and Co, 1841), 289; William Ellis, Polynesian Researches: During a Residence of Nearly Eight Years in the Society and Sandwich Islands, Vol. 1 (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1833), 78. Charles Knight, ed., Natural History: Or, Second Division of “The English Encyclopedia,” Vol. 3 (London: Bradbury, Evans and Co., 1867), 673. Charles Hamilton Smith, The Natural History of the Human Species: Its Typical Forms, Primeval Distribution, Filiations and Migrations (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1859), 40. See also Chris Ballard, “‘Oceanic Negroes’: British Anthropology of Papuans, 1820–1869,” in Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940, ed. Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2008). 15. See Josiah Clark Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo and Co., 1855), 435. 16. “Papua,” Chambers’s Encyclopedia. 17. Fisher, Book of the World, 687–88; Goodrich, Asia and Oceanica, 213. 18. “Johnston’s Physical Geography,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 65 (April 1849): 415. 19. Charles Beach, Andrew Deverel: The History of an Adventurer in New Guinea, 2 Vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1863), I:110–111. See also Ballard, “The Art of Encounter,” 229–30. 20. Beach, Andrew Deverel, 126. 21. Beach, Andrew Deverel, preface. 22. See Nigel Krauth, ed., New Guinea Images in Australian Literature (St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1982), xiv. 23. New Guinea Company, Prospectus of the New Guinea Company (Ltd) (Sydney: New Guinea Company, 1867). Communications from Sydney to London concerning this great public interest in New Guinea saw a New Guinea Company also formed in London in that year. See Athenaeum, May 8, 1875. 24. Prospectus of the New Guinea Company. A second prospectus was issued the following month. 25. “Papua,” Chambers’s Encyclopedia. 26. See W. T. Forster, The Wreck of the “Maria”, or, Adventures of the New Guinea Prospecting Association (Sydney: J. Reading and Co., 1872). 27. See Luigi Maria D’Albertis, New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw, 2 Vols. (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1880), 2:224. 28. Cole, Mr. Jones’s Account of a Race of Human Beings with Tails, Discovered by Him in the Interior of New Guinea (1875), http://www.erbzine.com/mag18/tails.htm. Accessed November 24, 2008. 29. Krauth, New Guinea Images, 6. 30. Krauth, New Guinea Images, 2. See also Ballard, “The Art of Encounter,” 230–31. 31. See Marcus Clarke, “Bajau; or, Gypsies of the Sea,” AustLit, accessed October 7, 2014; http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C574587; Krauth, New Guinea Images, 13. 32. Clarke, “Gypsies of the Sea,” cited in Krauth, New Guinea Images, 18 33. Rockhampton Bulletin, October 29, 1875. 34. The expedition had some success with coastal villages, but their efforts to engage with communities in the hinterland failed. See Susan M. Davies, “Plumes, Pipes and Valuables: The Papuan Artefact-Trade in Southwest New Guinea, 1845–1888,” in Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum, ed. Sarah Byrne, Anne Clarke, Rodney Harrison, Robin Torrence (New York: Springer, 2011), 92. 35. John. A. Lawson, Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea (London: Chapman and Hall, 1875). See also Stella Tove Regis, “Imagining the Other: Representing the Papua New Guinea Subject” (PhD Dissertation, University of New South Wales, 1999), 17. 36. Krauth, New Guinea Images, 35. For an example of the American discussion of the book see Appleton’s Journal, July 7, 1875, 90. 37. Evening Standard, April 10, 1875.

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38. Brisbane Courier, 1875, cited in Phyllis Mander Jones, “Biographical Note re. John Lawson,” undated manuscript, held Mitchell Library, Sydney, 1953. 39. Lawson, Wanderings in New Guinea, 5. See also Ballard, “The Art of Encounter,” 234–43. 40. Lawson, Wanderings in New Guinea, 5. 41. Krauth, New Guinea Images, 30. 42. Nigel Krauth, “The New Guinea Experience in Literature: A Study of Imaginative Writings Concerning Papua New Guinea, 1863–1980” (PhD Thesis, University of Queensland, 1983), 28. 43. Krauth, “New Guinea Experience,” 28. 44. The Athenauem, May 29, 1875, reprinted in John Moresby, New Guinea and Polynesia. Discovery and Surveys in New Guinea and the D’Entrecasteaux Islands. A Cruise in Polynesia and Visits to the Pearl–shelling Stations in Torres Strait of H.M.S. Basilisk (London: Hohn Murray, 1876), 321. 45. D’Albertis, New Guinea, 2:2–3. 46. See Ballard, “The Art of Encounter,” 232–34, 257n21. 47. See Earl, The Eastern Seas; or, Voyages and Adventures in the Indian Archipelago, in 1832-33-34, Comprising a Tour of the Island of Java—Visits to Borneo, the Malay Peninsula, Siam . . . (London: W. H. Allen, 1837). 48. Review of John Moresby, New Guinea and Polynesia, in Edinburgh Review 144 (1876): 232. 49. Krauth located nine such examples published between 1870 and 1900. 50. Krauth, New Guinea Images, 51. 51. Krauth, “New Guinea Experience,” 542. 52. George Manville Fenn, Nat the Naturalist (London: Blackie and Son, 1883) and Bunyip Land or Among the Blackfellows in New Guinea (London: Blackie and Son, 1885), 10. See also Krauth, New Guinea Images, 53. 53. Fenn, Nat the Naturalist, 226. D’Albertis’s New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw was plagiarized by F. Frankfort in his 1885 boy’s own tale The Fate of the “Black Swan.” See Krauth, New Guinea Images, 55. 54. Gavan Daws has argued that Polynesia was always the “essential South Seas.” See Daws, A Dream of Islands: Voyages of Self-Discovery in the South Seas (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, Brisbane, 1980), xi. 55. Anne Maxwell has noted that for many observers, New Guinea continued to be framed not against Polynesia but against Africa. Therefore, notions of “ugliness” and “savagery” were sustained. See Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the “Native” and the Making of European Identities (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), 151. 56. The book was Robert Macdonald, The Great White Chief: A Story of Adventure in Unknown New Guinea (London: Blackie and Son, 1908). 57. Samuel McFarlane, “My Experiences as a Pioneer Missionary amongst the Cannibals of New Guinea,” Journal of the Manchester Geographical Society 10 (January–March 1904): 8–17. 58. On Chalmers, see Patricia A. Prendergast, “James Chalmers,” Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/chalmers-james-3187. Accessed January 9, 2014. 59. Stevenson wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin in December, 1890: “I want you to get Pioneering in New Guinea by J. Chalmers. It’s a missionary book, and has less pretensions to be literature than Spurgeon’s sermons. Yet I think even though that, you will see some of the traits of the hero that wrote it; a man that took me fairly by storm; for the most attractive, simple, brave, and interesting man in the whole Pacific. He is away now to go up the Fly River: a desperate venture, it is thought; he is quite a Livingstone card.” See Stevenson to Colvin, December 24, 1890, in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 8 Vols. ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995): 7:59. See also Laavanyan M. Ratnapalan, “Robert Louis Ste-

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venson’s South Seas Writing: Its Production and Context within the Victorian Study of Culture” (PhD Thesis, Goldsmith College, University of London, 2007), 58. 60. Pratt, Two Years Among the New Guinea Cannibals; A Naturalist’s Sojourn Among the Aborigines of Unexplored New Guinea (London: Seely and Co., 1906), 20, 335. 61. J. M. Walsh, Overdue: A Romance of Unknown New Guinea (Sydney: States Publishing, 1925). 62. W. N. Beaver, Unexplored New Guinea: A Record of the Travels, Adventures, and Experiences of a Resident Magistrate Amongst the Head-hunting Savages and Cannibals of the Unexplored Interior of New Guinea (London: Seely, Service Co, 1920), 17. 63. Evening News, December 7, 1875. 64. Chalmers, Pioneering in New Guinea, 79. 65. Chalmers, Pioneering in New Guinea, 81, 82. In his 1888 study of Chalmers, William Robson noted that “Mr. Chalmers had often heard of a Women’s Land inhabited only by Amazons, who were famous farmers, canoeists, and [who were] able to hold their own before all comers.” See Robson, James Chalmers, Missionary and Explorer of Rarotonga and New Guinea (Fleming H. Revell: New York, 1888), 63. 66. South Seas Review 1 (May 30, 1938): 23. 67. Jones, “Bibliographical note re. John Lawson.” 68. Advertisement, BP Magazine 5 (September 1933): 18. 69. Jonathan Lamb, “Re-imagining Juan Fernandez: Probability, Possibility, and Pretence in the South Seas,” in Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Diane Losche (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 210.

SIX The Colonial Endeavor and Australia’s South Seas

An array of cultural forms highlighted the continuing fascination with the South Seas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. American writers, popular as well as scholarly, were instrumental in that process, which was contemporaneous with a more assertive United States colonial endeavor in and around the Pacific region. Americans, however, were not alone in their fascination with the South Seas, and from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a deepening interest in the region was evident beyond the United States—notably in Britain, another colonizing power—as well as in the as-yet-unfederated Australian colonies. As reflected in the interest in New Guinea, Antipodean fascination with the South Seas mirrored the same illusory and often contradictory perceptions that characterized Americans’ views of the region. It also reflected the transnational dimensions of South Seas discourse. White Australians’ constructions of the South Seas were influenced, moreover, by the self-perception that unlike Americans or Europeans, they were inhabitants of, and not simply sojourners to, the Pacific region. Accordingly, while “Australia” was still a nascent political entity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was more than a passive observer of the Pacific colonial endeavor. Ignoring his publishers’ requests to avoid spending too much time writing nonfiction, Robert Louis Stevenson’s abiding interest in the political intrigue that beset the Samoan Islands during the 1880s and 1890s led him to write reports of the colonial struggle in the South Seas. Stevenson, however, was not the first fiction writer to address the colonial issue. In 1873 Mark Twain, accompanied by Charles Warren Stoddard, had enjoyed a triumphant lecture tour of Europe. His public addresses on the 75

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subject of Hawaii fostered public interest at a time when a number of powers, including the United States and Britain, were jockeying for control of the Sandwich Islands. The widespread interest in the subject in Britain delayed Twain’s return home. In “view of the prevailing frenzy concerning the Sandwich Islands, and the informed desire of the public to acquire information concerning them,” he told the readers of the London Standard, “I have thought it well to tarry yet another week in England and deliver a lecture upon this absorbing subject.” The lecture was entitled “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands.” 1 Hawaii was not the only South Seas locale to become the subject of considerable public debate during the late nineteenth century. The interest in Hawaii was one aspect of a broader fascination with the Pacific Islands, which were increasingly regarded as sites where Western nations might exert influence and power. This political interest, which both contributed to and was sustained by public curiosity with South Seas literature, encouraged several new contributions to the South Seas library. Britain’s annexation of the “Feejees” in the early 1870s renewed literary interest in the South Seas. For the first time in a long time British authors made a significant contribution to America’s South Seas imaginings. Writing in Appleton’s Journal, William Rideing pointed out that “many London presses [were] kept busy” printing South Seas travelogues by British authors. Among the most popular of this time was “English gentlemen traveler” J. W. Boddam’s Pearls of the Pacific, which gained a readership on both sides of the Atlantic. 2 And, as noted in the previous chapter, John A. Lawson’s Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea also captured American attention. European and American interest in the South Pacific as a site for colonial aggrandizement caused increasing public concern in the British colonies of Australasia. Since the late eighteenth century these European outposts had been intimately enmeshed in Britain’s South Seas enterprise. As first-generation white Australians such as William Charles Wentworth claimed, the Australian continent was the largest island of the South Seas: Proud Queen of isles! Thou sittest vast, alone, A host of vassals bending round thy throne: Like some fair swan that skims the silver tide, Her silken cygnets strew’d on every side, So floatest thou, thy Polynesian brood Dispers’d around thee on the Ocean flood, While ev’ry surge, that doth thy bosom lave, Salutes thee “Empress of the southern wave.” 3

Sydney became the administrative headquarters for the British endeavor in the South Seas and the city’s port quickly became the most important in the South Pacific trade. 4 Early plans for the colonization of

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the new British territory of New South Wales had included suggestions that Tahitian women would be the perfect partners for British convicts bound for Botany Bay, while New Zealand appeared, initially at least, to consist of South Seas islands inhabited by South Seas Islanders. 5 Like some Americans, some early colonists of New South Wales used their vision of South Sea Islanders to denigrate the indigenous inhabitants. Royal Marine Officer Watkin Tench described the Aborigines of Sydney Cove as “inferior” when compared with “the subtle African, the patient watchful American, or the elegant timid islander of the South Seas.” 6 Reflecting the regard held for “Polynesia” within the British world, some convicts planned to escape from the penal settlement of New South Wales to the South Seas where they might live out their life, or pretend to be a shipwrecked sailor and seek passage back to Britain from a passing ship. 7 As New South Wales moved to self-government and some colonists began contemplating the federation of the emerging Australasian colonies, concerns grew regarding the strategic integrity of British interests in the region and hence any new nation’s future. During the 1850s there was a significant public debate in Australia and New Zealand over the French colonization of New Caledonia. Australasian concern even reached the pages of the Boston Daily Evening Traveler, which dedicated considerable space to the issue in its February 3, 1854 edition. Citing the Sydney Herald the report noted the: extreme regret at the neglect of the government of Great Britain to colonize this fine island; a neglect which it says cannot be attributed to any lack of information or advice in respect to it—for time after time have the government of Australia [sic] and commanders of Her Majesty’s ships which have explored those latitudes, spoke on sanguine terms of the immense advantage which would accrue to the Australian possessions from the colonization of New Caledonia which is directly upon the route of commerce between Australia and the great markets of the northwest and northeast such as China, California and the West Coast of the American continent. 8

Later, during the 1870s, the sensation created by Lawson’s Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea, in conjunction with the local contributions to the literary engagement with New Guinea that predated its release, convinced many Australians that while an opportunity had been lost with New Caledonia, New Guinea had to be claimed for Britain. Reviewing John Moresby’s New Guinea and Polynesia, the Edinburgh Review described the Australian public’s “fascination” with New Guinea: “Rightly or wrongly the Antipodean mind seems to consider that the possession of New Guinea is a necessity to Australia.” 9 An American journal noted that it “was Australian importunity that led to the recent annexation of Fiji, and the antipodean people are now clamoring so loudly for the an-

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nexation of New Guinea that the seizure of that vast and little known country will follow shortly.” 10 By the 1870s the interest shown in New Guinea and Samoa by the newly unified Germany had replaced earlier Australian concerns regarding French ambitions in New Caledonia and the New Hebrides. The German interest in New Guinea, and in the South Pacific more generally, excited considerable public debate in Australia, where it was feared Germany was attempting to encircle the Australasian colonies, and acquire territory that could be used for military bases that would threaten British interests in the region. 11 German designs on the South Seas continued to alarm Australasians during the 1880s. Repeated calls were made for the British annexation of not only Samoa and New Guinea but also the Solomons, New Hebrides, Marshall, and the Gilbert and Ellice groups. There was deep concern in the Australian colony of Victoria regarding the future of New Guinea. Victorians had also been at the forefront of the 1850s debate concerning New Caledonia and had exerted considerable pressure on Britain to annex Fiji. Victorians, local politician and future Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin informed American readers of Scribner’s Magazine, “kept a jealous eye upon the progress of European settlement in the South Seas.” When, after British inaction, the Queensland colonial government decided in April 1883 to annex eastern New Guinea and a number of adjacent island groups, Victorians were especially vocal in their support. Following the refusal of the British colonial office to recognize the annexation, partly on the grounds that Germany was not interested in the island, the “angry sentiment of Australia rose to white heat.” 12 In reporting the British refusal to recognize the Australian annexation of southeastern New Guinea, Alfred Deakin suggested that Australian anger “found vent in the aspiration after federation.” 13 The South Seas played a role in the Australian federation debate, and it was assumed that a federated Australia could exert more influence in the South Seas than the disparate British colonies. The fear of French and German expansion in the Pacific was a motivating factor in the establishment in 1883 of the Federal Council of Australasia, which included the Australian colonies, New Zealand, and Fiji. 14 Some officials in the British Colonial Office regarded Australians’ and New Zealanders’ desire to expand into the Pacific as a consequence of their “strong jingo feeling.” 15 Australians’ and New Zealanders’ references to their desire for an “Australasian Monroe Doctrine” must be seen in the context of their perceptions that the British failed to appreciate the dangerous situation facing Australasia. 16 Such a danger was economic, as well as military. As one New Zealand spokesman suggested, it “has always been one of the aspirations of New Zealand to be an emporium for the Pacific Islands, and this expectation ought not to be taken from us by such unjustifiable methods as has been adopted by Germany.” 17

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Between 1855, when one American commentator had depicted the South Seas as lying between “two emerging empires” who rightly should control them, and 1913, when the Australian politician Bernhard Ringrose Wise described the islands of the South Pacific as “natural adjuncts of an Australian empire,” Australians took a keen interest in extending their influence to the Pacific. 18 This imperial agenda was one imperative during the debates surrounding Federation. Speaking at a Federation convention in 1890, New South Wales Premier Sir Henry Parkes lamented that there was “no doubt whatever” in his mind “that if there had been a central government in Australia—if Australia could have spoken with one voice in the year 1883, New Guinea would have belonged to Australia.” 19 Continuing to pursue this theme, at an 1893 Federation conference, Parkes referred to “the important South Sea islands”: These beautiful and innumerable islands—most of them admirably situated for the support of human life in health and vigor—are sure to become a seat of great commercial activity. Who is so interested in the young commerce of the Pacific as Australia? It is the progress and settlement of Australia which has thrown light upon these interesting islands, and established means of communication with, and there is no power on the face of the earth that is so well entitled to the benefit of commerce and intercourse with the South Seas as Australia. 20

The debates surrounding an Australian constitution included discussions of possible provisions by which the Commonwealth could admit new states. Robert Garran’s 1897 work The Coming Commonwealth suggested that one reason for granting the new Commonwealth power to admit new states was that “territories not at present contemplated such as Fiji or New Guinea might seek admission, either as full-blown states or as dependent territories.” 21 These late nineteenth-century discussions concerning the composition of an Australian federation were shaped by racial as well as colonial imperatives. The possibility of Fiji and New Guinea becoming Australian states stood in sharp contrast to a frequently expressed determination to unite the colonies in order to preserve Australia for the white man. For some time Western debate about the South Seas had been influenced by Social Darwinism and its adherents. Social Darwinism’s notions of racial degeneration became a useful prism through which the apparent debasement of many South Seas people might be explained. The West’s “Fatal Impact” may have hastened degenerative trends that were already in train. In Tahiti, one of Charles Warren Stoddard’s characters noted that walking “alone in those splendid nights I used to hear a dry ominous coughing in the huts of the natives. I felt as though I were treading upon the brinks of half-dug graves, and I longed to bring a respite to the doomed race.” 22

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Many theologians also embraced Darwinian theories, realizing that they provided a convenient explanation as to why the quality of life in the South Seas continued to decline in the wake of Christian redemption or, equally, the reason why Christianity was the only tool of salvation from such a horrible fate. As the Reverend Joseph Elkins commented in an address to the 1873 conference of the Evangelical Alliance in New York City: “The Polynesians, scattered over a thousand isolated points in the South Seas, have plainly sunk from a state much more civilized than that in which they now are.” 23 The notion of the degenerating South Sea Islander became yet another given in Western perceptions of the South Seas. In debating Australian federation, one anonymously authored book described the struggle between rich and poor that had helped fuel the labor movement in Australia during the 1890s. Referring to English authors such as positivist Frederic Harrison, and emphasizing the need to improve society, the author noted that “Our present type of society is, in many respects, one of the most horrible that ever existed in the world’s history.” Contrasting the “boundless luxury and self-indulgence” that existed “at one end of the scale” with the “condition of life as cruel as that of a Roman slave, and more degraded than that of a South Seas islander,” this writer referred to Westerners’ obligation to ameliorate social ills. 24 For Australians, Social Darwinism fueled a number of beliefs that were central to their national development, and which were congruent with arguments made by white minorities in other settler societies. First, and most important, the development of the tropical north of the continent could not be secured by white labor that was unable to thrive in the climactic conditions. Second, the peoples of the South Seas were capable of such labor in tropical climes and could provide an attainable source of same. Finally, Social Darwinism encouraged a Western “scientific” racism that encouraged many white Australians to consider Pacific Islanders’ rights and personal freedoms as being of secondary importance to the economic needs of White Australia. One result was the practice of “black-birding”—the consequences of which further devastated already fragile island communities and informed aspects of the Australian federation debate. 25 Leaving to one side the whole issue of convict labor, the use of indentured labor had a long history in Australia. An alternative to slavery (the distinction from which was often blurred) first South Asians, and then Chinese, had for several decades been used as indentured laborers in the Australian colonies. With imperial restrictions on the indenture of Indian labor, and amid growing anti-Asian sentiment associated with the Australian gold rushes, the providers of such labor to Australia looked to the Pacific, especially the islands of Melanesia, for alternate sources. While some Islanders entered voluntarily into indenture agreements for work in tropical Australia, many others were kidnapped (“blackbirded”) and

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transported, against their will, to Australia. From its inception “blackbirding” was seen by many people as undesirable and reprehensible. 26 Efforts were made within Australia, and in the United States, to outlaw the practice. (Pacific Islanders were also “blackbirded” to Latin America during this period.) 27 In the Australian colonies, public disapproval of the practice was greatly influenced by the literature of onetime blackbirder George Lewis (“Louis”) Becke. Becke’s two decades in the Pacific symbolized many of the stereotypical images associated with Westerners’ encounters with the South Seas. He married and had a family with an Ellice Islander. His working life during his years in the Pacific included acting as the supercargo for the American buccaneer and black-birder William “Bully” Hayes. On one occasion Becke faced a Brisbane court on a charge of piracy from which he was acquitted. 28 In 1893 Becke was back in Sydney, without a source of income. Encouraged by the editor of the Bulletin magazine to write of his adventures, Becke’s stories proved popular and he soon found a new career. His books sold well in both Australia and Britain and he later moved to Europe where he was “lionized” by British society. 29 One of the best traveled Europeans of the South Seas, Becke had an abundance of material for his thirty-five books, a number of which were based on the adventures of his alter ego, “Tom Denison.” Becke frequently reminded his readers that he had lived a South Seas life. Authenticity thus remained fundamental to the South Seas narrative. Introducing Becke’s most famous novel, By Reef and Palm, the Earl of Pembroke noted that everyone “who has a taste for good stories will feel, I believe, the force of these. Every one who knows the South Seas, and I believe, many who do not, will feel that they have the unmistakable stamp of truth.” 30 Lamenting, like Stevenson, the decline and degradation of the South Seas, Becke was “pained by the spectacle of a race in the process of extinction.” 31 More widely traveled than Stevenson or Melville, Becke spent considerable time in Melanesia, including his first visit to New Guinea in 1882. He utilized the less attractive aspects of his South Seas experiences in Melanesia to build his adventures. Tom Denison’s adventures may have been in the paradisal South Seas, but paradise could still be a very dangerous place. While Becke’s literary reputation has not matched that of Melville or Stevenson, his influence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was profound—and was recognized by his contemporaries. In his 1966 study of Becke, A. Grove Day described the Australian author as the “best writer of the South Seas of the past century—a man hailed as the ‘Rudyard Kipling of the Pacific,’ praised by Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad, and compared with Robert Louis Stevenson and Herman Melville.” 32 Questions of race figured prominently in Becke’s work, and contributed to Australians’ continuing interest in the practice of blackbirding.

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Along with the moral arguments against blackbirding, many Australians were troubled by the presence of yet another nonwhite minority in White Australia. Foregrounding the ever-contentious relationship between race and sex, some commentators representing the dangers allegedly posed by a “Kanaka” minority as a physical threat to Australians—particularly white women. Largely as a consequence of their physical prowess, Islanders were thus constructed as a serious threat. A number of books and plays of the time represented Islanders in this way. One of the more popular of these texts was Bland Holt’s long-running play The Great Rescue, which played at the Melbourne Royal for more than two years and which featured a scene with a menacing “kanaka” with a butcher’s knife. Although that dramatic scene was at best contrived, having little to do with the action of the play, it did reflect a common apprehension of the period. 33 Again, too, such images resembled those presented elsewhere; consider, for example, the images of aggressive sexuality that characterized many depictions of African Americans during the same period. These constructions of the threatening “Kanaka” stood in direct contrast to the generally favorable opinion Australians continued to hold of the idea of the South Seas. To Australians there appeared no contradiction between their fear and loathing of “Kanakas” and their love of the South Seas as a literary construction. Australians still delighted in Henry Lawson’s poem “Foreign Lands,” in which he dreamed of South Seas islands. 34 One of the more revealing ways in which these contradictory perceptions were manifest was in the early twentieth-century Australian embrace of surf bathing, which was closely associated with the South Seas. The public discourse surrounding surf bathing reveals that the classical Arcadian interpretation of the South Seas and its people remained a powerful image, reinforced by Social Darwinist notions—the same notions that had demonized the kanaka and suggested the Polynesian was experiencing racial degeneration. Australians transposed popular perceptions of the South Seas onto themselves and their beaches. In Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an important aspect of Victorian morality was broken down by the decision to allow surf bathing on beaches during daylight hours. Previously considered unacceptable to public decency, such a practice had been prohibited in many locations under a variety of state and local government laws. 35 Extension of surf bathing hours also corresponded with local developments around swimming that saw the emergence of the “Australian crawl” (freestyle), and local narratives that connected the stroke’s emergence with the South Seas and notions of the “nimble savage”—an enduring perception of South Seas Islanders and their “natural” athletic abilities that had been evident in Western cultural productions since the voyages of Cook. 36

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Surf bathing was quickly seen as “invigorating, health-giving and health retaining.” 37 Local Sydney surf bathing pioneer Walter Biddell insisted that the surf and surf bathing was “Nature’s best health restorer.” 38 These benefits of sun, sand, and surf were closely associated with the South Seas: “As far as history goes back,” noted the nationalist, proWhite Australia journal Lone Hand, “the South Sea islander has reveled in the surf.” 39 The apparent physical power of the “Kanaka,” used to construct images of fear and loathing, was contrasted with a more generic notion of the South Seas male that was deployed to demonstrate the therapeutic power of the beach. Writing on the popularity of the surf bathing pasttime in Sydney, one advocate noted that there was “no more healthful pastime for young people of both sexes.” “As a matter of fact,” the author continued, “at some of the seaside suburbs of Sydney many residents look more like South Sea Islanders than white people, being of a healthy brown tint, with firm glassy skins.” 40 Individual bathers took pride in their tans, and the Sydney Mail was happy to report that Sydney bathers were “as brown as South Sea islanders.” 41 Surf lifesaving carnivals on Sydney beaches often included a “brown man” competition to judge the white Australian with the darkest tan. 42 White Australian surf bathers now had the “brown-black hue of the kanaka”: “A man feels he’s a man when his skin is a real good brown.” Women agreed. They knew not why but “the best fellows were the brownest.” 43 Furthermore, they also sought to tan their skin. A photographic and artistic essay on the “The Poetry of Browning” celebrated “The Brown Girl of the Beaches.” 44 As it had for South Sea Islanders, the sun was producing “a fine and strong race of young men and women.” 45 Revealing the enduring power of the South Seas tradition, Sydney’s surf bathers were described as “living the lives of true Arcadians as ever reveled in the greenwood.” 46 They had inherited from the South Sea Islanders the mantle of “Greek Gods”: “The tourist or journalist who could write a description of them without employing the phrase ‘young Greek gods’ or ‘statues of bronze’ has not yet been born.” 47 Praising the browning of white Australia, the Lone Hand insisted that “the white man represents the pariah class despised of all; and if he would survive it is for him to adapt Nature’s protective provision of taking on the color of his surroundings as soon as possible.” 48 Australians, at least surf bathing Australians, were seen to be doing just that: “from a little distance they look more like South Sea islanders than white Australians.” 49 Demonstrating the failure of the missionary endeavor to destroy the old Arcadian notions of the South Seas, Australians drew parallels between their own beach-side existence and what they perceived as the idyllic existence of South Seas Islanders. The beach was teaching Australians to think like South Sea Islanders: “Why toil to get rich to do exactly the same thing you are doing not-rich? Why get all hot and bothered over more production when the thing you want is produced by the Pacific cost

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free?” 50 In its inaugural editorial in December 1917 the Sydney newspaper The Surf insisted that the “surf does not forget that the surfer is a gay-hearted, care-free child of nature, who enjoys the good things the gods have given him.” 51 Another report suggested that Sydney bathers— “these brown children of nature”—had “one advantage of which civilization robs us. They can revel in the glories of the waves untrammeled by the garb of convention.” The same commentator contended that “in view of our state of civilization” it was necessary to “emulate the freedom of the savage.” 52 Not everyone, however, was happy with the image of young Australians in tight-fitting costumes parading around the surf and sand. Writing in 1906, one correspondent to the Sydney Mail described the surf pioneers as nothing more than “a few wild white men rehearsing their primitive instincts.” 53 When Australians entered the surf they also engaged in activities that had been first performed in the South Seas. During the early twentieth century, as the popularity of surf bathing grew, the Australian media claimed that the new practice of “surf shooting” (later known as “body surfing”) was an Australian invention. In late 1906, however, Freddie Williams, a surf bather from the northern Sydney beach community of Manly who was commonly recognized as the best practitioner of the art in Sydney, revealed the truth. “Surf shooting,” he told a fellow enthusiast, had “originated in the islands” and had been taught to him by a “South Sea islander.” 54 While the Manly community in the late nineteenth century had a number of “South Seas islanders,” Williams’s instructor was most probably a gardener named Tommy Tanna. Tanna, a native of the New Hebridean Island of the same name, was supposedly first seen body surfing on Manly Beach in 1886. Arthur Lowe, who at the time was a young boy, rejected Mark Twain’s earlier insistence that “none but the natives could ever master the art of surf bathing thoroughly,” and reputedly asked Tanna to teach him and his friends how to body surf. 55 Within a short time the practice had grown into a popular pastime among local boys and young men. Another South Seas–inspired surf pastime that became popular on Australian beaches during the early twentieth century was surfboard riding. According to one Australian magazine of the early 1900s, “surf shooting on boards has been known to South Sea Islanders as far back as the white man can trace.” 56 On Cook’s third voyage surgeon William Anderson and Sir Joseph Banks recorded not only surf bathing in Tahiti, but also Tahitians’ use of a canoe as a way to ride waves in the surf. 57 In Hawaii, Cook’s crew witnessed the locals using a flat piece of board to catch waves which the Englishmen called “sharkboards.” 58 New Yorker John B. Whitman recorded in his diary during a visit to Hawaii in the years 1813–1815 that the craft was a “surfboard,” although British Missionary William Ellis may have been one of the first to share the label

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with the public when he saw a “surf-board” and board riding in Hawaii in 1823. 59 Recalling a visit to Pitcairn Island in the 1830s, British naval surgeon Frederick Debell Bennett also recorded the use of a “surfboard.” 60 In the 1850s Baptist Minister William Baker (also known as George Washington Bate and with the nom de plume “Haole”) wrote in his Sandwich Island Notes: “Of the numerous national games and amusements formerly practiced by the Hawaiian, surf-bathing is about the only one which has not become extinct.” “Surf-bathing,” Baker continued, is an exciting sport to the swimmer, and a cause for excitement and astonishment on the part of an unaccustomed spectator. The swimmers start out from shore, taking with them their surf-boards. These boards are of dimensions suited to the masculine strength and capacity of the swimmers. . . . A standing position on the swiftly-gliding surfboard is a feat of skill never yet surpassed by any circus rider. 61

While Mark Twain mentioned surfing briefly in Roughing It, and although Charles Warren Stoddard’s 1874 travel volume Summer Cruising in the South Seas had a cover illustration of Hawaiian women board riding, by the early 1890s the ancient art of surfing (he’enalu) was in demise—another victim of “Americanization.” As ethnologist Nathaniel B. Emerson lamented in 1892, surfing had “felt the touch of civilization, and today it is hard to find a surfboard outside of our museums and private collections.” 62 Surfing enjoyed a minor renaissance in the early twentieth century, thanks largely to the efforts of local Hawaiians at Waikiki, and the support offered by American journalist Alexander Hume Ford, who became enraptured by the sport while traveling through Hawaii on his way to Australia. In 1907 Ford taught Jack London how to surf at Waikiki, and London told the story to the world. Surfing, enthused London, was “a royal sport for the natural kings of the earth.” 63 Having read of board riding in Hawaii, a Sydney man by the name of Frank Bell reputedly built the first Australian surfboard from a church door and used it on Sydney’s Freshwater Beach during the 1890s. 64 The pastime continued to be practiced from time to time on Sydney beaches over the years but did not secure a wider following among surf bathers, who preferred to “shoot” the waves without a board. It was claimed that when a leading Australian surf lifesaving official was given a nine-footlong redwood surfboard as a gift after a visit to Hawaii in 1912 the inability of the gift’s new owner and his friends to master the craft saw it converted into an ironing board. 65 It would take the visits of South Sea Islanders to the United States and Australia in the early decades of the twentieth century to popularize surfing in both countries. While real estate magnate Henry Huntington had invited Irish/Hawaiian surfer George Freeth to California to perform demonstrations after reading London’s reports of the surf, it was Olym-

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pic swimming star “Duke” Kahanamoku who popularized the sport on the west coast of the United States. En route to the 1912 Stockholm Olympics Kahanomoku gave demonstrations on the Californian beaches of Corona Del Mar and Santa Monica. Those exhibitions caused a sensation and launched the sport in earnest in southern California. Two years later Kahanamoku visited Australia and New Zealand and conducted several board riding demonstrations in Sydney. 66 Just a few years after “Kanakas” had been forcibly repatriated from Australia, “the Duke” was swamped by well-wishers. Australians’ interest in Kahanamoku, and their early embrace of what subsequently became known as “surf culture,” revealed that the growing allure of the South Seas extended well beyond the United States. Feeling uniquely positioned vis-à-vis the South Seas, and confidently proprietorial of their future, Australians shared Americans’ fascination with the Pacific, and were active contributors to popular and scholarly discourses about a region of growing commercial and strategic significance. As the next chapter reveals, the trans-Pacific interest in the South Seas would be expressed in an ever widening range of new cultural productions, all of which helped make a mythical South Seas ever more “real” to audiences. NOTES 1. London Standard, October 7, 1873, in Mark Twain’s Letters from the Sandwich Islands, ed. G. Ezra Dane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1938), 219. 2. William Rideing, “The South Sea Islands, Part 1,” Appleton’s Journal 15 (22 April 1876): 513. See also J. W. Boddam, Pearls of the Pacific (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1876). 3. W. C. Wentworth, Australasia (Sydney: G and W.B. Whittaker, 1823), 3. 4. J. C. Furnas, Anatomy of Paradise, Hawaii and the Islands of the South Seas (1937; repr., London: Victor Gollancz, 1950), 209. 5. This notion of New Zealand as a South Seas island, however, was challenged by the course of European colonization. In selling his colonization plan for New Zealand, Edward Gibbon Wakefield noted that New Zealand offered valleys as “green as the meadows of Devonshire, hills as picturesque as those of Scotland, and the sky of Italy over all!” See “Colonisation: Mr Wakefield’s Theory,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 65 (May 1849): 527. By the late nineteenth century New Zealand was being described as “the England of the South Seas.” So dramatically had the European presence changed the natural environment of New Zealand that Somerset Maugham found it impossible to stay there during his South Seas excursion: the islands were too reminiscent of England. A 1920s National Geographic article suggested the country could be distinguished from Polynesia “because of geographic affinity with Australasian land masses.” See Robert Cushman Miurphy, “The Romance of Science in Polynesia,” National Geographic 48 (October 1925): 360. Kerry Howe has noted that “most New Zealanders over the past hundred years have not regarded their country as a ‘Pacific island,’ or even as an integral part of Polynesia.” See K. R. Howe, “New Zealand’s Twentieth-Century Pacific Memories and Reflections,” New Zealand Journal of History 34, no. 1 (2000): 6.

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6. Watkin Tench, A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and a Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (1793; repr., Essex: Empire Book Association, 1986), 252–53. 7. The notion of the South Seas as a focus for escape from New South Wales was subsequently examined in Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1874; London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1885), 254. 8. Boston Daily Evening Traveler, February 3, 1854, reproduced in R. Gerard Ward, American Activities in the Central Pacific, 1790–1879, Vol. 5 (Ridgewood: Gregg Press, 1867), 67 9. Anon., Review of John Moresby, New Guinea and Polynesia, in the Edinburgh Review 144 (July 1, 1876): 232. 10. J. E. Chamberlain, “A Dream of Anglo-Saxondom,” The Galaxy 24 (December 1877): 789. 11. See for example Illustrated Sydney News, January 17, 1885. 12. Alfred Deakin, “The Federation of Australia,” Scribner’s Magazine 10 (November 1891): 553. Having examined the British colonization of Australia, James Chalmers (the New Guinea missionary discussed in the previous chapter) expressed his reservations at the prospects of Australian control of New Guinea. Without British rather than Australian control, the results of annexation would be “hurtful.” In contrast to the Australian fiction of terra nullius, Chalmers also observed of the village that would become Port Moresby: “They are no doubt the real owners of the soil, and, it may be, some day in a land court with a British Judge they will have much to say.” See Chalmers, Pioneering in New Guinea (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1887): iii. 13. Deakin, “Federation of Australia,” 553. 14. Nicholas Aroney, The Constitution of a Federal Commonwealth: The Making and Meaning of the Australian Constitution (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 146. 15. Paul Knaplund, Gladstone’s Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1935), 105. 16. See Peter Overlack, “‘Bless the Queens and Curse the Colonial Office’: Australasian reaction to German Consolidation in the Pacific, 1871–99,” Journal of Pacific History 33, no. 2 (1998): 133–52. 17. Angus Ross, New Zealand Aspirations in the Pacific in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 200. 18. Anon., “Islands of the Pacific,” De Bow’s Review 18 (January 1855): 80; Wise, The Making of the Australian Commonwealth, 1889–1900: A Stage in the Growth of the Empire (London: Longmans Green, 1913), 82. 19. Official Record of the Proceedings and Debates of the Australasian Federation Conference, 1890, the Parliament House, Melbourne (Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1890), 223. 20. Official Report of the Federation Conference Held in the Court-House, Corowa, on Monday 31st July, and Tuesday, 1st August, 1893 (Corowa: Published by the Conference, 1893), Appendix A., vi–vii. 21. Garran, The Coming Commonwealth: An Australian Handbook of Federal Government (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1897), 179. 22. Charles Warren Stoddard “Prodigal in Tahiti,” Atlantic Monthly 30 (November 1872): 621. For an engaging study around imperialism, scientific racism, and disease in the South Pacific, consult Jeffrey Scott Clayton, “Discourses of Race and Disease in British and American Travel Writing about the South Seas, 1870–1915” (PhD Dissertation, Auburn University, 2009). Charles Darwin had been yet another South Seas traveler who had journeyed to the region interested in the issue of missionary impact and having conducted his own preliminary studies of Kotzebue, Beechey, and Ellis. Darwin was also influenced by his grandfather Erasmus’ writings on the sex life of Tahitians. In turn Darwin had been influenced by the writings following Cook’s encounter. Janet Browne has gone so far as to suggest that “the younger Darwin could barely look at a tropical plant without seeing in his imagination undulating Tahitian

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maidens.” See Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, Vol. 1 (London: Random House, 1996), 306–309. 23. Evangelical Alliance Conference, History Essays, Orations and Other Documents of the Sixth General Conference of the Evangelical Alliance, held in New York, October 2–12, 1873 (New York: Harper and Bros., 1874), 320. 24. Anonymous, Is Federation Our True Policy? or, The Politician Revealed to Himself (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1898), 355. 25. For a discussion of the transnational phenomena of blackbirding, consult Gerald Horne, The White Pacific: US Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 33–62. 26. For an early anti-blackbirding treatise see Royal Navy officer George Palmer, Kidnapping in the South Seas (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1871). Writing of the practice in the New Hebrides, Palmer asked whether the “man-stealers” or the missionaries would win the day. See Kidnapping in the South Seas, 54. 27. See Arthur Inkersley, “Experiences of a ‘Blackbirder’ Among the Gilbert Islands,” Overland 23 (June 1894): 565. For a useful introduction to the subject consult Clive Moore, “Revising the Revisionists: The Historiography of Immigrant Melanesians in Australia,” Pacific Studies 15 (June 1992): 66–86. 28. Louis Becke, Pacific Tales (1897; repr., Abingdon: Routledge 2010), vii. 29. A. Grove Day, Louis Becke, Vol. 9 (New York: Twayne, 1966), 8. 30. Louis Becke, By Reef and Palm (London: Unwin 1898), 8 31. Becke, cited in The Red Funnel 6 (October 1908): 1. 32. Day, Louis Becke, 8. 33. Margaret Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage, 1829–1929: An Historical Entertainment in Six Acts (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983), 214–16. 34. See Henry Lawson, Popular Verses and Humorous (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1900). 35. See Sean Brawley, “‘Our Lifesavers’: The Royal Life Saving Society and the origins of lifesaving in Federation Sydney,” in Sport, Federation, Nation, ed. R. Cashman, J. O’Hara and A. Honey (Sydney: Walla Walla Press, Sydney 2001), 139–64. 36. For discussions around this theme consult Gary Osmond and Murray G. Phillips, “‘The Bloke with a Stroke’: Alick Wickham, The ‘Crawl’ and Social Memory,” Journal of Pacific History 39, no. 3 (2004): 309-24; Gary Osmond and Murray G. Phillips, “‘Look at that Kid Crawling’: Race, Myth and the ‘Crawl’ Stroke,” Australian Historical Studies 37, no. 127 (2006): 43–62. 37. Phil Harris, “Surf Bathing in New South Wales,” The Red Funnel 5 (August 1907): 1. 38. Daily Telegraph, October 15, 1907. 39. Egbert T. Russell, “Australia’s Amphibians,” Lone Hand, January 1, 1910, 254. 40. C. D. P., “Sunbaking, Surf Bathing and Camp Life in New South Wales,” Red Funnel 6 (April 1908): 268. 41. Sydney Mail, February 22, 1905. 42. Freshwater Surf and Life Saving Club, Program, Anniversary Day Carnival, Tuesday, January 26, 1909, Held in Mitchell Library, Sydney. 43. Samuel A. Mills, “The Romance of the Breakers,” Sydney Mail, March 7, 1906. 44. Russell, “Australia’s Amphibians,” 254, 256. 45. C. D. P., “Sunbaking, Surf Bathing and Camp Life,” 269. 46. Sydney Mail, March 7, 1906. 47. Jean Curlewis and Harold Cazneaux, Sydney Surfing (Sydney: Art in Australia Ltd., 1929), 3. The notion of Greece in the colonization of the Pacific has been discussed by Bernard Smith. See Smith, Imagining the Pacific in the Wake of the Cook Voyages (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992), 213–21. 48. Russell, “Australia’s Amphibians,” 262. 49. Fred C. Williams, “The Call of the Surf,” Sydney Mail, January 16, 1907. 50. Curlewis and Cazneaux, Sydney Surfing, 6.

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51. The Surf 1 (December 1917): 1. This association with nature was part of the rejection of the “modern condition.” Micaela Di Leonardo has noted that in the United States the South Seas Islanders were “grist for the antimodernism mill of the Gild Age and Progressive Era.” The reemergence of the notion of the noble savage reflected Americans’ need for personal salvation. See Di Leonardo, Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 3. 52. Fred J. Broomfield “The Song of the Surf,” Sydney Mail, March 7, 1906. 53. Sydney Mail, March 7, 1906. 54. Arthur Rosenthal, “Topics of the Beaches,” Sydney Mail, January 16, 1907. 55. A. M. Lowe, Surfing, Surf-Shooting and Surf-Lifesaving Pioneering (Sydney: privately published 1958), 24–25. 56. George Street, “The Siren Surf,” Australian Magazine 9 (1 December 1908): 1341. 57. See J. C. Beaglehole, ed., The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771, 2nd ed. (Sydney: The Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales in Association with Angus and Robertson, 1962), 281. 58. Patrick J. Moser, ed., Pacific Passages: An Anthology of Surf Writing (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 69. 59. John B. Whitman, An Account of the Sandwich Islands: the Hawaiian Journal of John B. Whitman, 1813–1815 (Honolulu: Topgallant Pub., 1979), 88; William Ellis, Narrative of a Tour Through Hawaii: Or Owhyhee, 2nd ed. (London: H. Fisher, 1827), 212. 60. Frederick Debell Bennett, Narrative of a Whaling Voyage Round the Globe, From the Year 1833 to 1836: Comprising Sketches of Polynesia, California, the Indian Archipelago, etc., With an Account of Southern Whales, the Sperm Whale Fishery, and the Natural History of the Climates Visited (London, Richard Bentley, 1840), 35. A report on Bennett’s book introduced the term to Australian readers of the November 28, 1840, edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. Bennett’s was yet another book consulted by Melville, in this case for Moby-Dick. See James Barbour, “Composition of Moby-Dick,” in On Melville, ed. Louis J. Budd and Edwin Harrison Cady (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), 207. 61. A. Haole, Sandwich Island Notes (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1854), 298. 62. Cited in Richard A. Gould, Man's Many Ways: The Natural History Reader in Anthropology (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 115. 63. Jack London, “Riding the South Sea Surf,” Woman’s Home Companion, October 1907. George Waldo Browne observed in 1900 that the Hawaiian native was “never so much at home as when, surf-board in hand, he rides the rolling billows.” See Browne, The Paradise of the Pacific: The Hawaiian Islands (Boston: Dana Estes & Co., 1900), 187. 64. Lowe, Surfing, 47. 65. A story contained in the Private Papers of Mrs. C. B. Maxwell, Mitchell Library, Mss196, Box 1. 66. Gary Osmond, “‘Honolulu Maori’: Racial Dimensions of Duke Kahanamoku’s Tour of Australia and New Zealand, 1914–1915,” New Zealand Journal of History 44 (2010): 22–34.

SEVEN The Fair, the Stage, and the Song

Writing in the early 1890s, the noted Australian socialist William Lane remarked that if one was to visit a house in Sydney one was likely to find on display “South Seas spears and masks.” 1 Such “curios” could be purchased from the firm “Tost and Coates,” opened in 1872 by taxidermists Jane Tost and her widowed daughter Ada Coates. In 1878 Ada married the naturalist Henry Rohu and the firm became known as “Tost and Rohu,” trading under that name into the 1930s. Through Henry’s influence the company became increasingly interested in ethnographic objects. Along with its taxidermy work, and the sale of imported glass domes, mounted huntsmen trophies, and fur and feather apparel, the company also traded in Pacific Islander artifacts. 2 Indeed, by the 1890s Tost and Rohu—who increasingly referred to themselves as “Island Curio Dealers”—claimed the largest stock of Pacific Islander artifacts in Australia, and the sale of objects from the “innumerable islands of the South Pacific Ocean” had become the company’s main focus. 3 These curios were sold and shipped all over the world, to museums and private collections. The collection and display of South Seas “curios” was a popular pastime in Australia and the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. 4 As well as personal collections, public and private museums in both Australia and the United States also held significant South Seas collections. These ranged from small-time amateur displays such as the “museum” attached to the Port Adelaide Mechanics’ Institute, which held “sling stones from New Caledonia, a mat from the New Hebrides, tapa skirts from Fiji, Maori gourds, war clubs from the Solomon islands, a New Guinea drum, models of Fijian canoes, and New Hebridean weapons,” to the Peabody Museum at Yale University, New Haven, which boasted the world’s largest collection of South Seas artifacts. 5 As this 91

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chapter reveals, the popularity of these physical embodiments of the South Seas was yet one more manifestation of the wide-ranging interest in the South Seas. From museums and exhibition displays, to the traveling displays that carried images of the South Seas to small towns as well as large cities, and to the “Hawaiian” musical instruments and forms which attracted widespread popular attention, the public fascination with the South Seas ranged far beyond the written word, and fed a public curiosity with the region that reached its apogee during the decades preceding World War II. The interest in South Seas “curios” in Australia and the United States at the end of the nineteenth century rested upon longer-term cultural practices. The exposition movement that had emerged in Europe with the 1851 London Great Exhibition was another important site for the display of South Seas curios—typically set within a broader context of European progress and colonial advancement. 6 Visitors to the Sydney International Exhibition of 1873, for example, saw an exhibit created by the newly founded colonial government of Fiji that not only showcased the export products of the new colony’s plantation economy, but also displayed a number of traditional items of Fijian society and culture. The Melbourne International Fair of 1880 included a display of implements and weapons from New Guinea, the Solomons, New Hebrides, and Fiji, while a “New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition” held in Dunedin in 1889 reputedly featured the largest collection of South Seas artifacts ever assembled. 7 From the seventeenth century the display of South Seas curios had included human beings. Returning to England from the South Seas, William Dampier brought with him a “South Sea Islander”—the “Painted Prince” he named “Giolo.” Giolo was “exhibited” in London where he caused a sensation and reintroduced tattooing to Europe, although it would not be until the visit of James Cook that the term “tattoo”—from the Tahitian “tatau”—entered English vernacular. 8 Cook also brought back to England the “Tahitian Prince, Omai.” Like Giolo, Omai became the subject of great public interest and was feted by royalty. Omai was reputedly the first “sideshow” spectacle. 9 In the United States such South Seas spectacles had not occurred, perhaps because one consequence of America’s commercial engagement with the South Seas from the 1790s was the presence in American seaports of “South Seas Islanders” who were important members of the commercial enterprise. As reflected in Melville’s Moby-Dick, a number of “South Sea Islanders” visited and lived in American ports. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, during the 1840s “actual cannibals [stood] . . . chatting at street corners,” while on that other shining sea, Richard Dana had learned how important Hawaiians were to America’s maritime enterprise on the Californian coast. 10

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A century after Omai captured the imagination of London society, however, the 1776 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia gave Americans an opportunity to witness the public exhibition of South Seas Islanders. The display was the brainchild of Phineas T. Barnum, one of the most enduring and important figures in nineteenth-century American popular culture. 11 Barnum had already discovered the discursive power of the South Seas on the American imagination in the 1840s when he staged one of the most successful public hoaxes of the time. During the 1820s a “mermaid” had been displayed in England and had generated much public interest. 12 A fabrication made from fusing the preserved remains of a large fish and a female ape, the item was procured by Barnum, who took it to the United States in the early 1840s. While the original English mermaid had supposedly been acquired in Indonesia, Barnum capitalized on the prevailing American interest in the South Seas and claimed the mermaid was from “Feejee.” 13 Barnum played a high-stakes game with his mermaid. Promotional material exuded traditional romanticized images of the mythic creature, including comely topless women of European features. 14 In his publicity he was appealing to and reinforcing traditional romantic images. At the same time, however, Barnum sought to generate controversy about the exhibit’s bona fides that would heighten public interest. Such an approach relied on creating an air of authenticity—a practice that had been successfully used by many South Seas authors. In several public addresses, a colleague of Barnum’s, posing as an English scientist from the fictitious “Lyceum of Natural History in London,” insisted on the mermaid’s authenticity. 15 The controversy sustained a long barnstorming tour before the mermaid found a permanent home in Barnum’s “American Museum” in New York City. Static displays of the South Seas appeared again at the 1876 exposition in Philadelphia. The New Zealand Government exhibit, for example, included a photographic display of “traditional” Maori life. 16 More important for the South Seas tradition, Barnum made the journey to Philadelphia with the intention of once again using the South Seas to entertain his audiences. While not in the fairgrounds proper, a veritable “sideshow” alley appeared virtually overnight near the exposition. With his American Museum having burned to the ground in suspicious circumstances, Barnum opened another “Museum” in what became the prototype of the American World Fair Midway. 17 Barnum’s Museum resurrected the ghosts of Giolo and Omai with its display of “Fijian maneaters.” The Fijians performed daily with exhibitions of various aspects of traditional island life including carefully orchestrated dances. In 1879 a second exhibition was held in Sydney. The Sydney organizers went one step further than their colleagues in Philadelphia and allowed “living natives” to be displayed within the exhibition grounds proper. In addition to artifacts from New Guinea and other Pacific lo-

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cales, Aboriginal Australians, and “two small companies” of “natives” from New Zealand and Fiji were placed on show in specially constructed “houses” within an “Ethnological Court.” The Australian Town and Country Journal commented on the exhibition’s “tabooed spot to the general public” which held signs “threatening instant death from poisoned spears and arrows to all intruders.” Praising the ethnological committee which had created the court, the Journal suggested “no such comprehensive and varied collection of the ethnology of the Pacific Islands has ever before been attained in any part of the world, and our scientific visitors will especially appreciate the opportunity of studying the subjects here submitted to their notice.” 18 The Maori and Fijians performed dances and other “traditional” activities. 19 The South Seas again featured prominently at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Although static displays were present (including an exhibit of art, craft, and photography presented by the New South Wales colonial government and entitled “The South Pacific and New Guinea”) Barnum’s success at the Philadelphia exposition encouraged another American to stage a similar display, this time within the exposition grounds. 20 Michigan-born entrepreneur and trader Harry J. Moors was a long-time resident of Apia, Western Samoa. In one of his many guises he had acted as an agent for Robert Louis Stevenson in the construction of the writer’s home at Vailima. 21 Moors planned to profit from the enduring American interest in the South Seas by building an entire South Seas “village” at the Chicago World’s Fair and filling it with South Sea Islanders. Organized with the assistance of Joseph Strong, Moors’s “extensive exhibit and company of South Seas islanders” resided in their “village” wherein they performed “traditional” pastimes including kava ceremonies and war dances. At the conclusion of the Fair, Moors signed the group to Barnum and Bailey’s circus, where they performed before ending their American stay with a performance at the San Francisco midWinter Fair of 1894. 22 Buoyed by his success in Chicago, Moors returned to the United States in 1904 for the World’s Fair in St. Louis—formally known as the “Louisiana Purchase Exposition.” On this occasion he brought a larger group of South Sea Islanders and a greater number of props. Along with a variety of dances, the Islanders cooked meals in underground ovens, made kava, climbed fake palm trees, and sold souvenirs. While the Islanders had strong competition from the “dog-eating” Filipinos, Julian Hawthorne (the grandson of Nathaniel) claimed they provided “the most delightful and refreshing performance at the Fair.” 23 A reporter for Century magazine applauded the display, noting that “imagination easily transports one to the little coral reef on which these people live, and in their daily life do all they represent on the stage, except to eat human flesh.” 24 When the Fair concluded, Moors took his troupe on a yearlong tour.

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Moors’s success encouraged imitators. Across the Pacific, the New Zealand Exhibition of 1906–1907 included a Maori village as well as dancers from Samoa, Nuie, the Cook Islands, and fire walkers from Fiji. 25 In 1915 the Panama Pacific International Exposition was held in San Francisco to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal and commemorate the 400th anniversary of Balboa finding his “South Sea.” The fair featured yet another “Samoan” village and one visitor to San Francisco and the fair, the author of Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder, described what she saw: We went to . . . the Zone and went to the Samoan village. Samoa, you know, are South Sea islands belonging to the U.S. There were several girls and men dressed, or rather undressed, in their native costume. . . . They wore necklaces and strings of beads and rings. . . . Their skin was a beautiful golden color where it was not tattooed and their voices were soft and musical. The girls are very pretty and some of the men are fine-looking. They danced their native dances and sang their island songs. In all this dancing and singing they never touched each other and they danced in every muscle of their bodies, even their fingers and toes. . . . I did enjoy every bit of it. 26

World’s Fairs were regarded as important sites for the general education of a nation. As one commentator put it, the World’s Fair was “another edition, the latest and most complete and by far the best illustrated of an Ecumenical Encyclopedia published in one enormous volume.” Advertisements for the Columbian Exposition insisted that the “world’s fair has proven a great, big school, where people come like children to learn.” 27 As Australian historian Graeme Davison observed, World Fairs were “a straightforward application of the principle of learning by looking.” 28 Many North Americans and Australasians took that opportunity to look. Ten million Americans attended the Philadelphia World’s Fair, while nearly twenty million attended that held in St. Louis. In Australia, the Sydney and Melbourne expositions attracted more than a million visitors. Given the modest populations of the Antipodean colonies, such figures reveal the great appeal of the expositions to Australians. The ratio of attendances equated to 150 percent of their respective colony’s populations and between 59 percent and 69 percent when the total populations of all the Australian colonies were included. Philadelphia’s attendance represented 22 percent of the American population. 29 When it came to the South Seas, however, these exhibitions were deeply flawed. 30 Rather than informing Australasians and North Americans, World’s Fair’s South Seas exhibits perpetuated many of the popular, poorly informed preconceptions of the Pacific region and its peoples. Like his mermaid, Barnum’s latest Fijians were a construction aimed at pleasing their audience by exciting their already (mis)informed

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imaginations. In peopling his village Moors had been very particular in choosing fair-skinned Islanders who were pleasing to the eye from either a Western feminine or masculine viewpoint. Referring to the Chicago display, one commentator remarked in 1896 that a “multitude of our readers will remembers those remarkable exhibits, the warm-skinned brawny men and comely women in their weird dances and plaintive or warlike barbaric singing.” 31 Significantly, too, viewers to the exhibits saw in the displays what they wanted to see. A Sydney newspaper illustrator reflected his ideas of the South Seas when he captured the very popular “Fijian war dance” at the 1879 exhibition. The artist embellished the image with spears and skulls that were not part of the actual performance but which corresponded with his idea of an authentic South Seas event and setting. 32 While Barnum made specific reference to the peoples of “Fiji,” and although Moors insisted his was a “Samoan” village, such exhibits helped perpetuate the notion of a generic South Seas. The shorthand for such displays was usually “South Sea Islanders.” The irony of Moors’s exhibit was that not all of his Samoans were Samoan. Among his troupe at Chicago were Fijian and Wallis Islanders. Barnum had gone even further at Philadelphia: the Fijian “princess” who accompanied his “maneaters” was an African American actress from Virginia. 33 Although these displays used the language of education, and emphasized their didactic purpose, profit was the bottom line. Moors and others were happy to change tradition if it meant greater public interest. Mindful of fears that the Islander drums might prove monotonous to the Western ear, Moors hired a Mexican orchestra to accompany the group when dancing. Consequently, although fairs played an educative function, and were for many Americans, Australasians, and Europeans a major source of information about the South Seas, the images presented typically bore little resemblance to the complexities of Pacific Island cultures and societies. 34 Perhaps most important, such displays, emphasizing “traditional” Islander life, paid scant attention to the nineteenth-century transformation of many Islander communities, and perpetuated the notion of a timeless South Seas that sustained the popular stereotypes. Barnum’s “man-eaters” were never seen to eat human flesh; an unlikely, if unsurprising possibility given that Barnum had procured their services from a Christian mission in Fiji. 35 The Maoris, Fijians, or Samoans who appeared at American or Australasian expositions were always found in traditional garb. Moors’s Islanders, for example, were prevented from wearing American clothes and haircuts and told to “resume their natural state of barbarism.” 36 In effect, fairs and exhibits played a part in the objectification of Islanders—a process all the more telling given that the rising popularity of fairs was contemporaneous with the development of “scientific” racism. 37

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Moors and Barnum were not alone in sensing the entrepreneurial opportunities presented by the South Seas. At the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 American commercial interests based in Hawaii had funded an exhibit as a means of attracting investment. While the exhibit focused on Hawaii’s exports, it also included a troupe of Hawaiian singers and dancers who performed traditional Hawaiian fare accompanied by a Hawaiian band. Leaving to one side traditional music, a distinctive Hawaiian musical style had emerged in the islands following the arrival of Portuguese migrants to Honolulu in 1879. One of the migrants, Joao Fernandez, reputedly introduced a Portuguese instrument that quickly evolved into the ukulele. 38 The Hawaiian ukulele and its “slack key” sound became the foundation of a new musical style that quickly became associated with not only Hawaii but the South Seas more generally. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this Hawaiian musical genre was an important expression of Americans’, and others’, interest in the South Seas. Initially contracted to play at Chicago in 1893, the first “Hawaiian” musical group to tour the United States was “The Royal Hawaiians.” Performing in front of hundreds of thousands of interested visitors over the course of the fair, the band’s rendition of “Aloha Oe” enjoyed wide popularity. The melodious style of Hawaiian music reinforced the notion of Hawaii as a paradise, and a “land of music, romance and gorgeous sunshine.” 39 Following the Royal Hawaiians’ popularity at Chicago, the genre became increasingly well known to American audiences. This interest encouraged a number of Hawaiian groups to cross the Pacific for tour dates. One of these groups, the “Fernandez Serenaders,” made several successful tours around the turn of the century. Their promotional material referred to “popular demand for our friends from this little sister republic in the far Pacific, and for the sweet melodies they bring.” 40 Another touring group of the early twentieth century was Joseph Kekuku’s “Hawaiian Quintet.” Kekuku, who claimed to have invented the other quintessential Hawaiian instrument, the “steel guitar,” played 125 cities across the United States and asserted that over one million Americans heard his group perform. It was not unusual for the band to play five encores: “The wistful beauty of the music seems to carry the American audience across the Pacific to those beautiful islands of the South Seas.” 41 American interest in the genre was sustained by the visit in 1901 of “ukulele virtuoso” Mekia Kealakai to the World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York, but it was the return in 1905 of the Royal Hawaiians to the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon, that extended the popularity of Hawaiian music among American audiences. 42 As had been the case a decade before, the visit sparked another upsurge in American interest that benefited a number of bands that toured in the

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Royal Hawaiians’ wake. From 1906 to 1908 the most popular of these groups were the so-called “Honolulu Students.” Represented as the graduating class of a Hawaiian musical school in Honolulu, led by a “Professor Keouli,” the group enjoyed great success, particularly in New York, Pennsylvania, and New England during the winter of 1907–1908. One newspaper report noted: “The hall was crowded and the audience was enthusiastic over the program given.” 43 Reviewing another performance by the Honolulu Students, the North Hampshire Daily Herald commented that the “born entertainers” had “greatly pleased the audience.” 44 Interest in the genre had not waned when the Royal Hawaiians, Joseph Kekuku, and ukelele master Ernest Kaleihoku Ka‘ai peformed at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exhibition, held in Seattle. The Royal Hawaiians’ “On the Beach at Waikiki,” performed for the first time at the Fair, became a popular hit on the west coast of the United States. 45 The same year as the Royal Hawaiians were appearing in Seattle, the music of Joseph Kekuku, now appearing with Toots Paka’s Hawaiian troupe, was recorded on Edison cylinders. 46 While recordings by Kekuku and W. K. Kolomku would, along with future expositions, maintain an American interest in Hawaiian music, the genre received an enormous fillip in 1911 when the South Seas finally captured the imagination of American theatrical producers. This interest produced a magnificently successful play that came to be known as “The Bird.” The theatrical success of “The Bird” was contemporaneous with the continued success of literary depictions of the South Seas, including the work of the Irishman Henry de Vere Stacpoole. Before he wrote of New Guinea, de Vere Stacpoole had already secured a reputation as a South Seas author. Following the opposite literary trajectory to Pierre Loti, de Vere Stacpoole first explored the exotic realm of Japan (The Crimson Azaleaus) before turning his attention to the South Seas. Published in 1908, The Blue Lagoon: A Romance was the first of de Vere Stacpoole’s South Seas works and the first in a trilogy that was not completed until the 1920s. The story told of the journey of two children growing to adulthood while stranded on an idyllic South Seas island. As they grow, the children learn “the great truths of life,” and flourish because “Nature has indeed opened her doors to the children.” The children’s discovery of sex and love outside society’s normal mores became part of the novel’s notoriety. A review in the New York Times noted that “Old-fashioned persons of a certain fixed conventionality may hope that a missionary comes to the island opportunely with bell and book but there is none in residence.” 47 The very positive and romanticized image of the South Seas portrayed by de Vere Stacpoole was inspired, in part, by Robert Louis Stevenson. For de Vere Stacpoole, his fellow Celt’s claim that the “sight” of the South Seas held “a fairylike, a heavenly prettiness,” resonated with Celtic traditions and helped him create his enchanted South Seas isle. 48 Such a repre-

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sentation further posited the South Seas as a desirable escape from the ills of civilization. Elsewhere, de Vere Stacpoole spelled out this allure: I think that we civilized folk put on a lot of airs and waste a lot of pity on savages . . . who is happier than a naked savage in a warm climate? Oh, he’s happy enough, and he’s not always holding a corroboree. He’s a good deal of gentleman; he has perfect health; he lives the life that a man was born to live face to face with Nature. He doesn’t see the sun through an office window or the moon through the smoke of factory chimneys. 49

Aided by a love affair between the lead characters that was considered “daring,” The Blue Lagoon became a literary phenomenon. Causing an immediate sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, the novel was republished six times within a matter of months. In the United States, the 1910 edition of the book nearly surpassed the popularity of earlier editions when it was reprinted with the added bonus of illustrations courtesy of the noted Hungarian literary artist Willy Pogany. 50 The popularity of literary depictions of the South Seas was thus enhanced by Westerners’ visual representations of the region. In writing of the South Seas de Vere Stacpoole had been well aware of its wide appeal. The book helped American theatrical producers reach the same conclusion. In Britain the South Seas had been staged in productions dating back to the late eighteenth century. 51 Through the nineteenth century the story of Robinson Crusoe emerged as a popular subject for pantomime in Britain and Australia. Before his partnership with composer Arthur Sullivan, W. S. Gilbert was just one of the many writers who retold Crusoe’s story for the stage. 52 In Australia, the South Seas featured in John Perry’s 1888 Centenary Drama Prize–winning The Life and Death of Captain Cook. 53 Finally, following the commercial success of the Blue Lagoon, the “romantic” South Seas were translated onto the American stage. Two theatrical responses appeared in quick succession. The first was Jesse M. Glick and Irving M. Wilson’s Naalani: A Tale of Summer Seas. The one-act operetta examined the life of a South Seas “maiden” and the events leading to her marriage. 54 Naalani, however, was overshadowed by theatrical producer Richard Walton Tully’s play Bird of Paradise. Titling his work after a creature long associated with the South Seas, Tully was either oblivious to, or unconcerned about, the fact that the genus was confined to New Guinea, northern Australia, and parts of eastern Indonesia. Embracing the romance of Blue Lagoon, the play harked back to Melville and the love affairs that had often been recalled between a Western sailor and an Islander woman. The play, however, was not without its action and suspense, as the love interest, the beautiful Islander maiden Luana, is ultimately thrown into a volcano to appease restless gods. All this excitement and romance was complemented by a Hawaiian musical accompa-

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niment and, most important for many audience members, the lascivious “hula” dance performed by women in brief costumes with grass skirts. 55 “The Bird”—as it quickly became known—premiered at the Los Angeles theater of producer, manager, and playwright David Belasco on September 11, 1911. 56 Belasco and Tully had first collaborated in 1906, for Tully’s “The Rose of Rancho.” Impressed by Belasco’s ability to create a spectacle, henceforth Tully worked hard to ensure his productions created “stage atmosphere by lighting and scene.” 57 Along with the two American actresses playing the two native leads of Liliha and Makia, the cast included a group of Hawaiian singers and an accompanying Hawaiian band and Hawaiian extras. 58 With many members of the audiences seeing their first “hula” skirt and dance, as well as hearing their first ukulele solo, a review in the Los Angeles Herald described the “story” as “interesting and the staging picturesque.” Tully had “demanded and procured stage settings of picturesque beauty [including a tropical downpour]. The opulent imagery of the three-act production was enhanced by the weird mystery of his settings and the prismatic coloring of his ‘atmosphere.’” Reflecting the broader significance of “The Bird,” the review noted that Tully’s “marked sympathy with Hawaii” reflected his “appreciative understanding of its natives.” 59 A 1912 review of a Chicago production of the “The Bird,” published in the Bulletin of the “Play-going Committee of the Drama League of America,” explored these issues. “The play,” it was noted, “is novel and interesting as a contrast in civilizations. It is about the loss of Hawaii to us. . . . Authenticity and vivid coloring are given to the play by a group of native Hawaiians who with weird music, the graceful Hula dance and impressive religious rites, blend the situations into a perfect picture of the Lotus land.” 60 Like the literary tradition, or World’s Fair’s exhibits, however, “The Bird” helped popularize a generic South Seas. Although the play was set in Hawaii, one of the most popular tunes of the production was the song “I Wanted Some More of Samoa.” “The Bird” was an immediate success. Its popularity in Los Angeles secured a New York season that premiered on January 8, 1912, and lasted 112 performances. Even before the New York season had finished, touring companies were taking the production across America. From major urban centers such as Chicago, where a 1912 production was staged at the Garrick Theater, to a popular production at the Oliver Theater in Lincoln, Nebraska, “The Bird” attracted widespread interest. Into the mid-1920s touring companies performed the play to audiences across the nation. “The Bird” also left American shores and at one time there were over thirty touring companies throughout the English-speaking world presenting the show. 61 From 1919 to 1927 a “Bird of Paradise” production, which included Joseph Kekuku as a member of the company, toured Europe. 62 In Australia, impresario J. C. Williamson brought a production staged by American George Barnum, with Canadian actress Muriel Starr

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playing Luana, and the requisite “troupe of native Hawaiians.” After seasons in Melbourne and Adelaide, Sydney’s World’s News became besotted with the production and its main lead. Before the production had opened in Sydney the paper noted that “[p]robably no dramatic production of recent years has aroused greater interest.” It initially suggested that the play’s main message was an invocation of the old Kipling adage: “East is East and West is West. And never the twain shall meet.” The “real kernel of the play” was: that there is a barrier set between the white man and the savage which can never be bridged. There may be lapses among degenerate whites, who consort with and imagine they love the physical attractions of those in whom the repulsiveness of savagery has been extinguished, but the lasting and complete union of love and respect there cannot be, and, in all cases, it is the lesser order which suffers and learns the lesson. 63

Such ideas, however, were not repeated after the News’s correspondent had seen the show. Noting the spectacular nature of the production—“[s]eldom has a play been mounted more skillfully”—the correspondent commented of Starr that it was “difficult to conceive a more artistic presentation of the beautiful South Seas princess,” and that the Hawaiians with their “hula hula dances and playing of the ukelele” lent themselves to “the true atmosphere of the Pacific Islands.” 64 During the late 1920s “The Bird” was rewritten as a full musical and renamed Luana, premiering at Arthur Hammerstein’s Theater on Broadway, New York City, in September, 1930. Billed as a “musical romance of the South Seas,” it was noted that the play included “a female chorus which shakes a mean haystack.” 65 The music and dance of “The Bird” were considered essential components of its popularity, and were embraced by other theatrical forms, most notably music hall, vaudeville, and burlesque. Anatole Friedland’s tabloid musicals (“tabs”), which had started in 1911 and flourished during the 1920s, often relied upon South Seas themes. 66 The Zeigfeld Follies introduced South Seas numbers to their production, with leading ladies such as Fanny Brice appearing in grass skirt. 67 The 1916 Follies, for example, performed the hula-skirted number “I Left Her on the Beach in Honolulu.” 68 Tapping into long-standing assumptions concerning the sexual availability of Islander women, nudity or implied nudity was an important feature of these shows. In vaudeville, Frank Ferera had performed as early as 1900, but within a decade and a half the South Seas became a popular theme, with productions such as the “Fanchon and Maron Vaudeville Shows,” which introduced a widely lauded South Seas show titled “Alahia” that was lauded as one of their best. Set in Honolulu, with the band housed in a hut, the show included a hula dance by two women (sisters Gaylene and Dyu Rayne), one of whom removed the grass skirt

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and proceeded to complete an acrobatic routine. Other acts included performances of the number “Song of the Islands.” 69 South Seas scholar J. C. Furnas has argued that “The Bird” “ineradicably imbedded the Hawaii-cum-South Seas tradition in the mass-mind of America.” Like the exposition displays, performances of the play added “visibility and three dimensions to inchoate public notions of the world of palms, islands, and voluptuousness.” 70 Furthermore, the traveling company productions of the play brought the seductive power of the South Seas to many regional centers and audiences that had not benefited from World’s Fairs: “From Omaha and Memphis, the revolving haunch, the grass skirt, and the flower necklace had become as proverbial symbols of carnality as the name of Paris France, in conjunction with a perfume or lewd picture.” Don Blanding, a resident of Kansas City, was so enamored with the production of “The Bird” that he spent his life savings to secure a passage to Honolulu. 71 Following the success of “The Bird” the Victor Recording Company arranged for the incidental music of the play to be recorded by The Hawaiian Quintet. By 1915 increases in phonograph ownership allowed increasing numbers of Americans to bring Hawaiian music into their homes. Groups such as Keoki Awai’s “Royal Hawaiian Quartette” and the Irene West “Royal Hawaiians” recorded Hawaiian music. By late 1915 Victor was issuing a disc of Hawaiian music each month in an effort to meet public demand. Recordings of Hawaiian music, however, were not the only means by which Hawaiian music entered American homes. In 1915 the Panama Pacific Exposition was held in San Francisco. 72 While a number of Hawaiian bands performed, the highlight was the appearance of ukulele virtuoso Ernest K. Ka‘ai. Ka‘ai’s performances had an unanticipated consequence. No longer prepared to listen to the music, many Americans wanted to buy ukuleles and play Hawaiian songs themselves. After his tremendous success in San Francisco, Ka‘ai published a collection of tunes called Hawaii’s Music and, in 1916, responding to the craze in ukulele playing, another edition of his original instructional booklet The Ukulele: A Hawaiian Guitar was published. 73 The popularity of Hawaiian music at the Exposition in San Francisco prompted bands to tour the United States. An advertisement for the Honolulu-based “Major Kealakai’s Royal Hawaiian Sextet” noted there was “no music in all this world that has gained such rapid and favorable popularity as the music of Hawaii.” The group had been “repeatedly enjoyed” in the “leading cities of the Pacific Coast and the Middle West.” 74 The tours of such Hawaiian bands allowed many Americans who had never ventured to a World’s Fair to see Hawaiians firsthand. Speaking of the performers in “Major Kealakai’s Sextet,” it was noted that “the native soul was instinctively full of rhythm,” and that the group sing their “native songs” play their “native instruments and appear in ‘Hawaiian cos-

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tumes.’” 75 The “Liliuokalani Hawaiians,” (“named for the beloved exQueen”) were seen to be taking their audience on a journey: “They present, through the medium of songs, instrumental numbers, folk dance, etc, a picture of life in the South Seas islands.” 76 As part of their self-promotion, many of these musical groups alluded or referred directly to the South Seas literary tradition. The Liliuokalani Hawaiians’ promotional material, for instance, quoted Mark Twain in its attempts to entice audiences to their performances. 77 The Hamakua Singers and Players also relied on Twain’s endorsement of Hawaiian life to promote their work. 78 By the end of 1915 Hawaiian music had attained the first rank of American popular music, as reflected in the popularity of touring bands, recordings, and instrument sales and lessons. 79 To compete with the popularity of these interlopers, American musicians introduced Hawaiian songs to their playlists. In Florida the Royal Venetian Band, which was contracted to the St. Augustine Chamber of Commerce for the playing season of 1915, introduced to its selection “Maori—a Samoan Dance.” 80 The Lilian Johnston Company, performing primarily in Illinois, went to considerable lengths to announce to the public that the trio had introduced “Hawaiian songs” into their act. 81 The Pittsburgh Ladies Orchestra was also quick to point out that their program included a “Hawaiian song specialty.” 82 The Arden Entertainers—“just four real American girls”—went even further, introducing Hawaiian music, dance, and dress for some of their musical program. Their publicity material noted: It is in applying their art to the interpretation of the moods and music of beautiful Hawaii that these young women achieve unusual success. In this connection it seems strange that we in the “states” should be so tardy in appreciating the beauty of the music and folklore of the “Pearls of the Pacific.” . . . For the delightful sketch which the quartet presents the young women appear in the native Hawaiian dress. 83

Whether reflecting their own interest, or the perceived need to remain relevant, American songwriters also embraced the Hawaiian style, or made Hawaii and the South Seas the subject of their songs. In 1911 Edward Madden and Percy Wenrich wrote and composed “My Hula Hula Love”—although the music itself showed no Hawaiian influence. 84 In 1915 L. Wolfe Gilbert and S. R. Henry published their song “Queen of the South Sea Isles,” which started with the line “On the sunny banks of Fiji.” 85 In 1914 Irving Berlin’s “idea of paradise” had been a simple park bench on a June evening. A year later Hawaii was paradise. His “My Bird of Paradise; My Honolulu Girl” (a title no doubt inspired by the popular stage play) included the refrain “Wait for me my Hula girl / My hula-hula girl / I’m coming back to you / That sunny sky land / Hawaiian Island / Will soon be my land / I hear a Ukulele strumming gaily / In my dreams.” The following year Berlin wrote “I’m Down in Honolulu Looking Them

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Over”: “You know my Uncle Jeremiah / Who disappeared a month ago / We got a letter from Hawaii / And I declare, my uncle’s there.” The song perpetuated popular ideas about dress and the sexual availability of Islander women: “Try and guess the way they dress / No matter what / you think it is, it’s even less.” The singer’s brother sends a message to his Uncle: “He sent a wire to Jeremiah / He said ‘I’ll go you fifty fifty / with every Hula girl you see’ / My brother nearly died / Uncle just replied / Don’t bother me.” 86 Harry von Tilzer enjoyed commercial success with “On a South Sea Isle,” performed by the well-known singer Irene Bordoni. 87 Another song, “Tongo Islands,” beginning with the lines: “I sail’d from port one summer’s day / And to the South Seas made my way,” encompassed many of the prevailing stereotypes of the South Seas. The sailor arrives in a native village, is befriended by a local chief, becomes a chief himself, and then marries a local: “My bride was fair you may suppose.” The other chiefs grow jealous “They swore they’d cut me up like pork / And eat me without knife and fork.” 88 By 1916 Hawaiian music, or songs with Hawaiian themes, were outselling all other musical forms. 89 In that year New York’s famous Tin Pan Alley produced scores of Hawaiian songs. The Victor Recording Company produced 146 Hawaiian records—more than any other genre. 90 That same year, Al Jolson recorded “Along the Way to Waikiki.” Even opera was not immune from a South Seas influence. In 1917 Rudolf Friml, the Czech-American pianist-composer who subsequently became famous for his 1925 light operetta “Vagabond King,” and for his movie scores, wrote “Hawaiian Butterfly Medley.” 91 Ray Sherwood and Carl D. Vandersloot’s lullaby “Hawaiian Twilight” was used to help children fall asleep 92 In 1918 Walter Bolian and James Heshel wrote “My Hawaiian Rose.” 93 Romance also featured in F. Henry Klickman’s “Sweet Hawaiian Moonlight Tell Her of My Love,” also produced in 1918. 94 Other fads in American popular culture were projected onto Hawaiian backdrops. The “tango craze” of 1917 was given a South Seas flavor in The Leightons’ novelty song entitled “Faraway in Honolulu; They’ve got the Tango craze”: “When them natives do the tango—most every evening—you can see them dance (see them dance, see them dance) to the funny music playing.” The song then proceeded to produce more traditional fare: “should you ever get the notion / That you want to cross the ocean / Just take a steam-boat to Hawaii and travel into Honolulu / Where you’ll see the Hula.” 95 E. Ray Goetz, Joe Young, and Pete Wendling wrote “Yaaka Hula Hickey Dula.” Reputedly an “Hawaiian love song,” the piece began with the lines: “Down Hawaii way / Where I chanced to stray / On an evening I heard a Hula maiden play.” The chorus continued: “I’m coming back to you, my Hula Lou.” 96 “Hula Lou” was the title of a song by Edward Crossmith and Ted D. Ward: “I’m

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leaving town to-day—I’m going far away / To that land of heart’s desire / Fair Hawaii / Where most ev’ry one adores you, nothing bores you.” 97 While the ukulele emerged as a popular hobby for men, the hula emerged as its female equivalent. To cater to this new interest in the dance a woman calling herself “Huapala” opened a studio in New York City were one could learn the hula. She also managed a road show with her “Hawaiian dancers and Ilima Islanders.” 98 Reflecting on this American fad of the Great War years, in 1916 Grant Clarke, Eddie Cox, and Jimmie V. Monaco wrote “Honolulu, America Loves You”: “Hawaii, what are you doin’? / Hawaii what are you doin’? / You made this wonderful nation talk of you / You made the Yankees delighted / They danced and get all excited / We’ll all be talk-in Hawaiian very soon.” 99 In 1917 Earl Burtnett, Joseph A. Burke, and J. E. Dempsey had a hit with “My Rose of Waikiki.” 100 Not all Americans, however, shared this obsession with Hawaii. New Yorkers Bert Kalmar and Archie Gottler tried unsuccessfully to swim against the tide with their 1917 song “The More I See of Hawaii the Better I Like New York”: I heard them talk about Hawaii / And so I left New York to try her / I went and saw just what there was to see / From the Hula maidens to the beach at Waikiki. . . . You’ve heard the talk about the palm trees / They’re just a lot of false alarm trees / They may be pretty but they’re not for me. . . . I wouldn’t give an inch of Herald Square for all the acres they have down there . . . the one who started raving about Hawaii / Must have been a fool or a darn good liar. 101

Despite these occasional critiques of the apparent cultural obsession with the South Seas, and notwithstanding a waning fascination with Hawaiian music and Hawaii as a lyrical subject during the early 1920s, tunes with a South Seas flavor continued to enjoy commercial success throughout the interwar period. A major American hit of 1925 was Ray Henderson and Billy Rose’s tune “Don’t Bring Lulu,” which was made famous by the well-know duet Gus Van and Joe Schenck. It included the lines “We all went to the party, real hi-toned affair / Then along came Lulu. Wild as any Zulu / She started into the Charleston and how the boys did stare, but when she did the hula-hula then she got the air.” 102 The technological changes of the 1920s, including the development of radio, played a part in sustaining and generating popular interest in the South Seas. Many radio stations across the United States, from those in the major cities, to those such as radio WOC in Davenport, Iowa, introduced “Special Hawaiian Musical Programs.” 103 Hawaiian music, moreover, left a significant legacy in American popular music through the ukulele and the steel guitar. The Carlo Lamberti Concert Company was quick to point out to possible contractors of their services that they had within their rank two “Hawaiian guitarists.” 104 The ukulele became a

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standard musical instrument during the 1920s for performers such as Rudy Vallee, who tapped into the popularity of the instrument and the Hawaiian genre on college campuses, and Cliff Edwards who became known as “Ukulele Ike” and who recorded the popular Hawaiian song “The Night is Young.” 105 So widespread were ukuleles and steel guitars in American popular music that one performer, Frank Lane, advertised himself as “one of the few remaining entertainers who work without the aid of a ukulele.” 106 The American interest in Hawaiian music also helped popularize the genre around the world. In 1911 Ernest Ka‘ai made the first of several visits to Australia offering a program that included Hawaiian and Polynesian themes with a Maori Haka rolled in for good measure. His “Hawaiian Concert Party Troupe” visited a number of Australian cities, even venturing to Tasmania. 107 Following a number of trips to Japan and the United States, in 1924, Ka‘ai returned to Australia for a two-year tour. At the same time as publicity material for the show “A Night in Honolulu” exploited favorable Australian perceptions of the South Seas, it also claimed a special place for music over the traditional literary representations of the South Seas: “The romantic glamour of sunlit isles, set like pearls in the vast Pacific, has been revealed to the world in different languages but no living novelist can aptly describe the softness and sweetness of Hawaiian music.” 108 The successful tour attracted large audiences and favorable reviews. 109 Two of Ka‘ai’s performers, David and Queenie Kaili, stayed in Australia at the end of the tour and in 1927 recorded twenty songs for the Parlophone label in Sydney. The couple also continued to tour with Queenie entertaining audiences with singing and hula dancing in a grass skirt. 110 Hawaii’s appeal thus reached south and east across the Pacific. As in the United States, Australian composers and musicians sought success by replicating the Hawaiian sound or introducing South Seas themes into their lyrics. In July 1918 the Bijou Theater in Melbourne hosted a review entitled “Safety First,” which told “the story of a musical company stranded in Honolulu.” Songs included “Queen of the South Seas Island.” Later that year a group billing itself as “Australia’s first jazz band,” and playing at the Empire Theater in Brisbane, boasted a program that included a “dream Hawaiian” number. 111 Melbourne composer Henry George Schumer penned a number of Hawaiian-inspired songs including “In Sweet Hawaii (My Heart Lies Captive)” (1920), “I’ve Said Goodbye to Dreamy Hawaii” (1921), and “The Message of the Steel Guitar” (1921), while Sydney composer Jack Godfrey wrote “Honolulu Baby Mine.” 112 Like Americans, Australians were also keen to acquire the skill to play instruments such as the steel guitar and the ukulele. 113 Following the foundation of a “Hawaiian Club” in Sydney, similar establishments were organized in other states during the late 1920s. 114 Australian steel guitar-

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ist Jim Jensen later summed up the opinion of many practitioners on either side of the Pacific: “any player would have given his right arm to sound like a Hawaiian musician.” 115 Australians were not the only performers keen to imitate the Hawaiian sound. Across the Tasman, Hawaii’s influence was also evident in New Zealand, where it crossed ethnic boundaries. Attempting to use their ethnicity to popular advantage, a number of Maori performers visited Australia during the interwar period and performed Hawaiian shows. On the variety stage of the Tivoli circuit, Grace Thompson, performing under the stage name “Lani Kalua,” not only sang Hawaiian tunes but reputedly was the first person to perform the hula in Australia on a regular basis. 116 Such adoption of Hawaiian styles by Maori perpetuated in Australian minds the notion of a generic South Seas. Writing on the popularity of Hawaiian music in the interwar years, George H. Lewis has noted that the “fascination of Hawaiian music is the illusion, the dream of a paradise island it produces. . . . It is the romance of strange places, the escape from the mundane. People are lost in it.” 117 In common with other cultural forms that both popularized and homogenized the “South Seas,” Hawaiian music provided an escape for American and Australian audiences. Indeed, the growing popular interest in the “music of the South Seas” during the Great War, and then again during the Depression, highlighted that fact that for many Westerners the South Seas continued to signify a form of escapism. Yet the enduring interest in the musical forms widely associated with the South Seas, like the public fascination with representations of the region in expositions, and in stage productions, reflected a deeper preoccupation with the Pacific region. The widespread interest in Hawaii, and, by extension, the South Seas, found expression in a number of often unlikely forms. In the December 1916 issue of the New York monthly Medical Review of Reviews the editorin-chief, Dr. Victor Robinson, wrote an editorial entitled “Hygiene in Hawaii.” Therein, Robinson commented on a recent address by Frederick L. Hoffman, of the Prudential Insurance Company of America, which had been delivered to the Medical Society of Hawaii. For this “Hawaiian enthusiast,” one of the reasons Hawaii was “justly called The Paradise of the Pacific” was because it was “perhaps the most conspicuous modern illustration of successful tropical adaptation and race progress.” By way of introduction, Robinson noted that “Hawaii has captured America”: From every phonograph-shop come the strains of the “Hilo March” and “That Hula Hula.” No vaudeville is complete without the “The Honolulu Cabaret,” and “My Own Iona.” Every hurdy-gurdy turns out “On the Hoko Moke Isle,” and “Back to My Sunny Honoloo (sic).” The boy in the street whistles “Hellow (sic) Hawaii, How Are You?” “Dear Old Dreamy Honoulu Town,” “My Rose of Honolulu,” “I Left Her at the Beach at Honolulu,” “I Want to Go Back to Honolulu.” Our music

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Chapter 7 teachers have closed the piano and put aside the violin—in order to live they advertise lessons on the ukulele and the Hawaiian guitar. In every burlesque-show thruout [sic] America, the chorus-girls in dresses of straw and with shells around their necks, sing the seductive “Yaaka Hula Hickey Dula,” and if we hear much more “Oh! How She Could Yacki Hacki Wiki Wacki Woo,” all of us are apt to leave our present occupations, and like the love-smitten here, we will be “tryin’ to learn Hawaiian.” . . . Book after book on Hawaiian life is coming from the press; Jack London, in popular magazines, is writing colorful praises of the Paradise of the Pacific—illustrated with alluring soft-eyes thicklipped dusky maidens. 118

Robinson’s editorial, and the lecture to which it referred, captured the popular allure of, as well as scientific interest in, Hawaii. And while Hawaiian music was the focus of widespread commercial attention, the underlying fascination during the early decades of the twentieth century with the Island group—and, by extension, the rest of the South Seas— owed much to the success of the World’s Fairs and other exhibitions, which brought the South Seas to life for millions of Americans, Australians, and others. In popularizing and homogenizing the “South Seas,” all of these cultural forms played a part in perpetuating an illusory South Seas, which continued to function as a counterpoint—sometimes appealing, sometimes terrifying, but always compelling—to Western society. NOTES 1. William Lane, Workingman’s Paradise: An Australian Labour Novel (Sydney: Edwards, Dunlop, and Co., 1892), 53. 2. Martha Sear, “Unworded Proclamations: Exhibitions of Women’s Work in Colonial Australia” (PhD Dissertation, Sydney University, 2000). 3. Percy S. Allen, Stewart’s Handbook of the Pacific Islands, 3rd ed. (Sydney: McCarron, Stewart, and Co, 1914), 133. 4. Kristen Hoganson’s work provides a broader introduction to this theme of exotic cultural production acquisition within American domesticity. See Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 5. Philip C. Candy, “‘The Light of Heaven Itself”: The Contribution of the Institutes to Australia’s Cultural History,” in Pioneering Culture: Mechanics’ Institutes and School of Arts in Australia, ed. Philip C. Candy and John Laurent (Adelaide: Auslib Press, 1994), 13. 6. For details of the exposition movement see John E. Findling and Kimberley D. Pelle, Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988 (New York: Greenwood, 1990). 7. Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities (London: Leicester University Press, 1999); Findling and Pelle, Historical Dictionary, 117. 8. Sebastian Jobs and Gesa Mackenthu, eds., Embodiments of Cultural Encounters (Munster: Waxmann Verlag, 2011), 3. Michael Atkinson has suggested this was part of a broader interest in the tattooed “other” at the time. See Atkinson, Tattooed: The Sociogenesis of a Body Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 31. European sailors who traveled to the South Seas embraced tattoos. William Bligh noted that of

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the Bounty mutineers all but two were tattooed. Mark G. Doyle has suggested that the desire of tattooing by European sailors reflected their urge to “satisfy Polynesian women’s aesthetic preferences.” See Doyle, “Race, Romance, and Imperialism: Intercultural Relationships in Victorian Literature” (PhD Dissertation, Indiana University, 2011), 88. For a useful introduction to tattooing in the South Pacific see Rachel Robinson, “The Commodification of Polynesian Tattooing: Change, Persistence, and Reinvention of a Cultural Tradition” (Master of Arts Dissertation, University of Kansas, 2010). 9. See Amy Krakow, The Total Tattoo Book (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1994), 21. Kate Fullagar has provided a revisionist examination of Omai’s visit within the context of eighteenth-century New World visitors to Britain. See Fullagar, “‘Savages and Moderns: The New World in Britain, 1770–c. 1800” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2004). 10. See Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 8th impression (Boston: St. Botolph Society, 1922), 33. For discussion of this element of the novel consult Carolyn Porter, “Call Me Ishmael, Or How to Make Double-Talk Speak,” in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase, 2007), 141. Richard Henry Dana, Two Years before the Mast: A Personal Narrative (1840; New York: Harper, 1868), 165. 11. For an introduction to Barnum and this form of exploitation of non-Westerners during the nineteenth century and beyond, consult Gilles Boetsch, Nanette Jacomijn Snoep, and Paul Blanchard, Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage (Paris: Actes Sud, 2012). 12. Jan Bondeson, The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 49. 13. Bondeson, The Feejee Mermaid, 51. 14. James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 82. 15. Cook, Arts of Deception, 82. 16. Maxwell, Colonial Photography, 143. 17. Findling and Pelle, Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs, 57. 18. Australian Town and Country Journal, November 8, 1879, 9. 19. See Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Oakland: University of California Press, 2001), 225. 20. On the Australian exhibit see William Wyatt Gill, The South Pacific and New Guinea, Past and Present; With Notes on the Hervey Group, and Illustrative Songs and Various Myths (Sydney: C. Potter, Government Printer, 1892). 21. Jenni Calder, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tales of the South Seas (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996), 18. 22. Charles Greene, “California Artists, Joseph D. Strong,” Overland Monthly 27 (May 1896): 507. 23. Cited by J. C. Furnas, Anatomy of Paradise, Hawaii and the Islands of the South Seas (1937; repr., London: Victor Gollancz, 1950), 420. 24. Cited in Richard O’Connor, Pacific Destiny: An Informal History of the U.S. in the Far East, 1776–1968 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 221. 25. Maxwell, Colonial Photography, 136. 26. Letter from Laura Ingalls Wilder to her Family, September 4, 1915, www.sanfranciscomemories.com. Accessed March 24, 2003. 27. Cited in Julie K. Ross, “The World’s Columbian Exposition: Idea, Experience, Aftermath” (Hypertextual MA Dissertation, University of Virginia, 1996), xroads.Virginia.edu/~MA96/WCE/title.html. The Chicago Fair was also seen to bring a “new science” to America—“Anthropology.” See Warren K. Moorhead, “A New Science at the Fair,” North American Review 157 (October 1893): 507. 28. Graeme Davison, “Exhibitions,” Australian Cultural History 2 (1982–1983): 6. 29. Davison, “Exhibitions,” 17.

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30. Adria L. Imada has noted that the Hawaiians’ exhibits on the “world stage” were “framed as ethnographic objects in exposition settings.” See Imada, “The Hawaiian Kingdom on the World Stage,” in Coast to Coast: Case Histories of Modern Pacific Crossings, ed. Prue Ahrens and Chris Dixon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 34. 31. Greene, “California Artists,” 507. 32. Hoffenberg, Empire on Display, 225–26. 33. Maxwell, Colonial Photography, 82. 34. Maxwell, Colonial Photography, 1. 35. Maxwell, Colonial Photography, 83. 36. Maxwell, Colonial Photography, 81; Micaela Di Leonardo has suggested that Islanders were “imprisoned in time.” See Di Leonardo, Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 13. Johannes Fabian has labeled the representation of Islanders as being trapped in a historical vacuum as the “ethnographic present tense.” See Anne Stephen, Ross Gibson, and Nicholas Thomas, Pirating the Past? (Sydney: Powerhouse, Museum, 1994), 158. 37. Maxwell, Colonial Photography, 2, 4. 38. See Lorene Ruymar, The Hawaiian Steel Guitar and Its Great Hawaiian Musicians (Anaheim: Centerstream Publications, 1996), 9–10; and Allan A. Metcalf, How We Talk: American Regional English Today (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 153. For an examination of earlier European interest in “South Seas music” consult David Irvine, “The Pacific in the Minds and Music of Enlightenment Europe,” Eighteenth Century Music 2, no. 2 (2005): 205–229. 39. The phrase was also used to describe the work of the Fernandez Serenaders. See “Fernandez Serenaders,” Redpath Chautauqua Collection, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City) (hereafter cited as Redpath Chautauqua Collection), http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/tc/id/52616. Accessed December 12, 2005. 40. “Fernandez Serenaders,” Redpath Chautauqua Collection. 41. “Kekuku’s Hawaiian Quintet,” 1904, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http:// 128.255.22.135/cdm/ref/collection/tc/id/54995. The same phrase was used to describe other groups such as Vierra’s Royal Hawaiian Singers and Players. See “Vierra’s Royal Hawaiian Singers and Players,” 1923, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/tc/id/37128. See also Wilmington Morning Star, December 24, 1916, 12. Kekuku’s claim is debatable. As well as the claims by other musicians such as James Hoa and Gabriel Davion, it is assumed that the Hawaiian steel guitar was in fact a derivative of the Spanish guitar and that this instrument appeared in Hawaii in the 1830s, brought to the islands by Mexican cattle herders. See Tim Gracyk, Popular American Recording Pioneers, 1895–1925 (New York: Haworth Press, 2000), 118; Adrian McNeil, “A Mouse, A Frog, the Hawaiian Guitar and World Music,” Perfect Beat 2 (July 1995): 83. 42. See Anon., “The Ukulele: Hawaii’s Little Musical Giant,” Gold Coast 11 (Winter/ Spring 1999) accessed via nfo.net website on October 22, 2008 (nfo.net/usa/ukehist.html). 43. Hartford Courant, October 28, 1907, cited in the promotional brochure, “The Honolulu Students from the Hawaiian Islands” (Rochester, NY: Central Printing Engrave Co, 1908), Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/ collection/tc/id/55143. The same quote appeared a year later in the North Carolina Weekly High Point Enterprise, December 9, 1908. 44. Daily Herald, 25 October 1907, cited in “The Honolulu Students” promotional brochure. 45. James R. Cowdrey, et al., “Musical and Social Interactions,” in Music Cultures in the United States: An Introduction, ed. Ellen Koskof (New York: Routledge, 2005), 129. 46. See David J. Steffen, From Edison to Marconi: The First Thirty Years of Recorded Music (Jefferson: McFarland, 2005), 203. 47. New York Times, June 13, 1908.

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48. H. de Vere Stacpoole, Tropic of Love (London: Readers Literary Pub. Co., 1928), 8. 49. H. de Vere Stacpoole, Blue Lagoon, 28th impression (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), 182. 50. Furnas, Anatomy of Paradise, 413. 51. For an introduction to these performances see Irvine, “The Pacific in the Minds and Music of Enlightenment Europe,” 223–24. 52. Henry J. Byron, W. S. Gilbert, Tom Hood, and Henry S. Leigh, Robinson Crusoe, or, The Injun Bride & the Injured Wife: A Burlesque (London: The ‘Fan’ Office, 1867). 53. Sydney Morning Herald, January 30, 1888. See also Walter Veit, Captain James Cook: Image and Impact, South Seas Discoveries and the World of Letters (Melbourne: Hawthorn Press, 1972), 47. 54. Jesse Glick, Naalani: A Tale of Summer Seas. An Operetta in One Act (1911). Held in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress. 55. For an introduction to the play and its significance consult Christopher B. Balme, “Selling the Bird: Richard Walton Tully’s “The Bird of Paradise and the Dynamics of Theatrical Commodification,” Theater Journal 57 (March 2005): 1–20. 56. This was the first production. See “Bird of Paradise Clipping Book,” Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library (NYPL), MWE2 n.c. 4632 #7. Neil Rennie is mistaken when he suggests that the first production was the Broadway version that opened in January 1912. See Rennie, Far-fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 221. 57. Moses Coit Tyler, William Peterfield. John Erskine and Carl Van Doren, The Cambridge History of English and American Lit, Vol XVII, Later National Literature, Part II, XVIII The Drama 1860–1918 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), 24. 58. Bird of Paradise Clipping Book, NYPL. 59. Los Angeles Herald, September 13, 1911. 60. Bulletin “Playgoing Committee,” Drama League of America, September 2, 1912, MWE2 n.c. 4632 #7, Bird of Paradise Clipping Book, NYPL. 61. Bird of Paradise Campaign Book, 1932. Billy Rose Theater Division of New York Public Library, MFL + MC 3, 0008 # 48. 62. Ruymar, The Hawaiian Steel Guitar, 45. 63. World’s News, April 13, 1918. 64. World’s News, April 20. 1918. Starr also appeared in a season through the north island of New Zealand in 1920. See Evening Post, January 24, 1920. The Post also referred to the impossibility of interracial love as the “truth” of the play. 65. New York Telegram, September 18, 1930, held in Bird of Paradise Clipping Book, Billy Rose Theater Division of New York Public Library, MWE2 n.c. 4632 #7. 66. Bernard Sobel, A Pictorial History of Vaudeville (New York: Citadel Press, 1961), 58. 67. Julien Phillips’s history of the Zeigfeld Follies includes a photograph of Fanny Brice attired in grass skirt. See Phillips, Stars of the Ziegfeld Follies (Minneapolis: Lerner Publications Co., 1972), 45. 68. Randolph Carter, The World of Flo Ziegfeld (London: Elek, 1974), 64. 69. “Alahia,” Billy Rose Theater Division of New York Public Library, MFL N.C. 1068. 70. Furnas, Anatomy of Paradise, 413. Tully’s notoriety from the play also led to him being called on to share his recipe for “Hawaiian Croquettes a la ‘Bird of Paradise.’” He had supposedly acquired the recipe during his visit to Hawaii, when he lived “weeks at a time in out-of-the-way villages” to obtain material for the play. See Richard Walton Tully, “Hawaiian Croquettes A La ‘The Bird of Paradise,’” in The Stage Cookbook: Written for Men by Men, ed. C. Mac Sheridan (New York: George Doran, 1922), 49. 71. Blanding, Hula Moons (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1930), 444. 72. A recording disc jacket of the time noted that many “music lovers have searched in vain for the cause of sudden passion for Hawaiian music, which struck the United States around 1915 and 1916. Perhaps the cause may be found in the Panama-Pacific

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Exposition at San Francisco, where many Hawaiian singers and dancers were heard by thousands of tourists who visited the fair.” Cited in Frank Hoffman, B. Lee Cooper, and Tim Gracyk, Popular American Recording Pioneers: 1895–1925 (Binghamton: Haworth Press, 2000), 120. 73. Ernest K. Ka’ai, Hawaii’s Music (Honolulu: Ernest K Ka’ii, 1915); and Ernest K. Ka’ai, The Ukulele, A Hawaiian Guitar and How to Play It (Honolulu: Wall, Nichols Co., Ltd, 1916). For a general history also see Jim Tranquada and John King, The Ukulele: A History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012). 74. See brochure “Major Kealakai’s Royal Hawaiian Sextette: Vocalists and Instrumentalists of Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands” (Chicago: Loro Gooch Musical-Dramatic Bureau, undated), Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://apps.its.uiowa.edu/libsdrc/ details.jsp?id=/majorkea/1. 75. See brochure “Major Kealakai’s Royal Hawaiian Sextette.” 76. See brochure “Liliuokalani Hawaiians,” Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http:// apps.its.uiowa.edu/libsdrc/details.jsp?id=/liliuokalani/1. 77. See brochure “Liliuokalani Hawaiians.” 78. See brochure “Hamakua Singers and Players,” Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/tc/id/37075/rec/1. 79. For further insights into the genre and its influence consult Charles Hiroshi Garrett, Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (Oakland: University of California Press Press, 2008), 165–214. 80. See brochure, “Royal Venetian Band,” (St Augustine: The Record Company, 1915), Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/tc/id/37075/royalv/1. 81. See brochure for “The Lilian Johnson Company” (Chicago: W. W. King, 1920), Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/tc/id/ 37802. 82. See brochure for “Pittsburgh Ladies Orchestra: Vocal & Instrumental Entertainers,” (1927), Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/tc/id/23584. 83. See brochure, “Arden Entertainers” (Chicago: W. M. King Service, 1917), Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://apps.its.uiowa.edu/libsdrc/details.jsp?id=/arden/1. 84. Edward Madden and Percy Wenrich, “My Hula-hula Love” (New York: Jerome H. Renwick and Co, 1911). 85. L. Wolfe Gilbert and S. R. Henry, “Queen of the South Sea Isles” (New York: J. W. Stern, 1915). 86. Irving Berlin, “My Bird of Paradise; My Honolulu Girl” (New York: Berlin & Snyder, 1915). Berlin also wrote “That Hula Hula” for the musical comedy Stop, Look, Listen (New York: Irving Berlin, 1915). Copies of both are held in the Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. 87. Irene Bordoni, “On the South Sea Isle: A Beautiful Hawaiian Song” (New York: Harry von Tilzer Music Publishing, 1916), Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Collections Library, Duke University. 88. L. Deming, “Tongo Islands and Get Married as Fast as You Can” (Boston: the author, undated) American Singing Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ query/h?ammem/amss:@field(DOCID+@lit(as113820)). 89. Michael Keaney, “100 Years of Hawaiian Music” Honolulu Magazine, http:// www.honolulumagazine.com/core/pagetools.php?pageid=8151&url=/honolulu-magazine/november-2010/100-years-of-hawaiian-music/&mode=print. 90. See “The Ukulele: Hawaii’s Little Musical Giant.” For an extensive list of the genre consult David J. Steffen, From Edison to Marconi: The First Thirty Years of Recorded Music (Jefferson: McFarland and Co., 2005), 198–203. 91. Rudolf Friml, “Hawaiian Butterfly Medley” (Orange, NJ: Edison, 1917).

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92. Ray Sherwood and Carl D. Vandersloot, “Hawaiian Twilight” (Williamsport, PA: Vandersloot Music Pub. Co., 1920). 93. Walter Bolian and James Hensley, “My Hawaiian Rose” (Detroit: Jerome H. Remick, 1918). 94. Harold G. Frost and F. Henri Klickman, “Sweet Hawaiian Moonlight Tell Her of My Love” (Chicago: Frank K. Root, 1918). 95. The Leightons, “Faraway in Honolulu: They’ve got the Tango Craze” (New York: M. Wimark, 1917). 96. E. Ray Goetz, Joe Young, and Pete Wendling, “Yaaka . . . Hula Hickey Dula” (New York: Waterson, Berlin and Snyder, 1916). 97. Edward Crossmith and Ted D. Ward, “Hula Lou” (New York: Bernard Granville, 1916). 98. See brochure “Huapala: Her Hawaiian dancers and Ilima Islanders,” Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/tc/id/49708. 99. Grant Clarke, Eddie Fan, and Jimmie V. Monaco, “Honolulu America Loves You” (New York: Leo Feist, 1916). 100. Earl Burtnett, Jos A. Burke, and J. E. Dempsey, “My Rose of Waikiki” (New York: Jerome H. Remick & Co., 1917). 101. Kalmar and Gottler, “The More I See of Hawaii the Better I Like New York,” (New York: Puck and Abrahams, 1917). Garrett argues that Kalmar had written many Hawaiian-themed songs before this effort. See Garrett, Struggling to Define a Nation, 194. 102. Ray Henderson and Billy Rose, “Don’t Bring Lulu” (Sydney: J. Albert & Son, c.1925). 103. The Davenport Democrat and Leader, July 20, 1927. 104. See brochure Carlo Lamberti Concert Company” (1926), Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/tc/id/25240. 105. See Cliff Edwards, “Ukulele Ike” (1895–1971), http://www.redhotjazz.com/ cliffedwards.html (Accessed October 14, 2014). 106. Cited in John King, Famous Solos and Duets for the Ukulele (Pacific, MO: Mel Bay Publications, 2004), 7. 107. Brisbane Courier, March 29, 1911; Sydney Morning Herald, April 10, 1911; Sunday Times, April 16, 1911; Table Talk, April 27, 1911. 108. See George H. Lewis, “Beyond the Reef: Cultural Constructions of Hawaii in Mainland America, Australia and Japan,” Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 2 (1996): 123. 109. Jackey Coyle and Rebecca Coyle, “Aloha Australia: Hawaiian Music in Australia (1920–55),” Perfect Beat 2 (January 1995): 34. Ka‘ai first visited Japan in 1910 for an international exposition engagement. Hawaiian bands were popular in Japan from that time to the eve of the Pacific War. The expansion of Japan’s South Seas empire during the Great War, along with the strong links between Japan and Hawaii through migration, have been identified as important factors in the musical genre’s popularity at this time. See Shuhei Hosokawa, “East of Honooluly: Hawaiian Music in Japan from the 1920s to the 1940s,” Perfect Beat 2 (July 1994): 51–67. 110. Coyle and Coyle, “Aloha Australia,” 34 111. Coyle and Coyle, “Aloha Australia,” 33. Earlier Australian songs included Thomas Armstrong’s “Leonora or That Dreamy Honolulu Rag,” Copyright registrations held in National Archives of Australia, Canberra. See file A1336, 2202. 112. See Copyright registrations held in National Archives of Australia, Canberra. See files A1336, 8988; A1336, 9278; and A1336, 9242. Such songs continued to be registered for copyright through the 1920s and into the 1930s. See for example, James Norman Bryan, “If They Put Honolulu in Ireland,” (1923), Gerald Francis Dillon, “Honoulu,” (1928); George Stevenson Wallace, “Off Honolulu,” (1930), Slyvia Gladys Harrison, “My Heart is in Honolulu,” (1931), see Copyright registrations held in National Archives of Australia, Canberra. See files A1336, 11808; A1336, 17984; A1336, 20059; A1336, 21489.

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113. Coyle and Coyle, “Aloha Australia,” 34. 114. Coyle and Coyle, “Aloha Australia,” 41. 115. Coyle and Coyle, “Aloha Australia,” 36. 116. Coyle and Coyle, “Aloha Australia,” 41; Nikki Bambrick and Jeremy Miller, “Exotic Hula: ‘Hawaiian’ Dance Entertainment in Post-war Australia,” Perfect Beat 2 (July 1994): 59. 117. Lewis, “Beyond the Reef,” 123. 118. Victor Robinson, “Hygiene in Hawaii,” Medical Review of Reviews 22, no. 12 (1916): 877–78.

EIGHT The Great War and the Lost Generation

At the same time as historians have suggested World War I marked the “beginning,” or “birth” of the “modern age,” they have long recognized that the conflict produced a “crisis of confidence in Western modernity,” that triggered “a kind of pervasive, collective, and incurable shellshock.” 1 Indeed, not only had the Great War challenged the “linear progression of civilization and associated value systems of millions,” but even more bleakly, as one contemporary commentator remarked, the horrors of the conflict suggested Western civilization was “hastening towards its own ruin.” 2 Some survivors responded by retreating “into a dream of home.” For others, however, their desire to escape led them to reject Western civilization altogether. 3 As Jay Winter has observed, the “Great War, the most ‘modern’ of wars, triggered an avalanche of the ‘unmodern.’” 4 While the War would not leave the South Seas untouched—the first Australians to die in the Great War, for example, died in the seizure of German New Guinea—its absence in time, space, and spirit, from the events in Europe and the Middle East during 1914–1918 saw many people look to the South Seas as a site of escape, either literally or figuratively. 5 Among those who looked to the South Seas as a site of escape were members of the so-called “Lost Generation.” Paris was not the only possible site of escape contemplated by these young American writers and artists in the aftermath of the War. For many people the South Seas had featured since their childhood as a site for adventuresome escape. 6 The war and early postwar period reacquainted the Lost Generation with their childhood dreamings. 115

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The South Seas made brief cameos in many works of the time. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, was inspired by the British poet Rupert Brooke, who had become synonymous with escape to the South Seas during the war years despite the fact he had experienced war and found “heaven on earth” in the reverse order—having died on his way to the Dardanelles Campaign in 1915 after his South Seas sojourn of the previous year. 7 Fitzgerald’s 1920 novel This Side of Paradise borrowed for its title words contained in Brooke’s 1914 poem “Tiare Tahiti.” Depicting life at Princeton in the early postwar years, the bored and disillusioned characters consider the South Seas as one possible site of escape—a place where one might “deteriorate pleasantly” and “where lust could be made a mode of life.” 8 In Ford Madox Ford’s Henry for Hugh, however, Henry dreams of the South Seas but it is unattainable. 9 It was thus apparently impossible to escape the modern condition. Two American veterans who decided to not only dream of, but to physically escape to the South Seas were Charles Nordhoff (grandson of his namesake) and James Norman Hall. Both men had joined the Great War prior to America’s entry in 1917, although they finished their war with the American Expeditionary Force. Residing in Paris in the days after the Armistice, with the “greatest adventure we shall ever know” behind them, the two Army aviators decided that given they had no houses or lands to anchor them, or “promising careers” to drag them “back into the bewilderments of modern civilization,” they would allow their minds to turn to “an old allurement—the South Pacific.” Deciding to try and make their careers as writers, and with a cash advance from Harper’s, Nordhoff and Hall arrived in Tahiti in late 1919. Their Faery Lands of the South Seas was published in 1921. Encouraging Westerners to utilize the South Seas as a tourist destination, they called for the “preservation” of native life, both for the benefit of travelers as well as the indigenous inhabitants. 10 Americans were not alone in seeing the South Seas as an antidote to the stresses of modern civilization. One Englishmen who escaped from the war in Europe and enjoyed a South Seas sojourn was the writer Somerset Maugham. Like most educated countrymen of his generation, as a child Maugham had received a thorough grounding in the South Seas tradition. “Intrigued” by the work of Herman Melville and Pierre Loti, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb Tide and The Wrecker were among Maugham’s favorite South Seas stories. 11 Following the onslaught of the Great War, the medically trained Maugham served in a Red Cross unit before joining British intelligence. Exhausted by his endeavors, Maugham was encouraged to travel as a form of recuperation. With this opportunity he decided to both realize a dream and commence work on a new project. In his 1915 international bestseller Of Human Bondage, Maugham had incidentally told the story of the artist, bored and frustrated by the strictures

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of modern society, who sought personal and artistic freedom through escape to Tahiti. The inspiration for this story had come from an earlier visit to Paris where Maugham had learned more about the life of Paul Gauguin. 12 During the second half of the nineteenth century artistic fascination with the South Seas developed in Europe under the influence of the newly emerged French “Impressionist School.” While the impressionists initially sought inspiration in subject and style from Japanese art, some of the school’s adherents—including Gauguin—looked increasingly to the South Seas as an inspiration. Like the authors, artists such as Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh saw the South Seas as providing another site for recuperation and escape from “civilization.” 13 Long interested in the French explorers of the South Pacific, Gauguin had been inspired by Pierre Loti’s La Marriage de Loti. 14 The colors and subjects of the South Seas offered enormous possibilities. “I am somewhat of Vincent’s opinion,” Gauguin diarized, “that the future belongs to the painter of the yet unpainted tropics.” It was Gauguin, however, not van Gogh, who traveled to the South Seas with the aim, he told the French press, of creating images to accompany Loti’s words. 15 For Maugham, his desire to escape, and write more about this notion of artistic escape, sent him to the South Seas in search of the ghost of Gauguin. While Mary Gluck has observed that Gauguin has “long been an icon of modernist Primitivism,” in the early decades of the twentieth century Gauguin had been mostly forgotten in France and never widely known in the English-speaking world. 16 Maugham set off for the Pacific in November 1916 with his lover Gerald Haxton as companion and secretary. He traveled first from Haxton’s hometown of San Francisco to Hawaii, and then on to American Samoa, where Maugham met “Miss Thompson,” a prostitute fleeing a crackdown in Honolulu for a bar job in Pago Pago. Thompson became the inspiration for another of Maugham’s stories that he initially called “Miss Thompson” but which became better known as “Rain.” Arriving in Pago Pago, Maugham also met a recently discharged young American sailor called “Red,” who would be the subject of another story. 17 Like so many before him, Maugham regarded his trip to the South Seas as a pilgrimage in honor of the great writers who had preceded him. For Maugham, the South Seas remained as they had been earlier endorsed by Melville, Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Pierre Loti, Louis Becke, and Lafcadio Hearn. Upon his arrival he not only sought to find the ghosts of Gauguin but the spirits of these earlier writers. A highlight of his visit to Samoa in 1917 was attending the grave of Robert Louis Stevenson. 18 The South Seas presented by Somerset Maugham were informed by Melville and Stevenson’s work. But, like Jack London, Maugham went even further in representing the South Seas as a site of escape. While it

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was liberating, however, paradise still held grave dangers. In the short story “The Pool,” included in Maugham’s 1921 volume titled Trembling of a Leaf, the Scottish bank manager Bertie Lawson seeks to escape to the South Seas because he was “repelled by civilization.” Ultimately, however, after an unsatisfactory return to civilization, Lawson kills himself in the pool of the story’s title—where he had first met his estranged Islander wife. 19 Maugham concluded that once the veneer of civilization was removed Westerners in the South Seas became locked in a struggle between their restraint and their urges. These conflicting imperatives were expressed in the 1922 Broadway production of Rain, when the hotel owner “Horn” commented on the role played by missionaries in the South Seas: “These reform folks fighting depravity are only fighting their own hankering for the very indulgences they suspect in others.” 20 Most of Maugham’s time and effort was spent researching Gauguin. His research included interviews with former associates of the Frenchman, visits to his old haunts, and the purchase of remaining examples of his art. 21 With this research completed, Maugham embodied Gauguin in his character “Charles Strickland,” the central figure in his novel The Moon and Sixpence. The novel played an important role in perpetuating the idea of the South Seas, not only because of its public success but also because it introduced Gauguin, through the character of Strickland, to a wider English-speaking audience. While Maugham was completing The Moon and Sixpence, American author, art critic, and Pulitzer Prize winning poet, John Gould Fletcher had turned his attention to the life of the real Gauguin. Regarding his decision to write a biography of Gauguin Fletcher later recalled: I deliberately chose Paul Gauguin, less discussed as a painter than Cézanne, less important as a man than van Gogh, because in him I sensed something akin to my own exile, as well as something close to my own smoldering revolt and disgust with nineteenth-century progressive civilization. Gauguin had preferred savagery, as Rousseau had and Thoreau had: and I felt now, facing the reality of tanks and submarines and poison gas and airplanes and incendiary bombs, that all three were right. 22

Fletcher wrote the biography during mid-1918, “while the supreme madness of the war fever burnt itself out among all the nations of the earth.” He spent his time “communing with Paul Gauguin amid the tropic solitudes of his distant and peaceable South Seas Eden of Tahiti—a spot of the world’s surface I have never visited, though I envied Gauguin his escape at the time, and have always since wanted to go there.” 23 Fletcher associated Gauguin with the sentiments of the past and present: The enormous destruction of human life, of nature, of art, in the past war has been altogether out of proportion to the military results achieved by either side. . . . For all these devices of destruction we of

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the twentieth century, with our belief in purely material progress, stand guilty to-day; and the blood of our guilt has reddened earth already for over four years and may continue to do so for many generations to come. The past war before it came to an end had long ceased to be a contest between national ideals and had become a struggle between man and an inhuman, scientific, organized machine. . . . We have learned to speak of “man-power” as our books on physics speak of “horse-power.” The task we, in the war, set ourselves was a grisly paradox; we proposed to save civilization, to undo a great wrong, by destroying the very basis of human life on which all civilization stands. 24

The scene set, he concluded his biography: With a sense of spiritual release we revert to those who dreamed of the great return to nature—to Rousseau, Whitman, Gauguin. . . . In Rousseau’s prose, in Whitman’s poetry and in Gauguin’s painting we see the only gleam of hope for self-tortured humanity, and the promise of a land where nature and man are one and where reigns a peace that passes all understanding. 25

Fletcher could not secure a publisher for his biography until the Moon and Sixpence had been released, provoking a broader interest in Gauguin. 26 Capitalizing on this interest, the New York publisher Nicholas I. Brown published a translation from the French of Gauguin’s long forgotten autobiographical travelogue, Noa Noa. Nancy Mowll Mathews has argued that Noa Noa was Gauguin’s attempt to resurrect his career in Paris by creating an image of him having enjoyed an erotic idyll in Tahiti—an image removed from his lived experience. 27 Gauguin’s own words also appeared in a collection of his letters to fellow French painter George-Daniel de Monfreid, which were translated into English by Ruth Pielkovo. The 1922 edition included a foreword written by another man who had taken the time to search for the ghosts of Gauguin some years before Maugham—American journalist Frederick O’Brien. 28 While his name would be virtually forgotten by the 1940s, during the 1920s O’Brien’s name became synonymous with the South Seas, and was associated with a wide range of cultural productions. Frederick O’Brien had left the United States at the turn of the century to explore America’s expanding empire in the Pacific. The annexation of Hawaii and the acquisition of the Philippines as a trophy of the SpanishAmerican War had seen this empire grow dramatically within the space of a few years. Traveling first to Honolulu and then to Manila, O’Brien became involved in the establishment of a number of English-language newspapers in Manila, including a stint as editor of the Manila Times. After many years in the Philippines, O’Brien returned to the United States. But he again grew restless, and sought to escape the modern condition. Hoping to flee the modern city’s “sky touching buildings,” with its “artificially lighted cages of a thousand slaves to money-getting,” in

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1914 he journeyed to the Marquesas. 29 The South Seas were an obvious destination for the now middle-aged O’Brien because they had fed his imagination since childhood: Where is the boy who has not dreamed of the cannibal isles, those strange, fantastic places over the rim of the world, where naked brown men move like shadows through unimagined jungles, and horrid feasts are celebrated to the “boom, boom, boom!” of the twelve foot drums? 30

His journey was the realization of a “boy’s own” fantasy: “What the great captains, and Loti, and Melville, Becke, and Stoddard, had written had been for years my intense delight. Now I was to realize my childhood dream.” 31 Returning to the United States, O’Brien recorded his travels and attempted to have them published. Initially rejected for publication, it was five years before his first book on the South Seas was accepted by a publisher. With the assistance of Rose Wilder Lane—who later wrote a fictionalized biography of Jack London, and who was a daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie—and aided by the changed environment of the early postwar period, O’Brien’s White Shadows in the South Seas was published by Century in September 1919. 32 White Shadows in the South Seas was a lament for a passing South Seas. Invoking the warnings of Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson had compared the “convulsive and transitory state” of the Marquesan Islanders with the Highlanders of Scotland, who during the “clearances” of a century before had also lost their traditional lives to the demands of the “commercial” agent. 33 The Western world had not heeded the warnings of Melville and Stevenson and now, thanks to the “White Shadows” of Western encroachment, O’Brien was performing the last rites on a diseased paradise and its people in a state of profound racial degeneration. 34 The modern age, which had destroyed Western society with its cataclysmic war, was also destroying the South Seas. Although it did not arrive in American stores until September 1919, White Shadows in the South Seas became the fifth-best selling nonfiction work of that year. The following year it ranked second, edged out by H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History. It remained on the Publishers Weekly bestselling list until July 1921, and remained a popular book in American libraries; for example, it was still the fourth most borrowed book in the United States in September 1921. 35 The third most borrowed book of September 1921 was O’Brien’s follow-up work, Mystic Isles of the South Seas, which itself had sat on the best seller list from May to August 1921. While White Shadows had concentrated on the Marquesas, Mystic Isles concentrated on Tahiti and Moorea—as “the merriest, most fascinating world of all the cosmos.” Returning again to his influences, Loti, Melville, Becke, and Stoddard—or, as he described them, the “great captains”—O’Brien expressed his “intense delight” at

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their writings, and recalled that his visit provided a chance to “realize the dream of childhood.” While Stevenson was not mentioned explicitly, the missionary endeavor and the colonial enterprise in the South Pacific were invoked as “wretched” acts that had “killed a people.” 36 A third book, Atolls of the Sun, appeared in late 1921 and again promised “experiences, impressions, and dreams in the strange and lonely islands of the South Seas.” 37 O’Brien now turned his attention to the notion of the South Seas as a destination for escape from Western civilization—a desire reinvigorated by the Great War. As well as discussing his own desires for escape, O’Brien explored the theme through the life of Gauguin, who had also “tried to escape from the cage of heredity, habits, and the thoughts of his countrymen.” Concluding that while Gauguin had physically escaped the Western world, he had been unable to escape its influence, O’Brien hypothesized on a similar theme to Maugham: in the South Seas artists (and others) were “tortured” by their “conflicting desires.” Despite his desire, and the desire of others, to escape, O’Brien concluded that by the twentieth century it had become impossible to escape Western civilization. 38 O’Brien’s work was widely serialized and reviewed in the American press. The themes of sexual allure and civilization destroying paradise were constants. The New York Tribune included a full-page story on the first book, illustrated with three images of “island beauties” and headlined “The Beautiful Race of the South Seas is Being Exterminated by Civilization.” 39 Influenced by the works of those writers who had preceded him, O’Brien’s books, despite their classification, danced between reality and fiction. Consequently, and in the finest South Seas tradition, the authenticity of the work was challenged at the time. 40 One prominent defender of O’Brien was Sydney Greenbie, who, at the suggestion of Jack London and the “then still unfamed” O’Brien, had traveled to the South Seas in the last years of the Great War. Recounting his experiences in a 1921 travelogue, Greenbie found truth in O’Brien’s words: 41 He has given us almost an entire new world and so magnified it, brought it so close to us, that we can look at it as though it were in our very hands. It is hard to believe that it is real. The truth is always hard to believe. Especially hard is it for us to believe that this new world is better than ours and that ours is not so valuable an antique as it has been cracked up to be.

With allusions back to Melville and the sentiments of contemporary primitivism, Greenbie also noted of O’Brien’s work: “We get to see ourselves compared with primitive people—they show up so much better.” 42 Although O’Brien claimed White Shadows in the South Seas was written for “those who stay at home and dream,” readers responded to the book

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in a variety of ways. 43 Some interpreted its mourning at the passing of the South Seas as a clarion call to preserve what remained—both physically and intellectually. One person deeply affected by White Shadows was William F. Charters, a “tax adjustor” from Indianapolis. In 1924 the elderly Charters read White Shadows and “was deeply moved by the author’s praise for the passing of native civilizations.” Responding by beginning a book collection that aimed to preserve many irreplaceable records of South Pacific peoples and cultures, Charters acquired a number of important first editions such as William Bligh’s A Voyage to the South Seas (1792) and James Burney’s Voyages to the South Seas. In 1931, shortly before his death, Charters donated the collection, which in a few years had grown to 2,000 items, to Butler University in Indianapolis. 44 Charters’s efforts to preserve the old South Seas were matched by others’ enthusiasm to experience the region before it was too late. One American, who had settled in the South Seas before the war, noted with alarm the increase in the number of Westerners coming to Tahiti to settle after the war: “so many totally unsuitable people drift out here misled by the romantic stories they have read.” 45 A South Seas sailor, interviewed in the 1930s, recalled the increase in the number of young men seeking to work passage on ships for the sake of adventure: “Do you know the worst type that goes to sea. It’s the adventurers, those friggin’ college boys.” The sailor knew one captain who hated them; “if he caught somebody readin’ an adventure story that was the end of them.” 46 After reading The Moon and Sixpence and Maugham’s collection of short stories, Trembling of a Leaf, author and publisher Alex Waugh wondered whether the South Seas were “really like that?” Resigning from his father’s publishing house, he set off to investigate the region for himself. 47 O’Brien’s influence was clearly evident in the case of children’s author Armstrong Sperry. Sperry’s great-grandfather, Serano Armstrong, had been a ship’s captain, whose stories of his South Seas adventures had piqued the interest of the young Sperry. That interest had been further excited by his wide reading on the subject: In my childhood I had read Melville, of course, and the South Seas stories of Stevenson and London. From the very first those islands fired my imagination, and made me long to throw all my schoolbooks out the window and stow away on the first ship I could find that was sailing South. 48

Sperry, a member of the so-called “Lost Generation,” returned from wartime Naval service to complete art school in New York before the obligatory year abroad in Paris. Returning to New York he found an illustrator’s job that failed to hold his interest. Then Frederick O’Brien changed the course of his life: As the years passed, those childhood fantasies were shelved and forgotten—but they did not die. And then one day I could read a book by

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Frederick O’Brien and that brought them all to life again. . . . I thought then, and I still think, that it is one of the most fascinating yarns I have ever read. . . . Yes, it was O’Brien’s book which turned a boyhood wish into a resolve. When I finished the last page I knew that I was going to the South Seas. It had become a certainty. 49

Such certainty was checked only by the fact Sperry was unsure how to get to the South Seas. In a bold gesture he wrote to O’Brien and asked how he might get there. O’Brien responded favorably to the request and Sperry soon found himself a member of the Kaimiloa Expedition of 1924–1925, exploring the South Seas under the auspices of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu. Sperry’s role was artist and “assistant ethnologist.” 50 Thanks to the inspiring tales of Sperry’s grandfather, the South Seas locale that had figured most prominently in his dreams was the “primitive and enchanted island” of Bora Bora. In July 1925 Sperry arrived on the small island. What he discovered was not the paradise as his grandfather had described, but a land very much under the White Shadow. One consequence of Prohibition in the United States was a boom in the popularity of soda fountain soft drinks, which relied on the vanilla bean, a crop grown on Bora Bora and a number of other South Seas islands. American demand for the vanilla bean transformed the economy of Bora Bora, producing, in Sperry’s opinion, the worst effects of American materialism. The vanilla boom, however, was short-lived and the people of Bora Bora were then forced to deal with a traditional structure that had been cast asunder. That the inhabitants of Bora Bora were able to restore their traditional lifestyle after the onslaught of civilization gave Sperry hope that the future foreseen by O’Brien might be preventable. Traveling with the expedition, Sperry encountered less than warm praise for his mentor O’Brien. While the “scientists” regarded O’Brien’s book as an obvious fabrication, Sperry, like Greenbie, was certain that O’Brien had captured the essence of the South Seas. As he subsequently recalled: I have heard scientists scoff at it (White Shadows). O’Brien they said, was an Irishman with an Irishman’s imagination, who never let fact stand in the way of making a good story. Well—perhaps that’s true. But I have learned this—there are things which the scientist has the gift to accomplish which remain forever beyond the reach of the artist. Yet the world which belongs to the artist is a world to which few scientists possess the key; it is the world which the artist shares, perhaps with children alone—the world of imagination. If O’Brien didn’t always get his facts straight, and if his scientific observations were frequently faulty, he achieved something beyond objective reporting. He had the power to recreate, through the medium of words, the spell that lies over the South Sea islands. 51

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Sperry’s conviction that it was perhaps only in fiction that the true magic of the South Seas could be glimpsed was reflected in the articles he wrote and illustrated on his return to the United States. Although all his works were presented as factual accounts of events he experienced while in the South Seas, his mix of ethnological observation and adventure yarn challenged the boundaries of plausibility—and those that most dramatically challenged the limits of credibility were typically set in the less wellknown Melanesia. An April 1926 story in World Magazine was headlined “Saved from Cannibals by a Stick of Dynamite: A New Yorker’s Extraordinary Adventure with New Hebridean Savages.” 52 Another story published in a subsequent edition of the same magazine enticed readers in similarly melodramatic albeit less succinct terms: “Cast Alive into the Molten Heart of a Volcano: An American Artists-Explorer’s Hair-raising Adventure with Cannibals of the Solomon Islands, Whose Superstitious Fear Caused Them to Offer Human Sacrifice to the God of ‘Smoking Mountain.’” 53 Sperry’s first children’s book, One Day with Manu, appeared in 1933. 54 Purporting to portray a slice of everyday life for an Islander boy on Bora Bora, the book was well received. Several other works published during the 1930s also utilized South Seas themes, before Sperry reached the pinnacle of his career with the 1940 publication of Call it Courage, which again chronicled life in the South Seas. Achieving great popular and critical acclaim on the eve of the Pacific War, Call it Courage won the American Library Association’s 1941 Newbery Medal for “the most distinguished contribution to American books for children in 1940.” Drawn from Polynesian lore—the story of a young boy afraid of the sea after the death of his mother during a hurricane—the novel was lauded for its “unusual and authentic South Seas subject matter.” The praise accorded to Sperry revealed that the old combination of entertainment and “authenticity” remained powerful factors behind the success of specific South Seas stories. 55 Frederick O’Brien was also credited by some commentators with almost single-handedly resurrecting the popularity of Herman Melville to American readers and beyond. 56 With memories of Melville, O’Brien had visited the now desolate Typee Valley in White Shadows. His views on escape from civilization were also reminiscent of Melville’s and certainly played some part in renewing popular attention in Melville during the centenary year of his birth. Other influences, however, also spurred the fresh interest in Melville. In August 1919, the month before White Shadows was released, Columbia University academic Raymond M. Weaver wrote a short biographical piece on Melville in the New York weekly magazine The Nation to commemorate the centenary. 57 Thereafter Weaver commenced work on the first biography of Melville: Herman Melville Mariner and Mystic. 58 Weaver’s private papers include copies of reviews of both

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O’Brien’s and Maugham’s work; presumably, therefore, he had read these reviews as he completed his project. 59 Concentrating on themes that resonated with his postwar audience, Weaver suggested that Melville had come “to believe that the gifts of civilization to the South Seas were without doubt very doubtful blessings.” 60 Melville, moreover, had been able to contrast his South Seas experience with the “blatant defaults of civilization.” 61 Yet with an eye to Western civilization’s redemption in the aftermath of the “War to End All Wars,” Weaver insisted that Melville had never, “unlike Baudelaire and Whitman,” been prepared to resign himself to “vacant animal felicity.” Despite the charms of Fayaway and his own “depravity”—manifested in part by his “unblushing approval of nakedness”—Melville was always “eager to get back to civilization.” 62 Melville’s works became more accessible, with many of his books being reprinted soon after World War I. Omoo, for example, was reprinted in August 1919 (before O’Brien’s book had been published), June 1921, and again in February 1922. 63 In his introduction to a 1920 edition of Typee, Columbia University academic Sterling Andrus Leonard revisited some old controversies. Typee, claimed Leonard, had been “verified by the testimony of later travelers” and found to be “remarkably correct.” 64 Leonard considered a 1919 National Geographic article by J. W. Church, titled “A Vanishing People of the South Seas,” as “confirmation of much of Melville’s record” and the “essential truth” of the book. 65 Referring back to Stevenson and his embrace of “all that Melville foresaw,” Church had observed that both men had seen the “miserable results brought about by the coming of civilization.” 66 In his 1922 collection of Melville’s private correspondence, Meade Minnigerode contended: Fame has returned to Herman Melville after 70 years. . . . Mr Masefield has spoken. Mr Weaver has written. First edition copies of Melville’s works have been removed from the dusty limbo of unconsidered counters and placed in aristocratic company upon the high-priced shelves of bibliophiles. Soon in the land of his birth, it will be possible to mention his name in public gatherings without explanatory identification. 67

Melville’s renewed popularity reached across both the Atlantic and Pacific, and his work was translated into a range of languages. Sigmund Freud, who had himself already developed an abiding interesting in the South Seas, was given a German translation of Typee by a friend in 1927. 68 In Faery Lands of the South Seas, Charles Nordhoff and James Hall observed an enduring South Seas truism when they wrote that “one can’t be wholly matter of fact in writing of these islands. They are not real in the ordinary sense, but belong, rather, to the realm of the imagination.” One individual who took Nordhoff and Hall literally was George S. Chappell,

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a New York writer and architect. In the wake of Frederick O’Brien’s rise and rise, Chappell decided to parody the American fixation with the South Seas, with the assistance of a number of prominent New Yorkers including publisher George P. Putnam. Under the pseudonym “Dr. Walter E. Traprock”— presumably a reference to T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock which had appeared the previous year—in late 1921 Chappell published, with Putnam, The Cruise of the Kawa: Wanderings in the South Seas. Purporting to be an account of a South Seas expedition by Traprock, the work replicated in style and content the South Seas genre, augmented with a range of outrageous claims. Among these claims were the discovery of a new island group—the “Filberts”—and a bird that laid cubed eggs with markings resembling a dice. The book was dedicated to four Islander women—“the girls we left behind.” The work started with a foreword by George Putnam that offered some insight into the continuing American fixation with the South Seas: “Of late the lure of the South Seas has laid its gentle spell rather overwhelmingly upon American readers. To be unread in Polynesia is to be intellectually déclassé.” Many reviews of The Cruise of the Kawa likewise commenced by noting the American obsession with the South Seas. Marguerite Mooers Marshall asked: Have you South Sea Island yearn? . . . Do you belong to that ever increasing number of fans who long to exchange Prohibition and propriety for Polynesia, who dreams of shaking the dust of civilization from their feet and acquiring in its place a breadfruit tree, a costume composed of not more than two yards of gaily-figured cloth and a beauteous island bride who won’t expect you to bring her an unopened pay envelope every Saturday night? Or are you a little fed up with all this talk of tropical islands, and even more tropic ladies, of menus composed of fifty seven varieties of fish and sixty-nine of fruit . . . of that loafers’ paradise somewhere in the south seas which seems to have taken rather more than its fair share of space in current literature, the movies and the rhapsodies of your romantic friends? 69

Most newspapers were quick to inform their readers the book was a hoax, athough some decided to play their part in perpetuating the ruse. Headlining its review “A Curious Cruise” the New York Tribune claimed to have met Traprock “and grasped his adventurous hands.” “Traprock’s pages” on the South Seas, wrote the reviewer, “open doors to a region of tradition and modes of life that will necessitate a rewriting of geographies and works on philology and racial traits . . . no book has upset pet theories of natural history and the affairs of subtropical life so completely.” Only in the caption of an accompanying photograph of Traprock with his “island bride” did the paper refer to the work as an “exuberant parody of the many highly colored accounts of South Seas wanderings and adventures.” 70

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The Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger was even more duplicitous, running its story under a headline “Truth about the South Seas”: Of the many books recently publicized about the South Seas none can compare in interest with “The Cruise of the Kawa.” . . . The book is an account of the discovery of the Filbert islands, hitherto appearing on no maps and the story of the life of the people and the adventures of the exploring party among them. Other South Seas writers describe the beauty of the woman of the islands, but no photographs which they produce justify the praise bestowed. Mr Traprock includes several photographs of women, and they will all satisfy the taste of the most pernickety judge of feminine beauty.

Of the book’s many photos it was observed that they had been included “because the camera cannot lie.” Readers were also informed that the expedition had left the Filberts because of the “guilty fear” they had introduced disease that would lead to the “ultimate disappearance of the race as it is disappearing in the Marquesas.” The closest the paper came to revealing the hoax was in the story’s last lines: “A fake? Well, didn’t they say that [Paul] Du Chaillu was faking when he came back from Africa with the report that he had found gorillas there?” 71 With most newspapers spoiling the joke, Chappell and Putnam decided to sustain the controversy in the hope of selling more books. A month after the Tribune had first revealed the hoax, an advertisement appeared in the paper stating that on October 19, 1921, Traprock would visit four New York bookshops with members of the expedition. In each they would “publicly deny the maliciously slanderous reports to the effect that Dr. Traprock is an impostor, that he never was south of the Battery, and that his book is untrue.” 72 The book was an immediate best seller. Publishers Weekly listed it in its November 1921 list—in the general, rather than the fiction section. 73 Whether or not Americans were reading it as a “burlesque,” the New York Evening World claimed it was one of the “books that everyone else is reading and talking about.” 74 In Chicago it was claimed sales of The Cruise of the Kawa were bettered only by Wells’s The Outline of History. 75 In Washington, the bookshop Brentano’s stated the work was among its “books in most demand” in the nonfiction section. 76 Also in Washington there had been reports that officials of the National Geographic Society were “wondering how they happened to become so excited over the findings in the South Sea Islands of Capt. Walter E. Traprock.” They were “suspecting that perhaps they are the victims of some sort of joke. It is causing considerable amusement amongst scientists in Washington.” 77 The following day the Louisiana Bienville Democrat claimed it was still not clear if The Cruise of the Kawa was indeed a hoax and that the National Geographic Society was investigating. 78

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Even after the hoax had been well established and not only Chappell but his other confederates had been outed, the Washington, D.C., Evening Star still wanted to believe: The fact that the nearest Traprock ever got to the South Seas is Baltimore doesn’t in the least detract from the side-splitting interest of the alleged record of his travels. And as they are illustrated with photographs, and the camera never lies, it's a little bit hard to disentangle imagination from truth, even when one is on the inside of the secret and knows that Traprock in everyday life is George S. Chappell, an architect of New York, and that among the other “members of the Kawa expedition,” pictured in South Sea regalia, are such notables as Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair; Heywood Broun, the New York critic; Charles Hanson Towne, the poet, and George Palmer Putnam, the publisher. 79

Chappell would build a career parodying travel literature. In the wake of the success of Robert J. Flaherty’s documentary Nanook of the North he turned his gaze to colder climes. 80 In a 1925 National Geographic article on Polynesia, Robert Cushman Murphy observed that for “numberless readers the flood of books and articles by war-weary sojourners in the southern Pacific has meant the discovery of a new literary field, one in which heavenly isles green with breadfruit and the hibiscus tree, ringed by sapphire lagoons and dancing surf, are the setting for the lives of languorous natives who retain the pristine charm of ADAM AND EVE.” 81 Many people, however, were not content to merely read about the South Seas. In August 1921, the New York Tribune commented on the popularity that Tahiti had recently received—no doubt influenced by Gauguin’s recent elevation in the English-speaking world. Tapping into the continuing legacy of the Great War, and those seeking a “leave of absence from the world,” the newspaper described Tahiti as the place “Where People Go When They Get Tired of This World.” At the same time, however, prospective sojourners were cautioned that “Nearly All the Good Hermit Sites Are Taken and the Demand is Still Fresh to Brisk.” The caption to an accompanying cartoon, depicting the overcrowded beaches of the French colony, read: “Poets and painters, disappointed politicians and broken down crooks, wife deserters and alimony dodgers, all have had the word passed along that Tahiti is the magic land where nothing matters.” 82 In analyzing American engagement with Oceania, Paul Lyons has identified the “vogue for the South Seas” during the 1920s. In tracing this continuing fascination, this chapter has explored and the ways in which Paul Gauguin was introduced to the English-speaking world, as well as the ways in which Herman Melville continued to shape Westerners’ impressions of the South Seas. Suggesting that the South Seas were seen to

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exist outside Western time, Lyons has hypothesized that in the wake of the Great War they were constructed as a “counter to modernity.” 83 The War had problematized Western civilization and fueled an enduring idea that the South Seas could serve as an escape, most recently from a world seemingly hell-bent on its own destruction. Like their predecessors, the works of the early postwar period were characterized by the strange but powerful alchemy of “fact” and fiction, which served to satisfy a public for whom the South Seas represented both the possibilities and the perils of an escape from “civilization.” The contradictions inherent in Western constructions of the South Seas were evident to some observers. In introducing Faery Lands of the South Seas, Nordhoff and Hall had suggested: The islands of the South Seas are places of interest curiously limited. The ethnological problem presented by the native is interesting only to the men of science, commerce is negligible, there is little real agriculture, and no industry at all. There remains the charm of living among people whose outlook upon life is basically different from our own; of living with a simplicity foreign to anything in one’s experience, amid surrounding of a beauty unreal both in actuality and in retrospect. 84

Yet perhaps because they now resided in Tahiti and not the United States, Nordhoff and Hall’s analysis was out of touch with the perceptions of many of their contemporaries. Into the 1920s the American public’s fascination with the South Seas would be further encouraged by scientific and anthropological studies, which quickly found their way into the popular imagination through texts that secured wider general audiences; through articles in popular scientific magazines, such as National Geographic; and through the public lectures delivered by so-called South Seas “authorities.” NOTES 1. The quotes are from Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975; repr.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 12; Carole Sweeney, From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism, and Primitivism, 1919–1935 (Westport: Praegar, 2004), 18; Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 24. See also Modris Ekstein, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989). 2. See Jonathan Atkin, A War of Individuals: Bloomsbury Attitudes to the Great War (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 5, 21. 3. Wyatt Bonikowski, Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination: The Death Drive in Post–World War I British Fiction, ebook (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). For some survivors the war’s legacies made their return home untenable. Returned veteran Cosmo Hamilton expressed this sentiment in his novel Paradise. Returning from the war but unable to settle down, the protagonist looks to the Pacific for respite: “Well, he could imagine that a year or two in the South Seas would make a pleasant change after a long spell of London and its traffic.” See Hamilton, Paradise (New York: Little Brown and Co, 1925), 202. Another Englishman, Arnold Safroni-Middleton, had escaped earlier to the Pacif-

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ic but saw the war years as a prompt to share his reasoning. The South Seas were a “neutral world,” where he could “at last” find “rest from the hot-footed turbulency of civilized humanity,” and “dwell beneath the Eden like shades of feathery palms, and listen to the wind-blown melodies.” See Arnold Safroni-Middleton, South Sea Foam: The Romantic Adventures of a Modern Don Quixote in the Southern Seas (New York: George Doran, 1919), 27. 4. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995; repr.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 178. 5. Military service in World War I did provide opportunities for some Australian, New Zealand, Japanese, and American service personnel to experience the South Seas while on war duty. One such individual was an Australian soldier, Arthur Miller. On his way to Europe for service on the Western Front, Miller’s ship stopped at Pitcairn Island. Writing his memoirs while on leave in Britain in 1917, he noted: “I remember years ago reading about the Mutineers of the Bounty, but in my wildest dreams I have never imagined that I would ever see the place.” See Miller’s Memoirs, in the Private Papers of Arthur William Miller, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, AWM PR91/ 118. 6. T. S. Eliot and Lincoln Steffen are two examples. Both had held close dreams of the South Seas since their youth. See Neville Braybrooke, “T. S. Eliot in the South Seas: A Look at the Poems and Short Stories That He Wrote When He Was Sixteen in St. Louis,” The Sewanee Review 74 (Winter 1966): 376–82; and Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (1974, repr.; New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 276. 7. In one letter to his friend Edward Marsh, Brooke had exclaimed: “Oh, Eddie, it’s all true about the South Seas! . . . there it wonderfully is: heaven on earth, the ideal life, little work, dancing, singing & eating, naked people of incredible loveliness, perfect manners, & immense kindliness, a divine tropic climate, & intoxicating beauty of scenery.” See Brooke to Marsh, cited in The Letters of Rupert Brooke, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 525. Brooke’s experience was conveyed to Americans in the early postwar years via Edward Marsh’s 1918 study entitled Rupert Brooke: A Memoir (New York: John Lane Company, 1918), esp. 202–209. 8. F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Scribners, 1920), 282. 9. The analysis is Laura Colombino’s. See Colombino, Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), 211–13. 10. J. C. Furnas, Anatomy of Paradise, Hawaii and the Islands of the South Seas (1937; repr., London: Victor Gollancz, 1950), 27–28. 11. Robert Calder, Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 136. 12. Ted Morgan, Somerset Maugham (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980), 209. 13. See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism,” Art in America 77 (1989): 118–29. 14. Paul Gauguin, The Intimate Journals of Paul Gauguin, trans. Van Wyck Brooks (1931; repr., London: KPI, 1985), vii; and Nancy Mowll Mathews, Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 157. For a discussion of Loti’s work see chapter 3 of this book. 15. Stephen F. Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 43, 47, 143. 16. Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2008), 2. 17. Morgan, Maugham, 215. 18. Morgan, Maugham, 217. 19. See W. Somerset Maugham, The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands (New York: George Doran, 1921), 164. 20. Gerald Boardman, American Theater: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1914–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 192. 21. Morgan, Maugham, 219. 22. John Gould Fletcher, Life is My Song (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937), 265.

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23. Fletcher, Life is My Song, 266. 24. John Gould Fletcher, Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art (New York: Nicholas L. Browne, 1921), 190. 25. Fletcher, Paul Gauguin, 191. 26. Fletcher, Life is My Song, 267. 27. Mathews, Paul Gauguin, 190. 28. Paul Gauguin, The Letters of Paul Gauguin to Georges Daniel De Monfreid, trans. Ruth Peilkovo, Foreword by Frederick O’Brien (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1922). 29. Frederick O’Brien, White Shadows in the South Seas (New York: The Century, 1919), 123. See also Jeffrey C. Geiger “America’s White Shadows: Modernist Ethnography and the South Pacific” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, 1997), 148. 30. Geiger, “America’s White Shadows,” 149. 31. Cited in Geiger, “America’s White Shadows,” 150. 32. Rose Wilder Lane, He Was a Man (New York: Harper and Bros., 1925). 33. Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900), 11. 34. Rod Edmond has explored Stevenson’s and London’s concerns with disease and illness in the South Seas as “counter discourse” to the South Seas as paradise. The onslaught of Western diseases and their devastation in the South Pacific was seen to be a direct consequence of colonization. See Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gaugin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 180–82, 194–222. Lawrence Phillips has also explored this theme, noting the presence of illness and disease in Melville’s work. See Lawrence Phillips, “The Negotiation of Colonial Identities in the Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London” (PhD Dissertation, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2002), 83–109. 35. The book was also popular on the other side of the Pacific, with one contemporary commentator noting it was “widely circulated” in Australia. “When Romance and Realism Meet: Picture Making in the South Seas,” BP Magazine 1 (December 1928): 21. 36. Frederick O’Brien, Mystic Isles of the South Seas (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1921), 5, 12. The connection between the missionary endeavor and Western colonialism was reasserted during the period. See for example K. L. P. Martin, Missionaries and Annexation in the Pacific (London: Oxford University Press, 1924). 37. O’Brien, Atolls of the Sun (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922), Foreword. 38. O’Brien, Atolls of the Sun, 443. 39. New York Tribune, March 21, 1920. See also Tribune, October 12, 1919. 40. Later examinations, suggesting that the work was a “novelized, rather than precisely factual account,” have remarked upon its digressive and episodic structure, which was considered reminiscent of Melville. See Geiger, “America’s White Shadows,” 166. 41. Greenbie noted by way of introduction: “Here, then, I was to trace the steps of Melville, of Stevenson, of Jack London—largely with the personal recommendations of Jack—and of one then still unfamed, Frederick O’Brien. All the courage in the face of the unknown, all the conflicts between the world civilizations in their various stages of development, all the dreams of romance, of future welfare and achievement, would unfold in my progress southward and fall into two much-talked-of and little-understood divisions—East and West.” See Sydney Greenbie, Pacific Triangle (New York: Century, 1921), 10. 42. Sydney Greenbie, “Against the South Seas: White Shadows in Mystic Isles,” Bookman 54 (November 1921): 259. 43. O’Brien, White Shadows in the South Seas, foreword. 44. The collection still exists in the Special Collections and Rare Books section of the Irwin Library at Butler University. See http://www.butler.edu/media/20577/charters.pdf.

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45. J. B. Grey and Beatrice Buckland Grey, South Sea Settlers (London: Harold, Holt and Co, 1927), 263. 46. Interview with “X O’Brien,” National Maritime Union, New York City, American Life Histories, Manuscripts from the Federal Writers Project, 1936–1940, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; http://lcweb2.loc.gov/mss/wpalh2/22/2202/ 22021104/22021104.pdf. 47. Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 212. 48. Armstrong Sperry, “Newbery Award Acceptance Paper,” delivered in Harvard Yard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 1941, cited at http://www.ogram.org/sperry/ papers/Newbery/Acceptance.shtml. 49. Sperry, “Newbery Award Acceptance Paper.” 50. The Kaimiloa Expedition was so named after the expedition’s four-masted schooner (the phrase was a Hawaiian one, meaning “long search”) owned by multimillionaire Medford Kellum of Florida. See Armstrong Sperry, “The Charge of the Tiger Shark,” The World Magazine, February 7, 1926, 7. 51. Sperry, “Newbery Award Acceptance Paper.” 52. World Magazine, April 25, 1926. 53. World Magazine, May 23, 1926. 54. Sperry, One Day with Manu (Philadelphia: John Winston Co., 1933). 55. “Armstrong Sperry,” Current Biography (New York: H.W. Wilson Company, 1941), 813. 56. See Paul Lyons, American Pacifism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2006), 219. Melville’s back catalog had laid dormant for nearly twenty years after a brief resurrection of interest in the wake of Robert Louis Stevenson. Introducing a 1902 edition of Typee, Columbia University Professor of English Literature W. P. Trent observed that while Melville has “passed out of vogue” he had “recently been restored in favor, owing partly to the high praise given him by the late Robert Louis Stevenson.” See Herman Melville, Typee: Life in the South Seas, ed. W. P. Trent (Boston: D. C. Heath and Co., 1902), iii. 57. Raymond M. Weaver, “The Centennial of Herman Melville,” The Nation 109 (August 2, 1919): 145–46. 58. Raymond M. Weaver, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (New York: George H. Doran, 1921). 59. See Raymond M. Weaver Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York City, MS#1316. 60. See Weaver, Melville, 196. In explaining Melville’s popular resurrection and significance to 1920s modernist thinking, Paul Lauter noted that the “South Seas island connection” was important. See Lauter, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, and American Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 205, 274. 61. Weaver, Melville, 399. Neglecting Frederick O’Brien’s influence, Clare L. Spark has concluded that Weaver was “the founding father of the Melville Revival.” See Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (Kent: Kent States University, 2001), 45. Linda Costanzo Cahir shares a similar conclusion. See Cahir, Solitude and Society in the Works of Herman Melville and Edith Wharton (Westport: Greenwood, 1999), 12. For a broader discussion of the significance of the Melville Revival in the 1920s consult Eric Aronoff, Composing Cultures: Modernism, American Literary Studies, and the Problem of Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013). 62. Weaver, Melville, 210–11. In 1921 Carl Van Doren observed that while Melville was “thoroughly sensitive to the felicities of the exotic life,” he never lost “himself in it entirely as did later men, like Lafcadio Hearn and Pierre Loti.” Rather, Melville always remained “the shrewd and smiling Yankee.” See Carl Van Doren, The American Novel (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 70. 63. Herman Meville, Omoo, 5th impression (New York: W. R. Caldwell & Co., 1922). The renewed interest in Melville was expressed across the English-speaking world.

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See for example the 1922 British reprint of Mardi; Herman Melville, Mardi and a Voyage Thither (London: Constable and Co., 1922). 64. See Herman Melville, Typee: A Romance of the South Seas, ed. Sterling Andrus Leonard (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1920), vi. 65. Melville, Typee, Leonard’s introduction, vi. 66. See J. W. Church, “A Vanishing People of the South Seas: The Tragic Fate of the Marquesan Cannibals, Noted for their Warlike Courage and Physical Beauty,” National Geographic (October 1919): 275–306. 67. Meade Minnigerode, Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville and a Bibliography (New York: Edmond Byrne Hackett, 1922), 3. English poet and writer John Masefield had expressed his opinion regarding Melville in 1912. See Paul Giles, “‘Bewildering Entanglement’: Melville’s Engagement with British Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert Steven Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 225. 68. Siegbert Salomon Prawer, A Cultural Citizen of the World: Sigmund Freud's Knowledge and Use of British and American Writing (London: MHRA and Maney, 2009), 64. The German subtitle had been changed to “An Experience in the South Seas.” 69. The Evening World, October 26, 1921. 70. New York Tribune, September 25, 1921. 71. Evening Public Ledger, September 17, 1921. French-American zoologist Du Chaillu had indeed discovered the gorilla for the Western world. See James L. Newman, Encountering Gorillas: A Chronicle of Discovery, Exploitation, Understanding and Survival (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 23–47. 72. New York Tribune, October 19, 1921. 73. Publishers Weekly 101 (January 7, 1922): 21. 74. The Evening World, January 16, 1922. 75. New York Tribune, November 4, 1921. 76. The Washington Times, February 5, 1922. 77. The Washington Times, October 5, 1921. 78. The Bienville Democrat, October 6, 1921. 79. Evening Star, May 11, 1922. 80. See Walter E. Traprock, My Northern Exposure: The Kawa at the Pole (New York; G. P. Putnam’s, 1922). 81. Robert Cushman Murphy, “The Romance of Science in the South Seas,” National Geographic Magazine 48 (November 1925): 355. 82. New York Tribune, August 28, 1921. 83. Lyons, American Pacifism, 43. 84. Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, Faery Lands of the South Seas (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1921), 1.

NINE A South Seas Education Platform Speakers, National Geographic, and Margaret Mead

Visiting the Marquesas in 1921, American Harry Pidgeon reflected on his terms of reference. Commenting that no “island of the sea” had “attracted me as this one has—not alone for its scenery but for its romantic history as well,” Pidgeon’s expectations were shaped by the twin forces of history and literature. His historical reference point was Captain David Porter’s recollections of one hundred years before, while the recently resurrected Herman Melville and Typee (which, as noted, had itself borrowed heavily from Porter’s work) provided the literary inspiration. Visiting a feasting ground, Pidgeon made an immediate connection with Melville: it “seemed probable,” he wrote, “that it was the place where Melville’s hero feasted with King Mehevi.” 1 During the decade following World War I, Pidgeon was just one of many Westerners who visited the South Seas, a region that continued to fascinate Americans, Australians, and others. In the period after World War I, it was easier than ever to “learn” about the South Seas. Stimulated partly by the prominent place accorded the South Seas in a range of cultural forms, the abiding interest in the Pacific also reflected the continuing influence of the region in “scientific” and educational discourses. As this chapter explains, public lectures from professional “platform speakers” played a key role in that process, as did the publication of popular “scientific” journals such as National Geographic, which in turn reflected the analyses offered by anthropologists, the most famous of whom was Margaret Mead. Significantly, too, despite their stated intentions to provide “objective” and “scientific” accounts of the region for popular audi135

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ences, their representations of the Pacific continued to reflect and perpetuate the myths, falsehoods, and fictions that characterized less scholarly depictions of the region. Public lectures on a great variety of topics had long been an important and early form of adult education in the United States. In 1826 Americans’ desire for self-improvement was recognized in Massachusetts with the establishment of the Lyceum movement, an attempt at formalizing hitherto ad hoc public lectures. As the network expanded across the United States it provided a ready-made circuit for accredited platform speakers to spread their message. 2 During the late nineteenth century the platform speaker circuit was fostered by the appearance of private Lyceums, such as the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, established in 1868 by James C. Redpath. 3 Redpath adopted the practice of hiring platform speakers—including prominent personalities such as Mark Twain— and then committing them to extended tours. Perhaps more important than the private bureaus was the establishment of the Chautauqua assemblies in New York in 1874. Initially established as a forum for Sunday school teachers, the organization subsequently broadened into an educational self-improvement movement. By the early twentieth century the Chautauqua had sought to expand its reach by establishing “circuit” or “tent” Chautauquas. During the summer months a stable of speakers and performers toured more isolated parts of the United States providing not only speakers but a space in which they would be heard. The Chautauqua tent would be pitched in the local fairground for a few days before moving on to the next town. 4 In Australasia, while Lyceum theaters appeared in several cities, this adult education/improvement role was usually delivered by another benevolent public organization, the Mechanics’ Institute, or School of Arts. First appearing in the Australian colonies during the late 1820s, and lasting until the Great War, these institutions “made a unique and distinctive contribution” to adult education in Australia. As Philip Candy has noted, throughout “the nineteenth century the public lecture served as a major vehicle for enlightenment and for entertainment.” 5 Australians learned about the South Seas through the library services and public lecture programs provided by these organizations. 6 With the decline of the School of Arts movement in Australia during the interwar period some of this public education role regarding the South Seas was taken up through the outreach or “extension” programs of Australian universities. During the early 1930s, for example, the University of Sydney offered an extension program that included a twelvelecture series on “The Pacific Islands.” With the first lecture providing a general introduction, subsequent talks covered a variety of themes including geography (with notes citing facts on climate and agriculture courtesy of Robert Louis Stevenson) and anthropology (the “Good-look-

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ing by European standards” Polynesians were contrasted to the “coal black” Melanesians). 7 In the United States, platform speakers addressing South Seas themes had appeared on the Lyceum and Chautauquas platforms for many years. But in the wake of the wartime musical interest in Hawaii, and Frederick O’Brien’s postwar musings, the South Seas became one of the more popular topics of the 1920s. Platform speakers carried the South Seas tradition across the length and breadth of the United States and played a very important role in informing regional perceptions. In August 1929, audiences at Redpath’s Chautauqua six-day “Tent” program in Abilene, Kansas, were entertained and informed with a “South Seas program” promising “all the charm and witchery of the ‘Paradise of the Pacific.’” Center stage were “Vierra’s Hawaiians,” who were still on the road attracting large crowds to their musical performances. 8 By the 1920s the use of visual material to support such lectures was standard. J. Alex Brown, a former employee of the New York City Board of Education, offered a hundred-slide “visual education” show entitled “Where Life is Different,” which he played to school audiences. 9 Camille Rathun, noted for her “charming informality,” toured the Midwest in the 1920s with a lecture program entitled “strategic islands of the Pacific.” 10 In 1924 Professor Frederic Washburn from the University of Minnesota conducted a three-lecture traveling program with two hundred “lantern slides” and titles promising both entertainment and information: “The South Sea Islands: Land of Silent Footfalls,” alluded to O’Brien; “Sixteen Hundred Miles in a Trading Schooner” referred to writers such as Stevenson and London; and “The Savage Marquesas” alluded to Melville. While Washburn sought to challenge literary perceptions of the South Seas, his principal aim was to provide a point of brand differentiation for his product. “Coming at a time when we have been fed to repletion upon romantic literature about this faraway country in the lonely Pacific,” it was noted that Washburn’s “frank yet delicate treatment of the subject is refreshing to say the least.” As with a number of musical performances, much was made of the power of the lecturer to transport their audience to the South Seas: “At the close of one of these lectures, the audience feels that it has actually been in the tropics amongst a childlike, gentle, kindly and ignorant people, who take life very easily, and who have many strange and to us barbarous customs; a dying race, doomed by the disease and vices of the white man.” 11 To further facilitate a connection with their audience, many platform speakers routinely used the South Seas literary tradition as a tool to promote their activities. Often this took the form of allusions to noted South Seas authors. At the same time as he distanced himself from the “romantic literature,” Professor Washburn utilized that romantic tradition to sell his program: “Mr. Washburn went to the famous Typee Valley, Melville’s home among the Cannibals in 1842 and brought back interesting souve-

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nirs from there and elsewhere.” 12 During the 1930s Englishman Selwyn Driver toured the United States with his program: “Around Amazing America and Tahiti.” The promotional material alluded to Robert Louis Stevenson, Pierre Loti, Paul Gauguin, and Rupert Brooke. 13 Driver was followed by another Englishman, Professor B. R. Baumgardt, whose lectures reflected a dilemma confronting many so-called “South Seas experts.” To ensure their financial viability they needed to not only inform but entertain. While most platform speakers claimed at least some form of educational credentials to give their South Seas pronouncements more credibility, the key to their success was in entertaining their audience. Baumgardt reflected this dilemma when he addressed audiences in New York. Hawaii, therefore, was the “wonderland of tropical beauty,” as well as a place of great “scientific interest.” 14 For Baumgardt, it was important to satisfy the public’s scientific curiosity, as well as the widespread desire to be entertained by stories of places that often remained in the realm of the fantastic. Another platform speaker who reflected this dilemma was New Zealander Leila M. Blomfield. During, the 1920s Blomfield toured hundreds of schools across America’s West Coast and Midwest, delivering her lectures on Maori’s “rapid advance from savagery to civilization, from cannibalism to citizenship.” Again, to ensure her audience was entertained, as well as informed, Blomfield delivered her presentations in traditional Maori dress. 15 The continuing popularity of South Seas authors, as well as the extent to which the South Seas literary tradition permeated American popular culture during the interwar period, was further evidenced by endorsements from South Seas literary icons. In establishing the credentials of their South Seas performances, platform speakers exploited those endorsements, and highlighted their own literary connections and antecedents. Mildred Leo Clemens, who toured the United States, Australia, and New Zealand with her extravaganza Happy Hawaii—which included film, dance, and music, as well as the obligatory public lecture—provided an “authentic” experience in part because her promotional material reminded potential attendees that she was “the cousin of Mark Twain.” 16 Similarly, Dr. George A. Bronson Jr., who toured Texas, Oklahoma, Illinois, Kansas, and Ohio with his “Hawaiian picture show” (the “world’s greatest educational entertainment”) was quick to emphasize he was a “companion of the late Jack London.” 17 That the platform speaker was usually a seasoned traveler who spoke from firsthand experience was also a crucial dimension in the advertising of the performance. Describing himself as “America’s foremost world traveler,” Burton Holmes presented a lecture entitled “Happy Hawaii” that utilized slides and motion pictures. 18 Dr. Edward Burton McDowell used “lantern slides” and motion pictures to support his lecture program through the Northeast and Midwest. Speaking on such topics as “Samoa:

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Tropical Paradise of the South Pacific” and “The Fiji Islands,” McDowell presented himself in the immodest terms characteristic of many selfstyled South Pacific “experts.” “The enterprising traveler,” it was noted in publicity for McDowell’s lectures, “has the undisputed right to say that his motion picture camera was the first to be operated in either Samoan or Fiji Islands; and that his moving pictures of savage life and custom in these remote lands are today the only ones in existence.” 19 William F. Aldrich’s “Trip to the Hawaiian Islands” promised “something unique and entirely different” with his “consistent box office magnet” that combined a lecture, a twenty-minute colorized motion picture with synchronized musical accompaniment, and his “Imperial Hawaiian singers.” “His program played to sold-out audiences in California before he tried his hand in the Midwest. 20 Some of the most successful and influential platform speakers were individuals who identified themselves as South Sea Islanders. Among the most enduring of these individuals was New Zealand/Aotearoa Maori Wherahiko Rawei. 21 Rawei’s background enabled him to claim an authenticity that permitted him to create the “very atmosphere of the Pacific.” “Do not get the mistaken idea,” it was claimed in one of his brochures, “that he presents a travelogue. On the contrary it is a living picture of Polynesian life in the person of one who has lived it and knows it all experimentally through and through.” 22 Promotional testimony suggested that Rawei and his family had arrived in New York in 1903 to attend “The Congress of Nationalities,” and, following a successful musical recital at the Art Institute of Chicago, they had decided to stay and entertain and inform American audiences. 23 “The Raweis” (including wife Hine Taimoa and their daughter “Little Rae”) first appeared on the Lyceum Circuit shortly before World War I. The trio offered not only a lecture but music, songs, and scenery—a “most unique and fascinating entertainment, portraying native life of the South Sea islands.” Billed as “Native New Zealanders,” their performance was “replete with instruction and inspiration.” Describing the “rise of their people from savagery to Christianity,” the Raweis presented “a kind of Polynesian play picturing the old, wild life of the savage tribes of the South Seas in sharp contrast to the present-day civilization of the same people, who now boast the best government under the sun.” New Zealand was lauded as the “wonderland of the South Seas,” and a “land of romance, poetry and sentiment.” 24 Identifying a complex series of gradations on the scale from savagery to civilization, Rawei described the Maori as “the highest type of savage life inhabiting the islands of the Pacific.” In language owing much to theories of scientific racism, Maori were commended as a “people who have been wonderfully quick to forsake their aboriginal customs and superstitions and fit themselves for the highest walks of civilized life.”

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Rawei’s connection with his “primitive” origins purportedly remained strong and stood as an exemplar to other colonized peoples: “Dr. Rawei is the product of modern Christian culture as contrasted with the primitive condition of his native South Sea island home, and a convincing, living rebuke to the native American who says he has no chance.” Rawei’s credentials in both the civilized and primitive worlds left him well placed to educate his audience who were assured that his English was “remarkably correct.” 25 Clear evidence of the need to entertain and intrigue audiences can be found in the biographical material that accompanied Rawei’s appearances. Early promotional material suggested that: “Mr. Rawei “was born in the wilds of Northern Zealand, among the most savage people, was adopted by an English lady when about twelve years old, given a through education and enabled to graduate with high honors and the degree of Master of Arts from Christ Church University.” 26 By the early 1920s, when Rawei was working by himself within the Redpath-Hooker Chautauquas, he was now being addressed as “Dr. Rawei.” His life story still “read like a delightful novel” but had changed dramatically. It was now being claimed that Rawei had been born in the 1850s in the Maori village of Pipiriki. A few days after his birth his village was attacked by British soldiers and his mother and father (who was “Chief”) were killed. The young Rawei was adopted by the British colonel who led the raid and was taken to England where he was educated at the Rugby School before being sent to medical school. He then returned to the South Seas where he “ministered to the natives of these islands made famous by the stories of explorers and novelists.” 27 Such accounts differ starkly from earlier reports about Rawei in the New Zealand press. In 1893 the Ashburton Guardian identified Rawei as a “half-caste Maori evangelist” who had recently given “one of his lecture entertainments in aid of his Maori Mission.” He discussed the “life of the Maoris in the King Country” before singing in English and Maori. It was hoped that locals would support Rawei financially in his efforts to civilize and Christianize. 28 The Otago Witness, however, raised the “diverse opinions” in the community regarding Rawei’s bona fides and his mission to improve the condition of the people in his village of Pipiriki. Calls for Rawei to produce his “credentials” had been made. After seeing a letter from a former employer in Sydney and from the colonel of the Salvation Army, the newspaper was satisfied Rawei was a “perfectly honest, straightforward young man.” Furthermore, the newspaper claimed that it had sighted account books related to the mission. 29 While there is no newspaper or shipping record of Rawei visiting Australia before 1893, he did take his show to Australia after leaving Otago. In Launceston, Tasmania, the visit of the “young New Zealand evangelist” had been anticipated with “much interest.” During a religious service at a local Methodist Church he told the audience he had left

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New Zealand to find more funds to support his work. His address to the Mechanics Institute saw the doors closed to prevent overcrowding. 30 Rawei returned to Launceston in February 1894 but the reception he received this time was more skeptical. Noting that the evangelical dimension of Rawei’s first visit had been replaced by a “cash business,” the Examiner asked for his credentials. 31 Rawei, accompanied by his wife “Hinie Taimoa,” then moved onto regional Victoria. In Stawell, Rawei provided “enjoyable entertainment” with “striking accounts of peculiar habits, strange customs, and remarkable traditions of his mother’s people—the fast disappearing Maoris.” They stated that their aim was to build a “model home” in King Country as an example for all Maori about the benefits of civilization and Christianity. 32 In 1897 Rawei and Hinie were performing to packed auditoriums in Fremantle, Western Australia. 33 The Daily News reported that their audiences “experienced some of the enthusiasm for Maoriland and the Maoris that intelligent visitors to that wonderful land always imbibe.” 34 The following year the Raweis were still in Australia, delivering lectures to large audiences. 35 In 1899, according to a letter received by a resident of Mudgee, New South Wales, they were back in New Zealand. Recalling an earlier visit, the resident had been informed via a letter from Hinie that they had returned to New Zealand and established a Christian school. 36 In 1899 a Wanganui, New Zealand, resident wrote to the Wellington Evening Post, questioning Rawei’s continuing claims for his work. “The Reverend Mr. Williams,” who ministered to the village of Pipiriki, disputed certain “facts” Rawei had conveyed about Maori in the Waikato/ King Country. 37 These allegations may have spurred a decision by Rawei to again leave New Zealand and head for the United States. Between 1899 and 1901 references to the Raweis appeared regularly in the American press, although by August 1901 they were back in Australia. 38 From this time through to 1903 the Raweis traversed Australasia, but their evangelical mission had been replaced by an educative lecture, delivering “beautiful word pictures” and songs about the “wonderland from which he hails.” 39 In 1906 the Poverty Bay Herald reported on Rawei’s second visit to the United States, identifying him as a “Baptist preacher.” Quoting from the Michigan Grand Rapids Press, the report suggested “Dr. Rawei’s life reads like a romance.” Only twelve years before he had been “a little naked savage running wild in the forests of his homeland.” While no mention was made of his wife, the report noted that as well as Rae, another child—“Piwari”—also performed in his shows. 40 Sensing some fabrication, the Wellington Free Lance asked “If ‘Doctor Rawei,’ why not ‘Bishop?’” 41 From 1913 Rawei performed exclusively for the Redpath Chautauqua Circuit and mostly toured the Midwest. By 1919 the Auckland-based New Zealand Observer reported that Rawei was back in New Zealand and was

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giving an address to the Orphan’s Club at the Masonic Hall. The report did not connect him with the Maori performer who had left New Zealand many years before. While still “highly-cultured,” Rawei was no longer a Maori but a “gifted native teacher formerly of Moorea, one of the Tahitian islands.” As well as showing “native cloth,” Rawei performed “charming and tuneful specimens of Tahitian melodies.” 42 There are no media reports suggesting the ruse was exposed, although Rawei and his family were back working in the United States by the early 1920s. Advertised endorsements of Rawei’s performances came from a number of sources, including citations from Australian newspapers that appear to have never existed or had ceased publication three decades previously. The most significant endorsement of a Rawei tour, however, came in 1924 when in offering yet another version of Rawei’s life, mention was made of his close association with Robert Louis Stevenson. Promotional material for his new program, “Uncle Sam’s Samoan Islanders,” included a quote attributed to the Scotsman. Rawei was apparently a “native raconteur who fascinates with the witchery of his word paintings. Beware of songs with his guitar. . . .” Another endorsement attributed to Stevenson stated Rawei was a “Polynesian raconteur who fascinates one with the witchery of his word paintings, so beware, lest he start you a roaming o’er over the Southern Seas. . . . Apart from this bad habit, he is a fine fellow, and one of my choice friends.” 43 To make an authentic connection between a Maori, Samoa, and Robert Louis Stevenson, the promotional materials alleged that Rawei had practiced as a doctor in Samoa and hence his connections. 44 Rawei’s peregrinations—both real and fabricated—thus continued until his death in the Cook Islands, while en route to New Zealand, in 1928. 45 The interest in Rawei was just one sign of the ongoing fascination with the South Seas. Platform speakers continued to draw attentive audiences, and by the 1930s “Sit Down” shows—a form of entertainment where patrons sat down to watch the performance—were popular on the platform circuit. 46 A popular “Sit Down” performance was the “Hawaiian Show,” a program of entertainment, which, like the exhibits at World’s Fairs, was designed to entertain by suggesting to the audience they were party to an ethnographic exhibition. One such entrepreneur was L. Harvey “Doc” Cann, who worked for George W. Traver’s Chautauqua Shows. Exploiting the label “Chautauqua” to conceal what was essentially a carnival, Travers secured bookings in towns that normally rejected the “carnies.” Cann started his Hawaiian show because it was the only banner not in use. He created a suitable stage, a Salvation Army bass drum, and then found two “young ladies” who could dance in a style that the audience accepted as a genuine hula. 47 One notable platform speaker of the early 1920s was Gilbert H. Grosvenor, who made a number of public addresses, including slide shows,

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based on his 1920 journey to Hawaii. 48 Like so many before him, Grosvenor (who was also Alexander Graham Bell’s son-in-law) was seduced by Hawaii. “We enjoyed Hawaii immensely,” he wrote soon after his 1920 trip, it “is a very extraordinary place.” 49 Of greater significance than his platform presentations, Grosvenor brought the South Seas to millions of Americans, and the rest of the world, through the pages of his magazine, National Geographic. National Geographic played a crucial role in articulating and popularizing the South Seas during the interwar period. Its combination of words and pictures gave the magazine added authority at the same time as providing a platform for the type of titillation long associated with the region. The founders of the National Geographic Society, which was established in 1898, had met initially to discuss “the advisability of organizing a society for the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge.” A journal was considered an important aspect of the Society’s outreach and during 1899 it published its first “Magazine.” Reflecting the composition of the Society more generally, the National Geographic Magazine began life as a “technical” journal for informed audiences. In the wake of the Spanish-American War, however, the Society envisaged for itself a wider national role and moved to broaden its membership. 50 As a 1906 memorandum noted, the motivation for such expansion was simple: “The usefulness and influence of the National Geographic Society could . . . be considerably extended by an increased membership throughout the country.” 51 This attempt at attracting a broader membership was also reflected in the content and focus of the magazine. Having founded the magazine, during the early twentieth century Grosvener served as the magazine’s editor. Seeking to broaden National Geographic’s appeal by making its style and content more accessible, its articles were supposedly written at a level that could be understood by “a child of ten.” 52 Of crucial importance in the enterprise was the inclusion of photographs. As Alexander Graham Bell noted in a letter to Grosvenor: “Everyone looks at the pictures and LOOKS AT THEM ALL. . . . Of first importance to my mind is ILLUSTRATIONS AND PLENTY OF THEM. But what kind of illustrations? Those, of course, that prove most interesting to ordinary people, and stimulate them to read the articles.” 53 Over succeeding years, one of the keys to the magazine’s continuing popularity was Grosvenor’s inclusion of “many wonderful and unique photographs”: “The National Geographic Magazine brings to our feet the out of the way corners of the world. It gives to the reader, from the men foremost in the world of Exploration and Discovery, not only vivid descriptions of strange countries and stranger people, but actual pictures of their daily life.” 54 Grosvenor went so far as to copyright the term “Pictorial Geography.” 55

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Combining an astute sense of what would appeal to a general audience with an equally well-honed sense of the public’s desire for “scientific” information about a range of subjects, Grosvenor’s approach to the magazine ensured that within a relatively short space of time National Geographic was soon both “popular and influential.” 56 While the magazine was a benefit of membership of the Society, its popularity transcended its members. As early as 1906 the magazine was reporting that the “living character of the National Geographic makes it extremely popular in the reading rooms of public and school libraries.” 57 It was claimed that the journal was held in “virtually every public library in the United States and thousands of school libraries.” 58 The Society’s membership, and hence the magazine’s circulation, increased rapidly through the first two decades of the twentieth century. By 1919 the magazine had receipts of nearly two million dollars and a circulation larger than the combined circulations of Atlantic Monthly, Century Magazine, Harpers, Outlook, Review of Reviews, and Scribner’s. The Reader’s Digest could match it but only the Saturday Evening Post could boast a larger circulation. 59 The journal, moreover, was providing its “Bulletins” to nearly five hundred newspapers reaching a combined readership of twelve million people. 60 The magazine’s popularity continued to grow during the interwar period. In 1920 circulation was 750,000. By the mid-1930s it topped one million, and kept on rising. 61 The subscription list, however, reveals just a small measure of the enduring significance of National Geographic. Its popularity among teachers and librarians ensured wide readership, as did the magazine’s place in other public domains such as doctors’ offices and barbershops. In 1936 Grosvenor made a conservative estimate that in any given month of publication the magazine reached at least five million readers. 62 Indicating that he understood well the significance of the National Geographic enterprise, Grosvenor wondered who could “even begin to estimate the cultural results of distributing this readable, easily understood, humanized and picturized [sic] knowledge among millions of people, not only of the United States but of foreign lands, decade after decade?” 63 Grosvenor’s assessment was accurate. By the interwar period the National Geographic magazine enjoyed enormous pedagogical power, which was at least in part a consequence of the magazine’s content and its shrewd marketing. Many Americans wanted to read about the world beyond their shores and the National Geographic was an attractive option because of its apparently altruistic, apolitical motivations, and its insistence that readers could be assured of “the magazine’s absolute accuracy and impartiality of its contents.” “Authenticity” was thus again fundamental to the public’s acceptance of the images and details of the South Seas—and elsewhere. Of course, National Geographic was not without its biases. As Tamar Rothenberg has shown, the magazine “expressed very

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definite politics, and dressed its facts in fantasies of adventure, travel, sexual availability, Anglo Saxon superiority, [and] nationalism.” 64 From its beginnings the National Geographic Society revealed an interest in the South Seas—an interest that increased following the American annexation of Hawaii. With the end of World War I the magazine responded to the renewed interest in the South Seas with a major article by author John W. Church entitled “A Vanishing People of the South Seas: The Tragic fate of the Marquesan Cannibals, Noted for Their Warlike Courage and Physical Beauty.” 65 With his article appearing just weeks after the publication of White Shadows in the South Seas, Church, like Frederick O’Brien, had been moved to write in lament of the “tragic fate of the Marquesan cannibals.” Offering a portrait of Marquesan society that touched on the primitivist themes that had become so important during the wartime and postwar periods, Church conceded that while the Marquesan had been a “cruel and, licentious, cannibal,” their way of life “approached the ideal combination of health, wealth, and happiness to a degree rarely, if ever, attained by any civilized community.” This happy existence lasted until the “long arm of civilisation” reached the islands, thereby precipitating a “tragic story of a losing fight” against the degrading evils of Western civilisation. 66 Church documented the degeneration of the Marquesans. With a warm recollection of Melville’s South Sea idyll, it was noted the Typee Valley was now an “utterly desolate valley” devoid of inhabitants. Within a generation, it was predicted, there would be no more “full-blooded” Marquesans. The Marquesans’ fate provided a “tragic story of a losing fight by a race of savages against a civilization represented in this instance by the whaler, the missionary, the trader, the ‘blackbirder.’” Moreover, according to Church, the frequently misguided attempts at conversion of the missionaries had exacerbated the Marquesans’ misfortunes. 67 Church’s National Geographic story was widely discussed in American newspapers. One syndicated story reprinted around the country led with such sensational headlines as “Spells death of perfect women” and “Famous South Sea Belles are now a drunken degraded race.” 68 The Honolulu newspaper The Garden Island took exception to the story, particularly its critique of the missionary endeavor. 69 In 1924 Gilbert Grosvenor devoted an entire edition of National Geographic to Hawaii, writing most of the issue himself. In introducing the magazine, Grosvenor insisted that Hawaii deserved attention because as “the members of this Society know, the Hawaiian Islands are one of the wonderlands of the globe.” Nature “conceals in them,” he continued, “more of her mysteries to attract and chain the attention of the student and more of her masterpieces to enrapture the visitor than in any similar area.” 70 Offering a potted history of Hawaii and the South Seas, National Geographic attempted to reconcile the contradictions that had long character-

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ized the South Seas tradition. Hawaiians, when first “discovered,” had been a “handsome semi-civilized race . . . happy and kindly . . . fond of music and of the beauties of Nature.” But they were purportedly also subject to “a peculiar and harsh form of religion, of which the tabu was the principle feature.” Grosvenor compared the early missionaries to the Pilgrim Fathers: where the Pilgrims “were sacrificing all to seek in a distant land religious freedom for themselves,” the missionaries “were sacrificing everything to take religious liberty and light as they conceived it, to others.” Grosvenor went even further to link this spiritual enterprise with the story of America. “Probably,” he hypothesized, “no page in American history is more stirring and romantic than the adventure on which these young men and women of New England embarked.” The motivation for the missionary endeavor, however, was now shared with the Hawaiians themselves. It had been “Hawaiian boys” in New England and “their stories of the godlessness of their islands that forced the Missionaries to act.” 71 In a 1920s testimonial praising the National Geographic magazine, Society member, magazine contributor, and former President William Howard Taft remarked: I wonder if you men realize how much it means to have a monthly magazine like The Geographic going into hundreds of thousands of American homes with its contents of informative, interesting, stimulating reading matter and pictures? Especially at a time when these homes are being bombarded with cheap, sensational and sex pandering publications. I consider the National Geographic Magazine one of the most potent educational influences in American life to-day. 72

Yet at the same time as Taft was expressing concern about the sexual assault on Americans’ moral welfare, the National Geographic was playing its own important role in titillating quarters of American society as it became “America’s ubiquitous source of wholesome exotics and erotica.” 73 Through the photographic representation of the South Seas and its preoccupation with titillation, the National Geographic sustained a vision of the “porno-tropics.” 74 While bare-breasted women had appeared in National Geographic since at least 1908, many of the “dark, bare breasted women” who appeared in the magazine prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War were indigenous women of Hawaii and the South Pacific—exoticized, eroticized, and essentialized. The magazine captured on its pages various “types,” and the South Sea Islander woman “type” was typically “beautiful,” with “luxuriant hair, live eyes, perfect teeth, a slender graceful form, a skin of velvet texture, and unblemished figure.” Readers were left to assume that all Islander women possessed the physical features of the women they had seen. As Tamar Y. Rothenberg has noted, this left the photographs to perform an “abstracted role by embodying the cultural essence of the

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group.” 75 They reaffirmed the South Seas as a sexualized environment where white Americans could live out their fantasies. In justifying their decision earlier in the century to reveal naked breasts in the pages of the National Geographic, the Society’s President Alexander Graham Bell had insisted that “prudery should not influence the decision” and that such pictures should be included because they were “a true reflection of the customs of the times in those islands.” 76 By the interwar period, however, photos of naked South Sea Islanders rarely met such criteria. Although Islander women appeared topless in the magazine it was usually no longer a “true reflection” of their existence. Magazine journalists and editors were fully aware of this, but they were equally aware of the power of such illustrations. Photographers encouraged locals to wear outfits that their grandparents or even earlier generations may have worn. Usually such a fraud was not disclosed, although in illustrations accompanying a piece by Grosvenor himself on the Hawaiian Islands a photograph of a topless Hawaiian girl was captioned: “pure blooded Hawaiian girl wearing the costume of past generations.” 77 That the photo was little different from the fantasy postcards of exotic women that were sold in Honolulu at the time was reflected in the fact that this purported historical recreation had the woman holding a ukulele—an instrument only forty years old, but intimately connected with American notions about islands of romance and music. Rather than an historical reconstruction, the photo represented American fantasies—fantasies that continued to perceive and construct the South Seas as being outside time. The final South Seas article to appear in National Geographic before the start of the Pacific War reflected on this very idea. A travelogue by two Norwegians who decided to spend their honeymoon in the South Pacific, this article told readers that the two lovers were “turning back time in the South Seas.” The honeymooners were going back in time because they “wanted to go back to nature.” Happily for them, they found a “Tropic Eden.” 78 To the generation of young men growing up in the interwar years National Geographic was a site of titillation. As Marlon Brando noted, his boyhood obsession with Tahiti came from the pages of National Geographic. 79 During the 1920s and 1930s, other “scientific” sources of information also served to excite the interest of Westerners in the South Seas. Indeed, the popularity of both platform speakers and National Geographic during the interwar years reflected not only the general public interest in the South Seas but the degree to which “science”—broadly conceived—had always played an important role in informing the tradition. At its foundation, the idea of the South Seas had been a product of Western science, conceived and sustained by the navigators and scientists who had found the South Seas, and by the writers who typically adopted pseudoscientific approaches to ensure the popularity of their works. The use of scientif-

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ic language to describe the South Seas had always given legitimacy and authenticity to works that in reality lacked both. As highlighted by the experiences of Armstrong Sperry, during the 1920s the South Pacific once again became the site for numerous scientific expeditions. Through the interwar period numerous “expeditions” were sent to the South Seas with a variety of purposes. Sperry’s journey with the Bernice P. Bishop Museum’s Kaimiloa Expedition, for example, was just one of thirty-two expeditions through the South Seas sponsored by the Honolulu Museum between 1920 and 1934. The American National Research Council, which established a Committee on Pacific Investigations in the early 1920s, also funded a number of expeditions including the 1923 Tanager Expedition with the Bishop and the United States Navy. 80 The following year, another Navy-sponsored expedition examined Fanning, Christmas, Jarvis, and Palmyra Islands. 81 In 1929 the Bishop supported the Pacific Entomological Survey that had begun fieldwork in the Marquesas in 1929. While it had been the science of “discovery” that had first created the South Seas, the science of “ethnography” had been crucial in sustaining it. Ethnography had reflected the amateur nature of Western science before its increasing professionalization during the late nineteenth century. Influenced by this professionalism, however, ethnography was also transformed by the emergence of anthropology and anthropologists. Although anthropology’s triumph would be a gradual affair, the interwar years saw ethnography captured by anthropology and anthropologists. The nonprofessional ethnographers who had sustained the study of “foreign” peoples (missionaries, travelers, and writers) began to lose their authority and power to inform on such issues. Although anthropology’s professional status was confined mainly to the academy, the general public gained glimpses of the new science during the interwar years. During the 1920s, as anthropology as a discipline became popularized outside the academy, it engaged with the public culture. At the forefront of such a development were two South Seas anthropologists: Polish academic Bronislaw Malinowski, who heralded a new era of anthropological inquiry and gave it a public face with his seminal work Argonauts of the Pacific; and American researcher Margaret Mead, whose Coming of Age in Samoa became both an anthropological and popular sensation during the late 1920s. Both anthropologists, but especially Mead, played important roles in furthering the South Seas tradition, particularly ideas pertaining to the region as a site for carnal pleasure. Coming to the South Pacific wary of the South Seas tradition, and bringing what Malinowski labelled “preconceived ideas,” he and Mead sought to provide a more authentic explanation of Western contact with the South Seas than they believed had been offered by earlier misleading

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travel writing and fiction. 82 The amateur ethnographers had alluded to science, but had lacked the proper training to harness its power as a distiller of truth. Malinowski noted that the “research which has been done on native races by men of academic training has proved beyond doubt and cavil that scientific, methodic inquiry can give us results far more abundant and of better quality than those of even the best amateur’s work.” 83 Science was a powerful pedagogical tool. But it did not prevent first Malinowski, and then Mead, from also adopting a more time-honored approach in championing their works. Like countless South Seas sojourners before them, the two anthropologists empowered their works by claiming an authority derived from the fact that they had visited the South Seas, and stayed there for prolonged periods. “It would be easy,” wrote Malinowski, “to quote works of high repute, and with a scientific hall-mark on them, in which wholesale generalizations are laid down before us, and we are not informed at all by what actual experiences the writers have reached their conclusions.” 84 Fieldwork had arrived. Ironically, despite Malinowski and Mead’s skepticism toward earlier works that generalized about the South Seas, and notwithstanding their confidence that their own works were informed and empowered by science and fieldwork, both authors reinforced rather than challenged the South Seas tradition. And although both authors claimed otherwise, neither discarded totally their preconceived ideas about the South Seas. Indeed, it had been their preconceived ideas that had first interested them in the region. Argonauts was a work was a “composite of art, imagination and intuition.” 85 Mead realized that the Great War had enhanced the South Seas’ reputation as a “personal escape” from a “post war world that denied spontaneity” and trammeled “individual passions.” 86 But she found it more difficult to acknowledge these and other popular cultural influences upon her own ideas about the South Seas. Malinowski, too, was following in the figurative footsteps of earlier South Seas sojourners. Despite his insistence that “science” would kill the falsehoods about the South Seas, during his fieldwork in Papua he continued to read the works of Joseph Conrad. 87 Neither Mead nor Malinowski felt it important to challenge the basic foundation of the tradition: namely that the “South Seas” were a Western cultural construction. Malinowski’s Trobriands were “South Sea Islands” and Mead spoke of “South Sea Islanders” and Samoa as a “South Sea Island.” 88 In the islands of Papua, Malinowski painted an image familiar to the general public: “To someone not acquainted with the South Seas landscape it is difficult to convey the permanent impression of smiling festiveness, the alluring clearness of the beach, fringed by jungle trees and palms, skirted by white foam and blue seas.” 89 Malinowski and Mead had set out to subvert the South Seas tradition. But with the irrefutable backing of science, their work confirmed many

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Westerners’ assumptions about the region. While Malinowski railed against the notion of the “typical South Seas islander,” he generalized from his scientific observation and inquiry that Islander women had “exceedingly loose . . . sex morals.” 90 Mead could confirm, with her detailed fieldwork notes, that celibacy was “meaningless” to Samoans. Titillating her readers, she spoke of “pretty” girls, loose women, “trysts beneath the palm trees” and masturbation. 91 The ways in which Mead and Malinowski’s works were published and marketed to the general public were essential elements of their power in supporting the themes upon which the South Seas tradition rested. The accessibility of Coming of Age owed much to Mead’s publisher William Morrow. While Mead had sought a “commercial publisher,” it was Morrow who helped ensure the book’s commercial success. 92 Realizing that the American reading public was receptive to “eroticized images of the South Seas,” Morrow sought significant changes to the manuscript. 93 It was Morrow, too, who oversaw the adoption of American vernacular (“sweetheart, wait for me to-night”) and the rewriting of the introduction and new concluding chapters to interest a general audience. No doubt influenced by the 1927 publication of Malinowski’s Sex and Repression in Savage Society, Morrow also ensured the title of Mead’s book was changed from the relatively mundane “The Adolescent Girl in Samoa” to the racier Coming of Age in Samoa. Again, too, visual images were an essential ingredient of marketing the South Seas, and Morrow insisted that Coming of Age in Samoa used an alluring cover in which a topless Islander woman leads her male partner into the palm grove for the inevitable “tryst.” With the cover made even more sensationalist by the inclusion of a pronouncement from “sexologist” Havelock Ellis, Mead’s “scientific” book had one of the most provocative covers of any contemporary work. William Morrow was selling sex in the same way other publishers of South Seas literature sold sex. In his analysis of Mead’s work Geoffrey Geiger concluded that like “her contemporaries Mead reveals to her reading public not just certain things about the landscape and people of the Pacific, but taps into the landscape of the American imagination of the ‘South Seas.’” 94 Other scholars, too, have reflected on the relationship between Mead’s work and the sexualization of the South Seas. Sharon Tiffany has suggested that Coming of Age in Samoa helped perpetuate the image of Polynesia as “sexual playground,” and Micaela di Leonardo, noting the important role of anthropology in American popular culture, has pointed out that the dominant tendency within public culture in the United States in the interwar period was to read the text as “sex under the palm trees.” 95 While the work of Mead’s contemporaries was important, it was her book that became an international bestseller during the 1920s. Geiger has hypothesized that “more than those of any other author, including Melville, Mead’s writings reinforced and popularized the South Pacific to

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Americans as a key site for imagining the exotic.” 96 Through the interwar years scientific “authority,” augmented by the popularity of platform speakers’ “factual” accounts of the South Seas, and by the visual as well as literary “evidence” provided by National Geographic, had reinforced the compelling amalgam of “fact” and fantasy that informed the idea of the South Seas. NOTES 1. Harry Pidgeon, “Around the World in the ‘Islander,’” National Geographic 53 (February 1928): 151. 2. For an introduction to the Lyceum movement consult Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005); Carl Bode, The American Lyceum (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968); David Mead, Yankee Eloquence in the Middle West: The Ohio Lyceum, 1850–1870 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1951); Leah Stambler, “The Lyceum Movement in American Education, 1826–1845,” Paedagogica Historica 21 (1981): 157–85. 3. See John R. McKivigan, Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). An older biography is Charles F. Horner, The Life of James Redpath and the Development of the Modern Lyceum (New York: Barse and Hopkins, 1926). 4. For a general introduction to the Chautauqua circuit consult Andrew Chamberlin Rieser, The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 5. Philip C. Candy, “The ‘Light of Heaven Itself’: The Contribution of the Institutes to Australia’s Cultural History,” in Pioneering Culture: Mechanics Institutes and School of Arts in Australia, ed. Candy and John Lauren (Adelaide: Auslib Press, 1994), 9. 6. Candy, “The ‘Light of Heaven Itself,’” 1. For further information on the institutes, see Derek Whitlock, The Great Tradition: A History of Adult Education in Australia (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1994). 7. The University of Sydney Study Group Scheme, “The Pacific Islands,” Associated Pamphlet, 193[?], Lecture 1, 18, and The University of Sydney Study Group Scheme, “The Pacific Islands,” Associated Pamphlet, 193[?], Lecture 2, 1, both in the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. In the United States a number of colleges also adopted this extension role. See for example, Michael Shinagel, “The Gates Unbarred”: A History of University Extension at Harvard, 1910–2009 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 8. Paige Lush, Music in the Chautauqua Movement: From 1874 to the 1930s (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2013), 99. 9. See the brochure, “J. Alex Brown: Visual Education”; undated, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department, Iowa City, (hereafter cited as Redpath Chautauqua Collection), http://hdl.loc.gov/ loc.award/iauchau./brownjalex/1. 10. See the brochure, “Camille Rathbun, Presents Worlds Lectures with Perfect Motion Pictures,” n.d., Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iauchau./rathbun/1. 11. See the brochure, “Frederic L. Washburn,” 1924, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iauchau./washburn/1. 12. See the brochure, “Frederic L. Washburn.” 13. See the brochure, “The Selwyn Driver: Lecture – Entertainments,” n.d., Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iauchau./selwyn/1.

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14. See the brochure, “B. R. Baumgardt Lectures,” n.d., Redpath Chautauqua Collection. http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/tc/id/26204/rec/2. Another academic who toured the circuit was William Norwood Brigane, a Professor of Speech at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, who gave a presentation entitled “Hawaii: Crossroads of the Pacific.” See the brochure “William Norwood Brigance: Educator, Author, and Lecturer, Hawaii: Crossroads of the Pacific,” 1928, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/compoundobject/ collection/tc/id/33433/rec/1. 15. See the brochure “Leila M. Bloomfield of New Zealand,” 1923, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/tc/id/ 36114/rec/6. 16. See the brochure, “Mildred Leo Clemens,” Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/tc/id/24835/rec/2. 17. See the brochure, “Dr. George A. Bronson, Jr.: World’s Greatest Educational Entertainment, Hawaiian Picture Show,” Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/tc/id/23165/rec/1. 18. Milwaukee Journal, February 16, 1941. Holmes had been delivering his presentation since at least 1898 with a program titled: “Hawaii: Hula Girls.” How different the 1941 production was from his productions of the 1920s, including his 1927/28 production of the same name, is unclear. See Larry Langman, Return to Paradise: A Guide to South Sea Island Films (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press: 1988), 94. 19. See “Travel Stories: Edward Burton McDowell,” Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/tc/id/3937. 20. See “A Trip to the Hawaiian Islands and Aldrich’s Imperial Hawaiian Singers,” n.d., Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ tc/id/53209. 21. For an introduction to Rawei and his career consult Evan Roberts, “The Peripatetic Career of Wherahiko Rawei: Maori Culture on the Global Chautauqua Circuit, 1893–1927,” in The Cosmopolitan Lyceum, ed. Tom F. Wright (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 203–220. 22. Wherahiko Rawei, “Presenting a South Sea Entertainment,” n.d., Redpath Chautauqua Collection, Department http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/tc/ id/52076. 23. Rawei, “Presenting a South Sea Entertainment.” 24. Wherahiko Rawei, “The Raweis: Native New Zealanders,” 1914, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/tc/id/ 37987/rec/1. 25. Wherahiko Rawei. “The New Zealanders in Song, Story, and Picture from Cannibalism to Culture,” 1916, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/tc/id/43339/rec/2. 26. Rawei, “The New Zealanders in Song, Story, and Picture.” Presumably this was a reference to the Christchurch University College of the University of New Zealand. Introducing Rawei as “Wherahiko Rawei BA,” a 1906 New Zealand newspaper report on Rawei lecturing in the United States concluded he was “probably the same gentlemen who has toured these colonies with his entertainment ‘Maori Picture, Song and Story.’” See Evening Post, July 4, 1906. 27. See the brochure, “The Sterling Circuit of Redpath-Horner Chautauquas 17th Year,” (Hooker, Okla., n.d.) Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/tc/id/35991/rec/1. Charlotte Canning accepted Rawei’s Rugby story in her general study of the Chautauqua Circuit. See Canning, The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 86. 28. Ashburton Guardian, April 18, 1893. 29. Otago Witness, June 29, 1893. 30. Launceston Examiner, September 25, 1893. 31. Launceston Examiner, February 1, 1894.

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32. Horsham Times, May 29, 1894. 33. The Daily News, September 15, 1897. 34. Daily Press, November 4, 1897. 35. National Advocate, April 14, 1898. 36. Mudgee Guardian and North-Western Representative, May 2, 1899. 37. Evening Post, June 13, 1899. 38. Roberts, “Wherahiko Rawei,” 210; Daily Telegraph, August 26, 1901. 39. Evening News, February 18, 1903. 40. Poverty Bay Herald, July 4, 1906. Roberts notes that it would appear the Raweis attended the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, and that Rae was also known as “Piwa.” See Roberts, “Wherahiko Rawei,” 212. 41. Free Lance, July 21, 1906. 42. Observer, October 4, 1919. See also Taranaki Daily News, August 1, 1919. 43. Wherahiko Rawei, “Uncle Sam’s Samoan Islanders,” Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/tc/id/50006. An amended version of the quote in another flyer had Stevenson identify Rawei as a “native Raconteur.” See Wherahiko Rawei, “Uncle Sam’s Samoan Islanders,” 1924, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/traveling-culture/chau1/pdf/rawei/5/brochure.pdf. 44. Wherahiko Rawei, “Uncle Sam’s Samoan Islanders.” 45. Roberts, “Wherahiko Rawei,” 214. 46. Joe McKennon, A Pictorial History of the American Carnival (Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1971), 141. 47. McKennon, American Carnival, 80. 48. McKennon, American Carnival, 80. 49. Gilbert Grosvenor to Edwin P. Grosvenor, August 18, 1920, Grosvenor Family Papers, Part 1, Box 37, Folder 3, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as LoC). 50. Tamar Yosefa Rothenberg, “National Geographic’s World: Politics of Popular Geography, 1888–1945” (PhD Dissertation, Rutgers University, 1999), 56. 51. Gilbert Grosvenor to Members of the National Geographic Society, c. January 10, 1906, Grosvenor Family Papers, Part 1, Box 160, Folder 1, LoC. 52. Rothenberg, “National Geographic’s World,” 202. 53. Alexander Graham Bell to Gilbert Grosvenor, March 5, 1900, Grosvenor Family Papers, Part II, Box 6, Folder 19, LoC. 54. Draft speech, c. 1909, Grosvenor Family Papers, Part 1, Box 160, Folder 1, LoC. 55. “Report of the Director and Editor of the National Geographic Society for the year 1919,” Grosvenor Family Papers, Part 1, Box 160, Folder 1, LoC. 56. Susan Schulten, “The Making of National Geographic: Science, Culture, and Expansionism,” American Studies 41 (2000): 5–29. 57. See National Geographic report, Grosvenor Family Papers, Part 1, Box 160, Folder 1, LoC. 58. J. R. Hilderbrand (Chairman, National Geographic) to Gilbert Grosvenor, November 28, 1924, in “Notes for an address to the Association of American Geographers,” Part 1, Box 159, Folder 2, LoC. 59. Rothenberg, “National Geographic’s World,” 5; “Report of the Director and Editor of the National Geographic Society for the year 1919,” Grosvenor Family Papers, Part 1, Box 160, Folder 1. 60. “Report of the Director and Editor of the National Geographic Society for the year 1919.” Grosvenor Family Papers, LoC. 61. Rothenberg, “National Geographic’s World,” 7, 115. Gilbert Grosvenor, “The National Geographic Society and its Magazine,” National Geographic 49 (January, 1936): 163. 62. Grosvenor, “National Geographic Society and its Magazine,” 123. 63. Grosvenor, “National Geographic Society and its Magazine,” 164. Australians and New Zealanders were not spared from National Geographic’s reach. Ten thousand,

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three hundred and seventy two Australians were members and 4,049 New Zealanders were also listed as belonging to the Society. 64. Rothenberg, “National Geographic’s World,” 16, 19. 65. John W. Church, “A Vanishing People of the South Seas: The Tragic Fate of the Marquesan Cannibals, Noted for Their Warlike Courage and Physical Beauty” National Geographic 36 (October, 1919): 275–306. 66. Church, “A Vanishing People of the South Seas,” 275, 297–98. 67. Church, “A Vanishing People of the South Seas,” 298–99, 306. 68. See for example Richmond Daily Register, January 23, 1920, and Concordia Sentinel, January 17, 1920. 69. The Garden Island, November 18, 1919. 70. Gilbert Grosvenor, “The Hawaiian Islands,” National Geographic 45 (February, 1924): 115. 71. Grosvenor, “The Hawaiian Islands,” 115, 120–21. 72. Hildebrand to Grosvenor, “Notes for an Address to the Association of American Geographers,” Grosvenor Family Papers, LoC. 73. Tamar Y. Rothenberg, Presenting America’s World: Strategies of Innocence in National Geographic (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 3. 74. Rothenberg, Presenting America’s World, 14. The phrase is Anne McClintock’s. See McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 22. 75. Rothenberg, Presenting America’s World, 77. 76. Rothenberg, “National Geographic’s World,” 97. 77. Grosvenor, “Hawaiian Islands,” 125. 78. Thor Heyerdahl, “Turning Back Time in the South Seas,” National Geographic 79 (January, 1941): 109, 113. 79. Michael Sturma, South Seas Maidens: Western Fantasy and Sexual Politics in the South Pacific (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 200), 1. 80. Manuscript, “SC Tanager Expedition,” Files in the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Box 1.8. 81. “SC Waters,” Files in the Bishop Museum, Box 1.1. 82. Bronislaw Malinsowki, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge, 1922), 9. 83. Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, xv. 84. Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 3. 85. John W. Burton and Caitlin W. Thompson, “Nanook and the Kirwinians: Deception, Authenticity, and the Birth of Modern Ethnographic Representation,” Film History 14, no. 1 (2002): 74. 86. Mead cited in Paul Shankman, The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 131. 87. Bronislaw Malinsowki, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (London: Routledge & Kehan Paul, 1967), 27. 88. Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1; Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (New York: William Morrow, 1928), 7, 12 . 89. Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 34. 90. J. C. Furnas, Anatomy of Paradise: Hawaii and the Islands of the South Seas (1937; repr., London: Victor Gollancz, 1950), 32. 91. Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, 97, 141, 135, 14, 137. 92. Sharon W. Tiffany, “Imagining the South Seas: Thoughts in the Sexual Politics of Paradise in Samoa,” Pacific Studies 24 (September–December, 2001): 24. 93. Tiffany, “Imagining the South Seas,” 24. 94. Jeffrey Geiger, Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the American Imperial Imagination (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 39.

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95. Tiffany, “Imagining the South Seas,” 24; Micaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 16–17. 96. Geiger, Facing the Pacific, 38.

TEN South Seas Tourism

A common refrain in platform speakers’ publicity during the 1920s was their ability to take their audience on a “journey” to the South Seas. Reflecting the influence of Frederick O’Brien, Professor Frederic Washburn’s flyer noted that at “the close of one of these lectures” members of the audience feel they have “actually been in the tropics amongst a childlike, gentle, kindly and ignorant people, who take life very easily, and who have many strange and to us barbarous customs; a dying race, doomed by the disease and vices of the white man.” 1 By the late 1920s, however, the pedagogical power of platform speakers was under challenge. Increased leisure time for the middle class, and growing and more financially viable opportunities for international travel and tourism, led increasing numbers of Americans and Australasians to seek firsthand encounters with the South Seas. A frequent and important advertiser in the National Geographic magazine at this time was the Matson Navigation Company. The Matson Line purchased space in the magazine to encourage readers to consider a South Seas holiday on one of its well-appointed vessels. The development of the South Seas as a tourist site during the interwar years was another significant reflection of the pedagogical power of the South Seas during that period. By the 1920s, middle-class Americans and Australasians could realistically consider Hawaii and the South Pacific as holiday destinations. Indeed, by 1925 one commentator remarked that travel to the Pacific had become so commonplace as to be “hardly adventurous.” 2 The development of the South Seas as a tourist site was a by-product of the establishment during the nineteenth century of trade and communication links between the West Coast of the United States and the Hawaiian islands, and more generally between North America and Australasia. 3 Regular shipping services between San Francisco and Honolulu 157

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were established in the late 1860s and extended to Australasia in 1870 with the formation of the short-lived American-Australian Line, which operated a service between San Francisco, Honolulu, Auckland, and Sydney. In 1872 the United States Congress passed a bill to introduce a mail service to Tahiti and the Marquesas. This essentially involved ships of the Oceanic Line meeting cutters from Tahiti and Samoa while in transit and exchanging mail while still at sea as the larger ships continued on to Australasia or North America. 4 Such brief encounters allowed passengers an intriguing if fleeting introduction to the South Seas. In December 1881 long-time New South Wales Premier Henry Parkes recalled a journey from Sydney to San Francisco on the Royal Mail steamer Australia. The ship visited Auckland and Honolulu: and between these places, the weather being fine, we loitered with slackened steam at Samoa for three or four hours, where the native came on board in large numbers for purposes of curiously and trade. . . . Nearly every passenger purchased some article—fan, basket or mat—of native manufacture and our brief stay was full of interest. 5

Trade between these destinations remained fickle through the nineteenth century, but generous government subsidies for the shipping of mail ensured the survival of such services. During the 1890s the desire for an “All British Route” from Great Britain to its Pacific Dominions saw the creation of the “All Red Mail” route between Vancouver and Sydney taking advantage of the recently completed Canadian Pacific Railway. More generally, the New Zealand government saw both the Canadian and American transcontinental railways as a quicker means of communication and trade between Great Britain and the Antipodes and so encouraged the development of the trade route and supported the New Zealand Union Line. 6 Australian authorities, on the other hand, continued to look westward toward the Suez Canal as the most efficient path to Britain. As well as trade developments across the Pacific, increasing colonial interests in the South Pacific saw enhanced maritime connections between Australia and New Zealand, and the islands of the South Pacific. In Australia such services were provided by Burns Philp and Co., while in New Zealand the Union Line not only offered regional services, but also competed on the Australasian-North American route. French and German lines, moreover, operated services from Australia to their island colonies. In the early twentieth century, for example, the German shipping line Lohman and Co. operated a four weekly service from Sydney and Brisbane to Rabaul and German New Guinea, before passing on to Manila. 7 By necessity, the trade routes between North America and Australasia passed through the islands of the South Pacific and Hawaii. By 1912 Hawaii was a destination for Australian butter and by 1924 a market for Australian apples. Although limited passenger space allowed only the

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most determined to visit the “South Seas,” that situation changed after the Great War. The proposition that the South Seas might make an interesting holiday destination gained currency during the late nineteenth century. By the end of the 1880s Thomas Cook was offering Melbourne-based Australian tourists “excursions” to the South Seas. 8 Meeting the increasing interest in tourist travel to the islands, in 1908 a Sydney company began publishing its annual Stewart’s Handbook of the Pacific Islands. This instructive booklet, which sought to “supply the reader with an accurate account,” proved very popular and was printed on an annual basis into the 1920s. 9 In the United States a promotional campaign for South Seas holidays had accompanied the opening of the Pacific railroad in 1869. A specially prepared book by Samuel Bowles noted that to those of “us of the East,” the “Sandwich Islands” were “a remote foreign kingdom, where our whalers refit and to the conversion of whose heathen we dedicated all the sanctified pennies of our childhood.” More Americans, Bowles suggested, should visit to see for themselves why the territory should be annexed. For Americans living in eastern parts of the United States, “the familiarity with which the Eastern visitor finds ‘the Islands’ spoken of in California, the accounts he receives of their strange scenery, their wonderful volcanoes, their delightful climate—all will strongly invite him to make them a visit.” 10 In 1875 Charles Nordhoff’s Northern California, Oregon and the Sandwich Islands was billed as providing information for “travelers for pleasure or information.” The voyage to Hawaii, asserted Nordhoff, was “very comfortably made.” 11 Reflecting the increasing travel to not only Hawaii but also to the South Pacific, William Rideing recalled in 1876 what once had been: “Even twenty-five years ago the traveler who had visited them was looked upon with wonder and respect, but to-day they are comparatively familiar spots, constantly visited by whaling and trading ships.” 12 “Hawaii for Tourists,” published in the Overland Monthly in 1895, predicted that the growth of the “distinctively tourist traffic” would eventually contribute to “a large source of Hawaiian prosperity.” 13 Two such tourists to Hawaii in the mid-1880s were Mary Chester and her sister Amy Pease. Leaving San Francisco for Honolulu in July 1885 on the Pacific Mail Steamship City of Sydney, the sisters maintained a journal of their travels. Prior to their departure they had been bombarded by friends and relatives about what to expect. Even at the dock their expectations were fueled by friends who “had painted the voyage in such glowing colors, that we soon grew weary smiling.” 14 Arriving in Honolulu, the two women were “in a constant flutter of delight all the way and almost fancied ourselves in Fairyland.” Of the Hawaiian “Kanaka” men, they noted that many of them were “fine looking, well built fellows[,] a great improvement upon our Negroes but a

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little like them.” Islander women, however, did not meet expectations. “The women are coarse heavy looking things in the most brilliant greenaways without any sort of figures.” “All the women,” they continued, “look like barrels, & wear greenaways or loose sacques.” 15 Chester and Pease also provide early insights into the way the fledgling tourist industry was transforming the lives of Hawaiians. After visiting “a modern looking home full of Kanaka women,” who were making native “curiosities,” the sisters were left disturbed by the image of the women “all sewing for dear life.” Later that evening they attended a luau where a fifteen-year-old danced the “Hula Cui” to guitar and vocal accompaniment. The young woman, they lamented, appeared to be an “unwilling” member of the performance. 16 The local economy, evidently, had already been corrupted by the demands of the tourism industry. Another visitor to Hawaii, although he arrived there in the early twentieth century (after American annexation) was Englishmen gentleman-traveler Alfred Harmsworth (First Viscount Northcliffe). Despite widespread efforts to elevate Hawaii as a tourist destination, Harmsworth expressed surprise at how few travelers ventured there. “It is remarkable,” he wrote, “that the archipelago so much read about by most of us in childhood days is comparatively little visited.” Having been told by a fellow traveler that it was “impossible that you should be disappointed in Honolulu,” Harmsworth found himself in cordial agreement: No matter what sort of fairyland you have imagined it to be, no matter what colorless anemic pamphlets you may read of it on the way there, its magical reality far and far exceed its advertised charm. Worry about what the Sphinx may be like “face to face,” if you like; or about the Great Wall of China; or the Irrawaddy; or even about the Taj Mahal— but do not give a thought to Honolulu till it rises over the edge of the Pacific. You will then know the futility of the printed word. It is just a scarp of Paradise dropped down by a lucky fluke into the middle of the Sea of Endless Summer.

In similar tones to Chester and Pease, Harmsworth’s only disappointment was with the Hawaiians themselves: “I looked for the Hawaiian of my youthful reading—the tall, aquiline men of graceful carriage—but I found them rarely and with some difficulty.” 17 Many observers linked the rise in tourism to Hawaii and the South Pacific to the popularity of the South Seas’ literary tradition. Harmsworth’s comment that his vision of the South Seas was informed by his “youthful reading” was echoed by other observers: Ever since the days of Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” and Charles Warren Stoddard’s “Lazy Letters from Low Altitudes,” first advertised extensively to the American public, the delights of the Hawaiian trip there has been an increasing stream of tourist travel . . . to read any

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adequate account of Hawaii is to desire to see with the eye of the flesh the things presented to the eye of the imagination. 18

The major obstacle to the development of the South Seas tourist industry was the lack of adequate transportation. Although private cruising in the South Seas—as exampled by Robert Louis Stevenson and later Jack London—became a popular alternative during the 1880s, due to the vagaries and constraints of the shipping lines, the first regular round trip between Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States did not begin until 1883. 19 By 1890 a “steady tourist trade” was underway with between thirty and forty visitors a month. The high-water mark came in 1889–1890 when one hundred first-class passengers a month were visiting the islands. Shortly thereafter the industry collapsed as a result of not only the 1890s economic downturn but also of fears of war and political destabilization in Hawaii surrounding issues of control. The tourist industry became one of the cogent arguments for American action in Hawaii: annexation was purportedly the only way to ensure “a sudden and large increase of tourists.” 20 Hopes that annexation would result in a sizeable increase in tourists, however, were not immediately realized. In Australia the new century saw the Burns Philp Company offer its “winter excursion to the South Seas” from at least 1903, and its first “South Sea Cruise” in 1906. 21 Round-trips were available for A£25, or for £10 a round-trip was available to one of the “lesser known [island] groups of the Pacific.” The “unique cruises” were sold as the “now popular way of spending a vacation.” 22 Reports of such holidays began appearing in the local press. Readers of the February 1908 edition of the Sydney magazine Red Funnel, for example, were entertained by the story of an organized tour of New Guinea where tourists encountered the “merry laughing Papuans.” Readers of the Australian Magazine could read of a “Month’s good holiday” on a Burns Philp steamer where they were able to visit islands with “real savages.” 23 Prior to the outbreak of World War I a number of commercial interests had been considering an expansion of their South Seas tourist interests, but the conflict put these on hold. A 1924 report conducted by the Mid Pan-Pacific Union concluded that little had changed from 1914 except that the prices being quoted for South Seas travel had doubled. 24 Apart from Hawaii, organized tourist excursions to the South Seas remained a minor activity. In the late 1920s, however, the South Seas began to emerge as an important and profitable holiday destination for Australians and Americans. In the United States, business interests in California identified the potential for developing a regular passenger service between Los Angeles and Hawaii. With the assistance of the United States government, the newly formed Los Angeles Steamship Company leased two ex-German war prize liners and began operating a bimonthly service. The fre-

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quency of the service increased until the Great Depression saw passenger volumes decline and the Company taken over by the San Francisco-based Matson Navigation Company. The Matson Line had begun as a shipping service between California and Hawaii in 1882. Its first passenger steam service began in 1908. Following World War I, after acquiring three ships of the Oceanic Steamship Company that had been involved in the Australian, the company expanded its interests into the South Pacific. Seeing the potential for passenger services between the United States and Australia, and an American passage as the quickest route from Australia to England, with both routed via the islands of the South Pacific, the company acquired the Malolo, a new luxury liner, in 1927. 25 Orders were placed for three other vessels, which arrived in the early 1930s. With four passenger liners Matson operated two on its San Francisco–Hawaii run and the other two (the Monterey and the Mariposa) on a new service to Australia. Costing over eight million dollars each to build and outfit, the Monterey and the Mariposa brought a new standard of service to the Pacific. Each ship could carry more than seven hundred passengers and boasted such modern conveniences as air-conditioning and revolutionary “plastic” bathroom fittings. As important as the new level of comfort, the new ships of the Matson Line shortened the running time between San Francisco and Sydney by one third. The Monterey made her maiden voyage in June 1932 departing San Francisco and visiting Los Angeles, Honolulu, Pago Pago, Suva, Sydney, and Melbourne. 26 Matson spent considerable time and effort promoting its new service with extensive advertising campaigns in the United States, the British dominions of the Pacific, and in South Pacific colonies. The campaigns surpassed in color and beauty the advertising campaigns of the popular Atlantic lines. To further encourage patronage “boat trains” were established to transport Americans from the East Coast to San Francisco and a liner departure. The company also diversified into the hotel industry in Hawaii, where Waikiki was already established in the eyes of many Americans, thanks to the efforts of earlier cultural productions, as the quintessential South Seas paradise resort. 27 One American who decided to take a Hawaiian cruise with his wife was Ipswich, South Dakota, businessman H. E. Beebe. Beebe had a card printed for his clients that noted “Aloha: That’s Hawaiian for good luck. . . . On February 8th at noon from San Francisco on the Matson line steamship—Malolo we set sail for the land of flowers and grass skirts—Hawaii.” 28 The arrival of the Monterey and the Mariposa enhanced the potential for South Seas tourism. Tourists could stop at a number of South Pacific destinations and enjoy a short in-transit port-of-call visit or leave the ship for an extended period. By the early 1930s, moreover, the notion of the “South Seas cruise” was well established. In 1926 and 1927 the Cunard Line sent two of its “Atlantic liners” through the South Pacific as part of “world cruises.” In the early 1930s P & O introduced its “Pleasure

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Cruises” of the Pacific. A twelve-day cruise from Sydney to Noumea on the RMS Mongolia cost eleven guineas for a tourist-class berth. A cruise to Fiji cost thirteen guineas. 29 Upon taking control of the Los Angeles Steamship Company, the Matson Line refurbished one of its ships for “South Seas island” cruising. A five-week, twelve-thousand-mile cruise of the South Pacific was conducted in early 1934 and repeated (with an additional thousand miles of cruising) in the middle of the year. In 1920 tourist passengers had represented 20 percent of Matson’s business. By 1935 that figure had grown to 60 percent of the business of a company that had grown dramatically since the end of World War I. 30 Across the Pacific, Australian companies were also taking a deeper interest in South Pacific tourism. The Canadian Australasian Royal Mail Line, which operated the “All Red” route from Sydney to Vancouver, began advertising in Australia, North America, and Britain about the possibilities of South Seas holidays. With its “palatial steamers” it offered a regular four weekly service from Vancouver to Sydney via Honolulu, Suva, Fiji, and Auckland. One advertisement noted that in “itself this is a South Seas cruise de luxe, but at Suva one may rest a bit, cruise by local steamer among the Fijian islands, then take a Union Steamship Company of New Zealand palatial flyer for a visit to Samoa, Tonga and New Zealand.” One could then return to San Francisco with a “stopover” in Papeete. 31 Burns Philp took advantage of its considerable interests in the South Pacific to expand its tourist operation in the region. With “travel consciousness” now apparent among Australians, the Company formed a “World Tour and Travel Department.” In 1928 it began publishing a magazine that aimed to encourage patronage of its new department with glossy advertisements, travel stories, and anthropological reports written for a popular audience by some of Australia’s leading anthropologists, including the University of Sydney academic H. Ian Hogbin. 32 The World Tour and Travel Department offered Australian tourists the opportunity to encounter not just “new countries,” and “new peoples,” but also new “new manners and customs, dress and habitations . . . an irresistible kaleidoscope of changing itineraries.” 33 While the new department brokered holidays all around the world, a full-page advertisement in the first issue of its magazine made it clear Burns Philp saw that the greatest opportunity for growth was in Pacific tourism. Celebrating the “enchantment of the Pacific,” the company advised prospective tourists that for “a Glorious Holiday and Healthful Trip, you cannot do better than visit the coral-encircled and palm-fringed Isles of the South Pacific.” Along with “magnificent scenery” and” “luxuriant tropical vegetation,” tourists could visit “interesting native villages,” set amid “quaint surroundings.” The company offered monthly trips from Sydney and Brisbane to Papua, a three-weekly service to New Guinea, a six-weekly service to the Solomons, and an eight-weekly service to the New Hebrides. 34

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In marketing travel to the South Seas, tourist operators continued to exploit the literary tradition—as one advertisement put it, a visit to the South Seas was the opportunity to turn “dreams into reality.” 35 One of the first articles in the BP Magazine, entitled “The Romantic South Sea Islands,” insisted: How few of us have not reveled in tales of the wonderful South Sea islands, of their gorgeous beauty, their sunlit skies, their waving wealth of palms and tropical greenery, their wonderful wave swept-coral reefs amid beaches of golden sand. Have we not as children and adults reveled in the romantic stories of life amongst the interesting dusky races of these Southern Islets?

Continuing, the article acknowledged the literary tradition: Romance and adventure are inseparably bound up with literature of these islands and we have almost got to think of them as mythical isles of beautiful imaginings, creations of the poetic brain, only to be enjoyed in book or picture, like fairy tales of modern Arabian nights. 36

A subsequent advertisement for the company specifically acknowledged one of the tradition’s leading contributors: “The Isles of the South Pacific have been immortalized by Robert Louis Stevenson in his romantic and absorbing stories of these wondrous coral encircled outposts.” 37 Stevenson’s thoughtful considerations of the dangers of paradise for Westerners and Islanders were forgotten in the pitch to sell travel. Stewart’s Handbook corroborated the stories of the beauty of Islander women, although such glimpses could be fleeting. The 1923 edition noted that Samoan women were “fit mothers for a race of strong men,” and were “often noticeably beautiful in the features.” “In girlhood and early womanhood,” it was suggested, “they have beautiful figures, but like other natives of the tropics, they do not retain them for long.” 38 A new Burns Philp advertisement in the early 1930s, utilizing an image of a topless Islander with Europeanized features, claimed that the South Seas were the “isles of colorful romance.” While the “untraveled” would be presented with a “wonderland of color and romance,” the “experienced voyager” would succumb to the “allure of a new sensation, reawakening the old happy thrill of early adventures.” 39 Aware of the popular conceptions of the South Seas, Burns Philp was also careful in its selection of destinations. A 1935 article by travel writer Mollie Lett, published in the BP Magazine, noted that not all islands held the “spell.” “For by no means do all islands fulfill this enchanting vision. Many[,] approached by mud and mangrove, and enveloped in dense undergrowth and jungle, repel rather than attract. Their sinister appearance and their mute and gloomy inhabitants offer no allurement.” Part of the skill of a travel company was to find those islands that met expectations. Thanks in part to the writing of Bronislaw Malinowski, the Trobri-

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and Islands off Papua were considered by Lett to fit the bill: “The villages are teeming with interest and are altogether attractive. They comply with the very popular idea of what a South Sea island should be.” 40 Within industrial society, the need for a “change” to counteract the stressful effects of city living had captured public attention in North America and Australasia at the turn of the century. The South Sea isles were regarded as the latest balm for the tired city brain worker. The literary escapes of the turn of the century could now be overtaken by a real encounter: The busy city man seeking a few weeks respite for his tired brain from the hurry and bustle and strain of modern high pressure of commercial life, or the resident of the sunbaked inland plains, the squatter or the mining man longing for a whiff of salt sea air, and a glance at the green, waving palms and the brilliant foliage of the vine covered forests of the tropics, may have their wishes gratified with an expenditure of time and money well within the reach of both. A trip which appeals to all is to the romantic Solomon Islands. 41

If tourists wanted to really escape to primitivism, Burns Philp could help them experience the South Seas without any vestiges of Western influence, and, like the castaways of literary fame, camp on a coral island: Robinson Crusoe and good Man Friday! Who has not envied them at some time in their lives, and longed to be cast adrift on some tropic isle, far from the bustle and the hustles of the madding crowd, from the clang of trams and the tinkle of telephones, from the yells of newsboys and all the nerve-racking turmoil that we call civilization? How often, harassed by taxes, indigestion, a nagging spouse, or any of the other ills that flesh to heir to, have you not muttered between clenched teeth, “For two pins I’d leave this something—something country and go and live on a coral island.” 42

Such a trip resurrected the experience of a famous South Seas type. “Camping on a coral island” allowed a visitor to experience the life of the castaway, without the inherent dangers of the past. Into the 1930s Burns Philp continued to sell its South Seas holidays, although its market share was being eroded by the Matson Line, which had quickly become the benchmark in South Pacific travel. Burns Philp had no choice but to improve its services to protect its market share. The Company ended the 1930s with its acquisition of the 6,267-ton Bulolo, which commenced regular services between Sydney and Port Moresby. The ship maintained a high level of service that included the first swimming pool on an Australian vessel. An important means of conveying the delights of the South Pacific was via postcards, which tourists sent home in their thousands. Perpetuating notions of the South Seas, these postcards—like exhibitions—had a “powerful impact on the way in which non-westerners” were “portrayed

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in twentieth-century popular culture.” 43 One very popular American postcard of the 1930s—which no doubt played a part in forming the misconceptions of many American and Australian servicemen who would subsequently be so disappointed with the South Seas they encountered during World War II—depicted a topless women with the caption: “Would you like to see Samoa?” 44 Postcards thus added to the store of public “knowledge” about the South Pacific. In 1936 Willard Price claimed that “Tahiti and Samoa are becoming as well known to the diligent travelers as Hawaii.” 45 Many Americans, and other wealthy Westerners, were also bringing themselves to the region, either following in Robert Louis Stevenson’s footsteps and hiring a suitable vessel, or spending a small fortune to buy one. Writing in 1931 to a friend in the States, Charles Nordhoff noted that a “great many yachts come through these days—the last one was Mr. Vanderbilt’s magnificent ‘Alva.’” 46 Another South Seas yachtsman of this period was the Western novelist Zane Grey. Thanks in part to the old legacy of America’s maritime tradition in the South Pacific, and the work of oceanographers and other naturalists during the 1920s, the South Seas was gaining popularity as a watery playground for wealthy fishermen. The chase for some of the Pacific’s largest fish gave the game hunter another theater of operations. Grey was at the forefront of popularizing “Big Game Fishing in the Southern Seas.” 47 During the mid-1920s Grey purchased a schooner (Fisherman) and set sail for points including the South Pacific. Between 1925 and 1939 journals such as Outdoor Life, Pacific Sportsmen, Physical Culture, Motor Boating, Country Gentlemen, Southern Sportsmen, and Natural History all published articles by Grey. In those articles, and in books such as Tales of Fishing (1927) and Tales of Tahitian Waters (1931), Grey chronicled his many fishing adventures. Then, in 1932, he produced and directed South Seas Adventure, a documentary of his adventures. Thomas J. Geraghty, who received a writing credit for Grey’s film, was also credited in 1932 as adapting the story for the film Mr. Robinson Crusoe. 48 Followed closely behind the traveler, however, was the tourist (then, as now, the distinction was less clear than many people imagined) and many South Seas commentators expressed concerns for the South Seas. Visiting Tahiti for the first time in 1912 Englishman S. W. Powell was disappointed to find Papeete “chocked with tourists”: “There was something contemptible as well as hateful about this mob. There was a painful want of dignity in the bearing of these members of a superior race.” Powell saw the tourist, representing “modern civilization,” as a grave danger to the South Seas. 49 Rupert Brooke was not very much taken with Honolulu, which he declared had been overwhelmed by the “tourist trade.” Like Powell, Brooke saw tourists as a sign of civilization’s reach, and his purpose in heading to the South Seas had been to escape civiliza-

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tion. Disappointed to find civilization when he reached Fiji, he set forth again to look for “wilder islands.” 50 A journalist who Englishman John W. Vandercook met while sailing on the Matson Line’s Malolo had already judged Polynesia as too tame: “His interests, formed by the convention of his trade, were bloody. Down there in Melanesia, they hunted heads of course? They ate each other? . . . We would[,] he hoped, be in continuous and frightful danger.” 51 Referring to a recently arrived steamer, James Norman Hall told one correspondent in December 1933 that the vessel “brought us very few tourists, thank the Lord!” 52 Such sentiments were even more strongly felt by the travelers of the 1930s. Traveling from California to Hawaii John W. Vandercook noted that it “was July and school was out and all those pedagogic women with chapped hands had come, by God! For a merry time.” Arriving in Honolulu, Vandercook, who labeled himself not a tourist but a “tropical traveler,” was unimpressed by the “wreaths of flowers,” or by the tacky brass band welcome with soprano singing “song of the islands.” Noting that the “pity of Hawaii” was that it was so “credible,” he lamented that the island group was so much like what the tourist expected to find. “But where tourists are the prime cargo,” he concluded, “there is little but haste, noise and indignity.” 53 On a world tour, future systems theory scientist Gabriel Kron found that Suva had been “spoiled” because “many rich Australians spend their vacation here just as wealthy Americans spend theirs in Hawaii.” 54 Those concerns notwithstanding, the tourist industry’s penetration of the South Seas remained on the whole superficial, confined as it was to the major sea routes. One traveler, American Isabel Anderson, suggested as late as 1936 that in “the first place the South Seas Islands are by no means easy to reach. One cannot drop casually into a steamship office and ask for a round-trip ticket, nor indeed, get much information from travel bureaus. . . . There are no liners, or in fact any sort of boats—calling regularly at one island after another across the Pacific.” 55 That isolation, however, was being challenged. Tourism, concluded a number of observers, seemed the way of the future for the South Pacific. Because “of the appeal which the South Seas islands have had for western people,” noted Felix M. Keesing, professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii, “some observers have suggested that in time the Oceanic area might form a playground or resort for people from other countries, with the natives, so to speak, putting on a show.” “Already,” wrote Keesing, “the ports on the main travel routes become alive with tourist activity on boat days.” Moreover, he noted, it “might be said that Hawaii and Tahiti are today the only real places in the region where the cult of the South Seas may really be practiced in any fullness for the very real reason that the old-time native life there is largely a thing of the past.” 56

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The new opportunities for tourist travel to the South Seas during the interwar period also helped stimulate new cultural productions. For example, Hawaii became the focus of attention for Australian musical theater during these years. Melbournite Harold Anderson’s musical “A Holiday in Hawaii” was registered with the Commonwealth for copyright protection in 1930. 57 In the western New South Wales town of Orange, a local man named Hugh Holm penned his own musical Home to Hawaii with the song “Won’t You Come to Old Hawaii” (1936), while Sydneysider Minnie Alice-Fish wrote another musical, “I’m Going Back to Hawaii” (1939). 58 With the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 the number of Americans and Australians interested in South Seas cruising declined. While passenger volumes between the West Coast and Hawaii remained strong into 1940, passenger journeys to the South Pacific and Australia had collapsed, prompting Matson to begin a series of successful cruises to Tahiti, which continued into 1941, that called at Papeete, Honolulu, Auckland, and Sydney. Even the threat of war in the Pacific did not undermine the enthusiasm of some people to engage in their own South Seas adventure. As the following chapters reveal, that sense of adventure was heightened by a new and ever-more influential form of popular culture. NOTES 1. Frederic L. Washburn, 1924, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/ collection/tc/id/21605. 2. Henry Woodd Nevinson, More Changes, More Chances (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1925), 39. 3. See, for example, Frances Steel, “Via New Zealand Around the World: The Union Steam Ship company and the Trans-Pacific Mail lines, 1880s–1910s,” in Coast to Coast: Case Histories of Modern Pacific Crossings, ed. Prue Ahrens and Chris Dixon (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 59–76. 4. Hervey W. Whitaker, “Samoa: The Isles of the Navigators,” in Century 38 (May 1889): 12–13. 5. Henry Parkes, Fifty Years in the Making of Australian History (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), 285. 6. For further discussion consult Steel, “Via New Zealand,” 59–76. 7. Percy S. Allen, Stewart’s Handbook of the Pacific Islands, 3rd ed. (Sydney: McCarron, Stewart & Co, 1908). 8. Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the Native and the Making of European Identities (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), 135. 9. Allen, Stewart’s Handbook. The handbook became a useful forum for advertising South Seas travel and Burns Philp became an early advertiser. 10. Samuel Bowles, The Pacific Railroad—Open. How to Go, What to See: Guide for Travel to and Through Western America (Boston: Fields, Osgood and Co, 1869), 91. 11. Charles Nordhoff, Northern California, Oregon and the Sandwich Islands (New York: Harper and Bros., 1874), 18. Nordhoff had earlier written the popular Stories of the Island World (New York: Harper, 1857).

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12. William Rideing, “The South Sea Islands, Part 1,” Appleton’s Journal 15 (April 22, 1876): 513. 13. John D. Spreckels, “Hawaii for Tourists,” Overland Monthly 25 (June 1895): 660. 14. “Mary Chester and Amy Pease Journal,” July 8 to August 2, 1885, MS Doc 594, Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu (hereafter cited as Bishop Museum). 15. Chester and Pease Journal, July 13, 1885, Bishop Museum. 16. Chester and Pease Journal, July 17, 1885, Bishop Museum. 17. London Times, undated, held in James Partington Edge Scrapbook, 1902–1927, Doc 158, Bishop Museum. 18. Spreckels, “Hawaii for Tourists,” 660. 19. Australian author Marcus Clarke claimed that by the 1890s it had become the “habit” of English nobility to cruise the South Seas in their yachts. See Clarke, Australian Tales (Melbourne: A. & W. Bruce, 1896), xvii. 20. Spreckels, “Hawaii for Tourists,” 661. 21. Sydney Morning Herald, August 25, 1903. 22. Sydney Mail, March 7, 1906. 23. C. Hendry Pooley, “Among the Solomon Islands,” The Australia Magazine 1, no. 8 (1908). 24. Mid Pacific Magazine 27 (January 1924): 7. 25. An advertisement for the Oceanic-Matson service claimed: “To England via the dreamy Hawaiian Islands. The shortest and most fascinating route,” BP Magazine 2 (March–May 1930): 87; “The Travel Age,” BP Magazine 1 (June 1929): 57. It was estimated at the time that between 40,000 and 50,000 Australians were visiting England each year. By 1934 the Company was offering passage from Sydney to London via the United States for £76 for cabin class, nearly half of the old fare to Europe via the Suez Canal. 26. For introductions to the Matson Line and trans-Pacific travel during this period consult Peter Plowman, Across the Pacific: Liners from Australia and New Zealand to North America (Sydney: Rosenberg Publishing, 2010), esp 9–194; Francis Steel, “Lines Across the Sea: Trans-Pacific Passenger Shipping in the Age of Steam,” in The Routledge History of Western Empires, ed. Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 315–29. 27. Kosmas Tsokhas, “The Matson Line, Australian Shipping Policy and Imperial Relations 1935–1939,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 40, no. 3 (1994): 366. For a discussion of Waikiki’s development as the “ideal resort paradise” consult Masakazu Ejiri, “The Development of Waikiki, 1909–1949: The Formative Period of an American Resort Paradise” (PhD Dissertation, University of Hawaii, 1996). 28. The card is held in the Library of Congress collection, “An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera,” http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/rbpehtml/ 29. Advertisement, BP Magazine 7 (December 1934): 12. 30. Tsokhas, “The Matson Line,” 366. 31. Mid Pacific Magazine and the Bulletin of the Pan Pacific Union, (Hawaii) published by the Honolulu Star Bulletin 28 (September 1924) advertisement. 32. “The Travel Age,” 57. The cost of passage to London at that time was between A£114 and A£138 while Burns Philp sent a tourist to Port Moresby for A£15. For an example of Hogbin’s work see “Native Dancing and Dancers,” which examined dance culture on the island of Malaita in the Solomons. See BP Magazine 7 (September 1935). 33. Editorial, BP Magazine 1 (December 1928): 3. 34. Advertisement, “The Enchantment of the Pacific!” Burns Philp Magazine 1 (December 1928): 4. 35. Advertisement: “Wonder Isles of the Pacific,” BP Magazine 1 (March 1929): 3. 36. “The Romantic South Sea Islands,” Burns Philp Magazine 1 (December 1928): 3. 37. “Wonder Isles of the Pacific,” 3. 38. Allen, Stewart’s Handbook, 1923, 351. 39. Advertisement, BP Magazine 5 (December 1932).

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40. Mollie Lett, “Isles of Enchantment,” BP Magazine 7 (June 1935): 1. 41. “The Romantic South Sea Islands, BP Magazine 1 (December 1928): 9, 66. 42. Morna Kane, “Camping on a Coral Island,” BP Magazine 8 (March 1936): 73. 43. Maxwell, Colonial Photography, ix. 44. J. C. Furnas, Anatomy of Paradise, Hawaii and the Islands of the South Seas (1937; repr., London: Victor Gollancz, 1950), 418. 45. Willard Price, Rip Tide in the South Seas (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1936), 1. 46. Charles Nordhoff to Gerritt Wilder, August 18, 1931, in James Norman Hall Papers, 1906–1954, Special Collections, MS/MS 01.01, Box 4, Folder 3, Grinnell College Libraries, Grinnell, Iowa (hereafter cited as Grinnell College). 47. Zane Grey “Big Game Fishing in the Southern Seas,” Motor Boating (January 1934): 16–17. 48. Three years later Grey produced a fictional film starring himself as himself. Filmed on Queensland’s Hayman Island—“selected from all the South Seas islands to provide a background”—White Death told the story of how Grey saved an island’s inhabitants from the ravages of a giant shark called “White Death.” See Rockhampton Morning Bulletin, December 19, 1936. 49. S. W. Powell, A South Sea Diary (London: Victor Gollancz, 1942), 7, 27. 50. Christopher Hassall, Rupert Brooke (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 416, 421. 51. John W. Vandercook, Dark Islands (London: William Heinemann, 1938), 1. 52. Hall to Gerrit and Lilian Wilder, November 19, 1933, Folder 3, Box 4, Hall Papers, Grinnell College. 53. Vandercook, Dark Islands, 1, 2, 7. 54. Cited in Louis Turner and John Ash, The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Principal (New York: St. Martins, 1976), 160. 55. Isabel Anderson, Zigzagging the South Seas (Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1936), 7. 56. Felix M. Keesing, The South Seas in the Modern World (London: George Allen and Unwin 1932), 14–15. 57. Harold Anderson, “A Holiday in Hawaii,” copyright registration, January 28, 1930, A1338/19425, National Archives of Australia (hereafter cited as NAA). 58. Hugh Holm, “Home to Hawaii,” copyright registration, July 15, 1936, A1336/ 28613, NAA; Hugh Holm, “Won’t You Come to Old Hawaii,” A1336/28432, NAA; Minnie Alice Fish, “I’m Going Back to Hawaii,” May 22, 1939, A1336/32985, NAA.

ELEVEN Hollywood Encounters the South Seas

“Life,” wrote Frederick O’Brien in 1922, “is not real.” Rather, he wrote, it “is only an illusion, a screen upon which each one writes the reactions upon himself of his sensory knowledge.” Contemplating the relationship between filmmakers, their products, and their audiences, O’Brien concluded that the “individual is the moving camera and what he calls life is his projection of the panorama about him—not more actual than the figures upon the cinema screen.” Describing Atolls of the Sun as “a book of experiences, impressions, and dreams in the strange and lonely islands of the South Seas,” O’Brien declared he had “put the film that passes through my mind in wild places and among natural people.” 1 Frederick O’Brien, of course, was just one of many people to meditate on these questions. Like Gore Vidal’s comment that “movies are the lingua franca of the twentieth century,” Nobel prize–winning author V. S. Naipaul’s claim that “the movies in the twentieth century were much more important as a forum for shaping people’s feelings and educating people than literature,” conveys the cultural power of cinema. 2 Yet while cinema emerged as a dominant cultural force during the early decades of the twentieth century, it perpetuated many of the same misconceptions and stereotypes surrounding the South Seas that had long been evident in Western literature. This chapter, and those that follow, examine the ways in which the existing South Seas tradition informed and shaped Hollywood’s cinematic engagement with the region—which, in turn, played a vital role in shaping Westerners’ understanding of the South Seas during the 1930s, the 1940s, and beyond. These are crucial decades in the history of cinema, both with regard to the specific subject of the South Seas, as well as the popularity of the medium as a form of entertainment. Indeed, it was estimated that in 1930, even as the United States confronted the Depres171

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sion, 115 million Americans—from across a range of social classes—attended the cinema each week. 3 Since an important aspect of this analysis concerns the process by which the South Seas were interpreted and presented by individual scriptwriters, producers, and directors, it is helpful to examine not just the final products of their cinematic labors, but to also consider some of those sections that did not make it into those final versions. Consequently, the early drafts of scripts are a valuable source for understanding the transformation of the South Seas into a cinematic phenomenon. The first recorded film shooting in the South Seas was for scientific rather than entertainment purposes. It took place in September 1898 when Cambridge don Alfred Haddon—hoping to capture native life on film for posterity and further research—took a Lumière camera with him on his anthropological exhibition of the Torres Strait. 4 Haddon’s film is significant, but in terms of popularizing and extending images of the South Seas, it was soon overshadowed by other, more commercially oriented films. The first commercial films to deal with the South Seas were scenic nonfictionalized ethnographic “travelogues.” Usually shown by platform speakers as an alluring and crucial dimension of their performance, these were extensions of the magic lantern entertainment. 5 Like the World’s Fair exhibits, National Geographic, and the science of Malinowski and Mead, these travelogues could “trade on notions of ethnographic objectivity.” Seeking legitimacy from the discursive authority of anthropology, the producers of these films invited the audience to become “virtual ethnographers.” 6 The camera, apparently, did not lie, and the early travelogues offered viewers the opportunity to gaze upon worlds about which they had hitherto only dreamed. Like the still photography of National Geographic, ethnographic travelogues portrayed “types” and homogenized native peoples across the world, including those of the South Pacific. During a period in which South Seas travel was still unavailable to many people, the travel film was publicized as the next best thing, and as a medium that was both entertaining and educational. As Alison Griffiths has noted, not “only did cinema offer unique pedagogic advantages over the traditional arts, but it was perceived as a more cost-efficient and intellectually worthy method of vicariously experiencing distant lands and peoples.” 7 The South Seas also became a backdrop for the emerging motion picture industry. From at least 1909 the region was a focus of a number of early American films. One of the first was a one-Edison-reel adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1893 short story “The Bottle Imp,” called The Imp of the Bottle. 8 The most successful of these early films was the Vitagraph Company’s 1911 production, Davy Jones in the South Seas, a comedy starring William Shea. 9

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One of the first cinematographers to realize that film could tell a story as well as record images was Frenchmen Georges Méliès. Inspired by pioneer filmmakers Auguste and Louis Lumière, Méliès established the Star Film Company, which produced the famous 1902 film, Trip to the Moon, widely regarded as the first science fiction film. In 1902 Méliès had sent his brother Gaston to New York to resolve copyright issues regarding the company’s productions. Gaston Méliès stayed in the United States and began making his own films, first in New York, then in the warmer climate of San Antonio, Texas, before relocating to California in 1911. In 1912 Gaston took a production company to the South Pacific with the aim of “seeking the unusual and as yet unpictured local color” of the region. An important dimension of Méliès’s work would be the production of ethnographic travelogues: “The educational films will be of great value. The purely native life in many of these out-ofthe-way corners of the world is fast changing into a hybrid life. To catch what may still be found of ceremonies and customs of the simple South Sea Islanders is as worthy a work as can be found for a motion picture camera.” His more ambitious goal, however, was to merge the South Seas travelogue with South Seas fiction: What a golden mine of romance is waiting for this adventurous picture maker! It was the neighborhood that Robert Louis Stevenson lived for so long and where so many of his best romances were written. It has been said that here is romance’s last great stronghold and that it can be found nowhere else on earth as here. There are stories like fairy tales of strange foods and of magic, and there are stories of beautiful Polynesian princess (they usually have a hibiscus in their hair) who swim like mermaids. There are also stories, quite historical, of great warriors and heroic deeds of valor, of gun-runners, of diplomatic intrigues, of treasure hunters, and no one before this has been on the spot nor dared to make pictures of island life; because they lacked on the local color. 10

Méliès had a difficult time in the South Seas. Unfortunately, much of his film stock did not survive the tropical conditions and so only a handful of films could actually be made from the great amount of celluloid exposed—a disaster that would financially ruin Méliès and bankrupt his production company in 1915. From his shooting in Tahiti, the only production for which enough footage survived to piece together a film was the comedy The Misfortunes of Mr and Mrs Mott on Their Trip to the South Seas Island of Tahiti. Directed by Bertram Bracken, with a scenario by Edmund Mitchell (an individual who accompanied the crew and who was purportedly “thoroughly familiar with the islands in the South Seas” 11) the film told the story of the Mott family who, after coming into a fortune, had, like many well-to-do Americans of the period, embarked on a voyage to Tahiti. Informed by the travelogue tradition, the film’s narrative was slight; its appeal relied on scenes such as a crossing-the-

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equator ceremony and general views of Tahiti as seen by the sightseeing Motts. Having completed filming in Papeete—where at least one member of the crew contracted syphilis—Méliès decided to continue his South Seas sojourn and took his crew to New Zealand, where the film stock seemed to enjoy a higher survival rate. Here he produced three more films. The first, Loved by a Maori Chieftess, was also produced in 1913. The story told the tale of a European man whose love for the local Chieftess brought the wrath of the Maori men, who, in the finest South Seas tradition, are about to cook and eat him when the Chieftess finally saves him from such an unpleasant fate. The second Méliès film was an adaptation of the classic Maori fable “Hinemoa.” The tale of the love between a man and a women and the obstacles they must cross (including a lake) to be united had been unveiled to the Western world in the early 1850s courtesy of New Zealand Governor George Grey’s book Polynesian Mythology. John O’Leary has shown that Grey doctored the original story to make it palatable to Victorian audiences and in so doing enshrined a “landscape of sentiment” that helped romanticize the South Seas and associate its scenery with love and romance. Grey’s recounting of the legend had done much to change Western perceptions of New Zealand, that had hitherto seen the land as demonic and inhabited by cannibalistic savages. Arriving at the height of the backlash against Herman Melville, Polynesian Mythology afforded comfort to both sides of the South Seas debate. It tempered Melville’s strident Islander sexuality with Victorian notions of love and romance, and also showed by the display of such “gentleness and grace” that South Seas Islanders could—and should—be Christianized. 12 Méliès’s third New Zealand film looked to European and Maori traditions for inspiration. How Chief Te Ponga Won His Bride was a combination of “Hinemoa” and Romeo and Juliet, with the Italian families of the Shakespeare play replaced by Maori tribes. Tribal rivalry and the beauty of a woman were the film’s central theme, and like Méliès’s previous work, the story of Chief Te Ponga melded “European” and South Seas traditions to produce a work that appealed to a range of audiences. Méliès’s expedition was well publicized in American trade magazines and the stories promised much more than would eventually be delivered. 13 One New York–based company, Progressive Motion Pictures, decided to make its own South Seas film before Méliès’s return. McVeagh of the South Seas (also known as Brute Island) starred leading silent era actor Harry Carey (who supposedly wrote the book upon which the film was based) as the drunken white man slowly degenerating in paradise (purportedly somewhere near the Solomons) who is about to marry an Islander woman before he is redeemed by a white woman. The “stupendous production” was “staged in the south seas when might was right and men knew no law.” While the film had not been made on location,

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publicity insisted that the “thrilling situations and sensational scenes” had been captured against “Beautiful island and ocean backgrounds.” 14 While Méliès’s films were not shown in Australia or New Zealand, Antipodean film producers were inspired by his work and like their counterparts elsewhere began to look to the South Seas tradition for their storylines. In 1914 George Tarr directed another all-Maori cast in another adaptation of the Hinemoa legend for Australasian and British audiences. The following year, noted Australian director Raymond Longford took a production team to New Zealand and made A Maori Maid’s Love. Shot on location in Auckland and Rotorua (the setting for the fable of Hinemoa) the film’s basic premise was not far removed from that of Méliès’s first New Zealand film—the relationship between a Maori “girl” and a European “man” who is sent on field duty in the Rotorua district. In the melodrama the European falls in love with the Maori and the Maori gives birth to a child but—in yet another warning that the pleasures of the South Seas were often fleeting—dies shortly after. A Maori Maid’s Love enjoyed some cinematic success in Australia but its importance lies in the fact that it contained a South Seas cinematic first. In all his New Zealand films Méliès employed local Maori actors. In Hinemoa especially, the distance between Méliès’s fiction and the travelogue was not great. Although Longford used many Maori actors, his partner, the attractive Australian actress Lottie Lyell, was cast in the lead role as the Maori maiden. 15 How Australian audiences responded to an obviously white woman playing a Maori is difficult to ascertain, but generally the film was criticized for not offering more detail on the nature of “Maori life.” The Sydney Sun lamented that “full advantage was not taken of the Maori life, and customs, and the picturesque accompaniment of the Rotorua district.” 16 The power of the South Seas travelogue as the only acceptable cinematic means by which film could represent the South Seas thus endured. With the Great War’s South Pacific theater seeing the confiscation of German territory in New Guinea and Samoa by Australian and New Zealand military forces, cinematic representations of the South Pacific during the war years used the war against Germany as a source of inspiration. In 1915 Monte Luke directed For Australia for noted producer J. C. Williamson. In the film an Australian reporter discovers a German spy ring on a South Seas island, but before he can raise the alarm he is captured and imprisoned on an uncharted isle. The reporter manages to escape with the assistance of the “half-caste” Samoan girl “Kana” (played by another Australian actress, Alma Rock Phillips) who distracts the Germans by doing a dance in a grass skirt that extends over her breasts. 17 Across the Pacific, The San Francisco Panama Pacific Exposition and the surge in the popularity of Hawaiian music in the early years of the Great War also influenced Hollywood. In 1915 Hobart Bosworth produced and

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starred in The Beachcomber. The script told of a young castaway rejecting civilization and a fiancé before a message in a bottle heralds his Christian redemption. 18 Thomas Ince also pursued the popular South Seas type when he co-wrote and produced Aloha Oe (Triangle Film Corporation, 1915). Authentic to the literary type, Ince’s beachcomber is in the throes of degeneration, precipitated by the absence of civilization’s restraints on behavior and by an excess of alcohol. Aloha Oe was not shot on location but on the back lot of “Inceville Studios” in the Santa Monica hinterland. Moreover, no Islanders participated in the film. Instead, Islander characters were played by the Native American extras Ince had on staff for his many Western films. Reflecting an accommodation to the new genre in America, reviewers appeared untroubled by the lack of location shooting or by the absence of Islanders. Much was made of the performance of Enid Markey as “Kalaniweo” in Aloha Oe. “Miss Markey’s dark hair and large dark eyes,” noted one reviewer, made “her the perfect type for the part of the Polynesian princess.” More generally, the production’s authenticity was endorsed rather than challenged: “This picture is produced in a most spectacular manner. The eruption of the volcano [from which the white man saves Kalaniweo from human sacrifice—another, but more recent, ingredient of the South Seas tradition] is one of the greatest pieces of realism ever successfully produced and will convince the most hypercritical.” “The grandeur of the tropical scenes,” it was emphasized, “are registered by the camera in all their natural beauty.” 19 In 1916 the Australian production house Crick and Jones sent Raymond Longford back to New Zealand to complete the first reenactment of the mutiny of the Bounty for celluloid. Unlike A Maori Maiden’s Love, all Islander characters in his retelling of the story of the Bounty were played by Maori actors. Reviewers missed the fact that despite wearing traditional Maori attire, and performing traditional Maori songs, the Maori women appearing in the film were supposedly playing the alluring Tahitians who lured Fletcher Christian and his colleagues away from their duty. Opening to packed houses at Sydney’s Hoyts Theater on September 2, 1916, Mutiny of the Bounty was hailed as “absolutely the finest production yet manufactured in Australia.” 20 The film’s success extended to New Zealand and it was also sold to the British market. In 1917 Hollywood producer Jesse L. Lasky began his long association with the South Seas. Lasky also looked to the literary canon to inform storylines. His production company, Lasky Feature Play Company, sent a cast and crew (with local Hawaiians also cast in lead roles) to Hawaii to make the second adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp. Acknowledging the legacy of the literary tradition as the source of cinema’s inspiration, the film’s opening scenes shows an actor playing Robert Louis Stevenson telling his story to a little boy and girl. 21

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With the film fueling the widespread wartime desire for escapism, The Bottle Imp’s success saw Lasky look again to Hawaii and a South Seas tale when his company was merged in 1918 to form Famous-Players-Lasky (the studio arm of Paramount Pictures). That year the company produced Hidden Pearls, a story examining the desire of many Americans to escape to the South Seas. On the death of his mother, a young American/South Seas Islander living in the United States is pronounced king of a small island. Having lost his father’s fortune, he returns with the idea of exploiting the island by stealing from a secret and very valuable pearl bed. On escaping with the pearls to Honolulu, however, he has a change of heart, and instead of returning to civilization returns to save his community and marry the beautiful “Tahona” (played by American actor Margaret Loomis). Some exterior shots were filmed in Hawaii. 22 Other Hollywood studios were not far behind Lasky. The same year as Hidden Pearls was released Universal Pictures produced Wild Women, one of the early films of noted director John Ford. In this film, Western cowpunchers, in San Francisco to compete in a rodeo, visit a Hawaiian cabaret. The men drink too much and one of them falls asleep whereupon the Hawaiian music helps him dream of life on a South Seas paradise (a backlot) with a local “princess” (played by Molly Malone). The following year, 1919, Fox Film Corporation produced A Woman There Was. Starring Theda Bara as “Zara,” the “dusky princess of a South Sea island,” Bara wore an unusual garment comprising a dress covered with a type of grass skirt that one reviewer suggested looked like “shredded wheat.” 23 Billed as “A Romance of the South Seas, the Eternal Question of the Man and the Woman,” the film depicted Zara as caught in a love triangle between a native pearl diver and a newly arrived American missionary. Foreshadowing John Ford’s The Hurricane by nearly twenty years, the film’s finale saw the Islanders’ village destroyed by a typhoon after the natives tried unsuccessfully to offer the missionary as a sacrifice. 24 Hollywood’s growing interest in the South Seas concerned the Hawaii Promotion Committee, which penned a letter for the “writers and producers of Hawaiian pictures.” Stating that Hawaii was “modern,” the letter emphasized there were “no ‘wild women’ on the beach at Waikiki or anywhere else.” With regard to dress, it was noted that Hawaiians “for the past forty years have dressed exactly as do the civilized people of any colonial country.” There was “[n]o primitive life in Hawaii”: “No people in the Hawaiian Islands wear grass skirts. . . . Hawaiians today, as for the last fifty years, dress exactly like all the American residents here.” Further, since the island held no “wild beasts,” it was “ridiculous to show in photoplays elephants, lions, tigers, buffaloes, giraffes, or any other creatures of tropical countries.” Noting, too, the use of the term “kanakas,” the Promotion Committee pointed out that the phrase was a term used for inhabitants of the South Seas, and emphasized to Hollywood that “Hawaii is not in the South Seas.” 25

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An important feature of Hollywood’s early South Seas films was the ways in which they borrowed directly from the literary tradition to portray “inter-racial” love between Europeans and Islanders as an acceptable consequence of Western encroachments into the Pacific—ideas that had emerged in the late eighteenth century and which had been enshrined in texts such as the Bounty narrative, as well as in Typee’s Fayaway, in Bird of Paradise, and elsewhere. Such relationships, while increasingly viewed as problematic in the wake of the rise of scientific racism, appeared less dangerous than the much-feared “miscegenation” between white and black Americans—dangers that had recently been reinforced for American cinemagoers in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. 26 One explanation for the conflicting messages between Birth of a Nation and these South Sea films was the gender of the non-European “other.” That gender was an important consideration can be seen from an examination of Fox’s 1919 A Fallen Idol, which was filmed on a soundstage in Hollywood with exteriors completed in Miami. Tapping into yet another literary theme, the film examined the clash of race when “Princess Laone” (played by well-known chorus girl and artist’s model Evelyn Nesbit) visits Santa Barbara and falls in love with the nephew of her host. Although Laone is warned off because of racial difference and returns to Hawaii, the nephew follows his lover and they are eventually reunited and married. The Motion Picture News claimed this as “something new under the camera lights” and a “rude jolt” to the “familiar blood barrier of Oriental versus Occidental.” 27 D. W. Griffith’s own efforts in the South Seas genre in 1920 also spoke to the issue of gender. Coinciding with the public interest in the South Seas generated by Frederick O’Brien, Griffith traveled to Florida and the Bahamas to make two South Seas films. While The Love Flower was a detective story that just happened to be set on a South Seas island to where an American family had fled, the very popular second film The Idol Dancer was a bona fide South Seas film addressing a number of issues within the tradition. 28 Created against the South Seas context offered by O’Brien and Somerset Maugham, The Idol Dancer’s story showed Islanders’ ways of life in turmoil because of the extremes of white culture—corruption and exploitation on one side, and puritanical missionary practices on the other. The idol of the film’s title, the alluring “White Almond Flower,” is of mixed “race” combining the “blood of vivacious France, inscrutable Java,” and “languorous Samoa.” 29 One day while visiting the beach White Almond Flower finds a drunken beachcomber—“a derelict thrown upon the shore.” Accepting White Almond Flower’s help, the beachcomber (“Dan McGuire”) is immediately attracted to her. A rivalry for the Islander woman’s affection quickly develops between McGuire and “Walter Kincaid,” a young

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Christian missionary. Less puritanical than his missionary colleagues— after seeing White Almond Flower performing the hula, he “wants to live”—Kincaid has come to the South Seas to not only seek the Christian redemption of the Islanders, but also to regain his health. The Islander maiden plays off the two South Seas types until she is captured by a third character, a white fortune hunter called “the Blackbirder” who, with the aid of a cannibalistic chief from another isle, decides to take White Almond Flower as his own after his passions are raised witnessing her dancing before a wooden idol. The kidnap attempt is foiled by the Beachcomber and Missionary acting independently. The Missionary’s health deteriorates in the wake of the encounter and near his death he asks the Beachcomber and Native to renounce their ways. The Beachcomber renounces his gin and the Islander her idol. These two miracles have the effect of delivering a third miracle: the Missionary recovers from his illness in time to join the reformed Beachcomber in defending the village from a cannibal attack. While The Idol Dancer was never considered one of Griffith’s great films, and although it soon faded into relative obscurity, the film did attract an audience when it was released and was the subject of critical review. Much was made of Clarine Seymour—the “prettiest . . . and most charmingly photographic” American actress of the day—who played White Almond Flower. The titillation Seymour provided her audience was noted in reviews. As one reviewer put it, Seymour “is what she pretends to be, a dusky island belle.” Burns Mantle’s review in Photoplay recalled Rudyard Kipling’s line—“She wears not so very much in front and little less than ’alf of that be’ind”—before recognizing modern influences with the observation that Seymour was “a beauty bright from the bells on her toes to the permanent wave in her hair (a wave she never learned to do in the South Seas Islands).” Mantle concluded that no one could blame Kincaid for being seduced by White Almond Flower’s beauty. 30 Griffith’s decision to shoot the South Seas in the Bahamas was also a point of some discussion. Photoplay questioned the worth of such location shooting when Griffith “brought precious little back that he could not have ordered in his Westchester studio, or found in Florida. . . . However, better a real background that seems a waster of money than an imitation that could be recognized.” 31 Reviewers and audiences, apparently, still sought authenticity despite many films being made on lots. Exhibitors exploited the interest in the South Seas to attract audiences to their cinemas. Industry publications gave suggestions and reported on efforts to transform the experience of the viewing public when they watched a South Seas film. Reporting on the efforts of a Milwaukee cinema to exploit the arrival of Griffith’s The Idol Dancer, the Exibitors Herald noted that the “fascinating South Sea atmosphere was carried out

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through art suggestions in display advertising and the transformation of the theater into a straw-thatched South Sea village.” 32 The commercial success of these early Hollywood South Seas films, and the broader societal interest in the region, saw the genre continue to grow in the early postwar period. Paramount Artcraft capitalized on the interest in Gauguin with its 1920 production Idols of Clay, which followed an English sculptor who decided to “end his life and his career in a lingering debauch” on a South Seas island, but who—unlike Gauguin— instead finds redemption before returning to civilization. 33 In 1922, Jesse Lasky sent yet another production team to Hawaii, with instructions to make two films on location. The results were The Bonded Women (1922) and The White Flower (1923), both of which featured Betty Compson, who, following the death of Clarine Seymour one month after the opening of The Idol Dancer, claimed the title of the South Seas first movie star. While the Bonded Woman simply used “a dash of the South Sea island atmosphere just for good luck,” The White Flower maintained the interracial aspects of its counterparts. 34 Compson played “Konia Markham,” the daughter of an American father and Hawaiian mother. Noting that The White Flower had been made in Hawaii “in order to have the atmosphere correct,” one advertisement for the film claimed it would be the “first time the real Hawaii will be seen on the screen.” Compson’s Konia, moreover, reportedly struggled “between her conflicting selves.” 35 That such films continued to be vehicles to titillate audiences with Hollywood’s most attractive leading ladies was evidenced again, in 1924, when Australian actress and swimming sensation Annette Kellerman starred in the Lee-Bradford Corporation production Venus of the South Seas—the “story of Girls and Pearls, Love and Adventures, Mermaids and Wonders of the South Seas.” 36 During the decades that followed, the capacity of filmmakers to titillate, as well as “inform”—thereby perpetuating aspects of the South Seas tradition that were already well established in literary form—ensured that audiences would be offered an array of cinematic representations of the South Pacific. Despite the growing popularity of the fictional narrative film, some filmmakers continued to regard the travelogue as the best forum for exploring and explaining the South Seas. Martin and Osa Johnson’s “Johnson Film Company,” for example, continued to make ethnographic educational films, including their 1922 production Head Hunters of the South Seas. 37 Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal, also saw a market. In 1920 footage shot from Siam, Java, and New Guinea formed the core of an ethnographic film called Shipwrecked Among Cannibals. Despite its claims to authenticity, the actual encounter with cannibals on a small South Pacific island (Frederick Henry Island) near New Guinea was staged. Tapping into O’Brien’s work, an advertisement for the film in a Holly-

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wood trade journal was headlined: “Going—Going—Gone! In fourteen years these Savages will be a vanished race—this film, their only record.” 38 Another advertisement featured a naked and geographically unidentified Islander woman with the headline: “Never have there been any as remarkable.” 39 Frank Hurley, an Australian, was another travelogue and ethnographic filmmaker. Internationally recognized for his film work in Antarctica with the Mawson and ill-fated Shackleton expeditions, “Captain” Hurley had recently returned from service as a cameraman with the Australian Imperial Force in the Middle East. Having seen Antarctica and the Holy Land, and seeking a new, challenging environment, Hurley became interested in the Australian colony of Papua, as well as his country’s recently acquired League of Nations–mandated territory of New Guinea. With a commission from the Anglican Board of Missions to document their work, in 1920 Hurley traveled to Papua to make “travelogue entertainment.” Along with the film commissioned by the Board of Missions, Hurley made a travelogue entitled Pearls and Savages. 40 Although Hurley’s efforts required the assistance of colonial authorities, Robert Dixon has suggested the film was not a work of propaganda for the colonial enterprise in New Guinea. 41 The Papua represented in the film was essentially a timeless one, with no reference to colonial administration, or to the impact of that administration. It often appeared that Hurley and his camera were making “first contact” with some of the communities he encountered. The film created a “sensation” when it screened in Sydney in 1921. Hurley provided a lecture with the film three times a day for five months, before touring the nation. One reviewer noted he had been “fascinated by the Robinson Crusoe adventures of photographer Frank Hurley. . . . His film Pearls and Savages made me personally long to let down my hair, grab a few beads, and stain myself chocolate.” 42 A second film, With the Headhunters in Papua, was produced in 1923 and Hurley toured both films through the lecture circuits of Australia and the United Kingdom. Hurley’s original plan had been to meet the famous American travel writer and filmmaker Lowell Thomas in Papua with the goal of producing a collaborative work that would also be attractive to the American market. The plan, however, was not realized and so Hurley himself took Pearls and Savages to Canada and the United States. As had been the case in Australia, a “travel book” for the film was published by George Putnam. 43 Representing himself as one of those members of the Lost Generation who had rejected civilization for paradise, Hurley claimed he could not tolerate modern cities and would be “more comfortable in a cannibal’s grass hut.” 44 While Pearl and Savages enjoyed some success in the United States, its reception was more modest than it had been in Australia. Hurley concluded that the reason for the film’s inability to realize its full potential could be explained by the demise of the travelogue genre. If

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his work was going to sell in the United States it would have to be narrative driven. Returning to Australia, Hurley was determined to unite the travelogue with the literary tradition, through the narrative form. Deciding to follow the path set by Raymond Longford and adapt a South Seas classic for the screen, he chose Louis Becke’s The Hound and the Deep (also known as Pearl of the South Seas). With £10,000 funding from Australian-born British film magnate Sir Oswald Stoll, Hurley made preparations to shoot his film in Papua. His new approach, however, did not excite Australian authorities, who prohibited him from filming in Papua because “it would be harmful to show whites and blacks together.” 45 Evidently, Australian colonial authorities’ concerns about miscegenation extended to Papuan natives. Consequently, the Hound and the Deep was relocated and shot on Thursday Island. While justifying his on-location filming on the grounds that he could not “parody these people in the studio,” Hurley subsequently felt obliged to cast Australian actress Grace Savieri as the Islander woman Hurana in The Jungle Woman, also shot on Thursday Island. 46 The films did acceptably well at the box office, but the Australian film industry was already in decline, in the face of American competition. The decisive factor in Frank Hurley’s decision to switch from travelogues to fictional narrative had been a film he had seen while in the United States. The film marked the debut of Robert J. Flaherty. Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North showed Hurley that the best way to represent the far-flung places of the world was to tell a story rather than merely show a scene. Flaherty had approached Nanook of the North with a similar desire as the anthropologist, seeking to create an authentic ethnographic experience. 47 Unlike Hurley, not everyone was convinced by Flaherty’s approach, and much of the academic debate associated with the film related to the issue of authenticity. 48 Critics were silenced, however, when Margaret Mead’s dissertation advisor, Columbia University professor of anthropology Franz Boaz, praised the work and contacted Will Hays, President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, seeking a more formal connection between Hollywood and anthropology. 49 In the wake of the international success of Nanook of the North, Flaherty was approached by Jesse L. Lasky, who wanted another Nanook and suggested to Flaherty he could go anywhere in the world to film it. Having lived much of his adult life in the frozen North, Flaherty decided to look to the warm South Seas—a location that met with Lasky’s firm approval. Flaherty’s decision was partly informed by a film that had exercised a significant influence on Johnson’s 1912 travelogue Jack London’s Adventures in the South Seas Islands. 50 He promptly approached Frederick O’Brien, whose notoriety was at its height. Offering encouragement to Flaherty, O’Brien suggested that the best place to capture the “old cul-

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ture” of the South Seas before its extinction was the village of Safune, on the island of Savaii, in the New Zealand–mandated territory of Western Samoa. 51 Inspired in part by O’Brien’s representation of the South Seas and his obvious enthusiasm for the project, Flaherty and his family set sail from San Francisco in April 1923. Their preconceptions of what they would find in Samoa were firmly ensconced in the South Seas tradition—images that O’Brien had endorsed. Flaherty’s wife, Frances, recalled later that her husband believed the South Seas would make good Hollywood box office because of the “thrills and sensations” they would find there. “All the way down on the steamer,” she wrote, “we talked about it, about the sea monsters there doubtless were down there around those islands; doubtless the Samoans had encounters, fights for their lives, with them.” 52 Arriving in Samoa, Flaherty and his party learned that O’Brien’s glamorous depictions were somewhat exaggerated. Frances Flaherty noted she could not “say that Safune turned out to be the most picturesque spot in the whole of the South Seas.” 53 Yet this disappointment did not diminish the enthusiasm with which the Flahertys went about their task, establishing their home in a house which O’Brien himself had once used. Soon after arriving Flaherty began identifying locations, especially searching coral reefs for the homes of the giant octopuses and tiger sharks that would be crucial to his story. Although he found several locations, Flaherty searched in vain for “sea monsters.” Frances later reflected that her husband grew despondent, and “just sat on our verandah with every thought falling away from him.” 54 The South Seas were not as he expected them to be; the sea was not the threat to the Samoans he had imagined; and there was no real struggle against the environment, as there had been for the Eskimos. Weeks turned to months as Flaherty struggled to find a suitable theme. And then it dawned on him: while he could not pit the people against the environment, he could concentrate on the people themselves. Filming the elaborate rituals and customs of Samoan life would allow him to capture what he had come to consider as the “lyric beauty of Polynesian life.” 55 Having identified a theme, numerous obstacles nonetheless remained. Casting proved difficult. He could not find in the entire village of Safune a girl sufficiently attractive to his tastes to play his heroine. Noting that there were few “photographable types,” he widened his search to nearby villages where he finally found the “type” he required—a young woman closer to his and his viewers’ perception of South Seas beauty. Another difficulty was capturing the customs and rituals themselves. In another case, a tattooist had to be brought from another island to perform the ritual for the cameras. If not for Flaherty and his film, Ta’avale, who played the part of “Moana”—would not have been tattooed. 56

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Although Flaherty had cast locals as fictitious characters and had staged situations for the benefit of his camera, the final product—known variously as Moana, Moana of the South, Moana of the South Seas, and Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age—was considered a “documentary”; indeed a review of the film by John Grierson in the New York Sun actually coined the term. The film premiered at the Rialto Theater in New York on February 7, 1926. Although plans for a group of grass-skirted “hula” dancers were not realized, outside the theater palm trees decorated the facade, covered by a light dusting of snow. While Flaherty had woven a romantic connection between his two main characters, Paramount’s publicity department, which had expressed disappointment that there were “not enough tits,” concentrated much of their promotional activities on highlighting the sexual dimension. The public were thus encouraged to come and see “The Love Life of a South Sea Siren.” 57 Moana won much critical acclaim, especially in Europe. A review in Exceptional Photoplays praised the film as “obviously one of the very few entirely beautiful pictures that the screen has given us.” 58 Despite such plaudits, Moana was not a commercial success. This fact, however, did not prevent Jesse Lasky and Paramount from continuing to see profit in their association with the South Seas. In the wake of Moana Lasky produced two South Seas films in quick succession. The first, Aloma of the South Seas (1926), filmed in Puerto Rico, Bermuda, and Long Island, starred the Polish actress and dancer Gilda Gray, who became a sensation through her popularization of the dance known as the “shimmy.” An advertisement in Motion Picture News asked viewers to imagine Gray as “a tempestuous South Sea dancer striving to fascinate the man she loves, knowing his heart is held lightly by a woman of fashion from another world.” Alluding back to the still bankable Frederick O’Brien, the advertisement described “Gilda as the heroine of a throbbing romance staged amid the white shadows and blue lagoons of the South Seas.” 59 Exhibitors were assured that “Gilda Gray’s sylph-like form shows to advantage in this exotic story, which has the wild, primitive morass of the tropics as its background. The heavy mystic atmosphere of the South Seas makes an appropriate framework.” 60 The second Paramount film, Hula (1927), was filmed in Hawaii and starred the “It Girl,” Clara Bow. Both films, but particularly Hula, delivered the titillation that the Paramount publicity department had found wanting in Moana. In Hula, for example, the screen was filled with Bow’s brief costumes, hula dancing, and an opening sequence with her swimming naked in a pool. Moana also helped convince Irving Thalberg, the young head of production at Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) that the time was right for the new studio to enter the South Seas. Thalberg had recently hired the even younger David O. Selznick, who quickly assumed a producer role with the company. A friend of Flaherty, Selznick had two South Seas pas-

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sions—Moana and Frederick O’Brien’s White Shadows in the South Seas. Of O’Brien’s book he later claimed he “was madly in love with White Shadows in the South Seas.” 61 With the help of Moana Selznick convinced Thalberg that White Shadows should be MGM’s first South Seas picture. Thalberg, moreover, accepted Selznick’s insistence that the film would need to be made on location. While Selznick had been instrumental in securing White Shadows, and had commenced work, Thalberg relegated him to Associate Producer with the main role given to former St. Louis sports journalist Hunt Stromberg. Selznick had already secured the services of W. S. “One Take Woody” Van Dyke, who had built a reputation on low-budget but successful westerns that had been produced by Selznick. Stromberg, however, had a better idea. Why not get Robert Flaherty himself to direct? It was decided that Flaherty and Van Dyke would be “co-directors” for the production. 62 Knowing both men, Selznick was not only convinced that the plan was a recipe for disaster, but was also worried about Stromberg’s vision for any South Seas picture. While Selznick was seeking an “ethereal love idyll,” Stromberg was convinced that “tits and sand sell tickets.” 63 Shortly after Flaherty’s arrival at the studio Stromberg asked Flaherty to screen Moana. At its conclusion Stromberg allegedly exclaimed: “Boys I’ve got a great idea! Let’s fill the screen with tits.” 64 The poetic beauty of Moana had been lost on him. Reflecting the power of the South Seas tradition, all he saw were exposed breasts and the potential for commercially lucrative titillation that this new genre allowed. Selznick pleaded with Thalberg to end the co-direction plan (in favor of Van Dyke) and to persuade Stromberg to make a film that kept the essence of O’Brien’s work—not the “tasteless” titillation Stromberg had in mind. Following Thalberg’s refusal to intervene, Selznick resigned from both the project and the studio. In Selznick’s absence the project continued. MGM had secured the rights to both the original book and a play written by O’Brien which dramatized many of the important themes of his books and which he had titled White Shadows. Set at a depot of the “American South Seas Trading Company” in the Marquesas Islands, in “the heart of the South Seas,” the play centered around the activities of an American university professor conducting a “post-mortem” into the demise of South Seas culture. The Marquesans—“unexcelled in the record of humanity for beauty, vigor and valor”—were represented by Maanatini, a Marquesan “Prince,” and the clash of civilizations was symbolized by Tahia, the “half caste American.” Asked by Tahia why he “‘speaks so evilly of the whites,” Maanatini replies: You do not know our history! Our degradation by the Whites! We were a happy and healthy people until they came with their guns to take away our freedom. They said our clothes were hateful to God and sold

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Thalberg and Stromberg had little time for the ponderous play. But they did consider White Shadows in the South Seas an excellent title for a film. Arriving at MGM, Flaherty linked up with screenwriter Laurence Stallings to flesh out a storyline. The two men soon concluded that rather than attempting to make something out of O’Brien’s play or travelogue, they would be better off making a film version of Herman Melville’s Typee. Thalberg, who had already had a staff writer prepare a treatment of White Shadows in the South Seas, was not convinced. Stallings resigned, and although Flaherty remained with the project, the production files do not show any evidence of Flaherty’s hand in the subsequent preparation of the script. These efforts appear to have been left to two MGM staff writers, Ray Doyle and Jack Cunningham. Both Doyle and Cunningham, as well as the earlier treatment writer Eugene Walters, conducted considerable research into the South Seas, and despite the rejection of O’Brien’s play, were greatly influenced by his book’s message. One of O’Brien’s themes—that the Islanders of the story should be represented as the descendants of Caucasians, who were clinging to the hill tops of the “lost continent”—prompted considerable debate. For his part, Walters was confident that from “almost every available source of information that the records show, and from such anthropological data as has been handed to us”—albeit “not without a sense of romance”—there could be little doubt that such claims were wellfounded. 66 Doyle and Cunningham had difficulty conveying this theme in a fictionalized and silent action film, and were determined, in any case, to exploit the story to highlight the devastation of the South Seas brought on by the “white men’s lust for wealth and empire.” 67 The opening title to Cunningham’s version of the screenplay insisted that the “story of the South Seas is the story of the white man’s greed . . . of darkness falling over a happy primitive people for whom there is no dawn.” 68 Doyle and Cunningham’s efforts to raise what they considered the most important issues in South Seas affairs met with a frosty response from the producers. Such intellectualization did not interest Hunt Stromberg. Sent back to the drawing board, Doyle and Cunningham eventually produced a tale focusing on the story of a white man, destroyed by civilization, who escapes to paradise where he is redeemed by the love of an Islander woman. The revised version made only passing references to the European degradation of the South Seas. It was decided that the film would be shot on location in Papeete, in Tahiti. During his early visit to the South Pacific, Flaherty had been very critical of Papeete, but his views had changed by the time he returned.

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Van Dyke, too, was impressed. He wrote to his mistress, Josephine Chippo: The island is lovely as far as I have gotten but I haven’t had a chance to look around much yet. . . . I have bought a hula outfit for you this morning and when I get back I am going to make you dress in it. Have only seen a couple of good looking natives. They are supposed to be very good but they sure look better on the film than off. 69

Van Dyke’s production diary, along with his letters to Chippo, provide revealing insights into the making of White Shadows in the South Seas and are interesting precursors to the experiences hundreds of thousands of Allied service personal would share in fifteen years’ time. In Van Dyke’s second letter, written the next day, he was still effusive in his praise about the “delightful people” and their “small corner of heaven.” The physical beauty of the Islander women, however, remained a disappointment: “The women have a certain savage beauty but I have no desire to give myself a chance to tire of them.” But he conceded that such hints of disillusionment were his problem, rather than a reflection of the failings of paradise: “I guess that I am un-romantic and unimaginative.” 70 By the third day, and his third letter, he realized that it was not him but his environment: “This is a country of first impressions. It is beautiful on arrival and then it begins to wane rapidly. As long as you can hypnotize yourself on first impressions, you will get along all right, but it will not stand for analysis.” From that point on Van Dyke lamented every day in his tropical “Hades.” At every opportunity he debunked what he now saw as the fictitious South Seas tradition. In explaining his motivation he told Chippo he was “severe in this criticism only because the enthusiasts have gone to the other extreme. The South Seas are only unusual if one’s disposition leans that way.” 71 On the question of the Caucasian origins of Polynesians Van Dyke noted: In one of Flaherty’s articles, he asserts that it is very possible that the polonysians [sic] were originally of the caucasion [sic] race. Other writers who have come down here and married the native women, like Keable, Stevenson, Lane, Hampton assert that same thing. I suppose it’s only natural that when you sleep with them and marry them that you should want to find some justification for it. If they have an ounce of caucasion ancestry in the whole race, then I’m a Jersey cow.

Van Dyke’s disappointment about the unattractiveness of Islander women was an ongoing theme: “I have been sadly disillusioned in regard to the beauty of native women. I have even heard someone say something once about native charm. It’s all a delusion and a snare. If they are beautiful then I am Adonis.” 72 By February 1928, having “lost all sexual desire for women,” he remarked that he might “just as well have things cut off for all the good they are doing.” 73 Clyde De Vinna, Van Dyke’s

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cameraman and another of Chippo’s correspondents, agreed: “No foolin’—I’ve been a regular angel the whole time down here—honestly. Seem to have lost the old South Seas kick.” 74 Not all members of the crew, however, held such reservations. Van Dyke reported to Chippo that two crew members were involved in sexual relations with the two native women who had been selected for supporting roles. The rest of the crew were also in various states of degeneration: “The crew all work with nothin’ on from the waist up and they are all as tan as the natives. This place is sure a degenerate’s paradise. Some of our gang are wallowing in it. Can’t understand how they can but they are. These natives represent a very little different strata to me than the negro.” 75 The “South Seas” were not the South Seas. Not long after arriving in Papeete, Flaherty realized that Van Dyke was under precise instructions from Thalberg and Stromberg about the type of picture to be made. Flaherty and Van Dyke soon fell out and Flaherty returned to the United States, leaving Van Dyke to complete the film on his own. The production was now in the hands of the South Seas skeptic. Although he rejected the notion of Caucasian ancestry in Polynesian people, Van Dyke worked with a Caucasian female lead—the Mexican actor Raquel Torres—who was cast, in a tribute to Melville, as the beautiful and seductive “Fayaway.” Reflecting the triumph of Hollywood actresses to play Islander women, the Hollywood journal Motion Picture Classic suggested that to “provide a South Seas beauty fully up to expectations, the wisest plan is to import one from Hollywood.” 76 Despite the fact he nearly had “heart failure” when Flaherty suggested that he might stay in the islands for the rest of his life, Van Dyke made a film in which the male lead—Dr. Lloyd (played by Monty Blue)— does just that and finds “complete regeneration”: the South Seas were effectively redeeming “the man civilization had destroyed.” Furthermore, this regeneration is achieved through the arms of the beautiful Islander woman Fayaway. 77 Although his own experiences in the South Pacific had debunked many aspects of the South Seas tradition, Van Dyke had made a film that endorsed those same traditions. Commercial priorities had prevailed. White Shadows in the South Seas premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on August 3, 1928. With the addition of a post-production audio track it was MGM’s first sound film. Asked by reporters outside the theater what had been his greatest difficulty in directing the film, Van Dyke mused that it was stopping the “Natives” from laughing: “I’ll never forget it—that laughter of the South Seas.” “Hades” had become an “effortless Utopia.” 78 Reflecting Stromberg’s desires for the film, promotional advertisements in the press spoke of “THE BOOK THAT NOBODY DARED TO FILM—AT LAST IT’S HERE—TWO YEARS OF PRIMITIVE DANGER TO BRING IT TO YOU! IT’S DIFFERENT!” With a drawing of

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Monte Blue embracing a topless but subtly shaded Torres, audiences were told they would see: Dens of the South Seas where human wreckage of all nations drifts for adventure and fortune! Intimate love ceremonials of the South Seas! How pearl divers are sent to their doom by cruel traffickers in jewels. Wild interiors of the South Seas Islands, whose beauty is staggering, never before seen in any film drama! The Canoe battle in waters swarming with man-eating sharks! AND MANY MORE THRILLS! 79

Notwithstanding such sensationalism, MGM also suggested that in the same style as Moana, White Shadows was a factual account of South Seas life. A promotional booklet that was released with the film—with a cover depicting a topless woman and a man fighting a shark—contained an introduction purportedly written by “Chief Maheui,” a native Tahitian leader. Maheui suggested that the film showed Americans “what our native life is”: “We have only to be ourselves in the story and it has been easy for us.” 80 As had long been the case, the “South Seas” that was presented to American and Australian audiences was a creation of the Western imagination and desires, rather than an accurate representation of a region and its peoples. As the following chapters reveal, in the wake of Flaherty’s work, there was no serious challenge to that well-established pattern of misrepresentation and misunderstanding. NOTES 1. Frederick O’Brien, Atolls of the Sun (New York: The Century Co., 1922), foreword. 2. John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ix. 3. Daily Review and Motion Pictures Today 24 (March 17, 1930): x. 4. Brian McFarlane, Geoff Mayer, and Ina Bertrand, eds., Oxford Companion to Australian Film (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999), 109. 5. Theodore Baker, “The Roots of Travel Cinema. John L. Stoddard, E. Burton Holmes and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Travel Lecture,” Film History 5, no. 1 (1993): 68. 6. Alison Griffiths, “‘To the World We Show’: Early Travelogues as Filmed Ethnography,” Film History 11, no. 3 (1999): 282. 7. Griffiths, “‘To the World We Show,’” 293. 8. Moving Picture World 5 (13 November 1909): 694. 9. Davy Jones in the South Seas, Vitagraph Company, Nickelodeon 5 (January 14, 1911): cover. Other examples include the 1909 Selig Polyscope Company production No Man’s Land, in which a young American travels to the South Seas but is shipwrecked in a storm and finds an island where a beachcomber Spaniard rules over the native population. See Motion Picture World 9 (October 30, 1909): 621. The Thanhouser Company produced Value—Beyond Price, a Crusoe-like tale set on South Seas island. The Missing Years was a 1912 production in a similar vein. See Motion Picture World 12 (May 18, 1912): 640. How Algy Captured a Wild Man was yet another Crusoe-inspired film. See Motion Picture World (September 2, 1911): 649.

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10. See Hanford C. Judson, “Melies Globe Trotters Reach Tahiti Islands,” Motion Picture World 13 (August 24, 1912): 774. 11. Judson, “Melies Globe Trotters,” 774. 12. See John O’Leary, “Creating a Landscape of Sentiment: George Grey and the Legend of Hinemoa,” Australian-Canadian Studies 18, nos. 1–2 (2000): 41–50. 13. Dore Hoffman, “Melies in the South Seas,” Motion Picture World 14 (December 14, 1912): 1061. 14. Motion Picture News 10 (October 31, 1914): 78. 15. Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, Australian Film, 1900–1907: A Guide to Feature Film Production (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980), 57. 16. Sydney Sun, January 16, 1916. 17. For an introduction to the film consult Daniel Reynaud, Celluloid ANZACS (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007), 30. 18. Alan Gevinson, ed., Within Our Gates: Ethnicity in American Feature Films, 1911–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 75. 19. Galveston Daily News, December 19, 1915. 20. Pike and Cooper, Australian Film, 64. 21. Gevinson, Within Our Gates, 117. 22. Motography 19 (February 9, 1918): 269. 23. Motion Picture News 18 (June 14, 1919): 4027. 24. Exhibitors Herald 8 (March–June 1919): no page. 25. Moving Picture World, October 20, 1917. 26. For an introduction to discussions on the film and this theme consult Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 19–33. 27. Motion Picture News 19 (May 31, 1919): 3663. 28. Exhibitors Herald, May 8, 1920. 29. Cited in Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Proscenium Publishers, 1984), 421. 30. Variety, March 26, 1920; Photoplay, 18 (June 1920): 67. 31. Photoplay, 18 (June 1920): 67. 32. Exhibitors Herald, May 1, 1920. 33. Photoplay 19 (February 1921): 53. 34. Exhibitors Trade Review 12 (August 1922): 765. 35. Film Daily 23 (January 3, 1923): 3. One trade photograph showed Compson posed in a swimsuit on Waikiki beach in front of four “beach boys” including Duke Kahanamoku. See Exhibitors Herald, December 9, 1922. 36. Advertisement, Exhibitors Trade Review, December 29, 1923. Kellermen had completed Hollywood’s first nude scene in her 1916 film Daughter of the Gods 37. Exhibitors Herald 15 (October 14, 1922): 13. For a further exploration of the Johnsons consult Pascal James Imperato and Eleanor M. Imperato, They Married Adventure: The Wandering Lives of Martin and Osa Johnson (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), and Prue Ahrens, Lamont Lindstrom, and Fiona Paisley, Across the World With the Johnsons: Visual Culture and American Empire in the Twentieth Century (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013). 38. Film Daily 13 (July 18, 1920): 10. 39. Exhibitors Herald 11 (August 14, 1920). 40. Hurley’s was not the first attempt to chronicle the work of the missionary endeavor. In 1917 interests supporting the Christian ministry in the Solomon Islands made The Transformed Isle. For introductions to Hurley and his approach consult Robert Dixon, Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments (London: Anthem Press, 2011). 41. Robert Dixon, “Frank Hurley’s Pearls and Savages: Travel, Representation and Colonial Governance,” in In Transit: Travel, Text, Empire, ed. Helen Gilbert and Anna Johnston (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 207. 42. Dixon, “Frank Hurley’s Pearls and Savages,” 207–208.

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43. Frank Hurley, Pearls and Savages: Adventures in the Air, on Land and Sea in New Guinea (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1924). 44. Dixon, “Frank Hurley’s Pearls and Savages,” 210. 45. Pike and Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1977, 171. 46. McFarlane, et al., The Oxford Companion to Australian Film, 242. 47. John W. Burton and Caitlin W. Thompson, “Nanook and the Kirwinians: Deception, Authenticity, and the Birth of Modern Ethnographic Representation,” Film History 14, no. 1 (2002): 74. 48. Fatima Tobing, “Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North: The Politics of Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnography,” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of US Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernadi (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 301. 49. Tobing, “Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North,” 303. 50. Richard Barsam, The Vision of Robert Flaherty: The Artist as Myth and Filmmaker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 16. 51. See Betsy A. McLane, A New History of Documentary Film: Second Edition (New York: Continuum, 2012), 26. 52. Cited in Paul Rotha, Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 53. 53. Francis Hubbard Flaherty, “Setting up House and Shop in Samoa. The Struggle to Find Screen Material in the Lyric Beauty of Polynesian Life,” Asia (August, 1925): 639–711. 54. Cited in Rotha, Robert J. Flaherty, 58. 55. Flaherty, “Setting up House and Shop in Samoa.” In contrast Martin and Osa Johnson had found danger aplenty elsewhere in the South Seas. Head Hunters of the South Seas promised a “tribe of head hunters on the warpath,” a “real earthquake,” a “strange tribe of monkey people,” “man eating sharks after man-eating savages,” and “a volcano erupting.” See Exhibitors Herald 15 (October 14, 1922): 13. 56. Cited in Rotha, Robert J. Flaherty, 68–69. 57. Cited in Rotha, Robert J. Flaherty, 68–69. 58. Exceptional Photoplays 6 (November/December 1925): no page. 59. San Bernadino County Sun, September 24, 1926. 60. Exhibitors Trade Review 19 (December 26, 1925): 87. 61. Rudy Behlmer, ed., Memo from David O. Selznick (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 15. 62. Rudy Behlmer, W. S. Van Dyke’s Journal: White Shadows in the South Seas, 1927–1928 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996), 16. 63. Mark A. Viera, Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 84. 64. Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Innocent Eye: The Life of Robert J. Flaherty (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., 1963), 123. 65. Frederick O’Brien, “White Shadows, A Play in Three Acts,” Turner/MGM Production Notes, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (hereafter cited as AMPAS), Los Angeles. 66. Eugene Walters, Treatment of White Shadows, Turner MGM/Production Notes, April 18, 1927, AMPAS. 67. Ray Doyle, Third Treatment, “White Shadows in the South Seas,” Turner MGM/ Production Notes, September 10, 1927, AMPAS. 68. Jack Cunningham, Treatment, “White Shadows in the South Seas,” Turner MGM/Production Notes, AMPAS. 69. Woody Van Dyke to Josephine Chippo, December 10, 1927, Folder 16, Josephine Chippo Papers, AMPAS. 70. Van Dyke to Chippo, December 11, 1927, Folder 16, Chippo Papers, AMPAS. 71. Van Dyke to Chippo, December 24, 1927, Folder 16, Chippo Papers, AMPAS. 72. Van Dyke to Chippo, December 21, 1927, Folder 16, Chippo Papers, AMPAS. 73. Van Dyke, Production Journal, February 7, 1928, Folder 17, Chippo Papers, AMPAS.

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74. Clyde de Vinna to Chippo, undated, Folder 8, Chippo Papers, AMPAS. 75. Van Dyke to Chippo, undated, Folder 19, Chippo Papers, AMPAS. 76. “She and Her Shadow,” Motion Picture Classic 27 (July 1928): 43. 77. White Shadows in the South Seas, Promotional Booklet (New York: MGM, 1928), held in Folder 8, Chippo Papers, AMPAS. 78. Stage and Screen Evening Herald, July 28, 1928. 79. San Francisco Examiner, March 10, 1928. 80. Anon., White Shadows in the South Seas, Promotional Booklet.

TWELVE Cinematic Escapes The South Seas Adventure Film

Robert Flaherty’s association with the South Seas genre did not end with his decision to abandon White Shadows. Upon returning from Tahiti he was hired by William Fox of Fox Studios to make a film in Mexico. Feeling constrained by the Hollywood studio system, Flaherty soon lost interest in the project. In an attempt to keep him focused Fox promised Flaherty that after he had finished filming in Mexico he could return to Tahiti to make the film that White Shadows was not. To facilitate such a production, his brother, David Flaherty, was sent to Tahiti. When David returned from the South Pacific he was invited to dinner by the German film director F. W. Murnau. Having made such cinematic classics as Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, Murnau had been invited to Hollywood in 1926 by William Fox, but by late 1928 he had also tired of the studio system and was laying plans to escape. He had purchased a large yacht and renamed it Bali—his intended destination. Aware that Robert Flaherty’s Mexican project was about to be suspended by Fox because of creative differences, Murnau saw an opportunity for two Hollywood outcasts to travel to the South Seas and make the kind of films they wanted to make—like Moana, which Murnau adored. The Flaherty brothers readily agreed. David Flaherty and Murnau set sail in April 1929 for the South Seas, while Robert Flaherty, after extricating himself from Fox, and finalizing a funding agreement with Colorart, a new studio, traveled by steamer a month later. Murnau’s impressions of the South Seas demonstrate the strength of the tradition in Europe—particularly in Germany, which had held a South Seas empire until World War I. Most of Murnau’s literary inspiration, however, was derived from the works of English and American 193

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writers. Cramming the Bali with South Seas literature—including works by Conrad, Stevenson, Melville, O’Brien, Loti, and Nordhoff and Hall— he hoped such a library would strengthen his “nostalgia” for a place he had never seen. 1 Disillusionment, however, struck Murnau when he was just eight hundred miles from Los Angeles. For Murnau the Southern Cross had been his symbol of the South Seas, so he was greatly disappointed when he first saw the constellation hundreds of miles north of the equator. Although Murnau apparently felt this disillusionment like a physical pain, once he was in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Southern Cross shone brighter, he reinvested it with its former symbolism. Perhaps, unlike Robert Flaherty, Murnau was also aware that he was traveling to an imaginary place. Writing to a friend in Berlin he noted that the Southern Cross would “shine down on our books and our dreams, for it is towards our books and our dreams that we are voyaging.” 2 By the time the Bali had reached the South Pacific the cruise had taken on all the hallmarks of a pilgrimage. The yacht’s first port of call was the picturesque Tai-o-hai on the island of Nukuhiva in the Marquesas, which had been portrayed by writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Frederick O’Brien, and which had been the famous setting for Melville’s Typee. Next stop was Typee itself, where Melville had been briefly held prisoner, and then on to Gauguin’s grave at Atuona. These ports of call all served to reinforce the South Seas tradition for Murnau. Accepting O’Brien’s argument that paradise would soon be lost, he came to the realization that he and Flaherty should make a film which captured the real South Seas before they vanished. 3 While Flaherty shared Murnau’s views on the proposed film’s central theme, and although he played a pivotal role in creating the basic storyline, it soon became apparent that the two men had very different ideas about how this theme would be translated into celluloid. With Colorart pulling out of the production following the Wall Street crash, and with Murnau deciding to bankroll the production himself, Flaherty felt increasingly compelled to step further into the background. He finally sold his share in the film to Murnau a few months before the end of shooting. Moana would remain Flaherty’s only South Seas picture. 4 Murnau had been fascinated by Flaherty’s stories of his earlier trip to Samoa, particularly his reports of the sacredness of the village virgin or taupou and the punishment which befell any man who dared break the tabu. Although the original storyline had to be changed because of fears of litigation by Colorart, Murnau made his storyline the tale of two lovers who dared to break the tabu after the woman found herself elevated to this sacred position. The young lovers escape to “where the White man rules and the Old Gods are forgotten.” But civilization—represented chiefly by conniving Chinese businessmen—only imprisons them before

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the forces they have unleashed by their love finds them with devastating consequences. 5 Murnau selected as his location for the film the island of Bora Bora, which he described in his film’s opening titles as a “land of enchantment remote in the South Seas . . . still untouched by the hand of civilization.” Like Flaherty with Moana, Murnau had great difficulty in casting. To “keep the real spirit of the thing” he decided that all his actors would be newcomers who had never appeared before the camera. This, he hoped, would also allow him to produce a film that danced between the realms of drama and documentary—as Moana had done, and White Shadows had sought to do. “You know and you understand that for a dramatic story,” he confided to a friend, “this will be quite an experiment—but I shall enjoy doing it, as I hope to catch some of the true unspoiled Polynesian spirit.” 6 Again like Flaherty, Murnau’s parameters for South Seas beauty were narrowed by the Europeanized forms of the South Seas tradition. In his leading man he sought to find an Islander whose figure made him “look like a Greek god, a model for the Olympic games, a delight of nature.” 7 While his search for this image of South Seas masculinity was relatively straightforward, he had greater difficulty with casting his leading lady and the supporting cast. Murnau and Flaherty had originally intended to cast Hollywood actress Lina Lang, but the plan fell through, forcing them to cast locally. They “combed the islands” looking for “suitable” cast members before Flaherty finally found a beautiful young woman with “Grecian features.” Anne Chevalier was of Tahitian/French ancestry and some distance from the “true unspoiled Polynesian spirit” which Murnau planned to capture. To ensure that this spirit was obvious Chevalier quickly became known only by her character’s name—“Reri.” In the eventual cast list for the film she would be titled such. Claiming that Chevalier, and her leading man, had “all the qualities of pure native appearance” Murnau emphasized she would “still appeal to a white audience.” 8 In late 1930, eighteen months after first arriving in the South Pacific, Murnau and his crew returned to Hollywood to complete editing the film that would be called Tabu. While Murnau had been in Tahiti, Hollywood had been in the grip of a transition that would alter the direction of American film for decades. Through the 1920s pressure mounted for greater censorship of Hollywood’s product. Production houses had attempted to circumvent such criticism by putting in place forms of selfcensorship, but by the early 1930s Hollywood’s opponents were not appeased. In response the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDAA) introduced a new and harsh “production code” to regulate what Americans could and could not see. The code was very prescriptive, from the amount and type of violence, to the duration of a

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screen kiss, to the arrangement of furniture in the cinematic American bedroom. Although Murnau had not followed Stromberg’s advice to fill the screen with naked breasts, nudity was a feature of his film. His final cut included many images of topless women and naked males in various poses including suggestive dance scenes. The film, however, was passed by the MPPDAA “without elimination.” In protecting scientific films the code decreed that “natives in their native habitat” could be represented in ways different from what might otherwise be deemed acceptable. Although Tabu was a fictional film, and while Murnau had expended great effort in casting to ensure he produced a specific outcome, the film was considered a travelogue, or at least possessing a “travelogue flavor,” with the implication that a narrative had not been staged but that the director had “shot it indiscriminately.” 9 One MPPDAA reviewer, judging the film “satisfactory with respect to the Code,” and arguing that it contained “no reasonable censorship difficulties,” concluded it should “be recommended highly as an outstanding picture.” 10 A second MPPDAA reviewer noted that there was “one scene during the progress of a festival when a native girl with bared breasts performs a South Seas dance. (This is likely to annoy many viewers of the film, but the action did not strike me as being either sensuous or vulgar—merely natural.)” 11 In the same way as National Geographic escaped censure and became a source of adolescent male titillation, Murnau’s defense that his was an authentic and ethnographically informed image of Islander life allowed the nudity to survive the censors’ intervention. Most state censors followed the MPPDAA decision and allowed the film to screen without cuts. Some states, such as Pennsylvania, cut a scene involving a young boy “where his sex was shown,” but that was the extent of the cut. 12 While no longer directly involved in the production, Robert Flaherty had approached Jesse Lasky and secured a distribution deal for the film with Paramount. Murnau was also offered a ten-year contract which would allow him to return to the South Seas and continue to make films. Plans were also laid for an adaptation of Melville’s Typee. The premiere of Tabu, released with the subtitle Forbidden Love in the South Seas, was held at Leo Brecker’s Central Park Theater in New York on March 18, 1931. Promotional material for the premiere suggested that Murnau “had dreamed for years of making such a picture.” The line between drama and documentary was also once again blurred. 13 The film was made only after Murnau had “studied the primitive happy people of the atolls.” Film Daily suggested that the “scenic beauty and alluring atmosphere of the South Seas have been caught with remarkable effectiveness, and this achievement alone makes the picture distinctly worthwhile.” 14 Discussions concerning the film during the course of the 1930s were often based on questions of authenticity. At a September 1937 screening to the Film Society, the movie was described as an authentic

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representation of South Seas life, compelling one member of the audience to ask: “You mean that this story could have happened a few years ago just as the picture presents it?” “Exactly,” responded the Film Society representative, “and it might still be possible on some of the more remote islands.” 15 The film’s opening title also made a grab for authenticity. “Only native-born South Sea Islanders appear in this picture with a few half-castes and Chinese.” Bora Bora was described as an island “still untouched by the hand of civilization.” 16 Reviewers were greatly impressed by Tabu. The Hollywood Reporter pointed out that it had “all the elements of audience attraction that are necessary including an array of native beauties who dance and put a front line chorus to shame.” 17 With Tabu complete, Murnau made plans to return to the South Seas, where he hoped to make the first cinematic adaptation of Typee—a project that perhaps reflected the influence of Flaherty, who had wanted to complete such a film instead of White Shadows. Murnau, however, would never make Typee; nor would he bathe in the critical acclaim that followed Tabu’s release (and which included an Academy Award for cinematographer Floyd Crosby). One week before the premiere, Murnau was killed in a road accident in California. Some claimed this was the revenge of South Seas, angered not because he had made a film on the subject of tabu, but because in making it he and his crew had flouted a number of such restraints. 18 In building his bungalow on a burial site, or filming in a sacred location, Murnau’s actions at times appeared little different from those of countless other Western visitors to the South Seas. In the case of Tabu, moreover, such posturing added to the film’s mystique and no doubt helped its commercial success. That success was one factor prompting Hollywood’s continued interest in the South Seas. Like Flaherty’s Moana before it, Tabu’s importance lay not only in its own commercial success, but also in its influence on other Hollywood filmmakers. As Ray Greene has argued, Tabu was “undeniably influential on everything from John Ford’s Hurricane to Abbott and Costello’s Pardon My Sarong.” 19 Murnau’s South Seas adventure inspired another prisoner of Hollywood to stage his own escape. Douglas Fairbanks, Snr., considered something of a Hollywood institution, had not made a successful transition from the silent era to the talkies. Frustrated by this failure, Fairbanks decided to make his own South Seas picture and, like Murnau, set sail for Tahiti on his own private yacht, accompanied by a small cast and crew. 20 With the working title “Fairbanks’s South Seas Picture” the Hollywood stalwart sought to make a film inspired by Robinson Crusoe—a South Seas story he had loved since he was a boy. 21 The film’s treatment, prepared by Fairbanks himself, reflected his own untenable position in Hollywood and the allure of the South Seas: “For centuries the islands of

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the South Seas have been a haven of mystery and romance to the scholar, the sportsman, and the adventurer.” But, according to Fairbanks, “here ends the quest for the veritable Garden of Eden, where man may escape from the humdrum of civilization, where he may revel in the glories of primitive paradise.” Fairbanks’s plight was further elucidated in the story of his character—the wealthy society type Steve Drexel. Having grown “tired of bluebloods, of conventions and formalities,” Drexel is bored by polite society, annoyed by debutantes, and uninterested in dinner parties. Steve was “a bundle of nervous energy, handicapped by a fortune and a name,” and “stifled by inactivity. Occasionally he had kicked over the traces to become society’s bad boy, but this time he had rebelled once and for all.” 22 The original draft of the treatment notes of what became Mr. Robinson Crusoe refers to Drexel’s decision to escape through “a cruise across the Pacific” (Fairbanks subsequently changed the yacht’s course so that it sailed though “the South Seas”). Onboard Drexel’s boat are two of his close friends and a “Professor” (whose area of expertise is not revealed). Heading for Sumatra and a tiger hunt, Drexel begins dreaming of a South Seas escape: he wants “to fight the battle of nature with his bare hands, just like Robinson Crusoe.” Enamored by that idea, Drexel decides that the island near the now-moored yacht is the perfect location for such an escape. While the Professor attempts to dissuade him by warning of cannibals, and by pointing out that “Robinson Crusoe was a myth,” an “imaginary character in fiction,” one of Drexel’s friends decides the plan worthy of a wager. 23 Drexel will be paid a thousand dollars if he can survive on the island until his friends return from Sumatra. Drexel ups the stakes and insists that not only will he survive, but that he will have hot and cold running water on their return. As predicted, Drexel finds island life idyllic. He has plenty of food, he builds a “penthouse” in the trees, and has hot and cold running water thanks to bamboo piping and a fire. Drexel effectively has the best of both worlds—all the creature comforts without the stress of civilization. While he befriends a monkey, an Islander he encounters refuses to be his “Man Friday.” The “native” escapes but not before he abandons his radio to Drexel. Tuned to San Francisco, Drexel’s decision is further reinforced by news of the Wall Street crash and the many suicides of those financially ruined. While “Friday” did not meet Drexel’s expectations, the following day an Islander woman who has escaped from a planned marriage to a nearby island chief arrives. Drexel takes “Saturday” in and after she washes his dirty dishes, her desire to be with the man who had “been so kind to her” becomes clear. A relationship does not develop, although viewers understand that the only reason such a relationship has not taken place was because of the strength of Drexel’s character. Some of the promotional material suggested that Saturday was cast by Fairbanks on location

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and was a local woman of Tahitian and English descent who accompanied Fairbanks back to the United States. 24 Photoplay observed that if “there were many other natives like her, we’d all go native.” 25 The reality, however, was different. The actress, Maria Alba, was Spanish, and had accompanied the production team to the South Pacific. In the era of the talkie her accent had been seen as a problem for casting, but in the guise of South Sea Islander it was not an issue. 26 The film climaxes with the abandoned chief and Friday’s cannibal tribe seeking revenge on the American. With the return of the yacht, Drexel and Saturday escape. The question then became one of what to do with the South Seas maiden: “As a rule they conveniently jump into volcanoes.” Unlike Hollywood’s earlier romances, and perpetuating the values of the Production Code, however, Drexel is certain that “East is East and West is West.” No doubt inspired by the real-life experience of Murnau’s Reri, Saturday’s plight is happily resolved: she returns with Drexel to the United States, where she becomes a dancer at the Ziegfeld Follies. Mr. Robinson Crusoe was the first attempt by Hollywood to make a talkie in the South Pacific. While Fairbanks had a conservative approach to the use of dialogue, the expensive and temperamental sound equipment created significant technical difficulties. The new equipment did not respond well to the tropical humidity, and the weather was not as good as had been hoped. Reporting that “‘Cloud effects by Papeete’ could be the title sheet of the forthcoming Doug Fairbanks travel picture,” one news report suggested that cloud shots were “about all of the famous island venture in the tropic seas” that would find their “way to the silver screen in the final showing.” 27 Such claims were exaggerated, but director Eddie Sutherland was compelled to use a studio to replace the many poorly lit scenes and large sections of the sound track. Yet such reshooting allowed greater poetic license than the original on-location shoot. Shooting some scenes in Hollywood rather than Tahiti, for example, allowed Drexel to befriend the monkey before Saturday’s arrival. David O. Selznick experienced similar difficulties to Fairbanks in filming on location in the South Seas. As the newly crowned production head at Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO), Selznick was finally given an opportunity to make his own South Seas film—Bird of Paradise. While it had been a spectacularly successful stage play, Hollywood producers had been reticent to adapt “The Bird” because it was the center of a long-running intellectual property dispute between Richard Walton Tully and Grace Fender, a schoolteacher who claimed the play was plagiarized from her earlier work. 28 Following the resolution of the case the play was up for grabs. RKO secured the cinematic rights to the play and after a false start with his predecessor, William LeBaron, the project fell to Selznick, who decided to personally oversee production. Believing that his earlier ef-

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forts to insist on a tasteful rendering of the South Seas had been vindicated by the critical responses to Van Dyke’s work on White Shadows, and greatly impressed with Murnau’s Tabu (inspiration from which he would borrow through the 1930s), Selznick’s intention was that his film would be RKO’s “prestige” offering for 1932. 29 With Mexican actress Dolores del Rio contracted to play “Luana” (yet another case of casting where del Rio’s accent was not seen to detract from the story) Selznick approached his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, to secure the services of noted MGM director King Vidor. At their first meeting Selznick told Vidor: “I want you to make a South Seas film for me.” Vidor knew the play Bird of Paradise, but admitted to Selznick that he had not read it. He was handed a copy of the play and asked to read it overnight. Vidor made an effort to read it but became bogged down in the first scene. At his next meeting he conceded to Selznick he had not finished reading the play and asked for the producer’s thoughts on the content. Selznick then conceded that he had not read the play either. Reflecting a pragmatism he had loathed in Hunt Stromberg five years earlier, Selznick informed Vidor that the director need not follow the play: “Just give me three wonderful love scenes,” he said, “I don’t care what story you use so long as we call it Bird of Paradise and del Rio jumps into a flaming volcano at the finish.” 30 With that brief Vidor began making plans for the film. Selznick’s original idea of filming in Tahiti had to be amended when it was realized how long it would take to transport a film crew to the destination, and that del Rio’s contract had only a few months remaining. Hawaii became the new site for the film—an acceptable alternative given that Tully’s original play had been set in Hawaii. Of his preparations for the film Vidor recalled that he “started reading all the South Seas material” he could lay his hands on: “The research department sent me all the National Geographics that contained a picture of an outrigger canoe or a native climbing a coconut.” With scriptwriter Wells Root, Vidor began working on a script for the film. In “our badly lighted office in a Hollywood studio lot,” he remembered, “we tried our best to become a couple of carefree Polynesians. Neither of us had ever been further west than Catalina Island.” 31 Vidor and Wells had great difficulty writing a script and arrived in Hawaii without one. Some planned locations, moreover, were not as suitable as initially thought. Relying on travel brochures, Vidor had found what he thought was a picturesque isolated beach to film the opening. Clyde De Vinna, of White Shadows fame, had been contracted as cinematographer. When they arrived at the beach, however, Vidor found a group of country club buildings on one side of the beach and a “colony of impressive residences” on the other. 32 Finding another potential location, Vidor was not happy that the beach was free of palm trees. To leave his audience in no doubt that the beach was indeed a South Seas beach, a

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number of palm trees were moved from a nearby grove and replanted on the sand. Having secured an authentic South Seas beach Vidor now had to wait for authentic South Seas weather. For days, rain and cloud hampered the production team. The beautiful sun-drenched South Seas were nowhere to be seen. After a number of weeks Vidor eventually cabled Selznick and sought permission to complete filming in the RKO-Pathe Studios in Culver City, Los Angeles, with remaining exterior shots filmed on Catalina Island, off the coast of southern California. 33 It was hoped that these locations would produce a more authentic South Seas. The story that finally emerged at first challenged but ultimately supported the Production Code’s views on interracial relations. An American sailor (played by Joel McCrea) arrives in paradise and falls for the alluring Islander “Tapu Luana.” With her social status standing in the way of their union, the American abducts Luana and they live happily for a time on nearby “Lani” Island (Hawaiian for Heaven). Ultimately, however, Luana realizes that their union cannot last and she returns to her village and her destiny (as demanded by Selznick) with an angry volcano. Bird of Paradise did well at the box office, although the overrun in production costs meant its patronage did not translate into large profits for RKO. The film, however, did resurrect the flagging career of Dolores del Rio. While Selznick had questioned Stromberg’s desires for titillation in White Shadows, he was quite happy to titillate viewers with del Rio’s naked form. Del Rio’s costume consisted of a grass skirt and strategically placed lei that covered her nipples and, with the assistance of adhesive tape, managed to defy gravity. In a swimming scene the actress appeared nude. With its interracial love (and implied sexual union), costuming, and a nude scene, Vidor’s film constituted a direct challenge to the Production Code. Once again, however, the MPPDAA passed the film without significant alteration. Even before its completion an MPPDAA representative who had examined the script and the costumes to be used informed Selznick that there “should be little or no censorship trouble and of course it is satisfactory from the stand point of the code.” 34 While Murnau’s appeal to ethnographic reality had secured the acquiescence of the MPPDAA, an actress in an outfit created in a Hollywood costume department was still seen as acceptable because it was creating a South Seas reality. With the Production Code successfully negotiated Selznick promoted the film as a “Flaming Pageant of Forbidden Love.” Partly because she had exposed more of her body than any Hollywood actress since Clara Bow in Hula, del Rio’s career was resurrected. The following year a group of artists, designers, and “medical men” were gathered by the journal Photoplay to select the “most perfect feminine figure in Hollywood.” With

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audiences having seen more of del Rio’s figure than anyone else’s it was perhaps not surprising that she won. 35 In effect, she was an acceptable “other,” who had gained notoriety playing another acceptable “other.” While del Rio’s status was soon to be supplanted by an even more famous actress, who more than any other figure captured the allure of the South Seas for generations of moviegoers, there was another dimension to the South Seas adventure film of the 1930s that married Hollywood’s fascination with the renewed interest in the scientific dimensions of the South Seas. As noted in chapter 9, Western science helped sustain Hollywood’s South Seas during the interwar period. The popular scientific interest in the South Seas, sparked in large measure during the 1920s by National Geographic, continued to amplify and shape the South Seas tradition. Thanks mostly to Margaret Mead, anthropologists were at the fore of the public consciousness; but other scientists had also engaged with the South Seas, and a number of them also shared their findings with general audiences, often through the pages of popular science journals such as National Geographic or Nature. Gifford Pinchot and Charles William “Will” Beebe were well known during the period, and they used their reputations to secure opportunities to visit the South Seas and to share their encounters with wide readerships. A conservationist, and reputedly America’s first “forester,” Pinchot, after a term as governor of Pennsylvania, journeyed to the South Seas and in 1930 wrote the popular “adventure seasoned with science” To the South Seas: The Cruise of the Mary Pinchot to the Galapagos, the Marquesas, the Tuamoto Islands and Tahiti. Ornithologist, naturalist, oceanographer, and inventor of the bathyscope, Beebe wrote a number of works dealing with his South Seas scientific experiences, notably an account of the New York Zoological Society’s first oceanographic expedition. 36 American author and Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs would use Beebe’s Arcturus Adventure as the motivation for one of his characters first heading for the South Seas. 37 Through the interwar period numerous “expeditions” were sent to the South Seas with a variety of purposes. Of the thirty-two Bishop Museum–sponsored expeditions of the period, fifteen had an ethnographical focus, while the remainder focused on aspects of the natural sciences. Although Western science’s first “voyages of discovery” in the South Seas had taken place over 150 years earlier, the sporadic nature of scientific investigations of the region through the nineteenth century meant there was still much to discover. 38 While there had been major events such as the Wilkes Exploring Expedition, and although colonialism had furthered scientific investigation as an important dimension of the imperial endeavor, during the 1920s and 1930s much of the South Pacific remained unknown. The Tanager Expedition, for example, had the single

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and simple goal of exploring “little known parts of the Pacific.” 39 Islands continued to be discovered, and some lost, during the period. For the purposes of navigation most of the American expeditions of the period still relied on the very cursory charts completed during the Wilkes expedition of the 1840s. The Pacific Entomological Survey was more fortunate. Its maps “were taken from the United States Hydrographic Office charts, which were reproductions, with little change, of the French charts” that had been “made in 1881 and 1882.” Nevertheless, the expedition found landmasses that were not plotted on their charts, leaving men unskilled in surveying to provide very crude attempts at filling in knowledge. In supplying these rough attempts at mapmaking, the survey could only report that it “is obvious from the above that the maps shown here are not intended as exact representations of the islands, but merely as sketches. Details of the topography are largely diagrammatic and the limits of error are admittedly wide.” 40 A related problem was the rediscovery of what was already known. The use of different names to describe the same place was a source of constant confusion. Attempting to give primacy to its geographical names, the Pacific Entomological Survey noted that the “locality names have been entered with great care; most of them represent a consensus of opinion of more than one Marquesan of standing. Almost all of the names in the interior of the islands have not appeared in any previous publication. Many of them are known to a few older residents alone.” 41 Notwithstanding the difficulties of geography and cartography, natural scientists sought to journey to the South Seas to chronicle flora and fauna that were unknown to the Western world. Such endeavors were fueled by the hope that such a search would identify aberrations of nature—aberrations that might support or complicate the dominant Darwinian scientific theories, and which would challenge the way the world was understood. Like anthropologists, natural scientists engaged the South Seas with preconceptions drawn from literary tradition. Scientists, if they wished, could also tap into the emerging science fiction genre for their entertainment. Will Beebe, for example, was inspired by the South Seas science fiction of Jules Verne. The proto–science fiction writers reflected and fueled scientific inquiry and the search for aberrations in nature. The quest to find further evidence to support evolution was a theme explored by these writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like the scientists themselves, science fiction writers pined for realms in splendid isolation, timeless realms where evolution had not taken place. The most popular and influential of the resulting tracts was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, which first appeared, in serial form, in The Strand magazine in 1912. In The Lost World a British scientist finds in the inaccessible jungles of the Amazon a land that has escaped history—a prehis-

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toric world untouched by evolution, and where dinosaurs still walk the earth. Although many of Charles Darwin’s ideas regarding evolution had first been considered during his observations in the South Pacific, questions persisted that the region might contain a timeless land on any one of its thousands of islands, both known and unknown. With Islander people already living outside history, in an apparently timeless Arcadia, it was only a short leap of faith from the classical era to the pre-historic present. Taking inspiration from Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs explored the theme in a South Seas setting in his 1918 serial in Blue Book Magazine, which became the 1924 novel The Land That Time Forgot. Set in World War I, a German U-boat (with some rescued Britons who take over the vessel) strays from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific and finds an island preserved in prehistoric time. The crew encounters dinosaurs, as well as a variety of humans at various stages of development. 42 Given that science, in its various guises, played such a prominent part in perpetuating and popularizing the South Seas during the interwar period, it is not surprising that Hollywood sought to bring a scientific perspective to the South Seas. In 1933 two studios, RKO and Paramount, brought new scientific dimensions to the South Seas adventure film. Like Nordhoff and Hall, and Will Beebe, Merian C. Cooper had been an American aviator flying for the French during the Great War. His adventures in Europe included being shot down and taken prisoner in Germany and remaining in Europe after the war to fight with the Poles against the Russians until he was again shot down and incarcerated in a Moscow prison camp, before making a daring escape. Returning to the United States, he worked for the New York Times before, in 1922, joining a scientific expedition led by Captain Edward A. Salisbury in the vessel Wisdom II. The expedition visited the “South Seas,” Ceylon, and Africa. As many explorers of the period were now doing, Salisbury decided to film the expedition. When the cameraman left the expedition, Cooper suggested as a replacement a former Keystone studio and war cameraman he had met in Vienna in 1918. Ernest B. Schoedsack soon joined the expedition, and with Cooper, assisted in making not only Salisbury’s expedition travelogue, The Lost Empire, but also the anthropological film Gow The Headhunter, which set out to examine the cultural and racial distinctions between Polynesia and Melanesia, and which concluded with an examination of the life and times of “Gow,” a New Hebridean “cannibal.” 43 Frustrated and disappointed by their experience as expedition filmmakers, Cooper and Schoedsack decided that they would conduct their own expeditions and make their own films. Impressed by Nanook of the North, the two men planned to make a film examining the migratory habits of the Bakhtiari of northeastern Persia. While Cooper stayed in

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New York securing funds for the project, Schoedsack joined a New York Zoological Society expedition to the South Seas headed by Will Beebe. It was Beebe who introduced Schoedsack to fellow expedition member Ruth Rose; Schoedsack and Rose later married, with Rose becoming an important member of the Cooper/Schoedsack enterprise. 44 Having secured sufficient funds, mostly from family, and with journalist and former spy Marguerite Harrison joining the expedition, work on the film commenced in late 1924. The result was Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life. 45 Despite Flaherty’s impact on Frank Hurley, Cooper still saw the lecture/screening approach as the best way to display ethnographical film. At Paramount, Jesse Lasky had other ideas. Still awaiting the delivery of Flaherty’s Moana, Lasky picked up the film. Grass caused a minor sensation and returned a small profit. Its success was sufficient to convince Paramount to offer Cooper and Schoedsack the funding to make a second film. Traveling to Thailand to examine the role of elephants in the daily life of a local village, they produced Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, which—like Moana—was a staged ethnographical film—a story was created and shot. 46 Following Chang’s success, Cooper and Schoedsack joined Paramount, and ventured into feature fiction to produce The Four Feathers (1929). The success of The Four Feathers allowed them to not only pursue other nonfiction projects, but also saw them move to accept a more lucrative offer with RKO when their friend David O. Selznick moved there in 1932 to take over production. Cooper’s position as assistant to Selznick allowed him greater creative freedom, and they were soon ready to complete a project Cooper had been toying with for some time. Through Schoedsack’s friendship with Will Beebe, Cooper met another member of the New York Zoological Society, the naturalist-adventurer-philanthropist W. Douglas Burden. Inspired by Chang, and developing a friendship with Cooper, Burden decided to make his own ethnographic film that focused on the Native Americans of northern Ontario— to whom he had been introduced in his youth. The result was The Silent Enemy (Paramount, 1930) another of the interwar period’s ethnographic classics. 47 Cooper was fascinated by one of Burden’s earlier adventures. As early as 1912 news had reached the United States of an island which, in the best South Seas tradition, held a fantastic pearl bed, and which was also inhabited by gigantic ancient reptiles. In 1926, under the auspices of the New York–based American Museum of Natural History, Burden led an expedition to this “South Seas” island (which was in fact the eastern archipelago of the Dutch East Indies) to find and return one of these “dragons” to civilization. 48 The island, with “its fantastic sky line . . . its sentinel palms, its volcanic chimneys bared to the stars” was Komodo Island—and this “fitting abode” was home to the world’s largest reptile, the carnivorous “Komo-

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do Dragon.” 49 Burden’s expedition had its own adventures on the island, including a number of narrow escapes from their subjects. A number of dead and two live dragons were returned to the States for examination. The two live specimens eventually found their way to the Bronx Zoo where their health quickly deteriorated and they died. Burden’s tale inspired Cooper to once again explore the South Seas in cinematic form. While Burden had shot a short film on Komodo, Cooper’s first idea centered around making a nonfiction film about Komodo Island as a land time had forgotten. Increasingly, however, he looked to build an adventure narrative based on an expedition to such an island. The exploration adventure fantasy was a genre in its own right. From Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, to the more recent offering from Burroughs (all of which borrowed some of their ideas from writers such as John Cleves Symmes and Edgar Allan Poe) such stories often included encounters with enormous prehistoric creatures that time and evolution had forgotten. These creatures might threaten the explorers, or simply provide a display when they fought other, equally menacing, creatures. Cooper saw the Komodo dragons as the prehistoric threat to the explorers of his drama. But he also wanted the spectacle of a grand struggle with another fearsome creature. He decided to make this opponent of the Komodos a giant African gorilla. Why a gorilla was chosen remains unclear, although Monty Blue’s return to the South Seas in the 1932 film The Intruder (Allied Pictures Corp) saw the star and his cast mates stranded on an island with a murderer, a castaway who has become a “wild man,” and a menacing gorilla. Having visited Africa Cooper was aware of the tales surrounding the great ape which were still filtering into the Western world. In 1926 FBO Studios (the forerunner to RKO) released Man Hunt, a nonfiction film recounting the adventures of a group of scientists seeking to bring a gorilla back to civilization. The notion that an ape could inhabit a South Seas island was not as far-fetched as it would become. Monkeys were of course already a staple of South Seas tales dating back to Johann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson. The idea that the South Sea islands of the Malay archipelago held apes was based on the actual existence of the mysterious and much-discussed orangutan. Considered the “missing link” in the evolution story, the “wild man of Borneo”—as the ape was at one time considered—could also be found elsewhere in the archipelago. In 1921 the film Bali, the Unknown: Or Ape Man Island was released. The travelogue claimed that a prehistoric Ape Man civilization lived in Bali. Ten years later Schoedsack and Rose made Rango for Paramount, another purportedly nonfiction film shot in Sumatra which explored the life of an orangutan and his adventures. The film was significant because it sought to explore the personalities and intimate lives of its animal characters. 50

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Cooper’s original idea called for a production team to take a gorilla to Komodo Island. The ape and a reptile would then be encouraged to have a fight to the death, a struggle that would hopefully be entertaining and captured on film. The more Cooper examined his plan, however, the more infeasible it became. The project was shelved but not forgotten. While producing another film—The Most Dangerous Game (a tale of an insane and bored game hunter on an undisclosed Caribbean island who turns to hunting humans)—Cooper was shown footage from an experimental film being undertaken by special effects pioneer Willis O’Brien. O’Brien’s special effects had first caused a sensation in his 1925 adaptation of Conan Doyle’s Lost World (First National Pictures) which climaxed with a dinosaur attacking London. O’Brien’s stop-motion animation project, Creation, featured men encountering dinosaurs on an undisclosed island. David O. Selznick scrapped the project—on Cooper’s recommendation—but O’Brien’s approach gave Cooper a way to make his Komodo film. There was no need to transport a real gorilla to Komodo Island: O’Brien could make one. And with the jungle set of The Most Dangerous Game, and the South Seas village and assorted props from Vidor’s Bird of Paradise still available, there was no need to go to Komodo at all. Further inspiration for Cooper’s project had come from British thriller writer Edgar Wallace and his 1927 mystery The Avenger, wherein “Bhag,” an “educated” orangutan, develops an attraction for a movie star and pursues her. Cooper approached Wallace to write a script. Wallace completed a draft in early 1932 but his untimely death left the script to be finalized by others. 51 Wallace’s script was called The Beast, but Cooper changed the film’s title to King Kong. King Kong was set on Skull Island in the South Seas. The native inhabitants of this particular island (a pastiche of Malay and Polynesian cultures) do not sacrifice attractive women to volcanoes. Instead, human sacrifices are given to a giant ape as a means of placating the beast who lives behind a giant wall, on the other side of the island. Reflecting Cooper and Schoedsack’s own experience, the Europeans who visit the island are members of a scientific expedition aiming to make a film about what they find there. It soon becomes clear, however, that the leader of the expedition has other intentions—to capture the great beast. Reaching the village the Islanders are stunned by the beauty of the female member of the expedition, an actress brought along for reasons that are unclear. The Islanders seek to use Ann Darrow (played by Fay Wray) as the next sacrifice to the beast, and to placate the visitors, six of the most attractive native women will be provided to them. Despite the beauty of the Islander women the party refuses the offer. The Islanders, however, kidnap Darrow and she is given to the beast. Like the Islanders, Kong is enchanted by the beauty of the white woman, with whom he falls in love—thus ensuring his ultimate demise. Entering the ape’s prehistoric timeless realm, the expedition employs gas (a powerful and negative

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allusion after World War I, and a sign of civilization’s failure) to subdue him. The ape is then taken to New York for display, but, frightened by the media frenzy, he escapes, finds his love, and climbs the Empire State Building for a final encounter with civilization via the machine guns of fighter planes. King Kong was enormously successful. Upon opening in New York City it filled the Roxy and Radio City Music Hall cinemas (holding a collective total of 10,000 seats per session) ten times a day for several weeks. Produced for $650,000, the film grossed more than $5 million. 52 Another South Seas science fiction film of the 1930s was Paramount’s Island of Lost Souls, a 1932 adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Possibility. 53 Directed by Erle C. Kenton, the film starred Charles Laughton in the first of a number of South Seas roles. While it had been the latest developments in military science that had saved civilization by destroying King Kong, the notion that science could be detached from civilization and thereby pose a threat to the West’s continued existence was a theme that had existed long before the splitting of the atom. In 1874 Jules Verne explored the subject in Mysterious Island—the sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. Escaping in a balloon from a Confederate prison camp, five Union soldiers are carried across the continental United States and into the Pacific, where they eventually land on a desert island, which they promptly name “Lincoln Island.” With no choice they begin a Crusoe-like existence and actually survive and prosper. Their success, however, is not simply a result of their own labors; the notorious “Captain Nemo” and his submarine are also hidden on the island, and he plays a role in ensuring the castaways’ survival. The reader comes to understand Nemo and the motivations that drove him in 20,000 Leagues. The submariner was in fact “Prince Dakkar,” a highly educated South Asian. In the wake of the failed Indian Mutiny of 1857 Dakkar sees no way of resisting European domination. 54 Developing a hatred for the civilized world, he decides to use the superior scientific knowledge he has gained from the West to destroy it (a theme that would be later taken up by Guy Boothby’s Tibetan evil genius “Dr. Nikola” and Sax Rohmer’s Chinese evil genius “Dr. Fu Manchu”). In Wells’s story it is not a non-European but a crazed European who feels the need to reject civilization, in this instance to allow science to reach its true, perverted, potential. Dr. Moreau secures a South Seas island for himself where, free of social restraints, he can conduct his experiments unhindered. His experiments aim to explore the connection between animals and humanity. Through the vivisection of animals and the indigenous inhabitants of the island he seeks to achieve a rapid acceleration of evolution. Once again it is the European who ensures the “degradation of the islanders.” 55

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Like Verne’s work, Wells’s story uses its discussion of scientific matters to ensure an air of authenticity. The story is introduced by Edward Prendick, the nephew of the novel’s protagonist, who found the narrative among his uncle’s papers. Furthermore, the introduction suggests that the Royal Navy had since attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate the island on which the events unfolded—thus deploying a regular South Seas literary ploy, which reinforced rather than challenged authenticity. 56 That Paramount pictures decided to adapt Wells’s novel in 1932 (a French adaptation—L’ile d’Epouvante—was released in 1913) may well have been a result of the company’s efforts to merge two of the period’s more popular cinematic genres. While Tabu delivered the studio enormous critical acclaim in 1931, the biggest money earner for the year was Universal’s Dracula. Dracula heralded the birth of the American horror movie and a number of films followed. Island of Lost Souls was a hybrid. Like Dracula’s Transylvania, the mystery of the South Seas (in this case another soundstage jungle with some exteriors shot on Catalina Island) provided the perfect location—and evidence of the endurance of what Roslyn Jolly and Stephanie Smith-Browne labeled the “South Seas Gothic.” 57 King Kong and Island of Lost Souls offered an alternative vision of the South Seas environment. The stable environmental and geographic conditions which allowed the castaway to survive in relative good health were nowhere to be seen on Skull Island or Moreau’s island. As reflected in the earlier literary encounters with New Guinea, the South Seas island could be a forbidding place of impenetrable and dangerous jungle, rather than small, idyllic atolls with golden sand and palm trees. It was a straightforward task to suggest that such environs were the natural home of creatures and natives who might mean harm to Europeans. 58 Although the cinematic hero Palmer ends up on Moreau’s island while on his way to Apia (the MPPDAA application suggested a “South Sea Island Vicinity of Samoa” 59) the film explores the Polynesian/Melanesian dichotomy, with the initially inviting Polynesian palms giving way to Melanesian jungle. Reflecting a broader interest in jungles, Hollywood offered an inversion of the South Seas gaze. The view of the sea from the palm-fringed beach was replaced by the darkness of the menacing jungle. While the South Seas as a site for exotic and erotic encounters had been a feature of Wells’s original novel, the cinematic version articulated the theme through the creation of a new character, “Lota, the Panther Woman.” To cast the role Paramount staged a “Panther Woman of America” contest. The winner (who beat 60,000 other applicants) was an attractive newcomer, Kathleen Burke. While Parker’s fiancée comes to his rescue, Lota is the main female focus. She is unleashed by Moreau to see whether she is capable of the feminine qualities that might allow her to seduce Parker and produce a child to further his experiments: “Has she a woman’s emotional impulses; is she capable of loving, mating and hav-

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ing children?” 60 The experiment almost succeeds before Parker senses danger—Lota’s claws suggesting an, admittedly underplayed, bestiality. Designed to seduce, Lota is represented as Moreau’s most successful experiment to date. With all of Moreau’s creations reflecting the stereotypes of various non-European races Lota is represented as Polynesian. Like many of the earlier South Seas films, both King Kong and Island of Lost Souls explore miscegenation and extended the focus to themes of bestiality. Historians have viewed King Kong as, at its heart, a story of white America’s fears of the black man. 61 Whether through lust or love, Kong takes Wray for himself, and the film sets out to titillate as Darrow’s clothes are disheveled by the beast—a scene where Kong tears Darrow’s clothes was removed in many jurisdictions. In the Island of Lost Souls allusions to bestiality were subtly underplayed because of Burke’s physical beauty and the construction of Lota as a Polynesian. Fatimah Tobing Rony has even gone so far as to suggest Lota was a “typical” South Seas siren. 62 The notion of an Islander woman seducing a European again reflected an enduring element of the South Seas tradition. Despite its horror and science fiction credentials, much of the publicity surrounding Island of Lost Souls centered on Lota and her perceived needs. While the seduction of Parker, and Lota’s attire (native attire with a South Seas theme that on occasion revealed Burke’s nipples), did not seem to trouble those censors who were also not repulsed by the film’s horror and violence (although it was banned outright in Britain and the Australian state of Tasmania) the sense that this nonwhite woman might achieve the sensibilities of a white woman were unacceptable. In all Australian states that permitted the film, and in the American states of Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York, the dialogue relating to Lota’s female impulses, and her capacity for loving and mating, were expunged. 63 By the beginning of the 1930s the South Seas was most frequently represented in Hollywood films within the adventure genre. At a time when the ships of the Matson Line or Burns Philp were providing opportunities for tourist encounters with the South Pacific, and when South Seas adventure was deemed a thing of the past, Hollywood continued to portray the region as a world of not only inherent romance, but also a place of danger, excitement, and mystery. Accordingly, while movies such as Tabu, Mr. Robinson Crusoe, and Bird of Paradise perpetuated the longstanding tradition of depicting the South Seas as a site for exploring the meaning of “civilization,” Hollywood’s South Seas increasingly reflected commercial imperatives made all the more urgent by the Great Depression. Those imperatives were important factors driving filmmakers to deploy themes of sexuality—and violence—in ever-more-dramatic ways, sometimes with expensive consequences given the vagaries of filming in the uncertain environment of the South Pacific. In doing so, and in re-

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turning to another South Seas certainty—the quest for scientific authenticity—filmmakers’ interest in the Pacific meshed with science fiction to produce films reflecting the larger theme of the “South Seas Gothic.” King Kong and the Island of Lost Souls, moreover, were products of the enduring scientific interest in the South Pacific which, in the 1920s, returned to levels of popular engagement that had not been seen in North America since the 1840s, and in Europe since the late eighteenth century. Following the preoccupation with Polynesia fueled by Frederick O’Brien and the Lost Generation during the previous decade, and influenced, too, by a broader 1930s Hollywood fascination with jungles as sites of danger and intrigue, both King Kong and the Island of Lost Souls reengaged the South Seas tradition with Melanesia. By 1933, however, the Great Depression’s impact on the Western world was, once again, encouraging more utopic, and escapist, Polynesian-centered visions of the South Seas. NOTES 1. Lotte H. Eisner, Murnau (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), 210. 2. Cited in Eisner, Murnau, 208. 3. Eisner, Murnau, 211. 4. For a discussion of the making of the film that addresses a number of issues including Flaherty’s legacy in the final cut, see Mark J. Langer, “Tabu: The Making of a Film,” Cinema Journal 24 (Spring 1985): 43–64. 5. Anthony Coulson has contrasted Murnau’s Tabu and Van Dyke’s White Shadows, notably their different treatments of paradise, the dangers of civilization, and the noble savage. See Anthony Coulson, “Paradise Islands: Van Dyke’s White Shadows in the South Seas and F. W. Murnau’s Tabu,” in Revisiting Space: Space and Place in European Cinema, ed. Wendy Ellen Everett and Axel Goodbody (Bern: European Academic Publishers, 2005), 133–56. 6. Eisner, Murnau, 207. 7. Eisner, Murnau, 212. 8. Eisner, Murnau, 208. 9. J. A. Vizzard, Memorandum, “Tabu,” June 7, 1950, Motion Picture Association of America/Production Code Administration (hereafter cited as MPPDAA/PCA) Files, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (hereafter cited as AMPAS). Hugh Ridley has observed that the film somewhat deliberately danced between fact and fiction in the same way as much South Seas literature—notably Melville’s work. See also Hugh Ridley, “Reflections on the Literary Antecedents of Murnau’s Tabu,” in Processes of Transposition: German Literature and Film, ed. Christiane Schönfeld and Hermann Rasche (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 81–88. 10. James B. M. Fisher, Review of Tabu, March 24, 1931, MPPDAA/PCA Files, AMPAS. 11. R. E. Plummer, Review of Tabu, March 19, 1931, MPPDAA/PCA Files, AMPAS 12. Stephen S. Joy to Paramount, April 22, 1931, MPPDAA/PCA Files, AMPAS. 13. Assenka Oksiloff, “Shot on the Spot: Primitive Film,” South Central Review 16, no. 2/3 (1999): 16–33. 14. Film Daily, March 22, 1931. 15. Held in Production files, Tabu, MPPDAA/PCA records, AMPAS. 16. Tabu, Synchrotone, Paramount, 1931. 17. Hollywood Reporter, January 21, 1931. 18. Film Daily, March 22, 1931.

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19. Ray Greene, “Sorry Sarong Number,” Village View, May 15–21, 1992. Sarina Pearson extends the list of “highly romantic canonical films” of the period to also include Van Dyke’s White Shadows. See Pearson “The Influence of Fiction and Cinematic Excess on the Factual,” Journal of Pacific History 45, no 1 (2010): 105. 20. Gregory Paul Williams, The Story of Hollywood: An Illustrated History (London: BL Press, 2011), 283. 21. Richard Schickel, Douglas Fairbanks: The First Celebrity (London: Elm Tree Books, 1976), 128. 22. “Mr. Robinson Crusoe Script and Production Material,” 1932, in Thomas J. Geraghty Papers, Herrick Library, AMPAS, Special Collections, Collection 83. 23. “Mr. Robinson Crusoe Script and Production Material,” Geraghty Papers, AMPAS. 24. “Mr. Robinson Crusoe Script and Production Material,” Geraghty Papers, AMPAS. 25. Photoplay 42 (September 1932): 27. 26. Photoplay 41 (May 1932): 19. 27. See for example, Tipton Tribune, May 25, 1932. 28. See Christopher B. Balme, “Selling the Bird: Richard Walton Tully’s The Bird of Paradise and the Dynamics of Theatrical Commodification,” Theater Journal 57, no. 1 (2005): 1–20. 29. New York Times, September 10, 1932. Bird of Paradise challenges Pearson’s claim that outside Moana, White Shadows, and Tabu, the South Seas was only the subject of Bgrade movies. See Pearson, “Fiction and Cinematic Excess on the Factual,” 105. 30. Jeffrey Spivak, Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 61. 31. Uncited newspaper clipping, May 19, 1932, Geraghty Collection, AMPAS. 32. Uncited newspaper clipping, May 19, 1932, Geraghty Collection, AMPAS. 33. Luis I. Reyes, Made in Paradise: Hollywood’s Films of Hawaii and the South Seas (Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 1995), 44–45. 34. “Bird of Paradise,” MPPDAA/PCA, Files, AMPAS. 35. Joanne Hershfield, “Delores del Rio, Uncomfortably Real: The Economics of Race in Hollywood’s Latin American Musicals,” in Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, ed. Daniel Bernardi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 147–48. 36. William Beebe and Ruth Rose, The Arcturus Adventure; An Account of the New York Zoological Society’s First Oceanographic Expedition (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1930). 37. See Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan, South Seas and the Castaways, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600661.txt. 38. Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 7. 39. Tanager Expedition, MS SC Tanager Expedition, Box 1.8, Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii (hereafter cited as Bishop). 40. Alistair Adamson, “Report on Field Work in the Marquesas Islands, 1929–1932,” 1934, Bishop. 41. Adamson, “Report on Field Work in the Marquesas Islands,” Bishop. 42. See Burroughs, The Land That Time Forgot (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1924). 43. The film was also released in 1931 as Gow the Killer. Another version was entitled Cannibal Island. 44. See Kathleen Sharp, Stalking the Beast (www.kathleensharp.com, 2006), 21; Carol Grant Gould, The Remarkable Life of William Beebe: Explorer and Naturalist (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004), 255. For further background on Cooper and Schoedsack’s relationship, consult Harry Waldman, Beyond Hollywood’s Grasp: American Filmmakers Abroad, 1914–1945 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1994), 63–70. 45. For a discussion of the film consult Hamid Naficy, “Lured by the East: Ethnographic and Expedition Films about Nomadic Tribes—The Case of Grass (1924),” in

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Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham: Duke University Press. 2006), 117–38. 46. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 133–37. 47. For a discussion of Burden’s work consult Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 35–38. 48. See W. Douglas Burden, Dragon Lizards of Komodo: An Expedition to the Lost World of the Dutch East Indies (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1927). See also Sharp, Stalking the Beast, 20–22. 49. See W. Douglas Burden, “Island of Komodo,” National Geographic 52 (July–December 1927): 216–32. See also Burden, Dragon Lizards of Komodo, and Burden, Results of the Douglas Burden Expedition to the Island of Komodo (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1927). 50. Derek Bousé has observed of Rango: “It is difficult now to appreciate how far ahead of its time Schoedsack’s film was in the straightforward way in which it establishes animal characters, then proceeds to tell a story that reveals their individual personalities and explores their intimate lives.” See Bousé, Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 120. 51. Ray Morton, King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson (New York: Applause Theater & Cinema Books, 2005), 26–27, 45, 47. 52. Kenneth Von Gunden, Flights of Fancy: The Great Fantasy Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland), 103. 53. See H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Possibility (New York: Stone & Kimball, 1896). 54. Peter Costello, Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978), 126. 55. Wells, Island of Dr Moreau (1896), 216. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/159/159-h/ 159-h.htm. 56. Wells, Island of Dr Moreau, iv. 57. See Roslyn Jolly, “South Sea Gothic: Pierre Loti and Robert Louis Stevenson,” English Literature in Translation 47, no 1 (2004): 28–49; and Stephanie Denise SmithBrowne, “Gothic and the Pacific Voyage: Patriotism, Romance and Savagery in South Seas Travels and the Utopia of Terra Australis” (PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 2007). Another South Seas horror film of 1933 was Allied Artists’ Horror in the Night (also known as Virgins of the South Seas) starring Lila Lee, Monty Blue, and Gwen Lee. They were making their second South Seas film together after the 1932 film The Intruders. 58. This notion of the foreboding jungle had been explored by Cooper and Schoedsack’s previous film, The Most Dangerous Game, which in turn was an adaption of Richard Connell’s 1924 short story of the same name—which had appeared in Collier’s magazine on January 19, 1924. In the original, the jungle was the Amazon. 59. James Wingate, “Report on Island of Dr. Moreau,” May 13, 1933, MPPDAA/ PCA, AMPAS. 60. Wingate, “Report on Island of Dr. Moreau,” MPPDAA/PCA, AMPAS. 61. Robert Gooding-Williams, Look, a Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), 59; Christopher J. Metzle, The Construction and Rearticulation of Race in a Post-Racial America (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2008), 99; David N. Rosen, “King Kong: Race, Sex, and Rebellion,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 6 (1975): 7–10. 62. Rony, The Third Eye, 169. See also Wingate, “Report on Island of Dr. Moreau,” MPPDAA/PCA, AMPAS. 63. Production Code file, Island of Dr. Moreau, MPPDAA/PCA AMPAS.

THIRTEEN HMAV Bounty and the Great Depression

Despite his successful collaboration with Charles Nordhoff during the early 1920s, by April 1927 James Norman Hall was writing to friends in the United States seeking to make them the beneficiaries to his veteran’s insurance in return for a loan. Confronted by the possibility of destitution, the American was tiring of his South Seas existence: “I’m afraid that I’m going stale down here,” he wrote, “and furthermore, this perpetual worry about how to eat from day to day makes it very hard for me to write. . . . I think I’ve been long enough at Tahiti.” “Certainly it would be much better for me,” he concluded, “in so far as writing is concerned, to be in America.” 1 Eventually, the liquidity crisis subsided, and Hall returned to his role as South Seas booster. In a 1929 letter, written only days after the Wall Street crash, he beseeched one of the same friends he had earlier asked to help him escape the South Seas to now visit Tahiti: “Think how short life is, and how beautiful the South Seas are, and how homesick I am to see you all. Think—but no, don’t think. Just hop on a train for California and as Stevenson once said, Tahiti is the first on your left outside the Golden Gate.” 2 Having resolved to stay in Tahiti, Hall was now working with Nordhoff on their largest project—a trilogy examining the Bounty mutiny. Hall had first read a detailed account of the mutiny while on a furlough in Oxford during the Great War. 3 The account he read was supposedly published in 1832 and so was, presumably, Edward Tagart’s Memoir of the Late Captain Peter Heywood, R. N. 4 Heywood had been a young unranked junior officer on the Bounty who, in circumstances that remain unclear, joined the mutineers—although he was later captured and tried, only escaping the death sentence after a royal pardon. 215

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Hall had long toyed with the idea of spending his time writing about the Bounty. But he never put pen to paper. 5 How much the story of the Bounty may have fueled his desire to escape to the South Pacific after the war is unclear. Referring to his decision to return to the topic with Nordhoff ten years later, Hall recalled: “Of course, a great deal has been written about the Bounty, but most of this was many years ago, and we hope that not many people in these days are familiar with the story.” 6 The story of HMAV Bounty, commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh, RN, and the April 1789 mutiny off Tonga, led by Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian, had become one of the most influential and enduring South Seas tales. Commenting on an American naval mutiny in the 1840s, an article in the North American Review had invoked the Bounty as “an incident which is connected in various ways with circumstances abounding in interest, in romance, and in instruction.” 7 In his Directory for the Navigation of the South Pacific Ocean, published in 1851, Alexander Findlay noted in his introductory comments that the “fact of the mutiny and the escape of the mutineers to Pitcairn Island are now familiar to all.” 8 Twenty years later, the Chicago Tribune reprinted the opinion of the New York Post: “Few episodes of modern history are so full of romantic interest as the mutiny of the Bounty. . . . It has been recited again and again in magazines and books of travels, nor has the repetition in any manner weakened the spell it exercises over the English reader.” 9 A decade later, the New Zealand Otago Witness remarked that the “adventures” of the Bounty’s “voyage across the Pacific, together with the subsequent proceedings of the mutineers, are narrated in scores of books designed to inspire youthful minds with a longing to ran away to sea.” 10 Interest in the Bounty was also evident in the Australian colonies. In the 1890s Louis Becke moved to England to continue his writing career, although he continued his collaborations with the Australian-based Walter Jeffrey. In their 1898 work Naval Pioneers of Australia they dedicated a chapter to Bligh and the mutiny. Conceding that “[a]ny number of books and a dozen different versions, have been written of the mutiny,” they asserted that the best—the 1884 Mutiny in the Bounty!, written by Australian judge Alfred McFarland—had not gained a wide international readership because it had been published in the Antipodes. Furthermore, as Hall would observe in the 1920s, Becke realized during the 1890s that despite claims to the contrary few Londoners were familiar with the story. Indeed, Becke had decided to write on the subject after a proposal to write about the Pitcairn Islanders for a London magazine was rejected because the editor did not know what the Australian novelist was talking about. As Becke and Jeffrey noted in their book: “Another reason for retelling the story, is that, notwithstanding that the name of the Bounty sounds most familiar in most people’s ears, yet we have some evidence that the present generation has almost forgotten everything relating it.” 11

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A decade later, in North America, Becke’s efforts appear to have been unsuccessful. The Amador Ledger of May 6, 1910, asked its Californian readers: “Who has not heard of the mutiny of the Bounty? The romance of it still lingers from one end of the Pacific to the other.” The paper, however, had forgotten much of the detail. It affirmed that Captain “Blythe” had commanded a “man-of-war,” not the three-masted converted cargo ship sent to Tahiti to collect breadfruit. Moreover, it placed the fledgling British outpost of New South Wales in northern Australia and made it— not Timor—the location that “Blythe” reached with his loyal crew in an open boat. Nordhoff and Hall were not the only writers in the 1920s who decided that a reengagement with the Bounty was both necessary and potentially rewarding. The South Pacific–based authors were beaten to publication by authors in Australia, Great Britain, and the United States. The story had already caught the interest of biographers, ethnographers, historians, and romance novelists. English publications about the Bounty and its crew included former naval officer Geoffrey Rawson’s 1930 nonfiction account Bligh of the Bounty, and Owen Rutter’s 1930 novel Cain’s Birthday, which attempted to prove its South Seas authenticity by using the premise that its author had uncovered a hitherto lost manuscript (Christian’s diary) from Pitcairn Island. One reviewer commented that by shedding new light on the whole saga and the “romance of the sea,” the novel would be of interest “to lovers of history, since the author has evidently spared no efforts to obtain the true facts.” 12 Another reviewer commented that it “makes an interesting book, the narrative conveyed with a sense of actuality.” Rutter spent the 1930s editing collections of documents related to the Bounty. Anthropologist Harry Shapiro, an American scholar, engaged with the Bounty story before Nordhoff and Hall produced their book. Shapiro’s doctoral thesis had examined the issue of “race mixture” as it applied to the English and Tahitian Pitcairn Islanders. Even as his work challenged common assumptions about race, it reinforced common ideas about European engagement with Pacific Islanders. He found no signs of “degeneration,” but he did find evidence of what he called “hybrid vigor.” 13 From his position as Assistant Curator of Physical Anthropology at the American Museum he conveyed his findings to a wider audience in a 1928 article on the mutineers. Publishing his work in Natural History Magazine, Shapiro linked the story of the Bounty to yet another enduring tradition with the title: “Robinson Crusoe’s Children.” Recalling the Bounty’s arrival in Tahiti, he noted that “[n]ature and the natives were kind.” 14 The work from his thesis would eventually be published in 1936 as The Legacy of the Bounty, acknowledged by Nordhoff and Hall in later editions of their trilogy. 15 In Australia, William Bligh and the Bounty had never been far from public consciousness, partly because the British naval officer’s second

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mutiny took place on the shores of Sydney Cove in 1808 when then Governor Bligh was usurped by the officers of the New South Wales Corp in the so-called “Rum Rebellion.” The producer of a 1930 theatrical production, Governor Bligh: A Tale of Old Sydney, insisted his subject had been “discussed ever since he left Sydney one hundred and twenty years ago.” 16 Interest in Bligh and specifically his time on the Bounty had been rekindled during the Great War. 17 As well as the aforementioned 1917 film, the Australian literature included Tasmanian-born journalist Roy Bridges’s dramatic 1915 novel The Bubble Moon; Ida Lee’s 1920 historical study which focused on Bligh’s second journey to the South Seas (with a chapter on the Bounty); Mary Gaunt’s novel Joan of the Pilchard, which was billed as “the first romance connected with the Mutiny of the Bounty,” and which was first serialized in the Melbourne Age in 1929 before publication in London in 1930; and Sydney Teachers College lecturer George Mackaness’s two-volume biographical study The Life of Vice Admiral William Bligh, published first in Australia in 1931 and subsequently republished in London and New York in 1935. 18 Through the nineteenth century two major themes were associated with the Bounty story. One theme focused on the events after the mutiny and the founding and survival of the colony on Pitcairn Island. With the earliest public report of the colony’s existence by New England sea captain Mayhew Folger in 1810, and the other cultural productions that soon followed, such as the Drury Lane Ballet of “Pitcairn Island” in 1816, the mutineers’ colony came to be constructed as a model society in paradise. 19 Reports of the colony’s murderous early days were overshadowed by what the society became. For over a century the media and literary engagement with Pitcairn were very positive. It was not until the mid1930s that a Maine newspaper raised an alternative view. Noting the colony’s early intrigues and violence, the Lewiston Evening Journal raised negative connotations by associating the structure of society on the island with communism. 20 The second, and far more controversial, theme—upon which historians have tended to focus—concerned the mutineers’ motivations. Had the men mutinied because of Bligh’s harsh treatment or because of their sexual relations with Tahitian women? Because one answer placed the blame on Bligh and the other on Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers, the question was usually constructed as an either/or proposition. Bligh’s explanation of the mutiny was simple: “I can only conjecture that the mutineers assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheiteans than they could possibly have in England; which, joined to some female connections, have most probably been the principal cause of the whole transaction.” 21 Initially at least, and despite the efforts of Christian’s brother to present an alternative explanation of events, Bligh’s interpretation dominated the public imagination.

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Mayhew Folger’s 1810 report, however, emboldened Bligh’s opponents, including Mary Russell Mitford, whose 1811 poem “Christina, the Maid of the South Sea” helped resurrect the “gallant and amiable Christian.” 22 Fleshing out Folger’s account to American readers, in 1817 Amasa Delano questioned the negative interpretations of the mutineers and spoke of Bligh’s failings. Christian had “governed with so much wisdom and equity,” wrote Delano, “as to produce harmony and peace.” His successor, Alexander Smith, had achieved “perfect chastity, sincerity and honesty” on Pitcairn. “If they lose their present character,” Delano concluded, “it will probably be through an intercourse with crews from Europe and other commercial countries, claiming the privileges of a more enlightened system of ethics and religion than theirs.” 23 Lord Byron maintained Bligh’s version of events in his poem The Island, but in the period after Bligh’s death in 1817 his reputation was undermined by a literary campaign that placed the blame for the mutiny squarely on his shoulders. The Bligh persona that became familiar to generations of Western readers was created at that time. It commenced in 1824 with John Marshall’s entry in the Royal Naval Biography and was followed in the early 1830s by Sir John Barrow’s 1831 book The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause and Consequences. Frederick William Beechey’s account, also published in 1831, was informed by his ship’s visit to Pitcairn, and by the testimony provided by John Adams, the sole surviving mutineer. Edward Tagart’s aforementioned biography of Heywood brought yet another strong critique of Bligh in 1832. 24 Authors who engaged with the Bounty story felt compelled to pronounce on Bligh’s guilt or innocence, and on the allures of Tahiti. Most publications of the latter half of the nineteenth century, such as Diana Belcher’s The Mutineers of the Bounty and Their Descendants in Pitcairn and Norfolk (1870), and Rosalind Young’s various publications, were quick to blame Bligh; their positions were predictable given that Belcher was a stepdaughter of Heyword, and Young was a Pitcairn Islander. 25 Becke and Jeffrey entertained Bligh’s position, but concluded that “when the mutiny broke out the seductions of Tahiti were less the cause of the outbreak than the tyrannical and coarse conduct of Bligh.” 26 This interpretation of the mutiny remained dominant for nearly a century. It was really only in the wake of World War I, and the reaffirmation of the South Seas as a site of escape from civilization, that popular literature began to challenge the long-held orthodoxy. Approaching the story of the mutiny from a broader canvass, Ida Lee, George Mackaness, and Geoffrey Rawson expressed sympathy for Bligh’s interpretation. While Lee claimed she would not pass judgment on the mutiny, she nevertheless observed that it was not so much Bligh’s behavior, as the culture clash between shipboard life and the attractions of Tahiti that explained the mutiny. “The charm of native life, the loveliness of the island, and

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particularly the attractions of the native women,” she wrote, “seem to have fascinated them, and the glimpse of liberty after long restraint on board ship had such an effect upon them that before they left Tahiti some of the men were ready to cut every tie that bound them either to the service of their country or to the ship.” 27 A decade later, George Mackaness concurred with Lee’s interpretation. Making much use of Cook’s earlier reports of Tahiti to contextualise the experience of the Bounty’s sailors, Mackaness included a letter American James Mario Matra had written to Sir Joseph Banks on news of the mutiny, wherein Matra claimed that members of Cook’s crew, including Matra himself, had considered mutiny after their stay in Tahiti. 28 Reviewers and readers concluded that the book supported “Bligh’s conviction that the lotus life and the flesh-pots of Tahiti were the primary cause of the mutiny.” 29 Whether or not Bligh’s behavior sparked the mutiny, however, was not the reason for the Bounty’s place within South Seas lore. Despite the concerted and prolonged efforts against him, Bligh’s interpretation remained persuasive because it reflected and affirmed enduring ideas about the South Seas. In July 1896 Salt Lake City’s Deseret News reminded its readers that the famous episode in South Seas history had occurred because “the five month sojourn [in Tahiti] allowed her crew to form connections with the native women.” 30 The unreliable Amador Ledger explained that the “women of Tahiti loved the fair skinned sailors and sought to hide them from Blythe [sic], their oppressor, but they were captured and the ship sailed away.” 31 In 1921 the Ashburton Guardian reminded its New Zealand readers that the mutiny had occurred because “the sailors became infatuated with the beautiful women of the island.” 32 Such popular recollections of the Bounty support Michael Sturma’s assertion that the “mutiny on the Bounty, in the wake of enthusiasm generated by early European contact with Tahiti, further consolidated the image of the South Seas as a place of adventure and sexual gratification.” 33 It was within this context of ongoing interest in the story of Bligh and his crew that Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty became a popular sensation during the 1930s. Sales were greatly assisted by the serialization of the book in the Saturday Evening Post, and by its selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club as its October 1932 offering. 34 As well as the over 100,000 Book-of-the-Month Club subscribers who bought a copy, it was also claimed that over 20 million Americans had read the book as a result of the serialization. 35 By late 1935 the Mutiny on the Bounty was in a twelfth edition, which reputedly attracted another three million readers to the story. The book was the topic of much conversation. In Washington, D.C., for example, the book was discussed in the space of a few weeks by meetings of the League of Republican Women and the American Association of University Women. 36 Based on its American sales and readership alone, Mutiny on the Bounty can be considered the

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single largest cultural production in the history of the South Seas to that time. To complete their manuscript, Nordhoff and Hall rented a Papeete hotel room with a “sort of South Seas character about it.” 37 Here they would meet daily to write, after traveling from their respective homes. Taking considerable trouble to research their topic, they cited a long list of sources and advised readers that an “exhaustive bibliography” was to be found in Mackaness’s Life of Vice-Admiral William Bligh. 38 Mutiny on the Bounty includes a list of the ship’s company on the fateful voyage. It is correct in all but one detail. Peter Heywood’s name is not on the list. This was because rather than have their narrator inhabiting a real person, they created a fictional midshipman, Roger Byam. As they explained in the Preface to the book, Byam “had his actual counterpart in the person of Peter Heywood.” 39 Despite Nordhoff and Hall’s insistence that they had not followed the story “in every detail,” and that they enjoyed the license of “historical novelists,” the novel was considered to be stylistically similar to the earliest contributions to the South Seas literary tradition. As so many novels had done before it, Mutiny on the Bounty sought to engage with South Pacific history to affirm the story’s provenance and its authors’ credibility. Authenticity thus remained vital to the book’s popular appeal. Mutiny on the Bounty, although fictionalized and given a narrator-hero, was “founded in fact” and “reads like an actual account,” reported Time magazine. 40 Such authentication was also delivered through the characters. William Bligh’s bona fides as a South Seas sailor are established early in the book through his proximity to James Cook. Byam notes that he has read Hawkesworth’s chronicles and is fascinated with Bligh because he had sailed with Cook. 41 Despite acknowledging they were historical novelists, Nordhoff and Hall insisted that in “the essentials, relating to the mutiny and its aftermath,” they had “adhered to the facts preserved in the records of the British Admiralty.” 42 References to the book’s authenticity, specifically by mention of “admiralty records,” were used repeatedly in publicity and public receptions of the book. The Los Angeles Times review claimed that the authors “had rescued from forgotten archives the almost incredible facts concerning the mutiny on the Bounty.” 43 The reality, as demonstrated in their Preface, was quite different. Most of Nordhofff and Hall’s research had been in secondary sources, with some reference to collections of primary source documents. In announcing their selection of Mutiny on the Bounty, the Book-of-theMonth Club continued to blur the line between fact and fiction. Subscribers were assured that while “reality” seldom “presents material for a narrative that exceeds fiction in its qualities of dramatic excitement and romance,” Nordhoff and Hall had achieved just that. 44 The book was “not a sea story, it is not a romance of the South Seas (although it reminds one most often of Melville’s Typee), it is not merely fictitious memoirs, it

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is not, of course, pure history—it is all of these in combination, with the advantage over a historical memoir that the authors have been free to develop the play of human personality.” Nordhoff and Hall’s account, the Club concluded, was “perhaps as authentic a reconstruction of life among the Polynesians in their idyllic period as we may hope to get.” 45 In publicizing the book much was made of Nordhoff and Hall’s own experiences as members of the Lost Generation. That the two authors were resident in the South Seas, was, as it had always been, an important marketing tool for selling the book. Book-of-the-Month Club subscribers were told that these “two young Americans, let down and disillusioned by the war in which they were aviators, went to the South Seas, to live, married, and have lived there ever since.” They had “left this disturbing civilization.” 46 A review in the St. Louis Dispatch suggested that the two authors were in Tahiti “resting from wars and wanderings beneath their bread fruit trees, doubtless smoking pandanus leaf cigarettes and wearing only clothes of native make and lei of hybiscus (sic) about their necks.” Casting the two authors as beachcombers, with the requisite life and temperament, it was noted that they managed to complete the book despite “the soft wind which blew off the sea, the perfume from the flower filled valleys, and the inviting voices of the island maidens bathing in the surf.” 47 In Australia, meanwhile, the collapse of the film industry under the weight of American imports reduced the opportunities for Australian cinema to engage with the South Seas. Between 1924 and 1932 only one South Seas film, The Devil’s Playground (Fine Art Films Production, 1928) was made in Australia. Reputedly based on Ashley Durham’s Hell’s Highway, and allegedly the first Australian talkie, The Devil’s Playground was made by a group of professional and amateur filmmakers and actors from Sydney’s north shore, who shot most of the film in the Mosman Town Hall or at nearby Broken Bay. The Devil’s Playground reflected O’Brien’s White Shadows. The movie was set on a South Seas island where a chief, unhappy with the “white invasion” by missionaries and traders, summons his ancestors for advice and launches a war on the whites before the Royal Marines arrive to save the day. 48 Borrowing from the American recipe that looked to titillation to secure success, the Australian filmmakers overstepped the mark: their film was banned and not screened until 1966. 49 In the early 1930s the prominent cinematographer Charles Chauvel returned the Australian film industry to the South Seas with one of its most significant productions to date. The second Australian production to examine the mutiny, In the Wake of the Bounty filmed exteriors on location in Tahiti and Pitcairn Island, with the interiors shot on a soundstage in Sydney. It is best remembered as the film that launched the career of Errol Flynn. 50

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In the Wake of the Bounty portrayed Bligh unfavorably, but it was also clear that Chauvel saw Tahitian women as the motivating factor for the mutiny. Publicity material reinforced the theme. Screening posters depicted a sailor looking lecherously upon a topless Islander woman. Audiences were told they would see the same dances as those seen by the men of the Bounty, with “True Tahitian men and women in all the glamour of their native setting.” 51 As a result of such encounters, “thoughts of home, sweethearts and wives were buried under the demoralising debris of scented nights and tropic madness. . . . Each sailor kidnapped a South Seas maid.” “You must see this amazing picture,” publicity material insisted, “to understand the true facts that led to the mutiny and disappearance of the mutineers.” 52 Claiming that the film was “not a drama,” the opening credits observed that the motion picture was “the first in a series of great travel films to be produced by Expeditionary Films Ltd. Depicting strange incidents, strange places and strange peoples. . . . Each travel feature will contain the thread of a story based upon a true life drama.” The film opens with an old blind sailor being called on by his drinking acquaintances to tell the “truth of that mutiny.” “Days in Hell and Nights in Paradise,” he begins, “then Days in hell again.” 53 Bligh’s cruel disposition is established before the Bounty, to the accompaniment of ukuleles, arrives in the “warm faeryland of Tahiti.” Images of topless Islander women swimming in a lagoon brings the old sailor to call on his companions: “Come let us drink to those Tahiti days. To those girls hah hah me lads. What girls, what days, what nights.” The viewer is then treated to more images of topless female Tahitians frolicking around a waterfall, before the focus turns to a frenetic dance scene. 54 It was in the context of such hedonism that Bligh then orders the departure of the ship: “After months of enchantment the order to leave Tahiti sorely rent the heart of sailor and dusky maid.” The men start to say their good-byes. Some sailors bid a fond farewell to two Tahitian women at once. Christian, it is noted, is “mad about a girl,” but he is not the only one so enamored. The crew have become “madmen bewitched by Tahiti’s soft guile.” 55 While the amount of female nudity in In the Wake of the Bounty did not trouble the President of the National Council for Women—who endorsed the film as being of “intense historical interest”—it did provoke the censors’ ire. 56 The Australian Customs Department held this censorship role in the first instance because some of the film had been shot overseas and therefore was, technically, being imported into Australia. Accordingly, trouble began at the port of entry. The film was only permitted to enter the country if it was seen by no one but the crew, and the finished product was then resubmitted for examination. 57 Islander nudity and the dance sequences were the central issue. Like American directors at the same time, Chauvel defended the shots on the grounds of their authentic-

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ity: “Every effort has been made to produce the film historically,” he argued. “Natives had to be specifically chosen because knowledge of native dances is dying out.” 58 The film, it was claimed, had a “strong historical and ethnographic interest,” and none of the scenes had been filmed to “introduce any suggestion of an improper element. Ultimately the production “had tried to reproduce faithfully the Tahitian dances, instead of making travesties of them as most American directors did.” 59 Drawing further comparisons with recent American films, it was noted that in “none of the scenes did natives wear less clothing than African natives in the American production ‘Congorilla’ which had recently screened at the Plaza Theater.” 60 Chauvel was thus positioned as an ethnographer. In January 1933 the completed film was once again placed before the Minister of Customs. The film could be exported in its complete form, but cuts were imposed on the “Tahitian Episodes” for domestic audiences. 61 An appeal was lodged. The appeal board ruled in favor of the production “except one set of incidents which relate to a native dance.” 62 Chauvel appealed again, insisting that the “scenes of the native dance are the pivot of the whole production. If they are deleted the film will be spoilt.” Although a compromise was eventually reached after Chauvel threatened to not screen the film in Australia, it still had then to endure the scrutiny of the various state censors, many of whom made their own cuts. 63 In the Wake of the Bounty eventually opened in Sydney in March 1933. 64 It played to good audiences for several weeks before moving to Brisbane for a successful run through April and May before heading to Melbourne in June. A print of the film was screened in Hobart in January 1934, but West Australians had to wait until 1936 for the film to finally open in Perth. 65 In September 1933 it was announced that an American company had paid a “considerable sum” for both the American and the British screening rights to In The Wake of the Bounty. The first Australian “talkie” to be so purchased, hopes were raised that the sale marked a renaissance in Australian cinema. It was, however, a false dawn. The film had been secured so that it could not be screened as competition to the film MGM was undertaking to make, and which would be based on the Nordhoff and Hall novel. 66 In The Wake of the Bounty would be cut up and some of the location shots, especially those taken on Pitcairn, would be used as short films to support the American film. Before it became a sensation, the screen rights to Mutiny on the Bounty had been purchased for $12,500 by Hollywood actor/director Frank Lloyd. 67 Having secured the rights Lloyd then approached MGM, where Irving Thalberg had convinced Louis Mayer that the book would make a

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good picture. Lloyd did not fulfill his ambition to star as Bligh, but he did get to direct the film with a staggering two-million-dollar budget. The film stayed close to the narrative arc of Nordhoff and Hall’s first book, although it also borrowed sections from the other two books that made up their Bounty trilogy—namely Bligh’s amazing escape to Timor in an open boat, and the establishment of the new colony on Pitcairn. Much of the dialogue was verbatim. Nonetheless, a number of changes from both the book and the original story were made. Most significantly, at a time when Europe was being increasingly unsettled by Nazism, the film implied that Bligh represented a Royal Navy that no longer existed, by suggesting that the events on the Bounty ended flogging, and that the mutiny was the last in the Royal Navy. Both claims were erroneous. Furthermore, to maintain some symmetry in the story, Bligh was made the captain of the Pandora, the British ship sent to round up the mutineers. Finally, the Bounty’s volunteers were recast as “a motley one of convicts [and] bewildered wretches ‘pressed’ into service” 68 The Bounty opened in American cinemas in November 1935. In Los Angeles, the Times reported that the opening of the film at Loew’s State and Grauman’s Chinese Theater had marked “one of the biggest week ends in the history of both cinemas.” 69 Within six weeks 600,000 Americans had reputedly seen the film. 70 Despite the fact the “story of Captain Bligh and his mutineers on the Bounty” had “already been unfolded to Australian audiences in a film directed by Mr. Charles Chauvel,” Australians also flocked to cinemas when the film was released in 1936. 71 In Hobart the local theater was obliged to put on midnight sessions to cater to the “hundreds of patrons unable to secure seats.” 72 Cinemas were compelled to show the film an unprecedented four times a day. The Canberra Times observed the popularity of the “truly epoch making film.” 73 In his examination of the 1935 MGM production, Australian historian Greg Dening has observed that “there seemed to be almost a missionary zeal in proving the film’s historical authenticity.” 74 This zeal included a replica of the Bounty based on the original drawings, English actor Charles Laughton’s acquisition of a uniform from Bligh’s original naval tailors who still kept his measurements, the examination of Bligh’s log held by the Mitchell Library in Sydney, and several months filming in Tahiti for numerous external shots. Undermining such bids for “authenticity,” most of the film was shot on Catalina Island off the California coast (complete with twenty-five transplanted palm trees) and on one of MGM’s soundstages. Perhaps the biggest challenge to the film’s authenticity was Clark Gable’s American accent in the role of Fletcher Christian. As they had with so many other South Seas cultural productions, reviewers and the cinemagoing public were curious as to the authenticity of Mutiny on the Bounty. The Floridian Sarasota Herald insisted it was “the true story.” 75 The Maine Lewiston Daily Sun was convinced that if “the

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motion picture camera had been in practical use 150 years ago, no more authentic nor thrilling record of the amazing exploits of HMS Bounty and the historical mutiny could have been recorded than will be seen in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s ‘Mutiny on the Bounty.’” 76 Its stable mate, the Lewiston Evening Journal, was “impressed by the educational value” of the film. “Many persons have asked us,” remarked the paper’s reviewer, “‘Is this Historical?’” Readers were asked to refer back to Nordhoff and Hall to confirm its historical accuracy before the review moved on to perpetuate two of the film’s aforementioned falsehoods: that the mutiny ended mutinies and flogging in the Royal Navy. 77 The Spokane Daily Chronicle insisted the film was an “authentic visual document” that “faithfully” followed the book. 78 The Wall Street Journal acknowledged that the book was a work of fiction but observed that the film was “quite faithful” to Nordhoff and Hall’s “original story, which was built on British Admiralty records.” 79 As had been the case for the book, the allusions to “Admiralty records” became a central marketing tool for the film. While much of the advance publicity emphasized that the film was based on the Nordhoff and Hall novel, some of this material skipped over the book to suggest that the film itself “faithfully follows the original British admiralty records.” A number of newspapers repeated the phrase when speaking of the film’s authenticity. 80 In Sydney, the Camperdown Chronicle insisted that the film was the “true story” of the mutiny “wrung from the records of the British admiralty.” 81 The Canberra Times went further, claiming that the film had been made “with the cooperation of the British admiralty.” 82 Charles Laughton’s depiction of Bligh informed much discussion of the film. The character assassination of Bligh, which had commenced in the early nineteenth century, was complete. Laughton’s Bligh was “a man of hideous mental distortions,” a brute with a “pervert’s lust for persecution.” 83 With Gable’s American accent Fletcher Christian was transfigured as a “Yankee Rebel,” and the film reinforced American perceptions of themselves and the British which had justified the war of independence: “TYRANNY BRINGS REBELLION.” 84 Laughton’s depiction of Bligh, however, did not diminish the fact that audiences were watching a South Seas film. The demonization of Bligh did not detract from the film’s representation of the South Seas as an earthly paradise. The film offered an “authentic reproduction of many of those appealing qualities [of the South Seas] that have made classics of the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson.” 85 The Chicago Tribune observed that “the Tahitian sequences” provided a “vivid contrast to the turbulent ocean and the wretched life aboard ship.” 86 The Washington Post described “the picturesque and tranquil isles of the kingly Tahitians, leading their restful and untrammelled lives in a pristine and beautiful natural paradise. The idyllic interval serves to point by contrast to the hideous villainies with which Capt. Bligh paved the way to his ostensible destruc-

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tion.” 87 Islander women had played a telling role in the story. The Wall Street Journal observed that securing the ship, Christian aimed to “take the Bounty back to Tahiti and its native girls” 88 Thereafter the withdrawal to Pitcairn saw them “founding an island Paradise in a south sea Eden!” 89 The relationships between the mutineers and the Tahitian women were a far more important selling point for the film than the depravities of Bligh’s character. MGM’s posters for the film were dominated by a painting of Fletcher Christian embracing a Tahitian woman. A large pictorial spread for the film in the Hartford Courant showed a similarly formed still from the movie with the headline “Lovers in ‘Mutiny on the Bounty.’” Following a now well established Hollywood South Seas tradition, the film sought to titillate through its costuming. The Washington Post observed the different costumes that appeared in different shots of Christian’s “Tahitian girlfriend”: “The costume in the long shots is more abbreviated and is for the patrons, while the close-up apparently is for the censors.” 90 Early publicity for the film made much of the fact that the two female leads in the film were Tahitian. Two women, identified in the credits as “Mamo” and “Movita,” were cast as the Tahitian love interests for Christian and the fictitious Byam. Early media reports accepted MGM’s claims that “the two leading women in the cast, Tehani and Maimita, [were] genuine and very beautiful natives.” 91 Mamo was a “lovely Tahitian girl” who was studying law at the University of California. 92 Movita was “also a native-born Tahitian, as lovely of face and physique as any Hollywood actress.” Reviewers appreciated this element of authenticity. The Lewiston Daily Sun’s reviewer concluded that the female leads were “so charming and so seemingly intelligent” that “one feels with Christian and Byam that civilization could do little for them, in the way of improvement.” 93 The Melbourne Argus, while “quibbling” on some aspects of historical accuracy, noted that the “scenes in Tahiti, helped greatly by the delightful acting of two native girls, are full of Arcadian touches.” 94 MGM had deliberately used only the two women’s first names in the credits and associated publicity to perpetuate a similar charade to that employed by Murnau and Fairbanks. Neither woman was Tahitian. Movita Castaneda was a twenty-year-old Mexican-American actress, while Mamo Clark was Hawaiian (“three quarters Kanaka and one-fourth Saxon”) studying prelaw at the University of Southern California. 95 The book version of Mutiny on the Bounty was released at the height of the Great Depression, and the film version appeared at a time when a full economic recovery was still some years away. The onslaught of this global economic catastrophe was a timely reminder that the civilization that had self-destructed in 1914 remained precarious. As Americans in record numbers were viewing the cinematic version of Mutiny on the Bounty,

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Philip Kingsley wrote an opinion piece for the Chicago Tribune about the South Seas. Invoking the mutiny, Herman Melville and Typee, and Robert Louis Stevenson, Kingsley suggested that many Americans dreamed of an escape, and “losing the hurried, worried American world in the lands of no depression.” The South Seas was again being depicted as a site of escape from the stresses and decay of civilization. As Kingsley remarked to a group of Chicago businessmen, the “World depression” was “unknown . . . in the mystic isles of the South Seas.” 96 Indeed, it was still possible to escape to the region where “there are thousands of islands where one might construct a Robinson Crusoe existence.” And among the glimpses of “golden beaches and coconut palms” lived people, who unlike Americans, lived with “no fear.” 97 At least one Chicago businessmen agreed with Kinglsey’s analysis. Ralph W. Zimmerman was a Chicago architect who sailed for the South Seas with his family as a “Depression Antidote.” Claiming he hatched the plan after having grown “tired of the depression and the constant comment of the depression,” and seeking “to divorce himself for a while from business,” Zimmerman embarked on an “exciting adventure.” 98 The South Seas were constructed as a destination where an American could “elude” the Depression. 99 A Tahiti correspondent for the Los Angeles Times reported in 1933 that each “mail boat from the United States that once a month enters the narrow break in the barrier reef and drops anchor in the calm, sapphire-blue waters of Papeete harbor, Tahiti, brings another contingent of Americans who have come here for the express purpose of ‘outsitting the Depression.’” 100 Affluent honeymooners also continued to select the South Seas, with some deciding to linger longer. San Francisco newlyweds “Mr. and Mrs. Phillip Hess” traveled to Tahiti, and showed no inclination to return: “Their parents and friends were appalled when the couple wrote that they liked the languid life there and might remain forever.” Eventually, after four months, “they were prevailed upon to return.” 101 One famous American who decided to escape the Depression and head for the South Seas was the editor and publisher William “Ray” Long. Long had an enduring literary relationship with the South Seas. As editor of the Cosmopolitan he had been the first to see Somerset Maugham’s manuscript for Miss Sadie Thompson and was the first of a long line of editors who turned down the story as being “too sultry and outspoken.” Later his “uncanny insight into readers[’] taste” saw him engage Maugham and other noted South Seas authors such as Peter B. Kyne (whom he had lured from the Saturday Evening Post). 102 One of the first books published by his new publishing house “Ray Long and Richard R. Smith” was Loring Andrews’s Isles of Eden: A South Sea Idyll. Supposedly a “new note in books about the Islands of the South Seas,” his “new and original method” was to “make South Seas adventure wholly respectable by sharing it with his family.” Offering hope for the author and his pub-

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lisher, one review observed that “Mr. Andrews has written an engaging book, a much more human book than are most South Seas volumes, and he has made it seem real and convincing, whatever may be the amount of truth in its narrative.” 103 The San Jose News reported that it was Long’s literary engagement with “South Seas fiction” which had “inspired him with the desire to visit the scenes of some of these romances.” It was rumored that Long himself intended to write while in the South Seas and return with the “Great Polynesian Novel.” 104 The circumstances under which Long made his departure attracted considerable publicity. A few weeks after Andrews’s book had been published, on a hot New York day in August 1932, Long had risen from his desk and told staff he was leaving immediately for the South Seas. 105 Proceeding to San Francisco, and leaving his wife at home, he told his business partner, Richard Smith, that he would be gone for seven or eight weeks. Several months later he wrote that his return would be “indefinitely postponed,” before finally deciding that he would never return to America. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette commented that the letter had come from Papeete, “the scene of some of the Joseph Conrad novels and works by other novelists and artists which may have appealed to Long more than his friends suspected.” 106 Long had walked out of his office “a couple of jumps ahead of a nervous breakdown.” 107 While he would later suggest he had gone “to the South Seas to find himself again,” a major cause of his condition was the Depression and the parlous state of his new publishing enterprise. 108 The Chicago Tribune was blunt: “Editor Prefers South Seas to Bankruptcy Court.” 109 In Long’s absence the firm’s creditors secured an involuntary bankruptcy because “the majority stockholder has been in the South Seas for the last nine months.” 110 The Depression may have dramatically reduced the numbers of tourists but the number of Americans seeking to stay in the South Pacific for an extended period was apparently unprecedented. 111 British authorities in the Solomon Islands (“a land in which there is no unemployment, where the Budget is always balanced, and in which natives have all that they desire”) moved against the “unnecessary figure of fact and fiction of the South Seas, the beachcomber” by placing a £50 bond on all intending residents. Consequently, the beachcomber escaping the Depression to the Solomons had “virtually disappeared.” 112 Authorities in French Polynesia also attempted to dissuade Americans from escaping to the South Seas. Students of the University of Illinois were urged to forget such plans: Dreams of an easy life in the South Seas with cheerful natives to do the white man’s bidding are false, say officials here, unless the indolent dreamer has ample funds. . . . The officials add that books of recent

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The report noted that suicides of Westerners who had exhausted their funds in the South Seas was increasing. 113 Ray Long did eventually return home. A few months later he committed suicide. 114 Mutiny on the Bounty had played its role in painting an unrealistic and “false picture” of the South Seas. Nordhoff and Hall had reaffirmed the Western impression of the South Seas as a suitable site to escape the drudgery of daily existence. The possibility is debated before the Bounty even leaves Spithead. Upon introducing Bligh, the two authors sow the seeds for the clash of cultures. When Roger Byam meets Bligh, Byam’s mother notes that she and her son had been “studying Rousseau” and his idea that “true happiness can only be enjoyed in a state of nature.” Bligh responds that he had “been told his ideas.” His lack of intimacy with the French language, however, renders it difficult for the “rough seaman” to express “an opinion on a subject more suited to a philosopher.” Yet he concludes that “true happiness can only be enjoyed by a disciplined and enlightened people.” Reminding the Byams of the “taboo” rules of the Tahitians, he muses that “a few days among men in a state of nature might have changed Monsieur Rousseau’s ideas.’” 115 Having settled into this Tahitian existence, Byam tells the reader that “had it not been for my mother I believe that I might have been content to settle down to a long period of Indian life.” Tahiti, he emphasized, allowed “a life of most delightful ease and tranquility.” 116 In Tahiti, Nordhoff and Hall were well aware that the Depression had reached the South Seas. They saw its consequences every day. Despite media reports to the contrary, the Depression had undermined most of the South Pacific’s export markets. 117 Furthermore, for the American authors, some of the money made from the book was lost when a Papeete bank collapsed. 118 They remained convinced, however, that the Depression might produce a positive outcome for the region. An opportunity for the South Seas to escape the White Shadows had presented itself. Hall noted to friend that: I suppose you have heard how the general industrial depression has hit us here. Copra and pearl shell are so low that it hardly pays to collect them. In my opinion hard times, in the northern sense, are good times in the South Seas sense. To speak paradoxically, conditions are so bad that they couldn’t be better, from the native point of view. Of course, all of the white traders are lamenting, but the natives are eating island food of their own providing instead of tinned food from the Chinamen’s stores, and you see many more pretty little niau houses going up in the districts now that there is no money for corrugated iron and gingerbread scroll-work. It is all to the good, I think. Down with the tree Prosperity! Say I. I only hope that times will become so bad that there will be no money for gasoline. . . . If only Tahiti and all the rest of

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these islands could be cut off for five years from all trade with the outside world, we would have a renaissance of Polynesian life that would be glorious. 119

In another letter he noted: “What a year the past one has been! And our machine-ridden civilization has only itself to blame for it. There has never been any doubt in my mind as to what machines would do to us if given their way.” Overproduction was the cause of the world’s difficulties. “It ought to make them think and take away some of their cocksureness about ours being the best of all possible civilizations,” he argued.” 120 Nordhoff agreed, but he also conceded that it was the same civilization that allowed him to enjoy his South Seas exile: Times are very hard indeed—the natives have had to give up highheeled shoes, new phonography records, and town-cars, but will always, I hope, be able to enjoy the customary three squares a day. The depression falls hardest on the government, on large planters, and on the traders. The native of course, can always catch a few fish, get a few bananas, breadfruit and fei. . . . Well if people at home stop buying books, I shall probably soon be digging up uhi moua [mountain yam] myself. 121

Nordhoff and Hall accepted, as the “forerunners of the current crop of ‘escapeologists” who had “scorned all the comforts and luxuries of modernity” to escape the “hell of civilization,” that their writing had contributed to the idea of the South Seas as an effortless Eden. 122 Following on from, and indeed implicated in, World War I, the Great Depression was the second crisis for modernity in as many decades. As Jani Scandura has argued, the Great Depression was both an “economic and mass psychological depression.” 123 The South Seas, therefore, once again assumed significance as a site of escape from civilization and its maladies. As the impact of the economic downturn began to ease in the second half of the 1930s, however, interest and engagement in the cultural productions of the South Seas grew, and reached a level of significance equal to the levels of fascination that had inspired Daniel Defoe, and prompted the South Seas bubble. Central to this process was a woman from New Orleans and her sarong. NOTES 1. James Norman Hall to Courtright Greener, April 4, 1927, James Norman Hall Papers, 1906–1954, Special Collections, MS/MS 01.01, Box 4, Folder 2, Grinnell College Libraries, Grinnell, Iowa, (hereafter cited as Grinnell). 2. Hall to Green, November 9, 1929, Hall Papers, Box 4, Folder 2, Grinnell. 3. Milwaukee Journal, February 6, 1942. 4. Edward Tagart, A Memoir of the Late Captain Peter Heywood, R.N., With Extracts from His Diaries and Correspondence (London: Effingham Wilson, 1832).

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5. Deseret News, January 14, 1938. 6. Hall to Roy “Cush” Cushman, January 1, 1931, Hall Papers, Box 4, Folder 3, Grinnell. 7. Charles Sumner, “The Mutiny on the Somers,” The North American Review 57 (July 1843): 197. 8. Alexander Findlay, A Directory for the Navigation of the South Pacific Ocean: With Description of Its Coasts, Islands, Etc. from the Strait of Magalhaens to the Arctic Sea (1851), xiii. 9. Chicago Tribune, March 11, 1871. 10. Otago Witness, June 16, 1883. 11. Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery, The Naval Pioneers of Australia (London: John Murray, 1899), 99. 12. Literary World 33 (July 1930): 75; See Geoffrey Rawson Bligh of the Bounty (London: P. Allan, 1930); and Owen Rutter, Cain’s Birthday (London: Hutchison and Co, 1930). 13. Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach, Celebrating a Century of the American Anthropological Association: Presidential Portraits (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 126. See also H. L. Shapiro, Descendants of the Mutineers of the Bounty (Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1929); Harry L. Shapiro, The Physical Characters of the Society Islanders (Honolulu: The Museum, 1930); and Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942; repr.; Cleveland: World Publishing, 1964), 11. 14. H. L. Shapiro, “Robinson Crusoe’s Children,” Natural History Magazine 28 (May–June 1928): 290. See also Edwin Teale, “South Seas Colony Reveals New Facts About Heredity,” Popular Science Magazine, October 1928, 20–21. 15. Harry L. Shapiro, The Heritage of the Bounty: The Story of Pitcairn through Six Generations (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936). 16. Sydney Mail, July 30, 1930. 17. Age, April 2, 1931. The explanation that the interest was born of changes to the merchant navy, and its closer association with the Royal Navy during the Great War, however, was tenuous. The Sydney Morning Herald noted that renewed interest in the Bounty could be attributed to the 1856 relocation of the descendants of the mutineers from Pitcairn to the Australian territory of Norfolk Island. See Sydney Morning Herald, February 20, 1936. 18. Roy Bridges, The Bubble Moon (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915); Ida Lee, Captain Bligh’s Second Voyage to the South Sea (London: Longmans, 1920). See also Mary Gaunt, “Joan of Pilchard, Chapter IX,” Melbourne Age, November 7, 1929; Mary Gaunt, Joan of the Pilchard (London: Ernest Benn, 1930); George Mackaness The Life of Vice Admiral William Bligh (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1931). 19. Folger’s report (“Pitcairn”) reached the public through the pages of the Quarterly Review 3 (1810): 23–24. 20. Lewiston Evening Journal, November 22, 1935. 21. William Bligh and Edward Christian, The Bounty Mutiny (New York: Penguin, 2001), 11. 22. Mary Russell Mitford, Christina, the Maid of the South Seas; A Poem (London: A. J. Valpy, 1811). 23. Amasa Delano, Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere: Comprising Three Voyages around the World (Boston: E. G. House, 1817), 148–49. Delano’s account influenced Herman Melville’s ideas on “moral leadership,” and his novel Omoo raised questions about Christian’s motivations. See Kevin Hicks, “Acts of Recovery: American Antebellum Fictions” (PhD Dissertation, Princeton 2005), 188. 24. John Marshall, Royal Naval Biography (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825), 747–85; John Barrow, The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause and Consequences (London: John Murray, 1831); Greg Dening has suggested that Barrow essentially plagiarized Marshall. See

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Dening Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theater on the Bounty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 124. William Beechey, Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), 53–56; Edward Tagart, A Memoir of the Late Captain Peter Heywood. 25. Diana Belcher The Mutineers of the Bounty and Their Descendants in Pitcairn and Norfolk (London: John Murray, 1870). See also, for example, Rosalind Young, Mutiny of the Bounty and Story of Pitcairn Island, 1790–1894 (Oakland: Pacific Publishing, 1894). 26. Becke and Jeffery, Naval Pioneers of Australia, 100. 27. Lee, Captain Bligh’s Second Voyage, 47. 28. Mackaness, The Life of Vice-Admiral William Bligh (1931; repr., New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936), 167. Matra’s letter had been discussed in a footnote in Edward Smith’s 1911 biography of Banks. See Smith, The Life of Sir Joseph Banks (London, John Lane, 1911), 40. The connection was discussed in the Melbourne Argus, April 28, 1917. 29. See Melbourne Age, April 2, 1931. 30. Deseret News, July 25, 1896. 31. Amador Ledger, May 6, 1910. 32. Ashburton Guardian, September 9, 1921. Robert Langdon observed in 2000 that a question of “fundamental significance” had barely been examined: “What was it about the women of Tahiti that made them so attractive—so seductive—to the mutineers.” See Langdon, “‘Dusky Damsels’: Pitcairn Island’s Neglected Matriarchs of the Bounty Saga,” Journal of Pacific History 35, no. 1 (2000): 29. 33. Michael Sturma, South Seas Maidens: Western Fantasy and Sexual Politics in the South Pacific (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002), 52. 34. Launched in 1926, the Book-of-the-Month Club was a mail-order company that by 1929 had over 110,000 members. See Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Bookof-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 261. 35. The promotion for the film version claimed 25 million Americans had read the book. See Lewiston Daily Sun, November 19, 1935. 36. Washington Post, July 8, 1934 and April 15, 1934. 37. Hall to Roy “Cush” Cushman, 1 January 1931, Hall Papers, Box 4, Folder 3, Grinnell. 38. Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, Mutiny on the Bounty (Boston: Little Brown, 1932), preface. 39. Nordhoff and Hall, Mutiny on the Bounty, 5. 40. Time, October 17, 1932. 41. Nordhoff and Hall, Mutiny on the Bounty, 16. 42. Nordhoff and Hall, Mutiny on the Bounty, 5. 43. Los Angeles Times, October 30, 1932. 44. Nordhoff and Hall, Mutiny on the Bounty, 5; “Mutiny on the Bounty,” Book-of-theMonth Club News, September 1932. 45. “Mutiny on the Bounty,” Book-of-the-month Club News, September 1932 46. Berkeley Daily Gazette, March 13, 1933. 47. Clair Kenamore, “‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ Almost a Classic,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 4, 1932. 48. Eric Reade, History and Heartburn: The Saga of Australian Film, 1896–1978 (Sydney: Harper and Row, 1979), 73. 49. Sydney Morning Herald, February 8, 1930. 50. Thomas McNulty, Errol Flynn: The Life and Career (Jefferson: McFarland, 2004), 2. 51. Susanne Chauvel Carlsson, Charles & Elsa Chauvel: Movie Pioneers (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1989), 73; Charles Chauvel, In the Wake of “The Bounty”: To Tahiti and Pitcairn Island (Sydney: Endeavour Press, 1933). 52. Brisbane Courier, April 28, 1933; See also Patricia O’Brien, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 244. 53. In the Wake of the Bounty, produced and directed by Charles Chauvel (Expeditionary Films, 1933).

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54. In the Wake of the Bounty. 55. In the Wake of the Bounty. In the 1917 Australian production there was a suggestion of Bligh’s “brutal tyranny,” but it remained the case that Christian had gone “mad.” See Adelaide Advertiser, March 29, 1917. 56. Brisbane Courier Mail, May 8, 1931. 57. Sydney Morning Herald, January 20, 1933. 58. Sydney Morning Herald, March 29, 1932. 59. Sydney Morning Herald, September 26, 1932. 60. Townsville Daily Bulletin, October 10, 1932. 61. Sydney Morning Herald, January 28, 1933. 62. Sydney Morning Herald, February 11, 1933. 63. Sydney Morning Herald, April 6, 1933. 64. Sydney Morning Herald, March 15, 1933. 65. The fact the film was showing on Australian screens for at least two years challenges Greg Dening’s claim that the film did not receive much of an airing and was quickly bought up by MGM. See Dening, Performances (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996), 172-73. 66. Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 346. 67. Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language, 344. Chrystopher J. Spicer, Clark Gable: Biography, Filmography, Bibliography (Jefferson: McFarland, 2002), 122. 68. The line was used in publicity on both sides of the Pacific. See for example St. Maurice Valley Times, January 8, 1936; Launceston Examiner, August 8, 1938. 69. Los Angeles Times, December 2, 1935. 70. Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language, 358. 71. Sydney Morning Herald, February 24, 1936. 72. Mercury, April 23, 1936. 73. Canberra Times, March 18, 1936. 74. Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language, 350. 75. The Lewiston Daily Sun, November 19, 1935; Sarasota Herald, December 29, 1935. 76. Lewiston Daily Sun, November 19, 1935. 77. Lewiston Evening Journal, November 22, 1935. The Chicago Tribune insisted that the Mutiny had improved naval justice. See Tribune, December 16, 1935. 78. Spokane Daily Chronicle, November 14, 1935; and San Jose News, December 7, 1935. 79. Wall Street Journal, November 13, 1935. 80. See, for example, Spokane Daily Chronicle, November 14, 1935. 81. Camperdown Chronicle, June 4, 1936. 82. Canberra Times, March 18, 1936. 83. Chicago Tribune, November 24, 1935; and Washington Post, November 14, 1935. 84. San Jose News, December 7, 1935. 85. Washington Post, October 31, 1935. 86. Tribune, November 26, 1935. 87. Washington Post, November 14, 1935. 88. Wall Street Journal, November 13, 1935. 89. Ludington Daily News, November 25, 1935. 90. Washington Post, November 18, 1935. 91. The Lewiston Daily Sun, November 19, 1935. 92. Chicago Tribune, November 24, 1935. 93. Lewiston Daily Sun, November 19, 1935. 94. Argus, March 12, 1936. 95. Hartford Courant, November 3, 1935. 96. Chicago Tribune, December 8, 1935. 97. Chicago Tribune, February 2, 1933. 98. Chicago Tribune, April 21, 1935. 99. Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1936.

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100. Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1933. 101. Berkeley Daily Gazette, March 15, 1934. 102. New York Times, February 10, 1935. 103. New York Times, June 12, 1932. 104. San Jose News, August 12, 1932. 105. New York Times, July 10, 1935. 106. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 19, 1933; and New York Times, July 10, 1935. 107. Time, February 18, 1935. 108. Los Angeles Times, July 13, 1935. 109. Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1933. 110. New York Times, April 27, 1933. 111. New York Times, September 22, 1935. 112. Argus, March 31, 1936. 113. Daily Illini, January 21, 1932. 114. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 19, 1933. 115. Nordhoff and Hall, Mutiny on the Bounty, 17. 116. Nordhoff and Hall, Mutiny on the Bounty, 96. 117. For one report on the Depression’s political and economic effects see “Old Ways in the South Seas,” Christian Science Monitor, January 16, 1935. 118. New York Times, April 30, 1933. 119. James Norman Hall to Gerrit and Lilian Wilder, February 1, 1931, Hall Papers, Box 4, Folder 3, Grinnell. A December 1935 story in the New York Times shared this notion that the South Seas was being spared: “Travellers who plan, or dream of, visits to the South Seas Islands apparently need not feel alarmed about the danger that Western civilization will spoil their primitive charm. Indeed, recent testimony of returned observers familiar with the islands is quite to the contrary; it is generally agreed that the trend is the opposite direction and that natives of the South Seas are reverting to ancient customs and modes of living as the often-times maligned influence of the white-man wanes.” See Barron C. Cohen “South Seas Keep Color,” New York Times, December 15, 1935. 120. James Norman Hall to Roy “Cush” Cushman, 1 Jan 1931, Hall Papers, Box 4, Folder 3, Grinnell. 121. Charles Nordhoff to Gerrit Wilder, August 18, 1931, Hall Papers, Box 4, Folder 3, Grinnell. 122. Deseret News, January 15, 1938. 123. Jani Scandura, Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 5.

FOURTEEN Pardon My Sarong The Arrival of Dorothy Lamour

Western audiences’ willingness to accept depictions of interracial love and sex in the South Seas genre—represented by the response to Mutiny on the Bounty—continued during the 1930s, confounding broader white anxieties of the time regarding the contentious topic of miscegenation. Audiences’ tolerances were informed by a number of factors: Hollywood’s embrace of the literary South Seas tradition, with its complicated but often positive ideas on such matters; the contemporary construction of the South Seas, notably Hawaii, by advertisers portraying so-called “hapa-haole” women as the attractive ideal of Islander womanhood; and the elevated position accorded to Polynesians in the hierarchy of race, a process reinforced by ethnographers as well as by Frederick O’Brien, and others. Hollywood had further perpetuated a Europeanized vision of Islander womanhood through the casting of Caucasian (often Latino) women as Islanders. The Production Code continued to allow levels of South Seas titillation not permitted in other genres. Furthermore, as Susan Courtney has argued, many South Seas scripts enjoyed greater freedom in the presentation of interracial relationships because the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) Production Code Administration (PCA) overseers did not regard Polynesians as black. As evidence, Courtney cites a MPPDA reviewer of the 1931 film, Never the Twain Shall Meet, who judged the issue of miscegenation unproblematic because the Islander woman’s father was white, and because Polynesians in any case were not black. 1 The Code had appeared to allow miscegenistic acts to be represented on screen in South Seas films so long as, ultimately, the relationship failed or ceased, usually through a realization of its impossibil237

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ity, as had occurred in Mr. Robinson Crusoe or Bird of Paradise. Nonetheless, as the genre became more popular during the late 1930s, the South Seas’ unique place in Hollywood seemed assured. In 1937 PCA chief Joseph Breen’s secretary Olga Martin wrote Hollywood’s Movie Commandments: A Handbook for Motion Picture Writers and Reviewers. Martin noted that a “union of a member of the Polynesian and allied races of the Island groups with a member of the white race is not necessarily considered a miscegentic relationship.” 2 The MPAA became far more concerned with suggestions of sex than with miscegenation, although Hollywood producers were inclined to hedge their bets, by downplaying miscegenistic relationships in the hope of securing greater levels of audience titillation. While a number of actresses had become closely identified with the idea of Islander beauty during the 1920s and 1930s, all were eclipsed in the second half of the 1930s by the New Orleans–born big band singer Dorothy Lamour. Lamour (with her “sarong”) became the quintessential South Seas heroine, shaping the perceptions of hundreds of thousands of Allied service personnel as they headed to the Pacific War in the early 1940s. On the eve of the Pacific War, the South Seas imaginings of American and other Allied servicemen were dominated not by the stories or images of James Cook but by the films of Dorothy Lamour. 3 Cinema had re-inscribed fantasies of the South Seas even more powerfully in popular consciousness. With the completion of the Bounty trilogy, and with the Great Depression still casting a long shadow, Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall decided to attempt to achieve what Robert Flaherty had been unable to do—find some aspects of South Seas life that posed an enduring danger to Paradise, and use it as the subject of a cautionary tale. Realizing “that people would be led to believe that the island life is free from all hardship and danger,” they decided their next project would “give a vivid and accurate account of the serpent in their insular Eden.” The environmental element which exercised an “overbearing tyranny” on native life was “The Hurricane.” 4 The Hurricane also returned to the broad theme of O’Brien’s White Shadows but, in contrast to O’Brien’s travelogue, Nordhoff and Hall’s fiction was considered by some commentators to provide authentic insights into native life, not seen since Melville. A reviewer in the Saturday Review claimed the book was “a story of today, cast as fiction but having all the force and terror of fact.” 5 The Literary Digest’s review argued “it is a book so close to the scenes that it would transport across the Pacific those of us who go down to the sea in books.” 6 Two love-struck South Sea Islanders—Marama and Terangi—become uncomprehending “victim[s] of the white man’s justice” when they fail to abide by the strictures of imposed colonial society. Now imprisoned for his assault on a racist white colonial, Terangi escapes repeatedly, much to

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the frustration of the local French governor. In his final escape he kills a guard, but before he can be recaptured, the island, and French colonialism, is destroyed by the storm of the novel’s title. In the wake of the storm the chastened Governor allows Terangi to escape and be reunited with Marama and their child. The Hurricane provided yet another cinematic take on the idea of the “noble savage.” 7 Nordhoff and Hall’s popularity, enhanced by the cinematic version of the Bounty, saw The Hurricane immediately snapped up for serialization by the Saturday Evening Post, and by MGM for the film rights. MGM boss Samuel Goldwyn had originally slated Howard Hawks to direct the film, but noted director John Ford was able to successfully lobby for the role. An avid yachtsman who had made several cruises to the South Pacific and Hawaii during the 1930s, Ford initially secured agreement that he could use his own 110-foot yacht Arana in the film, and make the most of the movie on location in the South Pacific. Ford wanted to emulate Murnau’s effort against a broader canvas supplied by Joseph Conrad. Permission to film in the Pacific was subsequently denied, much to Ford’s outrage, and so the film was shot largely on a Hollywood soundstage and lot (with a large lagoon and village built) with some exteriors shot at Catalina Island and a second unit sent to Samoa to capture some location footage. 8 Jean Spaulding’s review of The Hurricane in the Brisbane Queenslander considered the broader South Seas genre. She suggested that “with the exception of such notable an effort as ‘White Shadows,’” the “cinematic history of these palm-swept islands” had “reflected Hollywood’s sophistical philosophy toward the native in literature—a philosophy compounded of three parts condescension and one part gentle tolerance.” 9 Certainly The Hurricane did engage with the idea of the “noble savage.” In yet another critique of civilization, the primitive Terangi ultimately displays more humane personal qualities and sensibilities than the sophisticated and worldly French colonial official. Spaulding also insisted that Nordhoff, Hall, Goldwyn, and Ford had secured “heavenly emolument” with their achievement, “to wit, the manufacture of a South Seas film conspicuously lacking in grass skirts, beachcombers, cannibal chieftains, and rummy Englishmen.” 10 The rummy Englishmen, however, had simply been replaced by the troubled French colonial governor, and the beachcomber remained in the guise of the slowly deteriorating doctor who is only reconnected with the Western world in the wake of the hurricane. In concluding her review of The Hurricane, Spaulding suggested that the South Seas genre had developed three “distinct classes.” The first was the “shipwreck melodrama,” with the “menace” provided by “a deranged cannibal with a taste for rare white meat.” There were then two types of “sociological drama.” The first pointed “to the danger of miscegenation” courtesy of a “full-lipped Polynesian girl” who learns to say the

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word “love” in English before the beachcomber shaves off his beard and returns to civilization and his “debutante-fiancé.” The second focused on the degeneration of the white man in the tropics and the “dangers of alcohol.” Spaulding considered Nordhoff and Hall’s works to be “free of such formula taints.” She suggested that Mutiny on the Bounty had “dealt sympathetically and honestly with the native life of Tahiti” and that The Hurricane was, despite some promotions to the contrary, an “unromanticised picture of life on three South Sea Islands—the mythical Manukura and Motu Tonga, and the real Tahiti.” Clearly unaware of Tabu, Spaulding applauded the film’s focus on the life of Polynesians and suggested the two leads were “reunited under dramatic—but plausible—circumstances.” Presumably alluding to Ford’s South Seas cruises, Spaulding suggested that Ford “brought an intimate knowledge of the South Sea Islands and their people which would alone preclude the usual Hollywood exaggerations.” 11 Publicity for The Hurricane also emphasized the personal life and South Seas connections of Jon Hall as a way to reinforce authenticity. “I was born in the South Seas,” stated Hall in an interview in the fan magazine Screenland: “I learned to swim around coral reefs almost before I could walk. All the magic and beauty of the islands, the native songs, the superstitions, I knew by heart, when most kids are reading ‘Huckleberry Finn.’” Connecting Hall’s family to the South Seas tradition, the story continued: “Men like Frederick O’Brien, who wrote ‘White Shadows of the South Seas’ [sic] and Somerset Maugham knew and loved my grandmother. They put her in some of their stories.” The Screenland story also claimed that his grandfather, “Captain Chapman,” had reputedly established the tin and timber trade between the United States and Tahiti. Furthermore, Hall was friends with another American South Seas icon— Zane Grey. 12 The implication in some reporting of the film was that Hall’s portrayal was authentic because he knew “South Sea islanders as only one who has lived among them ever could.” 13 In tones not dissimilar to the false representations of Mamo Clark and Movita Castaneda’s background in the Bounty (both were also cast in The Hurricane in supporting roles with the earlier claims repeated) publicity for the movie suggested that Hall had been “discovered” by his neighbor, John Ford. One biography of Ford claimed the director considered his neighbor a Tahitian and gave Hall the role just as he was about to return to the South Seas. 14 The publicity claims for Jon Hall contained elements of truth, but there was also considerable embellishment. He had in fact been born Charles Felix Locher, not in Tahiti but in Fresno, California. His father, Felix Maurice Locher, was a Swiss-born musician and actor. Hall’s mother, Freida Charlotte Tehen Tetuanui Gooding, and his maternal grandmother had both been born in Tahiti and his parents had first met in Honolulu before marrying in San Francisco. Shortly after their marriage

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in 1912, press reports claimed they were going to Tahiti, but how long they stayed there, and how often the family visited the South Pacific in the following years, is unclear. 15 Jon Hall’s first film was indeed The Hurricane, but first Charles Locher, and then “Lloyd Crane” had appeared in at least four films before 1935 and a third name change. 16 Another claim for Hall and the film’s authenticity were familial associations made between the actor and James Norman Hall. Some reports suggested Jon was James’ nephew, while still others suggested they were second cousins. One later suggestion was that Hall’s real name was Charles Hall Locher. 17 The South Seas authenticity of The Hurricane was also reflected, for many reviewers, in the scale and quality of the film’s special effects. Life magazine insisted the storm scenes were the “most terrifying and realistic” in movie history. 18 The Melbourne Argus review certainly suggested that since the film was showing the dangers of a South Seas existence it challenged traditional South Seas fare, which therefore elevated its authenticity: “For years novelists and film producers have been teaching us that the islands of the South Pacific are an earthy paradise of nodding palm trees, sleepy blue lagoons and languishing Polynesians. In ‘The Hurricane’ Sam Goldwyn has added a grim footnote to this pretty story. The sun does not always shine on the Pacific.” “For sheer realistic force,” it was asserted, “the great” Hurricane “has never been surpassed on the screen.” 19 In casting for the female lead of Marama, Goldwyn chose the former beauty queen and big band singer Dorothy Lamour. After securing a motion picture contract with Paramount in 1935, Lamour secured her first lead role the following year, in a production called The Jungle Princess. Originally titled Queen of the Jungle, the first script had the action set in the “tangled jungle of upper Burma” and was supposedly the tale of a white hunter and a “Native Girl” called “Gina.” Through a number of script iterations, however, the location was moved to the jungles of Malaya and Gina became “Ulah.” Ulah was to live in a “village of happy natives untouched by civilization” but, influenced by the story of Tarzan, she was eventually moved from the village by the scriptwriters and lived by herself with her animal friends (including tigers and monkeys) in the jungle. It is here that she encounters a great white hunter, played by Welsh actor Ray Milland. Queen of the Jungle became Jungle Girl and then finally The Jungle Princess. The Production Code Administration had a number of concerns with the sexual suggestiveness of the script. The producers were warned that the film “has about it a flavor which, in our judgment, is not good and it is more than likely that political censor bodies, both in this country and Europe will delete many of the lines and considerable of the action.” 20 With the script including a number of suggestive scenes, including one

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where Chris carries Ulah into a cave, it was rejected by the PCA: “The specific code violation is the general offensive sex suggestiveness—the inescapable indication that Chris and Ulah have indulged themselves in an illicit sex affair.” 21 The studio agreed to make a number of changes. Breen informed the MPAA head General Will Hays in October 1936 that The Jungle Princess, “when first submitted to us, contained a definite suggestion of a sex affair between the two leads. After several conferences with the studio and a reediting of the picture we obtained the deletion of the offensive material.” 22 One concern with the script was the seemingly miscegenistic theme contained therein. Perhaps because Ulah appeared to be Malay, rather than Polynesian, concerns were heightened. Following the Tarzan theme, however, the producers were quick to point out the fact that Ulah was in fact not a Malay, but a white women, long since lost in the jungle—like Tarzan. 23 Rather than revealing this in time as a plot device and for “obvious reasons” a prologue for the film was created for screening in the “British empire” noting that Ulah was the “daughter of a white man.” 24 Notwithstanding the MPAA’s efforts, The Jungle Princess retained the capacity to titillate audiences. Paramount, exhibitors, and critics not only referred to, but also appeared to celebrate the sexual suggestiveness that had survived the editing process. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, for example, advised readers that “sex comes to the Tarzan precincts.” 25 Despite being set in Malaya, The Jungle Princess, particularly Lamour’s role, had a powerful and enduring impact on Western ideas about the South Seas. Much of the film’s titillation was derived from a tight-fitting and brief garment, created by famous Hollywood designer Edith Head. In the European summer of 1934 beachwear and casual fashion was seen to have gone “very ‘South Seas.’” South Australian readers of the Adelaide News were informed that “at a wonderful evening reception in Paris the new beach fashions were launched in an atmosphere of the South Seas. Titayana, the French woman explorer, who knows well the tiny and picturesque island [sic] of Oceania, gave a brief and informal talk on the origin of the garments.” 26 Reflecting a renewed geographical vagueness for the South Seas that saw the region expand once more in the 1930s to include the Dutch East Indies and, notably, Bali, reports noted that these South Seas fashions of 1934 had been inspired by “sarongs” reputedly from the island of Celebes in the Dutch East Indies, and “pareos” from Tahiti. 27 Head had created a garment for the film, which she labeled with the Malay word “sarong.” The costume was a central attraction of the film and existed before its future wearer was even cast. Indeed Head recalled later that it was Lamour’s successful encounter with the garment that ensured her casting over two hundred other hopefuls. To accentuate the costume’s effect, Head made it out of satin crepe, rather than cotton. The

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material, however, became slippery when wet and would actually fall off the wearer. Head’s solution was to sew Lamour into the costume daily. 28 One report noted of the costume that Lamour’s “lovely body had all the privacy of a public bath.” 29 Early in the approval process, and before it had even seen the costume, the PCA raised its concerns with Paramount regarding the “sarong”: “I also cautioned him regarding the swimming scene not to show any of the girl’s breasts in the pool—that my definition of a sarong was a garment extending from the waist to the ankles. He says that this is an extra-sarong that comes above the breasts.” 30 Head later received “letter after letter” advising her that her invention was not a sarong and it should be made of tapa cloth. Yet the label “sarong” endured and the garment soon became as famous as the actress who wore it: the two became inseparable in the public imagination for over a decade. 31 Most important, however, the garment would not be associated with native costumes in the wilds of the Malayan jungle, but with the South Seas and Polynesia. Versions of Head’s costume were widely manufactured and sold in stores across the United States. Head also designed a “saronggown” which could be worn for evening wear. The first model to demonstrate the new garment was Dorothy Lamour. 32 The Brisbane Courier Mail reported that “resulting fashions have convinced Hollywood experts that it is just a matter of time before all filmdom will ‘go native’ in clothes.” 33 One Australian fashion expert reported on her trip to Bermuda in 1938 where she found many Americans on holidays wearing “sarongs” and “pareos,” thanks to the “old South Seas.” 34 After the international success of The Hurricane for MGM, there were media reports that Sam Goldwyn again wished to borrow Lamour from Paramount to make a sequel. The Milwaukee Sentinel reported that in “any other picture but a sequel to ‘Hurricane’ she probably wouldn’t have created such commotion, but exhibitors made money with the South sea idyll and wanted an encore.” 35 Paramount, however, had other ideas. Lamour returned to the studio where a new movie, tentatively entitled “Dorothy Lamour Story,” was being prepared. The aim was to capitalize on the success of The Hurricane and The Jungle Princess. During Lamour’s absence at MGM, Ray Milland had been making Paramount’s South Seas offering for 1937, Ebb Tide, another adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne’s The Ebb-Tide, which was filmed in Technicolor and billed as the “first South Seas picture in color.” 36 The perceived on-screen chemistry of Milland and Lamour in The Jungle Princess saw Milland again slated to play Lamour’s leading man. The producers also decided that they wanted their leads on a South Seas island rather than in the wilds of the Malayan jungle.

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In the wake of Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm’s successful air crossing of the Pacific in 1928, plans for regular trans-Pacific air services between the United States and Australia and the United States and the Asian mainland were soon being explored. In 1935 Pan American Airways (Pan Am) expanded its Latin and South American services with a mail and passenger service to the Philippines and then on to China. 37 Dedicated services from San Francisco to Honolulu soon followed. 38 These so-called “clipper” services used large flying boats such as the Sikorsky S-42, Martin M-130, and later the Boeing 314. By the mid-1930s Pan American had realized plans for mail and passenger routes connecting San Francisco with Auckland, New Zealand. It was assumed that Australasian and British interests would then complete a trans-Tasman leg thereby establishing the last link in a “round-theworld chain of aerial services.” 39 Connecting this new form of transport to earlier forms of South Seas exploration, Pan American produced a “Transpacific” poster showing a Martin M-130 flying boat soaring over a nineteenth-century American clipper sailing ship. Because of the limited range of flying boats, the selected Pan American route provided passengers with opportunities to visit both Honolulu and Pago Pago in American Samoa, before arriving in New Zealand. In December 1937 the Samoan Clipper set out on its maiden commercial flight to Auckland although it carried neither mail nor passengers. It made stops in Honolulu, the desolate and uninhabited Kingman Reef, and Pago Pago. The aircraft then returned to the United States with mail from New Zealand and Australia. The second voyage for the Samoan Clipper, however, ended in disaster. On January 11, 1938, the clipper was on its way back to Auckland when it exploded off Pago Pago, killing all on board. The route to New Zealand was not resumed until late 1939 with the new Boeing-314 flying boat (the California Clipper and, from 1941 the Anzac Clipper) and a new route via the British and American-shared territory of Canton Island (named after the New Bedford whaler of the same name which ran aground there in 1854 and is now part of the present-day Republic of Kiribati) that took the aircraft via Suva and Noumea, rather than Pago Pago. Pan American’s advertising posters for Hawaii and the resumed route to New Zealand followed the artistic style already well established by South Seas cruise ship companies such as the Matson Line. One poster did note that with its South Pacific stopovers it was now possible for travelers to “Fly to South Sea Isles via Pan American.” 40 Inspired by, but clearly not accurately portraying, Pago Pago, which was also no longer a stop on the route, the poster was a glorious color illustration showing a Boeing-314 flying boat landing in a lagoon backed by steep mountains. In the foreground an attractive Islander woman, in what would have been identified by Americans as a sarong, lies in a languorous repose and, shaded by a palm tree, watches the plane’s arrival. The image was still

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being used by an Australian airline to market its flights to the South Pacific in the 1950s. 41 It was the danger of establishing these new air services in the Pacific that captured the imagination of the producers at Paramount. 42 Curt [“Kurt”] Siodmak and Gerald Geraghty’s outline for the film established that Milland’s new character, “Bob Mitchell,” was a pilot out searching for the third aircraft that had disappeared trying to establish an air route between Australia and the United States. Mitchell and his co-pilot Jimmy suffer a similar fate and crash on an island where Lamour’s character “Tura” resides, alone again, with just a friendly and helpful chimpanzee as her only company. 43 Her Jungle Love, shot in Technicolor, was again made on a Paramount soundstage and back lot with some exterior scenes shot on Catalina Island. In noting these exterior scenes, Silver Screen’s edition of April 1938 reminded readers that “We are supposed to be in the South Seas.” The producers, however, had long since changed their mind. Perhaps because of the Samoan Clipper disaster, and a subsequent disaster involving the Hawaiian Clipper, which vanished off Guam en-route from Honolulu to the Philippines a few months later, the final script moved the action back from a South Seas island to Malaya. Subsequently, Paramount’s publicity affirmed that “Paramount’s glorious adventure-romance” was set in the “Malayan wilds.” 44 After suggesting that the film was set in “one of the few remaining dark spots on the globe, the Malayan archipelago,” another promotional booklet then noted that no actress other than Lamour could have played the role of Tura because “[w]ho else could wear the revelatory sarong of the South Seas with the captivating charm and enchanting grace of this slim, seductive, sultry beauty.” The South Seas had, once again, seemingly been expanded to Southeast Asia. 45 The change in location, however, was inadequately conveyed to exhibitors, critics, and the general public. Although the menacing ignoble savages from the nearby island betrayed a Southeast Asian Islamic sensibility (despite also worshiping a Crocodile God) viewers saw not the Malayan archipelago, but a tropical island that looked very much like a generic, Polynesia-inspired South Seas island. And while some Hollywood fan and exhibitor magazines hedged their bets and spoke of “Dorothy back in her sarong and her tropical island setting,” most advised readers that Lamour was “on a wildly beautiful South Sea Island.” Hollywood’s review warned readers they would find themselves “planning a vacation in the South Seas” if you did not “watch out. 46 Film Daily summed up many representations of the film: A picture to fascinate all the youngsters . . . and many of the grown-ups who revel in the lure of the South Seas . . . Paramount’s “Her Jungle Love” . . . done in gorgeous Technicolor . . . one of the most terrifying and awe-inspiring scenes is that technical masterpiece that creates an

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Chapter 14 earthquake and shows its devastating power . . . wiping out the evil half-mad native rule and his savage hordes . . . for the thrill fans, old and young . . . a Sockeroo. 47

To again avoid any potential Production Code or audience concerns regarding miscegenation, Paramount again ensured that Lamour’s Tura was, despite the application of “three pints daily of dark body makeup,” a “mysterious white goddess of the jungle.” 48 Audiences, however, accustomed to the Europeanized Hollywood vision of South Seas Islander womanhood, did not appreciate such subtleties. Tura was “an exquisite native maiden in a seductively cinched-up sarong.” 49 The PCA seemed equally unconcerned. Its officials were again more concerned with the explicitness of any sexual suggestiveness than any interracial sensitivities. And once again the PCA advised Paramount that “Care must be taken throughout with the selection of the costumes to avoid any offensive or unacceptable exposure of the persons of the women shown.” Even a scene where one of the male leads gave a wolf whistle had to be removed because of its suggestiveness. 50 From the very earliest cinematic productions the South Seas genre had been considered informative as well as entertaining. Her Jungle Love, however, prompted widespread criticism on grounds that were rarely applied to other genres at the time. Despite reports that “[o]ld South Seas love songs and battle chants” had been included “to provide a realistic background for this story of love on a remote South Seas Pacific island,” a number of critics questioned the seriousness of the film. 51 A St. Petersburg Times review suggested the film was “quite too preposterous to be taken seriously,” and the Hollywood Reporter referred to the widespread skepticism toward the film. 52 Phony make-believe was apparently not an acceptable ingredient of a South Seas film. Observing that “Miss Lamour has played a jungle princess before and she knows what to do with a sarong and gibberish dialogue,” the Herald Tribune’s reviewer noted that Lamour’s “characterization of a hot-cha girl, welcoming a couple of stranded aviators to her South Sea atoll, is a compendium of phony make-believe.” 53 In particular, some critics had tired of the titillation provided by attractive European women in alluring costumes, which appeared to be at the centre of the genre. Ruth Waterbury, writing in Photoplay, was weary of such films making their leading ladies “untamed and torrid” and “always at the boiling point.” 54 Such criticisms notwithstanding, Paramount and other studios were unwilling to give up on what remained a financially lucrative genre. Paramount’s 1940 South Seas offering was Typhoon (known in Australia and some other markets as South of Samoa). 55 Attempting to protect its credibility by claiming a significant literary pedigree, the studio deliberately misled its exhibitors and audiences by suggesting the film was an “adaptation of the famous sea tale” by Joseph Conrad, which had first

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been serialized in the London Pall Mall Magazine at the turn of century before being published in New York in 1902. Other than their titles the novel and the film had nothing in common. At face value the script of the film appeared to offer little new in form or substance. This time Dorothy Lamour was “Dea,” the shipwrecked white women who, with the assistance of yet another agreeable chimpanzee, had survived successfully on the island for a decade before the arrival of the former United States Navy sailor and recovering alcoholic (played by Robert Preston) arrived in a submarine with his business partner to find elusive pearls. The sailor successfully battles his addiction and hostile natives in a cinematic climax that includes not only a typhoon but a “forest fire” and a tidal wave. Despite such standard fare, Paramount’s marketing department worked to establish Typhoon’s South Seas authenticity. Duncan Underhill pursued the theme in an extended preview of the film in the February 1940 edition of Hollywood. After observing that the “cinematic South Seas” was a “land lying east southeast of Utopia,” Underhill wrote that Lamour had dispensed with the “sarong” and was now wearing the “lava-lava.” It was suggested that in designing the garment to “confine some of the charms of Dorothy Lamour” the studio’s “technical department . . . [had] pored for months over dusty reference books, and crossquestioned hundreds of South Seas islanders cast up on the beach at Hollywood. It avers without a twitch of self-consciousness, that a lavalava is not a sarong, and that it resembles it only as a priceless Batik resembles a swatch of twenty-cent wallpaper.” 56 The decision to dispense with the sarong in favor of the lava-lava was supposedly the decision of Dr. E. F. Winckel, who throughout filming had been “[p]lanted doggedly on the beach at Director [Louis] King’s left.” The film’s technical advisor, the “learned doc,” was a “veteran of twenty-six years in the [Dutch] East Indies and associated backwaters.” Such a dearth of experience in the South Pacific might explain why Lamour’s costume looked nothing like the Samoan garment of the same name. Underhill also explained Winckel’s significance to the authenticity of the film: In ethnological matters Doc Winckel is a purist, a circumstance that raised a merry hurrah with the Typhoon shooting schedule. It was he who threw the Lamour wardrobe wizards into overtime spasms by decreeing that the lava-lava[,] not the sarong, should be used to enhance the celebrated Lamourean allure. And it was he who shifted the locale of the story some 3,000 miles eastward because the island originally selected as the site of the action was not in the typhoon belt but hurricane country. . . . From a comfortable upholstered lounge seat, a typhoon may look like a hurricane and no questions asked. But Doc Winckel nixed such a shoddy substitution and with one sweep of his

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Chapter 14 membership scroll in the National Geographic Society, whisked the whole business a thousand leagues to port.

Winckel’s supposed quest for authenticity also extended to the casting of extras. He selected from “American Indians, Hindus, Cingalese, Burmese, Melanesians, Samoans, Hawaiian and Filipinos” on the basis of whether they confirmed to a “typhoon type or the hurricane type.” 57 While Winckel was a technical advisor for the film, Underhill’s claims were exaggerated. Winckel’s Indonesian experience did not qualify him to pronounce on most matters relating to the South Pacific and, as had been the case in Her Jungle Love, it did mean that those Islanders who threatened the lead characters in Typhoon resembled Balinese rather than Samoans. 58 Like Edith Head’s original sarong, the lava-lava was nothing like the Samoan garment of the same name, or the Tahitian pareo. Having made a concerted effort to see off any challenge to the South Seas credibility of Typhoon, Paramount’s marketers were presented with another way to market the film and sidestep recent criticisms of the genre—World War II. Entertainment value, rather than authenticity, was perhaps a more important way to judge the worth of a South Seas film, and by offering audiences an escape from the troubled real world, if only for a few hours, the South Seas genre could now provide an important national service. 59 For the South Seas, entertainment across a range of cultural productions had long since been associated with romance. Typhoon was a “Tornado of Tropic Romance.” 60 In the May 13, 1940, issue of Film Daily, where the front page was devoted to the major revenue losses American studios would suffer as nations fell under the Nazi yoke, Paramount used a full page, and a baseball metaphor, to assure its exhibitors that Typhoon was a Box Office “home run.” The film was a “Technicolor triumph, that terrific typhoon of dynamite action and tropic romance with the greatest love team ever to find their heart’s desire beneath those torrid South Seas skies!” 61 Twelve days after German tanks rolled into Western Europe, Variety ran another full-page Paramount advertisement for the film: “Let the radios blare. . . . Let the headlines flare. . . . AMERICA STILL HAS TIME FOR LOVE!” 62 A review in Silver Screen in August 1940 accepted the argument, although perhaps not quite as Paramount would have anticipated: Well, if you’re an escapist this is your picture. It certainly won’t tax your mind in any way, and it will prove a sheer delight to your eyes. It is done in beautiful Technicolor and has the most naïve story of the year, but goes quite spectacular in the end with a typhoon, forest fire and a tidal wave. 63

The Sydney World’s News’s review agreed: Typhoon “is quite incredible, but very entertaining if you accept it as comedy.” 64 Reviewers, like most audiences, also did not buy the lava-lava line. Dorothy Lamour was

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“avec sarong to be sure.” Whether the critics were unkind, however, was not a major concern for Paramount. Typhoon produced the studio’s biggest return on investment for any production of 1940. 65 With Lamour and the South Seas firmly entrenched as “box office reliables for Paramount,” the studio decided that a remake of the 1926 Gilda Gray film, Aloma of the South Seas, with Lamour in the lead, would be its 1941 South Seas offering. 66 The film would be a major production, costing over $850,000, and for the first time since The Hurricane, Lamour would be cast not as an abandoned white woman, but as a South Seas Islander. Returning to more traditional South Seas fare, the now mandatory environmental danger to Lamour and her other island inhabitants would be the volcano—“a whole town buried under a sea of red hot lava!” 67 Given that the studio was now suggesting escapism was a valid rationale for the South Seas genre, production assistant Gladys Percey advised Paramount executive Frank Caffey that since “this seems to be a fictitious locale, I believe we shall have sufficient material on the South Seas for the art director’s use. . . . It might be necessary to have a technical man for some of the sequences depending on how exact they want the customs.” 68 Caffey decided, however, that a technical advisor with Tahitian expertise would be required. Five months later Percy informed Caffey that their efforts had not been very successful: “I am very sorry but we have been unable to find even one reportedly good Tahitian technical man, although we checked with all the other studio research departments, our casting department, music department and Bob Usher, who lived in Tahiti for a year or so as you may remember.” Percy then advised Caffey that John Datu, a former resident of the Dutch East Indies who had worked on The Jungle Princess, “claims to know ‘South seas.’” There was also the “very reliable” Typhoon technical advisor Dr. Winckel, although it was now conceded that his area of expertise was the Dutch East Indies, not the South Pacific. Another option was Jimmie Lono, a Hawaiian who was organizing some of the extras casting (despite the fact most were Mexicans) and also an orchestra. Lono, Percy affirmed, “claims he can do Tahitian.” 69 The producers decided to engage Lono as technical advisor for one week to give the film the required Tahitian feel. 70 Returning to the theme of South Seas adventure film as also a work of ethnography, subsequent Paramount publicity suggested audiences would indeed see “the pagan rites of a South Seas wedding . . . ceremonies never before seen by white men!” 71 The movie, moreover, would show “in exciting Technicolor, all the wondrous lush beauty of a tropic paradise.” The film did have some 16mm color file footage of Tahiti that was used for establishing shots but Aloma’s tropical paradise was variously shot on the beach at Corona del Mar, south of Los Angeles, the backlot at the Columbia Range in Burbank, and on Baldwin Lake in the Los Angeles botanic gardens. 72

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Aloma of the South Seas also saw Lamour reunited with Jon Hall, who was cast as “Prince Tanoa,” Aloma’s betrothed, who had recently returned to the island after fifteen years studying in the United States. Hall required little preparation for the part, having just starred opposite Frances Farmer in another popular South Seas film of 1940, United Artists’ South of Pago Pago. While mostly filmed near Long Beach in Los Angeles with second unit stock footage captured in American Samoa, the production for South of Pago Pago did film in Hawaii for four weeks, taking advantage of Pan Am’s clipper service. In a twist on the genre, Hall played “Kehane,” an Islander who is seduced by a white woman (played by Farmer) seeking to steal with her accomplices the island’s pearl resources. Despite the miscegenetic theme, advertising for the film, following the lead provided by Paramount, emphasized the theme of escapist romance: “South of Pago Pago. . . . Where People are ruled by Love!” Cinema goers would see “Jon (‘Hurricane’) Hall making love to Shanghai Ruby (Frances Farmer) beneath those South Seas stars.” 73 Introducing the film to exhibitors, the Showmen’s Trade Review observed that: [P]eople get the wanderlust when they think of the South Seas; some can satisfy their desires by taking a southern cruise; others, who are not quite so fortunate, have to be content to just think. And when a picture comes along with a tropical setting, with tropical romance and intrigue, it stirs the imagination of the populace, makes ‘em want to go to the movies. . . . It takes them to a place they’ve never been—a mysterious, romantic South Sea island; it takes their mind off world conditions, and that, in itself is a welcome tonic these days. 74

One review of South of Pago Pago, published in the same journal, concluded that “at this particular time” the “public need film entertainment that will help it forget current chaotic conditions. . . . Not since ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ and ‘Hurricane’ has there been a film in the same category that has captured the primitive beauty and epic romance of the South Seas so much as this one.” 75 Escapism, however, had to remain within the bounds of convention. When the PCA examined the script of Aloma of the South Seas, they balked at its sexual suggestiveness: There is one very disturbing element in the script submitted to us, and that is the general feeling of suggestive sensuousness associated with the shots, mostly of your two principle characters being clothed in sarongs and loin clothes, and the sexual contact between these two leads, especially their embraces while costumed in this manner. . . . If this feeling of sensuousness comes through on the screen it will be entirely unacceptable, and, in consequence, the picture would have to be rejected. 76

Despite such concerns, Paramount sold sex. Exhibitors were urged “to play up the ‘Lamour’s back in her sarong angle,’” and advised to pro-

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mote the film at their cinemas with lines such as “Dorothy Lamour in a Sarong Again. . . . Hatred and passion flame red hot in a South Seas paradise.” 77 Notwithstanding Paramount’s efforts, many critics were again unimpressed. The movie was “another Paramount working of the Dorothy Lamour—sarong—steel guitar—swaying palms—hula hula— sylvan swimming pool—climactic disaster vein.” Aloma of the South Seas was lambasted by critics for its lack of authenticity and credibility, and for its preoccupation with Lamour and her bodily form. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette concluded sardonically: “Don’t tell Ripley. He won’t believe it.” 78 Unlike The Hurricane, or even Typhoon, the special effects finale of Aloma challenged authenticity. It was “pretty phoney.” 79 Once again, however, the public was more forgiving. Aloma of the South Seas opened on Broadway on the Labor Day weekend to “tremendous” audiences, that were replicated around the country. 80 The Hollywood Reporter observed that despite “the jibes of 95 percent of the critics, the public seems to eat up these native romances of Paramount.” 81 Daily Variety’s review agreed, noting that theater “patrons who fall under the spell of tropical islands, beautiful maidens, melodramatic Hawaiian songs will find Paramount’s remake of Aloma of the South Seas sure fire entertainment.” 82 Within weeks of the release of Aloma of the South Seas, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the resulting Pacific War saw the South Pacific drawn into a world war on a hitherto unseen scale. While the South Seas may have provided a few short hours of escape from the hard realities of a world at war, unlike during the Great War it could not be cast as a paradise to which one could escape the maladies of civilization. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders journeyed to the Southwest and South Pacific theaters with ideas about the region informed most recently and forcefully by Dorothy Lamour and her sarong. Despite the critics’ barbs, on the eve of the Pacific War, Hollywood’s South Seas adventure picture held a pedagogical power that was probably unrivaled in the history of the South Seas tradition. Through its films, and most lately Dorothy Lamour, Hollywood had conveyed the idea of the South Seas to more people around the world than any other cultural production or event. As the authors have demonstrated elsewhere, the consequences were profound. NOTES 1. Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 129. 2. Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation, 333. 3. Will Beebe, “Introduction,” in Henry Fairfield Osborn, The Pacific World: Its Vast distances, Its Lands and the Life upon Them (New York: W. W. Norton, 1944), 1–2.

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4. Deseret News, January 14, 1938. 5. The Saturday Review, February 15, 1937. 6. Literary Digest, February 22, 1936. 7. R. G. Crocombe, The Pacific Islands and the USA (Rarotonga: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 1995), 236. 8. Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2011), 96; and Charles Silver, “Ford and the Romantic Tradition,” in John Ford in Focus: Essays on the Filmmaker’s Life and Work, ed. Kevin L. Stoehr and Michael C. Connolly (Jefferson: McFarland, 2007), 26. 9. Queenslander, May 4, 1938. 10. Queenslander, May 4, 1938. 11. Queenslander, May 4, 1938. 12. Adelheid Kaufmann, “Hurricane’ Hall,” Screenland 36 (February 1938): 34. 13. Queenslander, May 4, 1938. 14. See Michael Sturma, South Sea Maidens: Western Fantasy and Sexual Politics in the South Pacific (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002), 131; and Bill Levy, John Ford: A BioBibliography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998), 137. 15. United States Census, 1930, Fresno California Precinct 18, Block no. 146, Sheet no. 3A; and San Francisco Call, December 26, 1912. 16. Photoplay 53 (November 1939): 47. The notion of Hall being “discovered” persisted. See, for example, Ronald L. Davis, John Ford: Hollywood’s Old Master (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 88. 17. See Wheeler W. Dixon, Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 27–28. 18. “Jon Hall: Goldwyn’s Gift to Women,” LIFE, November 22, 1937. 19. Argus, September 26, 1938. 20. Joseph E. Breen to John Hammel, October 26, 1936, The Jungle Princess, Motion Picture Association of America/Production Administration Files (hereafter cited as MPAA/PCA), Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (hereafter cited as AMPAS). 21. Breen to Hammel, October 22, 1936, MPAA/PCA, AMPAS. 22. Breen to General Will Hays, October 31, 1936, MPAA/PCA, AMPAS. 23. Variety, November 17, 1936. 24. Breen to Hays, October 31, 1936, MPAA/PCA, AMPAS. 25. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 12, 1936. 26. See Adelaide News, August 16, 1934. From Paris, reports appeared suggesting sarongs and pareos would soon appear. See Sunday Mail, July 29, 1934. Fashions were seen to be going “very ‘South Seas.’” See Table Talk, September 27, 1934. 27. Sunday Mail, July 29, 1934; and Table Talk, September 27, 1934, 13. For discussions of the role of fashion in conveying identity, consult Rosy Aindow, Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870–1914 (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), and Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1987). The close relationship between film and fashion has been observed by a number of commentators. See, for example, Mila Ganeva, Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918–1933 (New York: Camden, 2008), 113–41. 28. Jay Jorgensen, Edith Head: The Fifty-Year Career of Hollywood’s Greatest Costume Designer (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2010), 50. 29. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 12, 1936. 30. A. H., “Memo for files, July 24, 1936, Conversation with Luraschi from Paramount,” MPAA/PCA, AMPAS. 31. Jorgensen, Edith Head, 50. 32. Jorgensen, Edith Head, 51, 55–56; and Harvey Molotch, “LA as Design Product: How Art Works in a Regional Economy,” in The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, eds. Allen John Scott and Edward W. Soja (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 244.

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33. Courier Mail, January 5, 1939. Australian women were being shown commercial “sarongs” for beachwear purchase as early as November 1935. See Barrier Daily, November 21, 1935. 34. Table Talk, December 29, 1938. 35. Milwaukee Sentinel, August 28, 1938. 36. See Motion Picture Daily, November 2, 1937. The first Hollywood adaptation had been in a George Melford Production in 1922. See Exhibitors Trade Review 13, (December 2, 1922): 6. The rights had been purchased in 1919. See New York Clipper, July 9, 1919. Also in 1937, Milland had starred in the naval aviation drama Wings over Honolulu. 37. Jenifer Van Vleck, Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 2. 38. For a discussion of the impact of commercial air travel on Hawaii consult H. Brett Melendy, “The Competition for Trans-Pacific Air Routes to Hawai’i, 1945–1959,” Hawaiian Journal of History 37 (November 2003): 199–216. 39. Argus, March 24, 1937. 40. See, “Fly to South Sea isles via Pan American/Lawler,” Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC, LC-USZC4-2308. 41. The airline was Sir Gordon Taylor’s Trans Oceanic Airways Pty Ltd. 42. For another example of this influence on Hollywood, see the 1938 James Whale Production Sinners in Paradise, in which a plane bound for China crashes in the Pacific. 43. Kurt Siodmak and Gerald Geraghty, Outline, Her Jungle Love, Paramount Pictures production records, Special Collections, Collection 215, Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS. 44. Film Daily, April 4, 1938. Aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart had disappeared over the Central Pacific in July, 1937. As previously observed, Southeast Asia had, from time to time, featured in Western constructions of the South Seas but, perhaps with the exclusion of Bali into the 1930s, the South Seas had once again firmly narrowed to the Hawaiian Islands and Oceania. 45. Promotional Booklet, Her Jungle Love, Paramount Pictures Production Records, Special Collections, Collection 215, Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS. 46. Modern Screen, June 1938, 80–81; and Hollywood 27 (June 1938): 10. 47. Film Daily, March 24, 1938. For another example see also Herman M. Levy “More Sinned Against . . . ,” National Board of Review Magazine 16 (March 1941): 17. 48. Pittsburgh Press, February 12, 1939; and Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune, April 16, 1938. 49. Hollywood 27 (June 1938): 10. 50. Breen to Hammel, November 3, 1937, Her Jungle Love, MPAA/PCA, AMPAS. 51. Herald-Journal, November 27, 1938. 52. St. Petersburg Times, April 17, 1938; Hollywood Reporter, April 27, 1938. 53. Herald Tribune, April 14, 1938. 54. Ruth Waterbury, “Close Ups and Long Shots,” Photoplay 52 (June 1938): 13. 55. Northern Argus, January 30, 1942. 56. Duncan Underhill, “Typhoon,” Hollywood 29 (February 1940): 24–25, 48. 57. Underhill “Typhoon,” 24–25. 58. Underhill “Typhoon,” 48. 59. David Welky, The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 29; Robert Fyne, The Hollywood Propaganda of World War II (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1994), 9. 60. Northern Argus, January 30, 1942. 61. Film Daily, May 13, 1940. 62. Variety 138, no. 11 (May 1940): 32. 63. Silver Screen, August 1940, 76. 64. The World’s News, October 19, 1940. 65. Rudy Behlmer, ed., Henry Hathaway (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001), 169. 66. Daily Variety, August 26, 1941.

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67. Modern Screen 23 (September 1941): 11. 68. Gladys Percey to Frank Caffey, October 9, 1940, Typhoon, Paramount Pictures Production Records, Special Collections, Collection 215, Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS. 69. Gladys Percey to Frank Caffey, March 8, 1941, Paramount Records, AMPAS. 70. Frank Caffey to Jimmie Lono, March 17, 1941, Paramount Records, AMPAS. 71. Modern Screen 23 (September 1941): 11. 72. Edward J. Ralph, Memorandum, May 7, 1941, Paramount Records, AMPAS. 73. Hollywood 29 (September 1940): 11. 74. Showmen’s Trade Review 32, no. 26 (1940): 15. 75. The magazine also provided advice on the ways exhibitors could promote the film with a range of local businesses: local radio stations and dance bands could play music from the film; a “musician, dressed in keeping with the film’s locale” could play and sing “South Sea Island songs on a ukulele, electric guitar or some native instrument”; jewelers and local department stores might display pearls with a Hawaiian theme; clothing stores could hold tropical print swimming costume displays and a beauty contest for sarong wearing women; a local newspaper might run a contest on the theme “What is your idea of Paradise?”; a canoe building contest for local schoolchildren could be held; travel agents might run promotions reminding potential travelers that while European cruising was restricted, they could still book a South Seas cruise; exhibitors might hire a flatbed truck with two males playing drums and five hula girls dancing on the tray. In conclusion exhibitors were reminded to “bear in mind that ‘South of Pago Pago’ is the kind of entertainment patrons want these days. Sell it with all the showmanship you possess.” See Showmen’s Trade Review 32, no. 26 (July 1940): 20. 76. Joseph Breen to Luigi Luraschi, March 4, 1941, Aloma of the South Seas, MPAA/ PCA, AMPAS. 77. Exhibition, September 3, 1941. 78. Pittsburgh Post Gazette, September 20, 1940. 79. Montreal Gazette, August 30, 1941. 80. Motion Picture Daily, September 3, 1941. 81. Hollywood Reporter, August 26, 1941. 82. Daily Variety, August 26, 1941.

Conclusion The South Seas and Tides of Favor

Reflecting on “The Romance of Science in the South Seas,” Robert Cushman Murphy observed in 1925 that the “lands and peoples of the Polynesian archipelago have predictably claimed the attention and excited the imagination of civilized mankind.” “The present tide of favor,” he contended, “is only a recurrence, such as has taken place about once in every generation since 1760 or earlier.” 1 Published, appropriately, in National Geographic, which had played such a powerful role in perpetuating the notion of the South Seas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Murphy’s article anticipated the central theme of this study— an exploration of the character and the reception of these tides of favor in the English-speaking world. From the time Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe first captured the public imagination, to the elevation of Dorothy Lamour as the quintessential cinematic Islander heroine on the eve of the Pacific War, the South Seas grew to become an enduring theme in popular and scholarly discourse in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere. Murphy was right to note that this fascination ebbed and flowed, but this study reveals that the ebbs never constituted a collective forgetting of the South Seas, and that the flows took place more regularly than Murphy suggested. And when the historians’ gaze extends beyond the literary sphere, to include a range of other cultural productions, it becomes apparent that the tide could not be turned. Through its reception history methodology, this study has shown that each “tide of favor” has been influenced by previous tides. For example, the same ideas concerning the sexual availability of Islander womanhood, or of the differences between Melanesia and Polynesia, recur repeatedly in a range of productions, over extended periods. Inevitably, new ideas—the association of the South Seas with manly physical exertion and surfing, for example, or depictions of the region as a site of colonial exploitation—are introduced. And contemporary circumstances see new meanings assigned to old ideas, such as the Lost Generation’s construction of the South Seas as a site of escape, or Frederick O’Brien’s notion of the “White Shadows,” informed by the enduring ideas of “Fatal Impact” and the “Noble Savage.” Yet the reception history of the South Seas is remarkable for the consistency of ideas sustained across time, place, and the range of cultural productions. 255

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Writing in 1939, Arthur Herman Wilson contemplated his generation’s fascination with “escape from contemporary civilization.” Against a backdrop informed by the legacies of war and depression, Wilson asserted that this literature of escape had three author types. The first were the “reformers,” who sought to “remake the contemporary scene into a new pattern of life.” The second group comprised the “sheer romancers,” who hoped to escape to fictional nonexistent lands. The final group included the writers of “personal narrative,” who sought to take their reader to “places already known but different from those of western civilization.” While Wilson suggested that some writers of personal narrative deserved criticism because they misled their readers and fictionalized their accounts, he argued such critiques could not be extended to those who wrote on the South Seas: Although maligned at times as a spinner of prefabricated weltschmerz, the writer of personal narrative about the South Seas deserves more serious consideration because he, at least, takes us from one real place, such as New York, to another real place, such as Samoa or the Marquesas, and not to a non-existent Altruria or Shangri-La. 2

Reflecting the rehabilitation of Herman Melville in the 1920s, and the collective forgetting of earlier cultural productions, Wilson identified Typee as the seminal text initiating and shaping the American fascination with “escape Southward.” Typee was a personal narrative that “said everything that has ever been said about South Sea living.” “It is a fascinating book,” wrote Wilson, “that could bear the publication imprint of the present year, so little has it dated itself in a century.” Lauding Melville for providing his readers with “the feeling of reality,” Wilson particularly commended Melville’s authenticity. Not only was Melville uninterested “in telling the impossible or improbable,” but “he was very plausible and graphic in presenting the customs of the Polynesians.” Hinting at the enduring tension between fantasy and reality in travel writing, Wilson accused returned “travelers from Europe” of telling “things that are much more fanciful than Melville’s Typee.” 3 After judging Frederick O’Brien (whose star was already waning by the late 1930s) as a “poor substitute” for Melville, Wilson then addressed the most recent South Seas literary sensations, “Messrs. C. B. Nordhoff and J. N. Hall.” While they were not writing personal narrative, it was impossible to omit the “fine work” of the two authors, whose “fiction most closely approximates personal narrative, factual narrative, or native life and character.” Mutiny on the Bounty owed much to “historical or factual narrative,” and the Hurricane had been “sincere and successful” in “artistically presenting and discussing native character.” 4 Wilson’s analysis resonates through this study. From Robinson Crusoe onward, South Seas works were judged as much for their authenticity as by their stylistic merits. Perhaps owing to Defoe’s legacy, and certainly influenced by the

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literary works of the eighteenth-century navigators, personal experience became the measure of authenticity and, consequently, the defining characteristic of the genre. Writers of fiction, such as Edgar Allan Poe, ignored this prescription at their peril when their stories were judged too fanciful. Yet despite their often implausible assertions, Captain John A. Lawson, Wherahiko Rawei, and “Dr. Walter E. Traprock”—along with those Hollywood producers who played by this convention—could be considered producers of realistic, nonfiction accounts. The cultural productions of the South Seas include a number of such frauds and hoaxes, each of which reflects the power of expectation, as well as the power of style over substance. Conditioned by earlier tides of favor, consumers of the South Seas knew what they wanted. This study has demonstrated the preoccupation of generations of consumers of cultural productions with the authenticity of what was being consumed. Whether it was fiction or nonfiction, or a melding of the two, the key ingredient for evaluating South Seas cultural productions remained the degree to which they produced an authentic and real account of the imagined South Seas. “Factual” or fictional, a work’s reputation, its sustainability, and its potential influence on future generations of cultural productions, were determined by its veracity. In several cases, most notably pertaining to the work of Herman Melville, contemporary challenges to a text faded with time and, as Murphy has demonstrated, rendered it capable of exerting a strong pedagogical influence on future cultural producers and consumers. Alluding to Hollywood’s impact and the rise of Dorothy Lamour, and to the South Seas’ long-standing function as an escape from the demands of civilization, Wilson concluded there was “more reality to this literature of escape southward than is apparent to those who view it as an opiate for the moment.” 5 Wilson’s assessment was informed by the immediate experience of the Great Depression, and the lasting legacy of World War I. The South Seas’ pedagogical power, however, would be most tellingly demonstrated soon after Wilson’s comment, with the outbreak of the Pacific War. That conflict would prove the enduring appeal and power of the South Seas, complicated as it was by the South Pacific’s transformation into a war zone. NOTES 1. Murphy, “Romance of Science in Polynesia,” National Geographic 48 (October 1925): 355. 2. Wilson, “Escape Southward,” North American Review 248 (Winter 1939–1940): 265. 3. Wilson, “Escape Southward,” 266–267. 4. Wilson, “Escape Southward,” 267–268. 5. Wilson, “Escape Southward,” 274.

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Williams, Christiane Kuechler. “Die Entdeckung des erotischen Paradieses. Eine Untersuchung der europäischen Südseerezeption im 18. Jahrhundert” (“The Discovery of an Erotic Paradise. An Investigation into the European Reception of the South Pacific Islands in the 18th Century.” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2001. Wood, James R. “Anecdote and Enlightenment, 1700–1800.” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2012.

Index

Adams, Henry, 36, 46; influence of Herman Melville, 56n53; influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, 50 “Aloha Oe” (song), 97 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 13 American National Research Council Committee on Pacific Investigations, 148 Amory, John H., 19 Anson, George, 5 anthropology, xv, 50, 68, 93, 123, 124, 129, 135, 136, 142, 148, 172, 203. See also Margaret Mead; Bronislaw Malinowski; H. Ian Hogbin; movies art, 47–48, 53, 99; impressionism, 117; “Volcano School”, 48, 55n31. See also Jules Tavernier, Joseph Strong, John La Farge, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh Australia, xiv, 11, 44, 45, 61, 75–86, 91–92; colonial ambitions in the Pacific, 78–79, 92; comparisons between indigenous Australians and South Sea Islanders, 77; concerns about European colonization of the South Pacific, 76, 77–78; convict escape to the South Seas, 87n7; economic development of the tropical north, 80; exhibitions/ expositions, 94, 95; influence of South Seas on world view, 83; “Kanaka” threat to Australian women, 82; New Guinea, 61–64, 78, 87n12, 115; popularity of Hawaiian music, 106–107, 168; scientific exploration, 64; social Darwinisim, 80; South Seas and federation, 78–79; South Seas cinema, 175, 222–224; surf bathing, 82–83;

surfing, 84–86; Sydney (Port Jackson), 11, 12, 47, 62, 64, 68, 76; tours of Wherahiko Rawei, 140–141 aviation in the Pacific, 244–245 Baker, William (George Washington Bate), 85 Balboa, Vasco Nuñez de, 1, 95 Ballantyne, R. M., 55n34; influence of Robinson Crusoe, 48; influence on Robert Louis Stevenson, 48; reception of work, 55n33 Banks, Joseph, 5, 84 Barnum, George, 100 Barnum, Phineas T., 93, 95, 96; Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, 94; Feejee Mermaid, 93, 95; Fiji Maneaters, 93 Barthes, Roland, xiii Baumgardt, B. R., 138 Beach, Charles. See Mayne Reid beachcomber, 176, 178–179, 189n9, 222, 229, 239–240 Beaver, Wilfred N., 68, 69 Becke, George Lewis (Louis), 80–81; influence on Frederick O’Brien, 120; influence on Somerset Maugham, 117; Mutiny on the Bounty, 216; reception of work, 81 Beebe, William, xi, 202, 204, 205; influence of Jules Verne, 203 Beechey, Frederick William, 32 Belasco, David, 100 Bell, Alexander Graham, 142, 143 Bennett, Frederick Debell, 84 Bennett, Judith, xii Berlin, Irving, 103 Bingham, Hiram, 34 Bird of Paradise (theatrical production). See Richard Walton Tully; theatrical productions 287

288

Index

Bishop Museum (Honolulu). See museums blackbirding, 80–81, 178 Bligh, William, 121, 216–217, 217–218; See also Mutiny on the Bounty Blomfield, Leila M., 138 Blue, Monte, 188 Blue Lagoon, The, 98–99 board riding. See surfing Boaz, Franz, 182 Boddam, J. W., 76 Bora Bora, 123, 195, 196 Bosworth, Hobart, 175 Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, 6, 35, 38n8, 53 Bounty, HMVS. See Mutiny on the Bounty Bow, Clara, 184, 201 boy’s own literature, 48, 66 Bracken, Bertram, 173 Brando, Marlon, 147 Breen, Joseph, 237 Bronson, George A., 138 Brooke, Rupert, 130n7; influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, 51; influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald, 116 Brown, J. Alex (platform speaker), 137 Burden, W. Douglas, 205 Burns Philp Company, 161, 163–164, 164, 165, 210 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 19, 202; influence of Arthur Conan Doyle, 204; influence of Edgar Allen Poe, 19; The Land That Time Forgot, 204 Byron, John, 5 Cann, L. Harvey, 142 cannibalism and cannibals, 12, 13, 45, 53, 60, 66, 68, 92, 93, 96, 104, 137, 138, 145, 167, 174, 178, 180, 181, 199, 239 castaways, 31, 48, 77, 98, 165, 175, 206, 208, 209; See also Robinson Crusoe censorship, 195–196, 210, 222, 223–224. See also Motion Picture Association of America Chalmers, James: Australian colonization of New Guinea, 87n12; descriptions of New Guinea, 67, 69;

influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, 67, 72n59 Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, 60, 62 Chappell, George S. (Walter E. Traprock), 257; The Cruise of the Kawa: Wanderings in the South Seas literary hoax, 125–128 Chautauqua assemblies. See platform speakers Chauvel, Charles, 222–224 Cheever, Henry T., 34–35, 54n19 Chevalier, Anne, 195 Chippo, Josephine, 186–187, 187–188 Church, J. W., 125, 145 Churchill, William, 49 cinema, xi, 171–188, 239; anthropology, 172, 181, 182, 196; Australian films, 175; authenticity, 176, 179, 180, 182, 239–241, 246, 247–248, 249, 257; documentary, 184; European women’s portrayal of Islander women, 175, 176, 177, 179, 182, 184, 188, 198, 201, 237, 238; influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, 172, 173; promotion of South Seas movies, 179; sex, nudity, sexuality, and South Seas movies, 184, 185, 196, 201, 209, 223, 237, 250; travelogues, 172, 180–181, 181, 182, 196, 205, 223; use of Native Americans and Mexicans as extras, 175, 249. See also Hollywood; movies Clarke, Marcus, 63–64 Clemens, Mildred Leo, 138 Cole, Edward William, 62–63, 64, 69 Colvocoresses, George, 35 Compson, Betty, 180 Conrad, Joseph, 53, 81, 246; influence on Bronislaw Malinowksi, 149 Cook, James, xi, 6, 13, 26, 35, 53, 82, 84, 92, 99, 221; American reception, 11, 238; influence on Jack London, 52; and James Jackson Jarves, 6; Robinson Crusoe, 6; South Seas tradition, 6, 9n34, 37, 38n6 Cook, Thomas, 159 Cooke, Edward, 2 Cook Islands, 52, 95, 142 Cooper, Merian C., 204–207

Index Coulter, John, 34 Crocker, Henry. See Henry Crocker Marriott Watson cruising, 49, 161, 162–163, 166, 168, 193–194 D’Albertis, Luigi M., 65, 67 Dampier, William, 1–3, 6–7, 7n5, 92 Dana, Richard Henry, 9n24, 25, 27, 45, 92 dance, 184, 196, 223–224; “tango craze” of 1917, 104. See also Hula hula Darwin, Charles, 62, 87n22, 204; influence of Erasmus Darwin, 87n22; influence of Frederick Beechey, 87n22; influence of James Cook, 87n22; influence of Otto von Kotzebue, 87n22; influence of William Ellis, 87n22; and Islander women, 87n22 Darwin, Erasmus: influence on Charles Darwin, 87n22 Davison, Graeme, 95 Day, A. Grove, 81 Deakin, Alfred, 78 Defoe, Daniel, xii, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8n12, 8n15, 13, 231, 256; and Henry Neville, 8n10; and Herman Melville, 27; and John La Farge, 3, 4; and Richard Henry Dana, 9n24; and Robert Louis Stevenson, 4; See also Robinson Crusoe Delano, Amasa, 12, 219; and Herman Melville, 12 Dening, Greg, 225 Dibdin, Charles, 4 Dixon, Robert, 181 Doyle, Arthur Conan: The Lost World, 203, 206 drama. See theatrical performances Driver, Selwyn, 137 Earl, G. W., 66 Edmond, Rod, xii, 5 education, 95, 96, 136; Australian university outreach/extension programs, 136; School of Arts and Mechanics Institute movement in Australia, 136. See also platform

289

speakers; National Geographic Ellis, Havelock, 150 Ellis, William, 15, 30, 31; attack on Otto von Kotzebue, 29, 32; influence of, 22n27; influence on Jack London, 52; influence on Herman Melville, 34; and surfing, 84. See also Polynesian Researches Emerson, Nathaniel B., 85 ethnography. See anthropology evolution, theory of, 62 exhibitions/expositions, 92–97; AlaskaYukon-Pacific Exhibition, Seattle (1909), 98; attendance at, 95; education, 95, 96; Harry J. Moors, 94–95, 96–97; Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, Portland (1905), 97; London Great Exhibition (1851), 92; Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St Louis (1904), 94; Melbourne International Exhibition (1878), 92; New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition (1889), 92; New Zealand Exhibition (1906–1907), 95; Panama Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco (1915), 95, 102, 175; Philadelphia Centennial Exposition (1776), 93, 95; Phineas T. Barnum, 93, 94, 95, 96, 96–97; San Francisco Mid-Winter Fair (1894), 94; Sydney International Exhibition (1873), 92; Sydney International Exhibition (1879), 93; World’s Columbian Exhibition, Chicago (1893), 94, 95, 97; World’s Fair, Buffalo, New York (1901), 97 Fairbanks, Douglas, 197–199, 227 Fanning, Edmund, 15; and Benjamin Morrell, 15; influence of James Cook, 22n30; influence of John Byron, 22n30; influence of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, 22n30 “fatal impact” (destruction of the South Seas), 31, 35, 36, 40n39, 50, 52, 79, 81, 121, 125, 127, 137, 145, 173, 178, 180, 185, 186, 194, 222, 255 Fayaway (character in Typee), 26, 35, 36–37, 41n66, 52, 125, 178, 188

290

Index

Fenn, George Manville: influence of A. R. Wallace, 66–67; influence of John A. Lawson, 67 Fiji, 12–13, 79; British annexation, 76, 77, 78; exhibitions/expositions, 92, 95, 96; possible state of Australia, 78, 79; subject of platform speaker presentations, 138; tourism, 163, 166, 167 Fiji (Feejee) Mermaid, 93 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 116; influence of Rupert Brooke, 116 Flaherty, David, 193 Flaherty, Frances, 183 Flaherty, Robert, 182–184, 189, 205; influence of Frederick O’Brien, 182–183; influence on David O. Selznick, 184; influence on Frank Hurley, 182; and Jesse L. Lasky, 182; Moana of the South Seas, 184; Nanook of the North, 182; Tabu, 193–196; White Shadows in the South Seas, 186, 187, 188, 193 Flynn, Errol, 222 Ford, Alexander Hume, 85 Ford, Ford Madox, 116 Ford, John, 177, 239 France: colonial ambitions in the South Pacific, 77, 78 Freeth, George, 85 Freud, Sigmund, 125 Friml, Rudolph, 104 Frisbie, Robert Dean: influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, 52 Furnas, J. C., 102 Gauguin, Paul, 119; influence of Pierre Loti, 117; influence on cinema, 180; influence on Rupert Brooke, 51; influence on Somerset Maugham, 116; John Fletcher Gould’s biography, 118–119; Noa Noa, 119 Geiger, Jeffrey, xii, 150 Geraghty, Thomas J., 166 Germany: colonial ambitions in the South Pacific, 78 Gibson, Arrell, 43 Gilbert and Ellice Islands (Kirabati and Tuvalu), 78

Gilbert (W. S.) and Sullivan (Arthur), 99 Goldwyn, Samuel, 239, 241, 243 Gould, John Fletcher: biography of Paul Gauguin, 118–119 Great Depression, xv, 194, 198, 227–231, 257 Great War. See World War I Greely, Horace, 32 Greene, Ray, 197 Greenbie, Sydney, 121, 131n41; and Herman Melville, 121 Grierson, John, 184 Gray, Gilda, 184, 249 Grey, George: Polynesian Mythology, 174 Grey, Zane, 166 Griffith, D. W., 178 Griffiths, Alison, 172 Grosvenor, Gilbert H., 142–143, 143–144, 144–145, 145, 147 Gulliver’s Travels, 3, 34 Haddon, Alfred, 68; use of motion pictures, 172 Hall, James Norman, xv, 116, 167, 215–216, 240, 256; Faery Lands of the South Seas, 116, 125, 129; Mutiny on the Bounty, 220–222, 256; The Hurricane, 238–241 Hall, Jon, 240, 250 Hammerstein, Arthur, 101 Hannah Hewit, or, the Female Crusoe , 4 Harmsworth, Alfred (First Viscount Northcliffe), 160 Harper Brothers publishers (Harpers), 18, 26, 27, 34, 36, 116 Harrison, Frederic, 80 Hawaiian Islands (Sandwich Islands), 6, 11, 12, 29–30, 30, 35, 37, 45, 46, 48, 75–76, 97–98, 117, 237; “Aloha Oe” (song), 97; Americanization of, 30, 44, 46, 52, 85; American annexation, 161; Bird of Paradise, 100; contrast of Hawaiian islanders with African Americans, 159; exhibitions/ expositions, 97; and Gilbert H. Grosvenor, 142, 145; Honolulu, 13, 30, 33, 35, 46, 48, 97, 101, 103, 106,

Index 117, 119, 123, 160; and Jack London, 52; and James Cook, 6, 28; location for movie making, 176, 177, 180; and Mark Twain, 46; missionaries, 13, 14–15, 17, 22n22, 28, 29–30, 34, 44, 46, 52, 97, 145; music/musical groups, 97–98, 102–103; National Geographic, 145; and Rupert Brooke, 166; Strong and Jules Tavernier, 48; subject platform speaker presentations, 138; surfing, 85, 89n63; tourist destination, xv, 48, 159–160, 166–167, 167; women, 12, 22n22, 52, 147. See also Hula hula Hawkesworth, John, 6, 13, 221 Hawthorne, Julian, 94 Hayes, William “Bully”, 81 Hays, Will, 242. See also Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association Head, Edith, 242–243 “Hinemoa” (Maori fable), 174 Hitchcock, Charles E., 33 Hogbin, H. Ian, 163 Hollywood, xi, 171–188; knowledge producer, xi; and South Seas, xv. See also movies Hollywood’s South Seas and the Pacific War: Searching for Dorothy Lamour, xiv Holmes, Burton, 138 Holt, Bland, 81 Howe, Kerry, 86n5 Hula hula, 46, 99, 142, 160; and movies, 178, 184, 250; and music, 103–104, 104, 105; and theatrical performances, 101 Huntington, Henry, 85 Hurley, Frank, 181–182; influence of Robert Flaherty, 182, 205 Idols of Clay, 180 Ince, Thomas, 175 Indonesia (Netherlands East Indies), 59, 205, 242, 247, 249 Islander women. See South Seas, women

291

Japan: popularity of Hawiian music, 113n109 Jarves, James Jackson, 6 Jeoly (Giolo), 7n5, 92 John Murray publishers, 26, 27 Johnson, Martin and Osa, 180; influence on Robert Flaherty, 174 Jolly, Margaret, xii Jolly, Roslyn, 209 Jolson, Al, 104 Ka‘ai, Ernest Kaleihoku, 98, 102; and popularity of the ukulele in United States, 102; tour of Australia, 106 Kahanamoku, “Duke”, 85–86 Kaimiloa Expedition (1924–1925), 123, 148 Kanaka, 82 Kealakai, Mekia, 97 Keate, George, 13 Keesing, Felix, 167 Kekuku, Joseph, 97, 98, 100 Kellerman, Annette, 180 King, Agnes Gardner, 51 Kingsford Smith, Charles, 244 Kipling, Rudyard, 100, 179 Kingston, W. H. G.: influence of A. R. Wallace, 66; influence of John A. Lawson, 66 komodo dragon, 205, 206 Komodo Island, 205–206, 207 Laemmle, Carl, 180 La Farge, John, 3, 4, 41n62, 46, 50; influence of Daniel Defoe, 53; influence of Herman Melville, 36, 37 Lamour, Dorothy, xi, xii, xv, 238, 241, 242, 243–47, 245, 246, 247, 248–249, 250, 251, 257 Lane, Rose Wilder, 120 Lane, William, 91 Lang, John Dunmore, 62 La Perouse, Jean François de Galaup, comte de, 35 Lasky, Jesse L., 176–177, 180, 205; and Robert Flaherty, 182, 196 Lawson, Henry, 82 Lawson, John A.: A. R. Wallace’s critique, 65; and Henry Crocker

292

Index

Marriott Watson, 66; influence on George Manville Fenn, 66; influence on W. H. G. Kingston, 66; John Moresby’s critique, 65; Luigi M. D’Albertis’s critique, 65; reception, 66–67, 68, 69, 77; Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea, 64–67, 76 Ledyard, John, 11 Leonard, Sterling Andrus, 125 Leonardo, Micaela di, 150 Lloyd, Frank, 224–225 London, Charmian, 52 London, Jack, 52–53, 117, 161; influence of Herman Melville, 52; influence of James Cook, 52; influence of Mark Twain, 52; influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, 52; influence of William Ellis, 52; influence on Armstrong Sperry, 122; reception of work, 52, 53, 107; surfing, 85 London Missionary Society, 13–14, 62 Long, William “Ray”, 228–229 Longford, Raymond, 175, 176 Los Angeles Steamship Company, 161, 163 Loti, Pierre (Julien Viaud), 36, 41n67, 98; influence on Frederick O’Brien, 120; influence on Paul Gauguin, 117; influence on Robert Loius Stevenson, 55n36; influence on Somerset Maugham, 116 Luke, Monte, 175 Lyons, Paul, 128 MacFarlane, Samuel, 62, 67 Malaysia, 60 Malinowksi, Bronislaw, xv, 148–150, 164, 172; Argonauts of the Pacific, 148, 149; influence of Joseph Conrad, 149; Sex and Repression in Savage Society, 150 Man, Glenn K. S., xi Marquesas, 26, 36, 120, 137, 148, 194, 256 Marshall Islands, 78 Masefield, John, 125 Matra, James Mario, 11, 220 Matson Navigation Company, 157, 162, 167, 168, 210

Maugham, Somerset, 117; influence of Herman Melville, 116, 117; influence of Joseph Conrad, 117; influence of Lafcadio Hearn, 117; influence of Louis Becke, 117; influence of Paul Gauguin, 116, 117; influence of Pierre Loti, 116, 117; influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, 116, 117; influence on Alex Waugh, 122; influence on Armstrong Sperry, 122; influence on Raymond M. Weaver, 124; The Moon and Sixpence, 118, 119, 122; and New Zealand, 86n5; Of Human Bondage, 116; and Paul Gauguin, 118; Rain, 117; South Seas as site of escape, 117; Trembling of a Leaf, 117, 122 Mayer, Louis B., 200, 224–225 McDowell, Edward Burton, 138–139 Mead, Margaret, xv, 135, 148–150, 172, 202; Coming of Age in Samoa, 148, 150 Melanesia, xiv, 46, 59, 124; differences from Polynesia, 53, 67, 136, 167, 209, 255; and Jack London, 53; and Louis Becke, 81 Méliès, Gaston, 173–175; adaptation of “Hinemoa”, 174; filming in New Zealand, 174; filming in Tahiti, 173; influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, 173 Méliès, Georges, 173 Melville, Herman, xiv, 12, 20, 25–28, 44, 50, 59, 81, 99, 150, 174, 257; and Baron von Munchausen, 28; criticism of missionaries, 28, 31–32, 46, 52; influence of Amasa Delano, 12; influence of Charles S. Stewart, 34; influence of Charles Wilkes, 34; influence of David Porter, 26, 34; influence of Frederick Debell Bennett, 89n60; influence of Jeremiah N. Reynolds, 20, 38n4; influence of Richard Henry Dana, 38n4; influence of William Ellis, 34; influence on Armstrong Sperry, 122; influence on Charles Warren Stoddard, 49; influence on E. M. Wills Parker, 35; influence on Frederick O’Brien, 120, 124;

Index influence on Harry Pidgeon, 135; influence on Hector MacQuarrie, 51; influence on Henry Adams,4n53; influence on Jack London, 52; influence on Pierre Loti, 36; influence on Robert Louis Stevenson, 49, 125; influence on Somerset Maugham, 116; Mardi, 34; Moby-Dick , 34, 37, 92; Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, 27, 28, 31, 32, 32–33, 33, 34, 37, 125; reception of work, 28, 33, 34, 35, 35–37, 46, 51; rejection of western civilization, 32, 44, 48; renewed popularity in the 1920s, 124, 256; review of work, 27, 27–28, 28, 32, 32–34; Robinson Crusoe, 27, 28, 33, 35; Typee, xi, 26–27, 28, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 125, 178, 183, 194, 196; White Jacket, 34 Menezes, Jorge de, 59 Menikoff, Barry, 50 Milland, Ray, 241, 243, 245 Minnigerode, Meade: and Herman Melville, 125 miscegenation and interracial love and sex, 178, 180, 199, 201, 210, 237, 241–239 missionary activity, 13–15, 50, 62, 67; criticism of, 17, 28–32, 35, 46, 52, 56n50, 145, 174, 178; impact on perceptions of South Seas, 14, 37, 46, 59; and social Darwinism, 80 Mitchell, Edmund, 173 modernity and the modern, 5, 35, 89n51, 115, 116, 119, 128, 231 Moors, Harry J., 94–95, 95–97; and Robert Louis Stevenson, 94 Moresby, John, 62, 65, 66, 77; compared to John A. Lawson, 66; critique of John A. Lawson, 65 Morrell, Benjamin, 15; and Edmund Fanning, 16 Morrow, William, 150 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), 195; Aloma of the South Seas, 250; Bird of Paradise, 201; Her Jungle Love, 246; Island of Lost Souls, 209; Jungle

293

Princess, 241, 243, 249; Never The Twain Shall Meet, 237; Production Code, 195, 199, 237; Tabu, 196 movies: Aloha Oe (Triangle Film Corporation, 1915), 175; Aloma of the South Seas (Paramount, 1926), 184; Aloma of the South Seas (Paramount, 1941), 249–251; Bali, the Unknown: Or Ape Man Island (Prizma, 1921), 206; The Beachcomber (Hobart Bosworth, 1915), 175; Bird of Paradise (RKO, 1932), 199–201, 210, 237; Birth of a Nation (David W. Griffith Corp, 1915), 178; The Bonded Women (Famous-Players-Lasky, 1922), 180; The Bottle Imp (Lasky Feature Play Company, 1917), 176–177; Chang (Famous-Players-Lasky, 1927), 205; Davy Jones in the South Seas (Vitagraph Company, 1911), 172; The Devil’s Playground (Fine Art Films Production, 1928), 222; EbbTide (MGM 1937), 243; A Fallen Idol (Fox Film Corporation, 1919), 178; For Australia (J. C. Williamson, 1915), 175; The Four Feathers (Paramount, 1929), 205; Grass (Famous-Players-Lasky, 1925), 205; Head Hunters of the South Seas (Johnson Film Company, 1922), 180; Her Jungle Love (Paramount, 1938), 245–246; Hidden Pearls (FamousPlayers-Lasky, 1918), 177; The Hound and the Deep, aka Pearl of the South Seas (Stoll Hurley Productions, 1926), 182; How Algy Captured a Wild Man (Selig Polyscope Company, 1911), 189n9; How Chief Te Ponga Won His Bride, 174; Hula (Paramount, 1927), 184; The Hurricane (Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1937), 177, 197, 239–241; The Idol Dancer (David W. Griffith Corp, 1920), 178–179; Idols of Clay (Paramount Artcraft, 1921), 180; Imp of the Bottle (Edison, 1909), 172; In the Wake of the Bounty (Expeditionary Films Ltd, 1933), 222–224; The Intruder (Allied

294

Index

Pictures Corp, 1932), 206; Island of Lost Souls (Paramount, 1933 ), 208–209, 209, 210; Jack London in the South Seas (Johnson Film Company, 1912), 182; The Jungle Princess (Paramount, 1935), 241–242; King Kong (RKO, 1933), 207–208, 209, 210; Lost World (First National Pictures, 1925), 207; Loved by a Maori Chieftess, 174; The Love Flower (David W. Griffith Corp, 1920), 178; Man Hunt (FBO, 1926), 206; A Maori Maid’s Love, 175; McVeagh of the South Seas (Progressive Motion Pictures, 1915), 174; The Misfortunes of Mr and Mrs Mott on Their Trip to the South Seas Island of Tahiti (Méliès, 1913), 173; Moana of the South Seas (Paramount, 1926), xi, 184; Mr Robinson Crusoe (United Artists, 1932), 197–199, 210, 237; Mutiny of the Bounty (Crick and Jones, 1916), 176; Mutiny on the Bounty (MGM, 1935), xi, 224–228; Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty, 1922), 182; Never the Twain Shall Meet (1931), 43; No Man’s Land (Selig Polyscope Company, 1909), 189n9; Pardon My Sarong (Universal, 1942), 197; Pearls and Savages (Stoll Hurley Productions, 1920), 181; Rango (1921), 206; Shipwrecked Among Cannibals (Universal, 1920), 180; The Silent Enemy (Paramount, 1930), 205; Tabu: Forbidden Love in the South Seas (Paramount, 1931), 193–197, 210; Typhoon (Paramount, 1940), 246–248, 249; Venus of the South Seas (Lee-Bradford Corporation, 1924), 180; The White Flower (Famous-Players-Lasky, 1923), 180; Wild Women (Universal Pictures, 1918), 177; With the Headhunters in Papua (Stoll Hurley Productions, 1923), 181; White Shadows in the South Seas (MGM, 1928), 185–189, 195; A Woman There Was (Fox Film Corporation, 1919), 177

Munchausen, Baron von, 20, 28, 34, 39n19 Murnau, F. W., 193–197, 227; influence of Frederick O’Brien, 193–194; influence of Herman Melville, 194; influence of Joseph Conrad, 193; influence of Nordhoff and Hall, 193; influence of Pierré Loti, 193; influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, 193–194; reception of Tabu, 196–197 Murray, Hubert, 69 museums, 91, 93; Barnum’s American Museum, 93; Bernice P. Bishop Museum (Honolulu), 123, 148; Peabody Museum (Yale University), 91; Port Adelaide Mechanics Institute Museum, 91 music, 97–98; influence of radio, 105; Hawaiian, 97–98, 99, 102, 138, 145; Parlophone, 106; Portuguese influence on Hawaiian music, 97; recordings, 98, 102; “slack key” sound, 97; steel guitar, 97; ukulele, 97, 100, 103, 105, 106; Victor Recording Company, 102, 104 Mutiny on the Bounty, 31, 178, 216–225; films, xi, xv, 176, 218; first American account, 12; and Islander women, 218, 220, 223, 227, 233n32; literary accounts, 217–218, 219–220, 220–222, 227–231; motivations of crew, 218–219; and reception of, 220, 221, 230; and Robinson Crusoe, 217. See also Nordhoff, Charles; Hall, James Norman; Bligh, William; Becke, Louis Naalani: A Tale of Summer Seas (play by Jesse M. Glick and Irving M. Wilson), 99 Naipaul, V. S., 171 National Geographic, xv, 125, 128, 129, 135, 143–147, 157, 172, 196, 199, 255; circulation, 144; establishment, 143; pedagogical power, 144; and use of photographs, 143 National Geographic Society, 127, 143, 145

Index New Caledonia, 77, 78 New Hebrides (Vanuatu), 78, 163; origins of surf shooting, 84 New Guinea (including Papua), xiv, 53, 59–69, 70n1, 75, 93, 115; and A. R. Wallace, 65; Australia, 61–62, 63–64, 68, 69, 77, 78, 79; cinema, 180–181, 182; comparison with Africa, 68; and Edward William Cole, 62–63; exploration of, 59–69, 71n34; female inhabitants as Amazonians, 68–69, 69, 73n65; and G. L. Domeny de Rienzi, 60; great civilization in interior, 66, 67; and Henry Crocker Marriott Watson, 66; inhabitants, 59, 60, 63, 64, 66–67, 68, 68–69, 70n5; inhabitants with tails, 62, 68, 69; and John Moresby, 65, 66; and Jules Verne, 59, 60; and Louis Becke, 81; and Luigi M. D’Albertis, 65; and Mayne Reid (Charles Beach), 61; missionary activity, 62; represented at exhibitions/ expositions, 93–94; resource potential, 61–62, 63, 66; tourism, 161, 163; as western literary device, 60; and W. H. G. Kingston, 66; wreck of the Maria, 62, 63 New Zealand, xiv, 20, 49, 51, 53, 66, 76, 138, 139, 163; colonial ambitions in the South Pacific, 78; concerns about European colonization of the South Pacific, 78; exhibition at Philadelphia Centennial Exposition (1776), 93; exhibition at Sydney International Exhibition (1879), 93; Maori, 91, 93, 96, 138, 139–142, 176; popularity of Hawaiian music, 107; as South Seas island, 86n5. See also “Hinemoa” Neville, Henry, 8n10, 8n12 noble savage, idea of, 2, 5, 8n14, 11–12, 13, 35, 37, 89n51, 211n5, 238, 255 Nordhoff, Charles (the elder), 46, 116, 159 Nordhoff, Charles, xv, 46, 116, 166, 215–216, 256; Faery Lands of the South Seas, 116, 125, 129; The Hurricane, 238–241; Mutiny on the Bounty,

295 220–222, 256

O’Brien, Frederick, 119–121, 145, 171, 238, 255; Atolls of the Sun, 121, 171; and Herman Melville, 120, 124; influence of Charles Warren Stoddard, 120; influence of Louis Becke, 120; influence of Pierre Loti, 120; influence on Armstrong Sperry, 122–123; influence on cinema, 178, 180, 184, 222; influence on David O. Selznick, 184; influence on Raymond M. Weaver, 124; influence of Robert Flaherty, 182–183; literary style, 121; Mystic Isles of the South Seas, 120; reception of work, 121–122, 123, 124, 210, 237; and Robert Louis Stevenson, 120; theatrical adaptation of White Shadows in the South Seas, 185–186; White Shadows in the South Seas, 120, 121, 123, 124 O’Brien, Patricia, 5 O’Brien, Wills, 207 O’Leary, John, 174 Oliphant, Margaret, 55n37 Omai, Prince, 92, 93 Osbourne, Fanny, 48, 49; and Robert Louis Stevenson, 48 Osbourne, Isobel, 48 Osbourne, Lloyd, 243 Pacific: exploration of, 1–2, 5, 6, 12, 15–17, 20, 25–26, 35, 61, 63, 64, 67, 68, 123, 143, 148, 202–203, 204 Pacific and Orient Line (P&O), 69 Pacific War. See World War II Pan-American Airways (Pan-Am), 244 Papua. See New Guinea Parkes, Henry, 79 Patterson, Samuel, 12, 14; and Ezekiel Terry, 12; reception of work, 13 Percival, John (“Mad Jack”), 22n22, 31 Pidgeon, Harry: influence of David Porter, 135; influence of Herman Melville, 135 Pielkovo, Ruth, 119 Pinchot, Gifford, 202 Pinney, Christopher, xiii

296

Index

Pitcairn Island, 216, 218, 222 platform speakers, 136, 137–143, 157; beginnings of Lyceum movement, 136; Chautauqua assemblies, 136, 137; endorsements of speakers by authors, 138; George W. Traver’s Chautauqua Shows, 142; indigenous platform speakers, 139; influence of Frederick O’Brien, 137; influence of Herman Melville, 137; influence of Jack London, 137; influence of Paul Gauguin, 137; influence of Pierre Loti, 137; influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, 137; influence of Rupert Brooke, 137; Lyceum movement in Australia, 136; reception by audiences, 137; Redpath-Hooker Chautauquas, 140; Redpath Lyceum Bureau, 136; and South Seas literary tradition, 137; use of audiovisual materials, 137, 138; use of musical groups/performances, 137. See also Wherahiko Rawei; education plays. See theatrical performances Poe, Edgar Allen, 17–20, 26, 43, 206, 256; influence of Benjamin Morrell, 19, 23n46; influence of Jeremiah Reynolds, 17, 18, 23n46; influence of John Cleves Symmes, 17; influence of Mutiny on the Bounty, 19; influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs, 19; influence on Jules Verne, 19; Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 18–19, 19 Pogany, Willy, 99 Polynesia, xii, xiv, 14, 32, 34, 43, 59, 69, 72n54, 76, 77, 80, 82, 108n8, 124, 126, 183, 210; differences from Melanesia, 53, 60, 67, 136, 167, 209, 255; Polynesians as Caucasians, 186, 187, 188, 237 Polynesian Researches, 15; reception of, 15, 22n28 Porter, David, 11–12; influence on Charles Warren Stoddard, 45; influence on Harry Pidgeon, 135; influence on Herman Melville, 26, 34, 135; and James Cook, 11

Powell, S. W., 166 Pratt, A. E., 68 Price, Willard, 166 primitivism, 117, 121, 145, 165 Production Code. See Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association Putnam, George P.: The Cruise of the Kawa: Wanderings in the South Seas literary hoax, 125–126, 127 Ratnapalan, Laavanyan, 50 Rawei, Wherahiko, 139–142, 256; and allegations of fraud, 140–142; and Robert Louis Stevenson, 142 reception history, xii, xiii, xviin18; other European receptions of South Seas, xvin7, 4, 193 Redpath, James C., 136 Redpath Lyceum Bureau. See platform speakers Reid, Mayne (Charles Beach), 61 Reynolds, Jeremiah N., 16, 17, 18, 20, 26; influence on Herman Melville, 20 Robinson Crusoe, 165, 189n9, 197, 227 Robinson Crusoe of York, Strange Surprising Adventures of, xi, 2, 3; reception of, 2–5, 6, 7, 8n15, 9n24, 25, 34, 99, 255; See also Swiss Family Robinson Rogers, Woodes, 2 romance, 3, 12, 25, 35, 46, 53, 97, 98, 104, 147, 164, 174 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 118, 119, 230 Royal Hawaiians (musical group), 97, 98 Ruschenberger, William Samuel W., 30, 31–32 Russell, Michael, 31 Salisbury, Edward A., 204 Samoa, 15, 20, 47, 49, 50, 75, 78, 94, 163, 165, 256; exhibitions/expositions, 95, 96; and Margaret Mead, 149; Pago Pago, 117, 244; and Robert Flaherty, 182; subject of platform speaker presentations, 138 sandalwood trade, 13, 18

Index San Francisco, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 52, 117, 163 sarong, 238, 242–243, 247, 250 Schoedsack, Ernest B., 204–205, 206 sealing, 12 Seeley and Co., 68 Selznick, David O., 184–185, 205, 207; adaptation of Bird of Paradise, 199–200; adaptation of White Shadows in the South Seas, 184–185; influence of Frederick O’Brien, 184; influence of Robert Flaherty, 184 sex and sexuality, 5, 6, 26, 27, 32, 35, 36, 45, 81, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 121, 146–147, 149–150, 165, 178, 179, 180, 184, 239 shipping, 157–158. See also cruising Silverman, Claudia, 19 Solomon Islands, 78 social Darwinism, scientific racism, and racial degeneration, 79–80, 82, 96, 107, 120, 139, 178, 217 South Seas: as arcadia/paradise/ fairyland, 2, 5, 7n1, 11, 13, 14, 26, 35, 38n8, 44, 50, 51, 52, 53, 82, 83, 98, 103, 107, 119, 138, 147, 159, 204, 227, 241; association with Pacific, xii; bubble, 2, 5, 62; and colonialism, 50, 56n50, 75–76, 92; commercial opportunities, 2, 5, 15, 16, 17, 18, 62, 68, 76, 77, 78, 79, 157; discovery, 1, 5, 7n1, 32; and European degeneration and loss of restraint, 117, 174, 175, 180, 188, 197, 208; and health, 46, 47, 49, 51, 54n19, 131n34, 165; as imagined region, xii, xiv, 1, 2, 5, 7n1, 11, 12, 35, 46, 59, 68, 69, 75, 96, 97, 107, 119–120, 150, 193, 245; Islanders, 2, 5, 8n14, 11–12, 31, 46, 60, 66–67, 82, 92, 93–95, 95–96, 160, 163, 164; and Islanders described as child-like, 32, 83, 137, 157; literary genre, 2–3, 5, 7n2, 7n5, 8n10, 8n12, 9n30, 19, 50, 81, 123–124, 125, 221–222; and the Lost Generation, 115, 122; negative constructions, 12–13, 14, 46; as site for political experimentation, 49, 55n37; as site of escape from civilization, xv, 32,

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33, 44, 45, 50, 55n37, 63, 83, 89n52, 98–99, 107, 115–119, 120, 121, 128, 129n3, 149, 166, 181, 227–231, 248, 256; as timeless region, 96, 110n36, 147, 181, 204, 207. See also Hawaii; Melanesia, missionary activity; Tahiti; Pacific; Polynesia souvenirs, artifacts, and curios, 37n1, 91–92 Spence, Catherine: influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, 51 Sperry, Armstrong, 122–124; Call it Courage, 124; influence of Frederick O’Brien, 122; influence of Herman Melville, 122; influence of Jack London, 122; influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, 122; One Day with Manu, 124 Spreckels, John D., 47 Stacpoole, Henry de Vere, 68; The Blue Lagoon, 98–99; influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, 98 Stagl, Justin, xiii Starr, Muriel, 100, 101 Sterling, John, 37 Stevenson, Robert Louis, xi, xiv, 48–52, 81, 136, 161, 164, 172; The Beach at Falesa, 50; and colonialism, 75; and Daniel Defoe, 4; Ebb-Tide, 243; Footnote to History, 50; and Frederick O’Brien, 120; and Harry J. Moors, 94; influence of Charles Warren Stoddard, 49; influence of Herman Melville, 49, 125; influence of Pierre Loti, 55n36; influence of R. M. Ballantyne, 48–49; influence on Alain Gerbault, 51; influence on Armstrong Sperry, 122; influence on Catherine Spence, 51; influence on cinema, 172, 176; influence on Frank Reid, 51; influence on Henry Adams, 50, 56n53; influence on Hector MacQuarrie, 51; influence on Jack London, 52; influence on James Chalmers, 67, 72n59; influence on Robert Dean Frisbie, 52; influence on Robert James Fletcher, 51; influence on Rupert Brooke, 51; influence on Somerset Maugham,

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Index

116; influence on Stewart’s Handbook of the Pacific Islands, 51; In the South Seas, 50; and Joseph Strong, 48; literary style, 50, 56n45, 56n48; reception of work, 50, 53; and Samoa, 49, 75 Stewart, Charles S., 22n28, 29, 30, 39n27; influence on Herman Melville, 34; reception, 22n28 Stewart’s Handbook of the Pacific Islands , 51, 159, 164 Stoddard, Charles Warren, 45, 47, 48, 75, 79, 160; comparison with Richard Henry Dana, 45; influence of David Porter, 45; influence on Frederick O’Brien, 120; surfing, 85 Strauss, W. Patrick, 15 Stromberg, Hunt, 185, 186, 188, 196, 200, 201 Strong, Joseph, 47–48, 53, 94; and Robert Louis Stevenson, 48 Sturma, Michael, 6, 220 surf bathing, 82–83; “Australian crawl” (free-style), 82; health, 83; surf shooting (body surfing), 84, 85; tanning, 83 surfing (board riding), 84–86, 89n63 Swift, Jonathan, 3 swimming. See surf bathing Swiss Family Robinson , 4–5; influence on Jules Verne, 5 Sydney (Port Jackson). See Australia Symmes, John Cleves, 16–17, 20, 206 tabu/taboo, 14, 36, 93, 145, 194, 230 Taft, William Howard, 146 Tahiti, 5, 9n30, 13, 15, 28, 29, 36, 45, 50, 51, 76, 79, 84, 92, 116, 118, 120, 122, 128, 137, 147, 167, 168, 173, 186, 222, 228, 249; See also Mutiny on the Bounty Tanna, Tommy, 84 tanning. See surf bathing Tasman, Abel, 1 tattooing, 7n5, 92, 95, 108n8, 183 Tavernier, Jules, 47, 48, 53 Taylor, Fitch Waterman, 30 Tcherkézoff, Serge, xii Tench, Watkin, 77

Terry, Ezekiel, 12 Thalberg, Irving, 184–185, 224 theatrical performances, 98–102; Alahia, 101; Anatole Friedland’s tabloid musicals, 101; Bird of Paradise, 98–102, 178; Luana, 101; Naalani: A Tale of Summer Seas, 98; opera, 104; Rain, 117; vaudeville, 101; Zeigfeld Follies, 101 Thomas, Lowell, 181 Thurn, Sir Everard im, 51 Tiffany, Sharon, 150 Tonga, 12–13, 36, 163 Torres, Raquel, 188 Tost and Coates (later Tost and Rohu) trading company, 91 tourism, xv, 46, 69, 128, 157–168; and the South Seas literary tradition, 164 travel writing, xiii, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7n2, 8n12, 11, 33, 64, 76 Trobriand Islands, 149, 164 Tully, Richard Walton: Bird of Paradise, 99–102, 199 Turner, Frederick Jackson: Frontier Thesis, 43 Twain, Mark, 46, 47, 48, 81, 138; and colonialism, 75–76; influence on Jack London, 52; platform speaking, 136; Roughing It, 85, 160; surfing, 85 Typee. See Herman Melville ukulele. See music Ulm, Charles, 244 United States of America: commercial opportunities in the Pacific, 15, 16, 17, 18; Congressional Naval Affairs Committee, 16, 20, 43; contrast of South Seas Islanders with Native Americans, 12, 36, 77, 139; engagement with South Pacific, 11–20, 36, 43–44, 46; exploration of Pacific, 15–18, 20, 25–26, 31, 35, 148; Hawaiian music/musical tours, 97–98, 102–103; impact of South Seas on American character, 17–18, 61; Manifest Destiny, 43, 61; Navy, 20, 25, 30, 148, 247; New England’s relationship with South Seas, 11, 19, 25, 44, 92, 145; popularity and

Index influence of Hawaiian music on American artists, 103–106, 107, 107–108; surfing, 85 Vandercook, John W., 167 Van Dyke, W. S., 185, 186–188 van Gogh, Vincent, 117, 118; and Paul Gauguin, 117 Verne, Jules, 5; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 59, 208; influence of Edgar Allen Poe, 19; Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 206; Mysterious Island, 208; and New Guinea, 59, 60 Viaud, Julien. See Loti, Pierre Vidal, Gore, 171 Vidor, King, 200–201 volcano sacrifice, 99, 201, 249 von Kotzebue, Otto, 29, 31–32, 87n22 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 86n5 Wallace, A. R., 65, 67; influence on George Manville Fenn, 66; influence on W. H. G. Kingston, 66 Wallace, Edgar, 207 Wallace, Lee, 45 Wallis, Samuel, 5 Walsh, J. M., 68 Warner, Charles Dudley, 36 Warriner, Francis, 29–30 Washburn, Frederic, 137; influence of Frederick O’Brien, 157 Watson, Henry Crocker Marriott (Henry Crocker), 66; influence of G. W. Earl, 66 Waugh, Alex, 122 Weaver, Raymond M.: biography of Herman Melville, 124–125, 125;

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influence of Frederick O’Brien, 124; influence of Somerset Maugham, 124 Wells, H. G., 120, 127, 208, 209 Wentworth, William Charles, 76 whaling, 11, 25, 27 Wheeler, Daniel, 31 Whitehead, John S., 44, 46 White Shadows in the South Seas. See Frederick O’Brien Whitman, Walt, 33–248 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 95, 120 Wiley and Putnam publishers, 26, 28; John Wiley and evangelical Christianity, 39n23 Wilkes, Charles, 20, 25–26, 31, 38n6, 40n35; influence on Herman Melville, 34 Williamson, J. C., 100, 175 Wills Parker, E. M., 35, 44 Wilson, Arthur Herman, 256 Winckel, E. F., 247–248, 249 women, Islander. See South Seas women; Hawaii women World’s Fair. See exhibitions/ expositions World War I, xv, 51, 107, 115, 116, 118, 121, 128, 149, 175, 204, 218, 251, 257 World War II, xi, xv, 168, 248, 251 Wyss, Johann David, 4–5, 206; See also Swiss Family Robinson Zeigfeld Follies, 101; and Fanny Brice, 101

About the Authors

Sean Brawley is professor of modern history and head of the Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University. Prior to accepting this appointment in 2014, he was professor of history and associate dean (education) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Before his appointment as ADE, he was director of teaching and Learning (2007–October 2009) in FASS. Chris Dixon is associate professor of history and director of research and research training in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He has previously served as associate dean for the Faculty of Arts at the University of Queensland and as president of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association. His major publications include Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Massachusetts Press, 1997) and African America and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Greenwood Press, 2000). He is currently completing a history of “African Americans in the Pacific War, 1941–1945.”

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