"Blissful Isles"
pp. 34-35 · Read in the full issue
Quaint Memories of 170 Years Ago
A READER who peruses “An Account of a Voyage Round the World, by the Honourable Commodore Byron” may easily comprehend why Captain Wallis was received so enthusiastically by the natives of Tahiti, as he warped the good ship “Dolphin” into Matavai Bay on the morning of June 24, 1767.
The Honourable Commodore—after a brush with the natives, in which his sailors were the acknowledged aggressors and which resulted in the death and injury of a number of the “Indians”— landed on one of the Disappointment Islands (in the northern Tuamotu Archi pelago) on Tuesday, June 11, 1765, and explored the deserted settlement.
“Our people,” the narrator informs us, “in rummaging some of the huts, found the carved head of a rudder, which had manifestly belonged to a Dutch longboat, and was very old and worm-eaten. They found, also, a piece of hammered iron, a piece of brass, and some small iron tools, which the ancestors of the present inhabitants of this place probably obtained from the Dutch ship (since identified as Roggeveen’s ‘Africaansche Galey,’ wrecked on Takapoto in 1723) to which the longboat had belonged, all of which I brought away with me.”
This, of course, is equivalent to a partv of tourists- walking into our present-day domicile and carrying away our silver spoons and any pieces of jewelry they might find lying about, as souvenirs—ah experience not unknown during the hec tic 1920 and 1930 decades.
Commodore Byron did not rifle the burial places and carry off venerated ancestral skulls and bones—that pleasing pastime was reserved for latter-day scientists—but his rape of the most cherished possessions of the island natives bad become common knowledge throughout Central Polynesia by the time Wallis arrived off the coast of Tahiti.
We know that there were frequent voyages between Tahiti and Ra’iroa, in the northern Tuamotus, and the Tahi tians had heard a pretty accurate description of the “Dolphin.’ long before she actually appeared off Tautira from the direction of Mehetia.
THAT redoubtable old buccaneer, Lord Anson, was the first dispenser of South Sea romance and fairy tale.
His description of Tinian, in the Ladrone (Mariana) Archipelago, rivals the most ecstatic and rose-tinted dithyramb ever put out by the Hawaiian Tourist Bureau.
Thither, from the Disappointment Islands, Commodore Byron hopefully navigated his scurvy-haunted ship, HMS “Dolphin.” Here is Byron’s account of Tinian: — “After I had fixed upon a spot for the tents, six or seven of us endeavoured to push through the woods, that we might come at the beautiful lawns and meadows of which there is so luxuriant •a description in the Account of Lord Anson’s Voyage ... to our great surprise and disappointment, we found the coun try very different from the account we had read of it: the lawns were entirely overgrown with a stubborn kind of reed or brush, which continually entangled our legs and cut us like whipcord. Dur ing this march we were also covered with flies from head to foot, and whenever we offered to speak we were sure of having a mouthful, many of which never failed to get down our throats ... I had never felt any such heat as I felt here.
Besides the inconvenience which we suffered from the weather, we were incessantly tormented by the flies in the
day, and by the musquitos (sic) in the night. • “The island also swarms with centi pieds (sic) and scorpions, and a large black ant, scarcely inferior to either in the malignity of its bite.
“Besides these, there were venomous insects without number, altogether un known to us, by which many of us suf fered so severely that we were afraid to lie down in our beds.”
Although all this was published in 1773, it has a strange resemblance to accounts written from the shores of romantic lagoons in the South Pacific in 1943. Verily, there is nothing new under