The amorous Tongans

of 300 years ago

When Captain Abel Janszoon Tasman returned to Batavia in June, 1643, from his 10-month voyage of exploration to the South Seas, the Governor-General and councillors of the Dutch East India Company, which had sponsored his voyage, found it hard to make up their minds about the value of the work he had done.

It was true, they resolved, that he had found a number of lands of indefinite extent and what seemed to be a convenient passage to the “gold rich” coast of Chile. But against this he had found “no riches or things of profit”.

And they wrote to the company’s managers in Holland carping at Tasman’s lack of thoroughness in not fully establishing the character of the lands and people he had en countered.

Shortcomings

The views of the company officials in Batavia on Tasman’s shortcomings as an explorer are likely to be shared by readers of a scholarly tome on Tasman and his voyages which has just been published by New Zealander Andrew Sharp.

Sharp’s book brings together in one volume for the first time transla tions of all three known accounts of Tasman’s voyage of 1642-43, during which he discovered parts of Tas mania, New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji, and a number of islands in the New Guinea area.

The book also sets down what is known of Tasman’s voyage to the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1644; it out lines his early and later life; places his two famous voyages in their historical perspective; and discusses the charts that derived from those voyages.

Spicy barbels account

The accounts of the 1642-43 voyage take up the bulk of the book. Tas man’s, which is by far the longest, is, in the main, a rather pedestrian piece of work.

Indeed, students of the present day can only regret that Tasman, in seeing so much of the world that was new to European eyes, did not have the curiosity and persistence to find out more about it and to write down what he saw in the painstaking manner of Captain Cook.

Fortunately, there was a barber and “wound-healer” on Tasman’s ex

pedition—one Henrik Haalbos— whose racy account of the voyage, first published in 1671, supplies some of the verve, colour and spice that is missing in his commander’s.

Haalbos was especially intrigued by Tonga and the Tongans and devoted as much space to describing them as he did to describing everything else encountered on the voyage.

Although Haalbos makes no mention of Tongan women exchang ing their “favours” for nails (as happened in Tahiti when the first Europeans arrived in 1767), it appears from his account that they had the same amorous propensities.

Shameless

“With the men came also many women on shipboard,” Haalbos records. “These were all uncommonly big; but among all stood out two frightful giantesses, one of whom had a moustache. They both grasped the wound-healer Henrik Haalbos round the neck; each desired fleshly intercourse; whereupon (they) as sailed each other with words. All had thick, curly and black hair.

“Other women felt the sailors shamelessly in the trouserfront and indicated clearly that they wanted to have intercourse. The men incited the sailors to such a transgression.”

Andrew Sharp states in a footnote to this choice little passage that “the custom of offering women to visitors was not a transgression in Polynesian cultures”.

While this is not a typical footnote, it is a good example of Sharp’s diligence in annotating every point throughout the journals of Tasman and his companions of 1642-43 which seems to require comment or elucida tion.

The third account of the 1642-43 voyage published in Sharp’s book, incidentally, is by an unknown sailor.

It, alas, is pretty much confined to remarks on the wind and weather.— RL.

T' v £ yages , OF ABEL JANSZOON TASMAN. Oxford Univerity Press. $11.90).