Rare Pacific
pp. 75-76 · Read in the full issue
Book Collection
Auctioned In Paris
By ROBERT LANGDON, executive officer of the Pacific Manscripts Bureau.
Possibly the most valuable collec tion of unpublished documents on the Pacific Islands ever to come on the market was put up for auction in Paris on June 2. The collection, which includes some rare published work, consists of 201 items. With a few exceptions, all the items relate to Tahiti and French Polynesia.
They date from 1768, when the French explorer Bougainville visited Tahiti, down to 1964.
Although nothing is said about the history or present ownership of the collection in the attractive catalogue that was issued for sale. I understand that it is the collection begun about 40 years ago by the late Andre Ropiteau, and continued after his death by Father Patrick O’Reilly, the well-known Pacific bibliophile, biblio grapher, historian and secretary general of the Societe des Oceanistes In Paris.
Ropiteau, who was born in 1904, was the son of a wealthy Burgundian vigneron and a vigneron in Burgundy himself. He developed a passion for collecting books and manuscrips on French Oceania when he paid his first visit to Tahiti and the other islands of French Polynesia in April, 1928.
Many treasures
Between visits to the French Pacific every subsequent two years from 1930 to 1938, Ropiteau haunted bookshops and sales rooms, and pored over antiquarian booksellers’ catalogues with the idea of building up an unrivalled library on French Oceania and producing an exhaustive bibliography on the subject.
Because few book collectors of Ropiteau’s time were interested in Pacificana, Ropiteau was able to gather together many treasures on the Eastern Pacific which are now almost beyond price. However, his dream of producing a bibliography on French Oceania was never realised, for in 1940 he was killed in a clash with the Germans while serving with a French infantry battalion in Lorraine.
Ropiteau’s extensive library passed
on his death to his friend, Father O’Reilly, a French Marist priest, who had become interested in the Pacific Islands in the early 1930’s when he did anthropological work in the Solomons and elsewhere for the French Government, the Ethnological Museum in Paris, and the Vatican Museum in Rome.
With the library, Father O’Reilly also inherited Ropiteau’s earnest enthusiasm to produce an exhaustive bibliography on Tahiti and French Polynesia, and immediately planned the production of it.
However, the bibliography proved to be such an immense task, and so many other literary projects intervened, that it was not until 1967 that Father O’Reilly, with the help of a collaborator, finally produced it —a phenomenal publication of 1,046 pages, weighing 4 lb 5 oz and con taining 10,501 minutely detailed entries.
Having thus completed what Ropiteau set out to do, it seems that Father O’Reilly then felt free to dispose of the library that Ropiteau and he had put together with the bibliography in mind. But, enthusiastic bibliographer that he is, he has extracted the last ounce of enjoyment out of the items that he has now put up for auction by producing a catalogue which is, in itself, a notable and informative guide to a mine of unpublished literature on French Oceania.
The first item in the catalogue is a six-page manuscript written by Chenard de la Giraudais, commander of I'Etoile, the consort of Bougain ville’s ship La Boudeuse on the first French voyage round the world. The manuscript includes Giraudais’ views on the Tahitians on the arrival of the two ships in Tahiti on April 6, 1768.
Other early items in the catalogue include: • A letter from William Wilson, second officer of the ship Duff, dated Whampoa, December 14, 1797, describing the arrival of the Duff in Tahiti nine months earlier with the first missionaries of the London Missionary Society. • A journal kept by the missionaries Henry Nott and James Elder on a preaching tour round Tahiti from February to April, 1802. • Letters dated 1798, 1799, 1801, 1802 and 1804 from various missionaries in Tahiti describing their affairs.
There are three letters from Pomare 11, the Tahitian king. One of these, written at Afareaitu, Moorea, on July 2, 1817, to a missionary in New South Wales,
describes how, three days earlier, the king had helped to print the first book ever produced in the South The king added; “Tahiti has accepted religion according to your teaching. All these lands have adopted the Bible. . . . The bad teachings have been abandoned.
Concubinage no longer exists.
Children are no longer strangled.
Alcohol has been abandoned”.
The earliest non-mission document of the 19th century in the collection is a 46-page manuscript written by the Abbe of Quelem, who acted as chaplain in Freycinet’s ship Uranie during her voyage round the world in 1817-1820.
In the Pacific, the Uranie’s land falls included Guam and Hawaii; and the good abbe’s manuscript describes, among other things, how he baptised Hawaii’s prince regent, who had “received his first Christian instruction from a Frenchman born at Gascogne, who practised medicine without being qualified in it”. The abbe added that the prince regent’s baptism “was administered in the midst of salvoes of artillery”’.
Missionary and consul
Among the most interesting of the manuscripts of the 1830’s is one from J. A. Moerenhout, dated April 30, 1836, to William Ellis, the secretary of the London Missionary Society in London.
Moerenhout, a Belgian, who had just been appointed American consul in Tahiti, and who was one of the island’s biggest merchants, com plained to Ellis that the LMS missionary George Pritchard, who was also the British consul, was play ing too big a part in the local busi ness world. “Pritchard is considered the principal merchant of the place”, he said, and added that it was prejudicial to the interests of the LMS to allow its missionaries to take part in commerce.
Moerenhout’s letter is of consider able importance historically, because of the many clashes which sub sequently occurred between himself and Pritchard, and which led, in the end, to Pritchard’s deportation and the establishment of a French protectorate in Tahiti.
This episode, known to history as the Pritchard affair, is further docu mented in Father O’Reilly’s collection by a notebook of 71 pages contain ing copies of 19 letters—in the hand of Pritchard himself.
Undoubtedly the most curious, and perhaps the most mysterious, manu script listed in the catalogue is an account book kept from 1877 to 1882 by Pomare V, the bibulous, irresponsible, feckless and last king of Tahiti, who died in 1891.
Of the account book, Father O’Reilly says: “Generally speaking, it is a book of receipts for money, signed by the creditors of the king, and sometimes countersigned by him. There are 9 royal signatures in all. The whole directory of big and small commerce of Tahiti of the period marches through these pages.
Items are written in English, Tahitian or in French. They deal with dollars, piastres, or francs. There are English, German and even Chinese signatures ... the beautiful and rather feminine writing of Alfred Hort, the rustic Gothic characters of Karl Cesar Schmidt. . . .”
Father O’Reilly goes on to detail a number of other features of the king’s account book, and adds cryptically: “This document contains, in addition, a few supplementary surprises for readers of Tahitian’*.
As might be supposed, the catalogue includes several items con cerning the French artist Paul Gauguin. But even better represented is the novelist Pierre Loti, whose story of Tahiti, called Rarahu when first published in 1880, and later Le Manage de Loti, is one of the classics of French Pacific literature.