Of The Pre-Cook

At Last, The Last

Classics

The Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen is famous in the annals of the Pacific as the Euro pean discoverer of Easter Island and most of the islands of Samoa. Yet it has taken almost exactly centuries for his own account of his voyage to be trans lated into English and published.

The translation is the work of the New Zealand scholar Andrew Sharp, who has also supplied a valuable introduction, an epilogue and notes to Roggeveen’s journal.

Roggeveen’s voyage, which took place in 1721-22, grew out of a pro posal put forward by his father in 1675 to seek lands in the South Seas with which trade could be conducted.

Roggeveen had three ships provided by the Dutch West India Company— Arend, Tienhoven and Afrikaansche Galei (known in English as the African Galley).

The ships rounded Cape Horn in January, 1722, touched at Juan Fernandez, and then steered WNW in search of Davis’ Land, an island reported in 1687 by an English buc caneer of that name, and said to lie about 600 miles west of the Chilean port of Copiago.

No land answering Davis’ descrip tion could be found, but Roggeveen did find an island which he named Paasch Eylandt (Easter Island) because the day of its discovery was Easter Day, 1722. He stayed at the island for five days and made one excursion ashore.

The Dutch expedition then sailed westward through the little-known Tuamotu Archipelago, losing the African Galley on the reef of Taka poto Atoll, together with five men who got drunk and decided to stay behind.

The next significant landfall was the upraised island of Makatea where some refreshments were obtained for the scurvy-ridden crews of the two remaining ships at the cost of several native lives.

Roggeveen and his officers then agreed that they had failed to find an island mentioned in their instruc tions, and that they should head for the East Indies with all possible speed to join the fleet that sailed an nually for Holland.

As a result, the expedition did not

trouble to investigate two high islands. Bora Bora and Maupiti, that they saw three days after leaving Makatea, nor did they spend more than a few hours among the Samoan Islands—Rose Island, Ta’u, Tutuila and Upolu—which they were the first Europeans to see.

Three months later, having sighted New Ireland, and sailed along the north coast of New Guinea, Rogge veen reached Java. By then sickness and death had ravaged his crews and only nine or 10 men were still fit for work.

The decimated survivors were sent home in a ship of the Dutch East India Company. Roggeveen died six years later. More than a century then passed before Roggeveen’s journal was discovered in the archives of the Dutch West India Company and pub lished in Holland in the original Dutch. A second Dutch edition ap peared in 1911.

The publication of the present English edition means that scholars now have easy access to reliable ac counts in English of all the European voyages to the South Pacific before Cook’s first voyage in 1769.

Because of the hasty nature of Roggeveen’s voyage, his accounts of his encounters with the Easter Islanders, Makateans and Samoans leave much to be desired. But scholars will undoubtedly find them useful.

Incidentally, the translator and editor does not mention what appears to have been the most important out come of Roggeveen’s voyage. This was that the wreck of the African Galley provided the Tahitians with a source of iron more than 40 years before Europeans discovered their island.—RL.

(The Journal Op Jacob Rogge

VEEN. Oxford University Press. $7.80.)

Americans In

The Pacific

Before the American Revolution, vessels from the 13 American colo nies did not sail eastward beyond Capetown or westward round the stormy Horn. The Indian and Paci fic Oceans were closed to the mer chantmen of England’s possessions; their wealth was the monopoly of the East India Company and the South Sea Company.

The merchants of New England, whose ships ploughed the Atlantic and the seas of Europe, had no per sonal knowledge of the trade of the Orient. And even though the teas of China figured in one of the early Continued on p. 53

events of their war for indepen dence, only a few American sea men had been to Canton.

When final victory in the war with England came to the American colonists, the sea routes to China were suddenly open to their mer chant ships. The Pacific and Indian Oceans, and the South Atlantic whose waters they join in the high latitudes of the southern hemis phere, became a field of adventure for American sealing and sandal wood vessels bound for China.

In search of cargoes to exchange at Canton, they sailed into un charted seas and found their way to the edge of the world.

The seal hunters and the sandal wood traders ventured where few had gone before, bestowing the names of their revolution’s heroes alike on the cold islands near the Antarctic Circle and the tropical bays of Melanesia and Polynesia.

American historian James Kirker, of New York, tells some of the story of these early American sail ing exploits in Adventures to China: Americans in the Southern Oceans, 1792-1812, a small book with illus trations as well selected as the jour neys he chooses to write about.

The book is both scholarly and readable. Some American maritime exploits in the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean are covered, but generally the author concentrates on the Pacific in this potted history which will make many people go to the sources for fuller details. A good index and bibliographical notes help them to do so.

(Adventures ’To China, Oxford

University Press. $7.50.)

Hawaiian volcanoes,

language and song

Among recent publications of the University of Hawaii Press: Volcanoes in the Sea, a 440-page explanation of Hawaii’s geology, by Gordon A. MacDonald and Agatin T. Abbott, is not a technical treatise for the expert; rather it is aimed at the reader who wants to know how volcanoes are made . . . just how volcanic Hawaii became one of the most beautiful strings of islands in the world.

How many know for instance that Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, two of the five mountains that make up the southernmost island, Hawaii, stand more than 30,000 ft above the adjacent ocean floor, and rise higher above their bases than any other mountain on earth? Volcanoes of the Sea, at SUSIS, is readable.

Spoken Hawaiian, by Samuel H.

Elbert, opens with the assertion that Hawaiian is far from dead, even in Honolulu. And to judge by the num ber of people under 20 already fluent in the language, it will be around for a long time.

The book encourages pupils to learn the language by hearing Hawaiian. Its exercises come in ques tion and answer form, the idea being that the patterns constituting the language are memorised.

Na Mele o Hawaii Nei (101 Hawaiian Songs) is a selection of Hawaiian songs, all post-missionary and therefore derived from missionary hymns. Apologies are given for the fact that melodies of the songs are not included—“a considerable task as many of the songs have never been transcribed in musical notation”.

Collectors, Samuel H. Elbert and Noelani Mahoe, end their introduc tion to the SUS 2 booklet, with a point relevant to other Islands territories: “Formerly there was much interest in the words and stories in these songs, as there is, for example, in traditional Western American folk songs. Today the melody and the beauty of the dancers, rather than the story, are of paramount interest, and the words of some of the more recent songs, not included in this collection, are simple

and artless”.-

Jse.

ALL the Time-Life national cooking books are a delight to read, even for non-cooks, and The Cooking of Germany, by Nika Standen Hazelton is no exception.

To learn about the food of a region is to learn something about the people—at any rate, if the region is European. In Europe they appear to have lost fewer of their national characteristics in food and in cook ing than we have in our English speaking world. These days you can travel all the way from New Zealand and Australia, through the tourist Pacific Islands, across the United States and Canada to the United Kingdom and, in the culinary sense, might never have left home.

The author says that in the last 50 years Germany has changed physically and in other ways more than any other nation in Western Europe, yet it has remained un mistakably German, There has, she says, been the same historical con tinuity where food is concerned although foods in modern Germany are produced in much the same way as elsewhere. Yet they remain different.

Recipes for the hearty food encoun tered all over Germany are provided in the main book but for those who like to separate the practical business

of cooking from the pleasures of look ing and reading, the recipes are re peated in a smaller, kitchen-sized book that comes along as part of the package deal. —IT.

(The Cooking Of Germany. Dis

tributed by Angus & Robertson. $6.50).

THE last of the useful series of books put out under the name of the Corona Library by the UK Central Office of Information has now appeared. It’s Austin Coates’

Western Pacific Islands, dealing with the Western Pacific High Commission area. This 13th volume in the series is the last because the colonial empire of the British Foreign and

Commonwealth Office has dis appeared. Publishers are Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, and the UK price is £1.50. A review will appear in our next issue.

THE seventh edition of the Golden Guide to South and East Asia has been published by the Far Eastern Economic Review based in Hong Kong. It’s still a treasure-house of information for any offbeat traveller in Asia; and just the job for whiling away the hours while waiting to cross your next frontier.

Price varies around the SA3 mark, depending on the country of pur chase.

AN Illustrated History of New Guinea, arranged by June Whittaker and Noel Gash, of the History Department of the Australian School of Pacific Administration, Sydney, is to appear shortly under the Jacaranda imprint. Meant pri marily for schools, it comprises photos and maps with detailed cap tions. And by the end of the year a group of four compilers, Mrs.

Whittaker, Mr. Gash, with John Hookey and Rod Lacey, expect to have published, again by Jacaranda, volume one of Readings and Source Material in New Guinea History.

It is a big book of 900 pages, re porting oral history and giving de tailed written source material on New Guinea up to 1886. Later volumes are planned to bring the material up to date. The book will be illustrated.

JQ'IJI ISLANDS is the simple title of the latest picture book on the dominion, designed mainly for the tourist trade. There’s hardly a ter ritory left which hasn’t one or more of this kind of thing extolling its virtues, and Hank Curth, who was the organiser and photographer, has a similar book to his credit about New Guinea. In colour and black and white, we get a competent run-down on the people, scenery, etc., all dis played in a small format sensibly chosen to make it convenient for packing or posting. What lifts Fiji Islands a little above the norm for this kind of book is the intelligent, text by Sue Wendt, which doesn’t talk down. It’s published by Nelson, at $5.95.

ANEW, beautifully produced story about the stamps of Papua-New Guinea and its forerunners, German New Guinea, Mandated Territory of New Guinea, British New Guinea and Papua, will delight the growing num ber of collectors who are being en couraged by the philatelically-minded postal authorities in Papua-New Guinea.

The colour plates in Franklin’s Guide to the Stamps of Papua and New Guinea deserve special praise, and so do illustrations of items such as the German 1914 airship expedi tion issue (not postally used because of World War I) and the Papuan postcard of 1920, which are not listed in popular stamp catalogues.

Mr. M. Franklin’s main theme is the connection of stamps with his tory. Read in conjunction with an authoritative stamp catalogue, the book (A. H. and A. W. Reed, $3.95) gives collectors and potential col lectors the kind of knowledge that makes their hobby even more enjoy able.— HHJ.