A pleasant ramble through

the shelves of Pacificana

Rifled Sanctuaries: some Views of the Pacific Islands in Western Literature. By Bill Pearson. Published 1984 by Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, Auckland, New Zealand. ISBN 0 19 6480299. No price given.

Bill Pearson has long been the authority on relations between the European discoverers of Polynesia and the indigenous people.

He has now given us the first published survey of the effects on European literature of west ern contacts with the Pacific Islands, from the discovery of Tahiti in 1769 to Stevenson and Louis Becke; in effect doing for literature, though in outline only, what Bernard Smith did for art in his study on European Vision and the South Seas.

Furnas once wrote that “more thousands of words of swill have been written per square mile of dry land about the islands than about any other geographical entity” and Pearson admits that much of what he had to read was of slight literary value.

However he is not writing a critique but tracing the deve lopment of European ideas about, and consequent atti tudes towards islanders and their societies after these had been transmuted by the con temporary cultural and intellec tual preconceptions current in the western world.

To this end we are taken on a pleasant ramble through the shelves of Pacificana noting the main categories of Pacific au

thors and discussing the effects of their publications on Euro pean and American thinking.

Starting with the discoverers Pearson moves on to consider the missionaries, the imposters who wrote part fictional part factual narratives, the writers of books for boys, the beachcom bers and finally the novelists.

It is an interesting but not a comprehensive survey omit ting, for example, the officials such as Pritchard, Trood and Romilly whose books followed those of the beachcombers; the women like Isabella Bird, Annie Brassey and C.F. Gordon Cum mings, who had their own ideas on race relations; and the more than 25 books by naval com manders who, like Henry Byam Martin, often held racy rather than racist views about the islanders they met.

In a study of 82 pages omis sions are inevitable. Still one would have liked to have read Pearson’s conclusions on the alleged imposters John Coulter and Michelena y Rojas, whose veracity has only recently been questioned through the “higher criticism” to which Pacific wri ters are now being subjected; and on the novelist Charles Warren Stoddard, whom Stevenson considered to be the only author apart from Melville to have touched the South Seas with genius.

Perhaps few of his readers will disagree at Pearson awar ding the palm for literary merit as the most accomplished writer in a not very gifted field to Melville, or to his conclusion that the categories of writers who showed the least bias in

their books were the discover ers and the beachcombers.

Probably the most serious distortion is found in the popu lar boys books of the nineteeth century, where the racial “myths of white supremacy” were inculcated in the imma ture minds of future imperial ists.

Pearson cites Bowman’s The Island Home and Ballantyne’s The Coral Island as good ex amples but he quotes from several others and tells us that no less than 58 books of “im perialist fiction” had been pub lished by 1923.

Pearson remembers many of these works being available in New Zealand school libraries when he was a boy. I certainly read several and later became convinced that some of the bizarre views on race relations which I heard in the islands between the two world wars could safely be blamed on their pernicious influence.

Fortunately I was saved by an incurable streak of romantic ism to form my teenage dreams of the South Seas from maybe as fallible but less harmful books such as Viaud’s The Marriage of Loti and Stack pole’s The Blue Lagoon.

Pearson’s study is a timely epitaph appearing in a decade when our perceptions of the Pacific islanders are becoming less dependent on the Euro pean observers than on the works emanating from the cur rent literary renaissance among the Pacific islanders themselves, an event noted at the end of the

book.

Marry Maude.