Book Reviews

LEE 800 OF BELAU: A Prince in London By Daniel J Peacock. South Sea Books. ISBN 0

8248 1086 Sus 18.50

Reviewed by HARVEY ZANE HELFAND IT is altogether fitting that Daniel Pea cock’s Lee 800 of Belau was selected as the first of a new series of “South Sea Books” published by the University of Hawaii Press and the University’s Pacific Islands Studies Program. Peacock’s book is a milestone in Micronesian chronicles, and an important contribution to the lit erature of Oceania.

The book recounts events related to the voyage of the East India Company packet Antelope , under Captain Henry Wilson, which was wrecked on the uncharted reef of the Belau (Palau) archipelago on a stormy August night in 1783. The crew was able to use the ship’s boats and a make shift raft to reach a sheltered cove on the small island of Oroolong (Ulong), some 22 kilometres southwest of Koror.

Before long a remarkable friendship sprang up between Abba Thulle (the Ibedul), High Chief of Koror, and Captain Wilson. Wilson’s men assisted the Chief in his battles with the village of Artingall (Melekeok) on the island of Babeldaob; in turn, the Englishmen were given food and help in constructing a new vessel, utilising what they could from the wreck of the An telope. Before sailing in the new ship, named Oroolong , Captain Wilson was asked by Abba Thulle to take along Lee 800, the Chiefs 10-year-old son, so the young Belauan could visit England, study under the Captain’s care and return with new knowledge to help his own people. Lee 800 made a strong first impression: “All of the English warmed to him from the time of their first handshake,” says a con temporary account.

After making their way to Macao, the officers and crew took passage on various East India Company ships and in July 1784 arrived in Portsmouth.

The next six months were a period of enthusiastic acculturation and learning for the amiable Lee 800. He lived in the Wil sons’ modest home in Rotherhithe, on the banks of the Thames near London, at tended school, played games with the Captain’s son and walked with the Cap tain to attend services at St Mary’s Church.

Lee 800 proved a quick learner, always aware of how his new experiences might be applied in Belau.

But his time in London was to be cut short abruptly. Though the Captain took precautions, the youth fell ill with small pox and in December 1784 succumbed. He was interred in the Wilson family tomb near the entrance to St Mary’s Church. An elegant epitaph was composed by Brook Watson, the member of Parliament who

introduced George Keate to Captain Wil son and became a favourite of Lee 800.

The closing lines of the inscription read: Stop Reader, stop! let Nature claim a Tear- A Prince of Mine, Lee 800, lies bury’d here.

This is all packaged in a style of writing that may surprise some Pacific scholars.

Peacock is refreshingly personal, candid, and poignant especially in his opening chapter, “Letter to Lee Boo,” in which he reports to the Prince: “You are not forgot ten. In fact, no lad from a Pacific Island was ever better remembered.”

Lee 800 of Belau is a book that has been waiting to be written. Author Peacock is a sensitive storyteller who has carefully pie ced together the parts of this account, pro viding new facts and linking the centuries.

The book should serve as a valuable ad dition to the Pacific history; and as the au thor states in the preface, it may “... also inspire latter-day Lee Boos to reflect on their own lives and record what others may wish to know before it is too late.”

THE COOK ISLANDS: A Guide By Norman and Ngaire Douglas. Creative Associates, Sydney, Australia. 160 pp; RRP $A11.95 and TAHITI: A COMPLETE GUIDE TO ALL OF THE ISLANDS By Vicki Poggioli. Hippocrene Books, New York, USA. 142 pp; $U59.95 Reviewed by BILL COPPELL WRITERS of guide books are al ways faced with a dilemma. They can limit their works to the bare minimum, and provide the visitor with enough information to get by on. This ap proach leads to superficiality and often leads the unwary reader into false expectations.

On the other hand, the trap into which authors of many guide books also fall is to become encyclopaedic, and to lose the reader in a maze of trivialities.

The best way is to provide a spring board from which the reader will want to become more knowledgeable about the place being visited. In their Cook Islands: A Guide , Norman and Ngaire Douglas have by and large achieved that desirable middle course.

This book contains many of the essen tial elements of the guide book that should be in every traveller’s kitbag: historical in formation, political, social and economic features of contemporary Cook Islands life, and (probably most importantly) the visitor is well informed about places to visit and things to do. The Cook Islands, for all their smallness, offer a great deal of inter est to the traveller who wants to leave be hind the fleshpots of the more fashionable tourist resorts; and this is brought to the fore effectively.

The layout is logical and provides easy access to sections of interest, there is an ar ray of maps, illustrations (both black and white and colour) that deal with the his torical and contemporary, and there are a number of well-chosen excerpts from books about the Cook Islands.

Let there be no cavilling at the overall usefulness of Cook Islands: A Guide. De spite its minor faults it is one of the better books available to those venturing into the lesser known and usually more com pelling parts of the Pacific.

Vicki Poggioli’s travel guide to Tahiti, on the other hand, is obviously written with the sole intention of addressing American readers and it largely follows the format of the standard American travel guide: information about air travel into French Polynesia with all flights originat ing in Honolulu or Los Angeles, with the sole exception being Lan Chile’s flights from Santiago. For the non-American there is nothing else on offer, or so it seems.

This guide offers us some useful snip pets of historical background and there are a few vignettes about the people and cus toms, but these are peripheral to the overt purposes of the publication: to provide “essential data” about tours, travel ar rangements, restaurants and hotels.

Like all American travel guide writers, Ms Poggioli gives plenty of warnings about Polynesian mosquitoes, spiders, lizards and cockroaches and provides advice about supplies of pills, lotions and other medications with which the wise and wary visitor should be armed.

There is selection of basic maps and 19 black and white photographs. The latter lack the natural sparkle that is so much a part of Polynesia, and few give promi nence to the people. It is the mixture of races and the spontaneity of the Polyne sians that for the majority of visitors will provide lasting memories of Tahiti.

Twenty-Eight Days In Kiribati By Robin

White and Claudia Pond Eyley. New Women’s Press, Auckland, New Zealand, 1987, Reviewed by BILL COPPELL CLAUDIA Pond Eyley and Robin White, in Days in Kiribai, provide in their own way an alternative travel guide to Kiribati. Ro bin White, an artist, went to live at Tarawa with her husband to assist in the work of the Baha’i community. While she was at Tarawa she became pregnant and was vis ited for a month by her friend, New Zea lander Claudia Eyley, and Claudia’s 13year-old daughter Brigid.

Robin White continued to work as an artist, and in particular created in wood

cuts many of her impressions of Kiribati life and of the effects of the Kiribati en vironment on Brigid. “I chose to present the series as woodcuts,” she writes, “a new medium for me, and I arranged the im ages in a manner similar to the mediaeval tradition where words and visual signals combine to fulfil an educative function.”

The friends have put together their impressions of life in Kiribati by bringing together elements of Robin White’s diary, an interview conducted by Claudia Eyley and extracts from the latter’s journal. There is also an interview with Winnie Powell, “Reaching a Woman’s Age”, in which this i-Kiribati mother talks about the intimate aspects of the transformation into wom anhood in Kiribati female society.

In word and picture Eyley and White give provocative insight into intimate as pects of Kiribati life and environment.

Robin White incorporates in her drawings and woodcuts the i-Kiribati vocabulary of the scenes and people she observes: though she claims to be following the mediaeval tradition in her pictures, she gives us a strength and boldness in portraying the i- Kiribati that evokes the feelings felt by Gauguin for the Polynesians.

The literary and artistic talents of the two authors are stamped on their book.

There is imagination and excitement in the manner in which they have moulded the printed word with reproductions from handwritten diaries, sketches, photo

graphs (black and white and colour) and woodcuts. There are unexpected flashes of humour in the written account and in woodcuts of bully-beef and mackerel tin labels. The photography also serves well its purpose of bringing together the i-Kir ibati and i-matang (Europeans) as part of the pervading atoll environment.

This is a book deserving of praise, as is its publisher the New Women’s Press of Auckland, which has as one of its ambi tions the publication of more books on and by Pacific writers and subjects. In Twenty eight Days in Kiribati , a standard has been set one that is to be hoped will lead to many more publications in the same vein and at the same level.

NOUS MOURONS DE IE VOIR! (“Ti mate ni kan moriko”) By Father Georges Delbos, Editions le Sarment, Fayard, Paris 1988 140 F Reviewed by NICOLAS ROTHWELL TESTAMENT to a great odyssey of faith, this history of the Catholic church in the islands of the Repub lic of Kiribati combines the best traits of religious mission a loving enthusiasm and a punctilious attention to detail that together lend the volume a delightful and inspiring tone.

Nous Mourons De Te Voir (literally, “We’re dying to see you”) is both a record of the extraordinary spiritual journey that

accompanied the European colonial pen etration of the 19th century Pacific, and a series of speculations on the character of the Ocean, more particularly the islands of Kiribati (formerly the British-ruled Gil bert Islands).

Father Delbos has carried out exten sive interviews with the key figures in the Catholic life of Kiribati today, and de votes his concluding pages to the “Bishop of Independence”, Monseigneur Paul Mea, whose tenure dates from 1979 when the Republic became independent. An intro duction by President leremia Tabai gives an impression of the central place this book occupies as an archive for the people of Kiribati a Pacific island nation where an intense spiritual life guides the evolu tion of society.

Father Delbos sketches with a deft hand the character of life in the islands of Kir ibati; the unforgettable rhythm of wind and wave that seems to summon forth in the inhabitants a particularly vivid apprecia tion of the divine order’s presence in the natural world. He also delves into the vexed relations between the twin religious powers of the Ocean, the French Catholics and the London Missionary Society: forces that contested for influence as their re spective colonial powers expanded through the islands.

No one who has visited Kiribati can ig nore the central importance of religion there: by far the most prominent buildings^

<4 in the islands communities are the churches, and the role of the islanders.

The “flame of belief’, as it was sweetly known by the missionaries, spread grad ually through the Pacific, by way of Fiji, Samoa and Tahiti before jumping from Polynesia to the Micronesian realm, to the atoll of Nonouti by returning labourers converted to Catholicism in Tahiti.

Father Delbos takes his evocative title from the pleading letter written by the first Gilbertese Catholics, asking for religious assistance: “We are dying to see you, do not scorn to visit us . ..” These first be lievers were inspired by the biblical ex ample of the Macedonian, who begged St Paul (in Acts 16) to “cross the sea, come quickly to our aid”.

The distances involved (and the cul tural divide) were, however, somewhat greater than in the Pauline example and so began the remarkable story of the Cath olic fathers in the Gilbert Islands; heroic figures among whom Father Bontemps, who evangelised the far-scattered islands, is pre-eminent.

Delbos’ volume contains many treas ures as he portrays the components of Gil bertese existence and examines the natural openness of the islanders’ character to new ideas. His tale is one of achievements and privation, ranging over the travails of World War 11, when the Japanese occu pied the islands, and the cataclysmic American storming of Tarawa atoll, to the slow fruition of the seeds of faith.

Father Bontemps was clearly a dedi cated preacher, criss-crossing the Gilberts in his zeal. Perhaps his methods may have been a trifle unconventional; he per suaded islanders that they were “Catholic in heart” by getting them to say they loved the Virgin Mary. But the crucial context of this missionary enterprise was the con tinuing rivalry between Catholic and Protestant faiths, still mirrored in the political divisions of many a South Pacific island state.

Delbos concedes that the “conflicts be tween the representatives of the two confessions were real, sometimes violent or tragic the historian cannot skate over them under the pretext of ecumenism,” but chooses instead to stress the common goals of the various Christian missions to to day’s Pacific: “pacification, civilisation, defence of the rights of the indigenous people, the care of the sick, the education of the young.”

He writes from long experience of the particular world of the Pacific. He has been director of Catholic Education for New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands, per haps the place where conflicts between the two Christian confessions have been most acute. His most intriguing (and to the gen eral reader his most valuable) specula tions come when he attempts to encapsulate the specific mentality of the Gilbertese in one of his many passages of reverie: “It springs from its origins, the sit

uation and even the form of the islands, the means of subsistence, for the Gil bertese is above all a man of the sea.

“Water is his element, as is land for the continental man. And all the difference between the psychology of a mariner and a farmer comes from that which distin guishes land from sea one is solid, the other fluid; one needs patience and reflec tion, the other demands suppleness and an inventive spirit ... so one should not be surprised if the defining characteristic of the Gilbertese (and of the Micronesian in general, as against the inhabitants of more fertile Pacific lands) is mobility, a spirit of adventure, initiative and invention.”

Father Delbos offers his readers not just a survey of the state of religious belief in Kiribati today, but a masterful overview of the entire fast-shifting society as the in fluences of modern media and Western culture begin to be felt across the islands.

More than a religious history, this ac count is broad enough to capture the re flective memories of the pioneer fathers, the customs and beliefs of the i-Kiribati, and even the “lacework of the palm-tree foliage” in its pages.

As Father Delbos recalls, everywhere he went in the islands of Kiribati, the faces of the missionaries of bygone days re turned to greet him: “for it is they who patiently, over this fortune-troubled cen tury of apostolic work filled with reverses, dashed hopes and human weakness, built stone by stone this Church of Kiribati, which is bursting with youth despite its age.” In Father Delbos, these little-known heroes have at last found a fitting memorialist.

LE GEANT DU PACIFIQUE By Xavier Pons Economica, 49 rue Hericart, 75015 Paris; 150 F Reviewed by ROBERT ALDRICH XAVIER Pons, a professor at the University of Toulouse and one of France’s foremost authorities on Australia, has already published a study of Australia’s populations and a “psycholi terary” biography of Henry Lawson. Here he turns his attention to Australia’s role in the South Pacific and in so doing has also produced a general study of colonial and post-colonial relations in the South Pacific from a French perspective.

Pons provides a critical appraisal of Australia’s actions in Oceania. He argues that in attempting to maintain its ties with England in the period from 1770 to 1920, Australia “all in all did not show itself very enlightened with regard to the Pacific”.

The Pacific “represented a permanent threat against which Australia had to de fend itself’; the result was a Pacific policy that was, he says, “essentially negative and dissuasive.”

Australia’s first interest in Oceania was

to defend itself against any dangers that might come from those shores or, more precisely, from Britain’s rivals in the South Seas, notably France, Germany, and later Japan. Unlike the other expansionist powers, however, Australia’s initial am bitions ended there: “Australia did not really feel the civilising vocation that so often served as a justification for modern colonial ventures,” Pons writes. “What could it have boasted of bringing to the in digenes language, culture or religion that Great Britain was not more able than Australia to deliver? The imperialist will of Australia had no other goal than to keep territories judged to be of strategic interest away from possible adversaries.”

This, however, dragged Australia into the imperial scramble, especially with Australian control of Papua. In a second period, from the end of World War I to 1971, “Australia found itself a little embarrassed by its empire, not knowing what to do with it, and to which it did not want to allocate an important part of its budget.” Aus tralian control of Papua and New Guinea and Nauru was marked by indifference and inefficiency and little was done to pre pare the islanders for eventual self-govern ment, leaving territories to the mercies of miners and traders.

The situation changed in the 19705, Pons suggests. Canberra saw that “good relations with the Pacific would facilitate the negotiations Australia was having with the countries of the Third World.” Fur thermore, the entry of Great Britain into the Common Market in 1971 profoundly modified economic prospects for Aus tralia. Australia had to find new markets for its exports, which led it to see its Asian and Oceanic neighbours in a new light.

Pons’s work is based largely on second ary sources, including Australian works, and his book avoids many of the fashion able simplistic theories about neo-colon ialism and about the Pacific becoming the new centre of the world.

Some critics might claim he downplays the role of France and avoids detailed treatment of New Caledonia and nuclear testing, but Pons is certainly no apologist for French policy: he characterises the Rainbow Warrior incident as “a veritable act of war carried out on the territory of a friendly nation against unarmed adver saries”; on New Caledonia, he calls the Australian position “moderate”.

But his work may give some comfort to those who reject criticism of France’s role in the South Pacific or who sense a certain sanctimoniousness in Australia’s and New Zealand’s own actions. His arguments may also stick in the throats of those who look for evidence of the benefits of the Aus tralian presence in Oceania. But this use ful study does reinforce the point that geopolitical activities, no matter what fine words are used to express them, are not based on moralistic considerations. □