So that was the millennium

By Michael Held

So that was the Millennium - hula dancers, white guys finding places the locals hadn’t lost, atom bombs, pastors, lots of going from one place to another and paradise.

Lots of paradise, feeding the dreams of men in cold European cities looking for a mythical world of warmth and endless free sex with dusky maidens. When the second millennium got underway, the Pacific was a fairly mobile kind of place.

The people we know as Fijians were already veterans of their lands and their descendants had pretty well pressed out to the Marquesas and perhaps as far as Hawaii.

New Zealand was being settled about the same time. Rapa Nui or Easter Island was empty though. Some of them might have even gone on to meet the South Americans and come back with the sweet potato.

Centuries later rampaging South Americans would return to the Pacific and plunder them, not of plants, but of people.

The behaviour of the Chileans and the Peruvians was one of many dark chapters written across the Pacific in this Millennium just over. The last five hundreds years were the tricky ones - when the rest of the world started coming into the Pacific.

It began in Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the first of the Spanish conquistadors - and one of the first of hundreds of white men whose “Pacific experience” began with a need to run away.

His plantation went broke and off he went to what is now Panama and in 1513 marched across the Isthmus to “discover” a whole ocean on the other side. Prosaically he named it Mar del Sur (South Sea) and extravagantly claimed it all for Spain.

The first of the great decisions where the fate of the Pacific was determined in Europe. Actually that wasn’t Balboa’s fault; the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas had divided the world between Portugal and Spain with the line going through South America.

Everything west was Spain’s.

Ferdinand Magellan is given the credit for being the first to circumnavigate the globe - except he got wacked on the head in 1521. Bom in Portugal he became Spanish

when he set out to establish the details of the rest of the Spanish world. He came up with the name “Pacific”, sailing info it on November 28, 1520. He thought it was very calm, but then after the Straits of Magellan

anything would.

Poor Magellan was remarkably unlucky - sailing all the way across the Pacific without hitting anything. They ran out of food and after 98 days bumped into Guam.

He named Guam The Island of Thieves.

On April 27, 1521, Magellan was killed in Cebu, the Phillipines, in a battle he created when he “converted” a tribe to Christianity. The chieftain who resisted him, Lapu-Lapu, is a hero even today in the Philippines - but all the same an obscure Middle Eastern religious sect began its hold over the Pacific.

The first of the white guys to actually make contact in the South Pacific is remembered these days for the fact that they’ve named a hotel after him in Honiara - and have his awkward painting. Alvaro de

Mendana kept up the glorious Spanish

tradition of sailing right across the Pacific and missing everything - until he got to the Solomon Islands. He was looking for the King Solomon’s treasure trove. He didn’t find it; it took Australians just over 400 years later to find that yes, indeed, the place

had gold.

It was starting to get crowded by the late 16th Century. Englishman Francis Drake sailed across the Pacific and like Magellan missed practically everything. The Dutch started to fill in the European maps although in an early sign of cross-cultural blundering, one of them, Abel Tasman, managed to kill locals in New Zealand, all the while really have no clue about where he was.

All this wouldn’t have meant a lot in Europe had it not been for a plainly romantic Frenchman, Louis de Bougainville. Around 1768 he visited Samoa, the Solomons and, most importantly, Tahiti. He named it after the birthplace of the goddess of love, Cythera, and planted in the European mind the image of the Noble Savage and the Pacific paradise. It was all on after that.

Heroic James Cook wasn’t, it would seem, much into sex. His journals do not have a lot about it, although he notes the presence of transsexuals in Tahiti and the behaviour of some of his crew. He was a man of science but like the first white man into the area, he too died violently on a beach. It was not a bright move by the Polynesians knocking out the men of science; what they then got were the men of exploitation and dogma.

One of Cook’s naval colleagues, William Bligh, had an unfortunate experience in Tahiti which enriched the English language

and provided countless copyright-free

scores for Hollywood. The first versions did not feature brown women but by the time Mel Gibson got around to do his rendition of it all, they were brown and pretty well naked. An incident of the lousy English class system ended up defining the Pacific in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Bligh had been there to take breadfruit trees - London had figured it was a good way to feed the slaves in the Caribbean.

Others with exploitation were quick to follow; the list was pretty long; sandlewood, timber, beche-de-mer, gold if it could be found, labour if it could be stolen into slavery or tricked into blackbirding and, most of all, territory.

And souls.

That was the great ultimate colonising mission and the one that survives even today.

The men who founded the London Missionary Society who in 1797 created stations in Tahiti and Tongatapu were not terribly bright and were mostly a bigoted bunch who, to our continuing misfortune ensured that the Pacific to this day remains locked in a kind of medieval Christianity.

The general drift of what was to happen was clear from the start.

“But amidst these enchanting scenes, savage nature still feasts on the flesh of its prisoners - appeases its Gods with human sacrifices - while societies of men and women live promiscuously, and murder every infant born amongst them,’’ said

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Thomas Haweis, one of the founders of the LMIS who believed islanders spent they days at ease and their nights in music and dance. The men who were to “save” the Pacific from themselves were English carpenters, shoemakers, drapers and tailors who believed they were one of God’s

chosen people.

Their followers have continued to come; Catholics and Methodists and a whole range of strange new religions including one which for a long time declared Polynesians were ineligible to get into heaven because they were not white. That was the Mormons, but they’ve since integrated heaven.

Its been the missionaries who, more than anybody else in the Millennium, have defined the Pacific. Their effects have been more than religious; despite limited language skills the early missionaries managed rudimentary written translations of the King James Version of the Bible (published in 1611) into the previously oral Polynesian languages and these have

become the cultural and social cornerstone of Polynesian culture. Its caught places like Tonga in a time warp. The churches, all imported from Europe and now bearing only casual resemblance to these now practising in the West, are the Pacific’s most powerful institutions and have their people by the throat.

Their leaders live well, extravagantly so in cases like Samoa’s Congregational Christian Church, while their people live in little more than poverty. Others have helped create the Pacific image around the world too; artists, writers, soldiers and explorers.

Paul Gauguin lush colour still sets a benchmark for defining the Pacific. His life style in which he ran away from family and “everything that is artificial and conventional” to find young love in Tahiti.

He died broke but was crucial in helping develop what is now the image of the Pacific - paradise.

Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson did their bit and this century James Mitchner created “Bloody Mary” in his Tales of the South Pacific which led to a

movie and a musical. It was Hollywood that had a decisive effect on the region’s arts.

The hula from Hawaii had been fairly racy until the missionaries clothed it, controlled it and oppressed it. But the movies bought it back, distorted it and eventually ensured it was every where for the tourists, although in more recent years the more nationalistic nations - Samoa, Tonga and New Zealand for example - managed to hold it out.

As the Millennium seeps away into the evening sky over Falealupo in Savai’i, its interesting to see the way Pacific cultures have begun to re-assert themselves after the historically brief period of Western intrusion. It is more than just Jonah Lomu too - its a whole host of artists, writers, thinkers and politicians - although the latter have tended not to be a great strength in this region.

But just as distance and isolation in this Millennium was ultimately no protection from the outside world, the next Millennium promises, and perhaps threatens, even more change for the Pacific Islands. ■