Australian Folklore 31, 2016 Australian Folklore 28, 2013 173 Do You Bring Your Gods With You or Do You Find Them There Waiting? Reconsidering the 1790 Polynesian Colonisation of Pitcairn Island Martin Gibbs and David Roe ABSTRACT: This paper re-examines the early years of the 1789 Bounty encounter with Pitcairn Island, with a specific focus on some of the potential perceptions and responses of the Polynesian colonists to their new home. We argue that when viewing the Bounty arrivals as a colonising population, the perceptions and reactions of the Polynesian participants almost certainly included responses to an existing spirit population within the Pitcairn landscape that was most likely undetectable and incomprehensible to the Europeans. In particular we draw on the notion that, especially in the early years, the Polynesians were engaged in a constant series of negotiations with spirits and other components of the landscape in order to make social, conceptual, and spatial sense of their new surroundings. KEYWORDS: Pitcairn Island, Colonisation, Polynesian Mythology, Bounty One question that has always intrigued me is what happens to demonic beings when immigrants move from their homelands. Irish-Americans remember the fairies, Greek-Americans the vrykólakas, but only in relation to events remembered in the old country. When I once asked why such demons are not seen in America, my informants giggled confusedly and said ‘They’re too scared to pass the ocean, it’s too far,’ pointing out that Christ and the apostles never came to America. (Richard Dorson, 1971: 36) The tiny volcanic outcrop of Pitcairn Island has attained fame on two fronts: first as the hiding place and scene of the violent demise of most of the HMAV Bounty mutineers, and secondly as the place where the last of their company led their descendants to spiritual redemption, piety and purity, creating a ‘model’ Christian community. Although the circumstances of the initial settlement and subsequent life on the island have been written about many times, it has undeniably been a narrative focussed on the fates of the British seamen. In contrast, and despite being the numerically superior component of the colonising population, the 174 Martin Gibbs and David Roe Polynesian men and women who accompanied them have been reduced to bit-players in the grand drama. In this paper we re-examine the early years of the 1789 Bounty encounter with Pitcairn Island, with a specific focus on some of the potential perceptions and responses of the Polynesian colonists to their new home. It is not the purpose of this paper to identify or reconstruct the ‘Polynesian-ness’ of the early Pitcairn way of life. There is no doubt that the majority of the colonists were Polynesian and that social and cultural continuities occurred. However, we suggest that when viewing the Bounty arrivals as a colonising population, the perceptions and reactions of the Polynesian participants almost certainly included responses to an existing spirit population within the Pitcairn landscape that was most likely undetectable and incomprehensible to the Europeans. In particular, we draw on the notion that, especially in the early years, the Polynesians were engaged in a constant series of negotiations with spirits and other components of the landscape in order to make social, conceptual, and spatial sense of their new surroundings. Of necessity the scenarios explored here are largely speculative: the paucity of historical information from the earliest years makes a more grounded analysis impossible. However, the intention is to encourage a consideration of possibilities in our understanding of a well-known story, rather than to provide a strictly empirical anthropological study. The first section of this paper presents a summary of the conventional (and Eurocentric) reading of the Bounty/Pitcairn story and especially of the settlement process and development of the early island community. The second section provides an overview of Tahitian religious structures and then considers how an understanding of this might provide an alternative interpretation of the experience of the Polynesian Pitcairners in their early years on the island. * * The Settlement of Pitcairn and the Path to Redemption The general circumstances of the voyage of HMAV Bounty, commanded by Lt William Bligh on her mission to collect breadfruit plants, are well documented (e.g. Barrow, 1831; Dening, 1994). For just over five months between October 1788 and April 1789 the Bounty crew were based in the area of Matavai Bay in Tahiti as the breadfruit plants purchased by Bligh were propagated. During this extended period the Bounty’s crew, originating primarily (but not exclusively) from Britain, settled into intimate relationships with female Tahitians, as well as developing taio (special bond/ sharing) friendships with Tahitian men which saw them afforded social and economic bonds and obligations equal Reconsidering the 1790 Polynesian Colonisation of Pitcairn Island 175 to those of close kin (Finney, 1964). Many also lived in domestic arrangements with their partners and were extensively tattooed in the traditional Polynesian style (Lummis, 1997:83). By the time the breadfruit plants were ready, the crew were reluctant to leave for the return voyage to England via the West Indies. The mutiny of officers and crew led by First Mate Fletcher Christian on 28 April 1789 may have been prompted by a desire to return to Tahiti, a result of Bligh’s belligerence towards his men, or a combination of these and other factors (Dening, 1994). With the captain and the non-mutineers set adrift in the ship’s boat, the Bounty returned to Tahiti to collect male and female companions as well as further supplies, before departing to find a base for a new settlement. After an abortive attempt to settle on the already-occupied island of Tubuai, the vessel returned once again to Tahiti in late September. With most of the mutineers now electing to stay on Tahiti despite the real threat of discovery and punishment by a vengeful British Navy, Fletcher Christian and eight other sailors, together with five Tahitian and one Tubuaian men (who, for convenience, we will refer to as the Polynesian men), 12 Tahitian women and one female child, prepared to leave again (Maude, 1968). They quickly stocked the ship with the plants and animals they considered necessary for successful colonisation and on 23 September 1789 pulled up the anchor and departed. At this point they effectively disappeared from the historical record for 18 years, until the chance rediscovery of the survivors on Pitcairn Island in 1808. From historic and ethnographic accounts Maude (1968) was able to reconstruct something of the movements of the vessel during the several months of its search for a new home. Christian had apparently decided their destination needed to be uninhabited, preferably uncharted, and without an obvious anchorage, to deter passing ships from visiting. After a period searching westward of Tahiti he eventually decided to swing far eastward and try to locate Pitcairn Island, described in a copy of Carteret’s Journal which was aboard the ship. Despite Carteret’s error in longitude which would ultimately help conceal Pitcairn for some years, Bounty arrived at the island on 15 January 1790. Geographically, Pitcairn is only 4 km at its greatest length, 9.6 km round and 450 hectares or 4.35 sq km in area. The island is a half of a volcanic caldera rising to 300m (1,100 feet), with precipitous coastal cliffs and only two moderately accessible landing-places for small boats: at Bounty Bay on the northeast and at West Harbour (Tedside) to the northwest. After several days standing off the island due to inclement weather, an armed party of four Europeans and three Tahitian men went ashore at Bounty Bay to determine whether the island was inhabited and suitable for settlement. As described some years later by Teehuteatuaonoa (‘Jenny’), one of the women aboard: 176 Martin Gibbs and David Roe The crew reported that there were no natives on the island; that it abounded with cocoa-nuts and sea-fowl, and that they had found traces of its having been once inhabited. Charcoal, stone axes, stone foundations of houses, and a few carved boards, were discovered. Christian got the vessel under a rocky point and came to anchor. (Jenny/ Teehuteatuaonoa, 1826) John Adams (Alexander Smith) also provided detail of the mechanics of the first few days of colonisation in his narratives to visiting sailors. Within days the Bounty was unloaded, after which there was heated discussion between the Europeans about whether to save her for future escape or destroy her to reduce the chances of detection. Despite a lack of agreement, several Europeans decided to set fire to the vessel, which drifted shorewards and sank (Erskine, 2004), thus also removing any opportunity for departure. As part of the strategy of concealment, the initial shelters and then the more substantial buildings that replaced them were kept behind a screen of trees and vegetation. The existing suite of naturally occurring and introduced economic plants available on the island rendered much of the imported flora unnecessary, although Jenny/Teehuteatuaonoa (1819; 1826) reported that they planted the superior varieties of plants such as yams which they had brought with them. Once the nine Europeans were reassured that the island was not occupied, the land was divided amongst them, a move which effectively reduced the Polynesian men to the status of landless servants. The Europeans had also initially claimed nine of the women as partners, leaving only three women for the six Polynesian men. When the death of two of the women attached to the Europeans saw an attempt in 1791 to claim replacements from those attached to the Polynesian men, tensions reached breaking point. The initial violent attacks came from several Polynesian men enraged at this insult, but led to a complex series of counter attacks, injuries, deaths and murders which extended over the next several years, involving different alliances of Polynesian and European men, as well as the women, all groups becoming involved in carrying out violent acts. As the reality of their isolation and the lack of any opportunity to escape dawned on them, a deep sense of despair also grew within the population. By 1794 only four adult males (all Europeans) survived, although by 1798 one had committed suicide (McCoy, possibly as a result of drunken derangement), and another (Quintal) had to be executed after becoming insane and violent (Lummis, 1997:125). Within ten years of landing, only two adult males remained. When Edward Young died from asthma in December 1800 John Adams was left as the last adult male on the island. He was accompanied by the surviving Polynesian women and 20 or so children (Lummis, 1997:130). Reconsidering the 1790 Polynesian Colonisation of Pitcairn Island 177 Sometime after the death of Young, Adams claimed that during a drunken stupor he had received a vision of the Archangel Michael (in later accounts sometimes Gabriel) which led him to introduce Christianity to the island, based around his own limited reading of the Bible and a vaguely remembered set of religious festivals and practices. By the time the American vessel Topaz arrived at Pitcairn in 1808 and discovered the fate of the Bounty mutineers, the island was ostensibly a model (and ‘Europeanised’) community of Christian virtue, a situation through which Adams, now the island patriarch and religious leader, also gained his own redemption in the eyes of the British Navy and the world at large. Although Adams died in 1829, Pitcairn continued to gain status and benefit as an exemplar in Christian piety, its story becoming a perennial favourite for preachers across the globe and reinforced in nearly 200 years of secular and church literature (Brodie, 1850; Dening, 1994; Lummis, 1997). * * Encountering a Landscape—the Pragmatics of Colonisation. The encounter between those aboard the Bounty and the Pitcairn landscape formed a watershed in relations. When the Europeans had been guests in Tahiti they had been subject to the structures and strictures of their Polynesian hosts. On Tubuai, the brief experiences ashore had in many respects been abnormal for both groups, especially when faced with a common threat from the native Tubuaian population, resulting in a settlement which had an overt military and defensive aspect (Christian, 1983:141). However, it was on Pitcairn, with the small groups of Europeans and Polynesians now stranded together, that major differences in perceptions of land and perhaps as importantly of landscape, became apparent. That these became related to power was a particular source of dismay to the Polynesian men (Dening, 1994). When Bounty arrived at Pitcairn there were no humans resident on the island, despite the signs of former habitation. It is unclear as to why this was the case. There has been a continuing debate among archaeologists about ‘extinct’ Polynesian islands, that is, islands where the population had apparently left or died out in the prehistoric past (Kirch, 1988). Pre-Bounty Pitcairn falls into this pattern, with several possibilities considered. The first of these is that the resident population of Pitcairn had eventually failed or been forced away due to small size of the island, and limitations on both the available resources (especially water) and the human population (Kirch 1988: 31). In this respect, restricted fresh water, loss of timber and progressive land degradation once the population neared 200 people were certainly contributing reasons for the departure of the Pitcairner Islanders to Norfolk Island in 1856 (Young, 1894). 178 Martin Gibbs and David Roe Another scenario is that Pitcairn with its impressive obsidian and fine- grained basalt outcrops was only intermittently visited by a population, possibly from the Gambier Islands (Mangareva), who would intensively produce stone tools for a period of time before departing again. Weisler (1995: 383) dismisses this notion of a ‘quarry island’ on the basis that prehistoric occupation was intensive wherever flat land was available, rather than in localised areas. However, if the intensive occupation was intermittent, the Bounty group may have arrived between visitation cycles, with the planned subsequent visit by its owners interrupted for some reason, most likely the impact of the Europeans into the region in the succeeding decade. Either scenario leaves the question of when this abandonment— permanent or temporary—may have occurred. Henry (1928: 472) associated Pitcairn with Tahitian legends of the ‘then populous little mountaineous island of Hiti-au-rereva’, although it is unclear how she makes this connection. Buck (1938) however suggested Pitcairn was the island of Mata-ki-te-rangi mentioned in Mangarevan folklore. Mata-ki-te- rangi was said to have originally been settled by a displaced group from Mangareva, although on the basis of oral histories Peter Buck suggested that the island drops out of Mangarevan history around the fourteenth century AD (Buck, 1938: 223-227). From archaeological evidence of transported stone, Pitcairn and Mangareva were in regular contact until at least 1450AD, with Weisler (1995: 402) indicating probable abandonment or population loss within a couple of hundred years after that. For the Europeans aboard Bounty, that the Pitcairn landscape was not currently inhabited by humans made it ‘empty’. That there were various exploitable resources upon it constituted a bonus, although the residue of past occupations was largely irrelevant to how the Europeans decided their new colony might proceed. In contrast, for the Polynesians to step ashore ‘uninvited’ on Pitcairn was to intrude upon a landscape which was immediately legible as having been ‘occupied’—and of belonging to unknown people. There was clear evidence of gardens and economic plants, of houses and occupation areas, of quarries and production, as well as of religious and spiritual sites. For the Europeans, hiding the fledgling settlement behind the trees was a strategy to deflect the attention of a vengeful British Navy. The Polynesians may have been conscious of that imperative, since the people of Matavai Bay had borne the brunt of British aggression when the crew of HMS Dolphin had fired upon the crowds there with canon and muskets in 1767 (Dening, 1992: 181). However, they were undoubtedly also aware, and probably significantly more concerned about, the potential for the original Polynesian owners of the island to return and wreak an equally bloody revenge upon trespassers and land thieves. Reconsidering the 1790 Polynesian Colonisation of Pitcairn Island 179 In a practical sense, for the Polynesians much of the colonisation process probably consisted of recovering and reinvigorating the existing systems on the island, as well as making additions from the flora and fauna transported on the Bounty (Erskine, 1994). The exact nature of the settlers’ agricultural practice is difficult to establish, although based on documentary accounts and later ethnographic observations it can be supposed to have been largely Polynesian in style, especially given the nature of the plants already available on Pitcairn and also transported there aboard Bounty. The majority of the Europeans were young and sailors by profession, with limited agricultural knowledge, with the exception of William Brown who was a gardener and botanist’s assistant on the Bounty. The environment and range of available plants would have made a Polynesian horticultural regime a necessity. By the time Europeans again made contact and recorded the nature of life on Pitcairn, it is clear that other than knowledge of English and a variety of social and religious codes and practices linked to Adams’ Christian structures, life on the island followed a very Tahitian pattern under the guidance of the women (Barrow, 1831; Beechey, 1831; Lummis, 1997). * * ‘Spirits’ in the Landscape While the above discussion outlines the pragmatics of establishing the new settlement on Pitcairn, there seems little doubt that the Polynesian members of the group would have had to engage with a range of other forces invisible and to some degree unintelligible to the European men. For Tahitians, their lives required constant interaction and negotiation with innumerable spirits. Oliver (1974) suggests that the spirit world could be divided into three main categories: atua (gods), atua-ta’ata (demi-gods), and ‘oromatua (ghosts, see also Henry, 1928: 380). Some spirits were powerful, had a broad relationship to humans (ta’ata) and may have had specific places of worship (marae) with priesthoods devoted to them. The period of Bounty’s visit to Tahiti was, however, only several decades after the arrival of the god ‘Oro (the god of war and sometimes of fertility) from Raiatea, together with his priesthood (Oliver, 1974: 385, 900, 912). This introduction had been attended by a shift, at least among Tahiti’s political and social elites, from a broader form of polytheism to a monotheistic focus on ‘Oro (Oliver, 1974: 385, 900, 912; Filihia, 1996). The minor spirits (atua-ta’ata) were weaker and localized: holding sway over specific areas of land and sea; tutelars of specific social units—territorial, kin, occupational, and so forth; familiars of individuals, 180 Martin Gibbs and David Roe patrons of events and of activities (e.g. childbearing, voyaging, tapa making, archery); and others. (Oliver, 1974: 57) Spirits communicated and manifested their approval or disapproval in dreams, in the success or failure of crops, in the weather, in the cries of birds, in health, injury or death, or any other event in life (Oliver, 1974: 71; also see the description of verb aiora in Davies, 1851: 17). Some spirits had an anthropomorphic aspect when required, while others occasionally took the form of animals or natural forces (Henry, 1928: 382-394). Some spirits were dangerous, others benign towards humans, and some had no interest in humans (Oliver, 1974: 61; Henry, 1928: 380). Relationships between humans and spirits were recognised and negotiated in a continuum from the rarefied areas of the temples through to the daily practices of home and garden. Davies (1851: 2600) records various practices of these kinds, such as the taumaha or offering of food for the gods or spirits of the dead. The spirits were a continuous presence, assuredly there as much as any other phenomena. Spirits were not supernatural in the sense of them being a force beyond comprehension. Rather they were an inevitable and necessary part of the Polynesian cultural landscape; they were neighbours—sometimes relatives—and to greater or lesser degrees inhabited the same geographical spaces and places as did people, rather than in a distinct or separate overlay upon the human world. They were normal, if not always welcome, parts of the environment and could not be ignored. Communication with spirits encompassed a range of engagements, most commonly and for the broadest range of individuals by simple offerings or recognitions at appropriate times or occasions, through to the precise performances of complex forms of prayer and ritual required for the more powerful gods and demi-gods (Douglas, 1974:85). Some interactions with spirits could be dealt with by individuals, others were undertaken by heads of families (usually patriarchs), while those associated with gods required specialists. In considering the broader set of relationships between humans and spirits, archaeologist McNiven has evoked the idea of the ‘spiritscape’: People ritually engage with spiritscapes either formally or informally. Informal ritual engagements tend to be situations where people experience a spiritual presence/power while undertaking everyday acts. They may occur when a person comes into close contact with spiritually charged contexts... or when a person simply senses that a spirit has made its presence felt—it is difficult to be alone in a spiritscape. Formal ritual engagements involve people taking an active role in controlling spiritual forces through special codified performances. (McNiven, 2004: 335) Reconsidering the 1790 Polynesian Colonisation of Pitcairn Island 181 Drawing on his research with the Melanesian populations of Torres Strait and Aboriginal peoples in northern Australia, McNiven described how landscape is managed through formal acts of ritual and practice which allow interaction with the spiritscape, as well as informal encounters with spiritual presence while undertaking everyday acts (McNiven, 2004: 345). These acts of orchestration (McNiven, 2004: 336) also have physicality in that they occur in and affect space and place. They may require construction of appropriate ritual structures or devices, or recognition of spiritual power in ‘natural’ features of the landscape, performance of dances, songs or ceremonies, and/or physical offerings. McNiven identified four key issues: 1) maintaining the availability of important subsistence species (i.e. ‘increase’ or ‘maintenance’ rites); 2) procuring key subsistence species (i.e. hunting magic); 3) controlling elements important to use of the sea (e.g. wind, waves and tides); and 4) mediating with the spirits and with the spirits of the dead (e.g. mortuary rituals) as a constant negotiation between the living-scape and the death-scape. (McNiven, 2004: 336) While Polynesian cosmologies were undoubtedly different from those of Melanesians and Indigenous Australians, the key elements and drivers of these relationships between humans, spirits and landscape are consistent with Polynesian examples as outlined in Oliver’s (1974) and Henry’s (1928) works. Spirits required management, offering difficulties or even dire consequences if this was not done, or done incorrectly. However, we suggest that McNiven’s notion of ‘spiritscape’ suggests a view of the world in which humans and spirits live in different spaces, a world where there is a distinct divide between the natural and the supernatural, between the sacred and profane, between ritual and practice, and between life and death. If these differences do not exist—or exist in very different ways than those with which we may be familiar—then the construction of ‘spiritscapes’, ‘living-scapes’ and ‘death-scapes’ becomes unnecessary— and, indeed, possibly unhelpful in understanding the complexities and motivations for human actions in a world conceived and understood through different logics. Maintaining the concept of a single cultural landscape, in which humans and non-humans co-exist and interact, in which the supernatural can be completely natural, and in which the dead still ‘live’, might better lend itself to an emic glimpse of a world in which the ‘human-scape’, the ‘spiritscape’, the ‘living-scape’ and the ‘death- scape’ are parts of the same integrated yet dynamic system. The question of how colonising Polynesian populations might have initially identified, perceived or encountered spirits on new islands remains largely unexplored in anthropological literature. Much of what has been written focuses on the narratives surrounding the heroic ancestral voyagers rather than the mechanics of colonisation and spirit encounter. 182 Martin Gibbs and David Roe Henry (1928: 443) provides a number of Tahitian oral traditions and narratives which revolve around voyaging of major gods, including the arrival of ‘Oro on Tahiti (see also Buck, 1939: 51). She relates some of the stories and processes surrounding the establishment of new deities (atua) on other islands, such as the construction by priests of new marae for their worship using sacred stones transported from other consecrated sites, offering of presents to placate existing gods and even the signifiers of arrival of the gods themselves, in the case of ‘Oro as a wind and flashes of lightning as he entered his carved image on his new marae on Tahiti (Henry, 1928: 128-129). While atua moved themselves between islands it might be imagined that some of the lesser orders of spirits, especially of the familiar/ancestral type, could have been taken with the colonisers and ‘installed’ in the new landscape (so to speak), while other spirits were encountered already in place and over time their presence(s), attributes and qualities are progressively discovered, recognised, accommodated, and possibly contested or even neutralised. It is probable that these processes were undertaken by ritual and spiritual specialists—the character of ritual architecture suggests, for example, a common design with locally required adaptations—or persons otherwise capable of undertaking the negotiations required to secure a landscape for occupation. One of the few discussions which might align with this question of whether or how lesser spirits might travel in the Polynesian world is by Feinberg (1996) in his descriptions of how spirits are categorized on the Western Polynesian outlier of Anuta in the Solomon Islands. Between gods (tutpua tapu), and undistinguished spirits (atua vare) are beings known as tupua penua, 'land spirits', and entities that might be termed 'totemic spirits', which have no distinct class label in Anutan. (Feinberg, 1996: 104) These tutelary totemic spirits were brought with the immigrants from their homelands to Anuta, some fifteen generations earlier. However, the land spirits (tupua penua) were native to Anuta, very numerous, and bound to natural phenomena and places. He further notes: Their exploits and personalities are captured in story and song. But they are spiritlike in that they are amoral, egotistic and dangerous. They have little positive role and, even in pre-Christian times, were usually avoided or placated rather than worshipped. (Feinberg, 1996: 104) While being cautious in drawing parallels between Eastern and Western Pacific cultural patterns, Feinberg’s work provides us with some avenues of possible insight. We could consider that on arrival on Pitcairn, not only