| In 1774, the first
Polynesian to visit London travelled to England with the crew of Captain
Cook's second Pacific voyage and became an overnight sensation. Seen as a
living example of the 'Noble Savage', Omai as he was known, was discussed
by scientists and philosophers, celebrated in all the best circles and
written about in everything from poetry to pornography. He proved a
lightning rod for European anxieties regarding imperialism, civilisation
and the true nature of mankind. The artistic and literary legacy of Omai's
encounter with Europe provides a fascinating insight into European culture
in a moment of transition, when old certainties were collapsing and new
ones were yet to form.
Omai arrived at
Portsmouth on 14 July 1774 as a crew-member on board HMS Adventure,
captained by Tobias Furneaux. Taken immediately to meet Lord Sandwich, the
First Lord of the Admiralty, he was then placed in the care of Joseph
Banks and Dr Solander, both of whom he claimed to remember from their
visit to Tahiti five years earlier. Three days later, on 17 July, he was
presented to King George III and Queen Charlotte at Kew. It was at this
introduction that Omai would reveal the grace and ‘natural’ good
manners that first astounded and then delighted his audience. Once
approved by the highest in the land, Omai’s career as a ‘social
lion’ was assured.
When Omai returned to the Pacific in 1776, many
felt that the failure to convert him to Christianity was an important
opportunity missed.
The journey of one man across half
the world, from his home in Tahiti to 1770s London and then back again,
provides us with a key to understanding the significance of Cook’s three
Pacific voyages and the cultural milieu in which they took place. That man
was Mai, better known in Europe as Omai, and he is the subject of the
National Library’s latest exhibition, Cook & Omai: The Cult of
the South Seas, developed in association with the Humanities Research
Centre at The Australian National University.
For the European world in which Omai arrived in
1774, the dominion of knowledge was growing daily under the influences of
empirical philosophy and the tools of scientific investigation. New ways
of understanding and ordering the physical world had created confidence in
an ultimately perfectible system of knowledge. But advances in
understanding also tended to highlight areas of profound ignorance such as
the full extent of the globe’s landmasses and, on a more intimate scale,
the true lineaments—physical and cultural—of human creation. The ship
on which Omai travelled to London was returning from a voyage to the
Pacific under James Cook, who had been charged with remedying one of those
areas of ignorance by establishing, finally, the existence (or otherwise)
of the fabled great southern continent. |
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| They found no such land,
disappointing the hopes of many an armchair geographer and raising the
possibility that other assumptions about the world based on received
wisdom and deductive reasoning rather than hard evidence might prove
equally chimerical. Both Cook’s first and second voyages to the Pacific
carried scientists and artists to guarantee the quality and reliability of
the evidence they brought back. This was not always enough, as Joseph
Banks, the naturalist on the first voyage, was to discover when some of
his observations—published in John Hawkesworth’s An Account of the
Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty, for Making
Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere (London: 1773)—met with
considerable public outrage and disbelief.
Johann Reinhold Forster, naturalist on the second
voyage with the assistance both of his son George and Anders Sparrman,
would have known better what reception his findings might receive,
especially as he had in 1772 translated Bougainville’s account of his
voyage to Tahiti (A Voyage Round the World: Performed by Order of his
Most Christian Majesty, in the Years 1766, 1767, 1768 and 1769 by Lewis de
Bougainville...), which contained this introduction:
I am a voyager and a seaman; that is a liar
and a stupid fellow, in the eyes of that class of indolent haughty
writers, who in their closets reason ad infinitum on the world and its
inhabitants, and with an air of superiority, confine nature within the
limits of their own invention. This way of proceeding appears very
singular and inconceivable, on the part of persons who have observed
nothing themselves, and only write and reason upon the observations
which they have borrowed from those same travellers in whom they deny
the faculty of seeing and thinking.
But why should those who sought to answer some of
the most pressing questions of their age meet with such hostility? The
answer lies in part with the Enlightenment’s increasingly polarised
views as to the virtues of civilisation, and to a destructive
contradiction at the core of European attitudes to the peoples of the
Pacific (and the non-European world generally). On the one hand, the
islanders were seen as examples of the Noble Savage, free and wild beings
drawing their laws (and their moral strength) directly from Nature,
uncorrupted by the vices of civilised life. On the other hand, many
Europeans saw the complexity of a society’s material culture as an index
of its progress. The generally superficial and subjective investigations
of other cultures by European explorers discovered little to challenge the
placement of their own culture at the apex of civilised development.
For some, usually the philosophes and men
of letters well versed in both the history of their own culture and its
latest ideological developments, the people of Tahiti in particular were
seen as representatives of the childhood of humanity, occupying a
pre-lapsarian world of innocence. Tahitian natural law, it was thought,
might supply an uncorrupted model for behaviour, a corrective for the
increasingly decadent societies of Europe. For others, these newly
discovered peoples were regarded as inferior, poor ‘savages’ clearly
in need of the boons of civilisation and over whom Europeans, as ‘Lords
of Creation’ had both a right and a responsibility to govern (The
Resolution Journal of Johann Reinhold Forster, London: 1982).
Omai, conveniently brought before those enquirers
into natural history who were unable to see Tahiti first-hand, would serve
as the evidence to prove or disprove diametrically opposed theories about
the nature of humanity. However he chose to behave, Omai risked
disappointing the expectations of at least a part of his audience, but his
visit was, in fact, a triumph. He arrived at Portsmouth on 14 July, 1774,
as a crew member on board HMS Adventure, captained by Tobias
Furneaux. Taken immediately to meet Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the
Admiralty, he was then placed in the care of Joseph Banks and Dr Solander,
both of whom he claimed to remember from their visit to Tahiti five years
earlier. Three days later, on 17 July, he was presented to the King and
Queen at Kew. It was at this introduction that Omai would reveal the grace
and ‘natural’ good manners that first astounded and then delighted his
audience. Once approved by the highest in the land, Omai’s career as a
‘social lion’ was assured.
Records show that representatives from
non-European cultures had been brought to England as early as the
beginning of the Tudor period. The traffic in exotic ‘savages’
increased with the spread of European territorial ambitions, but these
visitors usually failed to conform to a complex set of expectations based
more on literary conventions than reality. Most recently, in 1772, a party
of Eskimos had visited London and, before dying of smallpox, had been as
unimpressed by English society as that society had been disappointed in
them. Omai, however, possessed the advantages of youth and adaptability
and popular accounts suggest that he had a gentle and obliging
temperament. He was also a member of an extremely stratified society based
on inherited rank and land ownership, in which his marginal
position—living in exile on the charity of extended family after the
loss of his lands in inter-island warfare—made him acutely aware of the
nuances of rank and of appropriate behaviour codes.
He may also have benefited from the low
expectations many of his hosts had of his behaviour. Failing to ravish
their women, or drink and eat to excess in public, and being instead
attentive, appreciative and careful of his appearance, he astounded even
Samuel Johnson, who attributed his good manners to the superior company he
had kept in England, conveniently forgetting the months spent with British
sailors. Fanny Burney however, remarked ‘I think this [i.e. his graceful
manners] shews how much more Nature can do, without Art, than art with all
her refinement, unassisted by Nature’.
In his turn, Omai appears to have enjoyed his
stay in England. He dined with the Royal Society on 10 occasions—as a
gentleman, not as a specimen—he visited the theatre often, went on a
botanising tour of the countryside with Joseph Banks, stayed at
Hinchingbrooke with Lord Sandwich and was keenly sought after by Society
hostesses. He was also painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, the preferred
portraitist of the aristocracy and fashionable elite, and drawn by
Nathaniel Dance.
In late January 1776, the General Evening Post
announced, rather prematurely, that Captain Cook was about to undertake a
voyage to Tahiti to return Omai to his home, and then proceed northwards
in pursuit of the Northen-West Passage. Cook’s third voyage to the
Pacific, with the ships Discovery and Resolution, did not
leave England until early July 1776, and this time carried no scientists,
but rather an assortment of livestock and seeds with which to plant the
advantages of European agriculture in the Pacific. The ships also carried
many gifts for Omai, in the hope that a supply of curiosities and riches
would raise his status back home, and prevent the tales he would tell of
Britain from appearing as complete fabrications. For all their
preparations, both Cook and Omai would be dead by the time news of the
voyage reached England early in 1780.
Unfortunately, the rather belated attempt to
teach Omai to read and write before returning home failed, and so we have
no first-hand account of his time in England, nor of his reception back in
Tahiti. His silence has been supplied instead by the memoirs and gossip of
his associates, and by a series of pamphlets by anonymous authors
purporting to represent his views. While all of the pamphlets are
satirical, most quite ribald and one virtually pornographic, they do not
advance our understanding of Omai’s point of view. It is what he
represents and the extent to which he can be made a stalking horse for
contemporary philosophical arguments that seems to matter.
For more information
on Captain Cook, go to:
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