Estimates of the pre-contact populations of Pacific islands vary widely, but in Tahiti at the time of the Dolphin’s arrival, there were probably something like 60,000 to 70,000 people, with perhaps 300,000 in the archipelago as a whole. Certainly enough to supply thousands of warriors and hundreds of canoes—Robertson would later describe the ship as being surrounded by more than five hundred canoes, manned, “at a Moderate Computation,” by four thousand men. The risks of trying to land on so populous an island were obvious, and there were those who believed—rightly, as it turned out—that “nothing could be hade without blows.” At the same time, many of the crew were so debilitated by scurvy that the prospect of sailing on was unthinkable, especially when the tantalizing scent of tropical vegetation wafted out to the ship during the night.
The Tahitians in their canoes paddled round Wallis’s ship, holding up plantain branches and making speeches and throwing the fronds into the sea. The British showed trinkets and made friendly signs and tried to entice the islanders on board. The Tahitians seemed cheerful and talked a great deal in a language that sounded to Robertson like that of the Patagonians of Tierra del Fuego (with which it had no relationship whatsoever). More and more canoes continued to arrive, and eventually a “fine brisk young man” scrambled up by the mizzen chains and leapt out of the shrouds onto an awning, where he stood, laughing and looking down on the quarterdeck. Soon more Tahitians were climbing aboard, looking around at everything and snatching whatever they could. After a while—the story is familiar—the Tahitians began to be “a Little surly,” the British grew nervous, and the next thing was the firing of a nine-pound gun. At this, the Tahitians all jumped overboard and swam away to their canoes. Wallis ordered his men to make sail, and the islanders returned to shore.
Wallis was not leaving Tahiti, however; he was just circling in search of a safe place to land. As the Dolphin sailed round the island, the two sides engaged in a series of tactical maneuvers. At one moment, the Tahitians would be visiting the ship, bringing quantities of pigs, chickens, coconuts, breadfruit, and bananas; at the next they would be hooting and hollering, trying to make off with the ship’s anchors, or ambushing its boats. The meaning of all this was obscure to the Europeans, who alternated between trying to make friends with the Tahitians and aggressively fending off what they perceived as attacks.
The Tahitians, meanwhile, were also trying to make sense of what was going on. According to the Reverend James Cover, who lived in Tahiti some three decades later and who talked to descendants of people who had witnessed these events, the Tahitians were astonished by their first sight of a European ship, and “some supposed that it was a floating island,” an idea with some basis in Polynesian myth. On closer inspection, they realized that it was, in fact, a vessel, though one unlike any they had ever seen—while the largest Tahitian war canoes were almost as long as the Dolphin, they did not have anything like its breadth or height or its huge masts with their elaborate complex of rigging and sails.
How the Tahitians interpreted these events is, as many historians have noted, “by any standard of objective discourse, nothing more than informed guess,” since there are no contemporary sources that capture their point of view. But it seems likely that, at least in the beginning, they viewed the Dolphin as something come from the realm of the ancestors—a vessel from the mythic homeland of Hawaiki or the netherworld of Te Pō. Some have suggested that—as with Cook’s encounter at Kealakekua Bay—the Tahitians may have associated the strangers with an incarnation of the war god ‘Oro. The color red, which was prominently displayed on the sides of the ship, on the coats of the marines, and on the pennant that the British planted to symbolize their possession of the island, was linked with this deity, while lightning and thunder (cannon and gun fire) were signs of his terrible power. Then there were the many “wanton tricks” performed by women and girls, who stood on the rocks and in the prows of the canoes exposing their genitals—gestures that were interpreted by the British as “erotic enticement” but that, according to the anthropologist Anne Salmond, were actually a form of ritual behavior that “opened a pathway to Te Po, the realm of the ancestor gods, channelling their power” against the strangers.
When at last the Dolphin stopped circling and came to anchor in Matavai Bay, the skirmishing that had marked these first days came to a head. According to those on board the ship, the morning began quite ordinarily. Canoes came out to the ship to trade—nails and “Toys” for hogs, fowls, and fruit—all conducted “very fair.” An audience of thousands had gathered on the shore, and the bay was filled with hundreds of canoes. Many of these had a girl in front who “drew all our people upon the Gunwells to see them,” and although some of the sailors were worried about the large numbers of stones they could see lying in the bottoms of the canoes, most did not believe that the islanders had “any Bade Intention against us,” especially as “all the men seemd as hearty and merry as the Girls.”
Then a large double canoe carrying an obviously important figure put off from shore, and, at the same time, a silence fell upon the Tahitian crowd. The dignitary pulled on a red mantle and thrust a staff wrapped in white cloth into the air, and all at once the Tahitians began pelting the Dolphin with rocks—so many that in a few seconds “all our Decks was full of Great and small stones, and several of our men cut and Bruisd.” The British were slow to react, but when the Tahitians “gave another shout and powerd in the stones lyke hail,” they collected their wits and fired the great guns. The effect was dramatic. The explosion of sound, the flash of fire, and the rattle of shot on the canoes struck the Tahitians with “terror and amazement,” and they cried, so the Revered Cover tells us, “as with one voice, Eatooa harremye! Eatooa harremye! The God is come! The God is come! as they supposed, pouring thunder and lightning upon them.”
The battle was fierce but short. The British fired grape and shot into the canoes, hitting even those who had retreated to what the Tahitians clearly believed was a safe distance. The gunners took aim, in particular, at the large ceremonial canoe, hitting it squarely amidships and cutting it in two. At this, the Tahitian armada disbanded—so fast, wrote Wallis, that within half an hour there was not a single canoe left in the bay.
ALTHOUGH THE BATTLE of Matavai Bay mirrored European contact experiences in many parts of Polynesia—New Zealand, Rurutu, and Hawai‘i, to name just a few—the story that ultimately made its way back to Europe was not one of attacks and ambushes and fleets of stone-throwing warriors in canoes. It was a tale—familiar to us even now—of beauty and fascination, a story, for the most part, about Polynesian girls.
After the failure of their assault on the Dolphin, the Tahitians made no further attempts to attack the British and instead sought to engage and placate them. Wallis struck up a friendship with a powerful local chiefess named Purea, who had a political agenda of her own and who seems to have been interested in co-opting this new and awful form of power. The rest of the crew went from openly fearing the Tahitians to openly consorting with them. On his arrival in Tahiti, Wallis had established an official market for foodstuffs, based on a currency of different-sized nails. But once his sailors had begun to recover from scurvy, what they wanted even more than fruit and vegetables was sex, and by the end of their second week in Tahiti a black market had emerged. The currency of choice was nails, inflation quickly set in, and within a matter of weeks the whole thing was so out of hand that every cleat in the Dolphin had been drawn, two-thirds of the men were sleeping on the deck (having traded away the nails used to sling their hammocks), and the carpenter was saying to anyone who would listen that he feared for the integrity of the ship.
It is possible that, had Wallis been the only European to return with stories of Tahiti, the narrative might have been somewhat more nuanced: a story of light and dark, of amity and aggression, of both love and war. But the era of Polynesian isolation was over: just eight months after Wallis’s appearance, a second group of ships arrived, this time from France. They were commanded by Louis-Antoine