White Women in Fiji, 1835–1930 by Claudia Knapman

Author:Claudia Knapman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction/General
ISBN: 9781921902383
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2008-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

IMAGES OF WHITE AND BLACK AMONGST EUROPEANS IN FIJI

There are numerous expressions of the various aspects of British racial ideology amongst Europeans in Fiji. The romance of island life, interpreted within the framework of eighteenth century philosophies of nature, shaped the earliest European expectations about contact with Pacific peoples. By the 1790s features of island society unpleasant to Europeans led to mixed feelings about Pacific man. As late as 1872, visiting lawyer Richard Philp remarked of Cakobau’s son Ratu Timoci, ‘I thought I never saw a finer specimen of the “noble savage” than were he and his retinue’.22 But, in general, stories of shipwreck and massacre Fijian wars and ‘heathen’ customs promoted the image of the Fijian as a savage without nobility.

The main object of missionaries going to Fiji was to save the souls of the degenerate. Convinced that their religion was wholly right, those who did not convert were regarded as ‘poor deluded creatures’. This judgement of spiritual inadequacy influenced missionary judgement of Fijian culture. A lack of progress in ‘civilisation’ was seen as the natural corollary to unsaved souls.23 When ‘civilisation’ failed to follow conversion automatically, explanations were sought in terms of a racial view of the Fijians’ moral worth and intellectual capacity. Fijians were ranked above the Papuans by many missionaries and, despite doubt about their chances of survival, some ranked them above the Tongans. But in pessimistic mood in 1894, Frederick Langham estimated a low achievement level as inevitable with people who failed to see ‘the disgusting vile filthiness of their conduct’. In either case—spiritual alienation from God or racial status—the Fijian was in need of missionary help. And popular religious writing promoted the colour contrast of evil and goodness.24

Well into the 1870s there were sufficient instances of hostility to reinforce this image of the Fijian as ‘notorious for lying, thieving, murder and cannibalism’, ‘a half naked savage’ with ‘filthy habits and deceitful ways’.25 This allowed for calculated sensationalism in travel accounts by those who had been Camping among Cannibals.26 American Henry Adams described his experiences in 1891 in terms of contact with primitive violence: ‘Our attendants at meals are three gigantic Fijians in barbaric want of costume, and cannibalistic masses of hair, who smile kindly on us since they are deprived of their natural right of eating us’.27 Even in the twentieth century the Fijian as savage was not at rest. Beatrice Grimshaw’s adventures in 1907 appeared more intrepid, since ‘the Fijian was the most determined cannibal known to savage history’.28

Early settlers did not indulge in the exhilaration of contact with converted cannibals, but confronted the ‘savage’ in terms of rights to land and labour. Her Majesty’s Consul described the settler of the 1860s:

[He] feels he is in a new country, is apt to look down upon his neighbour of the aboriginal race, and prone to hold the maxim that to get whatever he can in such circumstances is the true morality, simply because he is the civilised white man.29

At their worst settler ‘rights’ justified

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