Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania, 1511-1850

Bronwen Douglas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137305893
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Blending global scope with local depth, this book throws new light on important themes. Spanning four centuries and vast space, it combines the history of ideas with particular histories of encounters between European voyagers and Indigenous people in Oceania (Island Southeast Asia, New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands).

Part I

‘Indians’, ‘Negroes’, & ‘Savages’ in Terra Australis

1

Before Races: Barbarity, Civility, & Salvation in the Mar del Sur

Voyages of the Portuguese, Spanish, & Dutch 1511–1616

In the third edition of De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa (‘On the natural varieties of mankind’), his landmark study of diversity within a common humanity, Blumenbach (1795:302–22) settled his long emergent fivefold classification of the ‘principal’ human varieties by naming them ‘Caucasian’, ‘Mongolian’, ‘Ethiopian’, ‘American’, and ‘Malay’. He justified the final term linguistically since the great majority of this variety spoke the ‘Malay idiom’, notwithstanding their dispersal across the immense space between Madagascar and Easter Island and the great variation in ‘beauty’ and other bodily attributes which saw the Tahitians divided into two ‘diverse stocks (races)’. One was ‘paler’ and facially very like Europeans, the other comparable in colour and features to ‘Mulattos’. This second Tahitian stock resembled Islanders seen in the western Pacific Ocean, amongst whom the New Hebrideans (modern ni-Vanuatu) ‘gradually’ approached the Papuas (‘Papuans’) and the New Hollanders who themselves merged imperceptibly with the ‘Ethiopian variety’. Accordingly, they might ‘not unfittingly’ be assigned to that category in Blumenbach’s ‘distribution’ which made the Malay variety transitional between the Caucasian – his original ‘medial variety of mankind’ – and one of the ‘two extremes’, the Ethiopian. Prime illustration of ‘insensible transition’ within and between varieties, the Malay confirmed his principled argument that humanity constituted a single species.

Blumenbach underpinned his case empirically in three footnotes (1795:320–1, notes x, y, z) referring to recent voyage narratives. One acknowledges Banks, chief naturalist on Cook’s first voyage of 1768–71 (Hawkesworth 1773, III:373), and the English philologist William Marsden (1782) as the first to point out the vast geographical span of what modern linguists call the Austronesian language family (Pawley 2007:20–3).¹ The second cites Bougainville (1771:214) as authority for the binary division of the Tahitians into different stocks – the bracketed term races was Bougainville’s own. The third lauds the ‘immortal’ Portuguese-born Spanish navigator Quirós (1770:164) for having ‘carefully differentiated the variety of men inhabiting the Pacific Islands’ by saying that some were albidos (‘whitish’), while comparing others to ‘Mulattos’, and others again to ‘Ethiopians’.

In appropriating voyagers’ descriptions of Pacific Islanders to a taxonomic agenda, Blumenbach succumbed to the common historical snare of anachronism by projecting his own classification backwards on to earlier representations. Bougainville’s circumnavigation of the globe in 1766–9 was the first great scientific voyage. The word race rarely features in his published narrative (1771) and always in its multivalent 18th-century sense rather than with the potentially segregative biological meaning that Blumenbach himself was in the process of formalizing (Douglas 2008a:37–49). In retrospect in the narrative – but not in his contemporary shipboard journal (1977) – Bougainville (1771:214) described the populace of Tahiti as comprising ‘two very different races of men’. The first, most numerous, was tall, beautifully proportioned, European of feature and a sunburned ‘white’ in colour. The ‘second race’ was medium sized, resembled ‘mulattos’ in ‘colour and features’, and had ‘stiff, frizzy hair’. Yet both shared the same language and customs and seemed to mix ‘without distinction’, with no correlation between physical appearance and social status or intellect. Ahutoru, a high-ranking man who accompanied the voyagers back to France and was their key source of ethnographic and linguistic information, was of ‘this second race’ but made up in ‘intelligence’ what he lacked in ‘beauty’ (Nassau-Siegen 1977:398; Hervé 1914:212–13).

Quirós had twice set out across the Mar del Sur from the Spanish vice-royalty of Peru on expeditions of colonization (in 1595) and discovery (in 1605), latterly as commander. In his best-known text, the so-called ‘eighth’ memorial submitted to the king of Spain in 1610 seeking royal support for a further voyage, Quirós (1973a:38–9) catalogued a broad, locally varied spectrum of skin and hair colour in people he had seen and heard about in the eastern and western Pacific Islands: ‘their colours are white, brown [loros] mulattos, and Indians, and mixtures of one and the others, the hair of some is black [negros], thick and loose, of others is twisted and frizzy, and of others very fair and thin’. This passage does not ‘compare’ some Islanders to the Ethiopians, as Blumenbach thought, deceived by Dalrymple’s mistranslation of Quirós’s Spanish adjective loro as the English noun ‘negroes’.² The eighth memorial was quickly translated into most major European languages and helped foster widespread belief in Terra Australis for more than 150 years.³

Indeed, Quirós could not have conceived and Bougainville did not propose a racial typology of Oceanian humanity. From the Renaissance to the late Enlightenment, the subjects of every expanding European realm took for granted their own ancestral, religious, and civil superiority but the words available for human description remained nominalist and comparative rather than abstract or racially categorical. These lexicons were also parochial, inegalitarian, and denigratory of feared or reviled persons – Jews, Moors (Muslims), infidels, heretics, pagans, Negroes, barbarians, manual workers, peasants, witches, wild men, and so forth. Several of Bougainville’s shipmates depicted Tahitians in terms no less fuzzy than those of Quirós. Lieutenant Jean-Louis Caro (1977:325) reported that some were ‘mulatto, some whitish, others reddish and the rest black’. The surgeon François Vivez (1977:242) saw ‘several nuances between mulatto and very white’, all with ‘black frizzy’ hair but none with ‘wool’ – code for Negro.

In Quirós’s memorials, variations in the skin colour of people he encountered in islands across the Mar del Sur were rhetorical tokens in his tenacious campaign to prove the reality of an unknown southern land ripe for conversion, exploitation, and colonization by Spain. In an earlier memorial, Quirós (1990:37–9) argued that the ‘disparity in colours’ of people he had seen in the Marquesas must prove their ‘communication with other peoples’ and the necessary nearby presence of a tierra firme (‘mainland, continent’).⁴ In yet another, Quirós (1625:1427–8, 1430) recounted how the ‘Lord’ of Taumako (Duff group, southeast Solomon Islands) had given him sailing directions for ‘more than sixty islands, and a large land’ whose inhabitants and products he described in detail. This Indigenous knowledge of ‘many islands’ populated by ‘many peoples’ of ‘various colours, with hair long, fair, black, curled, frizzy’, provided further ammunition that ‘in that hidden quarter of the globe, there are very large and extended provinces’. In the eighth memorial, Quirós (1973a:38–9) again strategically invoked the variegated appearance of South Sea Islanders as ‘certain’ signs of the ‘vicinity of more governed people’ and the occurrence of ‘much commerce and intercourse’.

Before races

The introductory section epitomizes the main discursive backdrop of this book – the emergence of racial taxonomy at the end of the 18th century out of the holistic but inchoate natural history of man of the late Enlightenment. In challenging Blumenbach’s presumption that voyagers’ earlier descriptions represent real racial categories, I emphasized certain resonances between Renaissance and Enlightenment perspectives on man, in implied comparison with the 19th-century science of race. Yet, just as seemingly radical differences need not connote epistemic rupture, so commonalities or analogies should not be mistaken for unrelieved sameness. Instead, particular representations must be contextualized within unstable contemporary patterns of meaning, sentiment, and faith. In this and the next chapter, I distinguish two preliminary phases in the semantic history of race, without implying a teleological trajectory with the science of race as preordained outcome. These phases bracket an earlier, less dramatic discursive transition apparent in western Europe by the late 17th century – a shift from a predominantly theological ontology to a more rationalist one, with related lexical changes.⁵ My brief outline of the first phase and its relationship to the ethnohistory of Oceania further problematizes the present realism of race by highlighting the word’s versatility and historical contingency. Moreover, it broadens my enquiry beyond its mainly French and British focus by acknowledging important European antecedents. This chapter spans just over a century – from 1511, when Europeans definitively entered Oceania after the Portuguese conquest of Malacca, to 1616, when the voyage of Le Maire and Schouten in search of the Zuytlandt (‘South land’) ended at Iacatra or Jayakěrta (soon to be renamed Batavia by Dutch conquerors, now Indonesia’s capital Jakarta).

I stress that 16th- and 17th-century Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch assessments of people newly encountered in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the South Sea were not racial in either the modern scientific sense of the term race or its present popular meanings. Rather, such judgements took shape from the mid-15th century in the empirical context of a radical expansion in overseas encounters and in the wake of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In the process, parochial, hierarchical, but universalized religious fundamentalisms drew on an ancient series of classical or Christian moral dichotomies – civilized and barbarian, essential and accidental, pure and polluted, white and black, godly and satanic, and so forth. Rationalized as natural by contemporary neo-Aristotelian science, religious and social bigotry was stiffened by specific histories – of protracted Iberian conflict with ‘infidel’ north African invaders and of the developing European identification of ‘heathen’, black, supposedly uncivilized Africans with chattel slavery (Russell-Wood 1978). Many Europeans, including Quirós, believed American, Antipodean, and African ‘barbarians’ to be redeemable by Christianity but saw no contradiction in dispossessing, enslaving, or even killing them. The climatic and humoral theories dominant from classical times to the early 19th century attributed differences in physical appearance, including skin colour, to the effects of geography and external agencies which, at least in principle, were reversible or surmountable.⁶ But such theories also implied that appearance was no reliable index of a person’s ancestry or estate. This empirical uncertainty may help clarify the adoption by nervous civil and ecclesiastical authorities in post-Reconquista Spain and Portugal of draconian judicial methods – notably the Inquisition – to identify, repress, and expel supposed potential dissidents from Catholic orthodoxy.

Parallel to Blumenbach, some historians – especially liberal antiracists in the aftermath of World War II – mistook early modern Iberian expressions of hierarchy and anxiety about difference for actual or embryonic racial or class prejudice. For example, the imperial historian Charles Boxer (1975:136) defined the Portuguese phrase limpeza de sangue and its Spanish cognate limpieza de sangre as: ‘“Purity of blood” from religious, racial and class standpoints. Muslim, Heretic, Black African and white working-class ancestry all being regarded as defiling or degrading’. Challenging the Portuguese belief that they ‘never had any racial prejudice worth mentioning’, Boxer (1963; 1969:3, 249, 260–2) questioned their longstanding preoccupation with ‘purity of blood’ and deplored their ‘hatred and intolerance’ towards ‘alien creeds and races’ from the mid-15th century. He used such phrases as ‘stringent racial and class requirements’ with respect to the legal conditions placed on candidates for Portuguese public, ecclesiastical, military, or administrative posts and for admission to guilds and military or religious orders. He argued that discrimination was originally ‘as much religious as racial’ when directed mainly against persons of Jewish, Muslim, or ‘heretic’ (Protestant) descent; it became explicitly racial by the early 17th century as specific legal discrimination was directed against Negroes and Mulattos in the context of the expanding slave trade; while a class element was manifest throughout in proscriptions on candidature by those engaged in ‘unworthy’ occupations and manual labour.

This proposed trajectory from religious and class to racial and class discrimination is both misleading and ahistorical. The feature common to Jews, Moors, and Gentiles (‘heathens’ or ‘pagans’) during the Renaissance and early modern era was that they were not Christian. Some infidels – notably the Chinese and the Japanese – were acknowledged as civilized while barbarians of all descriptions were thought to lack civility as well as true religion. Notwithstanding the damning liaison of blackness with African enslavement, skin colour was an ambiguous element in the constitution of prejudice due to its theoretical impermanence. Moreover, European workers, peasants, and inhabitants of remote districts were usually thought to be darker than persons of noble birth and high estate. The Iberian genealogical ideology of ‘purity’ meant that even conversion could not extinguish the ancestral stain of ‘infected’ or ‘impure’ blood and the ‘infamy’ or ‘disgrace’ it incurred. The Spanish term infamia could be a synonym for villanía (‘villainy’) which, like the English word, historically connoted low birth, rusticity, and depravity (RAE 1726–39, VI:487–8; Stevens 1726, II). Ignoring or discounting these intricate contemporary webs of meaning, sentiment, science, and history, Boxer at once anachronized and reified ‘race’ and ‘class’. Not only did his usage wrench them out of time, since neither word began to acquire its modern meaning until the late 18th century (Williams 1985:60–9, 248–50), but his oppositional logic granted them the reality of concrete entities – ‘races’ and ‘classes’.

Grounds for this critique litter Boxer’s texts. For instance (1969:260), he translated purity requirements for ordination in the archbishopric of Bahia, Brazil, as the need for candidates to prove they were ‘free from any racial stain of “Jew, Moor, Morisco, Mulatto, heretic or any other race disallowed as contaminated” (outra alguma infecta naçao reprovada)’. Yet racial and race are inappropriate terms here. Heretics were not a race and the original vernacular wording does not call them one. Rather, like Jews, Moors, and Mulattos, they are nação infecta, an ‘impure nation’ or ‘people’. In contemporary dictionaries, the Portuguese noun nação could be inherently negative – the phrase gente de nação (‘people of the nation’) denoted so-called ‘new Christians’, the relentlessly persecuted descendants of Jews forcibly converted at the end of the 15th century. The term nação was also a synonym for raça (‘race’), in the genealogical sense of ‘descendants’ or ‘lineage’, and for casta (‘lineage’, ‘stock’). Casta, however, was used much more than raça which was applied to people rarely and negatively. Translated into English as ‘breed’, it was ‘properly confined to the brutal species’. The phrase ter raça (‘have race’) is glossed as ‘have the blood of a Moor, or a Jew’.⁷

Boxer’s antiracism conflated a range of Portuguese terms with specific derogatory contemporary meanings under the presumed umbrella of the modern idea of race. Thus (1963:31–2), he collapsed social estate into race by using the English phrase ‘on a basis of complete racial equality’ to render the Portuguese não ha distinção de pessoas,… Nobres et Plebeos (‘has no distinction of persons,… Nobles and Plebeians’). I fully acknowledge the dehumanizing brutality of Iberian religious persecution and ominous nexus of colonialism and slavery, soon emulated by other early modern European states. But to reduce the multifaceted Iberian obsession with ‘purity’ – of blood, ancestry, birth, religion, estate, occupation, physical conformation, and so forth – to the blanket charge of ‘racism’ is to foreclose rigorous historical investigation into what these varied conditions might have meant, in practice as well as in law and precept.⁸ As Boxer (1969:260–2, 266–71) acknowledged, dispensations could be obtained for ‘contaminated’ blood, as for other legal impediments such as ‘illegitimate birth and physical defo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Indigenous Presence to the Science of Race
• Part I ‘Indians’, ‘Negroes’, & ‘Savages’ in Terra Australis
• Part II Race, Classification, & Encounters in Océanie
• Conclusion: Race in 1850/Oceania in 1850289
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index