Abstract
This chapter highlights Stevenson’s fascination with the colonial discourse that represented Marquesans as fierce “cannibals.” The chapter discusses In the South Seas and “The Feast of Famine: Marquesan Manners” alongside photographs depicting so-called savages and cannibals. The chapter situates Stevenson’s representation of the Marquesas within European conceptions of “cannibalism” as a Gothic trope, but it argues that imaginary and threatened “cannibalism” served as a bulwark against colonial violence. In addition to the topic of “cannibalism,” which structures the chapter, the case studies examine photographs depicting the relationships between a dispossessed chief named Moipu, his rival Paaaeua, and Lloyd Osbourne. The photographs are contextualized within Marquesan notions of kinship and name exchange and serve as potent examples of the clash between cultural performance and colonial ideology.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
According to Ivory, Aylic Marin was the pseudonym for Édouard Petit (1856–1904) (2004, 126).
- 3.
For an extensive analysis of Stevenson’s Gothic writing, see Reid (2006, 77–105).
- 4.
“The Feast of Famine: Marquesan Manner” first appeared in Ballads (1890). My citations are from Lewis’ edition of The Collected Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson (2003).
- 5.
I use this term to denote the period just prior to Euro-American contact with the Pacific Islands, or before significant foreign influence had taken place.
- 6.
For an overview of Marquesan archaeology and prehistoric settlement, see Kirch (2002, 257–67).
- 7.
To the best of my knowledge, Ratmanov’s Pacific diaries have yet to be published and translated from their original Russian.
- 8.
It is worth stressing that, to this day, stereotypes of Marquesans still include notions of barbarism and cannibalism. The most staggering example is the international media coverage of the German traveler Stefan Ramin’s murder in Nuku Hiva in 2011. The Marquesan man who was charged with Ramin’s murder was portrayed as a “cannibal” despite the total lack of forensic evidence.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
Abel Dupetit-Thouars (1793–1864) voyaged around the world in 1836–1839. He first saw the Marquesas in 1838. After his return to France in 1839 he was promoted to Admiral. He left France for the Marquesas in 1841 (Fontanès 2010, 23). As Dupetit-Thouars was taking possession of Nuku Hiva, the American whaler Acushnet dropped anchor in Taiohae Bay. On board were the deserters Herman Melville and Richard Tobias.
- 12.
For Radiguet’s illustrations of the Marquesas, see Fontanès (2010).
- 13.
Stevenson was well-versed in the major eighteenth-century Pacific travel accounts. According to Hillier (1989), Stevenson “had access to his father’s library, which included such books as Captain Woodes Rogers’ collected voyage accounts, The Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, The Female Bluebeard, probably the voyage logs of Captain Cook , and possibly many other books of exploration and adventure” (7). In unpublished drafts for The South Seas book (Beinecke, GEN MSS. 808), Stevenson refers directly to Vancouver’s Pacific voyages, Cook’s death in Hawai‘i, and Krusenstern’s arrival in the Marquesas. Moreover, in the 1890s a visitor to Vailima wrote to The Spectator that in Stevenson’s library, the majority of travel books dealt “with the Pacific. From Captain Cook down, it would be hard to name a Pacific travel book that has not found itself on the shelves at Vailima” (Hammerton 1910, 113).
- 14.
Although Stevenson does not assign each “epoch” a name (ISS, 34) he has in mind the time prior to sustained contact between Europeans and Marquesans and the period following French annexation. Similarly, E. B. Tylor (1884), in his Preface to George Turner’s Samoa: A Hundred Years Ago and Long Before, remarks that “[f]rom the anthropologist’s point of view the interest of Polynesian life belongs especially to the native period, before the islanders had passed out of the peculiar barbaric condition which Cook’s Voyages made known to the civilized world” (ix).
- 15.
- 16.
For a discussion of Stevenson’s engagement with the theory of degeneration, see Reid (2006, 8).
- 17.
For a discussion of the intersection between racial degeneration and cannibalism, see Brantlinger (2011, 31).
- 18.
Edmond (1997) explains that in the context of the Pacific Islands, at the end of the nineteenth century, “evolutionary explanations of the origins of the races” were “applied to human societies for confirmation of Anglo-Saxon superiority” (156).
- 19.
Accompanying “The Feast of Famine: Marquesan Manners” in Ballads is “The Song of Rahéro,” which was based on a Tahitian legend. For more on Stevenson’s Polynesian ballads, see Jolly (2013) and Henville (2012). Hillier (1989) observes that in “The Feast of Famine,” Stevenson’s goal was to remain faithful “to Polynesian oral tradition rather than appeal to western tastes or patterns of thinking” (66–7).
- 20.
In Part II of his journal of the Casco cruise (Huntington, MS. 2412 ), Stevenson includes several tales of Captain Hart and his plantation overseer, Robert Stewart, told him about violence and cannibalism in the Marquesas. Some are presented in Chapter XII (The Story of a Plantation) of In the South Seas.
- 21.
Eyriaud des Vergnes (1877) remarks on the potential for successful cotton plantations and refers specifically to Stewart’s success at the Atimaono plantation in Tahiti (16).
- 22.
Eyriaud des Vergnes describes this distilled alcoholic beverage (“eau-de-vie de coco”) as the source of violent acts such as assassinations (1877, 47).
- 23.
For Colley (2004), these photographs of Osbourne are not self-portraits; rather, she claims that the “pieces of string” that appear to be tied to Osbourne’s finger are there to “hold him still” (64).
- 24.
I borrow the term “cultural cross-dressing” from Tobin (1999, 7).
- 25.
The French government’s reaction to the annexation of the Marquesas was largely negative since the archipelago was not thought to possess considerable commercial potential (Fontanès 2010, 26).
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Manfredi, C. (2018). “We Savages”: Cannibal Performances in the Marquesas. In: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Impressions. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98313-4_2
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