Unwrapping Gods: Illuminating Encounters with Gods, Comets and Missionaries

Nuku, Maia

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_13

Maia Nuku⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print ((PERCP))

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Abstract

Missionary rhetoric employed metaphors of darkness and light to emphasize the transformation of heathen souls to enlightened spirituality. This was reinforced visually in the islands of Tahiti by London missionaries, who deployed the apparatus of natural science and philosophy current in metropolitan England (camera obscura, orrery) to perform public ‘ocular demonstrations’ for island audiences. Nuku examines the implications of these dramatic visual experiments for Pacific islanders who also viewed celestial entities (comets, stars, sun and moon) as embodiments of the divine. Contrasting instruments of Enlightenment science with the complex materiality of Polynesian ‘idols’ that were displayed concurrently in London’s Mission Museum, this novel analysis not only recovers crucial aspects of the evangelical encounter from a Polynesian perspective, but also demonstrates the richness of knowledge embedded in the artifacts themselves.

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Notes

1.
The London Missionary Society (subsequently LMS) was a non-denominational missionary society, largely Congregationalist in outlook, formed in 1795 by evangelical Anglicans and Nonconformists, which established missions in the Pacific, India, Africa and China. Original correspondence, reports and journals along with edited publications relating to the transactions of the LMS are housed in the archive of the Council for World Mission (subsequently CWM), Archives and Special Collections, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
2.
Missionary Sketches III (Oct 1818), CWM, 3.
3.
N.Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: University of Harvard Press, 1991), 154.
4.
Missionary Sketches III (Oct 1818), CWM, 2.
5.
J.Wilson, A Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean in the Years 1796, 1797 and 1798, in the Ship ‘Duff’, Commanded by Captain James Wilson (London: T. Chapman, 1799), 166.
6.
Jefferson, 20 April 1801, South Sea Journals, CWM; also cited in C. Newbury (ed.), History of the Tahitian Mission 1799–1830 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1961), xliii.
7.
J.C. Beaglehole, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks 1768–1771, 2 vols. (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1962), I, 316.
8.
Tupaia was a high-born Ra’iatean chief schooled in the ritual arts, navigation and oratory. Tupaia accompanied Captain Cook onboard HMS Endeavour as the expedition continued from Tahiti to New Zealand and beyond, proving himself invaluable as an intermediary during Cook’s various encounters and negotiations with islanders and Maori. He did not survive the voyage, dying unfortunately in Batavia in November 1770, but his remarkable visual legacy remains, which includes his own chart of the Polynesian islands, a facsimile of which is in the British Library (‘Tupaia’s Chart of the Society Islands with Otaheite in the centre, July-August 1769’, British Library 21592C). A suite of further pencil and watercolour illustrations, also held in the British Library (Maori bartering a crayfish, Tupaia, 1769, BL, Add. MS 15508, f. 11; Chief Mourner, Tupaia, 1769, BL, Add. MS 15508, f. 9), give us unique and invaluable insights into the ritual and daily life of eighteenth-century islanders. Refer also to Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (London, 2003).
9.
Beaglehole, Endeavour Journal, I, 318.
10.
Refer to T. Henry, Ancient Tahiti, Bishop Museum Bulletin No. 48. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1928); A. Babadzan, Les dépouilles des dieux: essai sur la religion tahitienne a l’époque de la découverte (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’Homme, 1993), 89–41; A. Kaeppler, ‘Containers of Divinity’, in S. Hooper (ed.), Polynesian Art: Histories and Meanings in Cultural Contexts, Special Issue, Journal of Polynesian Society 116, 2 (2007), 97–130.
11.
LMS missionary J.M. Orsmond devoted a full 20 pages of his manuscript ‘Tahitian Texts’ to entries concerning ‘aha which explained the binding techniques associated with coconut fibre cord, red feathers and the chanting of prayers. The dynamic process of assemblage was as crucial as the thing itself’. According to Orsmond, aha atua did not only refer to the sennit used to make a god, but to ‘the whole round of prayers offered to him’ (Sydney: Mitchell Library, 1862).
12.
T. Henry, Ancient Tahiti, 336–8.
13.
Refer to A. Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
14.
Missionary Sketches III (Oct 1818), CWM, 3.
15.
W. Phillips, Catalogue of the Missionary Museum (London: London Missionary Society, 1826), frontispiece.
16.
Ibid.
17.
W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 4 vols. (Rutland: Tuttle, 1831 [1969]), I, 406.
18.
J. Davies, in Newbury, History of the Tahitian Mission, 177.
19.
Ibid., 101.
20.
Phillips, Catalogue of the Missionary Museum, iv.
21.
Ibid., iii.
22.
Ibid., 19.
23.
Ibid., 45.
24.
S. Sivasundaram, Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795–1850. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
25.
Extract of a Letter of Messrs Tyerman and Bennet, Quarterly Chronicle of Transactions of the Missionary Society (TMS), III, CWM, 146.
26.
Report to Directors, 1825, CWM, 162.
27.
Letter Thomas Haweis to George Burder, 6 August 1819, CWM, South Seas Incoming.
28.
Report from Threlkeld and Williams, 11 November 1822, CWM, South Seas Incoming, Box 3 Folder 8.
29.
J.Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Seas; with Remarks upon the Natural History of the Islands Origin, Languages, Traditions, and Usages of the Inhabitants. (London: J. Snow, 1841), 37–8.
30.
J. Montgomery, Journals of Voyages and Travels by Revd. Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet (London: F.Westley and A.H.Davis, 1831), I, 507–8.
31.
Henry, Ancient Tahiti (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1928), 178.
32.
The suffix to Ta’aroa—Upo’o Vahu—refers to ‘eight heads’, which may have been a reference to the eight political units or chiefly districts that formerly made up the regional landscape. In a fascinating convergence, eight noticeably raised knots in the grain of the wood turned out in fact to be eight iron nails, driven into the sculpture in several places (noted by Steven Hooper and Maia Nuku on close examination of the sculpture in 2006; refer to S. Hooper 2007, ‘Embodying Divinity: The Life of A’a’, in S. Hooper (ed.), Polynesian Art: Histories and Meanings in Cultural Contexts, Special Issue, Journal of the Polynesian Society 116, 2), 179, f. 24. See also A’a: a deity from Polynesia</Emphasis>; Julie Adams, Steven Hooper and Maia Nuku. The British Museum Press (2016).
33.
Letter Threlkeld to LMS directors, 8 July 1822, South Seas Incoming, CWM.
34.
Letter from Threlkeld and Williams dated 18 October 1821; cited in Montgomery, Journals and Voyages, I, 507–8.
35.
Henry, Ancient Tahiti, 178.
36.
Ibid.
37.
Candlenuts (Aleurites moluccana) have a high oil content; when threaded onto the stalk of the coconut palm leaf, they made effective candles complete with wick; refer to Henry, Ancient Tahiti, 246; C. Orliac, Fare et habitat à Tahiti (Marseille: Éditions Parenthèses, 2000), 94.
38.
Montgomery, Journals of Voyages and Travels, I, 512.
39.
J. Wilson, A Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean in the Years 1796, 1797 and 1798, in the Ship ‘Duff’, Commanded by Captain James Wilson (London: T. Chapman, 1799), 345.
40.
Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises, 37–8.
41.
Ibid.
42.
Ellis, Polynesian Researches, II, 184.
43.
Ibid.
44.
Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises, 47.
45.
Ibid., 47–8.
46.
Missionary Sketches III (Oct 1818), CWM.
47.
B.G. Corney (ed.), The Quest and Occupation of Tahiti by Emissaries of Spain During the Years 1772–6. (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1916), I, 50.
48.
M. Jessop [Nuku], ‘Unwrapping Gods: Encounters with Gods and Missionaries in Tahiti and the Austral Islands, 1797–1830’ (Doctoral thesis, Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia, 2007), 161–98.
49.
Henry, Ancient Tahiti, 161.
50.
Ellis, Polynesian Researches, III, 168.
51.
J. Jefferson, 26 May 1799, South Sea Journals, CWM; cited in Newbury, History of the Tahitian Mission, xliii.
52.
Missionary Sketches III (Oct 1818), CWM.
53.
J. Davies, A Tahitian and English Dictionary (Tahiti: LMS Press, 1851), 99.
54.
Ibid., 24.
55.
Ibid., 99.
56.
Henry, Ancient Tahiti, 227.
57.
D. Oliver, missionary card index, card 255; cited in Newbury, History of the Tahitian Mission.
58.
Ibid.
59.
Montgomery, Journals of Voyages and Travels, I, 283.
60.
Ibid.
61.
Ibid.
62.
Ibid.
63.
Pomare to Haweis, Tahiti, 3 October 1818, CWM, South Seas Incoming, Box 3A Jacket B Folder 7.
64.
J Morrison [1791], in V. Smith and N. Thomas (eds.), Mutiny and Aftermath (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2013), 197.
65.
S. Schaffer, ‘ “On Seeing Me Write”: Inscription Devices in the South Seas’, Representations, 97 (Winter 2007), 90–122.
66.
J. Newell, ‘Irresistible Objects: Collecting in the Pacific and Australia in the Reign of George III’, in K. Sloan (ed.), Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (London: British Museum, 2003), 246–57.
67.
A. Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in J. Coote and A. Shelton (eds.), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 40–63.

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Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave, 10028, New York, NY, USA
Maia Nuku

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University of California Presidential Chair University of California, Riverside, Riverside, USA
Adriana Craciun
Professor of History and Philosophy of Science University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Simon Schaffer

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Nuku, M. (2016). Unwrapping Gods: Illuminating Encounters with Gods, Comets and Missionaries. In: Craciun, A., Schaffer, S. (eds) The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_13

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_13
Published: 25 August 2016
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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Online ISBN: 978-1-137-44379-3
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