The Accidental Ethnographer (2e)—Ocean and Isle: The Tongan Archipelago

One year ago on Round and Square (4 June 2011)—Living and Learning: Rules and Regulations 
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "The Accidental Ethnographer." (Coming Soon)
Click below for other posts from Ocean and Isle:

Isle 1            Isle  2            Isle 3           Isle 4            Isle 5            Isle 6            Isle 7

[a] Tonga RF

I gave a lecture at the Doylestown Historical Society on June 1st, as part of Doylestown, Pennsylvania's big bicentennial celebration. The subject was the American explorer and evangelist William Edgar Geil (1865-1925). This is part of a larger project that I am working on this summer in Doylestown with the help of Beloit College anthropology major Megan Nyquist '14. As I did a few weeks ago in preparation for another lecture (on another subject), I am posting some of Geil's own writings. This was enormously helpful to me the last time I tried it, and I think it is worth another try. I will, over the course of my summer research, post my lecture and some of the early results of the research Megan and I are doing. In the meantime, though, I want to start the "Accidental Ethnographer" series with William Geil's own words. I will post two or three readings from each of Geil's dozen books over the course of May and June.

[b] Shoreview RF

William Edgar Geil was a world famous figure in his day, and the reasons he has been lost to history (from his death until now) are as interesting as the underpinnings of his fame. Here is a very brief overview. In a day before anthropology or Chinese (or African or Micronesian) studies had a toehold in world universities, William Edgar Geil traveled the world, took extensive notes, returned to Doylestown, and wrote books. Depending on how you count them, he wrote almost a dozen—many of them thick and substantial in ways that a turn of the (last) century reader would understand, even if many people today would not. He traveled across central Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century, spent a year in Australia and New Guinea, and then found an abiding love for the study of China (which is where I "met" him, in a manner of speaking). He traveled the length of the Great Wall, journeyed the Yangzi River from Shanghai into southeast Asia, visited all of China's provincial capitals, and is the only Westerner to have written a book about his travels to all five sacred mountains of China.

He wrote about it all, and he took pictures. The former is not without problem; the latter is easily his legacy. It is all a fascinating picture of an American abroad in a peculiarly resonant time in American history—from the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 to the end of World War I. This series will grow as my research does, but let's get started with Geil's own words—a little from each of his published books.

 ***  ***

                                      He should be studied in his native haunts, and not described in a 
                                      situation in which he was never intended by nature to cut a figure.  
                                      To do so is misleading.[1]
 

[c] Repeatedly RF

Wow. William Edgar Geil is never more compassionate and understanding—although, to be sure, some passages equal the tone of this—than in the last paragraphs of today's snippet from his second big book, Ocean and Isle.[1] As I have stated repeatedly in these posts—and in public lectures from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania—William Edgar Geil was complicated. One moment, he seems to be propping up tired institutions and racial images that were problematic even in his own day. The next moment, he is urging us to look at (for example) the Tongans in a way that is easily as compassionate and understanding as any early twenty-first century anthropologist might urge.

You see (don't worry; you will hear this often on these "pages") William Edgar Geil was complicated. Every human life is pretty complex. Geil's was especially so. Why that might be is still a question to be pursued on the topical screens of "The Accidental Ethnographer." Let's take a look at Geil's description and defense of the Tongans and their archipelago.

Ocean and Isle—The Tongan Archipelago

William Edgar Geil (1902) 

[d] Islandreef RF

THE TONGANS

The one thing that seems to have impressed itself on the minds of the natives was the visit of Captain Cook. Though not the discoverer of Tonga, yet his visit seems to have been the dawning of a new era. Many hold the Friendly Islander to be of Asiatic origin, and offer as proof their customs—having cities of refuge, circumcision, and many of the hygienic regulations of the Holy Scriptures. The population of Tonga was evidently much greater in days that are gone than at present, the remains of numerous towns and graveyards testifying to the fact, and not only so, since Captain Cook's time they have decreased one-third. The cause of the recent decrease was no doubt due to the introduction of European diseases and epidemics, the whooping cough, influenza, and measles carrying off hundreds and hundreds. But the scourge in the islands is pulmonary diseases. Infantile mortality has been great, numbers have been carried off by zymotic diseases caused by unwholesome food, and another great cause has been the intermarrying. Strange to say, in times of scarcity the population seems to have increased. This is all concerning the past. At the present time the population of Tonga is increasing, and there is reason to believe that much of the above has been partially or entirely overcome. From 1860 to 1880 very wonderful changes were wrought in the government of the kingdom and in the whole fabric of the laws. The king at first issued a short code of laws copied after the Mosaic laws of Tahiti, the missionaries appointing certain chiefs as judges, but as their pay was the prisoners they got, little could be said of the justice they administered. The king, on the advice of the missionaries, set his people free, and to do so drew up a short constitution. This led to the first political battle in Tonga between the king and the people versus the chiefs...

[e] Tongafloral RF

There was also established a complete system of education, free and compulsory. It was made compulsory for every boy and girl up to fourteen years of age to attend school, and then could only quit after passing certain examinations. This is reasonable, for the Tongan alphabet has but seventeen letters. The Tongans are splendid mathematicians, but poor linguists, both in speaking and learning a language. The visitor is constantly being surprised from the time he comes in sight of Nokulofa, the capital of the kingdom, and while the large ship is tying up to a splendid wharf running out to deep water, and right through his stay. The progress made here has been simply marvelous, and there is evidence enough to lead one to conclude that in coming years still greater advancement will be made. The good king, under whom so much of this progress was made, is referred to by saint and sinner alike as a noble Christian man, having some faults I suppose like most everybody except the destructive critics, but altogether a right-meaning and a right-doing native prince of extraordinary sagacity, and the suggestions made by the missionaries were largely carried out.

The hermit crab is the armorial design on the coat of arms of the Tongan Wesleyan Institution—Tobou College. (The hermit crab never has a shell for its own, but can go into any shell and adjust itself to the surroundings.) The motto is: "The Tongaman's castle is his mind." In everyone of the 130 or more villages of the Friendly Islands is a church and schoolhouse, and some have two each. These are the proudest, most energetic, and most war-like of all the Polynesians. I may also say the most mathematical native race I have yet met. The Tongan youth will swallow a book of Euclid as promptly and I venture to say as thoroughly, as the average student in the American institutions. In the bounds of the Protestant congregations there is neither poverty nor illiteracy. One must be ready for surprises when visiting this horseback riding, warrior race, for, of the Tongans, one in every forty writes shorthand. Now tell me where can a similar condition of things be found, and let us see the visage of the modern literary scamp who will spend four hours in such an archipelago while his boat is shifting cargo and then insert in the permanent form of a so-called book a disparaging account of the habits and doings of the most intellectual of all the South Sea islanders...

ARE THE TONGANS LAZY?

[f] Ardent RF

The Tongan is not lazy. Some people have an idolatrous worship for money. The Israelites had a golden calf; the Greeks a golden Jupiter, but not so the Tongans. Men often go on toiling and moiling, eager to get rich, and then as ardent to get richer. Not so the Tongan, for money he will sell his surplus cocoanuts, fish, yams, bananas, the results of honest toil. Not simply sufficient coin for their personal needs, but they will work hard beyond that for money to give for charity. These twenty thousand all-told islanders have given as much as 100,000 dol. for philanthropic objects in one year. And regularly give into the thousands about 20,000 a year. The elder Cato made money by buying young half-fed slaves at a low price, then, after fattening them and training them to work, sold them. Brutus, in the Isle of Cyprus, loaned money at 48 per cent. interest, but these Tongans give, give, give. Are they less civilized then we Americans who have a world-wide reputation for "loving the almighty dollar," we of whom it is truthfully said,
                                                                                     "Mammon has led them on,
                                                                Mammon, the least erect of all the spirits
                                                                That fell from heaven."
When the Tongans has enough for needs and gifts he stops and maybe sings. He surely does not get drunk to use up his leisure hours.... 

THE CHARGE OF SLOTHFULNESS BROUGHT 

AGAINST THE POLYNESIAN

There is little doubt but that the professing of Christianity by a majority of the Polynesian leads the vicious and careless to give erroneous accounts of them.

[g] Where's Slotho? RF

Look at that singular South American animal, the sloth. I venture to conjecture it would neve have been given that name had it been properly observed in its native element first. But, taken from the trees, where nature insists it shall live and die, and placed upon the ground, it makes but slow and tedious progress, and cries out constantly with pain. Having no soles to its feet, and the limbs not formed to support the body on its feet, the belly drags on the soil, the poor thing in that unnatural attitude is in constant misery. Like the albatross, the legs of which bled on the deck when brought aboard the "Monowai," crossing the Tasman Sea, so the sloth cannot be fairly judged by its movements when out of its element. Look at it in its own dominion and you will see it hanging on the limbs of trees, the long claws of the feet serving admirably for that purpose. It will pass along rapidly, both up and down, and from tree to tree. When asleep, he supports himself from a branch parallel to the earth. In his wild state the sloth spends his whole time in the trees, there he lives, and there he dies. There is a singularity about his hair, different from that of all other animals; thick and coarse at the extremities and gradually tapers to the roots, where it becomes fine as a spider's web.

[h] Zwei-toe RF

Even to get a drink he is not accustomed to leave the trees, but will dexterously descend toward the outer edge of a carefully selected branch until it bends down to the water's edge, whereupon he quenches his thirst, still hanging on to the underside of the limb. He should be studied in his native haunts, and not described in a situation in which he was never intended by nature to cut a figure. To do so is misleading. The chameleon I, in Western Asia, placed on a section of bright red cloth, did not turn that color, for there is in nature no object of that hue sufficiently large for it to rest on; it turned mottle green, ground, and bark-color, but it was never made to satisfy the desires of novelty-loving travellers, nor to display antics for their amusement; now to declare from the red cloth experiment that the creature fails to change color according to what it is on might be a very misleading statement, and unfair to the animal. Chas. Wateron says, "The sloth is as much as a loss to proceed on its journey upon a smooth and level floor, as a man would be had he to walk a mile in stilts upon a line of feather beds."

They Polynesian is not to be judged fairly unless in his native element. Let him be among his cocoanuts, yams, bananas, and chimneyless homes and churches; give him the advantage of his accustomed environment, and he will be found active and industrious. To transplant him to Wall Street and then hesitate to commend him because he fails to arouse enthusiasm for his stock gambling qualities, is to be what Carlyle terms an "entire blockhead." Let none have the insolent address to assert the Tongans, Samoans, or Fijians lazy. They are a modest, sober, affable, domestic folk, not tardy in hospitality, in the lavishments which suggesting that virtue as displayed by the Romans in the early days, before the love of gambling and inordinate show started and finally consummated the decay of the nation. In the Roman lack of appreciation of merit or misfortune, or the stranger who was rewarded with generosity, lay the seeds of disintegration and decay—those destroying forces are not visibly at work in Tonga.[2]

Click below for other posts from Ocean and Isle:

Isle 1            Isle  2            Isle 3           Isle 4            Isle 5            Isle 6            Isle 7 

Notes

[1] William Edgar Geil, Ocean and Isle (Melbourne: Wm. T. Pater & Company, 1902), 139.
[2] Ocean and Isle, 131-140.

Bibliography

Geil, William Edgar. Ocean and Isle. Melbourne: Wm. T. Pater & Company, 1902.

[i] Visibly at work RF

The Accidental Ethnographer (2d)—Fiji...Land of the Butterflies

One year ago on Round and Square (3 June 2011)—Living and Learning: Warring States, Divided Message.
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "The Accidental Ethnographer." (Coming Soon)
Click below for other posts from Ocean and Isle:

Isle 1            Isle  2            Isle 3           Isle 4            Isle 5            Isle 6            Isle 7

[a] Cannibal Bay NZ RF

I gave a lecture at the Doylestown Historical Society on June 1st, as part of Doylestown, Pennsylvania's big bicentennial celebration. The subject was the American explorer and evangelist William Edgar Geil (1865-1925). This is part of a larger project that I am working on this summer in Doylestown with the help of Beloit College anthropology major Megan Nyquist '14. As I did a few weeks ago in preparation for another lecture (on another subject), I am posting some of Geil's own writings. This was enormously helpful to me the last time I tried it, and I think it is worth another try. I will, over the course of my summer research, post my lecture and some of the early results of the research Megan and I are doing. In the meantime, though, I want to start the "Accidental Ethnographer" series with William Geil's own words. I will post two or three readings from each of Geil's dozen books over the course of May and June.

[b] Cannibal Bay RF

William Edgar Geil was a world famous figure in his day, and the reasons he has been lost to history (from his death until now) are as interesting as the underpinnings of his fame. Here is a very brief overview. In a day before anthropology or Chinese (or African or Micronesian) studies had a toehold in world universities, William Edgar Geil traveled the world, took extensive notes, returned to Doylestown, and wrote books. Depending on how you count them, he wrote almost a dozen—many of them thick and substantial in ways that a turn of the (last) century reader would understand, even if many people today would not. He traveled across central Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century, spent a year in Australia and New Guinea, and then found an abiding love for the study of China (which is where I "met" him, in a manner of speaking). He traveled the length of the Great Wall, journeyed the Yangzi River from Shanghai into southeast Asia, visited all of China's provincial capitals, and is the only Westerner to have written a book about his travels to all five sacred mountains of China.

He wrote about it all, and he took pictures. The former is not without problem; the latter is easily his legacy. It is all a fascinating picture of an American abroad in a peculiarly resonant time in American history—from the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 to the end of World War I. This series will grow as my research does, but let's get started with Geil's own words—a little from each of his published books.

 ***  ***

William Edgar Geil gives his chapter on Fiji the title words "...land of the butterflies." He seems to have cannibals on the mind, though. Not unlike his earthquake and volcano rhetoric from yesterday's post, he indulges the English language in his description of human repast...of humans. We are only a fifth of the way into Geil's big book on the South Pacific, but we have already seen a powerful range of themes. Take a look at the way that Geil combines description and culinary evocation in the first few pages of his chapter on the exquisite island of Fiji. This is the very heart of anthropology...and anthropophagy. It also contains almost all of the keys to understanding William Edgar Geil and his complex life, thought, and reason for being.

Ocean and Isle—Fiji, or the Land of the Butterflies 

William Edgar Geil (1902) 

[c] Ca(nni)bal RF

The Fijian Archipelago consists of some 250 islands. The group lies half way from America to India, 300 miles north-east of Tonga, 500 miles south-west of the Navigator Islands. The exact distance from Fiji to Sydney is 1,900 miles, and to Auckland 1,200 miles. It is a Crown Colony, and has an acreage of 4,757,360 miles, which is slightly larger than Wales. THere are about 100 inhabited islands. The distinguished Dutch Captain, Tasman, discovered the Fiji Islands on the 6th of February, 1643, and named them Prince Williams Islands. On Turtle Island Captain Cook made an astronomical observation in 1773. Bligh passed by them after the mutiny of the "Bounty" when on his way to Timor. The missionary ship, "Duff," sailed among them, and the French ship "Astrolabe," in command of d'Urville, spent seventeen days in 1827 making the first chart. One half of the year 1840 was occupied by the American, Wilkes, making a survey of the entire Archipelago for the United States Exploring Expedition. The islands are of coral and volcanic formation. Many are very mountainous, the massive basalt peaks reaching as high as 5,000 feet about the tide. Frequent shocks of earthquake are felt, and volcanic action can be seen at the hot springs of Na-Savu-Savu on the island of Vanua Levu.

The country inland on the largest island is covered with a dense forest, and many large and valuable trees are available for commercial purposes. The soil, rich in humic acid, is deep and easily worked, and supplied with an abundance of moisture, for the rainfall at Suva is about 110 inches per year, and back in the mountains, where are the sources of the great rivers, 250 inches in not an unusual annual downfall of rain. Fiji is well watered. The two principal rivers are Singatoka and the Rewa. The latter rises at a point 4,000 feet about the sea, in the watershed of Calo. These rivers both drain the mountain country, and at their mouths are monster deltas, vast areas of flats, where sugar cane is cultivated. All tropical plants, and most temperate zone ones too, will prosper in this beautiful and naturally rich country. February is the warmest month, with a mean temperature of 84 deg. Fahr., and July is the coolest, registering 77 Fahr. Earthquakes and hurricanes are frequent, and especially the latter, are often very destructive. There are monster centipedes, sand flies, mosquitoes, and scorpions, but no malaria...

[d] Inversion RF

The Fijians are purely an agricultural and seafaring race. Descended from the gods, in real old Greek fashion, the peopling of the islands dates, by the most reliable traditions, far back in antiquity. I said they claim to be descended from the gods, but probably it would be nearer right to say that they worshipped their ancestors in pure Chinese style, without being restrained by the curbing power of the Celestial's sacred books. The Fijians are shrewd, witty, cheerful, and always polite. They are easy to get on with, if one knows and respects their peculiarities. They have not been nor are without talent. Their proverbs and poetry prove this. The Fijian language, which is Polynesian with some Malay words worked in for spice makes no distinction between reverence for the chiefs and for the gods. Their father-chiefs were their gods, but that they worshipped them before death, in the Roman "divine Caesar" mode, I know not, but am inclined to think that the worship was directed to the valiant chiefs who had gone to the spirit land...

When the few lonely missionaries came to these wild and inhospitable shores, they confronted murder, cannibalism, polygamy. The chief having most wives was counted best deserving of reverence. They were guilty of strangling widows, infanticide, the most inhuman treatment of war captives, and all the violent, bloody methods and schemes which their darkened but active minds could devise. Here came noble missionaries, and to-day what of civilization and humanity and Christianity the visitor witnesses must be placed to their credit. This I say without the least mental reservation. Out of the entire native population forty-seven per cent. are members in good and regular standing of the 896 Wesleyan churches. There are other preaching places, numbering 330, supported by the Wesleyan Fijians. The Wesleyan day schools have 25,610 attendants, and the Bible schools 30,890, while the adherents to the Wesleyan missions number the colossal aggregate of 91,197. The Roman Catholics has about 5,000 adherents, and have done some good work in the schools. They have been a bit amiss, however, in not devoting enough attention to such studies as would develop the reasoning faculties of the pupils.

The Fijians are a grateful people, or, at least, the converted are. The Government has erected 7,000 new houses, and moved entire villages from miasmatic to higher and healthier locations. It has required all houses to be built at least eighteen inches above the natural grade on the soil, and the sleeping part of the hut to be a foot or more above the rest of the room. Villages are required to keep a cow, and everything is being done by the Government and missionaries to cut down the death rate, for, sad to say, the Fijians are still diminishing in numbers. Dr. Withington tells me that but recently it was found that the decrease is due to the death rate and not the birth rate, as was at first feared. The birth rate should show net increase in the population each census, but the rapidity of the deaths leads to the regrettable result...

[e] Nourished RF

In Fiji one is at the fountain head of cannibalism, not of course of the present days, but of the past. Let us ask the question how came these islanders to become addicted to the use and abuse of human flesh? The history of these islands scandalizes human nature. As late as 1871, over an hundred persons were cooked and eaten in one village. In this case, afterwards, as if they would eat the tenderest morsels first, the pigs were consumed, bu the pork was underdone. So dreadful attacks of dyspepsia fell on the revellers, carrying some to their graves.

The cannibal days were, in a way, times of education, and the alert Fijians made bad use of the opportunities. Some scholars who have studied the Fijian cannibal question, say that the parents rubbed portions of human flesh on the lips of the children to arouse in them the appetite for the ghastly meal. They even put morsels into the mouths of infants that they might be nourished by the juices. This may have been under the spell of a tradition that the strength of the victim was transferred to the eater, or, as some hold, just to wantonly start the taste for the horrible feasts. Human meat salted down was considered a dainty dish. Chiefs lived upon their friends, often eating them raw. It was the custom in certain tribes to bake their enemies alive. The king of Rewa had a pretty female servant who dared to displease her lord. He ordered that one of her arms should be cut off and cooked; then he commanded her to eat it, which she did, and for this bloody inhuman grace she was permitted to live.

When a chief was unwell and wanted a real nicety, a young child was roasted for him. Women were reckoned more tender than men, and of better flavor. I met several ex-cannibals who have many times eaten human flesh, and they all agreed that it was tasty food. The Socinian says that human nature is very good. The Fijian says that human flesh is good, for he has eaten it. Indeed, in the Fijian language there is no word for corpse but "bakola," which conveys the idea of eating the dead. The Natawa clan finding an unfortunate boat's crew wrecked on their coast, cut off their legs, taking the precaution to first place native dishes under the wounds to catch the blood that none be lost. If, perchance, any fell aside on the ground, it was promptly licked up, and was in all respects treated as a very precious and appreciated delicacy. In this tribe so impatient and savage were they, that some could not curb themselves to wait for a body to cook, but tore or cut off portions such as nose, ears, and fingers, and ate them raw.

[f] Scarcity RF

They always cut off the cutis or outer skin, leaving what remained white. It does not appear that the custom was long in vogue. So vigorously was it practised, that if long observed it must have depopulated the islands. It is thought to have reached its apex when civilized nations learned of it and prepared to send missionaries to Fiji. So far had the consideration of human flesh gone as food, that search was made for the most toothsome vegetable to eat with the horrible banquet. Bordino was considered the best vegetable to accompany human flesh. Toussenel says: "Let us pity the cannibal and not blame him too severely. We who boast of our refined Christian civilization, murder men by tens of thousands from motives less excusable than hunger. The crime is not in roasting our dead enemy, but in killing him when he wishes to live." This suggested that cannibalism was caused in the first instance by the Fijian scarcity of animal food.

Fowls and pigs were not indigenous. On Fiji now there are no animals except such as have been imported. But four kinds of turtle are found, and a friend tells me there are more than fifty kinds of birds, including the "Orange Dove," but it is very rare. A biologist tells me that in Samoa they have the "robber Crab," This crab is so named because it climbs cocoanut trees, bits off the stem, the nut falls to the ground on some rocky place, breaks open, and the crab extracts the kernel for a living. It will not drop one down except there be a hard stone to break the shell in the fall. Here in Fiji is the Ugavule crab, which throws stones and earth at anything which pursues it. My biologist friend holds that the crab of Fiji is related to the crab of Samoa, but in this matter I must let the doctors disagree if it be not true.

But to hold on directly and pertinently to the cannibal question, from which we have hardly digressed...[1] 

Click below for other posts from Ocean and Isle:

Isle 1            Isle  2            Isle 3           Isle 4            Isle 5            Isle 6            Isle 7 

 

Notes
William Edgar Geil, Ocean and Isle (Melbourne: Wm. T. Pater & Company, 1902), 56-63.

Bibliography

Geil, William Edgar. Ocean and Isle. Melbourne: Wm. T. Pater & Company, 1902.

[g] Fijisun RF

The Accidental Ethnographer (2c)—Ocean and Isle: Earthquake on Nina Foov

One year ago on Round and Square (2 June 2011)—Living and Learning: Lessons for the Ages
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "The Accidental Ethnographer." (Coming Soon)
Click below for other posts from Ocean and Isle:

Isle 1            Isle  2            Isle 3           Isle 4            Isle 5            Isle 6            Isle 7

[a] Burning bush RF

I gave a lecture at the Doylestown Historical Society on June 1st, as part of Doylestown, Pennsylvania's big bicentennial celebration. The subject was the American explorer and evangelist William Edgar Geil (1865-1925). This is part of a larger project that I am working on this summer in Doylestown with the help of Beloit College anthropology major Megan Nyquist '14. As I did a few weeks ago in preparation for another lecture (on another subject), I am posting some of Geil's own writings. This was enormously helpful to me the last time I tried it, and I think it is worth another try. I will, over the course of my summer research, post my lecture and some of the early results of the research Megan and I are doing. In the meantime, though, I want to start the "Accidental Ethnographer" series with William Geil's own words. I will post two or three readings from each of Geil's dozen books over the course of May and June.

[b] Fault-finding RF

William Edgar Geil was a world famous figure in his day, and the reasons he has been lost to history (from his death until now) are as interesting as the underpinnings of his fame. Here is a very brief overview. In a day before anthropology or Chinese (or African or Micronesian) studies had a toehold in world universities, William Edgar Geil traveled the world, took extensive notes, returned to Doylestown, and wrote books. Depending on how you count them, he wrote almost a dozen—many of them thick and substantial in ways that a turn of the (last) century reader would understand, even if many people today would not. He traveled across central Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century, spent a year in Australia and New Guinea, and then found an abiding love for the study of China (which is where I "met" him, in a manner of speaking). He traveled the length of the Great Wall, journeyed the Yangzi River from Shanghai into southeast Asia, visited all of China's provincial capitals, and is the only Westerner to have written a book about his travels to all five sacred mountains of China.

He wrote about it all, and he took pictures. The former is not without problem; the latter is easily his legacy. It is all a fascinating picture of an American abroad in a peculiarly resonant time in American history—from the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 to the end of World War I. This series will grow as my research does, but let's get started with Geil's own words—a little from each of his published books.

 ***  ***

[c] Tinder RF

I am slowing down for about a week's worth of posts from William Edgar Geil's big book on the South Pacific. I am taking my time for a very specific reason. It so happens that the first truly famous professional ethnographer, Bronislaw Malinowski—a man who considered his work anything but an accident—wrote about an island in the South Pacific. I will have much to say in a comparative vein in my own essays among this growing series. For now, though, let's take Geil at his rhetorical word and keep examining his own narrative of travel through the islands of the southern seas. Today's entry traces the effects of an enormous earthquake fifty years before Geil's visit. We might ask ourselves precisely why he related in great detail the burning effluvia of decades past. By the time we get to the end of the entry...we'll know. Take a close look at Geil's supernatural tinderbox. 

Ocean and Isle—Earthquake on Nina Foov
William Edgar Geil (1902)

THE BURNING SEPULCHRE

Nina Foov is the euphonious native name for the island, which although afar off, midway between Vailima's solitary grave and the tombs of the Cannibal Chiefs of Fiji, belongs to the insular realm of the conquering Tongan kings. I know it is a sort of sea half-way house, for cautious Captain Newton says—and he knows, for he has the sextant and the Admirality charts—that he always likes to steam well into the island of Good Hope for an additional proof of the reckoning as it lies in this dangerous sea, at equal distances from Samoa and Fiji. 

[d] Burning RF

While some persons consider dates (figure ones) as lacking interest and not restful, nevertheless it serves my purpose perfectly to mention a few. Sometime during the 3d of August, A.D. 1791, the Island of Good Hope was discovered by Captain Edwards in H.M.S. "Pandora," and called by him Proby Island. This is probably the good Hope Island of Schouten, many continuing to refer to it by that name. Henslip of Tongatatabu, who has studied the island, and has business interests there, told me at the post office in Nukualofa, that the Nina Foov was the first of the Friendlys discovered, and that the honor falls to the lot of two captains, Le Maire and Schouten, and the date A.D. 1616. This was news to me, and I have had no opportunity to investigate the statement, but Henslip is positive that is correct. That many of the South Sea Islands were discovered several times is true, but whether any rascality to seize the honors obtained in those instances, we cannot say, but likely not.

Anyhow it is a volcanic island nearly circular in form, measuring three and one-half miles from north to south, and three miles from east to west, and is well wooded to the loftiest summit, maybe a thousand feet above the tide. I say "maybe" for the height is constantly changing. In the centre of the island is an old crater filled with a lake of brackish water, in which are hot springs, and traces of volcanic action are everywhere to be seen.  A very severe eruption occurred in 1853, when a village was destroyed and many lives lost.

[e] Free-flow RF

This island is in all respects of peculiar formation. Its aspect viewed from the sea is sepulchral and forbidding. Nothing is preserved to the eye but huge piles of funeral rocks, belted around the base by the white foam of the breakers. On landing, the paths are found to be black, and even the shrubs and trees in the lower parts of the valleys and ravines look black and dismal. In the higher portions of the island the vegetation is rich and beautiful. The scene of the violent volcanic eruption referred to lay over the finest gardening section of the island, and the one giving the above description was there soon after the night of horror. At this present time the appearance of the land from the sea is not forbidding. The beginning of the terrors on that awful night of 24th June, in the year of grace 1853, was a long continued earthshudder of frightful severity. The earth reeled and swayed beneath the startled people. This was no sooner over than there came a dull roar of thunder which seemed to roll up from the bowels of the earth, as if from the throat of some hideous monster awakening to a mortal pain. Then followed a deathly stillness. 

At midnight many sprang terror stricken to their feet as another convulsive throw, more dreadful than the first, shook the whole island, and at the same instant the subterranean thunder rolled up again deeper and louder than ever, but passed away without visible damage. It was well past midnight when a universal terror seized even those accustomed to the displays of the savage forces of nature. This third terrific convulsion was ushered in by a roll of thunder growling along underneath the feet of the assembling natives, gathering in force, growing more and more threatening, until with one appalling and stupendous crash the earth was rent open and a fiery wind, like a hot blast from the Inferno itself, swept roaring out of the mouth of the opening.

[f] Upshooting RF

This was followed by frightful screams and shrieks, for the earth was spreading apart in the midst of a native village, and into the cracked and gaping fissure, as though swiftly drawn by invisible hands, went the chapel and houses. Huge stones descending, crushed more than a score out of human shape, and rolled into the open jaws of death, as the flames of a new volcano shot high into the hot air as red as new-shed blood. Here was lurid splendor and ghastly flaming shapes, and with it all a molten sea of lava belched forth from the fiery gorge suddenly opened, and swept huts and shrubs, and living things into one hissing, burning sepulchre.

Showers of volcanic ashes fell about, while over the new-born crater a dark cloud was fast forming. Ever broadening, it hung like a pall of sable. At times this inky cloud was rent in twain by the upshooting fires until there was one frightful mass of leaping, seething tossing billows of flame and inky soot, and the walls of the crater upwashed within by liquid fire burst with the awful crash of a thousand pent up thunders, and out through the gap in the black crater wall rolled an avalanche of fierce red glare, licking up the foliage with the withering heat of blazing fluid rock.

Before the sun could shine through the murky vapor which hung suspended over the entire island, as if waiting to complete the doom, miles of country now hidden by the richest tropical growth, lay buried—encoffined in hot porous rock a fathom or two deep. Vast quantities of mud, ashes, and lava were belched forth during the death-dealing eruption.

[g] Swallowed RF

It is not to be wondered at, that a deep and widespread religious awakening followed the earth-reeling solemn scenes attendant upon the volcanic upheaval. Exploring parties visited the scene of the calamity when the surface was sufficiently cooled to admit of it.

The chiefs decided to hold a religious service as near as possible to the site of the destroyed and swallowed village. Courageously, yet solemnly, a large gathering of people met close to the larges and still active volcano. 

On that most impressive occasion a native preacher John Latu, delivered a sympathetic and powerful sermon on the words of Scripture: "For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." During this and other services, hundreds of the cocoanut-colored natives professed conversion, and their after lives proved it was no idle word spoken in the hour and circumstance of dreadful harbingers of disaster.[1]

Click below for other posts from Ocean and Isle:

Isle 1            Isle  2            Isle 3           Isle 4            Isle 5            Isle 6            Isle 7 

Notes

William Edgar Geil, Ocean and Isle (Melbourne: Wm. T. Pater & Company, 1902), 39-42.

Bibliography

Geil, William Edgar. Ocean and Isle. Melbourne: Wm. T. Pater & Company, 1902.

[h] Cooled RF

The Accidental Ethnographer (2b)—Ocean and Isle: New Guinea

One year ago on Round and Square (1 June 2011)—Seinfeld Ethnography: Newman's Mail
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "The Accidental Ethnographer." (Coming Soon)
Click below for other posts from Ocean and Isle:

Isle 1            Isle  2            Isle 3           Isle 4            Isle 5            Isle 6            Isle 7

[a] Sharing...of a sort RF

I am scheduled to give a lecture on today at the Doylestown Historical Society, as part of Doylestown, Pennsylvania's big bicentennial celebration. The subject is the American explorer and evangelist William Edgar Geil (1865-1925). This is part of a larger project that I will be working on this summer in Doylestown with the help of Beloit College anthropology major Megan Nyquist '14. As I did a few weeks ago in preparation for another lecture (on another subject), I am going to spend the next few days posting some of Geil's own writings. This was enormously helpful to me the last time I tried it, and I think it is worth another try. 

William Edgar Geil was a world famous figure in his day, and the reasons he has been lost to history (from his death until now) are as interesting as the underpinnings of his fame. Here is a very brief overview. In a day before anthropology or Chinese (or African or Micronesian) studies had a toehold in world universities, William Edgar Geil traveled the world, took extensive notes, returned to Doylestown, and wrote books. Depending on how you count them, he wrote almost a dozen—many of them thick and substantial in ways that a turn of the (last) century reader would understand, even if many people today would not. He traveled across central Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century, spent a year in Australia and New Guinea, and then found an abiding love for the study of China (which is where I "met" him, in a manner of speaking). He traveled the length of the Great Wall, journeyed the Yangzi River from Shanghai into southeast Asia, visited all of China's provincial capitals, and is the only Westerner to have written a book about his travels to all five sacred mountains of China.

[b] Tree travel RF

He wrote about it all, and he took pictures. The former is not without problem; the latter is easily his legacy. It is all a fascinating picture of an American abroad in a peculiarly resonant time in American history—from the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 to the end of World War I. This series will grow as my research does, but let's get started with Geil's own words—a little from each of his published books.

 ***  ***

William Edgar Geil started traveling the world with his trip to the holy land in the mid-1890s, and his first big book detailed his time on The Isle That Is Called Patmos. Geil revved things up considerably with his next trip, which took him to the continent and dotted islands of the South Pacific. Today's excerpt brings us right into the middle of his trip, when he is in every superficial way the consummate ethnographer (observation, discussion, note-taking, and reflection). The passage will also show that Geil was not an ethnographer in the style of the Malinowskis, Meads, and Radcliffe-Browns. That is what makes him so interesting to me—what makes him The Accidental Ethnographer. Let's get to work.

Ocean and Isle—New Guinea
William Edgar Geil (1902)

RUBBER AND RELIGION

This is the largest island on the planet, counting Australia as a continent. New Guinea, or Papua, is some 1,400 miles long, has among mountains, Mount Victoria 13,000 feet above the tide, and other peaks touching the clouds at 10,000 feet. Much of the country remains unexplored, and here is a chance for the adventurous American who desires to invade, scientifically, an important and, by white man, untrodden soil. In this land the humanized and inhuman native meet; here the civilized and uncivilized exchange trade; the Christianized and the heathen are in contact. A most interesting and important island this of the Papuans! One can pass quickly from the region of the Lord's supper to the section where to refuse a morsel of human flesh would be to have no longer the respect of the coffee-colored savage. some islands can never play a very important part in the commerce of the world, nor, through the changed native inhabitants, exert any great influence on the savage residents of other parts of the world, but here both will likely transpire. Aside from the gold and other minerals found in the streams, and mountains, and islands of New Guinea, there are forests of valuable timber, and soil capable of producing enormous returns from sugar-cane growing, india-rubber, cocoanuts, sago, tapioca, and eucalyptus. Bound as it is to become an attractive centre finally for the European in search of wealth and easy living, certain modify the relations of nations in time of war, and a splendid place for investing in missionary enterprise, I take pleasure in informing the Americans of the movements in the realms spiritual here.

[c] Divided RF

DIFFERENCES AND DIFFICULTIES

New Guinea, like ancient Gaul, is divided into three parts; part German, part Dutch, part English. In British New Guinea the territory has been divided into four ecclesiastical sections. There are four missionary societies at work, and lest there be over-lapping and contests for converts, the last Governor laid down boundaries past which the enthusiastic worker is not to go in making converts to his brand of Christianity. This strikes one as a most sensible arrangement, at least while the supply of heathen continues abundant. This plan has its weak points and can be objected to by the very earnest advocate of Churchianity rather than Christianity. But to one on the spot it has every appearance of being desirable, and might be recommended, until the stock of savage sinners becomes scarce. Then it will be early enough to open up the whole country to free trade in converts. The rivalry and competition between denominations is delightfully avoided, but the contrasting of methods and especially results, counting carefully the strategic points in each mission enterprise, is going on may be reckoned to accomplish good results. The London Missionary Society has the south coast from East Cape to beyond the Fly River, including some islands. The Roman Catholics come into the midst of this with Yule Island and up the Saint Joseph's River, with everything named after the Saints; in New Britain they have their lighters and other vessels named after the Saints as here. One time Gabriel was pulling Saint Peter out of the mud, and on another occasion Saint Peter got adrift and went astray and was taken in tow by another saint and gotten back; but to return to the geography of missions here. The Church of England have the north coast from East Cape to the German boundary; and the Wesleyan Methodists a small spot near East Cape, on the mainland, and all the islands east of Papua.

[d] Concentrated RF

Among the difficulties, I will mention but a few. The absence of large centres of population is considered a chief difficulty by some, but it has its advantages. The population of British New Guinea is estimated at 500,000 Papuans, extending in a thin line along the coast. In the back country I found large spaces without a village or hut. Recently a valley, 10,000 feet hight, has been found thickly inhabited, and it is not unlikely that the sum total of the inhabitants will finally be declared larger than I have given. There is one village of some 3,000 natives, but mostly the villages number a few hundreds. One at Port Moresby, or rather three very close together, Hunt says has 1,400 natives. These are semi-marine villages. Of course there is need for more workers of the vigorous stamp in a sparsely settled region. Where the population was massed there is bred vice and opposition, compact concentrated opposition to the advance of truth; there is no over-crowding in New Guinea.

 A real difficulty is the large number of dialects. One missionary tells me that in his district there are seven different languages in use. The lack of easy communications by land prevents frequent intercourse between tribes. But more so the innumerable dialectic disagreements. Captain F.W. Walker, who has been appointed to take Chalmers' place, will have to learn two or more languages in going from East Cape to the Fly River. Indeed, at East Cape, some twenty-five miles from where he now is, a different language is spoken, and an amount of work little dreamed of is necessary in translating. In Samoa, in Fiji, in Tonga, one translation of the Bible is sufficient, but here many are required. The London Missionary Society College at Vatorata is teaching in the Motuan exclusively. The Motu tongue is used for trading along the south coast for probably 200 miles. But very slow progress can be made with but twenty students and twenty-three babies in the midst of that splendid plantation of over 200 acres of land capable of producing sufficient food for 200 students. The idea of quality is in force there, and it is held a few good students are better than many inefficient ones. But the fact is not uppermost that more desirable still is a large number of good pupils. That the institution now has all the students of the better grade is unbelievable. There is much material about just as good as is now in the classes. 

[e] Other RF

The college was established by the herculean efforts of Dr. Lawes, who is still at the head of the institution. We have confidence that when he returns to Vatorata a larger work will at once be inaugurated. It may be that a lack of funds to put the fine farm on a paying and supporting basis the the reason for the smallness of a big thing. If so, we will anticipate with great pleasure hearing soon that Vatorata has 200 students instead of twenty. Mr. Riley, the helper or assistant to Dr. Lawes, has gotten more work out of the natives than move folks. I saw the students complete a fence, which took them other years one month, in two and a half days! That there is danger in letting things go too easily in dealing with the native races, I am convinced, and seeing the ex-savages hustle about Vatorata in more lively fashion than at some other places, I am inclined to expect to see the pushing along, more vigorously, of the Papuans, tried.

Click below for other posts from Ocean and Isle:

Isle 1            Isle  2            Isle 3           Isle 4            Isle 5            Isle 6            Isle 7 

 

Notes
William Edgar Geil, Ocean and Isle (Melbourne: Wm. T. Pater & Company, 1902), 200-203.

Bibliography

Geil, William Edgar. Ocean and Isle. Melbourne: Wm. T. Pater & Company, 1902.

[f] Inclined RF