Islands of Discovery: Scientific Curiosity in the Works of Darwin, Huxley and Wells

Intrigued by the descriptions of hitherto unknown species, Victorian naturalists embarked on Pacific journeys to study new flora and fauna. The third chapter follows a young Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley as they develop theories that would challenge the assumed boundaries between “civilized” and “savage” man. Their often overlooked travel narratives, The Voyage of the Beagleand The Voyage of the Rattlesnake respectively, displayed not only emerging theories of evolution and natural selection, but also early biological and anthropological observations that questioned whether Pacific islanders were truly so different from British ones. These radical new ideas, spurred on by later works such as Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man, influenced novelists to use the Pacific islands as a testing ground for new theories of regressive evolution. Capitalizing on the emerging genre of “science fiction,” H.G. Wells imagined the Pacific in The Island of Doctor Moreau not as an idyllic paradise but as a horrific nightmare that reduced all islanders, British and native, to their most bestial forms displaying distinctly Pacific resonances and the changing British perspectives on the islands.

Moving Missions and Novel Settlements: Early British Pacific Propaganda (1796–1866)

The book begins with the works of the first British visitors to the Pacific, missionaries from the newly formed London Missionary Society. Missionaries argued that the islanders were not “noble savages,” but instead were in desperate need of a “civilizing” education. This mission narrative also appears in fiction of the period, including William and Mary Godwin’s English translation of Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1814). Throughout the novel, the Godwins and Wyss depict the tension between the Swiss family’s God-given obligation to settle the land and its dispassionate scientific interest in new species and experiences. His story offers a fictional example of both the “civilizing” rhetoric found prominently in mission narratives and a scientific interest in the islands and their value as potential new colonies. Instead of viewing the story as a German text, the British adapted the story to support their imperial mission, eventually rewriting the novel to support British control over the original Swiss colony.

The Islanders Speak: Pacific Reflections in the British Press

The final chapter looks at the works of Pacific islanders that were published and circulated by the British press and that have remained almost invisible to literary critics. While influenced and edited by the British, the stories of Lee Boo, Ta’unga, and Queen Emma provide a small glimpse into the ways in which Pacific peoples viewed the British and how the British, in turn, conceived of islanders. The History of Lee Boo, while lacking historical accuracy, presents the islanders as complex individuals unable to be categorized simply as “noble savages” or in need of a superior civilizing force. Instead, Lee Boo shows islanders as having the desire and ability to improve their own societies. Ta’unga’s writings provide a very different perspective on missionary enterprises. While Ta’unga agrees with the Christian missions, his account shows the tensions between understanding and respecting Polynesian traditions and his desire to spread the gospel. Finally, the legend of Queen Emma undermines the British narrative of white male colonial superiority over the islands. With her mixed heritage as well as her gender, Emma flaunted tradition and presented a new vision of agency.

The Price of Paradise: Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and British Expansion in the Pacific

The fourth chapter turns to British settlers in the Pacific whose attempts to create ideal colonies reveal the weaknesses inherent in the British concept of themselves as a “superior” civilizing force. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Vailima Letters and The Beach of Falesá, he questions the right of the British to colonize or settle in the South Seas as part of a “civilizing mission.” By examining the effects of the invasive settler, explorer, and trader on the island landscape, Stevenson linked the health of the islanders and the state of the islands, presenting European invasion as a violent and potentially dangerous “disease.” While Stevenson focused primarily on the interactions between British and Pacific islanders, Joseph Conrad instead focused on the ways in which life in the Pacific impacted British individuals in his later and largely overlooked Pacific works, Freya of the Seven Isles and “Because of the Dollars. Conrad’s work reflects an increasingly dark vision of British settlement in the Pacific, one that depicts British men and women as weak and degenerate.

Adventures in the Pacific: The Influence of Trade on the South Seas Novel

The second chapter explores the transition from missionary texts to a more secularized portrayal of the islands in adventure fiction. I begin with George Vason, an LMS missionary who “went native” and lived amongst the islanders, which serves as a transition between conversion narrative and adventure fiction. The emerging genre of “boy’s fiction” emphasized entertainment rather than moral edification, while the works of authors such as Frederick Marryat and R.M. Ballantyne act primarily as propaganda for the growing empire. Marryat deliberately rewrites The Swiss Family Robinson in his novel Masterman Ready both to offer a more “authentic” representation of British trade and to showcase the ways in which boys could best serve the growing empire. R.M. Ballantyne’s first Pacific novel, The Coral Island, also focuses on boys as “men of empire” but, through the character of Bloody Bill, warns against the dangerous implications of Pacific trade. In his later works, Gascoyne, the Sandal-wood Trader and The Island Queen, Ballantyne explores other alternatives for the future of the British presence in the Pacific, transforming pirates into productive traders and evaluating the effect of female leadership on the masculine tradition of Pacific fiction.

Introduction

Almost all Pacific histories, ethnographic studies and literary analyses begin by commenting that the Pacific is a very large ocean. To scholars unfamiliar with Pacific studies this seems a rather obvious observation. Why not begin by saying that the Pacific is a very wet ocean or a very blue ocean? As I conducted my own research on the islands, however, I began to understand how this seemingly obvious statement underpinned so many of the choices, both rhetorical and theoretical, that defined my work. The Pacific Ocean covers a total area of over 69 million square miles, almost one third of the earth’s surface, touching multiple continents and containing a constantly changing number of islands with a highly mobile and diverse set of populations. As a result, scholars refer to the ocean’s vastness by way of an apology: ‘Please forgive what I cannot begin to cover; the peoples and places that my account sacrifices to present one study, one viewpoint, one glimpse into a vast and ever-changing area. The Pacific is a very large ocean.’ There are so many Pacific stories to be told; I can only examine a microscopic portion of a vast network that still has many avenues that should and hopefully will be explored. By necessity, this book focuses on a very narrow vision of the Pacific as it attempts to trace the story of British literature produced in the long nineteenth century outside the colonial centres of Australia and New Zealand. By narrowing my project to focus only on the impressions of one country and time period, I unsurprisingly exclude many interesting and important perspectives that I hope future scholars will trace, and in defence of the choices I have made, I offer the following rationale: the Pacific is a very large ocean....