Bad Colonists: The South Seas Letters of Vernon Lee Walker and Louis Becke
192
Bad Colonists: The South Seas Letters of Vernon Lee Walker and Louis Becke
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Overview
An obscure colonial trader, Walker wrote to his mother in England from Australia, the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and New Caledonia—and also from ships in between those places—during the 1870s and 1880s. Becke was a trader, too, but he was also a successful author of popular fiction that drew on his experiences in the Pacific. Written from Micronesia in the early 1880s, Becke’s letters are like Walker’s in that they report one setback after another. Both collections vividly evoke the day-to-day experiences of ordinary late-nineteenth-century colonists and open up new questions concerning the making and writing of selves on the colonial periphery.
Exposing insecurities in an epoch normally regarded as one of imperial triumph, Bad Colonists will appeal to students and scholars of anthropology, colonial history, cultural studies, and Pacific history and culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822379713 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Nicholas Thomas is Professor of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His books include In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories, also published by Duke University Press.
Richard Eves is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, also at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University. He is the author of The Magical Body: Power, Fame, and Meaning in a Melanesian Society.
Read an Excerpt
Bad Colonists
The South Seas Letters of Vernon Lee Walker & Louis Becke
By Nicholas Thomas, Richard Eves
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1999 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7971-3
CHAPTER 1
"An Awfully Bad Hand at Letter Writing": Vernon Lee Walker and Colonial History
Vernon Lee Walker wrote to his mother from Melbourne, from Sydney, from Noumea, and from small trading boats between the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) and New Caledonia. This was the period of the most conspicuously rapacious stage of European expansion: the scramble for Africa. The last of his letters overlaps with Stanley's expeditions into the Congo, although Walker was dead before the triumph of those journeys was established, before In Darkest Africa was published in 1890. It is difficult to avoid the view, however, that that book, a model of aggressive pioneering masculinity, would not have helped Walker much. While Stanley epitomized the success of colonialism at its most confident moment, Walker's world was inhabited by failed businesses, bad creditors, and recalcitrant and aggressive natives.
You might wonder why the fragmented and semiliterate notes that constitute Walker's correspondence deserve publication. Though his sentences were composed at the height of what global historians would call the imperial age, they derive from the most peripheral journeys and incidents, from petty trading and planting in fringe colonies. Though he writes about conflicts between islanders and traders, and incidentally about young Pacific port towns, now capitals in Fiji and New Caledonia, with their rawness and desperate façades of civility, there are many other sources, and many other published accounts, that are often far more detailed, that tell us about daily life in Suva and Noumea or the routines and irregularities of the trade in indentured labor from the New Hebrides and the Solomons to the sugar plantations of Queensland and Fiji. What we have here are merely passing glimpses.
Walker's time was a transitional one. The Pacific had changed a great deal since the early nineteenth century, when there were beachcombers— resident castaways or deserters—in the islands but virtually no settlers, and indigenous people remained almost fully in control of their own resources. Islanders, moreover, generally retained the capacity to define the terms of exchange with those who sought sandalwood and provisions, they resisted missionary intrusions or allowed them voice and space on emphatically indigenous terms, and they sustained their theaters of ritual and nonritual violence as it suited them. The whites who crossed the beach to deal with islanders accommodated themselves to indigenous relations and gambits more than they imposed their own. From the 1840s onward, however, trading and missionary activities increased steadily, though quite unevenly. In the eastern Pacific, British Protestant missions were well established early in the century, and the French were playing colonialists from the 1840s. In Fiji, a tiny European beachcomber settlement had expanded dramatically in the 1860s as colonists tried to capitalize on a cotton boom caused by the American Civil War. There were suddenly thousands rather than hundreds of whites in the islands, who created new trading relations and interisland trading relations based on the demand for laborers as well as provisions and commodities. New Caledonia had been annexed by the French as a penal colony in 1853, and in subsequent decades traders and planters became active in parts of the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands. The intensified activity that extended well beyond the secure European enclaves provoked a good deal of conflict, which led the colonial powers to assume control in Fiji in 1874, in the Solomon Islands from 1893, and in the New Hebrides in 1907. In the 1870s and 1880s, much trade and labor migration was taking place and port towns were emerging, but the reach of colonial government was decidedly limited. In the regions in which Walker was active as a trader, there was no formal control and certainly no administration. There were occasional and generally half-hearted efforts to investigate allegations of white misbehavior, and less restrained punitive actions against indigenous perpetrators of "outrages" against whites. In general, though, this was a time of unofficial colonialism, of commercial expansion—and sporadic contraction—that was unlicensed or marginally licensed by the state.
Walker was once alluded to in print by a journalist but not named, and this is emblematic of the extent to which unimportant colonists such as he, and ordinary people most of the time, have had negligible or nonexistent capacities to establish a presence in print, a citation, a documentary trace. And, though he is by no means inarticulate, the style and punctuation of his letters make it evident that writing was something of a labor and a strain. Are we, in publishing his letters and giving his account of himself and his uncertainty greater circulation than he would ever have anticipated, pushing further the effort of social historians to bestow voices upon the poor, on ordinary people, on women, on marginal and oppressed groups? Such work has supplanted the grand traditions of elitist history and done away with its pretension that the world was made by generals and members of parliament and colonial governors. It has shown that common people are not just recipients of benefits from above or victims of dominance, but actors who make themselves and have their own cultures and vitality, their hidden means of survival and resistance. That sort of history has been a liberal or left-wing project, and has mostly been motivated by sympathetic identifications and by a sense that the histories of minorities and oppressed groups were suppressed or stolen—as though they were substantial things available to be recuperated and restored.
It is not possible to empathize or identify with Vernon Lee Walker in this way. His story is poignant, and there may be moments when one feels his loneliness and sense of hopelessness. But he was not a member of some dominated group that a radical history would want to retrospectively validate. If we describe him as an inconsequential racist, we would not merely be capitalizing rhetorically on the ideological differences between the late nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth; in one sense, virtually all white people, and certainly most colonizers, of that time could be considered racists from our notionally enlightened vantage point. There is a certain facility in such identifications, too easy self-congratulation and too easy summation of different ways of identifying people who, of course, often were racist. But the point about Walker is different. By the lights of his time, within the spectrum of views then held, his attitudes toward Pacific islanders were harsh, frank, and bigoted. He used the word "nigger" more readily than others did (though probably not more readily than others of his class); he used it to apply to Fijians at a time when Europeans (or at least elite Europeans) generally referred to them as "natives" or as "Fijians," when fascination with past cannibalism was fused uneasily with appreciative responses to the etiquette and civility of Fijian chiefs and to the carvings, barkcloths, and pottery that were already being manufactured, not just for their local usefulness and value, but also for tourists and handicraft shows. Though his feelings toward islanders shift, the most he can do is express affection for individual servant boys. He does not, of course, articulate any theory of racial difference and does not venture opinions about whether people such as the Fijians and the New Caledonian "canaques" are permanently and irreducibly inferior to whites or whether they are potentially to be civilized and converted to Christianity. His comments on islanders embody a plurality of responses and attitudes; he is repelled, occasionally amused, and confident of his capacity to sustain control: "I never trust one of them, & always treat them fairly, the consequence is that I can do with natives, more than any one else." This range of responses finds the native in turn quaint, odd, dangerous, and disgusting and is broadly consistent with the observations of more articulate racist writers of the time who rejected missionary and philanthropic humanism.
If Walker cannot be produced here, as a character and as a writer, as somebody to be identified with or someone who in some sense seems to have been unjustly forgotten by historical memory (as if there were not innumerable others), it may instead be his very failure and lack of consequence that is important to us, that makes these letters not just legible, but maybe vital reading from the point of view of current concerns to reassess the nature and effect of colonial histories in both colonizing and colonized cultures.
The confidence of colonialism in the epoch of Stanley was not simply military and economic, but also epistemic: it was expressed, and to some extent made possible, by an attitude toward prospectively possessed spaces, toward geography, that was both cartographic and aesthetic. Terrain could be described and known; in an obvious sense, an awareness of possible routes, resources, settlements, and points of control were requirements of colonial government and trade. The full and precise accounting of topography that was realized in charts and surveys also afforded a kind of intellectual security that implied a corresponding pervasiveness of vision and dominance. Observations on the character and majesty of shorelines or rugged hills are so frequent in exploratory and travel literature that they seem as natural as the features represented —standard elements of the landscape of the genre. But appreciations of countryside are never innocent of wider narratives and implications that especially concern property. Images and stories of colonization, in particular, are likely to conflate different kinds of belonging: the land rightly belongs to those who feel that they belong to it. As Bernard Smith has observed, "The European control of the world required a landscape practice that could first survey and describe, then evoke in new settlers an emotional engagement with the land that they had alienated from its aboriginal occupants" (1985: ix; see also Mitchell 1994). Smith is referring here to visual representations and painting in particular, but writing about topography can work possessively in the same way, through a similar range of scientific, aesthetic, or sentimental registers. In addition, evocative writing about landscapes and scenery may be less concerned with establishing possession than transposing exploratory or pioneering journeys from a mundane to an almost divine level, instilling higher purpose and legitimacy: "On returning for the third time to the Nyanza, in January, 1889, and during our long stay at Kavalli for two and a half months, it was unseen, until suddenly casting our eyes, as usual, towards that point where it ought to be visible, the entire length of the range burst out of the cloudy darkness, and gratified over a thousand pairs of anxious eyes that fixed their gaze upon the singular and magnificent scene" (Stanley 1890: ii, 291-92).
Though there is great variety in modes of geographical observation — some extravagant and lyrical, some more contracted and mundane — all manifestations, like all transactions between colonizers and indigenous peoples, were implicated in the larger project of European apprehension and control to which Smith refers. At the same time, a place much closer to Walker's sphere of activity, also at the colonial periphery, could be responded to in these terms: "What a lovely spot! Along the coast in both directions stretches the thick fringe of coco-nut palms; behind them the deep green of the virgin forest.... Around us is the pale blue water of the lagoon" (Woodford 1890: 147). This is banal, and not much less so at the time than for readers numbed since by tourist cliches. What is striking, though, is that Walker scarcely engages in this sort of description. He does express his astonishment as he beholds the scenery of New Zealand; and he does go into raptures of a sort concerning the settler paradise of Mago (Mango) in Fiji(though what he celebrates in this case is less the natural environment than the exemption from labor the colonists appear to enjoy). During his Pacific travels, however, despite the fact that he is writing home, to a mother unfamiliar with the Pacific, he makes virtually no effort to evoke lagoons or beaches or mountains. He does talk about having to walk miles over coral and about traveling up and down a river, but the landscape is referred to rather than depicted; it does not emerge as an object of spectacle, as something detached from particular transits or uses. This failure epitomizes one of the critical senses in which he is, as he says, "an awfully bad hand at letter writing." Given the larger significance of remarks upon scenery, his shortcomings can be considered, not merely in terms of some basic ineptitude in the art of composition, but as part of a wider failure in the art of colonization, and specifically a failure on Walker's part to fashion himself, to write himself up as a confident colonial actor, whose particular ventures form part of a rounded aesthetic, economic, and political endeavor.
This signals the extent to which a perception of colonialism based on figures such as Stanley is an incomplete perception. Walker's letters show that even at the moment at which imperialism must have seemed globally triumphant, before it entered the cycles of depression and warfare that culminated in the First World War and before the unity of the British Empire was threatened and then undone by Boer nationalism in South Africa—even at this moment, there was an incoherence to settler identity, a perception, inadequately articulated, that the products of the rough life were no longer suitable for society at home. So far from uplifting others, the trader lapsed into his own kind of savagery. Much of the colonial writing of this period is optimistic, blandly self-assured, absurd in retrospect. Walker's letters register something very different. The most famous articulation of this vision came later, at the turn of the century, in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and subsequently, pessimistic and radical writing that exposed the corruption of colonization emerged from many parts of the empire; but Walker's letters show us something that the brilliance and coherence of Conrad's prose could only disguise: the way in which a failure of colonialism was manifested in a failure of writing, in an awfully bad hand.
Little is known of Walker's life other than what can be discerned from his letters. We have avoided annotating them in a conventional way, which would tell you what little we know about which ships he traveled on, more about the individuals he refers to in passing, and so on. That contextualization and specification is normally the business of an editor of historical texts of this kind. The information is supposed to make particular sources more accessible and useful, to install them like museum relics in a well-illuminated cabinet. It is not clear to us that knowing more about Walker's accounts or relatives would somehow make this correspondence into a valuable component of "the" historical record. Admittedly, such details supply certain facts for those concerned with, for example, the incidents of violence that led to extension of colonial control in the area and the failure of small Australian businesses in the Pacific. We are not opposed to that sort of annotation in principle and have done it in other texts. But in this case such worthy scholarship would seem to miss the point: the "evidence" here lies less in what Walker reports than in his haziness, in his inability to report, in the anxiety and epistemic murk his bad hand ironically renders so intelligible.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bad Colonists by Nicholas Thomas, Richard Eves. Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations xixPreface xxi
Acknowledgments xxiii
Introduction: Letter Writing and Colonial Selfhood 1
1. " An Awfully bad Hand at Letter Writing": Vernon Lee Walker and Colonial History 9
2. The Letters of Vernon Lee Walker, 1878-1887 19
3. Self-Fashioning and Savagery: Louis Becke's Pacific Letters 77
4. The Letters of Louis Becke, 188-1882 91
5. The Apotheosis of Savagery: Louis Becke's Pacific Tales 129
Epilogue: Figures in History 146
Notes 149
Bibliography 155
Index 161