Eighteenth Century Tonga: New Interpretations of Tongan Society and Material Culture at the Time of Captain Cook

Abstract

Although Tonga was discovered in I6I6 by Le Maire, fleetingly described by Tasman in I643, and the northern islands were seen by Wallis in I767, real knowledge of Tongan culture had to await Captain Cook's visits. The written accounts and ethnographic collections resulting from Cook's voyages are often our major source for understanding the character of Tongan culture in the eighteenth century. Yet, despite drawings, descriptions, and identifications which are outstanding for their time, little work has been done to interpret this early material in the light of other kinds of research in order to delineate the relationship between material culture and the social system. This article presents the preliminary results of several years' research in the field, in libraries, and in museums in the Pacific, America and Europe, in which materials from Cook's voyages have played a central role. Cook's visits to Tonga (I773-4) on his second voyage are most important here. For although the visits were short, a great deal of trading was done; and only specimens and descriptions collected at that time are certain to be relatively free from European influence.' Despite the abundance of artefacts and descriptions, their location and interpretation are not as simple as one might expect.2 Cook's crew often sold their ' curiosities' to the highest bidders and labels seldom accompanied them. At that time, moreover, some of the outstanding museums were private, for example, those of George Humphrey, The Duchess of Portland, Daniel Boulter, William Bullock, and especially Sir Ashton Lever. Most of these early collections were eventually sold at auctions, and so the specimens became widely dispersed, often with the subsequent loss of the association with Cook. The owners of such 'cabinets of curiosities' usually had little interest in the precise identification or technical significance of the material, and items were regularly labelled simply 'South Seas'; indeed, 'Otahiti' often became a catchall term for the entire area. Some objects found their separate way to the British Museum, but little care was exercised in labelling them, either as having come from Cook's voyages or as to their original provenance. In fact most of these specimens seem not to have been numbered or labelled at the time of their acquisition. In the late nineteenth century, however, they were catalogued along with non-Cook specimens, apparently by Edge-Partington, and given a series of numbers reflecting their supposed origin. The collection was divided into four categories: viz., HAW (Hawaii); TAH (Tahiti); NZ (New Zealand) and EP (eastern Polynesia). Some objects were assigned no numbers at all, and the Tongan material was for the most part not