Leaving Saint-Denis on an Open Boat: Creole Migration to the Pacific

Abstract

Abstract: In the early 1860s, a series of cyclones, the sugar industry collapse and increasing impoverishment among the Reunionese were significant push factors for people to explore greener pastures in other colonies. At the same time, governor Guillain in the new French colony of New Caledonia actively sought to recruit skilled workers from Reunion to start up sugar production in the Pacific, to build the local infrastructure and provide settler bodies for the colonial project. While we are aware of these important push and pull factors, what were the individual, personal motivations for the Creoles of Reunion, particularly the most poverty stricken and dispossessed, to leave home for the unknown island across the oceans? How did they imagine this new colonial space in the Pacific? Using the framework of Édouard Glissant's "The Open Boat," and based on research in the Archives départementales de La Réunion, this article analyses letters to the governor of Reunion written by (or for) prospective migrants, discussing their reasons (and pleas) to be granted passage to New Caledonia. It also considers the motivations to move that have been preserved in oral family histories among the descendants of nineteenth-century Reunionese migrants to the Pacific.