David Igler. The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush. New York Oxford University Press, 2013.
David Igler. The
Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush. New York
Oxford University Press, 2013.
255Â pp.
$29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-991495-1.
Reviewed by Ronald Schultz (University of Wyoming)
Published on H-Empire (January, 2014) Commissioned by Charles V. Reed
Bright Lights and Shadows in the Eastern Pacific
Understanding the Pacific Ocean as a system--as Fernand
Braudel and David Abulafia have done for the Mediterranean and a long list of
writers beginning with Charles Verlinden have done for the Atlantic--is a
project that has confounded even the best historians and anthropologists of the
past two generations. Instead of a "Pacific system" in one way or
another each of them has carved out a section--usually the southern islands--of
the Pacific Basin for discussion, leaving the whole story for later writers to
untangle.
David Igler's, _The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from
Captain Cook to the Gold Rush_ reflects this tradition, limiting his study to
the "eastern Pacific" by drawing an imaginary pole-to-pole line
through the Hawai'ian Islands and focusing on events and processes that took
place east of that line. Viewing the space between this line and the Pacific
coast of the Americas as a coherent entity allows Igler to write an especially
provocative book that opens much new material to view and forces us to rethink
the meaning of this early nineteenth-century ocean world.
Igler tells his story of the eastern Pacific through five
themes that encompass the salient experiences of the region and devotes a
chapter to each. He begins with trade, the raison d'être for all of the
events that set the eastern Pacific apart. Trade was central to the eastern
Pacific system, providing both the incentive for long and expensive ocean
voyages and the connections that made the eastern Pacific into a loose network
of widely scattered nodes. Especially after the close of the Napoleonic Wars in
1815, east Pacific trade attracted a kaleidoscope of traders from Europe and
Russia, but especially from American ports. Although the British had been among
the first in the ocean region following the Wallace and Cook voyages in the
eighteenth century, after 1815 British interest and trade focused increasingly
on their new empire in South Asia and Australia, leaving the bulk of east
Pacific trade to others. As hundreds of ships swarmed the early
nineteenth-century eastern Pacific, a system developed that was in many ways
reminiscent of the early modern Indian Ocean system, with coastal trade
ultimately more important to individual voyagers than the long slog to
Guangzhou. Thus Hawai'i became, in the wonderfully apposite phrase of Charles
Fleurieu, minister of marine under Louis XVI, the "grand
Caravanserai" of the trans-Pacific system, a place where water-worn ships
could be repaired, their crews and stocks replenished, and eastern goods
marshaled and transhipped to the western Pacific. Hawai'i was, in effect, the
Batam of the eastern Pacific.
Disease forms the second of Igler's themes and here he
adds an interesting twist, moving beyond the impact of the contagious diseases
carried by ever-growing flotillas of merchant ships and their crews to consider
the devastating impact of syphilis and gonorrhea, the STDs of the day. Although
one would have liked a little more specificity and some statistical analysis of
the dual impact of STDs and non-sexually transmitted diseases, Igler is surely
correct to argue that they covaried, each type of disease heightening the
morbidity and mortality of the other. This had important implications not just
for the eastern Pacific, but for all areas of outsider-indigenous contact.
Beyond arguing for the demographic importance of STDs in
the operation of the east Pacific system and for the devastating impact of
syphilis and gonorrhea on indigenous populations, Igler argues that one of the
primary vectors for the spread of these diseases was an eastern Pacific sex
trade in indigenous women. Looking past the lingering presentism of this claim,
this argument places Igler in more or less direct opposition to Pacific
scholars such as Nicholas Thomas and Anne Salmond who, looking at an earlier
period in the island south Pacific, offer a very different view of sexual
encounters and their meanings. Igler elides this discussion, but it has
relevance for his provocative sex-trade thesis. Indigenous leaders encouraged
sexual encounters with passing sailors as a means to gain trade goods, to
cement alliances, and to enhance their positions in contested intergroup
disputes. Most of the women offered to transient sailors appear to have been
slaves or at least low-status commoners--people without strong lineage attachments
to local ruling societies. One can confirm this by the fact that elite women
were _tapu_, that is taboo and thus systematically excluded from these
interchanges. Were the early nineteenth-century sexual encounters that Igler
discusses fundamentally different from those of the late eighteenth century? If
so, what accounts for the difference?
As these questions suggest, we need to know more about the indigenous women
involved and how the system of sexual exchange worked within indigenous
communities. Igler gives a good glimpse at how it affected men on ships and how
it spread STDs, but more work is needed for us to understand the indigenous
context in which this system of sexual exchange operated.
Closely related to the sex trade was the ubiquitous
existence of unfree social positions in the eastern Pacific trading world. Lack
of freedom had been a condition of often coerced service on sailing ships since
ancient times and once on board ship crews were little better than slaves to
the vessels captains and officers. Only in port did sailors have a chance to
legally or illegally remove themselves from their superiors' command. Of
course, unless they settled in or around the port, the tar's options were
limited to signing on to another ship. This is why sea lore has always acted as
a verbal Internet, sharing vital information about "good" and
"bad" captains, shipboard conditions, and the likelihood of fair pay.
Igler hints at, but does not directly address this form of unfreedom, instead
focusing on the ubiquity of local forms of unfreedom on which foreigners built.
As in Africa, slavery was an indigenous institution, one that traders were more
than willing to use for their own purposes. But even non-slaves were fair game
to the information- and labor-hungry European, Russian, and American traders
who plied eastern Pacific waters. Indigenous people were captured everywhere,
sometimes as hostages, but more importantly as future interpreters and
go-betweens to aid the swelling ranks of
foreign traders in their dealings with indigenous people. In time more of these
captives would be used as unfree labor in trading and shoreline enterprises.
As Igler points out, over the course of the nineteenth
century, what began as small-scale capture led to growing violence and the
colonial marginalization of whole groups of indigenous people throughout the
eastern Pacific basin.
One of the most difficult things for those living in
todays'
sanitized world of packaged meats and synthetic fur to
grasp is the seeming rapaciousness and lack of environmental concern of people
in the past. Early in his chapter, "The Hunt," Igler describes the
attitude of whalers and marine-mammal hunters as brutal and goes on to recount
how American, Russian, and other maritime hunters nearly stripped the eastern
Pacific of whales and sea otters by the middle years of the nineteenth century.
How else but brutal to describe whalers who congregated in whale spawning
grounds, capturing newborn calves, knowing that their mothers would do anything
to rescue and nurture their young? Using this technique whalers slaughtered
mothers in vast numbers and then released the orphaned calves to starve,
showing little concern for the calves or the reproductive capacities of whale
populations. The Russian war again sea otters was even more devastating,
virtually eliminating them from large stretches of north coast waters.
The last theme of Igler's tour of the eastern Pacific is
science, or at least the science of the early nineteenth century. By 1800 the
United States, Russia, and Atlantic European nations took an interest in
exploring, cataloging, and charting the Pacific Ocean basin and reporting on
the indigenous people who lived there. Increasingly, voyages to the Pacific
included "scientifics" as a special kind of supercargo, men (and in
the French case, one disguised woman) who collected specimens of rocks, plants,
and animals, while also writing mostly descriptive accounts of the indigenous
people they encountered on shore. Much of science in this early period
consisted of Linnaean classification and amassing huge caches of exotic
specimens; the reason for all this collecting and classification was ultimately
to create a hierarchical ordering of the natural world and the people in it.
Accordingly, Pacific naturalists divided in their views of the Pacific's
indigenous people (and indeed of indigenous people everywhere), some hewing to
the "natural man" thesis of Boccaccio and Rousseau, while others followed
Petrarch and viewed the differences between indigenous and
"civilized" people as a mark of indigenous inferiority and
exploitability. In adopting this bipolar system of classification
nineteenth-century "scientifics" were no more advanced in their
thinking than their fifteenth- and sixteenth-century counterparts who had
combined reports of newfound exotic peoples with long-existing anti-Semitism
and current anti-Islamic prejudices to concoct a dark mixture of incipient
racism. In a similar way,
nineteenth-century Pacific naturalists--at least those in the majority
"civilized" camp--wittingly or unwittingly laid the foundation for
the scientific racism that would dominate the United States and other colonial
powers in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Out of these quasi-professional scientific surveys of the
Pacific one significant figure did emerge: James Dwight Dana, a
"scientific" who would become one of the nineteenth century's
foremost geologists.
Igler spends the better part of a chapter discussing Dana
and his role in advancing the geological understanding of the Pacific Ocean
and, equally important, his proposal that the enormous ocean world should be
treated as a unified whole. Beginning in 1838, Dana spent four long years in
the Pacific as a member of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, studying the volcanic
island and coral formations that defined the geological history of the Pacific
basin and, in his nearly 800-page report on his findings, arguing for the
connected nature of the Pacific and its eastern hinterland. The western coasts
of the Americas, Dana argued, were components, not of a continental geology,
but of a Pacific-wide dynamic of land formation and long-term erosion.
Dana's ideas were somewhat speculative, but were well
received by many in the scientific community, including Charles Darwin. Thus it
comes as a complete surprise when Igler reveals that in his 1855 presidential
address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dana wore
the cap of expansionary nationalism and announced the dawn of a new
"American Geology." Gone from this nationalist geology were Dana's
earlier arguments for the Pacific origins of the western American coasts and in
its place Dana now argued for a system of national geology that firmly affixed
the West Coast of the United States to the dawning American continental empire.
The geology of the United States, Dana now argued, was a "simple"
geology (unlike the complicated geology of Europe, Asia, and
Africa) that reflected its exceptional providential
mission. The ancient geology of America was, Dana now claimed, yet more proof
of the nation's "Manifest Destiny."
The _Great Ocean_ is a provocative book that will force
us to look upon the early nineteenth-century eastern Pacific in new ways and will
call on us to reassess the importance of the events and processes that took
shape there. Yet while _The_ _Great Ocean_ shines a bright light on the
traders, ship officers, marine hunters, and naturalists who plied the eastern
Pacific in growing numbers in the first half of the nineteenth century, that
same light flickers and dims when cast on the indigenous people of the Pacific,
leaving them in deep shadow and sometimes near-total darkness. Igler's vantage
point is that of the wooden decks and rough-hewn trading rooms of European,
Russian, and American ships and commercial houses. In this view, indigenous
people appear mostly in vignettes, as largely abstract victims of disease and
sex-trafficking, as traders at scattered shoreline contact points, and as
unfree workers on sailing vessels. Missing is any deep understanding of these
people, their economic, social, political, or cultural systems and, most
important, why they interacted with the waves of oncoming foreigners the way
they did. There is no hint of the anthropological approach of Greg Denning,
Nicholas Thomas, Anne Salmond, or Inga Clendinnen here and this gives the book
a lopsided view of the eastern Pacific before 1850. In end, _The Great Ocean_
gives us a well-developed world of sailors, masters, sailing vessels, and
ever-increasing trade and exploitation, a world cast in full light and colorful
detail set against a much less-developed world of indigenous people who live in
the shadows or at best in the reflected glow of a trader's lantern.
If we are to understand the many worlds of the eastern
Pacific, we will need to know more about this half-lit world.
Citation: Ronald Schultz. Review of Igler, David, _The
Great Ocean:
Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush_.
H-Empire, H-Net Reviews. January, 2014.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.