These hills do not immediately suggest volcanic activity, but both contain craters. The northern one (that on the left in the pictures) is Rara, long choked and overgrown; the other, Monu, hold a pool of boiling mud, and from halfway down its southern side gushes a hot spring of clear water. It is probably a very long time since either of the craters was other than it is now. There are no legends of any activity there.
Indeed, there seem to be few legends of any kind about the island. It is as if it existed in its isolation without a history until less than two centuries ago. Even since then the record is fragmentary, but I have, since my return, been at considerable pains to find out what I can about it from a variety of sources and feel that this is the best place to include the result of my researches. They do at least go some way towards explaining a factor which puzzled some of us from the start of the voyage: that is the availability of an uninhabited, but richly fertile island.
In those atlases which do notice it, Tanakuatua is usually shown as included in the Midsummer Islands group. This was always misleading, and later became inaccurate. In the first place, it lies five hundred miles from the nearest of them, and about one hundred and fifty miles from its nearest, and smaller, neighbour, Oahomu. One suspects that both these islands may well have been brought into the Midsummers’ zone for the sake of tidiness by those who draw those sweeping, territorial dotted lines on maps of the Pacific Ocean, since they are still more remote from any other island group. It is, moreover, not inconceivably the existence of these lines which caused them at one time to become a responsibility of the Midsummers’ administration. Stranger things than that have happened in Colonial history.
♦
In the days of early exploration both islands appear to have been elusive. Unlike most islands in the region they were unnoticed even by Captain Cook, for though, on his second voyage, in 1774, he visited (and named appropriately to the season of his visit) the Midsummers, neither the log of the Resolution, nor that of the Adventure, makes mention of any such outlying islands, though one would have thought one or other of them to lie close enough to his course to be observed.
It is not, however, until twenty years later that the discovery of an island that can scarcely have been other than Tanakuatua is recorded.
In 1794 Captain Sleason, of the Purpose, noted in his journal:
7th day of April at six of the clock in the morning, the wind backing and falling to calm, brought upon us a thick fog. In this we continued drifting three days. On the morning of the 10th April came on a strong wind from the West which drove off the fog, but, freshening to a gale, forced us in heavy weather far to eastward of our course. This, likewise, held for three days. In the night of the 13th-14th the gale abated, the morning breaking serene, with the sea fallen again near to calm, and the wind Westerly yet, but now very light.
By first light we sighted land at some three leagues distant, bearing E.S.E. Making closer we discovered it to be an Island of no great size, rising in the centre to a mountain of low height having the form of two humps joined by a ridge. The vegetation is abundant, palms and other trees, together with bushes thickly covering all but the upper parts of the Mountain.
At our approach, sea birds in great numbers flew out to attend us, and a school of dolphins rode to our bows, but we could perceive no sign of human habitation.
The Western side of this Island is set about with a stout reef having a number of islets in it, and also several navigable passages. One of these we sounded and successfully essayed. Having anchored in the lagoon, I sent the cutter ashore, with water kegs.
The boat crew found the Island not to be uninhabited, as it had appeared, for, having discovered a stream and followed it up a short way for clear water, they came upon a small clearing. Set about this were seven or eight huts, exceedingly mean and poorly constructed, being in the main of pieces of bark lashed together. The condition of this place was so filthy as to set up a noisome stench. At the centre of the clearing was a pit of ashes, with several large stones of the kind which natives of these parts use for their cooking, lying therein. One of our men, thinking the place long deserted, found this not to be so, and suffered a slightly scorched foot.
The boatswain, then coming up, was of the opinion that it had not been deserted above an hour or two, though we had seen no smoke.
Some of the huts contained wooden tools of poor workmanship, also some rudely contrived nets which were judged to be for fishing. In one hut was found a human leg bone decorated in part by carving, and a stone knife lying among chips of bone from the work. Also in this hut was a human skull, more recently fresh than the leg bone, and declared by the boatswain, though out of what experience I know not, to have been not above a week severed.
After several journeys, our watering then being sufficient, the crew came aboard, having had no sight of any of the natives.
The general location of this island and the reference to the double-summitted mountain leave little doubt that it was Tanakuatua. Its rediscovery and the true charting of its position, however, had to wait until it was visited by H.M.S. Pertinax in 1820. And in the twenty-six years that had passed since Captain Sleason wrote his account, conditions there seem to have changed.
The Pertinax made a preliminary circumnavigation of the island noting that the eastern and northern coasts were rocky and inhospitable, offering neither convenient landing places, nor good anchorage, and that a strong reef starting from the southernmost point enclosed a lagoon which bounded almost all the west coast. The ship did not attempt a passage of the reef, but dropped anchor just outside it, within sight of a beach on which a number of canoes was drawn up.
A party of about fifty natives, armed with spears, gathered on the beach, in lively conference. They then launched six of the canoes and made across the lagoon towards the Pertinax. A little short of the passage through the reef, however, they paused, and rested their paddles. The canoes came together. There was another, more sober, conference during which heads turned now and then towards the ship. After this exchange of second thoughts they turned back, making energetically for the shore where, after pulling up the canoes, they withdrew into the trees, and disappeared entirely.
A shore-party, landed from the Pertinax, found a village of huts entirely deserted. Among the possessions left behind by the natives they came upon a rusty pistol, several sailors’ knives, four brass belt-buckles, and a number of metal buttons, as well as less surprising objects such as a row of skulls on the lintels of the largest hut, and a number of bone ornaments and barbs.
In course of further exploration they noticed a cross erected upon a small headland further along the coast. This they found to be made of pieces of planking, clearly from some ship, nailed together, set upright, and roughly carved with the letters R.I.P. Digging in front of it in the hope of finding something that would identify the grave, they unearthed, instead of the remains they expected, a bottle containing a folded piece of paper. On this was written in a brown pigment, thought to be blood:
IN MEMORY OF
James Bear of London
Edward Timson of Shepton
Henry Davis of Lewes
Here wrekked from the ship Fortitude 10 day of May A.D. 1812. All et by the cannible savidges May-July A.D. 1812.
PRAYS THE LORD
signed Saml. Hodges AB
While returning, the Pertinax party suffered an ambush by the natives. One man was nastily wounded by a spear, but three of the attackers fell to the muskets, whereupon the rest fled, leaving two of their number as prisoners.
From these captives the sailors later took the name of the island to be, as nearly as they could pronounce it (and assuming that it was indeed a name, and not some kind of invocation or curse) Tanakuatua. Accordingly it was so entered in the records, and has since remained.
Documents in the Record Office show that a ship named Fortitude did in fact sail from Deptford on the 2nd August 1811 bound for Botany Bay with a cargo of one hundred and forty-two
convicts. She never arrived, and was later assumed to be lost at sea. In the list of convicts sentenced to transportation aboard her occur the names:
James Bare, of London, for the forging of a postage frank, value 6 pence.
Edward Timson, of Shepton in Somerset, for combining to maintain the rate of wages.
Henry Davies, of Lewes in Sussex, for theft of a fowl, value 7 pence.
One of the members of the ship’s crew is recorded as Samuel Hodges, of Rye, in Sussex.
The Ship’s last reported port of call was Otaheite (later known as Tahiti). She sailed from there on the 15th April 1812, whereafter all trace of her was lost.
♦
Tanakuatua was now officially in existence on the Admiralty charts, but continued to be rarely visited, and then almost exclusively by ships driven off course, and finding themselves in need of water and fresh vegetables. There was, occasionally, some barter, but as the island had a reputation for treacherous inhabitants addicted to cannibalism, such visits were more usually in the nature of raids.
Thus there had been no exploration, and little more was known of the place than could be seen from the sea before 1848, when a survey party went ashore from H.M.S. Finder. It reported the natives as being:
…painted with patterns, much ornamented with shells and shell-work, and with some small pieces of coarse cloth worn more for decoration than for modesty. Most of the men wear, also, pieces of bone thrust through large slits in their ear-lobes, and often more slender bone needles through the septum of the nose, frequently projecting several inches on either side. Their faces are tattooed in an unsightly fashion in order to give the appearance of great ferocity.
When this fierce appearance, accompanied by loud shouts, menacing gestures and a brandishing of spears, failed to deter the approach of the survey party with its escort of marines, the natives seemed at first astonished, and then to suffer loss of heart. And as the marines raised their rifles preparatory to firing an intimidating volley over their heads, they immediately ran away, and hid among the trees where they remained until they were coaxed back by offers of presents.
With formal defiance thus disposed of, the party found them shy and suspicious. The only other hostile incident occurred when half-a-dozen of the party found their path barred by a group of some ten natives. All but one were armed with metal-tipped spears. The exception held a rusty musket. He lifted this unreliable weapon, and pointing it in the general direction of the ship’s party, raised his voice, apparently commanding it to fire. When it did not, he and his companions looked disconcerted. He tried again, and then, with a gesture of disgust, threw it on the ground, and the whole band scampered off into the bushes. Thereafter the survey went peacefully, though it was strictly forbidden for any man to straggle alone.
Tanakuatua was duly mapped. It is, in general, pear-shaped, with a length of eight miles and a width slightly over five. A small island, Hinuati, stands about a mile and a half off its southern tip, and has an area of some hundred and fifty acres. Along the reef are a dozen or so smaller islets varying in size from half an acre up to one of twelve acres. The soil is of volcanic origin, rich in mineral salts, productive of good taro crops, bread fruit, coconuts, and a variety of vegetables. The latter were unexpectedly found to include potatoes which were assumed to have been salvaged from a wreck, possibly that of Fortitude, and planted by castaways.
The adult population of Tanakuatua appeared at this time to be fairly small, possibly little more than one hundred and fifty, though deserted village sites suggested that it had recently been larger. The habits, conditions, and practices of the natives were reported as being mean, crude, and sordid to a repulsive degree. The officer in charge of the survey-party considered them to be the most primitive savages he had ever encountered, but in this he differed from the ship’s doctor who maintained that they were an example of degeneration induced by prolonged interbreeding.
The report did not doubt that the island, if intelligently cultivated, was capable of supporting a considerable population as well as producing copra and other trade commodities in useful quantity. Having regard, however, to the necessary amount of preliminary work, the capital required for it, the unsuitability of the natives for such work and the consequent need to import labour, the small size of the crops likely to be produced during several initial years, and, above all, the isolation of Tanakuatua from all usual trade routes, it was very doubtful whether any attempt to exploit the island’s potentialities could prove worthwhile.
Having thus summed up Tanakuatua’s relevance to the nineteenth-century world, H.M.S. Finder then sailed away northwesterly to survey and, in due course, to issue a still less favourable report on the island of Oahomu.
But if Tanakuatua was without importance in the world at large, it did not follow that the converse was true, and although the tempo was slow, the island was to experience more of it in the next sixty years than in some previous thousands.
In or about the year 1852 there was an invasion. Details are sketchy, but it appears to have been conducted by a force some three hundred strong, in a fleet of canoes. Who they were and where they came from – beyond their statement that their ancestral island lay somewhere towards the setting sun – is obscure, but from the fact that they brought with them their wives and families, and even fowls and small livestock houses in huts supported catamaran fashion upon lashed-together canoes, it is clear that they were engaged in purposeful migration.
Hostilities were brief, seemingly about half a day long, whereafter the residents’ resistance, demoralized by the invaders’ prowess and confidence, collapsed entirely, never to revive.
The newcomers brought a superior technology. In place of the groups of filthy bark hovels they built villages of thatched huts. They cleared spaces for taro patches and planted coconut groves they laid out gardens with several kinds of vegetables, and made it clear in many other ways that they had come to stay.
The two bloods mingled. Occasional ships putting in for one reason or another contributed new strains, too, so that a mere thirty years later the population bore very little resemblance to that recorded by H.M.S. Finder.
It was a confident, more self-reliant people now, with a conscious bent for independence. From the occasional ships, and a few expeditions of their own, Tanakuatuans had learnt a little of the world outside, and preferred their own ways. Towards chance visitors they were rarely hostile, for they liked barter and enjoyed an opportunity for a feast, but towards those Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and others who came to look at the island with calculating eyes, and sometimes made exploratory suggestions upon the wisdom, in this uncertain world, of entrusting the protection of one’s interests to a benevolent strong power, their manner was cold and their hospitality formal. It was a matter in which the views of successive chiefs and of their subjects were at one.
On several occasions they came nearer to ‘protection’ than they ever knew, but each time the old reasons prevented it from actually taking place. Even with the coming of steamers, prospective exploiters continued to decide that the island, in its remoteness, was too small, and its population too unco-operative, for any venture there to be better than a poor risk. And so, though by margins that were at times very narrow, Tanakuatuan independence survived even the Wonderful Century.
♦
But the world was changing. Half way round the globe from Tanakuatua an old Queen died. She had lived under an imperial sun in its high noon, and seen her subjects dapple the map with red patches, from continental daubs to little stipple spots in distant oceans, but when she went that sun, too, was sinking. The shadows of history were creeping over a great day done. Already a new wind was blowing gusty warnings, gathering strength for the gale that would tatter the Age of Confidence to its last shreds. And when that storm came, not even Tanakuatua, twelve thousand miles from its centre, remained untouched.
In 1916 it occurred to someone in the Admiralty that Tanakuatua and Oahomu both stood a good chance of a
ttracting German attention as bases, or hiding places, suitable for their armed merchant-ship raiders engaged in harassing shipping in the western Pacific. This thought he communicated to the Colonial Office with the suggestion that it might be a useful idea to forestall any such intention.
As a result, the Governor of the Midsummers in due course received instructions to take preventive action there. This led him to dispatch the Frances Williams, an inter-island trader now equipped for the times with a resplendent coat of dazzle-paint and a quick-firing gun, to show the flag. Her arrival at Tanakuatua, after a reassuring call at Oahomu, took place on the 15th September.
As she entered the lagoon after negotiating the passage of the reef, the Captain lowered his glasses, and passed them to the mate.
“‘Few ask me, Joe,” he said. “There’s something gorn a bit orf here. Been here afore a couple of times, an’ each time they all come out on the beach an’ start jumpin’ up and down an yellin’ their heads orf. But just take a shufti now.”
The mate swept the glasses along the shore line. He could see no sign of movement. But for the row of canoes drawn up on the beach the place might have been deserted.
The Frances Williams lost her way, and her chain rattled out.
The sound echoed across the lagoon, without rousing response of any kind. Then the mate said:
“Ah. There’s two or three of ‘em, Cap’n. Keeping well back in the trees. Seem to be wavin’ at us.”
As the Captain took his glasses back and turned them where the mate was pointing, four dusky figures broke from cover further along the beach and sprinted towards the water. Almost without pausing, they grabbed one of the drawn-up canoes, and took it with them. They were aboard it and paddling furiously in a matter of seconds. Then, before they had covered more than twenty yards, came the sound of a rifle shot. The bullet fell short of the canoe, throwing up a spurt of water. The paddlers hesitated briefly, and then bent to it again. There was the crack of a second shot. One paddler sprang to his feet. By the time the sound of his howl reached the Frances Williams, the canoe had already overturned, and its crew was striking out for the shore.