B A D C O L O N I S T S The South Seas Letters 
 
 of Vernon Lee Walker and Louis Recke 
 NICHOLAS THOMAS / RICHARD EVES 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
BAD COLONISTS 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2018 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/badcolonists01unse 
 
BAD COLONISTS 
 
 The South Seas Letters of Vernon Lee Walker & Louis Becke 
 
 & NICHOLAS THOMAS AND RICHARD EVES 
 
 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London, 1999 
 
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 Note Address—69 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne. 
 
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 merchants, 474$ George st 
 Walford, Charles W., carpenter, 10 
 Chester st 
 
 Wa :orJ, Fred., carpenter, 40 Arthur st 
 Wa.ford, H., mason, 337 Elizabeth st 
 Wh.ford, Ilcnry, 76 Albion st 
 Waiford, James, Nelson st, Balmain 
 Walford, Joseph S., The Retreat, Ken¬ 
 nedy st. Glebe 
 
 Walford, Margaret, 36 Upper William 
 
 Street S 
 
 Walford, W. B., Ill Upper William st N 
 Walker, J. H. & Son (Henry Walker), 
 tour merchants and biscuit 
 bakers, 16# Sussex st 
 Walker and Sons, joinery works, 
 Jones 6t 
 
 Walker, —, Rose terrace, Dowling st, 
 Paddington 
 
 Walker, —, Turner st, fail main 
 
 Walker, Miss, Harriet, school, 110 
 Bathurst st 
 
 Walker, Rev. Harris, Denison st, 
 Woolluhrti 
 
 Walker, Harry, 2 off Clarence st 
 Walker, H., Leichhardt at, Glebe 
 Walker, Henry, Goodlet st 
 Walker, Henry, cabman, 70 Figst 
 Walker, Howard, 73 Lower Fort st 
 Walker, J. C., law stationer, 91 Eliza¬ 
 beth street 
 
 Walker, Mrs. J. E., 128 Queen st, 
 Wonllahra 
 
 Walker, J. H., Tapper st, Murrickville 
 Walker, J. P., Tempto court. King st 
 Walker, James, stonemason, Raglau 
 st, Alexandria 
 
 Walker, James, Stevens rd. Botany 
 Walker, James, greengrocer, King st, 
 Balmain 
 
 Walker, James, baker, 63 Holt st 
 
 Walker, Thomas B M accountant, Nol- 
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 Walker, Thomas U., draper. Old South 
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 Walker, G. W., barrister, 2 Wentworth 
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 Walker, W. H., Maida, 50 John st, 
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 Walker, Watson, Goodbope st, Pad¬ 
 dington 
 
 Walker, William, painter, Maria st, 
 Marrickvillc 
 
 Walker. Wm., Victoria rd, Manickville 
 Walker, W., plasterer, Sarah Ann st 
 Walker, Wm., Waterloo rd. St. Tetera 
 Walker, W., Westmoreland st. Glebe 
 Walker, William, engineer. College st, 
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© 1999 Duke University Press 
 All rights reserved 
 
 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper © 
 Typeset in New Baskerville by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. 
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear 
 on the last printed page of this book. 
 
 Research and editorial work on this book were supported by 
 the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, an Australian Research 
 Council Special Research Centre at the Australian National 
 University, www.anu.edu.au/culture 
 
Extracts from letters by Vernon Lee Walker, Noumea, July 29, 1884, 
 February 3, 1885, and February 3, 1885. Rhodes House Library; 
 photographs courtesy Pacific and Asian History, Research School of 
 Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 
 (pages iv, v, vi) 
 
 “Three South Sea Stories,” title illustration by B. E. Minns for stories 
 by Louis Becke, Bulletin, 16 December 1893, p. 22. National Library 
 of Australia, Canberra. The ardst, Benjamin Minns, was a prominent 
 cartoonist and painter of indigenous subjects, (page vii) 
 
 Advertisement for McLean Bros, and Rigg, Vernon Lee Walker’s 
 sometime employer, from Sands & McDougall’s Directory of Melbourne, 
 1878, p. xlii. Nauonal Library of Australia, Canberra, (page viii) 
 
 Listing from Sand’s Sydney Directory for i88y, p. 515. National Library 
 of Australia, Canberra, (page ix) 
 
 Hiapo, Niuean bark cloth, 180 x 196 cm. Louis Becke made little 
 mention in his writings of the material culture and art of the Pacific, 
 but did collect some pieces, including this one, which he sold to the 
 Technological Museum in Sydney in 1892. He claimed in his letter 
 to J. H. Maiden, then that institution’s director, that the “specimens 
 of nauve cloth” were “among the best ever made on Savage Island.” 
 He was paid £12 for the collecuon, part of which, including this 
 piece, was subsequently transferred to the Australian Museum. 
 Photograph by J. Fields/Nature Focus (Australian Museum). 
 
 (page x) 
 
 Niuean fish hooks, pearl-shell, twine. These pieces were also col¬ 
 lected by Becke and sold as part of the same lot to the Technological 
 Museum, later the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, and 
 now the Powerhouse Museum. These were exhibited as part of 
 the Powerhouse’s “Pirating the Pacific” exhibition in 1993. Repro¬ 
 duced courtesy of the Trustees of the Museum of Applied Arts and 
 Sciences, Sydney, (page xi) 
 
 Extracts from letters by Louis Becke, Nanumaga, Ellice Group, 
 South Pacific, February 21, 1881 and Island of Peru, Kingsmill 
 Group, September 24, 1881, first page and final page. Mitchell 
 Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, (pages xii, xiii) 
 

4 ? Contents 
 
 List of Illustrations xix 
 Preface 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, 1880-1882 91 
 
 5. The Apotheosis of Savagery: Louis Becke’s Pacific Tales 129 
 Epilogue: Figures in History 146 
 
 Notes 149 
 Bibliography 155 
 
 Index 161 
 

Illustrations 
 
 Extract from a letter by Vernon Lee Walker, Noumea, July 29, 1884. iv 
 
 Extract from a letter by Vernon Lee Walker, Noumea, February 3, 1885. v 
 
 Extract from a letter by Vernon Lee Walker, Noumea, February 3, 1885. vi 
 
 “Three South Sea Stories,” title illustration by B. E. Minns for stories by 
 Louis Becke. vii 
 
 Advertisement for McLean, Bros. 8c Rigg, Vernon Lee Walker’s sometimes 
 employer, from Sands & McDougall’s Directory of Melbourne, 1878. viii 
 
 Listing from Sand’s Sydney Directory for 1883. ix 
 
 Hiapo, Niuean bark cloth, collected ca. 1890 by Louis Becke. x 
 
 Niuean fish hooks, pearl-shell, twine. Collected by Louis Becke. xi 
 
 Extract of letter by Louis Becke, Nanumaga, Ellice Group, South Pacific, 
 February 21, 1881. xii 
 
 Extract of letter by Louis Becke, Island of Peru, Kingsmill Group, 
 September 24, 1881, first page, xiii 
 
 Extract of letter by Louis Becke, Island of Peru, Kingsmill Group, 
 September 24, 1881, final page, xiii 
 
 Detail fromj. Hugh Johnson, “Oceania, or Islands in the Pacific Ocean, on 
 Mercators projection, comprising Polynesia, Malaysia and Australasia.” 10 
 
 “A Map of Fiji and New Caledonia,” fromj. W. Anderson, Notes of Travel in 
 Fiji and New Caledonia with some remarks on South Sea Islanders and their 
 Languages. 12 
 
Letter by Vernon Lee Walker, Sydney, New South Wales, December 18, 
 
 1883, two pages. 22-23 
 
 “Map of the New Hebrides, copied from the Admiralty Chart with 
 corrections and additions by the New Hebrides’ Missionaries,” 1891. 68 
 
 “Beach at Steep Cliff Bay, Raga, New Hebrides.” From an album of 
 photographs by John Beattie, The Scenery and Peoples of the Islands of the South 
 and Western Pacific [1906?]. 74 
 
 Photograph portrait of Louis Becke. 78 
 
 Extract from “A Dead Loss,” Louis Becke, Bulletin, 15 December 1894, 
 p. 19. 80 
 
 “Began to roll up his sleeves . . . ,” illustration by Norman Lindsay, from 
 Louis Becke, Bully Hayes: Buccaneer and Other Stories. 88 
 
 “The Gilbert and Ellice Islands,” from Deryck Scarr, Fragments of Empire. 92 
 
 Letter by Louis Becke, Nanumaga, Ellice Group, South Pacific, 
 
 February 21, 1881, two pages. 94-95 
 
 xx 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
# Preface 
 
 This book is a work of experimental history, stimulated by the critical an¬ 
 thropology of colonial cultures and by reflective writings on history making. 
 It explores two areas. The first is not so much the fashioning of colonial 
 masculine identities in the disorderly situation of the periphery, but the 
 failure or degeneration of coherent selfhood in tropical situations beyond 
 civility. The second is the significance of personal letters as vehicles for 
 self-fashioning. Letters are vital cultural documents, not only as historical 
 sources in the conventional sense, but as artifacts of selfhood, sometimes 
 expressions of the failure of selfhood. 
 
 These questions are here explored through two sets of letters, each from 
 traders in the South Pacific in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; we 
 have used the term of the period, “the South Seas,” to evoke the region as 
 a theater of European romance and violence, more than as the domain of 
 indigenous imagining and action. This book is about colonists’ fantasies and 
 realities rather than those of indigenous people. It is one-sided for method¬ 
 ological reasons, because these particular sets of sources strongly provoke 
 questions concerning the self-making of admittedly obscure colonial actors, 
 although they are not especially revealing so far as indigenous practices, his¬ 
 tories, and perceptions are concerned. But our frame of reference does not 
 aim to deny indigenous agency; indigenous realities erupt into these colo¬ 
 nial texts and into the lives of their writers, in one case to a fatal degree. 
 
 Both series of letters describe not colonial triumphs on the part of white 
 men secure in their superior identities, but fraught circumstances in which 
 not only the respectability and integrity of the writers, but even their racial 
 identity, become questionable. Both series of letters were addressed to the 
 writers’ mothers, and there are comparable silences. One set is from Vernon 
 Lee Walker, an unfortunate and unsuccessful character otherwise scarcely 
 known to the historical record, whose self-account is full of poignancy. The 
 other is from Louis Becke, once a best-selling writer, one still well-known 
 to students of Australian and Pacific literature and the literature of colo¬ 
 nial expansion. Becke’s best stories, some of them based on the experiences 
 related in these previously unpublished letters, rank with works such as 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide and Jack London’s South Sea Tales, and 
 similarly convey the violence and degeneracy of colonial life in the Pacific 
 frankly and powerfully. 
 
 This book is not a conventional scholarly edition of these letters. Rather, 
 it exemplifies what could be seen as an undeveloped genre of critical and re¬ 
 flective scholarship. Rather than being an exhaustive edition that provides 
 some balanced contextualization, we have framed these texts in a partial 
 way, making their interest from particular angles apparent. Yet we have also 
 aimed to present them in their integrity, in a fashion that draws attention 
 not only to the peculiar fascination of sources that may be inconsequen¬ 
 tial, from the perspective of a global colonial history, but to their specificity. 
 They are not simply texts or historical documents, but writings and indeed 
 artifacts of a particular kind. Being letters, they raise wider questions about 
 what letters actually are, how they work as powerful but awkward instru¬ 
 ments in social relations that do not merely communicate information or 
 reflect existing statuses, but often say both too little and too much. Letters 
 vitally animate the business of reciprocal self-fashioning, and reflect the real 
 lapses, and crises, of self-fashioning that are much in evidence on the colo¬ 
 nial periphery. The issue of degeneration—of civilized, or racially specific, 
 selves — figures prominently in the literature of the period, in psychology, 
 anthropology, and biology as well as in more extravagant forms in fiction. 
 The relation between Becke’s own correspondence and his stories is of great 
 interest in this context. 
 
 The letters are suggestive, also, about the relationships between popu¬ 
 lar literature and obscure personal notes, between public and private, and 
 between ideology and self-perception. Self-fashioning has become a popu¬ 
 lar theme in literary studies in recent years, but these letters remind us 
 forcefully that this is more than a literary effort; however powerfully self- 
 fashioning is expressed in writing, it is also something that had to be done, 
 by particular people in particular situations —for better or worse. 
 
 This is a multiauthored book in more senses than usual. Readers will 
 note differences of voice and style between different essays and commen¬ 
 tary sections. Because we broadly share a stance regarding the sources we 
 are engaging with, we have avoided signaling on the contents page or within 
 the text itself who wrote what, but some readers may find it helpful to know 
 that the introduction, chapter 1, and the epilogue were written by Nicholas 
 Thomas and chapters 3 and 5 by Richard Eves; the commentary on the 
 Walker letters is by Thomas and that on Becke by Eves. 
 
 xxii PREFACE 
 
•IS Acknowledgments 
 
 Vernon Lee Walker’s letters of 1875-1882, of which we reproduce only a few 
 in this volume, are in the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; 
 those covering the period 1883-1887, all published here, are in Rhodes 
 House, Oxford, England. Louis Becke’s letters form part of a collection of 
 his manuscripts and memorabilia in the State Library of New South Wales, 
 Sydney, Australia. We are grateful to these institutions for permission to 
 publish these documents here. Christine Dureau transcribed Vernon Lee 
 Walker’s letters for Nicholas Thomas in 1990-91. Some of the material ap¬ 
 peared in Thomas’s book, Colonialism’s Culture (1994). Danielle Banks did 
 further proofing and editorial work for this full publication in late 1996. 
 On this project, as well as many others, Jennifer Newell has provided exem¬ 
 plary editorial support. We must thank Stephen Eisenman, who was at one 
 stage thinking of calling his important new book on Gauguin Bad Colonist; 
 when it became Gauguins Skirt he graciously allowed us to use what seemed 
 an irresistible title. 
 
 Nicholas Thomas would like to thank Margaret Jolly, and the many col¬ 
 leagues and friends with whom he has discussed questions of colonial cul¬ 
 ture in many places over the past decade. This book owes a great deal to 
 those conversations. 
 
 Richard Eves wishes to thank Roe Sybylla for her unending support and 
 encouragement, both intellectual and moral, during the writing of this 
 project. 
 
 We would both like to thank Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press for 
 his encouragement. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Introduction: Letter Writing and Colonial Selfhood 
 
 In the epoch of the word-processed letter, the fax, and the e-mail message 
 it is easy to think of the letter as a text rather than an artifact. This is how 
 letters have long been used by historians. Official or personal, they are col¬ 
 lections of words, of evidence. The letter attests to the event, the attitude, 
 or the shifting psyche of the biographer’s subject. Letters are evaluated: 
 Was the writer a witness to what is described, or was the account merely 
 hearsay? The historian supplants the original recipient and takes the infor¬ 
 mation that the writer had to give. Whether historians or not, we all use 
 letters in this way: to convey some business information, to keep in touch 
 with a friend, to hear of a death. 
 
 Letters indeed communicate, but they do other things and are other 
 things. Most of all they are objects. They are deceptively ubiquitous. They 
 just lie around, eluding reflection, while bearing peculiarly manifold fea¬ 
 tures: the thickness of the paper, the manner of folding, the size and type 
 of the envelope, the unusual stamps. There is the tangibility and the awk¬ 
 wardness and all the personality of the handwriting: the inky presence of 
 the absent person. There is the necessity of the signature, the raggedness of 
 an enclosed newspaper cutting. There is the envelope that appears to have 
 been tampered with, but has in fact been torn open because a correspon¬ 
 dent remembered something that needed to be added, or was struck by 
 anxiety and had to subtract or replace a page. 
 
 This materiality is something that the historian tends not to come clean 
 about. On the one hand we all experience the excitement of what seems 
 to be a direct encounter with a past actor, and this is most provoking when 
 the actor, the writer, is (in the most vulgar case) a famous person. It may 
 be still more exciting if the person is not famous but remarkable, if his or 
 her epistolic testament constitutes a personal discovery, a discovery for re¬ 
 search. This is the moment at which the researcher—you or I—revels in the 
 privilege of scholarship. We are often in archives that are not open to simply 
 anybody; it is the fact of our doctoral research, our Ph.D., our seriousness of 
 whatever sort, that constitutes the ticket, and even then the librarians may 
 be standoffish, they may hesitate before they bring out certain sorts of ma- 
 
terial, they may insist on white gloves, pencils, and old wooden bookrests for 
 heavy volumes. Still, here we are, in Rhodes House, or the Mitchell, or the 
 Petherick Room. One’s fellow readers seem to range from obsessives to ec¬ 
 centrics; there are involuntary, anxious gestures suggesting anticipation and 
 frustration, but not much noise apart from a slight clatter in the keyboard 
 of somebody’s laptop, the rapid movements of one’s neighbor’s pencil, the 
 insufficiently hushed chatter of the desk staff. This is the moment: the ma¬ 
 terials appear from some subterranean stack, we are undoing a faded pink 
 ribbon, rummaging through a file, and taking these pieces of paper out of 
 a succession of envelopes. Some sheets are heavy, stiff, and curiously clean, 
 considering that their writing took place on a small cargo boat, perhaps on 
 deck in fine weather. Others are delicate, blue, of what I think of as airmail 
 paper, the blue ink insufficiently distinct. Then there is the magic of the 
 script: the missionary’s bold flourish and the awkward, unpracticed hand of 
 the trader. In the 1880s an inconsequential racist has exposed an extraordi¬ 
 nary fife, and it is all too tactile. You begin to read; it is some time before you 
 are accustomed to the hand and the odd little devices that stand in for punc¬ 
 tuation. The letters do not so much communicate as suggest mysteries and 
 a strangely wild colonial life. You keep reading, and the place is suddenly 
 closing; the laptops have been put to sleep, the eccentrics are shuffling off, 
 the staff are impatient to get you out. 
 
 Much more could be written about the power and the magic of the ar¬ 
 chive; this is a theme that has been addressed by Greg Dening, Natalie Davis, 
 and Ann Stoler, among others. Though the peculiar scene and situation of 
 letter reading needs to be acknowledged, our interest here is more in the let¬ 
 ter as an artifact, as a composed artifact, and as a technique. We are mainly 
 concerned with personal letters, though official, legal, and business letters 
 are artifacts too, which discover all kinds of ways of contriving their gravity. 
 Personal letters, and most particularly those from intimates, are, we might 
 hazard, inherently poignant. They do not simply suggest or imply distance 
 and loss, but attempt to defeat spatial separation by producing presence; 
 they make absence present. We understand the letter not simply as a piece 
 of writing, but as an embodied expression, as an element of what Marilyn 
 Strathern (1988) identifies as the “partible person.” A person’s script is his 
 or her “hand,” it is a distributed aspect of his or her self, that renders the ab¬ 
 sence of the whole all the more painful: insofar as the letter succeeds it fails, 
 because it only evokes more forcefully the person who is in fact not there, in 
 person. These textual artifacts, however, always work toward some negotia- 
 
 2 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
tion of this failure; letters sustain relationships more or less unsatisfactorily, 
 despite and across distance. Yet there may be circumstances in which letters 
 do not aim to defeat space so much as exploit it. We all know that there are 
 things that are easier to say and do in writing than face-to-face. Distancing is 
 itself action, action that creates autonomy, that may be imagined to enable 
 the definition of self in spaces beyond the ties of kinship, conjugality, and 
 tradition. Robinson Crusoe, most particularly in Ian Watt’s insightful read¬ 
 ing (1957: 65ff), prefigures the accomplishment of colonial self-fashioning 
 in this sense. But the colonists discussed here are no Crusoes. 
 
 If letters often sustain relationships in the absence of face-to-face meet¬ 
 ings, those relationships are not simply perpetuated without modification. 
 Letters can also be stages for declarations, through which one’s connection 
 with another person may be intensified, fashioned, disfigured, or ended. 
 Stories begin, turn, and end with letters. A whole book could be —for all I 
 know, has been—written about letters in Western art and the narratives they 
 figure. Surely their most brilliant deployment, their most obscurely sugges¬ 
 tive appearances, are in Vermeer’s paintings. His women receive, read, and 
 write epistles intently, with absorption, sometimes with a flutter of anxiety, 
 the delicious agitation of passion, probably the fraught play of adultery. 
 
 If letters initiate, reaffirm, or change social relationships, they always 
 evoke the association between sender and recipient in a particular way— 
 by being formal or familiar, by being deferential or assertive. This may be 
 simple and relatively uninteresting if both parties to a correspondence per¬ 
 ceive their association in the same way, but constructions may differ or may 
 be contested, depending on a political, or micropolitical, field. I may strike 
 you as offhand, or I may assume a familiarity that you find inappropriate. 
 “Do not write to me as ‘my dearest Dr Mabel Palmer.’ ‘Dear Dr Palmer’ is 
 quite enough,” insisted a feminist and liberal in South Africa in 1951. She 
 was writing to Lily Moya, the young Xhosa woman whose education she was 
 supporting. 
 
 now for more personal matters, which it is even more difficult to speak 
 about, but which I also feel must be made plain. 
 
 You say that one of your reasons for wishing to be in Durban is that 
 you wish to see more of me, but have you ever asked yourself whether 
 I wish to see more of you? As a matter of fact I do not. Your roman¬ 
 tic and self-centred imagination has built up for you a picture in which 
 you are to be my devoted and intimate friend. Now you must forgive 
 
 3 
 
me for saying that this is nonsense. Even if you were a European girl 
 of your age it would still be all nonsense. What basis of companionship 
 could there be between a quarter educated girl of eighteen and an ex¬ 
 perienced old lady like myself? And of course the racial situation in 
 Durban makes all these things more difficult. (In Marks 1987: 136) 
 
 In her remarkable letters, Moya had attempted to fashion a close if ma- 
 ternalistic association, which is here fairly cruelly ruled out by Palmer. This 
 typifies the way in which letters take risks; they can also work to seduce 
 or disguise seduction, and may conceal or obscure as much as they convey 
 and disclose, as they so often do in the great epistolic novels, like Richard¬ 
 son’s Clarissa. As practices, as artifacts that have lives in their composition 
 and consumption, letters are often highly charged; their writing and read¬ 
 ing may be marked by tears, felt pain, and certainly often anxiety. 1 
 
 A letter may be a vehicle for a struggle with another person, a struggle for 
 his or her good estimation, or it may simply reaffirm friendship. But it may 
 also provide the opportunity for an effort of self-definition. If many activi¬ 
 ties, such as dressing and cooking, figure as everyday contexts for working 
 out what kind of person one is, letters of any substance or consequence not 
 only constitute another such context, but surely one that is peculiarly in¬ 
 tense: through style, content, graphic gesture, maybe even tears, one says 
 who one is. If this is so, to some degree, of letters from whatever place or 
 period, it is true in a heightened way for colonial letters. Many of those who 
 left Europe for Africa, the “East,” or the Pacific did so for many years, if 
 not for good. Under these circumstances, the letter is quite different from 
 the holiday letter, the love letter, or one written during a brief separation. 
 In those instances, the relationship at issue has another life in meetings, 
 transactions, or domesticity. Though gifts of artifacts, colonial souvenirs, or 
 cash that might be sent through the post had their own significance, letters 
 were central to the reproduction of the colonist’s kinship and familial ties. 
 Whereas a particular identity as a son or sister is usually made through di¬ 
 verse actions—shared work and worship, sociality, gifts, rebukes —the absent 
 colonist’s relationships, if they were to endure at all, had to be sustained 
 through writing. A colonist might be, or might try to be, a master in prac¬ 
 tice, and might dominate those around him or her brutally; yet, when he or 
 she wrote home, that act of writing could only proceed around distance and 
 lack. We are not arguing that colonists should retrospectively be accorded 
 some compassion that critical scholarship has tended to deprive them of. 
 
 4 INTRODUCTION 
 
This book presumes a critical stance toward colonial racism but has little 
 interest in the reiteration of generalized condemnation. Intellectual, and 
 perhaps political, progress on this front can only proceed through the speci¬ 
 fication of various state and other racisms, and through the tracing of their 
 cultural genealogies and institutional and practical expressions (cf. Stoler 
 1995). This book contributes to this project in a modest way, in drawing at¬ 
 tention to the contradictory workings of racial and colonial self-estimations 
 in peripheral situations. We aim to draw attention to the incompleteness 
 that is almost intrinsic to settler identity, that renders it incomplete, and 
 that is chronically negotiated, and peculiarly exhibited, in the practice of 
 correspondence. 
 
 Letters were almost the sole channel through which personal relation¬ 
 ships could be maintained, and it is accordingly not surprising to find Ver¬ 
 non Lee Walker “most fearfully disappointed at not getting any letters from 
 home,” soon after he arrived in Melbourne from England, “for I had been 
 looking out all the week for the mail” (February 8, 1876). Correspondence 
 was also the vital nexus through which contact with metropolitan society in 
 a wider sense persisted, less so for a settler in one of the Australian cities 
 than for a planter days away from other whites in remote parts of Fiji or 
 the Solomon Islands. In these latter cases, where there was limited access to 
 other sources of knowledge such as newspapers, individual correspondence 
 was still more crucial. Some sustained it and some did not. In the course of 
 the first series of letters published here, Vernon Lee Walker moves across 
 this spectrum of locations: he is at first in the entirely urban domains of Mel¬ 
 bourne and Sydney. We do not reproduce all his lettters from this period, 
 though some of them foreshadow his isolation and uncertainty; we hear of 
 his frustrations as a commercial traveler, albeit a prosperous one; he then 
 moves to Noumea, and, as the bright prospects of his brother’s business 
 diminish, he is finally running a small plantation and trading in unpaci¬ 
 fied areas of the then New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). Over this succession of 
 moves, the question of self-estimation and identity becomes steadily more 
 central and more fraught in his writing. 
 
 All too often, letters come back to what Greg Dening has called the 
 erotics of writing, in the sense of a highly charged play of written desires 
 and silences. Often, they are quite literally animated by sex, by marital in¬ 
 fidelity, and (in the colonial situation) by the racial and cultural infidelity 
 of miscegenation. Just as letters are produced out of absence—for the most 
 part one would not write if one was present —they are often energized by 
 
 5 
 
loud silences and awkward absences, by detours around the spaces that are 
 problematic, by statements that conceal more than they disclose. Insofar as 
 sexuality surfaces in Walker’s letters it is as an absence, sometimes a con¬ 
 spicuous one, certainly a predictable one, given that these are, after all, 
 addressed to his mother, yet nevertheless a perplexing one, if you are as 
 curious about historical characters as I tend to be. 
 
 It is odd not even to have an engraving or a photograph. Mostly, when 
 one does research on an individual, there is some visual image that can flit 
 about in the back of one’s mind. This is an index of the extent to which 
 historical research is engaged mostly with people of consequence, people 
 important enough to be sketched or painted. Hence I can form an image of 
 Becke, though it derives from a photograph that substantially postdates the 
 correspondence published here. In the case of unimportant Walker, there is 
 nothing to go on but his own writing, and he never describes himself—why 
 would he, to his mother? —except to inform her—to disturb her, I imag¬ 
 ine—that his skin has darkened. In the absence of an image, I imagine a 
 thin man, a gaunt version of the type in a Boys’ Own story, but it is a hazy 
 image, and not one that ever has a secure presence in my effort to visualize 
 this sometime clerk, storeman, and trader. 
 
 If many letters are primarily about the relationship between writer and 
 recipient, this is less obviously the case for Walker and his mother (we have 
 no sense of how she responded and wrote back to him). Though, certainly, 
 the letters are half-hearted efforts to sustain contact (they are mostly written 
 around Christmas, when familial ties or their waning were no doubt on his 
 mind), what is more conspicuous is Walker’s effort to create and fix his own 
 social location. But he is a bad colonist, not in the sense that he is power¬ 
 ful enough to be evil, to exploit any number of people in any especially 
 grievous way, but in the sense that he is bad at being one, bad at imagining 
 himself as someone shouldering the white man’s burden, as evoking a co¬ 
 herent or legitimate selfhood through his own script, through any imperial 
 script he has made his own. 
 
 Correspondence forces a matching, or mutual, assessment of the two 
 dimensions of the white colonizer’s identity—his or her roots in a “civi¬ 
 lized” country and his or her location as a pioneer in a place of settlement. 
 Writers from geographically remote situations would normally, as a mat¬ 
 ter of course, give an account of themselves. In the colonial situation, this 
 accounting involved an effort to distill, out of the plethora of experience 
 and response, a particular imagining of being, place, and future prospects, 
 
 6 INTRODUCTION 
 
which would be projected in relation to expectations about what mother or 
 relatives at home wanted to know—or should be forced to know. Colonial¬ 
 ism did not happen simply by virtue of economic transactions or military 
 intrusions; it was also something that had to be imagined and narrated, not 
 just in mass-circulation missionary magazines, administrators’ memoirs, or 
 official reports, but also in the minds of particular people whose inscrip¬ 
 tions of colonial identity might obviously differ from published, authorized 
 renderings. The imaginative dimension may be most conspicuous in repre¬ 
 sentations that celebrated empire and progress: in the intertwining of social 
 or racial evolutionary ideas with legitimations of rule over backward races, 
 or in the strong current of utopianism in nineteenth-century settler colo¬ 
 nialism that saw new societies, not simply as extensions of the metropolitan 
 nation that might aspire to reproduce its civility, but also as better, cleaner, 
 or more vigorous forms, composed either of uplifted natives or a race of 
 tough pioneers. These letters tell another tale. 
 
 7 
 

 
 
 
 
 
i & “An Awfully Bad Hand at Letter Writing”: 
 Vernon Lee Walker and Colonial History 
 
Detail fromj. Hugh Johnson, “Oceania, or Islands in the Pacific Ocean, on Mercators 
 projection, comprising Polynesia, Malaysia and Australasia.” Engraved by A. Fullar- 
 ton & Co. Edinburgh/London, 1862. Plate 71 from The Royal Illustrated Atlas of Modern 
 Geography. National Library of Australia, Canberra. 
 
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 con¬ 
 stitute Walker’s correspondence deserve publication. Though his sentences 
 were composed at the height of what global historians would call the im¬ 
 perial 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 facades 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. 1 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 in¬ 
 digenous terms, and they sustained their theaters of ritual and nonritual 
 
“A Map of Fiji and New Caledonia,” from J. W. Anderson, Notes of Travel in Fiji and New 
 Caledonia with some remarks on South Sea Islanders and their Languages, London: Ellissen, 
 1880. National Library of Australia, Canberra. 
 
 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, trad¬ 
 ing 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 Hebri¬ 
 des 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 gov- 
 
 12 
 
 “an awfully bad hand at letter writing” 
 
ernment 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 indige¬ 
 nous 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, push¬ 
 ing 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 par¬ 
 liament 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 identifica¬ 
 tions 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 vali¬ 
 date. 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 con¬ 
 sidered 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 
 
 13 
 
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 af¬ 
 fection 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 per¬ 
 manently 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 innumer¬ 
 able 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 mili¬ 
 tary 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 de¬ 
 scribed 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 secu- 
 
 14 “an awfully bad hand at letter writing” 
 
rity 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 natu¬ 
 ral as the features represented —standard elements of the landscape of the 
 genre. But appreciations of countryside are never innocent of wider narra¬ 
 tives and implications that especially concern property. Images and stories 
 of colonization, in particular, are likely to conflate different kinds of be¬ 
 longing: 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 re¬ 
 ferring 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 establish¬ 
 ing 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 dur¬ 
 ing 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 re¬ 
 sponded to in these terms: “What a lovely spot! Along the coast in both di¬ 
 rections 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 as¬ 
 tonishment 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 
 
 15 
 
(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 un¬ 
 familiar 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 some¬ 
 thing 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 short¬ 
 comings 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 coloniza¬ 
 tion, 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 fig¬ 
 ures such as Stanley is an incomplete perception. Walker’s letters show that 
 even at the moment at which imperialism must have seemed globally tri¬ 
 umphant, before it entered the cycles of depression and warfare that culmi¬ 
 nated 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, in¬ 
 adequately 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 reg¬ 
 ister 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 let¬ 
 ters 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 w r riting, in an awfully bad hand. 
 
 Little is known of Walker’s life other than what can be discerned from his let¬ 
 ters. 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 
 
 16 “an awfully bad hand at letter writing 
 
and specification is normally the business of an editor of historical texts of 
 this kind. The information is supposed to make particular sources more ac¬ 
 cessible 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 compo¬ 
 nent 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. 
 
 17 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
2 & The Letters of Vernon Lee Walker, 1878-1887 
 

“It was a little queer at first having a whole crowd of niggers round you” 
 
 January ig th 1878 
 Melbourne. 
 
 Dear mother, 
 
 I suppose that you will have guessed that I have been to Fiji, as I 
 did not write to you by the last mail. 1 I did not know myself that I 
 was going until the steamer was starting. 
 
 I went down to Sandridge to see them all off, and just as we were 
 saying good-bye, Mr Thompson said that I had better come, and 
 that Mr Renwick would make it all right with Mr Rigg. So, after a 
 little persuasion, I thought that I could not do better than go, since 
 I knew that I would never get another trip like it again. Away, I 
 went with no clothes but what I had on my back, however I man¬ 
 aged all right as between Mr Thompson and Howard, I got clothes 
 enough to last me till I got there. 
 
 We left Melbourne on Thursday evening at six o-clock, and 
 cleared through Melbourne heads at half past ten, we ought to 
 have remained at anchor inside the heads, as it is dangerous going 
 through at night, but since Mr Thompson was in a hurry to get 
 away, by tipping the pilot a little extra we got through all right. 
 Directly we were through rough weather commenced, which con¬ 
 tinued more or less till we got to “Suva.” Every-one was sick except 
 Mr Thompson and myself. However on the following Sunday, it 
 came on to blow a gale, and the knocking about was something aw- 
 full, so much so, that it was rather too much for me, and I was sick 
 all day. Strange to say ever afterwards directly I awoke, I was sick, 
 although I was all right directly afterwards; I fancy that it must have 
 been through the sea air getting in my mouth, and filling it full 
 of salt. 
 
 Church was out of the question this Sunday as everyone was so 
 ill, and it was so rough it was almost impossible to sit down. Howard 
 was too ill to move out of his cabin, and I got the steward to lash a 
 
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 i 
 
 Letter by Vernon Lee Walker, Sydney, New South Wales, December 18, 1883, two 
 pages. Rhodes House Library; photograph courtesy Pacific and Asian History, Re¬ 
 search School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra. 
 
big chair on deck, and then I wrapped myself in a ’possum rug and 
 did not move all day, just letting the sea wash over me. 
 
 There were only nine of us went down, and we mostly knew each 
 other so we had a fine time of it. There was Mr Thompson, Howard 
 and myself a clergyman whose name was Mr Hay (you would have 
 thought that he would rather have put a damper on the party, but 
 he was a fine fellow, and never as much as put on a white tie or black 
 coat all the time he was away, and could play a game of cards with 
 anyone, and yet on a Sunday he could preach a splendid sermon). 
 
 Then there was Mr Syme and his son (He is brother of the editor 
 of one of the papers here, so Mr Thompson, took them so that he 
 could write an account of the trip &ct, I see by this mornings paper 
 that he is bringing it out in the weekly paper, in numbers, the first 
 lot out to day, so I will be able to send them to you, and you will 
 be able to form your own idea of Fiji, and I should not wonder if 
 he does not also publish a book about it, and if so I will send you 
 a copy). 
 
 Next on the list was “Dr Dick,” (doctor of a lunatic asylum here, a 
 very nice fellow, and we found him very useful as we had a number 
 of small accidents). Then there was a young fellow named “Jackson” 
 from Sandhurst, and another named “Warburton” whose father 
 was killed and eat by the natives of Fiji a few years ago. This com¬ 
 prised the whole lot of us and a very nice party we were, the only 
 drawback were the two “Syuves” who were such dirty beasts and, 
 used to stuff themselves like pigs, until they could eat no more. 
 
 I had not a cabin myself as there are only two in the saloon (4 
 in each), but they were in Howards cabin, and they were rather too 
 much for him, so he used to go in the captain’s to dress himself, 
 and slept with me in the saloon. 
 
 It was rather strange that not a soul on board from the cap¬ 
 tain downwards had ever been to Fiji before. We did not see many 
 sights going down, passing a few islands (but unfortunately gener¬ 
 ally through the night). We saw a few seals and shot one or two 
 albatrosses &ct. 
 
 Before we were a couple of days out, we found that the captain 
 (he brought the steamer out from home) was not what he ought 
 to be; he said that he was a teetotler, but it turned out that he was 
 nothing of the sort, and that he was rather too fond of his liquor 
 
 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
(he had a private supply in his cabin, and used to drink on the sly, 
 but even now he will swear that drink never touched his lips all the 
 voyage). 
 
 One night (or rather morning for it was about 2 o-clock) he 
 nearly ran us on to a small island; everyone had turned in except Mr 
 Thompson and myself (for I was always up if there was any land to 
 pan, never mind what time it was) so we gave a hand in taking down 
 the sails, and I got to the wheel, and we managed to keep clear of 
 the island. Ever after that Mr Thompson (who, before would not 
 believe that the captain drank although I told him) always kept his 
 eye on him and told the chief mate to do the same. If Mr Thomp¬ 
 son had not been on board I do not think that I should now be 
 writing this letter to you. 
 
 We arrived off “Suva” on the Monday evening (11 days from Mel¬ 
 bourne) but as it was dark, and being a very nasty place to enter, 
 and amount of reefs about, we stayed outside till morning. I en¬ 
 joyed myself that night immensely, the water being smooth (we had 
 had it rough all the way from Melbourne) and the engines being 
 stopped, everything so nice and quiet. I had been fishing over the 
 stern of the ship with a small line, when all at once I had it carried 
 away all together, so I guessed that there were some sharks about. 
 I got a rope and fixed up a shark line, and in about five minutes I 
 had a fine big shark hooked on. It took about a dozen of us to haul 
 him up, and when we did get him on deck, he wanted to be mas¬ 
 ter there, for he upset four or five of them with his tail, before they 
 could clear out of the way. One of the sailors at last managed to cut 
 off his tail (they say that this is the only way to kill them). He then 
 cut him open and took out his heart, and cut off his head, and even 
 then he was alive, his tail being put into his mouth he bit it in two. 
 
 Well! we were to have gone into “Suva” at daylight, so I turned in 
 at two, and had an hours sleep, and then up again at three. When 
 I got on deck I found that I was the only one up, and that they 
 were just starting, although it was not daylight, so I went on the 
 bridge and there I found the captain tight, and I could see that the 
 ship was going on to the reefs, so I quietly went down, and got Mr 
 Thompson up, and he got the chief mate up, and by that time it 
 was getting daylight, so we got in all right. 
 
 The second mate was telling me that the captain would have run 
 
 25 
 
us ashore, if he himself had not gone to the wheel and altered the 
 course of the ship. 
 
 Of course we were in before anyone was up, so we gave them a 
 shot or two with the cannon which we had on board and which, 
 soon had them all out, I think that it must nearly have frightened 
 the life out of some of the niggers there, for a ship very seldom in¬ 
 deed calls there, but they soon came out to see what was the matter. 
 
 “Suva” is a splendid place, it nearly all belongs to Mr Thompson 
 who has a store and an hotel there. These are the only buildings the 
 rest being only huts. There are only about twenty white people here, 
 and I should think that they have a very slow time of it altogether, 
 there being of course nothing to do at all. The natives soon began 
 to come off in there canoes, and before long the ship was swarming 
 with them. They are a fine strong clan of men, but most fearfully 
 lazy, and as they live on nothing but fish and fruit, it is as much as 
 you can do to get them to work at all. We had some good fun with 
 them, throwing money into the water, and letting them dive for it. 
 If you throw a threepenny bit as far as ever you can, they will swim 
 to the place where it dropped in the water, and then dive down, 
 and are sure to get it before it, gets to the bottom. The women and 
 men wear no clothing but a piece of rag round their middle (some¬ 
 times not even that much) and the children nothing at all. 
 
 After breakfast we went ashore in the boats. It was a peculiar sen¬ 
 sation getting on land after all the rough weather we had had, and 
 it took us all our time to walk straight, our legs being quite drunk. 
 It was a little queer at first having a whole crowd of niggers round 
 you, but after a little time you don’t notice them at all, and get 
 quite used to them. 
 
 We first of all went through the store, and then patronised the 
 hotel (the only liquor they had was whisky and brandy) I think that 
 we must have made the landlord more busy, then he had ever been 
 since the hotel started. 
 
 Afterwards we went up to a Mr Joske’s (whose brother in Mel¬ 
 bourne is a great chum of Mr Thompson’s). We there had a good 
 blow out of fruit, and then some of us walked to the native village 
 (which was about a mile and a half off). Here we had some great 
 fun, such a row you never heard before (for I suppose that they do 
 
 26 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
not see a white man, except those that live there from one years 
 end to the other). 
 
 They had a good many curiosities to sell (clubs, spears, shells, 
 bows & arrows &ct) We bought them all up, although I myself, only 
 bought a few, as I thought that I would get better elsewhere (for 
 which I was afterwards sorry). You can buy them very cheap, for 
 instance clubs, beautifully carved and having the extra curiosity of 
 having killed men, you can buy for a shilling or two, or a piece of 
 tobacco. 
 
 The natives have nothing to sleep on but a mat, and a piece of 
 wood for a pillow. It is very seldom that they do any work, for they 
 live on fruit and fish, of which there is any amount. They will even 
 only catch enough fish for themselves and will not catch any to sell. 
 They do not catch their fish with lines, but go along the beach with 
 spears, and directly they see a fish, they throw the spear at it and 
 very seldom miss. 
 
 The following day we got up an excursion to go up the “Rewa” 
 river. We hired a small sailing boat (as our ship boats would not 
 go through the shallow places), and after taking in provisions and 
 a cask of beer, we started about midday. We had some pretty good 
 fun going up the river, and did ample justice to the provisions and 
 beer. We arrived at “Rewa” about seven o-clock seeing nothing, par¬ 
 ticular, but the splendid scenery, and a few river snakes, and birds. 
 
 At “Rewa” we saw the greatest sight that was to be seen, namely a 
 meeting of all the native chiefs and their tribes (this meeting only 
 takes place either only once a year, or once every ten years, I forget 
 which). They starve themselves for sometime before, so that they 
 can bring as much food as possible to the feast (for it is nothing 
 else). We were told that some of them had been almost starved to 
 death, for although there was any amount of food about, yet the 
 chiefs would not let them touch it, so that they might keep it, to 
 take with them. 
 
 We arrived just in time to see one of the tribes dancing a “meca 
 meca” or native dance. They all dress themselves out with beads 
 and shells, painting themselves, till as they think, they are tremen¬ 
 dous swells. The dancing was very well worth seeing, keeping such 
 good time, they are brought up to it from children, so as to make 
 
 27 
 
themselves perfect, and so that they can beat other tribes as they 
 are awfully jealous. 
 
 After the dance they all went to get their supply of food, which 
 is served out to each tribe. They are all gathered together and then 
 each lot receives their share. I forget how many pigs they had killed 
 and were distributing the day we saw them, but I know that there 
 were some good piles of them. They were all put in heaps accord¬ 
 ing to their sizes, so many small ones, and so on till they came to 
 the big ones. They are baked whole, and filled with stones (what for 
 I don’t know). The turtles were divided in the same way, they cook 
 them alive, just putting them on the top of the fire, and eat nearly 
 raw, they were very anxious that we should have some, but “not 
 me.” They have a pudding of their own manufacturing, I think that 
 it is made chiefly of sugar I did not taste it but some of them did. 
 
 We saw them all feasting as we were going back, they all sit round 
 in a ring, one man in the middle, with a knife, he cuts it up all in the 
 dust and dirt, and the others eat it with their fingers, it was good 
 fun seeing them cutting up a large pig, he does warm to his work. 
 
 I forgot to say that we were introduced to the King of the “Fiji 
 islands” “King Cakobau.” Every one has to kneel to him even the 
 Governor, I did not care about doing it, as it was not a very nice 
 thing to have to kneel to a nigger, however I thought that it was 
 rather better to go down on one knee than to take the chance of 
 getting a crack on the head. 
 
 He is an awful villain, and a few years ago, used to live on nothing 
 but human flesh, even when a lad, they say, that if he was playing 
 with a friend, he would think nothing of hitting him over the head 
 and eating him. 
 
 We saw his canoe which is a tremendous thing, it was launched 
 over the bodies of live men, two or three hundred being killed for 
 the occasion. Nearly all the white people here, have seen them eat¬ 
 ing human flesh. Most of the chiefs now have big schooners of their 
 own, and are very well off. I forget how many thousands the King is 
 allowed by government. 
 
 After we had walked about a bit, we went to have a look at the 
 hotel, where we were going to put up for the night. We found that 
 they had nothing to eat in the house, so we had to fall back on our 
 
 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
own provisions. After feeding we went over again to see the meet¬ 
 ing, and hung about there till nearly one oclock in the morning. 
 
 It was intended that we should all have gone further up the river 
 the next day, to see two sugar mills, which had lately been started, 
 but the governor arriving at “Rewa” that evening and hearing of 
 course that we were there, sent across to say that he would like to 
 see Mr Thompson the next day. 
 
 However Howard and I and Warburton thought we might make 
 a fine trip of it if we went by ourselves, so we told Mr Thompson, 
 and got his gun from him, and without saying a word to anyone, 
 took the owner of the boat, and three niggers, and started at three 
 oclock in the morning. First of all I should tell you that the night 
 before when we got to the hotel, we found that there was no where 
 for us to sleep. He was putting up a new hotel, which had got half 
 the floor down, no doors or windows in, and not an article of fur¬ 
 niture of any description, and here we slept on the bare floor (for 
 which he had the cheek to charge us 4 shillings ahead), or rather I 
 did not sleep for as it was 2 o-clock I only lay down for a hour. 
 
 After we had got a little way up the river we had a bathe, and took 
 the risk of sharks (for the water is thick with them). We then started 
 eating (for you may be sure we took the provisions and beer with 
 us), and we found that before nine oclock we had gone through 
 breakfast, Lunch, dinner, tea, and supper, so we had to start afresh. 
 I got some duck shooting, killing a good many, although we only 
 managed to get a few of them; I made the niggers jump overboard 
 and swim for them. We called at a small store to buy a few pine¬ 
 apples, but the man would not let us pay for them sending seven 
 or eight dozen, to the boat for us, some of which we brought to 
 Melbourne with us. Howard afterwards bought a whole lot of curi¬ 
 osities from them. 
 
 We arrived at the sugar mills at about eleven o-clock and after 
 going through them, and taking a few sticks of sugar cane away 
 with us, started back about one. Now, came the worst part of the 
 trip, for we had the wind and tide against us. 
 
 We had promised to be back at “Rewa” by four o-clock, so that we 
 might start back early for “Suva.” Well! we were creeping along very 
 slowly, bathing and shooting every now and then till we saw a big 
 
 29 
 
pig fall in the water and, snapped up by a shark; so I said no more 
 bathing for this child. We did not get to “Rewa” until nine o-clock, 
 and to shew you how hot it was, we managed to drink 24 bottles of 
 beer between the three of us. We started back to “Suva” about half 
 past nine, and after one or two narrow shaves for upsetting (for the 
 boat was rather small for us 13), we arrived alongside the steamer 
 about two o-clock, and I can tell you that I was glad for it was rather 
 too much of a good thing to sit in that small boat for 23 hours. 
 
 We left “Suva” for “Laveuka” the same day, I slept the whole way, 
 and although I was sleeping near the canon, it failed to wake me 
 when it was fired off. “Laveuka” is only about 6 hours steaming 
 from “Suva,” it is built at the foot of a mountain, so that you get 
 the sun blazing on you and not the slightest breeze. We soon had 
 the ship crowded with people, coming off from shore, but unlike 
 “Suva” as they were all whites and no blacks. There are a good few 
 stores here, and even too chemists shops, and a good many boat¬ 
 men for such a little place, they must have made nearly a fortune 
 from us, rowing us to and from the ship. The natives here are a 
 little more decent, the women wearing a covering over the shoul¬ 
 ders, while one or two men I saw “sporting” hats. 
 
 The following day was Sunday, and the clergyman was ashore 
 preaching. Some went to church, and most not. I stayed on board 
 all day fishing for sharks but whether they would not bite on a Sun¬ 
 day, or not I don’t know, but I could not get them to look at the 
 hook, although directly anything was thrown over they, soon had 
 it. The water was beautifully clear, and you could see thousands of 
 small fish and shark’s. 
 
 The following day we all received invitations to go to the gover¬ 
 nors, and I was the only one who refused, and I had by far the best 
 of it, as they had all to turn out in black coats, which must nearly 
 have killed them with heat. 
 
 We left “Laveuka” the next morning (Christmas morning) for 
 “Suva,” so that we were both at “Laveuka” and “Suva” on Christmas 
 day. Most of them went ashore to Mr Joske’s for their Christmas 
 dinner, but I and Howard and one or two others staid on board, 
 there was nothing extra happened, and everything passed off very 
 quietly. 
 
 One of the chiefs was to have brought me a lot of curiosities to 
 
 30 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
buy, but I found that he had had a row with another chief and that 
 they were both in the lock-up, so that I came away with very few 
 curiosities. I intended to have sent them home to you, but those 
 that I have now, are hardly worth sending. I forget how long we 
 staid in “Suva” this time, only a day or two I think. 
 
 Just as we got in, a labour vessel came in from the “Solomon 
 islands” with three or four hundred niggers on board. They had 
 nothing at all to eat on board, and had got disease amongst them, 
 and were in a horrible state. In one place they had had a row for 
 taking some cocoa-nuts, the chief mate was killed, and three or four 
 of the seamen wounded, and one poor fellow had his hand taken off 
 by a shark. They had been six months on the voyage. When we went 
 on board every-one was drunk, and the poor black fellows, starving. 
 
 There were a splendid lot of curiosities on board, but they were 
 too drunk to bargain with, however Mr Thompson bought a whole 
 lot of parrots from them, and carried them safely to Melbourne 
 with only the loss of two, one got away, and the other one drowned. 
 
 After we left “Suva” we went to “Maro,” bringing with us Mr 
 Thompsons brother in law, who manages their store, and a Mr Poo- 
 ley, and three second class passengers, all of them coming on to 
 Melbourne. At “Maro” Mr Thompson has a sugar plantation; but as 
 it was six or seven miles up the river, only one or two of them went 
 up, whilst most of us stayed on board. We only saw two natives (as 
 the village was a long way off) who came off in their canoe, with a 
 couple of kittens to sell, and because we would not buy them they 
 threw them in the water, we managed to save one of them, and 
 brought it with us to Melbourne. 
 
 I proposed that we should take one of the ships boats and go on 
 shore, so away we went, and had not gone above half a mile before 
 the plug came out of the boat and began to fill, frightening the life 
 out of some of them, I however put my finger in the hole and man¬ 
 aged to stop the water a little till they found the plug again, after 
 all we had to turn back to the ship as we could not find a land¬ 
 ing place. After we had put them on board, Howard and I took the 
 boat and guns, and tried the other shore where we landed all right, 
 and managed to shoot a lot of birds and fish. 
 
 We left “Fiji” for “Melbourne” the same evening and spent New 
 Years day at sea, we had a little more excitement than on Christ- 
 
 31 
 
mas day as they were mostly Scotchmen on board, but beyond an 
 awful row at twelve oclock, and a little extra whisky, nothing much 
 happened, except indeed, that our dinner was spoiled through the 
 cook getting drunk, and having a fight. 
 
 They were expecting to get in on Monday the J th but on the Satur¬ 
 day it became fearfully rough with a head sea, and wind. Saturday 
 night I did not get a wink of sleep, and was up all night, holding 
 on by the “skin of my teeth.” On Sunday morning it increased, and 
 I wonder that some of us were not killed, for the things were flying 
 about in all directions. One fellow I quite thought was killed, he 
 had the ships-library, and five portmanteaus on the top of him at 
 once. I had a portmanteau fall on my shoulder, but it did not do 
 much damage. One night I was lifted from the saloon seats where 
 I was sleeping, right on to the table and there I lay for a few mo¬ 
 ments, not knowing whether I was dead or alive. 
 
 The “hawser” go[t] washed overboard by the sea, and got en¬ 
 tangled round the screw’, as luck would have it, one of the “fan’s” 
 caught it and cut it in two else nothing would have saved [us] for it 
 would have pulled up all the machinery. As it was there must have 
 been 50 or 6o£ [load] and more than half of it was lost. 
 
 The chief mate w r ent over the side of the ship to put a rope round 
 it to haul it up, and found that he could not get back again and one 
 of the seamen had to go over to get him. 
 
 The next misfortune was the wheel to be carried away, but there 
 were luckily two places to steer from so we had the other place, al¬ 
 though they had packed cases of pine-apples all round it after that 
 the governor of the engine broke, and so we found it was no use to 
 try to get along with such a sea and head wind, and as we had only 
 a day and a halfs coal on board (we were less than 24 hours steam 
 from Melbourne if it had been smooth) w r e were frightened, that 
 they would not last so we turned back to go into Sydney. 
 
 I was rather glad myself, as I have always had a longing to see 
 “Sydney.” By this time I was regularly dead beat from w’ant of sleep, 
 and as one of the engineers offered me his “bunk” while he was on 
 duty, I went and lay down and had the best sleep for four hours 
 that I had from the time I left Melbourne. He knocked me up at 
 12 oclock, and found that we could see Sydney lights in the dis¬ 
 tance, and saw r the pilot steamer coming out for us, I was thankful 
 
 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
to get inside the heads into smooth water, for the last day or two I 
 had been wet through, by a big sea that washed over me and I was 
 obliged to keep my clothes on as I had no change. 
 
 We anchored in Sydney at daylight on the y th (my birthday, which 
 I spent ashore). We went on shore after breakfast, and Howard and 
 I went paying calls all morning, and in the afternoon, took a car¬ 
 riage, and drove out to the gardens and round the harbour. Sydney 
 is the prettiest place I have ever been in, and I like it far better than 
 Melbourne. 
 
 There are some splendid buildings, having got very good stone 
 there. I went to see the pantomime in the evening which was the 
 only thing that I was dissapointed with in Sydney. 
 
 Howard and Warburton had made up their minds to stay in 
 Sydney for a day or two and go overland to Melbourne. So we left 
 them, and at daylight we left for Melbourne. I saw a number of 
 people I knew in Sydney, including Mr Drysdale. 
 
 The passage from Sydney to Melbourne was so calm that there 
 was not a ripple on the water, and we had a splendid time of it. 
 Nothing happened very much on the way, I shot a porpoise with 
 a revolver. We arrived off the Heads about seven oclock, on Friday 
 evening. 
 
 We drank Mr Thompsons health &ct going down the bay and ar¬ 
 rived at Williamstown at about ten oclock, I left the ship here (as 
 I was expecting Howard would be home about that time and I was 
 trying to get home before him) and took a boat across to Sandridge 
 where I got a cab and drove home, and found a telegram from 
 Howard saying that he would not be home till the following day. 
 
 Altogether we had a splendid trip of it, and I enjoyed myself im¬ 
 mensely. 
 
 I found my letters waiting for me here, and was glad to find so 
 many for me. 
 
 I found one from Mr Sandiford, asking me to go and spend 
 Christmas with him, and get some shooting, which I was sorry to 
 have to decline as he has now asked me four or five times. Howard 
 is next going to Adelaide, but I do not think he will leave till 
 next week or the week afterwards. I forgot to tell you that the two 
 “Chamberlaines” of Birmingham were down in “Fiji,” but they un¬ 
 fortunately left “Laveuka” the day we arrived; we heard that they 
 
 33 
 
had been buying a tremendous lot of curiosities. Howard after¬ 
 wards met them at Sydney. I have not been to Mr Thompsons since 
 we arrived, I intended to have gone on Sunday but it looked like 
 rain, so I had to put it off. 
 
 The Pantomimes are all hard at it still, but they [are] not quite 
 up to the mark. We have the Circus here as well, with a lot of addi¬ 
 tions to it. The “Lusitania” arrived this morning (January 22) but 
 Mr Reece has not been up yet. I expect that he will go on to New 
 Zealand to-morrow, as there is a boat leaving. 
 
 Work, seemed a little strange at first, after five weeks idleness, 
 but now I have got into it all right. I have asked Mr Rigg for a move 
 from where I am now, as I have been here for 18 months now, I 
 shall ask him again and if he does not move me, I shall [feel] in¬ 
 clined to move out altogether myself. 
 
 I am very much obliged to you for the chain, I did not think that 
 I should get any presents at all. Sallie says in her letter that she and 
 Willie have sent me out a locket with Mr Reece, so I suppose that 
 I shall get them all tomorrow. Well! I think that I have written a 
 long enough letter this mail, so the others can hardly expect to get 
 any till next, as this is a family letter with love to all[.] 
 
 Believe me 
 
 Your loving son 
 VL Walker 
 
 January 23 rd “Reece” has just been in, and brought my parcel, I like 
 the chain very much indeed. He is going on to New Zealand to day, 
 so excepting the few minutes he was here, I shall not see anything 
 of him. 
 
 Commentary 
 
 When Walker wrote the preceding letter he was twenty-one years old and 
 had been in Australia for three years. He was working for McLean, Bros., 
 and Rigg, Importers and General Ironmongers, whose specialties, accord¬ 
 ing to an advertisement of the time, included Nobel’s Genuine Dynamite, 
 “Hardware Novelties,” and “Squatting Supplies.” Times were prosperous 
 enough for a holiday of sorts; this holiday may have been provided for by 
 William Kerr Thomson, a family friend who owned a good deal of land in 
 New Zealand and Fiji as well as in Victoria; his activities seemed to have 
 
 34 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
paved the way for the later trading activities in the Pacific of Walkers some¬ 
 what domineering elder brother, Howard. For these men, recreation seems 
 mainly to have meant shooting. At various points on the journey, seals, 
 ducks, “one or two albatrosses,” other birds, and fish are shot—though not 
 for eating; sharks too are caught and cut up. This is unremarkable entertain¬ 
 ment. Between Sydney and Melbourne on the way back, “nothing happened 
 very much on the way, I shot a porpoise with a revolver.” It is difficult, 
 for me at least, to avoid considering this a violent life. That assessment, of 
 course, depends on certain values of the present; just as those who ethno- 
 centrically denigrated Melanesian headhunters ignored the ritual meanings 
 of that kind of killing—its value in a system of ancestor worship and pro¬ 
 pitiation—my, or our, abhorrence of Walker’s way of destroying life passes 
 over its meaning and interest for men of his time. They certainly had their 
 culture, which is not the same as mine; but that fact does not make it easier 
 to understand this careless sport. Regarding it as a kind of ritual does not 
 help; some rituals are enacted through dull habit rather than vital energy. 
 
 Walker often presents himself, not as an actor, but as a person directed by 
 others: he had not intended to participate in the trip, but at the last minute 
 “Mr Thompson said [he] had better come.” This passivity and carelessness 
 make him almost an object to which things happen; during the bad weather 
 on the voyage out he sits on deck all day, without moving, “just letting the 
 sea wash over me.” Walker’s apparent lack of will to shape either his own 
 course or surrounding affairs is manifest again in the way that the letter de¬ 
 scribes and situates Fiji. What it does is most striking if we consider another 
 account of the same trip, an account that Walker refers to. The Symes men¬ 
 tioned near the beginning are members of the famous Melbourne family 
 that owned the leading daily newspaper, the Age, in which a five-part ac¬ 
 count of the trip appeared: 
 
 The result of a recent trip to Fiji has been to impress me most favor¬ 
 ably in regard to the industrial capabilities of the country, and its 
 future commercial prosperity ... I consider it most desirable that the 
 people of Victoria should get acquainted with the youngest of our colo¬ 
 nies, since a better acquaintance might not only induce them to take 
 a deeper interest in its affairs than they appear to take at present, but 
 might also be the means of enabling them to see their way to the in¬ 
 vestment of capital, and to the bestowal of some of their characteristic 
 energy in the development of its resources. (“Papalan-hi” 1878: 7) 
 
 35 
 
The writer proceeded to still more optimistic claims —that Fiji could be for 
 Australia what the West Indies had been to Europe —and came back to such 
 questions at many points in his report. But the islands were attractive to the 
 tourist as well as the investor or settler: 
 
 During the greater part of the voyage you sail over placid, summer seas, 
 sighting innumerable islands, which raise their browm and purple peaks 
 above the sunlit waves. You see some features of nature peculiarly char¬ 
 acteristic of that quarter of the world, and to be met with nowhere else, 
 as, for instance, the coral reefs which form; beautiful but dangerous 
 circles round each of the islands, and the cocoa-nut palm trees which 
 supply the natives with food and drink and almost all they need. You 
 see the way in which the natives live, blending in their character a good 
 deal of the barbarism out of which they are just emerging, and a little 
 of the Christian civilisation which has been placed within their reach. 
 You see new aspects of nature, and new phases of life. (Ibid.) 
 
 No mention here of the hazards and discomfort of the trip —a drunken 
 captain, reefs, and storms—but what is striking about the newspaper ac¬ 
 count are not its trite fabrications of a sanitized, pleasant tour, but the 
 article’s larger coherence. It is of course a typically dull piece of colonial 
 journalism, and it is hard to distinguish from many other accounts of Fiji 
 of the period, which were extremely repetitive on the subject of the islands’ 
 resources and prospects, but the text possesses a certain completeness and 
 composure, which Walker’s franker and fragmentary narrative lacks. The 
 journalist positions Fiji on the periphery of an expanding frontier; people 
 are about to know the place better, to visit in greater numbers, to expand 
 settlement and increase production. The islands present themselves both as 
 novel prospects and novel sights; just as the eye is excited and inspired by 
 the scenery and the natives, energy is stimulated by the scope for invest¬ 
 ment and development. This vision is informed both by precise geographical 
 knowledge (the total area is “nearly equal to that of Wales”) and ethnologi¬ 
 cal understanding: land tenure and traditional government through chief¬ 
 tainship can be described. Fijians are at once objects of anthropological 
 speculation —could their cannibal natures really be altered by Christianity? 
 — and “grotesque” characters who provide amusement and spectacle: 
 
 They were . . . not repulsive. They were rather an appropriate adjunct 
 of the scene. How could we have believed that we were in Fiji at all, 
 unless we had seen just such grotesque fellows as these we saw cluster- 
 
 36 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
ing on the deck, or squatting on the bows of their canoes, or swimming 
 about in the water. (Ibid.) 
 
 Fiji, then, is not somewhere that one can simply be; one needs to be per¬ 
 suaded that one is in such an exotic place, and belief can be confirmed by a 
 kind of measurement: the natives are as grotesque as one expects. 
 
 Walker appears uninterested in the larger narrative that the Age writer 
 imagines. Of course, he comes out with some of the standard observations: 
 the Fijians are utterly idle, though their fastidiousness in preparing for their 
 dances attests to their jealousy and vanity; and he, like so many others, was 
 at least mildly titillated by the prospect of owning a cannibal’s club. (The 
 interest, incidentally, made the manufacturing of “cannibal” weapons some¬ 
 thing of an export industry even as early as the 1870s; they were made 
 mainly by pacific and Christian Fijians unlikely to have ever killed anyone.) 
 But just as Walker is not interested in the specific natures of Fijians —they 
 and the Solomon Islander indentured laborers alike are simply “niggers” — 
 neither is he concerned with the future of Fiji, which is such a weighty 
 issue for Syme’s ponderous report. Walker refrains from representing the 
 islands and the journey in terms of an aesthetic and inquisitive possessive¬ 
 ness that would accompany economic appropriation; his “ethnological” ob¬ 
 servations are marked by a carelessness that is almost refreshing after the 
 false and tedious precision that characterizes much colonial anthropologi¬ 
 cal and travel writing. So the feast witnessed at Rewa took place “either only 
 once a year, or every ten years, I forget which.” 
 
 37 
 
*s “7 have been waiting anxiously 
 
 July iq th 1880 
 65 Pitt S' 
 
 My dear mother 
 
 I am beginning to think that I must have dropped out of the 
 memory of all at home, for I have not heard from any one (except 
 one letter from you) since I have been in Sydney. That letter was 
 dated March 25 th , so that I have had no news from home for four 
 months, I thought at first that my letters must have gone to Mel¬ 
 bourne, so I wrote to make enquiries and found that there were 
 none there for me. There was a letter from you to Howard arrived 
 last mail and I have sent it on to him. 
 
 I sent you a newspaper by the “San Francisco” mail last week with 
 an account of the capture of the “Kelly gang,” who have managed 
 to elude the police for the last two years, there was tremendous 
 excitement here while the fight was going on, hundreds of people 
 outside the newspaper offices, watching for the telegrams as they 
 came in, with the accounts of the fight, as it was proceeding. In Mel¬ 
 bourne I believe the excitement was still worse, and people even 
 shut their shops, so that all could go and watch the telegrams as 
 they came in. “Ned Kelly” who was captured alive has not yet re¬ 
 covered sufficiently to appear at his trial, but they expect that he 
 w T ill be well enough this week. 
 
 Howard has been away in Adelaide and Melbourne for the last 
 three weeks, so that I have been left by myself here, and have found 
 plenty to do, I expect him back again, in four or five days. He went 
 overland to Melbourne, and happened to be passing “Glenrowan” 
 railway station, while the fight with the “Kelly’s” was going on, and 
 stayed there to watch it, so I expect full account of it on his return 
 here. 
 
 I feel very dull in Sydney after Melbourne, and as yet have made 
 very few friends here, and if it was not for the harbor I don’t know 
 what I should do on Saturdays and Sundays. 
 
I wonder if you are still thinking of coming out here for a trip. 1 
 have been waiting anxiously to hear from you every mail, if you are 
 still thinking of coming, but I am always dissappointed and do not 
 receive any letters at all. 
 
 Melbourne, I expect is very lively now preparing for the Exhibi¬ 
 tion and I hope that business may take me over there, so that I may 
 get a chance of seeing it, as I only just saw the finish of the “Sydney” 
 one, I am sending our exhibit over to-morrow, but it will have to 
 wait some time there before it will be opened. 
 
 I thought that Melbourne was bad enough for news, but I find 
 that Sydney is worse, for I have no news at all, to tell you, so must 
 conclude, with love to all 
 
 Your loving son 
 V Lee Walker 
 
 I enclose a photograph I had taken, just before leaving Melbourne, 
 I did not intend sending any home, as I have never had a photo¬ 
 graph (I make a mistake I had one, Harry’s) sent me since I left 
 Bromley House. 
 
 39 
 
«» “ ‘Mango Island’... is a perfect ' paradise’ 
 
 December 2i J( 1880 
 65 Pitt S' 
 
 Dear mother 
 
 I suppose that Howard, in his letters has told you why I have not 
 been able to write to you for the last mail or two. 
 
 At the last minute M r Thomson talked me into going another 
 trip to “Fiji" with him, and I have not regretted accepting his offer 
 for I could not have enjoyed any trip more. 
 
 I with Howard was down on board the steamer to say good by 
 to them before they left (they were leaving at daylight) and it was 
 about one oclock in the morning when I said that I would go, so 
 I just went home put my things with my portmanteau, came back 
 again and turned into the first empty bunk I came to, 8 c by daylight 
 we were steaming down the harbour. It was the Prince of Wales 
 birthday (Nov gth) when we left Sydney 8 c you could not have got 
 a more miserable day, for it was raining hard 8 c the sea was fear¬ 
 ful rough, as there was a gale of wind blowing. Things went very 
 quiet for the first two or three days, as everyone was sea-sick, my¬ 
 self included (although I thought that I was never going to be sea¬ 
 sick again). There were between 20 8 c 30 of us on board most of 
 them new-chums, amongst them “Cartland” (Howards friend from 
 Birmingham). “Howard” of Bedford (son of the great Implement 
 makers) 8 c “Ward” of Sheffield (son of Ward of Ward 8 c Payne the 
 sheep-shear makers). Altogether their was a decent lot (I forgot to 
 mention that we had a parson, as M r Thomson never travels with 
 out a parson on board) 
 
 We passed “Lord Howes Island” 8 c “Norfolk Island,” but it was 
 too rough to land at either places, so we had to put off our visit till 
 the return trip from “Fiji.” 
 
 We arrived at “Suva” on Friday November ig lh , having had bad 
 weather all the way down. 
 
 I should have told you the object of M r Thomsons trip to Fiji. The 
 
whole of “Suva” belongs to M r Thomson, & “Leveuka” the present 
 capital, not being a large enough place M r Thomson says to the 
 government I will give you three fifths of “Suva,” if you will promise 
 me to make that place the capital. The Government accepted his 
 offer 8 c November 22 nd was the first Land sale day. 
 
 Not arriving till the Friday & the land-Sales being on the Mon¬ 
 day we did not think that it would be worth while leaving “Suva” so 
 we sent the steamer on to “Leveuka” & we put up at the Hotel on 
 shore. On the Monday, of course, there was great excitment about 
 the sales, as the “Leveuka” people were going to do all they could 
 to spoil it, for the moving of the capital meant the ruin of a lot 
 of them who had property at “Leveuka.” However the sale went 
 off better than anyone expected and the “Leveuka” people had to 
 buy themselves. It was only Government land that was sold, but Mr 
 Thomson sold a lot of his afterwards privately, 8 c got nearly double 
 the price of the government lands. 
 
 The next day we all went up the “Rewa” river in a small steamer, 
 8 c we were away for two days, but the pleasure of this trip was spoilt 
 by all of us getting wet through to the skin the first day, & none of 
 us having a change. You never saw such dirty miserable creatures 
 as we looked when we returned to “Suva” 
 
 When we arrived at “Suva,” we found that the steamer had re¬ 
 turned and was waiting for us, so at 3PM that day (25 th ) we left 
 for “Leveuka” where we arrived at ten oclock the same night. At 
 3PM the next day we left “Leveuka” for “Mango,” where we ar¬ 
 rived at 8 oclock the next morning. “Mango” Island belongs to 
 four brothers named “Ryder,” and is a perfect “Paradise,” it is no 
 use trying to describe it, because it would be impossible. The four 
 brothers take alternate years of work, and pleasure, two of them are 
 on the island for twelve months, whilst the other two travel round 
 the world for pleasure, then at the end of every twelve months they 
 change places. They have a house at each end of the Island about 
 4 miles apart, 8 c have a telephone at work between the two of them. 
 They employ about 6 white people 8 c between 300 8 c 400 natives 8 c 
 grow cheifly cotton, sugar, coffee 8 c maize & cocoa-nuts for copra. 
 Thousands of tons of fruit of every description you can name, lying 
 rotting on the ground, as they can’t eat it and can’t export it. It 
 is impossible to descibe what the island is like, but I have never 
 
 4 1 
 
seen such a beatuiful place anywhere talk about flowers & scenery. 
 Ah well! it is no use talking about them for no one could believe 
 it unless they saw it. It was well worth the travelling of the 2000 
 miles to see that Island alone. We were all very sorry when evening 
 came and we had to leave it & go on the “Taviwui,” which place 
 we reached the next morning at daylight, but this being a very reli- 
 geous Island (and it being Sunday 28th.) as there are a great num¬ 
 ber of missionary’s here, every thing was very quiet, and I fancy we 
 were all thinking of “Mango Island,” which took all the shine out of 
 this Island. However we spent a very pleasant day, and left again in 
 the evening for “Leveuka” arriving there the next morning Monday 
 29 th at 9AM. Here we stayed two days as we had to take in cargo. 
 We gave the “Leveuka” people a big lunch “on board,” & they gave 
 us a big dinner on shore and altogether we spent a very pleasant 
 tw'o days. We had a photograph taken of the lot of us in a group, 
 and I well send you one of them as soon as they arrive. (They are 
 to come up by the next steamer which is daily expected). From 
 “Leveuka” we went back to “Suva,” and from “Suva” on December 
 2 nd at 3PM we started back for Sydney. 
 
 On the 6th we arrived at “Norfolk Island,” and here also we spent 
 a day. It is as I daresay you know an old Convict settlement and the 
 ruins of the prison &ct are still there. We walked across the island 
 (between 3 & 4 miles) through an avenue of Norfold Island Pines, 
 and on the other side met Bishop “Selwyn,” and fifteen or sixteen 
 clergimen who had come from Auckland to consecrate a church. 
 We went inside the church, which was as pretty a one as ever I went 
 into, the floor being beautifully laid with marble. The church was 
 put up in memory of Bishop Patterson who was murdered by the 
 natives amongst the Islands (Norfold Isl d is always the Bishops head 
 quarters) & w’hich I am afraid will be the end of “Bishop Selwyn” 
 for there have been a great number of murders lately. Before we 
 left I had some good fishing. I was the only one on board who knew 
 anything about deep-sea fishing, and having my own tackle with me 
 I got on first rate, whilst the others could not understand why they 
 could not catch any. I supplied the ship with fish for three days. 
 
 We left Norfolk Island the same evening and arrived at “Lord 
 Howes” Island on December 8 th 8PM, but it being dark, we were 
 not able to land. However we had some good sport on board. 
 
 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
About ten oclock I put the shark lure overboard and almost before 
 the bait touched the water we had a shark hooked and amongst 
 any amount of yelling and howling (not the shark) we got him on 
 board. Well! to make a long story short, for two hours we hauled 
 in sharks as fast as ever we could, and at that time our arms ached 
 so, that we had to leave off as fast as we caught them the sailors 
 chopped off their tails (the only way to kill them) 8 c through them 
 overboard, and the others seeing their wounded would attack and 
 eat them. We counted the tails, and found 25 so it was not a bad 
 nights work (it would have been more fun in the daylight, as it was 
 very dangerous at night as, they were plenty big enough to bite 
 ones legs off, luckily there were no accidents. 
 
 In the morning the wind began to blow and a boat came off and 
 told us not to attempt to land as it was too rough. This was a fearful 
 dissappointment to us as we had all intendjed] to have had some 
 fine shooting, as there were any amount of wild pigs 8 c goats on the 
 Island. 
 
 There are only 48 people on the Island, and no ship ever calls 
 there, at least they think themselves very lucky if they here twice a 
 year from the other world. If that is but being buried alive, I dont 
 know what is; They do not have to work at all, as everything grows 
 so luxuriantly. We had another dissappointmeant, as we intended 
 to have all got a supply of fruit to take to our friends in Sydney. We 
 did not get any from Fiji (at least I only got a bunch of “bananas” 
 8 c a few pineapples) as they said “what’s the good of carrying it 
 when you can get any amount at “Lord Howes Island,” which is 
 only two days steam from Sydney.” Well we had to go without our 
 fruit, and at 8AM we started for “Sydney.” The captains words were 
 soon verefied, and we were very soon in a gale which lasted for 24 
 hours. We arrived in Sydney on Saturday Dec-11 th 9AM after the 
 pleasantest trips I ever spent 8 c doubly so as it is a trip that none of 
 us will have the chance of ever going again. 
 
 M r Thomson was the only one who had bad news waiting for him 
 “his fathers death in Glasgow” You must know that we were like 
 out of the world for five weeks, as there is no telegraph & we could 
 here of nothing from the time we left till the time we returned 8 c 
 when they told me that “Hanlou” had beaten “Trickett” I couldn’t 
 believe it, however I found that it was true. 
 
 43 
 
I found pleanty of work when I came back, and have been busy 
 ever since, espescially as Howard has gone to Melbourne I expect 
 him back in a few days when he is going to “New Caledonia” & will 
 be away for a month. 
 
 I have had a very bad throat ever since I came back from “Fiji” & 
 for two or three days I was frightened about it as I could not swallow 
 at all, it is better now, but I cannot get it quite well, although I have 
 been taking care of myself. We went round the harbour in a steam 
 launch & got caught in a “scuall” & got wet through so I think that 
 I must have caught cold. 
 
 I have missed the mail for wishing you a merry Christmas but I 
 hope that you will have had one, and will have a very Happy New 
 Year 
 
 Your loving son 
 V Lee Walker 
 
 44 
 
 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
© “Icant stand cold 
 
 September ig' A /8i 
 102 Clarence S' 
 Sydney 
 
 Dear Cyril 
 
 I found your short letter waiting for me here, on my return from 
 New Zealand, and I have been so busy that I have not had time to 
 answer it before. 
 
 I had a long trip through New Zealand, four months of it, and 
 at the very worst time of the year, nothing but rain, snow, frost and 
 wind, I was pretty glad to get back to warm weather again, for I can’t 
 stand cold after living in a hot climate for five years, “things ain’t as 
 they used to was.” In doing New Zealand you have to go through a 
 lot of coaching, & being stuck on the box of a coach for two days at 
 a stretch (and some of them are days from half two in the morning 
 till eleven at night), & raining and snowing is not what you may call 
 travelling for pleasure, I had lots of accidents and adventures, but 
 nothing very serious. The worst I think was being upset in a river, 
 whilst crossing in a coach, the driver mistook the ford, and before 
 we knew where we were, we were upset coach and all in five feet of 
 water. We managed to save the horses and luggage, (the latter of 
 course soaking), but we had to leave the coach in the river, 8 c wait 
 in our wet clothes for two hours for another coach, and did not 
 reach our destination till eleven at night, without even a dry collar 
 to put on. 
 
 I was wet through for nearly three weeks, and of course had to 
 suffer in the shape of rheumatism. The next time I make a trip to 
 New Zealand I hope that it will be in the summer months. 
 
 Thanks for your photo. I do not know if I sent you one of my last 
 or not, but all my things are packed up in cases and goodness only 
 knows, when I will have time to open them up but when I do I will 
 send you one of mine. 
 
 Howard has gone down to “Noumea” in his new steamer “The 
 
India,” and will I expect be away for about a month, so that I have 
 plenty of work to do while he is away, and don’t care how soon he 
 comes back. 
 
 Business has been very slack, but I think is looking up a little 
 now. Well! this is mail day so you must excuse a long letter, and 
 when I have a little spare time I will drop another line or two. 
 
 Your affec te brother. 
 V. Lee. Walker. 
 
 Cyril W Walker Esq re 
 Wolverhampton 
 
 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
« “I would hardly find my way about Wolverhampton now 
 
 October 25^/82 
 163 Clarence S' 
 Sydney. N.S.W. 
 
 Dear mother, 
 
 I find that I have not had a letter from home since last January, 
 so I fancy it is about time I wrote a line and give you what little 
 news I can. 
 
 I have not been out of Sydney since I last wrote to you, and I 
 begin to feel in want of a change. I was going down to New Caledo¬ 
 nia, for a trip in about a fortnights time but Howard is down there 
 now, and unless he returns, next week, I shall not be able to get 
 away for another six weeks. 
 
 Howard went down to New Caledonia last week, but I do not 
 think that he will remain there for long. We were expecting M r 
 David Storer, out here this year, but we got a cablegram from him 
 two days ago, and I do not think that he will come out now. Howard 
 is talking of going home next March, but he has been talking of 
 going home for so long that I shall not believe it, until he has really 
 left, I wonder how long it will be before I am able to take a trip 
 home, I have felt awfully home-sick the last year or two, and I fancy, 
 get more so every day. I suppose that I would hardly find my way 
 about Wolverhampton now. I should like to see you take a trip out 
 here, the journey is nothing now, and it is well worth a trip to see 
 the Colonies. 
 
 We have got awful swell offices here now, in fact, as nice as any¬ 
 one in town, and have got plenty of store room. 
 
 I suppose you will have heard about out Exhibition being burnt 
 down, it was a tremendous blaze, I could feel the heat, where I live, 
 which is more than a mile away, by this Post I send you an illus¬ 
 trated paper, with a full account of the fire. 
 
 We had a big fire three doors from our office, a little time ago, 
 
which was a little too near to be pleasant considering we had about 
 2000 drums of oil in the place; we should have had a nice blaze. 
 
 I got a newspaper from Willie this mail, which is the only Wolver¬ 
 hampton news I have had this year. I notice that Mary Morton is 
 married and the M rs W.W.W. has given a basket of “Kidney beans,” 
 to the hospital. 
 
 I was very glad to hear from Howard, that Norman, had got such 
 a good billet. I wonder if he has altered as much as Cyril, when I 
 got Cyril’s photograph, some time ago, I did not at first recognise 
 him, he has grown such a swell, I enclose a rough photograph, 
 I and some friends had taken, during a boating excursion, I am 
 afraid that it will take you all your time to recognise me, although I 
 do not think that I have altered much. Has anyone had any photo¬ 
 graphs taken lately, if so I wish you could manage to beg or steal 
 some for me, after not seeing them for eight years. How the time 
 does fly. I have forgotten my own age, the years pass so quickly, and 
 taking no notice of my birthdays as they pass. Am I 25, or 26? I 
 fancy that I must be somewhere about that. 
 
 Nov 7 th I have been so busy that I have not had time to finish 
 this letter before. Howard is still in New Caledonia, but I expect 
 him back this day week. All last week I was so busy that I hardly 
 knew what to do with myself, I was at the office every morning at 
 ’past five, & until 10 & 11 at night, so that I had quite enough of it. 
 Thank goodness, I have got pretty square with everything now. 
 
 Thursday the 9 th (Prince of Wales Birthday) is a holiday for us, 
 but unfortunately our steamer is going away, on that date so that 
 I am afraid it will put a stop to my holiday. Well! it is mailday to¬ 
 day and I am up to my neck in work, so I must bring my letter to a 
 close. Hoping all at home are in good health, 
 
 Your lovinfg] son 
 V. Lee Walker. 
 
 48 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
e “Sallie has sent me her childrens photographs 
 
 January 8^/83 
 163 Clarence S* 
 
 My dear mother. 
 
 Your letter of November 2 nd , was forwarded on to me to New 
 Caledonia, where I have been for the last month, and you can 
 imagine how glad I was to hear from you once more, for it is such a 
 long time since I last received a letter from you. I was very pleased 
 to receive your photograph, I could not have wished for a better 
 Christmas box and only wish that I could get more of the others 
 to send me their photographs; Sallie has sent me her children’s 
 photographs’ the little girl is very like her, in fact they both are. 
 
 I left for Noumea on December i s< , it is only a four days trip in 
 the steamer, and we had a nice lot of passengers on board. 
 
 Of course I have met nearly all the Noumea people in Sydney, 
 and as I only made up my mind to go to Noumea the night before 
 the steamer left, I took them all by surprise. I stayed with some 
 bachelor friends of mine, and never enjoyed a trip more. I will give 
 the Noumea people credit for knowing how to live; all their work 
 is done in the early morning before breakfast. You get up at five, 
 go to your office till ten o-clock, when you go home to breakfast, 
 which takes till twelve or after, when you have your smoke a sleep 
 for an hour, a bath, then back to the office till four or five oclock, 
 then drive (every one has a trap of some sort) for an hour, and then 
 go home to dinner, and to bed early. They know how to feed you, 
 and take things very easy. The people there are very nice and I only 
 wish I could have stayed for another month. I did not go very far 
 inland as it was my first trip, and could not very well get away from 
 Noumea breakfast with one, dinner with another nearly every day, 
 however I managed to get round the coast as far as our Chrome 
 mine, and stayed there two days, I was greatly pleased with it. 
 
 My Christmas day I spent at sea, on the way back to Sydney it was 
 a miserably rough day, and I don’t think a soul on board enjoyed 
 
their Christmas dinner, everyone was sick from the captain down¬ 
 wards, I did not eat a bite all day, in fact I never left the deck. We 
 arrived in Sydney on boxing day, and as ill-luck would have it we 
 ran aground when coming alongside the wharf, which kept us so 
 long, that we lost that holiday as well. Of course I have been awfully 
 busy since my return, and have got any amount of private letters to 
 write, so much so that I have had to come back to the office this 
 (Saturday) afternoon, and will be writing all day to-morrow. New 
 Years day I was back at the office, and it is only to-day that I have 
 got square with my work. On Monday the English mail goes out, 
 and on Tuesday the New’ Caledonian mail comes in so that I shall 
 have my hands full next week. 
 
 Howard was to have gone home in the “Ballarat,” the steamer 
 w’hich takes this letter, but he now finds that he cannot get away 
 till the next P & O boat, leaving here on the 26'\ 1 make a mistake 
 in saying that he w r as to have gone by the steamer which takes this 
 letter, the steamer he was to have gone with, does not leave till the 
 end of next week however you ought to see him three weeks or a 
 month after you receive this; f only wish that 1 was going with him 
 1 do not think that he will remain away long, I expect him back in 
 about six or eight months after he leaves. 
 
 We have had a very cool summer here as yet, in fact I feel it cold, 
 after Noumea, but we have had plenty of rain, so that the farmers 
 cannot grumble. 
 
 I have w'ritten to “Chuckling” this afternoon, I think that there is 
 a very good chance for her husband, but he would have to begin at 
 the bottom of the ladder, to get Colonial experience, which means 
 starting as a carpenter at £io/- per day, and I think I could safely 
 promise him a billet at that. 
 
 Hoping, dear mother, that you are still keeping good health, and 
 that you will have a happy year before you 
 
 Believe me 
 
 Your loving son 
 V. Lee Walker. 
 
 Howard goes home by the “Natal” leaving here February 3 rd 
 
 50 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
«s “/ wonder how many years it will be 
 
 September 3^/83 
 Sydney. N.S.W. 
 
 My dear mother. 
 
 I have been so busy since Howard’s return, that I have not had 
 time to write to you before. I have to thank you very much for the 
 £10/-/- which you sent me, you may be sure that it was very wel¬ 
 come. Howard was only here a week when he had to hurry off to 
 New Caledonia on business; he took Louie with him. Louie seems 
 to like Sydney she saw a great deal of it during the week she was 
 here, & I had the pleasure of showing her round. I am sorry to 
 say that Howard had bad news on his arrival here, as one of the 
 largest houses in New Caledonia have suspended payment. How¬ 
 ever I fancy that it will turn out all right, and that we shall not lose 
 anything. I am afraid that Howard will have some difficulty in get¬ 
 ting a house to suit him here, as nice houses are awfully scarce just 
 now, and rents are something frightful. Only part of his furniture 
 has arrived, so that even if he got a house, he could not very well 
 get into it, till the remainder arrived. We have had some excitement 
 over the Irish informers, who came out. They were not allowed to 
 land, and have been put on board a man-of-war down the harbour, 
 from whence they will be sent back, home again. 
 
 George, who you will remember went home with Howard, has 
 gone back to his old billet on board the “City of Melbourne,” he 
 has had some fine yarns to tell about his travels. I have chaffed him 
 about going back to Mary’s ship (I suppose that you have heard 
 Howard speak about her, she is the stewardess). He seems to have 
 been great friends with the girls at Bromley House, and I am sure 
 that if he were here now, that he would send his love to them 
 all. There is a steamer from New Caledonia due here to-day, and 
 Howard may return by her, although I do not expect them till the 
 end of the week, when there is a large steamer due. 
 
 I have hardly had time to have a talk with Howard since his re- 
 
turn, but he seems to have enjoyed his trip, short as it was. I have 
 met a friend of Norman’s here, Walker, of “Walker’s Whisky,” and 
 have had to show him around town he is staying here for a month. 
 
 Well! I do not think that I have any more news to tell you, so, 
 hoping that you are keeping in good health, and with love to all 
 at home. 
 
 Believe me, dear mother 
 Your loving son 
 V. Lee Walker 
 
 I was looking up this morn & find that it is now eight years since I 
 left home I wonder how many years it will be till I see it once more? 
 
 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
<*• “There is no news of any interest 
 
 Sydney N.S.W. 
 
 December 18^/83 
 
 My dear mother, 
 
 I was pleased to find a letter lying on my desk, from you when 
 I came in to the office the other morning. I have no foreign note 
 paper in the office, and this is the only sheet I can rake up, and it is 
 not as clean as it might be. 
 
 Howard has at last got a house, strange to say it is in the same 
 terrace where I am living, which will be handy. For a house in town, 
 it is the best situation you could wish for, the front view is looking 
 right down the harbour and from the back you look right up the 
 Parramatta river, there is always a cool breeze, and very few mos¬ 
 quitoes. It is now being papered and painted & I do not suppose 
 that they will get into it till the middle of January. 
 
 The only objection to it is the approach as you have to pass 
 through the part of town where the chinamen live, and the smell of 
 their cooking is not always the sweetest; omnibusses however pass 
 the door every three minutes, so that you need never walk. We are 
 getting into the warmer weather now, and we have had one or two 
 very hot days. 
 
 Howard has had a lot of trouble lately, the last was the death 
 of our agent in Noumea (Mr Williams). He was a most particular 
 friend of Howard’s, and had splendid prospects before him. The 
 poor fellow was getting on to his horse, when the horse shied, and 
 threw him, on to his head. He was on[ly] 31 years of age and leaves 
 a wife and three children, his wife only being confined about three 
 days before the accident. 
 
 Howard, Louie, and myself are dining with a Mr. Nossitter on 
 Christmas day, you may be sure that we shall not forget you at 
 home. I am not going out of town for the holidays, and do not 
 know what I shall do to pass away the time. 
 
 We are very busy in the office day as we are two hands short one 
 
being on the sick, & one away for a fortnights holiday Mr Rigg of 
 McLean Bros & Rigg died last Sunday and is to be buried to-day, he 
 has left a number of friends behind him, and will be greatly missed. 
 
 I fancy that I owe Cyril a letter, tell him that I will most likely 
 answer it during the holidays, I am such an awful bad correspon¬ 
 dent, and there is no news of any interest to those at home. 
 
 I am rather late in wishing you a Merry Christmas, but I trust 
 that you will have a Happy & Prosperous New year. Hoping that all 
 are well at home 
 
 Believe me, my dear mother 
 Your loving Son 
 V. Lee Walker. 
 
 Commentary 
 
 We reproduce only a few of Walker’s letters from the years between 1878 
 and 1883. He wrote frequently and repetitively, acknowledging regular let¬ 
 ters from his mother, expressing disappointment when they did not arrive, 
 noting events in the social calendar such as pantomimes, and conveying the 
 sense that his brother Howard w T as enjoying a social and commercial whirl, 
 to which Lee was largely peripheral. Despite the apparent condition of pros¬ 
 perity, Lee often seems at a loose end, and evidently isolated. It is Howard 
 who has the opportunity to visit home, Howard who owns the business, he 
 who directs Lee to travel or not travel, to take a place or not in the boat, 
 and he who is married or about to be married, and is making arrangements 
 concerning houses, furniture, and wallpaper. 
 
 Up until 1883, the letters imply a genteel existence, a circuit of drives, 
 of meals, and engagements; the main difficulty seems to be in getting a 
 “nice house.” Lee, however, mentions “bad news” in September 1883, and 
 by December is reporting that “Howard has had a lot of trouble lately.” We 
 do not encounter many more references to drives in traps, and the social 
 life seems to become less hectic. Even at this time Walker must thank his 
 mother for a gift of £10; whether this was solicited because of some hardship 
 is not clear, but there is a suggestion that the story, the plot of “Colonial 
 experience” that Lee recommends for another correspondent’s husband, is 
 coming unstuck. The notion behind this is glimpsed in the reference to the 
 “splendid prospects” of Williams, which were sadly extinguished by his acci¬ 
 dent. Society at home is crowded and restrictive; in the colonies, a working 
 
 54 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
man must start from the bottom and work hard, but ultimately has better 
 and brighter opportunities in their open spaces than in the metropolitan, 
 industrial congestion of cities such as Wolverhampton. If this is so, he ought 
 to be sending remittances rather than receiving them. 
 
 Walker says in a later letter that at Christmas his thoughts “naturally turn 
 towards home,” and his mention of photographs in January 1883 reminds 
 us of how familial ties were reduced by time and distance to fragile threads 
 of too-occasional correspondence, to mementos such as photographs, lock¬ 
 ets, and chains. His niece and nephew, he finds, resemble their mother; his 
 memory of her, by now, must be as indistinct as one of those sepia photo¬ 
 graphs that—if still preserved in the possession of some descendant alive 
 now—would be faded and jumbled with others, and with other familial 
 detritus, in a rarely opened desk drawer. But, of course, it is not the re¬ 
 semblance that is important; the statement is more a way of saying “I am 
 still here.” Walker enunciates, or feels obliged to enunciate, a continuing fa¬ 
 milial tie that seemed perhaps to be fraying: “it is such a long time”; “I . . . 
 only wish I could get more of the others to send me their photographs.” 
 
 This is a period of some security, initially even one of optimism; the life 
 in Noumea appears to be attractive, and if residence in the Rocks is marred 
 by the stink of Chinese food, it sounds as if the bus service was better then 
 than it is now. But even in this period, there is a sense of lack and isolation; 
 not leaving town for the holidays, Walker doesn’t know what he’ll do “to pass 
 away the time.” And if dinner with Mr. Nossiter and the death of Mr. Rigg 
 suggest a degree of society, the presence of men who will be missed by many 
 friends, there is also a hint of an absence of value: “there is no news of any 
 interest to those at home.” 
 
 55 
 
ts “Things here have changed greatly 
 
 July 2g rt 1884 
 Noumea 
 
 My dear mother 
 
 If ever anyone ought to be ashamed of themselves, it is I, for 
 I cannot remember when I last wrote to you, 8 c although I might 
 have excuses for not writing to other people, yet I should have no 
 excuse in not writing to you. 
 
 Things here, have changed greatly, since I last wrote to you, 
 but I suppose that you will have had full particulars from Howard 
 and Louie. 
 
 I am very, very sorry to hear of Louie’s return home, I have been 
 away from Noumea for a trip all round the Island, 8 c only heard of 
 her departure, on my return (a week or so, ago). I am afraid that 
 she wall not have a good opinion of me, & I daresay that there are 
 lots of little things, which I might have done, to make her stay more 
 pleasant, but having been out of decent society for so many years, I 
 am afraid that I must have appeared a rather uncouth brute, how¬ 
 ever I meant well, even if I did not behave so. 
 
 As I said before, I have been for a trip round the coast, and al¬ 
 though it was very rough work, I enjoyed myself thoroughly 8 c only 
 wish that I was going to start the same trip over again to-morrow, 
 for I am miserable in Noumea, as I have no friends 8 c I see very 
 little of Howard I have just a bedroom, & take my meals out, 8 c 
 hardly speak a word to anyone from the time I get up until I go to 
 bed. I come home after dinner (as to-night) and write letters, or if 
 I do not wTite letters, go to bed, as the offices open here, at seven 
 oclock in the morning, so one has to get up early. 
 
 The trip I took was in our own schooner, a little bit of a boat with 
 two beds in it, if you can call them beds, for I slept on the boards 
 with just a blanket round me 8 c went about without boots all the 
 time as one has to walk through the water so much, that it is no use 
 wearing boots, only w r hen you have to walk two or three miles over 
 
coral, it is rather trying, but you soon get used to it. The greatest 
 objection I had at first was the cock-roaches, although I got used 
 to even them after a time. The ship was full of them, great big fel¬ 
 lows two or three inches long, who used to crawl over your face 
 whilst you were asleep, which was, (to say the least of it) anything 
 but pleasant. We managed to run on a reef, & I never expected 
 to see land again, as it was nasty weather at the time, however we 
 were lucky enough to get off, with not much damage to the ship, 
 but it took us two or three days to recover our spirits again. The 
 captain is a very decent fellow (an Irishman), so it was a comfort to 
 have someone to talk to after being with no-one but Frenchmen for 
 some time. Dangerous as it is, travelling round the coast I would far 
 sooner, be doing it, than having to live in Noumea, for I never feel 
 well in this beastly place, whereas I got as fat as a pig during my trip. 
 I wonder when I will be able to take a trip home. I am afraid that 
 it will be a long time yet, but I would like to have a look at you all 
 again, for I was only a boy when I left and would see things in a very 
 different light now, although I am afraid that I would never be able 
 to stand the cold, for I complain of it here sometimes, & goodness 
 knows, it is hot enough in this place I had a letter from Sallie a mail 
 or so ago, but have not answered it as yet & I have an idea that I owe 
 Nellie a letter, however I will try to write to them next mail, but let¬ 
 ter writing is an awful job for me, for I am an awful bad hand at it. 
 
 Well! I think that it is time for me to go to bed, 8 c will endeavour 
 to write a little more regularly to you. With love to all 
 
 Believe me 
 
 Your loving Son 
 V. Lee Walker 
 
 57 
 
«*• “Luck seems to be against me 
 
 Noumea, New Caledonia 
 February 3 rd 1885 
 
 My dear mother, 
 
 I ought to be ashamed of myself for not writing oftener to you, 
 and have no excuse to offer, except that I am an awfully bad hand at 
 letter writing. I am afraid that I will have very little news to tell you. 
 
 I like New Caledonia very much as far as the climate goes, but 
 there is no amusements of any kind. We get up in the morning 
 at five, go to the store at six (having a cup of coffee before going 
 down) & work till a quarter to eleven, when we go home to break¬ 
 fast, returning to the store between twelve and one 8 c work till six. 
 At seven we have dinner (only two meals a day) and generally go 
 straight to bed, so that you may say, our life here is nothing but eat¬ 
 ing, drinking, sleeping, & working. Certainly we have a band which 
 plays on Thursday nights and Sunday afternoons. The band is com¬ 
 posed of convicts, who do nothing else but play, consequently they 
 play splendidly. Howard has got a splendid little house to live in, 
 about the best here. I have only got a dirty little room in an hotel, 
 with not even a chest of drawers to put my things in. We both take 
 our meals at the club, 8 c I must say, they feed us splendidly. 
 
 Howard is away in Sydney, but I am expecting him back again by 
 the first steamer, which should be in sometime during the week. I 
 am living in his house whilst he is away, to look after it for him. It 
 is a fearful place for robberies, nearly every night there are some 
 stores and private houses broken into. However we have been won¬ 
 derfully lucky, as they have never troubled us once. I always am the 
 last to leave the store, & so, see that it is properly fortified, then I 
 have built a house myself in the yard, in which, I have at least half a 
 dozen “boys” (as all canaques are called never mind what age they 
 are) to sleep every night. Howard’s, house I also look after, well, 8 c I 
 pity any-one that attempts to get in whilst I am staying their. In the 
 
yard I have two good watch-dogs loose all night, also two or three 
 boys to sleep outside. In the house I see to everything being “made- 
 fast” myself and have the two little boys (youngsters about ten years 
 of age, Howard has three of them, & no-one else to keep the house 
 in order, 8 c you would be surprised to see how well they do it) each 
 one sleeping across the doors. For myself I have my revolver under 
 my pillow, & I fancy that a thief would receive a warm reception. 
 
 Last night, or rather this morning about two oclock, I heard 
 someone trying to open one of the doors. I got up quietly & 
 sneaked along on my hands 8 c knees until I arrived at the opposite 
 door, when through the glass window I saw a head. I took aim at 
 it (for my motto here is - “shoot first, and sing out afterwards”) 8 c 
 had my hand on the trigger to shoot, when I noticed that the head 
 was wooley, so I knew that it must be a canaque so I sang out 8 c got 
 for an answer “Its me master.” It was one of the little boys, who was 
 trying to open one of the doors, without waking me, but couldn’t. 
 Poor little beggar I do not think he quite understood how near he 
 was being shot. He is my favorite boy, not more than ten years old, 
 & has only come from the New Hebrides about a month ago. He is 
 such a pretty little fellow 8 c is just beginning to talk English. I did 
 not sleep a wink afterwards thinking how near I had been to killing 
 the poor little devil. Our cashiers house was broken into last Thurs¬ 
 day evening whilst he 8 c his wife were at the band they were not 
 away twenty minutes (between eight & nine oclock) but when they 
 came back the house was turned upside down 8 c everything of value 
 taken, which I am afraid they will never see again. They are sure to 
 give Howard’s house a turn, as he has so many valuables. I am only 
 afraid that it will get robbed in the day time, as there are only the 
 two little boys (Howard has the other one in Sydney with him) to 
 look after it. I am not afraid of the night-time whilst I am their. 
 
 We have had a most horrible fever here (not dangerous) called 
 “The Dengue,” 8 c I fancy nearly everybody has had it. I was one of 
 the first to get it 8 c was bad for more than three weeks. For ten days 
 I eat nothing at all 8 c consequently was too weak to stand, however 
 I was only away from the store for 4 days. Howard, was one of the 
 last to get it, but he was laid up at home for more than a week. We 
 have had no rain for nine months, which made it a great deal worse 
 
 59 
 
for the fever. To-day however it is quite cold 8 c raining hard, which 
 should wash away what little there is left of the fever. For the coun¬ 
 tries sake I hope that it will rain for at least a fortnight. 
 
 We spent a miserable Christmas here, being all sick with the 
 “Dengue.” Seven of us Englishmen had breakfast together, but it 
 was very dull, for none of us could eat & it was a broiling hot day, 
 after breakfast I went home 8 c lay in a bath all afternoon. 
 
 New Years Eve, I and the captain of our schooner went out into 
 the country, 8 c eat our breakfast with a German Family, & spent a 
 pleasant day. You may be sure that I did not forget those at home. 
 
 Our schooner is in the “labour trade,” that is, she goes down to 
 the islands, gets canaques, they have to come of their own free will 
 (the government have their agent on board to see that everything 
 is done lawfully) 8 c you have to pay their friends for them either 
 in muskets, money, powder &ct. When the ship is full, she returns 
 to Noumea 8 c their you sell them to whoever likes to buy them for 
 domestiques &ct. Some of them are engaged for 3, 4 & 5 years. 
 The longer they are engaged for, the more money you can get for 
 them. Some of them we got as much as £30/-/- a head for them. 
 The buyer has to give them wages at the rate of, from 9 to 12 francs 
 per month, but does not pay them until their engagement is fin¬ 
 ished. Everything is done through the Government who see that 
 the canaques are not cheated, at the end of their engagement they 
 have to be returned to their Island. 
 
 There is any amount of danger for the ship in going amongst the 
 Islands, as every time a ship comes back we hear of ships being 
 fired at 8 c white men killed by the canaques, 8 c often eaten. 
 
 I intended to have gone in our schooner this trip, but it is now 
 the hurricane season, ( 8 c people seem to think that we are going 
 to have one this year) so I thought that I would put off my trip, for 
 even if we should be caught in a hurricane & blown ashore, it is 
 poor consolation to be eat, after you have run the risk of swimming 
 ashore &ct. The Frenchmen, here, lost a fine man-of-war about a 
 week ago, she ran on to a reef during the night; luckily there were 
 no lives lost. I do not get on with my French as well as I should, 
 there is too much English spoken here. 
 
 Well! I fancy that I have written all I can, 8 c hoping that you are 
 in the best of health 8 c with kind love to all. 
 
 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
Believe me 
 
 Ever your loving son, 
 V. Lee Walker. 
 
 I wonder when I shall be able to take a trip home to see you all. 
 
 “Willie” is in Australia now, but I am afraid that I will not be 
 able to see him, as Howard will go to Sydney again, when he arrives 
 their & we cannot very well, both leave together. Luck seems to be 
 against me. 
 
 Commentary 
 
 The “things” that have “changed greatly” are conjugal as well as financial. 
 The woman that Howard brought out to Sydney only the year before has re¬ 
 turned, whether before or after they were married is not clear. Does Louie 
 leave simply because Howard’s business fails? Why does Lee subsequently 
 “see very little” of Howard? 
 
 These letters, of course, are full of silences. Walker’s sexuality is one of 
 them; it is an area we would not expect to find any explicit, or even implied, 
 discussion of in letters to his mother. He presents himself as being so iso¬ 
 lated that I sometimes wonder if he was celibate. One can only guess why 
 Louie might have thought badly of him or considered him uncouth. Did 
 he make some kind of pass at her that alienates him from Howard as well? 
 Or is Walker only expressing a preoccupation of his own, with his remote¬ 
 ness from decent society? This sense of distance is manifest not only in this 
 awkwardness or rupture, not only in Walker’s sense of the improbability of 
 a trip home, but also in his discomfort even in town society in New Cale¬ 
 donia. Noumea, which he appeared previously to enjoy, is now so miserable 
 and beastly that he says the place makes him physically ill. In the letter of 
 July 1884, Walker presents himself as solitary to the point of being silent; by 
 early 1885 this stark isolation is somewhat ameliorated, as he seems to dine 
 with Howard at the club and spend some time visiting with the Irish captain 
 of their labor-trading vessel. 
 
 In all of these letters, spanning nearly ten years, there is only a single pas¬ 
 sage in which Walker expresses any individualized feeling for an islander. 
 He is evidently appalled by how nearly he comes to shooting his house- 
 boy, “a poor little devil,” his “favorite boy,” “a pretty little fellow.” He has 
 shifted a long way since his visit to Fiji, when he remarks on the strangeness 
 
 61 
 
of being surrounded by “niggers.” I cannot assume that the familiarity that 
 displaced this sense of oddness and distance included sexual relations with 
 either men or women, girls or boys. We do know that many white traders 
 of the period would have entered into such relations, but can only specu¬ 
 late, perhaps pointlessly, about this man’s experience. His rough work and 
 heavily tanned skin do not seem quite sufficient to explain his sense that he 
 has become unfit for life “at home.” 
 
 62 
 
 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
«s “There is a kind of fascination in the risks you run 
 
 January 3 rd 1886 
 Noumea 
 
 My dear mother, 
 
 I ought to be thoroughly ashamed of myself for not having writ¬ 
 ten to you lately, & there is no excuse for it. 
 
 I have just returned from a trading trip to the New Hebrides 
 as super-cargo on board our schooner. Our last super-cargo was 
 killed by the natives & when the schooner returned we could not 
 find a man to fill his place, as it is a rather difficult position to fill. I 
 told Howard that I was sure I could do it better than anyone else, 8 c 
 that I would go for him. He seemed to think that I was not capable, 
 but at the last moment when he could get nobody else to go, he 
 told me to go. 
 
 I rather surprised him when I returned two weeks earlier than 
 he thought I could do the trip in. I made a better trip than anyone 
 who had gone down before me. 
 
 I can get along with natives better than most people 8 c have no 
 fear of them. 
 
 You would hardly know me now, I am more than brown almost 
 black from the sun. Clothes do not trouble one much in the Islands. 
 Pajama trousers 8 c singlet are full dress, always bare-footed, as I am 
 in the water nearly all day jumping from the boat ashore. 
 
 In going ashore one has always to be armed to the teeth. I am 
 the only white man that goes ashore from the ship, the others cap¬ 
 tain and mate (only three white men on board) stay on board to 
 look out for the ship. I always have four boys (all black fellows are 
 called “boys” down here) to pull me ashore, each armed with a rifle 
 8 c I with a revolver. We back the boat ashore so as to be able to pull 
 away quickly in case of trouble with the natives. I jump ashore 8 c 
 the boat pulls away a short distance the boys all ready with their 
 rifles to cover me. The first thing on landing I am surrounded with 
 from too to 300 (according to the place) natives all armed with 
 
muskets, rifles, or bows 8 c poisened arrows. They are too frightened 
 of a white man to attack him when they see he is armed, it is only 
 when they see that they can kill you, without any danger to them¬ 
 selves, that they attempt it. I find from experience that the ones 
 that are the worst are those that have been to the white man’s coun¬ 
 try and can speak English, they are the biggest rogues 8 c the ones 
 to be most carefully watched. The one that speaks to you the fairest 
 is the one that will be the first to lift [h]is hand to kill you, or to 
 start the others to do it. I never trust one of them, 8 c always treat 
 them fairly, the consequence is that I can do with natives, more 
 than any one else. A mistake people make is in thinking that they 
 understand the word “gratitude,” there is no such word in their dic¬ 
 tionary, 8 c nobody knows it more than I do, for if any “boy” here 
 gets into trouble I am the first one they come to. The other day one 
 of our “boys” came to me with a fearful wound, he had got it in a 
 fight. I took him to the hospital 8 c got it sewn up for him. A little 
 time afterwards I wanted some night-work done at the store, when 
 he was the only one who refused to come 8 c give a hand. 
 
 The life on board these small schooners is not a very happy one 
 bags of rice for a mattress 8 c a blanket, was my bed 8 c after you get 
 “copra” on board it is impossible to sleep below because of the heat 
 & smell, then the hard deck 8 c a blanket consists of my bed, pleas¬ 
 ant in bad or rainy weather. 
 
 Meals, we have to take as best we can, but always on deck as there 
 is no room down below, 8 c our food as you can imagine is not of the 
 grandest. However in fine weather it is not so very bad, 8 c there is a 
 kind of fascination in the risks you run. 
 
 One of our traders had his house burnt down 8 c lost about £150 
 /-/-’s worth of copra 8 c trade, besides having two shots fired at him, 
 all done by the natives. It happened about four days before I got 
 to his place, since which time he had been sleeping in the bush 
 and living on “yams” &ct. I took him away from the place & fully 
 expected that we would have a fight in leaving, but although there 
 were about 200 of them they were frightened of two white men, 8 c 
 we left without exchanging a shot. 
 
 I expected to be in “Noumea” for Christmas day but when we 
 were quite close we got becalmed 8 c for four days we did not move 
 at all. I was fearfully wild as I wanted to have my Christmas dinner 
 
 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
ashore. However, I had bought a pig at my last port of call, in case 
 of accidents, 8 c for fear that we should be at sea for Christmas, so 
 the poor pig had to suffer, & we had fresh meat for dinner, which is 
 a treat for us. I did not forget you at home, 8 c drank all you healthes 
 in a “nobler” of gin, not a very aristocratic drink, but it was all we 
 had on board. New Year’s day we had a bachelor’s dinner party, & 
 had a pleasant evening of it. 
 
 Now I come to think of it, in four more days it will be my birth¬ 
 day, but I cannot for the life of me, think how old I am. It must be 
 somewhere about thirty. 
 
 Well! the band has just started to play, so I think that I will go to 
 hear it 8 c try to add a few more lines to this letter another time. 
 Jan ry .g 2.A.M. 
 
 It is too hot to sleep, 8 c as there is a mail leaving at six oclock this 
 morning, I may just as well finish this letter 8 c post it. 
 
 I have no more news to add, so with best love to all. 
 
 Believe me 
 
 Your loving son 
 V. Lee Walker. 
 
 6 5 
 
« “I would be fit for nothing at home 
 
 December 25^ 1886 
 At Sea 
 
 Off Erromango. 
 
 Dear mother 
 
 I am thoroughly ashamed of myself for not having written to you 
 for such a long time, but I have been waiting, waiting, waiting to see 
 if the time would not come, when I could write good news, but I am 
 afraid that it wall be a long time before I shall be able to do that. 
 
 Things have not been going so well with us as they might have 
 done, but I suppose that you will have had all news from Howard 
 so I will only write about myself. 
 
 To-day, being Christmas day, of course my thoughts naturally 
 turn to-wards home, and: after lying on my back nearly all morning 
 (too hot to do anything) I thought that I would write a letter home, 
 although I had no good news. 
 
 I am at sea, on board a small schooner of 50 tons, on my way to 
 Noumea, after a voyage round the New Hebrides, to arrange all my 
 affairs, as I have plenty of land and a store their, and I do not know 
 when I may be able to come down here again. 
 
 For the last eighteen months I have been living on board this 
 small schooner, all the time in the New Hebrides coming from one 
 Island to the other, selling trade, collecting copra &ct, 8 c when the 
 ship is full taking it to Noumea 8 c then bringing fresh trade down 
 again. It is a very rough life but I do not dislike it, certainly you 
 have not got much comfort on board, for instance sometimes when 
 short of water we cannot even get a wash for perhaps a week. Dress 
 does not trouble one much, a pair of trousers & singlet, nothing 
 else. My arms, feet, and face, are nearly as dark as a natives, from 
 sunburn. There is a fascination about the live. You never know one 
 minute but you might get knocked on the head by a tomahawk, 
 or shot at with rifle by the natives, as they are all armed. The man 
 
whose place I took in the vessel was speared by the natives and 
 killed; I had been with him the trip before. However all the time 
 that I have been in the Islands I have never had any trouble with 
 the natives and have always got on well with them. I am more fright¬ 
 ened of fever than of being killed by natives. I suffer a good deal 
 from fever and ague, one time I thought that I was never going to 
 get up again. This trip I have had it bad for a week, but I am nearly 
 well again now. It is strange that I spent last Christmas I spent at 
 sea close to where I am now. We should have been in Noumea now 
 but got caught in a storm about a week ago 8 c had four of our sails 
 blown away so that we had to put back 8 c anchor, in order to repair 
 sails. We made another start yesterday (rather hard lives, having to 
 go to sea on Christmas eve, but we have to push along as we are 
 behind time). We are now about thirty miles from an island called 
 Erromango, with hardly a breath of wind and a smooth sea. We are 
 just going to have our Christmas breakfast I expect that you would 
 call it dinner, as it is eleven oclock. We have got a grand feed to¬ 
 day, and all of us have been giving a hand to cook. There are four 
 of us white men on board, Captain, Mate, 1 passenger and myself, 
 6 natives as crew (they are having a great feast also, to-day) 2 native 
 passengers and a Malabar cook. We have a cold fowl, roast leg of 
 goat and a jam roll. They are calling me on deck to breakfast or Ki- 
 Ki, as it is called here. After Ki-Ki I will continue my letter. 
 
 We had just finished our Ki-Ki when there was a cry of shark, 
 two big ones were following the ship, so I got a shark hook and 
 rope, and soon had one of them on deck, he was not a very big one 
 only about 9 or 10 feet long. I put two bullets through his head 
 and cut his tail off, and after all he managed to get over the side of 
 the vessel again. He took charge of the deck whilst we had him on 
 board. One of the boys lost the shark hook overboard, so we could 
 not catch the other one. I afterwards shot a porpoise, so that we 
 have had some sport this afternoon. I am afraid that we are going 
 to have a very long trip to Noumea, as there is very little wind how¬ 
 ever I hope to be there before New Years day. 
 
 It is now 8.P.M, I suppose about to.A.M. with you, I wonder what 
 you are all doing, I hope that you all will have a happy Christmas: 
 I wonder when I shall spend a Christmas with you again. 
 
 67 
 
"Map of the New Hebrides, copied from the Admiralty Chart with cor¬ 
 rections and additions bv the New Hebrides' Missionaries,” 1891. National 
 Library of Australia. Canberra. 
 
 We could not eat any dinner to-night, as we all got a little fever, 
 but hope to be all well by the time we reach Noumea. The crew are 
 singing carols for us. whilst I write. They are Mare boys, from the 
 Loyalty Islands. You would be surprised to hear how well they sing. 
 They can all read and write hating been taught by an English Mis¬ 
 sionary, who had spent most of his life on the Island. They can sing 
 better than most white people. 
 
 68 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
We have got nothing to drink on board but some old tom gin, 
 however I am going to drink all your healths before I turn in. You 
 would be amused if you were to see our cabin. It is about eight feet 
 by six feet, and there are five of us to sleep in it. I can tell you that 
 with the heat of the copra, it is pretty warm. You cannot sleep on 
 deck on account of the fever. 
 
 You will wonder that I like this life, but when I get to Noumea this 
 time I do not know what I shall do, now that Howards business has 
 failed, I am afraid that I will not be able to come down here again. 
 
 Howard wants me to go home, but what is the use of my going 
 home, after being down here for so long, I would be fit for nothing 
 at home. Certainly I want to go home to see you all again, but then 
 I would like to pay my own expenses and come back again. Howard 
 says that he is going home as soon as he has settled all his affairs. I 
 am very glad of it, as he has not been well for a long time. I wish that 
 I could see my way to remain down here, but my land will have to 
 remain idle & my store empty until I see if something will turn up. 
 
 Howard came down with me last trip, and we managed to get 
 shipwrecked, the ship and cargo was totally lost but luckily no lives. 
 We had to remain on one of the Islands (luckily it was where the 
 troops were stationed, so that we had nothing to fear from the 
 natives) for six or seven days until another vessel took us on to 
 Noumea. 
 
 It is a long time since I commenced this letter, & I have never 
 had time to finish it. 
 
 Strange to say I am now again on my way to the New Hebrides, 
 and this time I am going to stop down. I have some stores on board 
 and am going down to finish my store and open it. I shall have 
 plenty of work to do for the first few months and have got four 
 natives with me, to give me a hand. 
 
 I will write to you again as soon as I get settled & will tell you 
 how the life suits me. With love to all and trusting that you are all 
 in good health. 
 
 Believe me 
 
 Ever your loving son 
 V. Lee Walker 
 
 6 9 
 
Commentary 
 
 Colonists of diverse kinds and in diverse ways tried to make places of settle¬ 
 ment like home, or better than home. Such efforts presupposed the trans¬ 
 formation of lands and peoples to bring them into some kind of conformity 
 with European values. But there is a set of risks that corresponds with these 
 potential accomplishments: it may instead be the colonizer who is assimi¬ 
 lated to the place, or to indigenous society. And this is what Walker under¬ 
 stands to happen to him, not in the sense that he adopts a local lifestyle, 
 but in one respect that is more arresting, given the fetishization of skin pig¬ 
 ment in the period: “I am more than brown almost black from the sun”; “My 
 arms, feet, and face, are nearly as dark as a natives.” “Going native,” now a 
 cliche, was then a specter that was equally present in the fiction dealing with 
 the colonial experience in the Pacific: 
 
 McClure nodded. “Don’t go black,” he advised. 
 
 I laughed at that, and my laugh was well-informed with conviction. 
 I knew indubitably that no matter how great a hold the islands had on 
 me, never would I forget that I was a white man, a member of the domi¬ 
 nant race; never would I drift and slacken and grow slipshod in the 
 things that matter. Yet there are men —one finds them on almost every 
 beach in the wide South Seas—who in other days and other climes 
 have held their heads high with the highest, but who now, because of 
 some queer kink in their mental make-up, or perhaps because of some 
 dimly-remembered transgression of the civilised code, have shed their 
 white men’s ways and thus drifted by easy stages into the dingy inertia 
 that places them level with the beasts. They live native fashion; in many 
 cases they have native wives. They are not black men, but neither are 
 they white. They have eaten of the lotos, and in the Lands of Always 
 Afternoon they dream their lives away. (Walsh 1982 [1925]: 88) 
 
 The scope for failure envisaged here has intellectual, behavioral, and spe¬ 
 cifically sexual dimensions. One fact that seems to be crucial has less to do, 
 curiously, with color than with memory and certainty: “going black” may 
 or may not be a potentially visible shift, but is in any case a matter of self¬ 
 conception, of a man’s preserving his sense that he is “a member of the 
 dominant race.” Though we might have regarded this racism as being, above 
 all, a tissue of genetic assumptions, it seems rather to have depended on a 
 continuing fashioning of the self. What matters, above all, is attention to the 
 
 70 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
“ways” of white men; and this seems not to be a simple activity of adhering 
 unselfconsciously to propensities within oneself, but an effort of cultivation, 
 requiring a constant struggle to avoid becoming slack or slipshod, a struggle 
 that must correct an internal tendency to “drift” and “forget.” Whiteness 
 is not a self-evident natural fact, but a condition that must be defended 
 against enemies within. 
 
 What is imagined is a crisis specifically of masculine identity, which can 
 be situated in the imperatives and taboos of colonizing missions. Settler 
 colonialism, in particular, is understood as the penetration of darkness, the 
 transformation of virgin forests into fertile pastures or farms, the fertiliza¬ 
 tion of once sterile or barren lands. The dominant sexual metaphor has been 
 remarked on often enough, and the literalization of the metaphor in the 
 sexual relations that many colonists obviously did have with “native women” 
 served to enact and underline the fundamental inequality of the encounter: 
 black women were accessible to white men, but white women were certainly 
 not available to black men. In one sense, then, the fact that one cross-racial 
 coupling but not the other was possible expressed colonial dominance in 
 its most elementary form; but this demonstration of power also prejudiced 
 the integrity of the white self. Particularly if there was a longer-term re¬ 
 lationship, the colonizing actor’s membership in “decent” white society was 
 inevitably compromised; even if living “native fashion” really meant living 
 in a peculiarly “hybridized” way, specific to a beach community or some 
 other margin between white and indigenous society, the coherence and self- 
 reliance of the colonist as a purely white actor was nevertheless undone. The 
 notion that involvement with local women epitomized degradation and led 
 to tragic conflicts has a long history in the Pacific, and was expressed, for 
 example, not long after Walker’s death in many of Louis Becke’s stories, in¬ 
 cluding one entitled His Native Wife. 
 
 If we take it for granted that racism rested on a genetic construction of 
 identity—the children of white people were white—we would be neglecting 
 a significant dimension of European debate about the nature and causes of 
 physical differences. One of the longest-running arguments in what might 
 broadly be called anthropological thought concerned the extent to which 
 differences in skin color, hair, and other features were permanent and in¬ 
 nate, or whether they were more properly seen as traits associated with life 
 in particular climates. The environmentalist view, widely expressed in the 
 eighteenth century, took black people to be black because they lived in the 
 tropics; white men there became darker, and their progeny might eventu- 
 
 7 1 
 
ally become as dark as “negroes.” Black people in Europe or North America 
 would conversely gradually become lighter. Much of this discussion, espe¬ 
 cially in its earlier phases, was highly speculative, abstracted from particular 
 evidence concerning either white people in the tropics or black slaves in 
 America, and avoided anomalies such as relatively light-skinned Asians in 
 the tropics; it seems ironic that a well-meaning but empirically flawed argu¬ 
 ment against the stability of racial differences should find a kind of proof, 
 centuries after it was first enunciated, in the experience of a particular racist 
 settler who declares that he is almost as dark as a native, and so near to 
 being black that his mother would hardly recognize him. His conception of 
 color is evidently similar to that in Walsh’s “Romance of New Guinea”: one 
 cannot depend on one’s whiteness, and though Walsh’s character is confi¬ 
 dent enough that he will retain his, Walker has felt himself slacken. 
 
 There is a gap or fissure that seems conspicuous in Walker’s identity here; 
 he discovers a kind of value and meaning in particular experiences and con¬ 
 flicts, yet is unable to present this in any positive way. His choice of life fig¬ 
 ures only negatively, as a lapse or inadequacy that transports him from any 
 better context, that renders him useless in any site of civility. As was noted 
 above, a number of writers, to the contrary, saw the frontier as a site for ac¬ 
 tions of special value, as a place where a strong and aggressive male pioneer 
 could display himself—usually by doing a good deal of shooting. Walker 
 does not avoid this imagery despite the possibility that it will offend or 
 trouble his mother: he refers quite directly to the risks and the violence and 
 leaves one surprised by how precisely he anticipates his own violent death. 
 
 No doubt many colonizing ventures were marked by moments of failure 
 and disappointment. In one district officer’s diary from central Fiji, many 
 entries read simply “Still raining. No mail.” Missionaries and administra¬ 
 tors might lose faith in what they were compelled to impose, or they might 
 realize that “the natives” were adroitly deferring to white dominance in un¬ 
 important ways while getting on with their concerns and ancestral religion 
 much as before. Planters and traders might see the value of their petty 
 commodities falling, might despair the corrosion of their bodies by tropical 
 diseases, and might disown their half-caste children. Some of these failures 
 left colonists intact; in other cases, they undid them, leaving them with no 
 more than pieces of experience and value that could not be reconciled. 
 
 72 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
«s “It will not be a very merry affair 
 
 Bellevue Station 
 Port Sandwich 
 Mallicolo 
 Xmas day 1887, 2 
 
 My Dear Mon, 
 
 It is my very painful duty to advise you of the death of Lee. 
 
 He left here on the i6 rt for the Island of Pentecost where I have 
 a large property, after visiting this place, he went up the coast to 
 purchase yams, & landing at Steep Cliff Bay, (or rather he did not 
 land at all) as soon as the boat touched the shore about 100 natives 
 fired on him, he had a couple of shots with his Winchester & was 
 then shot in the arm, 8 c tomahawked at the back of the head, the 
 whole affair did not take two minutes 8 c I think he died without 
 pain. The little vessel could render no assistance as they had only 
 the one boat, but they fired about too shots, they were about a mile 
 away. Next day they fell in with a Fiji vessel 8 c went ashore in two 
 boats, the natives had all cleared, but they recovered Lees body, it 
 had not a stitch of clothing on 8 c was simply hacked to pieces, two 
 fingers gone (evidently to get his ring), the body was bought on 
 here & buried in the French Soldier’s quarters, all hands turning 
 out. The soldiers went to great trouble over the matter clearing a 
 passage of half a mile through the bush to enable us to have a clear 
 way to the burying ground. 
 
 As you may imagine this has been a great shock to me, I have 
 been in bad health for a long time, & it has been a great strain on 
 my weak nerves, 8 c I have been in bed the last two days. 
 
 This upsets all my plans, I finished my affairs in New Caledonia, 
 & was only filling in my time until April when I was going home, 
 now Goodness Knows when I will be able to leave here, as I have no 
 white man with me, 8 c have about 40 niggers working on this plan¬ 
 tation, 8 c 20 more on another plantation a few miles from here; this 
 place does not suit my health at all. 
 
“Beach at Steep Cliff Bay, Raga, New Hebrides.” From an album of photo¬ 
 graphs by John Beattie, The Scenery and Peoples of the Islands of the South and 
 Western Pacific [1906?]. National Library of Australia, Canberra. 
 
 I was surprised to see the work Lee had done since I was last 
 here, we have got Coffee, Maize 8c Tobacco growing, all Kinds of 
 vegetables - over too pigs, any amount of Turkeys, Fowl &ct - & it 
 seems very hard that he should be taken away just as he was com¬ 
 mencing to make headway. 
 
 I am packing up his private effects, 8c will send them on to you 
 in due course. 
 
 Now, my dear Mon, I leave it to you to break the news to our 
 Mother Sc relations, 1 do not write to Will as he takes no notice of 
 my letters, 8c I cannot help saying that if he had acted in anything 
 like a brotherly manner you would have had Lee with you today, 
 it was dead against my advice that Lee ever came to live here, but 
 what was the poor fellow to do, when those who were in a position 
 to help him would not lend a helping hand. 
 
 I am sending a report to H.B.M. Consul at Noumea, Sc also to the 
 English men of war, but the English will do nothing. 
 
 I have got two vessels placed at my disposal one American flag 8c 
 the other Danish 8c we intend to go to Pentecost 8c get our revenge, 
 I have got 20 volunteers here, all white men, splendid shots 8c ac- 
 
 74 LETTERS OF VERNON LEE WALKER 
 
customed to the Islands, & I expect [an]other 20 from Noumea 8c 
 being under foreign flags no-one can interfere with us, 8c we will 
 make it hot for the natives. 
 
 Lee had a crew of 4 niggers, I fancy all were killed but only one 
 body was found, they were all armed, the boat of course was plun¬ 
 dered 8c all arms 8c trade 8c a Kenworth about goofrs. The boat 
 which belonged to me 8c worth tooofrs, was broken up, 8c burned, 
 so what with the niggers (who belonged to one) &c I make a smart 
 loss - the previous trip Lee made he lost a boat worth 1000 frs. 
 
 It is very hard times for one, but I try to keep my pecker up, 8c 
 must do the best I can until I can get assistance: things have been 
 looking better for me here of late, 8c I have a good chance of getting 
 a Comp [an] y formed in Melbourne to take over my Estates, I am 
 working with the Missionaries who are now subsidizing a steamer to 
 run between Melbourne 8c here, 8c for which I am agent. We have 
 had 20 vessels in here this month, so you will see there is always 
 something doing. 
 
 I have about 20 people here to dinner today many being asked 
 long ago by Lee, 8c who of course did not know of his death, I am 
 afraid it will not be a very merry affair, but I must do my best. 
 
 I hope you are all well, 8c wish you all a happy 8c prosperous 1888 . 
 
 Believe me, my Dear Mon, 
 Your affec. brother 
 H. Walker 
 
 Address letters to Noumea - my Agent will forward . 3 
 
 75 
 
3 # Self-Fashioning and Savagery: Louis Becke’s Pacific Letters 
 
Photograph portrait of Louis Becke. Mitchell Library, 
 State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. 
 
© A man's true character is generally revealed by sudden misfortune} 
 
 Louis Becke was not a retiring man. He did not allow fate to dictate his 
 fortune, nor an older brother to define his character. Compared to Walker, 
 Becke was a confident man. He did not allow circumstances to overwhelm 
 him, but utilized what he found in the world to his own ends. And yet he 
 was not a successful man. He was more assertive in attempting to fulfill his 
 ambitions, yet his career as a colonist comprised a series of failures and mis¬ 
 fortunes and had to be abandoned. Because of his gift for spinning a good 
 yarn, Becke became a more consequential figure than Walker, and yet, even 
 here, his talents did not lead to prosperity. It seems that Becke was not 
 backward in his relations with women either, and yet each of the three rela¬ 
 tionships we know of seems to have foundered. Becke enjoyed a period of 
 fame, and perhaps many women, but at the end of his life he lived in a hotel 
 room, alone, poor, and alcoholic. 
 
 Becke’s letters and his later writings are to be understood in the context 
 of the ideas then current. Until recently, studies of the colonization of the 
 Pacific have tended to focus on the ways the colonized were represented by 
 the colonizers: Specifically, to justify the domination and exploitation that 
 occurred with colonization. It was also understood that the racist discourses 
 of the past often rested on the idea of an evolutionary progress through de¬ 
 grees of civilization. There was, however, little recognition of what it meant 
 that the colonizers themselves were imagined as fitting into this racial and 
 cultural hierarchy. It is an interesting point that although the colonizers in 
 general were seen as being at the top of the hierarchy, individual whites were 
 not. Only with the more recent move toward seeing colonial cultures as not 
 “monolithic or omnipotent” has it been realized that the colonizers could 
 fall disgracefully from their position at the top of the hierarchy (Cooper 
 and Stoler 1989: 609). 2 The letters of Becke and Walker demonstrate that 
 colonizers were not always, as they have usually been depicted, astute and 
 successful exploiters of the colonized. Both sets of letters illustrate tellingly 
 what Cooper and Stoler have referred to as the tensions of empire (1989 
 and see Stoler and Cooper 1997). They give us converse images of failure — 
 
Dbckmbik IS, 1894. 
 
 19 
 
 TTxT&aZIeifai. 
 
 ( op thj« girl or get *w»y from the id double-quick time the wheleboet wi 
 
 3w, I don't went to make any man feel and search was made- In half-an ho> 
 
 •he don't particularly care about you, returned, and gaining the dock said, in 
 cool way, to the mate: " Hoist in the 
 
 riae, but with a varied string of oaths lashed The graceful creature nodded her approval of 611 away again as quick as possible.” 
 
 together he fell back, waving his hand to Chaplinas remarks, and Martin glared at her. went below 
 
 me in recognition. The girl was not a native of Then he took a dnnk of gm and meditated. \ f ew minutes afterwards he was at 
 
 the island—I oould tee that at a glance. She was Two minutes rawed. Then Martin turned. tonud amusement, making tortoise shell < 
 
 *» handsome as a pioture, and, after giving us a " How much . he aaid. a fret saw 
 
 dignified greeting, in the Yap (Caroline Islands) " Fifty pounds, sonny. Two hundred and fifty " A sad end to the poor girl's life," I i 
 dialect, she reeumed her fanning and smoking her dollars.'' •• v_ - sk. .. 
 
 cigarette. " Eaey to see you've been in the busineea," '**• “? d the met hodscal esHonol ■ 
 
 •Martin,” I said, “shake yourself together, mumbled Martin; ''why, her mother'* worth s 'ii ~ * *“ mJr 01,1 y 
 
 What is the matter! Are you tick, or bit «nly that Tam't nodeaL" 
 
 .k- 1 -■—k *» .. We „ a, how much do you want T" 
 
 that sounded as if his “ A hundred" 
 
 on wool ; "got s knife “ Haven't got it on board, sonny. Take eighty 
 C) never got well; and sovereigns and the rest in trade or liquor T" 
 drinking all the time "—and then, with “ It's a deal," said Martin ; “ are you game to 
 - —■/ —ail* of childish vanity, "all over her. part ten sovereigns for the girl's mother, and 111 
 by my owners to an She's my new girl, wo* d'ye think of her. Ami get her hack from the natives !" 
 
 « where they had a trad- the a star V " No," said Chaplin, nsing ; “ the girl's enough 
 
 charge of which had, it • • • for me.” 
 
 trouble by shooting a Ail this time Chaplin stood back until I She had risen and was looking at Mar 
 o investigate the called him up and said to the trader, " Our new » pallid face and set teeth, and then w 
 suffering^ in any captain, Martin I" word of farewell on either ode she piel 
 
 
 hundred 
 
 Boil. 
 
 
 J'Both/ c 
 
 I've Lm d 
 
 native My instruct ions 
 
 i believed, got 
 
 •— My ir- 
 
 r, ana, il 
 way, to take any the 
 in nis place. Tne in 
 within the memory of 
 ■till dwell under the re 
 
 trader and put another man 
 cadent here related is well 
 some very worthy men who 
 ofs of thatch in the Western 
 
 Chapin 
 1 said h 
 
 *' By God," said the ti 
 e image of th 
 is here frw 
 
 t Martin 
 
 r, slowly, " if he e 
 catching skipper 
 
 Honolulif^ur __ _. 
 
 That's me I" said Chaplin, coolly puffing 
 away at his cigar, and taking a seat near the aoia 
 with one ewift glance of admiration at the face of 
 the girL 
 
 ■r Chaplin. 
 
 Extract from “A Dead Loss,” Louis Becke, Bulletin, 15 December 1894, 
 p. 19. National Library of Australia, Canberra. 
 
 of the inability of some colonizers to shape the world according to their own 
 aspirations. 
 
 Like Walker’s, Becke’s letters from the colonial periphery of the Pacific in 
 the 1880s were addressed to his mother, telling her of his life as a trader. Al¬ 
 though he was a bad colonist, Becke at least escaped with his life, and his ex¬ 
 periences were to be of profit to him as the basis for his Pacific tales. Despite 
 his widespread popularity at the turn of the century, however, Becke is now 
 an almost forgotten literary figure. All the same, his many books and writ¬ 
 ings constitute a substantial record of the kinds of thought and the practices 
 that occurred during the nineteenth-century colonization of the Pacific. 
 
 Considerably more is known about Becke than about Walker, who can 
 be known only from the fragments that can be excavated from his letters. 
 Nevertheless, Becke is something of a puzzle, for in attempting to come 
 to grips with his character one constantly finds that the images he projects 
 of himself are fraught with contradiction. Thus, despite the availability of 
 far more source material, the portrait we can construct seems to be incon¬ 
 sistent. We will argue that there is a reason for this inconsistency: Becke is 
 seeking to construct himself according to the current ideals of masculinity 
 as they were played out in the context of colonialism. 
 
 Born George Lewis Becke at Port Macquarie in New South Wales on 
 June 18, 1855, the son of a clerk of petty sessions, Becke preferred to be 
 known by the name of Louis. 3 Like many boys of that era he had probably 
 heard and been enthralled by tales of adventure on the high seas, and he 
 was reputed to have desired as a boy to become a pirate. It is an ironic 
 
 80 SELF-FASHIONING AND SAVAGERY 
 
coincidence that Becke was later to be charged with piracy (although the 
 charges were dismissed as unfounded). 
 
 Becke’s long association with the Pacific began before his seventeenth 
 birthday when, in March 1872, he expressed his yearning for adventure by 
 stowing away on a ship bound for Samoa. There he disembarked and found 
 work in a store. For the next twenty years, interspersed with some time in 
 Australia, Becke worked in the Pacific as a supercargo, trader, and labor re¬ 
 cruiter. 4 He worked as supercargo on the Leonora for Captain “Bully” Hayes, 
 who was notorious throughout the Pacific as a pirate, con man, and thief, an 
 almost legendary status that was to be greatly enhanced by Becke’s writings. 
 In 1874 the vessel traded in the northwest and central Pacific until March 
 that year, when it was wrecked at Kusaie. The crew was stranded for six and 
 a half months before being rescued. Becke spent much of this time in a 
 Kusaiean village well away from Hayes—according to Becke, because of the 
 way Hayes and some of his companions were treating the local inhabitants. 
 When a British warship arrived, Hayes escaped but Becke was charged with 
 piracy and taken to Australia because of the questionable way Hayes had 
 obtained the Leonora , 5 Becke spent a considerable part of the next few years 
 in Australia, although exactly how much is unclear. He continued to pur¬ 
 sue adventure, participating in the Palmer River gold rush and working on 
 a station in Queensland and as a clerk in Townsville. 
 
 In early 1880 Becke returned to the islands, remaining at least until late 
 1882, the period documented in the letters reproduced here. During this 
 time he worked, as an independent trader and for three different firms, in 
 the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, New Britain, and the Marshall Islands. This 
 was a period of considerable change and great adventure, which will be ex¬ 
 plored more fully in the commentary that accompanies the letters. It seems 
 probable that Becke remained in the Marshall Islands from the time of the 
 last letter, sent from there in November 1882, until he returned to Australia 
 probably in 1886, when he was married. Both he and his wife, Mary Eliza¬ 
 beth Maunsell, visited the islands, but she became ill and they returned to 
 Australia, with Becke returning alone to the islands intermittently. 
 
 Becke finally left the islands permanently to live in Sydney in 1892. Popu¬ 
 lar knowledge has it that in Sydney he was introduced to J. F. Archibald, the 
 founder and editor of the Bulletin, by Ernest Favenc, another author and 
 friend, and thus began his literary career. He had, though, been working as 
 a journalist for a year prior to this event. It is said that after hearing some 
 of Becke’s stories, Archibald urged that he write them down. His first short 
 
 81 
 
story, “Bully Hayes: The Pirate of the Pacific,” appeared in the Bulletin in 
 1893, and his first collection, By Reef and Palm, was published in 1894, to be 
 reprinted three times in that year. It was his long association with the Pacific 
 that gave Becke the wealth of experience and adventure that forms the 
 backbone of his tales, giving them a vivid and realistic complexion. Over the 
 next two decades he was to write thirty-four books (including six novels in 
 collaboration with Walter Jeffery, the editor of Town and Country Journal). His 
 titles included Bully Hayes: Buccaneer, The Ebbing of the Tide, Under Tropic Skies, 
 Ridan the Devil and Other Stories, The Adventures of Louis Blake, and His Native 
 Wife. In 1896, Becke left for Europe, where he lived mainly in England, also 
 spending some time in Ireland and France. In igog he returned to Australia, 
 where he died in 1913. Besides his fiction, he produced numerous articles 
 and journalistic pieces for magazines and newspapers and had a regular col¬ 
 umn, “London Notes,” in the Sydney Evening News, where he reported items 
 of interest and trivia concerning various celebrities and authors. 
 
 Letters from the Colonial Periphery 
 
 The ten letters reproduced here were written by Becke from the Equatorial 
 Pacific, the region that today is referred to as Micronesia. Most of them were 
 written while he was a trader in the Ellice Islands (now called Tuvalu) or in 
 transit to other islands of Micronesia, such as the Gilbert Islands or Kings- 
 mill Group (now called Kirabati) and the Marshall Islands. Encompassing 
 the period from April 11, 1880 to November 1, 1882, they are a scattered col¬ 
 lection with obvious interruptions in continuity. Although he mentions the 
 terrible time he had in New r Britain in one letter, no letters from there have 
 survived. Like the letters of Walker, they are not rich texts of great value 
 to the more conventional historian. Rather, they are a small collection of 
 incomplete writings, concerned with practicalities such as the comings and 
 goings of shipping and the best way to maintain communication. Scant in 
 detail, they are fragmentary and disorderly, giving only brief glimpses and 
 rare snatches into the life of the trader. Letters such as these, however, open 
 up another dimension in our understanding of the history of colonialism in 
 the Pacific. Their fragmentation and partial nature can be read as reveal¬ 
 ing the fragmentary and partial nature of colonization and of the colonists 
 themselves. Becke’s letters, like Walker’s, capture the ups and downs of the 
 trader’s life, the gains and losses. In addition, with the help of the hindsight 
 
 82 SELF-FASHIONING AND SAVAGERY 
 
provided by his later writings, it is possible to discern in Becke’s letters an 
 effort to construct himself in a mold that conforms to the ideals of the times. 
 
 Far from fulfilling the initial optimism of the first letter, where Becke pre¬ 
 dicts that he will make money, the letters catalogue a never-ending series 
 of disasters. The disasters Becke confronts, such as a hurricane and a ship¬ 
 wreck, can be seen, in a wider sense, as metaphors for the failure Becke 
 was to become as a trader. Far from constructing what Shapiro (1988: 58) 
 has termed an explicit personal success narrative of the trader profiting on 
 the colonial frontier, Becke’s letters constitute what could be described as 
 an explicit personal failure narrative. His letters catalogue not his successes 
 but his financial ruin, his life in the Pacific as a bad colonist. 
 
 If we get a picture of colonialism as not particularly successful, we also get 
 a picture that is complex, wrought by many competing forces. For example, 
 the interests and agendas of the traders and the government agents who 
 oversee the activities of their nationals in the Pacific do not always coincide. 
 As an Australian in the Pacific, Becke is subject to British laws, laws that he 
 decries as overly restrictive. Far from being unencumbered by regulation, 
 trade here is constrained and impeded. In one letter, Becke speaks nostalgi¬ 
 cally of the past before British regulation and wishes he were an American, 
 exempt from it. The intrusion of imperial control is not uniform; it is not 
 successfully applied by the colonizers, but is lax and piecemeal. As a re¬ 
 sult, Becke and his colleagues had everything stolen from them by islanders 
 whom he was later to characterize as “intractable.” However, it is the Royal 
 Navy, which Becke disparages as part of the control system, that intervenes 
 to punish the islanders responsible (see below). This contradiction shows 
 that Becke is articulating different perspectives according to the varying cir¬ 
 cumstances in which he writes. Similarly, Becke’s disparagement of some 
 traders but not others shows the extent to which the traders themselves can 
 be seen not as a homogeneous bloc, but as separated by competing aims. 
 It becomes more apparent in Becke’s Pacific tales that these divisions are 
 often linked to questions of class. 
 
 Despite their differences, there are some striking similarities between 
 the letters of Becke and those of Walker. As we have argued of Walker, 
 Becke’s letters are characterized by a notable absence of description of the 
 environment in which he is located, descriptions that would make the un¬ 
 familiar more accessible to the reader. Like Walker, Becke avoids evoking 
 a landscape of aesthetic affect, preferring to recount some of the unusual 
 
 83 
 
incidents of his daily life. This is surprising in Becke, particularly as his 
 later writings contain many romantic renderings of the Pacific landscape (a 
 landscape often spoiled by the intrusion of unsavory colonists). Mostly, the 
 concerns and events he recounts center on Becke himself and point to the 
 ways in which he authors himself through these texts. Further, apart from 
 his account of navigation by fire, there is little ethnographic reportage. The 
 islands are presented as a rather incomprehensible place and the islanders 
 as rather incomprehensible beings, a cultural and ethnographic void, with 
 few gestures toward understanding the other. 6 In sum, not only do Becke’s 
 letters reveal some of the wider tensions within the colonizing cultures in 
 the Pacific, the tensions of empire, they also reveal the process by which 
 colonizers such as Becke seek to fashion themselves as a particular kind of 
 colonist and man. 
 
 Through their descriptions of historical events, empiricist historians seek 
 to portray the objective reality of events in the narrative texts they weave. 
 In seeking to describe the “way it really was,” they mostly eschew “fictional” 
 texts. Biographers of Becke have often remarked on the disparity between 
 the accounts of his life he offers for literary consumption through his narra¬ 
 tive tales and what really happened. Disparities have even been noted in his 
 accounts of his life in supposedly nonfictional texts. As a number of com¬ 
 mentators have noted, the biographical introduction to his first collection 
 of short stories, By Reef and Palm, written by Lord Pembroke and based on 
 notes supplied by Becke, is full of “factual” errors. Others, however, have 
 taken the inverse position. Maude, for example, has remarked that many 
 of Becke’s so-called fictions are based on real events: “The division made 
 between fiction and non-fiction wTiting is, however, rather artificial and dis¬ 
 guises the fact that Becke based much, probably most, of his so-called fic¬ 
 tion on the stories of actual events which he heard recounted by the traders 
 and natives with whom he mixed, supplemented by library research” (1967: 
 226). It would be a great shame to dismiss Becke’s “fiction” as of limited use 
 because the factual details are often erroneous. Equally, it would be a great 
 shame to accept his letters unproblematically as “nonfiction,” given that 
 many of them feature gaps and silences and are constructed so as to repre¬ 
 sent a particular image of himself to his mother. Although such gaps and 
 silences, disparities and disjunctures may lead the empiricist historian to 
 despair, they can be exceedingly illuminating. Rather than a homogeneous 
 truth, the disjunctures, ruptures, gaps, and silences reveal the complexities 
 and tensions of empire, as well as the ways men, such as Becke, seek to 
 
 84 SELF-FASHIONING AND SAVAGERY 
 
represent themselves in a particular way, which changes over time. This is 
 not to suggest that there are “no facts,” but that facts alone cannot portray 
 the complexities of human interactions, and so slide over the realities. 
 
 Like Maude, we do not wish to take up the distinction between “nonfic¬ 
 tion” or “truth” and “fiction,” but rather to suggest that the terrain of writ¬ 
 ing in the form of letters, like that of short stories, is refracted through the 
 prism of the imagination. In other words, both “fiction” and “nonfiction” are 
 born through imaginings. So, we prefer to take Becke’s letters and his later 
 writings as one body of work. If we see both the writing of “nonfiction,” such 
 as letters, and the writing of “fictional” short stories or novellas as processes 
 of writing or refashioning the self and the world, then it is possible to gain 
 a greater understanding of the author’s way of being in the world, and also 
 greater appreciation of the complexity of colonialism and its contradictions. 
 
 This is a world that changes in complex and disjunctive ways. Thus, 
 though there are many differences between his letters and his later writ¬ 
 ings, there are also similarities. In terms of differences, the letters and his 
 fiction were written during different phases of imperialism. Although writ¬ 
 ten during a period of increased imperial rivalry just prior to the scramble 
 for Africa, the letters were written before official colonial annexation took 
 place in the Pacific. His stories were written later, at a time of interven¬ 
 tionary imperialism, a period of intense imperial rivalry that preceded and 
 followed the annexation and imposition of colonial regimes across Africa 
 and the Pacific. 7 Despite these differences of era, there are thematic conti¬ 
 nuities. Here we have in mind the image of whites “going native” that occurs 
 in both the letters and his Pacific tales (muted in the earlier and more obvi¬ 
 ous in the later writings). 
 
 In both his letters and his Pacific tales, Becke fashions a particular self 
 through the process of writing: a plucky hero struggling against the environ¬ 
 ment and peoples of the Pacific. He writes himself as the resolute colonist 
 who withstands the temptations to fall while in this foreign environment, un¬ 
 like so many of those who figure in his writings. It is of interest that Becke’s 
 letters lack the alarmist nature of much writing representing the colonial 
 periphery. Unlike his later tales, which are filled with acts of savagery, his 
 letters are constrained, tending to downplay the disasters he confronts. This 
 was no doubt due to his wish not to alarm his mother, particularly because 
 letters either took a long time to reach Australia or went astray. However, by 
 downplaying the enormity of what happens to him, Becke is also presenting 
 an image of himself as a man of fortitude who is ready to face and over- 
 
 8 5 
 
come all the difficulties he confronts. With true pluck he grits his teeth and 
 gets on with life. The disasters he confronts are not for him insurmountable 
 problems that would cause a lesser man to give up in despair, but consti¬ 
 tute the challenges of life that test him. A similar kind of self-fashioning is 
 at work in Becke’s failure to mention that he married a local woman while 
 on the island of Nukufetau. Through such a silence, Becke writes himself as 
 unlike the typical traders who “go native,” crossing the racial and cultural 
 divide by marrying locals, adopting local dress, or behaving as the locals 
 do. Thus, if Walker writes of himself as “going native,” then Becke writes of 
 himself as the opposite, as a person who is above this. 
 
 If we see letter writing as a process of writing the self, there is some simi¬ 
 larity between the processes of letter wTiting and autobiography. 8 As literary 
 artifacts, both seek to inscribe a particular image of the self. Both processes 
 can be regarded as what Foucault calls techniques of the self, the means by 
 which the self fashions the self for an audience. Thus we do not take the 
 view that the “true self” is disclosed in private communications but is hid¬ 
 den in public. The public and the private self are often different, but this 
 means that the self is not unitary, not that one is real and the other not. On 
 the contrary, private letters, like autobiography, are a part of the process of 
 writing the self, of constructing the self through the word. Letters may not 
 convey the more refined and polished forms of narrative, displaying the co¬ 
 herence and closure of autobiography, but in that lack of closure they can 
 give a more penetrating view of the production of self. We take the view that 
 the self Becke presents to his mother is not a pretense, but is an effort to 
 make himself in that mold. 
 
 As we have suggested, the content of Becke’s letters to his mother is cir¬ 
 cumscribed, and what is left unsaid is as revealing as what is said. In much 
 the same way as Shapiro (1988) has suggested for the autobiographical warn¬ 
 ings of Benjamin Franklin, Becke casts himself as the model most appro¬ 
 priate to the context. The task for Becke, in the words of Shapiro, “became 
 more than simply exemplifying the ideal character; it extended as well to 
 valorising the context within which such a character ought to function” (57). 
 Just as Franklin in his autobiography constructs himself as an advertisement 
 for America, Becke constructs himself as an advertisement for colonialism. 
 Becke values both the context, that is colonialism, in which the ideal char¬ 
 acter ought to function and the sort of character the ideal colonist ought to 
 embody. 
 
 As others have shown, the discourse of character was a pervasive compo- 
 
 86 SELF-FASH IONING AND SAVAGERY 
 
nent of imperial and colonial discourse, especially in the nineteenth cen¬ 
 tury. Some, such as Richards (1989), even suggest that it was vital to the 
 British Empire (see also Chakrabarty 1994 and Field 1982). “Good conduct 
 and sound character were more than just desirable,” he writes, “[t]hey were 
 essential. They were the justification of the British Empire” (76). An indi¬ 
 vidual with character was thought to possess certain highly valued moral and 
 personal qualities, which were an essential justification for imperialism. The 
 notion of character not only encompasses moral consistency but such things 
 as consistency of action, “self-restraint, perseverance, strenuous effort, [and] 
 courage in the face of adversity” (Collini 1985: 36). Implicit in Becke’s let¬ 
 ters, the discourse of character is a dominant theme in his Pacific tales. For 
 Becke, to lack character or to have a bad character signals a propensity to 
 degeneracy. The discourse of character that Becke enunciates speaks clearly 
 of the need to maintain racial boundaries. It also shows how in the colonial 
 context the concept of race is saturated with discourses of class. 
 
 Becke’s encounter with another trader, George Winchcombe, is illumi¬ 
 nating in this regard, showing how the trading community was fractured by 
 divisions based in part on class. As we deal more substantially with their en¬ 
 counter and their representations of each other in the commentary on the 
 letters, here we will merely raise some points relevant to our overall argu¬ 
 ment. In one of his letters Becke says that people like Winchcombe are “no 
 better than the natives.” Years later, Becke featured Winchcombe as a char¬ 
 acter in one of his stories, “Tarria, the Swimmer.” Winchcombly, as he is 
 named, is a degenerate white who is so dirty and unkempt that Becke’s alter 
 ego, another trader, questions whether he is indeed white. Eventually the 
 treacherous and degenerate Winchcombly is killed off by Becke’s alter ego. 
 Winchcombe also gives an account of his meeting with Becke in his diary, 
 this time on the island of Nukufetau and, in much the same way as Becke, 
 he constructs Becke as a dissolute and somewhat unscrupulous character, 
 very different from the picture Becke presents of himself. 
 
 Which of their respective accounts is the more “truthful” or embodies 
 the “truth” is not really relevant to the issues we are concerned with here. 
 Rather, we see the disparities and contradictions as pointing to the process 
 of authoring, of writing the self in a particular way. As Becke acknowledges 
 when he argues in a letter that on the whole the trader of today is better 
 than in previous times, the common image of white settlement and trade in 
 the Pacific was one of violence and white degeneracy. Prior to Becke’s and 
 Winchcombe’s residence, there had been a long history of whites living in 
 
 87 
 
“Began to roll up his 
 sleeves ...” illustra¬ 
 tion by Norman 
 Lindsay, from Louis 
 Becke, Bully Hayes: 
 Buccaneer and Other 
 Stories, Sydney: New 
 South Wales Bookstall 
 Co., 1923, p. 101. 
 
 the Pacific —escaped convicts, castaways, beachcombers, and traders, who 
 often adopted local dress, had their bodies tattooed, and married local 
 women. Men such as this were thought to have “gone native,” to have de¬ 
 generated to a state of “savagery” like the islanders. There was a prevailing 
 image of the Pacific as a place where whites were scarcely capable of living 
 without losing their cultural and racial identity. It is not surprising that both 
 Becke and Winchcombe should try to distance themselves from that image 
 and from the types of whites who had lived in the Pacific previously. Becke 
 authors himself as one who maintains his racial and cultural integrity, as dif¬ 
 ferent from those earlier whites who went “native,” of whom he sees Winch¬ 
 combe to be a latter-day example. But if Becke constructs Winchcombe as 
 one of those vestigial characters from a bygone era, Winchcombe does the 
 same to Becke. 
 
 The image of Becke as the morally upright colonist and Winchcombe as 
 the unkempt and degenerate trader is shown in the Norman Lindsay illus- 
 
 88 SELF-FASHIONING AND SAVAGERY 
 
tration in the 1923 edition of Bully Hayes: Buccaneer, which contains the story 
 “Tarria, the Swimmer.” Although the face of Becke’s alter ego, the trader 
 Watson, is shaded and cannot be said to bear a likeness to Becke, and was 
 created in a later period, it conveys an image of the type of colonist Becke 
 had wanted to present. It shows Watson immaculately dressed in a white 
 (pajama) suit, complete with tie and shoes and, as the archetype of the 
 upright colonist, wearing a white pith helmet. Winchcombly presents the 
 opposite picture. He wears neither shoes nor tie, and his clothes are untidy 
 and worn. Whereas he is presented rolling up his shirt sleeves preparing to 
 fight his adversary, Becke’s alter ego, in contrast, stands with his hands on 
 his hips, in a pose clearly illustrating his reserve and coolheadedness in the 
 heat of the situation. 
 
 89 
 

 
 
4 4 * The Letters of Louis Becke, 1880-1882 
 
- 0 ° 
 
 Butarrtari 
 
 s' 
 
 <r 
 
 : 'iv Marakei . 
 
 Aboiang>j; 
 
 /^Tarawa < 
 
 Maiana 
 
 Is*-Abemama 
 
 A 
 
 KuriaA-A 
 
 Aronuka 
 
 Nonouti 
 
 Tabiteuea.-j, 
 
 $•. Beru 
 
 ; v 
 
 $:• Nikunau 
 
 %Onotoa 
 Tamana $ 
 
 %Arorae 
 
 ^ Nanumea 
 
 ' Niutao 
 
 Nanumanga 
 
 &Nui 
 
 o«- 
 
 6 °- 
 
 * Vaitupu 
 
 Nukufetau ' 
 
 / Funafuti 
 
 50 100 150 200 
 
 _i i_i i 
 
 MILES 
 
 
 17 3 ° 
 
 _1_ 
 
 176 ° 
 
 _l_ 
 
 Nukulaelae 
 
 Niulakita . 
 
 i- 
 
 “The Gilbert and Ellice Islands,” from Deryck Scarr, Fragments of Empire, 
 Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1967. 
 
© “I am sure I will be very comfortable and make some money 
 
 Schooner “The Venus” 
 off the island of 
 Nanumaga [Nanumanga] 
 Ellice Group 
 South Pacific Ocean 
 April nth. 1880 
 
 My dear Mama 
 
 Just a few lines to tell you that I am going to remain on the above 
 island for 18 months and am busy landing my goods, it is called 
 Hudson’s island or Nanomaga [Nanumanga] and is a small island 
 with about 200 people on it - and no white men - there is a Samoan 
 teacher here and he and his wife Elina are old friends of mine and I 
 will live with them until my house is built. The king and chiefs have 
 made a law that only one white man is to live on the island and that 
 has decided me to remain as I think I will do very well here - the 
 people are very friendly and I hope in 6 months more to be able to 
 speak their language well - the island is only 3 miles long and is an 
 atoll or a lagoon island - no anchorage - vessels must lie off and on 
 - “The Venus” is coming back for my copra in about 4 months and 
 then she goes to Sydney. I have about three thousand dollars $3000 
 of trade and I am busy getting it on shore, it is now Sunday and the 
 “Venus” leaves on Tuesday - we cannot land anything to day being 
 Sunday as the natives are great missionaries in their way. When you 
 write to me send to care of Capt Hamilton and write below “Nanu¬ 
 maga” Ellice Group. The chief officer of the Venus Mr Senior is a 
 particular chum of mine and I give him this letter to give to any 
 ship he may meet in the Kingsmill Group. 
 
 The native teacher and his wife are such nice people and I am 
 sure I will be very comfortable and make some money. 
 
 I will not fail to write and tell you how I get on by every opportu- 
 
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 nity. I must now close up and with love to all at home I am dearest 
 Mother 
 
 Your affectionate Son 
 Louis G. Becke 
 
 Commentary 
 
 By the time this letter was written the twenty-five-year-old Becke was an old 
 hand, having lived in the Pacific since 1872. His experience of living for six 
 
 94 LETTERS OF LOUIS BECKE 
 
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 !H/t eai/jf IS// & ‘Z/A 2sties s/satt .01*2erne /A-teiaS/fir/eg/Crr?d'/i'- 
 
 Letter by Louis Becke, Nanumaga, Ellice Group, South Pacific, February 21, 1881, 
 two pages. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. 
 
 and a half months among the local people on Kusaie in 1874 would have 
 given him a good understanding of life on a small island and how to estab¬ 
 lish rapport with the local inhabitants—useful experience for settling into 
 the lifestyle of a lone trader on a remote island. 
 
 Mainly because the local leaders have restricted the white population to 
 one trader, the tone of this first letter is cheerful and optimistic. Without 
 rivals, he predicts that he “will do very well here,” a point that he reiterates 
 toward the end of the letter when he says he will make some money. Like 
 other traders in this region, Becke will be trading much of the $3,000 of 
 
 95 
 
goods for locally produced sun-dried copra. Perhaps not wanting to alarm 
 his mother, he does not mention what goods he is trading, probably in¬ 
 cluding guns, ammunition, tobacco, cloth, and possibly liquor, although his 
 employer did not want his employees to trade in this last item (see below). 
 Becke is working for the Liverpool merchant and shipping firm of J. S. De 
 Wolf and Company, one of the many smaller trading firms that had short¬ 
 lived operations in the Pacific. Attracted by ever-increasing world copra 
 prices, the firm sent The Venus, a 191-ton three-masted schooner, to Samoa 
 in 1878, unfortunately for them at a time when the competition was at its 
 fiercest level (Munro 1980: 23-24). 1 Using Apia in Samoa as a base, De Wolf 
 and Company traded beyond there to places such as the Tuamotus, Tonga, 
 the Caroline Islands, and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, where Becke be¬ 
 came its resident trader. 
 
 Apart from his enthusiasm about the possibility of making some money, 
 the overall tone of this letter is bland, and it appears to have been written 
 in a hurry. As is the case with many of his letters, it details the comings and 
 goings of shipping and the means by which practical communication with 
 his mother is to be facilitated. This is the letter of a dutiful son, concerned 
 to keep his mother informed and reassured as to his welfare. He tells her 
 twice, for example, that he has good friends on the island, an educated man 
 and his wife, “such nice people,” who will make him “comfortable.” This is 
 no travel narrative—we get no sense of where he has come from or how 
 he came to be there, and we do not learn of any adventures or interesting 
 people he has met on the way; there are no evocative descriptions of the 
 landscape in which he finds himself or of the local people he is to live with. 
 In his rather uninspired description of the place that is to be his home, 
 Becke does not evoke the South Sea island paradise that has captured the 
 Western imagination. As with Walker’s first letter, there is no sense of an 
 aesthetic possessiveness that might accompany his economic exploitation of 
 the island, although Becke’s later writings are replete with romantic descrip¬ 
 tions of the landscape. In “Ema, the Half-Blood,” although he characterizes 
 the Gilbert and Ellice Islands as “the most uninviting and monotonous in 
 appearance” of all “the thousands of islands that stud the bosom of the 
 North Pacific,” he also offers a description that is far more striking than that 
 in his first letter. He writes: 
 
 The long, endless lines of palms, stretching from one end of an island 
 
 to the other, present no change or variation in their appearance till, as 
 
 g6 LETTERS OF LOUIS BECKE 
 
is often the case, the narrow belt of land on which they so luxuriously 
 thrive becomes, perhaps, but fifty yards in width, and the thick matted 
 undergrowth of creepers that prevail in the wider parts of the island 
 gives place to a barren expanse of wind-swept sand, which yet, however, 
 supports some scattered thousand-rooted palms against the sweeping 
 gusts from the westward in the rainy season, and the steady strain of 
 the south-east trades for the rest of the year. 
 
 In such spots as these, where the wild surf on the windward side of the 
 island sometimes leaps over the short, black reef, shelving out abruptly 
 from the shore, and sweeps through the scanty groves of palm and 
 pandanus trees, and, in a frothy, roaring flood, pours across the narrow 
 landbelt into the smooth waters of the lagoon, a permanent channel is 
 made, dry at low water, but running with a swift current when the tide 
 is at flood. (1897b: 9-10) 
 
 97 
 
# “in consequence of events that have happened I am thinking 
 of leaving and going away” 
 
 Nanumaga (Hudson’s Island) 
 Ellice Group 8 July 1880 
 
 My dear Mama 
 
 About ten days ago Willie Williams came here in his vessell a 
 native schooner the “Vaituputemle” he told me that he was in 
 Samoa two months ago and saw Mr De Wolf there and that Captain 
 Hamilton had a lot of letters for me but although Williams offered 
 to take them Capt Hamilton did not give them to him as he had 
 not yet heard from me and did not know whether I was in the Ellice 
 or Kingsmill or Marshall Groups, neither of course did De Wolf as 
 he left “the Venus” at Funajuti [Funafuti] - so my letters are still in 
 Samoa, of course I am sure there is one from you amongst them; 
 however I expect to get them when the “John Williams” comes 
 here in October, that is if I am still here; for in consequence of 
 events that have happened I am thinking of leaving and going away 
 farther to the northward. 
 
 I have had a serious dispute with the natives or rather with a 
 chief here and his people and I have closed my trade house and do 
 not now buy any copra and unless they pay me ten thousand cocoa- 
 nuts I will leave the island with my trade as to remain would be a 
 great loss to De Wolf and Sons. 
 
 I have built a very large house and outhouses and am or [?] was 
 quite settled down till this affair happened - most fortunately I kept 
 calm although a few more words would have brought on a terrible 
 mess - and I don’t want to be taken to Fiji in a man-o-war to make 
 the acquaintance of the estimable Chief Justice Corrie, the High 
 Commissioner for Polynesia, for in all disputes now with natives 
 especially if there is any blood-shed an Englishman is run up with a 
 rope with little compunction - a man in the South Seas now might 
 as well be a Chinaman as an Englishman for all the protection he 
 will receive - the first chance I get I will naturalise myself as a citi¬ 
 zen of the United States. 
 
Almost all the people on this island like me and are well deposed 
 and friendly to me but I want to go further to the northward where 
 the people are free from that curse of the islands the mission¬ 
 ary element, the missionaries have only been here about five years 
 and they have as usual succeeded in rendering the natives less fe¬ 
 rocious but ten thousand times more cunning, lying, avaricious and 
 hypocritical than they were in their natural state, and in which the 
 Almighty intended them to remain else he would not permit them 
 to undergo such a change for the worse. Since “the Venus” left 
 me no other vessells have been here except the “Vaitupulemele” - 
 times are very much changed in the islands now no whaleships now 
 cruise in this group. If I can get De W’s approval I will try get up to 
 Strongs Island [Kosrae] or else in the Caroline or Marshall Groups. 
 I am living pretty lonely at present as I have dismissed all my work¬ 
 people and servants and have kept only a little native girl Pautoe 
 who keeps house for me and cooks for me native fashion and whom 
 I have adopted there is of course a great row going on every day 
 meetings etc and on an average I receive two deputations every day 
 imploring me to remain and not to close my trade house but they 
 might as well cry to a stone. I rise every day at 4. am. and bathe 
 and then Pautoe gets my breakfast generally flying fish or lobsters 
 and fills my pipe (I smoke a pipe now) and cleans the house while I 
 smoke and instruct her on how to use a broom and wash plates etc 
 without breaking more than two at one wash-up, about 10 oclock 
 some 20 or 30 native girls come and sit on the veranda in the 
 shade and plait straw or sinnet and try and wheedle a cigarette out 
 of the white man and as they consider it a great privilege to come 
 and talk to the white man I make them pay for it by bringing me 
 fish, puraka and young cocoanuts to drink. I think I drink about 
 30 cocoanuts every day - every evening the missionary and his wife 
 Eline send me ten cocoanuts and something for tea and I return 
 the compliment by either a little beef or biscuit or whatever I may 
 have ready at the time. About a month ago I and Felipe a native of 
 Nukufetau (De Peyster Island) built a house on the windward side 
 of the island and lived there with his family in all 8 of us but since 
 this quarrel I have come back to my big house in the village. 
 
 Yesterday (Saturday) was a very heavy day to me - there was great 
 meeting of the people and I went to demand my fine - not being 
 
 99 
 
well enough acquainted with the language to make my speech I 
 had to do so in Samoan and a Samoan present translated for me - 
 my opponent said little except that he was guilty but could not pay 
 the fine as the people were now paying off a fine of Willie Williams 
 of $500. one hundred and ten thousand cocoanuts; which they are 
 now paying to me as Willie William’s deputy as he is to give me 
 5% on all they pay. So far they have paid on William’s a/c 6094 lbs 
 copra about $100. If I was an American or a German I could make 
 the natives pay me about $2500 in copra but as I am an Englishman 
 I can not. I don’t expect “the Venus” here now, she must have gone 
 away up into the Carolines or else back to Samoa or is lost, in the 
 latter case you will not receive the letters I gave to young Senior my 
 chum the mate Williams told me that De Wolf was waiting in Samoa 
 for one of his vessells a schooner “the “Redcoat” coming from En¬ 
 gland with a general cargo - she will I dare say come here to me 
 and then go up to the Line Islands. The weather has been lovely 
 here for some 8 or ten days and next week the missionary and I 
 are going in a canoe to Nanomea to see if we can learn anything of 
 “The Venus” it is distant about 50 miles and of course out of sight 
 as all these Ellice islands are mere sand banks - when a canoe leaves 
 here it starts on a dark night at Sundown - a huge fire is made on 
 the beach and the glare of it is seen in Nanomea, by which the 
 people there know a canoe is coming - and they at once make an 
 answering fire to guide the canoe to them in fair weather it usually 
 takes a canoe ten hours to cross but if the current is strong some 
 days. I would have gone alone long ago but I have no compass. I 
 will leave my house in charge of Pautoe my little girl and expect to 
 be back in 4 days. I have nice little cat given me by the Carpenter 
 of the “Venus” and she is a famous rat-catcher - the natives call her 
 “thepig with toenails that can climb trees "and she is much admired and 
 caressed by the native children, her name is “Dodger” 
 
 [unsigned] 
 
 Commentary 
 
 Written some three months after the first in the collection, this letter shows 
 that Becke’s original optimism has soured and captures the ups and dowms 
 of his relationship with the Nanumangans. Written both during the dis- 
 
 IOO LETTERS OF LOUIS BECKE 
 
pute and after it was resolved, it provides a good illustration of the tenuous 
 nature of trading on the colonial periphery. From his optimistic predictions 
 of staying for eighteen months and prospering, after three months he has 
 dismissed all of his workpeople and servants, is “living pretty lonely,” and is 
 contemplating moving elsewhere. The exact nature of the dispute with the 
 island chief is not clear, but it is clear that it is serious enough to cause him, 
 a man who values levelheadedness and self-control, to threaten to leave. The 
 silences in Becke’s report suggest that he seeks to author himself as the in¬ 
 jured party. This tends to be confirmed when Becke’s “opponent” admits he 
 is guilty. 
 
 Although violence was avoided because Becke maintained his calm, he 
 makes it clear that he would not have been so restrained if the British gov¬ 
 ernment had not been policing the actions of its citizens in the Pacific. If he 
 were not an Englishman, he hints, he would perhaps have had recourse to 
 bloodshed. Unlike many of the Pacific tales in which, through the voice of 
 the narrator, Becke constructs himself as a colonist with character unwilling 
 to use violence to further his interests, this letter speaks of just such a readi¬ 
 ness, constrained only by fear of British juridical intervention. For Becke it 
 is obvious that the law should be protecting the commercial interests of the 
 British trader, not defending the interests of the Pacific islanders. This let¬ 
 ter conveys a nostalgia for a past when trade in the Pacific was unfettered by 
 regulation. 
 
 Becke overestimates the ability of the British government to police citi¬ 
 zens such as he. The high commissioner’s effective jurisdiction in the waters 
 of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, as for the Western Pacific more generally, 
 was greatly understaffed and underresourced. This alone severely limited 
 the high commissioner’s ability to police British subjects, but there were 
 also considerable legal difficulties in administering laws applicable to sub¬ 
 jects outside of British dominions. 2 The prosecutions enacted by the High 
 Commission in the early 1880s, in the main, appeared to be the result 
 of fortuitous circumstances rather than of effective juridical control (Scarr 
 1967: 124). 
 
 The view we have from this letter is markedly different from many of the 
 texts Becke was to write celebrating British colonization as far more success¬ 
 ful and benevolent than its German counterpart. His stated disaffection for 
 British citizenship and disdain for British law in the Pacific did not prevent 
 Becke from applying in 1893 to the Western Pacific High Commission to 
 become resident commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. 
 
 101 
 
If the interference of the Royal Navy, under the aegis of the Western 
 Pacific High Commission, is seen as a hindrance to commercial success for 
 the trader, so is the influence of missionaries. The missionary intervention 
 upsets the balance of the trading relationship, a balance that Becke prefers 
 should be firmly in his favor. Again there is nostalgia for times past when the 
 Pacific islanders were easy prey to the beachcombers, castaways, and traders 
 living beyond the administrative governance of the European powers or the 
 moral governance of missionaries. In much the same way as latter-day an¬ 
 thropologists search for cultures to study that are uncorrupted by contact 
 with Western culture, Becke seeks Pacific islanders uncorrupted —in their 
 “natural state”—not for study, but for exploitation. 
 
 Becke’s attitude to the missionary enterprise, however, is as ambiguous as 
 his relationship to British colonialism. At various times he praises the mis¬ 
 sionary endeavor and at others condemns it. In a much later article on the 
 cession of British rights in Samoa to Germany at the turn of the century, 
 he concludes that the missionary enterprise in Samoa will be badly affected 
 by severance from the “nation to which they owe their enlightenment, their 
 schools, their churches, and the guidance of their esteemed missionaries” 
 (1899-1900: 220). Wherever the red ensign of England is seen waving amid 
 the swaying coco-palms of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, he writes, 
 
 you will everywhere see the beneficial results which have accrued to 
 the natives from the intercourse and training they have received from 
 teachers educated at the great training institution at [Samoa] . . . From 
 Samoa these young men and women have radiated in all directions 
 among the groups of the South, and (latterly) the Western, Pacific . . . 
 they live and do excellent work among the low-lying atolls of the Equa¬ 
 torial Pacific . . . The native teacher, however, has his faults, and needs 
 superv ision by his white superiors, in the absence of which he too often 
 becomes tyrannical, disposed to take the bit between his teeth and 
 cause dissension between his flock and the white traders, by his desire 
 to show his authority. (220) 
 
 Toward the end of this passage Becke tempers his outright enthusiasm 
 for the missionary enterprise and alludes to the “native” teachers being too 
 zealous, a comment that could be read in the light of his own disputes with 
 missionaries over trading. Whether the criticism of his letter is directed at 
 his Samoan missionary friend or not is unclear, although as he exchanges 
 
 102 LETTERS OF LOUIS BECKE 
 
food with “the missionary and his wife” it seems unlikely. His reference to 
 cunning and avariciousness seems to suggest that the balance of the trad¬ 
 ing relationship has tipped toward the Nanumangans rather than himself. 
 Whatever the case, there is a rather large gap between seeing missionization 
 as the curse of the islands to praising its beneficial results. 
 
e “I am glad to say that matters are all right again, 
 I have opened my trade again” 
 
 Nanumaga 
 Aug 24. 1880 
 
 My dear mama 
 
 So many important (to me) events have happened since last writ¬ 
 ing 8th July that I have had no time to continue my letter, first of 
 all we have been to Nanumea the natives made a signal fire about a 
 month and on the following night all the people and I gathered on 
 the beach to see if the Nanumea people would answer our signal, 
 we waited till midnight and I was about to turn in when a prolonged 
 shout made me turn back and we saw all the sky to the westward in 
 a fiery glow, it died away in about a minute and then came again 
 - so then we knew that the Nanumeans were expecting us - next 
 day at sunrise we started in five canoes the one I was in containing 
 Ioane, Eline his wife two other men and the King of Nanumaga, 
 we had a fine breeze from the S.E and in two hours were out of 
 sight of land in the open ocean. We sailed on all day till dark when 
 one of our canoes capsized we then took down sails and waited for 
 the fire as we did not see any land and were afraid to run past it 
 in the dark. We saw the Nanumaga fires every hour but none from 
 where we thought Nanumea to be, at ten oclock a heavy squall set 
 in with a wild sea and cold rain two men constantly bailing to keep 
 us from foundering, poor Eline was wet through till Ioane and I 
 made a covering of the sail and I gave her a change of my clothes, 
 the natives now commenced to get frightened and wanted to turn 
 back but Ioane and Eline and I held out, at midnight it cleared up 
 and then Eline called to me to look and we saw a glorious blaze 
 from Nanumea about 20 miles away - we set sail and passed over 
 the reef at 4. am. 
 
 Here to my astonishment I found two white men traders Alfred 
 and a man named Harry Johnson a very decent young fellow, who 
 took me to his house, he is married to a native girl and is doing 
 very well. We intended only to remain 4 days at Nanumea but our 
 
people quarrelled with the Nanumeans who seized our canoes and 
 trouble was brewing but after 16 days delay we got away again and 
 after a bad passage back we reached our own island in safety. I for¬ 
 got to say though that only two canoes came back one small and 
 mine, the other three were too frightened. I brought back three 
 cats with me which I got from Pepa, Harry’s wife. 
 
 On the day after our return I had a big meeting of the people 
 and I am glad to say that matters are all right again, I have opened 
 my trade again, they have agreed to my demands and as everything 
 was just as merry as marriage bells I got ready a party to go with 
 me to the Grand Local Reef to catch sharks for the sake of their 
 fins we were all ready to go last Monday, food cooked etc and just 
 as I was leaving the house two children came running along out of 
 breath to say that they had seen a “Vaka Motu” (Big Ship) coming 
 round the other side of the island and ten minutes afterwards you 
 can imagine how delighted I was to see the old “The Venus” - to 
 give you an idea of how the natives like me, as soon as they saw 
 the “Venus” all the native girls came down to my house each with 
 a new mat in their hands and some with brooms to clean the house 
 and make it look nice when the Captain came on shore and as 
 these mats are each worth a dollar 30 mats was no mean present, 
 when the Captain, Supercargo and I came on shore I found the 
 house scrupulously clean and all the rooms covered with handsome 
 sleeping mats, not a bit of rubbish any where and a large amount 
 of green cocoanuts ready for us to drink, my copra greatly disap¬ 
 pointed me only turning out 3300 lbs. I expected there would be 
 6000. However Captain Cummings was so pleased with me and my 
 house that he said he would not fail to give a good a/c of me to 
 A. T. De W. My friend Senior I was glad to see again but he could 
 not come ashore. At sundown The “Venus” stood away to the S.S.E 
 for Nukufetau taking 200 passengers from here to Nukufetau to 
 remain there a week so I expect her back in ten days - there are 
 now only about 10 men and 30 women on the island with me - my 
 little Pautoe has gone too - her parents went and I did not like to 
 keep her. Ioane and Eline have also gone. I want you to tell Alfred 
 that Mr MacKenzie supercargo of “The Venus” told me that it may 
 happen that De Wolf will close up his island businesses and so I am 
 writing to him to ask him to let me stay on here and I will pay him 
 
for his trade in two years time and carry on the business myself - I 
 am pretty confident he will trust me, in that case I will like Alfred 
 to come here with me as we will do well. I will hear from De W. in 
 5 months and will then write to Alfred to tell him what is the result. 
 
 I must now say good bye. I will give this letter to Senior, if he 
 comes to see you I hope you will make him welcome for my sake. 
 With love to all. dear Mama 
 
 Your affectionately Louie 
 
 Commentary 
 
 After describing the use of signal fires for navigation and his intention to 
 travel to Nanumea, this third letter gives an account of the journey. Despite 
 his mention of the capsizing of a canoe and being hit by a squall, this letter 
 minimizes the dangerous nature of the journey. Some of the Nanumangans 
 want to turn back, but rather than considering that their reasons may be 
 sound, Becke constructs them as “frightened.” The extent of the danger is 
 revealed in one of his stories, which describes a tragedy that occurred on 
 that same route a number of years earlier. “The Rangers of Tia Kau” de¬ 
 scribes a journey that went dreadfully wrong when a party were taken by 
 sharks when their canoes were hit by a squall near the shark-infested reef 
 of Tia Kau in 1872. Of a party of seventy men, women, and children, only 
 two men survived. Becke probably moderates the danger of the journey so 
 as not to alarm his mother. However, in doing so he writes himself as the 
 fearless masculine adventurer, revealing the extent to which Becke fashions 
 himself as a courageous man who transcends the mundane in taking risks. 
 
 This letter, too, conveys the ups and downs of the trader’s life. Again 
 there is optimism derived from the resolution of the conflict with the Nanu¬ 
 mangans in terms favorable to Becke and the reopening of the trade store; 
 at the same time, there is the disappointment of not having nearly as much 
 copra as he had thought. The captain of the ship promises to give a good 
 report of the trading station to Tom De Wolf. It is characteristic of Becke 
 that, despite the ominous news that De Wolf is likely to abandon the busi¬ 
 ness, he remains optimistic, suggesting to Alfred that he come to the islands 
 and that both of them “will do well.” 
 
 Like many of the trading firms that operated in the Pacific in the nine¬ 
 teenth century, De Wolf and Company did close down, withdrawing from 
 the region with losses of £20,000, according to Becke (1895a: 287). Be- 
 
 106 LETTERS OF LOUIS BECKE 
 
cause of his inexperience in this type of trade, unlike his larger rivals in the 
 islands, De Wolf made many mistakes which, as Munro remarks, “resulted 
 in costly failures and setbacks” (1980: 32). The main problem identified by 
 Munro is that De Wolf failed to consolidate his trade in one region before 
 extending it beyond that place. Whereas the larger firms had been work¬ 
 ing at building their trading empires for twenty or so years, he tried to 
 establish one virtually overnight. With his network spread so wide, he was 
 unable to service the trading stations adequately with the shipping he had 
 available (32). 3 For Becke, the collapse of De Wolf was due to the “extraor¬ 
 dinary” manner in which he required his traders to carry out business. In an 
 interview several years after Becke had left the islands, he remarked: “This 
 firm then carried out business on —to commercial ideas —most extraordi¬ 
 nary lines. They started off with the idea of dealing fairly and squarely with 
 white trader and native alike. The result was a most disastrous failure. We 
 (the firm’s employes [sic]) all had most stringent instructions as to our line of 
 conduct. We were not to intermeddle in native politics, not to sell grog, not 
 to contract an indefinite number of marriages, and, above all, to pay fairly 
 for all native produce” (1895a: 28y). 4 
 
 Whether Becke or De Wolf’s other traders conformed to these ideals is 
 unclear. 5 Certainly in his later writings, as we have suggested, Becke tends 
 to fashion himself as a colonist with character who followed the behavioral 
 precepts of his employer. Implicit in the quotation from Becke above is a 
 criticism of De Wolf’s “extraordinary” way of doing business. Clearly Becke 
 believes that fair trading is not the way to run a successful business. Fortu¬ 
 nately for Becke, Tom De Wolf was generous in giving him some thousands 
 of pounds of trade goods at a time when the firm was failing badly. 
 
<s> “I can tell you I enjoyed a glass of grog when I got on board 
 
 August 28. 1880 
 
 My dear Mama 
 
 “The Venus” not yet back - dead calmed for a whole week, how¬ 
 ever I expect her to-morrow on Monday; on Friday the “Vaitupule- 
 mele” came here Willie Williams sent her to me for his copra which 
 I delivered. I got it all off by sundown. I had bought a cash box 
 from the captain and came on shore and had agreed with him to 
 come off in the morning just as I got on shore at dark a wild squall 
 came on and the schooner signalled she was off, but I ran to the 
 house got some money but missed the canoe, but I swam over the 
 reef and the schooner ran in and picked me up. I can tell you I en¬ 
 joyed a glass of grog when I got on board. I came ashore at g p.m 
 and “Vaitupulemele” left for Nukufetau. 
 
 [unsigned] 
 
«s “they are no better than the natives 
 
 Island of Nanumaga 
 Sunday August 28. 1880 
 
 My dear Mama 
 
 At daylight I was called by my cook who said a ship was in sight 
 I ran down to the beach expecting to see “The Venus’’ but it is the 
 native vessell “Vaitupulemele” lying becalmed about 10 miles off; 
 she left here last Friday and must have got away about 70 miles 
 when it fell calm and she has drifted back here. 
 
 I hope she will drift in closer today as I want to try and get a 
 boat compass from her. I forgot to tell you that I am a great pig 
 man now I have 22 pigs in my styes and two days ago Mrs Pig in¬ 
 creased my stock by twins, it takes just 50 cocoanuts a day to feed 
 them; I sold 6 to “The Venus” if Mr Senior should come to [pass?] 
 to see you and he says he is coming back here please ask Edwin to 
 try and get him two dogs for me, a male and female any breed, and 
 Senior will bring them to me. To day being Sunday I am alone in 
 the house my cook and housemaid have gone to church and - ser¬ 
 vants wages are not very high here my cook Ume $1.50 per month 
 and Tafeta housemaid $1.75 per month. I forgot to say that I had a 
 visitor here in the “Vaitupulemele” a trader from an adjacent island 
 Nuitas [Niutao] Geo Winchcombe - four years on Nuitas and can¬ 
 not yet talk the language in fact I had to interpret for him. such a 
 man to talk, my ears are actually tingling now, I don’t know how 
 much more I would have suffered if it had not been for a case of 
 gin I produced and by liquoring him up freely I got a little respite, 
 he is a fair sample of too many island traders fond of liquor and 
 never happy without some grievance to relate against the natives, 
 these are the men that give the missionaries such a pull over all 
 traders - they are no better than the natives - they let their children 
 run about wild and devote all their energies to the gin-bottle, but 
 still at this present time the general islander trader is as a rule a 
 
respectable and fairly educated man, there are few left of the old 
 class, the dissolute whaler or escaped convict. 
 
 It is a lovely calm day today the sea smooth as glass; before [?] n 
 oclock I am going to walk over to the windward side of the island to 
 see if I can see “The Venus” coming back this is such a little island 
 that it is only 20 minutes walk across the island, although it is 4 miles 
 long but very narrow; last night I baked 4 loaves and left three in 
 a box and while I was asleep a pig came in and eat three but very 
 considerately left me one for Sunday; (this is no doubt the result of 
 missionary teaching)!?] I think Olive would like to see my two cats 
 and a pet pig I have, they always sleep together piggy lies down and 
 the cats sprawl across him like wet dish-cloths. I had a tame pigeon 
 here and kept him in a box and the black cat was for ever glaring at 
 him with hungry eyes - on day she got into the box w r hile I was away 
 I drove her out and the pigeon came out too but it was inside of the 
 cat. - I expect “John Williams” here next month and then I hope 
 to get a letter from you telling me you are all well at home. About 
 3 weeks ago while I was at St. Augustine’s Island the natives saw a 
 large ship painted white passing to the N.W; it must have been the 
 “San Francisco” one of Goddeffroys vessells going to the Carolines. 
 Generally on this island only one vessell is seen in a year. I wish a 
 man-of-war would come so as to make a little money; and to get 
 some books or newspapers from her. It is very probable that I may 
 leave here soon (but to return) to proceed to the Marshall Islands 
 on business that I have neglected too long and of vital importance 
 to me. If ever you get any papers to send me please do so - they will 
 require id postage - but send to C/o Hamilton else the postoffice at 
 Apia will claim them, any papers or books will be acceptable. Ham- 
 iltons agent in Sydney is John Williams of Apia 51 Pitt St. but I hear 
 he is a regular nipper - so don’t send a parcel if he wants to charge 
 you freight. Will you tell Alfred that if he comes to Sydney to call 
 on the agents of Henderson 8 c Macfarlane of Auckland who now 
 do all the business down here and if he chooses they wall I daresay 
 give him an agency if he desires to come to the islands again, I do 
 not know who their agents are but it is easy to find out by enquiring 
 from such as Rabone Fagoto or other people who do business wath 
 the islands - else he could write to Mr Henderson of H 8 c M. Mer¬ 
 chants, Auckland who is a very nice young fellow I hear - they have 
 
 HO LETTERS OF LOUIS BECKE 
 
five vessells in the trade and stations in both the North and South 
 Pacific and pay their agents salary besides a commission, the salary 
 is $50.00 per month. Their agents here are Flower on Funafuti - 
 Thompson on Nuie [Niue] - Johnson on Nanomea [Nanumea] and 
 many others who I do not know - they are a very respectable firm. 
 Tell Alfred that if I cannot arrange with De Wolf in the event of 
 his closing up to keep me on I intend to go in with Henderson and 
 Macfarlane. 
 
 With fond love to all at home 
 Yours affectionately 
 Louis G. Becke 
 
 Venus arrived sails tonight I send this by Mr Senior. 
 
 Commentary 
 
 A substantial proportion of this interrupted letter is concerned with the 
 various comings and goings of ships and with domestic arrangements. It is 
 most illuminating, however, for its account of the visit of another trader, 
 George Winchcombe, because it prefigures a theme that becomes dominant 
 in Becke’s Pacific tales, the theme of “going native.” 
 
 From Becke’s account it is obvious that the two men did not get on well 
 together. Whatever the cause of Becke’s dislike, his comments show that he 
 is fashioning himself as superior to Winchcombe, as a trader of character 
 who has not fallen. Far from Winchcombe’s being described as decent, like 
 the traders Becke met on the visit to Nanumea recounted in the earlier let¬ 
 ter of August 24, 1880, he is described as intemperate and disagreeable. In 
 writing that Winchcombe is “no better than the natives,” Becke is suggest¬ 
 ing that he has descended to the level of the local people —he has “gone 
 native.” Although earlier he nostalgically praised the past era when traders 
 were allowed to carry on their business free of government intervention, 
 Becke now disparages past traders as dissolute whalers or escaped convicts, 
 disreputable and uneducated. 
 
 As we have already noted, Winchcombe appears under the thinly dis¬ 
 guised name of Winchcombly in the story “Tarria, the Swimmer,” published 
 many years after this letter was written. Set mainly on the islands of Nanu¬ 
 mea and Nanumanga, it tells of a degenerate white trader, Winchcombly, 
 who has a disagreement with a trader from Nanumanga, Watson, an alter 
 
 111 
 
ego of Becke, and eventually tries to kill him. A third character in this story 
 is a Man Friday-like Tokelan black man from Onotoa, who selflessly gives up 
 his life to save Watson’s. As in the Becke letter, Winchcombly is presented 
 as an intemperate and disagreeable character, “a drink-besotted, unclean, 
 creature, illiterate and violent-tempered” (1923: gg). Not only is he con¬ 
 structed in this narrative as a generally obnoxious person but also as a racist. 
 At their first meeting a quarrel arose because Winchcombly did not think 
 Watson should be staying in the same house as a black man, suggesting that 
 to do so makes the blacks disrespectful of whites. “ A nice sorter w’hite man 
 
 you are to put up with a-Kanaka missionary when there’s a white 
 
 man liv’n’ here. It’s the likes o’you as makes these rotten natives so damned 
 saucy to w r hite men’” (99-100). In the ensuing quarrel, Watson questions 
 whether Winchcombly is a white man, suggesting that the dirty, unkempt, 
 and barefoot Winchcombly may call himself a white man, but Watson does 
 not. He concludes by saying that if he had a wash he might resemble one. It 
 is paradoxical that Watson has recourse to the language of race to impugn 
 the racist Winchcombly. This clearly demonstrates that Becke’s discourses of 
 the degenerate white are embedded in wider racial narratives that encom¬ 
 pass both black and white. 
 
 112 
 
 LETTERS OF LOUIS BECKE 
 
« “my station was destroyed by a hurricane 
 
 Nanumaga. Ellice Group S. Pacific 
 February 21. 1881. 
 
 My dear Mama. I have had a rough time of it since last writing - on 
 the 2 d of this month my station was destroyed by a hurricane. For 
 some two or three days previous to this we knew that something 
 strange was to happen, many strange sea-birds unknown to the 
 natives came flying from the westward and with strange cries settled 
 on the beach and on the cocoanut trees, for nearly two months 
 past it had been blowing heavily from the westward, but on the 1 st 
 the wind fell and the sea made a curious noise like the bellowing of 
 some beast. Next day it commenced to blow and and my anxiety was 
 great but lest the house would give way, although it withstood the 
 force of the wind it succumbed to a new and unexpected danger. At 
 three oclock in the morning it then being pitch dark and raining 
 and blowing furiously, and dead low water I was sitting in one of my 
 servants houses with three natives of De Peyster’s island and some 
 of my workpeople watching my dwelling house was in danger from 
 two tall cocoa nut trees which every moment threatened to fall and 
 crush in the roof. It was now blowing furiously the air filled with salt 
 spray and as I expected a change at turn of tide I sent a little girl to 
 crawl along on the sand to the beach and see if the tide was coming 
 in - in a few minutes she came flying back saying. “The sea has gone 
 away, there is nothing but tarevereve” (great empty space). Antici¬ 
 pating something serious we ran into the big house and the next 
 minutes with a strange roaring sound the sea rose up like a wall 
 and dashed over the reef in one mighty wave and swept up into 
 the village, sweeping away fifteen houses like chaff - the next wave 
 dashed into my front room and filled it with coral rocks and sand. 
 How glad I am to say that by working like demons we saved all the 
 trade, or at all events almost everything of value, by the time I had 
 got everything carried into the rear of the village and out of dan¬ 
 ger the wind was at its height and the sound it made was like the 
 
droning of countless flocks of bees, and sea after sea rolled up into 
 the village, in a few minutes my house, trade house, copra houses, 
 fowl houses, pig houses etc were things that had been, and were 
 piled up without much regard to regularity in a heap, together with 
 sundry drowned pigs and other live stock, the next wave they went 
 away to sea together with a few native houses. I lost some copra but 
 saved 7000 lbs and also saved my canoe which is a valuable one, so 
 altogether I won’t grumble; as I might have lost all. 
 
 I have written to De W. to tell him of this -1 estimate general loss 
 at $250:00 to $300:00. The natives say it is 35 years since such a 
 storm as this visited the island. It is now the 21 st and you will per¬ 
 haps be surprised to know that I am back again in the old position 
 with new house, copra houses, cook houses, and man servants and 
 maid servants and all things that are his. Some hundreds of thou¬ 
 sands of young cocoanuts have been destroyed and I am anxiously 
 awaiting the arrival of one of our vessells, to consult as to what is 
 to be done. My vessell is now some five months overdue -1 will now 
 say good bye and with love to all I am dear Mama. Your affectionate 
 Son. Louis. 
 
 Commentary 
 
 In Becke’s marvelously vivid description of the impending disaster of the 
 hurricane, we catch a glimpse of the writer he was to become. Like much 
 of his later fictional writings, this letter has a rawness and intensity that con¬ 
 veys the reader in imagination to the tiny Pacific island to be confronted by 
 ominous signs of overwhelming disaster. 
 
 This letter again reflects the fluctuations in fortune of Becke’s trading 
 venture. Although disaster strikes in the form of a hurricane and accom¬ 
 panying tidal wave, ruin is (at least temporarily) averted. Despite the de¬ 
 struction and flooding of his house, Becke sustains a comparatively small 
 loss, and he rebuilds his trading station, which rises phoenix-like from the 
 ruin. Despite the disruption, Becke still conveys some of the optimism that 
 characterizes his earlier letters. He doesn’t want to grumble at his losses, as 
 they could have been worse. Again, although he may be avoiding alarming 
 his mother about the dangers of living in the Equatorial Pacific, he is also 
 presenting himself as a man who overcomes adversity and disaster. 
 
 In writing of these events, Becke makes his own self central. This is mainly 
 
 114 LETTERS OF LOUIS BECKE 
 
a narrative of Becke’s endeavors to take charge in the face of disaster. Apart 
 from a slight mention of the effects of the hurricane on the Nanumangans, 
 their presence is largely discounted. When they appear they are unnamed, 
 as small players on the stage where Becke has the main role. Understandable 
 as this may seem, given the nature of his audience, this foregrounding also 
 has a broader effect. Like the account of the canoe journey discussed above, 
 this is an example of Becke writing himself as the masculine colonial adven¬ 
 turer. By taking disaster and danger in his stride, and indeed seeking them 
 out, Becke is fashioning himself in a particular way: as a man with pluck. 
 
 Although Becke rebuilds after the disaster, some of the early optimism of 
 this letter is dissipated at its conclusion when he mentions the extent of de¬ 
 struction of the coconut plantation and anxiously awaits one of De Wolf’s 
 vessels which is five months late, a lateness that reflects the crumbling state 
 of the De Wolf trading network, and ultimately Becke’s role in it. 
 
 n 5 
 
« “the Captain of the Redcoat was instructed to close up the business 
 
 Schooner “Redcoat” 
 Island of Nukufetau. 
 Ellice Group 
 May l. 1881 
 
 My dear Alfred 
 
 This is to tell you that the “Redcoat” arrived at Nanumaga and 
 brought me a letter from you and an illustrated news, I also re¬ 
 ceived two papers from you by a New Zealand vessell. Mr De W 
 wrote me a very nice letter 8 c said that the captain of the Redcoat 
 was instructed to close up the business and that in my favour only 
 he made an exception and the Captain has given me Two Thou¬ 
 sand dollars in trade and I have only given him my note of hand to 
 pay as I can to any other firm whom he may appoint and he (De W) 
 said most likely he would get Henderson & McFarlane to call for my 
 copra. This of course is a good offer for me and so I left Nanumaga 
 to come here and will wait here for one of Hendersons vessells to 
 call here and take me up to the Carolines. I have seen Mr Hender¬ 
 son himself some two months ago and told him that I would like 
 to get a station from him and he told me that if the Redcoat called 
 and squared up with me he would give me a station in the Caro¬ 
 lines - so I have come to live on this island until Hendersons send a 
 vessell for me. I expect to remain here for about five months. I will 
 write to you again by the earliest opportunity and tell you where I 
 am going as perhaps I may not engage with Henderson at all. 
 
 Address as usual to Hamilton I am so busy landing my stores 
 and getting a few lessons in navigation that I have no time to write 
 more, if this should reach you in Sydney be sure to call on the Red¬ 
 coat and see Capt Foster. I have given him a letter to Aubrey. - he is 
 a fine young fellow. 
 
 In haste 
 Yours Louis 
 
Commentary 
 
 Unlike the other letters, this is written to Becke’s brother Alfred, and shows 
 that he has moved from Nanumanga to the island of Nukufetau, about two 
 hundred miles to the southeast. From this letter we see that the demise 
 of De Wolf and Company that had been presaged in the earlier letters has 
 finally occurred, although the effect of this collapse on Becke has been mini¬ 
 mized considerably by Tom De Wolf’s generosity. The stop on Nukufetau is 
 a temporary one, being for the purpose of waiting for a trading vessel of the 
 firm of Henderson and Macfarlane, the company Becke hopes to work for. 
 
 Like Becke’s previous employer, Henderson and Macfarlane was a small 
 trading firm, but with a long history of commercial enterprise on the colo¬ 
 nial periphery. As one laudatory account puts it, this firm “was to blazen 
 many a splendid chapter in New Zealand’s history, from the famous ’49 
 goldrush to the Yukon through the Maori Wars, to the stirring adventurous 
 days of the Pacific traders” (Hallett n.d.: 1). Despite its long history of trad¬ 
 ing elsewhere, its entry into trading in the Pacific was relatively recent at the 
 time that Becke worked for them, the company establishing itself at Suwar- 
 row in 1875 (Hallett n.d.: 25). According to Hallett, this was a period when 
 the South Seas “was a ‘No Man’s Land’—a magnetic attraction for the ad¬ 
 venturers of the world where trade, adventure, easy-living, large profits and 
 no law made it appear a paradise” (25). Whether in fact the large profits 
 were realized is doubtful, and Henderson and Macfarlane, like many a trad¬ 
 ing firm, were not very successful and their traders even less so. 
 
 As indicated in the next letter, dated September 24, 1881, Becke wrote 
 to his mother while on Nukufetau about some “extraordinary adventures” 
 he had there, but unfortunately that letter was lost. It was on the island of 
 Nukufetau that Becke married a local woman, NeleaTikena (Day 1967: 35, 
 150 n.16). As Becke never mentions in his later interviews or writings that 
 he was married there, it is doubtful that he would have told his mother. This 
 silence is consistent with the way that he uses silences and absences gener¬ 
 ally in his writings to fashion himself as a colonist who, through reserve and 
 propriety, maintains his “civilized” difference from the locals. Some insight 
 into Becke’s residence on Nukufetau can be gained from other sources, 
 however. One such account comes from the trader George Winchcombe, of 
 whom Becke had written so disparagingly. 
 
 In a section of notes under the heading “Beck[e] Traders and Goods 
 Landed in Teachers Home,” Winchcombe writes: 
 
 117 
 
An Englishman Lewis Beck[e] arrived here May 7. 1881 in the Sch 
 “Redcoat” to await the arrival of another Vessel to take him to the line 
 Islands. 
 
 The Natives were not at all anxious about his landing here, from some 
 previous tidings of him about the Islands 8 c offered him accommoda¬ 
 tion, he therefore went to Teacher’s house and soon made arrange¬ 
 ments to land here 8 c and live with the Teacher “[Mekish].” accompa¬ 
 nied him to the Vessel, his trade and other [goods] landed & placed in 
 missionary home, he also [went] and slept there himself. 
 
 Among other things were about 50 Gun with ample Ammunition 8 c 
 an about 30 Cases Liquor, here he remained [several weeks] passing 
 his time by firing gun, day after day greatly disturbing the quiet [life] 
 of the Island, we visited each other occasionally 8 c and I purchased few 
 Articles of him in the Teachers home 8 c drank grog there with him. 
 
 There was a little girl remaining at Teacher’s house as playmate to 
 his little girl, she might have been about 14 years old, Beck was middle 
 aged man—and as I can suppose, influenced by Effects of drink, he 
 prepared this little girl to give her consent to marry him, then freely 
 presenting the Father with cloth 8 c other things won his approval 8 c 
 willing[ness] to the marriage, but it was conjectured] by the people, 
 that the Teacher would not marry a child at that age 8 c contented 
 themselves i[t] [could] therefore not be carried into Effect, they were 
 however pretty disappointed for when the appointed day arrived, the 
 marriage was solemnized by the Teacher in the Church. 
 
 May 14 1881. “Emerald” ship of War arrived, Captn. Maxwell 8 c and 
 some of the officers landed and as the Captn. said he wished to see the 
 Missionary Buildings, myself 8 c Beck conducted him to the Teacher’s 
 House, [then] to the Church & School. While in the Teacher’s house, 
 the Captn. remarked to Beck, that he was well supplied with fire arms 
 8 c Liquor & enquired if it was for sale on the Islands 8 c Beck replied in 
 the negative. 
 
 Aug. 14 1881. Beck left the Island in the Schn. “Orwell” for the Line 
 8 c returned his young wife to the Father again, since which she has been 
 fined 2 or 3 times for Criminal offences. Said he would return to his 
 wife in 1 or 2 years. 
 
 A few weeks prior to Becks departure, he quarrelled with the Teacher 
 about something, 8 c posted papers on the trees about the Church, on 
 
 118 LETTERS OF LOUIS BECKE 
 
a Saturday night, charging him the teacher with being a liar &c, this 
 was written in Samoan language and remained up all day Sunday. This 
 is what Beck & the Native told me. I did not read them myself. 6 
 
 The veracity of Winchcombe’s account of Becke, like Becke’s account of 
 him, can be questioned. The two men clearly did not like each other, and 
 each constructs the other in a particular way. Whatever the personal motives 
 behind his account, Winchcombe selects those aspects of his rival’s behav¬ 
 ior that would be disapproved of in certain circles and that could be used 
 against Becke. For example, Winchcombe writes disapprovingly of Becke’s 
 living with the local teacher, not maintaining the reserve and distance that 
 should characterize the relations between races. Winchcombe represents 
 Becke as idle, immoral, and dissolute, a disagreeable, argumentative man, 
 a heavy drinker, and of questionable morality in his relations with women. 
 Becke, it seems, has taken his marriage lightly, using and abandoning a very 
 young woman, leaving her ruined. Like Becke’s portrayal of him, Winch¬ 
 combe portrays Becke as a degenerate white, who forsakes the norms and 
 behaviors of civilized white society. 
 
 n 9 
 
t* “we lost the vessell and with difficulty saved our lives 
 
 Island of Peru [Bern], Kingsmill Group 
 
 Sept 24.1881 
 
 S. Lat 1.20 E. Lon 176.21 
 
 My dear Mama. I am sorry that I have nothing but bad, bad news 
 for you as regards myself for we were castaway on this island on 
 the 24 th of August last and I lost all I possessed in the world. After 
 my last letters to you from Nukufetau by the “Redcoat” I remained 
 on Nukufetau waiting for Henderson Macfarlane’s vessell. H.M.S. 
 Emerald came and bought me over 30 papers and two letters from 
 you, one from Aubrey, one from Hamilton, one of your letters was 
 only a month old. The “Emerald” left next day, the Captain and offi¬ 
 cers were very kind to me and supplied me with provisions, I am 
 sorry I could not write by her as the Capt Maxwell said he would 
 be in Sydney by the 25 th of July, but as I had some land disputes to 
 settle I had no time to write. At last on Aug 6 th . the long expected 
 vessell came for me from Auckland the “Orwell” and the super¬ 
 cargo Flower had instructions to take me to Apiang [Abaiang] in 
 this group and I was to form a head station there and to be man¬ 
 ager for the firm of all their business in the Kingsmill and Marshall 
 Groups. I packed up and we sailed next day and after touching at 
 various islands we made this island on Aug 24 th and at 11. a.m. at 
 night we lost the vessell and with difficulty saved our lives. I have 
 written to Aubrey an account of the wreck and have asked him to 
 forward it on to you so that you may read it and then send on 
 to Alfred. The natives plundered and pillaged the vessell, we were 
 without arms and I had the maddening sensation of seeing myself 
 robbed and dared not raise my hand else we would have all lost 
 our lives. The firm (H & M) have an agency here and we all went to 
 live in the traders house a very nice fellow a Tyrolese named Fran¬ 
 cisco Vollino. We set to w'ork to save some provisions but the natives 
 robbed us almost as fast as we got it, however we saved some at this 
 time all my worldly goods was a piece of red silk I had wrapped 
 
round my loins, afterwards though I got a good many thin clothes, 
 but unfortunately the climate here is such that I never go beyond 
 wearing a pair of cotton trousers. The day after the wreck the Cap¬ 
 tain called us together and asked for volunteers to go in one of the 
 boats saved from the wreck to the island of Apamama [Abemama] 
 distant 300 miles, the crew refused, the mate, I and two others vol¬ 
 unteered, but as luck would have it next day a barque called the 
 “George Noble” belonging to a Chinese firm in Sydney came here 
 and Capt Evers took Capt Robinson, five men and a boat on board 
 and was to take them as near to Apamama as he could and then 
 they were to pull. At sunset the “Geo Noble” left and so far that is 
 all we know of our Captain and crew. He (Our Captain) was to go 
 to Apamama and try and charter a schooner named the “Coronet” 
 belonging to the King of Apamama to come here and take us all 
 up to Auckland. If the Coronet was not there he said he would wait 
 there till one of our vessells named the “Belle Brandon” came there 
 from the Marshalls and as young Mr Henderson is on board of her 
 she would come up here at once and take us away. We are daily ex¬ 
 pecting a vessell either the “Coronet” or the “Belle Brandon,” but 
 perhaps the “George Noble” will come here first on her way up to 
 Sydney if so you will soon see me as [well?] Le Brun the mate, Boat¬ 
 swain and I will come up to Sydney in her if the Captain will give 
 us a passage. I am now quite dependent on H & M and I hope the 
 “Orwells” loss will not hurt them much; but it will be some months 
 before they have another vessell ready to take her place and if I re¬ 
 main here with the Supercargo and wait till we go up to Auckland I 
 will when I get there be a stranger in a strange place and no money 
 to keep me, but if I get to Sydney I know some people I think 
 whom I can stay with till I get orders to report myself at Auckland 
 to H & M; and there is always a steamer every week. In case how¬ 
 ever we cannot get to Sydney in the “Geo Noble” you must always 
 in future direct your letters to me care of Henderson & Macfarlane, 
 Merchants, Auckland and if I am in Auckland I will of course get 
 them, if not they will keep them for me, for the firm in Auckland I 
 suppose do not know anything of me as I was engaged by young Mr 
 Henderson who is now down in the Marshall Group and it was by 
 his orders that the “Orwell” came to Nukufetau for me. I must tell 
 you that when I left Nukufetau I had two splendid collections of 
 
 121 
 
shells one for you and one for Aubrey; they are all at the bottom of 
 the sea now. I also got another letter from you by the “Orwell” and 
 16 papers making 4 letters and 46 papers within this last 3 months, 
 so I am sure none of your letters to me have miscarried and I had 
 written you a letter of 20 pages telling you of some very extraordi¬ 
 nary adventures that happened to me in Nukufetau in consequence 
 of the visit of the “Emerald” I had also letters prepared for Edwin, 
 Alfred & Aubrey, they were of course all lost when we were wrecked. 
 I had them all packed in that little box I made from the wreck of 
 the “Leonora” when we were castaway on Strongs island in 1875, so 
 that box is gone too. I got it from Fanny when I left Sydney in the 
 “Venus.” All the last papers I had from you I never ever opened as I 
 was keeping them till I got settled down at Apiang. In the same box 
 I had $900:00 in English gold, all lost, but a great deal of it found 
 by the natives who won’t give it up, and as they are 2000 strong 
 here and we are only 9 all told I will never see that money again. 
 An American Captain who took a great liking to me gave me a gold 
 chronometer watch quite new which he paid [£]40.o.o for, that I 
 also lost, together with goods to the value of Three thousand dol¬ 
 lars - a hard knock for me this time. We were likely at first to have 
 lost all our lives by the natives, but the Captain’s conduct was cool 
 & quiet, and fortunately for us all I found a native who could talk 
 Samoan and although we had one fight on the second day there was 
 no bloodshed, till a native picked up one of my rifles on the beach 
 and as the beach was also covered with liquor he also got drunk and 
 shot his own brother dead on the spot in his drunken fury. With 
 the aid of the two Samoan missionaries on the island we have re¬ 
 covered a good deal of the stuff that was stolen by the natives, but 
 all of it that belonged to me was some clothes and 16 Enfield rifles 
 and one revolver. We are expecting the “George Noble” here next 
 week and if I do not get a passage by her I can at least send you 
 a letter. I forgot to tell you that the shells I sent you by Mr Senior 
 were “collared” by Mr De Wolf who sent them to England. When 
 you write to Auckland let me know if you received any letters by 
 the “Redcoat.” There is another thing I want to get to Sydney for, 
 for some time I have been suffering from a poisoned foot and the 
 doctor of the man-of-war could do nothing for it on board but said 
 that it can be cured with ice baths, it is very painful and I have now 
 
 122 LETTERS OF LOUIS BECKE 
 
been bad with it five months, otherwise I am in good health, don’t 
 forget to write to Auckland care of H & M if I don’t come up in the 
 “Geo Noble” to Sydney and with sincere love to all at home I am 
 dear Mama your affectionate Son Louis G. Becke. 
 
 Commentary 
 
 Becke’s situation has deteriorated badly. After having his trading station 
 destroyed by a hurricane and his employer’s firm collapse, Becke is now 
 shipwrecked and has lost everything. Emphasizing the enormity of his dis¬ 
 aster, he repeats “bad, bad news,” and later remarks that it has been a “hard 
 knock” for him. Unfortunately, a much fuller description of the wrecking 
 of the ship in another letter appears to have been lost. Partial accounts are 
 given in some of his later writings, such as the following, drawn from one of 
 his journalistic accounts of fishing in the Pacific: 
 
 In 1882 I took passage from the Island of Nukufetau in the Ellice Group 
 for the Caroline Islands. The vessel was a fine brigantine of 160 tons, 
 and was named the Orwell. She was, unfortunately, commanded by an 
 incompetent, obstinate, self-willed man, who, though a good seaman, 
 had no meteorological knowledge and succeeded in losing the ship, 
 when lying at anchor, on Peru [Bern] Island, in the Gilbert Group, ten 
 days after leaving Nukufetau, simply through disregarding the local 
 trader’s advice to put to sea. Disastrous as was the incident to me, for 
 I lost trade goods and personal effects to the value of over a thousand 
 pounds, and came ashore with what I stood in—to wit, a pyjama suit — 
 and a bag of Chili dollars . . . (1901a: 155-56) 
 
 Some of the detail in this account is different from that in his letter to his 
 mother, such as the amount of trade goods and clothing he was left with. 
 Also absent is mention of the losses having been incurred at the hands of 
 the islanders. These silences downplay the extent of Becke’s losses, making 
 him something other than the bad colonist he is. Through silences and ab¬ 
 sences Becke rewrites the incident to present himself not as the victim of 
 islanders, but as stoically taking personal losses in his stride. The original 
 letter, of course, was written at a time when Becke’s anger and emotions 
 were heightened. Given that he had probably barely escaped with his life 
 and had lost everything he owned, the revelation of his anger at this mo¬ 
 ment is understandable, as is the more dispassionate tone he adopted later. 
 
 123 
 
Then, with true imperialist pluck, he is able to put disaster behind him and 
 to make the best of the incident. Afterwards he could congratulate himself 
 from a “fisherman’s point of view,” having spent most of his three months 
 on the island pursuing one of his passions: fishing (1901a: 156). 
 
 Also absent in the later account is the underlying inclination to violence; 
 Becke shows in this letter that he is willing to use it to defend his interests. 
 As with the letter of July 8, where he reports his conflict with the Nanu- 
 mangans and nostalgically wishes for a return of an earlier period of unen¬ 
 cumbered free trade, the threat of recourse to violence underlies his words. 
 This is erased in his later accounts, where he fashions himself as the good 
 colonist who always treats the islanders honorably. 
 
 The story “The Brothers-in-Law: A Tale of the Equatorial Islands” pro¬ 
 vides further insight into his view of the Bern Islanders. The islanders are de¬ 
 scribed as “wild, intractable, and savage people” (1901a: 286), comparable 
 to the degenerate whites there “who spent their days in idleness, drunken¬ 
 ness, and debauchery” (287). Of course, if the Gilbert Islanders are indeed 
 as “wild and intractable” as his letter and later accounts convey, the ques¬ 
 tion arises as to how the resident trader has managed to stay in business or 
 even to stay alive. As Macdonald (1982: 23) has suggested, rather than being 
 inclined to pillage and plunder, the islanders were merely exercising their 
 claim to wreck salvage, a practice established for many years. Successful 
 white residence on the island of Bern was contingent upon abiding by the 
 ways of the islanders. “When Europeans accepted Gilbertese customs and 
 value,” as Macdonald has remarked, “there was seldom any difficulty” (23). 
 
 124 
 
 LETTERS OF LOUIS BECKE 
 
© “We are now at Tarawa - natives fighting 
 
 On board the “George Noble” 
 Island of Tarawa, Kingsmill Group 
 North Lat. 1.50. East Lon 173.00 
 [14th Dec. 1881] 
 
 dear Mama. 
 
 I am coming up to Sydney in the “George Noble,” we left Peru 
 on 6 th Oct and went to Drummonds Island [Tabiteuea] and there 
 we met the releiving vessell the “Coronet” belonging to the King 
 of Apamama. Capt Robinson on board, going to Peru to take us 
 all up to Auckland Captain Robinson came on board this vessell 
 and made arrangements with me to go on to Sydney and report 
 the “Orwells” affair to the Commodore in Sydney and try and get a 
 man-of-war down - very likely I may have to leave Sydney soon in a 
 man-of-war but of course I cannot tell yet - you will see the arrival 
 of this vessell in the papers and I will telegraph to you as soon as I 
 arrive in Sydney. We are now at Tarawa - natives fighting, and leave 
 tomorrow for Apiang, then to Makin and then direct to Sydney. 
 
 December 14. We are now off New Caledonia and as we may meet 
 the Sydney mail steamer I will send this on by her, we are right in 
 her track and if we should meet her she will of course reach Sydney 
 before us; we are now only 900 miles from Sydney heads. I am anx¬ 
 ious to get there as my foot is very bad every now and then. 
 
 [unsigned] 
 
© “it would have been vastly to my interest and have saved me 
 all the misery I suffered" 
 
 Majura [Majuro] (Island of) 
 Marshall Group 
 North Pacific 
 Nov 1. 1882 
 
 My dear Mother 
 
 I wrote you from Jaluit in this group to tell you where I was etc 
 and sent the letter via California - since then I have been by a curi¬ 
 ous coincidence sent by by Hernsheim 8 c Co to trade on this island 
 in opposition to Henderson and Macfarlane - it is very unpleas¬ 
 ant and distasteful to me in one way as you know I told you that 
 I was under engagement to H 8 c M when the Orwell was lost; and 
 was waiting in Sydney till heard from Mr Henderson but his letter 
 reached Sydney the day after I left and you sent it on to New Brit¬ 
 ain - had I remained in Sydney one day longer and received that 
 letter it would have been vastly to my interest and have saved me 
 all the misery I suffered in New Britain. 
 
 However in about a year or so my time will be up with the Ger¬ 
 man firm and I am sure Mr Henderson will give me a station - their 
 head station is here 30 miles up the lagoon - I went up yesterday 
 as I heard a ship was there and found the barque “India” there - 
 Mr Carr - Supercargo handed me two letters one from you and one 
 from Aubrey both 18 months old - they had gone to Nanumaga 
 but the natives there could not give the Captain of “John Williams” 
 my address I suppose, thence to Nanomea or Samoa and by some 
 means came into Mr Carrs hands who was going to send them to 
 Dead letter office. In future you may have no fear of addressing 
 me under cover to Henderson 8 c Macfarlane of Auckland. I have 
 changed my address so often that the letters cannot keep going 
 astray - but all letters will reach me eventually - do not send any¬ 
 thing more via New Britain or Jaluit. Henderson 8 c M are in regular 
 communication with Majura being their head station if there are 
 any letters in Samoa I will get them as I will write now to Hamilton 
 
- and tell him to send them here - H & M are now again sending 
 ships to Samoa. I am in hopes again of getting something from 
 the government for the goods plundered from the Orwell - as Mr 
 Carr tells me the island is to be visited by a man-of-war and fined 
 $15,000:00 or £3000. I may get a little out of this. I must now close 
 in haste as I must take this up myself in a canoe to H & M station 
 to put it on board the India. With best love I am dearest mother. 
 
 Affectionately Louis Yours. 
 
 nearly clear of fever 
 
 Commentary 
 
 Written after Becke’s arrival in the Marshall Islands, this final letter was writ¬ 
 ten almost eleven months after the one of December 1881. Again it conveys 
 Becke’s plans to his mother after further changes in his circumstances. He 
 has just spent some time trading in New Britain, which he says caused him 
 “misery.” There are no letters surviving from this time, but it appears likely 
 that illness was a factor in this evaluation, as indicated by his remark that he 
 is nearly free of fever. 
 
 The change to another island group has meant a change of employer. 
 Becke is now working for the German firm Hernsheim and Company, in 
 competition with his old employers Henderson and Macfarlane. We are told 
 this is “unpleasant and distasteful,” perhaps more so than Becke reveals 
 here, for in his writings and interviews he views Germans with disdain, repro¬ 
 ducing the imperial rivalry between Germany and Britain. 7 In an interview 
 in the St. James Gazette in 1896, Becke speaks of the German colonization of 
 New Guinea as a “howling and dismal failure” (1896b). “The fact is,” he says, 
 “the Germans cannot colonize. People in Australia like the German colonist 
 under British rule; but under German rule the German colonist is ‘a ghastly 
 failure.’ ” All the islands in Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, he com¬ 
 plains, were first opened up by the British trader, but many have now been 
 annexed by Germany, driving the British trader out: “It is the special busi¬ 
 ness of the German authorities to drive the British trader out of the very 
 islands which British people opened up.” Although to some extent he is re¬ 
 flecting the changes in the colonial map of the Pacific that occurred in the 
 late 1880s, when various parts of the Western and Equatorial Pacific were 
 divided between Britain and Germany in the Anglo-German Agreement of 
 1886, Becke is mainly reflecting upon the economic dominance of German 
 
 127 
 
firms during the time he was a trader. 8 During the period encompassed by 
 these letters, for example, German interests controlled an estimated 70 per¬ 
 cent of the commerce in the Pacific basin (Munro 1980: 24). Aside from 
 the German New Guinea Company, whose activities in New Guinea were 
 an economic failure, German firms were more successful than the other 
 firms Becke worked for. 9 The same distaste for German colonialism, but not 
 colonialism more generally, is often evident in Becke’s Pacific stories, which 
 feature many degenerate and violent Germans who are usually contemptu¬ 
 ously referred to as “Dutchmen.” 
 
 Despite having to work for a German firm, in this letter Becke is again 
 optimistic —this time about receiving some compensation from the Bern 
 Islanders, as a warship was to be dispatched there. Eventually one of the 
 warships of the Royal Navy’s Australian Station, hms Espiegle, was sent to 
 Bern to extract a penalty. After being threatened with a naval bombard¬ 
 ment, the islanders agreed to pay a fine of thirty tons of copra, but later 
 bitterly protested the injustice of the fine (Macdonald 1982: 23). Whether, 
 in fact, Becke received any compensation is uncertain. 
 
 This is the last surviving letter of Becke’s time working as a trader. How 
 long he continued to work in the Marshall Islands and whether he found 
 any success there is unknown. As we suggested previously, it seems probable 
 that he remained in the Pacific until he returned to Australia in 1886. We 
 do know that the success he did find was not as a colonist but as an author 
 recounting tales of life in the Pacific. 
 
 128 
 
 LETTERS OF LOUIS BECKE 
 
5 @ The Apotheosis of Savagery: Louis Becke’s Pacific Tales 
 

 
 
 
 
In his letters to his mother Becke presents himself as an upright colonist 
 with sufficient character to resist “going native.” 1 This theme becomes far 
 more strikingly apparent in his later Pacific tales. Many of these were written 
 in London at the turn of the century, when degeneration and decadence 
 were exciting the popular imagination. 2 As his earlier letters testify, Becke 
 was well aware of the notion that whites living in the Pacific were susceptible 
 to moral and cultural degeneration. At its most rudimentary, degeneration 
 was a counternarrative to the idea that progress was inevitable. Rather than 
 the future’s being assuredly bright and promising as progressivist historical 
 narratives postulated, degenerationism held that there was the possibility of 
 decline and regress, that the future also held the potential of being grim. 
 Historically, degeneration has connoted not only cultural decline, but also 
 moral and physical decline. As Pick has remarked, degeneration has been 
 an exceedingly fluid signifier and as such cannot be “reduced to a fixed 
 axiom or theory . . . [rather] it was a shifting term produced, inflected, re¬ 
 fined, and reconstituted” (1989: h j ). 3 Accordingly, the term has been used in 
 a wide range of social and scientific theory, from medicine to anthropology, 
 from psychology to criminology, and from biology to geography. The idea 
 of degeneration, however, was not restricted to the nineteenth century, nor 
 was it only “a European disorder,” as Pick has argued. 4 Rather, it was also 
 a colonial disorder and took on particular saliences in that milieu. Becke’s 
 stories of beachcombers, castaways, deserters, traders, and escaped convicts 
 recount the lives of men who transgress the racial and cultural boundaries, 
 falling to become like the colonial other. “In those days,” Becke writes, 
 “there were many white men in these islands. Some were traders, some were 
 but papalagi tafea [beachcombers] who spent their days in idleness, drunk¬ 
 enness, and debauchery, casting aside all pride and living like these savage 
 people, with but a girdle of grass around their naked waists, their hands 
 ever imbued in the blood of their fellow white men or that of the men of 
 the land” (Becke and Jeffery 1901: 287). 
 
 Like Winchcombe, many of the characters in Becke’s stories are described 
 as “generally a rough character—a runaway from some Australian or Ameri- 
 
can Whaler, or a wandering Ishmael who, for reasons of his own, preferred 
 living among the intractable, bawling, and poverty-stricken people of the 
 equatorial Pacific” (i8g4[ig55]: g8). At other times, his protagonists are de¬ 
 scribed as “white loafers” or "poor whites.” A great number of his stories 
 reflect Becke's own life as a failed colonist, whose only profit was the memo¬ 
 ries of his time in the Pacific. Becke’s stories tell, as he says, “of those resdess 
 wanderers who range the Pacific in search of the fortune thev always mean 
 to gain, but which never comes to them, except in some few instances” 
 (1902: 175). 
 
 From the Marshall Islands in the northwest to the Pitcairn Island in the 
 southeast, the geographic range of Becke's stories is far and wide across the 
 Pacific. A number of stories are located in Australia, recounting his times 
 working or adventuring there. 5 Many are drawn from his experiences in the 
 Equatorial Pacific, and many feature the islands where he was a trader, such 
 as the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. 6 Others feature the island of Majuro in the 
 Marshall Islands, from which one of the letters was written. 7 Unlike his let¬ 
 ters, some of these stories are rich in ethnographic detail, particularly when 
 it comes to subsistence activities such as fishing, in which Becke took a par- 
 ticularlv active interest. Stories such as “The Fisher Folk of Nukufetau,” “A 
 Hundred Fathoms Deep,” and "The ‘Palu’ of the Equatorial Pacific” docu¬ 
 ment some of the fishing techniques of the islands where he traded, as well 
 as Becke’s own sporting feats. 
 
 The sty le of Becke’s stories is unpretentious, with a rawness and intensity 
 that mav be labeled realism or naturalism. He was a masterful storyteller 
 who, though perhaps falling short of the literary merit of, say, Conrad, 
 could produce a gripping storv. Although to call him a writer of imperial¬ 
 ist adventure fiction is justified, to do so without qualification discounts the 
 complexity of his writings. 6 Likewise, to typify him as a racist and colonist is 
 to overlook the complexity of his views. Both the letters and the Pacific tales 
 display the conflicting interests and tensions within the colonizing cultures. 
 Becke is no simple racist who disparages and denigrates all that is other; his 
 letters give the impression of a man who, despite some conflict, was able to 
 establish a rapport with the islanders with whom he lived. 
 
 Ambivalent Images 
 
 Like Conrad’s, Becke’s Mews of race and colonialism are ambivalent and 
 fluid. He decries certain forms of racism and colonialism and the excesses 
 
 132 THE APOTHEOSIS OF SAVAGERY 
 
of some colonists, but not all. For both Conrad and Becke, British imperi¬ 
 alism with its civilizing mission was acceptable, and even praised by Becke, 
 whereas other European imperial ventures, such as the Belgian (Conrad) 
 and the German (Becke) are condemned. In a number of interviews and 
 articles Becke decries the German colonization of New Guinea, which he 
 says has had “disastrous results,” but praises the British colonization there, 
 which he says has been accompanied “with the steady march of progress and 
 civilisation.” 9 As noted earlier, many of his stories feature the brutal Ger¬ 
 man, whose violence and “savagery” make him more akin to the “natives.” 10 
 
 Despite his generally enthusiastic support of some colonialism, particu¬ 
 larly the British variety, the Pacific tales do not unequivocally celebrate the 
 imperial venture, as do some texts in the adventure tradition. Many of his 
 stories speak of the brutality of a settler and imperial culture that is ruthless 
 in the pursuit of economic expansion and profit. They capture with stark 
 realism the greed, corruption, and violence that has accompanied the colo¬ 
 nization of the Pacific and call into question many aspects of the colonial 
 project. 
 
 “The Trader’s Wife,” set on the island of Abaiang in the Gilbert Group, 
 is one story that provides an example. An islander kills a white trader to 
 steal his wife, who is white and something of a rarity in the islands. He is 
 eventually handed over to a man-of-war for punishment, after the captain 
 threatens a naval bombardment of the village and to hang some chiefs he 
 has seized as hostages. A fellow trader, perhaps wanting to ensure his own 
 safety, urges that the captain should have the man shot on shore as an ex¬ 
 ample to the other islanders, rather than hanging him on board the ship. In 
 the belief that the local chiefs will carry out the execution on shore in the 
 trader’s presence, the captain consents. However, the trader carries out the 
 execution himself by having the culprit strapped to a cannon and blasted to 
 pieces. The story ends when the trader’s dog deposits “a gory lump of hor¬ 
 ror at his master’s feet” while he is eating his dinner (1898: 159). This typical 
 Becke story portrays the relations of the colonial periphery ambiguously, 
 illustrating in a grotesque fashion that the trader is little different from the 
 islander in his savage violence. 
 
 The fluidity of Becke’s texts is partly realized by employing contrasting 
 images of nobility and ignobility. At times the noble savage is contrasted with 
 the ignoble white; at others the ignoble savage is contrasted with the noble 
 white. The movement between these images suggests that white and black 
 are not determined and immutable categories but belong in one hierarchy 
 
 133 
 
of civilization, and that movement up and down that hierarchy is possible. It 
 is in this sense that Becke’s texts appear ambivalent. On the one hand, they 
 subvert many of the essentialist assumptions about race by showing that 
 racial boundaries are not clearly demarcated, for, just as progress toward 
 civilization is a possibility, so is regress toward savagery. On the other hand, 
 in the subversion of racial essentialism, his texts reiterate the language of 
 race as a component of a universalizing narrative of progress (and regress). 
 
 Because they range over such a wide geographic and cultural landscape, it 
 might be expected that Becke’s Pacific tales would acknowledge the cultural 
 diversity of the area. However, he repeats many of the prevailing images and 
 typifications of Pacific islanders, for example, the common racial hierarchy 
 that posits the peoples of the Eastern Pacific as superior to those of the West¬ 
 ern Pacific, a Hew that had wide currency in nineteenth-century anthropo¬ 
 logical and scientific writings and in popular texts. 11 In this view, the peoples 
 of the area that today is referred to as Polynesia, including Hawaii, Samoa, 
 Tonga, and Fiji, were deemed superior to the peoples of the area that we 
 now call Melanesia, including New Guinea, New Britain, New Hebrides, 
 and the Solomon Islands. Throughout his writings Becke reproduces these 
 racialist discourses with his own inflections and biases. Many of his tales 
 present the image of the brave, fearless, skillful, and noble Polynesian who, 
 despite some negative qualities, is generally esteemed. An example is his de¬ 
 scription of the Samoan missionary stationed on the island of Nanomanga: 
 “He was intended by nature to be a warrior, a leader of men; or—and no 
 higher praise can I give to his dauntless courage —a boat-header on a sperm 
 whaler. Strong of arm and quick of eye, he was the very man to either throw 
 the harpoon or deal the death-giving thrust of the lance to the monarch of 
 the ocean world; but fate or circumstance had made him a missionary in¬ 
 stead. He was a fairly good missionary, but a better fisherman” (igoia: in). 
 
 Although Becke laments the fact that this man is a missionary, he por¬ 
 trays a “natural man,” Rousseau’s “man in the state nature,” whose resource¬ 
 fulness, strength, agility, and courage make him perfectly attuned to life 
 in the islands. Other images reinforce the noble nature of the Polynesian. 
 One people in the Paumotu (Taumotu) Group in the southeastern Pacific 
 is described as “one of the proudest, most self-reliant, and brave of any of 
 the Polynesian race, or their offshoots” (1902: 175). While the image of the 
 Polynesian man is one of courage and bravery, the image of the Polynesian 
 woman is one of seductive beauty. In the story “Collier: ‘The Blackbirder' 
 this beauty is contrasted with the violence of the labor trade. 12 Here, one of 
 
 134 THE APOTHEOSIS OF SAVAGERY 
 
Becke’s alter egos, Tom Denison, describes his encounter with the Tahitian 
 lover of a shipmate in highly erotic language. He focuses on the eyes, writing 
 that her “dark, melting eyes” were glowing as a result of her lover’s return. 
 Denison thinks how lucky is his shipmate and “this dark-faced daughter of 
 the blue Pacific to be the most witching little creature he had ever seen in 
 all his ocean wanderings” (1897a: 163). The beauty here is beguiling and be¬ 
 witching, casting a magic spell over those men who gaze upon it. The image 
 is one of being captured against one’s will and better judgment. Similar 
 kinds of eroticization of women’s bodies occur in other stories; for example, 
 a woman of Samoa is described as “a splendidly formed young woman, with 
 perfectly oval features and a wealth of long silken hair” (1897a: 180). Yet 
 another story about Samoa repeats a similar description; in this case the 
 woman is said to be “scarcely out of her girlhood” and “possessed to a very 
 great degree all that beauty of face and figure and vivacity of expression that 
 are met with in the Malayo-Polynesian races of the Pacific Islands” (1897a: 
 148). So, Becke’s images of Polynesian women repeat familiar Western dis¬ 
 courses from Bougainville to Michener, presenting the women as objects of 
 male erotic desire. 
 
 In contrast to the image of the noble and beautiful Polynesians, the Mela¬ 
 nesians of Becke’s stories are presented in almost entirely negative terms. 
 The dominant picture is of bloodthirsty and treacherous cannibals, with 
 few, if any, redeeming features—that is, the ignoble savage. As suggested 
 below, some Melanesians are so thoroughly bad that only a “few words” 
 are needed to typify them: “As for the natives of New Britain, a few words 
 will suffice. They were the most unmitigated savages, cowardly and treach¬ 
 erous, and with the exception of the people of the villages in the vicinity 
 of Blanche Bay, whose women wore a scanty girdle of leaves of the plant 
 Cordyline terminalis, they passed their lives in a state of stark nudity” (1899: 
 194). The Melanesian man is “cowardly and treacherous,” unlike the brave 
 and noble Polynesian. The women, too, are portrayed in negative contrast 
 to their Polynesian counterparts. The women of New Britain have no be¬ 
 guiling beauty; rather than their bodies being eroticized, their nakedness 
 is seen as a sign of primitiveness. Places such as New Britain, where Becke 
 was a trader for a short time, are also characterized by an unhealthy envi¬ 
 ronment that is likely to kill the white colonizer. If this does not occur, he 
 will probably be eaten: “If you don’t die of fever you’re pretty sure to get 
 knocked on the head and go down the nigger’s gullets,” Becke writes in one 
 story (Becke and Jeffery 1901: 127). In another story set in New Britain, the 
 
 1 35 
 
inhabitants are described as “fierce and treacherous” and “more or less ad¬ 
 dicted to cannibalism” (1899: 135). 
 
 The peoples of the Equatorial Pacific are given an equivocal position in 
 the racial hierarchy. On the one hand, the Ellice Islanders, like the Polyne¬ 
 sians, are represented sympathetically, as noble rather than ignoble. In one 
 story, for example, the Ellice Islanders are described as having a “gentle 
 nature and amiable character” (1898: 106). Like the image of the Polyne¬ 
 sian man as a fine fisherman, the Ellice Islanders are applauded for their 
 fishing skills. As Becke says, “From morn till night the frail canoes of these 
 semi-nude, brown-skinned, and fearless toilers of the sea may be seen by the 
 voyager paddling swiftly over the rolling swell of the wide Pacific” (1901a: 
 149). On the other hand, the Gilbert Islanders are represented as more akin 
 to the Melanesians, as ignoble rather than noble. Invariably, the Gilbert 
 Islanders are described as a “noisy, intractable lot of devils” (1967: 52), as 
 “fierce, wild-eyed, black-haired natives” (82), or as “wild and intractable 
 natives” (1901a: 109). As in many of his accounts, a description of an indi¬ 
 vidual suffices for a whole people: “These two men were like nearly all the 
 people of the Kingsmill Group [Gilbert Islands] —dark-skinned, strongly 
 built, and with a certain fierceness of visage, born of their warlike and quar¬ 
 relsome nature, and which never leaves them, even in their old age” (1902: 
 178). Rather than their inclination to attack whites being born of a history 
 of violent encounters with them, as Macdonald (1982: 23) has suggested, 
 the Gilbert Islanders are considered to have a naturally violent nature. Else¬ 
 where their violence is depicted as almost bestial: “the Gilbert Islander, 
 whose inborn fighting proclivities were showing in his gleaming eyes and 
 short, panting breaths” (1902: 210). 
 
 “Going Native” 
 
 It is in applying to whites the contrasting images of nobility and ignobility 
 that Becke subverts the view of a fixed racial and civilizational hierarchy. 
 His texts are laden with examples of black savagery, but the whites can also 
 reach those depths, and even surpass them. In this sense, the negative rep¬ 
 resentations of the blacks serve to show how far the whites have transgressed 
 racial and cultural boundaries. 
 
 At its most rudimentary, “going native” in Becke’s stories sometimes con¬ 
 sists merely of living on an island in a thatched hut, eating the local food, 
 and dressing as the locals do. Sometimes the whites have acquired various 
 
 136 THE APOTHEOSIS OF SAVAGERY 
 
local skills, such as climbing coconut palms or catching bonito. However, 
 “going native” often goes beyond these surface trappings to a more funda¬ 
 mental change of being —to living, behaving, and thinking as the natives do. 
 Some men, “[cjasting away the garb of civilisation and tying around their 
 loins the . . . grass girdle . . . soon became in appearance, manners, lan¬ 
 guage, and thoughts pure natives” (Becke 1895b: 161). 
 
 Occasionally, Becke’s main white character is a lone man, living on an 
 island and married to a local woman. More typically, there are several whites 
 living on the same island and married to local women. Often they have more 
 than one wife, and many have what is described in one story as an “ample 
 harem.” Licentiousness is a common character trait of many of the whites 
 he features. In the story “Hickson: A Half-Caste,” Becke describes the crews 
 of the American whaling fleet meeting at Ponape as “savagely licentious” 
 (1895b: 119). These stories convey the archetypal image of savagery as a state 
 of amorality where passions are totally unrestrained, and where excessive 
 lust, violence, and greed are standard behaviors. This is a world of primitive 
 excess, where the white traders and settlers succumb to the immoderation 
 usually attributed to the islanders. 
 
 Often the whites have come to look like the locals, with darkened skins 
 and tattooed bodies, as the following description suggests: “Both men were 
 dressed like natives, naked to the waist, and save where their girdles of ti 
 leaves protected their skins, their tattooed bodies and limbs were darkened 
 as deeply by the rays of a tropic sun as were those of their native associ¬ 
 ates” (i897a[i987]: 146). Racial and cultural identity is sometimes blurred 
 to such an extent that other whites are unable to discern the difference be¬ 
 tween the white “savage” and the black “savage.” In the story “An Honour 
 to the Service” (1895b), a white character has gone native to such a degree 
 that he is mistaken for a local chief by whites visiting the island. Even his 
 father, a member of the crew, does not recognize him. To live for a pro¬ 
 longed time without contact with other whites in the midst of the Pacific 
 islanders is to risk forgetting one’s identity as a white, to become one of the 
 locals. Toward the end of the story, after being flogged for striking the cap¬ 
 tain of a ship, this man proclaims that it is years since “I saw a white man, an’ 
 I’ve almost forgotten I was a white man once” (291). Of course all travelers 
 to foreign lands must to some extent adopt some of the lifestyle of the local 
 inhabitants, such as eating the food, wearing the clothes, and living in local 
 accommodations (Brantlinger ig88: 192). The point, however, is the par¬ 
 ticular way this is construed in these accounts. The adoption of the clothing 
 
 137 
 
and appearance of the Pacific islanders, or what Low (1993) calls cultural 
 cross-dressing, is not a matter of practicality or a subterfuge to infiltrate in¬ 
 digenous societies for purposes of governance, a theme apparent in some of 
 Kipling’s tales (see Kipling 1991: 24-29). In Becke’s stories, the adoption of 
 the customs of the other is depicted as a much deeper act. It is the adoption 
 of an inferior form of morality and lifestyle; it is to ^different and inferior, 
 to be a savage, and is thus a process of cultural and moral degeneration. 
 
 Becke’s stories present life in the Pacific as precarious and dangerous, 
 a place where one cannot retain one’s cultural and racial identity without 
 considerable and sustained effort and where one can easily give way to the 
 “dark” forces within. He describes “going native” as a process of moral and 
 social degeneration in which the whites descend into a savagery that is often 
 more ugly and morally repugnant than the treachery of the Melanesians or 
 the intractability of the Gilbert Islanders. Becke gives the reader images of 
 the colonist’s nightmare, the Kurtzian horror of Heart of Darkness. 
 
 Usually the whites in Becke’s stories are characterized by drunkenness 
 and brutality and, as we discuss later, they often meet a violent death. Many 
 are in the service of local chiefs as mercenaries and in one story are referred 
 to as “fighting-cocks ” because they often participate in the warfare between 
 groups, utilized for their fighting skills and competence with new forms of 
 weaponry, such as muskets and rifles. This association between white and 
 black often sees white pitted against white, and Becke’s stories abound with 
 whites killing one another in local wars or in acts of treachery and revenge. 
 Theirs is a world of passions out of control, of desire unrestrained, an image 
 usually ascribed to the ignoble other. 
 
 Although the actions of ignoble Pacific islanders are not usually as vile 
 as the “white savages,” Becke uses similar terms to describe both, such as 
 “rude,” "uncultured,” “treacherous,” “ferocious,” “monster,” “savage,” “tiger 
 in human form,” and “shameless degraded beings.” The acts whites per¬ 
 form in the Pacific are often considered “darker” than any they have per¬ 
 formed in their previous lives, showing the extent to which the Pacific is a 
 place where people lose their reason and allow their passions to run riot. 
 In one story Becke remarks that the locals are ”[l]ess cruel and treacherous 
 than their white associates" (lSgyaUpSy]: 73). Henry Deschard, a charac¬ 
 ter who has spent many vears roaming the islands of the Pacific escaping 
 retribution for a crime, is described as “darker than the Kurians them¬ 
 selves" and, in “his love of the bloodshed and slaughter that so often ran 
 riot in native quarrels,” Becke writes, “he surpassed even the fiercest native” 
 
 138 THE APOTHEOSIS OF SAVAGERY 
 
(1895b: 163). By using the same primitivist language to represent both colo¬ 
 nizer and colonized, the stories allude tellingly to one of the tensions of the 
 colonial venture: the dangerous extent of the colonizers’ fallibility in for¬ 
 eign lands. Instead of demonstrating the superiority of the colonizers, the 
 white traders and settlers succumb to the excesses usually attributed to their 
 “inferiors.” 
 
 The story “Prescott of Naura” illustrates this theme. This story is set on 
 Naura, an island near the Marshall Islands, known to the white traders 
 and seamen who visit it as Pleasant Island, although, from Becke’s descrip¬ 
 tion, pleasant it is not. The narrator immediately represents it as a wild 
 place, inhabited by “a teeming population of noisy, intractable savages” 
 (i897a[ig87]: 65). An escaped convict, Robert Prescott, described as having 
 a “most ferocious courage and cruel nature” and “savage spirit” (67), lands 
 here. He and an accomplice, at Prescott’s behest, poison a number of their 
 compatriots, who all die in excruciating pain. Illustrating the great depths 
 to which the whites have fallen, Becke writes that the local people, on hear¬ 
 ing the agonized groans, are moved to pity, and ask the two white men to 
 put an end to the misery. But the two villains have no pity and leave their 
 victims to a lingering death. Even the notoriously “wild” Pleasant Islanders 
 are filled with horror at the actions of Prescott and his accomplice, and both 
 villains are forced off the island. 
 
 The theme of a white “savagery” that exceeds that of the islanders is also 
 a dominant motif in “Martin of Nitendi.” This story describes the acts of 
 piracy of a white man living among an island people who attack and plun¬ 
 der a passing ship. Because of his acts of “reckless courage,” this man is 
 accepted into the local society and achieves a measure of authority and 
 influence that is surpassed only by the chief. As in many stories, he has as¬ 
 sumed “native garb” and wears a girdle of ti leaves and nothing else other 
 than a hat made of coconut leaves shading his “blood-shot” and “savage” 
 eyes from the sun. This character, Jim Martin, was put ashore by a whaling 
 vessel because of his mutinous conduct, and as a result he has dissociated 
 himself forever from civilization, becoming one of the most desperate and 
 blood-stained beachcombers that had “ever cursed the fair isles of the South 
 Pacific” (1901b: 103). Becke emphasizes that Martin’s previous identity as 
 a white man has been erased when he writes “he had been a White Man” 
 (101). Elsewhere, again emphasizing the “savage” state to which Martin has 
 fallen, Becke describes him as a “wild, naked creature” (102), a description 
 that also calls into question his humanity. He had indeed become “more a 
 
 139 
 
savage native than a white man” (105). The story ends with a punitive expe¬ 
 dition in pursuit of Martin for the massacre of a ship’s crew. He escapes into 
 the mountains but is eventually shot and mortally wounded by a soldier who 
 had thought he was a “nigger.” When Martin is found wounded by the lake, 
 his racial identity is called into question when a soldier asks him, “Who are 
 you? Are you a white man?” (111). 
 
 Of course not all the characters in Becke’s Pacific tales “go native,” and 
 when they do they do not necessarily descend to such extremes of violence. 
 Sometimes, there is a white who has “gone native” but has not succumbed 
 to the degenerate state of brutality of the vast majority of the other white 
 characters. In the story “In the Old, Beach-Combing Days,” there is Charles 
 Westall, who, “Unlike many of his class,” was “neither a drunkard nor a 
 ruffian” (i897a[ig87]: 27). Although Westall has not “gone native” in the 
 typical ways, he has done so in others. In the custom of the locals, he is 
 polygamous, with five wives and twenty to thirty children (27). Another story 
 tells of the madness of the captain of a whaling ship, a fanatically religious 
 New Englander, who is stranded in Ponape after his crew has deserted. After 
 living alone and hermit-like on his ship for a year, a sudden change in his 
 “character and conduct” takes place. Going ashore, he returns with five or 
 six women whom he keeps permanently aboard, keeping his “harem in lux¬ 
 ury” by stripping off and selling parts of the ship, such as the sails (1895b: 
 122). By the end of the year the boat was stripped, and the once fanatically 
 religious New Englander “went utterly, hopelessly mad” (122). 
 
 If the possibility of regression is an ever-present reality for those whites 
 who live in the racial and cultural borderlands of the Pacific, then the possi¬ 
 bility of redemption for those fallen characters is less possible. Once a white 
 man has “gone native,” the likelihood of his return to “civilization” is very 
 limited, if not impossible. Usually the story ends in violent death, or the con¬ 
 tinuation of that life as a “native.” As with Wiltshire in Stevenson’s The Beach 
 ofFalesa, who remarks that he is “stuck here,” many of Becke’s characters are 
 unable to escape the Pacific once they have fallen. The process of degen¬ 
 eration is, thus, conceived as a one-way journey. This is put most tellingly in 
 one of Becke’s stories when a white mercenary for a local chief, after seeing 
 a fellow' mercenary killed in an affray, in a sad echo of Walker’s words to his 
 mother ponders the future and asks quixotically of another beachcomber 
 whether they will meet the same fate: “I wonder if you an’ me is going to get 
 finished off like poor Tommy Lane? Or is you an’ me goin’ to spend all our 
 
 140 THE APOTHEOSIS OF SAVAGERY 
 
lives here among a race o’ savages, livin’ like ‘em, thinkin’ like em’, and dyin’ 
 like ’em?” (18973(1987]: 145). 
 
 As the beachcomber’s words suggest, once one has “gone native” there is 
 no alternative but to remain thus or die. Once the racial divide has been 
 crossed there is rarely any return to “civilization,” and most of the charac¬ 
 ters in Becke’s stories, as Brantlinger has remarked, remain “stranded in the 
 backwaters of Empire with nowhere to go” (1988: 41). For others who do not 
 meet with the treacherous and violent deaths that they have often meted 
 out to others, there is a restless wandering, in which the perpetrators of ab¬ 
 horrent acts spend their lives hoping their pasts will not catch up with them. 
 The notorious Prescott, for example, spends the rest of his life as an exile, 
 estranged from both the world into which he was born and the world into 
 which he has fallen, unable to escape his “black past” (1897314987]: 79). 
 
 Unlike many of Becke’s stories, where there is rarely an explanation for 
 the fall of men apart from their presence in the Pacific, Martin’s “vicious 
 nature” is partly explained by his upbringing in the convict system, which 
 Becke describes as “awful.” Both his mother and father had been convicts 
 and he grew up under the shadow of the gallows and the “cat” (whip). From 
 convict to “savagery,” the step, we are told, is not great: “From the simple, 
 loafing beachcomber stage of life to that of a leader of the natives in their 
 tribal wars was a simple but natural transition, and Jim Martin, son of a con¬ 
 vict father and mother whose forbears were of the scum of Liverpool, and 
 knew the prison better than the open air, followed the path ordained by 
 Fate” (igolb: 113). This passage is of particular interest because of its inflec¬ 
 tion of the racial discourse of degeneration with a class dimension. For a 
 lower-class person, whose forbears were the “scum of Liverpool,” the fall is 
 not so great or profound, but a fairly simple and natural transition. A simi¬ 
 lar theme is evident in the story “Prescott of Naura” mentioned above. Al¬ 
 though many of Prescott’s acts are explained by his presence in the Pacific, 
 they are also partly explained by his experiences of the penal system at Port 
 Arthur. “The cat took all of the white man out of me at Port Arthur,” he 
 says, “and for fifty years I lived with kanakas, and I am a kanaka now—back¬ 
 bone and soul” (18973(1987]: 85). This also illustrates that it is much more 
 likely that those who “go native” are those whose position in the class hier¬ 
 archy is lowest. 13 
 
 As Cooper and Stoler (1989: 614) have remarked, students of imperial¬ 
 ism have discussed class issues in two ways: either by examining the nature 
 
 ! 4 1 
 
of accumulation by the metropolitan capitalist classes, or by examining the 
 emergence of class among the colonized set in motion by capitalist intru¬ 
 sion. However, as they suggest, “class impinged in the making of empire 
 in other ways: constraining who came to the colonies, what class visions 
 they harbored, what features of European class culture were selectively re¬ 
 worked . . . and ultimately how racial boundaries were maintained” (614- 
 15). Only those of a certain class—the class to which Becke attaches him¬ 
 self—are capable of living and working in the Pacific without “going native.” 
 Just as Becke supports the maintenance of racial boundaries, he supports 
 the maintenance of class boundaries. Only members of certain classes are 
 considered to have the moral fortitude and respectability to resist the temp¬ 
 tations to excess that the Pacific offers in the Western imagination. 
 
 Thus, Becke s stories can be read as allegories cautioning travelers and 
 colonizers to be wary when they enter the realm of the “primitive,” warning 
 of the danger of transgressing the racial divide. To all those who do not have 
 the right class position and sufficient masculine character, they serve as a 
 warning to be wary. 14 
 
 “ Manliness” 
 
 Occasionally Becke’s stories feature men who personify the requisite char¬ 
 acteristics and do not fall. One such figure is Henry Lefrancois, who, writes 
 Becke, despite his French name is English to the backbone. In an act of 
 heroism worthy of the empire, Lefrancois first kills two treacherous men 
 who had slaughtered an entire ship’s crew in an attempt to steal its valuables 
 and cargo, and then single-handedly sails the ship to safety. Later he settles 
 in Hawaii, where he gains the respect of both natives and Europeans for 
 his “sterling, straightforward character, courage, and all-round manliness of 
 disposition” (1905: 267). It is these attributes that make this man noble, a 
 colonist of character who, far from falling in the Pacific, proves himself. Un¬ 
 like the unfortunate and pious New 7 Englander mentioned above, who fell 
 despite having sufficient “character and conduct,” Lefrancois does not fall. 
 Character and conduct as class-based virtues are not enough in themselves, 
 but must be supplemented with other virtues, particularly manliness. 
 
 Becke’s humorous stories featuring Tom Denison, his alter ego, and Saun- 
 derson provide additional evidence of this. Saunderson is a partner in the 
 firm that oras the ship on which Denison is supercargo, and features in the 
 stories “Saunderson and the Dynamite,” “Saunderson and the Devilfish,” 
 
 142 THE APOTHEOSIS OF SAVAGERY 
 
and “Denison Gets Even with Saunderson.” Saunderson is the type of per¬ 
 son who has finely developed the art of annoying people. To the chagrin of 
 others, he is not averse to telling people how to do their work, and his in¬ 
 eptitude lands him constantly in trouble. As Becke writes: “he was a fearful 
 bore, a great intermeddler with other people’s affairs, and was always get¬ 
 ting himself into trouble over his officiousness, and then blaming Denison” 
 (1967: 167). He annoys Denison by suggesting that the job of supercargo is 
 superfluous. Despite his bourgeois position and pious nature, it would seem 
 that he does not have the requisite character to be a successful colonizer. 
 Saunderson fails because he lacks the “courage, and all-round manliness of 
 disposition” of Lefrancois, an attribute that has been strengthened through 
 long practical experience. Far from having a long history of working in the 
 Pacific, which would have tried and tested his masculinity, making him a 
 better man, Saunderson has only the experience of two brief voyages. Far 
 from his actions being governed by the masculine virtues of courage and 
 self-control, they are governed by impetuousness and stupidity, as Becke’s 
 accounts of him humorously show. Through such characters as Saunderson 
 and others who “go native,” Becke authors himself in his fiction as one who 
 manfully maintains his cultural and racial identity and integrity. 
 
 Through the third-person voice of the narrator, Becke distances, and so 
 fashions, himself as different from these “white natives.” He writes predomi¬ 
 nantly from a position of ethnocentric and moral superiority, as one who 
 personifies the virtues of the colonial entrepreneur, having both the requi¬ 
 site “character and conduct” and the “manliness of disposition” to negotiate 
 the morally and physically testing environment he construes the Pacific to 
 be. As in his letters, he represents himself as being willing to take risks, able 
 to take adversity in his stride, and having the moral and physical fortitude 
 to withstand the temptations to fall. 
 
 When he features in the stories directly through an authorial “I” he repre¬ 
 sents himself as a colonist with the ideal character and type of masculinity. 
 An example of this is his account of his stay on Kusaie, in which he dis¬ 
 tances himself from “Bully” Hayes, whose treatment of the local inhabitants 
 he abhors. Further, when he adopts the pseudonym of Tom Denison, the 
 substance of the stories is often significantly different from his tales of fallen 
 whites. Many of these stories are humorous and present a less “dark” side of 
 the colonial venture. 
 
 Emerging from the context of the imperial expansion of the late nine¬ 
 teenth century, Becke’s Pacific tales speak candidly of the imperial and 
 
 M 3 
 
colonial venture, articulating a counterdiscourse that suggests that the colo¬ 
 nizing venture was not exactly the triumph portrayed by imperial history, 
 but was fraught with contradictions. Walker’s letters also speak poignantly 
 of the failures of the colonial venture. They record a succession of economic 
 failures much like Becke’s, and foreshadow his own pathetic death in the 
 cause of colonial trade. Neither Walker nor Becke gives us a picture of the 
 successes of the civilizing mission. 
 
 Walker instead exposes the problematic nature of what Pratt (1992) has 
 called the contact zone, that colonial space where cultures meet and inter¬ 
 act. His letters suggest that the contact zone is a place of instability not 
 only for the colonizers but for the colonized as well. When he writes that 
 those “savages” who have been to the “white man’s country” are the “biggest 
 rogues,” he is suggesting that if the colonizers are physically and morally 
 corrupted by their sojourns in the tropics, a similar thing happens to the 
 colonized who journey in the opposite direction. The “savage” in this view 
 is not redeemed and elevated from his morally fallen state by his contact 
 with the “civilized” world, as missionary narratives hold, but is corrupted by 
 the encounter. Repeating the view that movement from one’s proper place 
 opens the potential for moral degeneration, this is a reassertion of a racial 
 hierarchy and a statement that the colonized should stay where they are — 
 at the bottom. Despite his occasional sympathy for those local people suf¬ 
 fering from the harshness of the labor trade or his affection for the boy who 
 does his domestic labor, Walker’s writings speak for the colonial venture and 
 the ideas of racial hierarchy on which it is founded. Nevertheless, though 
 a supporter of colonialism, his writings undermine the colonial venture by 
 narrating a dissonant tale of failure. 
 
 We have suggested that in their writings Walker and Becke articulate 
 some of the contradictions of colonial discourse and thought. These go far 
 beyond the economic failures they both experienced, to enunciate the view 
 that the colonizing culture is threatened and called into question in zones 
 of intercultural contact. If the world of the primitive other is constructed in 
 the wider colonial discourse as a place to which people journey in search of 
 adventure, pleasure, or profit, then the writings of Becke and Walker sug¬ 
 gest that such journeys are not without risk. Similarly, if the space of the 
 primitive other is constituted as the testing ground for character, where, 
 through acts of “derring do,” the masculine self is realized, then the writings 
 of Walker and Becke illustrate that this, too, is not without risk and danger. 
 Although it was desirable to travel to the place of the primitive other, there 
 
 144 THE APOTHEOSIS OF SAVAGERY 
 
was the possibility that one could fall, to become like that other. Thus if, as 
 Stoler and Cooper have recently argued, a basic tension of empire is “that 
 the otherness of the colonised persons was neither inherent nor stable” 
 (1997: 7) and had to be defined and maintained, this also pertains to the 
 colonizer. As we have shown, this is evident in the writings of Walker and 
 Becke, who present a vision of the colonizing venture always on the verge of 
 rupture and the colonizers struggling to maintain their racial and cultural 
 identity, which is constantly called into question and challenged. Thus, on 
 the one hand, when Walker writes that he is becoming unfit to return home 
 he is articulating a view that his identity as a colonizer has been called into 
 question, that he has been debased by the colonial venture to the level of 
 the colonized. Becke, on the other hand, protects himself from this dreadful 
 possibility of “going native” by writing himself as a colonist with character 
 rather than as a bad colonist. 
 
 The similarities between Becke’s and Walker’s experiences in the Pacific 
 are striking. Both wrote to their mothers at contemporaneous times, both 
 worked as traders and supercargoes, both were shipwrecked and had en¬ 
 counters with recalcitrant Pacific islanders. Yet there are equally remarkable 
 differences. Despite his failures, the confident and self-assured Becke fash¬ 
 ions himself as a good colonist through his writings. The unconfident and 
 ineffectual Walker, on the other hand, fails to fashion himself into anything 
 but a bad colonist. His repeated representation of himself as an “awfully 
 bad hand” at writing epitomizes his attitude of helplessness against the tide 
 of events and the power of others. If Becke fashions himself as an ideal type, 
 Walker represents himself as incapable of attaining ideals. He seems unable 
 to direct his own life toward a chosen end, and instead remains a help¬ 
 less victim of circumstance, to an extent that readers may find exasperating. 
 Paradoxically, however, his very inability to write and his very helplessness 
 amount to a gift: for readers more than a century later, his letters enable 
 us to understand the most glorious moment of empire from the vantage 
 point of the poor white, which has generally been obscured by imperialist 
 and anti-imperialist narratives alike. Walker shows the project, albeit inad¬ 
 vertently, as a struggle that was as futile as it was harsh. 
 
 *45 
 
# Epilogue: Figures in History 
 
 The posthumous life of Louis Becke could be seen as a continuation of 
 the lapse into obscurity that marked the writer’s last years. It is true that 
 his books, frequently reissued in the first decades of the twentieth century, 
 have not totally disappeared from view. One of his best collections, By Reef 
 and Palm (1894), w'as reprinted in 1955 and 1970; one set was translated 
 into German in the 1960s; and another collection appeared in facsimile as 
 recently as the late 1980s. Yet his readership is hardly the broad one that 
 he once enjoyed. He is known, not so much to those looking simply for an 
 adventurous tale, but to those with an interest, and probably an academic 
 interest, in Australian literary studies. His place in history lies in short to 
 medium-length entries in reference works such as The Oxford Companion to 
 Australian Literature and the Australian Dictionary of Biography, as well as in 
 A. Grove Day’s (1967) fairly pedestrian commentaries. It is highly likely that 
 he is norv read and cited most frequently by those engaged in the critique of 
 colonial fiction, such as Robert Dixon (1995) and ourselves. Only those con¬ 
 cerned with the deconstruction of imperial culture, it seems, are concerned 
 to keep this particular author of imperialist fantasy alive. 
 
 If Becke has a small place in history, one might think that Vernon Lee 
 Walker has none at all. He certainly has no place in public historical con¬ 
 sciousness in Australia or anywhere else; he scarcely figures even in the pub¬ 
 lished corpus of specialist scholarly history on the Pacific islands, outside 
 a couple of passing references (e.g., Scarr 1990: 145). Yet he once figured 
 in a private, familial historical imagining. His niece, Helen Maria Williams, 
 resident in Western Australia, wrote to the historian John Cumpston in the 
 early 1960s about a trip she had made to Vanuatu, then the New Hebri¬ 
 des. It seems that she had gone, principally, in order to make some kind of 
 contact with the place in which her uncles had w'orked, and where Lee had 
 died, even though she did not travel to Pentecost itself. 
 
 Visited New Hebrides in June of this year. Received with hospitality by 
 the New'man family, going first of all to Oscar Newman at Tisman on 
 Malekula. Was taken to Port Sandwich, where, in pouring rain and such 
 humidity as I had never before encountered, I found the old aban- 
 
doned Soldier’s cemetary in which Uncle Lee had been buried —the 
 whole gloomy place undermined with land crabs down whose holes I 
 fell repeatedly . . . 
 
 While staying with Olive and Stan Breusch at Oaba [Aoba, now Am- 
 bae], a native from Pentecost related the story of the murder which had 
 been passed on to him by his father—also sang a song made up about 
 it which he said was still sung and danced to!!! in the village. The story 
 was as written in letters but a grisly bit added about one poor native 
 with yaws, who could not run and hid when the soldiers came and who 
 was taken by the soldiers, after the village was burnt, etc., and strung 
 up the mast of the ship and shot. He also said that Lee was known and 
 liked by the coastal tribes but it so happened that fatal morning that 
 an inland tribe was down on shore and the chief’s wives were all out 
 on the reef collecting whatever they do collect there, when the boat 
 rowed ashore with [the] white man standing up in it holding out some 
 trade goods and one [of] the women made a grab at it and it looked as 
 though she was being dragged into [the] boat and, as there had been 
 a lot of women stealing by whaling crews going on, the chief shot him 
 and hacked him to pieces. 
 
 In Vila, at the Joint Court, I saw records in both uncles’ hand writing 
 of the purchase and sale of land, the former, bearing the names of sev¬ 
 eral natives with unpronounceable names, who were only able to put a 
 cross against their names and who sold some 1000 acres for about £75 
 worth of trade goods. 
 
 This land was at Port Sandwich, on which the French Residency now 
 stands. There did not seem to be any record of land mentioned as being 
 owned at Pentecost. (NLA MS 904) 
 
 This fragment indicates, intriguingly, that Walker not only remained alive, 
 in some sense, for Helen Williams, but also for some of the people of Pente¬ 
 cost. The man who related this account may well have added the point that 
 Walker was liked by the locals specifically for his listener’s benefit; the sig¬ 
 nificance of the ancestor for the descendent would hardly have been lost on 
 the average Melanesian. However, it is equally possible that this was true, 
 and the rest of the narrative is entirely consistent with the kinds of antago¬ 
 nisms that existed between coastal and bush peoples, and with the cycles 
 of reciprocal violence that incidents of violence and kidnapping occasioned 
 during the years of disorderly colonial trade. 
 
 This text provides us with a glimpse of indigenous historical imagining 
 
 H7 
 
that this book has otherwise neglected. The nature of its particular inquiry 
 has perforce confined us within the uncertainties and contradictions of a 
 European archive. In general, we are unable to reconstruct how Becke, or 
 the figures like Walker upon whom he based his characters, were perceived 
 bv the Fijians who dived for coins, by Noumea houseboys, or by those who 
 engaged in trade in Micronesia and Vanuatu. It is vital to recall that there 
 were many other perceptions of these actors, and perhaps many other ways 
 of narrating their successes and failures. Yet, if the composition of this book 
 has been dogged bv a lingering concern that we are rehabilitating bad colo¬ 
 nists, it is just possible that Vernon Lee Walker has, over the past hundred 
 vears. figured in indigenous histories in ways that he could not have antici¬ 
 pated and that we cannot now reconstruct. 
 
 148 
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
# Notes 
 
 Introduction 
 
 1 I have not ventured here to discuss cross-cultural variation in the value and use of 
 letters, a topic discussed in an exemplary manner by Besnier (1995: chs. 4 and 5). 
 Although his discussion is most illuminating concerning the specific investments in 
 letters in Nukulaelae (a Polynesian atoll) culture, some of the points he makes are 
 more widely suggestive: “Events like letter writing and reading on Nukulaelae thus 
 hypercognize affect: emotions are referred to more overtly and frequently than in 
 other communicative events”; “Nukulaelae Islanders define letter writing and reading 
 as affectively cathartic contexts, in which certain types of emotions are hypercog- 
 nized”(in). 
 
 1. “An Awfully Bad Hand, at Letter Writing": Vernon Lee Walker 
 and Colonial History 
 
 1 For general background, see Scarr (1967) and Howe (1984), and on labor recruiting 
 specifically, Corris (1973), Moore (1985), and Jolly (1987). These include citations to 
 many primary texts and publications of the period that incorporate much richer de¬ 
 scriptions of trading and labor recruiting than Walker’s. 
 
 2. The Letters of Vernon Lee Walker, 1878-1887 
 
 1 Walker’s punctuation is idiosyncratic. Instead of a full stop he usually uses a some¬ 
 what decorative mark which looks like an equal sign. These have been replaced with 
 full stops throughout his letters. 
 
 2 Note written on page: “Lee was killed Dec 21st, 1887. Cyril W. Walker.” 
 
 3 Margin Note: “Lee was killed on 21st and buried on 22nd.” 
 
 Newspaper clipping pinned to page 3 with handwritten note: “Cutting from Keble’s 
 Margate and Ramsgate Gazette.—dated 16 Feb 1889”: 
 
 — MURDER OF EUROPEANS IN THE SOUTH SEAS. 
 
 According to advice received on Monday from New Zealand, her Majesty’s ship 
 Opal returned to Auckland at the end of December from a cruise among the islands 
 of the South Seas, the natives of which had murdered a number of Europeans. The 
 Opal ascertained at Apia that no fewer than four persons had recently been mur¬ 
 dered and then mutilated. One of these was a Swede, and a second a French half 
 caste. Three of the murdered men were first cast ashore, their boat having capsized. 
 On arrival at Port Sandwich it was found that the natives had made a murderous 
 
attack on a Queensland trading vessel, and that the Government agent, a Mr Cecil, 
 had received most serious wounds. Prior to taking any action here, it was decided 
 to proceed to Pentecost Island, where a Mr Vernon Lee Walker and a boat’s crew 
 had been treacherously murdered. A friendly chief afforded the required infor¬ 
 mation as to the guilty tribe, and the chief of the offending natives was forthwith 
 summoned to come on board the Opal, and pay the penalty of his misdeeds, or war 
 would be declared. In reply, the chief sent a refusal, but offered as a reparation, a 
 man and two pigs. He next offered to give up the "actual murderer," but no notice 
 was taken of this offer inasmuch as forty or more were concerned in the attack. 
 The surf was heavy, and the men could not well land, but the village was bom¬ 
 barded, the natives flying into the bush. At Port Sandwich the Opal was joined by 
 the French man-of-war Fabert, and each vessel, proceeding to Si, landed together 
 120 men. These marched to the village, the natives flying at their approach, and 
 having burned all the huts, and destroyed all they possibly could of the plantations, 
 returned on board. The vessels parted company here. The Opal visited Paama, and 
 burned the village there, and then left for New Zealand. 
 
 3. Self-Fashioning and Savagery: Louis Becke’s Pacific Letters 
 
 1 Louis Becke (1902: 217). 
 
 2 For studies that consider the ways the colonizers themselves were imagined, see 
 Cooper and Stoler (1989), Eves (1998), Stoler (1989a, 1989b, 1995), and Thomas 
 (1994). 
 
 3 Further biographical details on Becke can be found in the introduction to Day (1966, 
 1967, 1987), Maude (1956, 1967), and Michener and Day (1957)- Discussions of his 
 work can be found in Baird (1956), Day (1966, 1967, 1987), Dixon (1995), Ingram 
 (1937), and Thomas (1993). 
 
 4 The supercargo was responsible for the trade store on a ship, serving to replenish the 
 stock of land-based trade stores. 
 
 5 As noted above, the charges were dismissed, Becke having played no part in obtain¬ 
 ing the ship. 
 
 6 In his later writings Becke presents a far more complex and informed picture of the 
 local inhabitants, despite his use of the language of race. 
 
 7 Or w'hat Brantlinger has referred to as “New Imperialism” (1988: ix). 
 
 8 There are, of Course, also marked differences because their objectives and scope tend 
 to vary. “The objective of autobiography is a life, not simply a record of the things 
 which have ‘touched upon’ an existence,” w'hich is what letters tend to recount (Wein- 
 traub 1975: 824). 
 
 4. The Letters of Louis Becke, 1880-1882 
 
 1 According to Firth (1977: 8), after fluctuating from as high as £22 per ton at the end 
 of the 1870s to £15 in 1881, and back to £20 in 1882, the European price of copra 
 entered a decline from which it did not recover until 1901. 
 
 I5O NOTES 
 
2 Scarr, for example, suggests that “The High Commissioner’s success in bringing 
 British offenders to justice was very slight indeed” (1967: 162). For a much fuller ac¬ 
 count of the difficulties of the Western Pacific High Commission in governing British 
 subjects, see in particular Scarr (1967) and Brookes (1972: 416). 
 
 3 Though Munro is quick to dismiss the use of material deriving from Becke in relation 
 to the trading venture of De Wolf and Company because of factual inaccuracies, he 
 utilizes material from Becke that has come second-hand through Day. 
 
 4 Tom De Wolf, to whom Becke dedicated one of his books, and who is often mentioned 
 in his stories, was on quite good terms with Becke and never stringently adhered to 
 these instructions. He was evidently involved in supplying guns on credit to a group 
 of Samoans from the Malietoa party for their wars (Munro 1980: 34). Becke, on the 
 other hand, suggests that to help free the country “from the hated Germans,” Tom 
 De Wolf lent Malietoa a large sum of money to pay off his debt to the great German 
 trading firm (1895a: 287). Whatever the case, it certainly illustrates that De Wolf was 
 not averse to meddling in local politics himself. 
 
 5 Certainly from the account of Alfred Restieaux, one of the traders Becke met on 
 Nanumea, not all of De Wolf’s employees followed his strictures. The captain in 
 charge of The Venus often found refuge in the bottle and was incapable of performing 
 his duties to such an extent that the British consul in Samoa sent a telegraph to the 
 firm’s head office in London informing them of his neglect (Munro 1980: 26-27). 
 
 6 George P. Winchcombe 1881-1887, Diary, in Louis Becke Papers, Microfilm CY Reel 
 491 of Dixson Library Manuscript 159, ML Safe 1/8. 
 
 7 Hernsheim and Company was a trading firm established by Captain Eduard Hern- 
 sheim in the 1870s and seems to have been very successful. As Firth (1978: 115) has 
 noted, and I am relying on his account here, Hernsheim was notable as one of the few 
 speculative traders of any period in the Pacific islands whose commercial venture was 
 profitable. At its height, he had trading stations in the Caroline and Marshall Islands, 
 where his brother Franz was stationed from 1878, and in the islands of the Bismarck 
 Archipelago, such as the Duke of York Islands, in New Ireland and New Britain, where 
 Eduard was based. Although Becke does not specify who he had worked for in New 
 Britain, it is very likely that it was for Hernsheim, whose trading interests there were 
 extensive. Unlike De Wolf and Company, who sought reputable traders, Hernsheim 
 was not so discerning. One of his agents recruited four traders in Ponape in 1877 
 because they were prepared to work in parts of the Pacific where few whites had ven¬ 
 tured, but they were “all degenerate and addicted to drink, always ready for a fight 
 and carrying a revolver” (Hernsheim cited in Firth 1978: 119). 
 
 8 On Anglo-German rivalry in the Pacific, see Knight (1977), Masterman (1934), and 
 Scarr (1967). 
 
 9 On the German New Guinea Company, see Firth (1972). On German firms more gen¬ 
 erally in the Pacific, see Firth (1977, 1978) and Spoehr (1963). 
 
y. The Apotheosis of Savagery: Louis Becke's Pacific Tales 
 
 1 This chapter heading is taken from the title of one of the reviews of Becke’s collection 
 of stories entitled Pacific Tales. Of course not all Becke's stories present this theme. 
 His writings are varied and many are humorous and lighthearted. 
 
 2 Degeneration was also a common theme in the metropolitan centers of Europe in 
 the late nineteenth century. See Bowler (1989: 196-97), Buckley (1967), Greenslade 
 (1994), Morton (1984), Pick (1989), Siegel (1985), and Torgovnick (1990). 
 
 3 See also Stepan (1982, 1985), Stocking (1968), and Thomas (1996). 
 
 4 Degeneration is a common theme in narratives of white travel and residence in tropi¬ 
 cal lands. There are a considerable number of nonfiction accounts from the Pacific. 
 The Methodist missionary Burton refers to some whites who lived in Fiji as “men who 
 sank lower than the lowest savage, and found delight in deeds of blood and abhorrent 
 cruelty” (1944: 12). In an earlier work he suggests that these whites “lived lives that 
 out-rivalled, in filthiness and wickedness, the cannibal Fijian” (1910: 23). There is also 
 the case of John Renton, discussed by Becke (Becke and Jeffery 1901: 101-12), Holt- 
 house (1988), and Marwick (1935). Charles Savage, probably one of those Burton is 
 referring to, is discussed by Davidson (1975) and by Orr (1977) in a novel based on 
 his life. For discussions that touch on "going native” in other colonial fiction, see 
 Brantlinger (1988), Katz (1987), Low (1993), Parry (1993: 228), and Street (1975). 
 For discussions that explore this in relation to literature about the Pacific, such as 
 R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, see Street (1975), Green (1989), and Hannabuss 
 (1989). For Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Beach of Falesa and The Ebb Tide, see Brant¬ 
 linger (1988: 39-42). 
 
 5 He also wrote a collection of stories from his time in France, Sketches from Normandy. 
 
 6 Among these are “Tarria, the Swimmer,” already mentioned, and others such as “A 
 Truly Great Man: a Mid-Pacific Sketch,” “The Trader’s Wife,” “Chester’s ‘Cross,’ ’’ “Col¬ 
 lier, the Blackbirder,” and “The Shadows of the Dead.” Others based in the Gilbert 
 and Ellice Islands are “Pakia,” “Solepa,” “The Fisher Folk of Nukufetau,” “The ‘Palu’ 
 of the Equatorial Pacific,” “The Rangers of the Tia Kau,” “The Brothers-in-Law: A 
 Tale of the Equatorial Islands,” “The Strange Adventure of James Shervinton,” “ ‘Pig- 
 Headed’ Sailor Men,” “Apinoka of Apamama,” “The Fate of the Alida,” “Mrs. Malle- 
 son’s Rival,” “The Peruvian Slavers,” “A Question of Precedence,” “Long Charley’s 
 Good Little Wife,” and “A Hundred Fathoms Deep." 
 
 7 Such as “The Methodical Mr Burr of Majuru,” “A Point of Theology on Maduro,” and 
 “The Strange White Woman of Maduro.” 
 
 8 During the height of his literary career at the turn of the century he was compared 
 favorably to Kipling, being referred to as the Kipling of the Pacific. Becke knew 
 Kipling personally, being a neighbor of his in Eastbourne where he lived for some of 
 his time in England. During his stay in London he was very familiar with the literary 
 scene and often included discussion of literary figures and recent novels in his column 
 “London Notes” in the Sydney Evening News. He was a great admirer of Stevenson and 
 thought that the Beach of Falesa, a tale of trading life in the Pacific, was the best novel 
 of Polynesian life since Kingsley and Pembroke’s South Sea Bubbles (Becke 1895a). He 
 
 I52 NOTES 
 
would undoubtedly have known of Conrad, but whether he was a source of literary 
 inspiration is unclear. Conrad is reputed to have known and admired Becke’s work 
 (Day 1987: 7). 
 
 9 Westminster Gazette 30 August 1997. For more of his views on German colonialism, see 
 Becke (1899-1900). In collaboration with Walter Jeffery, Becke also wrote a glowing 
 account of George Grey’s contribution to the British Empire (1898). 
 
 10 He refers occasionally to Germans who are “White men,” meaning that they behave 
 like whites and not blacks. 
 
 11 Having its origins in some of the writings of scientists on Cook’s voyages of explo¬ 
 ration to the South Seas in the eighteenth century, it was developed more fully by 
 D’Urville in the early part of the nineteenth century (Thomas 1989). It was, and still 
 is, widely deployed by anthropologists and by many of the missionaries evangelizing 
 in the Pacific in the early part of the twentieth century (Eves 1996). This division also 
 features in other fictional writings on the Pacific, such as those by Jack London, writ¬ 
 ten at the turn of the century (Eves 1998). 
 
 12 This story is apparently based on an incident involving a labor recruiter from Fiji who, 
 finding himself short of supplies, off-loaded eighty Gilbert Islanders onto a vessel 
 bound for Tahiti. The Gilbert Islanders escaped from the hold, and in the ensuing 
 fight the captain, some of the crew, and a number of the Gilbert Islanders were killed. 
 A member of the crew blew up a section of the ship to thwart the attackers, and the 
 surviving Gilbert Islanders swam to a nearby island (Macdonald 1982: 60 and see also 
 Newbury 1956: 164). 
 
 13 Lombroso’s criminal anthropology comes to mind here. It explains criminal behavior 
 through the same language of race and class, saturated with ideas of regression, ata¬ 
 vism, and degeneration. For a discussion of the primitivism in Lombroso, see Gould 
 (1981). 
 
 14 In a number of colonies, the problem of whites “going native” was addressed by con¬ 
 trolling immigration into the colony, as well as movement of both colonizers and 
 colonized. For a brief discussion of this, see Eves (1998), and for a more comprehen¬ 
 sive discussion, see Stoler (1989a, 1989b). 
 
 *53 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 159 
 

 
 
 
# Index 
 
 Alcohol and drunkenness, 24-25, 31, 32, 
 118, 122, 138 
 Archibald, J. F., 81 
 
 Artifacts, xiv, 14, 27, 37. See also Curiosi¬ 
 ties; Letters, as artifacts 
 Australia. See Becke, Louis: in Australia; 
 
 Walker, Vernon Lee: in Australia 
 Autobiography, 86-87 
 
 Beachcombers, 11, 12, 131, 140-41 
 Becke, Alfred, 110-11, 116-17, 120 
 Becke, Aubrey, 120, 122 
 Becke, Louis, xxi-xxii, 71, 79-145, 146; in 
 Australia, 81, 82, 128, 132; biographies 
 of, 84-85; and civility, 117; in Europe, 
 82; and failure, 79, 83, 120-24, 126, 
 
 132; in Gilbert (Kiribati) and Ellice 
 (Tuvalu) Islands, 81, 82, 93-125, 132, 
 134, 136; and landscape, 83-84, 96-97, 
 113-15; and letter writing, 82, 83, 96, 
 114, 131, 143; in Marshall Islands, 81, 
 
 82, 126-28, 132; publications, 80, 82, 
 111-12, 123-24, 128, 131-45, 152 n.8; 
 relations with islanders, 84, 86, 98-99, 
 102-3, 10 5 > 10 7 > 118, 120-22; in Samoa, 
 81; and selfhood, 114-15, 131, 143; and 
 self-fashioning, 80, 83-86, 107, 111- 
 12, 114-15, 117, 123-24, 143, 145; and 
 trade, 80, 82-83, 93, 95-96, 98-103, 
 108, 116-17, 120, 126-27, 132; writing 
 career, 81-82, 114, 128, 131-45, 146, 
 
 152 n.8 
 
 Bully Hayes: Buccaneer, 89 
 By Reef and Palm, 82, 84, 146 
 
 Cannibalism, 14, 24, 28, 36, 37, 60, 135- 
 
 36 
 
 Character, 86-87, * 44 _ 45 
 Chiefs, 14, 27, 28, 30-31 
 Churches and church-going, 21, 30, 42 
 Civility, 7, 11, 14, 16, 54, 56, 61, 70-72 
 Civilizing of the self, xxii 
 Class, 83, 87, 141-42 
 Collecting, xiv, 14, 27, 37 
 Colonial governance, 7, 12-14, 41, 60, 72, 
 83, 101-3, 127-28 
 
 Colonial writings, xxi-xxii, 3, 6-7, 11, 15, 
 16, 36-37, 70, 72, 84, 87, 146, 152 n.4. 
 See also Becke, Louis: Publications 
 Colonialism, 11-16, 85, 102, 128, 132- 
 33, 143-45; analysis of, xxi-xxii, 4-5, 
 
 14, 16, 70, 79, 82, 84-85, 131-45; and 
 failure, 16, 144-45; imagination and 
 narration of, 6-7, 15, 54-55, 86-89, 
 !3 1_ 45i ar, d landscape, 14-15, 41, 84. 
 
 See also Colonial governance; Landscape: 
 and possession; Landscape: Colonial 
 impact on 
 
 Colonists: and adventure, 115; and failure, 
 xxi, 6, 16, 54, 69, 72, 73, 79, 83, 131, 
 144. See also Identity: colonial 
 Conrad, Joseph, 16, 132, 152-53 n.8 
 Curiosities 27, 30-31, 34. See also Artifacts 
 
 Dance, 27-28 
 
 De Wolf and Company (merchants), 96, 
 98-100, 105-7, in. 114-15. 116-17, J 5i 
 11.4-5 
 
 De Wolf (trader). See De Wolf and Com¬ 
 pany (merchants) 
 
 Degeneration, xxi, xxii, 6, 56, 61, 69, 70- 
 71, 87-89, 109-10, 111-12, 119, 124, 131, 
 135. 136-42, 144-45, 15 2 n -4! ^ class, 
 141-142. See also “Going native” 
 
Dening, Greg, 2, 5 
 
 Denison, Tom, 142-43 
 
 Dress, 24, 26, 27, 30, 63, 66, 120-21 
 
 Erotics of writing, 5 
 Evolutionary theory, 7, 14, 71, 79 
 Exhibitions (Intercolonial), 39, 47 
 
 Fiction/nonfiction, xxii, 70, 84-85 
 Fiji. See Walker, Vernon Lee: in Fiji 
 Fishing. See Hunting 
 
 Gilbert (Kiribati) and Ellice (Tuvalu) 
 Islands. SeeBecke, Louis: in Gilbert 
 (Kiribati) and Ellice (Tuvalu) Islands 
 “Going native,” 70-71, 85, 86-89, m-12, 
 131, 136-42, 145, 152 n. 4 , 153 n.14. See 
 also Degeneration 
 
 Hayes, “Bully,” 81, 143 
 Henderson and McFarlane (merchants), 
 116-17, 120-21, 126-27 
 Hernsheim and Company (merchants), 
 126-28, 151 n.7 
 His Native Wife, 71 
 
 History, the writing of, 1, 13, 16-17, 79 . 
 
 84, 131, 144, 146-48 
 Hunting, 24, 25, 29, 31, 33, 43, 67, 72, 
 123-24 
 
 Identity: colonial, xx-xxii, 4-7, 16, 70-72, 
 85-89, 131, 142, 143; cultural, 88-8g, 
 13 1 , 137-38, 140-41, 143, 144; racial, 
 xxi, 87-88, 112, 137-42, 143. See also 
 Masculinity 
 
 Illness, 21, 31, 40, 44, 45, 50, 57, 59-60, 
 61, 67, 68, 69, 73, 122-23, 12 7 
 Imperialism, 11, 16, 85, 87, 133, 143-45 
 Islanders: agency, xxi; control of exchange, 
 11, 93; and employment, 58-60, 73, 
 99-100, 109; interactions with traders, 
 26, 58-60, 63-64, 69, 93-95, 122, 
 
 133; intermarriage, 71, 88, 104, 117- 
 
 18, 137; as missionaries, 93, 102-3, l 34'> 
 responses to Europeans, 26, 72, 93, 122 
 
 Journalism, 13, 24, 35-37, 123, 127, 149- 
 5 ° n -3 
 
 Labor, 2, 37; migration, 12; and morality, 
 26, 70; opportunities in Australia, 50; 
 for planters and traders, 41, 58-59, 64, 
 69, 73, 75; trade, 11, 31, 60, 134. See also 
 Islanders: and employment 
 Landscape: and belonging, 15, 70; colonial 
 impact on, 70, 84; and possession, 14- 
 15, 41; representations of, 14-16, 36, 
 
 83 
 
 Letters: as artifacts, 1-4, 86; as cultural 
 documents, xxi; and distance, 2-4, 5-6; 
 and self-definition, xxi, xxii, 3, 4-6, 85- 
 87; social role of, xxii, 2-6, 54-55, 96, 
 122. See also Fiction/nonfiction 
 Lindsay, Norman, 88-89 
 
 Marshall Islands. See Becke, Louis: in 
 Marshall Islands 
 
 Masculinity, 11, 71-72, 80, 106, 115, 142- 
 45. See also Identity 
 Maunsell, Mary, 81 
 
 McLean, Bros., and Rigg (merchants), 21, 
 34 . 54 
 
 Missionaries, 11-12, 42, 68, 71, 72, 99, 
 102-3. See also Islanders: as missionaries 
 
 Natural environment. See Landscape 
 New Caledonia, 12, 12, 14. See also Walker, 
 Vernon Lee: in Noumea 
 New Hebrides. See Vanuatu 
 Newspapers. Seejournalism 
 Noumea, New Caledonia. See Walker, 
 Vernon Lee: in Noumea 
 
 Patterson, Bishop, 42 
 Photographs, 6, 39, 45, 48, 49, 55 
 Pirating, 80-81 
 
 162 INDEX 
 
Plantations, 31, 41, 73-74 
 Planters, 5, 12, 41, 72 
 Progress: notions of, 36, 133-136. See also 
 Race: notions of 
 
 Race: notions of, 7, 14, 71, 79, 87, 119, 
 132-36; and class, 83, 87, 141-42 
 Racism, 5, 13-14, 70-72, 112 
 Representation. See Landscape, represen¬ 
 tation of; Self-fashioning; Colonialism: 
 imagination and narration of 
 Respectability, xxi. See also Civility 
 Rigg (trader). See McLean, Bros., and Rigg 
 (merchants) 
 
 Savagery, 16, 70, 72, 99, 135, 136, 139 
 Self-fashioning, xxi, xxii, 3, 4-6, 83, 84; 
 and letters, xxi, xxii, 3, 4-6, 70-72, 83, 
 84-86. See also Becke, Louis: and self- 
 fashioning; Walker, Vernon Lee: and 
 self-fashioning 
 
 Selfhood, 57, 62, 63, 65, 69, 70-72, 86. 
 
 See also Self-fashioning; Degeneration 
 Selwyn, Bishop, 42 
 Settlers, 11-12, 26, 36, 71, 87-88 
 Sexuality, xxi, 5-6, 61, 62, 71, 137 
 Smith, Bernard, 15 
 Solomon Islands, 12, 31 
 “The South Seas,” xxi 
 Stanley, Henry Morton, 11, 15 
 Strathern, Marilyn, 2 
 Syme family, 24, 35 
 
 Thomson, William Kerr, 21, 24, 25, 26, 31, 
 34, 40, 43 
 
 Traders, 11-12, 16, 63-64, 83, 87-89, 95- 
 96, 101-2, 104, 109, 127. See also Walker, 
 Vernon; Becke, Louis 
 Trading, 11-12, 27, 31, 37, 63-65, 66, 83, 
 101-3, 106-7, n 7’ 127-28, 147, 150 n.i 
 
 Travel literature, 15, 35-36 
 
 Utopianism, 7 
 
 Vanuatu (New Hebrides), 12, 68, 146-47. 
 See also Walker, Vernon Lee: inVanuatu 
 
 Violence, xxi, 13, 35, 42, 58-59, 60, 64, 
 66-67, 72. 73 _ 75> 87, 101, 122, 124, 
 
 133 . ! 34 > 1 3 6 - ! 3 8 - 14 °> 142. 147 
 
 Walker, Howard, 21, 24, 29, 31, 33, 35, 38, 
 40, 44, 45-46, 47, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 
 
 61, 69, 73 
 
 Walker, Louie, 51, 56, 61 
 
 Walker, Vernon Lee, xxi, 5-6, 11-75, 1 44 ~ 
 45, 148, 149-50 n.3; in Australia, 21, 
 33 - 34 - 38 - 39 . 40 , 43 - 44 . 45 - 46 , 47- 
 48. 5 °. 5 1_ 5 2 > 53 - 55 ; in Fiji- 1 5 - 2 5 - 3 b 
 37, 41; and racism, 13-14; and failure, 
 xxi, 6, 14, 16, 17, 66, 144, 145; in New 
 Zealand, 45; in Norfolk Island, 42; in 
 Noumea, 49, 56-57, 58-61, 63-65, 
 
 66; and passivity, 35, 54; relations with 
 islanders, 13-14, 24, 26-28, 2g, 37, 58- 
 59, 61-62, 63-64, 66-67, 68; responses 
 to landscape, 15-16, 27, 41-42; and self- 
 fashioning, 5, 6, 16, 145; and selfhood, 
 69, 72; and trade, 60, 66, 69, 72, 73-75; 
 in Vanuatu (New Hebrides), 63, 66, 69, 
 73 
 
 Whiteness, 6, 63, 66, 70-72, 87, 112, 137, 
 139-40 
 
 Williams (commercial agent), 53, 98-100, 
 108 
 
 Williams, Helen Maria, 146-47 
 
 Winchcombe, George (trader), 87-89, 
 
 109, 111-12, 117-19, 131-32 
 
 Women: and eroticism, 134-45; and sexual 
 relations, 71, 117-19, 137 
 
 163 
 
Nicholas Thomas is Director of the Centre for Cross- 
 Cultural Research at the Australian National University. 
 
 He is the author of a number of books, including In 
 Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories (Duke, 1997). 
 
 Richard Eves is an Australian Research Council 
 Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the Australian 
 National University. 
 
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 Bad colonists : the South Seas letters of Vernon Lee Walker 
 and Louis Becke / Nicholas Thomas and Richard Eves. 
 Selected letters of Vernon Lee Walker and Louis Becke, 
 with commentary. 
 
 Includes bibliographical references and index. 
 
 ISBN 0-8223-2257-9 (cloth : alk. paper). 
 
 ISBN 0-8223-2222-6 (paper : alk. paper) 
 
 1. Oceania—History—Sources. 2. Walker, Vernon Lee- 
 Homes and haunts—Oceania. 3. Becke, Louis, 1855- 
 1913 —Homes and haunts—Oceania. I. Walker, Vernon 
 Lee. II. Becke, Louis, 1855-1913. III. Thomas, 
 
 Nicholas. IV. Eves, Richard. 
 
 DU18.B33 1999 995 —dc2i 98-21598 CIP 
 


 
 
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