Crossing the Beach: A Victorian Tale Adrift in the Pacific

By the early nineteenth century, the figure of the British beachcomber had emerged in the South Pacific as a counterweight to the construction of Captain James Cook's legacy as one of benevolent imperialism, legitimized knowledges, sexual continence, and upright middle-class masculinity. Perceived to be morally dissolute, sexually promiscuous, and an absconder from the values of British civilization generally, the beachcomber straddles the boundary between what is deemed savage and civilized by his location at the interface of two previously unrelated communities, one European, one Pacific. Indeed, the dissolution of boundaries in the contact zone of the South Pacific is etched on and through the very body for those beachcombers who were tattooed, or who were rumored to have participated in cannibalism. For having relocated his home from the British Isles to the South Pacific island—going native—the beachcomber becomes culturally suspect, ceding the privileges of a native of Britain. Here I will analyze The Narrative of the Late George Vason (1840), one of many early-nineteenth-century narratives of British subjects who found themselves adrift, culturally, morally, and physically in the South Pacific. Vason arrived in the South Pacific as a missionary, part of the first generation of those sent to civilize the islanders through biblical teaching, but he soon chose to leave the missionary fold and threw in his lot with the Tongans—what we might call "reverse conversion." This narrative is a tale of British civility shipwrecked, no longer anchored in constructions of the British subject as innately civilized, but revealed instead as contingent.

The 1840 version of the Narrative, told by George Vason but recorded by James Orange, is a bifurcated text, with an evangelical framework imposed on the beachcomber narrative.¹ Operating in two different registers, it functions on the one hand as an evangelical tract warning of the potential to fall from Christian grace, and on the other as an ethnography of Tongan culture; it tells its tale from two narrative voices, one expressing admiration for faka-Tonga (the Tongan way) and one denigrating Tongan culture as savage. In its evangelical register, the Narrative departs from standard beachcomber texts that present themselves as part adventure tale, part travel narrative, and part ethnographic observation, but not usually as moral tract. The evangelical presumption of the Narrative is the universal applicability of Vason's case: anyone, even those blessed to spread the word of the Lord, may fall from grace, the narrative suggests, though having fallen one may repent and return to the fold. It is the old argument for eternal vigilance. But this universalist impulse is accompanied by a repeated invocation of Vason's personal moral failings rather than any shared potential for sin: hence the apologetic account of Vason's actions at the end of his Narrative. As he regretfully remarks, "This was the melancholy close of my conduct as a Missionary. In looking back on this lamentable frustration of the endeavours of the religious world, as far as it regarded me, I see that the guilt of it all attaches to myself" (134). The tension between the universalizing and individualizing impulses of the Narrative are, I will suggest, symptomatic of larger concerns about the imperial project, but first I want to lay out the centrality of the beach in imperial negotiations of the South Pacific.

In his landmark book on contact between Marquesans and Westerners, Islands and Beaches, Greg Dening refers to the act of "crossing the beach." The phrase signifies not only the beach as what we might now designate a "contact zone" (after Mary Louise Pratt's work in Imperial Eyes), but also the change in structures of reference necessitated by crossing from one side of the beach to the other, and indeed the impossibility of maintaining cultural purity once any encounter on the beach has taken place. In Dening's use of the term, the beach functions both as a literal space to...