Sea of Glory

Kirch also discusses the development of “conquest warfare” in Fiji, p. 160.
    Derrick in A History of Fiji tells of the impact of Charlie Savage, pp. 44-45; he also speaks of “tame white men,” p. 47. Clunie refers to David Whippy’s mercenary beginnings in Fiji, p. 92. Wilkes tells of his strategy in contacting Tanoa in his Narrative, vol. 3, p. 48, in which he also recounts his climb up Nadelaiovalau, which he refers to as Andulong, pp. 50-52. Wilkes tells of setting up the observatory at Levuka and the organization of Alden’s and Emmons’s surveying parties in his Narrative, vol. 3, pp. 52-53. Wilkes recounts giving Sinclair a “severe rebuke” in ACW, p. 457; Sinclair gives his side of it in a May 11, 1840, journal entry.
    Wilkes recounts Tanoa’s dramatic arrival in his Narrative, vol. 3, p. 54. Derrick in A History of Fiji tells about Tanoa’s and Seru’s decimation of Verata, p. 22. The missionary’s account of Seru’s torture and eating of two prisoners appears in Clunie, p. 41. In his journal Reynolds refers to the squadron’s determination “to have the thing settled” when it came to the question of cannibalism, adding: “I remember reading in some book of travels, the assertion of the author, ‘that he considered all the accounts of such a practice among any people, to be fabulous: the bug bear stories of voyagers who delighted in tales of the marvelous: that he did not believe mankind could be so vile, or human nature so degraded: in short, that there was no such thing as a People who fed upon men for the love of it.’ If this gentleman, who had such exceeding faith in the goodness of human kind, had been killed in Fegee, his ghost would have corrected his notions with a vengeance. (See Quarterly review, Dec. or Sep. 1836.)” The argument to which Reynolds refers is essentially the same made by William Arens in The Man-Eating Myth (1979). See Gananath Obeyesekere’s attempt to discount contemporary references to cannibalism in “Cannibal Feasts in Nineteenth-Century Fiji: Seamen’s Yarns and the Ethnographic Imagination,” pp. 87-109; in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, edited by Francis Barker, et al. While Obeyesekere makes the excellent point that the sailors’ fears of survival cannibalism at sea contributed to their obsession with native cannibalism, he chooses not to refer to the Expedition’s findings concerning cannibalism, even though he is clearly aware of Wilkes’s Narrative. For a contrasting view, see Marshall Sahlins’s “Raw Women, Cooked Men, and Other ‘Great Things’ of the Fiji Islands,” in The Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, edited by John and Jean Camaroff.
    Wilkes describes his meeting with Tanoa in his Narrative, vol. 3, pp. 55-60. Wilkes tells of his meeting with Paddy O’Connell and his decision to abduct Veidovi, whom Wilkes refers to as “Vendovi” (my thanks to Fiji scholar Paul Geraghty for pointing out the proper spelling of Veidovi), in his Narrative, vol. 3, pp. 68-69, 104-5. Reynolds recounts how Hudson went about capturing Veidovi in his journal, as does Wilkes in his Narrative, vol. 3, pp. 126-36. Wilkes tells of Whippy’s concerns about the taking of Veidovi in his Narrative, vol. 3, pp. 141-42; his description of how his dog Sydney protected him in Fiji is from ACW, p. 462. Wilkes recounts his meeting with Belcher in his Narrative, vol. 3, p. 182; in ACW, pp. 463-64; and in a June 22, 1840, letter to Jane.
    Reynolds speaks of Perry’s three weeks without orders from Wilkes in his Manuscript, p. 53. In addition to his journal, Reynolds tells of boat-surveying duty in a September 21, 1840, letter to his family. Hudson’s calculation about the number of miles traveled by the Peacock ’s boats in Fiji is in his journal, p. 567. Reynolds describes the cannibalism incident aboard the Peacock in his journal, while Wilkes tells of Hudson vomiting in an August 10, 1840, letter to Jane. My thanks to Jane Walsh, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution who has worked extensively with the Ex. Ex. collection, for sharing an article in manuscript in which she writes probingly about how the Fijians consciously manipulated the Expedition’s officers’ and scientists’ fears of cannibalism.
    James Dana refers to the botanist Rich as “so-so” in a June 15, 1840, letter to Asa Gray in Daniel Gilman’s Life of James Dwight Dana, p. 122. Wilkes mentions the discovery of a new species of tomato and a stand of