George Robertson. An Account of the Discovery of Tahiti. 1955. Edited by Oliver Warner, Dent, 1973.

I have owned An Account of the Discovery of Tahiti for a long time but had overlooked reading it. I picked it up out of curiosity to see how it compared with Herman Melville’s Typee, his nonfiction account of spending the better part of a year on the island of Nuku Hiva during his whaling days.¹ Both works are considerably earlier than Robert Louis Stevenson’s The South Seas, which describes an idyllic, Westernized, and Christianized South Pacific.

Robertson kept a fairly detailed diary while he was the sailmaster on board the H.M.S. Dolphin, sailing around the world and tasked with locating a new continent in the South Pacific or South Indian Oceans. Neither existed. (Australia had already been discovered.)

The Dolphin was the first European vessel to land on and truly discover Tahiti. At times the sailing vessel was surrounded by hundreds of Polynesians in canoes. Robertson seemed to be a favorite of the woman who was the Queen. While communication was crude, the sailors and the native people were able to develop a pretty direct and apparently fair trading system. The Tahitians loved metal objects, especially nails. The sailors were delighted with fresh food, poultry, pigs, and fruits.

At first there was a certain amount of mistrust on both sides, but the Dolphin was able to intimidate the native people by their weapons. Soon both sides were peaceable.

There is not a whole lot of specific detail about the culture, but it is interesting to read about this cross-cultural engagement. While Robertson is concerned about skin color, he saw the Polynesians as being much more similar to Europeans than natives of other exotic places they had visited. The women, he writes, were “handsome.” He speculates that they might have had Jewish ancestry because Jews have migrated all over the world.

This book covers a little over five weeks in the summer of 1768. Tahiti really does sound like a tropical paradise. Even though the captain claimed the island for Britain, the French arrived two years later and turned it into one of their colonies. Still this is an interesting historical artifact, and the few woodcut style illustrations in this edition add to the exotic quality of the record.

One curious structure was a small step pyramid, like some of the older Egyptian pyramids or those in Mesoamerica. Was Thor Heyerdahl onto something, or is that just coincidence? Typee goes into much more detail about the lives and lifestyles of Polynesian people, but Master Robertson’s record is a nice introduction.

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¹ Typee covers about a third of a year. Ship records show that Melville actually spent about a month there, so his story is fictionalized. I guess we might call it creative nonfiction today.