Around 1910, the Dunedin, New Zealand photography company, Muir and Moodie, published a postcard titled “A Samoan Dancing Girl.”1 It depicts a young Samoan woman standing in front of a painted backdrop of trees, gazing out with a confident self-awareness, smiling slightly. She wears the traditional costume of the Samoan taupou , a ceremonial role bestowed as an honour, occupied by the virginal daughter of a chief or a high-status young woman who was additionally chosen for beauty and character.2 Far from being simply a dancing girl, the sitter is actually Fa’amusami Malietoa, also known as Sa’o tama’ita’i Fa’amu, the daughter of King Malietoa Laupepa and his first wife, Fuaolemalo Faumuina Fiame Leitutua Johnson of Lepea and Lefaga. This photograph will serve as a case study addressing the uses and reuses of photographs of young Samoan women, which will investigate how misinterpretations of the social roles of young Samoan women contributed to misunderstandings about the nature of some of these photographs. I will argue that many photographs or postcards that seem to be simple examples of exoticisation may actually be repurposed portraits of Samoan women of high status, originally made to commemorate their important social roles.
The postcard is one of many that circulated in and outside of Samoa in the early twentieth century, printed to satisfy the desires of Westerners who were captivated by the idea of the exotic, partially dressed Samoan girl. Such photographs of young women who appear, to Western eyes, to be scantily clad, tend to be lumped together as examples of colonial exploitation, which is true in part, but which is also a generalisation that obscures important histories and identities. While they may appear similar superficially, they fall into two distinct categories: photographs of young women wearing props who were paid to model, and photographs of high-ranking young women who posed in their own ceremonial garb to memorialise their honorary and sometimes royal status, which is the case with the photograph of Fa’amu (the shortened version of her name). Due to the dual roles of early Samoan photography studios in creating both portraits for individuals and postcards for mass production, as well as the way that the glass plate negatives of portraits were retained by studios and thus outside the control of the sitters, the distinctions between these two groups have been blurred. As a result, historical evidence of Samoan practices of self-portraiture, and its relationship to the use of photography to commemorate prominent social status, has been muddied or lost.
While this photograph is similar to others that were staged to exploit the exotic beauty of the sitter, it was in fact made to commemorate her role as a royal Samoan woman. The postcard was made, years later, from a negative originally printed in carte-de-visite form (Fig. 1), taken in the Apia studio of photographer John Davis.3 The photograph’s hand-written inscription reads, “Samoan Princess Fa’ane.”4 However, it should read “Samoan Princess Fa’amu,” an identification confirmed by Momoe Malietoa von Reiche, a Samoan poet, artist, sculptor, and photographer who is the granddaughter of the sitter’s brother.5 Traditional Samoan culture was ruled by chiefs, not kings, but Fa’amu’s father Laupepa was so crowned by the Germans in 1881 in an effort to settle unrest in Samoa, making him the first Samoan king, and Fa’amu a princess.6
Fig. 1
John Davis. Samoa Princess Fa’ane, Apia, about 1893. Albumen print on board. TR2016.33. Courtesy of Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
Fa’amu was in fact a girl who danced, when acting in her ceremonial role as taupou . The garments she wears include an elaborate headdress, called a tuiga, which denotes her high status, an equally elaborate skirt of fine-plaited mat (‘ie toga), held up by a tapa belt, and she holds a ceremonial club. Her upper torso and arms are bare, her breasts exposed. She also wears Western jewellery.7 In addition, she would also have performed functions such as mixing the ceremonial drink kava, leading ceremonies, and dancing. The taupou stayed indoors to protect her skin from the sun and did not perform manual labour.8 Usually girls would serve as taupou for two or three years before being married off to a high-ranking man chosen by her family; traditionally in such marriages, she stayed with her husband and his family until she became pregnant and then returned home, but did not marry again, although her former husband generally married again, to another taupou . Such marriages had traditionally followed a public defloration ceremony,9 although by the time the photograph was taken, public virginity tests had been all but eradicated, although one took place near Apia in 1897.10
Later in her life, Fa’amu married a paramount high chief, Mata’afa Faumuina Fiame Mulinu’u I, who was a leader of the pro-independence Mau movement, which worked to free Samoa from German colonial rule; Fa’amu was a leader in the women’s Mau. Mata’afa’s marriage to Fa’amu played an important role in his ascent to power, as it cemented ties between two very powerful families who had long been rivals. Their son, Mata’afa Faumuina Fiame Mulinu’u II, became the first president of Samoa. Their granddaughter, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, is a high-ranking chief and deputy prime minister of Samoa. In 1893, when the photograph was made, Malietoa Laupepa won a war against the rival Matā’afa family, so this photograph could relate to that victory. Fa’amu would have been trained from childhood for her position as taupou , and even at a young age was politically savvy and strategic; neither she, nor her family members or attendants, would have allowed her to be exploited. Instead, this photograph demonstrates a future leader of Samoa commemorating her important social position during a time of cultural and political upheaval. Thus, this photograph commemorates Fa’amu’s role as honoured taupou of the most powerful family in Samoa.
The carte-de-visite image also appears in a full-page reproduction in Mary Warner Marien’s Photography: A Cultural History (2014).11 Marien uses the image to demonstrate ways that photography reinforced stereotypes, in this case that of the young, beautiful, sexually uninhibited Polynesian woman. This is certainly a highly pervasive and problematic stereotype of exotic women, but here the context misconstrues the nature of this particular image. The photograph’s caption reads, “Bare-breasted Samoan women were often pictured wearing an elaborate headdress and carrying a large club. Western photographers favored the exotic look of the taupou , or village maiden, a position of honour in Samoan society. Thus anthropological imagery mixed with tourist visions of the Pacific.”12 This framing of the image demonstrates the way in which colonial photographs, like all photographs, may experience radical shifts of meaning when their original context is lost, as well as the way in which such photographs become mired in a confusing matrix of meanings: portrait, postcard, ethnographic document, and so on. The author goes on to state,
John Davis … the first commercial photographer in Apia (then German Samoa, now the capital of Western Samoa) told a visitor that ‘hundreds of native girls and youths presented themselves at his studio in hopes that they would make photographs of commercial value for book illustrations and for selling to tourists.’ Yet he chose ‘only two, or three at the most, who possessed the thick lips and sensual features which coincided with the stock European idea of the South Sea type.’13
While this is true, the text suggests that the specific woman pictured in the photograph possibly sought out the photographer in the hopes of having her photo published widely for profit, or perhaps unwittingly allowed this to happen, and that the picture is necessarily read in a stereotypical fashion as suggestive of sexual availability. This misreading occludes the sitter’s historical importance.
Many photographs published by postcard companies appear to have been appropriated from other origins, including photography studio archives and images published in travelogues by Western visitors to Oceania. This results in what is termed orphaning, when photographs are removed from their original historical and social context. This is certainly the case here. John Davis’s Apia studio burned down in 1895. He re-opened his business, and when he died in 1903, it was taken over by his assistant, Alfred Tattersall. Tattersall reprinted some of Davis’s and other photographers’ negatives, taking credit for them. After Tattersall died in 1951, no libraries took on his archives, and they were destroyed in a hurricane in 1966.14 By that time, numerous photographs such as these had long since been repurposed.
In 1893, Fa’amu would have been unable to anticipate that the image would ever be used for anything beyond her original intentions. This is but one of many of a best-selling genre of postcards which depicted young, beautiful, Polynesian women.15 Tens of thousands of postcards were made in Samoa alone between 1870 and 1925.16 During the worldwide so-called postcard craze circa 1895–1915, such images were sold profitably to tourists by photography companies owned by Europeans, or white Australians and New Zealanders, contributing to the formation of the colonisers’ sense of racial superiority over the colonised. The commercially produced photographs and postcards that have been preserved in libraries, museums, archives, and private collections are but a fraction of those that once existed.17 Because they were widely reproduced, repurposed, mailed worldwide, distanced from the original circumstances of their making, mislabelled, and so forth, it is extremely difficult to survey them with any precision. Sometimes young women in such popular postcards were labelled Polynesian beauties, belles, or dancing girls, but many were identified as princesses, chief’s daughters, village maidens or virgins, or in the case of Samoan examples, taupous . The women pictured often wear what appear to be “native” costumes, which are frequently far more revealing than contemporary Western garments; these traditional clothes may be authentic to the sitters’ own culture and status, or may be the photographers’ props. Some women wear garments covering their breasts, while others do not. Some images of this type are evidence of colonial eroticisation and exploitation of indigenous practices, when native models chosen for their attractiveness were paid to wear props which may or may not have anything to do with their own cultural experiences. For example, in a group of images from the archives of the Sydney-based Kerry and Co. postcard company, three figures (a child, a woman, and a man) wear nearly identical tuiga headdresses, indicating that it is a prop, as tuiga were composed of multiple parts that were arranged differently for different wearers.18 In other cases, the images are appropriated studio portraits, made voluntarily by their sitters, who were memorialising their ceremonial roles in a time of great change in their culture.19 A substantial number identify their sitters, for example Davis’s “Vao, taupou of Apia,” 1893,20 and “The taupo Fuamoa,” by an unidentified photographer, printed in Beatrice Grimshaw’s In the Strange South Seas (1907).21 Whether or not these names are spelled correctly or are entirely invented remains to be seen, but I do not believe it to be the case that all of them are fabricated.
The young women chosen to appear in staged, costumed images that fulfil long-standing ideals of Polynesian beauty. Polynesians, and in particular Samoans, had been idealised by the West as the most attractive indigenous group. Writing for The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U. S. A., 1893, Mrs. E. J. Ormsbee wrote, “The Samoans are a very good-looking and a finely-built race, both men and women, with skins of a pale brown color, bright eyes, straight black hair and beautifully white teeth. Physically it would be difficult to find a better developed race.”22 Polynesians generally were equally idealised for what the West perceived to be their happy, and sexually liberated, lives, which was more a misinterpretation of the West than it was reality.23
In 1876, the New Zealand Herald published a brief, but telling, note relating to Davis’s photographic interests that describes items obtained by a local merchant:
Host Perkins, of the Occidental [Auckland, New Zealand] has received a consignment of curiosities from Samoa, including a portfolio of photographs taken by Mr. S. Davis (probably Mr. J. Davis) a Sydney photographer, now travelling through the Navigator and Friendly groups. Amongst these photographs are portraits of Samoan belles that would take the shine even out of a Circassian. The post says that ‘beauty unadorned is adorned the most,’ and Perkins can show to his customers portraits of island beauties possessing ‘considerable personal attractions.’24
This report confirms Marien’s assertion of the photographer’s intention to exploit native Samoans through photography. An advertisement for Davis’s studio in The Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser from 1894 lists products including “Large stock views of Samoan Scenery and Carte and Cabinet Portraits of Prominent Samoans,” as well as “Photos of Natives, Cabinet size—6s per doz.”25 These instances demonstrate that Davis was certainly interested in taking photographs to be sold for commercial purposes.
Nevertheless, the specific conditions in which the portrait of Fa’amu was made suggest that it was not taken for commercial gain. Beginning in the 1880s, in addition to running his photography business, Davis was also the postmaster in Apia, serving directly under King Malietoa Laupepa.26 That the photographer served at the will of this powerful king suggests that photographic exploitation of Fa’amu would have been very unwise, if not out of the question. Furthermore, any interpretation of this image must also consider other, more conventional studio portraits by unidentified photographers of Fa’amu in fashionable, contemporary European dress, circa 1895 (Fig. 2). By contrast, baggy “mother hubbard” dresses were the usual Samoan alternative to traditional dress. As Laupepa’s daughter, Fa’amu was frequently photographed, beginning in childhood,27 and was therefore unlikely to be manipulated into being represented in a way other than one she wished.
Fig. 2
Sa’o tama’ita’i Fa’amu, daughter of Malietoa Laupepa. Stephenson Percy Smith, 1840–1922: Maori and Polynesian photographs. Ref: PA1-q-223-35-1. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand
That the taupou’s customary role was still important in the 1890s and after is demonstrated by the reports of Westerners visiting Samoa. A photograph by an unidentified photographer dated between 1885 and 1898, collected by Thomas Berry Cusack-Smith, is labelled, “Group of men and women armed with traditional weapons, Samoa,” and features two women in the garb of taupous , both holding clubs, at the front of the group of men. In 1893, the same year Fa’amu’s portrait was made, Robert Louis Stevenson described a battle between the Laupepas, Fa’amu’s family, and the Mata’afas, the other most powerful Samoan family, whose heir Fa’amu would later marry. According to Stevenson, the Laupepas returned triumphant with eleven heads as trophies. Subsequently, the victors were horrified to find that one was a girl’s head and that she was the taupou of Savaii. She had been helping her father with ammunition when she was shot, and because she had short hair, her executioner would not have realised who she was in the heat of battle.28 Whether or not Fa’amu herself was involved in this battle is unclear, but this record provides evidence that the same year that Fa’amu sat for her portrait as a taupou , other young women serving in that capacity were still performing traditional duties.
The role of the taupou in Samoan culture, especially in relation to her virginity, has been debated, and certainly it evolved and changed after European contact, particularly after the arrival of missionaries who found many aspects of the taupou distasteful, if not sinful. Contemporary Western visitors repeatedly reported that the taupou was always accompanied by older women who fiercely guarded her.29 Margaret Mead, however, famously argued that the emphasis on the taupou’s virginity masked widespread sexual activity among other young Samoan women, while Derek Freeman has counter-argued that virginity was widely upheld.30 Mead’s work, while debated, has contributed to the perpetuation of the idea of the sexually available Samoan young woman. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and the actual behaviours of pre-contact adolescents will never be known.
Further complicating our understanding of this role, the taupou’s virtuous character was contradicted by what appeared to Westerners to be salacious dancing in a ceremony the night before her marriage, on what was called Joking Night, when the village welcomed a travelling party including the groom’s extended family. A first section included formal, choreographed dances led by the taupou . The second part, however, consisted of comic acts parodying the taupou as well as suggestive dancing by the taupou herself.31 In this sense she embodied two identities that seem conflicting to Western thought: pure virgin and erotic dancer. But these were evidently not contradictory to Samoans.32
The beliefs of Christian missionaries in Samoa predictably did not support traditional Samoan serial marriage, the seemingly lewd second half of Joking Nights, nor public defloration, but the idea of a village virgin appealed to them.33 They thus held the taupou up as a model for other girls.34 In practicality, Samoans found ways to compromise between traditional behaviours and those imposed by missionaries. They added some of the ribald conduct from the second half of the Joking Night to the dance of the taupou that closed the dignified first half, by surrounding her with comic performers during her final solo; the performance was never in English and did not welcome Westerners.35 While Christian missionaries insisted that girls who entered into monogamous permanent marriages be virgins, they also encouraged matches chosen by the girls rather than dictated by their families to achieve social advancement.36 Thus, Christian impositions appealed to girls who wished to have more say in their choice of husband.
Adding to misinterpretations of the meaning of Samoan nudity, Westerners misunderstood the meaning behind Samoan women’s removal of their upper garments; the girls’ disrobing did not have a sexual or eroticising component in traditional Samoan culture. For example, in complex Samoan gift-giving etiquette, a respectful present of cloth would be wound around the body of a young girl. Then, to convey the gift, the girl would unwrap the cloth, being left wearing only a garment around her waist and hips.37
Despite these frequent misunderstandings, memoirs written by European travellers in Samoa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries clearly recognised the prestige of the taupou . Since larger villages usually had two to three taupous, while all villages had at least one,38 and many visitors travelled from village to village, they had the opportunity to interact extensively with their hostess taupous . The European writers are clearly experiencing Samoan culture from a colonial point of view; nevertheless, there are multiple mentions of taupous’ social power, their strong interpersonal skills, their absolute respectability, their skill as entertainers, and their attentiveness to their guests. One such visitor even referred to the taupous he encountered as “represent[ing] the highest class of female chieftains.”39
In the Davis photograph, Fa’amu embodies these tensions around changes taking place in her culture: the portraits of her in Western dress demonstrate that she is clearly able to adopt Western style and comportment, but the Davis photographs indicate that she also treasures her social role as taupou . At the same time, she would have been aware of decades of Western missionaries’ attempts to end topless dress;40 according to Stevenson, her father was a devout Christian,41 and she was educated by missionaries. Having her photo taken in this way may replicate the subversiveness of other Samoan practices under colonialism. The hand-written identification suggests that this photograph, and others similarly labelled from this group, functioned like European cartes-de-visite, given as gifts from their subjects to a visitor to the island.42
In addition to being a taupou , Fa’amu was highly educated, having spent seven years at the English school in Fiji, having been sent there in part to escape the turmoil around her father’s contested rule.43 Commentators from the late nineteenth century confirmed her maturity and accomplishment. We catch glimpses of her through the eyes of Swiss author Lina Boegli, who wrote about her visit to Apia in 1897:
I went to the English church with Princess Fa’amu, the daughter of King Maleatoa [sic]. She wore European dress, the glory of which centered in a brand-new pair of patent leather shoes, evidently made for someone far smaller than her Samoan Highness. As we were walking home from church, suddenly my princess sat down in the middle of the road, took off her shoes and stockings, and exclaimed, with delight, “Now I feel comfortable.” I wonder why she does not make herself feel comfortable always; she would be so much better looking. Princess Fa’amu is quite a nice girl, well educated, even according to the European standard of education.44
Boegli’s sense of entitled superiority grates, but nonetheless conveys a sense of Fa’amu’s personality and self-possession. Boegli also notes that Fa’amu had confided in her about her dislike of a particular duty of the taupou: “Princess Fa’amu … tells me that she always runs away from home when her father is visited by some noted chief, for fear that she may be called in to chew kawa for them.”45 Writing in 1899, ethnologist and consul general to Samoa, William Churchill comments,
The Princess Fa’amu … is the only daughter of King Malietoa Laupepa.46 Although she is not yet twenty, she has had her fair share of troubles. When her father was dragged into exile she was hurried away to Fiji, and there spent [seven] years at school. Since the restoration of her father to the throne she has been a pupil at the boarding-school of the London mission in the hills back of Apia, and may be considered quite an accomplished young person, speaking English, Fijian and Rarotongan in addition to her native Samoan.47
That the consul general to Samoa was well-acquainted enough with Fa’amu to comment thus is indicative of her comfort with interacting with important leaders. Around the same time, in the 1888–1889 volume of The Sunday at home: a family magazine for Sabbath, the Reverend R. Wardlaw Thompson recorded his visit to the Samoan school Fa’amu attended after leaving the English school in Fiji. He describes the senior girls performing a musical drill with Indian clubs, commenting, “They seemed greatly to enjoy this part of their training and went through the whole of the drill with great energy and in perfect unison. The king’s daughter, Faamu, a tall, graceful girl of 18, was quite a leader in this exhibition.”48 This too demonstrates Fa’amu’s accomplishments and the respect she was accorded.
A few years later, in 1907, another side of Fa’amu emerges. A Mr. and Mrs. W. A. Grebst told an unnamed reporter for The Times of India that while visiting Samoa,
we were invited to a native dance given by Princess Faamu (the daughter of the late King Malietoa Laupepa) which was being given in honour of some white friends. After a repast of cocoanuts and arrowroot and other dishes, the natives who were assembled in the house, began to dance. The dance was performed sitting, there being strange movements of the hands and feet and weird swaying of the body. Princess Faamu, fired by the actions of the others, joined in the dance and became more excited and vigorous. She was dressed in banana leaves and her body was oiled with cocoanut [sic] oil until it glistened. Flowers were entwined in her hair and were wreathed around her neck. Eventually she became so impetuous and boisterous, so carried away as it were, that she tore off everything she wore with the exception of a ‘titi’ which covered her loins, and forgot everything but the joy and the enchantment of the dance. The assemblage beat time with their hands on the matting, and gradually made it quicker and quicker. It is impossible to imagine the startling weirdness of the picture that was presented to us. You must have seen a charming Princess in her wild beauty performing the dance; you must have seen the rich and lovely structure of the house, the floor covered with bright fantastic mats; you must have seen glistening nut brown bodies in sinuous action, made startlingly mystical and bewitching by the flickering lights from the numerous cocoanut [sic] oil lamps; you must have seen hundreds and hundreds of eager faces gathered outside in the dark, and you must have heard the wild but still harmonious singing, before it is possible for you to imagine what this dance is like. At all events it will remain in our memories fresh and unsullied for all time.49
While this record by Westerners exoticises the performance, it does demonstrate that if, in 1907, Fa’amu was still dancing in traditional ceremonial dress, toplessness was not a cause for concern for her.
Much later in Fa’amu’s life, an article in New York Herald Tribune by reporter Joseph Driscoll, describing Samoa’s loyalties during World War II, provides another glimpse of her:
In an interview at their straw-thatched fale on the cocoanut-lined highway running out of the town of Apia, on the island of Upolu, the Samoan royal family assured me that it was solidly behind the United States and Great Britain in the war against Germany and Japan. The word ‘solidly’ may be used advisedly, for Mataafa, who weights around 300 pounds, is every inch and every pound a prince of the blood royal and a man of substance whose support can be relied upon. Mataafa’s consort, Faamu, is a woman of ordinary size, but there are those who regard her as the brain trust of the family. It is Mataafa who makes the decision and it is quiet, smiling Faamu who advises him.50
Later in the same article, the author notes, “on a pedestal this Samoan princess had placed an oil painting of an American commoner, a marine buck private. In his right hand was gripped an automatic pistol. When I remarked inanely that it was sad that such nice young men had to kill, the motherly Faamu, who has two children of her own, objected: ‘But this is war. It is right he should kill.’”51
While this reporter’s disrespectfully light-hearted jibes about Mata’afa set an unpleasant tone, the article nonetheless underscores Fa’amu’s reputation for political perspicacity and, with her comments about the role of the soldier, her own role as a female warrior in her youth.
The seemingly automatic assumption that a young Samoan who appears partially dressed is completely naïve, provocative, and/or being exploited is commensurate with the West’s misunderstandings about Polynesian culture since its first contacts, long before Gauguin’s controversial Post-Impressionist paintings of young, often nude Tahitian women. I would therefore like to turn to the early impressions of Tahiti, where we find the roots of the stereotype of the beautiful and sexually available Polynesian princess, as well as the earliest idealised representation of a Polynesian woman.
British captain Samuel Wallis sighted Tahiti in 1767, and French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville sailed there in 1768, although neither landed. Bougainville stayed in proximity to the island for two days and claimed it for France, calling it the New Cythera. The idealising identification of Polynesians specifically in relation to the Classical is exemplified by Bougainville’s writings. He likened male Tahitians to Greek gods: “I never saw men better made, whose limbs were more proportionate: in order to paint Hercules or Mars, one could nowhere find better models.”52 Bougainville wrote, describing the arrival of his ship in Tahiti: “All these people came crying out tayo, which means friend, and gave a thousand signs of friendship … the periaguas [canoes] were full of females … most of these fair females being naked.”53 Despite his efforts to keep these females from boarding his ship, one did. When the young woman, clad only in a drapery, dropped it to reveal her nude form, Bougainville, demonstrating the idealising perception of Tahitian women by Westerners, wrote: “The girl carelessly dropt a cloth, which covered her, and appeared to the eyes of all beholders, such as Venus shewed herself to the Phrygian shepherd, having, indeed, the celestial form of that goddess.”54
Jean-François de Galaup de Lapérouse’s arrival in 1787 marked the first time Europeans actually landed in Samoa. Influenced by already prevalent stereotypes about Tahiti, in particular Bougainville’s writing about Tahiti as a New Cythera populated by Venuses, Galaup de Lapérouse described the sexual freedom of unmarried Samoan girls, despite evidence to the contrary demonstrating their reluctance to be given as sexual favours to the French: his journal recorded that young girls were involuntarily offered to the French by adults and wept in protest.55 Robert Williamson’s 1939 omission of that part of Lapérouse’s narrative has strongly distorted contemporary views of the sexual permissiveness of young women in Tahiti. Instead, Williamson hews to Bougainville’s stereotype.56
Bougainville was also among the first Westerners to visit Samoa, naming it the Navigator Islands, to recognise the boating skill of the Samoans who greeted his boat,57 in 1768.58 Early reports of interactions with Polynesians also indicate long-standing fantasies about Polynesian royal women in particular. The earliest example of an image representing this Western idealisation of Polynesian women is a painting from 1780 by John Webber, of Poedooa (Poedua), who was the daughter of Oree, the Chief of Ulietea, one of the Society Islands. Webber painted from first-hand experience: he joined Cook’s third expedition (1776–1780). When the ship anchored in Ra’iatea, two sailors deserted, too tempted by the beauty of the island, having “strongly attache’d themselves” to two Tahitian girls.59 When the sailors refused to return, Cook decided to take four hostages: Orio, a chief of Ra’itea; his daughter Poedua; her husband Moetua; and Orio’s son, Teura. It took four days for Cook’s strategy to succeed and the two sailors to return. While Poedua was devastated by being held hostage,60 Webber shows her with a gentle smile. Unlike Fa’amu, Poedua wears a classicising white drape (either tapa or Western cloth)61 around her waist.62 She holds a fly whisk that identifies her as a member of the chief’s family.63 She shows no reluctance to be wearing only a wrap around her lower body and a gardenia at each ear, tucked into her tumbling black curls. Faint tattoos ornament her arms and hand. Behind her, palm fronds echo the feathers of her fly whisk, while in the far background, a partly cloudy sky dominates green-grey mountains. The painting in no way documents that it was created on board the ship, nor Cook’s hostility in taking captives who had nothing to do with his sailors’ desertion, nor that Cook obtained his hostages by promising them “Knives, beads & other Things they had been asking for on shore.”64 This painting, then, so clearly the product of a violent and exploitative situation, shows only the idealised beauty of Poedua, and her peaceful nature, setting a precedent for subsequent imagery of chief’s daughters made by Western men. O’Brien has argued that such images represent “the epitome of the Pacific, being young, feminine, desirable and vulnerable.”65
This fascination with Polynesian princesses is related to aesthetic and cultural judgements about colonised peoples. Bernard Smith argues that reactions to colonised peoples categorized them into two categories: either soft or hard primitivism. Soft “primitives” were perceived to lead lives of indolence, where nature provided all with little effort required, resulting in “sloth and degeneration.”66 The indigenous peoples of the Society Islands (Tahiti) were perceived to fall into this category. They were likened to the residents of the classical Elysium.67 Hard primitivism, in contrast, described a very simplified form of life that required work for survival. For example, the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego were, in their hardscrabble existence, seen as beasts.68 While both forms were idealised at different times, eighteenth-century Europeans saw in soft primitivism a oneness with nature that indicated a natural virtue.69 They related it to the idealised Classical world. Thus, Tahitians were the most ideal “noble savages,” and this nobility translated into the idealisation of beautiful Polynesian women as princesses. Contemporary accounts of encounters with Polynesians repeatedly articulate their innate nobility.
As Momoe Malietoa von Reiche has written: “Although the Samoans were used as subjects for profit making, be it as decorative objects, or puppets in power games, or labourers in the schemes of expansionism, their lives and their faces were nevertheless recorded visually and beautifully, and these photographs tell the story of an era and its passing. There are no excuses as to the manner of their making; the circumstances of each condone the idiosyncratic make-up of the image-makers themselves.”70 She also commented, holding in her hands the photograph of her aunt Fa’amu in her taupou garb, that “she considered the camera during the first years of contact with the West like a gun, a weapon that induced fear. For her ‘photography became the first real form of exploitation of Samoa because the camera recorded and captured moments that were vulnerable, sensitive, and virginal.’”71 The photograph does indeed capture a complex moment of negotiation between different cultures.
Fa’amu posed for this picture during a time of radical change in the social role of the taupou . Public deflowering had all but ended, and the era of the taupou leading warriors to battle was also coming to a close. Oftentimes kava was now mixed by pounding with stones rather than being chewed by the taupou and her attendants. That her father had been crowned king, a role foreign to Samoan culture, making her a princess, is evidence of the extreme changes taking place in her culture. She would certainly have been aware that posing topless would be strongly frowned upon by Europeans, yet nonetheless chose to have her portrait made in this fashion, while certainly not intending it to become a stereotypical postcard image. The two photographs reproduced here demonstrate that she used photography both to demonstrate her modernity and to assert her resistance to it.
To investigate such photographs without restoring to these women their own agency, and without considering what they accomplished afterwards, is a grave insult. While certainly in Samoan culture the accomplishments of women like Fa’amusami are well known, the specifics of Samoan political history are not widely studied in Western culture, and these taupous who decided to commemorate their honorific status photographically deserve not to be dismissed as merely victims of exploitation. Some of the visitors to Samoa who wrote about their travels named the taupous they met, providing a potential list to be compared to identified photographs. Thus, it is incumbent on historians to try to find out who these sitters were, rather than to dismiss them as young women exploited by colonising photographers.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
1. Boegli, Lina. Forward: Letters Written on a Trip Around the World. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1904.
2. Bougainville, Louis Antoine de. A Voyage Round the World. Translated by John Reinhold Forster. New York: Da Capo Press, 1967.
3. Brown, George. Melanesians and Polynesians: Their Life-Histories Described. London: Macmillan and Co., 1910.
4. Churchill, William. “Samoan Types of Beauty.” The Cosmopolitan 27 (1899): 248–249.
5. “The Dance,” The Times of India, 30 May 1907.
6. Driscoll, Joseph. “Samoa Pledges Firm Alliance.” New York Herald Tribune, 8 November 1943.
7. Krämer, Augustin. The Samoan Islands [Die Samoa-Inseln]. Translated by Theodore Verhaaren. 2 volumes. Honolulu: University of Hawa’ii Press, 1994 [1902].
8. New Zealand Herald, Volume XIII, Issue 4364, 20 September 1826.
9. Ormsbee, Mrs. E. J. “Samoa—Its People and their Customs.” In The Congress of Women: Held in the Women’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U.S.A., 1893, edited by Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle, 590–596. Chicago, IL: Monarch Book Company, 1894. From Mary Mark Ockerbloom, A Celebration of Women Writers. Accessed 8 February 2020. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/ormsbee.html.
10. The Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser, 7 July 1894.
11. Smith, S. Percy. “Hawaiki: The Whence of the Maori.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 7 (1898): 137–177.
12. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Vailima Letters, Being Correspondence Addressed by Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, November 1890–1894. London: Methuen, 1895.
13. ———. A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa, Swanston edition (1912). Accessed 10 February 2020. Gutenberg.org..
14. Thompson, Rev. R. Wardlaw. “A Sunday at Malua.” The Sunday at Home: a Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading (1898/99): 726–730.
15. Vojnich, Oszkár. The Island-World of the Pacific. Translated by Arthur B. Yolland. Budapest: Pallas Literary Pub. Co., 1909.
Secondary Sources
1. Blanton, Casey, ed. Picturing Paradise: Colonial Photography of Samoa 1875–1925. Daytona Beach: Southeast Museum of Photography, 1995.
2. Brunt, Tony. To Walk Under Palm Trees: The Germans in Samoa—Snapshots from Albums, Part 1. Auckland: published by the author, 2016.
3. Gilson, R.P., and J.W. Davidson, Samoa, 1830 to 1900: The Politics of a Multi-Cultural Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.
4. Jolly, Margaret. “From Point Venus to Bali Ha’i: Eroticism and Exoticism in Representations of the Pacific.” In Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly, 99–122. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
5. Kahn, Miriam. “Tahiti: Ripples of a Myth on the Shores of the Imagination.” History and Anthropology 14.4 (2003): 307–326.Crossref
6. Keesing, Felix M. “The Taupou System of Samoa: A Study of Institutional Change.” Oceania 8.1 (1937): 1–14.Crossref
7. Mageo, Jeannette. “Zones of Ambiguity and Identity Politics in Samoa.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (2008): 61–78.Crossref
8. Marien, Mary Warner. Photography: A Cultural History. 4th Edition. New York: Pearson, 2014.
9. Nordström, Alison. “Paradise Recycled: Photographs of Samoa in Changing Contexts.” Exposure 28.3 (1992): 8–15.
10. ———. “Popular Photography of Samoa: Production, Dissemination, and Use.” In Picturing Paradise: Colonial Photography of Samoa, 1875–1925, edited by Casey Blanton, 11–40. Daytona Beach: Southeast Museum of Photography, 1995.
11. O’Brien, Patty. The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006.
12. Peduzzi, Nicole. “Travelling Miniatures: Kerry and Co.’s Postcards of the Pacific (1893–1917).” PhD Dissertation, University of East Anglia, 2011.
13. Quanchi, Max. “The Imaging of Samoa in Illustrated Magazines and Serial Encyclopedia in the Early 20th Century.” Paper presented at the 15th Pacific History Association Conference, NUS, Samoa, Apia, Samoa, 2000.
14. ———. “A Single Visual History of Oceania, New Zealand and Australia.” Paper Presented at A History of New Zealand Photography, University of Otago, Dunedin, 2007.
15. Shankman, Paul. “The History of Samoan Sexual Conduct and the Mead-Freeman Controversy.” American Anthropologist New Series 98.3 (Sept. 1996): 555–567.
16. ———. “Virginity and Veracity: Rereading Historical Sources in the Mead-Freeman Controversy.” Ethnohistory 53.3 (Summer 2006): 479–505.
17. Smith, Bernard. European Vision and the South Pacific. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
18. Tamaira, A. Marata. “From Full Dusk to Full Tusk: Reimagining the ‘Dusky Maiden’ through the Visual Arts.” The Contemporary Pacific 22.1 (2010): 1–35.Crossref
19. Tcherkézoff, Serge. “First Contacts” in Polynesia: The Samoan Case (1722–1848), Western Misunderstandings about Sexuality and Divinity. Canberra: The Australian National University E Press, 2004.
Footnotes
1
I wish to advise readers that this chapter includes images of deceased individuals, including those of indigenous peoples of Samoa, and other material which may offend some readers. Allison Nordström notes the use of a portrait of Fa’amusami on a Muir and Moodie postcard from New Zealand, c.1910 and on prints held by museums in the USA; Allison Nordström, “Paradise Recycled: Photographs of Samoa in Changing Contexts,” Exposure 28.3 (1992): 10 and 11–12. Max Quanchi discusses this image in two conference papers, “The Imaging of Samoa in illustrated magazines and serial encyclopedia in the early 20th century,” paper presented at 15th Pacific History Association Conference, NUS, Samoa, Apia, Samoa, 2; and “A Single Visual History of Oceania, New Zealand and Australia,” paper presented at A History of New Zealand Photography, University of Otago, Dunedin, 9. In the former he thanks Max Shekleton for informing him about this example, which is in Shekleton’s private collection, Noumea.
2
In certain instances, Western women were awarded this status, for example, Margaret Mead and artist Aletta Lewis. See Jeanette Mageo, “Zones of Ambiguity and Identity Politics in Samoa,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (2008): 63.
3
Davis was born in London in 1831 and moved to Sydney, Australia, in 1854, opening his studio in Apia in 1873, on the island of Upolu in Samoa. Nicole Peduzzi notes, “John Davis was the first photographer to arrive in Samoa. … When, in the 1880s, Davis also became postmaster in Apia, he was well informed about all the ships coming and leaving; this considerably helped him to sell and distribute his photographic material and postcards”; Nicole Peduzzi, “Travelling Miniatures: Kerry and Co.’s Postcards of the Pacific, 1893 to 1917,” (PhD Diss, University of East Anglia, 2011), 199 n. 129; cites Allison Nordström, “Popular Photography of Samoa: Production, Dissemination, and Use,” in Picturing Paradise: Colonial Photography of Samoa, 1875–1925, ed. Casey Blanton (Daytona Beach: Southeast Museum of Photography, 1995), 27–29. Apia was one of two towns in Samoa with European and American communities. Nordstrom, “Paradise Recycled,” 8.
4
It is also reproduced in Casey Blanton, ed., Picturing Paradise: colonial photography of Samoa 1875–1925 (Daytona Beach: Southeast Museum of Photography, 1995), illustration 29, p. 71. Max Quanchi points out that “the naming of portraits in the Pacific was often random and usually confused given names, titles and honorific, as well as being regularly misspelt,” in Max Quanchi, “A Single Visual History of Oceania, New Zealand and Australia,” 11. The same is true of irregularities in spelling of Samoan words. Fa’amu is also often spelled “Faamu.” Similarly, taupou is often spelled taupo. I have preserved the original spellings in quotes.
5
Peduzzi, “Travelling Miniatures,” 228.
6
R.P. Gilson and J.W. Davidson, Samoa 1830 to 1900: The Politics of a Multi-Cultural Community. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 318.
7
Nordström, “Paradise Recycled,” 11.
8
Mageo, “Zones,” 68.
9
Mageo, “Zones,” 65.
10
Paul Shankman, “Virginity and Veracity: Rereading Historical Sources in the Mead-Freeman Controversy,” Ethnohistory 53:3 (Summer 2006): 488, citing Augustin Krämer, The Samoan Islands [Die Samoa-Inseln], trans. Theodore Verhaaren, (Honolulu: University of Hawa’ii Press, 1994 [1902]) Vol. 1, 46–47n.
11
Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 4th ed. (New York: Pearson, 2014), 219.
12
Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 219.
13
Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 218, citing A. Safroni-Middleton, South Seas Foam: The Romantic Adventures of a Modern Don Quixote in the Southern Seas (New York: George H. Duran Co., 1920), 228–229.
14
Tony Brunt, To Walk Under Palm Trees: The Germans in Samoa—Snapshots from Albums, Part 1 (Auckland: published by the author; initial print run paid for by Samoa Historical and Cultural Trust, 2016), 240. Brunt is a New Zealand journalist whose information about the Tattersall plates comes from interviews with Samoans associated with the Tattersall family, including Momoe Malietoa von Reiche, 2014.
15
While “Polynesian” is a very broad term, I am using it to reflect the reception of such images in the West, where difference Polynesian cultures may not have been readily recognized. In regard to particular images, however, I will be more specific.
16
Nordström, Picturing Paradise, 11, fn 2.
17
Nordström, Picturing Paradise, 11, fn 2.
18
Peduzzi, “Travelling Miniatures,” 197–198.
19
The work of historians of visual culture such as Sander Gilman, in his writing on Saartje Baartman, and Mallek Alloula, in his book Colonial Harem, has been criticised for re-inscribing exploitation of colonial subjects by reproducing images that are the product of exploitative relationships between image maker and the subject(s). It is my intention in this chapter that, while showing images that are artefacts from such situations, I hope to provide context, history, and criticism that will limit such reinscriptions in order to reach towards the subjectivity and agency of the photographs’ subjects. This is especially relevant in the case of photographs whose original intentions were not for commercial exploitation.
20
There is a Tattersall photo titled, “Some of the turtles killed for Vao’s wedding feast,” published in H.J. Moors, With Stevenson in Samoa (Boston: Small, Maynard and Co., 1910), reproduced in Nordström, “Paradise Recycled,” 11.
21
Beatrice Grimshaw, In the Strange South Seas (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1907), frontispiece.
22
Mrs. E. J. Ormsbee, “Samoa—Its People and their Customs,” in The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U. S. A., 1893, ed. Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle (Chicago, IL: Monarch Book Company, 1894), 590–596. From Mary Mark Ockerbloom, A Celebration of Women Writers, accessed 8 February 2020, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/ormsbee.html.
23
See, for example, Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 47.
24
New Zealand Herald, Volume XIII, Issue 4634, 20 September 1876, 2. https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/new-zealand-herald/1876/09/20/2.
25
The Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser, 7 July 1894, 3. https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/samoa-times-and-south-sea-advertiser/1894/07/07/3
26
Brunt, “To Walk Under Palm Trees,” 236.
27
Peduzzi, “Travelling Miniatures,” 228.
28
Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima Letters, Being Correspondence Addressed by Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, November 1890–1894 (London: Methuen, 1895), 166–167.
29
For example, Oszkár Vojnich, The Island-World of the Pacific, trans. Arthur B. Yolland (Budapest: Pallas Literary Pub. Co., 1909), 314; S. Percy Smith, “Hawaiki: The Whence of the Maori,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 7 (1898): 161; George Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians: Their Life-histories Described (London: Macmillan and Co., 1910), 120.
30
Shankman, “The History of Samoan Sexual Conduct and the Mead-Freeman Controversy,” American Anthropologist New Series 98.3 (Sept. 1996): 556.
31
Mageo, “Zones,” 65, cites Augustin Krämer, The Samoan Islands, trans. Theodore Verhaaren (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, [1902] 1995), 2:366–381; William Thomas Pritchard, Polynesian Reminiscences (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), 78; John B. Stair, Old Samoa (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1897), 133–134; Napoloene A. Tuiteleleapaga, Samoa Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (New York: Todd and Honeywell, 1980), 68–69; John Williams, The Samoan Journals of John Williams, ed. Richard M. Moyle (Canberra: Australian National University Press, [1830–1832] 1984), 247–248.
32
Mageo, “Zones,” 69.
33
Mageo, “Zones,” 67.
34
Mageo, “Zones,” 67
35
Mageo, “Zones,” 69.
36
Mageo, “Zones,” 70. This also affected boys; as all girls began to be treated as taupou , the burden of manual labour, and the girls’ protection, fell on boys, resulting in their sense of a loss of status.
37
Serge Tcherkézoff, ‘First Contacts’ in Polynesia: The Samoan Case, 1722–1848; Western Misunderstandings about Sexuality and Divinity (Canberra: The Australian National University E Press, 2004) 168.
38
Felix M. Keesing, “The Taupou System of Samoa: A Study of Institutional Change,” Oceania 8 1 (1937): 4.
39
Smith, “Hawaiki,” 161.
40
Mageo, “Zones,” 68.
41
Robert Louis Stevenson, A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (Swanston Edition, 1912), 29, accessed 13 February 2019, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/536/536-h/536-h.htm.
42
Nordström, “Picturing Paradise,” 27.
43
William Churchill, “Samoan Types of Beauty,” The Cosmopolitan 27 (1899): 248.
44
Lina Boegli, Forward: Letters Written on a Trip Around the World (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1904), 142.
45
Boegli, Forward, 144.
46
This is not correct; Laupepa had several daughters by three different wives.
47
Churchill, “Samoan Types of Beauty,” 248–249.
48
Rev. R. Wardlaw Thompson, “A Sunday at Malua,” The Sunday at Home: A Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading (1898/99): 727.
49
“The Dance,” The Times of India, 30 May 1907, 11. As told by Mr. and Mrs. W. A. Grebst.
50
Joseph Driscoll, “Samoa Pledges Firm Alliance,” New York Herald Tribune, 8 November 1943, 18.
51
“The Dance,” The Times of India; 30 May 1907. 11.
52
Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 42.
53
A. Marata Tamaira, “From Full Dusk to Full Tusk: Reimagining the ‘Dusky Maiden’ through the Visual Arts,” The Contemporary Pacific 22.1 (2010): 7, citing Louis Antoine de Bouganville, A Voyage Round the World, trans. John Reinhold Forster (New York: Da Capo Press, 1967), 218.
54
Tamaira, “From Full Dusk,” 7, citing Bouganville, A Voyage Round the World, 219.
55
Tcherkézoff, “First Contacts,” 29.
56
Tcherkézoff, “First Contacts,” 28–29.
57
Tcherkézoff, “First Contacts,” 23.
58
However, he found Samoa distinctly wanting in comparison to the beauty he had appreciated in Tahiti; Tcherkézoff, “First Contacts,” 25 and 27.
59
J.C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 191; cites J.C. Beaglehole, ed., The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery. The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776–1780, Part 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 116. Italics in original.
60
Tamaira, “From Full Dusk,” 13, citing J.C. Beaglehole, ed., The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery. The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776–1780, Part 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1076.
61
Tamaira, “From Full Dusk,” 11.
62
Miriam Kahn, “Tahiti: The Ripples of a Myth on the Shores of the Imagination,” History and Anthropology 14.4 (2003): 310.
63
Tamaira, “From Full Dusk,” 11.
64
According to the ship’s surgeon, David Samwell. Tamaira, “From Full Dusk,” 13, citing Beaglehole, The Journals of Captain James Cook Part 2, 1076.
65
Patty O’Brien, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 82.
66
Smith, European Vision, 49.
67
Smith, European Vision, 42.
68
Smith, European Vision, 329.
69
Smith, European Vision, 42.
70
Quanchi, “A Single Visual History,” 12.
71
Peduzzi, “Travelling Miniatures,” 228–229, citing von Reiche, “Letter from Apia,” in Blanton, Picturing Paradise, 69–71.