New Directions in Narrative History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. xi, 377 pp. (Illustrations, maps.) US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-300-19877-5.
The captain was Benjamin Morrell; the “cannibal” Dako (who was also called “Sunday” and perhaps originally something like “Terrumbumbyandarko”), a young man from Uneapa, a small islet north of West New Britain (part of Papua New Guinea today). A Yankee mariner from Stonington, Connecticut, Morrell commanded the schooner Antarctic that left New York harbour in 1829 for the South Shetland Islands. A decade of slaughter had left few seals there to kill, and Morrell next sought alternative cargo at Manila. Finding not much here that might profit himself and the voyage’s investors, he headed back into the Pacific seeking to harvest and dry beche-de-mer (sea cucumbers) that he might hawk to the Chinese. But when he set up a harvesting camp on one of the Carteret Islands and took local leaders hostage, islanders attacked and killed 14 of his crew.
After another call at Manila to restaff his ship, Morrell returned to the region to bombard his Carteret enemies. Heading back to Manila without much beche-de-mer aboard, he anchored off Uneapa, looking for more. Here, too, relations quickly soured with importunate islanders and the Antarctic’s guns again blasted a flotilla of canoes. Out from the carnage, crewmen grabbed Dako, who was hanging off the ship’s rudder pole, bound him in ropes, and named him “Sunday” after the day (14 November 1830) of the encounter. A few weeks later, Morrell would kidnap a second man, “Monday,” from the Ninigo Islands. Despite Melanesia’s linguistic complexity, Morrell thought to use Sunday and Monday to translate his future trading encounters. Back home in America, he made more profitable use of them by staging “cannibal” shows in New York City, and on the road between Albany and Washington, DC.
Fairhead follows the intertwined lives of Morrell, his wife Abby, his ghostwriter Samuel Woodworth and Woodworth’s son Selim, and Selim’s friend Thomas Jacobs (later Monroe), both of whom sailed with Morrell and Dako back to Uneapa. Monday died of consumption and was buried in New York but Dako’s story ended happily enough. In 1834, Morrell at last found new investors and a new ship, and he returned to the Bismarck Archipelago with Dako, who went home to Uneapa (although his wife had remarried during his absence). With better intelligence, Morrell’s trading endeavours improved, too. He managed to insert himself into the Bismarck Sea’s vast, traditional trading network centered largely on Aromot, a small islet off Umboi. Still, he failed to load profitable amounts of beche-de-mer, sandalwood, pearls and pearl shell, tortoise shell, or other marketable cargo. Instead, he headed to Canton for tea and silk. Returning to America, Morrell either accidentally or purposefully sank his ship off Madagascar. In 1839, in command again of a probable slave ship, Morrell either died in Mozambique or faked his death and made his way to Venezuela, avoiding his creditors.
Published as part of the New Directions in Narrative History series by Yale University Press, Fairhead has tried his hand at writing creative nonfiction. He retells Morrell’s and Dako’s stories in suitably readable form, and the book also offers reproductions of line drawings that illustrated the three contemporary accounts of Dako’s voyages. An anthropologist, Fairhead endeavours to reconstruct Dako’s own appreciation of his kidnapping, his years in America, and his return home to Uneapa. To do so, he carefully read voyage accounts, logbooks, newspaper and journal reports, memoirs and he also relied on oral histories and contemporary ethnography from Uneapa provided by anthropologist Jennifer Blythe. Those familiar with other early cross-cultural encounters in the region won’t be surprised that Dako and his community took Morrell and his crew to be spirits, and evil ones at that; and both Dako and Monday remained terrified for months that Morrell had plans to eat them. Close encounters with wax dummies and skulls in rudimentary American museum collections did little to assuage their worries.
Dako and Monday in New York City joined a succession of exotic, early-nineteenth-century visitors fetched willingly or not to the cities of Europe and America, including sundry Cherokee chiefs, Ahutoru of Tahiti, Omai of Huahine, Lee Boo of Palau, and the young girl Elau from Erromango. Such visitors were sometimes fêted and celebrated, sometimes turned over to natural scientists for close examination, and sometimes—like Dako and Monday—put on display for those willing to pay to hobnob with purported cannibals. Fairhead situates these visits in the context of current popular and scientific debates about the nature of humanity, race, Christian dogma and origin myth, and emerging geographic and other scientific disciplines, not to mention the creeping attraction of exotic displays that would lead to the circus sideshow, world’s fairs and expositions, and the natural history museum.
Dako left behind only faint traces in a forgotten original American stage play, a children’s book or two, and an essay by early American ethnographer Theodore Dwight. Dako also sedimented into American literature as a prototype for Poe’s Pym and Melville’s Queequeg. In these days of rampant globalization and population flows, it is good to know something of those Pacific Islanders who were first on the move.
Lamont Lindstrom
University of Tulsa, Tulsa, USA