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The Capture and Curation of theCannibal ‘Vendovi’: Reality andRepresentation of a Pacific FrontierAntony Adlera

a Department of History, University of WashingtonPublished online: 25 Jul 2014.

To cite this article: Antony Adler (2014) The Capture and Curation of the Cannibal ‘Vendovi’:Reality and Representation of a Pacific Frontier, The Journal of Pacific History, 49:3, 255-282, DOI:10.1080/00223344.2014.914623

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The Capture and Curation of the Cannibal ‘Vendovi’: Reality andRepresentation of a Pacific Frontier

ANTONY ADLER

ABSTRACT

The United States Exploring Expedition into the Pacific launched in 1838 was marked,like the continental expansion westward, by violent encounters with Native peoples. Byexamining the record of the expedition’s kidnapping of the Fijian Ro Veidovi, the fateof his body after death, and the ways his story came to be invoked in the officialnarrative of the expedition, the popular press, the ‘National Gallery’ and, morerecently, the Fijian press, this paper demonstrates how violent contacts on the Pacificfrontier were remembered, effaced, and reconceived. The changing story of Ro Veidovipermanently bridged distant locales in an emerging ‘Pacific World’, setting in motiontranscultural negotiations that continue to this day.

Key words: Pacific World, US Exploring Expedition, Fiji, historical memory, USwestward expansion, cannibalism

On the afternoon of 10 June 1842, four vessels of the United States ExploringExpedition, a government-sponsored naval and scientific squadron under thecommand of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, sailed into New York Harbor. Theexpedition had completed a four-year journey around the world. An enormous collec-tion of natural history specimens and cultural artefacts, eventually to become thefounding collection for the Smithsonian museum, had been gathered, and much ofthe West Coast of North America along with dozens of islands and atolls had beencharted, completing a crucial task for a nation with growing economic interests inthe Pacific.1

© 2014 The Journal of Pacific History, Inc.

Antony Adler ‒ Department of History, University of Washington. antony.adler@gmail.com

Acknowledgements: For their helpful reading and criticism I am grateful to Dr Bruce Hevly, Dr SimonWerrett, Dr Vicente Rafael, Dr Carol Higham, Dr Ann Koblitz and the anonymous reviewers. Forher aid in obtaining image reproductions, I would like to thank Sandra Kroupa. Finally, I wouldlike to thank the editors of the Journal of Pacific History for their insightful readings and usefulsuggestions.

1 The survey work yielded the first complete chart of the Fiji island group and, despite some errors,greatly aided shipping. R.A. Derrick, A History of Fiji, vol. 2 (Suva 1957), 92. Graham Burnett argues

The Journal of Pacific History, 2014Vol. 49, No. 3, 255–282, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2014.914623

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TheUnitedStatesExploringExpeditionor, as it is oftencalled, the ‘U.S.Ex.Ex.’,was America’s first attempt to launch a voyage of exploration rivalling those sent by theEuropean sea powers into the Pacific.2 Six vessels departed from Hampton Roads,Virginia, on 18 August 1838 with 346 men, including nine civilian naturalists. Thoughmarred by conflict between the expedition’s commander, Charles Wilkes, his navalofficers and the scientific personnel (Wilkes was court-marshalled upon return), the USEx. Ex. ranks as one of the most successful scientific expeditions of the 19th century.3

Yet despite its successes, the US Ex. Ex. has been called a ‘forgotten’expedition, with the claim that the accomplishments of the voyage were oversha-dowed by the court martial of Wilkes, and that the public (and federal government)quickly lost interest in an expedition that had failed to cast honour upon thenation.4 There is some truth in this. Wilkes was not destined to enter school textbooksas a rival to Columbus or Captain Cook. However, the exploring expedition did notdisappear entirely from public memory; rather, memory of certain aspects of theexpedition lived on in some settings, while fading in others.

At the heart of the recurring evocation of the US Ex. Ex. is the shifting tale ofone man, the Fijian Ro Veidovi or, as his captors called him, ‘Vendovi’, arrested bythe expedition in the Fiji Islands and returned to New York in chains.5 No other

that charting by the US Ex. Ex. was a form of ‘imperial transformation’ serving American interests.Graham Burnett, ‘Hydrographic discipline among the navigators: charting an “empire of commerceand science” in the nineteenth-century Pacific’, in James R. Akerman (ed.), The Imperial Map: cartogra-

phy and the mastery of empire (Chicago 2009), 203. JasonW. Smith argues that theUSEx. Ex. charts werenot only tools of navigation, but also a means by which the process of civilising the Pacific entered theimagination of American mariners and the public. JasonW. Smith, ‘The bound[less] sea: wildernessand the United States Exploring Expedition in the Fiji Islands’, Environmental History, 18:4 (October2013), 10. It is worth noting that the exploring expedition was the first to chart Pearl Harbor ‒ des-tined to become the most important American naval base in the Pacific. Bruce Cumings, Dominionfrom Sea to Sea: Pacific ascendancy and American power (New Haven 2009), 186.2 The abbreviation ‘U.S. Ex. Ex.’ was employed in contemporary shorthand and has since beenadopted by historians. Nathanial Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America’s voyage of discovery: the US Exploring

Expedition, 1838‒1842 (New York 2003), 2.3 Two hundred and eighty islands charted including the first sighting of Antarctica; 4,000 ethno-graphic artefacts, 50,000 pressed plants, 648 species of plants returned as living plants and seeds,2,150 birds, 134mammals, 588 fish, 300 fossil species, 400 species of coral, 1,000 species of crustacea,208 jars of insects and zoological specimens, and 895 envelopes containing 5,100 specimens. SeeNathaniel Philbrick, ‘The scientific legacy of the US Exploring Expedition’. www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/usexex/learn/Philbrick.htm (accessed 21 Dec. 2012). The history of the creationand voyage of the expedition has been told in great length elsewhere, most notably in DavidB. Tyler, The First United States Exploring Expedition (1838‒1841) (Philadelphia 1968), and in Philbrick,Sea of Glory.4 Philbrick, Sea of Glory, xix, 325. See also, William Bixby, The Forgotten Voyage of Charles Wilkes

(New York 1966).5 In standard Fijian spelling, the <d> is pronounced <nd>. The word ‘Ro’ is an honorary title des-ignating Rewan chiefs, still employed today. Unless quoting, I use the contemporary Fijian spelling,‘Veidovi’. My quotations preserve a variety of original spellings, including those for Veidovi’s name.

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person associated with the expedition has been represented in so many guises: fromcannibal king, to prisoner, ‘old Christian’, informant, observer, geographicaleponym, museum curiosity, scientific specimen, rescued victim, eponym for a navalfamily’s pet and a commercial shipping vessel, respected relative, and emblem oftrans-Pacific accord. Far from being forgotten, Veidovi has remained a focal pointfor recurring identifications, claims and debates. While accorded only a relativelyminor place in the published record of the US Ex. Ex., the story of Veidovi isvitally important for understanding how the expedition was assimilated in Americanculture.

Veidovi’s capture and curation can be framed as a chapter in the history ofscience (in its connection to the history of museums, phrenology or ethnography),as a story of imperialism and military conquest, of Western perceptions of ‘theother’, or as part of Western cultural treatments of cannibalism. In this essay, Iargue that the story of Veidovi is an important episode in the creation of a PacificWorld in the mid-19th century. That is, a Pacific World as imagined by Americans,in which the memory of Veidovi served as an essential common point of reference.

In recent years, a growing number of historians have sought to define andsituate (temporally and geographically) what they have called ‘the Pacific World’.6

Of course, a Pacific World created by the first human settlement of Oceania pre-dated, and should not be confused with, Western framing of this space.7 Rather, con-temporary usage, comparable to the ‘Atlantic World’, is defined by repeated contactbetween people of very different cultures across an entire ocean basin. MattK. Matsuda describes the Pacific World as a ‘multilocal space marked by nominativesof conflict’.8 Katrina Gulliver, identifying its origin with European voyages of explora-tion, writes, ‘whereas the Atlantic World was born of slavery, the Pacific World wasborn of science’.9 This is an intriguing claim, and the story of Ro Veidovi offerssome supportive illustration to the argument.

From the American perspective, Veidovi’s capture can be read as part of thestory of the pivotal entry of American science, and American military power, into thePacific. For while it can be argued that the Pacific World may have been framed byscience, this took place in conjunction with imperial expansion and was further shapedby the popular culture of the continental USA. David Igler has argued that the valueof ‘Pacific History’ is that it embraces a ‘methodology that searches for the vital inter-play between global, oceanic, and local scales of history’.10 These are precisely thescales of connection that Ro Veidovi’s story reveals by illuminating the processes of

6 See Katrina Gulliver, ‘Finding the Pacific world’, Journal of World History, 22:1 (2011), 83‒100, andMatt K. Matsuda, ‘AHR Forum: the Pacific’, American Historical Review, 111:3 (2006), 758‒80.7 For discussion of a native framing of that region that tutored Captain Cook, see David Turnbull,‘Cook and Tupaia, a tale of cartographic méconnaissance?’, in Margarette Lincoln (ed.), Scienceand Exploration in the Pacific: European voyages to the southern oceans in the eighteenth century (London1998), 117‒32.8 Ibid., 758.9 Gulliver, ‘Finding the Pacific world’, 89.10 David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford 2013), 11.

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taxonomy and of representation involved in the display of the exploring expedition’sscientific culls.

Like the Atlantic World, the Pacific World may be imagined as a network oflocales, spread across an ocean basin, whose invisible connective lines mark move-ments of vessels, objects, peoples and ideas. Moreover, Indigenous commentators con-tinue to demand recognition of the ‘Sea of Islands’ as an ongoing, diasporicIndigenous space.11 The story of Veidovi follows a single line in that network, reveal-ing ties that bound geographically distant spaces. Beginning with Bernard Smith’sEuropean Vision and the South Pacific, scholars of Pacific history have shown how Eur-opeans used the region as a space in which to exercise their imagination and builda collective self-identity during the Age of Exploration. The Pacific had an equallyprofound influence on the American imagination. As Richard D. Fulton and PeterH. Hoffenberg write in the introduction to Oceania and the Victorian Imagination, ‘Itwould be difficult to fully understand the Victorians as they understood themselveswithout considering their individual and collective engagement with Oceania’.12

Tracing the ways in which the US Ex. Ex. was remembered, and the places inwhich those memories were sustained, serves both to re-evaluate an importantchapter in the history of an oceanic frontier, but also to inform our understandingof how 19th-century Americans understood their relationship to the Pacific, and itspeoples.

Veidovi’s story has recently received renewed attention by historians. His fatehas been cited as proof of America’s aggressive colonial ambition and failed diplomacyin the Pacific.13 Ann Fabian, who has provided the most detailed account of Veidovito date, argues that his story ‘illustrates how America’s colonial aspirations helped toinvent Fiji as a place of small islands’. In Fabian’s account, Veidovi was the accidentalvictim of an expanding American economy dependent on whaling and thebêche-de-mer fishery of the South Pacific. Where American enterprise had beenestablished, ‘American law and custom had followed’.14 Fabian reads Veidovi’scapture as ‘colonial theatre’.15

11 See Arlif Dirlik, What is in a Rim? Critical perspectives on the Pacific Region idea (Lanham, MD 1998);Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘Our sea of islands’, Contemporary Pacific, 6:1 (1994), 147‒61; Margaret Jolly, ‘Ima-gining Oceania: Indigenous and foreign representations of a sea of islands’, Contemporary Pacific,19:2 (2007), 508‒45.12 Richard D. Fulton and Peter H. Hoffenberg, Oceania and the Victorian Imagination: where all things arepossible (Surrey 2013).13 For instance, Igler, The Great Ocean, 161.14 Anne Fabian, The Skull Collectors: race, science, and America’s unburied dead (Chicago 2010), 142.15 Ibid., 144. Though Fiji eventually became a British colony in 1874, Fabian’s assessment of theAmerican presence in Fiji as ‘colonial’ during this earlier period is well warranted. The Americannavy provided protection for American settlers and traders in the region for decades. And when, inthe early 1870s, Ratu Seru Epenisa Cakobau offered to cede several islands to the United States inpayment for a US$45,000 debt, American newspapers printed editorials in support of the annexa-tion of Fiji. See, ‘Swarming for annexation’, New York Tribune, 25 Jan. 1870.

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However tempting it may be to encapsulate Veidovi entirely within a narra-tive of imperialism, his story also exemplifies transmutations of the institutional andpublic memory of the expedition in the decades following its return, as well as chan-ging narratives of civilisation, savagery and the honour of peoples. Individuals andinstitutions – naval officers, journalists, museum curators, scientists, political factionsand Fijian clans – became agents of competing and changing historical narratives.

In tracing the changing portrayals of Veidovi, I examine how the exploringexpedition was first presented and remembered in the USA, revealing the diversityof initial imaginings of that ‘place of small islands’.16 This will also reveal the waysin which violence attendant upon the charting of an oceanic Western frontier wasframed for public consumption, and how events in one small part of the PacificWorld came to resonate in the consciousness, culture, and collective memory ofpeople living in a geographically distant emerging power.

I focus particular attention on the display of the expedition’s ethnographiccollections in Washington DC in what came to be known as the ‘National Gallery’in the Patent Office, predecessor of the Smithsonian Institution. For it was there, inthe controlled space of a museum exhibit in the nation’s capital, that material evidenceof frontier violence was first mustered to give scientific and juridical legitimacy to onenarrative of the expedition. The capture and death of the Fijian Veidovi, and thememory of the US Ex. Ex., was framed within a larger historical narrative of thenation as an agent of human progress through pacification of its furthest Western,oceanic frontier. But, as we shall see, the curators of the Patent Office exhibit werenot the only agents working to reshape the memory of the exploring expedition, orof Veidovi.

THE RETURN OF THE EXPLORING EXPEDITION

Though Veidovi’s story requires attention to events that occurred in the course of theexploring expedition, the history of the public memory of the expedition begins with itsreturn toNewYorkHarbor in 1842. TheNew York Herald reported that the expedition’sflagship, the US sloop of war Vincennes, ‘came up in fine style… and fired a nationalsalute’,17 stating that ‘the fashion of the city’ crowded the Battery, eager to witnessthe triumphal culmination of an unparalleled national venture for which the impressivesum of US$928,184 had been appropriated.18 The excitement was not limited to theEast Coast. As Mark Twain recalled decades later:

When I was a boy… in that village on the Mississippi River which atthat time was so incalculably far from any place… the name ofWilkes, the explorer, was in everybody’s mouth… . What a noise it

16 Similarly, Paul Lyons has described Wilkes’s official narrative of the expedition as an effort tocreate ‘an American Pacific Archive’. Lyons, American Pacifism, 76.17 ‘Return of the Exploring Expedition’, New York Herald, 11 June 1842.18 Daniel C. Haskell, The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838‒1842, and Its Publications, 1844‒1874:a bibliography (New York 1942), 5‒6.

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made, and how wonderful the glory!…Wilkes had discovered a newworld and was another Columbus.19

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in The Dial, praised the expedition as having ‘executedevery part of the duties confided to it by the Government’. In addition to chartingand surveying Pacific islands, it had succeeded in establishing ‘friendly intercourse,and protective commercial regulations…with the chiefs and natives’. Emersonnoted, ‘this duty has been attended with much labor, exposure, and risk of life, ‒the treacherous character of the natives rendering it absolutely necessary that the offi-cers and men should be armed… and… prepared against their murderous attacks’.20

The valour of the enterprise could thus be linked to the ‘murderousness’ of theNatives, it soon became matter for dissension that, while representing the USA onthe world stage, the voyage had been marked by violence, particularly in the FijiIslands. How could violence inflicted on a foreign population by an expedition sent,in the words of Wilkes, to ‘carry the moral influence of our country to everyquarter of the globe where our flag has waved’, cast honour upon the nation?21

Announcing the arrival of the squadron, the New York Herald listed the accom-plishments of the voyage in bullet form. These included: ‘- It has bombarded andknocked down sundry villages belonging to the uncivilized’, and ‘- it has caughtand brought home for exhibition a Cannibal chief of one of the Fejee Islands’. ‘Inone word’, the article concluded, ‘the result of this expedition… will reflect honoron the country at large, and the Fejee Chief in particular’.22 The New York Journal

of Commerce, seeking to capitalise on the sensational arrival of a real ‘cannibal’,reported: ‘Vendovi, one of the principal chiefs of the Fiji group of Islands is onboard the Vincennes as a prisoner, having attacked… the crew of an Americanvessel, after which, he and his followers feasted on their bodies’. 23 But almost immediately,to the frustration of both captors and journalists, Veidovi, who had been ill, died.

CANNIBALS ON DISPLAY

Though the arrival of a purported cannibal chief in New York caused excitement in1842, this was not the first time American newspapers had announced such an attrac-tion. In September 1831, the Morning Courier and Enquirer ran an advertisement for theexhibition of ‘Canibals [sic] of Islands in the South Pacific’:

two Savages, just arrived here… from the South Pacific, will exhibitthemselves at Tamanny Hall daily… visitors will be shown their war

19 Mark Twain, Autobiography, vol. 2 (New York 1924), 120.20 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Intelligence’, The Dial, July 1842.21 Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States’ Exploring Expedition, During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840,1841, 1842, 5 vols (Philadelphia 1845), I, xxiii.22 ‘Return of the Exploring Expedition’, New York Herald, 11 June 1842.23 ‘Selected summary: from the Journal of Commerce, June 11th. Exploring Expedition arrival ofthe Vincennes’, Christian Secretary, 17 June 1842. Emphasis in original.

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clubs, spears, &c. and one of the seamen who was wounded by thesepeople, will be present, to give every information in relation to theirhabits and character. Admittance 25 cents – Children half price.24

One year later, another pair of purported cannibals was exhibited throughout theNortheast by Captain, and entertainment entrepreneur, Benjamin Morrell. Morrellexplained his motives for exhibiting Islanders he named ‘Sunday’ and ‘Monday’:

My object in bringing these two men to the United States is… I trust,duly appreciated. In the year 1830 they were ferocious savages, and,as they now confess with horror, even CANNIBALS! In the year1832 they are civilized, intelligent men, well fitted for becomingproper agents, or interpreters… to open intercourse with theirnative isles, which cannot fail of resulting in immense commercialadvantages to the United States…25

Public display of repentance was a familiar cultural idiom for American Protestants,and Morrell’s exhibition of reformed ‘cannibals’ was designed to entice investors tosupport his Pacific business ventures as well as to earn revenue as public entertainment.In fact, Morrell’s published narrative about his adventures in the South Pacific becameimmensely popular, inspiring a Broadway play that ran for 24 showings in 1833.Having now had a chance to read about or even see Morrell’s ‘real cannibals’,however, theatre critics were quick to point out flaws of inauthenticity:

some alterations are necessary in the dress and general appearance ofthe persons representing the natives…These savages, we presume,from the authority of Captain Morrell, as also from the two specimensbrought to this country, are of a darkmulatto or copper color.The faces,therefore, of those who represent them should not be white… and theyshould not be attired in calico frocks, nor green jackets; but in some suchcovering as might convey the idea expressed by Captain Morrell, thatthese natives are perfect savages – wild, uncultivated islanders…26

Cannibals on display in America were complex signifiers: science, commerce andpopular culture were not rigidly separated institutional domains, and ‘Pacific canni-bals’ bridged them all.27 Veidovi was not the first ‘live cannibal’ to capture publicinterest in America; the notion that some Pacific islands, and Fiji in particular,

24 Morning Courier and Enquirer, 3 Sept. 1831.25 Benjamin Morrell, A Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Sea, North and South Pacific Ocean, Chinese Sea,

Ethiopic and Southern Atlantic Ocean, Indian and Antarctic Ocean. From the Year 1822 to 1831 (New York1832), 466.26 ‘The Drama’, The New-York Mirror: devoted to literature and the fine arts, 16 March 1833.27 For discussion of the intersection of science, commerce, and popular culture during the Victorianera, see Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (eds), Science in the Marketplace: nineteenth-century sites and

experiences (Chicago 2007).

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were ‘cannibal islands’ was well established in the public imagination by the time of hisarrival.28

Nor was Veidovi the first Pacific Islander forcibly taken hostage, though hewas the only one brought to the USA. Wilkes indicates that temporary hostage-taking of chiefs by bêche-de-mer traders was routine in the course of trade nego-tiations.29 And already in 1840, Wilkes had arrested a Samoan chief, Tuvai, for themurder of an American sailor from New Bedford, subsequently depositing him onWallis Island. In his published narrative, Wilkes explains: ‘I conceived that thiswould accomplish all the ends I had in view…His fate would… remain a mysteryto his countrymen, and the impression I had hoped to produce on their mindswould be effectually made’.30 Wilkes records Tuvai’s ‘delight at being released’ andhis departing after ‘shaking hands with the sentry’.31 But the exploring expedition’ssecond captive, Veidovi, was not to be so fortunate.32 A revealing description of thecapture can be found in the private journal of one of the expedition’s young officers.Midshipman William Reynolds observes that after forcing Veidovi’s brother to turnVeidovi over:

The Captain assured the King, that… he would be brought back…a better man and with knowledge that to kill a white person was thevery worst thing a Feegee man could do; that he would be taught tospeak our language and learn our ways… he would be a great benefitto his own people by being able to tell them… how, by a peaceful

28 Gananath Obeyesekere has demonstrated that accounts of cannibalism in Fiji and the Marquesasbecame prevalent only after New Zealand – previously designated a cannibal island – was settled byEuropeans. The designation ‘cannibal islands’ was thus tied to a shifting colonial frontier. GananathObeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: the man-eating myth and human sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley 2005), 150.The veracity of 19th-century accounts of cannibalism in the Pacific (and elsewhere) has been thesubject of much scholarly debate. See, for example Catalin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Can-nibalism (Princeton 2009); Marshall Sahlins, ‘Artificially maintained controversies: global warmingand Fijian cannibalism’, Anthropology Today, 19:3 (2003), 4; and Patrick Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals:race and the Victorians (Ithaca 2011), 27‒45. For further discussion of cannibalism as trope in 19th-century America, see Paul Lyons, ‘Lines of fright: fear, perception, and the “seen” of cannibalismin Charles Wilkes’s Narrative and Herman Melville’s Typee’, in Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn(eds), Body Trade: captivity, cannibalism and colonialism in the Pacific (New York 2001), 126–48.29 Wilkes, Narrative, III, 221.30 Wilkes, Narrative, II, 157. See also David A. Chappell, Double Ghosts: Oceanian voyagers on Euroamer-ican ships (Armonk, NY 1993), 83.31 Wilkes, Narrative, II, 158. A second Pacific Islander who travelled with the expedition was a Maoriseaman who went by the name ‘John Sac’. Wilkes describes him as a ‘petty New Zealand chief’.Wilkes, Narrative, I, 313.32 A beachcomber encountered in Fiji, Paddy Connel, provided Wilkes with witness testimonyagainst Veidovi. Wilkes recorded Connel’s account in the published narrative. Wilkes, Narrative,III, 104–5. For a description of Veidovi’s capture, and its place in the history of Fijian powerstruggles, see Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: understanding history as culture and vice versa

(Chicago 2004), 242–3.

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and honest intercourse everything that a Feegee man wanted wouldbe brought to their shores.33

In Reynolds’s account, Veidovi is an involuntary participant in an elaborate spec-tacle of reformative assimilation, a display – designed for onlookers living half a worldaway – of America’s ability to elevate Islanders from ‘cannibal savagery’. A Nativepoint of view on the kidnapping shortly after it took place is suggested in the translated1871 autobiography of a Native missionary from Tonga, living in Fiji at the time.

I was at Rewa when the chiefs of America… took Ratu Veindoviaway…When this news was brought to the town… the warriorsran together, vowing to kill us all, because they thought the mission-aries had a hand in this deed…we escaped; but indeed we thoughtthat our time had come.34

‘A WONDERFUL CHANGE WAS WROUGHT’

Participants in the expedition often dwelt upon Fijian bodies ‒ the admiration andhorror they evoked. Describing his first impression of Fijian Islanders, MidshipmenWilliam Reynolds observed:

[The Fijians] were the ugliest in physiognomy of any race we hadseen… they were fine specimens of men, but black in color… theyrepresented a mingled hideousness & ferocity that well become thecharacter they have earned themselves…May they be smittenfrom the Earth!35

Such ‘hideousness’ was a visual manifestation of ferocity. The Fijians, concurred theexpedition philologist, Horatio Hale, might be regarded as ‘fine specimens’, but thatthey ‘differ from the Polynesian as the wolf from the dog; both, when wild, are perhapsequally fierce, but the ferocity of the one may be easily subdued, while that of the otheris deep-seated and untameable’.36 Fijians exploited this interest in their cannibalism andferocity, offering human body parts to would-be collectors in exchange for trade goods.37

33 William Reynolds, The Private Journal of William Reynolds, ed. by Nathaniel Philbrick and ThomasPhilbrick (New York 2004), 159.34 Joel Bulu, Joel Bulu: the autobiography of a Native minister in the South Seas, translated by a missionary

(London 1871), 23–4.35 Reynolds, The Private Journal, 145.36 Horatio Hale, United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842 Underthe Command of Charles Wilkes, U.S.N. Ethnography and Philology (Ridgewood, NJ 1968 [1846]), 50.37 See Wilkes’s reference to the purchase of a roasted skull. Wilkes, Narrative, III, 234. See also TitianPeale’s reference to portions of ‘cooked bodies taken on board the U.S. Ship Peacock for sale’ in hisdescription of cranium 24. Titian Peale, ‘Catalogue of ethnographic collections’, United States Explor-ing Expedition, and Titian Ramsay Peale, Catalogue of Ethnographical Collections, 1838‒1842 (Canberra:

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It is not surprising that Veidovi’s forced transformation to ‘civility’ began withan alteration of his physical appearance, as illustrated in the published narrative of theexpedition. Two images from the narrative are reproduced below. The first (Figure 1)was drawn soon after Ro Veidovi’s capture, while in the second Veidovi has beenshaved by the ship’s barber (Figure 2).38 The shaving of hair paralleled a practiceenforced by missionaries in the Paumotu Island groups and remarked upon byWilkes, who recorded that among the Paumotu Islanders, ‘all the males’ headswere shaven… for the sake of cleanliness, and also to distinguish Christian fromthe heathen party’.39

An unofficial account of the voyage by seaman Charles Erskine provides asupplementary description of Veidovi’s transformation:

Vendovi…who had been captured… through the treachery of oneof his nephews, declared… he would club, roast, and eat the trea-cherous fellow… Six months afterward the old chief had becomeso much civilized that the irons were taken off him. He appearedto be a very thoughtful, genial, and pleasant sort of man. After hehad been with us eighteen months, seeing and learning ourmanners and customs… such a wonderful change was wrought in

Australian National University, Pacific Manuscripts Bureau 1968), microfilm number 124. For adetailed analysis of this particular event, see Lyons, American Pacificism, 72‒87.38 Wilkes describes the forced shaving of Veidovi in his autobiography. ‘[I]t was sometime before he[Vendovi] became reconciled to… the mortification he experienced in having his huge head of hairwell cropped off…A close crop was made of his head by our ship’s barber who was much elated bythe job and retained locks for presentation’. Charles Wilkes, Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles

Wilkes, U.S. Navy, 1798‒1877, ed. by William James Morgan, David B Tyler, Joye L. Leonhart,Mary F. Loughlin (Washington 1978), 475. As Nicholas Thomas points out, ‘Hair, for a Fijianchiefly man of the time, was no mere matter of vanity, it was an expression, almost the substanceof, status, power and identity; from Veidovi’s perspective, this would have been a gratuitous andbarbaric assault’. Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: the Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven 2012),153. The image in Figure 2 by expedition artist A.T. Agate resembles the portrait by Sir JoshuaReynolds of the Tahitian Omai, brought back to England by Captain Cook. Reynolds’s portraitmay have set a convention for the re-acculturated ‘South Pacific chief’ as a turbaned, clean-shaven man. Or, Veidovi (who in this image appears to retain his head hair) may be wearing a tra-ditional Fijian headdress, the resemblance to the turban worn by Omai thus being coincidental.Images appear in Wilkes, Narrative, I, 120, 142. Incidentally, Wilkes makes no mention of theshaving of Veidovi’s beard.39 Wilkes, Narrative, 326. Wilkes employed an obsolete term for what is now known as the TuamotuIslands. It should be noted that the shaving of heads carried ritual meaning for both missionariesand Natives throughout Polynesia. A missionary report on the Gambier Islands in the 1830sclaimed that new converts requested ritual hair cutting. ‘The hair is sacred to their false gods,and it was considered a grievous sacrilege and sin to cut it. Towards the end of December, the chil-dren and youths requested the missionaries to cut off their hair, and throw it into the fire.’ ‘Glanceat the institution for the propagation of the faith’, Dublin Review, 4 (London 1838), 373.

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him that the sailors used to call him ‘The old Christian, cannibal,man-eater’.40

His purportedly violent nature tamed, a Veidovi now rendered harmless was referredto with the diminutive and familiar ‘old’. But already on shipboard Veidovi was beingnarratively groomed as a fine specimen or even, as Wilkes’s autobiography suggests, atrophy:

FIGURE 1: ‘Vendovi’ by expedition artist A.T. Agate, Wilkes, Narrative (1844), III, 120. Cour-tesy of University of Washington, Special Collections.

40 Charles Erskine, Twenty Years before the Mast: the more thrilling scenes and incidents while circumnavigating

the globe under the command of the late Admiral Charles Wilkes 1838‒1842 (Philadelphia 1896), 193.

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Until now he had been kept in irons, and as all apprehensions wereover as to his escape I ordered him to be set free…He was amodel of a man, very tall and erect and of a proud bearing…Hewas a splendid picture of a Savage.41

During the months of the return voyage, the expedition’s ethnologist, CharlesPickering, employed Veidovi as an informant on Fijian culture and in later publi-cations offered Veidovi’s observations as support for his own speculations about

FIGURE 2: ‘Vendovi’ by expedition artist A.T. Agate, Wilkes, Narrative (1844), III, 142. Cour-tesy of University of Washington, Special Collections.

41 Wilkes, Autobiography, 475.

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human migration.42 Wilkes, for his part, perhaps motivated by an impulse to exalt thestatus of his human prize and immortalise the feat of his capture, named one of theislands in Puget Sound ‘Vendovi Island’ – an honour normally reserved for navalofficers.43

But by the time the expedition arrived in New York Harbor, Veidovi was soill that death appeared imminent. While newspaper editors debated whether his illnessmight be due to his being deprived of human flesh,44 Pickering, the ethnologist, urgedthe well-known craniologist Samuel Morton to rush to New York, lest he miss achance to inspect a ‘specimen of humanity as you have never seen’.45

American public reaction to Veidovi’s death ranged from a show of sympathyfor one who could not be judged by the norms of a way of life he had never known, tomockery. One weekly journal, Brother Jonathan, reported:

The most valuable curiosity… is no more. We speak of Vindova, aFijian chief… It is stated that Vindova was present and abetting atthe murder of the crew of the brig Charles Doggett… and that healso joined in the horrid repast upon the bodies… . If it was purposedto send this savage back to report upon what he saw in this country, itis unfortunate that he died; but if anything like punishment was pro-posed, it is fortunate; for there could be little civilized justice, ininflicting chastisement upon one who had not sinned against lightand knowledge.46

Another, the New World, found in Veidovi’s death an opportunity for satire:

Great joy was manifested in certain circles on the arrival of theVincennes, when it was announced that His Majesty Vendovi,King of the Fejee Island, was on board… the most magnificentschemes for lionizing his majesty were contemplated, but alas!Their plans were all frustrated by the death of Vendovi… in conse-quence, it is supposed, of his long deprivation from human food.Vendovi, it must be remembered, was a cannibal.47

This passage was followed by a list of imagined events that might have been held inVeidovi’s honour, including a banquet featuring ‘a cold clergyman’. For the most

42 Charles Pickering, The Races of Man; and Their Geographical Distribution (London 1854), 40.43 By contrast, for the names Wilkes assigned to other islands in Puget Sound see Herbert Hunt andFloyd C. Kaylor, Washington West of the Cascades: historical and descriptive: the explorers, the Indians, the pio-

neers, the modern, vol. 1 (Chicago 1917), 526–28.44 Barry Alan Joyce, The Shaping of American Ethnography: the Wilkes Exploring Expedition, 1838‒1842

(Lincoln, NE 2001), 145.45 Charles Pickering to Samuel Morton, 10 June 1842, American Philosophical Society, quoted inFabian, The Skull Collectors, 121.46 ‘The Exploring Expedition’, Brother Jonathan: a weekly compend of belles lettres and the fine arts, 18 June1842.47 ‘A Real King’, The New World: a weekly family journal of popular literature, science, art, 18 June 1842.

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part, however, notice of Veidovi’s death was relegated to passing comment. TheNew York State Mechanic noted that ‘the body of the Fiji chief, who immortalizedhimself by eating the crew of an American ship’ was to be embalmed. ‘We havenot learned what disposition is to be made of him then. Some one says he was theonly curiosity brought home by the exploring expedition’.48

No longer capable of serving as a living specimen, Veidovi’s remains werepressed into metonymic service to represent savagery and cannibalism, the antithesisof human progress to be advanced by American Christian civilisation, in an exhibitnarrating the relationship of the USA to peoples on its Pacific frontier.

BATTLE OF MALOLO AND COURT MARTIAL OF WILKES

No sooner had newspapers squeezed the last ounce of drama from the death of a ‘can-nibal king’ than this story was supplanted by a different kind of man-eating spectacle:the court martial of the expedition’s commander, Charles Wilkes. ‘We understandthat there is to be a nice mess dished up in a short time in the shape of court martials,courts of enquiry, arranging specimens, rocks, etc., in the eating of which nearly all ofthe officers of the Exploring Expedition are to participate with finger glasses andnapkins’, wrote a reporter for the New York Herald.49

Among several charges laid against Wilkes was that he had employedexcessive force in the Fiji Islands. On two occasions, between May and August of1840, Wilkes ordered the complete destruction of native crops and villages. Theseattacks markedly countermanded orders that had been given upon departure bythe secretary of the navy, who had stressed that the aims of the expedition werepeaceful and had tasked Wilkes with leaving a favourable impression among thenatives. In fact, the expedition’s actions embarrassed both the US government andthe navy.50

The first attack in the islands occurred after the theft of one of theexpedition’s surveying sloops. Though the boat was recovered, Wilkes ordered reta-liatory destruction of a village, together with all the Natives’ canoes and crops.Years later in his autobiography, he recorded: ‘the whole town was reduced to aheap of ruins’, which ‘had the effect to strike terror into all the towns along thecoast’.51 Wilkes’s policy of terror became even more pronounced after hisnephew, Midshipman Henry, and a Lieutenant Underwood were killed while sur-veying the island of Malolo in June 1840 (Figure 3).52 Wilkes’s memoir describes the

48 ‘Vendovi’, The New York State Mechanic, a Journal of the Manual Arts, Trades, and Manufacture, 2 July1842.49 ‘The Vincennes – Discharge of her Crew, &ct’, New York Herald, 13 June 1842.50 Wilkes, Narrative, I, xxviii.51 Wilkes, Autobiography, 468.52 After the return of the expedition, the officers and scientific corps funded a memorial for thedeceased at Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on which they inscribed: ‘Fell by thehands of Savages, While Promoting the cause of science and philanthropy, at Malolo, One ofthe Feejee group of islands, July 24, 1840.’ Wilkes, Narrative, III, 311.

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attack: ‘the entire town was destroyed estimated to contain some 2,000 natives’.53

That same day, he ordered Commander Ringgold to lead an attack against asecond village on the other side of the island, stipulating ‘every man or nativecapable of using a club, or stone, is to be destroyed’.54 In the wake of theseactions, Midshipman Reynolds confided in a letter to his family, ‘once a feegee,always a feegee. They seem to be one of the races of men that are afflicted withthe curse of God… and the sooner they are extinct upon the earth, the better,which event I heartily pray for’.55

FIGURE 3: ‘Murder of Lieut. Underwood’, United States Exploring Expedition, Voyage of the U.S.

Exploring Squadron Commanded by Charles Wilkes, of the United States Navy in 1838, 1839, 1840,

1841, and 1842: Together with Explorations and Discoveries Made by Admiral D’Urville, Captain Ross,and Other Navigators and Travelers; and an Account of the Expedition to the Dead Sea, Under Lieutenant

Lynch (Auburn 1852), 326. Adler collection.

53 Wilkes, Autobiography, 472.54 Wilkes, Narrative, III, 424. An account of the attack, stressing the laboriousness of mass killing, isprovided in the published narrative of one of its participants, Joseph Clark: ‘The number killedcould not be correctly ascertained… [but] must have been considerably large… a comfortablenight’s repose was very acceptable, following as it did, a day of fatigue, slaughter and bloodshed’.Joseph G. Clark, Lights and Shadows of a Sailor Life, As Exemplified in Fifteen Years’ Experience, Including theMore Thrilling Events of the US Exploring Expedition, and Reminiscences of an Eventful Life on the ‘Mountain

Wave’ (Boston 1848), 162.55 William Reynolds, Voyage to the Southern Ocean: the letters of Lieutenant William Reynolds from the U.S.

Exploring Expedition, 1838‒1842, ed. by Anne Hoffman Cleaver and E. Jeffrey Stann (Annapolis1988), 195. This passage, with its reference to God’s curse, signals more than Reynolds’s impatiencefor the extinction of a doomed race. Contemporary missionary writing often invoked biblical com-parisons when classifying Pacific peoples. As Jane Samson explains, ‘many missionary

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After the destruction of the villages, the crew gathered artefacts for theexpedition’s collections, Wilkes recording that ‘numerous clubs, spears, bows andarrows, with several muskets, were picked up, together with fish-nets, tapa, &c’.56

Wilkes then demanded that the chiefs present themselves in surrender. One of the

FIGURE 4: ‘Viendori – from a portrait-bust at the naval hospital, Brooklyn’, Will M. Clemens,‘The Passing of Viendori’, Illustrated American, 4 April 1896, 442. Courtesy of Michigan StateUniversity Library.

ethnographers called Polynesians and Micronesians “Semitic”, relating them to Noah’s son Shemand to the peoples of the Middle East. The darker islanders in the western Pacific were often labeled‘Hamitic’, associating them with the cursed descendants of Ham’. Jane Samson, Race and Empire

(Harlow 2005), 35.56 Wilkes, Narrative, III, 278.

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crew, Joseph G. Clark, records how they were made to crawl on their hands and kneesbefore prostrating themselves at the feet of their subjugators.57 Wilkes ordered that, ifthe chiefs did not comply, they were ‘to be exterminated’,58 and noted with satisfac-tion that the Islanders, whose crops had just been destroyed, procured 3,000 gallons ofwater, 12 pigs, yams and 3,000 coconuts for the expedition.59

Later, at Wilkes’s court martial, when Lieutenant Robert Johnson was ques-tioned as to whether ‘the destruction of life and property was in self-defense’, heresponded: ‘it was to avenge my messmates… I was desired to go on shore andshoot the natives for killing my brother officers. It was not done in self-defense’.60

Despite this admission, or perhaps swayed by Wilkes’s argument that ‘unless [the]court [was] prepared to justify the indiscriminate destruction of those whose illfortune [might] throw them into the hands of those merciless savages, they mustacquit [him]’, all charges were dropped.61

In fact, with the cooperation of naval superiors in Washington, Wilkes pre-emptively sought to quell debate concerning his actions even before the expedition’sreturn. In a letter to the secretary of the navy, dated 10 August 1840 and published inthe New York Evening Post on 11 February 1841, he describes the deaths of Underwoodand Henry and the punitive attacks ordered, noting their ‘beneficial effect upon thenatives’.62 This letter was accompanied by the boat orders issued during the surveyof the islands, and a letter from a junior officer describing the murder of Underwoodand Henry.

These letters were reprinted, with further embellishment, in other newspa-pers. Under the heading ‘A Small War’, the Louisville Public Advertiser reported: ‘Assoon as the news of this treacherous murder had been received… boats were immedi-ately dispatched to make an assault upon the island. They… succeeded in rescuingthe bodies of the murdered men… already stripped in preparation for some of themost horrid rites of cannibalism’. While Wilkes refers in his letter only to ‘natives’and ‘warriors’, the Louisville Public Advertiser referred to ‘savages’, ‘natives treacherousin the extreme, and the worst cannibals’. It informed readers that these same Islanders‘occasionally eat their wives and children’ and that the Expedition had ‘captured achief… who… killed ten of the crew of an American vessel’.63

While the ‘small war’ soon faded from public attention in the USA, it drewcriticism in England. ‘This is a sad story to connect with objects of science… fire

57 Clark, Lights and Shadows of a Sailor Life, 163.58 Wilkes, Narrative, III, 280.59 Ibid., 283.60 ‘Trial of Lieut. Charles Wilkes, U.S.N., Naval Court Martial, Reported for The New-YorkTribune’, New York Daily Tribune, 22 Aug. 1842. Johnson’s response, as transcribed in theNew York Tribune, differs slightly from that quoted by Philbrick who employed court martialrecords and reports published in the New York Herald. See Philbrick, Sea of Glory, 321.61 Charles Wilkes, Defense: the following defense of Lieut. Charles Wilkes to the charges on which he has been tried

is respectfully submitted to the court (Washington 1842), 21.62 ‘South Sea Exploring Expedition’, New York Evening Post, 11 Feb. 1841.63 ‘A Small War’, Louisville Public Advertiser, 17 Feb. 1841.

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and sword are not the instruments of civilization’, noted one author in the Westminster

Review, adding dryly:

The crew did not quite descend to a level with the savage. Seventy-fivemen were killed to revenge the loss of two, but captain Wilkes did noteat his prisoners, as the natives would have done. This is gratifying.64

In contrast, the North American Review defended the actions:

We have no hesitation in saying that we regard [Wilkes’s] conductwith unqualified approbation. We not only justify the punishmenthe inflicted upon the natives, but we fully appreciate the necessityfor his exacting that particular form of submission by which alonethey acknowledge themselves conquered.65

The reviewer took a more critical stance, however, with respect to the dismember-ment of Veidovi, after death, in the USA.

His body did not grace the triumph of his captors, but his skull is stillnumbered among the trophies of the Expedition. It may be thoughtthat we are making an exaggerated demand upon the sympathies ofthe reader, in asking his compassion for the sufferings of a Feejeesavage…Yet Vendovi seems to have been no worse than all histribe, and certainly was not destitute of the rude virtues of hispeople… how unjust it is to charge upon an individual the crimesof his age and country[.]66

Detailed accounts of the attacks in Fiji have been provided in other histories of theexploring expedition, but the sources cited here suggest how these events shapedpublic perception of the Islands.67 Already on shipboard Veidovi was exhibited as acuriosity at ports of call in Hawaii and San Francisco; when the expedition arrivedin the Oregon territories, he was made to march with the sailors in an impromptuIndependence Day parade ‘dressed in the Fiji fashion’ and leading Wilkes’s petdog.68 Once deceased, he was represented as a captured ‘murderer’ whose remainscould justly be treated in the same way a headhunter would treat anyone falling

64 ‘Exploring Expedition of the United States’, Westminster Review, 44 (1845), 247–48. The Britishresponse might be read as a counter-argument in a larger national debate over the effectiveness ofBritish punitive naval expeditions. Jane Samson has shown that critics of the British navy oftenpointed to American and French punitive actions as models of effectiveness, though ‘the evidencesuggests that French and American punitive raids were no more “effective” than British ones’. JaneSamson, Imperial Benevolence: making British authority in the Pacific Islands (Honolulu 1998), 141.65 ‘Art. III – Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition during the years 1838–1842. ByCharles Wilkes’ [review], North American Review, 61 (Boston 1845), 85.66 Ibid., 80.67 See Philbrick, Sea of Glory, 220–30.68 Erskine, Twenty Years Before the Mast, 236.

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into his hands. A letter from the expedition’s geologist, James Dwight Dana, to thenaturalist Asa Gray reported:

The Feejees have proved a very interesting group for us. We havefound the natives a cruel, treacherous race of cannibals… yourhead would not be long your own if trusted among them…wemanaged to get into our possession one of the chiefs…We intendto bring him with us to the United States to gratify the people athome with a sight of one of these man-eaters.69

And expedition ethnologist Charles Pickering wrote in his scientific report that,though he had not met ‘with a really fine head among the Feejeeans… strangersdid not readily forget the features of Veindovi’.70 Of course, as events played out, itwas not Dana or Pickering who lost their heads, but Veidovi, whose head wassevered, prepared, encased and displayed by Americans.

ARTIFACT NO. 30

After Veidovi died, his skull was severed from his body at a New York naval hospital.71

Once defleshed, it entered the catalogue of the expedition’s ethnographic collectionsas ‘artifact no. 30’, with the following description:

Cranium of Veindovi, Chief of the island of Kantavu,… chargedwith the murder of… the crew of the Brig Charles Daggett…He

69 James Dwight Dana to Asa Gray – Feejee Islands, 15 June 1840, quoted in Daniel C. Gilman,The Life of James Dwight Dana: scientific explorer, mineralogist, geologist, zoologist, professor in Yale University

(New York 1899), 118.70 Pickering, The Races of Man, 147. Henry Lyman, the son of missionaries living in Hawaii, recalleda visit aboard the flag ship Vincennes, in which he had been ‘permitted to look upon Vendovie, thecannibal chief’. He recalled ‘a brawny giant, whose sullen countenance clearly revealed the miseryof his punishment’. Henry M. Lyman, Hawaiian Yesterdays: chapters from a boy’s life in the islands in the

early days (Chicago 1906), 54–5. In San Francisco, another visitor recalled ‘a thorough savage andcannibal… of large and powerful frame… a cunning look in his eyes’. William Heath Davis, SixtyYears in California: a history of events and life in California: personal, political and military, under the Mexican

regime: during the quasi-military government of the territory by the United States, and after the admission of the

state into the union, being a compilation by a witness of the events described (San Francisco 1889), 131.71 Five days after Vendovi’s death the New York Herald reported: ‘We have understood that the bodyof the Fejee chief, Vendovi, is about to be embalmed by the learned faculty of the University ofNew York. We hope Dr. Mott will be prevailed upon to deliver a lecture on his remains. The sur-geons at the Hospital have already cut off his head… in his day of glory, he had thirty hairdressersto wait on him. Vendovi beat the Broadway dandies all to smash’, ‘Important from the ExploringExpedition’, New York Herald, 17 June 1842. It is unclear when Vendovi’s skull was defleshed. Forimages and a discussion of the skull see T.D. Stewart, ‘The skull of Vendovi: a contribution of theWilkes expedition to the physical anthropology of Fiji’, Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania,13: 2‒3 (1978), 204‒14.

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confessed having… succeeded in killing ten of the men, who werecooked and eaten; the rest escaped with the vessel.72

Together with the rest of the expedition’s collections, Veidovi’s skull was sentto Washington DC to be mounted in the recently constructed Patent Office.There it was displayed in a new ‘National Gallery’ under the supervision ofCharles Wilkes.73

When the National Institute for the Promotion of Science held its first annualmeeting in the Patent Office on 21 April 1844, Senator Robert J. Walker, introducedby President Tyler, delivered the opening speech. Remarking that ‘a visit to our newand beautiful Patent Office will convince the close observer that the inventive geniusof America was never more active than at the present moment’, the senator posed arhetorical question: ‘does the untutored savage start in the world at the same pointwith Sir Isaac Newton in the race toward the goal of infinite knowledge… ?’74

Walker and his audience viewed the Patent Office exhibits as a showcase for Americangenius and a tutorial in human progress. Situated in the nation’s capital, the accom-plishments of American science and exploration could be lifted onto an internationalstage. Here, the collections returned by the exploring expedition were displayed from1842 to 1857. But how did the public viewing the collections, including Veidovi’sskull, interpret what they saw?

Although few visitors wrote about their impressions, records of the curationand the design of the galleries reveal the message they were intended to impart.The guide to the Great Hall, in which the expedition’s collections were arranged,instructs visitors: ‘when inside the door turn to the right’. A surviving floor planshows that visitors were expected to file past cases in the order in which they werenumbered. This path took visitors first past ‘war implements from the feegeeislands’ and ended in front of ‘[the] Original Declaration of Independence, Relicsof Washington, Treatises with Foreign Powers, and Presents to Officers under

72 Titian Peale, ‘Catalogue of ethnographic collections’, prepared 1846, Smithsonian Institute,Washington DC; on microfilm, Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, PMB 124.73 For more onWilkes’s assertion of control over the collections see Antony Adler, ‘From the Pacificto the Patent Office: the US Exploring Expedition and the origins of America’s first nationalmuseum’, Journal of the History of Collections, 23:1 (2011), 49‒74.74 ‘Introductory address of Hon. R.J. Walker, of Mississippi, director of the National Institute’, Bul-letin for the Proceedings of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, 1 (Washington DC 1844), 450.There is no evidence that Wilkes was interested in phrenology. However, as Roger Cooter and PaulTurnbull have shown in the case of Britain, phrenology had a broad cultural influence in the early19th century. Many believed that phrenology, and the study of the skulls of Indigenous peoples inparticular, ‘would bring a new degree of scientific accuracy to both the natural and civil history ofhumanity’. The inclusion of skulls in the Patent Office, as opposed to other types of human remains,is understandable in this context. Paul Turnbull, “‘Rare work amongst the professors”: the captureof Indigenous skulls within phrenological knowledge in early colonial Australia’, in Barbara Creedand Jeanette Hoorn (eds), Body Trade: captivity and colonialism in the Pacific (New York 2001), 6. See alsoRoger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: phrenology and the organization of consent in nineteenth-

century Britain (Cambridge 1984).

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Government’.75 The processional order suggested not only a journey into thePacific and back, but a progression from Fijian savagery to American federalgovernment.76

An article in the American Journal of Science and Arts in 1843 provides a contem-porary description:

Separate cases or parts of cases are allotted to the different islands…and when labeled throughout… the condition of the various tribes orraces, and the degree of civilization among them, will be at onceapparent… By a walk through the National Gallery, we travel withmore than railroad speed over the Pacific, and examine… the rela-tive intelligence of the savages…were the chief Veindovi living, avisit to the hall with Veindovi at hand would be little less interestingthan visiting the islands themselves. One advantage, at least nodanger would be apprehended from a ferocious race of cannibals,that are ready to attack all intruders into those seas.77

This conception of the exhibit as a place of imaginary transport, evoking the imageof a living Veidovi as guide, all hazards of contact with ferocious races removed, cele-brated government-sponsored exploration and American expansion into the Pacific.The museum excised the ‘terror’ inflicted on natives, while playing up dangersfaced by American crews. Included in the display was the club used, it was claimed,to murder Lieutenant Underwood in Fiji, as well as rock fragments from the site ofCaptain Cook’s 1779 murder in Hawaii.78

An 1857 guide to the exhibit directed visitors to case no. 37 to view ‘tattooedheads – one, the head of the Fegee Chief, Vendovi’. There, visitors were instructed totake particular note of the fact that, among these heads, the ‘features are decidedlydifferent; hair in remarkable good preservation; teeth in very good order and

75 See John Varden, A Guide for the Visitors to the National Gallery, Revised in Accordance with the Instructions

of the Commissioner of Patents (Washington DC 1857), and ‘Plan of the National Gallery containing thecollections of the Exploring Expedition’, Magnificent Voyagers, 239.76 The visual record of the colonial periphery provided imagery inviting displacement in time aswell as space. Citing Johannes Fabian, Anne McClintock has argued that 19th-century museumsserved as spaces in which ‘the image of global history [was] consumed… in a single spectaclefrom a point of privileged invisibility’. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: race, gender and sexuality inthe colonial contest (New York 1995), 40. The interpretation of exhibits as ‘panoptic’ and ‘imperial’spaces of power has been elaborated by many scholars, in particular Donna Haraway, Paul Turn-bull and Roslyn Poignant. Poignant, for instance, describes sites in which colonised people werebrought to act as entertainers and ‘examples of their race’ as ‘chronotopic’ conjunctions ‘of timeand space…where historically specific relations of power between colonizers and colonizedwere made visible’. Roslyn Poignant, Professional Savages: captive lives and Western spectacle (NewHaven 2004), 7.77 G.S. Silliman, ‘A brief account of the discoveries and results of the United States’ ExploringExpedition’, American Journal of Science and Arts, 44 (1843), 399.78 See artefacts no. 1952 and 909–11 in Peale’s Catalogue of Ethnographic Collections.

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sharp, as they are filed with the shark skin… ready for use’.79 An earlier 1853 guide,prepared by R.J. Pollard, described case 37 simply as ‘Egyptian mummies… ; Peru-vian mummies, crania, &c., and one very fine skull of the African elephant. Amongstthe human crania is the head of the Feejee chief Vendovi’.80

The collection had been assembled through acts of violent pillage, and theexpedition naturalists had participated in Wilkes’s explicitly proclaimed policy ofterror. Naturalist Titian Peale, for example, had attached a silver plaque to his gun-stock (the same gun used for collecting animal specimens), engraving it with thelocations and dates when he had fired upon Natives.81 But when the collection wasexhibited in the nation’s capital, the violence on the oceanic frontier, insofar as itappeared at all, was framed by glass cases in monumental museum space and givena legitimising gloss. Visitors were invited to look down upon the severed head of a‘cannibal chief’, collected, curated and rendered harmless by American naval power.

In his discussion of the Fijian exhibits at the British international exhibitionsin 1886 and 1924, Ewan Johnson suggests that, despite organisers’ efforts to promotean image of ‘progress and promise’ in the British Colony of Fiji (annexed in 1874),visitors left with their ideas about Fiji and the Fijians unchanged.82 Similarly, visitorsto the Patent Office, seeking entertainment rather than lessons on moral progress, arelikely to have come away with their preconceptions largely intact. While most left norecord of their impressions, we might imagine that precisely because of pre-existing per-ceptions about Fijian savagery, they would have been drawn to the Fijian artefacts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had enthused over the expedition’s successes inThe Dial, wrote to his wife, Lidian, expressing delight in the Patent Office exhibit,asking her to inform his friend Thoreau of the wonders to be seen there:

I believe I was about to tell you, mainly for Henry’s information, thatI had seen… arms trinkets implements, & natural & artificial curios-ities from the Feejees and Tonga & navigators’ & Sandwich Islands,… brought home by our recent Explorers: the most invigorating factsby far, coming from our friends the Feejees, tattooed heads & bakedheads, and headdresses more striking than beautiful, and Feejeepillows[.]83

These ‘invigorating facts’ in no way indicated the legacy of their acquisition.Noticeably absent from the Fijian collections were any of the muskets used against

79 Alfred Hunter, A Popular Catalogue of the Extraordinary Curiosities of the National Institute, Arranged in the

Building Belonging to the Patent Office (Washington DC 1857), 45.80 R.J. Pollard, ‘Guide to the National Museum in the US Patent Office, commencing with thenumbering of cases on your right, entering the door’, Congressional Directory for the Second Session of

the Thirty-Second Congress of the United States of America, and Guide Book Through the Public Offices (Washing-ton 1853), 45.81 For an image of Titian’s gun, see: Herman Viola, Exploring the West (Washington, DC 1987), 54.82 Ewan Johnston, ‘Reinventing Fiji at 19th-century and early 20th-century exhibitions’, Journal ofPacific History, 40 (2005), 28.83 See, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Ralph L. Rusk, vol. 3 (New York 1939), 123

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expedition crew during the battle at Malolo, an absence that enhanced the impressionof radical difference between Natives and crew.84 The exhibit, in the hands of Wilkes,had become a means of asserting narrative control through intentional ordering,labelling and judicious decisions of inclusion and omission.

VEIDOVI AS PERSON, ARTEFACT AND SYMBOL

Despite the dismantling of the exploring expedition exhibit in 1856, the memory ofVeidovi persisted in multiple permutations. Almost immediately after the expedition’sreturn, ‘Vendovi’ as representation began to diverge from ‘Vendovi’ the man. A June1842 article in the New York Herald featured Veidovi as an emblematic glutton, associ-ated with the intermittent enemy, John Bull, invoking him to make fun of a Southernpicnic:

the procession, embracing all denominations of politicians of bothsexes, white, black, yellow, and quartroon, moved… it was difficultto say which attracted most attention, they, or the 20,000 poundsof meat…which were speedily surrounded, and their contentswalked into with a degree of voracity which would have put JohnBull (or Vendovi) himself to the blush.85

Twenty years later, with the Civil War in full swing, Harper’s Weekly condemned theattacks of Southern guerrilla fighters in these terms: ‘such God forsaken wretchescan not be found anywhere in the world out of the Feejee Islands and the SouthernSlave States.’86 The godforsaken ‘Feejee savage’ had become a floating point of refer-ence, no longer embodied in America only by Veidovi.

While the man forcibly transported to America as a captive faded from publicmemory, his tangible remains continued to be the object of scientific discourse. Onevisiting British ethnologist recorded:

Among the Fiji skulls… several exhibit the broad, well-roundedocciput… this is not an invariable characteristic… in another Fijiskull of the same collection, – that of Veindovi, Chief of Kantavu,

84 In the Narrative, Wilkes dismissed the Natives’ use of firearms: ‘The natives had…muskets; butthe latter were so unskillfully handled as to do little damage, for they… put charges into themaccording to the size of the person they intended to shoot at’. Wilkes, Narrative, III, 278. The inef-fectiveness of the muskets had more to do with the faultiness of the guns than with the inexperienceof the Fijians. Muskets had been present on the Islands since the early 1800s and, as R.A. Derrickwrites, most of these weapons were trade muskets ‘costing a few dollars apiece; and these, whenpitted with rust and too generously charged with powder, might be more dangerous to the manwho pulled the trigger than to the man aimed at’. Derrick, A History of Fiji, 46.85 J.G. Bennett, Esq., ‘Great teetotal barbeque in Kentucky – Harry Clay a teetotal candidate –

splendid speech – splendid occasion – great moral movement Lexington, June 9th 1842’,New York Herald, 18 June 1842.86 Quoted in Linda Frost, Never One Nation: freaks, savages, and whiteness in US popular culture (Minnea-polis 2005), 19.

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who was taken prisoner… and died at New York in 1842, – theocciput though full, is slightly vertical.87

In 1856, Veidovi’s skull was transferred from the Patent Office to the Division ofMammals in the new Smithsonian building, distancing it from association with theman and his history. From there it was transferred to the Army Medical Museumin 1868, and finally back to the Smithsonian in 1898, when the museum opened a Div-ision of Physical Anthropology.88

Though Veidovi’s skull became just another scientific specimen amongSmithsonian artefacts, plaster casts of his head and bust continued to circulate. Hisbust was reproduced several times – though how the copies were disseminated isunknown. One cast stood for years in the Naval Hospital in Brooklyn; anotheradorned one of the rooms of the publishing headquarters of the Phrenological Journal

in New York City. An article in that journal in 1870 describes the office as ‘filledwith… skulls of Greenlanders, Indians, Kaffirs, Australians, idiots, etc., and castsof heads of men and women who were either very good or very bad’. Amongthese was the cast of Veidovi. The article painted a colourful picture of the Fijiancaptive: ‘he was a giant in stature… ; his joints… all double, and his teeth allmolars. The linaments are massive and strongly marked; the expression is resoluteand dignified, but sad’. The author claimed Veidovi was taken captive ‘as a fittingretaliation from representatives of a Christian nation’ after the Islanders were‘accused of stealing or some other dishonesty peculiar to savages’. Upon the depar-ture of ‘the steamer’ of the US Exploring Expedition, he continued, Veidovi cut offone of his fingers and gave it to his favourite wife, this ‘token of faithfulness’ showing‘fortitude and love so strong in that savage heart’. In conclusion he noted that Vei-dovi’s skeleton had been ‘preserved in the University Medical College’ untildestroyed by a fire ‘two years since’.89

The narrative in the Phrenological Journal (1870) is striking for its embellish-ments, yet the most dramatic fictionalisation of the Veidovi story, ‘The Passing ofViendori’, by Will M. Clemens, appeared in the Illustrated American on 4 April1896.90 Clemens began with Veidovi’s ‘portrait-bust’, describing it as ‘imbued withmore of the refinement and crude intellectual force, and… less marred by the linesof pure savage instinct, than you would naturally expect to find in a personage suchas it represents’. He went on: ‘there is something in the expression of the eyes andmouth that clearly declares how the life of this cannibal chieftain was dominated bythe savage passion of conquest’. Written 54 years after Veidovi’s death, Clemens

87 Daniel Wilson, LL.D., ‘Indications of ancient customs, suggested by certain cranial forms’, BritishAmerican Magazine Devoted to Literature, Science, and Arts, 1 (Toronto 1863), 452.88 Fabian, The Skull Collectors, 161.89 H.G. Pardee, ‘An afternoon at “389”’, Phrenological Journal, 50 (1870), 39–40.90 Will M. Clemens, ‘The passing of Viendori’, Illustrated American, 19 (New York 1896), 442.Clemens was the first biographer of Mark Twain (to whom he was not related). See AlanGribben, ‘Autobiography as property: Mark Twain and his legend’, The Mythologizing of Mark

Twain, ed. by Sara deSaussure Davis and Philip D. Beidler (Tuscaloosa 1984), 47.

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claims that his story had been ‘handed down among the officers of the Navy’. In thisaccount, Veidovi, dominated by a ‘savage passion of conquest’, had been the victim ofaggression from another Fijian tribe, war having been brought about in Trojanfashion by Veidovi’s abduction of the daughter of a rival chief. Clemens elevates Vei-dovi’s status as a prince, stating that he possessed ‘lands in abundance’ and ‘wives bythe score’, notably depicting his power in naval terms: he ‘led a navy of a thousandwell-manned war canoes’. Finding himself defeated by his Fijian enemies, Clemensexplains, Veidovi put to sea in self-banishment only to be rescued by the UnitedStates Exploring Expedition. Once brought to the USA, he became ‘a great favouritewith the officers and men’ thanks to his ‘quiet disposition and his mild melancholy’.However, Veidovi, was ‘not fitted for civilization’. ‘[C]hafing beneath the restraintsthat were necessarily placed upon him and unaccustomed to the food, the clothingand temperature’, he died.

Clemens may have been right in at least one claim: the story of Veidoviretained currency longer in the navy and, by extension, in the broader world of mar-itime commerce, than elsewhere. The famous naval officer, scientist, and ‘father ofoceanography’, Matthew Fontaine Maury, named his family’s dog ‘Vendovi’.91 In1850, a schooner christened ‘Vendovi’ was built in South Thomaston, Maine.92

Plying the waters between Portland and New York, it appeared regularly in the‘marine intelligence’ section of the New York Times as late as 1865.93 Finally, anarticle published in the New York Tribune in 1903 reported:

In the Naval Hospital is a curious old death mask of a Fiji Island chief,who died there in the early half of the last century. Becoming friendlywith an American naval officer whose vessel visited his island, thechief accepted an invitation to make a tour on the ship. Thewarship was suddenly ordered home, and the chief was brought tothe Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he died a few months later from con-sumption. His body lies in the Naval Cemetery.94

Harder to trace is the historical memory of the Battle of Malolo, the most violentencounter during the voyage of the exploring expedition. Some evidence suggeststhat the memory of the expedition’s retributive violence did have a lasting effect onlater interactions between Islanders and sailors, as Wilkes intended. Mary DavisWallis, the wife of a bêche-de-mer trader recorded in a memoir published in 1851that ‘during the four years succeeding the squadron’s visit, no murders were com-mitted upon white men; but since the expiration of that term some fifteen persons

91 Diane Fontaine Maury Corbin, A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury, U.S.N. and C.S.N.: author of ‘Phys-

ical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology’ (London 1888), 47.92 Cyrus Eaton, History of Thomaston, Rockland, and South Thomaston, Maine, from their first exploration,

1605; with Family Genealogies, vol. 2 (Challowell 1865), 104.93 ‘Marine intelligence; Cleared. Arrived. By telegraph. Spoken, &c. Foreign ports’, New York Times,21 Nov. 1865.94 ‘The News of Brooklyn: an historic clock in the naval yard – the Civitas Club’s gavel’, New York

Tribune, 1 Feb. 1903.

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have been killed’.95 Wilkes, in any case, was not the last American naval officer todestroy Fijian villages. In 1856, the New York Daily Tribune reported that the USsloop of war John Adams destroyed five towns in retribution for attacks on Americanships. These actions were commended in now familiar terms: ‘the obstinate andrefractory nature of these savages demanding… vigorous and harsh measures, theCommander of the John Adams deemed it expedient to teach them their obligationsto the human race, and did so in a manner that made some impression upon them,and which… they will long remember’. The result of the vessel’s visit, the piece con-cluded, was the re-establishment of ‘order and [the restoration of] the confidence ofAmerican citizens residing there’.96

Memory of the Battle of Malolo, like the memory of Veidovi, lived on withinthe armed services after fading from public awareness. In 1934, a retired US MarineCorps captain published a pamphlet on the history of US naval landings, describingthe exploring expedition’s punitive attacks on Fiji Islanders and bemoaning theIslanders’ historical amnesia:

the Feejee Islanders kept fresh in the memory the lesson taught themby Lieutenant Wilkes. However, being natives of a tropical climate,and subject to the inertia usually attributed to such inhabitants, theeffects of the lesson so administered finally waned and disappeared.97

But it is in ‘the islands’, in recent years, that new publics, articulating and demand-ing new discourses about Veidovi’s memory and remains have emerged. An article inthe Fiji Sun, entitled ‘Ro Veidovi’s grave found’, described how Veidovi’s remains hadbeen located in ‘one of America’s distinguished military burial grounds, Cypress Hillsin Brooklyn, New York’. The author observed that ‘the Ro Veidovi story has… con-nected senior Fiji and USA Government officials’. The director of the cemetery,William Rhoades, reported as ‘ready to discuss the history associated with this distin-guished gentleman’, is quoted as stating that ‘he [Veidovi] was obviously a well-respected man of his culture and apparently earned the respect of the US NavyCrew that captured him… that in itself speaks volumes about his character’.98

95 Mary Davis Wallis, Life in Feejee, Or, Five Years Among the Cannibals (Boston 1851), 154.96 ‘From the Feejee Islands. Vengeance on the savages. Burning of five towns. Treaty with theFeejee king’, New York Daily Tribune, 15 Feb. 1856.97 Harry Allanson Ellsworth, One Hundred Eighty Landings of United States Marines, 1800–1934

(Washington DC 1934 [1974]), 80.98 Visiti Ritova, ‘Ro Veidovi’s grave found’, Fiji Sun, 23 Nov. 2009. www.fijisun.com.fj/main_page/view.asp?id=30106 (accessed 21 Dec. 2012). Despite the headline, there is no evidencethat Ro Veidovi’s body has ever been located. His body may have been transferred to CyprusHill Cemetery from the Naval Hospital Cemetery along with other human remains in 1926.However, when the Fijian embassy requested the repatriation of his remains in the early 1990s,his marked gravesite was found to be empty. See Diana diZerega Wall and Anne-Marie Cantwell,Touring Gotham’s Archaeological Past (New Haven, CT 2004), 166–7. For a picture of Ro Veidovi’sgrave marker, see J.K. Herman, ‘Vendovi: cannibal and curio’, US Navy Medicine, 77:2 (March‒April 1986), 20.

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Another article in the same paper, entitled ‘The Rewan story’, reported that one ofVeidovi’s descendants, ‘the late Roko Tui Dreketi Ro Lady Lala Mara…met withDr Adrienne Kaeppler, Curator for the Pacific at [the] Smithsonian, and discussedRo Veidovi’.

[Ro Lala] had expressed her wishes to have her ancestor’s skullremain on exhibit. Dr Kaeppler said the US State Departmentasked for its return (to Rewa) ‘as a goodwill gesture.’ But Ro Lalahad stated it was ‘an honour to have her ancestor curated by theNational Museum of Natural History’. Until her death in 2005, RoLala’s wishes remained, until a family member… visited the Smith-sonian to view the display. She… presented a piece of Kumi (bark-cloth) to lay the skull on…Ro Veidovi had died on US soil, underthe watch of its eminent scholars and distinguished explorers… ‘We will share our side of the story some day and hope that theGovernment of the United States will hear that chapter and makethe official records to make the connection’ Ro Teimumu said.‘Yes, he was a rogue assassin… and was accordingly punished, buthe was also family and we will be proud to share that he was partof us,’ she said.99

Renewed interest in Veidovi led the Fijian cultural television program Noda Gauna

to air an episode dedicated to his story on 28 December 2009. The following day aneditorial appeared in the Fiji Sun titled ‘Ro Veidovi – putting him in proper perspec-tive’. Its author, Ro Alipate Doviverata Mataitini, criticised the press, Noda Gauna, andthe chief advisor to the paramount chief of the Rewa district, Dona Takalaiyale, inter-viewed for the programme, for seeking to redeem Veidovi:

While it made for interesting viewing, the information…was notfactual. Takalaiyale’s attempts to gloss over… one of the moreinfamous periods in Rewa’s history with supposed proper chiefly be-haviour ultimately demeans those who were affected at the time byRo Veidovi’s criminal act.…Ro Veidovi was… a victim of hisown generation, subject to the atrocities of the time like murder,abuse and cannibalism, memories of which can only be expungedby the telling of the truth…Really, the past is not something to beproud of.100

The editorial sparked public debate and, in response, Takalaiyale published hisown piece:

To call Ro Veidovi a murderer is extremely offensive.… he has lam-basted the memory of our high Chief. It is unfortunate and ill

99 ‘The Rewan story’, Fiji Sun, 15 Nov. 2009. www.fijisun.com.fj/main_page/view.asp?id=29627(accessed 21 Dec. 2012).100 Ro Veidovi – putting him in proper perspective’, Fiji Sun, 29 Dec. 2009. www.fijisun.com.fj/2009/12/29/ro-veidovi-putting-him-in-proper-perspective/ (accessed 21 Dec. 2012).

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informed of Alivate to judge the actions and life of Ro Veidovi from amodern day perspective and not from the historical and social contextin which this high Chief lived his life.101

Eventually, the paramount chief of Rewa requested closure of the debate, thoughothers took it up on internet discussion boards.

CONCLUSION

To call the United States Exploring Expedition ‘forgotten’ is incorrect. Reverbera-tions of contact and conflict in the Pacific over a century and half ago are still percep-tible today. By focusing on one man whose life was caught up in the events of theexploring expedition and who continues to be subject to changing representations,we learn how one human being has been put to service as artefact, symbol andtoken for a multitude of ideas debated by a diversity of social interests.

Reclaiming Veidovi as one of their own, and placing barkcloth under his skullin the Smithsonian collections, Veidovi’s descendants have made themselves co-par-ticipants in these evolving debates and in his ongoing curation. Long after his abduc-tion, death and dismemberment, Veidovi continues to be used to imagine the historyof the USA in the Pacific. The relic of the chief endures as a medium for Fijian andAmerican efforts to renegotiate the memory of dignities and indignities sustained inthe course of violent encounters on an oceanic frontier, while the displacement ofone man, across a vast expanse of ocean continues, even today, to connect disparateparts of a Pacific World.

101 Dona Tuicaumia Takalaivale Sauturaga Navolau, Lomanikoro Rewa, ‘Ro Veidovi’, Fiji Sun, 30Dec. 2009. www.fijisun.com.fj/2009/12/30/ro-veidovi-2/, (accessed 21 Dec. 2012).

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