Beachcombers: Vagrancy, Empire, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (297) ◽  
pp. 930-949
Author(s):  
Alistair Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
The South ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
First Contact ◽  
British Culture

Abstract Runaways, castaways and renegades, the beachcombers lived in the Pacific Islands, and were the vagrants of the South Seas. Historically, they were most prominent in the early nineteenth century, and belonged to the medial phase between the Pacific Islanders’ first contact with Europeans, and the formal colonization that followed. Roaming from one island to another, trading skills and goods with their inhabitants, the beachcombers were driven further and further afield as Western powers began to annex the Pacific Islands. By the 1880s and 1890s they had been thoroughly displaced by the missionaries and merchants who settled there; however, in spite of this, or rather because of it, the beachcomber became an increasingly prominent figure in British culture during this period. This article examines the importance of the beachcomber in the imperial imagination. It explores how the beachcomber was ambiguously presented as both an imperial pathfinder and a degraded buccaneer in popular novels and the periodical press, and how these portrayals were key to the public’s understanding of the Pacific Islands. This cultural and historical discussion then provides the context for a close reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide (1894). Here the beachcomber, a vagrant figure who captivated Stevenson’s imagination, is shown to be essential to his construction and critique of empire in the Pacific.

scholarly journals Miscellany and Collegiality in the British Periodical Press: TheHarmonicon(1823–1833)

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-293
Author(s):  
Erin Johnson-Hill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
School Of Music ◽  
The Status ◽  
Musical Knowledge ◽  
The Many ◽  
British Culture ◽  
National Styles

The Harmonicon was, in its day, London's premiere music periodical, gaining a wide and loyal readership at home and abroad. Perhaps the most the distinctive feature of the journal was its deliberate imperative to raise what it considered to be the ‘lamentable’ level of musical knowledge held by the British reading public. The journal's editor, William Ayrton, was deeply concerned that there was a lack of a national school of music in his own country that could ever match that which his rival French and German critics called their own. In this light, I argue that the journal's appeal and economic success was due to a didactic philosophy of ‘collegiality’ and ‘miscellany’ – to borrow William Weber's terms – as a means of disseminating musical knowledge to the broadest readership possible. Through reviewing, critiquing and publishing a remarkably assorted array of national styles and genres of music, the Harmonicon attempted to create a very general type of musical knowledge in Britain in the early nineteenth century, one which looked necessarily beyond national borders in an effort to build up a shared knowledge of music. Data drawn from musical examples spanning all 11 years of the journal's print run is analysed, assessing in particular the high number of international composers featured in the journal. The many miscellaneous strands interwoven throughout the Harmonicon reflect a mode of thinking about music that was integral to a valiant effort to raise the status and awareness of music in early nineteenth-century British culture.

scholarly journals ‘Louis Becke’s Modern Buccaneer: The transformation of William “Bully” Hayes into the first modern literary pirate of the Pacific’

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-108
Author(s):  
Chrystopher Spicer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
Robert Louis Stevenson ◽  
Pacific Region ◽  
The South ◽  
Major Work ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Short Period

During his career, Louis Becke, the most internationally well-known Australian writer of the South Pacific region at the turn of the nineteenth century, wrote a series of novellas, stories, and articles that featured the infamous conman and thief, Captain William ‘Bully’ Hayes, with whom he had sailed through the Pacific Islands for a short period. Influenced by the work of Robert Louis Stevenson and earlier accounts of piracy in the Pacific, Becke’s fictionalized version of Hayes was the original archetypal South Pacific pirate character: a Long John Silver of the South Seas. Beginning with the first major work about Hayes, A Modern Buccaneer, substantially written by Becke although published under Boldrewood’s name, Becke’s re-imagined Hayes became the pervasive Pacific pirate literary trope not only throughout Becke’s books, stories, and articles but also within the work of subsequent writers.

Kava : A Challenge to Alcohol?

1987 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
J.E. Cawte
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
Pacific Region ◽  
Northern Australia ◽  
The South ◽  
Aboriginal Communities ◽  
North East ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Arnhem Land

Kava has been introduced into Aboriginal communities in Northern Australia. Persons from Yirrkala in North East Arnhem Land visiting the South Pacific region on study tours have been impressed by their welcome in Kava bowl ceremonies, and some of them hoped that the Aborigines might use Kava instead of alcohol.In 1983 many Aboriginal people in Arnhem Land used Kava, and much more was used in 1984. By 1985 it became a social epidemic or ‘craze’ in many communities. Rings of people of both sexes and of all ages often sit together under trees around Kava bowls for many hours. They may drink up to a hundred times the amount normally drunk in the Pacific Islands by the same number of people in the same time.

CIVILIZED DEPRAVITY: EVANGELICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF EARLY-NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHINA AND THE REDEFINITION OF “TRUE CIVILIZATION”

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 409-429
Author(s):  
Benjamin Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Middle Kingdom ◽  
Select Committee ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Debate ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Ancient Civilizations ◽  
Bureaucratic State

In the first few decadesof the nineteenth century, the experience of missionaries among peoples as diverse as the ancient civilizations of India, the highly organized Zulu kingdoms, and the cannibal tribes of the South Seas had sparked a national debate concerning whether or not the “civilization of the heathen” was necessary before they could be converted, or whether Christianity would be the best means of civilizing them. Unresolved as far as public policy was concerned, this question entered discussions of the 1835 Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements), a committee convened to address problems arising between British settlers and indigenous communities, including important trade sites in Australia, New Zealand, and the islands of the Pacific. As with several other areas where significant British imperial pressure never took the form of direct colonial rule, the trade ports in China fell outside the committee's explicit considerations. Along with forbidding foreign settlements, Chinese culture did not fit the terms or assumptions of the committee's conversation. Since the first Jesuit mission to China in the late sixteenth century, there had been little doubt in Europe that Chinese civilization was far advanced. As a tightly controlled bureaucratic state confident of its own position as the Middle Kingdom of the world, China simply did not work within the discourse of civilization. This essay explores one attempt to adjust the terms of that British discourse in order to accommodate a civilized China.

The Pacific Islands Press

1974 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 470-477
Author(s):  
Jim Richstad ◽  
Michael McMillan
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Islands ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
The South ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Pacific Area

“Pacific-style journalism” seems to be emerging from the news-papers published in the diverse and widely scattered societies of the South Pacific area.

Bibles and Beads: Missionaries as Traders in Southern Africa in the Early Nineteenth Century

1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger B. Beck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
The South ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Metal Tools ◽  
London Missionary Society

Trade across the Cape frontier in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, and government attempts to regulate that trade, cannot be understood without first considering the role of Protestant missionaries as traders and bearers of European manufactured goods in the South African interior. From their arrival in 1799, missionaries of the London Missionary Society carried on a daily trade beyond the northern and eastern boundaries of the Cape Colony that was forbidden by law to the colonists. When missionaries of the Methodist Missionary Society arrived in the mid-1810s they too carried beads as well as Bibles to their mission stations outside the colony. Most missionaries were initially troubled by having to mix commercial activities with their religious duties. They were forced, however, to rely on trade in order to support themselves and their families because of the meagre material and monetary assistance they received from their societies. They introduced European goods among African societies beyond the Cape frontiers earlier and in greater quantities than any other enterprise until the commencement of the Fort Willshire fairs in 1824. Most importantly, they helped to bring about a transition from trade in beads, buttons and other traditional exchange items to a desire among many of the peoples with whom they came into contact for blankets, European clothing and metal tools and utensils, thus creating a growing dependency on European material goods that would eventually bring about a total transformation of these African societies.

scholarly journals James Stewart and the Changing Face of the Confederate in Mid-Twentieth Century Hollywood Cinema

2019 ◽  
pp. 223-235
Author(s):  
Peter Templeton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
The South ◽  
Hollywood Cinema

Hollywood cinema offers multifaceted perspectives of the south and the southerner, guided as much by the time of production as by the personnel working on individual movies. This article will focus specifically on two films, fifteen years apart, featuring the same leading actor–James Stewart–in two similar yet distinct portrayals of southerners. The similarities and divergences between the protagonists of Winchester ’73 (1950) and Shenandoah (1965) allow us to explore (via a close reading of each text) specifically how the Confederate rebel was constructed for a national audience in the mid-twentieth century, and how that changed across a contested period that saw wide-ranging events in the battle for Civil Rights. Finally, the article shows how debts and divergences from the nineteenth century logics of white supremacy and secessionism factor into particular Hollywood discourses about geography, whiteness, and masculinity and retain an ongoing relevance in the current, fraught political climate.

scholarly journals REVIEW: An unusual, insightful Pacific book

2001 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 178-181
Author(s):  
Ian Boden
Keyword(s):  
Print Media ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
The South ◽  
The Public ◽  
Practical Guide ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
On Line

Review of The Pacific Journalism: A Practical Guide, edited by David Robie. Suva: University of South Pacific Journalism Programme/ USP Book Centre, and South Pacific Books. Very rarely does a book appear in the South Pacific that is generated within the region and intended for those working here. Even more unusually does a book address itself to the need of Pacific Islands journalism, to the rights of the public to be informed, and to the responsibilities and obligations of journalists. Add to that an attempt to cover not only the print media, but to address television, radio and on-line news dissemination and you have a book with the potential to become a landmark publication. 

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