Kingdom of Tahiti

The war of Rua

formationDrafted from Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, Vol. I (1829)

When the mission ship Duff anchored in Matavai Bay on the 6th of March, 1797, the missionaries who came ashore found a district chief named Pomare already the effective master of Tahiti. He had been born to nothing more than the chieftaincy of Pare, but a combination of his own ambition, the favour of visiting British captains, gifts of firearms and powder, and the standing help of European sailors - not least the mutineers of the Bounty, who had drifted through the island for a decade - had let him assume and hold supreme authority over an island no single chief had ever securely ruled before. He granted the newcomers the district of Matavai to settle in: the earliest dated act of him exercising the authority of an established king rather than merely a powerful chief.

Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, Vol. I (1829) · Robert Smirke · Public domain

That authority was never as settled as it looked. Pomare's power rested on the same religious order it also, at moments, threatened. In 1802 he moved to seize Oro, the great war god whose ark and attendant rites legitimised his own rule, from the district of Atehuru, whose chiefs had custody of the idol and refused to give it up. When his men tore the god away by force, the Atehuruans read it as nothing less than a declaration of war.

Fire, flight, and a doubtful peace

What followed was remembered in Tahiti as Te tamai o Rua, the war of Rua, named for the rebellion's principal leader - the most powerful and alarming uprising the island had yet seen. Atehuru's warriors burned their way through the districts of Faa and Pare, driving out the inhabitants and threatening Matavai itself, where the missionaries and a handful of shipwrecked Englishmen were the only force standing between the rebels and the coast. Reinforcements from Eimeo reached Pomare's side, but were driven back in confusion before the rebels could be checked; only the accident of an armed British crew, cast ashore days earlier when their brig wrecked in the bay, held the pass above Matavai long enough for the king's beaten warriors to retreat in order.

The rebellion did not overthrow Pomare, but it proved something more lasting than any single battle could have: that his rule, however wide, still had to be fought for district by district, and that the god whose favour he claimed could just as easily arm his enemies as his own men.

Excluded from his hereditary dominions

expansionDrafted from Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, Vol. I (1829)

Pomare died suddenly on the 3rd of September, 1803, collapsing in a canoe as he set out toward an anchored ship, not long after a fresh round of trouble over his seizure of Oro at Atehuru. He was buried at Pare, where his household wished him to remain rather than be carried to his son at Atehuru, and within the year the strange, almost accidental origin of his own name - taken, tradition held, from a cough caught sleeping exposed in the mountains - passed to that son. In 1804 Otu assumed the name Pomare, fixing it as the regal name of Tahiti from that day forward.

Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, Vol. I (1829) · John William Lewin · Public domain

The inheritance was less secure than the name suggested. A resemblance was drawn at the time between Pomare and his contemporary in the Sandwich Islands: both men had risen from comparatively humble standing to supreme authority through their own energy and their dealings with foreigners, and both left their conquests to sons very different from themselves. Pomare II lacked his father's patient, laborious temperament, and the government he inherited did not long survive the transfer intact.

Defeat, and two years on Eimeo

Renewed civil war brought Pomare II's rule on Tahiti down entirely. The missionaries, who had preached in the islands for twelve years without a single convert to show for it, fled the fighting for Port Jackson in New South Wales, abandoning the mission they had held since the Duff first anchored. Pomare himself fared no better: driven from Tahiti, he spent the years that followed excluded from his hereditary dominions and in exile on the neighbouring island of Eimeo, his government dissolved and his family scattered by the same disorder.

Bibliothèque nationale de France · Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, Vol. I (1829) · Theodor Rodowicz · Public domain

It was in that exile, stripped of the authority his father had built, that something in Pomare began to shift. Whether it was the collapse of the system of idol-worship he had always relied on for success in war and politics, or simply the leisure enforced idleness gave him to think, the king who had once relied on Oro as completely as his father had now began to entertain doubts about it. When the missionaries, invited back by letters from the king himself, returned to the islands in the autumn of 1811, they found not the ruler they had left but a man newly and seriously willing to hear what they had to say.

The battle of Bunaauia

peakDrafted from Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, Vol. I (1829)

By the beginning of 1815 the question of Christianity or idolatry on Tahiti and Eimeo had become impossible to leave unsettled. The pagan chiefs who still held Tahiti invited Pomare and the Christian refugees sheltering with him on Eimeo to return and reoccupy their old lands; Pomare crossed over to reinstate them in person, and after a tense landing - the idolatrous party fired on his canoes before agreeing to a truce - the two sides negotiated what appeared to be a settlement. It was not. While the pagan chiefs exchanged assurances of friendship, they were, the source records, already arming in secret for the destruction of the king's party.

Ambushed at worship

The break came on the 12th of November, 1815, a Sunday. Some eight hundred of Pomare's people had gathered at Narii, near the village of Bunaauia in the district of Atehuru, for their regular Sabbath worship, when musket fire announced a pagan army advancing on the camp under the flags and idols of the old religion. Pomare rose and told his people to hold their places: they had gathered under God's protection to worship him, and worship was not to be abandoned merely because an enemy approached. The hymn was read, the service finished, and only then did the Christians arm themselves and form their lines.

The battle that followed went against them at first. The pagan vanguard broke the Christian front ranks, and the fighting became a running, disordered melee through the district's trees and brush, with men on both sides falling before the advance seemed to be carrying the day for the idolatrous army. It was checked only when the attackers reached the position held by Mahine, the Christian king of Huahine, and Pomare-vahine, a chief's daughter from Raiatea who fought armed with a musket and spear beside him. Their stand held the line long enough for the battle to turn, and by its end the idolatrous chieftain leading the attack was dead and his army broken.

Pomare's party showed the victory little of the old religion's own cruelty. Rather than pursue a massacre, the king and his chiefs extended clemency to the defeated, and turned instead to the war god's own house: the image temple and altars of Oro, the idol whose seizure thirteen years before had cost Tahiti the war of Rua, were destroyed. Word of the victory carried quickly to Eimeo and the islands beyond, and with the old religion's central shrine gone, the source records a general and lasting reception of Christianity across Tahiti that no sermon in the eighteen years since the Duff's arrival had achieved. Pomare himself did not take the final public step of baptism until the 16th of July, 1819, kneeling before a congregation of four or five thousand in the Royal Mission Chapel at Papaoa - the first person in the islands to receive the rite, and, in the eyes of the missionaries who had known him since Matavai, their most uncertain convert made, at last, their most public one.

Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, Vol. I (1829) · American at de.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

The heaviest bereavement

contractionDrafted from Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, Vol. II (1829)

Pomare's conduct after his 1819 baptism gave his oldest friends among the missionaries little comfort. The author, who had known him since the ceremony and recorded it as a moment of real and cautious hope, also records plainly that the king's subsequent behaviour was a matter of the deepest regret to his best friends - a disappointment left largely unspecified in the source but referred to often enough to make clear that the convert baptised before thousands in 1819 did not live out his remaining years as they had hoped.

His health had been declining for some time when the author spent a Sabbath afternoon with him at Eimeo in the early October of 1821. The king was by then unable to leave his house, though not thought to be in immediate danger. The end, when it came, came suddenly rather than as the slow decline his friends had been watching: Pomare II died on Eimeo on the 7th of December, 1821, the day before a party of visiting missionary deputies reached the islands expecting to find him still living.

Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, Vol. II (1829) · London Missionary Society · Public domain

The heaviest bereavement since Christianity's introduction

The author, present in the islands at the time, records the loss in terms he gives to no other event in either volume: the heaviest bereavement that the mission and the nation had suffered since the introduction of Christianity. It was a description earned by twenty- two years of history rather than sentiment alone. The man who died on Eimeo had been, by the missionaries' own account, present at nearly every turn of that history - the district chief's son who inherited a throne his father had built on foreign muskets, the king driven into exile by his own people's rebellion, the convert whose doubts about Oro were first entertained in that same exile, and the leader whose stand at Bunaauia had broken the old religion's hold on Tahiti for good. His son's coronation as Pomare III in 1824, and the dynasty's own continuation under later rulers of the same name, both lie beyond the years Ellis narrates here.

The wolf and the lamb

contractionDrafted from Cumming, A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-of-War (1882)

Pomare II's daughter Aimata took her father's own regnal name on becoming queen in January 1827, succeeding her brother Pomare III as Pomare IV, and reigned over a Tahiti at peace for a decade and a half. That peace ended in 1843, when a French admiral, Dupetit-Thouars, having already seized the Marquesas by force, anchored his flagship at Papeete and sent the queen an ultimatum: pay some thirty thousand dollars in indemnity for insults to the French flag, or watch her undefended capital bombarded.

Cumming, A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-of-War (1882) · Eugène Delessert · Public domain

The insult, such as it was, amounted to nothing more than Pomare and her Christian subjects declining to let French Catholic priests settle and found a rival mission on an island already served by the London Missionary Society. Terrified that the admiral meant what he said, and unable to meet his demands, the queen fled by night in a canoe to the neighbouring island of Moorea, hoping that no decisive action could be taken in her absence. It bought her nothing. The British consul, George Pritchard, her closest adviser through the crisis, was arrested, held in solitary confinement for ten days, and put aboard a ship out at sea without trial - removed from the islands for the crime, as the French government itself later admitted in private, of having too much influence with the queen for the admiral's liking.

Cumming, A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-of-War (1882) · George Baxter · Public domain

A salute with borrowed gunpowder

With Pritchard gone and the queen in exile on Moorea, the French Protectorate was declared over Tahiti outright. The warship Reine Blanche ordered the queen and her chiefs to salute the new Protectorate flag - and when they proved unable to comply, for want of gunpowder of their own, the admiral politely supplied the powder himself, so that the ceremony could proceed. Tahiti's own independence ended not with a battle but with a borrowed charge of powder, fired in salute to the flag of the power that had just taken it.

A life pension

endDrafted from Cumming, A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-of-War (1882)

Pomare IV endured what the record calls thirty-five years of French tutelage with the same independent spirit that had once made her flee rather than submit to it outright. She died on the 17th of September, 1877, sixty-five years old, and her eldest son Ariiaue was proclaimed king under the hereditary name, becoming Pomare V. The succession itself was arranged less by Tahitian custom than by the French admiral then governing the islands, who reconciled the new king with his estranged wife, had the pair jointly proclaimed King and Queen, and settled the line of succession for two further generations - a Tahitian royal house whose own future was now a matter for a French commandant to decide.

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa · Cumming, A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-of-War (1882) · Charles Georges Spitz · Public domain

The cloak thrown aside

The Protectorate had always been, in substance, a formal cover for French possession rather than a genuine partnership; what had been merely implicit in 1843 was made explicit in June 1880, when Pomare V was persuaded by the commandant to cede the nominal sovereignty he still nominally held to the power that had long since held its reality, in exchange for a life pension of twelve thousand dollars a year - an income that let him live out his remaining years free of the constant tutoring that had made his own kingship a wearisome burden without any of its honour. The annexation of Tahiti was formally proclaimed at Papeete in 1881, with a festival of salutes, parades and feasting that gave the newly annexed island every outward appearance of celebrating its own absorption. Of the kingdom Pomare I had built on borrowed muskets and mutineers' aid, nothing remained but a pension, a name, and a flag that was no longer his own.