They Came for Sandalwood: A Study of the Sandalwood Trade in the South-West Pacific 1830–1865

By Dorothy Shineberg

Few Pacific history books have stood the test of time as well as They Came for Sandalwood, but Dorothy Shineberg’s book, first published in 1967, has never been bettered. This fascinating account of the sandalwood trade describes the first regular contact between Europeans and the Melanesians of New Caledonia, the Loyalty Islands, and the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). Shineberg studied the relationships and rivalries between European traders and European missionaries, between trader and trader, and between tribe and tribe among the indigenous peoples. Her book documents the details and color of these interactions. Unseaworthy ships, bloody battles, the hazards of sea and reef, and the firepower and inadequacies of European weapons all provide a gripping picture of the 1830s to 1860s. Valuable appendices list the ships involved, their cargoes and the location of the sandalwood stations. They Came for Sandalwood remains the only detailed account of the sandalwood trade, its routes, marketing problems and profits, and of the ships, merchants and seamen involved. It is a sharp, perceptive analysis of the confrontation of the two cultures, approached from the standpoint of Pacific history rather than a mere extension of European history into the Pacific Islands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781921902291

Book preview

UQ ePRESS PACIFIC STUDIES SERIES

Tax Havens and Sovereignty in the Pacific Islands

Anthony van Fossen

God’s Gentlemen

A History of the Melanesian Mission, 1849–1942

David Hilliard

The Samoan Tangle

A Study in Anglo-German-American Relations 1878–1900

Paul M. Kennedy

White Women in Fiji 1835–1930

The Ruin of Empire?

Claudia Knapman

The Chiefs’ Country

Leadership and Politics in Honiara, Solomon Islands

Michael Kwa’ioloa and Ben Burt

Church and State in Tonga

The Wesleyan Methodist Missionaries and Political Development, 1822–1875

Sione Latukefu

Race and Politics in Fiji

(Second Edition)

Robert Norton

Managing Modernity in the Western Pacific

Mary Patterson and Martha MacIntyre

Grass Huts and Warehouses

Pacific Beach Communities of the Nineteenth Century

Caroline Ralston

Workers in Bondage

The Origins and Bases of Unfree Labour In Queensland 1824–1916

Kay Saunders

They Came for Sandalwood

A Study of the Sandalwood Trade in the South-West Pacific, 1830–1865

Dorothy Shineberg

Papua New Guinea

Initiation and Independence

Don Woodford

To Barry

Acknowledgments

For their help in finding material I am indebted to the officers of the libraries where most of this work was done—the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, the State Library of Victoria, the Mitchell Library, Sydney, the R.G. Menzies Library of the Australian National University, the National Library, Canberra, and the Archives Section of the State Library, Tasmania.

Special thanks are due to Mr H.E. Maude of the Australian National University, who brought much material to my notice and read the earliest drafts, making valuable comments. I am also deeply indebted to Dr J.S. Cumpston of Canberra, who helped and encouraged me in ways too numerous to mention. Both Mr Maude and Dr Cumpston aroused my interest in the traders and their contribution, and directed my attention to the value of the shipping reports.

Many colleagues have contributed to the writing of this book by discussion and by indicating valuable sources: Dr J. Gregory of the University of Melbourne, who advised me on sources for the China end of my trade route; Dr Donald Kennedy and Professor N.D. Harper, also of the University of Melbourne, my advisers on military problems; Dr John Bach of the University of Newcastle; Professor J.W. Davidson and Dr Neil Gunson of the Australian National University; Professor J. Hollyman of the University of Auckland and Professor Jean Guiart of the Institut françois de l’Océanie.

I am very grateful to those who read drafts of the manuscript and improved it by their suggestions: Dr F.J. West, Mrs M. McBriar, Mrs C. Richmond, Mrs Jennifer Terrell, and Professor J. La Nauze who supervised the work at the thesis stage and who has given much practical assistance since. My thanks are also due to Professor La Nauze for encouraging me to begin writing, and to Mr John Mulvaney for persuading me to stop.

One of the most delightful by-products of the research for this book has been the many friendships I have made in New Caledonia and the New Hebrides. I am grateful to all the people in the islands who gave me hospitality and patiently answered my questions, but in particular to Mme Augustine Varna of the Isle of Pines; M. and Mme F. Martin of Pa’ita, New Caledonia; Mr and Mrs Reece Discombe of Vila, New Hebrides; Mr and Mrs R. Paul and Mr and Mrs G. Wallington of Tana; Mr William Mete of Eromanga and Mr Richard Taraleo, now of Malekula.

I wish to express my gratitude to those people who gave me access to manuscripts in their possession: Sir William Crowther of Hobart, who allowed me to search his valuable collection of ships’ logs, and showed me many kindnesses; Mrs J. McLennan of Melbourne, who allowed me to read and microfilm the diary of her grandfather, the Rev. John Geddie, and enlivened my picture of the period with her reminiscences; the Rev. E. New, who allowed me to use the Presbyterian Church collection at their headquarters in Melbourne, and Pére Laurenge, archivist at the Archêveché at Noumea, New Caledonia, to whom I am indebted for generous access to the collection of fragile missionary documents in his care.

For permission to use and quote from unpublished material in their collections I thank the Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales, the State Library of Tasmania and the Congregational Council for World Mission (formerly the London Missionary Society). Reproduction of Crown copyright records in the Public Record Office appears by permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

I am indebted to those who searched materials for this work: Mrs J. Roth of Cambridge, Mrs E.I. Cuthbert of Sydney, the research officers of the Auckland Institute and Museum and the Alexander Turnbull Library of Wellington, and the late Miss Ida Leeson, of treasured memory. My best thanks are due to Mrs Anvida Lamberts for her efficiency and forbearance in the typing of the manuscript.

I wish to acknowledge my debt to the University of Melbourne for its financial assistance in the early stages of this work through the award of a Ph.D. research scholarship and the Caroline Kay scholarship, and also to the Australian National University for continued support and for making possible the necessary field work in the Pacific Islands.

NOTE ON THE USE OF TERMS

The term ‘Melanesian’ is used in this work to mean the inhabitants of the islands of the south-west Pacific known as Melanesia, although there are a few peoples of Polynesian origin dispersed throughout the region.

The spelling of place-names is based on the General Lists of Oceanic Names given by the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names of the Royal Geographical Society.

Andrew Cheyne’s plan of the Isle of Pines, 1842. Present-day names: A. Gadji; B. Gadji anchorage; C. Vao Bay; ‘Mount Keys’ is Pic Nga.

(‘Trading Voyages in the Pacific, 1841–4’, Mitchell Library, Sydney)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

1: Tea, Iron and Sandalwood

2: The Beginnings of the Trade

3: The Isle of Pines 1841–1843

4: The Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia and the New Hebrides 1842

5: The Merchant Venturers 1843–1852

6: The Job, the Ships and the People of the Trading Voyages

7: James Paddon

8: Robert Towns

9: Trade, the Light and the Flag

10: Buying Gold 1853–1865

11: Sandalwood Profits

12: The Sandalwood Trade in Melanesian Economics

13: ‘A Matter of Policy’

14: Violence and Fraud on the Melanesian Frontier

15: Migrant Labour

16: Massacres and Motives

Conclusion

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Abbreviations

References

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

Western Pacific Ocean

South-west Melanesia

Title page, log of the Louisa

(By courtesy of the Mitchell Library, Sydney)

PLATES

Cheyne’s plan of the Isle of Pines

‘Like the Masts of an immense fleet of Shipping’

Saint-Joseph

Council house, Isle of Pines, 1842

Isle of Pines clubs

Sandalwood tree

Chief’s house, Vao

Cheyne’s plan of the Loyalty Islands

Cheyne’s map of Uvea

Weapons from Tana

Naisilini

Man of Tana

(By courtesy of J.S. Cumpston)

Double canoe of New Caledonia

Natives of Koné

Bwaxat

Descendant of Bwaxat

Bwaxat’s house

Inyeuc Island

(Photograph by Reece Discombe)

Paddon’s station at Païta

Robert Towns

(By courtesy of the Mitchell Library, Sydney)

John Williams

Andrew Henry

(By courtesy of Mme F. Martin, Païta)

Andrew Henry’s station at Oubatche

(By courtesy of J. Hollyman)

FOREWORD

Bronwen Douglas

The Australian National University

One of Dorothy Shineberg’s first PhD students, Bronwen Douglas is adjunct associate professor in Pacific History at The Australian National University. Her latest book is Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania 1511–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Dorothy Shineberg’s They Came for Sandalwood is arguably the most important and influential monograph produced by the ‘island-oriented’ school of Pacific historians established in Canberra in the 1950s by Jim Davidson and Harry Maude.¹ Now commendably reissued as an ebook by the University of Queensland Press, Sandalwood is one of two great books published by Dorothy during her distinguished career as academic writer and teacher, the other being The People Trade. Both subsequently appeared in French translation.²

Born in 1927 and schooled in Melbourne, Dorothy was in 1950 the first Australian woman to win a Fulbright Travelling Scholarship to the US.³ On her return to Australia with an MA, she taught an Honours course in Pacific History at the University of Melbourne, the first of its kind in Australia. Among her students were Greg Dening and Niel Gunson, later prominent Pacific historians. She then spent five years as full-time wife and mother but in 1962 began a PhD thesis on early culture contacts in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). She focussed initially on missionaries until she realized that in most places they had been preceded by their bitter rivals, sandalwood traders mostly operating out of the Australian colonies. She corresponded with Maude who had published a seminal paper on the pork trade between Tahiti and Sydney.⁴ Inspired by Maude’s work and shown by him how to probe shipping lists and reports in Sydney newspapers for information about traders, their cargoes, and their activities, Dorothy switched her inquiry to the sandalwood trade in the wider southwest Pacific and gained her doctorate from the University of Melbourne in 1965.⁵

This already polished thesis was the precursor of They Came for Sandalwood which Dorothy revised for publication following her appointment to a research fellowship at the Australian National University. Apart from exemplary scholarship and rigorous attention to detail, the book bore few signs of its genesis as an academic thesis. Written in precise but elegant prose, illustrated by 24 aptly-chosen plates, it is accessible to a wide audience. The book is divided into three broad sections: narrative (chapters 1–5); biographical (chapters 6–8); and thematic (chapters 9–16). Taking a multifaceted approach, Dorothy sketched a rich historical panorama of people and places involved in the sandalwood trade in the New Hebrides, the Loyalty Islands, and New Caledonia in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Always even-handed, stressing neither traders nor Islanders to the exclusion of the other, she probed their activities and relationships from intersecting personal, economic, political, and religious perspectives. Dorothy had no opportunity to do sustained fieldwork and, in any case, the broad geographical span of her topic made it impracticable to tap the rich vernacular histories of Melanesian communities. However, she travelled widely in the region and enlivened her narrative with stories told by descendants of her historical protagonists and with photographs taken in situ.

Island Melanesia had to that point been largely neglected by historians (though not by anthropologists) and burdened with unflattering stereotypes, including the myth that traders ‘avoided’ going there because the inhabitants were by nature inhospitable cannibals.⁶ Dorothy showed in contrast that traders went where profits beckoned and that in Melanesia, as elsewhere, indigenous responses to strangers were always contingent, contextual, and strategic. Sandalwood displays to the full her talent for forensic history writing, demolishing the shibboleth that Islanders were merely supine victims of the ‘fatal impact’ of outside encounters.

Dorothy was not overtly reflective about historical method but Sandalwood is a remarkable work of practical historical investigation, recuperation, and critique. Its gripping narrative rests on an exhaustive trawling through scattered, disparate texts for information about traders and trading in the Islands – shipping reports, the exiguous letters, logs, and journals left by traders themselves, and the abundant accounts of missionaries and naval officers. Its interpretive core inscribes a sceptical reading of the abundant writings of hostile observers about mostly marginal men, their disapproved activities, and the savages they were presumed to dominate. The final five chapters comprise a sustained refutation of the hoary, ‘entirely European-oriented’ assumption of ‘the passive role of the Melanesian in culture contact’ – that Islanders were ‘simply the passive objects of European exploitation’ in trading relations and that, when violence occurred, ‘there must be a white man behind every brown’. Dorothy argued, in contrast, for what would now be termed indigenous agency. She repeatedly demonstrated ‘their use of their bargaining power to excellent effect’ in trading situations and specifically addressed the ‘problem of interpretation’ which typically explains Islanders’ violence towards Europeans in moralistic ‘retaliation-only’ terms, as ‘blind revenge for the atrocities committed by the white man’. In the process, she cogently rebutted the standard belief that traders owed their (alleged) dominance to the inevitable ‘superiority’ of firearms over local weapons.⁷ In practice, under Islands conditions, the quality and performance of the single-shot firearms generally available to traders accorded them no great advantage, given their usual great numerical inferiority. Dorothy concluded that ‘the islanders played a very lively part in their relations with the Europeans and that they endeavoured to turn the coming of the white men to their best possible advantage’, if necessary by force. The one new condition not easily explained or controlled by Islanders was the epidemics of previously unknown diseases that accompanied the arrival of foreigners and devastated many communities.

There is nothing a priori about this radical rethinking of early encounters. Rather, it emerged inductively from imaginative attention to the recorded details of particular situations, including traders’ accounts of their efforts to anticipate ‘the tastes of Melanesian buyers’. Nor, moreover, did Dorothy romanticize Islanders, stressing instead the flawed humanity they shared with traders and other Europeans. Her professed commitment to ‘liberal universalist’ values⁸ saw her apply a global secular rationalism to Melanesian trading (‘normal market conditions’, ‘the laws of supply and demand’, ‘ordinary processes of bargaining’), largely neglecting the local exchange protocols and pragmatic religiosity which informed particular behaviour. However, she was not so much insensitive to Melanesian specificities as forced by the wide-ranging scope of her study to engage in strategic ethnocentrism rather than the luxury of ethnographic precision.

In a significant contribution to economic history, Sandalwood charts the dramatic impact of the influx of European goods, especially metal tools, in propelling Islanders into the industrial age. Though regretting resultant ‘decay’ and ‘dislocation’, Dorothy acknowledged positive elements, local agency, and an internal dynamic in this process. There was marked ‘lightening of labour in subsistence agriculture’, at least for men. In the main, Islanders demanded trade goods which ‘served the ends of indigenous activities more effectively’. Nonetheless, technological change itself ‘slowly undermined’ their social structure ‘from within’, with European goods ‘the thin edge of the wedge’ since they soon became ‘necessities instead of luxuries’. Her concluding aphorism that the ‘final preponderance of the white man’ was ‘assured’ by 1865, the end of her period of study, is at odds with the overall tenor of the book. Many modern colonial historians would qualify this rhetorical presumption as premature and inappropriate to the vagaries and ambiguities of many colonial situations in the Pacific.⁹ Yet it rested in part on Dorothy’s just assessment that a late structural shift in the sandalwood trade, from itinerant vessels to permanent shore stations employing labour gangs imported from other islands, had transformed ‘the Melanesian’ from ‘an independent trader among his own people’ into ‘a migrant wage-labourer, dependent on his employer’. In such circumstances, Islander agency was undoubtedly circumscribed, though not eliminated. A brief chapter positioning ‘Migrant Labour’ within Melanesia as a precursor to the wider Pacific Islands labour trade anticipated Dorothy’s subsequent important study of New Hebridean labourers in New Caledonia in The People Trade.

Sandalwood was of course a product of its time. Dorothy later acknowledged its conventional gender bias (‘the Melanesian’ is always ‘he’ and women are rarely mentioned) and the ecological innocence that had made her oblivious to the heavy environmental cost of the trade. Yet, in important respects this book anticipated future critical and postcolonial strategies – the technique of reading dominant texts against the grain to recover traces of alleged riffraff who wrote little themselves; an awareness of the messiness of actual encounters and the ambiguities and tensions in imperial authority; a concern to complicate the essentialized racial categories ‘European’ and ‘Melanesian’; and a focus on indigenous agency.

I was one of the first PhD students to be supervised by Dorothy, inspired by her to work on New Caledonia. We remained close friends until her death in 2004. Her wise, generous, witty presence is gone but her rich legacy as historian, mentor, and teacher lives on. The electronic reissue of They Came for Sandalwood ensures that this marvellous book will continue to inspire future scholars and students but also delight new generations of non-specialist readers.

Notes

1. For a detailed critical appreciation of They Came for Sandalwood, in tandem with Maude’s Of Islands and Men, see Bronwen Douglas and Doug Munro, ‘Of Islands and Sandalwood: Shineberg, Maude and the Hidden History of Trade’, in Texts and Contexts: Reflections in Pacific Islands Historiography, ed. Doug Munro and Brij V. Lal, 140–53 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006). Back

2. Dorothy Shineberg, They Came for Sandalwood: a Study of the Sandalwood Trade in the South-west Pacific 1830–1865 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1967); Ils étaient venus chercher du santal, tr. André Surleau (Noumea: Société d’Etudes Historiques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, 1973; 2nd edition, 1981); The People Trade: Pacific Island Laborers and New Caledonia, 1865–1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999); La main-d’ceuvre néo-hébridaise en Nouvelle-Caledonie 1865–1930, tr. Béatrice Atherton (Nouméa: Société d’Etudes Historiques de la Nouvelle-Caledonié, 2003). Back

3. For biographical details, see Dorothy Shineberg, ‘The Early Years of Pacific History’, Journal of Pacific Studies 20 (1996), 1–16; Bronwen Douglas, ‘Obituary: Dorothy Shineberg: Pioneer Pacific Scholar, Inspiring Teacher, Friend’, Journal of Pacific History 40 (2005), 353–6. Back

4. H.E. Maude, ‘The Tahitian pork trade: 1800-1830’, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 15 (1959), 55–95. Back

5. Dorothy Shineberg, ‘The sandalwood trade in the south-west Pacific, 1830–1865: with special reference to the problems and effects of early contact between Europeans and Melanesians’, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1965. Back

6. E.g., Douglas L. Oliver, The Pacific Islands (2nd edition, Garden City: Natural History Library, 1961 [1951]), 104; H.E. Maude, Of Islands and Men: Studies in Pacific History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1968), 145–6, 149, 283. Back

7. For an extended reinterpretation, see Dorothy Shineberg, ‘Guns and Men in Melanesia’, Journal of Pacific History 6 (1971), 61–82. Back

8. Shineberg, ‘The Early Years’, 5–6. Back

9. See, for example, Bronwen Douglas, Across the Great Divide: Journeys in History and Anthropology (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998); Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1994). Back

1

Tea, Iron and Sandalwood

For a long time, ever since the Buddhist religion began to flourish there, China had been the greatest export market for sandalwood. For a much longer time the pious Buddhists of India had offered up the fragrant smoke, but India had her own sandalwood on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, while China grew none at all. Like the Indians, the Chinese used sandalwood for secular purposes also—for the manufacture of luxury articles such as inlaid boxes, fans and ornaments, and for perfumes, cosmetics and medicinal preparations—but it was as an incense wood that it was chiefly prized, for burning on religious and ceremonial occasions. While visiting China in 1833 the English naturalist, George Bennett, took a lively interest in the distribution and use of sandalwood, since he had already seen it cut and shipped at its source when he had travelled with a South Seas sandalwood expedition. He observed that a large billet of sandalwood, about three feet long and four to six inches in diameter, was considered the most acceptable offering a man could make to ‘the idols in the temples’. The large pieces, he remarked, were the votive offering of a rich person, to burn on special occasions such as the commencement of the new year; small pieces were then sold about the streets for poorer people to purchase, ‘for burning before the deities.’¹

When wood is for burning, large quantities are required. Since the sixth century A.D. enterprising merchants—Arab, Persian and Chinese—had brought the precious wood to China from India and the East Indies by sea and caravan, exchanging it for fine silks: nine centuries later they were joined by the Portuguese, then by Dutch and English traders; but the source of supply remained the same.

The sandalwood tree is not imposing: from about six or eight feet of fairly slender grey trunk, branches begin to straggle upwards at irregular intervals, bearing small shiny leaves, oval or pointed, depending on the species. In its best days good sandal grew to a height of about eight feet without and twenty-five feet with branches, and to about two feet in diameter. Nowadays, a trunk of eight to twelve inches across is considered an excellent specimen.

The exquisite perfume comes from the oil which forms in the heart-wood of the tree and is its only valuable part. Although the tree, in favourable conditions, grows quickly enough, the heart itself grows slowly; if unassisted by cultivation, it takes at least forty years to develop. The nearer the root, the greater the quantity of oil in the heart. These characteristics of the tree explain the highly wasteful manner of sandalwood-getting in the days of the South Sea Island trade. All the young wood and branches—being devoid of oil—were cut out and thrown away. The earth was dug up from around the roots so that the tree was cut right out and totally destroyed. The wood was then cleaned’—that is, the outer wood, known as the ‘sap’, was cut away. The final product was consequently a small proportion of the original tree and, it will have been observed, was won at the expense of considerable labour.

Those in the trade classified sandalwood broadly as red’, yellow’ and white’ in descending order of commercial value. The colour of the wood, deepening with the quantity of oil, depended on its nearness to the root and the age and quality of the tree. The commercial quality from tree to tree appeared to vary inversely with the degree of moisture in the locale. Dry, rocky conditions seem to have produced trees with the greatest quantity of oil.²

As the last of the great discoveries in the Pacific Ocean were made, from the 1760s, by European explorers, traders and whalers, it was found that some of the newly charted Pacific Islands grew the sandalwood tree. As far east as the Marquesas, as far south as New Zealand and Australia, as far north as Hawaii, the sandalwood trees subsisted here and there, though not always in commercial quality or quantities. Even the best of it was not as good as Timor or Indian wood, but it was attractive to traders excluded from other sources of supply and it was cheaper to get.

The sandalwood trade of the Pacific Islands owed its existence, equally, to a domestic revolution in England of much the same period, hardly less momentous in its consequences than the discoveries of Captain Cook. This was the substitution of tea for ale as the national beverage of England. Tea-drinking was still a novelty in the last years of the seventeenth century: the sale, however, of about twenty thousand pounds per annum during those years at the unattractive price of 16s per pound may be considered indicative of things to come. During the course of the eighteenth century, tea became so popular that successive governments loaded it with duties, apparently without much affecting the rate of consumption although causing an increase in the proportion smuggled from the Continent. Then came what one historian calls the most important event in the history of Anglo-Chinese relations prior to the abolition of the [East India] Company’s monopoly of the China trade’, namely, the Commutation Act of 1784 which lowered the tea duties from 119 to 12 1/2 per cent.³ By the season 1785–6 the Company was importing 15 million pounds of tea—more than two and half times the amount for 1783—which by 1800 had become over 23 1/4 million pounds, and by the early 1830s an average of about 30 million pounds per annum, at which time the tea duty was providing £3,300,000 for the British Exchequer, or one-tenth of its total revenue. English tea-drinkers were protected against shortages by the requirement that the Company was to keep a year’s supply always in stock.⁴

For the sandalwood story, the most important consequence of this thirst for tea was that it immensely stimulated the China trade. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, China was almost the sole source of tea,* and tea was becoming a necessity to the English. Although other Chinese goods, such as silks and lacquered ware, found a market in England, tea overwhelmingly predominated among the imports. In 1811–19 the total value of goods imported by the Company from China was £72,168,541, of which their tea imports accounted for £70,426,244.⁵ The great problem became, however, what to sell to the Chinese in order to pay for the tea. At first, the hopes of the English business community ran high: did not the large Chinese population constitute an immense new market for British manufactures, particularly for the clothing trade? The Chinese, however, obstinately refused to wear Lancashire cottons in preference to their homespuns. In fact, it proved very difficult to find any commodity of value that was acceptable to the Chinese. The predicament of the British merchant was epitomized in the famous remark of the Emperor Chien Lung to Lord Macartney in 1793: your Ambassador can see for himself that we possess all things.’ As the demand for tea increased, the China trade became more and more seriously one-sided. In contemporary publications concern was expressed about the imbalance of the China trade, particularly on account of the necessity of exporting vast quantities of specie to pay for the tea. At length, English merchants solved their problem by the export of produce from India for which there was a demand in China, notably raw cotton, and, above all, opium.

Western Pacific Ocean

This solution, however, was not open to British settlers in Australia, who at least in tea-drinking proved themselves more than a match for their brothers at home. By the end of the 1820s the trade between Australia and China was considerable but it was almost totally a one-way traffic. The colonists of underdeveloped New South Wales lamented their misfortune in living so close to the wealthy countries of Asia. ‘Our vicinity to China has ... been cried up as a mighty fine thing for New South Wales’, one wrote bitterly. It is quite the reverse; it is a good thing for China, but not for us ... it is cause of regret that all the neighbours of this vast island are rich and old countries, and want nothing from us.’⁶ Luxury articles, as well as some sugar, were imported from China to Sydney; sugar was also imported in large quantities from Manila, a convenient port of call on the home voyage from Canton; but by far the largest item in the colonial trade with the east was China tea of various qualities.

Commissioner Bigge recorded in 1823 that tea was ‘the constant accompaniment to the meals of the middle and lower classes of inhabitants.’⁷ From 1820, convicts in government employ were allowed a quarter of a pound of tea in their weekly ration or thirteen pounds of tea per man per annum, which reveals not only the universality of tea-drinking in New South Wales but also what was considered the bedrock in consumption rates. In 1830 the Sydney Gazette calculated that New South Wales consumed an average of about six thousand chests of tea per annum, observing: ‘We are certainly good customers to the Chinese, and great would be the advantage to ourselves, if we could pay for these large purchases in produce instead of money.’⁸ For colonial tea had to be bought with specie, and to the uneasiness this caused was added the practical problem of the scarcity of coin which at times was so severe that the purchase of oriental produce was curtailed: in the lean years of 1827–9, for example, the settlers were obliged to abolish the tea ration of their servants, who were reduced to drinking milk instead.⁹

In fact, the importing of vast quantities of tea to Australia was a much greater extravagance than it was to Europe, for the colonies not only suffered from a dearth of exports to China and an acute shortage of currency but also from a large excess of imports over exports in general. Although Europeans were fond of expatiating on the superstitious nature of the Chinese who would buy sandalwood at high prices to burn before their altars, under the circumstances the colonial tea-drinking habit was not less quaint. One correspondent to the Sydney Gazette pointed out that in five years the country had paid out more than £200,000 for the purchase of tea, commenting that the magnitude of this sum expended by the people of such a small colony in the Idle habit of tea-drinking’ was truly lamentable. Bad enough it would have been, he continued, had it been a barter trade,

although it would even then have swallowed up all our wool, oil, hides, horns, seal skins, timber, etc. every year; but when we reflect that it has all gone out of the colony in hard dollars or Treasury Bills (for these cunning China merchants will take nothing else), it is most humiliating to our character as British settlers, and a powerful answer to those who are wondering at the present scarcity of cash!¹⁰

The evils of fermented liquors, readers were told, were as nothing compared with the mischiefs of this excessive tea-drinking which was responsible for the low price of sheep, cattle and grain, the usurious interest on money, the increase in lawyers, the embarrassments of trade, the Insolvent Act and ‘a number of other evils’. In vain the inhabitants of New South Wales were exhorted to stick to gin and water, to drink more milk or to change to the coffee that might possibly be grown at Port Macquarie; the ‘tea-drinking mania’ increased rather than abated and the China trade became a permanent fact of colonial life.

When the East India Company monopoly was finally broken in 1834, the China trade was an obvious sphere of development for the rising merchant class of Sydney and Hobart Town. The question of how to avoid sending out their ships in ballast was now the problem of colonial entrepreneurs. They tried to sell various products to China including cedar and kauri but, as the firm of Jardine, Matheson in Hong Kong wrote to Thacker & Co. in Sydney: ‘Disappointment appears to attend all Experiments in the way of Commerce [from] your quarter and this with the single exception of Sandalwood, which has paid handsomely we understand.’¹¹

Sandalwood was an article which merchants could nearly always sell on the China market, if at unsteady prices, and any saleable commodity was better than ballast. There were times in the early years of the Pacific trade, however, when sandalwood commanded such high prices in China at so little outlay that it seemed as good as a gold-find to colonial merchants. One need not take too seriously the estimate of James Kelly, who told Commissioner Bigge that sandalwood from Fiji used to bring £70 to £100 per ton in China, for at the time of his visit to Fiji Kelly was a sixteen-year-old apprentice and would have had little close knowledge of the business end of the trade: on the other hand, Charles Hook, the manager of the concerns of Robert Campbell & Co., estimated that the price of Fijian wood once reached a peak of sixteen Spanish dollars per picul (=133 1/3 pounds), the equivalent of about £65 per ton, allowing the fairly high rate of 5s sterling per dollar, which was still an extremely handsome price.²² Later, in 1829, Indian wood was still fetching the enormous price of £80 per ton, apparently because of a decline in supplies from Hawaii: this indicates that South Seas wood, which usually brought about half the price of Indian, was probably valued at about £40 per ton—still an excellent return. This price did not hold throughout the thirties, but it climbed again to £50 and occasionally even higher in the forties.¹³ As in gold-seeking, the reputation for easy money, however illusory, was buoyed up by these peak prices providing considerable incentive to seek sandalwood, while bad prices due to over-supply of the market or poor quality of wood tended to be forgotten.

So the discoveries of stands of sandal in the Pacific Islands then, as they occurred, gave rise to rushes to the areas that were not unlike gold rushes in some respects: in the secrecy surrounding the ‘find’, the gambling spirit of the whole venture and in the magnitude of their effects on the tiny areas which were the scene of this activity.

The first Pacific Islands to feel the effect of the scramble for sandalwood were the Fijian Islands, in the early years of the nineteenth century. Fijian sandalwood was to all intents and purposes cut out by 1816; a small load was obtained by Peter Dillon as late as 1825 but it was no longer there in commercial quantities. On a smaller scale, the Marquesas Islands experienced a rush of European vessels when sandalwood was discovered there, probably in the year 1814, and they appear to have been stripped of their wood in three years.¹⁴ The years from 1811 to 1828 saw the sandalwood boom in Hawaii when the Hawaiian aristocracy lived high for a while on the profits of sandalwood cut by the common people: fourteen foreign sailing-ships and the best silks, liquors, tableware and clothing of Europe were among the purchases of the Hawaiian chiefs paid for in sandalwood.¹⁵

New Caledonia, the Loyalty Islands and the New Hebrides

The fourth and final sandalwood episode in the Pacific Islands is the one with which this study is concerned, involving what were then the virtually unknown islands of south-west Melanesia. It began with the exploitation of the sandal of Eromanga and other islands in the southern New Hebrides in the late 1820s, and was stimulated by rewarding finds in the Isle of Pines, the Loyalty Islands and New Caledonia, in that order, in the forties. A late discovery in Espiritu Santo—the largest and northernmost of the New Hebrides—revived a wilting