Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (47 page)

Cakobau was a Christian, and knew white men very well, but even he could not cope with the complexities of the European incursion—which had brought with it, besides drunkenness, disease, Methodism and gunpowder, an infinity of legal disputes. Among these jostling foreigners Cakobau never knew where he stood. Now the British Consul steps in with a decree, now an American Note demands immediate payment of compensation for an outrage; one day the European community decides to establish its own Assembly, the next a body called the Planters’ Protection Society declares itself ready to resist Cakobau’s authority by force. While the Fijians clung to their traditional tribal ways, the Europeans arrogantly ruled themselves, refusing to pay taxes. Cakobau was soon in despair. ‘If matters remain as they are,’ he presciently said, ‘Fiji will become like a piece of drift-wood on the sea, and be picked up by the first passer-by.’

The only solution, he was quick to realize, was annexation, or at least protection, by one of the Powers. The question was, which? The Americans were the obvious choice Not only were they the
most active in raising Cakobau to his regal eminence, but they had already succeeded in reconciling the monarchical traditions of Hawaii with their own republican ideals. Besides, for years they had been hounding Cakobau for compensation for the burning of their Consulate building, once threatening him with transportation to America, and once claiming three of his islands as collateral for the debt. Who more suitable, then, as protectors? But when Cakobau offered to cede Fiji to the United States
in
toto
, the State Department did not even bother to reply.

So the king turned, after a half-hearted attempt to interest Bismarck, to the British. It was in fact the British Consul in Fiji, William Pritchard, who first drew up a petition for cession to the Crown, but at first he got only dusty answers. The British were still deeply reluctant to embroil themselves, particularly as an alternative to the Americans. They were not yet in their imperialist mood, while the chance of Christian duty no longer seemed compelling enough to lure them into new colonial adventures—‘the hope of the conversion of a people to Christianity’, austerely noted the Duke of Newcastle, Colonial Secretary in Gladstone’s first Liberal Government, ‘must not be made a reason for an increase in the British dominions’.

But the pressure grew. The Americans on Fiji petitioned Washington for annexation, the Australians, alarmed by the thought that islands so close to home might come under a foreign flag, hinted that they might seize Fiji for themselves. Still the British hesitated. Mr Gladstone had little fellow-feeling for South Sea settlers, and even when, in 1874, the Liberal Government fell and Disraeli came into power, nobody wanted to take the plunge. Commissioners were cautiously sent to Fiji, to inquire further on the spot; and it was only when they reported that British annexation would cause ‘general rejoicing among all classes, Black and White’, and when the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Hercules Robinson, cabled that Fiji was in ‘a state bordering on anarchy’, that the British at last agreed to incorporate Fiji within their Empire.

Robinson himself sailed up from Sydney to accept the transfer of power, and Cakobau and all his most powerful chiefs assembled for the ceremony at Levuka, on the island of Ovalau. This was a
suitable venue, for Levuka had been the centre of everything most unsavoury and bewildering in the long awakening of Fiji. The town was squeezed on the foreshore facing west, with hills running so abruptly down behind that some of its streets were no more than steep flights of steps, dropping disconcertingly out of the bush. All around the harbour were the artifacts of the foreigners who had so drastically changed the life of the Fijians: the taverns and the wooden warehouses, the stores, the sailmakers, while from its eminence up Mission Hill the Methodist church looked warily down, in figurative pince-nez, upon the skull-duggeries below.

Here it was, on October 10, 1874, that Fiji voluntarily entered the imperial bond, and Great Britain embarked upon an Empire in the central Pacific—presently to include the Cook Islands, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Ocean Island, and a thousand lesser reefs, atolls and archipelagos. Nobody could call this aggressive empire-building, but even so it eventually made of the southern Pacific not an American preserve, as might have been foreseen, but preeminently a ward of the Raj. To the salute of guns from British warships in the harbour Cakobau’s flag was lowered that day, and the Union Jack hoisted in its stead. Sir Hercules, whom we shall briefly meet again in very different imperial circumstances, ceremonially saluted it, and Cakobau, dressed in all the flowered and wreathed magnificence of Fiji chieftainship, handed him his royal warclub with a message to Queen Victoria.

‘Before finally ceding his country’ (said this declaration, at least in a contemporary British translation) ‘the King desires to give Her Majesty the only thing he possesses that may interest her. The King gives Her Majesty his old and favourite war-club, the former, and until lately the only, known law of Fiji…. With this emblem of the past he sends his love to Her Majesty, saying that he fully confides in her and in her children, who, succeeding her shall become kings of Fiji, to exercise a watchful control over the welfare of his children and people; and who, having survived the barbaric law and age, are now submitting themselves under Her Majesty’s rule, to civilization.’
1

On the eastern shore of the Pacific the British and the Americans confronted each other more sternly. There they had resented each other’s presence for years. Ever since the discovery of the Columbia River, entering the Pacific magnificently from its great gorge through the Cascade Mountains, the western end of the U.S.Canadian frontier had been a cause of bitter contention. It was a rich place—rich in furs and fish, in the prospects of minerals, in farmland and forest. It was also one of the most handsome parts of the temperate globe. The white volcanic peaks of the Cascades provided a stupendous background to the scene, extending like tremendous vertebrae from horizon to horizon, so celestial that the Indians worshipped them, so terrific in their isolation that the first overland immigrants estimated Mount Hood (altitude 11,245 feet) to be at least 18,000 feet high. An American had been the first to glimpse the mouth of the Columbia, but a Briton had been the first to sail up it, and to realize that it provided a highway into the grand interior of America.

The Hudson’s Bay Company first administered this marvellous country, and the Company’s fur traders and factors were its earliest European explorers. The original Vancouver was a company stockade near the Columbia’s mouth, from which the formidable and eccentric John McLoughlin ruled almost single-handed what was then called the Oregon Territory. But once the American overlanders arrived, following the Oregon Trail through the Rockies and Cascades, the British hold on the territory was doomed. Sheer weight of numbers forced them out. The first wagon-teams of pioneers were kindly received by Dr McLoughlin;
1
but almost as
soon as they formed a majority in the country, they began to clamour for American sovereignty. The Oregon Question, the Anglo-American dispute over ownership of the Pacific north-west, was a perennial of American politics for thirty years, and during the most feverish period of American expansion could be guaranteed to set any political audience aflame: for the possession of Oregon, it seemed, like the acquisition of California, was essential ‘to the fulfilment of our national destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’.

Even when, in 1846, the question was peacefully settled by the Treaty of Washington, and the Canadian frontier to the Pacific was demarcated along the line of the 49th parallel, differences remained. The whole of what are now Oregon, Washington and Idaho went to the Americans; the whole of Vancouver Island, which overlapped the parallel, went to the British: but nobody was sure who owned the archipelago that lay in the Strait of San Juan de Fuca, north of Puget Sound, and thirteen years after the settlement of the Oregon Question proper, this petty anomaly almost brought the British Empire and the United States to war.

By then the country on both sides of the frontier was well populated, and each community had developed pronounced characteristics of its own. To the south had grown up a raw American frontier society, one of the toughest communities on the Pacific, exuding a lively disrespect for Queens, Empires and Limies, and a frank belief that one day the whole of the North American continent really would be overspread by those yearly multiplying millions. To the north was the very British colony of British Columbia, recently acquired by the Crown from Hudson’s Bay Company. Victoria on Vancouver Island was its capital, with a brand-new legislative building built in a faintly Chinese style on the foreshore, and there was a Royal Navy base at Esquimault, all bugle-calls and admirals’ barges, and a formidable Scottish Governor named Sir James Douglas: and 
though the colony had its own fair share of adventurers, speculators, wandering negroes and opportunist Chinese, still each year more respectable British settlers arrived, to honour their transplanted loyalties with British institutions and native phlegm.

Between the two communities lay the islands of the Strait. They were not in themselves of much value. Mysteriously wooded, sandy-beached, separated by narrow winding channels, they looked lovely from a distance, but did not invite settlement. Sometimes people landed on one island or another, to chop wood, or fish, but nobody lived there permanently, and when the British and the Americans signed the treaty of 1846, the islands were not mentioned. It was simply agreed that the boundary between Vancouver Island and the American mainland should run ‘through the middle of the channel’ through the Straits. The trouble was that there were two navigable channels. If the signatories meant the Rosario Channel, nearly all the islands would be British: if they meant the Haro Channel, they would nearly all be American. Since at that time the Strait was very inadequately charted, and nobody much cared about the islands anyway, the issue did not arise for years: but in 1852 the legislature of Oregon Territory, U.S.A., in an expansionist moment, established a county government for the islands of the Haro Archipelago—Island County it was called, and it specifically included San Juan Island, one of the biggest of them all.

The British reacted promptly. They had always assumed the islands to be theirs, and to make the assumption clear in December 1853 the Hudson’s Bay Company steamer
Beaver
, the best-known vessel on the whole north-west coast, paddled over to San Juan from Victoria and disembarked 1,300 sheep and a shepherd, Charles Griffin, who built himself a shack at the southern tip of the island, called it the Company Farm, and settled down as the only human inhabitant. The Americans protested. The Company retorted. Sir James Douglas bristled. Officials investigated. A few American settlers defiantly trickled over from Oregon Territory. The name of San Juan Island, hitherto unknown to Foreign Office and State Department alike, made its first fitful appearance in the diplomatic documents.

For the next five years the dispute was held in testy suspense,
but in 1859 it unpredictably exploded. By then there were nineteen Americans living on San Juan, and sixteen Britons, including the resilient Mr Griffin. It was scarcely a tranquil island now. The wild Indians of northern British Columbia were in a warlike mood, and now that there was somebody to raid on San Juan, they included the island in the itineraries of their war canoes. The claimant Powers themselves, represented by their respective Governors in these remote dependencies, were only too ready to squabble, and public opinion on both sides of the 49th parallel was inflammatory.

The crisis burst in June. An American farmer called Lyman Cutler had settled near the southern end of the island, and had fenced a small potato plot near the Hudson’s Bay farm on Cattle Point. He was not on good terms with the Company. Their cattle and pigs wandered freely around the place, and whenever they damaged his fences he complained. Too bad, he was told, the whole place belonged to the Company anyway, and he must look after his own fences. On the contrary, Cutler retorted, it was American territory, he had every right to be there, and he had been officially assured of American protection and support. The next time he saw a Company pig rooting around his potato patch, he stormed out of his cabin and shot it dead. Its protracted obsequies have been known ever since as the Pig War.

The American military commander in the north-west was General William S. Harney, one of the most extraordinary and difficult men in the U.S. Army. He was a famous Indian fighter, and seems to have been perpetually in a rage. Perhaps he was psychotic. Certainly with his jutting beard and his glaring eyes, his predilections for cruelty and revenge, his constant grievances and sudden impulsive accusations, he was a dangerous man to command the American forces on that touchy frontier. As a young colonel he had invaded Mexico without orders, suffering an ignominious defeat and being court-martialled for his impetuosity. As a general he had placed a number of Irish-American deserters under a wagon with nooses around their necks, obliging them to watch the course of an action against the Mexicans until, the battle won, he gave the order for the wagon to move off, and the prisoners were strangled. Since he had been in the north-west he had quarrelled with nearly everyone—with his own
officers, with his civilian colleagues, with Hudson’s Bay Company, with his superiors. Some said he had ambitions for the Presidency: others that he was off his head.

The death of Cutler’s pig was just his style. He sailed to San Juan almost at once, and decided to occupy it by force, the American settlers obligingly easing his way by formally requesting protection against Indian raids. On July 27 a company of U.S. infantrymen landed at Griffin Bay, at the other end of the island from the Company farm. They were commanded by a protégé of Harney’s, Captain George Pickett, who immediately issued a proclamation announcing that ‘This being United States Territory, no laws, other than those of the United States, nor courts, except such as are held by virtue of said laws, will be recognized or allowed on this island’. Almost at once a British Justice of the Peace arrived on the island too: Major John de Courcy, who was pointedly empowered to arrest ‘all persons who by force or by a display of force’ seized lands not their property.