p. 12 “In 1793, two kidnapped Maori were brough to Norfolk Island off the coast of Australia, in order to teach convicts how to work the flax that grew on many of the island’s coastal cliffs. These two kidnapped men are now commonly called Tuki and Huru. They came to Norfolk Island on the Shah Hormuzear, which was crewed by lascars, and which had arrived at Port Jackson (now Sydney) from Calcutta. On their way to Norfolk Island they travelled in the company of 2,200 gallons of wine and spirits, six Bengal ewes and two rams. They were the first Maori to live in a European community, and the kidnapped Tuki, a priest’s son, and Huru, a young chief, became close to the commandant of the convict settlement, Philip Gidley King. King was unable to discern much about flax-workinf from the pair, given that it was women who worked the flax in their communities. Yet he got Tuki to draw a map.
One commentator noted the extent of Tuki’s interests …”not only very inquisitive respecting England & C. (the situation of which, as well as that of New Zealand, Norfolk Island and Port Jackson) he well knew how to find by means of a coloured general chart)… he was also “very communicative respecting his own country… Perceiving he was not thoroughly understood, he delineated a sketch of New Zealand with chalk on the floor. Tuki’s map of his “country” is extraordinary not only because it is thought to be the oldest map drawn by a Maori.. It shows …Mauis’s Fire, the North Ireland; and .. Greenstone Water, the South Island. … a double-dotted line across the North Island shows the road taken by the spirits of the dead … and the place for leaping off into the underworld. .. Within this map, and in the conversations that happened around its making, Tuki attended to population, harbours, the concentration of fighting men and the availability of water… On their return to New Zealand, Tuki and Huru became important intermediaries between Maori and the British.”
p. 16 Peter “Dillon was an erratic maritime adventurer and private trader with aspirations of greatness, an Irisman born in French Martinique in 1788. If he is to be believed, he had served in the Royal Navy at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. He then sailed for the Pacific. He was known to foster close relationships with South Pacific islanders, an attachment which began when he was resident in Fiji 1809-09, when he made “considerable progress in learning their language”… From 1908, he set himself up in Sydney, using it as a base for his private trade across the Pacific. He moved to Calcutta in 1816 and traded between Bengal and the Pacific. By this time, he had married. Mary Cillon accompanied him on his voyages from Calcutta. .. His voyage of 1825-6 falls squarely in the middle of the age of revolutions and Dillon’s career is a telling gauge of changing gimes. For the British Empire followed in the wake of people who may be placed next to Dillon, namely private traders, sailors, castaways, missionaries and so-called pirates. The new empire sought to reform their activities with more systematic colonisation, “free trade” and liberal government. In keeping with this shift to formal empire, Dillon spent the later phase of his life in Europe. He now combined a new set of interests, presenting plans for the settlement of the Pacific to the governments of France and Belgium and publishing a proposal for the colonisatio of New Zealand by the British. In the 1840s, he was an active member of a characteristic association of reform in mid-19th-century Britain, the Aborigines Protection Society, whihc was tied up with the humanitarian heritage of anti-slavery. He also set out a plan for sending Catholic missionaries to the Pacific. He died in Paris in 1847.”
p. 17 voyage of St Patrick of 1825-6 “around 20 British sailors who had joined the crew had served in Chile’s war of independence against Spain, under the command of Thomas Cochrane, a British naval officer who played a pivotal role in the rebel navies of Chile, Peru and Brazil in the 1820s… 11 Pacific islanders .. also had on board a Chinese cook and a Bengali steward… A disturbing story told by George Bayly, the third mate… involves Dillon’s wife Mary. “His wife lived on board and he very frequently have her a thrashing…”.. Bayly said of himself “never was a captive bird more pleased to get its liberty than I was.”.. these shipboard relationships were unstable, unpredictable and violent and based on gender, status and race”.
p. 91 The language of the American and French revolutions, and the example of the Batavian Republic, was used by the trekboer in support of a conservative culture of settlement. This culture of settlement generated a local age of revolutions. It included the boers’ commitment to the harsh discipline of slaves and aggressive conflict with indigenous peoples. Such practices set a context for the expansion of the counter-revolutionary British Empire.”
p. 92 “Among enslaved people, the revolutionary rhetoric of these decades drawn from overseas was fundamentally reworked to suit local agendas. The year 1808 saw a significant slave rebellion in Cape Town. It began when two Irishmen told the 30-year-old Louis, the keeper of a wine shop, who was an enslaved person owned by the “separated wife of Willem Kirsten” that in Ireland, England, Scotland and America “there were no Salves, but all free people, that all people ought to be set free”… a group of enslaved people proceeded to take control of 34 farms in Zwartland, Koeberg and Tygerberg, districts where grapes and grain were grown. After the revolt’s suppression, about 300 prisoners were take. Sixteen of them were sentenced to death, 244 were returned to their masters… The Irishmen were appregended while attempting to escape to sea from Saldanha Bay.”
p. 130 “The glorification of Wahhabi revolt, and the interpretation of it as revolutionary, emerged partly from the period’s colonial writings. Indeed, in the early 19th century and in the context of the Napoleonic era, the Wahhabis could be case as akin to the people of the Swiss cantons or the Dutch United Provinces set “against crusading Catholic potentates”. In this rendition they could be glossed positively for how they stoof up to Ottoman tyrannt. If this was a period when ‘revolution’ was an unstable term of reference, especially in the British perception of the concept, the Wahhabies were revolutionary. In addition, European commentators sought to make sense of the Wahhabis through analogy to the Christian past. These were the inspired “Protestant” Muslims.”
p. 160 “the Navigation Laws, according to which British ships arriving and departing from London had to have predominately British crews, this despite the heavy reliance on Indian lascars. In practice this meant that lascars often took up work on vessels on the way to London … but such lascars found themselves stranded without work on getting to London, at times having to become passengers on the return journey. There was also an increasing feeling of rivalry, resentment and conflict on the part of lascars directed towards British officers and crew members on shops, connected to differences in pay and their exploittative use… attempts at reform generated further bureaucract rather than improvement in conditions… The so called ‘Lascar Act’ after the end of the Napoleonic Wars further precluded the legal use of Indian seamen on British vessels. These wider conditions framed the types of insurrections which occured amon lascars in the circuit of country trade between Bombay and the Gulf.”
p. 167 Cora Gooseberry … was an Eora woman.. a term for over 30 clans of Aboriginal people who resided in the Sydney region. She was the widow of Bungaree, who is often said to be the first person called an Australian in print… Both Cora’s remaining breastplates are engraved with fish and this is probably not an accident. It is now know that coastal Eora Aboriginal women played an important role fishing with hooks and lines from their nowie or canoes… with children in tow, while men usually fished with spears from the shore.”
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