8.1 Preliminaries

By extension, the subject of linguistic variations in MPP raises the question of its extralinguistic contexts, as already suggested by incidental references to the concurrent use of hand signs with the Pidgin. Although the first contacts between early British explorers (such as Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret) and Polynesians of the eastern Pacific drew primarily on hand signs for initial exchanges, James Cook, his crew, and those to follow in their footsteps (such as Esteban José Martínez and Joseph Ingraham) reported the use of gestures as a means of enhancing their first verbal exchanges in MPP similarly to what Herman Melville was to document half a century later. Other sources make incidental micro-sociolinguistic references to incomplete attempts by Europeans at speaking Tahitian, which served as the target of much amusement and mockery for Society Islanders in August 1773 (Forster Reference Forster, Thomas and Berghof2000 [1777]: 162), to contexts for teasing Māori escorts by Europeans in MPP (Nicholas Reference Nicholas1817: II.32–34), or even to songs in reduced Marquesan (Radiguet (Reference Radiguet1929 [1860]: 148, 192).

These micro-sociolinguistic references remained vague without specific information or independent confirmation. In contrast, the systematic collection of historical attestations in Part II has amassed a growing body of macro-sociolinguistic data that permit a fairly methodical appraisal of the Pidgin's extralinguisticdomains in addition to its grammatical pattern. The present chapter pulls together sociohistorical information on MPP into an integrated assessment, specifically a review of the Pidgin's origin, expansion, and persistence, its geographic and social distribution, as well as its uses and functions. The following discussion, reflecting the limitations of social science, however, remains less structured and cohesive than the preceding linguistic review.

8.2 Origin, expansion, and persistence

When in the late eighteenth century European explorers, primarily French and British voyagers, sailed around Cape Horn into the Pacific and northwest on their path to Asia or the northern Pacific, they inadvertently ran into the Society Islands. From a geopolitical perspective, Tahiti became an early trading center at the heart of the Pacific, supplying European explorers with fresh supplies, especially pork; however, it also inspired European imaginations of the Pacific as paradise and utopia. According to contemporary historical accounts, Society Islanders played an active role as entrepreneurs in their encounters with foreigners rather than remaining passive recipients of European advances (Newbury Reference Newbury1980; Tryon and Charpentier Reference Tryon and Charpentier2004: 87–93). Linguistically, the Tahitians’ engagement with the newcomers resulted in a structurally reduced contact medium, as first recorded probably by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville on his voyage around the globe in search for the imaginary Southern Continent (terra australis) in 1768 and then by Cook on his first voyage to the Pacific in 1769. What lends support to such an interpretation is the very fact that this medium, now known as MPP, was in use by the local elite, including chiefs, priests, and other native leaders. Bougainville (Reference Bougainville1771: 224–226, 231–232) manifestly expected more, as became evident from his poor opinion of the linguistic skills of his Tahitian passenger Ahutoru. Even after two years of residence in France, Ahutoru reportedly would not learn to speak French beyond a few isolated words, although, as if in a linguistic vacuum, he otherwise proved rather adept at engaging in Parisian life and culture. Did Ahutoru instead expect to use Tahitian, whether in vernacular or reduced form, in Bougainville's company and with other Europeans?

The dominant influence of Tahitian on MPP extended beyond initial encounters between Society Islanders and Europeans. By all indications, some form of reduced Tahitian was in use when, on Cook's first voyage to the Pacific from 1768 until 1771, Tupai‘a, a Ra‘iatean chief-priest and navigator-interpreter, communicated with Māori in New Zealand, reportedly with little difficulty in spite of substantive linguistic differences (Banks Reference Banks and Beaglehole1962: I.401, 420; II.35; Cook Reference Cook and Hawkesworth1775: II. 271–275; Cook Reference Cook and Beaglehole1955: 169, 171, 182, 240, 242, 282). Tapai‘a's adolescent servant, Taiata, similarly revealed a distinctive Tahitian nuance by the lexicon of his utterance (see (2) in 4.2 above). When Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne explored New Zealand on behalf of France in 1772, his officers employed Bougainville's vocabulary of Tahitian, including several indisputable MPP sentences with an SVO word order, in communication with Māori (see (3) in 4.3 above). On his second visit to the Pacific in 1772 to 1775, Cook recorded a few samples of MPP in which Society Islanders, including two women of chiefly rank and his Ra‘iatean interpreter Ma‘i, addressed Europeans. This recording lends evidence to the finding that the Pidgin was not just a European contraption good for contact with Pacific Islanders, but that the Islanders themselves used it and considered it an acceptable medium (see (4) and (5) in 4.4). The early Tahitian dominance of MPP emerges most clearly from the accounts by Cook's naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster and his perceptive son George, who, according to their descriptions and actual linguistic data, recognized what amounts to an unmistakably Tahitian-based pidgin, notwithstanding the younger Forster's subscription to an interpretation in terms of universal grammar (see (6) and (7) in 4.4). Most distinctive among Tahitian-derived words used in interactions with Māori was George Forster's use of taio ‘friend’, which became a kind of greeting among Pacific Islanders of the South Pacific (Forster Reference Forster, Thomas and Berghof2000 [1777]: 143–144, 171, 443, fn. 2). The dominant Tahitian influence is also evident in later attestations as offered by the British fur trader James Colnett and the British missionary George Bennet (see below).

Until historical research can uncover still earlier attestations, the currently available data therefore trace MPP clearly to the Society Islands and assign a key historical role to the Tahitians in the Pidgin's emergence and spread. By all indications, the Pidgin arose from an established Tahitian register of foreigner talk, used not only with Europeans but conceivably also with alloglossic Pacific Islanders, who may in turn have had similar linguistic traditions. This finding need not, however, favor a theory of foreigner-talk origin beyond an initial stage of formation, inasmuch as any such Tahitian foreigner talk still differed developmentally and typologically from MPP by greater structural inconsistency and additional culture-specific strategies (see Mühlhäusler Reference Mühlhäusler1997: 102). Nor does this model ultimately imply a pre-European origin for MPP, as eastern Polynesia was not linguistically diverse enough for pidginization to occur without the contact with Europeans.

Based on the currently available evidence, MPP came to extend its range across much of eastern Polynesia, from the Society Islands (including Tahiti) to New Zealand, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Marquesas in roughly that historical sequence, and possibly reached Easter Island (Rapanui) as well, although documentation for the Pidgin on the latter island has remained nominal. Within eastern Polynesia MPP functioned with few communicative complications or restrictions. Its wide use was the consequence of two major factors: a common linguistic base of historically closely related languages and the involvement of Pacific Islanders, primarily Tahitians and other Society Islanders, in their active engagement as interpreters and sailors on board of European and American ships throughout the region. Already on Cook's first voyage to the Pacific from 1768 until 1771, his Ra‘iatean navigator-interpreter Tupai‘a encountered little difficulty in communicating with Māori in New Zealand in spite of their substantive linguistic differences. French naval officers had much the same experience a year later in their explorations of Polynesia.

The linguistic findings from Cook's second voyage to the Pacific from 1772 to 1775 (see (4) through (7) in 4.4), then, are consistent with the Forsters’ portrayal of “Tahitian” as a general language for much of the South Pacific with little “dialectal” variation and in terms of a universal grammar. Little changes with the assessment by George Forster (Reference Forster, Thomas and Berghof2000 [1777]: 88, 120, 174, 176, 274–275, 303) that some linguistic differences between parties in contact could occasionally result in confusion, as was the case with the variation of t and k in Tahitian, dialectal differences of Rapanui from Tahitian, and the “guttural” pronunciation of Māori. Systematic documentation for any early Māori variety of MPP beyond (1), however, remained some time in coming, until unmistakable, detailed linguistic data became available with Moehanga through the British military surgeon John Savage in (14) in 1805 and with John Liddiard Nicholas in (17) and (18) a decade later (see 4.9 and 5.3).

As Cook turned north on his way to northwestern North America on his third voyage to the Pacific from 1776 to 1779 and accidentally came upon the Hawaiian archipelago, specifically the island of Kaua‘i, his unofficial naturalist William Anderson evidently used a Māori-influenced variety, as judged by several words with a distinctly velar nasal of ŋ in single or variable occurrences (see (8) in 4.5). Still, he reported no problems of mutual understanding or communication when introducing cognates from Polynesian languages of the South Pacific, principally from Māori and Tahitian, by way of a reduced form of Tahitian into an emergent Pidgin Hawaiian. When addressing his Tahitian servant-sailor Matatore, in captivity in Mexico in 1789, Colnett similarly used MPP spiked with Tahitian, as indicated by the derivation for “Tenenony” or teni/tini noni ‘small chief’ in two of four questions (see (10) in 4.6), which also suggest Matatore to have been a prime source for Colnett's Pidgin.

What, in contrast, the American fur trader Joseph Ingraham (Reference Ingraham and Kaplanoff1971 [1791]: 85–86) reported as misunderstandings in the use of MPP on O‘ahu in 1791were likely due to the social circumstances of a major scuffle, including the refusal by Hawaiians to cooperate with him and his crew, rather than the linguistic limitations of MPP as such. Documentation for MPP by the Irish fur trader Ross Cox still remains suggestive for the Hawaiian Islands in 1812, and the Scot Archibald Campbell recorded an extended but questionable set of MPP sentences for the Hawaiian Islands between 1819 and 1820 (see (15) in 5.1). A few years later the poet-linguist Adelbert von Chamisso, however, bore out earlier observations on the Pidgin's existence in the Hawaiian Islands with a fairly detailed linguistic account. Moreover, he described how Kadu, a Micronesian from Ratak (Marshall Islands) born and raised on Woleai Atoll (Western Carolines), found little difficulty in communicating with fellow passengers on board or with Hawaiians on shore (see (20) in 5.4).

Only on the Marquesas in 1791 did Ingraham and his crew apparently encounter considerable difficulty in interacting with Marquesans beyond isolated words, which suggests that MPP had not yet become established among these Pacific Islanders at the time or at least among those Marquesans who had by then had little or no contact with Europeans or Americans, as recognized by Ingraham and his supercargo, Ebenezer Dorr. The Pidgin may in fact have emerged in the Marquesas only toward the end of the eighteenth century after the arrival of a native Hawaiian named Sam, Tama, or Tom, who had sailed on American ships between Boston, South America, northwestern North America, and China as part of the fur trade. He likely spoke MPP and came to serve as interpreter for the English beachcomber Edward Robarts (Reference Robarts and Dening1974: 46–47). First indisputable evidence of the Pidgin on the Marquesas did not become available until 1812 to 1814, as indicated by the American naval officer David Porter in (16).

MPP also became a major medium used by missionaries, as attested by the missionary wife Lucia Ruggles Holman in the Hawaiian Islands in 1820 (see (21) in 5.5) and the English missionaries Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet on Tahiti in 1821 (see (22) in 5.6). In 1824, Bennet understood an exchange by a Māori chief in Pidgin Māori on the basis of his knowledge of reduced “Tahitian” or the Tahitian variety of the Pidgin. He answered accordingly, citing Tahitian-derived pua‘a for ‘pig’ (see the discussion following (23) in 5.6), which lends internal linguistic support to the notion that the Tahitian and Māori varieties of MPP were mutually intelligible and part of a single speech community. MPP, moreover, came into use as a prime tool of overt colonial control at about the same time. In 1827, the French naval officer and explorer Jules S. C. Dumont d’Urville (Reference Dumont d’Urville1830–33: II.72–73, 81–83, 97–98, 146, 147, 241–242; see (24) in 5.7) documented the use of MPP by Māori and himself on and immediately off board around New Zealand.

All along, MPP continued in the role of a trade medium. In 1828, Jacobus Boelen, captain of a Dutch maritime and commercial expedition in the eastern Pacific, confirmed usage of the Pidgin in the Hawaiian Islands except that several of his samples exhibited a clear verb-initial pattern, including three sentences with a VSO rather than SVO word order (see (26) in 5.9). In the same year, the Italian-born French naturalist-surgeon Paul-Émile Botta not only recognized a reduced Polynesian medium in the Hawaiian Islands as distinct from unintelligible vernacular Hawaiian but also confirmed the geographic range of MPP across much of the Pacific by speaking it with Tahitians and “New Zealanders” or Māori with only a “few modifications.” Botta, however, could not verify its use with Marquesans or Tongans, who reportedly spoke it as well (Botta Reference Botta1831: 142).

Historical attestations for MPP for the following decades present a similar picture of endurance until the mid-nineteenth century. In 1830, the American seaman-clerk John Slade (Reference Slade and Denison1844: 37–39, 42–44) reported the use of “the Kannacker tongue” with Hawaiian and perhaps other eastern Polynesians among his crew on ‘Uvea Island (“Wallis Island”) near Fiji (see (27) in 5.11), but evidently not in communication with Uveans. In 1832, the English whaler Robert Jarman (Reference Jarman1838: 124–125) confirmed Botta's earlier observation of a reduced Polynesian in use in the Hawaiian Islands, Tahiti, and New Zealand, which was “particularly easy to learn” so that “almost all [crew members] acquired a smattering of it.” In 1834, the English traveler Edward Markham (Reference Markham and McCormick1963: 53–54, 65–66) evidently attested the use of MPP in northern New Zealand between Māori of both genders and European whalers. In 1838, Dumont d’Urville (Reference Dumont d’Urville1841–1846: III.225) referred to a jargon mixed with Marquesan Spanish, and English on the Marquesas. While voyaging across the South Pacific in the 1840s, the English pearl trader Edward Lucett made use of “broken Maori” with Māori (see (30) and (31) in 6.4), and apparently used “the Kanaka language” in contact with Pacific Islanders in the Society Islands, the Tuamotus, and the Marquesas (Lucett Reference Lucett1851: II.195, 295–296), although he did not recognize the two media as part of a single one. In 1842, the American novelist Herman Melville documented MPP on Nuku Hiva and the neighboring Society Islands (see (32) to (40) in 6.5), as did Max Radiguet, secretary to staff headquarters of the French colonial expansion in the Pacific, in the form of a reduced form of Marquesan for 1842 through 1845 by drawing on a French artillery officer by the name of Monsieur Rohr.

After the mid-1840s, most historical attestations of MPP focused on the Hawaiian Islands, which may reflect a historical development as much as an inadvertent concentration by the current research on this archipelago rather than the South Pacific. An American sailor by the name of James F. Munger (Reference Munger1852: 22, 38, 63–64, 67) on a whaler in the Pacific and the Arctic therefore leads us to believe that MPP was alive and well in and around the Hawaiian Islands in October 1851. In the same year, a Gilbertese by the name of Timarare reportedly spoke MPP with several English words or Pidgin English enhanced by some Polynesian vocabulary on the topsail schooner Wanderer sailing from California via the Hawaiian Islands to the South Pacific, as observed by the captain of the accompanying supply ship, John Webster (Reference Webster1863: 23, 26–27, 35). Similarly to Richard Henry Dana in his Two Years before the Mast (Reference Dana1911 [1840]) and Melville in his second autobiographical novel Omoo (Reference Melville, Hayford, Parker and Tanselle1968b [1847]), the captain may inadvertently have Anglicized the historical record, as suggested by the presence of an incidental Polynesian vocabulary, the large crew of Pacific Islanders, and the fact that the main source, a Gilbertese sailor-interpreter, had just gone through a dramatic rescue effort. In 1854, the author of the Hawaiian Phrase Book, Artemas Bishop (Reference Bishop1854: iii), still recognized MPP in the Hawaiian Islands, even if only as a linguistic aberration reportedly deficient of grammar or aesthetics. In 1872, the French naval officer Pierre Loti (Reference Loti1880: 136, 415–416, 867, 879) also learned Beach or Pidgin Tahitian during his amorous encounters with young Tahitian women in Pape‘ete and used it with little difficulty on a subsequent visit to Honolulu. As recently as 1887, the Anglican missionary Herbert H. Gowen (Reference Gowen1892: 132) recorded MPP on Lāna‘i as well as on an interisland vessel to and from Maui in the Hawaiian Islands (see (45) and (46) in 6.12).

8.3 Geographic and social distributions

Although in principle the Pidgin's use on board of ships set few obvious geographic boundaries, MPP did not extend across the entire Pacific or even Polynesia at large, as judged by the historical record. Speakers of the Pidgin apparently encountered limits to its regular use beyond New Zealand, the Societies, the Marquesas, and the Hawaiian Islands.

Bougainville (Reference Bougainville1771: 237, 247) already noted that on two occasions, the Tahitian passenger Ahutoru attempted to speak “Tahitian” with Pacific Islanders of the Sāmoa archipelago and New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), but failed to understand them or make them understand him. The original journal by Bougainville (Taillemite Reference Taillemite1977: I.335, 346; Dunmore Reference Dunmore2002: 82, 93) confirms Ahutoru's inability to communicate with Samoans, even if it does not include any comparable statement about Vanuatuans. Still, if Ahutoru could not interact linguistically with Samoans, he would have encountered even greater communicative barriers with the linguistically more distant Vanuatuans. As a crew member on Cook's first voyage to the Pacific, Sydney Parkinson (Reference Parkinson1773: 182, fn.) reported the use of MPP as far west as Batavia, Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia), it was evidently limited to interactions between European and Tahitian crew members and did not extend to residents of Java. Cook and his crew, however, employed “Tahitian” on Tonga (“the Friendly Islands”) on their second voyage only to encounter difficulties in its use in spite of its correspondences to Eastern Polynesian languages (Forster Reference Forster, Thomas and Berghof2000 [1777]: 242). Nonetheless, Chamisso (Reference Chamisso and Hitzig1856b [1835]: 61, 62; Reference Chamisso and Kratz1986: 255) maintained that the common language of the eastern South Pacific or presumably MPP extended to Tonga, without offering any linguistic support for his claim. Other implicit or explicit references to MPP's extension to Tonga by James Burney (n.d. [Reference Burney1779]: 115), by Botta (Reference Botta1831: 142), and most recently by Sarah J. Roberts (Reference Roberts2013: 119) equally lack linguistic documentation, and apparently present no more than vague claims copied from earlier observers such as Cook, Forster, and Chamisso.

Incidental suggestions of Fijians or other western Pacific Islanders using MPP fare no better than vague references to Tongans speaking MPP. The English beachcomber Edward Robarts already rejected claims by his fellow countryman George Bruce, a resident among the Māori, that “broken Māori” was intelligible to Fijians in the early 1800s (Robarts Reference Robarts and Dening1974: 189–191). In 1830, Slade (Reference Slade and Denison1844: 46, 50, 52–53, 60, 65, 66, 76, 77–78, 83, 87, 96) could not successfully employ MPP on Fiji or ‘Uvea Island (“Wallis Island”); he required local interpreters for interlingual communication instead. In 1850, the French naval officer and settler Louis-Théodore Bérard similarly recorded what at first sight appeared to be MPP on New Caledonia, including nearby ‘Uvea Atoll (“Ouvéa”; see (43) in 6.7), but then he did not understand Māori during his visit to New Zealand in early 1851, which raises major questions about the nature of his linguistic data and the Pidgin's expansion into the western Pacific. Instead, it probably was part of a Polynesian-Melanesian contact medium, which the Australian trader Andrew Cheyne (Reference Cheyne and Shineberg1971: 98) had already documented on neighboring Lifu almost a decade earlier and which remained unintelligible to speakers of MPP.

Conversely, there were no more than a few western Pacific Islanders who spoke the Pidgin. One was Kadu, a Micronesian from Ratak (Marshall Islands) and originally Woleai Atoll (Western Carolines), who sailed on Otto von Kotzebue's expedition between 1815 and 1818 and who learned MPP on board and in use with Hawaiians on shore (Chamisso Reference Chamisso and Hitzig1856a [1835]: 226–227, 264–265, 268; Choris Reference Choris1812: Section “Iles Marianes,” 3–4; see (20) in 5.4). Another was Timarare or in short Tim, a native of Banaba, Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati), who in 1851 sailed on the fast topsail schooner Wanderer from California via the Hawaiian Islands to the South Pacific and apparently spoke the Pidgin with some questionable influences from English with a crew consisting largely of Pacific Islanders (Webster Reference Webster1863: 23, 26–27, 35).

When we encounter occasional historical attestations of MPP outside of eastern Polynesia (as most notably in the cases of Matatore in Mexico and Moehanga on his voyage to England), these instances by all indications remained exceptions outside of the Pidgin's established geographic range rather than attestations for its recurrent use in these locations. Any such historical documentation did not indicate MPP's use on any regular basis on the Pacific coast of the Americas except southern California, specifically San Diego, as attested by Dana (Reference Dana1911 [1840]: 180) in terms of Hawaiian as “a sort of compromise, a mixed language” by Hawaiian crewmen on shore as well as on board for 1835 and 1836 (see (29) in 6.2). As already suggested by Cox (Reference Cox, Stewart and Stewart1957 [1831]: 44–45, 198) in 1812, the other major exception might have been Hawaiian communities in northwestern North America, for which any direct linguistic evidence of MPP has, however, remained elusive until today and for which Chinook Jargon probably remained too serious a competitor in the area. To differentiate established speech communities or zones from areas of periodic visits, the accompanying vocabulary (Drechsel Reference Drechsel2014) lists any entries from such attestations outside of eastern Polynesia under the heading of location as “recorded in southern California,” “recorded in Mexico,” “recorded in England,” etc. as distinct from entries within the Pidgin's customary geographic range.

The geographic distribution of MPP bears directly on the social organization of its speech community in that linguistic differences ranging from minute dialectal ones to mutually unintelligible, unrelated languages reflected social distinctions notwithstanding any equalizing effects brought about by the Pidgin.

Socially, the Pidgin's speakers and audience did not divide solely in terms of European or American foreigners on the one hand and Pacific Islanders on the other. Among the visitors who learned MPP, the main actors were: explorers primarily from France, Great Britain, and the United States; crew members, scientists, and occasional passengers of diverse nationalities; beachcombers, traders, and whalers of various European or American origins; plus missionaries and other colonists predominantly from France, Great Britain, and the United States. Significantly, crews often spoke multiple languages on board rather than a single vernacular, a fact that added to MPP's appeal in interactions with Pacific Islanders on board.

Beyond obvious linguistic divisions among themselves, Eastern Polynesians disclosed considerable internal social differences, including social stratification. To infer that MPP was the preferred medium of Pacific Islanders of lower social rank would, however, miss the mark. On the contrary, the Pidgin speech community included not only commoners, but also community leaders. Prime examples were: Tupai‘a, a chief and priest of Ra‘iātea (Society Islands) and a navigator-interpreter on Cook's first voyage to the Pacific (Banks Reference Banks and Beaglehole1962: I.401, 406, 420; Cook Reference Cook and Hawkesworth1775: II.119, 120, 129, 146, 152, 171, 189, 203, 204); the Tahitian chief Potatau (as attested by George Forster in (7) in 4.4); Moehanga, a Māori man “of some consequence” as recorded by Savage in (14) in 4.9; perhaps Kamehameha I in the Hawaiian Islands, as suggested by a few primary sources (Campbell Reference Campbell1816: 127; Cox Reference Cox, Stewart and Stewart1957 [1831: 29]) and also by the fact that his former personal physician John Elliot de Castro eventually taught MPP to Chamisso (Reference Chamisso and Hitzig1856a [1835]: 157–158; see Schütz Reference Schütz1994: 25); and Māori chiefs (Nicholas Reference Nicholas1817: I.216, 243), whose acquaintance Tyerman and Bennet, representatives of the London Missionary Society, made by speaking the Pidgin (see (23) in 5.6).

By all available indications, the Pidgin reflected few other social restrictions. Cook and his crew on his second voyage to the Pacific recorded women as speaking the MPP, of which two instances evidently applied to two women of chiefly rank (see (4) in 4.4) and the other example gives no indication as to social status except advanced age and presumably the recognition that comes with it (see (7) in 4.4). Similarly, Nicholas (Reference Nicholas1817: I.280) recorded Māori mothers speaking MPP in 1814 and 1815. Still others such as Markham (Reference Markham and McCormick1963: 53–54, 65–66) documented the Pidgin's use by Māori women with their foreign husbands and with the crew on whalers in northern New Zealand in 1834, as did apparently Lucett (Reference Lucett1851: II.295–296) in the case of young but unidentified Polynesian women in the early 1840s. Between 1842 and 1845, Max Radiguet (Reference Radiguet1929 [1860]: 11–12, 34, 182) also reported women speaking the Pidgin on Nuku Hiva (Marquesas), although at times sparingly and with blank expressions. Similarly, the prime source of Pidgin Tahitian for Loti (Reference Loti1880: 136, 415–416, 879) in 1872 was young women engaged in prostitution. In addition, MPP included other young speakers such as Tupai‘a's adolescent servant Taiata as recorded by Parkinson (Reference Parkinson1773: 182, fn.), Cook's youthful interpreter Mahine from Porapora (“Bora Bora”/Society Islands) as recorded by George Forster in (7) in 4.4, and a young boy of unspecified age but old enough to have already sailed to northwestern North America, as documented by Ingraham (Reference Ingraham and Kaplanoff1971 [1791]: 167).

Aside from the accumulated linguistic data for MPP and its use by a socially diverse population, the repeated documentation of Pacific Islanders using MPP perhaps provides the strongest historical evidence that it was linguistically and socially real. The Pidgin was not simply an occasional or temporary linguistic makeshift medium for and by foreigners at one of their early stages of learning an Eastern Polynesian language as a second language, only to be shortly replaced by the local vernacular as ultimate linguistic target in a classic bilingual model. Instead, speakers of vernacular Polynesian languages had themselves come to recognize and adopt MPP as foreigner talk, and used it as an acceptable, perhaps even preferable, way of interacting linguistically with foreigners. Pacific Islanders thus acknowledged a clear grammatical distinction between the Pidgin and endogenous speech, the latter of which served as the root of the former but remained distinct, with its more complex grammar. Supporting documentation already comes from Tupai‘a's adolescent servant Taiata as recorded by Parkinson in (2), Ma‘i on Cook's second voyage to the Pacific (Beaglehole in Cook Reference Cook and Beaglehole1961: 281, fn. 3; see (5) in 4.4), the observations by Cook and Anderson of Tahitians deliberately using a “corrupted” form of their language with foreigners during the explorer's second voyage (Cook Reference Cook1784: II.250), Botta's explicit sociolinguistic distinction of the Pidgin from the vernacular in 1828, and Pierre Loti's unequivocal contrast of Beach Tahitian with vernacular Tahitian by his reference to “petit nègre,” a French pidgin of West Africa. However, the best evidence for MPP as a distinct linguistic entity consists of the fairly detailed attestations by the Māori chief Moehanga, even though recorded by an Englishman, and the evident confidence of his conversations in the Pidgin in 1805 (see (14) in 4.9).

Although a direct manifestation of the geographic dimension, regional differences within MPP ultimately remain poorly understood beyond basic dialectal or lexical differences. The historical documents are uncommonly silent about the social status of any regional or stylistic variation, or about borrowings from one variety to another. One might expect the Tahitian variety as apparently the oldest one to have enjoyed some special status; but the currently available historical information permits no such conclusion at this time. If the Pidgin's geographic dimensions reflect socioeconomic and political realities in any direct fashion, they were a prime linguistic measure of the eastern Polynesians’ central role in the early colonial history, often underestimated or overlooked in conventional history.

8.4 Uses and functions

The geographic and social distributions of MPP ultimately raise questions about its practical applications and its contexts of use. Functionally, the Pidgin operated as the prime interlingual medium between European voyagers of French and British provenance in their explorations of the eastern Pacific, especially the Society Islands, then New Zealand, and eventually the Hawaiian Islands, in their search for a sea route through the Arctic Ocean or the Northwest Passage, and in their westward expansion of the fur trade during the second half of the eighteenth century. Americans shortly followed in the Europeans’ footsteps, when the still young United States expanded beyond the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River into western North America with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. In their explorations of the Northwest Coast and California, Americans continued relying on ships as primary means of coast-to-coast transportation, sailing around Cape Horn and via the Hawaiian Islands, until the establishment of transcontinental railway connections in the late 1860s (Wolf Reference Wolf1982: 158–194).

As a premier regional lingua franca, MPP did not preclude its use by interpreters as frequently presumed; it also served as a major medium of translation by those mediating between islanders and newcomers, as repeatedly attested in historical records. An early example is Bougainville's Tahitian passenger Ahutoru when he interacted with the French explorer and his crew (Bougainville Reference Bougainville and Forster1772: 334–335, 447) and possibly when he approached Samoans and Vanuatuans, albeit unsuccessfully. Until he fell ill, Ahutoru also served in that function on the follow-up expedition to the South Pacific by the French explorer Marion du Fresne (Le Dez Reference Le Dez1985 [1772]: 334). Cook's prime source on his first expedition to the Pacific was Tupai‘a, a chief and priest of Ra‘iātea (Society Islands), who proved an unusually successful interpreter among the Māori (Banks Reference Banks and Beaglehole1962: I.401, 406, 420; Cook Reference Cook and Hawkesworth1775: II.119, 120, 129, 146, 152, 171, 189, 203, 204) and who used the Pidgin at least in contact with the British and possibly with the Māori as well. As Tupai‘a's servant, Taiata may have operated in a similar role (Parkinson Reference Parkinson1773: 182, fn.). On his second voyage to the Pacific, Cook employed Ma‘i from Ra‘iātea as a major interpreter and spokesman, who likewise used reduced Tahitian as a medium with the British (Beaglehole in Cook Reference Cook and Beaglehole1961: 281, fn. 3; see (5) in 4.4) and likely with alloglossic islanders beyond the Society Islands. Cook, moreover, relied on the marine-interpreter Samuel Gibson, reputedly better versed in “Tahitian” or MPP than the rest of the crew (Forster Reference Forster, Thomas and Berghof2000 [1777]: 88, 120, 176); but George Forster (Reference Forster, Thomas and Berghof2000 [1777]: 387) was convinced that his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, as the expedition's naturalist was the most competent in the language, which qualified him to accompany Cook to shore in the Society Islands. Because the elder Forster's description and linguistic data clearly identify MPP (see (6) in 4.4 in particular), we can conclude with reasonable certainty that in his interactions with Pacific Islanders Gibson, too, used reduced Tahitian rather than a vernacular. In addition, Cook drew on a second native interpreter, Mahine from Porapora (“Bora Bora”), who likewise spoke MPP in interactions with Europeans (see (7) in 4.4), although he did not exhibit as many linguistic skills as Tupai‘a (Forster Reference Forster, Thomas and Berghof2000 [1777]: 274–275). On his way home to neighboring Huahine (Society Islands), Ma‘i then served as major interpreter on Cook's third voyage to the Pacific, even though he intermittently left the British explorer in confusion, intentionally or not (Cook Reference Cook and Beaglehole1967: lxxxvii–lxxxviii, cix–cxii, 186–241).

Pacific Islanders evidently continued using MPP for interpreting. In the Marquesas at the end of the eighteenth century, Robarts (Reference Robarts and Dening1974: 46–47) drew on a native Hawaiian by the name of Sam, Tama, or – reinterpreted – Tom as translator, who had sailed on American ships between Boston, South America, northwestern North America, and China as part of the fur trade. Robarts reportedly acquired sufficient fluency to hold basic conversations with Marquesans, to uncover a plot by Marquesan crew members to rob their ship, to understand Tahitians and Māori in spite of their linguistic differences, and to become an interpreter in his own right (Robarts Reference Robarts and Dening1974: 68, 70, 86, 141–142, 190–191, 282). Similarly, from 1812 to 1814 the American David Porter drew on an Englishman by the name of Wilson as an interpreter, who by all indications spoke MPP rather than vernacular Marquesan (Porter Reference Porter1822: II.17–18, 28, 45–46, 84, 91, 95).

As Pacific Islanders came to travel with Europeans and Americans or even became crew members on their ships to replace those who had jumped ship in the Pacific Islands, MPP secondly became a major medium on board European and American ships sailing with Polynesian passengers or crew members in the eastern Pacific as well as on shore in contact with the native population, especially in harbors and surrounding areas. First indications for the Pidgin's use on board already came from interpreters and navigators from the Society Islands on early European explorations such as Ahutoru with Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and with Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne or Tupai‘a and his servant Taiata, Ma‘i, and Mahine with James Cook. Other prime examples are the by-now familiar Tahitian servant-sailor Matatore in the service of Colnett around 1790 (see (9) and (10) in 4.6) and “a little [Hawaiian] boy” old enough to have sailed to northwestern North America according to Ingraham in 1791 (Reference Ingraham and Kaplanoff1971 [1791]: 167). The best evidence, however, consists of several actual attestations of MPP by the Māori chief Moehanga accompanying the British military surgeon John Savage on a voyage from New Zealand to England in 1805 in (14) in 4.9. The Māori variety evidently served also as a medium aboard ships with any substantial native crews in New Zealand in the early nineteenth century (see Nicholas Reference Nicholas1817: I.371–373 and Cruise Reference Cruise1824: 173, 300).

Strongly suggestive evidence for the use of MPP on and immediately off board similarly derives from the observations and the linguistic evidence by Dumont d’Urville (Reference Dumont d’Urville1830–1833: II.72–73, 81–83, 97–98, 146, 241–242; see (24) in 5.7) for Europeans’ interactions with Māori as late as 1827. At O‘ahu in 1812, Cox took on twenty-six volunteer Hawaiians, ten as crew members in replacement of “indifferent sailors” and sixteen in the service of the Pacific Fur Company (Cox Reference Cox, Stewart and Stewart1957 [1831]: 44–45). By all indications, Cox's prime medium with these Hawaiians similarly was MPP. The same kind of Hawaiian-based medium apparently was in use on the king's and other Hawaiian ships, manned by crews consisting in part of native Hawaiians and in part of Europeans or Americans and sailing as far as Canton (Chamisso Reference Chamisso and Hitzig1856b [Reference Chamisso and Hitzig1835]: 246). According to the perceptive Chamisso (Reference Chamisso and Hitzig1856a [1835]: 268; 1856b [1835]: 255), Hawaiian crews usually could not speak English, although many had sailed on American ships and could understand some English. In another instance, Chamisso described how Kadu, a resident of Ratak in the Marshall Islands and originally a native of Woleai Atoll, Western Carolines, quickly adopted this medium in use on board the Rurik between 1815 and 1818 and with Hawaiians on shore, as also confirmed by Kotzebue's painter Louis Choris (Chamisso Reference Chamisso and Hitzig1856a [1835]: 226–227, 268; Choris Reference Choris1812: Section “Iles Marianes,” 3–4; see (20) in 5.4). Further if indirect suggestions for on-board use come even from European or American passengers who first learned the Pidgin on ships such as Chamisso, from a passenger and former pearl trader of English-Portuguese ancestry by the name of John Elliot de Castro on board the Rurik in 1816, from the missionary wife Lucia Ruggles Holman on board the Thaddeus in 1820, and possibly even from the American novelist Herman Melville, whose distinctively Hawaiian-colored version of MPP may reflect the early influence of a Hawaiian source on the writer's way to Nuku Hiva in the early 1840s.

There are other more or less explicit references for the use of MPP by Pacific Islanders on European and American ships in the Pacific. Less conspicuous examples are those by Slade in 1830, Jarman in 1832, and references by Markham to European whalers off the shore of northern New Zealand in 1834 and their use of MPP with Polynesian crews. More prominent sources are the literary sailor Dana in the Pacific hide and tallow trade, and on the beach of southern California in 1835 and 1836, Dumont d’Urville (Reference Dumont d’Urville1841–1846: III.225) and his crew in the Marquesas in 1838, the American sailor James F. Munger (Reference Munger1852: 39, 63–64) in reference to Hawaiian sailors on an American whaler in the Pacific and Arctic in 1851, and on an interisland vessel between Lāna‘i and Maui, Hawaiian Islands, as recently as 1887 (see (45) in 6.12). Like Chamisso's Kadu, the Gilbertese Timarare was another non-Polynesian Pacific Islander who apparently adopted MPP, although reportedly with some English replacements, on the fast topsail schooner Wanderer in 1851, as suggested by Webster (Reference Webster1863: 23). Indicative of the Pidgin's maritime functions is also the statement by the French naturalist-surgeon Botta (Reference Botta1831: 142–143), who already in 1828 recognized the use of MPP on O‘ahu limited to interactions with foreigners in Honolulu and – by implication – to its harbor area and immediate surroundings rather than rural areas. This interpretation matches Loti's description of the Tahitian variety as “Beach Tahitian” in 1872 (Reference Loti1880: 415–416, 879). Among the foreigners who learned MPP, the best examples were beachcombers – foremost Dana and Melville, but quite possibly also Robarts and Jean Cabri before them – who were on the front of culture contact with Pacific Islanders.

Significantly, MPP came to operate as a prime medium of trade with Pacific Islanders of eastern Polynesia. Europeans traded with Polynesians and other Pacific Islanders for the replenishment of basic provisions that inevitably ran out on long voyages – mainly clean water, fresh food (fruit, vegetables, staples, and meat, especially pork), and various resources with which to repair damages to their ships and other equipment from often rough passages (as around Cape Horn). They soon drew also on islanders as interpreters, go-betweens, pilots, and replacements for crew members who had jumped ship (see Chappell Reference Chappell1997). As the North American fur trade expanded into the trans-Mississippi West and as the Hawaiian Islands came to assume the role of a major entrepôt between northwestern North America and Asia, especially China (Bradley Reference Bradley1942: 1–120; Howay Reference Howay, Taylor and Kuykendall1930; Spoehr Reference Spoehr1986, Reference Samarin1988), MPP likewise became an important means of communication between fur traders and islanders in the northcentral Pacific in maritime contexts, as indicated by Colnett, Ingraham, Robarts’ Hawaiian interpreter by the name of Sam, Tama, or Tom on the Marquesas, apparently also Cox, and Dana from at least the mid-1780s through the 1830s. Similarly, the Pidgin evidently played a significant role in whaling and sealing, which drew on native people as crew members throughout the eastern Pacific, as suggested by Dumont d’Urville (Reference Dumont d’Urville1830–1833: II.81–83; see (24) in 5.7), Jarman (Reference Jarman1838: 124–125), and Munger (Reference Munger1852: 63–64) throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.

In contrast, historical documentation of linguistic attestations and their sociohistorical contexts indicate that MPP played a less important role in the trade of sandalwood, trepang (bêche de mer or sea slug/cucumber), or pearls than in the fur trade, whaling or sealing, notwithstanding two entries for “pearl” in the vocabulary with only incidental references to these contexts. Indirect, suggestive references to the Pidgin's use in the pearl trade still originate from Archibald Campbell's third to last example in (15) of 1809 or 1810 in 5.1, the reference by Chamisso (Reference Chamisso and Hitzig1856a [1835]: 157–158) to having learned the first elements of Pidgin Hawaiian on board the Russian ship Rurik from a former pearl trader on O‘ahu by the name of John Elliot de Castro, Slade (Reference Slade and Denison1844: 37–39, 42–44) on his trading venture for tortoise shells, trepang, pearls, and sandalwood on ‘Uvea Island and Fiji in 1830 after a less-than-successful whaling expedition to the North Pacific, and the accounts of Lucett (Reference Lucett1851: II.195, 295–296) in New Zealand in the early 1840s. However, the economic functions of MPP were not always clearly identifiable, for some Pacific Islanders served in multiple functions, which suggests that the Pidgin never remained restricted to a single sociolinguistic context. We might find a Polynesian sailor ship out from his home island to western North America on a fur-trading vessel only to return on a whaling ship and then to serve on another ship involved in the trade of sandalwood or pearls in the South Pacific, as economic circumstances changed and as fur gave way to sandalwood, whaling, or still other business endeavors (see Bradley Reference Bradley1942: 53–120, 214–238). By the account of Loti (Reference Loti1880: 415–416, 879), “Beach Tahitian” or Pidgin Tahitian figured significantly in the exchange of goods by foreign sailors for sexual favors from native women – transactions that were not limited to Tahiti, but undoubtedly occurred elsewhere in the eastern Pacific. Loti's observations, then, point to the need to document analogous encounters between foreign men and native women on other Pacific islands.

MPP served in other, non-economic functions, foremost as an initial medium of contact for Christian missionaries with Pacific Islanders. In 1820, Lucia Ruggles Holman, a missionary wife, offered perhaps the first irrefutable evidence for the use of MPP by missionaries in the Hawaiian Islands (see (21) in 5.5). The Pidgin was also the major medium between Tyerman and Bennet of the London Missionary Society on the one hand and Tahitians on the other a few years later (see (22) in 5.6). In 1824, Bennet understood an exchange by a Māori chief in Pidgin Māori on the basis of his knowledge of reduced “Tahitian”; he answered accordingly, citing Tahitian-derived pua‘a for ‘pig’ (see (23) in 5.6) instead of Māori-derived poaka. As recently as 1887, the Anglican missionary Herbert H. Gowen encountered MPP on board an interisland vessel between Lāna‘i and Maui and on shore on Lāna‘i (see (45) and (46) in 6.12). The Pidgin ultimately was no more than a stepping-stone for most missionaries in their attempts at recording and learning Polynesian vernaculars. As a result, they left comparatively few documentary traces of the Pidgin, which quite possibly played a greater role in early missionary endeavors than the few known historical attestations indicate.

Ultimately, MPP fulfilled functions of colonization beyond those of exploration, trade, and religious conversion in the form of explicit military or naval operations. A suggestion for a connection would already come from the chatty conversations by the Māori chief Moehanga with his friend Savage on their voyage to England in 1805 (see (14) in 4.9). Such indications also transpire from activities by the US navy in the Marquesas under the command of Captain David Porter (Reference Porter1822: II.28, 45–46, 84, 91, 95, 107; see (16) in 5.2) from 1812 to 1814. Perhaps the most overt example of a naval connection with MPP was Max Radiguet (Reference Radiguet1929 [1860]: 11–12, 32, 34, 161, fn. 1, 177, 182, 220) as secretary to the staff headquarters of the French colonial expansion in the Pacific on the frigate La Reine Blanche from 1842 until 1845. Drawing on an officer friend for linguistic-ethnographic information, he documented the Pidgin's use on Nuku Hiva in a naval context, including its representational institutions such as a Catholic mission and a colonial court. Another illustrative case of MPP's colonial connections again is its description by Loti (Reference Loti1880: 415–416, 879) as “Beach Tahitian” in Tahiti in 1872.

One domain of use that has been conspicuously absent in the attestations of MPP examined thus far is the classic context of plantations, although Roberts (Reference Roberts1995a: 27–43; Reference Roberts2005: 58–125) already documented such for Pidgin Hawaiian in the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. The absence of such documentation does not indicate an absence of the Pidgin on plantations elsewhere in the eastern Pacific; rather, it points to the need for the examination of additional, local records such as already examined by Roberts in the form of period newspapers and court records for the Hawaiian Islands. If the Hawaiian Islands are a representative example for the eastern Pacific at large, we must in fact continue assuming that MPP was also in use on plantations in the South Pacific, where existent, and served as the linguistic springboard for European and American settlers as well as immigrant laborers; but this hypothesis will first require in-depth historical research with local records of other Pacific Islands. If Roberts’ data for Pidgin Hawaiian provide an indication, such recent records may also prove richer than early attestations.