[singing] Mauatua, Mauatua My name is Julie Adams, I’m curator for
the Oceania collections here at the British Museum.
Working with the collections I do, I thought I knew all there was to know about the story
of Mutiny on the Bounty.
After all, it’s one of the most significant moments in maritime history.
It’s been the subject of endless books, TV documentaries, works of art, even Hollywood
blockbusters.
I thought I knew the story of Mutiny on the Bounty, but then in 2010 I met Pauline Reynolds.
Hieh, watawieh mais naem es Pauline Reynolds.
Mais kamfram es Norfolk Island en Hitiaurevareva.
This is the story of my ancestors, my tupuna vahine.
Mauatua, Teraura, Vahineatua, To'ofaiti, Tevarua, Teio, Puara'i, Fa'ahotu, Teatuahitia'a, Te'ehuteatuaonoa,
Tinafanaea, Mareva. ’Ia ora na.
The story of my ancestors actually begins in Tahiti, and one of those ancestors was
the woman Mauatua.
So, she was the daughter of an ari’i of Matavai, that means the chief.
And as a young girl she would have learned leadership skills.
But more importantly for this history and this story, she learned the skills of making
elite cloth.
There are many examples of tapa – barkcloth – in museum collections around Europe, including
here at the British Museum.
Many of those examples were presented as gifts to ship’s crews as they landed on the shores
of Pacific islands.
This exchange of gifts was a really important part of the Tahitian and Polynesian mindset.
‘I welcome you with cloth, and I also give you nourishment.
I envelope you with this cloth and bring you into my world.’
And it’s also a way of giving that person a special kind of ‘mana’, because they’re
wearing this elite cloth when they step on to your shore.
So, one of the arrivals was the ship Bounty in 1788.
It was October, October is the season of plenty.
Things are increasing, and a time of bounty, actually.
The British empire were looking for an even cheaper source of food to feed the enslaved
peoples working on the sugar plantations in the West Indies.
And Joseph Banks, a botanist who travelled with James Cook on his first voyage to the
Pacific, had eaten breadfruit in Tahiti and suggested that this could be the answer to
the problems.
And, so, the admiralty commissioned William Bligh to take the ship Bounty to Tahiti to
collect breadfruit saplings, to be transported to the West Indies.
Because of the time of their arrival, it meant that the Bounty had to stay for a number of
months.
So, all up, it was about five months.
And in that time, there were relationships that began.
Men, the sailors, actually were tattooed, and friendships were formed and romances as
well, of course.
It became a natural place of this exchange.
And then eventually the Bounty left.
Only a few short weeks after Bounty left Tahiti’s shores mutiny broke out, and in this imagined
scene you see Bligh, the commander of Bounty, cast adrift in a small boat about to be launched
out into the open Pacific Ocean, left to his fate with his loyal followers.
He seems to be pleading to those still on the deck of the Bounty for mercy.
And we see Fletcher Christian, the mutiny’s instigator, dressed in a jacket and hat, seemingly
unmoved by Bligh’s plight.
So, the Bounty came back to Tahiti, which would have been really strange, you know?
You've got a new captain, no Bligh, less crew.
They had a party aboard the ship to lure women aboard.
On the boat they ended up having 12 women – one of them was Mauatua, a baby girl,
and six Polynesian men… And nine mutineers, of course.
By Christmas Day 1800, of the nine original mutineers only John Adams had survived.
By Christmas Day 1800, of the 12 Polynesian women who sailed on the Bounty, Teraura, Vahineatua,
To'ofaiti, Tevarua, Teio, Teatuahitia'a, Mareva, Te'ehuteatuaonoa, Tinafanaea and Mauatua had
all survived.
So, Pauline, how did you come to know the stories of your ancestors, the names of those
women?
It was actually really hard, because I had to put a whole lot of different sources together
and I was actually living in Tahiti on an island called Huahine, and so I was exposed
to Tahitian names, and old Tahitian names.
But putting them together was quite difficult, and then that sort of brought me to trying
to work out their stories.
Work out, you know, who they were and more about those women.
So, I started writing to as many museums as I could find, and then I received these fantastic
lists of tapa and a list from the British Museum.
And eventually I actually got here, and I was able to look on them for the first time
and it was magnificent.
And the piece in front of us, in particular, is one that’s usually on display in the
Enlightenment gallery, and I guess that’s where you would have encountered it for the
first time.
It’s usually displayed alongside this label, which reads, ‘Tapa or native cloth of Pitcairn
Island.
Made by Mainmast Christian,’ which was the name that Fletcher Christian gave to Mauatua,
who he was in a relationship with.
And it describes her as ‘the widow of Fletcher Christian, the mutineer of the Bounty’.
So entirely framing Mauatua’s story within that Bounty narrative.
And so, what was it like when you when you first came to the Museum?
How did you feel?
So, this was probably the first one I actually saw, but this is the first time I’ve actually
been able to touch it, and feel it, and smell it and it’s actually really moving.
The label isn’t as interesting to me as the tapa itself or we also call it ’ahu.
I’d prefer to read this before I read that.
And because this is Mauatua, actually directly communicating with me.
And what is it telling me?
Well, it’s very finely made.
It has these lovely grooves on it that are made by the beater.
And it looks as though it was actually dyed a vibrant yellow, which is a reference to
the chiefly.
So, in Tahiti they dyed yellow and red, they use those two colours as an indication of
where they were from, where they were in the pecking order.
So, this tells me that she had those skills and that knowledge, and that she’d brought
it to Pitcairn Island and that she hadn’t left it behind.
And she was evidently gifting these to visitors as well, these pieces.
So, we know that when the women went on the Bounty, they would for sure, just like we
would pack our beloved objects with us if we were going somewhere, they would have packed
their tapa beaters with them.
And on Tahiti you’ve explained to me that these would have been made of wood.
This one is actually from Hawaii, but it is similar to traditional Tahitian instruments.
So, we have here also a piece of barkcloth that Pauline and I worked on when we were
together in Tahiti, and do you want to just explain like how would you go about working
with this?
They’ve slit the trunk or the branch and they’ve pulled off the bark.
And in that bark, you’ve got the outer bark and what in English you’d call the inner
bark.
So, this is the inner bark.
They’ve taken the brown outer bark off, and so it’s spongy, it’s wet.
And it would have probably been about this width originally, and then it would need to
be spread, and you use a beater for that.
So, you would find, this is quite fine, but you would find a beater with wide grooves
and you would begin with that, and that helps spread the fibres and move them until they
get to a certain width.
On Pitcairn, they innovated, didn’t they?
They created a different type of tapa beater.
And we’ve got an amazing example here.
So, do you want to talk about this amazing piece?
With pleasure!
In the Pitcairn–Norfolk language this is called an e’e, in Tahitian it would be called
an i'e The difference is you can see that this one here is wood.
In Tahiti they’re only ever made of wood.
We’ve only ever found wooden beaters.
But this one is actually made out of whalebone.
So, there was a period on Pitcairn where there wasn’t a lot of hardwood.
So, they innovated by finding new materials, which is pretty amazing.
At the time there were quite a lot of whalers around, and somehow that bone became available.
So, you can see that there’s these beautiful grooves, this is really important for making
tapa.
This is the widest one of this beater, and then they become more and more narrow as you
turn it around.
And this is part of the process of making tapa or ’ahu.
So, say that I’ve just taken this off the tree and I’ve soaked it for a while so it’s
nice and, it has quite a bit of water in it.
I’d start off with the wide grooves and I’d beat it – the first time, and that
would spread the fibres out.
And then as I worked and worked, I’d go to the next one, and the next one and the
next one.
You’d end on the finest one depending on the kind of fabric you’re trying to make.
And on Pitcairn each side has a name.
So this would be called big o-pili, then letel o-pili, uli a tau, u fa e.
It’s a real mix of tradition and innovation, and their ability to keep to what they know,
but then go beyond that.
And that’s something that happened on Pitcairn that’s, you know, really quite unusual throughout
Polynesia.
That they were making barkcloth far longer than they were on Tahiti for example.
So, I remember when we first met and you were talking to me about the tapa from Pitcairn
Island, and we looked at a piece like this one, which is really, really distinctive and
so different to the traditional tapa that the women would have made on Tahiti.
Does this also reflect a kind of innovation?
So, on Tahiti they had quite a few of these, they’re called tiputa.
So they’re worn as a poncho.
They’re not uniform, but they all have similar elements.
I was trying to imagine how it would sit on the body, and it seemed to me that it would
have been quite a short garment.
Is that your understanding?
Yeah, and on top of that they were quite tall, so you know shorter than it would be on you
or I.
But it also shows that they were probably working in them.
So, in Tahitian culture the tiputa were normally reserved for the elite class, and they were
long.
And they were worn in majesty you know.
They enhanced the majesty of the person that was wearing it.
Whereas these are, they’ve still taken a lot of effort to make, and they’re sort
of like an identity.
However, they were working in them because you can see that they would have had to sit
down.
They would have had to stand up.
They would have had to bend over.
So it’s quite a change from what was happening in Tahiti, yeah.
And so the garment, in a way, is telling us something of what those women’s lives were
like and how they really were enabling that settlement to survive through their skills,
rather than the mutineers whose story we constantly hear?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, although we’ve only rolled a small section of this beautiful tapa, you can see from the
size of the roll how big it was, some two by three metres.
So, a really huge piece.
What would that have been used for, do you think?
Well, I actually think this could have been made to be given as a gift, because quite
often tapa was actually made for that purpose, to be presented to somebody from the outside
coming in.
But this one’s quite unusual because it has the watermark of a beater in small diamonds.
And this beater doesn’t exist in Tahiti.
One of the women that came on the Bounty was from Tupua’i, in the Austral Islands, which
is south of Tahiti.
And they actually had beaters with these watermarks on them.
So, it means to me that she very most likely made this cloth.
Her name was Tinafanaea, and she was forced to leave Tupua’i because the Bounty went
there, and she sided with the people on the Bounty, she had no way that she could stay
on her island, so she must have brought a beater from Tupua’i and this is one of the
results.
So that research again allows us to, like, know the name of the woman, the maker, something
of her story.
What other legacies do you think of when you think of your research?
Well, it makes those women live on in written history.
It recreates or adds to that narrative that already exists about the mutineers.
But it makes it all more multi-dimensional.
I think it’s really important that we be able to tell our own stories, and to turn
narratives around and give voice to the people that really didn’t have a voice before.
And each of these tapa, they’re actually stories written by the women and their daughters
and their granddaughters.
And each time we get them out we can actually open our ears and listen for their voices
again.
Mauatua e Composed by Pauline Reynolds
Performed by Mauatua Fa’ara-Reynolds (daughter of Pauline Reynolds)