A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-Of-War

A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-Of-War

A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-Of-War recounts C. F. Gordon Cumming's 1877 voyage through the South Pacific aboard the French warship Le Seignelay, commanded by Captain Aube and carrying Monseigneur Elloi, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Samoa, on a tour of his mission diocese. Written as a series of letters to friends and to Lady Gordon, wife of Fiji's first colonial governor, the narrative follows the author from Fiji through Tonga, Samoa, and eventually toward Tahiti, blending travelogue, ethnography, natural history, and commentary on missionary and colonial politics. The book opens with Cumming's improbable invitation to join the cruise, extended by the ship's officers and the bishop after her two years living "At Home in Fiji." She embarks at Nasova in September 1877, and the early chapters describe shipboard life on the French man-of-war—its conviviality, cuisine, music, and the warm informality between Captain Aube and his crew, which she contrasts favorably with the stiffness of British naval discipline. At Tonga (the Friendly Isles), she lodges with French Catholic Sisters at the Convent of the Immaculate Conception in Maofanga, attends Wesleyan and Catholic services, and visits King George Tubou. She records Tongan customs, dress, and history, including the martyrdom of early London Missionary Society teachers, the introduction of European clothing and its ill effects on health, and long descriptions of local flora, fauna, and the cyclopean tombs of the Tui Tongas. A journey to Mua yields antiquarian material on ancient burial platforms (marae) across Polynesia, comparisons to Stonehenge and Easter Island's monoliths, and the legend of a hidden sea-cave at Vavau tied to Byron's poem "The Island." She also describes the Haamonga trilithon, phosphorescent seas, and coral grottoes explored by torchlight. The narrative then moves to Samoa (the Navigator's Islands), where civil war between rival factions—the Malietoa/Taimua-Faipule government and the Puletoa rebels—dominates events. At Tutuila and Apia, Cumming stays at the British Consulate, where dozens of vanquished Puletoa chiefs and their families live under the Union Jack's protection after a massacre near the consulate grounds. She details Samoan house architecture, tattooing, dance, kava ceremonies, warfare customs (including head-taking), burial practices, games, and the machinations of foreign traders and consuls—particularly the German firm of Godeffroy, which has acquired vast tracts of land and stirs tribal conflict for profit, and adventurers like the pirate "Bully" Hayes. A farcical, nearly disastrous incident occurs when Captain Aube lends armed sailors to the American consul for a bungled raid on a trading store, inflaming already tense relations among the resident foreign community. Extended passages describe the London Missionary Society's training college at Malua, led by Dr. George Turner, detailing its self-sufficient student life, curriculum, and the remarkable parallels Turner has drawn between Samoan customs and those of ancient Judea (sacrifice, mourning rites, oaths, polygamy, adoption). Cumming also recounts the harrowing 1842 mission to Tanna in the New Hebrides, where Turner and his colleagues narrowly escaped massacre amid local beliefs that missionaries caused epidemic disease, and she describes the volcanic phenomena of Tanna, Fotuna, and other islands, along with local wizard-practices of "disease-making." Throughout, Cumming digresses into natural history (flying foxes, land crabs, the near-dodo tooth-billed pigeon, coral reefs, the annual palolo worm swarm), botany, and comparative ethnography across the Pacific, drawing on her prior Fiji experience and on accounts of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Wallis Islands, and volcanic Tanna's fire-mountain. She reflects critically on the corrupting effects of Western trade, clothing, and liquor on indigenous peoples, while praising the "Fa-Samoa" (Samoan way) when left intact, and she records vivid social scenes: a beach picnic with French Sisters and Samoan schoolgirls, native feasts, and moonlit dances. The work is framed by an introduction describing how the author came to join the mission ship after two years in Fiji, and a note to the first edition warning of France's expanding territorial ambitions across the eastern Pacific—annexing Tahiti, the Marquesas, and Paumotus, and threatening the independent Austral and Hervey groups—anticipating the strategic importance of a future Panama Canal route. The narrative, as excerpted, closes with Cumming still aboard the Seignelay in Samoan waters, her ultimate itinerary toward Tahiti and beyond left deliberately uncertain, in keeping with the discursive, letter-based structure of the whole book.

By C. F. Gordon Cumming · Genre: travel literature, travelogue, letters · 25 chapters

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