7 - ‘Prizeable companions’

Summary

Those who want friends to open themselves unto, are cannibals of their own hearts.

– Bacon

Edward Robarts deserted the whaler New Euphrates at Vaitahu Bay, Tahuata in the Southern Marquesas in December 1798. He claimed that he jumped ship to escape the consequences of a planned mutiny. His flight was facilitated by a Hawaiian, Tama, then resident on the island, and by the chief of Vaitahu, Tainai, who directed him towards Hapatoni, another bay where he would be safe from the captain of the ship. Robarts spent his early months on Tahuata forging friendships that allowed him to acquire the language and explore the island. But between sociable encounters he was left alone, which, he admitted in his journal, ‘gives me an oppertunity of peeping and prying about me’ (Dening 1974:56). In January and then again in late February 1799, he offered his assistance to the crew of the whaler London, which anchored at Tahuata to make repairs. When the ship departed in March, Robarts was displeased to find that ‘a stout boy, a native of france, had hid himself among the natives’. Robarts comments of this fellow beachcomber, whose name was Jean Cabri, and whom he would re-encounter later during his stay in the Marquesas, that ‘He proved to be a very bad person not worth notice. He departed to live on the other side the Isle. I would not suffer him to be in the same house with me’ (Dening 1974:68).