Peter Dillon

Peter Dillon (born June 15, 1788 in Martinique , † February 9, 1847 in Paris ), also called Peter Dillon of Vanikoro , was an Irish-British merchant captain, explorer and writer. In 1826 he solved the riddle of the fate of the La Pérouse expedition.

Early years

According to his own statements, Peter Dillon was born in 1788 as the son of Irish immigrants on the island of Martinique. His father, also named Peter Dillon, brought him back to Ireland, County Meath , as a young child , where he grew up with relatives. Dillon joined the Royal Navy as a youth and fought in the Battle of Trafalgar . After quitting his service in the Navy, Dillon went to Fiji in 1806 and served - first as a simple seaman and later as an officer - on various merchant ships in the South Pacific .

Trade captain

From 1810 to 1812 he stayed on Bora Bora and operated from there very successfully shops in the salt meat trade ("Tahitian Pork Trade") between the Society Islands and Australia ( New South Wales ). Through his trade trips he made many contacts with the indigenous people of various Pacific islands and spoke several dialects. In 1814, missionary and rancher Samuel Marsden hired Dillon to be the captain of his brig Active . He should bring the lay missionaries Thomas Kendall and William Hall (born February 23, 1778 in Carlisle , † March 6, 1844 in Blacktown City ) to the Bay of Islands in order to make preparations there for the establishment of a permanent mission station.

Dillon married on September 22, 1814 and lived in Sydney with his wife Mary, daughter of a respected New South Wales farmer and merchant . In 1816 the couple went to Calcutta , from there Dillon undertook some profitable trade trips to Australia and New Zealand, from 1819 as the owner and at the same time also captain of his ships.

From 1825, Peter Dillon expanded his area of ​​activity into the South Pacific and traded sandalwood , which is highly sought after in Asia and which he obtained from Fiji, the New Hebrides and other islands. His role in the Fiji civil wars remains opaque; he may have supplied the parties to the civil war with firearms. Beyond his pursuit of profit, he was always accompanied by an interest in the history, culture and living conditions of the inhabitants of the islands he visited.

La Pérouse expedition

The fate of the French explorer and circumnavigator Jean-François de La Pérouse and his two ships Astrolabe and Boussole remained unclear for many years; they were considered lost. A search and rescue expedition by the French Vice Admiral d'Entrecasteaux in 1791 also remained unsuccessful; d'Entrecasteaux was killed.

On May 23, 1826 Peter Dillon came to Tikopia with his ship St. Patrick, of which he was the captain and owner . Thirteen years earlier, Dillon had dropped a Prussian named Martin Buchert (or Bushard) as well as a Laskar named Joe and his Fiji wife there at his own request. When the St. Patrick dropped anchor, Buchert and Joe came on board. Joe owned, as Dillon writes in his "Narrative", the silver crossguard of an old sword, which he offered for sale to a crew member. In response to Dillon's question as to how this object of clearly European origin could have got to the remote Tikopia, Buchert said that the natives had brought the quillons, several pieces of silver cutlery as well as iron nails, axes, teacups, glass bottles and other parts from a distant island called " Manicolo ”( Vanikoro ). The natives of this island have more such items, which would have come from two ships that were wrecked there in a violent storm many years ago ("when the old men of today were still young"). Six years ago (1820) one of the Tikopians would have seen two crew members of these ships on Vanikoro and spoke to them. Dillon, who identified the parts as presumably of French origin, decided to sail to Vanikoro, suspecting the items came from the missing La Pérouse expedition.

The St. Patrick reached Vanikoro two days later, but was unable to land due to unfavorable wind and current conditions and was forced to cruise off the coast for seven days. Because the ship was leaking, supplies were limited and the owner of the cargo the St. Patrick was carrying objected, Dillon decided to abandon the project, sail immediately to Calcutta and later return to Vanikoro. He reached India with some difficulty. In Calcutta, a French artist identified the sword bar as being made in Versailles and about forty years old. The initial "P." and the fleur de lys were very faint .

On September 8, 1827, Dillon returned to Vanikoro with the research and found numerous other relics that could be assigned to the French ships - some of them also La Pérouse personally. He brought them to France in 1829, where King Charles X appointed him Knight of the Legion of Honor and granted him a lifelong honorary salary .

Later years

In 1829 he published his travelogue "Narrative and Successful Result of a Voyage in the South Seas ..." For a short time, in 1829, Dillon was consul of France, but the July Revolution of 1830 put an end to his efforts to obtain an official position, although he was with the French as was also highly regarded by the British. For some time he lived in Sydney again.

In 1838 Dillon finally returned to Europe. The 193 cm (6 ft 4 in ) tall, sturdy Peter Dillon, an impressive figure according to contemporary witnesses, has always been considered argumentative and opinionated. In 1841 he wrote an open letter in which he accused the Wesleyan missionaries John Thomas and John Hutchinson as warmongers of the civil wars that began in Tonga in 1837 . The twelve-page letter entitled: Letter to Richard More O'Farrell, Esq., MP Secretary to the Admiralty, Whitehall, London, from the Chevallier Dillon, late French Consul for the Islands in The South Seas, on the defeat of Her Majesty's Ship, Favorite, and death of Her Commander, Captain Croker; at Tongataboo, one of the Friendly Islands, where he volunteered his services to the Wesleyan Missionaries to massacre the innocent and unoffending natives, whose only crime was, that they would not embrace a religion that had already caused more bloodshed and cruelty than any other event on record connected with the Friendly Islands , also contained criticism of the conquests of King Tupou I , who left the Wesleyans in honor of George III. was baptized in the name of "George". Dillon described him as a usurper without any legitimation to rule Tonga and Vava'u . The criticism of the missionaries in Tonga in particular and the proselytizing in the South Seas in general discredited the once respected Dillon in Great Britain. He died in Paris on February 9, 1847.

review

In his book "Narrative and Successful Result of a Voyage in the South Seas ..." Dillon describes cannibalistic practices in the Fiji Islands in great detail . Gananath Obeyesekere from Sri Lanka , professor of anthropology at Princeton University , described Peter Dillon 's descriptions as a sailor's thread in his book "Cannibal talk: the man-eating myth and human sacrifice in the South Seas" . He also calls for a consistent review of the concept of cannibalism in the media and presents the reports of Western eyewitnesses of the events as pure fiction. Obeyesekere also doubts the traditional details of the death of James Cook in Hawaii . His theses are controversial in science.

literature

• Peter Dillon: Narrative and Successful Result of a Voyage in the South Seas: performed by order of the government of British India, to ascertain the actual fate of La Pérouse's expedition: interspersed with accounts of the religion, manners, customs, and cannibal practices of the South Sea Islanders. Hardpress Publishing, 2019, ISBN 978-1-4069-0238-9 . Digitized

Remarks

1. ^ Letter to Richard More O'Farrell, Esq, MP Secretary of the Admiralty, Whitehall, London, from Chevallier Dillon, the former French Consul to the South Sea Islands, concerning the defeat of Her Majesty's ship, the Favorite, and the death of her commander, captain Croker on Tongataboo, one of the Friendship Islands, where he volunteered his services to the Wesleyan missionaries to massacre the innocent and peaceful natives whose only crime was their refusal to profess a religion that is already causing more bloodshed and cruelty had than any other known event related to the Friendship Islands

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} John Dunmore: Who's who in Pacific Navigation. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 1991, pp. 77-78
2. ^ Douglas Henry Pike (Ed.): Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 1, Melbourne University Publishing, 1966
3. ↑ Bob Makin: Peter Dillon of Vanikoro. Article in the Vanuatu Daily Post, October 9, 2018
4. ↑ ^{a b} Peter Dillon: Narrative and Successful Result of a Voyage in the South Seas: performed by order of the government of British India, to ascertain the actual fate of La Pérouse's expedition: interspersed with accounts of the religion, manners, customs, and cannibal practices of the South Sea Islanders. Hurst, Chance, and Co., London 1829
5. ^ NN: Probable Discovery of the Fate of La Perouse. In: The Asiatic Journal, Volume 23, January to June 1827, London 1827, pp. 625 f.
6. ^ Douglas Henry Pike (Ed.): Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 1, Melbourne University Publishing, 1966
7. ↑ Sione Latukefu: The case of the Wesleyan mission in Tonga. In: Journal de la Société des Océanistes, No. 25 from 1969, pp. 95-112
8. ^ Martin Daly: The Bible and the Sword: John Thomas and the Tongan Civil War of 1837. In: Wesley and Methodist Studies, Vol. 4 (2012), p. 79, Ed .: Penn State University Press
9. ↑ Gananath Obeyesekere: Cannibal talk: the man-eating myth and human sacrifice in the South Seas, Chapter 7, Narratives of the Self: Chevalier Peter Dillon's Fijian Cannibal Adventures. University of California Press 2005, ISBN 978-0-520-24308-8