Preference for Pacific Island Seafarers

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 102-103, 106:
As a result of continued shortages of crew, British and American ships frequently sailed shorthanded for the Pacific. The trips involved passages that were four to five months long, via the Cape of Good Hope [...]

Wordcatcher Tales: Paying the Crimp

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), p. 105:
At these growing Pacific port towns, beachcombers established themselves as crimps and arranged girls and ships for sailors of all nationalities. Richard Copping walked off the whaler Endeavour in April 1840 at the Bay of Islands [...]

Failed Hawaiian Colony on Erromango

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 88-89:
Kamehameha died in 1819 at the age of about sixty-six. His fleet of foreign-going ships probably never made adequate profits, even though most of the capital and operating costs had been derived from the extraction of [...]

Balkans & Papua New Guinea: Sprachbund issues

The following draft of a paper was presented at the Fourth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (FoCAL), in Suva, Fiji, in August 1984, under the title “The Balkans and Papua New Guinea: Language Contact Issues.” It briefly touches on some of the new (and disturbing) ideas about Sprachbund issues that I encountered during my Fulbright [...]

Tahiti, 1802: Hogs for Firearms

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 78-79, 81:
When Captain Wallis arrived at Matavai Bay in 1767, he assumed that the formidable woman Purea was queen. When Cook came in 1769, he also had the European predilection toward identifying a single ruler. He [...]

Tahiti, 1767: Sex for Iron

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 64-65, 69:
The master of HMS Dolphin under Captain Wallis in June 1767 was George Robertson. He was typical in many ways of the normal run of career masters [equivalent to Master Chief Petty Officers] in the [...]

Danger of “Pooping a Heavy Sea”

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 33-34:
Long west-to-east voyages, frequently into the prevailing trades, would inevitably involve extended periods of exhausting tacking or reversing lateens, as these vessels could sail no closer than about 75 degrees to the wind. When running free [...]

Suva, Fiji, in the Wake of the 2000 Coup

From “Papua, O‘ahu, Viti Levu” by Stewart Firth, in Pacific Places, Pacific Histories ed. by Brij Lal (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2004), pp. 63-65:
The map of Suva, with only a few Indian names, reflects the historic alliance between the British and the Fijian chiefs in ruling Fiji and the exclusion of Indo-Fijians from the upper reaches [...]

One Pacific Island Sailor’s World

From Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 6-7:
THE PACIFIC SAILOR who is waiting for a jumbo jet at Nadi International Airport in Fiji has been in transit for almost three days. He has travelled by local boat from his home island of Nanouti [...]

Russian Pacific Colony of Atuvai, Nigau, Ovagu, Mauvi?

Here’s a surprising passage from volume 7 (1973) of the Hawaiian Journal of History, whose back volumes are now online at the Oceania Digital Library Project hosted by the University of Hawai‘i Library’s digital repository.
On 21 May (2 June) 1816 G. A. Schäffer apparently achieved the improbable. In a solemn atmosphere Kaumualii—”King of the Sandwich [...]