An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, in the South Pacific Ocean

by William Mariner

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Genres: Nonfiction

476 pages, Paperback

Published October 9, 2018

Reviews

[Liyah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Must read if you want to understand poly history, a first hand account of our people before it all changed.....

[Daniel Cradler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great story and fascinating record of Tongan culture

William Mariner’s account of living among the Tongans provides a wealth of information on their culture and customs as they existed prior to extensive European influence. The story of how he came to live there and his interactions with the Tongan people during a pivotal period in these island’s history is also quite compelling. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Pacific Island history and anthropology.

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the story of William Mariner, a teenage British sailor and privateer who was adopted by the Tongan king Finau after Finau had ambushed and killed the rest of Mariner's shipmates in order to capture the British ship's artillery. Mariner was spared because he reminded Finau of his recently deceased son, and spent the subsequent four years as a member of Finau's family, observing the course of a Tongan civil war and providing one of the only written accounts of Tongan society before the inevitable arrival of European missionaries and subsequent obliteration of many of Tonga's cultural traditions (a story that is growing depressingly familiar as I work my way through Polynesia and Micronesia). I can only tell you about the first third of the first volume of Mariner's story because that's as far as I got before I gave up on slogging through an endless recounting of political maneuvering, minor battles, and ritual vengeance, punctuated by feasts of roasted pork and yams (Seriously. The importance of yams to this narrative cannot be overstated). It should be an interesting account, and I'm sure that some very historically-minded and detail-oriented people would find it so. But it reads like a history textbook (and I say this as a someone with a BA in medieval history); names, battles, places, very little in the way of colorful detail or human interest. If you're reading for interest or pleasure (and not, say, as part of your research for a doctoral thesis), I recommend just reading the wikipedia article on William Mariner and being done with it.

This review is part of a longer review on my blog, Around the World in 2000 Books.

[Tom]

adventurous, 19th century pacificana