If ‘friend or foe’ is the implicit first question of cross-cultural contact, in the Pacific it is articulated in a context that has disappeared from view: that of the crowd. In the literature of early European encounter in Oceania, crowds are everywhere, and the experience of the mass is presented as overwhelming. Gauging crowd feeling – ascertaining whether the bodies that surround one are fascinated or afraid or aggressive – is imperative to the instigation of trade, and the possibility of obtaining essential supplies. Robertson's account of the Dolphin surrounded by hostile canoes at ‘King George's Island’ in 1767 contrasts with Bougainville's depiction of pirogues manned by clamorously friendly Tahitians crowding his vessel less than a year later, but both observers give a sense of the immediate effect of mass scrutiny and the need for interpretation it instigates. The focus of this book is the relationship for which crowd scenes set the stage: the highly particularized connection of taio, through which access to local resources is ultimately mediated. That term or its cognates – almost invariably the first word of early European–Oceanic encounter – emerges, again almost invariably, from the crowd scene. In European accounts, it seems, the named friendship requires the background of the unnamed mass to become distinguishable. On the other hand, as reports of the death of James Cook show, the hostile crowd remains intransigently collective: harbouring rather than surrendering up its guilty individual.

Pressing, exhilarating, unnerving as a presence within accounts of contact, the Oceanic crowd has nonetheless remained curiously elusive of critical attention. There are a couple of notable exceptions: Marshall Sahlins has focused on crowd dynamics in support of his thesis that the Hawaiian reception of Cook amounted to deification (I will look at his analysis later in this chapter), and Greg Dening's substantial body of work on the theatricality of Pacific encounter, with its recognition of a ‘dialectic between audience and actors’ (Dening 1996:118), opens up a space for the examination of group reaction. Yet the Oceanic crowd becomes the primary focus of analysis exclusively in studies of population, where accounts of crowding are scrutinized in an attempt to gauge the impact of European disease and cultural decimation upon the lives of Pacific peoples. Within this field, however, there is no consensus.