Otaheite and The Farmer’s Boy by Simon J. White

When Robert Bloomfield published his long poem The Farmer’s Boy in March 1800 he included, as an appendix, an account of Otaheite from what he thought was Cook’s journal of his voyage to the South Seas. He prefaced the extract with a very short citation from ‘Summer’: ‘Destroys life’s intercourse; the social plan’. At the end of ‘Summer’ Bloomfield provides an account of an older inclusive harvest-home celebration and this line occurs in a lament for the decline of such festivals. The narrator remarks:

Such were the days, — of days long past I sing,
When Pride gave place to mirth without a sting;
Ere tyrant customs strength sufficient bore
To violate the feelings of the poor;
To leave them distanc’d in the mad’ning race,
Where’er Refinement shews its hated face:
Nor causeless hated; — ’tis the peasant’s curse,
That hourly makes his wretched station worse;
Destroys life’s intercourse; the social plan
That rank to rank cements, as man to man:
Wealth flows around him, Fashion lordly reigns;
Yet poverty is his and, and mental pains.      (II, 333-344)

He goes on to condemn ‘The widening distance which I daily see’ (II, 349), [1]  and to rage ‘Has Wealth done this? … then Wealth’s a foe to me; / Foe to our rights; that leaves the pow’rful few / The paths of emulation to pursue: … / For emulation stoops to us no more: / The hope of humble industry is o’er; / The blameless hope, the cheering sweet presage / Of future comforts for declining age.’ (II, 350-356) He concludes his lament with the plea: ‘Let labour have its due! my cot shall be / From chilling want and guilty murmurs free: / Let labour have its due; then peace is mine, / And never, never shall my heart repine’ (II, 397-400).

In the annotated fair-copy manuscript of The Farmer’s Boy that Bloomfield produced in 1807 he notes: ‘In reference to this passage [the one I have just cited], and as I thought, by way of illustration, I subjoined an extract from Cooks voyage not knowing but it was written by Cook himself, which I now find was not the case. … I was pleading for kindness between the ranks of society, and it seem’d to suit my purpose. And if I could believe that what I have said of letting “Labour have its due” would in only one instance persuade a Farmer to give his men more wages, instead of giving, or suffering him to buy cheap corn in the time of trouble, I should feel a pleasure of the most lasting sort, having no doubt but that an extra half crown carried is worth, morally, and substantially, a five shilling Gift, to those who in the House of their fathers work for bread.’ [2]  The extract was in fact from George Forster’s A Voyage Around the World which was first published in 1777, the same year as Cook’s own account of his second voyage. Bloomfield may have mistakenly understood that the passage was from Cook’s journal because he extracted it from one of the parallel reviews of Forster and Cook. The Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Magazine for the Fair Sex and The Town and Country Magazine, or Universal Repository for May 1777 both printed this passage in their reviews of the two volumes. Or he may have taken it from one of the numerous histories of Cook’s voyages which included passages lifted from Forster. For example John Hamilton Moore’s A New and Complete Collection of Voyages and Travels which was first published in 1785 or the anonymous A New, Authentic Collection of Captain Cook’s Voyages round the World first published in 1786.

In a way Bloomfield’s mistake reflects the problems that George and Johann Reinhold Forster had in selling their book. Despite the fact that it received more favourable reviews than Cook’s own journal, as the introduction to Thomas and Bergof’s edition points out, it was ‘abridged, pirated, printed in excerpt – in short, everything but sold’. [3]  But it is Bloomfield’s reasons for including the extract in an appendix to The Farmer’s Boy that are most interesting. In the annotation to the 1807 manuscript he remarks that he ‘was pleading for kindness between the ranks of society, and it seem’d to suit … [his] purpose’. [4]  He cannot have been unaware of the diverse ways in which the south-sea islanders had been represented. In asking his audience to read even part of his poem through the lens of Cook’s or anyone else’s account of Otaheite, he was inviting them to make a number of associations, some of which would not necessarily have reflected unequivocally upon either the poet or his poem. Bloomfield would have had some knowledge of the manner in which individuals of renown from a labouring-class background were received by polite society. The poet would have been familiar with the story of Stephen Duck and may have known about the experience of James Woodhouse and Ann Yearsley. He was certainly sensitive about the way in which he himself would be viewed by polite society, and later remarked in a letter to Lofft: ‘I feel my situation to be novel; the world looks at me in that light; I am extremely anxious on that account.’ [5]  When he eventually managed to wrest editorial control of The Farmer’s Boy from Capel Lofft (his editor / patron), Bloomfield did reveal that he was also sensitive about the manner in which he had been represented in Lofft’s preface. In his own preface to the 1809 edition of his poems he took some pains to correct the idea that he arrived in London: ‘dress’d just as he came from keeping Sheep, Hogs, &c … his shoes fill’d full of stumps in the heels [and that he] slipt up … [because] his nails were unus’d to a flat pavement’. [6]  He should therefore have been alive to the implications of inviting a reading of his poem through the lens of Otaheite or the Otaheitians.

Mai (or Omai) whom Cook brought back to England in 1774 would have been the most immediately identifiable Otaheitian for the majority of English people and was received by polite society as a quasi labouring-class subject. He was feted in the way that Bloomfield himself would be during the months after the publication of The Farmer’s Boy. To the surprise of polite society, Omai’s manners were found to be genteel. Samuel Johnson compared the manners of Constantine Phipps, Lord Mulgrave, unfavourably with those of Omai and noted that ‘there was … little of the savage in Omai.’ [7]  Frances Burney remarked that Omai ‘appears in a new world like a man who had all his life studied the Graces, and attended with unremitting application and diligence to form his manners, and to render his appearance and behaviour politely easy, and thoroughly well bred’. [8]  On the other hand Johnson did appear to think that Omai had developed his good manners through his contact with polite society in England, remarking that ‘all … [he] has acquired of our manners was genteel’. [9] 

Howsoever he developed them it seems that Omai’s politely genteel manners rendered him worthy of notice. By way of contrast Cook, whose father had been a day labourer, was regarded as one-dimensional, workmanlike, and awkward and uncomfortable in polite company. According to Burney, Cook was ‘well-mannered and perfectly unpretending; but studiously wrapped up in his own purposes and pursuits; and apparently under a pressure of mental fatigue when called upon to speak, or stimulated to deliberate, upon any other.’ [10]  The patrons and readers of labouring-class poetry were similarly obsessed with the manners and pretensions of the poets. Like Cook, labouring-class poets were expected to be ‘unpretending’ and it helped if they had genteel manners. Capel Lofft reassured readers of The Farmer’s Boy that the poet had ‘amiable’ manners and was uninterested in any ‘fame’ or ‘advantage’ that he might derive from the publication of his poem. [11]  In other words he could be admitted (temporarily) to polite company and did not have a desire to rise above his station in life.

One of the most famous statements regarding the value of labouring-class poets was apparently made by Samuel Johnson. According to Boswell, Johnson remarked of James Woodhouse: ‘it was all vanity and childishness: … such objects were, to those who patronised them, mere mirrours of their own superiority. “They had better” (said he,) “furnish the man with good implements for his trade, than raise subscriptions for his poems”.’ [12]  The question of how Omai could or should be assisted by his English friends was similarly a moot point for many observers. When the time came for Omai to return to his native land much was made of the assortment of gifts which he received from his patrons. According to the editor of Omiah’s Farewell; Inscribed to the Ladies of London ‘Omai … [was] returning to his native isle, fraught by Royal order with squibs, crackers, and a various assortment or fireworks, to show to the wild untutored Indian the great superiority of an enlightened Christian prince.’ [13]  Of course this remark is meant to be a reflection upon the shallow nature of English polite society. But it also reflects upon Omai who like so many labouring-class poets is apparently dazzled by the superficial glamour of polite society. Cook later noted that from ‘being much caressed in England, [Omai had] lost sight of his original condition’. [14]  The anonymous editor’s remarks imply that like Woodhouse, Omai would have been better served if he had been furnished with useful objects. Indeed both Cook and Forster remark with satisfaction upon the fact that Omai did not go completely unprovided with items that might help him to re-establish himself in a reassuringly lowly and pastoral position on his return to Otaheite. Cook expressed confidence that Omai would ‘endeavour to bring to perfection the various fruits and vegetables we planted, which will be no small acquisition’ but believed that ‘the greatest benefit these islands are likely to receive from Omiah’s travels, will be the animals that have been left upon them’. [15]  Forster even hoped that the animals might ‘hereafter be conducive, by many intermediate causes, to the improvement of [the islander’s] intellectual faculties.’ [16] 

The islanders’ supposedly limited intellectual capacity is not something that was necessarily looked upon in a disapproving manner. Forster had noted that the gifts which Omai received from his patrons in polite society, which included ‘a portable organ, an electrical machine, a coat of mail, and [a] suit of armour’, appealed to his ‘childish inclinations’. [17]  But the primitive innocence of the Otaheitians was also celebrated at a time when a great deal of thinking on genius derived from the ‘rediscovery’ of Homeric and later Ossianic primitivism. Like labouring-class poets. the Otaheitians were seen as being uncorrupted by education, closer to nature, and therefore in some way closer to the primitive origins of human endeavour. Controversially, many observers saw a kind of Golden Age in Otaheite where the island’s human inhabitants appeared to exist in an environment which somehow provided all of their needs without the requirement for any corresponding effort. After he has provided a lengthy description of the produce of the island Hawkesworth concludes: ‘All these, which serve the inhabitants for food, the earth produces spontaneously, or with so little culture, that they seem to be exempted from the general curse, that “man should eat his bread in the sweat of his brow”.’ [18]  This view of Otaheite was still common in the early 1790s when Edward Edwards remarked that ‘what Poetic fiction has painted of Eden, or Arcadia, is here realized, where the earth without tillage produces both food and clothing, the trees loaded with the richest of fruit, the carpet of nature with the most odiferous flowers.’ [19]  Of course, representations like these were very far from the truth, partly because they were often based upon views from the sea. Even when Europeans did land they tended to remain in the area of Matavai Bay. Moreover, early descriptions of Otaheite are heavily biased towards the experience of the island elite with whom the Europeans resided and spent most of their time. [20] 

Some observers offered a more balanced view. It is true that the extract which Bloomfield chose for his appendix presents Otaheite in a similar manner to Hawkesworth and Edwards: ‘Where the climate and the custom of the country do not absolutely require a perfect garment; where it is easy at every step to gather as many plants as form not only a decent, but likewise a customary covering; and where all the necessaries of life are within the reach of every individual, at the expense of a trifling labour; … ambition and envy in a great measure be unknown.’ [21]  But elsewhere Forster represented the elite as exploitative and devoted more space to the laborious experience of ordinary people. There are numerous occasions in A Voyage Around the World when the reader glimpses his disillusion at the unravelling myth of the Otaheitian Golden Age: ‘We flattered ourselves with the pleasing fancy of having found at least one little spot in the world, where a whole nation, without being lawless barbarians, aimed at a certain frugal equality in their way of living, and whose hours of enjoyment were justly proportioned to those of labour and rest. Our disappointment was therefore very great, when we saw a luxurious individual spending his life in the most sluggish inactivity, and without one benefit to society, like the privileged parasites of more civilized climates, fattening on the superfluous produce of the soil, of which he robbed the labouring multitudes.’ [22] 

Notwithstanding Forster’s equivocation, the common view of Otaheite at the time that Bloomfield completed The Farmer’s Boy — April 1798 — was of a place where exploitative labour was almost unknown. Bloomfield felt great anger at what he considered to be the exploitative turn in community relations in the English countryside. He described the transition in relations as ‘this change, ungracious, irksome, [and] cold’ (II, 347). Therefore to invite a contrast between rural Suffolk, where new ‘Wealth’ was responsible for the ‘widening distance’ (II, 349) between rich and poor, and a place where ‘[the appearance of] distinctions’ was ‘reduce[d]’ almost ‘to a level’, [23]  was to do more than to plead ‘for kindness between the ranks of society’ as Bloomfield evasively put it in his 1807 manuscript note. If the appendix and the passage, to which Bloomfield directs his reader’s attention in the headnote that introduces it, are taken together they can be read as a radical call for the transformation of English society. Some conservative observers were concerned about the possibility that apparently positive accounts of south-sea islands might encourage English subjects to challenge the social and gender status quo. Hawkesworth’s account of Otaheitian sexual mores, particularly the rites of the Arioi, had caused a sensation, particularly his suggestion that ‘different [sexual] customs are the result of different circumstances, and … cannot be attributed to moral deficiencies.’ [24]  But the concern went beyond just sexual moral questions. The apparent ease with which Otaheitians of all social classes obtained their daily bread was regarded as dangerously seductive for the labouring poor. During the later 1790s, runaways on south-sea voyages were severely condemned in ways that they had not been before. The author of A Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific in the years 1796, 1797, [and] 1798 remarked of a runaway that ‘The indolent life he had led at Otaheite, the unobstructed ease with which all of his sensual appetites had been gratified there, with his aversion to labour, and the prospect of its necessity, which a return to Europe held up to his view, strongly urged him to prefer a lazy savage life upon these unpromising islands to his native Sweden, which he knows to have advantages only for the industrious.’ [25] 

In light of such fears it is strange that Bloomfield’s appendix did not draw the ire of conservative reviews. The British Critic did express concern at the tone of the closing passages of ‘Summer’. The reviewer observed that ‘the author [had] received some impressions, probably at the debating society, of a questionable kind’. [26]  This is a reference to Bloomfield’s brother’s account in the preface of the poet’s visits to ‘a Debating Society at Coachmaker’s-hall, [which he apparently frequented occasionally] but not often’. [27]  The reviewer may not have read the appendix, or might have assumed that, like the rest of the paratextual material in The Farmer’s Boy, it was introduced into the volume by Capel Lofft. In any case it is an important document and impacts upon the way the poet and his poem could and perhaps should have been received and read. The appendix certainly problematizes Bloomfield’s apparently innocent call for ‘Labour’ to be given its ‘due’ in the closing lines of ‘Summer’.

[1] Robert Bloomfield, The Farmer’s Boy: A Rural Poem, Summer, line 341. BACK

[2] See Text. BACK

[3] George Forster, A Voyage Around the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof, assisted by Jenifer Newell, 2 Vols (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), Vol. I, p. xxxvi. BACK

[4] See Text. BACK

[5] Robert Blomfield to Capel Lofft, 26 Oct [1801].BACK

[6] See text. BACK

[7] James Boswell, Life of Johnson ed. by R. W. Chapman and Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 723. BACK

[8] The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768-1778, ed. by Annie Raine Ellis, 2 Vols (London: George Bell and Sons, 1907), Vol. I, p. 337. BACK

[9] Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 723, my italics. BACK

[10] Frances Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, 2 Vols (London: E. Moxon, 1832), Vol. I, pp. 270-71. BACK

[11] See text BACK

[12] Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 443-44. BACK

[13] Omiah’s Farewell; Inscribed to the Ladies of London (London: Printed for G. Kearsley, 1776), p. iv. BACK

[14] James Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, 3 Vols (London: Printed for W. and A. Strachan, 1784), Vol. II, p. 106. BACK

[15] Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, Vol. II, p. 110. BACK

[16] Forster, A Voyage Around the World, Vol. I, p. 12. BACK

[17] Forster, A Voyage Around the World, Vol. I, p. 11. BACK

[18] John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken … for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, 3 Vols (London: Printed for W. Strachan and T. Cadell, 1767), Vol. II, p. 186. BACK

[19] E. Edwards and G. Hamilton, Voyage of the H.M.S. Pandora [1791], ed. Basil Thomson (London: Frances Edwards, 1915), p. 108-09. BACK

[20] Dana Lepovsky, ‘Gardens of Eden? An Ethnohistoric Reconstruction of Maohi (Tahitian) Cultivation’, Ethnohistory, 46:1 (1999), 1-29 (4). BACK

[21] Forster, A Voyage Around the World, Vol. I, p. 199. BACK

[22] Forster, A Voyage Around the World, Vol. I, p. 165. BACK

[23] Hawkesworth, Voyages Undertaken … for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, Vol. I, p. 199. BACK

[24] Anne Maxwell, ‘Fallen Queens and Phantom Diadems: Cook’s Voyages and England’s Social Order’, The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation, 38:3 (1997), p. 249. See also Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken … for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, Vol. II, p. 128. BACK

[25] A Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean … in the years 1796, 1797, 1798. Compiled from the journals of the officers and missionaries (London: Printed by S. Gosnell for T. Chapman, 1799), p. 301. BACK

[26] The British Critic, 15 (1800), p. 602. BACK

[27] See text BACK