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In my research on eighteenth-century maritime texts about the Pacific Ocean, I came across an account printed in Alistair Couper's Sailors and Traders, a nautical history from 2008. The account concerns the behavior of English sailors aboard the HMS Dolphin, the celebrated first European invasion of Tahiti in 1767. Couper describes a scene of fervent sailors "playing at … 'the old trade,'" who "threatened the integrity of the ship," by drawing iron and nails from it to pay Tahitian women for sex.1 Taken literally, I doubted whether sailors would draw nails from the very ship that would carry them home. And as an Indigenous historian, I doubted whether two peoples without a common language or culture, a shared notion of morality or sexuality, a mutual understanding of trade or economic valuations, or indeed, a collective impression of what or who holds value, would tell the same story of nails being traded for sex. And as a Tongan-American scholar living in the diaspora, I wondered how this story contributed to my own fractured identity, the fragmenting of an Indigenous past, and the persistence of the idealized Pacific Islander subject.2
This article will examine the creation and transmission of a single, iconic, destructive, fabricated tale, what I call The Myth of the Nail. I contrast the European value of a nail, based on an economy of capitalist demand, with Tahitian values based on an economy of mana, a valuation based on vitality.3 For Tahiti exists in the public imaginary as a space of endless physical pleasure and beauty, filled with flowered and fruited dancing nymphs, robust and athletic demigods, Gauguin and white-sandy beaches.4 I claim that this imagined space was borne from a highly mischaracterized story starring the humble nail. I want to understand and revise the historical processes that manufactured the space of Tahiti, a space produced without the input of Tahitians, or as I will call them, as they call themselves, the Mā'ohi.5
I have focused on the transmission of The Myth of the Nail from the moment it occurred between Mā'ohi women and European sailors, to the telling and retelling of the story between Captains, to the myth's later entrance into popular erotica of...