By Mary K. Bercaw Edwards

is a good example of the complexities of whale conservation. On one hand, there is the North Atlantic right whale, of which there are only around 300 extant: certainly, a red flag conservation issue. To this reviewer, it is striking that Moore thinks the bowhead kill “makes sense”, and is o.k. while the killing of right whales does not make sense and is not o.k.

Moore’s book makes an interesting read for anyone interested in the “rise and fall” of the great whales. It is also an interesting read exemplifying a case study of one person’s view on societies interaction with a major conservation problem.

— Brian Rothschild, Ph.D., Professor emeritus,

UMass Dartmouth

Nancy Shoemaker

Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles: Americans in Nineteenth-Century Fiji

Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2019. 352 pp. Illustrations, maps. Paperback, ISBN 978-1-5017-6169-0, $31.95.

Nancy Shoemaker’s writing is always graceful, and that is certainly true of Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles. Yet what one takes away from her engrossing work is the sheer impressiveness of her research, as attested by the 37 closely typed pages of her Bibliography. Shoemaker has divided her work into three sections, centering on the beachcomber David Whippy, the sea captain’s wife Mary D. Wallis, and the merchant John B. Williams, whom she identifies as among “the foot soldiers of early U.S. global expansion”. Shoemaker argues that Whippy, Wallis, and Williams are “the three Americans who left the deepest imprint on the islands’ history”. Intriguingly, what she sees as tying these three together is not simply their presence in Fiji in the first half of the nineteenth century, but the fact that all three were pursuing respect.

“[T]his book,” Shoemaker argues forcefully, “is not about empire, borderlands, or settler colonialism.” There never was a U.S. empire in Fiji. Americans infiltrated Fijian politics piecemeal, exerting influence from within. American activity peaked in Fiji between 1800 and 1860, before the island group became a Crown colony within the British Empire in 1874 and achieved independence in 1970. Shoemaker’s approach is more difficult to explore and hence more remarkable than previous studies. She writes of her concerns about how settler colonial theory

has become dogma in indigenous studies and shut out other lines of inquiry. Settler colonial theory sheds light on the egregious dispossession and depopulation of native peoples as European settlers became the majority. It has little to say about Fiji, where today about 85 percent of the land is deemed “Native Land” and remains in possession of ethnic Fijians (“Itaukei”), who make up over half the islands’ population.

It is those “other lines of inquiry” that make Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles so significant.

One compelling inquiry concerns Phebe, the young Fijian woman whom Wallis took as a “servant.” Captain Wallis had acquired Phebe and a hog in exchange for a musket worth $2.50. He had originally wanted two hogs for the musket, but the turaga, or Fijian leader, only had one hog so sent the young Fijian girl in place of the second. Phebe stayed with the Wallises for years, traveling to Manila, New England, and twice back to Fiji. Shoemaker explores the “willful self-delusion and moral subterfuge” (133) that keeps Wallis from acknowledging that there is little difference between her husband acquiring Phebe in exchange for a musket and the buying of an enslaved person. When Wallis returned to New England, her status was enhanced by the money earned by her husband from the bêche-de-mer trade and by the fact that she had a servant, both of which depended on coerced labor. Shoemaker uses