LA REFORMA EN LOS PAÍSES BAJOS

deliberate use of latafi to mean protection he regarded Tupou's request

as unnecessary and peculiar. Although fatata was not a completely

correct translation for protection either, it more positively committed

Great Britain to protect Tonga. Thus it was preferable in Tupou's eyes

and much closer in meaning to the English text. As was his habit when he

was not in agreement with anything, Tupou told Thomson that he must refer

the matter to some other authority and that he needed time to do so.

The people he decided to consult were the chiefs, who were then due in

Tonga for Parliament. Thomson agreed and Tupou immediately sent for them.

While waiting for the chiefs to arrive, Thomson claimed, he sought

out the feelings of the Tongatapu chiefs on the proposed Treaty and

found that Fatafehi, Tungi, Mateialona, Ata and Vaea were openly in

favour of a British Protectorate; many of the lesser chiefs felt the 33

same but were afraid to voice their opinions. The inference Thomson

drew from this of there having been a general agreement among the Tongans

to surrender their country to British protection was, at the most, only

partially correct. All the chiefs he named were still very bitter

towards Tupou for his humiliation of 'Ofa and Tungi and his rejection

of Parliament's advice to marry her. Besides, Thomson's closest friends

in Tonga were the late Tuku'aho and Tungi, and it would have been

exceptionally unusual for him not to have met Tungi earlier than after

3 May, as he claimed in his report. Thomson stayed at Fongoloa, only

about five hundred yards from Latai, and it would have been very unlikely

for him not to have visited the aged and blind Tungi soon after his

arrival, if only to see how he was. Tungi on the other hand would have

almost certainly sent Thomson a h a 'u n g a an act that would have compelled

Ibid.

Thomson to communicate with him. That Thomson soon shared the depth of

the bitterness of Tungi and his supporters against Queen Lavinia is

evident from his description of her as suffering from the dual defects

of very low birth on her mother's side and a hereditary taint of 34

scrofula, and his failure to mention her high rank through Kupu and

the suitability of her gentle and humble nature as a wife for the

haughty and often unruly Tupou. Thomson and the chiefs he named had

common grounds for opposition to Tupou, and the reduction of the King's

sovereignty would have been, especially from the point of view of the

chiefs, appropriate revenge for his recent insult. Consequently the

willingness that had been shown by Tungi and the chiefs who supported

him for a British Protectorate could not have sprung entirely from a

genuine acceptance of its terms.

35

On 16 May, Tupou and Thomson met with forty chiefs. In an error

of simple fact unexpected from a man with Thomson's official and social

experience in Tonga, he described these chiefs as nopele (nobles) or

landed and titled chiefs, although there were only thirty noble titles

in Tonga. In saying that only one noble was absent from the meeting and

thereby implying that all the rightful leaders of Tonga were consulted

about the Treaty, Thomson was using the wrong fact and drawing the

correct conclusion from it. The forty men present were most probably

all hou'eiki (chiefs) and mostly nobles, but they could not all have

been nobles. As hou'eikij however, and as constituting the majority

of Parliament, they represented Tonga in accordance with both Tongan

and Western standards.

34 35

Ibid. Ibid.

Thomson was the first to address the meeting; he explained the terms 36

of the Draft Treaty and encouraged the chiefs to accept. When Tupou

followed him, he, contrary to his earlier promises, successfully persuaded

the chiefs to accept only those parts of the Treaty which he accepted.

This suggested that the influence of the Tungi faction had failed to

overcome the strength of traditional obedience to the King and dislike

for foreign intrusion. That his speech, as Thomson and Mateialona claimed,

had been largely tailored by Father Ollier, ought not, as it did in

Thomson's report to have obscured these points. The meeting completely

rejected the British draft for Article I, and replaced it with one 37

that guaranteed the independence of Tonga for all time. When Thomson

then asked Tupou to sign the rest of the Treaty His Majesty temporized,

suggesting that he may have also been unwilling to agree to parts of the

remaining articles.

When Thomson reminded him of his written acceptance of these articles,

His Majesty, in what the Special Commissioner described as a change of

front, invited himself to dinner at Thomson's residence on the following

evening and promised to sign the Treaty before he returned home. The

probable explanation for this, however, was that the King had been

surprised and shaken by the dangerous significance that Thomson had

attached to his letter and that he needed time either to think about it

or to confer with his advisers. Also Tupou was probably still hopeful

that he would be able to persuade Thomson to accept the Treaty that he

wanted.

On the following evening, the British plenipotentiary discovered

Tupou's second major objection to the Treaty. His Majesty flatly refused

36 37

Ibid. Ibid.

to sign unless Thomson removed from Article II the requirement that Tonga

should refrain from all foreign relations of any kind 'except under the 38 sole advice and through the channel of Her Majesty's Government'.

Judging from His Majesty's stubborn resistance to Thomson's further

efforts to persuade him to drop this objection, and his apparent

inclination to scrap the Treaty altogether if his wishes were not

obliged, it seems almost certain that Tupou had finally decided, perhaps

on the basis of renewed confidence derived from Father Ollier's assurances 39

of French protection against British pressure, that there should neither

be a British Protectorate over Tonga nor British control of its foreign

relations. Without these provisions however, the Treaty would have been

virtually useless to England and Thomson's mission to Tonga would have

been a failure.

In Thomson's own words, the next developments were as follows:

Accordingly, I invited him to state what he was-prepared to sign,