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In March 2008, the news of Greg Dening’s sudden death sent a shock wave round the world. Stan Katz immediately posted a notice in the “Brainstorm” section of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Web site (March 16, 2008), declaring that “Greg was one of the great humanists of the last century, an historian in mind and spirit.” Greg was also definitely one of the Institute’s own! Did he not write the introduction to the published volume of the papers from the first in the great new series of Institute conferences?1 I have been invited to honor him in these pages, and to this end I will foll ow the “voyaging” (very much his word) that brought Greg to be an anthropologist-historian playing an exemplary role amongst us.

In the late 1950s, Greg was an undergrad student in the history department of the University of Melbourne. This was perhaps the strongest department in Australia, but in those days that meant an exclusive concentration on European civilization, especially England and the British Empire. And yet indigenous history, long before its time, had come into the Melbourne curriculum “under the radar,” as it were. John Mulvaney, the founder of scientific archaeology in Australia, was in the department to teach ancient history—Greece and Rome, of course! But Mulvaney also offered a special Honours course called “Pacific Prehistory.” Greg, when he enrolled, was in many ways already a grad student through his prior and continuing engagement in the extended rigorous Jesuit training program. Both the high intellect and the questing spirit of the young scholar were soon drawn to challenge what he found to be a prevailing racist assumption that Polynesia (including what is now the fiftieth state in the American Union) had been first peopled by uncivilized “natives” in their primitive canoes randomly carried about by wind and tide. Greg decided that the only way to counter this prejudice effectively was to play anthropologist to the Polynesian past. And his most enduring contribution to historiography was his speedily turning ethnographer to the European and American ships through whose visits the world of Polynesia became part of Western systems of knowledge.

Greg went on to defy the strong tradition that saw the brightest Melbourne graduates go to Oxford. He went to do a Ph.D. at Harvard under Douglas Oliver. He took the Marquesas Islands in the early contact period as the subject of his dissertation. That was a fortunate choice—since it later became known that these islands had developed the mother culture for all Western and Southern Polynesia. Greg’s topic fell undoubtedly within the Omohundro Institute’s definition of early American history, and he became a most assiduous researcher in our field by scanning every available early New England whaler’s log to find the ones that recorded a visit to the Marquesas.

Chance and destiny! While Greg was based in Cambridge, he met Donna Merwick, then a Wisconsin Ph.D. student researching a dissertation on Boston’s Irish clergy. In 1969 Donna went out to fill a vacancy in U. S. history at the University of Melbourne, and Greg came to a place that was all his own, a joint appointment in both the history and sociology departments of the new LaTrobe University on Melbourne’s northern outskirts. Soon they married. Donna, having completed the book from her dissertation, decided to transfer her research interests back in time and across cultures to the Dutch New Netherlands. And so early American history—and in time, the Institute—made two most valuable recruits; the partnership with Donna carried Greg from being a de facto practitioner of New England maritime history to being an active participant in the conferences of ANZASA (the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association) and of the Omohundro Institute.

Greg wrote much wonderful early American history, and I can mention only highlights. There was, in Islands and Beaches, the story of the building of Fort Madison as part of Lieutenant David Porter’s 1813 assault on the Marquesan island of Nukuhiva, followed in the same book by a deep reading of Herman Melville’s Typee; there were numerous ethnographic histories of encounters between the Hawaiians and the first ships that came to their shores (of which I cite only an exquisite two-culture interpretation of the death and apotheosis of Captain Cook: “Sharks That Walk on the Land”); and there was the delicious account of “Mr. Adams’s Navy” that appears in that most remarkable work, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language.2

Greg told of the start of his great journey in his late published set of interwoven narratives, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self: “Fifty years ago I made a discovery that changed my life. I discovered that I wanted to write the history of the ‘other side of the beach,’ of indigenous island peoples . . . And on ‘this side of the beach,’ . . . I wanted to write the history of people whom the world would esteem as ‘little .’” His book richly recounts both histories of his chosen peoples—island natives, beachcombers, common sailors—and stories of his own learning experiences as he garnered those histories. None who read it will forget the bold “Prologue” celebration of “the most remarkable voyage of discovery and settlement in all human history,” when, some two thousand years ago, the seed-planting vessel for Western and Southern Polynesia—that Tongan “va’a tauna . . . double-hulled canoe”—set out on its four-thousand-mile journey to find the islands that wind and wave patterns, and above all the flight of birds, promised to be waiting. None will forget all the rich revelations of the worlds those voyagers made, and of the worlds brought with them by the tall-ship navigators who came long after. Our own worlds are enlarged—and with that also our sense of what history can do for us.3

Greg’s person will be sorely missed at future conference meetings, but his prolific published works will endure as an inspiration to all who seek ways to understand better the early American and indeed the human story.

Rhys Isaac
LaTrobe University

Footnotes

1. Greg Dening, “Introduction: In Search of a Metaphor,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 1–6.

2. Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774–1880 (Honolulu, Hawaii, 1980); Dening, “Sharks That Walk on the Land,” in Performances (Chicago, 1996), 64–78; Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge, 1994).

3. Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self (Philadelphia, 2004), 1, 12.