Overview
There was a trade in Pacific artefacts from the time the first Europeans arrived in the Pacific. But in the late 1800s, as travellers began to visit the Pacific region, a new tourist market emerged. Pacific people made items specially for this market – items they had always made, others they had modified, and some they had newly invented.
Pacific cruise ships
In June 1885 the liner Wairarapa, owned by the Union Steamship Company, made the first Pacific cruise from New Zealand. The trip was a great success, and launched a new era in tourism and tourist arts. The company continued to offer cruises of the Pacific Islands, mostly in the winter months when trade fell away.
A cruise brochure from 1895 paints a picture of a typical cruise and the kinds of souvenirs tourists might find in the Samoan Islands:
‘Canoe after canoe sets out from various places on the shore: all converging on one point – the ship. Most of them are manned by women, and some by children little better than babies ... The occupants of the various canoes are on barter bent; each carries with her some piece of merchandise to be disposed of on board – a piece of tapa, a basket of limes, breadfruit, or bananas, a piece of woodcarving, a war club, a model canoe, a kava bowl, or some such trifle.’
Tourism and trade
In the early 1900s the Union Steamship Company built three steamers designed for both trade and tourism on Pacific Islands routes. They regularly visited the ports of Suva, Nuku’alofa, Apia, and Pago Pago to deliver goods and load tropical fruits. They also carried passengers. Shipping ventures like these affected all aspects of life in the islands of the Pacific. Communication and travel improved, and performing groups and craft industries developed new initiatives around shipping routes and timetables.
The Union Steamship Company also built some facilities for the tourist industry, such as the Grand Pacific Hotel in Suva, Fiji, in 1914.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database (2007)