Additional notes on John Nisa Knowles

 

In about 1879 one Patrick Bourke came aboard the brig Adolphe and, being in liquor, picked a quarrel with J. Wilson, who beat him to death with a belaying pin. The Adolphe1s master was murdered in similar circumstances by John Knowles, a half-caste Tongan trading on the coast of New Ireland, who had already disposed of a Portuguese trader as they returned in their boat from a convivial visit to a German barque in St George's Channel.

- W.P. Morell, Britain in the Pacific Islands (Oxford, 1960), 309.

The half-caste Tongan, John Knowles, was brought down from New Ireland in a warship and handed over to be dealt with by his own 19 sovereign. And for his part in the punitive raid at Blanche Bay in 1878, the Rev. George Brown would have suffered what Gorrie considered should be the consequences, had not Gordon intervened. But at this point the Chief Judicial Commissioner's joyous tracking down of offenders was interrupted by the results of his own duel with Commodore Wilson, and it was never taken up again with the same zest. Between 1880 and 1882 total disenchantment set in and inhibited forward action.

- George Tupou I to Gordon, 11 August 1880 - ibid., no. 121 of 1880.

I don't know if this is the same family, but, in the British Consular records for Tonga, in the list of applicants to be recognized as British Subjects 1880-1911, which I have just transcribed, there is John Knowles, on 4 nov 1911, the son of Nisa or Gisa Knowles- a half caste Tongan, and Anna- a Tongan woman, applying to be recognized. Father & mother both died in Fiji

Nisa Knowles was the son of an American living in Tonga who was now dead (1911) .................................. Why would a person who was 1/4 American, and the rest Tongan should be accepted as a British Subject? I don't know, unless he was born in Fiji, which he could have been. In 1874 Fiji became a British colony, and its people were British subjects.

Tongans however were not British subjects, they had their own king, and were Tongan subjects. The file does not state whether he was accepted.

Was there a legal reasoning for his petitioned? ................................... This list contains quite a few Tongans who were born in Fiji, specifically Lomaloma, who could be the descendants of the Wesleyan Tongan exiles who were banished to Fiji, but I'm not sure about this. Many Tongan family records are on Familysearch.org and there is a film of Wesleyan marriages from Tongatabu available through the Mormon Family History Centres. However it is very hard to read, and many of the people only use a Christian name, with no surname, particularly early on The only other accessible records for Tonga are the ones I am working on, The Tongan section of The Western Pacific Hgh Commission Archive. I am gradually going through it, transcribing anything of genealogical interest. So far these are the subjects that need to be researched: 1. Distressed British and American seamen 1880's - 1900 2. Other pacific island's laborer's in Tonga;1900's 3. British and American subjects in Tonga 1880 -1911; 4. Register of 1/2 castes 1908-1912 5. Petition for British Passports 1900 -1920

William Knowles (Chalres Knowles' brother) was in Vavau in 1915 and 1916, as a member of the Patriotic League of Britons Overseas

• Edited: 26 Aug 2011 6:43 PM

There was a JOSIAH KNOWLES, Captain of the clipper ship "Wild Wave" which was wrecked off Oeno (part of the Pitcairn Islands) on March 5th, 1858. Knowles and forty others were marooned on the island but managed to build themselves a small craft named the "John Adams". They sailed for Tahiti and came in contact with the "Vandalia" which set out to rescue the remaining sailors who remained behind on Oeno. They were then taken to FIJI. I am guessing JOSIAH KNOWLES could very well have been William Knowles father. There is also a JIM KNOWLES who served as Mate on board the "E. A. Wilson" around the 1870s in Mille, Mulgrave Island. JIM was referred to as a "Tongan Half-Caste". JIM KNOWLES timeline/presence is mentioned also in New Britain (Papua New Guinea) in 1878 as he joined the ranks of other foreign and white settlers and a group of Rev. Brown’s missionaries in their reprisal against warring NB natives responsible for killing other white settlers and missionaries. My great-grandfather, WILLIAM HICKS was also a part of this reprisal party. JIM KNOWLES was later hanged in Fiji for shooting Larsen, one of Messrs. Goddeffroy's Captains. Could Jim and William have been brothers? And sons of Josiah?.

 https://library.puc.edu/pitcairn/pitcairn/OenoPhotoTour/10.shtml 

The Wild Wave Disaster

--from Shipmasters of Cape Cod, by Henry C. Kittredge

Captain Josiah N. Knowles became one of the most brilliant of the commanders of the late clippers, conspicuous first for a dramatic disaster and afterwards for a record passage.

The disaster came in 1858, after Captain Knowles had been in command of the medium clipper Wild Wave for four years, engaged in miscellaneous trade.  In 1856, sailing between Callao and Harve, he was off Plymouth in seventy days – a record which is believed never to have been broken.  Two years later came his great disaster. 

On the voyage in question, the Wild Wave sailed on February 9, 1858, from San Francisco for Valparaiso.  At one o’clock in the morning of March 5, when the ship was going through the water at the rate of thirteen knots, the lookout cried, ‘Breakers,’ and at the same moment the Wild Wave was on top of a coral reef.  A terrific surf broke over both reef and ship; all three masts went over the side, and sheets of copper, torn from the bottom of the vessel by the coral, were picked up by the breakers and hurled across the deck.  What with falling masts and spars, tangled rigging, swinging blocks and dead-eyes, flying sheets of copper and waves breaking clear across the deck, it is a miracle that everyone on board was not killed.

At daybreak Captain Knowles discovered that what he had struck was a circular reef that lay about two miles off the uninhabited island of Oeno and completely surrounded it.  The island, as figured in the chart, was twenty miles out of its true position – a mistake which was responsible for the wreck.  The island itself is a low strip of sand, half a mile in circumference and covered with meager shrubs. 

All day long the crew boated provisions ashore through the surf, wondering with every trip whether the ship would hold together for another one.  They pitched two big tents on the beach, one for the officers and passengers, one for the crew.  Luckily there was plenty of water on the island, as well as sea-birds’ eggs – for what they might be worth – and there were prospects of good fishing.  The steward cooked supper, and all hands turned in, though with little prospect of sleep because of thousands of land crabs that lay hidden in conch shells and coconut husks and bit deep with claws like a lobster’s.  There were rats on the island, too, from an earlier wreck, the remains of which were still visible. 

In the morning Captain Knowles called his mate, Mr. J. H. Bartlett, for a consultation, the upshot of which was that the two men should sail in one of their boats to Pitcairn Island, twenty miles (actually 76 miles) south, on the chance of getting some sort of craft there from the descendants of the mutineers of the Bounty.  A boat was made ready for the trip, but for the next four or five days it blew a gale, kicking up a surf that completely buried the hull of the Wild Wave and of course made it impossible either to start for Pitcairn or to get any more supplies from the ship. 

Finally, after a week of waiting, the surf flattened out, and the Captain started.  “I cannot divert my mind,” he writes in his diary, “from the one subject – home and friends.”  Bartlett and five men went with him; they left the second mate in charge at Oeno with orders to proceed to Pitcairn with the rest of the ship’s company if the Captain was not back in a month.  He also took several sea-birds from their nests, on the chance that they could be used as carrier pigeons to take messages between the two parties.  As the little boat pushed off, the rest of the company gave three cheers.  Before finally laying his course for Pitcairn, however, the Captain stopped at the wreck to pick up $18,000 in gold, an item that had been worrying him ever since the ship struck.

On the first night came a return of the bad weather, with thunder, lightning, and a high sea that made the boat dance about so wildly that it was impossible to read the compass.  They shortened sail and the next morning found that, as nearly as they could figure, they were ten miles farther from Pitcairn than when they had started, and it was blowing so hard that for most of that day they could not carry any sail.  However, what with rowing until they were ready to drop, and long after Captain Knowles’s hands were raw from the unaccustomed labor, and now and then setting a patch of sail, they raised Pitcairn at dusk.  But they were on the wrong side of the island, where the surf ran so high that no boat could land.  They lay on their oars all night and in the morning found a spot where it was possible to run through the surf.

Once on the beach, they found that a thickly wooded mountain separated them from the settlement.  They made their way over it only to discover, when they reached the other side, that all the inhabitants had left, having migrated in a body to Norfolk Island.  The houses stood empty, with live stock and chickens running freely in and out. 

Knowles and his party returned over the mountain to the boat and there, after letting the birds go with messages to Oeno, had their first sleep for fifty-six hours, Captain Knowles and Bartlett each with half the gold buried in the sand under his head.

The next morning the surf was too high for them to sail round the island to Bounty Bay, where the houses were; they therefore took the tedious overland route again.  Once arrived, however, they made themselves comfortable enough, cleaning out a house, broiling chicken, catching a goat, and in every way taking a new lease on life.  But their boat, left on the far side of the island, was smashed to pieces by an unusually high surf which reached it even in what they had supposed its safe position well up on the beach. 

The Captain and Bartlett brought the gold to ‘town’ and buried it under a flat rock on the shore.  With it they brought a compass and a chronometer, still undamaged, and they began to consider what their next move should be.  Whatever they did could not be done in a hurry.  Tahiti, which they had had some idea of trying to reach in their boat, lay fifteen hundred miles northwest, and all that remained of the boat was a mast and sail.  The rain began and continued.

Captain Knowles passed the time reading Jane Eyre, which he picked up in one of the houses, hunting goats, and worrying about his young wife in Brewster, Massachusetts.  They kept, of course, a constant lookout for ships the while.  ‘Nineteen goat meals this week,’ he reports on March 24; and on March 28, still in the midst of rain, he writes, ‘Read, walked and thought of home.’

Before the month was up after which the second mate was to join them at Pitcairn, Captain Knowles had reached his decision: he would build a vessel and sail to Tahiti.  A miscellaneous assortment of old tools had been left in the settlement; trees for timbers and planking were at hand.  On April 5, one month after the wreck, the party began to cut them down and hew out a keel and a stem, using rusty axes from the abandoned houses.  For the first two weeks the Captain suffered severely from blistered hands; after that, they hardened up nicely. 

The chief trouble was the rain.  ‘What a host of troubles that blunder of sombody’s had made for me,’ writes Knowles, thinking of the hydrographer who had drawn the chart.  April 20 came and went, with no sign of the second mate.  Work on the vessel progressed between showers; but a constant cloud over the Captain’s spirits was the thought how his wife would worry when no word of the arrival of the Wild Wave at Valparaiso reached home. 

On April 28 they killed a wild hog and salted the pork with sea salt.  On the 29^th they finished hewing planks for the vessel and stood them up against the church to dry.  They made sails from such pieces of canvas and stray rags as they could find, and began picking oakum from old rope.  ‘I didn’t think I should ever get down to that again,’ writes the Captain, ‘but so it was.’  They burned houses for nails and collected scraps of metal for fastenings – the scarcity of which was their chief concern. 

On May 26 the captain writes: ‘My 28^th birthday....  My friends think I’m lost.’  They made a charcoal pit and burned charcoal for fuel for the voyage, began work on a rope walk, and always, when it rained, picked oakum in the church, living the while on goat’s meat, coconut milk, and chickens.

By June 3 the hull was finished, a schooner thirty feet long, eight feet wide, and four feet deep.  The next job was caulking her, and by the time this was finished, it was found that the green wood had shrunk so much that she had to be calked all over again.  While some were busy at this, others were shaping spars, using the flagpole for one of the masts; then they painted her, with paint left in the houses, salted a quantity of goat’s meat for the voyage, made some old barrels into water casks, wrote letters to leave behind them, and on July 23 launched the vessel.  They provisioned her, in addition to their salted pork and goat’s meat, with twelve hundred oranges, made an ensign out of such rags as had not gone into the sails, and christened her the John Adams, after one of the former inhabitants of the island.  The Captain and Bartlett dug up their gold from under the flat rock, and, bidding farewell to three of their company, who preferred to take their chances on the island, hoisted sail for the Marquesas, as the wind was dead ahead for Tahiti.

The John Adams developed a peculiar and uneasy motion at sea, which promptly made all hands sick; but she was staunch and able, and in time the sickness wore off.  On July 25 she was bobbing along nicely through a heavy sea; on the 26^th it was calm enough to bring the stove on deck.  During the next week the schooner logged anywhere from 100 to 124 miles a day, and on August 3 looked in at Resolution By in the island of Ohitahoo, one of the Marrquesas, but the natives appeared so hostile that the Captain decided to try Ohevahoa instead.  A flat calm prevented them, however, and they headed for Nukahiva, which they sighted the next day, August 4.  They had decided, if there was no prospect of a vessel there, to continue their voyage to the Hawaiian Islands, but as they rounded the headland into the harbor of Nukahiva, they sighted the American sloop-of-war Vandalia lying at anchor, the only vessel in port.  Captain Knowles headed for her and hoisted his ensign.

Their tale was soon told.  The Vandalia promptly headed for Oeno to pick up those of the company of the Wild Wave that had stayed there and Mr. Bartlett went with her, subsequently joining her as an officer.  Captain Knowles, after selling the John Adams to a missionary for $250, went along too as far as Tahiti, whence he took passage for Honolulu on the French sloop-of-war Euridice and made the rest of the voyage to San Francisco on the bark Yankee, arriving on September 29 – seven months after he had left there in the Wild Wave.  He met many friends in port, who had thought him dead, and was interested to hear that he had become the father of a girl already seven months old.  On October 6 he left for New York on the S.S. Golden Gate and in due time joined his family in Brewster. 

Vailolomoli (Sione Nisa Sister)

 

IN   FIJI,   A   LINK   WITH 

 THE   ROMANTIC   PAST  

  SHE   HAS   128  

  DESCENDANTS  

  -   AND  

  ROYAL   BLOOD  

  In   his   book,   Tahiti—lsland   of   Love,   Robert   Langdon  

  gives   us   an   intimate   glimpse   of   the   very   early   life   of   Queen  

  Pomare   IV,   of   Tahiti.   She   was   a   14-year-old   hoyden,   Aimata,  

  when   her   brother   died   in   an   influenza   epidemic,   and   she  

  assumed   the   royal   title.   This   was   about   1826.  

  lays   Langdon:   “The   new   Queen  

  5   just   at   the   age   when   Polynesian  

  s   go   wild.   .   .   Abandoning   the  

  'eminent   to   the   chiefs,   she   spent  

  days   and   nights   having   fun   with  

  r   s   and   girls   of   her   own   age”.  

  According   to   Langdon,   it   was  

  arently   about   1830-32   that  

  isionary   George   Pritchard   became  

  uential   in   Tahiti   and   “the   Queen  

  >   induced   to   give   up   her   dissolute  

  fs   and   take   an   interest   in   govern  

  it”.  

  Romantic   story  

  'his   ties   in   with   a   romantic   story  

  nd   in   the   memories   of   Mrs.   Vai  

  omoli   Corrie,   86,   of   Suva,  

  ording   to   data   given   by   Mrs.  

  rie   to   a   PIM   correspondent,   Mrs.  

  rie   is   a   direct   descendant   of   an  

  gular   union   between   Queen  

  lare   and   a   king   of   Tonga.  

  Irs.   Corrie   has   all   the   genealogical  

  tils.  

  (ueen   Pomare,   while   very   young,  

  pursuing   pleasure   rather   than  

  srnmental   duties,   visited   Nukua  

  .   She   then   was   about   17   years  

  and   she   had   a   romantic   affair  

  i   a   Tongan   noble,   whom   she  

  Tibes   as   “Inoke   Fotu,   who   later  

  ime   King   of   Tonga”.  

  Aimata   Pomare   bore   Inoke   a   son,  

  just   before   she   was   obliged   to   return  

  home   and   begin   her   long,   unhappy  

  reign   as   Queen   of   Tahiti;   and   her  

  son   was   brought   up   by   relations   at  

  Holonga,   in   Tonga.   Later,   Inoke   be  

  came   king   of   Tonga.  

  According   to   Mrs.   Corrie,   the  

  king   on   one   occasion   visited  

  Holonga,   and   was   introduced   to   his  

  illegitimate   son,   and   made   a   fuss   over  

  him.  

  The   son’s   name   was   Semisemilolo  

  Oehau,   and   he   married   Akesa,   who  

  was   half   Tongan,   half   Rotuman.  

  They   had   six   children,   all   born   in  

  Tonga.  

  One   of   their   girls   was   named  

  Analea,   and   she   married,   in   Tonga,  

  Charlie   Knowle,   who   was   the   son  

  of   an   Englishman   and   his   Tongan  

  wife.  

  The   Knowles   had   four   children,  

  and   the   youngest   of   these,   born   in  

  Tonga,   in   1882,   was   Vai   Lolomoli.  

  She   married,   first,   in   Fiji,   a   member  

  of   the   Emberson   family,   of   Fiji,   and  

  they   had   one   son.   She   later   married  

  Alexander   Corrie,   and   they   had   seven  

  children.  

  Mrs.   Vai   Lolomoli   Corrie’s  

  descendants   now   number   128   (seven  

  children,   35   grand-children,   84   great  

  grand-children,   and   two   great-great  

  grand-children).  

  If   the   old   lady]s   memories   are  

  correct   —and   she   is   quite   definite  

  about   her   claim,   and   it   has   never  

  been   challenged—all   of   them   can  

  claim   that   they   carry   the   blood   of  

  two   royal   families—namely,   those   of  

  Tonga   and   Tahiti.   The   Tahitian   royal  

  family   was   pushed   into   discard   by  

  the   French   long   ago,   but   the   Pomare  

  strain   still   is   very   much   alive.  

  OLD   JAPANESE   BASE  

  FOUND   NEAR   RABAUL  

  Yet   another   reminder   of   the  

  Japanese   occupation   of   the   New  

  Guinea   Islands   has   been   unearthed  

  on   New   Britain—the   headquarters   of  

  the   Japanese   operations   against   the  

  Allies   in   1942-43.  

  Members   of   the   Rabaul   Lions   Club  

  discovered   an   extensive   underground  

  operational   base   recently   at   Malma  

  luan,   five   miles   outside   Rabaul.  

  The   base,   a   few   feet   under   the  

  earth,   had   lain   undisturbed   since  

  1945.   It   included   several   tunnels   and  

  rooms—one   of   which   appeared   to  

  have   been   a   radar   room.  

  Rabaul   Lions   hope   to   clean   the   base  

  up   and   promote   it   as   a   tourist   attrac  

  tion.  

  Mrs.   Vai   Lolomoli   Corrie,   86,   of   Suva,   and  

  her   grand-daughter,   Mrs.   Meta   Hussain.  

  87  

  CIFIC   ISLANDS   MONTHLY   AUGUST,   1968