Modern Philippines: A Jigsaw

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 1-3:

In March 1521 three ships under Ferdinand Magellan (Magalhaes/Magallanes), a Portuguese navigator in the service of the king of Spain, landed in the Visayan islands. One ship later completed the first circumnavigation of the globe, an event for the history record books but more importantly it changed that history of the islands, now home to 110 million people. A few decades later, Spain assumed ownership of the archipelago stretching from the Luzon Strait to the Sulu Sea and named it Islas Filipinas. The Spanish left a religion, a few genes and some aspects of culture, but the people were and remain predominantly of Malay/Austronesian race, language and culture, albeit with other influences from America and China.

The Philippines is unique in many ways; its geology, its fauna, in its history of rule by two successive Western powers, Spain and the United States. It has been a political identity with a singular name for nearly 500 years, much longer than many of its neighbours. It is the only predominantly Christian nation in Asia south of the Caucasus and is fervently Catholic. In the nineteenth century it spawned the first modern nationalists fighting Western imperialism.

However, this singularity does not make for an identity which is readily understood even by its own citizens, let alone by foreigners. It is part of the vast Malay Archipelago and shares a basic language and some culture with its Indonesian and Malaysian neighbours but it is separated from them by 500 years of history and itself divided by fragmented geography and regional loyalties. That history explains its current problems as reflected in its weak post-1945 economic and social performance compared with most of its neighbours, and its continuing high levels of violence. Democracy flourishes, elections are regular, noisy and competitive yet little progress is made towards changing a system dominated by dynasties as seen in the contests in the 2022 election. After the grip of two distant empires, Spanish and American, it now lives under the shadow of another, closer one, China.

Geology divides it into more than 2,000 inhabited islands. Regional rivalries and the widespread but not universal use of English have thwarted the acceptance of Filipino (essentially the Tagalog of Central Luzon) as the national language. Regional languages and loyalties remain strong so that imported languages and the Church seem at times the main unifiers. It is also an administrative jigsaw in that power locally lies not with its geographically coherent seventeen regions but with eighty numerous provinces and cities with province-level powers, some very small.

A basic Malay culture has been so influenced by Spain, the Catholic Church and then by America that its identity is sometimes seen as Latin as much as Asian. Indeed, many Filipinos in California, where they are the second largest Asian community, often self-identify as Latino or Pacific islander not Asian. The Catholic Church, as adapted locally, provides some common bond, other than for the Muslims, but faces its own challenge from evangelicals and populist preachers. Religious division is an underlying historical reality exacerbated by the concentration of Muslims in western Mindanao and Sulu and more recently by extremist Islamism from abroad. Yet the cultural roots and language, even aspects of its politics, remain essentially Malay from Ilocos in the north to Sulu in the south. However, fragmented by religion, local languages and quasi-tribal identities, the Philippines is at once identifiable yet hard to define or describe.

The very notion ‘Filipino’ began with local born Spaniards, known as creoles, and only very gradually spread to Spanish mestizos, Chinese mestizos and urbanized indigenous people accepted into the dominant principalia class. The nationalism of the ilustrados (the reformist educated elite) in the late nineteenth century raised national consciousness and the struggles against America and Japan saw mass participation. Independence brought the masses into the Filipino embrace but despite shared urbanization and education, the sense of national identity developed fitfully. Added to the centrifugal forces of geography were the strength of elite links to the US and of many leading businessmen to China. Suggestions to change the colonial name to a Malay one have failed – many late nineteenth revolutionaries preferred ‘Katagalugan’, which became the name of a short-lived Tagalog republic. More recently ‘Maharlika’, a word denoting a Tagalog noble warrior class, has been suggested but attracted little support.

Five hundred years on from the arrival of Spain and Catholicism fissures remain. Muslim Mindanao’s on and off warfare has been about local rivalries as well as opposition to Manila and Christianity. Meanwhile, non-Muslim parts of the island also continue to see conflicts, mainly over land rights between local ethnic groups, particularly in Mindanao and the broader population whose composition has been changed by decades of migration from the Visayas. That internal colonization continues. Visayan languages now predominate in Mindanao. Generally, regional loyalties and in political terms local patron-client relationships remain important. They remain crucial even if weakened by urbanization and the shared identity of the millions of Filipinos now working overseas or brought together via social media such as Facebook or by international beauty pageants. National politics is still partly driven by the regional appeal of particular candidates. Local identity is mostly stronger than national identity, perhaps a reflection of the lack of esteem of the national government.

After years under a backward Spain and the aegis of friars, American imperialism brought education and new legal and administrative systems. Seventy years ago, the then recently independent Philippines boasted higher literacy levels than most of Asia and the highest income levels of populous Asian countries apart from Japan. It had an admired – at least from a distance – US-inspired legal and democratic system. Today, despite two decades of reasonable economic performance, it is widely seen as having failed to match most of its neighbours in income growth and progress in education. It remains better known for natural disasters, flamboyant leaders, political violence and sporadic insurgencies, and for its major export – its own citizens finding work abroad which they could not find at home.

Its social structure has changed only modestly over time, with huge gaps in income and wealth, the dominance of certain families, particularly in the provinces, the preference for the fairer skins of mestizos (European or Chinese) and even place names celebrating colonialists, for example the posh enclaves of Makati – Magallanes, Forbes, Legazpi, Urdaneta and Dasmarinas. Violence is an all too constant ingredient in politics. President Duterte’s so-called War on Drugs killed particularly large numbers. Killings of political rivals, critical journalists and of farmer and worker activists had long been common but accelerated dramatically under Duterte. Lawyers abound but the state of law and order varies widely, ever subject to political and pecuniary influences. The state structure is weak for historical and geographical reasons which partly explain the persistence of insurgencies and of dynastic politics at both national and local levels. Senses of nationalism and civic duty appear weak compared to the demands of kinship and client relationships, blurring lines between public and private spheres. These features have especially flourished under the de-centralized political system and weak central bureaucracy bequeathed by America. Trading and sailing have always been essential elements of economic life and smuggling a natural outcome of attempts to tax it.

However, the nation has strengths too. Filipinos may be divided among themselves at home but in the outside world they have an identity and solidarity that is strong and recognized as such. Gender equality is ahead of most of Asia; Filipino workers are valued overseas for their skills and commitment, and command of English carries global benefits. Its Catholicism is sometimes more about ritual than ideology and society has relatively few hang-ups about racial mixing born of centuries of practice and the more recent impact of migration. It is welcoming of foreigners and renowned for its love of music and fiestas. There is a tradition of free speech – and sometimes gaudy rhetoric – and a media which is often too lively for those in power. In the much longer run, a generation or two away, its high fertility rate, which has long been a burden, will in a generation prove a bonus as most of its neighbours face ageing and falling populations. One day the nation may even acquire a name which reflects its Malay core identity.

Małgorzata Rejmer's Book Bukareszt

This week's newsletter from Culture.pl contains some articles about Polish connections with Romania. Here are some excerpts from an article by Mikołaj Gliński titled "Everyone Remembers Their Own Past Differently: Małgorzata Rejmer on Romania & Albania":

The author Małgorzata Rejmer talks about similarities between Romania and Poland, and reveals the way Poland is perceived from a Romanian perspective. She shares details of the first reactions to her book 'Bukareszt', which is due to be released in Romanian. The writer also reveals the beginnings of her latest project, a book about Albania.

Mikołaj Gliński: When and how did you first find yourself in Romania?

Małgorzata Rejmer: I think it all began with the documentary Dzieci z Dekretu (The Decree Children), which I saw in 2007. It tells the story of a Romania in which Ceaușescu banned access to contraception, and it conveys how the absurd becomes normal, and how the everyday becomes hell, with a constant string of humiliation. It's [shot in] the late 1980s, and factories run gynaecological check-ups of women, with testing material made of frog skin which changes colour in contact with the urine of a pregnant woman. I read all of Herta Muller’s books at the time, but it was only after my trip to Bucharest in 2009 that my curiosity was truly aroused. It was the longing for a city which I associated on the one hand with chaos and crumminess, and on the other hand, with beauty and pathos. For me, in a way it was a 'crooked Paris', an absolute mishmash, the glamorous and the plebeian all in one.

MG: When did you first have the idea of writing about Romania?

MR: In 2010, I began to write my doctoral thesis about Romanian cinema, and I read many books about Romania in a short period of time. And I just couldn’t believe it all. I knew that Romania was a fascinating country for a writer and anthropologist. On the one hand, it’s European and looks up to France and Germany, and on the other hand, it also looks back onto the Balkans and Turkey, it’s a mix of the culturally unique, of the provincial and the peripheral.

MG: Why did you choose reportage as a form of description? Your previous book, Toksymia, was a novel…

MR: I am not too attached to the idea that Bukareszt is a reportage piece. I don’t really consider myself a writer, and even less so a reporter. I am just a person who writes. I don’t have the workshop of a journalist, it’s difficult for me to write about a given subject. Either a subject flows out of me and writes itself, or no one could drag me with horses to sit down by my laptop. My writing is very capricious, and it costs me a lot of energy.

MG: The style in Bukareszt is very rich and diverse. You used different conventions (for example, the chapter about the revolution is written as a play, or even a parody, with acts, etc). You also draw on different cultural texts, (The Ballad of Master Manole, the epic of a lamb) as well as styles. I suppose those are not the typical elements of a reporter’s workshop?

MR: Bukareszt is literary and varied in style, because I had the feeling that this city is eclectic, and and that all of Romania is one big patchwork, and this was something that I wanted to render in the book's language. When I write about a famous Romanian ballad, the language imitates the ballad, and when I write about the chaos of the revolution, I choose the form of a drama. I wanted to adapt the style to the theme, for the polyphony of the book to match the diversity of Bucharest. In the end, if I tried to write all the texts in one style, I would die of boredom. I have to have some fun in my life, to play around with form, and to try out different things. I adore Herta Muller’s reportage from Hunger and Silk, although nobody calls Muller a reporter. Using short sentences, she sketches out touching human portraits and universal stories about humanity. Muller is relentless, she writes with images, doesn't back away from symbols, and she is at the very centre of the texts herself. I prefer this kind of writing to the most meticulous kind of reportage about some incredibly important and pertinent issue of our times.

MG: How did your Romanian friends react to your book? You do write about rather terrifying and shameful things from the country’s history: the terror of the security services, people spying on each other, prisons, the completely inhuman stories of women which resulted from the 1966 anti-abortion decree, and the taboo of a revolution – which perhaps never even took place?

MR: The book was read by a couple of Polish friends who live in Romania, and they were quite enthusiastic.  Some time ago, a Romanian woman wrote to me saying that after reading Bukareszt, she felt proud of her country again, and wanted to get to know its history. This was moving for me. Only the chapter on abortion has been released in Romania so far, and it was well received. I read comments by young people for whom the text was a discovery, because they had become accustomed to an idealised vision of the Ceausescu era.

Bukareszt is my way of seeing Romania, and a certain selection of facts. You can polemicize about this selection, but it would be harder to argue with the facts. The question of memory is a separate issue – everyone remembers their own past differently, and everyone has their own vision of it. Bukareszt would be a collection of these crumbs, but they are all fragments of a shattered mirror, and they don’t reflect a reality but rather convey a mosaic.

Bukareszt will probably get released in Romania this year, and, possibly, there will then be a discussion around it. It’s possible, but not certain. Romanians are not interested in working through the collective memory. Even at book readings in Cluj and Bucharest, the question hanging over me was "Why do you write about such difficult things from the past? If the present is terrible, why would we need to dig into the past, on top of that?”

MG: Was the work on Bukareszt a difficult experience for you, personally? I am addressing the talks that you had to conduct with people who have had some terrible experiences. Almost all of the topics from the first part touch upon some kind of trauma…

MR: I always approached my protagonists with the conviction that I really want to talk to them, and not that I want to do an interview. These talks went on for hours. I had to recover after many of these stories, and I repeatedly returned to some of them. At times, I would cry together with the people who told me those stories. Suffering is inscribed into life, but I am most interested in the way that these people were able to cope with it.  We all strive for normality even in the most abnormal of times.

MG: What was the most difficult thing for you get used to when you lived in Romania?

MR: I didn’t have any problems with getting used to Romania, but for a long time, I live there in house which very much resembled a squat, with parties running on until 5 in the morning. Recently I went to Bucharest once again, and I decided to stay in the old place out of nostalgia. There was a party once again, and this is something that is hard to get used to.

But apart from that, I didn’t have any problems getting acquainted with Bucharest. I spent some time growing up in a small town, and some time in the northern Praga district [in Warsaw], so Bucharest is close to my heart both in terms of the aesthetics and the atmosphere. And when a Romanian friend came to visit me, he even began to mark out [the district of] Grochów in his own way. For him, the Wiatraczna roundabout was evocative of the Fifth Iancului, the Astoria restaurant reminded him of Intermacedonia, and he would call the local kebab place the same way he would in Bucharest: 'Ali Baba'.

MG: While reading your book, one can have the impression that many of these historical experiences and situations are, to a certain degree, similar to Polish history, except for over there, things were somehow… a lot worse, a bit like a nightmare. Is it possible to compare these histories? Where do the parallels end?

MR: I cannot answer your question, because I am not able to define where the limits of these similarities lie. I am not the one to trace them out, let the Polish and Romanian readership do it themselves, in accordance with their own subjective feelings.

But looking at this issue from an objective side, looking at the facts, we could say that after 1965, the Romanian version of communism was completely different to the Polish one. It had the face of one man, Nicolae Ceaușescu. He was the one responsible for the situation in the country, he bestowed all of the important posts upon members of his family, and prepared his son to become his successor. Historians call this 'dynastic communism'. Ceaușescu was Romania. But let’s not forget that in the 1960s and 1970s Romanians led rather good lives, and in many ways, their situation was much better than the one in Poland. It was only the 1980s that brought about a sudden collapse and the fall of the state, as well as a suffering of the people with the complete indifference of the authorities.

The chapters on Romanian communism stir a lot of emotion, but it's enough to read Kolymskoye Stories to see a completely different scale of human suffering. No matter what atrocity we would think of, man is capable of inventing a greater and more effective one. In this place, the book should have some kind of quotation about man being the most cruel of all animals. I agree.

MG: What is the stereotypical idea that Polish people have about Romania?

MR: To put it bluntly, Poles associate Romania with poverty, Gypsies and Dracula. It’s all stems from ignorance. Just go there, visit Transylvania, Bukovina and Maramuresz and your whole stance towards Romania changes. Poles have no idea about the scale of Romanian influence on European heritage. They don’t know what extraordinary intellectuals surfaced in Romania in the interwar period. A majority of the most acclaimed ones emigrated. And very few Poles know that Romanian cinema has been storming European film festivals for more than a decade, it’s the country’s best export commodities.

MG: Was your perspective as a person coming from Poland at all helpful in understanding Romania? Poland is unarguably also a country from the East of Europe, and a member of the former communist bloc. It possibly has a similar cultural and historical background, being a quite big but peripheral country, under foreign rule for a period of time, and one looking up to the West with both admiration and fascination…

MR: Yes, I think that this kind of stance that we are saturated with as Poles – the sense that we have been wronged by history, that we are underappreciated and marginalised in Europe – helped me understand Romanians. I often explained to them that Poles have a very similar inferiority complex, a problem of peasant roots, and that they are terribly sensitive to any outside criticism. But for Romanians, Poland is Europe, and it’s almost Germany. When I told them about the 123 years of history under partitions, about the sense of inferiority, Romanians would cry out: 'But in the Middle Ages you were a superpower! And we never had a period of imperial Romania.' They would also often say: 'we have a common enemy, Russia!' In the area I lived in in Bucharest, I once saw a huge, dirty garbage container with the phrase 'Russia e gunoi', meaning 'Russia is garbage'.

Honolulu FBI vs. Mass Internment

From Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor, by Christine Kuehn (Celadon Books, 2025), Kindle pp. 160-161:

There was intense pressure to intern the entire Japanese population of the island—160,000 men, women, and children. Hoover and President Roosevelt, fearing an uprising, wanted a crackdown. Surprisingly, the man who stood in their way was the straitlaced conservative Robert Shivers. He fought it tooth and nail, astonishing Hoover and putting his career at significant risk. The close bond Shivers had formed with his Japanese American “adopted daughter,” Sue, had swayed him.

“I couldn’t have let you and thousands of people like you be arrested,” Shivers told her. The thought of Sue and scores of other innocents like her being forced into a camp had fueled a fire within that spurred him to take on the highest levels of the government.

On the west coast of the U.S. mainland, 120,000 Americans with Japanese heritage would be put into camps and not released until the end of the war, with virtually no one ever being charged with a crime.

Even the spy Yoshikawa, who was interned for a short time with Japanese Americans after his capture, saw the irony. “We were taken to a relocation camp full of innocent American Japanese,” he recalled. “They had done nothing. It was a cruel joke. You see, I couldn’t trust them to help me in Honolulu. They were loyal to the United States.”

While most of those held on Sand Island and in internment camps on the mainland were innocent of any wrongdoing, that was not the case with Otto and the rest of the Kuehns. Before it was over, they would have to navigate the ire of an enraged American public, a furious government, and federal prosecutors hell-bent on punishing someone for the heinous crime of December 7.

Dusko Popov vs. J. Edgar Hoover, 1941

From Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor, by Christine Kuehn (Celadon Books, 2025), Kindle pp. 119-120:

Special Agent Shivers was convinced the Kuehns were spies; he just didn’t know for whom. The payments pointed to the Japanese, but the FBI was getting information that the Nazis also had an interest in Pearl Harbor. That revelation came from another German spy turned double agent for the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6: Dusko Popov.

Popov was a well-educated Serbian who attended law school at the University of Freiburg in Germany in 1935. A few years later he was recruited by a former classmate to work for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service.

Popov immediately contacted the British diplomatic authorities, who enlisted him as a double agent. Within a short period of time, the Germans had come to trust him implicitly, even fronting him $50,000 to set up a spy ring in London. Popov was supposed to turn the money over to MI6, as part of a plan to fleece the Germans out of chunks of cash.

Ian Fleming, a British intelligence officer who would go on to create the character James Bond, was assigned to watch over Popov and make sure the cash made it back to London. After receiving the money from the Germans, Popov met Fleming in Portugal for the trip back to England. The Serbian, a well-known ladies’ man and gambler, made his way to Casino Estoril, an oceanside casino that was a well-known hangout for spies and other international highfliers.

While gambling at a nearby table, Popov overheard a Lithuanian businessman pompously declare he would match any bet, no matter how high the amount. Popov sauntered over to the table, sat down across from the man, and, without saying a word, dropped $50,000 on the table—MI6’s $50,000, the equivalent of $1 million today. The casino went quiet, and Fleming went white watching Popov potentially wreck the entire operation. The flustered Lithuanian asked the casino if they would lend him the money if he lost. Not unexpectedly, they declined, and the man walked away from the table, red-faced. Popov pulled the money off the felt with a grin, loudly proclaiming that gamblers like that are “an annoyance to serious players.”

Popov was, like Otto, a risk-taker, a bit of a narcissist—and Popov was purportedly Fleming’s inspiration for James Bond. The baccarat scene was even re-created, blow for blow, in his first book, Casino Royale.

In August 1941, the Germans sent Popov to the United States with $58,000 and a directive to establish a network of spies. Then he was to head to Hawaii and gather as much intelligence as possible on Pearl Harbor. Unbeknownst to Otto Kuehn, Popov was to be his replacement.

The Japanese had grown tired of Otto’s flamboyant lifestyle and considered him a growing security risk. Frequent phone calls and visits to the consulate, exorbitant spending, wild parties with military officers that made the local gossip column—Otto was becoming a threat to the operation. Fresh blood was needed, and Japanese intelligence asked Goebbels to replace him.

Arriving in New York, Popov set up a meeting with the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover was suspicious of the double agent, agreeing to let his staff meet with Popov only after the British reassured him. Popov was eventually summoned to the Commodore Hotel, where he showed the agents his orders, written in microdots, a new technology invented by the Germans that reduced entire pages of information down to the size of a period.

Almost half the hidden directives consisted of questions the Germans wanted answered about military operations in Hawaii: the depths of the water at Pearl Harbor, the torpedo nets under the water’s surface, exact locations of air bases at Hickam, Wheeler, and Kaneohe, and locations of submarine stations, along with sketches of the Pearl Harbor piers. “Is the Crater Punchbowl being used as ammunition dump?” read one question.

The warning was clear: The Nazis wanted Popov to gather intelligence the Japanese needed for an attack on Pearl Harbor. That got Hoover’s attention, and the FBI director decided to come to New York and meet with Popov personally. But when the two met face-to-face weeks later, the rendezvous was a disaster. The FBI director could barely contain his disdain for the German double agent. “You’re like all double agents,” he berated him. “You’re begging for information to sell to your German friends so you can make a lot of money and be a playboy!”

Popov brushed off Hoover’s comments and reiterated to the FBI director his warning of an impending attack. “But he just wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say,” he said later.

Hoover had deployed a lot of manpower to the FBI office in Hawaii and stepped up the pressure on Shivers. Yet here was the plan for the entire Japanese assault in front of his face, and he ignored it. While Hoover did notify President Roosevelt that the FBI had discovered a new microdot technology, forwarding a small portion of the text from Popov, he sat on the most important information: The Japanese were planning an attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Abwehr, meanwhile, aborted Popov’s mission to Hawaii. The glaring spotlight thrown on him from Hoover would bring too much attention to Japanese operations there. Otto would remain in place as Japan’s spy. But Germany’s role in the Pacific was now obvious. It was working in concert with Japan toward a common goal of knocking out the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, and they were using a network of spies to do it.

German Spies on Oahu in late 1930s

The Far Outliers are back in the Pacific now, as my reading reflects. I've been reading a new book that came out after we left for our academic year in Poland: Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor (Celadon Books, 2025), by Christine Kuehn, the granddaughter of the family of spies. Honolulu Civil Beat author Kirsten Downey read an advance copy of the book and highlights some of its findings in her online commentary on The Secret Life of a Prominent Kailua Family Revealed. Here are some excerpts.

There were indeed spies among us.

A long-running tale of intrigue in Hawaiʻi will get a new twist later this year with the publication of a soon-to-be published book from inside the family of notorious Hawaiʻi spies. Wealthy German nationals Otto Kuehn and his family were paid by the Japanese government to spy on U.S. military operations at Pearl Harbor, and they funneled information to Japan that helped make the Dec. 7, 1941 attack so devastating.

...

In her book Christine — the daughter of Otto’s son, Eberhard — describes the family’s spy history as a secret concealed from the grandchildren. She gradually unspools how she unraveled the story and pressured her relatives into sharing some of the facts, with her own research filling in more of the specifics. Eberhard, sometimes crying, declined to share many details about what his family had done and then developed dementia.

Her account will be new to many people. But the tale has independently survived in Hawaiʻi, amid the whispered reminiscences of kamaʻāina, in published news accounts from the era, inside archival records housed at the University of Hawaiʻi’s War Records Depository and in books about espionage published after the war. It’s been included in a list of the FBI’s most famous cases. All shed more light on how the chain of events unfolded.

Otto Kuehn, a former naval officer in Germany, his wife Friedel and their three charming children made quite a splash in Hawaiʻi in the late 1930s.

Mr. and Mrs. Kuehn had first arrived on the ship Tatsuta Maru in the spring of 1935, stopping in Honolulu for two weeks before heading to Japan, which they visited several other times in the next few years, according to gossipy society news reports at the time.

By 1936, the Kuehns had permanently settled on Oʻahu, where they were mentioned as the hosts of a dance party at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and as guests at a music recital attended by Hawaiʻi’s elite. He said he was in Hawaiʻi to learn Japanese.

The Kuehns became popular hosts at their posh homes in Kailua and Lanikai, frequently hosting the young naval officers who were squiring Ruth, their pretty 22-year-old daughter, around town and on outings. She and her mother operated a beauty salon near the Kāneʻohe Naval Air Station that was a favorite spot for Navy wives. Their two younger sons, Eberhard and Hans, were students at Punahou.

In August 1941, Ruth, then 25, married a widower, retired stock broker, J. Carson Moore, “who was flattered by her interest,” his family later recalled. Moore, 48, was a generous bon vivant who hosted an open bar at his home, with free-flowing booze, that was frequented by service members. Moore called his little saloon the S.S. Rum, according to archival records at the University of Hawaiʻi.

America was at peace at the time, but the Japanese Empire’s expansionist and militaristic ambitions were drawing increasing concern, particularly as Japan allied itself with Nazi Germany.

...

Many details of the Kuehn case were initially concealed because it was a wartime secret, which allowed both Otto and Friedel to vehemently protest that they were innocent of the charges.

In a letter to Otto, Hormann told him they felt misled, because they had considered him “a good Joe,” but that now they had been left hoping “that you were innocent of giving aid to the enemies of our country.”

Otto responded to Hormann in 1947, described the spying allegations as “ugly rumors,” and said his attorney had “demonstrated his innocence.”

“Mistakes will be made in time of national hysteria or danger,” Otto wrote in another letter. He added that his attorney “firmly believes in American justice and is sufficiently confident in a final success regarding my affair.”

In 1962, Friedel sued the U.S. government, saying that the charges against them were “all rot,” and that the allegations were brought against Otto to cover up the incompetence of the American military in allowing the surprise attack to occur. She sought $27,000 in damages from the U.S. government.

The facts, however, when they finally emerged, were damning. The Kuehns had done much more than make friends with amiable American military officers.

Otto had opened a steel furniture company, winning a commission to decorate a cocktail lounge at Pearl Harbor, which enabled him to get access to the base and take photographs of the ships in the harbor. He took pictures of other military installations, including Bellows, Wheeler and Hickam, revealing aircraft configurations. On at least one occasion, Otto took little Hans with him as he conducted his investigations, according to his granddaughter.

A Wikipedia article on the Kuehn family pieces together more sources on the family spy network.

Forster's About the Breadfruit

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 276-278, 282-283:

‘I would be far more useful to the world if I were to embark on another great voyage,’ he told a friend in November 1783, a few months after leaving the Rosicrucians. Weren’t there enough people who could sort, classify and regurgitate what had already been discovered? But if he couldn’t travel to distant continents and islands, he could explore them with his mind and imagination—and in Kassel in early 1784 he published his groundbreaking About the Breadfruit. In what was ostensibly a botanical treatise, he illustrated how the tendrils of botany reached into culture, ethnography, history, linguistics and human migration. A brilliant and original piece of scholarship, About the Breadfruit reveals George’s visionary thinking, the work of a man way ahead of his time.

George had first encountered the breadfruit during the Resolution voyage.* It was a tropical fruit which grew on large trees on many of the South Pacific islands they had visited. He had enjoyed the dishes made with the abundant breadfruit—cooked on hot stones or fermented into a dough which was baked like bread—but he had also noticed that they had been seedless. With no seeds, the breadfruit trees on Tahiti, Tonga, Tanna and Malakula, George explained in his essay, could only be propagated by cuttings from suckers that grow off the tree’s roots. During the many months they had spent in the region, George had not seen a single wild breadfruit tree—all of them had been planted by humans.

That made him wonder where breadfruit trees originated and how they had arrived on the islands. Searching Göttingen’s vast library, George had then discovered several botanical volumes which contained descriptions of wild specimens with seeds and small fruits with little flesh from Indonesia and the Philippines. If Tahiti, Tonga, Tanna and Malakula had no indigenous breadfruit trees with seeds, the only explanation was that they must have been exported from Southeast Asia, travelling thousands of miles across the ocean to the South Pacific islands. For George this proved two things. Firstly, the sophistication of the islanders’ agricultural methods—as there was apparently no seedless variety in Southeast Asia, they must have bred and transformed the originally small fruit into the large nourishing crop he had tasted. Just as cereals and fruits had been domesticated through selective breeding in Europe, so the South Pacific islanders had used cuttings from trees with larger fruits to facilitate the slow changes over the centuries—‘bit by bit’.

His second conclusion was even more striking, for the history and movement of the breadfruit enabled George to develop a stunning understanding of Polynesian migration. The breadfruit’s journey, and its cultivation from a small fruit with spiky skin, seeds and little flesh, to the larger seedless variety found in Tahiti, Tanna and the other islands, was proof that the Polynesians had migrated east from Southeast Asia across the Pacific—a theory confirmed more than 200 years later by DNA and archaeological studies. As people had boarded their canoes to travel to distant islands, they had packed their most valuable crops and animals. ‘The breadfruit tree,’ George wrote, ‘could only have been brought eastwards by humans.’

About the Breadfruit also illustrates how differently George thought from other scientists and explorers of his day. During the Endeavour voyage Joseph Banks had also taken note of breadfruit trees but his interest was economic. Struck by the ease of cultivation and rich harvests—‘Bread fruit is procurd with no more trouble than that of climbing a tree,’ he had written in his journal during the Endeavour’s stay in Tahiti—Banks lobbied both George III and Parliament to send an expedition to the South Pacific to transfer breadfruit tree seedlings from Tahiti to the West Indies in order to feed the slaves on British sugar plantations. Where Banks saw a nutritious high-yielding food plant that could fuel the engine of the British Empire, George Forster saw evidence of Polynesian migration.

...

The differences George observed in the people of Vanuatu and New Caledonia, compared to those on more easterly islands, was the result of intermingling between the descendants of the first migration wave and later Polynesian settlers. George could have not known the complex details of these migration patterns, but more than two centuries ago he worked out the broad outlines by studying the diaspora of Polynesian languages and the history of the breadfruit tree. He could only guess their reasons—‘oppression by their own people, or foreign conquerors, or superstitious legends, or some other cause’—but he was convinced that these great ancient navigators and their families had set out on purpose to find new islands to colonize and had not drifted there by accident. ‘I cast a glance at a map of that part of the world,’ he wrote in About the Breadfruit, ‘I survey the vast Pacific Ocean, and find that the most distant, solitary, and scattered islands are not only inhabited by people, but occupied by the very same people… I confess, I cannot convince myself that a storm, or a series of similar coincidences, is sufficient to satisfactorily explain this widespread dispersion of one and the same people across such a vast ocean from New Zealand to Easter Island.’

The people of the South Pacific, George realized, were connected rather than separated by the ocean. Where others saw tiny islands spread across the vastness of the Pacific, he brought them together with the threads of migrations. Building on what he had seen as a young man, George had matured into a bold and original thinker. It would take more than two hundred years for the world to catch up with him.

• As the first to publish the botanical description of the breadfruit from the South Pacific islands shortly after their return in 1775, George and Reinhold had their name attached to it for posterity—Artocarpus communis J.R. & G. Forst.

Forster's A Voyage Round the World

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 229-231:

By the end of 1776, less than four months after he had written the first word, the manuscript of A Voyage Round the World arrived at the printer. Publication was eagerly awaited—the naturalist Gilbert White (who was the publisher’s brother) excitedly informed friends and family at the end of January 1777 that publication was imminent. George felt no sense of relief because he had to begin the German translation immediately.

Reinhold had signed a contract with a German publisher who had travelled from Berlin to London in the previous summer. Karl Spener was an ambitious young man who had taken over his father’s firm at the age of twenty-three and who had met the Forsters already before the Resolution voyage when he visited England in 1771. Spener was only five years older than George and would become a trusted friend. George, Reinhold decided, would translate his own book, a daunting prospect given the many years in which George had spoken only English—he didn’t even converse in German with his family (and for the rest of his life, his father would speak and write to him in English). George’s letters to friends and acquaintances in Germany were always peppered with English words and his written German had become erratic. ‘I just have to ask one thing,’ he wrote to Spener with apprehension, ‘can the Berlin printers spell correctly?’ Someone would need to correct the final manuscript.

George was ill, exhausted, and had lost so much weight that even Reinhold Forster had to admit his son might need some assistance. It arrived in the form of Rudolf Erich Raspe, a brilliant eccentric who had fled the German state of Hesse-Kassel after it was discovered that he had been stealing and selling ancient coins from the collections of his employer, Landgrave Friedrich II. With news travelling slowly, Raspe wangled himself onto the guest list of the Royal Society but was soon expelled. He would later write the hugely successful Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia — a whimsical satire in which the eponymous protagonist performs such feats as riding on a cannonball, shooting a stag with cherry stones (the stag subsequently grows a cherry tree between his antlers) and visiting the moon. For the moment, Raspe was to work with George on the German translation of A Voyage Round the World. Progress was woefully slow and Raspe was often ill. Like his fictional character Munchausen, he also had a tendency to exaggerate and lie, coming up with excuses for his failure to deliver and reasons to borrow money from the Forsters. George spent a lot of time merging the voices of two translations into one and the collaboration ended in anger. Raspe, George told Spener, liked only himself and believed that others existed entirely to serve him.

The English edition of A Voyage Round the World was published on 17 March 1777. Six weeks later, Captain Cook’s own Voyage Towards the South Pole appeared, printed in a larger format and illustrated with more than sixty engravings after the drawings by William Hodges, the expedition artist—but the images of animals and plants were copied from George’s drawings which Banks had bought. It was one thing that George hadn’t been allowed to use Hodges’ evocative landscapes and depictions of indigenous people (as his father believed had been initially agreed with the Admiralty), but quite another that he couldn’t use his own drawings after Reinhold had sold them. But to see them published in Cook’s book now was a terrible blow.

Thankfully, the reviews of George’s A Voyage Round the World were mostly positive, with several writers commenting that they felt as if they were actually travelling on the Resolution. George was delighted. Samuel Johnson, one of the great literary figures of the age and the author of A Dictionary of the English Language, called the book ‘a great affection of fine writing’. Johnson’s friend and biographer James Boswell declared that ‘he carries you along with him’. Those who compared the two books favoured George’s A Voyage Round the World. ‘Captain Cook’s own narrative is a mere sailor’s journal,’ wrote one reviewer, but he was disappointed by the lack of illustrations in George’s account. ‘Every page of it abounds with life and character,’ raved the reviewer for The Town and Country Magazine, ‘painted with all the force of language.’ More than a dozen reviews were published in England, several with long extracts.

Rather than wait for the German translation, many German reviewers also read the English edition. Most admired the book, describing it as ‘ravishing’ and ‘admirable’, but there were also critical voices. One took offence at George’s description of the Dutch East India Company as ‘cruel and ambitious spice merchants’, and another disliked the favourable depiction of indigenous people, complaining about his ‘acerbic allusions to the cruelty, harshness and vices of the Europeans’. Confident about his arguments and portrait of the islanders, George sent a public reply to one of Germany’s leading newspapers, asking: ‘Why not deliver eulogies on virtues? They may appear anywhere—in a beggar’s hut or a palace, in Europe or Tahiti.’ He had no interest in repeating tedious prejudices against the indigenous people—‘I therefore show real virtues among savages, where in similar cases vices prevail among civilized people.’

The most glowing German review came from Christoph Martin Wieland, a distinguished writer who declared George nothing less than a poet. In an extensive commentary, published over three issues of the Teutsche Merkur, one of Germany’s most important journals, Wieland pronounced A Voyage Round the World a thrilling book. The descriptions were painterly and humanistic, executed with intensity and enthusiasm. It was a masterpiece. As always, Reinhold attempted to take the credit, insisting that he had shaped his son. ‘I alone was his leader, his teacher,’ he later said to Wieland, ‘who awakened the dormant spark of divinity in him.’

Within six months, pirated French and Swedish translations were available, followed by Spanish and Russian editions, and then even more French editions. None were authorized. Soon the book was declared a classic but it didn’t sell enough copies to support Reinhold’s spending habits, and of course they never received any money from the pirated translations. People loved pictures, George admitted, and at two guineas A Voyage Round the World cost the same as Cook’s generously illustrated and Admiralty-subsidized account. Father and son would have to find other ways to finance their life in London.

European Nationalist Revolts in 1905

This week's edition of Culture.pl contains an article by Zachary Mazur written in 2022 that heralds his new book entitled To Kill a Spy: Everyday Nationalism and Political Violence in Fin-de-Siecle Europe from Amsterdam University Press's CEU Press imprint later in 2026. Here are excerpts from most of the text of the article, without illustrations.

For decades, the Revolution of 1905 has been tucked away in history books as a mere ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Soviet rise in 1917. But for the Poles, Jews, Lithuanians and Ukrainians living under the Tsarist yoke, 1905 wasn’t a rehearsal for someone else's drama – it was their own leading role. It was the moment the modern mass nation was born, an epoch-making explosion of culture and defiance that shattered imperial censorship and provided a blueprint for the independent states that would follow.

The catalyst: a war of hubris & machine guns

On the eve of the revolution, the Russian Empire was engaged in an embarrassing war with Imperial Japan. The two powers fought over control of northeast China (Manchuria) and the Korean peninsula. The Japanese, from the European perspective, were an upstart Asiatic power that had only recently emerged from isolation and the variable dark ages of feudalism. Fuelled by an unapologetic anti-Asian racism, most people expected that the tsar’s Russia would destroy the Japanese army in a matter of weeks when the war began.

Instead, Russian troops faced continuous setbacks. Japanese commanders used trenches and machine guns – new technologies of the day – to break the will of their opponents. On the seas, Japan’s gunships destroyed the Russian Pacific fleet, leading to an epic journey for the Baltic fleet around the horn of Africa, 18,000 nautical miles.

After the nearly 8-month ocean voyage, Russia’s sailors again faced a thrashing in May 1905. With two fleets destroyed and numerous losses on land, Russia admitted defeat in the summer. US President Theodore Roosevelt invited the sides to negotiate peace in New Hampshire at an American naval base and the Treaty of Portsmouth ended the Russo-Japanese War in September 1905.

On the home front, the people of the Russian Empire took the brunt of the war effort. Among the newly formed urban working classes, a concomitant economic slowdown put severe pressure on the people as they faced unemployment and hunger. Already in 1904, there were anti-war protests in Warsaw and in a few other cities around the Russian-controlled partition of the Polish lands.

The true beginning of the revolution, however, came when Russian subjects led by a charismatic young Orthodox priest tried to petition the tsar in January 1905. A crowd of calm marchers solemnly moved toward the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, and despite the fact that the tsar was not even there, the guards panicked and opened fire on the people. The resulting mayhem and death became the rallying cry for radicals all over the empire. The tsar had tried to cultivate an image of a benevolent father figure, but after ‘Bloody Sunday’, even his most fervent supporters were disillusioned.

A hotbed of revolt: strikes & the October Manifesto

For the next two years following the events of January 1905, protests and strikes broke out all over the Russian Empire. The Polish part of the empire, that included the large cities Warsaw, Łódź, Radom, Kielce, Piotrków and Białystok, was the most industrialised region. As a result, it was poised to be a hotbed for revolutionary activity. Organisers went to work gathering support for strikes, and confrontations with police often turned violent. In Łódź, a huge centre for textile manufacturing, workers fought pitched battles on the streets with barricades and makeshift weapons.

General strikes, where whole industries stopped work, and especially striking railroad workers, forced the hand of the tsar. Finally, he had to give up some concessions to the protestors. In October, the tsar issued a decree that allowed for limited democratic freedoms of press and assembly and the formation of a parliamentary assembly, called the Duma. Though many of the protestors felt that this did not go far enough and continued their fight for further privileges, the so-called October Manifesto created an outpouring of publications, theatre and cultural life that the Russian Empire had never seen before.

Prior to this moment, censorship had been stifling, strictly regulating the languages in which books could be published or theatre performed. Lithuanian, Yiddish and Ukrainian had been banned for decades. While the suppression of the Ukrainian language continued – seen as a threat to the Russian 'heartland' in a policy of identity erasure that remains tragically relevant today – Lithuanian, Yiddish and other suppressed languages finally began to gain legal recognition within the empire.

The linguistic renaissance: breaking the imperial silence

Lithuanians gained the right to publish newspapers in the Latin alphabet as early as the spring of 1904, but the popular press exploded thanks to the Revolution of 1905. The proliferation of daily newspapers, such as the Vilniaus žinios (Vilnius News) signalled the beginning of a mass Lithuanian culture. The first great national assembly of Lithuanians took place in Vilnius, with 200 delegates, between 4 to 5 December 1905. All sections of society – from Belarus, East Prussia (where many Lithuania speakers lived as well) – took part.

They ended by demanding political autonomy for Lithuania, and to have their own provincial parliament with boundaries defined on ethnographic terms. Lithuanian scientific and artistic associations grew at the time, establishing the cultural arms of the Lithuanian national movement. These became vital just a few years later for the establishment of the independent Lithuanian state after World War I.

Yiddish too experienced a renaissance (or naissance) based on new-found freedoms in cities with large Jewish populations, such as Warsaw, Łódź and Vilnius. The tsarist authorities lifted bans on Yiddish printing and theatre in 1905, allowing for the creation of art and literature in a vernacular that practically all Jews used on a daily basis. Finally distinctly Jewish art could move to the public stage and reach audiences that had never experienced such forms of culture. The demand was clearly there, since four new theatres popped up in Warsaw almost immediately after the ban was lifted. In Mokotów, there was Bagatela, Elizeum on Karowa Street, Jardin d’Hiver on Chmielna and Muranower on Bonifraterska, all performing exclusively in Yiddish. Sholem Aleichem’s play Scattered and Dispersed saw its debut at this time (directed by Mark Arnshteyn). Yiddish dailies also appeared, and their content shows the popularity of theatre at the time. Jardin d’Hiver was playing two shows per day, with the exception of Shabbat. In 1908, the dedicated journal Teater Velt (Theatre World) appeared. All this newfound energy for Yiddish culture caused a modernisation of the language and uniformity that did not exist before among the Jews of the Russian Empire. This emergence also allowed for literary theatre to grow. On top of that, American actors with new plays written in New York came over and were the most commercially successful pieces.

Shadows of the revolution: the Pimps’ Pogrom

In the midst of the social upheaval and suffering, people looked for scapegoats to blame leading to one of the most bizarre episodes of the revolution: the Pimps’ Pogrom. In the working class Warsaw neighbourhood of Wola (today the site of skyscrapers, giving it the nickname ‘Hong Kong’), a seedy underworld of pimps, prostitutes and the men who frequented these establishments operated with the approbation of the local police.

In the Russian Empire, the sex trade was officially regulated, requiring both brothels and individual prostitutes to register with the police. Pimps supported the Tsarist status quo rather than the revolutionaries, as they could turn a profit under the state’s protection. Consequently, the sex trade was seen as an extension of the Russian regime and its police – the same officers who beat protesters and fired into crowds. The violence, however chaotic, was a strike against the very infrastructure of Russian control.

A song from that time:

Oj, lumpy to szpiedzy, [Oh the pimps are spies]
Prowokatorzy; [Provocateurs]
Chodzą na 'giełde', podsłuchują [They go to the market, eavesdropping]
potem donoszą na policje [then they tell the police]

It’s unclear what exactly sparked the riots against the brothels, but at the end of May 1905, a series of events led workers to destroy dozens of brothels, leaving at least 15 people dead. They moved from one house to the next, destroying furniture, smashing mirrors, tearing up clothes and bedding.

In one bordello, the sex workers put up a fight. A prostitute grabbed a copper pipe and hit a rioter over the head with it. In response, someone stabbed her with a knife and she died on the spot. In another brothel, the pimps fled, leaving the girls alone. Frightened for their safety, they hid under beds and in closets. The rioters pulled them out and beat them. The women yelled hysterically, called them names and cried: ‘What do you want from us? What did we ever do to you?’

Although a majority of the pimps and prostitutes were Jewish, both Polish and Jewish workers gathered on the streets to exact vengeance. In this way, it was very different from anti-Jewish pogroms, many of which took place in the context of the revolution. Some historians see this event as a moral crusade, while others claim that the association of the pimps with the Russian police was the strongest motivator. There were also witnesses who claimed that competing pimps were the most virulent rioters, so some plain old business competition was at play too.

These events brought attention to problems with prostitution in the Polish lands, sparking some difficult public discussions about issues that were normally left undisturbed. It also inspired several poems, such as Leo Belmont’s Po Pogromie (After the Pogrom) and novels, mostly published in Yiddish.

Rounding Cape Horn, 1774

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 201-202:

The seas here are notoriously dangerous, with the warmer water and weather fronts of the tropics colliding with the cold southern seas. Where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet, gale force winds whip across the water, and with no landmass in the southern seas to block them, waves can build for hundreds of miles, growing in strength and height until they reach Drake’s Passage, the narrowest point between South America and Antarctica. Cook knew what to expect from these angry seas where hundred-foot waves were not uncommon. Vessels disappeared or were shipwrecked here: lost in fog and hurricanes, crushed by icebergs, swallowed by waves, or smashed against rocky cliffs.

Unlike many other ships, the Resolution was lucky, and at 6 a.m. on 29 December 1774, she passed Cape Horn without incident. To George’s delight thirty humpback whales and several hundred seals played in the waves nearby. The whales came so close that when they spouted, the Resolution was enveloped by the reeking stench of half-digested krill. George watched mesmerized as the giant animals breached, leaping out of the water and then twisting onto their backs, landing with such force that the sounds their bodies made were like explosions. Repeatedly slapping their tails and fins against the surface, the whales made the water boil.

On 3 January 1775 they left the South American coast and turned east to cross the southern Atlantic towards Cape Town. Two weeks later, they spotted an island on the horizon and made their way towards it. Mountainous with craggy steep cliffs, it was icy and windswept. Its only inhabitants seemed to be large flocks of seabirds—albatrosses, petrels and shags among them—along with seals and penguins. Larger than any of the penguins George had seen so far, these were also tame. He measured them, recording that they were 39 inches tall, with black heads and yellow ear patches. He identified them as King Penguins, but ornithologists suggested later that this might be an altogether new species: the Emperor Penguin—Aptenodytes forsteri, named after the Forsters.*

Cook named the island South Georgia, after George III, and hoisted the Union Jack, taking possession for the king and his heirs while the marines fired their muskets into the air ‘to give greater weight to this assertion’, George wrote drily, ‘to the utter amazement of the seals and pinguins, the inhabitants of these newly discovered dominions’. Then, instead of turning north-east on a straight line towards South Africa, Cook stayed on an easterly course, skirting along the higher latitudes, still in search of the Southern Continent.

• Several other species which they found during the Resolution voyage were named after the Forsters, including the New Zealand fur seal (Arctocephalus forsteri), the Yellow-eyed Mullet (Aldrichetta forsteri) and the genus Forsterygion—a small fish from coastal New Zealand. Other species named after them are a hawkfish (Paracirrhites forsteri) and a North American tern (Sterna forsteri).

Explorers Return to Europe, 1775

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 207-208:

Before they had left England, it had been decided that the Resolution would return via Cape Town—which was why friends and families had sent letters there to wait for the crew on their arrival. The men devoured fresh food and letters and news. They read piles of old newspapers to catch up. ‘Sweden delivered from the yoke of aristocratical tyranny’, George was glad to learn. In the so-called Swedish Revolution, the young king Gustav III had been the mastermind in a coup d’état which had ended the stronghold that the nobility had exercised over the monarchy. He was not intending to take away freedom, the king had said, but wanted to stop aristocratic despotism and establish ‘a right kind of Liberty that only can make you, my dear subjects, happy’. Like other enlightened rulers at the time, he had then begun to reform the justice system and economy, as well as instituting limited religious freedom.

France had a new king: at the age of nineteen, Louis XVI had succeeded his grandfather in May 1774 during the second visit of the Resolution to Tahiti. Poland had lost vast swathes of land when Russia, Prussia and Austria had divided around a third of the country between them. Having added a huge territory to Prussia in the Polish partition, the Prussian king was, George noted, ‘resting from his triumphs’. George also read that Russia and the Ottoman Empire had signed a peace treaty in July 1774, ending the war that had begun in 1768. With Russia gaining land and the right to protect Christians in the Muslim realm, the treaty marked the beginning of the decline of the once powerful Ottoman Empire, which for long had controlled large parts of south-east Europe and the Middle East. George was optimistic. After the long years of war in Europe, peace seemed finally possible. Everything ‘promised general happiness to the human race’.

But trouble was brewing in the British colonies in North America. In December 1773 a group of colonists had dumped more than 300 chests of tea—the entire shipment of three East India Company vessels—into Boston harbour in protest against Britain’s new tax regulations on tea. A month later the rebels had tarred and feathered a British customs collector. On 5 September 1774, just as the Resolution had landed in New Caledonia, the colonists had convened the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia—a congress of elected colonial delegates—to discuss how best to respond to British rule in North America. Frustrated by the lack of parliamentary representation and economic restrictions, the delegates called for a boycott of British goods and recommended that each colony establish its own militia.

There was also news from the Adventure, which had stopped in Cape Town on her way to England exactly a year earlier, in March 1774. The men of the Resolution were horrified to learn that ten crew members had been killed and eaten by the Māori, but Cook refused to pass judgement until the news had been confirmed. He had always found the Māori to be brave and open-minded, ‘but they are a people that will never put up with an insult if they have an opportunity to resent it’. George agreed. John Rowe, one of the officers who had been cannibalized, had always shown a brutal disregard for indigenous people and ‘been exceeding desirous of firing upon them’. The Māori must have been provoked. ‘The whole tenour of their behaviour to Europeans, seems to acquit them of treachery and cruel malevolence,’ George wrote, ‘it is therefore greatly to be suspected that they took umbrage at some affront, perhaps unwittingly committed by the strangers, and revenged it.’

Forster's Impressions of Easter Island

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 163-165:

Perplexed by the huge stone statues they found here—human figures with extremely large heads and no legs, several metres high—George suspected that they were held in veneration. They asked the islanders ‘and from what we could understand, we concluded that they were monuments erected to the memory of some of their areekees, or kings’*—ariki was the Polynesian word for chief (or ari‘i in Tahitian). Usually able to adjust his viewpoint, these statues seemed just too baffling to George to appreciate. ‘The workmanship of this figure was rude,’ he wrote, ‘a European artist would have been ashamed of them.’ Where he had thought Tongan woodcarvers the equals of England’s best craftsmen, these statues showed ‘the arts in their infancy’.

George noted that the islanders here looked similar to the Tahitians except for their very elongated and pierced earlobes which almost reached their shoulders—‘in order to bring it to this size, they wore a leaf of a sugar cane, which is very elastic, rolled up in it like a scroll; by which means it was always on the stretch.’ They also had barkcloth, favoured red as a colour, had tattoos, and prepared their food not unlike those islanders the Resolution crew had met across the South Pacific islands. Their vocabulary revealed a common root with Māori and Tahitian words, he realized, and Hitihiti was delighted to be able to converse with them. Despite being thousands of miles away from New Zealand and Tahiti, George was certain that the islanders had ‘one common origin’.

Their faces were painted brown with streaks of white shell lime and some men wore large bushy caps made of brown gull feathers—almost ‘as large as the full bottomed wigs of European lawyers’. Some were dressed in tattered blue jackets and European hats, which they had traded with the Spanish explorers who had stopped here four years previously—‘indubitable testimonies of the visit which the Spaniards had made to this island’. Headdresses were regarded as sacred in Polynesia and the islanders snatched Hitihiti’s black cap as well as Hodges’ hat while he was sketching the statues. On another occasion, an islander grabbed Reinhold’s plant bag, and one of the marines shot and wounded him. Though Reinhold mentioned the incident briefly in his journal, George wrote about the moral implications—it was tragic ‘that Europeans too often assume the power of inflicting punishments on people who are utterly unacquainted with their laws’.

Trading proved difficult. Not only had the marine injured a man but the islanders had few provisions to spare. When the crew tried to bargain, the islanders tricked them by selling baskets of potatoes in which the bottom layers had been filled with stones. The islanders had no interest in beads or nails, but were keen on coconut shells and Tahitian barkcloth. Hitihiti once again advised the men to buy red feathers to barter with when they returned to Tahiti and purchased himself as many feather caps as he could find. The Resolution remained on Easter Island only three days because there was not enough food for them to stay any longer. Hitihiti added another stick to his journal bundle and ‘remembered Easter Island with this observation, tàta maïtaï, whennùa èeno, that the people were good, but the island very bad’.

* Today it is believed that the statues were carved between AD 1250 and 1500 as representations of ancestors and sacred spirits. Historians and archaeologists have speculated that the introduction of Polynesian rats and deforestation led to conflict, war, starvation and the societal collapse on Rapa Nui.

Cannibalism in New Zealand, 1773

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 148-151:

A week later, on 21 November, a group of Māori women paddled out and told the Resolution crew that they were worried. Their men, the crew learned, had left to attack their enemies. Who those opponents were remained unclear, but the next morning dozens of Māori warriors, their cheeks painted red, arrived in a flotilla of eight canoes packed with cloaks, weapons and greenstone objects to trade with the Resolution. Suspecting that the warriors must have raided a neighbouring settlement to sell their goods to the Europeans, George wrote, ‘I am much afraid that their unhappy differences with other tribes, were revived on our account’.

In any event, it was time for the Resolution to leave and the next morning Cook took a few men to a neighbouring island to collect sea celery, wild spinach and other greens as provisions for the long journey. Some officers rowed to a nearby cove to trade. When they pushed their boat ashore, they saw the Māori warriors from the previous day, and also something round and red impaled on a stick, possibly an organ, maybe a heart. As they looked around, they found more organs and intestines scattered on the ground—and to their horror a human head from which the lower jawbone was missing. The skull had clearly been fractured by something blunt, perhaps a club. The victim seemed to have been an adolescent boy. As the officers stared at the bloody heap, the Māori skewered the lung and showed them more body parts. When the officers asked what had happened, the warriors told them that there had been a fight with their enemies. With words and gestures, they explained that they had killed the boy and eaten parts of him, but they too had lost men, pointing at some weeping women nearby who were cutting their foreheads with sharp stones as they lamented the dead.

For Europeans, cannibalism seemed inconceivable. ‘In accordance with human nature,’ said Immanuel Kant, Germany’s most respected philosopher, ‘there cannot be many [man-eaters], or, more likely, perhaps none at all.’ As explorers had returned from South America and the South Pacific in previous centuries, there had been rumours and the occasional suspicious body parts but no one had ever actually observed the practice. In January 1770, during the Endeavour voyage, the Māori had confirmed that they did indeed eat people by picking up a human bone and pretending to bite into it. They ‘shew us that they had eat the flesh they bit a[nd] naw’d the bone and draw’d it thro’ their mouth and this in such a manner as plainly shew’d that the flesh to them was a dainty bit’, Cook had recorded in his logbook. The graphic demonstration had been enough to convince the crew. Richard Pickersgill, who had also travelled on the Endeavour, had noted that the ‘Barbarrous cruelty these savages is guilty of which ought to make them to abhord by all who may have occasion to tutch at these Islands’. This didn’t stop him from trying to purchase the half-eaten head now, so that he could take it to London to show his friends. He offered a nail and a bargain was struck.

When the men returned to the Resolution, Pickersgill placed his grisly purchase on a railing and soon everybody on board had gathered to examine it. Another group of Māori had come to the Resolution to trade and they now asked for the head so that they could eat it, but the new owner refused. Second Lieutenant Charles Clerke, who was known and liked for his practical jokes—‘a genal favorite’, as young Elliott said—proposed an experiment. Taking a sharp knife, he cut off one cheek and handed it to the Māori, but they gestured that they only consumed cooked flesh. After debating what to do, Clerke put the cheek on a gridiron and grilled it over the fire in the galley kitchen.

Transfixed the crew of the Resolution watched the Māori eat the cheek. Some goaded them, and others were revolted. Some even seemed tempted to try a bite themselves. A little later, when Cook returned from gathering wild vegetables, he demanded that the spectacle be repeated. He wanted to prove the rumours once and for all. ‘Being desireous of being an eye wittness to a fact which many people had their doubts about’, Cook wrote in his logbook, ‘I concealed my indignation and ordered a piece of the flesh to be broiled and brought on the quarter-deck where one of these Canibals ate it with a seeming good relish.’ Describing the scene as calmly as a scientific experiment at the Royal Society in London, Cook concluded ‘that the New Zealanders are Canibals can now no longer be doubted’.

Hitihiti was appalled and ‘Metamorphosed into the Statue of Horror’. Crying inconsolably, he hid in a cabin and it took George several hours to calm his friend. George was also shocked but refused to regard the Māori as heartless barbarians, determined to understand their motivation. It couldn’t be hunger, given the abundance of fish in Queen Charlotte Sound and the Māori’s productive vegetable gardens. Perhaps, then, the motive was revenge. Weighing up the arguments, he noted: ‘The New Zealanders never eat their adversaries, unless they are killed in battle; they never kill their relations for the purpose of eating them; they do not even eat them if they die of a natural death, and they take no prisoners with a view to fatten them for their repast.’ Although he might never know their exact reasons, ‘the action of eating human flesh, whatever our education may teach us to the contrary, is certainly neither unnatural nor criminal in itself.’

Polynesian Explorers with Cook, 1773

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 133-135:

On 18 September 1773, after a month in the Society Islands, the Resolution and the Adventure sailed west. The crew were sad to leave. Fourteen-year-old Midshipman John Elliott, so dismissive of the Māori in New Zealand, had thought Tahiti a paradise—‘the Men being all fine’, he wrote in his journal, and ‘the Women beautiful, compaired with all those that we had seen, of the Middle Size, zingy, suple figures, fine teeth and Eyes, and the finest formed Hands, fingers, and Arms that I ever saw’. The stores were filled with fresh fruit, vegetables and water, and on Huahine they had bought plenty of livestock. The Resolution left with 209 pigs, thirty dogs, and fifty fowls on board, and so many bananas that the deck looked like a tropical orchard. The men felt rested and healthy—except those suffering from venereal diseases.

They also had two new crew members: Hitihiti, who had boarded the Resolution on Raiatea, and Mai on the Adventure. Mai was in his mid-twenties, a tall and slim man with long black hair and small hands ornamented with tattoos. Originally from Raiatea, Mai had fled to Tahiti as a boy after invaders from Bora Bora had overthrown the Raiateans. A few years later, in 1767, he had been wounded during the bloody battle between the Tahitians and the Dolphin crew—the jagged scar below his ribs a lifelong reminder of the encounter. He then returned to Raiatea, but he was captured and taken to Bora Bora, from where he escaped to the island of Huahine. By his own account, he had assisted one of the high priests and travelled between the islands, but mostly he was burning to avenge Raiatea against Bora Bora. During the Dolphin attack he had seen and painfully felt the violent power of European guns. So when the Resolution and the Adventure arrived at Huahine, Mai had asked if he could travel to England to procure firearms in order to fight against the Bora Borans.

Mai was affectionate and full of energy, quickly becoming popular with the Adventure crew who nicknamed him Jack. They were especially impressed by his fishing skills and couldn’t believe how much more he was able to catch compared to them. James Burney, the Second Lieutenant on the Adventure, believed that Mai’s curiosity and strength made him perfectly suited for an expedition. George also thought him intelligent, if sometimes too hot-tempered. He preferred the company of seventeen-year-old Hitihiti, who was also liked by the rest of the crew. Elliott was struck by his handsome looks, declaring him ‘in every respect a very superior sample of this Country than Omai’. Mai and Hitihiti were not particularly fond of each other—presumably because Hitihiti was originally from Bora Bora, which had invaded Mai’s Raiatea—and they engaged with each other as little as possible.

Both islanders had to adjust to their strange new lives. Cooped up below deck in the airless space where the sailors slept, his hammock swaying to the rhythm of the Resolution’s pitch, Hitihiti became seasick. How different it was to sail on this cavernous ship compared with a Polynesian outrigger canoe. He only felt better when he ate some pieces of raw dolphin, which he dipped into a bowl of seawater, and some of the fermented breadfruit balls which he had brought on board. On the Adventure, Mai was homesick and then terrified when he saw most of the crew assembling on deck the day after he had come on board. The captain’s solemn voice, the men lacing their fingers in prayer and tracing a cross from forehead to their shoulders, convinced him that this was some kind of ritual and that they were going to offer him as a human sacrifice. It took a while, Burney said, to understand why Mai was so scared and to convince him that this was just the ship’s normal Sunday service.

Despite the initial difficulties, over the next weeks the two islanders became part of the crew, respected and valued. On the Adventure, Burney, who had been at sea since the age of ten, looked after Mai. Burney enjoyed Mai’s tales from the Society Islands even if he was exaggerating—‘he is a Small matter addicted to romancing.’ On the Resolution, George and Hitihiti struck up a friendship. Roughly the same age, they talked and taught each other side by side at a table, George’s wavy dark-brown hair tied into a ponytail next to Hitihiti’s tight black curls. Hitihiti helped George to review his vocabulary from the Society Islands and George in turn taught Hitihiti English. They learned from each other.

Forster's First Impressions of New Zealand

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 93-96:

George was a gifted linguist, quick to learn Māori names and words as he pointed at plants, animals, clothing, weapons and jewellery, asking to be told what they were called and keen to understand the Māori way of life. He noted the striking tattoos—‘strongly carved with spirals in the face’—and their clothing and hairstyles. Some of the women wore caps made of brown feathers, while others had tattooed lips with several rows of blue punctures on their chin. There were young men with ‘amazing bushy hair, which hung wildly over their faces’, and others who tied it back and often decorated it with white feathers or carved bone combs. George described their canoes and clothing—‘an apron, made of their close-wrought cloth, covered with red feathers, faced with white dog-skin, and ornamented with pieces of the ear-shell’—and watched them dance ‘alternately extending their arms, and stamping with their feet in a violent and almost frantic manner’.

Equally fascinated by nature, George recorded black oystercatchers with bright red bills and feet strutting along the beach, and the long-necked shags, part of the cormorant species, roosting on rocky outcrops. Falcons with brown-and-cream-flecked plumage glided above him, and the noisy ka-hek-ka-hek-ka-hek call of the Fluttering Shearwater echoed across the water. He shot birds and caught fish which he painted, and collected plants to press. One evening, he and his father caught a small tawny-brown spotted owl with beautiful golden-yellow eyes as they scrambled through the dense forest, and a few days later the now extinct slate-grey South Island kōkako, a bird slightly smaller than a pigeon with prominent orange wattle flaps under its beak.

The forests were thick and lush, an entangled web of evergreen trees and ferns that seemed prehistoric. Ancient rimus soared high—with dangling spiky foliage which almost looked like Spanish moss from a distance. There were giant pukatea that stood firm with their huge buttress roots and cabbage trees with dense tufts of long sword-like leaves at the tip of their branches, which the Māori used for weaving, the roots an important food source. Tree ferns laced the sky—ponga with crowns of large fronds with a silvery underside that glowed in the moonlight and the even taller mamaku which grew up to 60 feet high.

A lively trade was soon established between the Europeans and the Māori. Glass bottles, nails, hatchets and European clothes were exchanged for carved fishing hooks, tools, jewellery, weapons, cloaks—and sex. The Māori were particularly keen on glass bottles and European shirts, George observed, admiring how ‘they were not inclined however to make disadvantageous bargains, and demanded the best price for every little trifle which they offered for sale’.

But when the Māori men presented their women to the sailors, George was appalled. The women were reluctant but, no matter how much they cried, the Māori men decided whether or not they had sex with the Europeans. Like Cook (who worried that his men would introduce vice and disease), George blamed the crew for having started this sex trade. He doubted whether the Māori ‘ever debased themselves so much as to make a trade of their women, before we created new wants by shewing them iron-tools’. Nothing could excuse the crew’s behaviour. Who was worse, George wondered, the Māori men who forced their women to have sex, or the Europeans who partook?

...

‘I fear that hitherto our intercourse has been wholly disadvantageous to the nations of the South Seas; and that those communities have been the least injured, who have always kept aloof from us,’ George now wrote. Less than two months after praising how the Resolution crew had shown the Māori at Dusky Sound the advantages of European improvements—tree felling, repairing, painting—George’s attitude had drastically changed. It was an extraordinary statement for the time. More typical was young John Elliott, who was convinced that the Māori were ‘ferocious Cannibals’ who ‘work themselves into a frenzey, foaming at the mouth’, and Anders Sparrman, who declared that they had a ‘desire to tear their enemies’ limbs apart with their teeth’.

Furneaux's Adventure in New Zealand

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 91-92:

After losing sight of the Resolution among the Antarctic icebergs, Captain Furneaux had sailed the Adventure to Tasmania, a large island about 150 miles south of Australia which the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had sighted and visited in 1642. The French had landed there in 1772, but the Adventure was the first British ship to anchor. For a few days they charted parts of the eastern coast, stopping briefly to fill up their water stores. They saw some abandoned huts and overgrown pathways but didn’t encounter any inhabitants. From there the Adventure sailed east to New Zealand’s Queen Charlotte Sound, where they arrived in early April 1773, two months after their separation from the Resolution.

Like a vast river estuary, the opening of Queen Charlotte Sound was eight miles wide but narrowed as it stretched inland. Sheltered by mountains, the waters within were calm. Steep ravines, rocky headlands and densely forested ridges serrated the coastline where some of the mountains dropped in perpendicular cliffs into the sound, and others sloped down towards long beaches. The water was dark with thin azure bands along the shallow edges. When the Adventure reached the rendezvous point at Ship Cove, a natural harbour with a wide sandy beach and a freshwater stream, they discovered trees carved with the names of the Endeavour’s crew but no sign of the Resolution. Over the next six weeks, Furneaux’s men repaired their ship, took on supplies, and also met a great number of Māori who lived in nearby settlements.

The Māori had carefully approached the Adventure in canoes. ‘Tobia Tobia,’ they called out, using their name for Tupaia—the high priest and navigator from Raiatea, an island near Tahiti—who had joined Cook on his previous voyage and travelled with the Endeavour to New Zealand in 1770. As Māori and Tahitian were related languages, Tupaia had not only assisted Cook with his navigation but also acted as the Endeavour’s translator. In Māori tradition, Raiatea was also their ancestral homeland so they felt a reverence for Tupaia. Having seen him work as interpreter, guide and navigator, most of the Māori had regarded Tupaia as the Europeans’ leader. In the intervening three years, stories about Tupaia, and the Endeavour’s thundering cannons and her pale-skinned crew, had been recounted by the Māori across New Zealand. And so they asked the Adventure crew—some of whom understood a few Māori words because they had been part of Cook’s first expedition—about Tupaia and were saddened to hear that he had died during the Endeavour voyage.

...

The next morning, at 5 a.m., the Resolution turned into Queen Charlotte Sound. Once past the entrance Cook fired a cannon and to their delight another answered. A few hours later, they saw the Adventure in Ship Cove. That evening the two ships anchored next to each other and the men celebrated their reunion.

Translating for the Royal Society

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 51-53:

At the end of 1770, the Forsters moved back to London, taking lodgings next to Reinhold’s old school friend Woide, who had moved to Somerset House Stable Yard near the Thames. On 13 December, three days after their arrival, father and son went to the Royal Society, the nexus of British scientific enquiry where, since its foundation in the 1660s, fellows met to learn about new scientistic discoveries and exchange ideas with like-minded men. Reinhold Forster knew the Royal Society well, having attended the weekly meetings during their first stay in London. But now he wanted to introduce his son and present George’s translations (though Reinhold’s name was on their covers). So they made their way to Crane Court, a short fifteen-minute walk from their lodgings in a little cul-de-sac off Fleet Street, where the fellows met every Thursday. The president directed the meetings from a large armchair at one end of a long table, with a bust of the Society’s first royal patron, King Charles II, behind him, while the fellows sat on green-upholstered benches around the table.

At only sixteen George now found himself in the same room with some of the greatest minds in England. Almost every Thursday he accompanied his father to the Royal Society, where he sat under the watchful eyes of the portraits of illustrious previous fellows: the periwigged former president and mathematician Isaac Newton; the philosopher Francis Bacon in a lace ruff and embroidered velvet coat; and the architect Christopher Wren, who rebuilt London after the Great Fire of 1666. At these meetings George heard scholars talk about the physics of light, rare birds in the East Indies, new comets, the latest telescopes, tumours in pregnant women and subterranean geological formations. He saw animals preserved in spirits, pinned insects, a stuffed sea lion and a 24-foot snake, as well as the skeletons of a crocodile and an ostrich. He was receiving instructions unlike any other sixteen-year-old. As father and son attended the weekly meetings and published translations, their names soon spread across the scholarly world. Then, in February 1772, a little more than a year after their return to London, Reinhold was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and became officially part of the British scientific establishment.

George continued to work, translating eight volumes in total, while his father wrote and published numerous essays on botany, insects, zoology, antiquities, geography and mineralogy. ‘If I didn’t have a son of seventeen who helped me with translating,’ Reinhold admitted, ‘I couldn’t possibly do all this work.’ George began to feel like a ‘translation-machine’, but the reviews were glowing. ‘He writes our language,’ the Critical Review applauded (praising Reinhold, since only he was credited), ‘with propriety; always with perspicuity, the great requisite in the communication of scientific learning’. Another critic even declared George’s translation of Bougainville’s A Voyage Round the World ‘superior to the original’.

George Forster's Early Youth

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 27-28:

George Forster was ten when he went on his first expedition.

He was a slender boy, small for his age, but what he lacked in physical strength he made up for in tenacity during the five months that he and his father travelled through Russia. In charge of collecting and identifying plants, the ten-year-old would wander off alone, eyes wide open, searching for new discoveries—sometimes climbing trees, at others keeping his head near the ground to study the vegetation with a magnifying glass. When he returned to the tent with full bags, he would press the samples he had found between paper, carefully arranging blossoms and leaves so that he could classify them later. Soon his collection had risen to 700 specimens.

While other children sat on hard benches in orderly rows at school, learning by rod and rote, George found himself galloping on small Kalmyk horses across the Russian steppes and wading through marshes on the banks of the Volga river. He watched a violent wildfire race across the vast grasslands to the east, its ravenous flames consuming everything in its path. He remembered the terror he felt that day for the rest of his life. Instead of studying arithmetic or conjugating Latin verbs, he observed flocks of black herons, wild boars and wolves, and huge Bactrian camels used by the nomadic Kalmyks as pack animals, which evoked the stories of the Arabian Nights and Ali Baba. He met Muslim Tatar traders along the Volga, fierce Cossack warriors from the open steppes to the east who wore sheepskin hats, baggy trousers and colourful caftans, and German settlers so destitute that they lived in earth dugouts in the ground. Near today’s Russian border with Kazakhstan, he marvelled at Lake Elton, a huge shallow salt lake with a shoreline encrusted in a thick white layer like snow, against water which algae had turned blood red. And in the Ryn Desert just north of the Caspian Sea, he felt piercing winds whip across the dunes, as wild as the land itself.

Russia was on a different scale from the flat gentle countryside where George had been raised near Gdansk, in today’s Poland. Everything here was vaster and emptier. The skies, lakes and land were bigger, the distances immense, and the weather extreme. He feasted his eyes and tasted new foods. He ate wild asparagus, drank fermented mare’s milk—‘of a nauseous or disagreeable Taste’—and enjoyed the refreshing juice of bog cranberries mixed with water and honey after the long dusty days on horseback.

This was not like learning from the books he loved. He could see, smell and feel that he had entered another world. The food had a different flavour, the languages were unfamiliar, and the people looked nothing like those at home. In Russia, he absorbed a new and very foreign country for the first time. At the age of ten, he became a traveller.

How Much Polish in Esperanto

This week's newsletter from Culture.pl contains several articles on language, one of which, by Mikołaj Gliński, answers How much Polish is there in Esperanto? Here are some excerpts:

The Slavic Esperanto lexicon is generally considered to derive from two Slavic languages, both of which Zamenhof knew very well – Russian and Polish. While Russian, as he later recalled, was his favourite during his early days, as well as the language of the larger part of his linguistic output, Polish was the language spoken in Warsaw, where Zamenhof would eventually spend most of his life. And it’s actually these two languages that make up the 1% of Slavic in Esperanto vocabulary. The problem is that sometimes identifying the original language is very hard if not simply impossible.

While Esperanto words like barakti (to flounder, from барахтаться barahtat’sja), gladi (to iron, from гладить gladit’), krom (except, from кроме krome), or vosto (a tail, from хвост) are easy to identify as of Russian origin (they simply don’t appear in Polish), and others like kolbaso can be considered as coming from Russian based on their phonetic build-up (Rus. kolbasa, compare Pol. kiełbasa), there are also some that can be really problematic. This goes for words like celo (aim), bulko (bun), klopodo (effort), kaĉo (porridge, from kasza / каша kaša), prava (right [in opinion], from prawy / правый pravyj), or svati (to matchmake, from swat / сват svat). Due to their almost identical forms in both languages, it seems hardly possible to tell from which language Zamenhof took the original root.

...

And yet the group of Esperanto words which are usually identified as Polish loan words is significant. It includes such words as:

• barĉo – borscht (from barszcz),
• ĉu – whether (from czy),
• krado – a grating (from krata),
• luti – to solder (from lutować)
• pilko – a ball (Polish piłka)
• ŝelko – suspenders (from szelki)
• [via] moŝto – [your] highness (from Polish mość),

While this is a rather diverse bunch, comprising elements of clothing, sport items, local food, and a grammatical particle, some of these words can be more interesting than others, and actually instructive in telling us something about how Zamenhof saw the component languages of Esperanto, in this case Polish.

...

One of these words is moŝto. It certainly isn’t a word of particular prominence or frequency in contemporary Esperanto. In fact, it’s a word you’re not likely to use at all, unless you’re addressing high authority, or... a king. The latter was Zamenhof’s case – he used the word (precisely: Lia reĝa moŝto) when addressing the king of Spain Alfonso XIII speaking at the Esperanto Congress in Barcelona in 1909. Yet it is this word that also happens to offer interesting insights into the role of Polish in the Esperanto system.

The word goes back to the Polish word mość, one of many honorific lexemes used (historically) in Polish. In early modern Poland, the phrase was required as an obligatory form of address between and to members of the Polish nobility (szlachta). Used and abused, this linguistic habit was part of the more widespread social and cultural phenomenon known as szlachtomania (nobility-mania), a real scourge of early-modern Polish society.

...

While Zamenhof on the one hand made sure that addressing people in Esperanto would be as democratic as possible (Esperantists address each other by a simple vi (you), much like in contemporary English, and unlike in Polish), he also reserved a mode of speaking when addressing the highest royal authority. In finding the right word he somewhat naturally turned to Polish. A choice well justified, as Polish is perhaps the only Slavic language (along with Czech) to have developed an elaborate honorific system that distinguishes between who you’re talking to, based on your age and social status (historically, class of society).

That Polish is at the core of Esperanto honorific usage is best exemplified in the phrase via reĝa moŝto, which translates as Your Majesty, and can be seen as quite a direct calque from the Polish: wasza królewska mość...

Is Ĉu Polish?

But perhaps the most interesting and telling case of a Polish Slavic influence on Esperanto is the particle ĉu (whether, if). This little but important word goes most likely back to the Polish czy, otherwise it comes up only in Belarusian (ці/tsi) and is not used in other Slavic languages. Interestingly the same particle (צי, tsi) surfaces also in Yiddish, a language Zamenhof was surely familiar with.

Much the same as in Polish, ĉu in Esperanto is used primarily to introduce a question. Like in this example:

Imagine you find yourself somewhere in Eastern Europe. But is it Russia or Belarus, Poland or Croatia, Slovenia or Slovakia? Find out how much you know about Slavic languages and we’ll see if you’re able to make your way through Slavic Europe.

Ĉu li aŭ ŝi amas min? [Does he or she love me?]

Whereas in French or English, asking a question involves inverting the word order and/or inserting an auxiliary particle, which as many struggling language learners surely know, can be quite complicated, Esperanto simply puts ĉu in front of the phrase or subordinate clause, the sentence basically stays the same. This is exactly how ‘czy’ operates in Polish and Yiddish.

But ĉu is also interesting because it opens us on the issues of syntax – as most structuralists would tell you, language is not really about vocabulary. This helps to pinpoint the more thorough impact of Slavic, and Polish in particular, on the fundamental grammatical structures in Esperanto. Like say, the accusative...

Is Esperanto’s accusative Slavic?

Esperanto is somewhat notorious for its rather free word order. This goes for noun + adjective order (adjective noun) but also, and more importantly, the structural order of subject, object and verb in a sentence. The latter in Esperanto is very flexible, even if the word order which is usually recommended is SVO. This flexibility, which allows for great liberty in constructing Esperanto sentence, is actually facilitated through the presence of the accusative. Compare these examples:

The boy bit the dog

La knabo mordis la hundon

La knabo la hundon mordis

La hundon la knabo mordis

La hundon mordis la knabo

Mordis la hundon la knabo

Mordis la knabo la hundon

The presence of the accusative case (marked by the -n ending) was a bone of contention in early discussions among Esperantists (and partially led to a schism in the early Esperanto movement, see Ido). But Zamenhof always remained a strong advocate of the accusative. As Professor Żelazny explains, he thought it was a key tool in allowing bigger flexibility for Esperanto sentences, which was particularly important in poetry, which Zamenhof admired so much. The accusative affix allowed for greater flexibility in the Esperanto word order and thus multiplied the rhyming potential of it, which otherwise would be very limited.

As a result, Esperanto’s word order is very fluid (although naturally some positions are preferred by users) just like it is in Slavic languages. And while it’s obviously impossible to trace back the invention to Polish or Russian (German also has the accusative,) the Esperanto sentence shares a general similarity with the rather free syntax of Slavic sentence.

This is showcased in the early translation of The Pharaoh by Bolesław Prus. As Walter Żelazny notes, it was La Faraono, translated by Kazimierz Bein, that became a kind of model for much of the literature later written in Esperanto.

...

Semantic calques

A more subtle influence of Slavic languages on the structure of Esperanto, and more precisely its morphology, can be traced in the semantic build-up of Esperanto word formations, like senanima, senforta, or senfunda. While all these words are built from Esperanto (sen-) and Romance elements, they are actually semantic calques from Slavic languages, but again telling whether it’s Polish or Russian may be next to impossible.

• senanima – heartless, callous [calque of Rus. бeздyшный or Pol. bezduszny]
• senfunda– bottomless [calque of Rus. бeздoнный, Pol. bezdenny]
• senforta – powerless [calque of Rus. бессильный / Pol. bezsilny]

A similar ‘subliminal’ influence of Slavic semantics can be seen in the meaning and functioning of some words. One oft-cited example is the Esperanto word plena ‘full, complete’, which looks Latinate in form (French plein(e), Latin plen- ‘full’), but has the semantic range of Russian полный polnyi ‘full, complete’, as can be seen in the phrase plena vortaro ‘a complete dictionary’, a usage not possible with the French or Latin words. And one could add that it’s also how the word pełny is also used in Polish.

Phonetics

Another area of a possible Slavic influence is phonology. As Walter Żelazny explains: “The Esperanto phonological system is almost entirely Polish.” That’s why, as Żelazny claims, the majority of Poles, as the majority of Slavs, should not have to learn any vowels. In fact, all the sounds which you can find in Esperanto are also in Polish, including diacriticical signs: ĉ (Polish cz), ĝ (dż), Ĵ (ż), Ŝ (sz), ŭ (ł).

Alphabet

A bit surprisingly, Polish influence is also traceable in the Esperanto alphabet and orthography. The Esperanto alphabet consists of 28 letters, with each letter standing for one sound. Apart from diacritical letters, its peculiarities include the letters C and J. Pronounced as ‘ts’ and ‘y’, respectively, they may at first seem a bit counter-intuitive for many Esperanto learners, but they are best explained on the grounds of the Polish alphabet. It is a common experience of many Polish learners that these letters to the English eye are false friends. (As to further Slavic influence in the Esperanto alphabet, compare the letter ŭ in Esperanto and Belarusian).

...

Accent

But perhaps the best and most convincing example of the overall influence of Polish – and not Slavic languages – on the shape of Esperanto is its accent. The accent rule was included already in the first edition of Unua Libro, the first Esperanto handbook, published by Zamenhof in Warsaw in 1887. Among the 16 cardinal principles of Esperanto the one No. 10 reads:

The accent falls on the last syllable but one (penultimate).

The penultimate accent just happens to be one of the characteristic features of Polish, differentiating it sharply from other local Slavic languages, like Russian (which has unpredictable stress) or Czech (initial accent) as well as from French, which accents the last syllable pronounced. That’s why some practitioners of Esperanto claim that Polish pronunciation of Esperanto is the most natural and closest to the Esperanto standard. But this is of course rather a matter of individual taste.