Travel of Georg Forster
Queen Charlotte Sound - New Zealand (Tōtaranui)
Title
Heiva dance at Queen Charlotte's Sound
Short description
Georg Forster describes a heiva, or dance, performed by a group of natives visting the Resolution.
Text on source
Some of them being in remarkable good spirits, gave us a heiva, or dance, on the quarter-deck. They placed themselves in a row, and parted with their shaggy upper garments: one of them sung some words in a rude manner, and all the rest accompanied the gestures he made alternately extending their arms, and stamping with their feet in a violent and almost frantic manner. The last words which we might suppose the burden of the song, or a chorus, they all repeated together; and we could easily distinguish some sort of metre in them, but were not sure they had rhimes. The music was extremely rough, and of no great extent in these kinds of songs. In the evening they all went off again, and returned to the upper part of the sound from whence they came.
English translation
Folios/Pages
pp. 220-221
Date
1773 06 01
Observations on the events description
The dots on the map indicate the places where sound and music events were described. They don't represent travel stages.
Participants
Name
Role
Notes
Edit
Delete
Cook, James
Viewer
Forster, Johann Reinold
Viewer
How to quote
Fabbrocino A. P., "Heiva dance at Queen Charlotte's Sound" (Event description), Echos. Sound Ecosystems in Travelogues. Published 2024 03 14.
doi: 10.25430/echos.travels.76
This work is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 
