Sea People

by Christina Thompson

  The Tahitians in their canoes paddled round Wallis’s ship, holding up plantain branches and making speeches and throwing the fronds into the sea. The British showed trinkets and made friendly signs and tried to entice the islanders on board. The Tahitians seemed cheerful and talked a great deal in a language that sounded to Robertson like that of the Patagonians of Tierra del Fuego (with which it had no relationship whatsoever). More and more canoes continued to arrive, and eventually a “fine brisk young man” scrambled up by the mizzen chains and leapt out of the shrouds onto an awning, where he stood, laughing and looking down on the quarterdeck. Soon more Tahitians were climbing aboard, looking around at everything and snatching whatever they could. After a while—the story is familiar—the Tahitians began to be “a Little surly,” the British grew nervous, and the next thing was the firing of a nine-pound gun. At this, the Tahitians all jumped overboard and swam away to their canoes. Wallis ordered his men to make sail, and the islanders returned to shore.

  Wallis was not leaving Tahiti, however; he was just circling in search of a safe place to land. As the Dolphin sailed round the island, the two sides engaged in a series of tactical maneuvers. At one moment, the Tahitians would be visiting the ship, bringing quantities of pigs, chickens, coconuts, breadfruit, and bananas; at the next they would be hooting and hollering, trying to make off with the ship’s anchors, or ambushing its boats. The meaning of all this was obscure to the Europeans, who alternated between trying to make friends with the Tahitians and aggressively fending off what they perceived as attacks.

  The Tahitians, meanwhile, were also trying to make sense of what was going on. According to the Reverend James Cover, who lived in Tahiti some three decades later and who talked to descendants of people who had witnessed these events, the Tahitians were astonished by their first sight of a European ship, and “some supposed that it was a floating island,” an idea with some basis in Polynesian myth. On closer inspection, they realized that it was, in fact, a vessel, though one unlike any they had ever seen—while the largest Tahitian war canoes were almost as long as the Dolphin, they did not have anything like its breadth or height or its huge masts with their elaborate complex of rigging and sails.

  How the Tahitians interpreted these events is, as many historians have noted, “by any standard of objective discourse, nothing more than informed guess,” since there are no contemporary sources that capture their point of view. But it seems likely that, at least in the beginning, they viewed the Dolphin as something come from the realm of the ancestors—a vessel from the mythic homeland of Hawaiki or the netherworld of Te Pō. Some have suggested that—as with Cook’s encounter at Kealakekua Bay—the Tahitians may have associated the strangers with an incarnation of the war god ‘Oro. The color red, which was prominently displayed on the sides of the ship, on the coats of the marines, and on the pennant that the British planted to symbolize their possession of the island, was linked with this deity, while lightning and thunder (cannon and gun fire) were signs of his terrible power. Then there were the many “wanton tricks” performed by women and girls, who stood on the rocks and in the prows of the canoes exposing their genitals—gestures that were interpreted by the British as “erotic enticement” but that, according to the anthropologist Anne Salmond, were actually a form of ritual behavior that “opened a pathway to Te Po, the realm of the ancestor gods, channelling their power” against the strangers.

  When at last the Dolphin stopped circling and came to anchor in Matavai Bay, the skirmishing that had marked these first days came to a head. According to those on board the ship, the morning began quite ordinarily. Canoes came out to the ship to trade—nails and “Toys” for hogs, fowls, and fruit—all conducted “very fair.” An audience of thousands had gathered on the shore, and the bay was filled with hundreds of canoes. Many of these had a girl in front who “drew all our people upon the Gunwells to see them,” and although some of the sailors were worried about the large numbers of stones they could see lying in the bottoms of the canoes, most did not believe that the islanders had “any Bade Intention against us,” especially as “all the men seemd as hearty and merry as the Girls.”

  Then a large double canoe carrying an obviously important figure put off from shore, and, at the same time, a silence fell upon the Tahitian crowd. The dignitary pulled on a red mantle and thrust a staff wrapped in white cloth into the air, and all at once the Tahitians began pelting the Dolphin with rocks—so many that in a few seconds “all our Decks was full of Great and small stones, and several of our men cut and Bruisd.” The British were slow to react, but when the Tahitians “gave another shout and powerd in the stones lyke hail,” they collected their wits and fired the great guns. The effect was dramatic. The explosion of sound, the flash of fire, and the rattle of shot on the canoes struck the Tahitians with “terror and amazement,” and they cried, so the Revered Cover tells us, “as with one voice, Eatooa harremye! Eatooa harremye! The God is come! The God is come! as they supposed, pouring thunder and lightning upon them.”

  The battle was fierce but short. The British fired grape and shot into the canoes, hitting even those who had retreated to what the Tahitians clearly believed was a safe distance. The gunners took aim, in particular, at the large ceremonial canoe, hitting it squarely amidships and cutting it in two. At this, the Tahitian armada disbanded—so fast, wrote Wallis, that within half an hour there was not a single canoe left in the bay.

  ALTHOUGH THE BATTLE of Matavai Bay mirrored European contact experiences in many parts of Polynesia—New Zealand, Rurutu, and Hawai‘i, to name just a few—the story that ultimately made its way back to Europe was not one of attacks and ambushes and fleets of stone-throwing warriors in canoes. It was a tale—familiar to us even now—of beauty and fascination, a story, for the most part, about Polynesian girls.

  After the failure of their assault on the Dolphin, the Tahitians made no further attempts to attack the British and instead sought to engage and placate them. Wallis struck up a friendship with a powerful local chiefess named Purea, who had a political agenda of her own and who seems to have been interested in co-opting this new and awful form of power. The rest of the crew went from openly fearing the Tahitians to openly consorting with them. On his arrival in Tahiti, Wallis had established an official market for foodstuffs, based on a currency of different-sized nails. But once his sailors had begun to recover from scurvy, what they wanted even more than fruit and vegetables was sex, and by the end of their second week in Tahiti a black market had emerged. The currency of choice was nails, inflation quickly set in, and within a matter of weeks the whole thing was so out of hand that every cleat in the Dolphin had been drawn, two-thirds of the men were sleeping on the deck (having traded away the nails used to sling their hammocks), and the carpenter was saying to anyone who would listen that he feared for the integrity of the ship.

  It is possible that, had Wallis been the only European to return with stories of Tahiti, the narrative might have been somewhat more nuanced: a story of light and dark, of amity and aggression, of both love and war. But the era of Polynesian isolation was over: just eight months after Wallis’s appearance, a second group of ships arrived, this time from France. They were commanded by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, whose name lingers on in the beautiful bougainvillea, and although they remained in Tahiti for just nine days, it was long enough to form a vivid impression. The Tahitians, now experienced in the ways of Europeans, did not even try to attack the French ships but instead moved quickly to engage the strangers, and the French experience was largely one of hospitality.

  Everything about Tahiti enchanted the elegant, erudite Bougainville: “The mildness of the climate, the beauty of the scenery, the fertility of the soil everywhere watered by rivers and cascades.” “I thought,” he wrote, “I was transported into the garden of Eden.” He saw the landscape in terms of the picturesque—“nature in that beautiful disorder which it was never in the power of art to imitate”—and the inhabitants as children of
nature. The islanders, he wrote, “seemed to live in an enviable happiness,” and the worst consequence—for the French—of shipwreck in these parts “would have been to pass the remainder of our days on an isle adorned with all the gifts of nature, and to exchange the sweets of the mother-country, for a peaceable life, exempted from cares.” Writing for an audience of cosmopolitan Parisians, Bougainville cast the Polynesian inhabitants of Tahiti as innocent sensualists. Wallis had taken possession of Tahiti on behalf of the British, dutifully, if unimaginatively, naming it King George the Third’s Island. In the first shimmer of what would come to be known as le mirage tahitien—that constellation of images of indolence and hedonism that still cluster about Polynesia today—Bougainville rechristened the island New Cythera, after the place at which the goddess Aphrodite had risen from the sea.

  A Man of Knowledge

  Cook Meets Tupaia

  “Review of the war galleys at Tahiti” by William Hodges, 1776.

  NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH, LONDON.

  WALLIS ARRIVED BACK in England in May 1768, and Cook sailed for Tahiti in August. The end of January found him off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, on the Pacific side of Cape Horn. From then until the end of March, when the first unmistakable signs of land began to appear, the Endeavour was abroad on the great ocean. They were making anywhere from twenty-five to one hundred forty miles a day, keeping to a general northwesterly direction, though periodically the wind would force them round to the southwest. Cook logged the distance and direction traveled, the speed and strength of the wind, the latitude and longitude of their position. But as January bled into February, and February gave way to March, there was little else to report. Mile upon mile of ocean slipped by; masses of cloud swept in and were torn away by the wind; the sea rose, whipped to a froth, and then fell to a smooth, flat calm. There were creatures of the deep—porpoises and bonitos—and of the air: red- and white-tailed tropic birds replacing the high-latitude shearwaters and petrels as the Endeavour plowed steadily northward, enclosed in the great circle of sea and sky.

  Inside the great cabin, Cook plotted their progress, aware that oceans were known for their deceits. Others passing this way had written of cloud banks looming in the distance like high land, and one of the maps he consulted—Alexander Dalrymple’s “Chart of the South Pacifick Ocean, Pointing Out the Discoveries Made Therein Previous to 1764”—showed numerous “signs of continent” in this quadrant of the sea. This chart, and the history in which it appeared, had been drafted in support of Dalrymple’s fervid belief in the existence of Terra Australis Incognita and thrust into Joseph Banks’s hands on the eve of their departure. It detailed all the known landfalls of the previous two centuries, as well as all the unsubstantiated rumors, but Cook encountered none of these. Keeping his ship’s head pointed for Tahiti, he tracked steadily through the emptiness of the southeastern Pacific, making a long, clean, northwesterly run of more than four thousand miles.

  The atmosphere on board the Endeavour was increasingly one of anticipation as each day brought them closer to the island they had all heard so much about. At 39 degrees south latitude, Banks reported that the weather had begun to feel “soft and comfortable like the spring in England.” The next day the ship was surrounded by killer whales. On March 1, Banks wrote that he had begun the new month “by pulling off an under waistcoat,” and the next day he “began to hope that we were now so near the peacefull part of the Pacifick ocean that we may almost cease to fear any more gales.” Soon, however, they discovered a new kind of discomfort: the weather turned hot and damp, and everything began to mold. When, a few days later, the wind increased, they thought briefly they had picked up the trades. But there was more troublesome weather ahead: heavy squalls of rain and hot, damp air and days of frustratingly light wind.

  Toward the end of March, Cook reported some egg birds, a kind of tern seen only in the vicinity of land, as well as some man-of-war (i.e., frigate) birds, which were never known to rest at sea. “All the birds we saw this Day went a way to the NW at Night,” observed the master’s mate. A few days later, a log of wood floated past the ship. The next day someone spotted a piece of seaweed—all noteworthy events after fifty-eight days of blue-water sailing. About this time, a disturbing incident occurred: a young marine named William Greenslade threw himself overboard. Caught in a minor act of thieving while on duty, he had been hounded by his fellow marines and, according to Banks, was so demoralized that, on being called to account, he slipped over the side instead. Poor Greenslade—just nine days later their first Pacific island hove into view.

  It was an atoll about four miles long, with an oval lagoon, a handful of small islets, and long stretches of barren beach and reef. At one end there was a clump of trees, and near the middle a pair of tall coconut palms, which, with their fronds flying before the easterly wind, reminded Cook of a flag. It was inhabited by men who “March’d along the shore abreast of the Ship with long clubs in their hands as tho they meant to oppose our landing.” Cook sounded but found no bottom, and in the absence of an anchorage, he ordered the ship to sail on. He named this, his first Pacific atoll, Lagoon Island—a lot of them would have lagoons, as it turned out. Historians have concluded that it was Vahitahi, an island at the southeastern end of the Tuamotu Archipelago.

  As he picked his way through the reefs and islands over the next few days, Cook sighted several of the Tuamotus, naming them mostly according to shape: Bow Island, Chain Island, Two Groups. Some were inhabited, and on a couple of occasions he slowed the ship and waited to see if the islanders would come off in their canoes—they did not. From a distance, he admired the palms and the reef-enclosed bodies of water, which, with a kind of persistent Englishness, he described as “lakes” and “ponds.” But there was nowhere to stop, and in any case he was not particularly interested in stopping, for they were now getting close to their destination. Then, on the morning of April 11, they sighted Tahiti, rising dark and rugged from the sea, a dramatically different vision from the flat, bright rings of coral in their wake.

  Cook quickly established himself in the same bay that Wallis had occupied, setting up camp on a point of land that he named Point Venus—not for the reasons that had inspired Bougainville but in honor of the event they had come to observe. No one would have missed the double entendre, however; even before the ship had come to anchor, Cook implemented a prohibition against the giving of “any thing that is made of Iron . . . in exchange for any thing but provisions.” The Tahitians showed no signs of aggression, welcoming Cook and his officers and leading them on a pleasant ramble through the woods. The shade, wrote Banks, was deep and delicious among “groves of Cocoa nut and bread fruit trees loaded with a profusion of fruit.” Houses were scattered picturesquely here and there. It was, he wrote, “the truest picture of an arcadia . . . that the imagination can form.”

  And yet, something was amiss. Four of the Endeavour’s men had been to Tahiti with Wallis, and it was clear to them that something had happened in the intervening years. Several of the large houses and canoe sheds that had formerly lined the bay were gone, and many of the people they had expected to see were nowhere to be found. One of these was Purea, the chiefess whose star had been in the ascendant in 1767. She had since been defeated by a rival and forced to flee to another part of the island, but once word got around of the Endeavour’s arrival, she put in an appearance, accompanied by her counselor Tupaia.

  And here steps onto the stage one of the most intriguing figures in this story. Tupaia, who is variously described as Purea’s right-hand man, her chief priest, and her lover, was a tall, impressive man of about forty, with the bearing and tattoos of a member of the chiefly class. He belonged to an elite society of priests and performers known as the ‘arioi and was an expert in the arts of politics, oratory, and navigation. Banks considered him “a most proper man, well born,” and “skilld in the mysteries of their religion.” Cook admired him but was inclined to think him proud. Georg Forster, who sailed w
ith Cook on his second voyage and knew of Tupaia only secondhand, described him as “an extraordinary genius.” Richard Thomson, a missionary writing some seventy years later, observed that he was “reputed by the people themselves . . . to have been one of the cleverest men of the islands.”

  Although he is generally referred to as a “priest,” a better term, as Banks suggested, might be “Man of Knowledge.” The Tahitian word is tahu‘a (tohunga in Māori, kahuna in Hawaiian), and its core meaning is something like “an adept,” that is, a master, expert, or authority. The idea can be narrowly associated with a particular craft or specialization, like canoe building or oratory, but when used in a general sense it implies a remarkable constellation of different types of knowledge. A man like Tupaia might be responsible for maintaining not only the history and genealogy of the ruling family to which he was attached, including their sacred rituals and rites, but all the esoteric knowledge of the people in general—“the names and ranks of the different . . . divinities, the origin of the universe and all its parts,” as well as the “Practise of Physick and the knowledge of Navigation and Astronomy.” His fields, if one can refer to them as such, included cosmology, politics, history, medicine, geography, astronomy, meteorology, and navigation, all of which, in a world with no clear division between natural and supernatural, were inextricably entangled with religion. But Tupaia was not just a repository of information; he clearly had a deep and inquiring mind. The anthropologist Nicholas Thomas describes him as an “indigenous intellectual with experimental inclinations”—a phrase that seems to capture something of both the man and the age in which he lived.