Sea People

by Christina Thompson

  WALLIS’S FIVE-WEEK SOJOURN in Tahiti had been long by comparison with those of other European explorers, but Cook’s was of another order altogether. The Endeavour remained in the Society Islands for a full four months, arriving in April, in good time to observe June’s transit of Venus, and not leaving until the beginning of August. This meant that there was ample time for the visitors to learn about Tahitian ways, and Banks, with no official duties, was at leisure to explore. In the end, he compiled a substantial account of Tahitian manners and customs, based both on what he himself had observed and what Tupaia and others told him. As with much ethnography, it is heavily weighted in favor of the observable—how to make fishing nets and breadfruit paste, the distribution of houses, procedures for tattooing, varieties of tools, weapons, and musical instruments, the dimensions of various structures, and so on.

  Many of Banks’s observations are fascinating for their novelty, like his claims that “a S[outh]-Sea dog was next to an English lamb” in tenderness and flavor, that Tahitians bathed three times a day, and that both men and women plucked “every hair from under their armpits” and looked upon it “as a great mark of uncleanliness in us that we did not do the same.” He observed that while Tahitians were often ribald in gesture and conversation—one of the most popular entertainments for young girls was a dance that mimicked copulation—they observed the strictest of food taboos, expressing “much disgust” when told that in England men and women ate together and shared the same food. But he also made a number of valuable technical observations, including remarks on the size, shape, and seaworthiness of different types of canoes.

  Banks described both the regular va‘a—a single-hulled canoe with an outrigger, used for fishing and shorter trips—and the larger pahi, a double-hulled vessel with V-shaped hulls, a large platform, and one or two masts, which was used both for fighting and long voyages. Pahi, wrote Banks, ranged in length from thirty to sixty feet, but the midsize ones were said to be the best and least prone to accidents in stormy weather. “In these,” he adds, “if we may credit the reports of the inhabitants[,] they make very long voyages, often remaining out from home several months, visiting in that time many different Islands of which they repeated to us the names of near a hundred.”

  Much of this information came from Tupaia, who gave lists of islands to both Cook and the Endeavour’s master, Robert Molyneux, along with information about whether the islands were high or low, whether they were inhabited and, if so, by whom, whether they had reefs or harbors, and how many days’ sail they were from Tahiti. As evidence of Tahitian geographic knowledge, these lists are unparalleled—no other European in the first two-hundred-odd years obtained anything of the kind—but they are not without complications. To begin with, there is no single authoritative version: Cook’s list contains seventy-two island names, Molyneux’s fifty-five, and the two lists share thirty-nine names between them. Cook reported that Tupaia had at one time given him an account of nearly one hundred thirty names and that he had collected some seventy-odd from other sources, but that all of these accounts differed in both the number of islands and their names.

  Then there is the problem of transcription. Both Cook and Molyneux wrote the names phonetically, but English is a terrible language in which to try to represent sounds—think of the number of sounds represented by the letters ough—uff, oh, ow, oo, and so on. The result of Cook’s and Molyneux’s efforts is a list of words that is quite mystifying at first glance. The name Fenua Ura, for example, appears as “Whennuaouda”; the island of Tikehau is rendered as “Teeoheow”; the island of Rangiroa as “Oryroa.” The British also frequently made the mistake of attaching the grammatical prefix “O” to the beginnings of proper nouns. Thus, “O Tahiti,” meaning something like “the Tahiti” or “this is Tahiti,” was heard as “Otaheite,” Cook’s standard name for the island. A third complication arises from the fact that Tahitian is short on audible consonants; a name like Kaukura might be rendered in some dialects as “‘Au‘ura,” where the k’s have been replaced by glottal stops and then written down by an eighteenth-century Englishman as “Ooura.” One of the islands on Cook’s list is actually spelled “Ooouow.”

  Some of the islands on these lists might not even be specific locations. They might be islands with no cartographic equivalent—“non-geographic” or “ghost” islands, mythological locations, or names taken from stories of ancestor gods. Some of the names begin with a prefix meaning “border” or “horizon,” while others include terms meaning “leaning inward” or “leaning away,” suggesting that perhaps these are concepts or ideas rather than actual locations. Still others may belong to an earlier era, for even within the historical period the names of many Polynesian islands have changed.

  But even when you set aside all of the islands on the list that, for one reason or another, cannot be identified, quite a number remain. Fifty of the names on these lists can be correlated with islands that we can identify today. The implication is striking: Tupaia and his fellow Tahitians appear to have had knowledge of islands stretching east–west from the Marquesas to Samoa, a distance of more than two thousand miles, and south some five hundred miles to the Australs. Tupaia did not claim to have visited all of the islands whose names he knew; he told Cook that he himself had firsthand knowledge of only twelve. But he had second- or thirdhand knowledge of several more; he spoke at one point of islands that were visited by his father. The rest may have been islands that no one in living memory had seen but that were known to have been visited at some point in the past. They may, in other words, have belonged to a body of geographical knowledge that was handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation.

  Cook’s reaction to Tupaia’s list of islands was composed, in almost equal parts, of admiration and skepticism, and here it helps to know a little something about Cook. In the years before he was picked for the Endeavour command, he had been engaged in a detailed survey of the coast of Newfoundland. This was one of Cook’s areas of expertise; his biographer, J. C. Beaglehole, wrote that “nothing he ever did later exceeded in accomplishment” his surveys of the Canadian coast, which is saying something, given his achievements. And so, when Cook looked at the Pacific, it was not, as Keats would later have it, with “a wild surmise,” but with the eyes of a surveyor. Everywhere he went, he examined the coastlines, often going beyond the call of duty and far beyond what any of his predecessors had done. Seen from this perspective, Tupaia’s information was tantalizing but awkward. Cook felt that it was “vague and uncertain,” lacking as it did any fixed coordinates or objective measures of distance, and he was not sure how far it could be trusted. At the same time, it was clear to him that Tupaia knew “more of the Geography of the Islands situated in these seas . . . then any one we had met.”

  Tupaia, for his part, also appears to have taken an interest in the ways in which these strangers conceived and represented the physical world. A striking example of this, which has only fairly recently come to light, is a series of watercolors depicting various subjects in Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia. For two centuries it was assumed that these sketches had been painted by Joseph Banks, since they were found among his papers. But in 1997, a letter surfaced in which Banks made it clear that “Tupia the Indian who came with me from Otaheite” was the artist. This information was oddly startling; seeing the work of Tupaia’s own hand brings him close in a way that secondhand accounts of his actions have never been able to do. But the watercolors are also interesting from an anthropological perspective. Polynesia is famous for its decorative arts, but there was no naturalistic tradition of illustration in the islands. Tupaia’s paintings, while stylistically naive, are closely observed and seem to confirm what was so often said about him: that he was a man of boundless curiosity and a natural experimenter.

  Nothing proves this point so conclusively, though, as the fact that when Cook decided it was time for the British to leave Tahiti, Tupaia announced that he would like to go with them. He was not the f
irst Polynesian to sail away on a British ship; a Tahitian named Ahutoru had joined the French expedition under Bougainville and was, at that very moment, being feted in France. And there would be others—both of Cook’s ships on his second voyage carried Tahitian passengers part of the way, and on his third voyage he gave passage to a pair of Māori boys. But the insouciance with which Polynesians, including Tupaia, sailed away from their islands in the eighteenth century is quite stunning. No doubt it seems more so to us than it did to them—they were seagoing people, and the idea of sailing off to a new place may not have struck them as exceptionally adventurous. In truth, though, it was hideously dangerous—especially for them. Of the first three Tahitians to join European expeditions, only one returned. Beyond the rigors of the voyages themselves, which could last years and which exposed the islanders to a whole range of unfamiliar hardships, including extreme cold, unfamiliar and often undigestible food, loneliness, and social isolation, there was the very real danger of contact with diseases to which they had no immunity.

  One wonders whether they understood how far they were going, how long it would take, what kinds of risks they were running. It is hard to see how they could have, and yet they certainly knew they were going farther than they had ever been, to places that until recently they had never heard of, with people they had only just met. This speaks to the daring of men like Tupaia, but it also says something about the cultures of Polynesia. Within a very few decades, Polynesians of all stripes would be crisscrossing the ocean—Tahitians, Marquesans, Hawaiians, Māori—signing on as deckhands on ships out of Sydney, San Francisco, Nantucket, Honolulu. Described by one European traveler as “cosmopolites by natural feeling,” with “a disposition for enterprise and bold adventure,” they quickly became ubiquitous in sea stories of the nineteenth century. One has only to think of Richard Henry Dana’s Hawaiians camped out on the California coast, or Melville’s Queequeg the harpooner.

  Cook was not, at first, very interested in the idea of taking on a passenger. He had no need of extra hands, and he worried about what would happen when they got back to England. He himself was not a man of means, and he did not think the government would thank him for bringing back someone it would be obliged to support. Banks, however, had other ideas. “Thank heaven,” he wrote, “I have a sufficiency and I do not know why I may not keep him . . . the amusement I shall have in his future conversation, and the benefit he will be of to this ship . . . will I think fully repay me.” With this aspect of the problem solved, Cook relented, acknowledging that, of all the Tahitians they had met, Tupaia “was the likeliest person to answer our purpose.”

  That purpose was to lay down as much geography as possible, and the first order of business after leaving Tahiti was a survey of the “islands under the wind,” the Leeward Society Islands. This was Tupaia’s home territory; originally from Ra‘iatea, he had been forced to flee when his island was overrun by warriors from neighboring Bora Bora. On the voyage there, Tupaia proved himself an excellent navigator, each of the islands appearing precisely when and where he said it would. He further impressed Cook when, on their arrival at Huahine, he instructed a man to dive down and measure the Endeavour’s keel to make sure it would clear the passage into the lagoon. He was useful in all kinds of ways: piloting the ship, mediating with the chiefs, instructing the British on how to behave. There is a suggestion that he may have had his own motives, that perhaps he was hoping Cook would help him exact vengeance on the Bora Borans who were still in control of his ancestral lands. But Cook would not be drawn into local politics. He had other objects in mind, and on the tenth of August, under cloudy skies, he bade adieu to the Society Islands and, as Banks put it with characteristic brio, “Launchd out into the Ocean in search of what chance and Tupia might direct us to.”

  Tupaia’s Chart

  Two Ways of Seeing

  Chart of the Society Islands by Captain James Cook, after a drawing by Tupaia, 1769.

  THE GRANGER COLLECTION, BRITISH LIBRARY, LONDON.

  COOK HAD BEEN provided with a second set of “secret” instructions, which directed him, once the transit of Venus had been observed, to sail south from the Society Islands in search of Terra Australis Incognita. They were “secret” in the sense that they were not officially acknowledged, but anyone who thought about it would have known that the Admiralty would hardly send a ship all the way to the South Pacific without undertaking a little reconnaissance, and the Unknown Southland was still the object of greatest interest back at home. What this meant was that the Endeavour was now headed to a part of the Pacific where no European vessel had ever been. All the cross-oceanic traffic thus far had fallen within a narrow belt of twenty to twenty-five degrees on either side of the equator, and nobody knew what lay farther south (or north) in the middle of this vast sea.

  A day or so out of Ra‘iatea, Tupaia explained that if they steered for a point on their weather bow—that is, southeast—they would come to an island called Mannua on the morning of the third day. Cook, however, ignored this advice, keeping his ship’s head pointed south, and when on the third day no island was in sight, Tupaia told Banks that it was “etopa,” meaning it had “fallen behind.” He then told them that the next day, or the day after, they would come to an island called Oheteroa, and at 2 P.M. on the following day an island duly appeared. This island, which now goes by the name Rurutu, is one of a widely spaced chain of islands now known as the Australs.

  All this time, Tupaia was eager for Cook to steer the ship west, telling him that if he would only go in that direction he would meet with plenty of islands. He was right about that: the vast majority of islands in the Pacific do lie west of Tahiti, though even the closest of them are five to six hundred miles away. Cook had very little information about what lay in this direction, and much of it was erroneous, but he believed that Tupaia might be referring to the islands discovered by Schouten and Le Maire in the northern Tongan archipelago. Tupaia gave him to understand that it would take ten to twelve days to reach these islands from Tahiti and thirty or more to return, which accorded well with Cook’s understanding of the prevailing winds, the distance, and the sailing ability of Tahitian vessels. Interestingly, Cook seems not to have considered a sailing rate of 120 miles a day overly optimistic for a Tahitian pahi, noting that these large canoes could sail much faster than a European ship.

  It was all academic, though, because Cook had no intention of turning west, however many islands there might be. Instead he pressed Tupaia for information about what lay to the south. Tupaia replied that he knew of only one other island in that direction, that it was another two days’ sail, and that, although his father had told him of others, he could not say for certain where they were. In fact, there are just three islands south of where Cook was at that moment: Tubuai, Raivavae, and tiny, isolated Rapa; south of that there is nothing but ocean and ice. None of these was what Cook was looking for, and although he continued to query Tupaia, “we cannot find,” he wrote, “that he either knows or ever heard of a continent.”

  And so, on they sailed, past the last island, standing south for the great unknown. Almost immediately Cook observed a large, steady swell from the southwest, suggesting strongly that there was nothing but ocean in that direction. They were making about fifty miles a day on average, and gradually the weather and the birdlife began to change—the wind picking up, the temperature dropping, the albatrosses and shearwaters reappearing. They now had strong gales with thunder and lightning, squalls of rain, and a waterspout “the breadth of a Rain Bow” that descended from the clouds. A comet appeared in the sky and remained there, foreshadowing, so Tupaia told them, an attack on the Ra‘iateans by the Bora Bora men. The pigs and chickens they had brought from Tahiti began to die about twelve days out, possibly from the cold, which was steadily increasing, or perhaps because the food they were accustomed to eating had run out and they seemed unable to adapt to a shipboard diet. Tupaia, too, was feeling both the cold and the ill effects of the change in diet;
he was eating almost nothing and complained of a pain in his gut.

  All this time they were searching for signs of land. One day a cloud bank appeared that looked so persuasively like an island that Tupaia named it, and then found himself obliged to recant. Clumps of weed and chunks of wood floated past the ship, but when they were hauled aboard, they showed signs of having been in the water a long time. Sometimes a change in the color of the ocean encouraged Cook to sound, but there was never any bottom, and the types of birds that sailed by on the wind argued strongly against the presence of a continent, for “All these kind of birds,” wrote Cook, “are generally seen at a great distance from land.” Strong, variable winds and a large sea kept them busy—all except the boatswain’s mate, who, having been given a bottle of rum, drank the whole thing off at one go and was found dead in his hammock the next morning.

  By the second of September they had reached the 40th parallel. They had “not the least visible sign of land,” and with the weather “so very tempestuous,” Cook decided to stand north again for the sake of his sails and rigging. Or, more precisely, northward—the line, he found, between bad and better weather seemed to lie at about 37 degrees south—but also west, for there was nothing to be gained by going back the way they had come. This set the Endeavour on a long, zigzagging course, first northwest, then southwest, then due west, as the days of September ticked by. “Now do I wish,” wrote Banks in his journal, “that our freinds in England could by the assistance of some magical spying glass take a peep at our situation: Dr. Solander [the expedition’s naturalist] setts at the Cabbin table describing, myself at my Bureau Journalizing, between us hangs a large bunch of sea weed, upon the table lays the wood and barnacles” that had recently been pulled from the sea. Tupaia was there as well, though Banks did not mention him, for one of the many projects on which the gentlemen of the Endeavour were engaged during this long, rather uneventful segment of the voyage was a chart of all the islands Tupaia knew.