UNLIKE HIS DRAWINGS, this extraordinary document has been credited to Tupaia from the start. Cook referred in his journal to “a Chart of the Islands Drawn by Tupaia’s own hands,” and Johann Forster, Cook’s naturalist on the second voyage, mentioned two different copies: one given to him by an officer from the Endeavour and one in the possession of Joseph Banks. Forster himself created yet another version, which he “caused to be engraved as a monument of the ingenuity and geographical knowledge of the people in the Society Isles, and of Tupaya in particular,” and included in his own book. The original of all of these—the chart actually drawn by Tupaia himself—has been lost, but a copy drawn, signed, and dated by Cook was preserved among Banks’s papers.
It is a truly remarkable artifact: a translation of Tahitian geographical knowledge into European cartographic terms at the very first moment in history when such a thing might have been possible; a collaboration between two brilliant navigators coming from geographical traditions with essentially no overlap; a fusion of completely different sets of ideas. There was no precedent for it; it has no known equal; and, with the benefit of hindsight, it looks like something of a miracle that it was ever created at all.
Tupaia’s chart can be understood only as the product of a complex collaboration. Whether it was initiated by Tupaia or by Cook is impossible to say, though both seem to have been interested in the project. Tupaia, for his part, was clearly taken with the problem of graphical representation. Even before they left Tahiti, he had begun to dabble in mapmaking, drawing a chart of Ra‘iatea that showed reefs and passages, islets and mountains, with place names that appear to have been added by Banks. Cook, on the other hand, was a gifted and indefatigable chart maker and was profoundly interested in anything that would help him navigate this inadequately mapped sea.
Unfortunately for Cook—though interestingly for us—Tupaia’s chart is “opaque with trans-cultural confusion.” It depicts seventy-four islands, ranged in concentric circles around the Society Islands, with Tupaia’s home of Ra‘iatea in the center. Some of these—for example, the islands in the northeast quadrant of the map—lie in what we would consider the correct orientation vis-à-vis Tahiti. These include many of the Tuamotus and some of the Marquesas, both of which are northeast of the Society Islands, at distances of two to eight hundred miles. But many of the islands on the chart, including some that would appear from their names to belong to the Samoan, Tongan, Cook, and Austral archipelagoes, are wrongly positioned—north when they should be south, southwest when they should be northwest, or, most confusingly, split between north and south when they should be together in one place or the other.
Over the years, there have been many attempts to make sense of this muddle. One of the earliest and most intriguing analyses was that made by Horatio Hale, the philologist attached to the United States Exploring Expedition, which surveyed much of the Pacific in the 1830s and ’40s. Hale was extremely impressed by the amount of information contained in Tupaia’s chart. He noted that every important island group in Polynesia, with the exception of New Zealand and Hawai‘i, was represented, “though not accurately, yet with a certain attention to bearings and distances, which enables us to identify them.” But, he added, “much confusion has been made in the chart by a mistake of those for whom Tupaia drew it.”
This mistake had to do with the chart’s orientation. It is marked with the directions N, S, E, and W as well as with Tahitian directions: OPATOEROW on the north, OPATOA on the south, TATAHIETA OHETOOTTERA on the east, and TEREATI TOOTTERA on the west. The key terms here—a little hard to decipher behind the veil of Cook’s orthography—are to‘erau (tokerau in Māori, ko‘olau in Hawaiian), a widespread Polynesian word signifying a northerly wind, and to‘a (or, more familiarly, tonga), a term for winds from a southerly direction.
Hale believed that Cook and the other Europeans had fundamentally misunderstood what was meant by the designations “Apa-to‘erau” and “Apa-to‘a” on the north and south sides of the chart. Knowing that to‘erau signified the north wind and to‘a the south, “they concluded naturally that apatoerau and apatoa were names applied to the corresponding points of the compass; whereas,” Hale wrote, “apatoerau signifies, in fact, the point towards which the north wind blows,—i.e. the south, and apatoa, for the same reason, the north.” Thus, taken as cardinal directions, “Apa-to‘erau” and “Apa-to‘a” meant exactly the opposite of what they purported to indicate on the map: north was south and south was north, and the map, Hale argued, was, “in fact, printed upside down.”
But even assuming that this argument is correct, it still fails to explain the full complexities of Tupaia’s chart. Hale made the further ingenious suggestion that Cook might have meddled in the arrangement of the islands, looking over Tupaia’s shoulder as he drew and encouraging the “correct” placement of islands that he himself was familiar with. He noted that it was precisely those islands that Cook already knew—the Marquesas, Tuamotus, some of the Australs—that were oriented correctly, while those he had never seen or heard of were most likely to be located on the wrong part of the map. It was a creative solution to a tricky problem, but whether it is true or not is impossible to say.
FOR MANY YEARS, the emphasis among those seeking to explicate this document was on rationalizing Tupaia’s knowledge, that is, finding a way to make it correspond to the realities of geography as we understand them. This meant that Tupaia’s chart was always being viewed in terms of what was “right” and “wrong” about it, which aspects of it were “accurate” and which were “incorrect.” But this is to miss what is most interesting about the diagram, which is that it represents a fusion of two completely different knowledge systems, both of which placed the very highest value on information about the physical world but constructed and deployed that information in entirely different ways.
For the eighteenth-century Briton, the world of oceans and islands was understood in terms of mostly quantitative descriptive systems: latitudes and longitudes for location; distances in nautical miles; calendrical time (months, days, hours, minutes); winds measured on what would come to be known as the Beaufort scale. These systems were defined by their objectivity; they did not depend upon the perspective of the observer, and the phenomena they described were understood to exist outside of human experience and independent of any sort of supernatural force.
For an eighteenth-century Tahitian, on the other hand, there was no separation between the natural and supernatural worlds. One of Tupaia’s navigational techniques involved invocations to the god Tane for a favorable wind—an action that was cynically derided by Banks, who could not believe that Tupaia himself believed in the efficacy of what he was doing. But in the Tahitian worldview, the wind, the god Tane, and Tupaia himself were interconnected, and it was not just possible but obligatory for the navigator to attempt to influence the elements by calling upon his relationship with the god. For a Tahitian, the physical world was less like a set of discrete, objective phenomena and more like a web of connections in which gods, ancestors, humans, fish, birds, insects, rocks, clouds, winds, and stars were linked to one another genealogically.
European charts, such as those that Tupaia was introduced to by Cook, depicted the world in terms of conceptual systems that were entirely alien to Tahitians. Position, distance, and direction were defined in terms of a mathematical scheme of measurement based on the size and shape of the earth. The perspective was not that of a participant on the ground but of an observer high in the sky, the so-called bird’s-eye view. What such charts most emphatically do not capture is the way we actually experience geography—the perspective, for example, of someone standing on the deck of a boat. (It is worth noting that European navigators also drew coastal profiles in order to show what a coastline actually looked like to someone approaching it from the sea.)
In Tahiti, by contrast, there were few if any systems of absolute measurement. Distances were measured in time, and even then it was not in terms of a universal sta
ndard but time as experienced by a subject under certain conditions—as in Tupaia’s assertion that the western islands were ten days going (with the wind) and thirty coming back (against it). Positions were likewise relative rather than absolute. An island was not in some particular location—17°35' S, 149°48' W—but so many days’ sail from one place and so many days’ sail from someplace else. Although Tahitians did use a fixed directional system at sea, based on sun, stars, and winds, on land they employed a relative system based on the speaker’s position. On many islands in Polynesia, one does not travel east or west or north or south, but along axes determined by the local topography. In Hawai‘i, for example, you go mauka, toward the mountain, or makai, toward the sea—directions that can point north, south, east, or west, depending upon where you are standing.
This kind of subject-centered understanding was central to Tahitian thinking, and, at one level, it is possible to envision Tupaia’s chart simply as a translation of his ego-centered frame of reference into the objective terms of a European chart. For a contemporary example of how this might work, consider the famous New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg, “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” which depicts the world receding logarithmically from Manhattan across the Hudson River to New Jersey, Kansas City, Nebraska, the Pacific, and finally Japan. While not consciously ironic in the same way, Tupaia’s chart seems similarly subjective: dense and informed at the center (around his home island of Ra‘iatea) and increasingly metaphorical as it goes out.
BUT SUPPOSE THAT instead of thinking about geography, which is inherently static, we think in terms of navigation, which, while it depends upon a comparable body of knowledge, is essentially an action. Tupaia was not just a repository of geographical information; he was a navigator, a man who knew how to use the information he had and who only had it in order to put it into practice. One very interesting argument that follows this line of thinking suggests that Tupaia’s chart is not so much a map as a mosaic of sailing directions or bearings. That is, it is not a description of where certain places are, but an account of what it would take to reach them, a “navigator’s attempt to teach Cook and his officers the directions to surrounding islands.”
All known early seafaring traditions employed some kind of compass or scheme for “segmenting the circle of the horizon with invariant directional axes.” We know, from several different sources, that Polynesian navigators used the stars, in addition to winds, currents, cloud formations, sea marks, birdlife, and other indicators, to help them find their way across the ocean. Unfortunately, no early observer managed to get much in the way of detail about how this actually worked, but it is widely believed that they used a mental construct known as a “star compass.” The way a star compass works is this: You begin by envisioning the horizon as a circle marking the meeting point of the earth and the sky—which, of course, is exactly how it looks from a boat on the ocean or the high point of a small island. In the mind of an experienced navigator, this circle is dotted with points marking the rising and setting positions of particular stars. When the navigator imagines himself at the center of this circle and his destination as a point on the horizon, the star compass becomes a plotting diagram, giving the bearing of his target island in terms of the rising and setting points of particular stars. A “star path” is a course defined by the series of stars that rise over the course of a night in a particular direction.
Using a model of this kind, some thirty-three of the islands on Tupaia’s chart, including several that had remained obscure, can be identified in terms of plotting diagrams using five different islands of departure. Like Hale’s, this is an ingenious solution, and, as with Hale’s, it is impossible to say whether it is actually correct. But it does have the merit of asking whether there is knowledge encoded in Tupaia’s chart that might be difficult for us to see because it is based on unfamiliar assumptions about how information is most usefully organized. For us, the islands are most easily conceptualized in terms of a mathematical grid of latitude and longitude. But Tupaia might have conceived of them strategically, as clusters of islands that could be reached from a variety of starting points, given certain sets of bearings.
Everyone who has ever looked hard at Tupaia’s chart has found it tantalizing in the extreme. On the one hand, it is a unique and irrefutable testament to the breadth of Tahitian geographic knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century. On the other hand, many aspects of it remain stubbornly mysterious. Everyone who has ever thought about it has no doubt wished he or she could go back and shake Cook, Banks, and the others and demand that they try harder to extract what Tupaia knew, that they ask more questions, take better notes, pay more attention to the possibility—which they never denied—that there was knowledge here worth documenting, so that we, in the future, could more fully understand what the world looked like from Tupaia’s point of view.
What we can conclude, based on what we have, is that Tahitian geographic knowledge extended well beyond the Society Islands, encompassing the major island groups of central and eastern Polynesia. This does not necessarily mean that eighteenth-century Tahitians were routinely traveling to all these places—though they were certainly routinely traveling to some—but it does suggest that they knew these various islands existed and that this knowledge was culturally important enough to be handed down. But Tupaia’s chart also suggests—though, again, it does not prove—the limitations of Tahitian geographic understanding. There are three places in Polynesia that are not included on this chart. These are, not surprisingly, the islands and archipelagoes at the limits of Polynesian reach, the places it would have been the hardest to get to, the ones separated by the greatest and emptiest expanses of water. They are, of course, the three points of the Polynesian Triangle: Hawai‘i, Easter Island, and New Zealand—the last of which Cook and Tupaia were now on course to intercept.
An Aha Moment
A Tahitian in New Zealand
“A war canoe of New Zealand” by Sydney Parkinson, in John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages (London, 1773).
HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
ALL THROUGH THE month of September and into early October, the Endeavour plowed westward through an utterly empty region of the sea. There was little to remark apart from the birdlife, and Banks, normally a lively reporter, was reduced to keeping track of the albatrosses and petrels. Toward the end of the month, there was a clear escalation in signs pointing to the proximity of land. Large clumps of seaweed drifted by, “some in heaps as much together as would fill a large wheelbarrow.” Groups of whales and seals were sighted, and a shoal of porpoises ruffled the waves, leaping over one another like “a pack of hounds.” The ship was hit by a short, violent squall, which was taken as a sign of land, since such squalls were rarely met with on the open ocean. A Port Egmont hen—a kind of skua—was spotted, another good indication. The color of the water seemed lighter, and Cook cautiously began to sound. Sure enough, at the end of the first week in October, a boy at the masthead called out “Land.”
They had traveled some 3,500 miles since leaving Tahiti, crossing more than twenty degrees of latitude, and they were now back at 38 degrees south. The sea was colder, the sky was paler, and the land before them was high and rugged, with cliffs along the foreshore and hills rising to a great chain of mountains inland. There was nothing in the geography of New Zealand to suggest that the people who lived there might have anything in common with the people in the tropical islands they had left behind; indeed, Banks and many of the others were firmly of the opinion that they had come to the Unknown Southland at last.
Cook, however, was fairly sure that they were approaching the land discovered by Abel Tasman in 1642. As the Endeavour drew closer, they could see “many great smoaks” rising from points along the coastline. Cook was eager to make contact with the inhabitants, and as soon as he could, he brought the ship to anchor in a bay. Seeing some people on the shore, he directed his rowers to land near them, but as soon as the islanders spotted
the boats, they vanished into the trees. Cook and his party landed and set off down the beach. But as soon as they vanished round a bend, the islanders reemerged from the forest and made as if to attack one of the boats, which had been left in the care of four boys. At this, a marine in the second boat opened fire, hitting one of the islanders, who fell instantly to the ground. The man’s companions dragged him about a hundred yards up the beach and then fled when they saw Cook’s party, which had been alerted by the shots, racing back to the scene.
The Māori, who had been shot through the heart, was dead, and Banks took some time to scrutinize the corpse. He described him as a midsize man, brown-skinned and tattooed on one cheek with a perfect spiral. He was dressed in a fine kind of cloth that the English had not seen before. It was tied, Banks noted, exactly as shown in the engraving from Tasman’s account of New Zealand.
The following day, Cook tried again, this time taking two additional precautions. First, he landed with a party of marines, and, second, he took Tupaia with him. Cook wrote that he had tried to speak to the people of New Zealand in “the George Island Language,” meaning what he knew of Tahitian, but that they had answered him by flourishing their weapons and breaking into a war dance. This—the famous Māori haka—was vividly described by Lieutenant John Gore:
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