The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Creating a merchant navy out in the Sea of Okhotsk seemed beyond Russian capabilities. Perhaps, then, the Russians would have to bite the bullet and send ships all the way from the Baltic to the northern Pacific by way of the Atlantic. Fortunately the Russian Admiralty identified a man of unusual skill and experience to lead an expedition to the Far East. Johann-Anton von Kruzenshtern was a Baltic German from Estonia who had been seconded to the British Navy, fought the Revolutionary French and sailed under the British flag to the Caribbean. But the more he heard about the ocean world the more his attention turned to the Far East. He wrote:

  During the time that I was serving with the English Navy in the revolutionary war of 1793–9, my attention was particularly excited by the importance of the English trade with the East Indies and with China. It appeared to me by no means impossible for Russia to participate in the trade by sea with China and the Indies.26

  Setting out on a British ship in 1797, Kruzenshtern called in at Calcutta and Canton, reinforcing his sense that the Russians would never make a success of their fur trade without access by sea to China’s window on the world. Once he was back in Russia, Kruzenshtern’s voice was finally heard, and he was commissioned to take a pair of ships all the way from the Baltic to the Pacific. The first problem, though, was to find suitable ships. Russia could offer nothing capable of such a long voyage. Even Hamburg and Copenhagen had nothing available. Finally two suitable vessels, the new Leander of 450 tons and the even newer Thames, of 370 tons, were found in England. They were renamed the Nadezhda and the Neva and sent to the Baltic naval base at Kronstadt, to be prepared for a voyage that, it was hoped, would reach as far as Japan, carrying on board a certain Rezanov, gloriously appointed as Russia’s ambassador to the imperial court at Edo.27

  Kruzenshtern’s route took the ships along the coast of Brazil and round Cape Horn, which proved quite manageable, although soon after that the two ships were driven apart; the Neva found its way to Easter Island, while the Nadezhda pressed on to the Marquesas. These were not, of course, new discoveries, and Kruzenshtern had read Captain Cook with close attention; but it was the first time Russian shipping had entered the south Pacific. Kruzenshtern was determined that relations with the native islanders should remain cordial, and his aim in calling in at the Marquesas was to take on supplies. He permitted his men to barter for local goods, so long as they did not do so on board the ship. This did not prevent naked women from climbing on board who had, as a modern historian coyly observed, ‘more than fruit to sell the Russians’.28 The two ships managed to find one another in the Marquesas and made their way via Hawai’i into the far north of the Pacific, bypassing Japan for lack of time – Kruzenshtern had promised to deliver a cargo of iron and other naval stores to Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, while the Neva sailed towards Kodiak Island and the new Russian settlement at Sitka on the Alaskan coast.

  When they arrived, the Russians were horrified to discover that Sitka had been sacked by the Tlingits, the native population of the region. The Russia–America Company had made a fundamental error: by settling on the Alaskan coast and displacing the Tlingits, the Russians had created what a contemporary observer called ‘an unalterable enmity against the Russians’. The Tlingits had been living off the resources of the coastline, including not just its fish but its sea otters, whose furs the Russians were now trying to monopolize. By contrast, the British and the Americans took care not to settle the area, but preferred to come on seasonal trading visits. The Tlingits were formidable warriors, who went into battle wearing armour made of leather and bone, capable of stopping a musket shot in its tracks; before long they acquired firearms of their own. The Neva therefore sailed straight into a battle zone, where the Russians and the Tlingits were literally at each other’s throats. The Russians concluded that they would need to arm themselves well if they were going to gain control of the coastline and its furs.29 For if they did not establish settlements, they left the door open to the British, the Americans and the Spaniards, who still had a significant presence in California and further north.

  Another setback, this time for those aboard the larger ship, the Nadezhda, followed its arrival at long last in Japan, after setting out from Kamchatka in September 1804. The Russian ambassador, Rezanov, landed in Deshima, only to be berated by the Japanese for poaching on the territory, tiny though it was, that had been assigned to the Dutch; he was also criticized for arriving in a well-armed warship rather than a trading vessel. He hung around for three months before a curt message arrived from the shogun: ‘it is our government’s will not to open this place. Do not come again in vain. Sail home quickly.’ To encourage him to go, the Japanese authorities sent a massive quantity of rice, salt and other foodstuffs, but Rezanov refused to accept the gift and made plain his anger at rejection, which the Japanese officials saw as a highly embarrassing breach of etiquette. They did explain that they would have to take the blame if he left the gifts behind, and would feel obliged to commit a mass act of hara-kiri. Rezanov had the good sense to take the gifts and leave, in April 1805.

  Kruzenshtern had other plans, now that the embassy to Japan had failed so completely. After mapping the island of Sakhalin, to the north of Japan, he headed for Macau, which he knew from his earlier sojourn in Canton. There he was joined by the Neva, which had turned its back on the frightening Tlingits. But breaking into the Canton market was not straightforward. The other nations had their consulates and warehouses. Kruzenshtern was eventually able to convince an English merchant named Beale to negotiate on his behalf with a Hong merchant, Lucqua, and the cargo of the two ships was sold, apart from the best sea otter skins, which were known to fetch extortionate prices in Moscow. The ships loaded tea, nankeen cloth and porcelain. This time they would head westwards, through the East Indies and round the Cape of Good Hope, with one ship calling in at St Helena. The two ships were back in Kronstadt in August 1806, after a voyage lasting just over three years.30 The profits were meagre, but there were grounds for rejoicing: Russian ships had circumnavigated the globe for the first time, and valuable information had been gathered about the Sea of Okhotsk and the coast of Alaska. It was understood that a pioneering expedition of this sort was bound to produce mixed results, but that any future successes would be built on the information gathered by these two ships.

  The information these ships gathered is what historians tend to call the ‘scientific’ aspect of this and other voyages, such as those of Captain Cook and the Frenchman La Pérouse. However, it masks the more prosaic reality: even if the information about the daily life of the Tlingits in Alaska or the Ainu in Hokkaido aroused genuine interest, the prime purpose of these voyages was to uncover sources of wealth, and to reach them before rival European powers did so. This was especially important for the Russian tsars, who were constantly in need of sources of funds for ambitious campaigns around the Baltic and the Black Sea. The Russians failed to gain the lion’s share of the Pacific fur trade, but the importance of their presence lies in the way that Russian pioneers penetrated ever deeper into unknown waters, building ships of questionable quality in unpromising locations very far from the Russian homeland, and setting out year after year into frozen islands.

  IV

  The Russians were the first to recognize the potential of the northern Pacific, even if their most important motive was to promote trade links with China. The period in which they were making these remarkable advances also saw closer contact between Europeans and the inhabitants of the Polynesian islands, particularly during the 1760s and 1770s. Here too there was a question mark. Did these islands have anything to offer? Coconuts were not going to draw in vast numbers of trading ships. The reputation of the islanders for cannibalism and human sacrifice was counterbalanced by the image that survived to and beyond the time of Gauguin, of islands where free love and a simple life without wants were to be had. This too was part of the Polynesian reality: European sailors were astonished and generally delighted by the readiness of local wo
men to offer their bodies, as much for courtesy as for ecstasy. Tahiti became ‘the island which encapsulated European images of the south Pacific, whether benign or malign’.31 On the other hand, these islands lived largely from their own resources, and their subsistence economy found it hard to meet the demands of European sailors for food and other basic supplies, quite apart from the lack of luxury products on offer.

  It is clearly a mistake to talk, as one otherwise illuminating book has done, of ‘the discovery of Tahiti and Hawai’i’ in this period.32 What the Europeans discovered had been discovered centuries before by Polynesians. The arrival of the Europeans in the Polynesian islands led to vigorous exchanges of information, as each side began to see that they could learn from the other; in some areas, such as Hawai’i, this happened with startling rapidity, as the islanders adopted European clothes and even shipping. The Polynesians looked for similarities at least as much as they noticed differences; an extreme case was the experience of a Tahitian who travelled to the court of King George III in England, and who, while on board ship, had to be persuaded that the Christian rituals he witnessed on board would not culminate in human sacrifice – not that he was opposed to the practice, but he was afraid that he would be chosen as the victim. He was more comfortable with what he saw in Cambridge, where the sight of dons processing through the Senate House in their scarlet gowns brought to mind the processions of high priests back home.33

  The best word to use to describe the first encounters in Tahiti is ‘serendipity’. Captain Samuel Wallis, from Cornwall, in charge of the Dolphin, arrived there in June 1767 in the expectation that what was (relatively speaking) so large an island, with mountains looming out of fog in the distance, must be the long-sought Southern Continent for which he was seeking. The natives, who crowded around in hundreds of canoes, seemed friendly, ‘particularly the women, who came down to the beach, and stripping themselves naked, endeavoured to allure them by many wanton gestures, the meaning of which could not possibly be mistaken’.34 But it was unclear whether their attempts to attract sailors to land were a ploy to lure them into a trap and kill them. An attempt was made to conduct ‘silent trade’, with each side leaving goods on the beach, but the English sailors only took what they wanted (some pigs) and left behind the bark cloth they had been offered. For their part, the Tahitians ignored the axes and nails the English had left behind. The English realized that they had somehow offended the Tahitians, and on a second visit they collected the bark cloth and everything else the islanders had put out for them.

  Even so, relations were at first difficult. Faced with an armada of boats, the Dolphin fired on the crowd that had gathered on the beach, which fled into the forests; after that, more than fifty canoes left on the shore were hacked to pieces by carpenters sent out from the ship under armed guard. The carpenters had good reason to be in a bad mood: women had in the end been allowed on board, but they had raided the boxes of nails they found lying around, and even pulled nails out of the ship’s beams, which threatened to make her unsafe. Facing European violence, the Tahitians assumed that they were being treated to a display of the wrath of their gods, and the gift of a pig and a plantain leaf was intended to signify submission to a superhuman power. This was transformed into an acceptance that, even if the British, and later on the French, were made of the same flesh and blood as themselves, they still had to be appeased, since the alternative was that the newcomers would unleash destruction far worse than anything their own warring bands were capable of achieving.35 In the end Captain Wallis struck up a friendship with the local queen, and they exchanged visits – he was impressed by the meeting house to which he was taken, which was about 100 metres long. Queen Obearea wept when the Dolphin set sail.36

  Gradually, though, it was understood that this was not actually part of the Southern Continent, though surely it must be an island lying off its coast, rather like Hispaniola or Cuba in relation to the Americas? A year after Wallis arrived there, Louis de Bougainville, a high-born French captain, reached another part of Tahiti, knowing nothing of the arrival of the English. Bougainville was well read in classical literature, and, remembering the story of how Venus had been born in the sea and had been washed up on the island of Kythera, he called the island Nouvelle Cythère.37 Bougainville titillated his male readers by describing how a Tahitian girl uncovered herself on deck and insisted that ‘here Venus is the goddess of hospitality’. The nakedness of the Tahitians recalled the nakedness of ancient Greek athletes. For Bougainville what had been discovered was not just a paradise, but a classical paradise; he had, in effect, travelled back in time to experience ‘the true youth of the world’. His experiences were much better than Wallis’s: the Tahitians had learned that European firepower was irresistible, so they eagerly co-operated with the next lot of Europeans, probably unaware of any real difference between the British and the French. The peaceful nature of Bougainville’s experiences in Tahiti led his readers, including Diderot, to enthuse about the grace and innocence of the islanders. As Matt Matsuda has observed, ‘even theft seemed a sign of innocence in a world where all things were shared’, not just objects but sexual relations. The impact of this voyage was all the greater, as Bougainville brought a Tahitian prince named Ahutoru back to Paris, where he became a favourite of Bougainville’s backer, the powerful politician and courtier the Duc de Choiseul, and showed himself to be an opera lover.38

  Choiseul had additional, less romantic, motives in supporting Bougainville’s expedition. France could not permit itself to lag behind Britain. Both countries were keen to identify the resources of the Pacific islands, and both were still obsessed by the idea of the Southern Continent. Interest in unfamiliar plants was genuine: the late eighteenth-century French explorer La Pérouse had naturalists on board; Cook’s companion Joseph Banks hungrily collected Pacific artefacts and kept filling up the South Sea Room which had been set up in the British Museum in 1775, forcing the museum authorities to enlarge the room within a mere six years.39 Cook was not just looking for new lands, though: he was also checking reports of discoveries by the French, even if some of these discoveries, such as the aptly named ‘Desolation Island’, could be dismissed as of little interest.40 The curiosity of the British took a more practical turn: rather than speculating about ‘noble savages’, Captain Cook and his men were requested to watch the expected transit of Venus across the sun from Tahiti, and to carry on the search for the Southern Continent. He was instructed to bear in mind ‘the Honour of this Nation as a Maritime Power’, which ‘may tend greatly to the advancement of the Trade and Navigation thereof’.41 One important feature of Cook’s second and third voyages, of 1772 and 1776, was the testing of John Harrison’s chronometer, a clock that was to prove accurate enough to make it possible to measure longitude; latitude was a much more straightforward problem, but dealing with the measurement of distance in the direction the earth turned was far more complicated. His use of Harrison’s timepiece allowed him to chart the South Sea islands with impressive accuracy. It is said that at the moment Captain Cook was struck down and killed in Hawai’i the clock stopped.42 But here again it is important to remember that science was being deployed in the service of trade and empire.

  Cook, like Bougainville, appreciated the skills of Polynesian navigators. He persuaded Tupaia, a highly skilled navigator, priest and local nobleman, to come on board, and Tupaia accompanied Cook around the Polynesian islands, even drawing a famous map of large tracts of the Pacific from memory, sketching in such places as the Marquesas and the Cook Islands; Tupaia was just as helpful as Harrison’s chronometer. Banks thought of Tupaia as another specimen, even if he was a highly intelligent one. Cook was less interested in playing that game, and was impressed by what Tupaia knew: ‘we have no reason to doubt his veracity in this, by which it will appear that his Geographical knowlidge [sic] of those Seas is pretty extensive.’ Tupaia knew the names of seventy-four islands, and his map covered a vast area of the Pacific roughly equal in size to Europe (i
ncluding Russia-in-Europe). Most importantly, he explained the complex wind system of the Pacific, still poorly understood after several centuries of a European presence in this ocean.43

  The adaptability of the Polynesians to European ways was striking. They were particularly adept at commercial deals. In the early nineteenth century, Pomare I, the ruler of Tahiti, traded with the British settlement in New South Wales and joined forces with the London Missionary Society (having converted to Christianity in 1812), sending a ship to Port Jackson, the bay that includes Sydney Harbour, in 1817; Pomare loaded pigs and sandalwood as the main cargo, and on later sailings by Pomare’s merchant fleet pearls were gathered in other islands and forwarded to Sydney. The crews were largely Tahitian.44 Both Ahutoru and Tupaia had already shown a willingness to work with people from a strange world and a fascination with European culture that was to develop in surprising ways once the Europeans (including the Russians) and the Americans developed an interest in Hawai’i.

  V

  Tupaia did not include the farthest-flung parts of the Polynesian world, Hawai’i, New Zealand and Easter Island, in his sailing directions.45 His knowledge about the Pacific was an accumulation built up over many centuries and handed down by word of mouth, so that much of the detail was in place long before Hawai’i, Aotearoa and Rapa Nui were settled by Polynesian navigators. Just as it had taken these navigators a long while to cross the band of winds that separated the southern from the northern Pacific, so the arrival of the Europeans in the remote volcanic islands of Hawai’i took a long while, though the Manila galleons or other Spanish ships may well have passed through the archipelago when blown off course, or been attracted by plumes of smoke and fire from the still active volcanoes on Hawai’i Island. A handful of archaeological discoveries, including a piece of woven cloth found in a late sixteenth-century grave, suggest occasional outside contacts with Europeans.46 In 1777 Cook’s target was no longer the Southern Continent but that other persistent obsession of European governments keen to carve out fast and profitable trade routes: the North-West Passage. The British Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 to the crew that would find this route. Cook’s trajectory northwards from Tahiti, across 3,000 miles of open ocean, took him to O’ahu and Kaua’i, on the second of which he made landfall in January 1778. As in Tahiti, the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the arrival of the British was that these were not ordinary humans but the gods who lived far beyond the horizon.47