by Tony Horwitz
The next morning I headed to the airport, still wobbly on my feet. As the plane lifted off and wheeled over the harbor, I caught a glimpse of the Endeavour, far below. The ship looked like a bath toy, its towering masts no bigger than toothpicks. As the plane rose through the clouds, I eased back my seat, several inches wider than the ship’s hammocks.
Just as I slipped into a half-sleep, a voice reeled me in. “This is the first mate,” the PA system crackled.
Can’t be, I thought. Geoff, ordering us back on deck.
No. Just the cockpit, telling us our altitude and travel time. Flight attendants came down the aisle with drinks. I undid my shoes, idly fingering the laces. Tugboat hitch. Square lashing. Up here, they seemed so simple. The woman in the next seat glanced at me strangely.
“I just got off a ship,” I said. “Captain Cook’s ship. We had to tie a lot of knots.”
She smiled, the way one does at a fanciful child, and put on her headphones.
Chapter 2
Tahiti:
Sic Transit Venus
The alurements of disipation are more than equal to anything that can be conceived.
—CAPTAIN WILLIAM BLIGH, WRITING ABOUT
TAHITI AFTER THE MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY
In late May 1768, two months before the Endeavour’s departure from England, a ship called the Dolphin anchored near the mouth of the Thames. Dispatched two years earlier on a voyage of discovery, the scurvy-racked vessel had found only one place of consequence: a mountainous isle in the South Pacific. The wondrous tales told of this island by the Dolphin’s crewmen, and by French sailors who visited soon after, stirred Western imaginations in ways that still shape our vision of the Pacific.
The island was temperate and fertile, abounding in everything a man long at sea might dream of: fruit, fowl, fresh water, and females more enticing than any in the world, bare-legged and bare-breasted, with flowers garlanding their jet-black hair. The women lined the beach and tempted the English with “every lewd action they could think of,” one crewman reported. It was a vision straight out of the Odyssey.
So was the scene that followed. Sailors coupled with native women on the beach, on the ship’s deck, in huts along the shore. The English gave the women nails: highly prized metal that native men molded into fishhooks. Before long, the Dolphin’s sailors had pried so much iron from their ship that cleats loosened and two-thirds of the men had to sleep on the deck, having removed the nails that held up their hammocks. Officers caught one sailor stealing nails and forced him to run the gauntlet, or sprint between two lines of men armed with whips. His mates barely flogged him, and they soon began giving women their shirts instead of nails.
Even the Dolphin’s sour, sick commander, Samuel Wallis, eventually succumbed. On his first trip ashore, islanders carried the captain to a hut where young women undressed and massaged him. Wallis found “great benefit” from “the chafing,” as he called it, and allowed himself to be dressed in native cloth and attended to by a chief’s wife, a large, handsome woman whom Wallis christened “my Princess, or rather Queen.” The enchanted captain named the island after King George and sailed off with embraces and “such tenderness of affection and grief, as filled both my heart and my eyes.”
Ten months later, on another shore of the island, two French ships arrived under the command of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, a classicist and gentleman as well as a naval officer. “The young girl negligently allowed her loincloth to fall to the ground,” he wrote of a woman who climbed aboard the ship, “and appeared to all eyes as Venus showed herself to the Phrygian shepherd. She had the Goddess’s celestial form.” A naturalist on board wrote even more rhapsodically about island lovemaking, much of which was public: “Here, modesty and prudery lose their tyranny. The act of procreation is an act of religion; its preludes are encouraged by the voices and songs of the assembled people, and its end is greeted by universal applause.”
The French felt as though they’d walked into the pages of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Discourses extolling “natural man,” uncorrupted by society, were the rage of Parisian salons. “I thought I had been transported to the Garden of Eden,” Bougainville wrote of the island’s lush interior. “Restfulness, a quiet joy and all the semblances of happiness reign everywhere.” Bougainville entertained islanders with a flute-and-violin concert, followed by fireworks. At the end of this ten-day idyll, Bougainville named the island “New Cythera,” after the Greek isle where the love goddess Aphrodite emerged from the sea foam. “What a country! What a people!” he exclaimed.
Natives had their own name for the island: O Tahiti. This was Cook’s destination in 1768, and the paradise to which I planned to follow him after setting up base in Australia.
Sydney is home to the world’s best archive of rare books and manuscripts on Cook. It is also the hometown of my wife, Geraldine, who looked forward to living there with our son while I researched Cook and roamed the Pacific. She found us a row house with a view of the Sydney docks. We’d been there three days when a close friend from our previous stay in Sydney, Roger Williamson, appeared at the door carrying a bottle of wine in each hand. Like most males in Australia, Roger drank too much. Whenever I was with him, I did the same.
Over the first bottle, I shared my plan for traveling in Cook’s wake. Over the second, Roger declared that he’d go with me. “I grew up in Yorkshire, like Cook,” he said. “I understand the man.”
“You’d be a bad influence.”
“Very bad. That’s the point.”
Roger had spent his first twenty-six years in Yorkshire, exactly as Cook had. His mother still lived in Whitby, the port from which Cook first sailed. Roger was also a skilled sailor who spent every free moment on the water.
“It’s my trip,” I told him. “I’d have to be captain.”
“Fine. You can bend me over the boom and flog me. I like being beaten. I’m English.”
“Okay,” I said, pouring him another glass. “Free-associate. What do you think of when I say ‘Captain Cook’?”
“Roast beef, silly wig, funny hat. All that grim-lipped, hunchbacked British sense of duty I came to Australia to escape.” He paused. “Also the greatest sailor of all time. I’m an utter poltroon compared to Cook.”
“And Tahiti?”
“Coconuts. Swaying hips. Grass skirts. Mostly to do with crumpet.”
“Crumpet?”
“Sheilas. Or whatever you call them in America. Warm, willing flesh.” Roger had recently separated from his wife and decamped to a dismal flat in downtown Sydney. Crumpet was much on his mind. “We’ll put on wigs and stockings and march onto the beach at Tahiti, like Cook and his men,” he went on. “I’d look good in stockings.”
This was probably true. Like many English émigrés to Australia, Roger came from pale, pinched working-class stock, but during twenty years in Sydney he’d leisured himself into a handsome, bronzed Aussie. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with sun-streaked blond curls, and blue eyes set in a perpetually tanned face. I rarely saw him out of the Sydney summer uniform: T-shirt, shorts, deck shoes.
“Of course,” he said, “I can assure you as a proud Yorkshireman that Cook didn’t disgrace himself by rooting the natives. Only filthy sailors did that. They were rough as boots.” He chuckled. “You can play Cook.”
We finished off the wine. I woke some hours later with a sore head, and lay awake mulling the notion of taking on crew. “Only those associated with the sea can appreciate Cook and his achievements,” Horatio Nelson observed. Perhaps Roger could explain some of that to me. At the least, he’d be good company.
The next day, Roger phoned from Melbourne, where he’d gone on business. He worked for a firm that sold books to libraries. It was Roger’s job to charm librarians into buying the titles his company peddled. He was good at this, so he had time and money to devote to his sailboat and wine cellar—or to bumming around the Pacific with me.
“It’s bloody gray and awful here, like Yorkshire,” h
e said. Most Sydneysiders disdain Melbourne as dull, with dismal weather. “Let’s go to Tahiti. Now.”
“Not now. It’s the wet season there, ninety degrees every day and a hundred and ten percent humidity.”
“Yes, it’ll be vile. We’ll get scrotum rot.” Roger laughed. “Don’t be a pathetic Yank. You think Cook was put off by a little rain?”
By the time Cook reached Tahiti in 1769, he’d been sailing west for eight months, the longest ocean passage of his career to that point. He’d endured a chilly reception from the Portuguese in Rio (who suspected the English were smugglers), rounded Cape Horn, and lost five men, including “a good hardy seaman” who had served with him in Canada. “Peter Flower seaman fell over board and before any Assistance could be given him was drown’d,” Cook wrote with customary terseness. “In his room we got a Portuguese.”
During the ten-week Pacific passage, along a more southerly course than any ship had sailed before, a despairing marine threw himself overboard and drowned. The wine ran out. Banks felt his gums swell and “pimples” form in his mouth: early signs of scurvy. Whatever else Cook might have worried about as he neared the tropics, rain was certainly the least of it.
The Endeavour dropped anchor on April 13, 1769, in Tahiti’s Matavai Bay, the same inlet the Dolphin had visited two years before. Sydney Parkinson, an artist aboard the Endeavour, painted a word-picture of the scene: “The land appeared as uneven as a piece of crumpled paper, being divided irregularly into hills and valleys; but a beautiful verdure covered both, even to the tops of the highest peaks.”
Several of the Dolphin’s men had joined the Endeavour and inflamed the crew with tales of the island’s bounty. On first landing, however, the English found both food and islanders scarce. “No very agreeable discovery,” Cook grumbled, “to us whose Ideas of plenty upon our arrival at this Island was carried to the very highest pitch.”
The Dolphin veterans insisted that the bay had changed, and it had; an attack by islanders from the interior had driven much of the population away. But exploring a little farther, the English encountered the welcome they’d hoped for. Islanders greeted Cook and Banks with green boughs (a symbol of peace), calling them tiao, or friend, and giving them presents of perfumed cloth. Then they escorted several officers and gentlemen to an open longhouse. Women pointed at mats on the ground, “sometimes by force seating themselves and us upon them,” Banks wrote. Unlike his French predecessor, the English naturalist saw virtue in privacy. “The houses being intirely without walls, we had not an opportunity of putting their politeness to every test.”
Cook, a staid family man, made no mention of this scene. But Banks, a twenty-six-year-old bachelor—albeit a bachelor engaged to a soon-forgotten Englishwoman—pressed on. “I espied among the common croud a very pretty girl with a fire in her eyes,” he wrote of a feast later the same day. Beckoning the girl to his side, Banks gave her beads and other trinkets. A jealous chief’s wife, seated on the botanist’s other flank, plied him with fish and coconut milk. “How this would have ended is hard to say,” Banks wistfully reported. At that moment, several of his companions realized they’d been pickpocketed, losing a snuffbox and spyglass. The English angrily demanded the items’ return, and eventually got their possessions back—but not before the girl with fire in her eyes had fled.
The next day, as the English set up camp on a promontory Cook named Point Venus, a Tahitian snatched a sentinel’s musket. The young officer on duty ordered his men to fire and one of them shot the thief dead. The Quaker artist, Sydney Parkinson, was appalled: “What a pity, that such brutality should be exercized by civilized people upon unarmed ignorant Indians!” Cook explained to the Tahitians “that the man was kill’d for taking away the Musquet and that we still would be friends with them.”
How he communicated this concept isn’t clear. The Dolphin veterans doubtless acted as interpreters, though they knew only a smattering of the local language; the rest had to be conveyed with hand signs. Nor do we hear the Tahitian side of the story. Attempting to divine islanders’ thoughts from the English journals is like watching a movie with the volume off; most of what we get are reaction shots. “No sign of forgiveness could I see in their faces, they lookd sulky and affronted,” Banks wrote of a later confrontation.
Four days after the English landing, Alex Buchan, a landscape and figure painter in Banks’s retinue, died during an epileptic seizure. “His Loss to me is irretrievable,” Banks wrote, “my airy dreams of entertaining my friends in England with the scenes that I am to see here are vanished.” It fell to Parkinson, a draftsman who specialized in plants and animals, to fill the gap. The artist faced an added challenge: Tahiti’s voracious flies. “They eat the painters colours off the paper as fast as they can be laid on,” Banks wrote, “and if a fish is to be drawn there is more trouble in keeping them off than in the drawing itself.”
Flies and pickpockets aside, the English were enchanted by their surrounds. Wandering inland, Banks found “groves of Cocoa nut and bread fruit trees loaded with a profusion of fruit and giving the most gratefull shade I have ever experienced, under these were the habitations of the people most of them without walls: in short the scene was the truest picture of an arcadia of which we were going to be kings that the imagination can form.”
The islanders inspired similar awe. “I never beheld statelier men,” wrote Parkinson, who described them as tall, muscular, and tawny, with large black eyes and perfect white teeth. They seemed to possess a natural grace: in their gait, in their manners, in their fluid athleticism when swimming and canoeing. But it was the women who captivated the English most of all. They bathed three times a day in a river near Point Venus, shaved under their arms (as did the men), bedecked their hair with blossoms, and anointed themselves with coconut oil. (Banks, who disliked the oil’s smell, nonetheless judged it preferable “to the odoriferous perfume of toes and armpits so frequent in Europe.”)
Islanders also displayed as little inhibition with the Endeavour’s crew as they had with the Dolphin’s. “The women begin to have a share in our Freindship which is by no means Platonick,” the ship’s master, Robert Molyneux, observed soon after the Endeavour’s arrival. He returned to the subject a few weeks later: “The Venereal Disorder made sad work among the People.” So sad that more than a third of the crew showed signs of infection.
Cook, always mindful of his men’s health, tried to contain the disease’s spread by barring infected men from going ashore. “But all I could do was to little purpose for I may safely say that I was not assisted by any one person in ye Ship.” Cook also feared for Tahitians, presciently observing that the disease “may in time spread it self over all the Islands in the South Seas, to the eternal reproach of those who first brought it among them.”
Who had brought it remained unclear. The Dolphin’s crew hadn’t reported any cases of venereal disease—or, as Cook and his crew variously termed the illness in their journals, “this filthy distemper,” “the fowl disease,” “the Pox,” “a Clap,” “that heavy Curse,” and “that greatest plague that ever the human Race was afflicted with.” A month before the Endeavour’s arrival in Tahiti, Cook’s surgeon had checked the men and found only one sailor afflicted; he was barred from contact with Tahitian women. So Cook consoled himself with islanders’ reports that the disease had arrived with other European visitors.
The Frenchman, Bougainville, disputed this. He wrote that syphilis was already present when he landed ten months after the Dolphin. Hence another chapter in the cross-Channel blame game, whereby the English termed syphilis the French disease and the French referred to it as le mal Anglais. To complicate matters, some scholars believe that the sickness wasn’t syphilis but yaws, a tropical skin disease that produces symptoms similar to those of venereal disease.
To afflicted islanders, the source of the contagion made little difference. Nor was venereal disease the deadliest consequence of Western contact. When Cook returned to Tahiti in 1773, islanders co
mplained of another scourge, brought by a Spanish ship that had visited in the interim. “They say that it affects the head, throat and stomack and at length kills them,” Cook wrote. “They dread it much and were constantly enquiring if we had it.” Cook didn’t identify this influenzalike ailment, but he wrote that Tahitians called it Apa no Peppe (the sickness of Pepe), “just as they call the venereal disease Apa no Britannia or Brit-tanee, notwithstanding they to a man say that it was first communicated by M. de Bougainville.”
As Tahiti became a popular port of call in the decades following Cook’s visit, other diseases took hold: tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, whooping cough. Alcoholism and internecine warfare, abetted by Western weapons and mercenaries, became rife as well. The toll was catastrophic. In 1774, Cook estimated Tahiti’s population at 204,000. By 1865, less than a century after the first European visit, a French census recorded only 7,169 native inhabitants remaining on the island.
Roger and I arrived in Tahiti after a ten-hour flight from Sydney to Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia (a French protectorate that includes Tahiti and 117 other islands sprinkled across a swath of the South Pacific roughly the size of Europe). Men in floral shirts strummed ukuleles as we waited for our baggage in a decrepit terminal cooled by ceiling fans. After passing through immigration, we were met by honey-colored women in tight floral dresses cut high up the thigh. They greeted us with wreaths of pink and white hibiscus and signs touting package holidays: “Tahiti Legends,” “Pacific Escapes,” “Exotismes.”
We changed money and found flowered beauties adorning the bank-notes. I bought a bottle of mineral water while we waited for a bus to our hotel. The label bore a reproduction of a Gauguin maiden, bare-breasted, in a colorful wrap. The tourist brochures offered similar images of bronzed women in string bikinis. Whatever else might have changed, Tahitians still sold sex as aggressively as they had to the young sailors who landed here in the 1760s.