Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  Cook poked fun at himself, too. When he came ashore at one beach, an elderly woman presented the captain with a comely young “Miss.” Cook declined, apologizing that he had nothing to give her. “[I] thought by that means to have come off with flying Colours,” Cook wrote, “but I was misstaken, for I was made to understand I might retire with her on credit.” When he again declined, the elderly woman berated him, “Sneering in my face and saying, what sort of man are you thus to refuse the embraces of so fine a young Woman, for the girl certainly did not want beauty which I could however withstand, but the abuse of the old Woman I could not and therefore hastn’d into the Boat.”

  Other Englishmen weren’t so insistent in resisting native charms. “The Women are in general handsome and to the last degree obliging,” wrote Charles Clerke. Another crewman, William Bayly, judged the women “fat & Jolly,” and wrote that they often swam to the ship, exchanging their favors for a nail. “Virtue is held in little esteem here.” This judgment echoed that of a Dutch surgeon who briefly visited the islands with Abel Tasman 130 years earlier. “Two frightful giantesses grasped me,” he wrote. “Other women felt the sailors shamelessly in the trouser-front, and indicated clearly that they wanted to have intercourse. South-landers what people.”

  Cook stayed on the islands only a few days in 1773, and returned for another brief tour the following year, immediately after visiting Niue. His concluding remarks on the isles couldn’t have differed more from those he’d just penned about Savage Island. “Joy and Contentment is painted in every face and their whole behaviour to us was mild and benevolent,” he wrote. “This groupe I have named the Friendly Archipelago as a lasting friendship seems to subsist among the Inhabitants and their Courtesy to Strangers intitles them to that Name.”

  Cook’s journal made for pleasant reading during the short flight from Niue. But it proved a poor primer for our own arrival at Tongatapu, the principal island of the Royal Kingdom of Tonga. (Tonga, a native word meaning “south”—the main island’s position in relation to the rest of the archipelago—supplanted Cook’s name in the nineteenth century.) We were greeted, not by “acclamations from an immence crowd,” but by sullen officials who stamped passports and inspected bags without so much as looking up. Outside the terminal, a woman from the International Dateline Hotel pointed us to a bus. “Why was your plane late?” she demanded. During the half-hour drive to the hotel, she stared blankly ahead, ignoring our questions.

  My first impression of Tonga’s landscape, viewed through the bus’s smudged windows, was as dismal as Cook’s had been admiring. Pigs snuffled in the garbage that littered roadside fields. We passed graffiti-covered billboards for cigarettes, a vegetable stall named Prison Market, and a battered sign arcing over the road, emblazoned with the words “Long Live Your Majesty.” Sweeping under this arch, we entered downtown Nuku’alofa, the Tongan capital, which seemed at first glance a dreary expanse of ferroconcrete boxes.

  The International Dateline Hotel rose beside the waterfront, facing its namesake, 180 miles to the east. Tonga claimed to be the first landfall on earth struck by the dawn sun; “Where Time Begins,” said the inscription on a clock face by the hotel entrance. Erected in 1967 to accommodate guests at the king’s coronation, the state-owned Dateline also billed itself as Tonga’s leading hotel. Since Roger and I had anticipated sleeping rough in Niue, we’d splurged when making reservations in Tonga.

  Stuffed birds stared forlornly from a glass case in the Dateline’s cavernous lobby. Porters loitered in the shadows, ignoring a crowd of newly arrived guests, who toted their bags past a broken elevator and up a peeling stairwell. Our “deluxe” room featured a naked bulb dangling from the ceiling, torn window screens, and a soggy carpet pocked with cigarette burns. “The furniture looks like it was stolen from a suburban house in Melbourne thirty years ago,” Roger said, settling into a mildewed chair. He reached for an ashtray, already full of butts. A can of peanuts, open and half empty, sat atop the fridge.

  We fled outside for a walk through the stifling heat. A few blocks from the hotel, we entered a residential neighborhood of dirt and gravel lanes. Many of the homes appeared unfinished: jumbles of corrugated iron, cinder block, and scrap lumber. Pigs, ducks, and roosters wandered in the alleys. On the main streets, road signs hung askew and power poles teetered. Even a park enclosing the tombs of Tongan royalty appeared vandalized; chickens and dogs slipped through the torn fence to defecate around the imperial graves.

  I like untidy places. As a traveler, nothing bores me more than bland tourist traps. But Nuku’alofa’s squalor surprised me. In Niue, I’d had ample time to read about Tonga. Among other things, I’d learned that the kingdom—which encompasses 171 far-flung islands, many of them uninhabited—ranks among the wealthiest nations in the South Pacific. Tonga’s royal family owns multiple palaces, as well as properties all over the world, and the king’s personal wealth has been reported at $350 million U.S. Most of the travelers’ accounts I’d read depicted Nuku’alofa as quaintly picturesque. To me, the place seemed old-fashioned in a charmless way, neglected rather than nostalgic.

  The only sign of public improvement was a curious plaque near the water, commemorating “the inauguration of this extension of the Vuna Road streetlighting by HRH Crown Prince Tupouto’a at 7:00 P.M. on Thursday 30 June, 1988, to mark the 70th Birthday of His Majesty.” Roger shook his head. “It’s weird, almost Marie Antoinette. Let them have light!”

  The people we passed on the streets also surprised me. Big, I expected. Tongans rank among the largest people on the planet, beginning with their king, who was once cited by the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s weightiest monarch, at 444 pounds. I also recognized Tongans’ features from the journals and artwork of Cook and his men: soft and handsome faces, dark copper skin, black hair. Tonga was the only South Pacific nation never to have been colonized. It also had a long history of barring immigrants. (“Tonga for the Tongans,” a nineteenth-century monarch declared.) As a result, the hundred thousand islanders were so ethnically “pure” that biotechnology firms sought Tongan DNA to study genetic links to disease, which are easiest to isolate in homogenous populations.

  But if Tongans’ bloodlines appeared little changed since Cook’s day, the same didn’t seem true of their temperament, at least in the presence of foreigners. The captain described islanders as not only exceptionally hospitable, but also as “a people of a good deal of levity.” The women, he added, were “the merriest creatures I ever met with and will keep chattering by ones side without the least invitation.”

  Levity and chitchat weren’t much in evidence now, as we’d already seen at the hotel and airport. During our three-hour walk, we occasionally sought refuge in fan-cooled stores. Most shopkeepers ignored us. On the streets, cars didn’t give way to pedestrians, and neither did pedestrians. We were almost knocked off the sidewalk several times by men barging the other way as if we were invisible, or of no more consequence than gnats. At the waterfront, I paused to snap a picture. A pack of young men on bicycles rode into the frame. “What the fuck you doing!” one shouted at me. “No fucking pictures!”

  The women weren’t hostile, but nor were they the gay, flesh-baring “Lasses” described by Charles Clerke and other crewmen. Most of those we passed wore a traditional woven girdle called the ta’ovala. Stiff and dun-colored, the ta’ovala looked like a floor mat that had been picked up and tied, apron-style, over the women’s other clothes, covering them from the knee to the solar plexus. The garment appeared hot and uncomfortable, and served to emphasize the women’s girth.

  Many of the women held hands, and some men locked fingers with other men. But there was no such contact between the sexes—a restraint absent in Cook’s day, when the English observed Tongans making love in public. While the Tongans had escaped colonialism, they had fervently embraced Western missionaries, Methodists and Mormons in particular.

  Before leaving Sydney, Roger and I had lunched with a diplomat who often visited T
onga. Inevitably, Roger asked about island women. “They are not only very large, but very very Christian,” the diplomat told us. Glancing downward, he added, “In Tonga, Percy sleeps quietly at night.”

  At sundown, larded with sweat and vaguely depressed, we retreated to an open-air pub by the waterfront. The walls were covered with recruitment posters for the U.S. Marines (“Tough and Proud of It”). Ten or so men, broad-shouldered and bull-necked, stood guzzling Royal Beer and gazing at us with what seemed a certain menace. “I feel like I’m at a Mike Tyson convention,” Roger said. At six feet, three inches, and over two hundred pounds, he wasn’t accustomed to feeling physically intimidated.

  We were about to leave when the barman asked, in American-accented English, where we came from. He’d lived in California for many years, become a U.S. citizen, and served in the military: hence the posters. “Tongans are trained from birth to be tough,” he said, “and we respect authority. So we make good soldiers.” Most of his patrons had worked overseas, too, usually in Australia or New Zealand. “Tongans also make good bar bouncers,” he said. Then he asked what brought us to Nuku’alofa.

  “We’re going to all the places Captain Cook went,” Roger said.

  “Oh yeah, Cook,” the barman replied. “His great-great-granddaughter lives out back. She works at the bar.”

  This was news. I asked if we could speak to her. The barman headed through a yard behind the pub and returned with an attractive, fair-skinned woman of about twenty, named Macy Cook. She had reddish-brown hair, tattoos on her upper arms, and a nose ring. Her skirt and halter top exposed much more skin than was customary in Tonga. “My father’s dad was Captain Cook’s grandson,” she said. “I forget all the history.” She smiled suggestively. “There are plenty of Tongans related to Cook. He liked the girls.”

  Macy didn’t know any more about her lineage. But she told us to return in a few days when she went each week to visit her mother. “She has a book on family history,” Macy said. “It’s got a picture of Cook that looks a lot like my father.”

  Reading Cook’s journals is a constant reminder of how specialized our skills have become in the modern era. On one page, Cook discusses astronomy, geology, meteorology, and animal husbandry. On the next, he offers insight into management, commerce, and diplomacy. Then he veers into lengthy speculation about ocean currents and the formation of islands. Few people today would even dream of dabbling in so many disciplines, much less mastering them.

  Cook didn’t excel at everything. He was a merely competent linguist who leaned heavily on other crewmen when assembling native vocabularies. Cook also freely acknowledged that religion remained a mystery to him. Nonetheless, he seems such a polymath that his occasional blind spots come as a shock. One such limitation was his shaky grasp of Polynesian politics. In his approach to almost every other realm of Pacific life—including sexual mores and cannibalism—Cook displayed a steady shrewdness and lack of bias. But when it came to navigating island governance, Cook often tried to squeeze very foreign customs into an inelastic British box.

  Nowhere was this more obvious than in Tonga, to which Cook returned in 1777, on his third Pacific voyage. He toured the archipelago for more than two months, one of his longest visits anywhere. Eager to secure a steady flow of provisions, and to make sense of Tonga, Cook spent much of his time seeking out island rulers. “It was my intrest as well as my inclination to pay my Court to all these great men,” he wrote with characteristic deference. Also very English was Cook’s presumption that Tonga had an absolute sovereign akin to George III. He referred to this figure as “the king,” and became obsessed with finding him.

  Tonga’s hierarchy, however, didn’t conform to British norms. Power and rank flowed through an intricate lacework of chiefs, plenipotentiaries, and taboo-wreathed relatives of the Tu’i Tonga, a hereditary leader who came closest to Cook’s notion of king. Complicating matters still more, several female kin of the Tu’i Tonga had a status superior to any man’s. Island leaders also jostled for power, and saw the English and their ships as potentially useful in this struggle. As a result, the English became enmeshed in an extended game of “take me to your leader” that almost cost Cook and his crew their lives.

  On his first Pacific voyage, Cook had been able to rely on Banks’s charms and aristocratic instincts, as well as on Tupaia’s interpretive skills, when trying to divine Polynesian politics. The captain wasn’t similarly blessed on his later voyages. At times, he also showed signs of becoming a little too confident in his own judgment. In labyrinthine Tonga, this inevitably led to misunderstandings, some of them quite comic.

  Early in his wild-goose chase after Tonga’s “principal man,” Cook was led to a young person whom islanders treated with exceptional awe. “I found him seated with so much sullen and stupid gravity that I realy took him for an ideot,” Cook wrote. His vain attempts at communicating with this “Post stuck in the ground” confirmed the captain’s low opinion. Cook was about to depart when a Tongan insisted that the immobile figure was, in fact, “the principal man on the Island.” So Cook rather grudgingly showered trinkets on the “little brat,” as the captain called him. This taciturn youth, it turned out, was Tonga’s tahama, or sacred child, so revered that even the Tu’i Tonga couldn’t eat in his presence.

  Much more serious was Cook’s confusion over a charismatic young chief named Finau, who led the English to believe that he was ruler of Tonga. Tall and handsome, and possessing what a lieutenant called “much fire and vivacity,” Finau ostentatiously displayed his own power, inviting Cook to watch as subjects paid homage to the chief by delivering immense piles of yams, pigs, turtles, and other food. Finau also flattered the English with his extravagant hospitality. One gift of provisions was so massive that Cook wrote: “There was as much as loaded four boats and far exceeded any present I had ever before received from an Indian Prince.”

  Finau also engaged Cook in a curiously competitive round of entertainment. The Tongans staged boxing and wrestling matches, inviting sailors into the ring and promptly knocking them down. (“A couple of lusty wenches” also boxed, Cook wrote, “with as much art as the men.”) Cook reciprocated by showing off his marines and musicians. The Tongans then performed a war dance, a “harlequin” show, and a torch-lit concert that, Cook wrote, “whould have met with universal applause on a European Theatre and so far exceeded any thing we had done to amuse them that they seemed to pique themselves in the superiority they had over us.”

  Not to be outdone, Cook concluded the revelry by firing off “sky and Water Rockets which astonished and pleased them beyond measure and intirely turned the scale in our favour.” William Anderson, a surgeon, wrote that Tongans “compar’d the sparkles which fell from the sky rockets to falling stars,” and supposed that the smoke “remained and became a cloud.”

  The Tongans’ day-and-night-long “deversions,” as Cook called them, were intended as exactly that. Years later, an Englishman living among the Tongans learned that Finau had staged the extravaganza to deflect his visitors’ attention so that he and his accomplices could massacre the English and seize their booty-laden ships. At the last moment, a tactical dispute among the Tongan chiefs led to the scheme’s abandonment. But Cook fell prey to another of Finau’s deceptions. When the captain asked to accompany Finau to his home island of Vava’u, “he seemed not to approve of this and by way of deverting us from it, told me there was neither harbour nor anchorage.” Vava’u, in fact, offered the best harbor in all of Tonga. Finau apparently feared that the English, if they found it, would take over his island.

  Sailing south instead, Cook discovered that Finau was “not the King,” though he evidently wished to command all the isles. Rather, the most kinglike figure in Tonga was a man whose family name Cook rendered as Fattafee—appropriate, given that “he was the most corperate plump fellow we had met with.” Fattafee—more accurately, Fatafehi—was the Tu’i Tonga, number thirty-six in a line of hereditary rulers. The surgeon, Anderson, recogn
ized that size amplified the “rank and power” of Polynesian leaders. He described Fatafehi as a man “of a monstrous size with fat which render’d him very unwieldy and almost shapeless.”

  This imperial blob studied everything aboard the Resolution with keen curiosity. However, when Cook invited him below, “his attendants objected to this, saying if we went there people would walk over his head.” The king’s head was so sacred that no one else’s could ever rise above it. When subjects approached, they bowed their heads between their knees and reverently tapped the soles of the king’s feet. Attendants also carried the king ashore in what Cook described as a “hand barrow.” They fanned flies from his face, and when he lay down, women beat him gently with their fists, a sleep-inducing massage that continued through the night.

  “I was quite charmed with the decorum that was observed,” Cook wrote of the fawning treatment accorded Fatafehi. “I had no where seen the like, no not even amongst more civilized nations.”

  The king escorted the English to Tongatapu and entertained them almost daily with feasts and kava ceremonies. The captain reciprocated on board the Resolution. This endless round of eating and drinking consumed the rest of Cook’s stay in Tonga. His journal starts to read a bit like Banks’s in Tahiti: the jaded account of an inveterate socialite, detailing who sat where, in what order they drank kava, how much food they consumed, what dances they performed. His men also made themselves at home, learning to shave with shells, timing canoe races, and enjoying the favors of island women, who, Charles Clerke wrote, “render’d our Bill of Fare compleat.”

  The English didn’t entirely approve of their hosts’ “feudal” ways, as Cook put it. He noted that a chief, angry with his subjects, “beat them most unmercifully” with a club until one man fell bleeding and went into convulsions. “On his being told he had killed the man he only laughed,” Cook wrote of the chief. Later, Cook saw a royal canoe run over two small boats, “with as little concern as if they had been bits of wood.” He also watched as the king plundered canoes “and took from them every fish and shell they had got.”