by A. N. Wilson
Perhaps this was Reinhold’s way of telling him not to do it? Perhaps his secret was no secret at all, and everyone, Nally, the midshipmen, even the Captain knew it. Most painful of all were those passages in the Holy Scripture which seemed to say that God knew. Herr, du erforschest mich und kennest mich. Ich sitze oder stehe auf, so weisst Du es; du verstehest meine Gedanken von ferne . . . He understood our hearts, but could He forgive us? Was it not wasting the precious seed of life? Was it not trivializing the impulse which He had implanted in us to multiply the species, to make other human souls, not merely to give ourselves filthy pleasure? Surely if He forgave this sin He would condone it, He would be like Mr Patten with his manly laughter, his implication that boys will be boys. Oh, why could human beings not be like those species who had a mating season? For long ice-bound months, the father penguins stood with one egg, kept warm on their feet and sheltered by their feathery legs, while their mates waddled for miles to find fish. The penguins did not go in for self-abuse, they could concentrate upon being penguins, whereas, for George, this habit which was so compulsive drove out all useful, creative or intelligent mental acts and therefore in some sense prevented him from being George. Nothing, nothing, not prayer nor resolution – nor even his attempt to trick himself into embarrassment – Vati knows why you slipped back to your cabin – he knows you do not need your pencil box or your pocket-volume of Horace – could stop this all-consuming, humiliating, exhausting, depressing need. Oh, so depressing, the lowering of spirits which followed each squirt, but even the knowledge that it would be the result, the shame and the sadness could not stop him.
—And you, lad, with Mr Hodges, you’re the two artists, you come along o’ me – it was the Captain who was addressing him – and we’ll pop yer dad and Mr Wales in the launch. They can do some Natural History and we’ll take Mr Gibson our gallant corporal since he says ’e knows t’ lingo.
George and his father liked Gibson who was a marine; even more they liked the Captain’s easygoing attitude towards him. Gibson had sailed on the Endeavour voyage in ’69 and deserted on Tahiti, where he had taken a wife, and acquired the belief during the year or so of his association that he understood what she was saying. (More than many of us’d say of our womenfolk, was the Captain’s judgement.) He forgave Gibson when he came back to England and specifically asked him to travel on the Resolution to act as an interpreter. The language in Tahiti bore kinship to that of the New Zealanders, or so Gibson had his shipmates believe.
—You should do it in oils, Mr Hodges – were Cook’s awestruck words as they crossed the long cove, light rain pattering blue-black water, verdant, sheer slopes soaring above them, and beyond the rain, glowing over the mountain, a rainbow. Little songbirds, linnets, sang so close to their heads, they almost expected them to land on their hats, while on the water were blue duck, brown tern, and the black and white oyster-catchers. As the pinnace-men rowed them towards the rocky shore, they could see a low-lying hut thatched with flags of the flax plant and covered with bark. Out of this edifice came a blue-lipped woman with a child on her back, followed by a little boy and a girl who waved to their visitors. The woman called something into the hut, and there emerged an old man wearing a coloured mat with dried albatross-skin in his ears. He was followed by some younger men.
Captain Cook stood in the bow of the pinnace and, as it nudged the rocks, he threw his handkerchief out as a present; then a couple of the medals cast by Matthew Boulton in Birmingham, with the head of George III. The New Zealanders watched. The young woman with the baby seemed to think his actions comical. No one picked up the objects. Somewhat with the air of a conjuror attempting a new trick, Cook now produced a blank sheet of white paper from his pocket. Then, hatless, he sprung from the boat on to the rocks and walked towards the natives. He held out the paper to the old man.
—Peace! he hollered.
The elder was visibly afraid of the Captain who was by a good foot the taller man. His hand shook as he took the paper, but Cook then grasped this tremulous hand, enfolded the man in an embrace, and rubbed noses – remembering from his previous visit that this was the polite form of salutation there.
The next day it became apparent why the young woman had laughed when the Captain cast down his gifts, and why she had not picked them up. The respectable women stayed indoors. It was assumed that any gift, however small, was taken in exchange for favours. Sailors, both from the Resolution and the Adventure, streamed towards the shore, some swimming rather than waiting for the jolly boats.
—You canna stop it, it’s nature, Dr Forster.
—That they should do it so flagrantly, not even trying to hide themselves . . .
—I know, I know . . .
—After all your warnings.
—At least there was no case of that among them.
—On the Resolution, yes – but did all the Adventures submit themselves to their surgeon for examination?
—We don’t like it, Dr Forster, but believe me, I’ve worked with sailors all my life – in the merchant service, in the Royal Navy – you can’t change nature. You sometimes have to turn a blind eye.
—They don’t all behave like this. Why can’t they be like Nally?
The Captain gave Reinhold a quizzical look.
—There hasn’t been trouble with that one?
—With Nally? Sometimes a little slapdash maybe. The coffee he makes is too weak.
—That’s not quite what I mean.
—What sort of trouble might Nally have given?
—Your boy would’ve said if there’d been trouble? I know he’s a shy lad, but he’d have said?
Not caring to admit when he did not understand, Reinhold changed the theme. Next time he ran across George, however, he asked him,
—You haven’t had trouble with Nally?
—What kind of trouble, Vati? It isn’t true what the men say about him.
—What do they say?
George paused.
—You’re not to get Nally into trouble.
—What is it they say?
—They say he supports the new ideas. Thinks all men should have votes and send members to Parliament – that kind of thing.
—Is that all they say?
—It’s all a lot of nonsense.
It was conspicuous that Nally was among those who didn’t go ashore in pursuit of the women, preferring to sit on deck darning, which he did with great deftness and concentration.
George knew the words, in at least five languages, for what the men and women were doing, so openly, so shamelessly. During his obsessive solitary lustful reveries he had assumed that these activities were what he wanted, more than anything in life, to pursue. Watching the sailors and the New Zealanders rutting changed his perspective. His own visits ashore, with Mr Hodges or his father, were sketching trips or expeditions to collect botanical specimens. Sport, too, occupied them – they shot a number of seals, and after a few curled lips almost every man aboard pronounced the meat as good as beefsteak. There was hardly a part of the district, however, when engaged in these occupations, when one did not come across some naked bottom bouncing up and down on a woman, sprawled on a rock; some other woman fellating a midshipman against a tree; or one of her friends on all fours while a group of ratings took it in turns to approach her from behind, their masts swaying shamelessly in front of them, their nankeen trousers round their ankles.
The energy of it all, and the openness, frightened him. Presumably the ones who did not indulge – Nally, say, the surgeons, the Captain, Reinhold, and quite a lot of the ratings – only abstained for fear of disease; they were all men, this was what they wanted – a thought which troubled him so much he was for a few days abstinent from his secret vice. He had never considered, until the scenes so shamelessly displayed in Dusky Bay, how much loss the activity involved: not merely loss of dignity, but loss of something else for which he could find no word. It was perhaps loss of self.
The Resolution was overhauled and re
ady to sail as the New Zealand winter began. The Adventure had in the meantime explored Van Diemen’s Land. Cook devoted the next five months to sailing in the South Pacific. There was a delightful month when the two ships sailed in convoy with gentle breezes and blue-green bobbing water. Then bad fortune hit the Adventure whose Captain, Furneaux, never took enough care of the health and diet of his men. Their cook died, and many of the Adventures had by then gone down with scurvy. They had also several outbreaks of venereal disease after their sojourn in New Zealand, throwing open once again the question of whether this ultimately derived from the European visits in ’69 or whether in fact the disease was indigenous. Some of the scurvy cases improved when, after a period in August of being quite becalmed, they reached Tahiti and were able to eat fresh fruit and vegetables once more.
George had become a seaman. At their first setting forth, the movements and noises of the ship had been alien, the frequent nausea, the numbing sameness of each nautical day, with the ringing of bells, with each half-hourly turning of the sand in the glass. Now he was used to all of it, the morning summons by Nally, the often inconsequential, gentle conversations they had together, their shared fondness for the ship’s cat, the everlastingness of the limitless sea, the timelessness of days adrift, the unutterable strangeness of being out of sight of land for weeks on end brought a calmness which made him dread the moment when land was descried. Ship life somehow suited the hidden innerness of his adolescent moods, the countless hours of mental drift, when he was conscious, but unfocused, aware of human voices but in no necessity to converse or understand what was being said, whether it was Reinhold prosing about the life of migrant birds or midshipmen pursuing their relentlessly arch humour. Moreover, cocooned by the ship’s empty routines and surrounded by the automatic busy-ness of sailors swabbing, climbing, mending, stitching, rigging, the specific erotic torments and onanistic preoccupations were on many days containable. Loneliness was sad but there was a comfort in loneliness. Instinct told him there were worse things than the low-level gloom of his adolescent life, which was at the same time paradoxically quickened by sharpness of outlook, an intensity of awareness, so that the taste of salt on his lips and face, the dampness of the breeze on his skin, the rise and fall of the turquoise swell, the voices and faces of the sailors, the exact colour and texture of the plumage of an albatross, were all vividly present. His capacity for observation was so sharp that it almost hurt, the sheer excitement simply of existence itself. And then it was land ahoy and the monastic repetitiveness of ship life was once again threatened by exposure to the human how d’ye do, the complexities of the social.
A month or so of exploring the island life of Queen Charlotte Sound. Then the purity and pleasure, after the beginning of June, of open sea: pleasure for George at least, though the Adventures all grumbled to the point of mutiny about sailing through squalls and rain, and Reinhold, half tempted to outdo them in self-pity, half anxious to show himself the better seaman than Captain Furneaux, said,
—You see the justice of their point of view. Anyone in charge of a vessel pulls into harbour for winter, sits so to say, sits the storms out. But Furneaux is not a man of science and our Kapitän is. We must press on – Furneaux with his more limited perspective does not quite see this.
When the Adventure’s cook died, the Captain of the Resolution sent over one of his own reliable shipmates, a man called Chaplain. Scurvy and VD were by then rife on the Adventure. It was essential to roar onwards over the waves in the hope of reaching the Society Islands before the crew of the Adventure started to die. The Resolutions, doggedly fed by their Captain on the barrelled remains of the Sauer Kraut and whatever fish could be hauled out of the ocean, were tired, but fit and proud.
Yet while for Captain Cook this beginning of his Island Sweep, his visit to Tahiti and the other Society Islands, was a feat of endurance and a voyage of scientific discovery, for George these weeks had been part of the inward journey made by all of us at some stage of youth, in which erotic preoccupations were to the fore. His terrier, Blanche, caught the mood and mated with Reinhold’s spaniel, Octavian. Blanche gave birth to ten puppies at the beginning of August, and one of them was stillborn. Another of the dogs on board, a New Zealand puppy whom Nally had rather adopted, fell on the dead puppy and ate it.
—There are too many dogs on board! Of this one cannot doubt. Yet we have a rooted objection, based on prejudice, to eating them!
—You’re right there, Dr Forster. I’ve eaten dog – tastes like mutton. But an Englishman thinks twice afore he’ll eat his dog.
At dinner Reinhold pursued his theme – that if only the English poor could be persuaded to eat their dogs and cats their cities would be cleaner and their diets more nutritious.
For George, the coition of the animals, the talk of devouring, were all alarming reminders of the predatory centre of Nature’s cycles of eating, slaying, breeding, eating. When in his guilty notebooks and journals he put a small ‘o’, more often several ‘o’s for Onanie, he became ever more aware of how much this solitary vice was a retreat from the powers of Nature, which with attractions as strong as gravitational force were trying to absorb him into the procreative, destructive and alimentary processes without which life itself would cease. His overwhelming consciousness of these things, his sense of being held back by his solitary eroticism, from involvement in the entire system of Great Creating Nature, his longing for, revulsion from, involvement in that system, dominated the days before they reached the Society Islands, making of these exhilarating days a journey of the imagination as much as of the sea miles. Temperatures rose to the seventies. At the beginning of August they sailed past a group of small islands, the Tuamotu, whose sandy palm-clustered shores had never been seen before by European eyes. They changed course northward. At night coming out to pursue his vice beneath the stars, George luxuriated in the slapping of the ink-black water against the Resolution as they breezed along through warm night air, and he gazed at the silent, cruel brightness of the moon shedding its cold white radiance on the choppy sea surface. And at dawn, five o’clock, on 15th August they saw the volcanic outline and high peaks of Osnabruck Island.
It was an indication to George of how much this voyage had entered, in its present phase, into a metaphor of erotic journeying, that when he published his Voyage in ’77 it was appreciated as not only a travel book but as a variety of erotica. James Boswell, who sought out George, made it clear that the arrival of the Resolution in the blue waters off Tahiti formed part not merely of his geographical dreams but of his inner sexual Mythos. Enthusing to his friend and hero the great lexicographer about George’s evocation of island life, Boswell provoked the put-down Don’t cant in defence of savages. It was obvious why. Johnson, who fought his demons with iron self-control, had given up going backstage in the London theatres because the actresses excited his ‘amorous propensities’. George’s Tahiti – a little like the exactly contemporaneous and more coarsely phallocentric and priapic Roman Elegies of Goethe – evoked a new, liberated world. His Tahitian islanders were Adam and Eve before the Apple, or at any rate semi-naked examples of a humanity unimaginable in the confines of bourgeois Lutheranism, the closed Pfarrhaus of the mind in which Reinhold, while managing to produce six children, dismissed these impulses as a filthiness, a distraction from the life of reason.
—And it really was the case, sir, pressed the Scottish nobleman, his glowing pink face moist with lubricity. They came, the island lovelies – swimming out to you – their brown boobies like buoys afloat in the . . .
He had neither completely nor fully written such a sentence clearly, for Boswell, as for so many of those who purchased his Voyage, this was one of the great set-pieces, as the tired, dogged little sloop the Resolution, a metaphor of English pluck and common sense, tacked about to the south end of the island, avoiding the reefs, until the population of Tahiti, or so it seemed, paddled, drifted, swam towards them, some in canoes, some simply swimming in the water. Common sense
, John Locke and empiricism met with physical passion, papayas and coconuts.
Symptomatic of George’s change from preferring life at sea to life on land was the feeling of boredom which overcame him whenever the Resolution put in, or tried to put in to land. Here in fact he showed himself the landlubber, for never was Cook more the seaman than when gauging a suitable landing-space and, having made the choice, coming in to shore. The better part of two days were spent in landing in Matarai Bay. At break of the first day Cook realized the Resolution was not more than half a league from the reef and that she and the Adventure were in danger of running aground. For the whole day the Resolution was full of bustle, the Captain and the officers shouting. The swell of the sea was thumping the poor little Resolution against the reef. With three or four hundred fathoms of rope, a warping machine was carried out into the water, but still the sloop stuck fast. The aim, George was told, was then for a kedge anchor and a hawser and the casting anchor with an eight-inch hawser bent to it, to be used to cut away the bower anchor. The pinnaces were then lowered and oarsmen by means of ropes managed to heave the Resolution away from her stuck position. It was then necessary for them to go to the rescue of the Adventure, which was well and truly stuck and which, in order to get properly afloat, had to lose two of her anchors.
George both admired the practical skill with which these complicated operations were effected and felt numbed by the old sense of boredom which all the practical operations of seamanship always awoke in him. During the arrival at Tahiti, however, the detachment, sense of inadequacy – he scarcely knew what the famed warping machine actually was – mingled with quite other feelings, as the islanders bobbed about them.