by A. N. Wilson
Even while Captain Cook halloo’d, and his officers supervised, for hours and hours, the saving of the two sloops, and their eventual safe harbouring, the Tahitians were holding up baskets of apples, plantains, bananas, coconuts. They brought promise of an alternative Pelagian universe in which the fondling of flesh was no more guilt-ridden than munching upon a yam. Cook, in his Journals, Reinhold in his, conveyed the social and commercial exchanges which he and Captain Furneaux had with the natives. The exchange of nails and medals for fresh meat (hogs) and fruit. There were the expected courtesies, the solemn pouring of glasses of Madeira, in the grand saloon of the Captain’s cabin, for tattoo’d King and Prince. There were the predictable mishaps, as well. Dr Sparrman was set upon by natives and robbed of everything but his trousers. On Reinhold’s part there was the tireless botanizing, and on George’s part some of the finest of his watercolours – of the white-winged sandpiper and the red-rumped parrot. Reinhold formed a particular attachment to a Tahitian chieftain named Potatow with whom he believed it was possible to hold conversations about such esoteric questions as theology and life after death. For George, however, the whole of the Tahitian experience was merely a backdrop to what happened one afternoon as he sat with his colour-box and sketch-book near a well-planted piece of shrubland. As he carefully put down on paper a likeness of the Barringtonia speciosa, capturing the veins in every leaf, the delicacy of the firm jutting stigma, the velvet of the petals, the pistil and the stamen, he was aware of being watched, and looking up, he saw her. She was naked to the waist. Jet black hair hung over her shoulders. She sat for about an hour, watching him, hugging her knees through the grasses of the skirt which covered her upper thighs. Unlike the men, the girls were not heavily tattoo’d but there were decorations on her upper arms. He wanted to give her the painting because she watched with such evident admiration and because he knew himself to be getting better and better. At the same time he did not want to think he was treating her like a prostitute, so he waited for the sunny air to dry his work while he said his name, and she said hers, which was something like Rye or Rai or Ray. She was about his age – or seemed so. Sometimes in later years he wondered whether she had in fact been much younger. He wanted her more than anything but his shyness, his simple inability to act, his total absence of experience, would undoubtedly have led him to pack his colour-box and go back to the jolly boat, had she not taken his right hand and stroked his index finger, and then guided this finger to touch her breast.
An hour later, when he returned to the ship he scarcely noticed his father’s reproaches.
—We were going to send a search party – for some minutes to go off into the woods, yes, but – two, three, maybe, hours. This was a cause for concern.
They met twice more, he and Rai – he formed all kinds of fancies in his head – that she was a ray of light, Viva el Ré – but part of the poignancy of their association was that there was no chance of conveying such fancies. When the two sloops left for another of the Society Islands – Raiatea – she came alongside the Resolution, standing on the shoulders of a young man and waving a flowering Barringtonia. She tried to throw it towards him, but it had no chance of reaching the deck and he watched it floating on the bright blue surface of the ocean as if it was the embodiment of dashed hopes and lost dreams.
He had not fallen in love: he had fallen into something almost as intoxicating. He had fallen into an enchantment, and waking hours had the quality of dream. Those fantasies of poets, such as the comic scenes in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in which the characters open their eyes and see a new glory in their love-objects, this was what he saw, and new glory, too, in the world.
Raiatea was just as paradisal as Tahiti, the same light sand, wind-blown palms, blue waves. Cook, Furneaux and their entourage were entertained to a heeva – in which the islanders of both sexes, naked to the waist, hieratic young men and thigh-thrusting maenads, made a frenzied dance before them.
—Heeva – that’s what they call it.
—It’s a sort of ritual dance, Nally.
—That would be right. Quite reminiscent of the Captain when he loses his rag.
It was an analogy which gradually came to be adopted by all the Resolutions. The Captain, a man of such a sensible and well-balanced disposition, had occasional outbursts not just of petulance but of a rage so wild that, without speaking, he would sometimes jump up and down on the deck as if seized by some of the psychic fury which had animated the Polynesian dancers, their wobbling breasts, jutting pelvises, jabbing arms.
Strangely enough, he danced a heeva before they left Raiatea. Did she, George wondered – she who was his chief preoccupation, derive her name from this island? Might she come, like Venus born from the seashell on the waves, floating over the seas towards him if he yearned for her with sufficient fervour?
It was probably because he allowed his head to be filled with such daydreams that the unfortunate incident occurred. George and Reinhold, with Nally, Dr Sparrman and a few others, had made a small excursion to the north part of the island. George suddenly said he would like to hire a canoe, perhaps try painting the island from the water. Reinhold indicated a likely-looking native, who was standing beside a jetty, and the boy set off towards him. George had a gun over his shoulder. As he tried to indicate his wish to hire a canoe – pointing, and making pantomimic movements suggestive of an oarsman – the man grabbed the gun and a tussle ensued. The man was bigger and more muscular than George, and what followed, which happened in a matter of seconds, was that Reinhold reached for his own gun. Seeing that the man had George’s rifle and was intending to make off with it, paternal instinct and a sense of natural justice guided hand and eye. Reinhold was a good shot, responsible for many of the booby, tern and wild duck which had appeared, fricasseed, at the Captain’s table. He peppered the thief’s arse with loose shot, not enough to kill a man, but enough to make him drop the gun and scarper.
At first, when the Captain heard of the incident he was inclined to laugh it off, but for Reinhold it had not been a laughing matter. It had summoned up from his vitals a consciousness of how much he loved his son. It was not the prospect of losing his son’s rifle, it was the prospect of George’s death, which had made Reinhold reach for his gun.
—My son, Kapitän Cook, might have died. This is another example – no – I must say this. I am sorry but I must speak. Another. I must. Example. On Tahiti Dr Sparrman was half murdered, robbed, left for dead in the woods. We look to you to protect us, sir – not to leave unavenged an attack upon one philosophical gentleman – and to treat as a matter of merriment the near murder of another.
Those who witnessed this tactless lecture did not include George but they did include Nally.
—You could see the veins coming out in the Captain’s forehead. You know how it is when the wrath is in him. Boiling in him. And the quietness descends. The ominous quiet. Like the moment after you’ve lit the touch paper, and there’s that silence before the cannon blasts off. And I’m not so sure your Da noticed the silence, the way the rest of us noticed it. Then by Jesus off goes the old twenty-four pounder and, oh George, the look on your Da’s face. Doctor Forster, says the Captain, I’ll not have my authority undermined. Have I not said, time and time again . . .
. . . Nally’s reported speech attempted no ‘imitation’ either of the Captain or of Reinhold, but he was a good narrator, conveying the different speakers by pauses and by slight alterations of facial expression . . .
—My first speech from the foredeck before we left Plymouth . . .
. . . it was the Captain who spoke . . .
—insisted this was not a warship. We are not conquistadors, sir. We are men of science. We will defend ourselves if other men attack us but we will not open fire on them. By God, sir, that’s . . .
Nally’s voice trailed away. Then a pause and a tautening of his thin, sucked-in cheeks as he ‘became’ Reinhold.
—You give orders to me, sir? You speak as if
I were one of your ratings? You give orders that I may not fire – quite safely – a few pellets in the po of some savage – to defend my son’s life – you upbraid me in front of Mr Wales, Mr Pickersgill – in front of these little boys. Jesus, George, the midshipmen didn’t like that part, I can tell you. Oh Jesus. And then your Da said he demanded satisfaction. And the Captain says he had not heard the remark, that officers in the Royal Navy, oh dear me, do not accept challenges from German village dominies and he could take it – he was banned from entering the Captain’s quarters for the rest of the voyage.
—Banned? But, Nally, where will we eat?
—Gun-room, I suppose.
—With the little boys.
Painful as the quarrel was to contemplate, it was hard not to finish the conversation with a laugh on both sides. Three days later, First Lieutenant Cooper approached Reinhold and told him the Captain would be obliged were Dr Forster to attend him in his cabin. A stiff conversation had ensued. The Forsters were reinstated at the Captain’s table. This was a relief to George, who had found the conversation of the midshipmen, who messed in the gun-room, uncomfortably reminiscent of his two experiences of school, in Petersburg and Warrington. He disliked boys, their coarseness, their banter, their determined facetiousness. All the midshipmen seemed to be carrying on an everlasting joke at his expense, exemplified, though not explained, by the fifteen-year-old Elliott asking Harvey, slightly younger, whether he had done any good drawings lately. It was plainly an allusion to George’s activities: and made the boys laugh so much they all but spat out the seal-steak through which they were ravenously chewing.
—I did a lovely drawing of a booby.
Whoops had turned to howls, made worse by George’s scarlet, furious silence.
At the end of June, they put in at Tonga. July saw some of the pleasantest weather of the entire voyage as gentle winds bore them into the New Hebrides basin. In September they sailed due south, and by October when New Zealand came in sight, they were finding it difficult to sail in tandem with the Adventure. The wind was too strong, on 22nd October, turning to gale force, to allow them to get into Cook Strait. Eight or nine leagues south-south-east of Cape Palliser, the Resolutions lost sight of their sister ship. By the very end of October, violent winds, some of the most furious they had encountered, blew them in sight of the Kaikoura mountains in South Island. So great was the gale, they were forced to lie under the mizzen staysail.
At the very beginning of November the storms passed.
—Cras ingens iterabimus aequor.
Even Nally could recite the line – it was a shared joke between him and George. Reinhold said it so often when they took their course once more over the mighty main. The brave little sloop got under sail on the Feast of All Hallows and, once under sail, was directed under Cook’s sure guidance, past Cape Campbell and into Queen Charlotte Sound by the next flood tide. Off Cloudy Bay, he took a course across the strait to the coast of the North Island, and found an inlet, east of Cape Terawhiti, where he could anchor safely in the bay. It had been a terrifying three weeks and it ended with a desolating sense of loss. For, the Adventure was nowhere to be seen.
II
1789
—IT’S LIKE A PARADE.
—It is a parade, darling.
—Parade!
—Better than the circus, said Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the many young men who came to their apartment.
—George, Humboldt doesn’t want to talk to the baby!
George was standing at the window of their apartment in Mainz. Beneath, in the street, a procession of thirty-five, or so, calèches, elaborate rococo carriages, painted, some with flowers, others with the coats of arms of their occupants, passed through the main street to the great Romanesque cathedral of St Martin of Tours. Most of the coaches were barouches – known in the Mainz dialect as Pirutsche – open two-wheelers – whose occupants, powdered and bewigged like the liveried footmen who attended them, waved to the crowds who lined the pavements and cheered. After these local noblemen and women came a long ecclesiastical procession, boys and girls in white garments, scattering rose petals, gold-vestmented acolytes holding a gilded umbrella over the Host as it proceeded on its wobbly journey to St Martin’s, and behind this spectacle, and the boys swinging incense-bearers, came a procession of robed clergy, the last of whom, borne on the shoulders of boys on a golden throne, was the Prince Elector himself, Archbishop Karl Josef Reichsfreiherr von Erthal, a golden mitre on his powdered periwig, rings on the fingers of the purple gauntlets which he held out, half in salutation, half in benediction as he passed.
—He’s looking up at us, said Humboldt.
Some of the other men in the room – Jacobi, Herder, Huber (a young protégé of Schiller’s to whom George had taken a shine) – clustered at the window to see the phenomenon of the long-faced seventy-year-old cleric.
—The paradox is the Catholics are more liberal than we are, said Humboldt.
—It’s true, said Jacobi. The new King of Prussia bans Kant from lecturing on religion. Dear old Erthal there made our George his librarian.
—He’s a great admirer of yours, said George. It wasn’t just flannel. When he spoke of you to me, asked me about you, he had been reading your work on Spinoza.
—I bet he denounced me as a heretic.
—He does not go in for denouncing. Little by little the old man seems to be holding out his gloved finger to the modern world, the new ideas.
—Spinoza’s were hardly new ideas, said Therese sharply. It’s simply that he exposed the sheer absurdity of believing in a personal God over a hundred years ago and still they’re at it – look at them.
—It’s like a parade.
—Yes, darling.
While Therese spoke to Jacobi of Spinoza, George kissed his daughter’s cheek and walked round the room holding her; the exaggerated bounce of his steps made the child laugh.
Before Rosechen, George had resigned himself to a life without love, or life without conscious love – for he was clever enough to know what had lain beneath the frustrations and irritations of life with, and without, Reinhold. This, though, was love riotous, love obvious and shared. So happy was he in his love for his daughter that he scarcely noticed how much it irritated his wife. He could only think that it – the love – it – the child – it – their having at last a shared love-object – could give her pleasure.
How, in any event, could Therese not be happy, here, after the monstrosity of life in Vilnius? Their new-built apartment was far grander than anything either of them had lived in before – its pillared entrance hall below, its delicately bannistered stone staircase, its large, symmetrical panelled rooms, with acanthus-carved dados and ceiling-roses. Rosechen’s world was not to be the pinched narrowness of the parsonage-house, nor the closed world of old tyrannies. Light would pour through her large unshuttered windows. Reason would open and shut her inquisitive eyelids. That room with its big apple-green panels, its round marble-topped table in the centre, its scrolled chairs with lion’s paw feet, would come often into his mind as he travelled. The room contained at that moment his hopes for his child, his life together with that child; it also contained the cleverness of his bright, young friends with their eager faces, and the strong personality of the women – above all of Caroline, just widowed, with her dark brown locks falling on her black-silk shoulders, and of Therese, whose animation intoxicated them all. George would remember how he had falsely supposed that Wilhelm von Humboldt, almost whooping with merriment at Therese’s every observation, was going to become the ‘new Assad’; but he would also remember how, as he clutched and bounced Rosechen close to his chest, and as the child gurgled and giggled, he had felt a happy toleration of Therese’s nature. Perhaps she could not really function unless those around her were in love with her. Perhaps she needed Wilhelm, gasping out thoughts from Spinoza’s Ethics, needed Huber and his thoughts about the latest play by Schiller, needed those intellectual young men to adore her as the
y shared the life of the mind. And perhaps the paradox of her friendship with Caroline Michaelis – now the widow – was this: whereas a beautiful woman is said to need a plain friend, and Caroline, with her full sensual red lips, glossy seductress eyes and cascades of chestnut tresses, was almost embarrassingly beautiful and Therese, dumpy and squinting, very much not so, their roles were much more symbiotic. Therese needed the beautiful friend to demonstrate that she was no bespectacled frump. That she was the companion of Caroline in seductive frivolity, just as Caroline and the other Universitätsmamsellen needed the well-read daughter of the Göttingen Professor to give them ballast, to advertise to the young men that they could flirt as much as they chose, and perhaps, who knew, enjoy something more than flirting, but not unless the men took the women seriously as intellects.
—George is given an easy time by the old Archbishop. There is a quintet of dusty underlings who do his work for him in the library – which is only open half the year. The other half of the year the court moves to Aschaffenburg, so George can get on with his writing.
—He tells me he is translating Hakluyt’s English Voyages.
This was said by Wilhelm’s younger brother, Alexander, a sweet-faced boy who looked much younger than his twenty years.
—I wonder about him sometimes, said George’s wife. We hear of English sailors at breakfast and dinner every day.
—We want more of his own work, said Alexander, giving her a winsome smile. The translations are of course interesting, but his travel-writing, his descriptions of the harbour at Tahiti as the Resolution dropped anchor, this must be one of the greatest pieces of German prose since the Luther Bible.
—I can see why he likes you, said Therese archly. But he has to do translations because we are always in bloody debt. Not surprisingly since he made me have another of these encumbrances.