Zone of the Marvellous

by Martin Edmond

  The French still like to say that the earliest account of the discovery of land in the Southern Oceans was given by a Frenchman, Binot Paulmier de Gonneville. Gonneville in 1504, on a voyage in the Espoir from Normandy to Brazil, was swept off course in the vicinity of the Cape of Good Hope and forced to land in an unknown country which he called Terre Australe. It was a paradise: rich and with such a benign climate that nobody had to work. He stayed there six months and returned to France with the son of a native king as his companion. Having lost his journals during a pirate attack he was unable to say precisely where he had been; but gave an account of his discovery to French naval authorities.

  A hundred and fifty years later a descendant of Gonneville, Jean Paulmier de Courtonne, canon of the Church of Saint-Pierre at Lisieux, published a book called Memoirs Concerning the Establishment of a Christian Mission in the Austral Land, in which he claimed to be the great-grandson of the native prince – who had married Gonneville’s daughter – brought back to France in 1505 and proposed the mission mentioned in the title of his Memoirs. On the basis of this proposal, which was not acted upon, Gonneville’s long-forgotten voyage was revived as a French claim, in contradistinction to the nascent or achieved empires of the English and the Dutch, over these unknown new lands.

  Brosses was a good systematiser but he wasn’t immune to romantic speculation. The putative Gonneville Land (it was probably, like More’s Utopia, somewhere on the east coast of South America), Quirós’s extravagant speculations on the shores of Santa Cruz, his Solomon isles, rich in gold, were entertained along with any number of other wild possibilities: men who copulated with turtles, men who lived on human flesh, the Bad people of the thousand Isles. The single recent French voyage that had looked for Gonneville Land was by Jean-Baptiste Charles de Lozier Bouvet, who in 1739 found in the southern Indian Ocean an island of ice-capped lava which he enlisted as a proof or a part of the Great South Land. His Cap de la Circoncision, now Bouvet Island, was for Brosses a headland of Gonneville’s Terre Australe.

  THERE WAS ONLY ONE other bona fide voyage of discovery into the Pacific between Dampier’s and that of Commodore Byron in the Dolphin in 1764 and that was by Dutch navigator and lawyer Jacob Roggeveen. He was sixty-two years old when he set out from Texel in 1721 in three ships provided by the struggling Dutch West India Company, which was in recession and needed new commercial openings. Roggeveen was looking for another chimera: low sandy islands backed in the distance by a long Tract of pretty high land which might probably be the Coast of Terra Australis Incognita as reported by William Dampier on the basis of an alleged sighting west of Chile by fellow buccaneer Edward Davis. Roggeveen had also in mind the report during Schouten and Le Maire’s 1616 voyage of an absence of swell to the south as they sailed through the northern Tuamotus more than a century before.

  Roggeveen found Easter Island, which may in fact have been the basis of shadowy Davis Land; he also saw some of the Tuamotus – upon one of which, Takapoto, he lost a ship, the Afrikaansche Galei – as well as outliers of the Society Islands and of the Samoas. He did not land at either of the two latter groups, although he did trade blue beads for coconuts off the Manua Islands. As Spate remarks, what Roggeveen had really done was to establish a northern limit to the extension of any Terra Australis, [but] the net result of his voyage was to confirm a belief in its existence. Both Borabora in the Society Islands and especially Samoa were thought by his officers to be possible peninsulas of the Great South Land: a rich and beautiful country. The people of Manua, friendly as they were, struck Roggeveen as primitive and he could not understand how they could have come to be where they were; yet he wrote that they were undoubtedly, like his own men, Children of Adam.

  BYRON’S 1764 VOYAGE in the Dolphin, like that of Anson (1740) before him, was not primarily a voyage of discovery. Its intention was strategic. He was to look for sites for British bases in the South Atlantic; visit Drake’s New Albion, that is, California; and search for a sea passage from the northern Pacific to Hudson Bay. He did go to the Falklands, taking possession of them for Britain without realising there were already Frenchmen there; but neglected to visit California (he said his ships were too much disabled) or to sail into the northern Pacific. Instead, laconically, he decided to run over for India by a new Track, hoping to find on the way the long-lost Solomon Islands.

  Sailing directly westward through the Tuamotus he landed just once, on Takaroa, where on its sister atoll Takapoto he found the remains of the Afrikaansche Galei. Byron also noted the lack of a swell from the southwest and vast flocks of birds flying that way; he wrote that if he could have sailed south he probably would have found the Great South Land. He went further west instead, through the Tokelaus, which he at first thought might have been the Solomons; then turning north passed Kiribati, where he named an island after himself, and ended his trans-Pacific voyage at Tinian in the Marianas. His return to England in 1766 after only twenty-two months at sea made his the fastest circumnavigation there had thus far been. More significantly his voyage was the inspiration for Samuel Wallis’s follow-up, again in the Dolphin, which set out later that same year. For if anyone can be said to have found a South Seas paradise, it is Wallis.

  It is curious that in several centuries of sailing across the Pacific no European had come across Tahiti before. Most of the islands that were seen in the initial passes through those waters were in the Tuamotus, a vast archipelago of atolls scattered between the Marquesas and Society Islands. It was more difficult, because of winds and currents, to sail to the south; and to the north lay the galleon route between Manila and Acapulco, which lasted until the early nineteenth century. As far as anyone knew, the Spanish had found no new lands on that route, somehow managing for 300 years to miss Hawai‘i. The Tuamotus were given many names by voyagers; one was the Low Archipelago and another the Dangerous Archipelago. Byron called them the Isles of Disappointment, not because he had any high expectations but because he failed to find any good anchorage among them.

  There islands lay scattered across the sea the way stars are scattered in the sky; an analogy which sounds meretriciously poetic until you understand that in eastern Polynesia the analogy was cosmologically precise: the Pacific Ocean to the early Austronesian navigators was a vast watery plain joined at the edges of the horizon to the arched and layered spheres of the sky. Islands were fixed on a foundation rock, Te Tumu; below this rock and beyond the sky was the generative and all enfolding darkness, Te Po, where gods and ancestors lived. Star pillars stood between island and sky, supporting the arched heavens; every island had its own star, which was also its sailing direction. The ancestors had broken from Te Po into this world, sailing their canoes across the sky, creating new stars, and hence new islands, as they went. To sail across the ocean was thus to repeat these ancestral star voyages: ocean and sky were mirrors, each reflecting the other. It is no wonder that the Tahitians thought that the Europeans who ‘discovered’ their land had cracked open the sky to get there; that they thought they were some godly, probably malevolent, irruption from Te Po.

  In 1766 Samuel Wallis in the Dolphin, with Philip Carteret in the Swallow, was sent into the Pacific to sail westward from Cape Horn, as near as possible to that latitude, for 100 or 120 degrees of longitude. If he found the Great South Land on that meridian he was to return to the Falklands; if not, or if he was driven too far north, he could return via the East Indies. Leaving the Strait of Magellan after a difficult passage the two ships were separated and did not see each other again. Like Byron, Wallis was unable to sail directly west and in early June found himself in the Tuamotus. He must have set more to the southwest than those who’d previously come this way for, on the evening of 18 June, they saw a great high mountain – the isolated volcanic cone Mehetia – and the next morning, as a thick bank of fog lifted and cleared, to their astonishment they found the ship surrounded by a hundred or more canoes filled with people hallowing and Hooting.

  The Tahitians held animated disc
ussions among themselves; made speeches to the ship; and threw plantain branches into the water: these were representations of sacrificed human bodies but how could the men of the Dolphin possibly know that? Some of the islanders came aboard the ship and turned out to be avid for iron. This was because iron salvaged in the Tuamotus from the Afrikaansche Galei had already made its way to Tahiti. (In the same way the Hawaiians also knew iron when Cook arrived there, perhaps because they had got it from the wrecks of Spanish ships or from Japanese junks drifting from the west.) When they would not stop stealing iron objects the Tahitians were thrown off the ship; later a nine-pounder gun was fired to deter them from attacking.

  Thousands of men, women and children lined the beaches the next day, watching in amazement as the Dolphin sailed along the coast of Tahiti-nui; the country had the most Beautiful appearance it’s possible to imagine. Further attempts to trade inevitably led to misunderstanding, then to skirmishing, then to the firing of muskets or larger guns. Many of the men of the Dolphin were suffering advanced scurvy and the whole ship’s company badly needed fresh water and fresh food; for that they required a safe anchorage. Such was found at Matavai Bay; but while the Dolphin was warping up the harbour, a concerted attack was made by the Tahitians.

  The ritual preliminaries to this attack were not understood by the English. Those Tahitians who stood on the shore apparently beckoning were in fact signalling them to go away; the bunch of yellow and red feathers handed up to Wallis from a large canoe was not a gift but a way of summoning the gods to the conflict that was about to commence. The women who stood on platforms on the larger canoes, dancing provocatively and exposing their genitals, were not inviting the sailors to make love to them but showing them the way back to the darkness whence they came – which they would take once they had been killed in battle.

  The attack was launched with a strange kind of Hallow and consisted of a barrage of stones hurled by warriors with slingshots. The men of the Dolphin replied with guns: muskets, deck guns loaded with small shot, cannons with round or grape shot. There was carnage among the canoes and carnage on the shore, where the guns were afterwards turned. Probably the Tahitians immediately gave up their design of attacking the visitors; but there was a second massacre when a crowd of about 4000 people, parading the red pennant with which Wallis had taken possession of the land, gathered round the ship’s boats at the watering place. Wallis ordered the ship’s guns to be fired as a precaution and sent his carpenters ashore to destroy all the canoes hauled up on the beach.

  After that, resistance ceased. That afternoon gifts of pigs, chickens, fruit, tapa cloth and dogs were brought out on to the sand for the people of the Dolphin; the English freed the two bound dogs, left the bundles of tapa and took all the rest, reciprocating with hatchets and nails. The Tahitians insisted they accept the tapa as well; it was only when they had done so that some old men brought a group of young women down to the beach, lined them up along the strand and made signs showing the sailors what they might do with them. Some of the women appeared reluctant and afraid, some had to be cuffed into line; but there was no hesitation from the sailors, who took the women on the beach, under the trees and behind the houses fringing the beach. This is how the myth of that particular sexual paradise began: not free love but an act of appeasement after bloody slaughter.

  THERE WAS A TENDENCY among Europeans to see the so-called primitive societies they found as not just pristine but changeless as well: as if they had existed since time immemorial in the state in which they were first met. This was never true; and subsequent research into the Tahiti of the mid-eighteenth century has shown it was already undergoing rapid change. A new god, ‘Oro, was establishing ascendancy, supplanting Tane; and his worship was being carried from island to island. It was a complex cult, still not completely understood. The power of ‘Oro could manifest in two ways, in peace or in war. In war he was a bloody exemplar but in his aspect of god of peace he was known as ‘Oro of the laid-down spear and his symbol was three spears disposed in a triangle; this was also the marker of the Arioi, his chief worshippers and the promoters of the cult.

  The Arioi were a society of lovers, warriors, navigators, orators, priests and artists who went from place to place performing music, dance and drama, tattooing, painting tapa and so forth. Their dances might be bloodthirsty re-enactments of battles or sacrifices; or lubricious rehearsals of sexual exploits. The Arioi, who were both men and women, were not allowed to raise children and so practised infanticide. When they travelled from island to island, pairs of dead men, and dead fish, sharks or turtles, lay on the prows of their canoes. Upon landing, the bodies of these human sacrifices to ‘Oro might be hung up in trees on ropes strung through their heads; or laid as rollers under the keels of the canoes as they were dragged up the sand. Perhaps the Arioi were themselves a sacrifice to ‘Oro; their aim was to win the fertility and abundance the god could grant through dedicating their own lives to him, whether as performers and artists or as avatars of war. Infanticide too was a way of ensuring fertility: in Tahiti a high-born child who was allowed to survive carried the accumulated mana of all those in the line who had died before he or she was elected to live.

  It seems that the Dolphin’s arrival could be understood by Tahitians only in terms of this new and sometimes bloody cult, which was not confined to the Society Islands – there was a similar institution called Ka‘ioi in the Marquesas at this time. For by the mid-eighteenth century ‘Oro’s marae at Taputapuatea on Rai‘atea was the centre of a great voyaging network that stretched as far as the Cook and Austral Islands to the south, the Marquesas in the north and the Tuamotus to the east: a nascent empire of the revenant god. Tupaia, whom Cook would take with him to New Zealand, was an Arioi; the map he drew for Cook and Banks covered 40 degrees of longitude and 20 of latitude, showing the whereabouts of seventy or more islands and spanning, for example, the 2500 miles between Tahiti and Fiji away to the west.

  Retrospectively recorded prophecies are perhaps not to be relied upon but it was said in Tahiti that a priest at Taputapuatea had foretold the arrival of a canoe without an outrigger bearing people whose body is different … and this land will be taken by them / The old rules destroyed … The initial attacks on the Dolphin suggest a typical Polynesian response to strangers from over the sea, completely in accord with Tasman’s reception at Golden Bay; but the Tahitians’ later submission, during which the offer of the women was made, may indicate that they then accepted that the Dolphin came in some sense from ‘Oro, that it was a bizarre and unprecedented version of his sacred canoe. Red was ‘Oro’s colour: the scarlet coats of the armed guard of soldiers lined up as protection while Wallis planted the red ensign ashore, the smoke and thunder of the red-painted guns on red-painted decks … these might have re-enforced the prophecy.

  It would not have taken very long for these ad hoc Tahitian beliefs to decay in the face of the incontrovertible physical realities the English brought with them, including that of venereal disease; nor would the myth of universally compliant and sexually available women long survive the often grim realities of the contact period; but the nature and the structure of the Dolphin’s visit to Tahiti had enormous, almost immediate, consequences for the next European visitor, the Frenchman Louis-Antoine de Bougainville; through him, for Europe as a whole; and beyond that, without exaggeration, for the world at large.

  BOUGAINVILLE WAS THE commander of the first French expedition to the Pacific, leaving Nantes on 15 November 1766. He had, like James Cook, previously fought in the war between France and England over Quebec. In the aftermath the French state, having lost its Canadian colonies along with the war, granted Bougainville permission to finance and lead an expedition to colonise the Falkland Islands. He founded the settlement of St Louis but the Spanish objected, claiming the islands were geographically part of South America. The French Government requested that Bougainville go back there to effect the return of sovereignty; and then continue on in to the Pacific and so around the
world. He was to search for new lands, open up a route to China and gather spice plants to take to Île de France (Mauritius) in the Indian Ocean. The expedition was well-equipped; like Cook’s after him, Bougainville’s was not simply a voyage of exploration but of scientific discovery as well.

  He had two ships: the frigate Boudeuse and the store ship Étoile. After threading the Strait of Magellan they entered the Pacific on 26 January 1768; sailed through the Tuamotus – it was he who called them the Archipel Dangereux – and on 4 April anchored at Hitia‘a Bay on the exposed northeast coast of Tahiti-nui. Hitia‘a is a little to the east and south of Wallis’s (and Cook’s) preferred anchorage at Matavai Bay. It was just nine months since Wallis had left the previous July – long enough for any babies the men of the Dolphin had fathered upon Tahitian women to have been born. And for the venereal and perhaps other diseases they brought to have spread around the island.

  Not long after the two ships anchored, Bougainville wrote, a young girl came on board and negligently let fall her robe and stood for all to see, as Venus stood forth before the Phrygian shepherd; and she had the celestial shape of Venus. The sailors and soldiers rushed to get at the hatchway … The Tahitians under their chief Reti had clearly decided to make love not war; to welcome the foreigners, not to attack them. Using stones to count with, Reti negotiated with Bougainville a nine-day stay for the French ships. Gifts were exchanged, and music: Tahitian songs to the accompaniment of a nose flute for a shipboard concert of flutes, violins and viols. Sky-rockets were set off into the soft tropical skies. Meanwhile the same sort of orgy that the Dolphins had engaged in at Matavai Bay began at Hitia‘a Bay; when the thieving of the islanders led to disputes and some deaths, peace was restored by negotiation. The French sailed away, convinced that what they had observed was the natural behaviour of the Tahitians; that what they had found was a natural paradise: