Zone of the Marvellous

by Martin Edmond

  Nature had placed the island in the most perfect climate in the world, had embellished it with every pleasing prospect, had endowed it with all its riches, and filled it with large, strong and beautiful people … Farewell, happy and wise people; remain always as you are now. I will always remember you with delight, and as long as I live I will celebrate the happy island of Cythera: it is the true Utopia.

  Bougainville’s, and especially his naturalist Philibert Commerson’s, reports of the La Nouvelle Cythère, the New Isle of Venus, caused a sensation in Europe. If, as the French briefly thought, Tahiti was a peninsula or outlier of the Great South Land then every previous and howsoever extravagant speculation about that fabled place seemed about to be confirmed. The reception the French sailors were given by the Tahitians resonates back thousands of years: it’s impossible not to think of Enkidu, the wild man in the Gilgamesh story, seduced into civilisation at the spring by Ishtar’s avatar, the temple harlot Shamhat. With this difference: the Frenchmen were, or seemed to be, seduced back to nature by the votaries of the Tahitian goddess of love, Hina, the moon.

  Nevertheless French and European understanding of this event was more likely to reach back to Classical Greece or biblical Eden for analogies. The mariners seemed to have found in Tahiti a veritable Golden Age where natural man and natural woman still lived. Or Eden before the Fall: the French designation for these fortunate prelapsarian beings was the Good, not the Noble, Savage. As always there are two strands irredeemably entwined in this kind of thought: the actual place, misunderstood as it was; and the uses to which intellectuals could put their understanding or misunderstanding as a criticism of their own society.

  There was already a hundred-year tradition in French letters of a utopia in the South Seas: between 1676 and 1781 accounts of eleven imaginary voyages to the Great South Land appeared. These were, as utopias generally are, essentially criticisms of French society as it was, not projections of a world that was thought to have any actuality. It was a genre that focused, and fed, the discontent that would culminate in the French Revolution. The books were subversive; many appeared under fictitious imprints. The tradition owes something to Defoe’s imagining of Robinson Crusoe, and to Swift’s Gulliver; it anticipates the radical critiques and idealistic speculations of Voltaire and Rousseau. Even the Marquis de Sade would in 1793 essay a Tahitian utopia in which nothing reminded me so much of a golden age … as the gentle and pure manners of this good people.

  The collision of this tradition with a society that seemed to exemplify all of its projections was one of those rare moments in history when literary and actual worlds merge to make one in which the ideal and the real are at once and equally present. It was of course an illusion: what Bougainville found in Tahiti was not only exceptional, it was already irrevocably changed by Wallis’s visit and, despite his hopes – remain always as you are now – would change further as a result of Bougainville’s. James Morrison of the Bounty, who lived eighteen months ashore in Tahiti, pointed out that the whole system was overturned by the arrival of a ship, their manners were then as much altered from their Common Course, as those of our own Country are at a Fair.

  This is not to say that there was not ambivalence in Europe towards the island paradise. Such a display of flagrant licentiousness was bound to attract comment from religious authorities and moral philosophers. Besides, the Tahitians practised infanticide and human sacrifice too; their marae often had human corpses upon them and the Arioi travelled with dead bodies on their canoes. Nor were they, as encyclopaedist Denis Diderot suggested, one big island-wide happy family. Like all Polynesian societies Tahiti was highly stratified, with each class bound by intricate rules that were more or less invisible to Europeans. The young Venuses who came out to the ships or entertained the sailors on land were most likely able, or forced, to do so precisely because they were not from higher-ranked families. Later, in the Marquesas, sleeping with sailors, with or without the payment of a nail or some such, was a way for commoners to attain some of the power or status that belonged by tradition to the higher classes.

  Diderot wrote a Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville which, while it was not published until 1796, circulated widely in intellectual circles from about 1773 onwards. It was, Spate remarks, an inspired caricature; the example of Tahiti shows how the miseries of civilisation arise from a failure to conform to nature’s laws. At the same time Diderot was aware that Europe would inevitably inflict its own barbarities upon those who lived in a state of nature – they have buried in our soil the title-deeds of future slavery, one of his (imaginary) Tahitian elders warns his people. But Diderot could not reconcile himself to living, brut et savage, the way Tahitians did; it was too late for that. The only hope was to reform, or revolutionise, French society on the basis of what could be learned from people living in innocent purity.

  This note of sadness, this sense of paradise lost even as it is found, is essential to the myth of Tahiti, as it is to the whole enterprise of seeking elsewhere for the marvellous that has been lost at home. It was sounded twice during executions consequent to the French Revolution. Louis XVI, going to the guillotine in January 1793, is said to have remarked to no one in particular that there was still no word of La Pérouse. The king, extremely well-informed on naval matters, had personally planned the explorer’s mission to the South Seas and assiduously followed his progress until the explorer disappeared after leaving his final despatches with the First Fleet at Botany Bay in 1788. And the last letter of Dantonist Camille Desmoulins, written to his wife, Lucile, while he too was waiting to be decapitated by Sanson, the same man who beheaded the king only fifteen months earlier, includes these words: I was born to make verse, to make you happy, to defend the unfortunate, and to form, with your mother and my father, and a few kindred hearts, an Otaiti.

  THERE WAS ONE OTHER curious, seemingly apposite, event at Hitia‘a. On board the Étoile a Tahitian by the name of Ahutoru recognised that Jean Bonnefoy, the young assistant to naturalist Philibert Commerson, was not a man but a woman. There had been suspicion and some speculation among the crew that the valet was in fact female – he grew no beard and was never seen to wash or to remove his voluminous clothing. Yet, incredible as it seems, no one, with the possible exception of Commerson himself, doctor, botanist and naturalist of the King, knew the truth that Ahutoru recognised at a glance.

  Her real name was Jeanne Baré, sometimes spelt Baret or Barret, an orphan from Brittany whose curiosity had been aroused by news of the planned voyage round the world. Jeanne was about twenty-six years old; Bougainville, pragmatic and generous, pardoned her deception. He said she was neither plain nor pretty and would later remark that if the two ships had been wrecked on any desert isle Baré’s fate would have been a very singular one. She was evidently an adept and courageous botaniser and regularly went ashore with Commerson collecting specimens. Commerson too was generous towards his helper: he dedicated the plant genus Baretia to her (this includes a species with ambiguous sexual characteristics); perhaps they were lovers. Jeanne Baré completed the circumnavigation, becoming the first woman known to have done so; but whether after Tahiti she sailed dressed as a woman or a man is unknown. In 1785 she was living quietly in the French countryside as Madame Dubernat, a widow, when she was granted a government pension in recognition of her work as Commerson’s assistant. The date of her death is unknown.

  Another curiosity aboard Bougainville’s ships was Ahutoru himself, the Tahitian who publicly revealed Jeanne Baré’s identity as a woman and who returned with the explorers to haunt the salons of Paris. Ahutoru, shorter and darker than most Tahitians because, he explained, he was fathered by an aristocratic warrior upon a slave woman, volunteered to go with the French, perhaps to discover the country where people knew how to build such large canoes capable of sailing across the oceans. There is a glimpse of him leaving, taking three pearl earrings from his ears and giving them to women aboard the canoe that brought him out to the ship. One of these he embrace
s, weeping. He was soon dismayed by the length of the voyage, the vastness of the ocean, and attempted to divert the ships to islands that he knew; but the French thought he wanted to go there only to make love to the women. He knew the stars and believed the sun and the moon to be inhabited. At Samoa he tried to talk to the natives in Tahitian and was further dismayed when they did not understand him. In a small Dutch port on the island of Buru he asked if Paris were as fine a city as this.

  Once in the metropolis he adapted quickly and well, although he never liked wearing clothes because it meant covering up the splendid tattoo on his buttocks and thighs. He was presented to the king and interviewed by philosophes, including Diderot. Another, La Condamine, along with Jacob Rodrigue Péreire, an authority in the treatment of deaf-mutes, made a study of his language from which it was deduced that Tahitian is related to Malay. Ahutoru enjoyed shopping and above all the opera, where he particularly loved the dancing. He knew the dates and times of performances and would go alone, paying his money at the door and watching from his preferred spot in the corridors – little balconies either side of the stage from which the changes of scenery could be observed.

  Bougainville thought he was intelligent, given to mimicry and satire and, though graceful, indolent and shy; others thought him stupid and lazy, apparently because he could not easily learn French; but La Condamine wrote that he refused to descend from the perfect clarity of his own language to the muddled complexity of a European tongue. All noted how fond of women he was. There are suggestions that Bougainville hoped that, once educated in the ways of Paris, Ahutoru could return to Tahiti and act as a kind of French ambassador ashore. He paid for the Tahitian’s return passage as far as Île de France, where the explorer Marion du Fresne agreed to take him the rest of the way home; but Ahutoru contracted smallpox and died somewhere off the coast of Madagascar. Du Fresne continued on to be massacred by Māori in the north of the North Island of New Zealand.

  Bougainville’s circumnavigation did not achieve any of its stated aims: he did not visit China, nor take spice plants to Île de France, nor find the Great South Land; although he did recognise Quirós’s Espíritu Santo in the New Hebrides and, beyond, saw the Great Barrier Reef, where long lines of breakers persuaded him to turn north rather than risk shipwreck seeking out the land he felt sure lay within the reef. The Solomon Islands too were observed, from the west, but Bougainville did not know them for what they were. He named Choiseul and viewed but did not name the larger island that is now called after him. By the time his ships were sailing across the Indian Ocean in pursuit of Carteret in the Swallow, whom Bougainville knew was ahead of him, James Cook in the Endeavour was already making his way down the Atlantic Ocean to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti.

  COOK’S MISSION HAD its roots in Halley’s astronomical observations fifty years earlier and his plotting of the times in the future when the passage of Venus across the face of the sun might be observed. The distance of the sun from Earth, and of Earth from Venus, might thus be calculated, with a consequent improvement in navigation. The calculations could even allow a reckoning of the size of the universe. There were two opportunities, in 1761 and 1769; on the first occasion 120 European scientists, eighteen of them Englishmen, set out to observe the transit from different stations around the world but the results were inconclusive. Now, after the end of the Seven Years’ War with France, the Royal Society was determined that Britain should play a leading role in the 1769 attempt. Either the Marquesas Islands, it was thought, or one of the Tonga group would be an ideal platform from which to make the observation; but the return of the Dolphin in May 1768 with its delirious news of a South Sea paradise led to the change of destination to Tahiti.

  The other part of Cook’s mission was to try to settle once and for all the existence of the Great South Land; like Wallis and Byron before him he was to sail into the southern Pacific Ocean in search of the elusive continent. If he failed he was to sail west until he reached the east coast of New Zealand, unvisited since Tasman’s voyage more than a hundred years before; and there with the Consent of the Natives to take possession of Convenient Situations in the Country. There was no mention in his instructions of New Holland, as Australia was then still known, but if he was to return to England via the East Indies and the Cape of Good Hope, as he had the option to do, it might have been expected that some sight be taken of that land.

  Cook, like Dampier, was the son of a rural worker, a day labourer. He was born in the tiny village of Marton-in-Cleveland and, when his father was appointed bailiff on a nearby farm, sponsored by the local squire to go to school where he learned to read and write and do arithmetic. He worked as a grocer’s boy in a fishing town, then in his teens was apprenticed to Captain John Walker, a Quaker ship owner in the port of Whitby. His first ship was a Whitby collier, or cat, called the Freelove. He lived in Walker’s house for nine years, sailing along the coasts of the North and Baltic Seas and, between voyages, studying navigation and mathematics. It’s certain that he learned from Walker not just seamanship but something also of the Quaker virtues of plain speaking, plain living, non-violence and purity.

  Cook attained the rank of mate, was offered a command of his own but instead, at age twenty-seven, joined the Royal Navy as an able seaman and worked his way up the ranks. He fought in several battles against the French in the Seven Years’ War, including a bloody encounter in the Channel and an extraordinary mission up the St Lawrence River during which, as master of HMS Pembroke, he charted, under constant fire, the course that the English would follow on their way to take Quebec. Afterwards he spent time surveying the coasts of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland; it was these meticulously accurate charts and his observations of an eclipse of the sun off Newfoundland, published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, that brought him to the attention of the Admiralty. Another ship with almost the same name as that in which Cook had charted the St Lawrence, the Earl of Pembroke, a Whitby-built cat of the kind he had sailed in his youth, was bought by the Navy Board and renamed the Endeavour.

  Whitby was where the earliest known English poet, Caedmon, lived in the seventh century CE. Like Cook’s father Caedmon was a farm labourer, a herdsman who, one night while sleeping with his animals, was visited in a dream and given a poem. This poem, which inaugurated a long and productive life for Caedmon as a maker of religious verse, is however his only writing to survive. In Old English it is nine lines long and was written in praise of God. Caedmon, on the basis of his name, may have been of Welsh or Breton origin; but he might also have been an avatar of Adam Kadmon, the primal being or first man of the Kabbala, who was sometimes shown with rays of light projecting from his eyes. James Cook too, despite his prosaic circumstances and his irreducibly practical nature, is a kind of first man: to him we owe the forgetting of an ancient continent and the inauguration of the geographical facts of the world we now live in.

  On Cook’s first voyage he charted the entirety of the coastline of New Zealand; as the Endeavour sailed down the east coast of the South Island there were spirited discussions on board as to whether or not this was in fact the Great South Land. Joseph Banks, who hoped that it was, did not admit the impossibility of the dream until they rounded South Cape at the tip of Stewart Island. With some regret he acknowledged the total demolition of our aerial fabrick calld continent. Cook had the option of returning via Cape Horn but his ship was in too bad a condition to do so; he sailed for New Holland instead. The Endeavour reached the east coast of Australia at Cape Howe near the present Victoria–New South Wales border and charted the coast north from there as far as Cape York; then navigated Torres Strait on the way to Batavia and home.

  On his second voyage Cook circumnavigated Antarctica; visited the Marquesas, Tahiti (again), the Cook Islands and Tonga and charted most of the New Hebrides, sailing into Quirós’ old harbour on Espíritu Santo where the failed colony of New Jerusalem had briefly been. On his way south from there to New Zealand he discovered New Ca
ledonia and demonstrated beyond all doubt that Quirós had found, not the peninsula of the Great South Land but an island group. He made three separate passes through the empty ocean east of New Zealand, where Dante had placed Mount Purgatory, and showed there could not be any great land mass in those waters. All his sailors saw was a succession of Cape Flyaways – banks of cloud that might have been, but were not, land.

  His third voyage was an attempt to solve another ancient geographical problem: was there a northwest passage from the Pacific through the Arctic Sea into the Atlantic? It was as he was sailing north to explore the Pacific coast of northern North America, the Bering Sea and to penetrate into the Arctic Ocean, that he discovered Hawai‘i, where he would later return to meet his death. On these second and third voyages Cook rigorously tested a version of the new chronometers invented by John Harrison, which clocks ultimately solved the problem of how to determine accurate longitude while at sea; and on all three voyages his gentleman scientists – Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, the Forsters, father and son, the various star-gazers – brought back such a wealth of astronomical, botanical, ethnographic, geologic and zoological data that scholars are still sifting through it. Then there is the artistic legacy, the pictures of landscapes, of men and women, of animals, birds and insects that Sydney Parkinson, William Hodges, John Webber and others accomplished during his voyages. Cook’s explorations also inaugurated the fur and the whaling trades that would devastate the wildlife of the Pacific and South Atlantic Oceans and enrich Europe and America to about the same extent of that devastation.