Zone of the Marvellous

by Martin Edmond

  For the purposes of this inquiry his foremost achievement is best expressed as a negative: after Cook the notion of a Great South Land, that vast and vastly wealthy domain dreamed of by Europeans for nearly three millennia, was shown to have been, all along, a fiction. Or, as it is expressed in the inscription upon a monument to Cook: It is now discovered beyond all doubt that the same Great Being who created the Universe … ordained our earth to keep a just poise, without a corresponding Southern continent. The same inscription has on it a (mis)quotation from the Book of Job (26:7): He stretches out the North over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

  IN DECEMBER OF 1769, off Cape Maria van Diemen in the far north of the North Island of New Zealand, Cook’s Endeavour and a French ship, the St Jean-Baptiste under Jean-François-Marie de Surville, passed each other in a violent storm without either captain sighting the other ship. De Surville was engaged on a trading voyage out of Pondicherry, India, with a rich cargo of textiles he hoped to sell to Jewish merchants in a fabulously wealthy land rumoured to have been recently discovered by the British in the South Seas – the ever delusive Davis Land. Perhaps the confusion arose from a mishearing of ‘Wallis’ as ‘Davis’; but there were no Jewish merchants in Tahiti or anywhere else in that part of the world and de Surville’s voyage was a disaster. By the time he left Doubtless Bay – his La Baie de Lauriston – after burning canoes and villages and taking a Māori hostage, he had already lost a third of his crew of 194 to scurvy. More would die of the same disease on the Pacific crossing to Peru, including the Māori, Ranginui; and de Surville was himself drowned in the surf off Chilca, south of Callao, as he attempted to land there.

  Over three centuries of explorations in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, many thousands of men aboard European ships died and were buried at sea – a vast freight of dead men’s bones consigned to Davy Jones’ Locker. Most of these men died of scurvy, a disease consequent upon a lack of vitamin C in the restricted shipboard diet: large discoloured spots over the whole surface of the body, swelled legs, putrid gums, and above all, an extraordinary lassitude … a strange dejection of spirits … with shiverings, tremblings, and a disposition to be seized with the most dreadful terrors on the slightest accident. This description comes from an account of George Anson’s voyage around the world in 1740, surely one of the most horrific in a catalogue of horrors.

  Cook’s three voyages twenty-odd years later have been celebrated as the first not to suffer the ravages of the vitamin C deficiency; curiously, while Cook was certainly vigilant towards outbreaks of the disease and consistently tried to forestall them, he did not believe in the efficacy of the orange and lemon juice he carried, preferring to rely upon pickled sauerkraut and wort of malt, as well as portable soup, preserved in blocks, and carrot marmalade, none of which is as effective an antiscorbutic as citrus juice. However the robb of citrus Cook carried, since it had been boiled, was also more or less useless. At various ports, for instance in New Zealand, he brewed a spruce beer from local plants and gave that to his men as well. He also insisted upon cleanliness below and above deck and tried to ensure that his people were not overworked and kept as far as possible warm and dry. His success at avoiding the plague of scurvy was also because of the fact that he stopped often and always took on fresh food and water when he did. It had been known for a very long time that greens and fruits restored the health of scurvy-sickened sailors in a matter of days.

  Cook also knew that many sailors carried venereal diseases of various kinds and consciously tried to prevent them infecting local populations in the islands – an impossible undertaking. At Tahiti gonorrhea and perhaps also syphilis were already rife by the time the Endeavour arrived at Matavai Bay. They had been introduced by the men of the Dolphin; and/or by Bougainville’s French sailors. For many years there was ongoing, futile argument between the English and the French as to who had brought the diseases of Venus to her islands; it seems certain that both expeditions carried infected men. Gonorrhea was a new affliction in paradise but the situation with respect to syphilis was complicated by two factors – at the time it wasn’t understood that the infection could remain latent in the body for years; and the islanders were already subject to yaws, an ancient disease of humans caused, like syphilis, by a Treponema spirochete.

  It was said that the results of Bougainville’s voyage were above all literary; the same, without the qualification, was true of Cook’s three. William Wales, the astronomer on his second voyage, later taught at the Mathematical School of Christ’s Hospital in London where Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb and Samuel Coleridge were among his pupils. Coleridge, also an admirer of Dampier, in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner reproduced words and images from Wales’ Journal and, more generally, gave an unforgettable picture of a ship of death navigated by a skeleton crew. Later in the nineteenth century Charles Baudelaire would also, in his Voyage to Cythera, see neither a good savage or a natural man, but a ludicrous carcass … a token gallows where my image hung. And Rimbaud’s ‘The Drunken Boat’, a poem in which the whole colonial adventure is evoked and then denied, concludes with an image of Europe as a small cold black pond upon which a sad child sets sail a boat as frail as a butterfly.

  WHEN IN 1804 THE Russian exploring expedition under Krusenstern called at the Marquesas Islands they found ashore two beachcombers, Edward Robarts and Jean Cabri, one English and the other French, who existed in a state of war with each other: a geopolitical opposition expressed by means of two individuals. Krusenstern took one of them, Jean Cabri, away with him; on board ship his German scientist, Georg Langsdorff, was fascinated to learn that Cabri knew how to dance to ‘La Carmagnole’, the signature tune of the sans-culottes in the French Revolution. A carmagnole was a short jacket worn along with the Phrygian cap, that ancient Trojan symbol of liberty adopted by emancipated slaves in Imperial Rome and used by freedom fighters in both the American and French Revolutions. Cabri may have introduced revolutionary ideals into the Marquesas and attempted to rally the islanders against the designs of European colonialists.

  His own fate was melancholy in the extreme: neither European nor Polynesian but somehow both at once, he lived for the rest of his life as a curiosity, an illustrated man who performed Marquesan dances for the crowned heads of Europe, taught Russian sailors at Kronstadt to swim and ended his days as a sideshow attraction in popular theatres and at country fairs in France. He is an opposite of Ahutoru the Tahitian, who liked to watch the scenery changes at the opera in Paris; and of all the other more or less doomed natives, like Dampier’s Giolo, whom European explorers took back home to show off: a heterotopia without a mirror, an inexplicable otherness in a solitary body. Jean Cabri died at Valenciennes in the early 1820s, having for twenty years tried and failed to earn a way back to his own particular paradise where his Marquesan wife and children awaited him; he was buried anonymously to prevent his tattooed skin being souvenired by a dealer in curiosities who had tried to buy it off him while he still lived.

  As Jean Cabri was wending his way through the fairgrounds of France and Switzerland towards that final rendezvous in Picardy, one of the younger officers on Krusenstern’s voyage, Thaddeus Bellingshausen, a Baltic German from Estonia, was engaged in what Alan Moorehead called the last Pacific exploration in the grand manner. Bellingshausen’s mission was to investigate Arctic and Antarctic waters looking for a Russian oceanic strategic and trading base. He was an admirer of Cook and, in England, paused for an audience with the ageing, gouty, wheelchair-bound Joseph Banks. Bellingshausen set off for the south to circumnavigate Antarctica, going in the opposite direction to Cook and becoming the first European, perhaps the first man, actually to see the coast of the white continent – at the edge of the Finibul ice shelf that rims the Crown Princess Martha Land coast.

  Bellingshausen used Port Jackson, Sydney, as his base to refit and to reinvigorate his men. He stopped there first towards the end of March 1820 in his ship Vostok (East); the companion ship, Mirnyi (Peac
e), joined them a week later. There were twenty other ships in the harbour – a convict fleet had just arrived. During the southern winter the Vostok and the Mirnyi sailed for the Pacific via New Zealand – in Queen Charlotte Sound they ate potatoes planted by Cook – calling at Tahiti where, as one writer put it, the New Cythera had been transformed into a lower-middle-class Protestant and English New Jerusalem. The women who came aboard to sing hymns and psalms had their heads shaved and wore calico-print granny frocks; tattooing was discouraged and liquor banned – although in fact it had replaced iron as an illicit form of currency. Even the weaving of garlands of flowers was forbidden. Bellingshausen was accompanied everywhere he went in Tahiti by the missionary Henry Nott and was undoubtedly restricted in what he was allowed to see; the impression of a neat European suburban outpost was probably contrived and some of the native ebullience and lasciviousness survived beyond his purview; he was certainly importuned, behind Nott’s back, for liquor by both King Pomare and his queen.

  The Russian expedition stopped again at Port Jackson in 1820 on its way back from the Pacific Islands. Bellingshausen and his crew were enamoured of Australian birdlife and when they left Sydney took with them on the Vostok and the Mirnyi eighty-four birds, including cockatoos, parrots, doves, a lory and a parakeet, and a small kangaroo that liked to hop around the deck. The astonishing thing about this event is that Bellingshausen was heading south again to resume his circumnavigation of Antarctica. The Russians seemed surprised when at higher latitudes the birds declined to sing. And that, although they were kept in cages below decks, they began to die. One, a black cockatoo, collapsed after trying to eat a stuffed kookaburra. On Macquarie Island, so early, fur seals had already been exterminated and the sealers were killing sea-elephants; they were rendering them down using live penguins as fuel. Bellingshausen was one of the last to see alive the parrot indigenous to the island which, along with albatross they caught, the sealers ate.

  In 1821, the Antarctic circumnavigation complete, the two ships turned for home; as they sailed into warmer waters off the Atlantic coast of South America, after three and a half months below the surviving Australian birds were brought up on deck and at once burst into song. One parrot escaped and climbed into the rigging. A sailor was sent aloft to recapture it but it flew away and then tried to settle on, or fell into, the water ahead of the ship. A pole was thrust out towards it and the bird managed to grasp it, holding on so tightly it did not let go for hours. The eventual fate of these birds is not recorded.

  The ice shelf seen by Bellingshausen was the Great South Land, a giant fragment of Gondwanaland where once forests grew and strange birds and animals lived. It was, and is, as far away from the antique notions of a Land of Gold as can fairly be imagined, whatever precious minerals might one day be mined there. But in some respects the delusive Great South Land had not so much disappeared as trifurcated: there was Antarctica; there was Australia; and there was the island and water world of Polynesia, stretching from Hawai‘i in the north to Aotearoa New Zealand in the south; from Fiji in the west to Easter Island in the east. These three worlds are the strange inheritors of Ptolemy’s lost dream; they would each in their different ways become zones of the marvellous over the 200 years after the grand European explorations ceased. With this qualification: in these new worlds, the marvellous would be inextricably and often paradoxically entwined with the quotidian.

  There was no Great South Land, unless it was Australia, inhabited, William Dampier said, by the most miserable people on earth. Nineteenth-century mythographers replaced the search for a lost land with extravagant speculations about lost peoples. Samuel Marsden, the ‘flogging parson’ of Sydney but a Christ-like saviour in Maoriland, thought the Polynesians were the biblical Sons of Shem. Or were they a remnant of the Lost Tribes of Israel? Māori became outcast Tius, in both their own and the European imagination. Later they were cast as part of Abraham Fornander’s Vedic Family; for Edward Tregear, they were Aryans; others thought of them as Atlanteans or a displaced megalithic people, perhaps from the Caucasus. Even today, the Fijian tradition that they come from central Africa can be sourced to the speculations of nineteenth-century missionaries. Meanwhile, Dampier’s bleak assessment of Aboriginal Australians seems as much dark prophecy as an intended observation, especially as it applies to the unlucky Tasmanians.

  VI

  LOST TRIBES

  TAPUTAPUATEA ON RA‘IATEA IN TAHITI WAS THE most sacred site in the eastern Pacific, the parent marae of others spread out across the ocean; stones from Taputapuatea were taken as foundation pieces for new marae on islands as far away as Aotearoa. It was where chiefs were invested, where priests spoke to the gods, where fertility of land and sea and the safety of the people were consecrated. At the time of Cook’s first visit it was dedicated to ‘Oro and the home of Tupaia, the Arioi priest and astronomer who travelled on the Endeavour to New Zealand and beyond. And yet when Joseph Banks went with Tupaia to visit the marae and came across a group of god houses, thrusting his hand into one of these shrines he found a parcel about five feet long, wrapped up in mats, which he tore with his fingers until he reached a layer of plaited sinnet, the covering of the god. Death was the traditional punishment for such an act of desecration; although Banks, and the English generally, were afterwards treated coolly and Tupaia seemed to be quite displeased, there were no overt consequences. Whether the bad luck the expedition later suffered at Batavia and beyond – after a relatively disease-free voyage, half the ship’s company died in the latter stages – could be ascribed to the anger of the god is a moot point; but Tupaia, who himself died of malaria at Batavia, may have felt himself doomed from the moment of Banks’ transgression. It was a casual but not an unusual act.

  A few months later at Botany Bay on the east coast of Australia, Tupaia, Cook and others of his gentleman scientists went ashore one evening soon after their arrival and were confronted by armed men whom they fired at and hit with small shot. Some women and children who were watching set up a most horrid howl. The men ran away, whereupon the English inspected their houses, discovering in one half a dozen small children hidden behind a shield and a piece of a bark. They also found some darts – spears – which they took away with them, throwing down nails, ribbons, cloth and a few strings of beads on to the house floor by way of recompense. Their sense of entitlement was so great that it extended to possession in both great and small measure – by the time Cook had travelled up the east coast as far as Cape York he was ready to claim the entire land for the British Crown, calling it New, and later New South, Wales.

  Yet when Cook came to assess the people of this country he was judicious, if perplexed:

  they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquility which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff etc, they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholsome Air, so that they have very little need of Clothing and this they seem to be fully sencible of, for many to whome we gave Cloth etc to left it carlessly upon the Sea beach and in the woods as a thing they had no manner of use for. In short they seem’d to set no Value upon anything we gave them.

  There were strange events on that first traverse of eastern Australia. Some of the Aborigines seemed not to see, or at least to ignore, the Endeavour: as if this mysterious white-winged object passing along the face of the ocean like a gigantic pelican were a vision or a dream, not a veritable thing of the world. In a song the Dulingbara people of K’Gari, now Fraser Island, would surmise that the strangers aboard must be burying themselves like the sand crabs / They disappeared like the smoke. The name K’Gari means Paradise; and Cook’s description of the people of
eastern Australia implicitly recalls the biblical Eden before the Fall: The Earth and sea … furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not … It is perhaps accurate as far as it goes but within or behind its encomium was an implacable will. Paradise may have been here but will not remain so: there is absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind that the time-haunted unhappiness of Europe not only will, but must, replace the eternal present of the indigenes. This heterotopia will inevitably be made over into an ecumene, our place.

  Within twenty years of Cook’s visit to Botany Bay, the First Fleet – nine convict transports and two naval escort ships – would sail into Botany Bay; and within thirty years of his initial visit to Tahiti a Missionary Society ship, the Duff, landed seventeen Protestant evangelists on the islands to begin their work of conversion of Pagans, living in cruel and abominable idolatry. Even though eight of them left on the first available ship and the Duff itself, on its next voyage, was captured by pirates, enough missionaries remained under Mr Nott to effect the changes observed by Bellingshausen. All across the Pacific in the 1820s and ’30s there were orgies of idol burnings: at Moorea in 1813; at Raivavae in 1822, when 133 images were destroyed; on Rarotonga in 1827 (538); Tonga in 1839 (275); and in many other places. These conflagrations were usually accompanied by ritual desecration of marae as the old gods were banished in favour of the new.

  THE SITUATION IN Australia was somewhat different. At least since Abel Tasman’s first voyage European explorers had carried with them instructions as to how to deal with native peoples encountered in the new lands. In general terms these instructions advised, on the one hand, precaution and on the other suggested finding out as much as possible about the new peoples – their clothing, weapons, customs, manners and the kind of warfare they practised. Trade goods were to be offered and those things that might be received in exchange evaluated. All insolence and hostility towards the discovered peoples was proscribed. These instructions were of no use to Tasman in Van Diemen’s Land, where he saw no one, although he was certain he and his men were observed; and the sudden attack at Murderers Bay pre-empted any attempt by the Dutch to fulfil them there. In Tonga, by contrast, they seem to have worked to the advantage of both sides.