A Polynesian navigator would look to the sky’s ‘tone’. It would be darker over an island than over open ocean. A red sky at sunrise or sunset meant there was humidity in the air. Rain could be expected if the moon wore a halo. If there was a double halo, a gale was coming as well. When dolphins and porpoises turned tail and swam for sheltered waters, a storm was on the way. If a frigate bird, which has a chronic aversion to getting its feathers wet, was seen flying out to sea, then the navigator could expect calm seas. Certain birds will only roost on land. If a white tern was sighted over the water, this meant there was land within two hundred kilometres; if it was a brown tern, land was only sixty-five kilometres away.
The water itself spoke to the navigator. If there was poor visibility, the ocean showed the way. The navigators could distinguish between waves that were caused by a local weather system and those that were formed by pressure systems beyond the horizon line. They also looked to the deep ocean currents that flow through the Pacific, just as terrestrial explorers follow the great river systems to find their way through a landscape. It’s even said that the greatest navigators could distinguish as many as five different swells at the same time and could sense an unseen island by reading the vibrations of the waves across a canoe’s hull – islands create unique wave patterns, a signpost to those who are looking for them.
Polynesian navigators charted their voyages in their minds from their point of departure by visualising the destination. The Polynesians couldn’t risk missing any of the signs encountered on the voyage and had to plot their route cerebrally as they progressed. Meaning that while they were on duty, they couldn’t sleep. Ever. They would sit on a special platform on the ship’s deck and were left to their business. These days, it’s said you’ll know a star navigator by their bloodshot eyes.
RICHARD ARIIHAU TUHEIAVA
The essence of celestial navigation is to master the art of visualisation. The navigator must keep the destination in mind. Even though you don’t see the island or the country where you’re going, you have to keep that destination and that island in your mind. If you lose that image – that picture – then you’re lost on the ocean.
Contemporary Polynesian navigators explain that other than the outer reaches of Rapa Nui, Hawai‘i and New Zealand, the longest open water voyage in Polynesia is five hundred kilometres, and that at sea you can see fifty kilometres in all directions. That means the span of the area visible to the naked eye is one hundred kilometres. So, theoretically at least, that means land is always somewhere just over the horizon. Still. It sounds horribly daunting, not least because to contemporary Western eyes the vessels they took to sea look terrifyingly flimsy.
MARGUERITE LAI, Dance Revivalist
The va’a were the backbone of our culture. Our canoes were the centre of daily life. Our villages were named for the va’a. It means everyone pulling together and working together. It’s a broader metaphor for Polynesian society.
These vessels were central to Tahitian society. The open catamarans were carved using tools made of coral, stone and human bone, and cracks sealed with sap and resin from breadfruit trees. Planking was bound together with rope made of coconut fibre, and sails were woven from pandanus leaves.
Cook had no concerns about the seaworthiness of Polynesian vessels. When he visited Tonga, he was particularly impressed by the double-hulled canoes he saw there. And they were speedy. He noted that they could reach seven miles an hour in a light breeze, which far outpaced Cook’s own vessels. In a fine example of nautical one-upmanship, in New Zealand waters a Māori canoe approached the Endeavour and a warrior on board called out to the men on board, ‘Are you alright? Are you sick? Why are you going so slowly?’ When told the ship was under full sail and travelling at top speed, the Māori sailors fell about themselves laughing before taking off again across the waves.
As the means by which Polynesians interacted with their world, the canoe was a pillar of traditional Tahitian society. Watching the Tahitians and their brethren negotiate their way across the waves, Cook recognised kindred spirits. Like him, these people were sailors.
MATAHI TUTAVAI
The big canoes would go out to other islands. They not only found those islands, they also went back and forth between them. We have family ties with Hawai‘i, with Aotearoa, with Samoa, Tonga. To us, the ocean wasn’t a barrier, it was a highway. We knew how to use it.
They handled their canoes ‘very dextrously’, said Cook: ‘I believe [they] perform long and distant voyages in them, otherwise they could not have the knowledge of the islands in these seas they seem to have.’ But the Polynesian ships were, in virtually every way, completely unlike the converted collier James Cook sailed into the Pacific. The newly minted lieutenant would have felt right at home in the coal-carting vessel formerly known as the Earl of Pembroke. Cook learnt to sail on Whitby ‘cats’, as they were called.
DAVID PRYCE, Sailor and Adventurer
You look at the shape of the Endeavour – well, it is pretty much as close to your bathtub as you can get. It wasn’t a very manoeuvrable ship.
With their flat bottoms, massive space below deck and square bows, the British ships weren’t much chop when it came to speed. But the ship renamed HM Bark Endeavour – ‘bark’ being the term used for those vessels that didn’t easily fit the British Navy’s classification system – was just the ticket for long-distance voyaging. Its ‘bluff’ bow was much stronger than a pointy hull, and its flat bottom and shallow draught meant it could be floated off troublesome reefs or shoals a great deal more easily than if it had a pointy bow. It may not have set any speed records, but as events later in the voyage would prove, the Endeavour was well chosen for the conditions. In any other vessel, Cook’s great Pacific adventure might have gone no further than his first voyage.
What the high priest of ’Oro and navigator, Tupaia, thought of Cook’s cumbersome vessel as he climbed on board in 1769 off the shores of Tahiti, we’ll never know. But thanks to the various journals kept by the crew of the Endeavour, we do know something about the man who left his ancestral home on Ra’iatea and set out to sea with a boatload of noisome British sailors. Born around 1725, Tupaia was an ’arioi and was blessed with all the traits that membership of the exclusive class of priests and priestesses entailed. He was statuesque and physically imposing, highly intelligent and charismatic, and a savvy diplomat. The ship’s master, Robert Molyneux, deemed Tupaia to be: ‘infinitely superior in every respect to any other Indian we have met with, he has conceived so strong a friendship for Mr Banks that he is determined to visit Britannia’.
It was true that Joseph Banks formed a particularly close relationship with Tupaia, so much so that he harboured ambitions to take him back to England and keep him. Much like an exotic pet.
SIR JOSEPH BANKS
Thank heaven I have a sufficiency and I do not know why I may not keep him as a curiosity, as well as some of my neighbours do lions and tigers at a larger expense than he will probably ever put me to; the amusement I shall have in his future conversation and the benefit he will be of to this ship, as well as what he may be if another should be sent into these seas, will I think fully repay me.
Banks also knew it would be a boon to have Tupaia on board as a translator and local mediator when they encountered other Pacific Islanders. Even before the Endeavour arrived in Tahiti, he had been contemplating the benefits that a local guide would offer.
SIR JOSEPH BANKS
[We should] persuade one of them to come with us who may serve as an interpreter, and give us an opportunity hereafter of landing wherever we please without running the risk of being obliged to commit the cruelties which the Spaniards and most others who have been in these seas have often brought themselves under the dreadful necessity of being guilty of, for guilty I must call it.
As for Tupaia, his motivations for embarking with Cook and his men were crystal clear.
RICHARD ARIIHAU TUHEIAVA
Tupaia did follow Cook because he want
ed to discover how things were outside of this country. He had a personal quest. He was not simply being used by James Cook. Tupaia had his own ambitions too. He had a very high level of wisdom and spiritual training – more so than James Cook. But he had no ship. He needed Cook to travel across the ocean and see the islands beyond.
In the intertribal wars, Tupaia had been driven from his homeland, Ra’iatea, by a rival group from Bora Bora. He relocated to Tahiti, where he aligned himself with Queen Purea and became her advisor and lover. Naturally, he was keen to take his home back. He must have known that an alliance with the British and their impressive weapons certainly wouldn’t hurt his ambitions.
Before the Endeavour set sail on the next leg of its voyage, Tupaia directed the ship to Ra’iatea and what we now know to be one of the most significant historical sites in the Pacific: Taputapuatea Marae.
RICHARD ARIIHAU TUHEIAVA
It was where the most beautiful ocean-going journeys of all time began. Celestial navigation was an art, but also a lifestyle. Taputapuatea was the navigational hub of all these people – these heroes – who crossed the ocean without any instruments, and returned to this place they considered their homeland.
It was here that Te Pō – the world of darkness occupied by the sacred ancestors – intersected with the world of the living: Te Ao. It was where the god of war, ’Oro, held court, and was also the mythical Havaiki from which the great Pacific migrations traditionally set sail.
SAM NEILL
Taputapuatea is the spiritual heart really of Polynesia. It’s a very sacred place. It gives me the same sort of feeling I’ve had at the pyramids in Mexico or at Stonehenge. I don’t really understand it, if I’m honest. It does feel quite dark to me, but perhaps that’s just my feeling about religion as a whole. The only thought I have on religion is that I believe you should be able to practise whatever it is that you believe in . . . as long as it doesn’t hurt any other people. Human sacrifice was a feature of religious worship at Taputapuatea . . . but we might just let that one go through to the keeper.
As a star navigator, Tupaia knew that all those who departed and returned to the islands must pay their respects at Taputapuatea. So it was that Cook and Banks were witness to a ceremony complete with complex chants and offerings to ’Oro intended to elicit divine protection for the rest of the voyage. But the visitors weren’t treated to the full show. When ’arioi usually arrived by canoe at Taputapuatea for a religious ceremony, sacrificial pairs of dead men and fish were strapped onto the prows of the boats, and other victims were hung in the trees ringing the stone platform by ropes strung through their heads or used as rollers beneath the keels of canoes as they were hefted up the shore from the sea.
Although Cook’s diary entries betray an anthropological interest in describing what he saw of Tahitian religious traditions, in general he shied away from theology.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
The mysteries of most religions are very dark and not easily understood even by those who profess them . . . it will be expected that I should give some account of their religion, which is a thing I have learned so little of that I hardly dare to touch upon it . . . The Mories [marae], which we at first thought were burying places, are wholly built for places of worship, and for the performing of religious ceremonies in. The viands are laid upon altars erected 8, 10, or 12 feet high, by stout posts, and the table of the altar on which the viands lay, is generally made of palm leaves; they are not always in the Mories, but very often at some distance from them . . . The viands laid near the tombs of the dead are, from what I can learn, not for the deceased, but as an offering . . . for they believe of a future state of rewards and punishments; but what their ideas are of it I know not.
Banks, however, got very hands on. Curious to understand the inner workings of Tahitian religious practices, he stuck his arm into a shrine in Taputapuatea and removed a sacred relic. This act was sacrilege on a grand scale, akin to reaching into a reliquary at the Vatican and pulling out St Peter’s fibula. The locals were apoplectic. Without Tupaia’s intercession on his behalf, Banks might well have found himself adorning the prow of a sacred canoe.
That disaster averted, the Endeavour readied to put out to sea, and the extent of Tupaia’s navigational knowledge soon became apparent. It was a meeting of minds as Cook transcribed the chart onto paper that Tupaia carried about in his memory.
RICHARD ARIIHAU TUHEIAVA
Tupaia shared his map of Polynesia with James Cook. But the way of using this map is very difficult for a Western mind because it goes hand in hand with the technique of visualisation. When you see an island, you know there’s another right after it. You draft the map in your mind and it’s a way of thinking and of visualising things. It’s easy for us. For Tupaia, it meant he had a way to come home. It’s like a sea turtle. They don’t get lost. Tupaia wouldn’t either.
What resulted was the perfect meeting of Enlightenment rationalism and Polynesian traditional wisdom. The chart records a total of 130 islands covering a rough circle with a diameter of 4700 kilometres, from the Marquesas in the east to Fiji in the west. Of those 130 islands, Tupaia had names for seventy-four, and although he had only visited thirteen of them, his father and grandfather had told him of the others. He explained to Cook the workings of the prevailing winds and currents that allowed the Polynesian people to travel and trade across the Pacific.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
Tupaia tells us that during the months of November, December & January westerly winds with rain prevail & as the inhabitants of the islands know very well how to make proper use of the winds there will no difficulty arise in trading or sailing from island to islands even though they lay in an east & west direction.
This couldn’t have failed to impress Cook, who was himself a cartographic prodigy, having taught himself mathematics, trigonometry, astronomy, surveying and charting. Cook left us a legacy that includes hydrographic surveys of Newfoundland and New Zealand that were still in use in the twentieth century – the last section of his chart of New Zealand was only retired in the 1990s.
They may have come from opposite sides of the planet, but when it came to their relationship with the sea, Cook and Tupaia had much in common. On the subsequent voyage between Tahiti and New Zealand, Cook marvelled at how Tupaia was able to identify the precise direction back to Tahiti without reference to any instruments.
ALEXANDER DALRYMPLE (1737–1808), Scottish Geographer and Hydrographer
I have heard Captain Cook as well as others assert, Toobia [sic] could show them at all times during the course of their voyage, to half a point of the compass, the direction in which Otaheite [Tahiti] lay.
And like Cook, Tupaia could sense the ship’s movement through the water, intuitively knowing when they had shifted course.
Cook could read the signs on land as well. And as the season turned in the Tahitian archipelago, he knew it was time to go: ‘the season for bread fruit was wholly over and what other fruits they had were hardly sufficient for themselves’. As the Endeavour sailed out to sea with Tupaia on board, the Tahitians wept, crying out ‘Auē! Auē!’ – ‘Alas! Alas!’
But Cook ignored Tupaia’s advice to bear west towards where the Tahitian navigator knew there were more islands to explore. Instead, the Englishman set a course to the south.
RAYMOND SMITH, Ngāti Kuia, Rongomaiwahine Tribes, Descendant of Kahura
Our opinion of Cook is that he was a reasonably fair person, a reasonably good navigator; however, he didn’t take direction well. He had the most skilled navigator in Tupaia, and Cook suggests Tupaia was only a mere interpreter, but in Pacific nations he was highly respected. It was to the detriment of the crew that Lieutenant Cook disregarded Tupaia’s knowledge.
What few on the Endeavour realised was that the Admiralty had set Cook a far more dangerous mission than the relatively benign task of recording the Passage of Venus. From Tahiti, Cook and his men were heading out into the great unknown. They had no way of preparing th
emselves for what lay ahead and no idea of just how important Tupaia would prove to be.
As Banks wrote, ‘We again launched out into the ocean in search of what chance and Tupaia might direct us to.’
PART TWO
FOUR
LOST WORLDS
If you look at the world from different angles, there are a lot of interesting things going on – a lot of continents. And then you turn ’round to the Pacific and from a certain point in space all you see is blue. It’s enormous; it’s a third of the planet. The scale of it just beggars belief – particularly if, like Cook, you’re in a little tub from Whitby, or – like Tupaia and the Polynesian navigators – you’re in a double-hulled canoe. The scale of this thing exceeds the limits of one’s imagination.
SAM NEILL
During an era when, thanks to Google Street View, we can take a virtual stroll around exotic cities during our lunchbreaks, and armchair amateurs use Google Earth to discover ancient cities buried beneath the sands in the Saudi Arabian desert, it’s almost impossible to imagine a time when the world beyond our shores was unknown in the most profound sense. There were no satellites beaming live footage from remote regions; no frontline reporters and cameramen transmitting images and events for us to digest with our evening meal; no National Geographic Channel; no Instagram; no Facebook; no YouTube; no smart camera recordings or live blogging. Any sense that there were unfamiliar lands and societies beyond the horizon existed only in the imagination, if at all.
Whether they lived in Moscow, Manchester or Matavai Bay, in the eighteenth century most people knew little if anything about the world beyond the proverbial back fence. In the absence of the fast, safe and comfortable means of modern mass transport we know today, long distance travel was an extreme sport. To say it was hard work is an understatement verging on the ridiculous. That’s why so many European philosophers and thinkers could believe there was a massive unknown continent hidden somewhere in the southern hemisphere without ever having seen it. Just as theoretical physicists today posit ideas about the universe without ever thinking they’ll jump in a spacecraft and head into outer space to test their theories in person, the European geographers had no intention of boarding a ship to sail into the great unknown. They left that up to men like James Cook.
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