The Pacific

by Meaghan Wilson Anastasios

  It did seem to be uncharacteristically footloose and fancy-free behaviour by the otherwise sober captain. Perhaps, as has been suggested, Cook had thrown caution to the wind because he was not under the scrutiny of civilian observers. Unlike on Cook’s first two voyages, where he had been attended by a clutch of scientists and civilians, the third voyage was staffed solely by military men. It’s possible that Cook cared less about what they thought of him than the judgement of men he would have seen as his social and intellectual superiors. It could also be that he had taken it upon himself to cast an anthropological eye upon proceedings and record the 'Inasi from a scientific perspective in the absence of non-military observers. Ultimately, this pig-headed determination would play a part in his demise.

  Cook was not a religious man. But in the name of science, he was interested in witnessing and recording cultural and spiritual rituals. As far as he was concerned, he was observing, not judging. So it is that we have from Cook a detailed account of human sacrifice he witnessed on Mo’orea during the third voyage – a ritual used to rouse the support of the gods when going into battle.

  CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

  They now took the bundles of feathers and the sacrifice to the great Morai … at the foot of them the latter was placed round which the priests seated themselves and began again their prayers, while some of their attendants dug a hole at the foot of the Morai in which they buried the victim. As it was putting into the grave a boy squeaked out aloud, Omai said it was the Eatua [God] . . . while two men beat at times on two drums very loud, and a boy squeaked out as before in a long shrill voice thrice, this as we were told was to call the Eatua to eat what they had prepared for him . . . The unhappy sufferer seemed to be a middle aged man, and as we were told a Tou tou but I never understood he had done any crime so as to merit death; it is however certain that they made choice of such for these sacrifices, or else common low fellows . . . During the ceremony we were silent but as soon as it was over . . . of course [we] condemned it.

  *

  Although Cook was clearly keen to record details of such rituals, his main concern was to get to the Arctic Circle before the northern hemisphere winter closed in. Before he left Polynesia, though, he had to do the one thing he had ostensibly returned to the Pacific to do – return Mai to his home.

  When Mai had set sail with Furneaux aboard the Adventure, he had hoped his newfound connections with the British would be put to use driving his enemies – the Bora Borans – from his homeland in Ra’iatea and avenging his father’s death at their hands. But it was not to be. On his return Ra’iatea was still in the hands of the Bora Borans, so instead Cook acquired land for Mai on Huahine.

  Whatever expectations Mai may have had about the reception he might receive fell flat. No doubt thinking he’d dazzle his countrymen with all the splendid things he’d brought back from Britain, when he first arrived in Vaitepiha Bay he donned a suit of armour and mounted a horse, intending to ride along the beach.

  Unfortunately, the horse was less concerned about making a positive impression and promptly unseated poor Mai.

  Even his vivid account of the splendours he’d seen in ‘Pretanne’, as Mai described Britain, failed to impress.

  JOHN RICKMAN (1737–1818), Lieutenant, Cook’s third voyage

  He said, the great King of Pretanne had three hundred thousand warriors every day at his command . . . and more than double that number of sailors, who traversed the globe, from the rising of the sun to his setting . . . That in one city only on the banks of a river far removed from the sea, there were more people than were contained in the whole group of islands with which His Majesty was acquainted.

  Until Mai offered his countrymen red feathers from a collection he had picked up in Tonga, even his own brother-in-law treated him dismissively.

  CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

  When we first drew near the island, several canoes came off to the ships each conducted by two or three men, but as they were only common fellows Omai took no notice of them nor they of him . . . At length a chief whom I had known before named Ootie and Omai’s brother-in-law . . . came on board, and three or four more . . . yet there was nothing either tender or striking in their meeting. On the contrary there seemed to be a perfect indifference on both sides, till Omai asked his brother down into the cabin, opened the drawer where he kept his red feathers and gave him a few . . . [W]ith the property he was master of he would [have] had prudence enough to make himself respected and even courted by the first persons in the island, but instead of that he rejected the advice of those who wished him well and suffered himself to be duped by every designing knave.

  As Cook described it, perhaps rather sadly: ‘It was evident to everyone that it was not the man but his property they were in love with, for had he not showed them his red feathers, which is the most valuable thing that can be carried to the island, I question if they had given him a coconut.’

  On Huahine, Cook instructed his men to build Mai a wooden house, which they surrounded by a moat to fence in his horse, cows, sheep, goats, turkeys, geese, rabbits, cats and monkey. By any standards, Mai brought with him a treasure trove of British goodies – his house contained a bed, dining table, chairs, a hand organ, muskets, swords, tin soldiers, a globe of the world and crockery. And a suit of armour. But all those worldly treasures couldn’t protect Mai from the hand of fate – he died just two and a half years after returning from Britain. All the splendours he’d brought with him were taken and dispersed by his family. Today, nothing of him remains in the Society Islands.

  Cook’s obligations fulfilled, on 8 December 1777 he departed Ra’iatea. He turned northwards, heading at last for the North American continent. The first leg of his journey had taken much longer than intended and for the first time in his life, it seemed things weren’t going Cook’s way. His third voyage was turning out to be a tale of thwarted ambitions.

  FIFTEEN

  GIVE AND TAKE

  For me, the strange contradiction of the wilderness – of the emptiest places of all – is that these are the places where I most readily feel the presence of the ghosts of those who have been here before . . . Captain Cook and the indigenous people who lived here.

  SAM NEILL

  Trading . . . Stocks. Shares. Bank bonds. Stamps. Pokemon cards.

  Everyone knows the rules of engagement. If you have something someone else wants, you trade it for something you want in exchange. If the rules of supply and demand kick in and you find yourself holding onto something scarce that someone’s keen to get their hands on, you may end up pocketing more for it than you actually think it’s worth. The flip side of that is if you’re extremely keen to offload it, you might be prepared to hand it over for less than its perceived value. Either way, the trade should end up with both parties pretty happy about the outcome. But things can get tricky in the schoolyard Pokemon stock exchange when you have a card the neighbourhood bully wants. As he or she advances towards you with ‘persuasive’ powers locked and loaded, it’s difficult enough to keep hold of your dignity without worrying about your Pokemon, which you’ll likely see torn from your sweaty little hands with nothing given in exchange except a bloody nose.

  Extending this metaphor into the eighteenth-century Pacific, as James Cook hopped from island to island, he was generally observing the rules and giving objects in exchange for the necessities he required from the locals. Nails, looking glasses, axes and red feathers were exchanged for consumables. As for the men on board, they ran an enthusiastic trade in goods for many things, including the locally made cultural objects that, marketed as ethnographic curios, set collectors aquiver back in Europe.

  At this point in the game things were fairly equitable between the visitors and the indigenous people he encountered. Cook was just one man seeking to boost supplies on one or two ships. In trade terms, at least, he had never shown himself inclined to behave like a schoolyard bully, but he was also in a position where he needed the supplies being offered by the people of t
he Pacific a great deal more than they required whatever it was he was presenting for their delectation. The indigenous people knew the value of what they had. And on the third voyage, Cook would meet a group of people on the North American coast who would prove to be the masters of the art of the deal.

  But first he had to get there. And to do that, Cook knew he’d have to offer his men something more than another hunk or two of hard tack to entice them to cooperate. The delays they’d endured had depleted the ship’s supplies to the extent that they wouldn’t make it back to home soil without some belt tightening. Although they were able to keep the expedition going with the goods they obtained through trade with the Pacific Islanders, there wasn’t enough surplus left to make it through those legs of the journey where they might expect to have trouble replenishing stores of fresh food and water. And after his experience in the Southern Ocean on the second voyage, Cook’s expectations of the Arctic Circle and what it might offer from a culinary perspective were not high. So Cook put it to his men – he’d share the bonus that would come his way when, as he expected, they found the North-West Passage.

  There was a catch, of course. It was a big ask, but the potential rewards were enormous.

  SAM NEILL

  To the officers’ amazement, the crew agreed to the unthinkable – to give up their daily ration of rum, except on Saturdays. That way they would preserve their supplies for the chilly north. Instead, the crew took to mixing their reduced grog with coconut milk. Could this have been the first ever piña colada?

  *

  The British quest to find a faster way to Asia from Europe via the Arctic was driven by a desire to reach the lucrative and insatiable markets of China and the Far East. Britain was determined to crack it open. As Cook was making his way to the western side of the Pacific shoreline of the North American continent, unbeknownst to him the Admiralty had decided to send another expedition to approach from the east. Lieutenant Richard Pickersgill, who had accompanied Cook on his two previous voyages, was given command of the Lyon. But the going was tough, and his ship and callow crew not up to the task. By all reports, he was intoxicated for much of the latter part of the voyage. After he returned to London, he was found guilty of drunkenness by a court martial and dismissed from service. He drowned a short time after – not, as he might have hoped, in command of a ship on the high seas but in the muddy water of the Thames.

  Putting this disappointment to one side, the Admiralty knew they had their best man on the job anyway. As Cook forged his way northwards, he was furthering British ambitions to establish itself in the North Pacific. Russian expansion into Alaska had Britain sweating, as did Spain’s consolidation of power along the North and South American coastline. Spanish missions and forts were being built all along the Californian seaboard, and they had established the first European settlement on the site of San Francisco in 1776. Without a bold move or two, any hope Britain had of gaining a foothold in the region was fast disappearing. Britain was struggling to hold on to its colonies in what became the United States of America, where the locals were rebelling against the Crown in the revolution that would stretch from 1775 to 1783. Meanwhile France was attempting to assert itself, with its navigators poking around the Pacific at the same time as Cook. Having lost its Canadian territories to Britain, France was eager to find new lands upon which to impose itself.

  Cook couldn’t claim ignorance of these agendas – he had cut his cartographic teeth early in his career charting the coast of Newfoundland just as the British were booting the French out of Canada.

  As much as all concerned liked to claim they were only focused on furthering the interests of science and exploration, that wasn’t the whole story. Political and economic goals were always foremost amongst the strategies pursued by the ambitious European nations.

  When news reached Spain from their colonies in Mexico that a British expedition was heading north, it caused much consternation on the Iberian Peninsula. Thanks to its settlements along the Pacific coastline and across the pond in the Spanish East Indies (now called the Philippines), Spain considered the Pacific to be its sphere of influence. It also considered much of North America its domain, and so news that the Russians had moved their fur-trading activities into Alaska must have irked them no end.

  With the Viceroyalty of New Spain overseeing much of what is today the United States of America, and the viceroyalties of New Granada, Peru and Río de la Plata stretching from Central America almost to the tip of South America, Spain’s territorial claims were not without good foundation from an eighteenth-century European perspective – keeping in mind that nobody in Europe had asked the people of the Pacific, who had been living there for thousands of years, what their thoughts were on the matter.

  The Spanish knew that if Britain found a route into the Pacific across the Arctic Circle, this would allow the British to sneak into waters that Spain believed it had prior claim to. Word found its way back to England that any moves they planned to make towards America would be unwelcome.

  The members of the Royal Society were incensed by the implication they had anything other than scientific purposes in mind. As a fellow of the Society and one-time vice-president, Daines Barrington protested, ‘the English nation is actuated merely by desiring to know as much as possible with regard to the planet which we inhabit’. The record shows he was likely protesting a little too loudly. Having authored a book in 1775 titled Tracts on the Possibility of Reaching the North Pole, Barrington probably had a fairly clear view of the true purpose of Cook’s expedition.

  *

  Cook was sailing into troubled waters. Of course, that was never going to deter him. What would slow him down, though, was the constant need to restock the ships’ stores.

  With that in mind, Cook called halt on Christmas Eve, 1777. His two ships had reached an island that he named, unsurprisingly, Christmas Island. The enormous coral atoll – the largest in the world – was unpopulated when Cook landed, although today it’s believed it was most likely used as a way station for the Polynesian voyagers crisscrossing the Pacific. Located smack-bang in the middle of the ocean, the island now known by the phonetic appellation ‘Kiritimati’ – say it out loud and you’ll understand the connection with ‘Christmas’ – was first sighted by a Spaniard, Hernando de Grijalva, in 1537. Desolate and remote, it was blessed with an embarrassment of marine life. Cook and his men managed to capture two hundred green turtles during their short stay on the island.

  For Cook and the early European navigators, islands like this had one use only. These were spots where the sailors could find the essentials they needed to get them to the places they really wanted to be. Which is why Cook made a habit of planting vegetables and releasing pairs of animals into the wild, in the hope they would reproduce and establish a supply of victuals ready and waiting for passing ships. With the wisdom of hindsight, we now know what an appalling idea this was – the extent of the environmental destruction caused by introduced species is beyond measure.

  At the other end of the environmental catastrophe spectrum, it wouldn’t take long before European powers became aware of just how rich in resources the Pacific was. Lacking the resource management skills of the Pacific First Nations, the Western approach was to take it all until there was nothing left. Which – over the centuries to come – humankind would have a very good stab at achieving.

  To strip this vast maritime territory of its natural resources, the Europeans first had to control it. The skirmishes to achieve supremacy in the Pacific would be fought diplomatically, economically, and also on the battlefield.

  *

  During the Second World War, one Polynesian island group and a bay named Pearl Harbor would become a tinderbox that would ignite the war in the Pacific. For our story, the archipelago would also be the place where Cook’s luck would finally run out.

  When the jagged peaks of Oahu appeared over the horizon on 18 January 1778, the men on board the Resolution and the Discovery became the first
Europeans to lay eyes on the Hawaiian Islands, which Cook named for the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich.

  As the British ships approached the neighbouring island of Kauai, a flotilla of canoes approached. What did the Hawaiians think of the apparition that arrived across the waves? Oral traditions record what the locals made of the peculiar vessels and their pale-skinned passengers. The masts they thought trees, the two boats an idiosyncratic double canoe. As for the men on board, the Hawaiians wondered at their ‘white foreheads, sparkling eyes, wrinkled skins, and angular heads’, and the way they ‘breathed fire from their mouths’ – presumably an impression of the sailors smoking tobacco.

  When the Hawai’ians came on board, they were astounded by what they saw.

  CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

  I never saw Indians so much astonished at entering a ship before, their eyes were continually flying from object to object, the wildness of their looks and actions fully expressed their surprise and astonishment.

  Cook was also astonished by the fact the locals spoke a Polynesian dialect, which meant he could communicate with them.

  The wonder of the initial contact was short-lived. As a trigger-happy third lieutenant – the brutal and generally disliked John Williamson – was attempting to land, he shot and killed a Hawai’ian.

  JAMES TREVENEN (1760–1790), Midshipman, Cook’s third voyage

  A wretch, feared & hated by his inferiors, detested by his equals, & despised by his superiors; a very devil, to whom none of our midshipmen have spoke for above a year.

  But unlike with Cook’s tragic first contact in New Zealand, there were no immediate repercussions.

  As the lure of the Arctic called, Cook departed the Sandwich Islands after a brief visit as a god. His return visit would end on a less positive note. But, for now, the two ships tacked northeastwards towards the American continent and a northern winter. Although they were still a long way short of the Arctic, to men who had been wallowing about in a tropical climate for an extended period, the cold was a rude shock. As Charles Clerke observed, ‘We have been so long inhabitants of the torrid zone, that we are all shaking with cold here with the thermometer at 60.’ For Englishmen accustomed to European winters, fifteen degrees Celsius should have been a doddle. But they had grown soft.