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The major ocean currents in the Pacific follow basically the same pattern, flowing west along the equator and peeling apart at the ocean’s edge, turning north in the Northern Hemisphere and south in the Southern and circling back around in two great cells. There is, however, also something called the Equatorial Countercurrent, which flows eastward along the equator in between the main westward-flowing northern and southern currents—just to make things confusing.
What all this meant for ships under sail was that near the equator things could be quite chaotic, and often there would be no wind at all. In the tropics, the winds and currents would, generally speaking, speed a ship on its way west, permit it to sail on a north–south axis, and effectively prevent it from sailing east the vast majority of the time. Thus, if one wanted to proceed eastward across the Pacific, the only sure way to do it was to travel in higher, colder latitudes (that is, farther north or south), where sailors typically encountered the opposite problem: the inability to make any westing at all.
The other major constraint on early Pacific navigation for Europeans was the problem of entry points. In the days before the man-made shortcuts of Panama and Suez, European ships bound for the Pacific were forced to sail to the very bottom of the world and around either Africa or South America in order to reach the Pacific Ocean. The eastern route, by way of Africa, was by far the longest; not only did one have to sail all the way south and around the Cape of Good Hope, but then there was still the whole Indian Ocean to cross, and beyond that the mysterious impediment of Australia. The western route, by way of South America, was shorter and therefore more attractive, but it also presented the greatest danger, in the form of a passage around the dreaded Cape Horn. Here, where the long tail of South America reaches almost to the Antarctic ice, lies one of the most fearsome stretches of ocean in the entire world. It combines furious winds, enormous waves, freezing temperatures, and a shelving, ironbound coast to produce what can only be described as a navigator’s nightmare: a maelstrom of wind, rain, sleet, snow, hail, fog, and some of the world’s shortest and steepest seas.
Stories of dreadful passages around Cape Horn are legion. Leading a squadron of eight ships around the Horn in the early 1740s, Britain’s Commodore George Anson was battered for a biblical forty days and forty nights by a succession of hurricanes so wild they reduced his crew to gibbering terror. Two of the squadron’s ships went missing, effectively blown away by the wind, and Anson was ultimately forced to resort to the hideous expediency of “manning the foreshrouds,” that is, sending men into the rigging to act as human sails, the wind being too ferocious to permit the carrying of any actual canvas. Needless to say, at least one seaman was blown from his perch. A strong swimmer, he survived for a while in the icy water, but such was the intensity of the storm that his shipmates were forced to watch helplessly as he was swept away by the mountainous seas.
Forty-odd years later, Captain Bligh of the Bounty encountered a similar series of storms as he tried to round the Horn on his way to Tahiti, on the voyage that would famously end in mutiny. For a month he battled winds that boxed the compass and was drenched by seas that broke over his ship. At the end of a titanic struggle against “this tempestuous ocean,” he finally surrendered. Turning east, he got the wind behind him and bore away for Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, a decision that would add ten thousand miles to his voyage.
There was an alternative to rounding the Horn, and that was to pass through the Strait of Magellan, the route pioneered in 1520 and the earliest known pathway into the Pacific from the Atlantic side. But this narrow, twisting passageway of some 350 miles, which separates the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego from mainland South America, presents navigational challenges of its own. Here the problem is not so much exposure as the complicated nature of the passage itself and unpredictable winds and currents. Magellan himself had been unusually fortunate, making the passage in only thirty-eight days, but the British navigator Samuel Wallis spent more than four months trying to clear the strait in 1767, giving him an effective sailing rate of less than three miles a day.
The Strait of Magellan opens out into the Pacific between 52 and 53 degrees south latitude. Cape Horn lies at approximately 56 degrees south, and navigators who decided to sail around it were routinely obliged to sail into the high fifties; Cook reached as far as 60 degrees south on his first passage round the Horn. But, either way, once they had made it into the Pacific, navigators found it almost impossible to advance. They could make no headway in these latitudes against the ferocious westerly winds. Southward lay the ice and snow—they were nearly to the Antarctic Circle—east was the coast of South America, and the only direction open to them was north.
It is this particular set of circumstances—winds, distances, continental obstacles, and sailing capacity—that explains a curious fact about early European encounters in the Pacific, which is that, even with the whole, wide ocean before them, almost all the early navigators followed variants of the same route. With one or two exceptions, they crossed the South Pacific on a long northwesterly diagonal, or, more properly, a dogleg, sailing north and then turning west once they picked up the trades. They did this not because they thought it was the path most likely to yield important discoveries—as the historian J. C. Beaglehole drily observed, “sailing on some variant of the great north-west line, of necessity a ship made through a vast deal of empty ocean”—but because it was the path dictated by the currents and the winds. As a consequence, many important islands that lie off this route, like Hawai‘i, were not encountered for centuries, while others, some of them minuscule, like the tiny atoll of Puka Puka in the Tuamotu Archipelago, were discovered over and over again.
THE TUAMOTUS, ALSO known as the Low or Dangerous Archipelago, feature in almost every early European account of the Pacific, for the simple reason that they lie directly across most variants of the great northwest line. A screen of some seventy-eight “low islands,” or atolls, the Tuamotus stretch for eight hundred miles along a northwest–southeast axis about halfway between the Marquesas and Tahiti. Most of these atolls are comparatively small, on average perhaps ten to twenty miles wide, but their key feature, at least from a navigator’s point of view, is their height. None of these islands reach an elevation of more than twenty feet; most are barely twelve feet above the tide line at their highest point. They are, as Stevenson put it, “as flat as a plate upon the sea.” What this means for sailors is that they are invisible until one is all but upon them, and later navigators, who knew more about what they were getting into, tended to avoid this maze of reefs and islands that was also sometimes known as the Labyrinth.
From the air, the Tuamotus are a dazzling sight: bright circlets of green and white floating like diadems in a sapphire sea. But, as the early explorers quickly discovered, up close there is not much to an atoll. Barely an island at all, it is really a necklace of islets, or motu, to use the Polynesian word, strung along a circle of reef. The motu are composed entirely of coral: sand, cobbles, coral blocks, and a kind of conglomerate known as beachrock. Verdant from a distance, they in fact have only the thinnest layer of topsoil and can support just a few salt-tolerant species of shrubs and trees. There are no natural sources of fresh water apart from rain, though there is an interesting phenomenon known as a Ghyben-Herzberg lens. This is a layer of fresh water which floats on top of the seawater that infiltrates the porous coral rock. Under the right conditions—the island cannot be too small, it cannot be in a state of drought, the well cannot be dug too deep—it is possible to extract fresh water from a pit dug into the sand, as a group of seventeenth-century Dutch sailors accidentally discovered on an atoll they named Waterlandt.
It was Charles Darwin who first articulated the theory of how coral atolls are formed. On his way across the Pacific in the Beagle, Darwin sailed through the Tuamotu Archipelago, recording his first impression of an atoll as seen from the top of the ship’s mast. “A long and brilliantly white beach,” he wrote, “is capped by a margin of green vegetation; and the strip, looking either way, rapidly narrows away in the distance, and sinks beneath the horizon. From the mast-head a wide expanse of smooth water can be seen within the ring.” It was already understood in Darwin’s day that corals were creatures—“animalcules,” as one writer put it—and that they could grow only in comparatively shallow water. And yet, here they were in the middle of the ocean, in a place where the water was so deep it could not be measured by any conventional means. (The Dutch named a second atoll Sonder Grondt, i.e., “Bottomless,” because they could find no place to anchor.) The obvious question concerned their foundation, or, as Darwin put it, “On what have the reef-building corals based their great structures?”
One theory popular at the time was the idea that atolls grew up on the rims of submerged volcanic craters. There were good reasons for associating them with vulcanism—high islands and low islands are found in close proximity throughout the Pacific. But there were also problems with the crater idea: some large atolls exceed the size of any known volcanic craters; some small atolls exist in clusters that cannot easily be envisioned as craters; and many volcanic islands are closely surrounded by coral reefs, which, if the theory were correct, would make them volcanoes within volcanoes—an explanation that seems unlikely at best.
Darwin’s notion, still the most widely accepted view, was that there is an association between atolls and volcanic islands, but that atolls begin life not on the rims of extinct craters but in the shallow waters of an island’s shores. Like many of Darwin’s ideas, his theory of coral atoll formation had the virtue of explaining not just how atolls are formed but how that process is linked to other kinds of coral formations, thus neatly accounting for all instances of what is essentially the same thing. He recognized that fringing reefs (on the shores of islands), barrier reefs (surrounding islands at some distance from the shore), and atolls (rings of coral without any island at all) are, in fact, a series of stages. The key to connecting them was the concept of subsidence—the idea that an island gradually sinks while the coral encircling it continues to grow. Thus, in the course of time, a fringing reef would become a barrier reef, and a barrier reef would eventually become an atoll.
AN ATOLL IS a very natural habitat for anything that swims or flies through the air. Atolls are home to more than a quarter of the world’s marine fish species, a mind-boggling array of angelfish, clown fish, batfish, parrotfish, snappers, puffers, emperors, jacks, rays, wrasses, barracudas, and sharks. And that’s without even mentioning all the other sea creatures—the turtles, lobsters, porpoises, squid, snails, clams, crabs, urchins, oysters, and the whole exotic understory of the corals themselves. Atolls are also an obvious haven for birds, both those that range over the ocean by day and return to the islands at night and those that migrate thousands of miles, summering in places like Alaska and wintering over in the tropics.
For terrestrial life, however, it is quite a different matter. A typical atoll in the Tuamotus might support thirty indigenous species of plants and trees—as compared with the more than four hundred native plant species that might be found on a high island like Tahiti, or the many thousands that grow on a large continental island like New Zealand—and, among land animals, only lizards and crabs. While there are places on an atoll where one might, for a moment, imagine oneself to be surrounded by land—places where one’s line of sight is blocked by trees or shrubs—a few minutes’ walk in any direction will quickly dispel the illusion. Strolling the length of even a largish motu, you eventually come to a place where you can see water on both sides. At such moments it becomes breathtakingly clear that the ground beneath your feet is not really land in the way that most people understand it, but rather the tip of an undersea world that has temporarily emerged from the ocean. The real action, the real landscape, is all of water: the great rollers that boom and crash on the reef, the rush and suck of the tide through the passes, the breathtaking hues of the lagoon.
And yet, when Europeans first reached the Pacific, they found virtually all the larger atolls inhabited. Even those that were clearly too small to support a permanent population often showed signs of human activity. On one tiny, uninhabited atoll, an early explorer found an abandoned canoe and piles of coconuts at the foot of a tree; on another there was the puzzling presence of unaccompanied dogs. Even the pit in which the Dutch sailors found water had almost certainly been dug by someone else. What all this appeared to suggest was that even the most insignificant and isolated specks of land were being visited by people who could come and go.
There are not many good early descriptions of these people. The Tuamotus offered almost none of the things that European sailors needed—namely, food, water, and safe ports—and their complex network of reefs was dangerous to ships. With so little to be gained and so much to be lost, Europeans tended not to linger, and the early eyewitness reports are correspondingly slight. What they did manage to observe about the inhabitants of the Tuamotus was this: they were tall and well proportioned (Quirós referred to them as “corpulent,” presumably meaning something like “robust”); their hair, which they wore long and loose, was black; their skin was brown or reddish and, according to the Dutch explorer Le Maire, “all over pictured with snakes and dragons, and such like reptiles,” an unusually vivid description of tattooing. Europeans, it is worth noting, had a famously difficult time identifying the color of Polynesian skin; a later Dutch navigator would describe the inhabitants of Easter Island as pale yellow where they were not painted a dark blue.
For food, the inhabitants of the low islands had coconuts, fish, shellfish, and other sea creatures; for animals, it is clear that at least they had dogs. Their knives, tools, and necklaces were made of shell (later investigators would also discover basalt adzes, which could only have been transported from a high island, there being no local sources of volcanic rock). Their principal weapons were spears, with which they armed themselves at the approach of strangers. Many Europeans who sailed past these islands reported seeing the inhabitants standing or running along the beach with their weapons in hand. Some interpreted their shouts and gestures as an invitation to land, others as an exhortation to depart, but, as “both sides were in the dark as to each other’s mind,” it was difficult to know for sure.
Later observers would describe the “roving migratory habits” of these atoll dwellers, noting that they wandered from place to place, “so that at times an island will appear to be thickly peopled, and at others scarcely an individual is to be found.” Census taking proved almost impossible, because some portion of the population was always “away,” hunting turtles or collecting birds’ eggs or gathering coconuts or visiting in some other corner of the archipelago. All of which raises an interesting question: Since there are almost no trees on an atoll, and certainly none of the larger species that in other parts of the Pacific provided wood for keels and planks and masts, what did the inhabitants of the low islands do for canoes? It being inconceivable that they could ever have lived in this watery world without them.
We have an early description, from 1606, of a fleet of canoes that came out “from within the island,” meaning presumably from across the lagoon, on the Tuamotuan atoll of Anaa. The vessels were described as something like a half galley—that is, a boat with both oars and masts—and were fitted with sails made of some kind of matting. Most had room for fourteen or fifteen men, though the largest carried as many as twenty-six. They were made, wrote the observer somewhat enigmatically, “not of one tree-trunk, but very subtly contrived.”
There is a picture in A. C. Haddon and James Hornell’s Canoes of Oceania that sheds some light on this remark. It shows a small canoe from the island of Nukutavake, in the southern Tuamotus, which was brought to England in the 1760s by Captain Samuel Wallis. Now held in the British Museum, it is described as “by far the oldest complete hull of a Polynesian canoe in existence.” At just twelve feet long, it is not nearly big enough to carry fourteen or fifteen men and was probably a small fishing boat, to judge by the burn marks on its upper edge, which are thought to have been made by the friction of a running line.
The amazing thing about the Nukutavake canoe is the way it’s constructed. It is composed of no fewer than forty-five irregularly shaped pieces of wood ingeniously stitched together with braided sennit, a kind of cordage made from the inner husk of a coconut. Close up, it looks like nothing so much as a crazy quilt whose seams have been decoratively overstitched with yarn. It is difficult to believe that such neat and painstaking rows of sewing could be made with something as rough as rope; or that what they are holding together could be something as stiff as wooden planks; or that anyone would think of making something as solid and important as a boat using such a method. Everything about it suggests cleverness and thrift and also, plainly, necessity. You can even see where the boards have been patched with little plugs or circles of timber held in place with stitches radiating out like the rays of a sun, and at least one plank shows signs of having been repurposed from another vessel.
It was said, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that the inhabitants of the Tuamotus were the finest canoe builders in the eastern Pacific, and that when chiefs on the high island of Tahiti wanted to build a great canoe, “they had need of the help of men from the low islands.” One eighteenth-century British commander described a double-hulled canoe that he saw in the Tuamotus as having hulls that were thirty feet long. The planks, which were sewn together, he wrote, were “exceedingly well wrought,” and over every seam was a strip of tortoiseshell, “very artificially fastened, to keep out the weather.” All Polynesians gave proper names to different parts of their canoes, including the thwarts, paddles, bailers, anchors, and steering oars. But in the Tuamotus it is said that even the individual boards were sometimes named, the old timbers serving as “reminders of the courage, endurance, and success” of those who had preceded them upon the sea.
Europeans greatly admired the craftsmanship of these vessels, but they also felt there was something a little startling about the idea of people putting to sea in boats that had been stitched together from scraps of wood. One early-eighteenth-century explorer recalled seeing a man some three miles out to sea in a craft so narrow it could accommodate only one person, sitting with his knees together. It was made, like the Nukutavake canoe, of “many small pieces of wood and held together by some plant,” and was so light it could be carried by a single man. Watching the progress of this canoe on the ocean was something of a revelation. “It was for us wonderful,” he wrote, “to see that one man alone dared to proceed in so frail a craft so far to sea, having nothing to help him but a paddle.” It was the merest inkling that here was a people with a different relationship to the ocean—people who could make their home on an atoll, people who could sail out to sea in a stitched ship—but, having little time or inclination to ponder the matter, the recorder of this interesting little tidbit turned and sailed on.
Outer Limits (#ulink_320e29fd-cf99-5b88-b095-9640cee64e1d)
New Zealand and Easter Island (#ulink_320e29fd-cf99-5b88-b095-9640cee64e1d)
Murderers’ Bay, New Zealand, 1642, from Abel Janszoon Tasman’s Journal (Amsterdam, 1898).
DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY.
ALL THE ISLANDS in the mid-Pacific are either high or low, volcanic or coralline. But down in the southwest corner, near the ocean’s edge, there is a large and important group of islands with an entirely different geologic history. New Zealand is one of the anchoring points of the Polynesian Triangle and a key piece of the Polynesian puzzle, but it differs from other Polynesian islands in several ways. It lies much farther south, in latitudes comparable to the stretch of North America that extends from North Carolina to Maine. It is temperate, not tropical; it can be hot in summer, but in the winter, at least in the south, it snows. New Zealand is also vast by comparison, with plains, lakes, rivers, fjords, mountain ranges, and a land area more than eight times that of all the other islands of Polynesia combined.
The islands of New Zealand are also unique in Polynesia in that they are, geologically speaking, “continental.” New Zealand is part of the ancient southern supercontinent of Gondwana, which once included all the Southern Hemispheric landmasses of Africa, South America, Antarctica, and Australia, as well as the Indian subcontinent. About a hundred million years ago, this supercontinent began to break up, and a piece of it drifted off into what is now the Pacific Ocean. Most of this fragment was submerged beneath the sea, but near the junction of the Australian and Pacific Plates, some of it was thrust up by tectonic forces. The result was the landmass we now know as New Zealand, or, to use its modern Polynesian name, Aotearoa. New Zealand still sits on this tectonic boundary, which is why it has earthquakes and active volcanoes.
Because it was part of old Gondwana and because it is insular and was isolated for tens of millions of years, New Zealand has a quirky evolutionary history. There seems to have been no mammalian stock from which to evolve on the Gondwanan fragment, and so, until the arrival of humans, there were no terrestrial mammals, nor were there any of the curious marsupials of nearby Australia—no wombats or koalas or kangaroos, no rodents or ruminants, no wild cats or dogs. The only mammals that could reach New Zealand were those that could swim (like seals) or fly (like bats), and even then there are questions about how the bats got there. Two of New Zealand’s three bat species are apparently descended from a South American bat, which, it is imagined, must have been blown across the Pacific in a giant prehistoric storm.
Among New Zealand’s indigenous plants and animals are a number of curious relics, including a truly enormous conifer and a lizard-like creature that is the world’s only surviving representative of an order so ancient it predates many dinosaurs. But the really odd thing about New Zealand is what happened to the birds. In the absence of predators and competitors, birds evolved to fill all the major ecological niches, becoming the “ecological equivalent of giraffes, kangaroos, sheep, striped possums, long-beaked echidnas and tigers.” Many of these birds were flightless, and some were huge. The largest species of moa—a now extinct flightless giant related to the ostrich, the emu, and the rhea—stood nearly twelve feet tall and weighed more than five hundred pounds. The moa was an herbivore, but there were also predators among these prehistoric birds, including a giant eagle with claws like a panther’s. There were grass-eating parrots and flightless ducks and birds that grazed like sheep in alpine meadows, as well as a little wren-like bird that scampered about the underbrush like a mouse.
None of these creatures were seen by the first Europeans to reach New Zealand, for two very simple reasons. The first is that many of them were already extinct. Although known to have survived long enough to coexist with humans, all twelve species of moa, the Haast’s eagle, two species of adzebills, and many others had vanished by the mid-seventeenth century, when Europeans arrived. The second is that, even if there had still been moas lumbering about the woods, the European discoverers of New Zealand would have missed them because they never actually set foot on shore.
AS WITH THE other islands of Polynesia, the European discovery of New Zealand was essentially a function of geography and winds. The vast majority of early European explorers entered the Pacific from the South American side. But there was another way in, from the west, and in 1642 a captain in the service of the Dutch East India Company sailed this route for the first time.
The Dutch East India Company, which was headquartered in Batavia (now the Indonesian capital of Jakarta), was the great mercantile engine of the seventeenth century, and all the major geographic discoveries in the Pacific during this period were made by Dutch captains in search of new markets and new goods for trade. One of these was a commander named Abel Janszoon Tasman, who, in 1642, set out with a pair of ships bound for the southern Pacific Ocean. Tasman followed what looks, on the face of it, like the most unlikely route imaginable. Departing from the island of Java, he sailed west across the Indian Ocean to Mauritius, a small island off the coast of Madagascar, which itself is a large island off the coast of southeastern Africa. There, he turned south and continued until he reached the band of powerful westerlies that would sweep him back eastward, all the way across the Indian Ocean, until he finally reached the Pacific. Tasman followed this lengthy and unintuitive route—sailing nearly ten thousand miles to reach an ocean that was less than twenty-five hundred miles from where he had begun—because the winds and currents in the Indian Ocean operate the same way they do in the Pacific, circling counterclockwise in a similar gyre.
The main obstacle between the Indian and Pacific Oceans is the continent of Australia, and the earliest Dutch discoveries in the seventeenth century were off Australia’s west coast. But Tasman’s route took him so far south that he missed the Australian mainland altogether, and the first body of land he met with after leaving Mauritius was the island, later named in his honor, of Tasmania. Continuing on to the east, he crossed what is now the Tasman Sea, and about a week later he sighted a “groot hooch verheven landt”—“a large land, uplifted high.” It can be difficult to tell how large a body of land is from the sea—European explorers were constantly mistaking islands for continents—but this time it was unmistakable. The land before them was dark and rugged, with ranks of serried mountains receding deep into an interior overhung with clouds. A heavy sea beat upon the rocky coast, “rolling towards it in huge billows and swells,” offering no obvious place to go ashore. So Tasman turned and followed the land as it stretched away to the northeast.
For four days they sailed with the wind from the west, keeping their distance for fear of being driven onto the rocks. From the sea, the country looked dark and desolate. But at last, on the fourth day, they came to a long, curving spit bending round to the east, enclosing a large bay. Here they saw smoke rising in several places—a sure sign that the country was inhabited. Tasman and his officers decided that they would go ashore, and by sunset on the following day they had brought the ships to anchor in the bay. From there they could see fires burning on shore and several canoes, two of which came out to meet them in the gloom. When they had come within hailing distance, the islanders called out in “a rough loud voice,” but the Dutch could not understand them. They had been equipped at Batavia with a vocabulary, almost surely the word list assembled twenty-five years earlier by the explorers Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire, but the language spoken by these people did not seem to match it. The islanders blew on something that sounded to the Dutch like a Moorish trumpet—no doubt a conch shell—and a pair of Dutch trumpeters responded in turn. Then, as darkness was falling, the parley ended, and the islanders paddled back to shore.
Early the next morning, a canoe came out to the ships. Once again, the islanders called out, and this time the Dutch made signs for them to come aboard, showing them white linen and knives. The men in the canoe could not be persuaded, however, and after a little while they returned to shore. Tasman held a second council, at which it was decided to bring the ships closer inshore, “since there was good anchoring-ground and these people (as it seems) are seeking friendship.” But before the ink was even dry on this resolution, a fleet of seven canoes set out from shore. Two of these took up positions nearby, and when a small boat ferrying men from one of the Dutch ships to the other passed between them, they attacked it, ramming the boat, boarding it, stabbing and clubbing the men, and throwing the bodies overboard. The attack was fast, furious, and effective; three of the Dutch sailors were killed instantly, one was mortally wounded, and three more were eventually rescued from the sea. The sailors on board the ships fired their guns, but they were too far away or too late or just too inaccurate, and the islanders escaped to safety, taking the body of one of the Dutch sailors with them as they went.
Tasman was shocked by the audacity of this attack and by the steady increase in the number of canoes gathering in the bay—first four, then seven, then eleven, and finally twenty-two—and he ordered his men to set sail as quickly as they could. But the islanders were equally determined not to let their quarry escape, and they pursued them right across the bay, abandoning the chase only when a man standing in one of the leading canoes was shot. Tasman christened the place Murderers Bay and made no further attempts to land in New Zealand. He never grasped that the bay in which he had been attacked (now known as Golden Bay) lay at the opening of the large strait that separates the North and South Islands of New Zealand, or that the “continent” he had discovered was in fact two large islands. Thinking that he might have chanced upon some corner of Terra Australis Incognita, he named it Staten Landt and proposed that it might be connected to the Staten Landt named in 1616 by Schouten and Le Maire. This, however, was unlikely, as Schouten and Le Maire’s Staten Landt was an island off the tip of South America, more than five thousand watery miles away.
TASMAN DID AT least get a look at the inhabitants of New Zealand, the people we know today as Māori. He described them as average in height “but rough in voice and bones,” with a complexion that was something “between brown and yellow” and long black hair, which they wore tied up on the tops of their heads in the fashion of the Japanese. Their boats were made from two narrow canoes, “over which some planks or other seating was laid, Such that above water one can see through under the vessel.” Each carried roughly a dozen men, who handled their craft “very cleverly.”
Interestingly, these double-hulled vessels sound a lot like canoes observed by seventeenth-century Europeans in other parts of Polynesia, but by the time the next European reached New Zealand, more than a century later, they were few and far between. What later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visitors to New Zealand commonly reported were the great waka taua: enormous single-hulled war canoes—up to a hundred feet long, with a breadth of five or six feet—which could carry as many as seventy or eighty men. Nowhere else in Polynesia were single-hulled vessels of such prodigious dimensions ever seen, for the simple reason that nowhere else in Polynesia did trees grow to this size. Carved, whenever possible, from a single trunk, they were designed as coastal and river vessels and were never intended for transoceanic travel.
This apparent evolution in canoe design is a salutary reminder that cultures are not static and that there is a logic to their transformations. If the Māori stopped making double-hulled oceangoing canoes, it must have been because they were no longer sailing across the ocean. But Tasman’s evidence suggests that as late as the mid-seventeenth century, at least in the South Island, the inhabitants of New Zealand were still using vessels of a type that linked them to the rest of Polynesia and to the tradition of long-distance ocean travel.
Tasman departed New Zealand with little more than a dramatic tale about the “detestable deed” committed by its inhabitants and set his ships on a northeast course, which would bring him, in about two weeks’ time, to the islands of Tonga. He was now entering a region of the Pacific with a much higher concentration of islands, a greater population density, and a complex set of relationships among contiguous archipelagoes. Tonga lies a few hundred miles from Samoa, at the western edge of the Polynesian Triangle. Together they constitute the western gateway to Polynesia; here are the oldest Polynesian languages, the longest settlement histories, the deepest Polynesian roots.
Tasman was not the first European to reach this region. The Dutch explorers Schouten and Le Maire had passed through the northern edge of the Tongan archipelago in 1616, stopping at a pair of islands where they traded for coconuts, pigs, bananas, yams, and fish and collected words for their vocabulary. Tasman, coming from the south, made landfall at the southern end of the archipelago, on the island of Tongatapu, where the people he met seemed friendly and eager to trade. He described them as brown-skinned, with long, thick hair, rather taller than average, and “painted Black from the middle to the thighs.” They came out to the ships in large numbers, readily climbing aboard, and relations between the two groups were generally amicable. Tasman was glad of the opportunity to get fresh food and water, but he was careful to keep his men armed, since, as his recent experience in New Zealand had taught him, it is difficult to know “what sticks in the heart.” The Tongans, however, seemed focused on trade, and much of Tasman’s account is given over to detailing the terms: a hen for a nail or chain of beads; a small pig for a fathom of dungaree; ten to twelve coconuts for three to four nails or a double medium nail; two pigs for a knife with a silver band plus eight to nine nails; yams, coconuts, and bark cloth for a pair of trousers, a small mirror, and some beads.
Once again, Tasman tried to use the vocabulary collected by his Dutch predecessors. He reported that he asked specifically about water and pigs—while somewhat confusingly displaying a coconut and a hen—but that the islanders did not seem to understand him. Reading his account, one longs to be able to go back and observe these transactions. Was he using the right part of the vocabulary? How was he pronouncing the words? Did his gestures merely confuse the situation? The story is all the more tantalizing because parts of Schouten and Le Maire’s word list had been collected just a few hundred miles away. For “hog” they had recorded the word “Pouacca,” a quite respectable rendering of the common Polynesian word puaka, meaning “pig.” For “water” they suggested “Waij.” Adjusting for Dutch spelling and pronunciation, this gives something like the English “vie,” which closely resembles a word for “water” in several Polynesian languages. It should have worked, but it didn’t, and a connection that might have been made slipped through the cracks.
IT WAS LEFT to the last of the early Pacific explorers to finally put two and two together. Sailing from the Netherlands in 1721, the Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen rounded Cape Horn and began making his way up the South American coast. For decades there had been talk of an island, or a chain of islands, or even a high continental coast somewhere in the southeastern Pacific. Many had gone looking for the country known as Davis’s Land (after a putative sighting by a seventeenth-century English buccaneer), and Roggeveen was determined to find it. Leaving the coast of South America, he plowed on through seventeen hundred miles of empty ocean, and on Easter Sunday 1722 he caught sight of what would turn out to be the most isolated inhabited island in the world.
Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, to use its modern Polynesian name, lies in the middle of a three-million-square-mile circle of empty sea. Its nearest neighbors, more than a thousand miles to the west, are tiny Henderson Island and even tinier Pitcairn, neither of which was inhabited when Europeans reached the Pacific, though both showed signs of prehistoric occupation. Easter Island is nominally a high island, but it is small, old, heavily weathered, and dry; it has no rivers, uncertain rainfall, and no protective coral reef. Difficult to inhabit and even more difficult to find, it constitutes the southeastern vertex of the Polynesian Triangle and represents the farthest known extension of Polynesian culture to the east.
At first, Roggeveen believed it to be “the precursor of the extended coast of the unknown Southland,” but the Dutch were destined to be disappointed on numerous fronts. What looked from a distance like golden dunes turned out to be “withered grass” and “other scorched and burnt vegetation.” The fine, multicolored clothes in which the islanders at first appeared to be dressed proved, on closer inspection, to be made of pounded tree bark dyed with earth, while the “silver plates” the Dutch thought they saw in their ears were made from something resembling a parsnip. Roggeveen wrote that he was struck by the “singular poverty and barrenness” of the island. It was not that nothing would grow—the inhabitants seemed well enough supplied with bananas, sugarcane, taro, and sweet potato—but rather that the island was entirely devoid of trees. This was puzzling on many fronts, but especially because it was unclear how, without any kind of strong and heavy wood to use as levers, rollers, or skids, the islanders could have erected their great stone statues—the famous moai of Easter Island.
These monolithic sculptures, with their long, sloping, oversize heads, upturned noses, and thin, pouting lips, are by now almost as familiar as the pyramids of Giza and perhaps more challenging to explain. The average moai stands about fourteen feet tall and weighs around twelve tons, but some are twenty to thirty feet in height, and the largest, had it been completed, would have stood seventy feet tall and weighed 270 tons. They are made from a kind of solidified ash known as volcanic tuff, and nearly half of the roughly nine hundred known statues still lie in the quarry where they were carved. A third were transported to various locations around the island, where they were erected on stone platforms and topped with stone hats, while the remainder lie scattered about the island, seemingly abandoned en route.
Roggeveen may have been the first, but he was by no means the last person to wonder how these statues had been erected. Indeed, the mystery of the Easter Island moai—what they meant, why they were carved, why their production abruptly ceased (there are half-finished moai in the quarry that are still attached to the rock), but especially how they were maneuvered into place—has inspired all kinds of speculation. People have tried to show how the statues might have been moved using only locally available materials: rocking them from side to side and walking them forward; sliding them on banana palm rollers; dragging them along on sledges suspended under wooden frames. The main problem, as Roggeveen noted in 1722, is the absence of everything that might have been needed to move a ten- or twenty- or thirty-ton block of stone: wheels, metal, draft animals, cordage, but most obviously timber.
Although Roggeveen found the island essentially barren of trees, modern studies of pollen found in sediment cores and archaeological finds of fossil palm nuts, root molds, and fragments of charcoal show that Easter Island was once home to a variety of tree species. Some twenty-two now vanished species have been identified, including the oceanic rosewood, the Malay apple, and something resembling the Chilean wine palm, which on the South American mainland grows to a height of sixty-five feet. Some of these trees would have produced edible fruit, others would have been good for making fires, at least two are known to have been suitable for making canoes, and still others produce bark that is used for making rope in other parts of Polynesia. Taken together, they would have constituted an entire arboreal foundation for human existence, not to mention a habitat for many now extinct species of birds.
Exactly what happened to all these trees is unknown, and there is a vigorous debate about the cause of what has been described as “the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world.” One argument points to the island’s ecological fragility and its vulnerability to changes brought about by humans. Sediment cores on Easter Island reveal dramatic increases in erosion and charcoal particles around A.D. 1200. This is often taken as a proxy for human activity in the Pacific, where slash-and-burn agriculture was widely practiced, and it has been used to support the argument that Easter Island’s ecological collapse began with the arrival of the first Polynesian settlers.
According to this view, the original colonizers began felling trees and clearing land for gardens and plantations as soon as they arrived. On a different island—one that was wetter, warmer, younger, larger, or closer to other landmasses—such activities might have altered the island’s ecology without destroying it. But Easter Island is a uniquely precarious environment. The slow-growing trees were not quickly replaced, while the loss of the canopy exposed already poor soils to “heating, drying, wind, and rain.” This, in turn, led to erosion, the loss of topsoil, and a general decrease in the island’s fertility. Each step in the degradation of the environment led to the next, and once the damage reached a certain level, there was no going back. Others—partly in response to the disturbing image of some desperate and improvident Easter Islander chopping down the last palm tree—have argued that the island’s deforestation was caused not by the islanders themselves but by their commensals, in particular the Polynesian rat. It was the rat, they argue, with its taste for nuts, seeds, and bark, its lack of predators, its climbing ability, and its fast rate of reproduction, that spelled doom for the virgin forests on Rapa Nui.
But however it came about, the loss of trees must have reached catastrophically into every aspect of the islanders’ lives: no shade, no nuts, no bark for cloth or cordage, no wood for houses or fuel. One of the most disturbing implications is that without wood, the inhabitants of Easter Island would have had no way to make canoes, especially the large, oceangoing kind they would have needed if they ever wanted to leave. For an island off the beaten track, with no near neighbors, this was a potentially ruinous reality. If one consequence of deforestation was that it brought to an end the age of monumental sculpture, an even more poignant implication is that it also spelled isolation from the rest of the world.
FOLLOWING THEIR BRIEF stop at Easter Island, Roggeveen and his men set sail again to the northwest, and May found them wandering among the northern Tuamotus. The hazards of this archipelago were forcefully brought home to them when one of the ships, the Afrikaansche Galei, ran aground on the atoll of Takapoto—the very island that, in one of history’s little jokes, Schouten and Le Maire had named “Bottomless.” Not so bottomless after all, as it turned out. Sailing on, Roggeveen came to the uplifted coral island of Makatea, where he found people who seemed “in all respects similar to those of Paaslant” (a version of the Dutch name for Easter Island), and then to Samoa, at the western edge of the Polynesian Triangle, where he again observed how “like the Paaschlanders in sturdiness and robustness of body, also in painting themselves,” the islanders were.
Thus, by 1722, there was finally enough history between Europe and the peoples of the remote Pacific for someone to begin thinking about the big picture. Europeans were still fixated on Terra Australis Incognita, but another poser had at last occurred to them. “To make an end and conclusion of all the islands which we have discovered and found to be peopled,” wrote Roggeveen, “there remains merely the presenting of the following speculative question, which seems to me must be placed among those questions which exceed the understanding, and therefore are to be heard, but answered with silence.” This question, which is almost completely obscured by Roggeveen’s tortured syntax—a sign perhaps of how difficult it was for him even to think—was, in essence: Who are all these people and how did they end up here?
Roggeveen appears to have been the first European to note the similarity of one group of Polynesians to another, but what interested him most was the question of how they had gotten to the islands. The problem, as Roggeveen saw it, was one of isolation and distance, something he now understood from hard personal experience—having rounded the Horn in mid-January, he did not reach the far side of the Pacific until the following September. On the grounds that the mysteries of navigation had only recently been unraveled, Roggeveen argued that no one could possibly have sailed such distances in the days before the Spanish and Portuguese. To suggest otherwise, he argued, “would resemble mockery rather than serious thought.”
This left only two possibilities. First, that the islanders of the remote Pacific had been brought there by the Spanish and left as colonists, though it was hard to imagine why the Spanish would go to the trouble of setting up “colonies of Indians in these distant regions” when there was nothing obvious to be gained by it. Then, too, the Spanish had always claimed that the islanders were already there when they arrived. That left just one possible solution, in Roggeveen’s view: that “the Indians who inhabit these newly discovered islands,” the people we now know as Polynesians, had not in fact come from anywhere but had been created in situ by God.
It is probably safe to say that the suggestion that Polynesians were autochthonous—that is, that they had first sprung into being on the islands on which they lived—was almost as absurd in 1722 as it seems to us today. But it does suggest how perplexing Europeans found the issue of Polynesian origins. In truth, it was not yet entirely clear how very puzzling a problem this was, since large swaths of Polynesia had yet to be discovered. Although European explorers had been crisscrossing the ocean for more than two centuries, long-standing political rivalries meant that knowledge of the region was still largely piecemeal—the Spanish knew some things, the Dutch knew others, no one was interested in sharing information, and everyone remained dazzled by visions of Terra Australis Incognita. All this, however, was about to change.
Part II (#ulink_64b68a49-0d4c-5fab-a5ea-1311702c6e32)
Connecting the Dots (#ulink_64b68a49-0d4c-5fab-a5ea-1311702c6e32)
(1764–1778) (#ulink_64b68a49-0d4c-5fab-a5ea-1311702c6e32)
In which we travel with Captain Cook to the heart of Polynesia, meet the Tahitian priest and navigator Tupaia, and sail with the two of them to New Zealand, where Tupaia makes an important discovery. (#ulink_64b68a49-0d4c-5fab-a5ea-1311702c6e32)
Tahiti (#ulink_d1c652bb-97b3-5053-b408-e4d4600d516b)
The Heart of Polynesia (#ulink_d1c652bb-97b3-5053-b408-e4d4600d516b)
“A View taken in the bay of Oaite Peha [Vaitepiha] Otaheite [Tahiti]” by William Hodges, 1776.
NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH, LONDON. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
BETWEEN MENDAÑA’S VOYAGE of 1595 and the midpoint of the eighteenth century, there were just five European expeditions that intersected in any significant way with the Polynesian world. But beginning in 1764, the number and intensity of these “visitations” increased dramatically, with ships coming thick and fast from England, France, Spain, and Russia—so many that there were sometimes two or three expeditions in the Pacific at one time—and encounters that lasted not days but weeks and months.
The reasons for this were many, but one important factor was the conclusion, in 1763, of the Seven Years’ War, a messy international conflict involving all the great European powers and several colonies, from which Britain emerged as a dominant power with the world’s most formidable navy. No longer tied up fighting its enemies, the British crown quickly set out to secure new territories and new routes, dispatching Commodore John Byron in 1764 on the first of a series of expeditions to the Pacific. Byron sailed in His Majesty’s Ship Dolphin, and when he returned in 1766, the Dolphin was immediately sent out again under the command of Captain Samuel Wallis. When Wallis returned in 1768, a third expedition was on the verge of departure. The aim of the first two voyages was largely strategic: Byron was to stake a claim to the Falkland Islands, examine the coast of New Albion (California), and look for a Northwest Passage; Wallis was to search for a continent between New Zealand and Cape Horn. But the goal of the third voyage was explicitly scientific: to carry a crew of scientists to a location from which they would be able to observe a celestial event known as the transit of Venus.
A transit of Venus occurs when the planet Venus passes between the earth and the sun. It was of interest to eighteenth-century astronomers because accurate measurements of the event’s duration could be used to calculate the size of the solar system, thereby answering one of the burning astronomical questions of the age. Unfortunately, the transit of Venus occurs only infrequently: twice in a period of eight years and then not again for a century or more. It was observed for the first time in 1639 (having passed unnoticed in 1631) and did not occur again in the seventeenth century. Late-eighteenth-century astronomers knew they would have two bites at the cherry—one in 1761 and another in 1769—after which their chances would be over, since it would not come again until 1874. A major international effort to document the transit of 1761 had produced disappointing results, and in the years leading up to 1769, members of the international scientific community, including Britain’s Royal Society, mounted a major campaign to ensure that the last opportunity of their lifetimes would not be lost.
An important consideration in all of this is where on the earth the transit can be seen, since it is fully visible only from those places that are in daylight for the duration of the event. In 1761, this had included most of the Eurasian continent, but in 1769 the ideal place from which to observe it was, most inconveniently, the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The only suitable islands known to fall within the “cone of visibility” were, on the eastern end, the Marquesas, last seen in 1595 and none too securely charted, and, in the west, the islands of Tonga, last visited by Abel Tasman in 1642. Between these, so far as anyone knew, there were only low coral atolls with terrible reefs and not a single safe harbor, and no reliable sources of food or water. Still, the Royal Society was committed, and plans were drawn up for an expedition with a final destination to be determined.
The man chosen to lead this expedition was a little-known lieutenant with a solid if undistinguished naval career and a reputation for being extremely good at survey work. At forty years of age, James Cook was not young, nor was he a man of rank or birth. He was tall, strong-featured, intelligent, disciplined, and extremely hardworking. Though largely self-taught, he was known as a talented mathematician and admired for his astronomical work, including an observation of a solar eclipse made while he was surveying the coast of Newfoundland. The voyage for which he had been selected was also somewhat out of the ordinary for a Royal Naval expedition. With only one ship (and a small one at that) and a very great distance to be covered, across a vast and largely uncharted sea, there was potential for glory but also significant risk.
The commander appointed, a suitable vessel was selected and rechristened the H.M.S. Endeavour, and a complement of sailors, scientists, and supernumeraries were named. These included the lively and observant young gentleman Joseph Banks—“one of the spoilt children of fortune,” as his biographer affectionately dubs him—who traveled as a passenger at his own expense, with an entourage consisting of two artists, a secretary, four servants, and a pair of dogs. But with just two and a half months to go before the Endeavour’s departure, the expedition still had no clear destination. And then, out of the salt-stained blue, the Dolphin returned, bringing news of an unexpected discovery.
THE DOLPHIN HAD been sent out under the command of Captain Wallis to scour the southern reaches of the Pacific Ocean. Wallis’s instructions directed him to sail west from Cape Horn for 100 to 120 degrees of longitude (some four to five thousand miles), a course that, had he been able to maintain it, would have brought him all the way to New Zealand. This was plainly impossible, given the strength and direction of the prevailing winds. Emerging into the Pacific from the Strait of Magellan, he was pushed north even as he tried to sail west, and his first sight of anything at all was in the Tuamotus. There was nothing surprising about this—a landfall in the Tuamotu Archipelago was by now to be expected. But Wallis’s path intersected the island chain at a point somewhat south of the routes taken by his predecessors, and this put him on the path to one of the most significant landfalls of the eighteenth century: “The island of Tahiti, famous name, the heart of Polynesia.”
Tahiti is the largest of a group of high islands known collectively as the Society Islands. They are located in the very center of the Polynesian Triangle and consist of two clusters: a windward group, which includes Tahiti and Mo‘orea, and a leeward group, which includes Ra‘iatea and Bora Bora. While not objectively large, they are large for islands in this part of the sea; Tahiti itself, though less than forty miles long, is the largest landmass for a thousand miles in any direction. To the modern eye, the Society Islands are perhaps the most striking omission on early maps of the Pacific—the islands it is hardest to believe no one had yet found. In fact, Magellan, Mendaña, Quirós, Schouten and Le Maire, and Byron had all sailed right past them, sometimes at a distance of less than a hundred miles. Roggeveen even caught sight of the peaks of Bora Bora, assumed it was an island discovered by someone else, and inexplicably sailed on.
From the European point of view, the discovery of Tahiti was a dramatic and fortuitous event. Not only had Wallis located an island that was right in the center of the cone of visibility for the 1769 transit of Venus, it was the island of a navigator’s dreams. Tahiti is mountainous, like the Marquesas, but, with its habitable coastline, fringing reef, and long stretches of crystalline blue lagoon, its topography is considerably more congenial. Its location, about 2,500 miles due south of Hawai‘i, is also meteorologically ideal: not too hot, not too dry, not too wet, not overly subject to hurricanes or typhoons. To the modern visitor it is delightful; to the eighteenth-century voyager it was a paradise on earth.
But, of course, such an island was bound to be inhabited, as indeed it was. When the crew of the Dolphin first sighted Tahiti, it appeared to them as a great cloud-covered mountain rising out of the sea. It was still many miles away at that point and, as evening was coming on, Wallis decided to put off his approach until morning. At daybreak he steered again for the island, but when the ship had come within six or seven miles, it was suddenly engulfed in fog. This, wrote the Dolphin’s master, George Robertson, “made us all very uneasy,” for by now they were close enough to hear the sea breaking and “making a great noice, on some reefs of Rocks.” This was nothing, however, next to the shock they received when the fog suddenly lifted to reveal not just a deadly row of breakers between the ship and the land but more than eight hundred men in canoes between the breakers and the ship.
Estimates of the pre-contact populations of Pacific islands vary widely, but in Tahiti at the time of the Dolphin’s arrival, there were probably something like 60,000 to 70,000 people, with perhaps 300,000 in the archipelago as a whole. Certainly enough to supply thousands of warriors and hundreds of canoes—Robertson would later describe the ship as being surrounded by more than five hundred canoes, manned, “at a Moderate Computation,” by four thousand men. The risks of trying to land on so populous an island were obvious, and there were those who believed—rightly, as it turned out—that “nothing could be hade without blows.” At the same time, many of the crew were so debilitated by scurvy that the prospect of sailing on was unthinkable, especially when the tantalizing scent of tropical vegetation wafted out to the ship during the night.
The Tahitians in their canoes paddled round Wallis’s ship, holding up plantain branches and making speeches and throwing the fronds into the sea. The British showed trinkets and made friendly signs and tried to entice the islanders on board. The Tahitians seemed cheerful and talked a great deal in a language that sounded to Robertson like that of the Patagonians of Tierra del Fuego (with which it had no relationship whatsoever). More and more canoes continued to arrive, and eventually a “fine brisk young man” scrambled up by the mizzen chains and leapt out of the shrouds onto an awning, where he stood, laughing and looking down on the quarterdeck. Soon more Tahitians were climbing aboard, looking around at everything and snatching whatever they could. After a while—the story is familiar—the Tahitians began to be “a Little surly,” the British grew nervous, and the next thing was the firing of a nine-pound gun. At this, the Tahitians all jumped overboard and swam away to their canoes. Wallis ordered his men to make sail, and the islanders returned to shore.
Wallis was not leaving Tahiti, however; he was just circling in search of a safe place to land. As the Dolphin sailed round the island, the two sides engaged in a series of tactical maneuvers. At one moment, the Tahitians would be visiting the ship, bringing quantities of pigs, chickens, coconuts, breadfruit, and bananas; at the next they would be hooting and hollering, trying to make off with the ship’s anchors, or ambushing its boats. The meaning of all this was obscure to the Europeans, who alternated between trying to make friends with the Tahitians and aggressively fending off what they perceived as attacks.
The Tahitians, meanwhile, were also trying to make sense of what was going on. According to the Reverend James Cover, who lived in Tahiti some three decades later and who talked to descendants of people who had witnessed these events, the Tahitians were astonished by their first sight of a European ship, and “some supposed that it was a floating island,” an idea with some basis in Polynesian myth. On closer inspection, they realized that it was, in fact, a vessel, though one unlike any they had ever seen—while the largest Tahitian war canoes were almost as long as the Dolphin, they did not have anything like its breadth or height or its huge masts with their elaborate complex of rigging and sails.
How the Tahitians interpreted these events is, as many historians have noted, “by any standard of objective discourse, nothing more than informed guess,” since there are no contemporary sources that capture their point of view. But it seems likely that, at least in the beginning, they viewed the Dolphin as something come from the realm of the ancestors—a vessel from the mythic homeland of Hawaiki or the netherworld of Te Pō. Some have suggested that—as with Cook’s encounter at Kealakekua Bay—the Tahitians may have associated the strangers with an incarnation of the war god ‘Oro. The color red, which was prominently displayed on the sides of the ship, on the coats of the marines, and on the pennant that the British planted to symbolize their possession of the island, was linked with this deity, while lightning and thunder (cannon and gun fire) were signs of his terrible power. Then there were the many “wanton tricks” performed by women and girls, who stood on the rocks and in the prows of the canoes exposing their genitals—gestures that were interpreted by the British as “erotic enticement” but that, according to the anthropologist Anne Salmond, were actually a form of ritual behavior that “opened a pathway to Te Po, the realm of the ancestor gods, channelling their power” against the strangers.
When at last the Dolphin stopped circling and came to anchor in Matavai Bay, the skirmishing that had marked these first days came to a head. According to those on board the ship, the morning began quite ordinarily. Canoes came out to the ship to trade—nails and “Toys” for hogs, fowls, and fruit—all conducted “very fair.” An audience of thousands had gathered on the shore, and the bay was filled with hundreds of canoes. Many of these had a girl in front who “drew all our people upon the Gunwells to see them,” and although some of the sailors were worried about the large numbers of stones they could see lying in the bottoms of the canoes, most did not believe that the islanders had “any Bade Intention against us,” especially as “all the men seemd as hearty and merry as the Girls.”
Then a large double canoe carrying an obviously important figure put off from shore, and, at the same time, a silence fell upon the Tahitian crowd. The dignitary pulled on a red mantle and thrust a staff wrapped in white cloth into the air, and all at once the Tahitians began pelting the Dolphin with rocks—so many that in a few seconds “all our Decks was full of Great and small stones, and several of our men cut and Bruisd.” The British were slow to react, but when the Tahitians “gave another shout and powerd in the stones lyke hail,” they collected their wits and fired the great guns. The effect was dramatic. The explosion of sound, the flash of fire, and the rattle of shot on the canoes struck the Tahitians with “terror and amazement,” and they cried, so the Revered Cover tells us, “as with one voice, Eatooa harremye! Eatooa harremye! The God is come! The God is come! as they supposed, pouring thunder and lightning upon them.”
The battle was fierce but short. The British fired grape and shot into the canoes, hitting even those who had retreated to what the Tahitians clearly believed was a safe distance. The gunners took aim, in particular, at the large ceremonial canoe, hitting it squarely amidships and cutting it in two. At this, the Tahitian armada disbanded—so fast, wrote Wallis, that within half an hour there was not a single canoe left in the bay.
ALTHOUGH THE BATTLE of Matavai Bay mirrored European contact experiences in many parts of Polynesia—New Zealand, Rurutu, and Hawai‘i, to name just a few—the story that ultimately made its way back to Europe was not one of attacks and ambushes and fleets of stone-throwing warriors in canoes. It was a tale—familiar to us even now—of beauty and fascination, a story, for the most part, about Polynesian girls.
After the failure of their assault on the Dolphin, the Tahitians made no further attempts to attack the British and instead sought to engage and placate them. Wallis struck up a friendship with a powerful local chiefess named Purea, who had a political agenda of her own and who seems to have been interested in co-opting this new and awful form of power. The rest of the crew went from openly fearing the Tahitians to openly consorting with them. On his arrival in Tahiti, Wallis had established an official market for foodstuffs, based on a currency of different-sized nails. But once his sailors had begun to recover from scurvy, what they wanted even more than fruit and vegetables was sex, and by the end of their second week in Tahiti a black market had emerged. The currency of choice was nails, inflation quickly set in, and within a matter of weeks the whole thing was so out of hand that every cleat in the Dolphin had been drawn, two-thirds of the men were sleeping on the deck (having traded away the nails used to sling their hammocks), and the carpenter was saying to anyone who would listen that he feared for the integrity of the ship.
It is possible that, had Wallis been the only European to return with stories of Tahiti, the narrative might have been somewhat more nuanced: a story of light and dark, of amity and aggression, of both love and war. But the era of Polynesian isolation was over: just eight months after Wallis’s appearance, a second group of ships arrived, this time from France. They were commanded by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, whose name lingers on in the beautiful bougainvillea, and although they remained in Tahiti for just nine days, it was long enough to form a vivid impression. The Tahitians, now experienced in the ways of Europeans, did not even try to attack the French ships but instead moved quickly to engage the strangers, and the French experience was largely one of hospitality.
Everything about Tahiti enchanted the elegant, erudite Bougainville: “The mildness of the climate, the beauty of the scenery, the fertility of the soil everywhere watered by rivers and cascades.” “I thought,” he wrote, “I was transported into the garden of Eden.” He saw the landscape in terms of the picturesque—“nature in that beautiful disorder which it was never in the power of art to imitate”—and the inhabitants as children of nature. The islanders, he wrote, “seemed to live in an enviable happiness,” and the worst consequence—for the French—of shipwreck in these parts “would have been to pass the remainder of our days on an isle adorned with all the gifts of nature, and to exchange the sweets of the mother-country, for a peaceable life, exempted from cares.” Writing for an audience of cosmopolitan Parisians, Bougainville cast the Polynesian inhabitants of Tahiti as innocent sensualists. Wallis had taken possession of Tahiti on behalf of the British, dutifully, if unimaginatively, naming it King George the Third’s Island. In the first shimmer of what would come to be known as le mirage tahitien—that constellation of images of indolence and hedonism that still cluster about Polynesia today—Bougainville rechristened the island New Cythera, after the place at which the goddess Aphrodite had risen from the sea.
A Man of Knowledge (#ulink_ca0a3eb5-d345-5c6b-9251-1bb2b536e5d6)
Cook Meets Tupaia (#ulink_ca0a3eb5-d345-5c6b-9251-1bb2b536e5d6)
“Review of the war galleys at Tahiti” by William Hodges, 1776.
NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH, LONDON.
WALLIS ARRIVED BACK in England in May 1768, and Cook sailed for Tahiti in August. The end of January found him off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, on the Pacific side of Cape Horn. From then until the end of March, when the first unmistakable signs of land began to appear, the Endeavour was abroad on the great ocean. They were making anywhere from twenty-five to one hundred forty miles a day, keeping to a general northwesterly direction, though periodically the wind would force them round to the southwest. Cook logged the distance and direction traveled, the speed and strength of the wind, the latitude and longitude of their position. But as January bled into February, and February gave way to March, there was little else to report. Mile upon mile of ocean slipped by; masses of cloud swept in and were torn away by the wind; the sea rose, whipped to a froth, and then fell to a smooth, flat calm. There were creatures of the deep—porpoises and bonitos—and of the air: red- and white-tailed tropic birds replacing the high-latitude shearwaters and petrels as the Endeavour plowed steadily northward, enclosed in the great circle of sea and sky.
Inside the great cabin, Cook plotted their progress, aware that oceans were known for their deceits. Others passing this way had written of cloud banks looming in the distance like high land, and one of the maps he consulted—Alexander Dalrymple’s “Chart of the South Pacifick Ocean, Pointing Out the Discoveries Made Therein Previous to 1764”—showed numerous “signs of continent” in this quadrant of the sea. This chart, and the history in which it appeared, had been drafted in support of Dalrymple’s fervid belief in the existence of Terra Australis Incognita and thrust into Joseph Banks’s hands on the eve of their departure. It detailed all the known landfalls of the previous two centuries, as well as all the unsubstantiated rumors, but Cook encountered none of these. Keeping his ship’s head pointed for Tahiti, he tracked steadily through the emptiness of the southeastern Pacific, making a long, clean, northwesterly run of more than four thousand miles.
The atmosphere on board the Endeavour was increasingly one of anticipation as each day brought them closer to the island they had all heard so much about. At 39 degrees south latitude, Banks reported that the weather had begun to feel “soft and comfortable like the spring in England.” The next day the ship was surrounded by killer whales. On March 1, Banks wrote that he had begun the new month “by pulling off an under waistcoat,” and the next day he “began to hope that we were now so near the peacefull part of the Pacifick ocean that we may almost cease to fear any more gales.” Soon, however, they discovered a new kind of discomfort: the weather turned hot and damp, and everything began to mold. When, a few days later, the wind increased, they thought briefly they had picked up the trades. But there was more troublesome weather ahead: heavy squalls of rain and hot, damp air and days of frustratingly light wind.
Toward the end of March, Cook reported some egg birds, a kind of tern seen only in the vicinity of land, as well as some man-of-war (i.e., frigate) birds, which were never known to rest at sea. “All the birds we saw this Day went a way to the NW at Night,” observed the master’s mate. A few days later, a log of wood floated past the ship. The next day someone spotted a piece of seaweed—all noteworthy events after fifty-eight days of blue-water sailing. About this time, a disturbing incident occurred: a young marine named William Greenslade threw himself overboard. Caught in a minor act of thieving while on duty, he had been hounded by his fellow marines and, according to Banks, was so demoralized that, on being called to account, he slipped over the side instead. Poor Greenslade—just nine days later their first Pacific island hove into view.
It was an atoll about four miles long, with an oval lagoon, a handful of small islets, and long stretches of barren beach and reef. At one end there was a clump of trees, and near the middle a pair of tall coconut palms, which, with their fronds flying before the easterly wind, reminded Cook of a flag. It was inhabited by men who “March’d along the shore abreast of the Ship with long clubs in their hands as tho they meant to oppose our landing.” Cook sounded but found no bottom, and in the absence of an anchorage, he ordered the ship to sail on. He named this, his first Pacific atoll, Lagoon Island—a lot of them would have lagoons, as it turned out. Historians have concluded that it was Vahitahi, an island at the southeastern end of the Tuamotu Archipelago.
As he picked his way through the reefs and islands over the next few days, Cook sighted several of the Tuamotus, naming them mostly according to shape: Bow Island, Chain Island, Two Groups. Some were inhabited, and on a couple of occasions he slowed the ship and waited to see if the islanders would come off in their canoes—they did not. From a distance, he admired the palms and the reef-enclosed bodies of water, which, with a kind of persistent Englishness, he described as “lakes” and “ponds.” But there was nowhere to stop, and in any case he was not particularly interested in stopping, for they were now getting close to their destination. Then, on the morning of April 11, they sighted Tahiti, rising dark and rugged from the sea, a dramatically different vision from the flat, bright rings of coral in their wake.
Cook quickly established himself in the same bay that Wallis had occupied, setting up camp on a point of land that he named Point Venus—not for the reasons that had inspired Bougainville but in honor of the event they had come to observe. No one would have missed the double entendre, however; even before the ship had come to anchor, Cook implemented a prohibition against the giving of “any thing that is made of Iron . . . in exchange for any thing but provisions.” The Tahitians showed no signs of aggression, welcoming Cook and his officers and leading them on a pleasant ramble through the woods. The shade, wrote Banks, was deep and delicious among “groves of Cocoa nut and bread fruit trees loaded with a profusion of fruit.” Houses were scattered picturesquely here and there. It was, he wrote, “the truest picture of an arcadia . . . that the imagination can form.”
