About an hundred of the Natives all Arm’d . . . drew themselves up in lines. Then with a Regular Jump from Left to Right and the Reverse, They brandish’d Their Weapons, distort’d their Mouths, Lolling out their Tongues and Turn’d up the Whites of their Eyes Accompanied with a strong hoarse song.
Cook responded to this intimidating display by drawing up his marines and marching them up the beach with the Union Jack paraded before them. The stage was set for a confrontation—and then something unexpected occurred. Tupaia stepped forward and addressed the warriors in fluent Tahitian and, to the surprise of everyone present, he was immediately understood.
The significance of this moment was monumental, both in terms of what it meant for the successful prosecution of the voyage and from a larger, theoretical point of view. Cook later acknowledged what a “prodigious advantage” it had been to have Tupaia on board during the six months they spent circumnavigating New Zealand. His knowledge of the language and his negotiating skills were indispensable in helping the British obtain geographical information, procure supplies, and, above all, avoid conflict with the Māori. Locally, Tupaia became something of a celebrity. He was often seen “preaching” to crowds or discoursing from the stern of the ship to canoe-loads of people who had paddled out to hear him. Years later, when Cook returned to New Zealand, one of the first questions he was asked was “Where is Tupaia?”
Tupaia, it is worth noting, did not exactly identify with the inhabitants of New Zealand. That is, he did not place his clear but distant kinship with them above his more immediate alliance with the British. On the contrary, he often observed that the Māori were great liars, and he warned the British to be on their guard in their dealings with them. This was similar to the approach he had taken at Rurutu, in the Australs, where he also told the British that the islanders were not to be trusted. At the same time, he plainly acknowledged a common heritage with the inhabitants of New Zealand. According to Banks, the subject of Tupaia’s long conversations with the Māori priests was “their antiquity and Legends of their ancestors,” which, while they no doubt differed in many details, would have exhibited significant similarities. One old man told Tupaia that “he knew of no other great land than that we had been upon,” but that his ancestors had come “originaly from Heawye . . . which lay to the Northward where were many lands.” This was a reference to Hawaiki, the mythic ancestral homeland recognized by islanders throughout the eastern Pacific.
To the Europeans, the resemblance between Tahitians and Māori was unmistakable, though there were contrasts as well. Some months later, as he was leaving New Zealand, Banks summed up the comparison: the Māori, he thought, were more active and less inclined to fat than the Tahitians; they were more modest in their carriage but less clean; they were better paddlers but worse sailors; they were less given to stealing but were cannibalistic, a practice the Tahitians claimed to abhor. On balance, however, it was clear to Banks that the similarities far outweighed the differences. “There remains,” he wrote, “little doubt that they came originaly from the same source: but where that Source is future experience may teach us.”
This question of whether the inhabitants of the many different islands across the Pacific were related to one another and the associated issue of where they might have come from were problems that Cook would return to repeatedly over the next few years. In the course of his second voyage to the Pacific—a long, complex expedition in the years 1772–1775, involving three passes along the edge of the southern ice and two tropical island sweeps—he visited several more Polynesian islands, including the Marquesas, Niue, Tonga, and Easter Island, in addition to returning to both Tahiti and New Zealand. On his third and final voyage (1776–1778), he returned again to Tonga, Tahiti, and New Zealand, visited some of the southern Cook Islands, and reached the as-yet-undiscovered islands of Hawai‘i, where he was killed. By 1778 he had effectively seen it all—the entire Polynesian Triangle—and had fully grasped the scope of the Polynesian diaspora.
Writing in 1774 of the inhabitants of Easter Island, the most easterly island in Polynesia, Cook was so struck by their affinity to the inhabitants of the far western isles that he was moved almost to lyricism. “It is extraordinary,” he wrote, “that the same Nation should have spread themselves over all the isles in this Vast Ocean . . . which is almost a fourth part of the circumference of the Globe.” It was astonishing, even in the abstract. But to one who had actually covered this distance himself, the idea must have had special resonance. When he wrote these words, Cook had just completed an eight-thousand-mile passage across the southern Pacific Ocean, steering a zigzagging course from New Zealand to Easter Island. If anyone understood just how far apart these islands were, it was him.
It is interesting to follow Cook’s logic regarding the relatedness of all these different islanders. A methodical thinker, he considered three different types of evidence in turn. First, there was the way the islanders looked. Brown-skinned, black-haired, often tall and physically robust, they were not only extremely similar to one another in appearance; they were also markedly different from the inhabitants of islands to the west, in Papua New Guinea, the Solomons, and Vanuatu, who were both more varied in appearance and typically darker-skinned.
Then there was the islanders’ material culture, the things they made and used: their fishhooks and clothing, their houses and canoes. Here, the broad outlines of an underlying resemblance were also apparent. Foods were similar, tools were similar, methods of cooking were widely the same. Canoes, while exhibiting interesting variations, showed broad similarities in design; the arrangement of houses and ceremonial spaces was often analogous. Though it was not always easy to tell—Cook spent months in both the Society Islands and New Zealand, but his visits to some of the other island groups were measured only in days—there seemed to be parallels even in some of the more recondite aspects of the islanders’ culture. In many places, for example, Cook noticed altars piled with offerings of food, and ceremonial gestures were often repeated, like the waving of palm fronds or other greenery at the meeting of two groups.
But what really persuaded Cook that the inhabitants of all these islands belonged, as he put it, to “the same race of People” was the similarity of their languages to one another. Tupaia’s unexpected ability to communicate with the Māori was the most dramatic illustration of this, but even before they reached New Zealand, Tupaia had given Cook to understand that “the same language was spoken in all the isles.” This was later confirmed on Cook’s second voyage, when a different pair of Tahitians traveled with him to Tonga, New Zealand, Easter Island, and the Marquesas. Although neither was a match for Tupaia in knowledge and linguistic ability, they were able to make themselves understood in all the islands except Tonga. No one at the time would have known it, but this actually makes good linguistic sense, as Tongan is both the earliest branch of the Polynesian language family and one of the most conservative, linguistically speaking.
COOK’S VOYAGES TO the Pacific coincided with a great leap in understanding about the nature of languages in general and their relationships to one another. In 1786, a British philologist named Sir William Jones, who had made a study of Indian languages and culture, suggested that the “affinity” of Sanskrit to Latin and Greek was too strong to have been the result of chance. It occurred to him that all three of these languages might have sprung from some common source—a different language altogether, one that perhaps might not even still exist. Jones went on to argue that several other languages, including Gothic (an extinct Germanic language), Celtic, and even Old Persian, might also be derived from this same original language. This insight led ultimately to the recognition of what is known as the Indo-European language family, a group of hundreds of historically related languages, both living and dead, covering a geographic range that stretches from the Indian subcontinent to Iceland.
It had, of course, long been understood that there were relationships among languages. Latin and Greek show many similarities; t
he Romance languages are obviously a group; Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages are all clearly related. But the idea that linguistic relationships might go far beyond this and include languages that seem, on the surface, to have no family resemblance whatsoever—Bengali, Manx, and Armenian, for example—was truly electrifying, as was the idea of a single protolanguage from which this great diversity might have sprung. In Europe, this hypothetical ancestral language, known as Proto-Indo-European, was reconstructed during a period of intense linguistic activity in the nineteenth century by scholars in England, Denmark, France, and Germany (among the field’s early pioneers was one of the fairy-tale-collecting Brothers Grimm), using a methodology that is still practiced today.
In its basic outlines, the comparative method is deceptively simple. The first step is to identify what are known as cognate sets, that is, groups of words in different languages that appear to resemble one another in both meaning and sound. The next question is whether the differences between these words are regular and systematic. It is a curious fact of linguistics that when languages change, they do so systematically. If, under certain conditions (like at the beginning of a word or before a certain kind of vowel), a sound in one language changes to a different sound in a related language, then it should always do so under those conditions. Between Latin and English, for example, there are certain predictable shifts, like the change from an initial p to f, as in pater/father and ped-/foot, or from d to t, as in decem/ten and dent-/tooth. This principle of regularity was the great discovery of nineteenth-century philology; without it there would be no meaningful way to compare languages or to illustrate their relationships over time.
Sometimes, though, similarities between languages are just accidental. The Greek word theós, meaning “god,” and the Aztec teotl, meaning “sacred,” have nothing to do with one another; they just happen to resemble each other in both meaning and sound. In other cases, a similarity can be so widespread as to constitute a language universal; common examples of this are baby-talk words, like the English ma and the Mandarin mā, both of which mean “mother.” Another source of confusion comes from onomatopoeic words, that is, words that sound like the thing they are describing. The Greek stem pneu-, meaning “breathe,” is remarkably similar to the Klamath (Native American) word for “breathe,” pniw-, but there is no relationship between them beyond the possibility that they may both reflect the sound of blowing or breathing out.
Finally, there is the problem of borrowing. English is a great borrower of words from other languages—goulash from Hungarian, veranda from Tamil, caribou from Micmac, gecko from Javanese, and the list goes on—but all languages borrow from one another. Borrowed words come into a language through contact between speakers of different languages, often to express a concept for which the host language has no word; they are not words that occur in both languages because they have descended from a shared ancestral root. So if two languages exhibit regular similarities of meaning, grammar, and sound, and if words that appear to be cognate are not onomatopoeic, universal, or borrowed, chances are good that the languages have a “genetic” relationship, meaning that they are derived from a common linguistic ancestor.
None of this would have been of terribly much interest to Cook, who was a man of action. But it was precisely the sort of thing that engaged the attention of Joseph Banks, who later in life actually corresponded with Jones and who was already thinking along these lines even before Tupaia first revealed the mutual intelligibility of Māori and Tahitian. During the long weeks at sea between Tahiti and New Zealand, when there was little to do but read and write, Banks devoted himself to recording his observations of the Society Islands. Among the topics he covered was the Tahitian language, which he described as “very soft and tuneable,” abounding in vowels and easy to pronounce. (Tahitian is sometimes difficult to read for this same reason; see, for example, a name like Faa‘a—or, as it is sometimes written, Fa‘a‘a—the district that has given its name to Tahiti’s international airport.)
Banks lists about a hundred Tahitian words for things like head, hair, dog, shark, sun, moon, rope, net, house, cloud, and bone, as well as a few important verbs—to eat, to drink, to steal, to be angry. His orthography is idiosyncratic, but it is roughly possible to work out what he heard. Two words on his list have since been borrowed into English—mahimahi, a popular type of fish, and moa, which Banks glosses as “a fowl,” though we know it as the name of an extinct flightless bird.
Making word lists was a conventional thing for explorers and their scientific companions to do in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like drawing charts and coastal profiles or pictures of new animals and plants, it was part of the great European project of describing newly encountered portions of the world. Navigators also compiled and shared vocabularies, in the hope that they might come in handy, and one often reads of an explorer—like Tasman, for example—trying out some word list on a group of islanders, usually to no avail. But Banks, with time on his hands and a good library at his disposal, took the idea one step further. Using word lists from two different books—the vocabulary compiled in 1616 by Schouten and Le Maire and a word list from a collection of voyages by the Dutch East India Company—he made a chart comparing the Tahitian words for the numbers one to ten with the words for these numbers in three other languages: those of the Cocos Islands, New Guinea, and Madagascar.
Numbers, as it happens, are one of the very best tests for relatedness among different languages. Like words for body parts or essential actions, they have a kind of durability, in part because they tend not to be borrowed. The number two, for example, shows remarkable consistency across a wide range of languages in the Indo-European family: Greek dúō, Vedic dvá(u), Latin duo, Welsh dau, Old Church Slavonic dŭva, and so on. Banks’s chart is similarly persuasive: two is given as rua in Tahitian, loua in the language of the Cocos Islands, roa in New Guinea, rove in Madagascar. Seven is hetu in Tahitian, fitou in the Cocos, fita in New Guinea, fruto in Madagascar. Even allowing for errors, the overall effect is to suggest strongly that the languages in Banks’s set are related.
It is not entirely clear exactly which languages Banks was actually comparing, but we can make an educated guess. What Schouten and Le Maire called the “Cocos Islands” are almost certainly a pair of small islands in the northern reaches of what is now the Kingdom of Tonga. Today Tongan is spoken on these islands; in 1616 it was likely a language closer to Samoan, but either way, it was undoubtedly a Polynesian language. What was meant by “New Guinea” is less certain, but it seems probable that it was New Ireland, an island off the northeast coast of New Guinea, far to the west of the Polynesian Triangle. Here the linguistic picture is much more complicated, but some of the languages spoken in this region do belong, if more distantly, to the large language family that also includes the languages of Polynesia.
From Tahiti to the islands of northern Tonga is a distance of about sixteen hundred miles; from Tahiti to New Ireland is more than four thousand miles. So we are already looking at a startling geographic range. But what made the whole thing almost too hard to credit was the idea that a version of this same language might also be spoken on the island of Madagascar. Madagascar is not even in the Pacific Ocean. It is an island off the southeastern coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean, nearly ten thousand miles from Tahiti by the shortest possible sea route. Banks himself was astonished by these results. “That the people who inhabit this numerous range of Isles should have originaly come from one and the same place and brought with the[m] the same numbers and Language,” he wrote, “is in my opinion not at all past beleif, but that the Numbers of the Island of Madagascar should be the same as all these is almost if not quite incredible.”
Incredible maybe, but also, as it happens, true. Banks had stumbled upon one of the most remarkable facts about the peopling of the Pacific, which is that all the languages of Polynesia, Micronesia, Fiji, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and the Philippines, as well as almost all the language
s of Indonesia and the Solomon Islands and some of the languages of Malaysia, New Guinea, Madagascar, and Taiwan, belong to a single language family known as Austronesian. Today there are believed to be more than a thousand languages in the Austronesian family, with more than three hundred million speakers worldwide, making it one of the largest language families on the planet. Banks, writing in 1769, could not possibly know this—it would be well into the twentieth century before the full picture emerged—but he had glimpsed one of the key pieces of the Polynesian puzzle.
CARTOGRAPHERS SOMETIMES JOKE that early maps of the Pacific can be placed into one of two categories: B.C. or A.C., meaning Before or After Cook. This is an acknowledgment of Cook’s unequaled contribution to geographic understanding, but it is also broadly true of the region’s history. Before Cook, the world of the Pacific belonged to the islanders who inhabited it; Europeans were infrequent and often incompetent visitors; outside understanding of the region was essentially nil. After Cook—and partly, though not entirely, because of him—the outlines of the Pacific and its islands came into sharper focus; the region became much more accessible; and outsiders began arriving, first in a trickle and then in a flood. After Cook, the remote Pacific—a world that had been changing gradually for centuries—was abruptly and in some ways cataclysmically transformed.
Cook himself did not live to see any of this, having met his death in Hawai‘i in 1778. Nor, sadly, did his collaborator and informant Tupaia. Tupaia left New Zealand in the Endeavour with Cook and sailed across the Tasman Sea to Australia—a country he certainly knew nothing about—where he painted a group of Aborigines spearing fish from their bark canoes. He then sailed to the Dutch East Indies, where, during a stop to refit for the long voyage back to England, he died of dysentery and fever, along with about half the Endeavour’s crew.
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