by Tony Horwitz
We woke late the next morning in a hotel at the edge of Papeete. Roger pulled aside the curtains and exulted, “It’s just like the pictures! Palm trees, emerald sea, smoky verdant hills!” He opened the door to the balcony and stepped halfway through—only to be blown back, as if by a nuclear flash. “Good God, it’s an inferno,” he gasped, slumping by the air conditioner.
Rather than hike several miles to the center of town, we stood on the boulevard in front of the hotel, waiting for the local bus service, called le truck. A dense clot of mopeds and French sedans motored past, belching lead-fumed exhaust. Le truck resembled a cattle car, open-air, with hard, spine-rattling benches. I found myself squeezed between enormous women in shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops. Almost all the passengers smoked, despite a sign saying “Defense de Fumer.” No one returned my smile.
The view from le truck was just as deflating. Papeete seemed a congested, honking mess, combining Parisian insouciance with Cairo-like infrastructure. Cars double-parked on crumbling sidewalks; motorists plowed through pedestrian crossings; signs toppled from cement-block buildings. We climbed out at Papeete’s central market and watched women whisk flies from fruit and fish. Then we wandered up Rue Colette and Rue Paul Gauguin, past peeling shopfronts and eateries called American Wave, Bip-Bop Burger, and Snack La Vague.
“It’s an utter shitbox,” Roger said, as we took refuge in a café crowded with sweat-stained Frenchmen smoking Gitanes and sipping Pernod. “The architects who designed this town must have been unemployable anywhere else.”
No settlement had existed here at the time of the Endeavour’s visit. But the traders and whalers who followed Cook to Tahiti chose Papeete’s sheltered bay as the island’s best port. In 1842, the French seized Tahiti from the British in a bloodless coup and made Papeete the administrative center of their growing Pacific colony. The twentieth century brought devastating cyclones, a German naval bombardment in World War I, and French nuclear tests, which pumped billions of francs and thousands of French soldiers and bureaucrats into Papeete. Rural job seekers followed, swelling the town’s population to include more than half of the 220,000 people living in all of French Polynesia. Whatever charm Papeete might once have possessed had long since vanished beneath ferroconcrete, car fumes, and billboards touting second-rate European goods dumped on the Pacific market at ruinous prices.
The only rental car we could find, at almost $100 a day, was a dwarfish box called a Fiat Panda Jolly, barely big enough for Roger to squeeze inside. “Special features—none,” he declared, discovering that the car had neither a radio nor a parking brake nor seat belts. We filled the Panda with $5-a-gallon gas and puttered ten miles east to Matavai Bay, the site of the Endeavour’s anchorage. At one end of the bay lay Point Venus, the peninsula on which Cook built a small fort to enclose his astronomical instruments and house his men when on shore. There was no road sign for the point, just an unmarked turnoff between Venustar Supermarché and a grocery called Chez Faty.
The road ended at a litter-strewn parking lot. Point Venus, the setting of so much Polynesian lore, now spread before us, a swampy peninsula edged by black volcanic sand. In the broiling afternoon sun, the beach looked about as romantic and welcoming as a tar pit. I later learned that producers of the 1962 Marlon Brando film Mutiny on the Bounty had imported white sand from America so Matavai Bay would match the Hollywood image of a tropical island.
A weekend crowd spread across the black sand. Most of the sun-bathers appeared to be French or demis, the local word for islanders of mixed European and Polynesian descent. (French and demis make up about a quarter of the population, with Tahitians comprising two-thirds, and the rest mostly Chinese.) Almost all the women were topless.
We found a quiet spot at the end of the beach, beside a woman with two small children. I’d brought a copy of the “Hints” provided to Cook by the Earl of Morton, who was the president of the Royal Society, advising the commander on proper behavior toward islanders. Cook used the “Hints” in formulating the rules of conduct he read aloud to his men before touring Matavai Bay. I decided to do the same.
“‘Exercise the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the Natives,’” Morton began. “‘Check the petulance of the Sailors, and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms.’”
“That was roundly ignored,” Roger said. “But I promise not to be petulant.”
“‘No European Nation has the right to occupy any part of their country,’” I read on, “‘or settle among them without their voluntary consent.’”
Roger nodded and turned to the woman beside us. “Do you mind if we claim your beach for Britain?”
“Excusez-moi?”
In rusty high school French, I told her that we’d come to replay Cook’s landing in 1769.
“Where is your boat?” she replied in English.
“It sank,” Roger deadpanned. Then he reached into his bag. “Don’t be alarmed by what you’re about to see.”
He pulled out two wigs from a costume shop in Sydney. I’d taken Roger up on his wine-soaked proposal in Sydney that we inaugurate our visit to Matavai Bay as proper Englishmen. However, eighteenth-century naval hairpieces weren’t easy to come by. So I’d opted for the next best thing: huge white mops made of an itchy synthetic.
“This is lamentable,” Roger said, pulling his on. “It’d fit anyone’s head. It’d fit two heads.” He climbed into white stockings while I buttoned up knee-length britches. Then I followed him into the warm, shallow water. We gazed up at the majestic green hills, wreathed in clouds. “This is a solemn moment,” Roger declared.
He took out the last of our props, a Union Jack. “Made in the Republic of Taiwan,” he said, studying the label. Then we waded parallel to the beach, in waist-deep water, with Roger wrapped in the flag. A few children in the water pointed at us and giggled, but their parents, reclining on the beach, barely turned their heads.
“This wig is hot and heavy,” Roger complained. “The history books don’t mention that.” He navigated ashore, steering toward a young demi in a bikini thong. Roger spread out the Union Jack and sprawled on top of it. In his wet tights and drooping wig, he looked like an unemployed clown. Roger smiled at the young woman beside us and said, “Nous sommes les Anglais qui arriver ici a very long time ago.” She shrugged, smeared her bare chest with coconut oil, and lay back on her towel.
I opened Cook’s journal and read another of Lord Morton’s hints: “‘If a Landing can be effected, whether with or without resistance, it might not be amiss to lay some few trinkets, particularly Looking Glasses upon the Shore.’” Roger reached in our bag: sunscreen, passports, car keys. “We could rip the rearview mirror off the Fiat Panda, if it’s got one.”
“‘Observe the natural Dispositions of the people,’” Morton continued. “‘The Characters of their Persons, Features, Complection, Dress.’”
Roger glanced at the topless woman on the beach towel beside us. “No great call on the world’s fabric here, that’s one thing that hasn’t changed.”
We read awhile longer, until the sun and burning black sand chased us into the woods skirting the beach. Here the crowd was mostly Tahitian, with families playing boule or lining up before snack stands. I tried to strike up a conversation with a vendor, asking him, “Connaissez-vous Capitaine Cook?” He stared blankly and handed me a Coke.
We walked the rest of Point Venus, trying to reconstruct the narrow promontory described in English maps and journals. A river from which the Endeavour’s crew had filled water casks was now a muddy, trash-choked trench. At the approximate site of the fort the English erected, sanitation men raked coconut husks, plastic bottles, Styrofoam, and other refuse into piles and set them alight, filling the air with industrial-smelling smoke.
Farther back from the water stood a tiny stucco lighthouse, with an enigmatic plaque quoting Robert Louis Stevenson: “Great were the feelings of emotion as I stood with my mother by my side and we looked upon the edifice designed by my father when I
was sixteen and worked in his office during the summer of 1866.” Stevenson’s father designed lighthouses in Scotland, and the writer didn’t visit Tahiti until 1888, twenty years after a French engineer built the edifice we were looking at.
Also puzzling was a nearby plinth, topped by a cannonball-sized sphere. The pillar’s pedestal appeared etched with the points of a compass. Only later did we learn that this was Tahiti’s sole memorial to Cook, erected by Britain’s Royal Society and Royal Geographical Society in 1901. The plaque had long since fallen off or been stolen, and high weeds had grown up around the shaft.
Much better tended was a large sculpture in the shape of a ship’s prow. It commemorated the arrival on March 5, 1797, of emissaries from the London Missionary Society aboard a vessel called the Duff. “After years of resistance and indifference the people of Tahiti embraced the gospel,” the inscription read, “and, following the path of the setting sun, bore its words to the uttermost islands of the Pacific Ocean.” March 5 remained a holiday in French Polynesia, marked by church gatherings and a celebration at Point Venus.
“Cook’s forgotten, but these hair shirts get a bloody big monument,” Roger grumbled.
As the monument suggested, the missionaries had met with mixed success, at least at first. Seventeen evangelicals, plus five of their wives and three children, disembarked at Tahiti in 1797. Eight missionaries fled on the next boat out, to Sydney. One of the remaining missionaries married a native woman and left the church. The first English child born on the island ran off with a Tahitian chief. “They in general treated our message with a great deal of levity and disregard,” one of the missionaries wrote of Tahitians. The churchmen also received a cool reception from Western sailors calling at Tahiti, who feared the Gospel would interfere with their traffic in rum, tobacco, and women.
But reinforcements arrived, including a very determined missionary named William Ellis. Tahiti’s alcoholic young king decided to embrace Christianity, and his subjects followed. Before long, the missionaries had imposed their austere creed. They banned “all lascivious songs, games or entertainment,” as well as the wearing of flower crowns in church. Island women hid themselves in the all-concealing gowns known as Mother Hubbards. “It was a thousand pities that the Tahitians did not convert Mr. Ellis,” wrote Robert Keable, a former English vicar who lived in Polynesia in the early twentieth century.
French influence, mass tourism, and a Tahitian cultural revival in recent decades had gradually eroded the missionaries’ grip. The skin on display at Point Venus gave evidence of that. So, too, we were about to discover, did Papeete’s nightlife, which recalled the extraordinary scenes that Cook and his men witnessed more than two centuries before us.
Soon after the Endeavour’s arrival, a procession of canoes entered Matavai Bay. One bore the stately woman that Samuel Wallis of the Dolphin had called Queen of the island. With great pomp, she presented the English with a hog and bunches of plantains. Cook reciprocated with trinkets. “What seem’d to please her most was a childs Doll which I made her understand was the Picter of my Wife.”
That’s what Cook wrote at the time. He later deleted this rare flash of humor—and the only mention in his journal of his wife—from the official version he submitted to the Admiralty. J. C. Beaglehole, the greatest of Cook’s biographers and the editor of his journals, believes the navigator omitted the doll episode “as unworthy of the dignity of such a document.” This instinctive self-censorship has left us an image of Cook that is probably sterner and more formal than he was in person.
Joseph Banks, who felt no such constraint, provides much richer detail of the light, often titillating side of the Endeavour’s stay in Tahiti. Of the Queen (whose name was Purea), the botanist wrote that she was “about 40, tall and very lusty, her skin white and her eyes full of meaning.” Though married to a chief, she had taken “a hansome lusty young man of about 25” as her lover. Purea also made advances toward Banks, who appears in youthful portraits as a handsome, dark-haired man with full lips and fine clothes adorning his six-foot, four-inch frame (in Tahiti, he wore a white jacket and waistcoat with silver frogs). The botanist rebuffed the Queen, having already attached himself to one of her young attendants, whom he called “my flame.”
Whole weeks pass in Banks’s journal with barely a mention of botany. Instead, he reports on elaborate feasts, wrestling matches, archery contests, traveling minstrels playing nose flutes, and long hot nights sleeping naked in islanders’ homes or beneath the thatched awnings of their canoes. During one such sleepover, Banks awoke to find his clothes had been stolen. No matter; dispatching a Tahitian to recover the garments, Banks wrote, “I heard their musick and saw lights near me; I got up and went towards them.” It was a heiva, or festival of dance and song.
The next morning, when the Tahitian returned with only part of Banks’s wardrobe, Purea gave the botanist native cloth to wear in place of his jacket. “I made a motley apearance,” Banks wrote with obvious delight, “my dress being half English and half Indian.” Later in his journal, Banks makes passing mention of “a turban of Indian cloth which I wore instead of a hat.” Eventually, he went entirely native, joining two women as a performer in a mourning ceremony. “I was next prepard by stripping off my European cloths and putting me on a small strip of cloth round my waist, the only garment I was allowd to have,” he wrote. “Neither of the women were a bit more covered than myself. Then they began to smut me and themselves with charcoal and water.”
If Cook wrote with an eye to the Admiralty, Banks obviously looked to the drawing rooms of London. But Banks wasn’t just a hedonistic fop. Like Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence, later British travelers who shared Banks’s taste for steamy exoticism, the botanist was a sensitive observer whose headlong immersion in native culture gave him access and insights denied less adventurous men. Cook, a keen judge of character, quickly recognized this, and put the botanist in charge of the delicate task of managing trade between the English and Tahitians. “Mr. Banks,” Cook wrote, in an uncommon expression of praise for any of the Endeavour’s men, “is always very alert upon all occations wherein the Natives are concern’d.”
Tahitians seemed as eager to sample English ways as Banks was to taste theirs. As a result, the Endeavour’s visit—much longer and more intimate than that of the Dolphin or the French ships—became a prolonged feast of mutual discovery. The islanders served the English a local delicacy, roasted dog, which Banks found “a most excellent dish,” and Cook declared “next to an English Lamb” in taste. The English invited Tahitians to dine on Western fare and drink to His Majesty’s health. “He imitates our manners in every instance,” Banks wrote of one chief, “already holding a knife and fork more handily than a Frenchman could learn to do in years.”
One night, islanders dragged Banks to the home of a sick, vomiting man. His family believed the man was dying “in consequence of something our people had given him to eat,” Banks wrote. The islanders presented the botanist with the remains of the man’s dinner as evidence. “This upon examination I found to be a Chew of tobacco which he had begg’d of some of our people, and trying to imitate them in keeping it in his mouth as he saw them do had chewd it almost to powder swallowing his spittle.” Banks prescribed coconut milk and the man soon recovered.
The English, for their part, submitted to a strange and painful form of Tahitian adornment. Natives dipped a sharp comb into the sooty juice of burnt candlenut and beat the comb’s teeth into their skin with a mallet. “The stain left in the skin, which cannot be effaced without destroying it, is of a lively bluish purple, similar to that made upon the skin by gun-powder,” wrote the artist, Sydney Parkinson. He and several crewmen “underwent the operation” on their arms, becoming the first Europeans to adopt the badge of seamen ever since: the tattoo, or, as the Endeavour’s crew rendered the Tahitian word, tat-tow or tataow. (The Tahitians, who had never seen writing, applied the same word to the strange figures the English inked on paper.)
The English and Tahitians also tried, with limited success, to explain their beliefs to each other. And so another novel word entered the Western vocabulary: tapu, or “taboo,” the intricate system by which Polynesians ordered the world into sacred and profane. It was tapu, for instance, for Tahitian women to eat in the presence of men. “They never gave no other answer but that they did it because it was right,” Cook wrote of his vain attempts at understanding this segregation. Curiously, a woman might sometimes break this taboo when alone with English men, “but always took care that her country people should not know what she had done.”
Cook, judging from his journals, was not a pious man. A product of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, he valued reason above all else, and showed little patience for what he called “Priest craft” and “superstition.” But the Articles of War, and Lord Morton’s “Hints,” ordained that Cook conduct “divine service” for his men. Banks invited some Tahitians to attend one such observance at Point Venus. The Tahitians closely mimicked the English, kneeling and standing, Banks wrote, and “so much understood that we were about something very serious that they calld to the Indians without the fort to be silent.”
Later that same Sunday, at the gate of the English fort, the Tahitians reciprocated by performing a rite of their own. “A young fellow above 6 feet high lay with a little Girl about 10 or 12 years of age publickly before several of our people and a number of the Natives,” Cook wrote. He guessed this public copulation was ceremonial, since venerable women stood coaching the young girl “how she should act her part, who young as she was, did not seem to want it.” (By “want it,” Cook meant that she didn’t need instruction.) Cook’s description of this scene would be widely popularized in writings about the voyage and create a sensation back home, prompting condemnation by English churchmen and the publication by literary wags of pornographic verse.
