Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  Cook later learned that the lovers outside the fort at Point Venus were Ariori, a class of Tahitians who devoted themselves to performing erotic songs, dances, and ritual sex. The Ariori belonged to a religious sect or fertility cult, one that also required its members to remain free by smothering any children born of their promiscuous unions. Needless to say, this horrified the English. And Cook, while no prude, believed the Ariori’s public orgies reflected the general lewdness of the culture. “Both sexes express the most indecent ideas in conversation without the least emotion and they delight in such conversation behond any other. Chastity indeed is but little Valued.”

  The Tahitians were just as shocked by aspects of their visitors’ behavior. Discipline had begun to deteriorate within days of the Endeavour’s arrival, and Cook duly punished his sailors; mindful of the Dolphin’s experience, he dispensed two dozen lashes, double the usual sentence, to a man who stole nails. When the ship’s butcher threatened an island man’s wife, the English invited Tahitians to watch the butcher flogged, to demonstrate the severity and evenhandedness of Western justice. “They stood quietly and saw him stripd and fastned to the rigging,” Banks wrote of the Tahitian audience, “but as soon as the first blow was given interfered with many tears, begging the punishment might cease a request which the Captn would not comply with.”

  Cook also ratcheted up his reprisals against native thefts. When a man stole a coal rake from the fort, Cook seized twenty-five fishing canoes loaded with fresh catch. Though the rake was returned, “Captn Cooke thought he had now in his hands an opportunity of recovering all the things which had been stolen,” Banks wrote. “He therefore proclaimed to every one that till all the things which had been stolen from us were brought back the boats should not stir.”

  Banks regarded this punishment as disproportionate and misdirected, “as the Canoes pretty certainly did not belong to the people who had stolen the things.” Not only did the islanders fail to return the stolen items, they retaliated by halting all trade of breadfruit and other goods. Cook stubbornly held out for several weeks before finally releasing the canoes.

  Mutual incomprehension over notions of property and justice would plague Cook throughout his Pacific voyages. Polynesians, for the most part, lived communally and had few personal possessions. The climate in Tahiti was benign and bountiful; islanders gathered as much fish and fruit as they needed for their immediate wants. If they had extra, they shared it. Extravagant gift giving was—and still is—a point of honor in Polynesia, an expression of how much a host values his visitor.

  Given this custom, what were Tahitians to make of a ship stuffed with dazzling surplus? The English helped themselves to fish, fresh water, and other of the island’s resources. Why shouldn’t the Tahitians help themselves to muskets, tools, watches, and whatever else they could lay their hands on—even the ship’s lightning rod and quadrant?

  The English, for their part, hailed from a society in which property rights were so sacrosanct that to poach a rabbit was a capital offense. Accustomed to public hangings and the severity of shipboard discipline, young sailors could hardly be expected to show mercy toward nimble-fingered Tahitians. Cook’s behavior, however, seems out of character. In almost every other circumstance, he treated natives with tolerance and restraint. Yet the theft of even minor goods unhinged him, and the more it occurred, the harsher his reprisals became. This was, perhaps, Cook’s tragic flaw. The cycle of larceny and retribution that began at Tahiti would continue for a decade, until it claimed Cook’s own life on a beach almost three thousand miles from Matavai Bay.

  The dance show at the Captain Bligh Restaurant began with bare-chested men thumping drums. Lithe women in coconut-shell bras and palm-frond skirts shimmied onto the floor, shaking their hips side to side, fast and furiously. A lone woman followed, stripping off a sarong and performing a sinuous pelvic motion. Men in loincloths came next, opening and closing their legs rapidly, sweat glistening on their bronzed thighs.

  “These are some traditional dances of Tahiti,” the emcee announced, in French and English. “Now we will see dances from other islands of Polynesia.” A woman in a Hawaiian mu‘umu‘u made feathery motions with her fingers. Tongans in ankle-length gowns did various tricks with wooden sticks. The Maori of New Zealand swung balls attached to strings in what seemed like a cheerleader routine. Then, just as the audience’s attention began to drift, the half-naked Tahitians returned, thrusting their hips to a pulsing drumbeat.

  The message was hard to miss. Tahiti, as its tourist literature proclaimed, was “the Island of Love,” a title that none of its neighbors dared challenge. The show, despite its touristy presentation, also gave some inkling of the “indecent dances” Cook and his men described. “You’ve been at sea for months, you’ve been lashed, fed filthy food, and haven’t seen a woman forever, and never seen one like this,” Roger said, his eyes trained on a dancer’s undulating hips. “Can you imagine? It’s a miracle they didn’t all desert.”

  From the Captain Bligh, we headed to Papeete’s waterfront strip of bars and nightclubs: Manhattan Discoteque, Hotel Kon tiki, Paradise Night. Crowded with French soldiers and young Tahitians, the clubs didn’t look very enticing. A girl of about fifteen stumbled out of one of the bars and came up to us mumbling something I didn’t understand.

  “Pardon?”

  She reached for my groin. “Je suck?”

  We wandered away from the water to Rue Colette and found a dance joint called the Kikiriri. Inside the dark bar, couples performed the Tahitian waltz, a fast, close dance in which the men planted their hands low on their partners’ buttocks. A few tourists bravely took to the floor and mimicked the Tahitians’ motions. “They look like Christmas turkeys, pale and waddling, flapping their wings,” Roger observed. He ordered another glass of overpriced vin ordinaire. “Two days in this place and I already feel a tremendous sense of racial inferiority. I’ll never look at a white woman again. And I don’t stand a chance with the locals.”

  “We could try the men.”

  “What?”

  I led Roger down Rue des Ecoles to a place I’d read about in our tourist guide, called the Piano Bar. Cook and his men had written about the masculine quality of some Polynesian women, and noted islanders of mixed or ambiguous gender. These were probably mahu, Tahitian boys raised as girls, wearing women’s clothes and performing traditionally female tasks. Mahu remained a strong presence in Tahiti, nowhere more so than at the Piano Bar, Papeete’s premier transvestite club.

  “Think of it as research,” I said, dragging Roger past the jolly eunuchlike bouncers at the door. Inside, we found a table beside the dance floor, which was crowded with couples performing the same, groin-grinding waltz we’d seen at the Kikiriri. Except that many of these dancers were tall and broad-shouldered, wearing pink lamé mini-skirts, halter tops, and high-heeled pumps.

  We’d arrived on a special night: an annual beauty contest to elect a new Miss Piano Bar. Five contestants in long sequined dresses and strapless black gowns appeared. An emcee sang “Queen of the Night” as the contestants sashayed around the floor to loud hoots from the audience. Half of Papeete seemed to have crowded into the bar, including a tall, elegant beauty who squeezed into a chair beside Roger, smiling and rubbing his thigh.

  “Bloke or sheila?” Roger whispered to me.

  “Bloke, I think.”

  Roger shrugged. “I like it here. At least I feel challenged.”

  The contestants reappeared in bathing suits: high-cut, one-piece costumes exposing smooth backs, slim arms and legs, and what looked like cleavage. “Perfect skin, glossy hair, exquisite thighs,” Roger said. “If they were girls, they’d be fantastic.”

  An evening-wear competition and talent contest followed. Samantha, a six-foot-two stunner, won the beauty contest by acclamation, blowing kisses and throwing a bouquet into the crowd. Then the dancing resumed and we staggered out into Rue des Ecoles. It was three A.M. and the street remained packed, mahu mingling with Frenc
h sailors, tourists, Tahitian couples. “No wonder we barely turned a head at Point Venus,” Roger said. “In our stockings and wigs, we fit right in.”

  On June 3, 1769, from nine in the morning until half past three in the afternoon, the English peered through their telescopes at the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. Though the sky was clear, Cook noted a “dusky shade” blurring the planet’s fringe. This caused him and his fellow observers to record differing times for the crucial moment of contact between the planet and star. Only later would astronomers learn that the entire exercise, carried out at Tahiti and seventy-six other points across the globe, had little value; the telescopes and astronomical knowledge of the day weren’t precise enough to accomplish the complex task.

  Banks, at least, had his customary good time, tagging along with a small observation party to a nearby isle: “3 hansome girls came off in a canoe to see us,” he wrote, ignoring the celestial Venus. “They chatted with us very freely and with very little perswasion agreed to send away their carriage and sleep in the tent.”

  Returning to Matavai Bay, Banks promptly set off on another adventure. He and Cook boarded the pinnace (one of the ship’s boats) “to make the Circuit of the Island,” the navigator wrote, “in order to examine and draw a Sketch of the Coast and Harbours thereof.” This is Cook in his element: surveying the contours of uncharted lands and setting down their coordinates on paper.

  This is Banks in his element: “Many Canoes came off to meet us and in them some very hansome women who by their behaviour seemed to be sent out to entice us to come ashore, which we most readily did,” he wrote, two days out from Matavai Bay. “I stuck close to the women hoping to get a snug lodging by that means as I had often done.” Cook wrote of the same spot: “there are also harbours between this and the Isthmus proper and convenent for Shipping made by reefs of Corral rocks.”

  Midway down the island’s eastern shore, Cook and Banks came to the place where Bougainville had landed the year before. Only later, though, would the English learn of a peculiar passenger who had been aboard Bougainville’s vessel. The valet of the ship’s naturalist was actually a woman disguised as a man. The French hadn’t realized this until they arrived at Tahiti. Islanders, as familiar with gender-bending then as they are today, immediately recognized the valet’s deception. She continued to serve the naturalist and disembarked with him later on the voyage; little more is known of her fate.

  Continuing on, through heavily cultivated countryside, the English visited a marae, or open-air temple, which Banks described as “a most enormous pile, certainly the masterpeice of Indian architecture in this Island. Its size and workmanship almost exceeds beleif.” Cook surveyed the structure’s precise dimensions: a platform measuring 267 by 87 feet, with steps rising 44 feet in a pyramid shape. The English were astonished by the fineness of the masonry: vast stones squared and polished, without iron tools. Banks judged the construction so expert that it might have been done “by the best workman in Europe.”

  Just as awesome was the collection of bones on the site. First, the English studied wooden altars strewn with the remains of hogs and dogs, sacrificed at the temple. Then Banks and Cook walked along a road by the marae. “Every where under our feet were numberless human bones cheifly ribs and vertebrae,” Banks wrote. The English also found fresh jawbones hung in houses, and learned that these were the spoils of a recent massacre, “carried away as trophies and used by the Indians here in exactly the same manner as the North Americans do scalps.” Tahiti was emerging as something other than the Arcadia the botanist had at first imagined.

  Returning to Matavai Bay, Cook prepared for the Endeavour’s departure, dismantling the fort for firewood. Two marines, on what was probably their final watch ashore, slipped out of the English camp and disappeared into the hills. “They had got each of them a Wife & would not return,” Cook wrote. To recover the deserters, Cook seized prominent chiefs, holding them hostage until the Tahitians returned the two men. The tactic worked, though at the cost of whatever goodwill the English had engendered. “We are likly to leave these people in disgust with our behavour towards them,” Cook wrote, “owing wholy to the folly of two of our own people.”

  The spirit of desertion may have been more prevalent than Cook realized. At one point, the Endeavour’s master wrote of “Mutinous words spoke by some of our People.” Twenty-one years later, following the mutiny on the Bounty, a former midshipman on the Endeavour confided in a letter to Banks that “most of the People” on Cook’s ship had schemed to stay in Tahiti. The midshipman claimed he had forestalled this mass desertion with tales of “the Pox—the disease being there, their getting it certain & dying rotten most probable.”

  This account, if true, speaks to the “alurements of disipation” in Tahiti that Bligh later blamed for his own misfortune on the Bounty. It also reveals just how reckless and rootless were the young sailors Cook commanded, and how harsh life at sea must have seemed to them. Jumping ship in the eighteenth century, at the edge of the known world, meant severing ties to home and family in a way that is unimaginable today, even to FBI fugitives or Mafia informers in the witness-protection program. Yet some among Cook’s crew were willing to risk all: for love (and lust), for a life of apparent ease, for escape from the horrors of maritime labor. Given what occurred during the rest of the Endeavour’s voyage, many of the men doubtless came to regret their decision to remain on board.

  Cook, for all his severity, seemed to understand the temptations his men were subject to. He sentenced the two deserters to twenty-four lashes each, but quickly released them from confinement. In a curious postscript, one of the deserters, Samuel Gibson (described by the Endeavour’s master as “a wild young man”), joined Cook for both his second and third voyages, rising to the rank of sergeant and serving as a valued translator on Cook’s return trips to Polynesia.

  The Endeavour’s departure from Tahiti brought another surprise. A high priest named Tupaia, whom Cook described as a keenly intelligent man and very knowledgeable about the surrounding seas, wanted to sail on with the English. Cook was reluctant, apparently out of concern for Tupaia’s welfare once he reached England. So Banks decided to take on the Tahitian as his own responsibility—and as his private pet. “Thank heaven I have a sufficiency,” Banks wrote, referring to his personal fortune, “and I do not know why I may not keep him as a curiosity, as well as some of my neighbours do lions and tygers at a larger expence than he will probably ever put me to.”

  Tupaia brought along a servant boy named Taiata. The Tahitians’ thoughts upon undertaking this astounding adventure—more daring, even, than that of Cook and his men—are lost to history. All we have is Banks’s account of the Endeavour’s sail out of Matavai Bay, three months to the day after the ship first anchored at Tahiti. Banks and Tupaia climbed “to the topmost head where we stood a long time waving to the Canoes as they went off.”

  A few days after our late-night bar tour, Roger and I climbed in the Panda to retrace Cook and Banks’s circumnavigation of Tahiti. The trip was easier than in 1769: a seventy-mile, badly paved road circles the coast of Tahiti Nui, or Great Tahiti, the larger of the two landmasses that together form the hourglass-shaped island. Soon after we sprang free of Papeete’s cement sprawl, buildings became scarce, except for churches, announced at regular intervals by signs saying “Silence Culte.” The palm-fringed beaches were empty, as were the coconut groves rising up the steep green hills. It was beautiful but eerily abandoned, like so many rural areas the world over.

  In Cook’s day, Tahiti’s bountiful landscape fed tens of thousands of people, as well as the hundred hungry sailors aboard the Endeavour. Now, the equation was reversed: a tiny fraction of Tahitians lived on the land, and roughly 85 percent of their foodstuffs were imported from Europe. Stopping to dip my toe in the surf, I found coconut shells intermingled with flip-flops, plastic containers of Nestle Lait Concentraté Sucré, soap bottles, and Coke cans.

  Driving on, we crossed a sma
ll bridge that bore an inconspicuous plaque noting that “L. A. de Bougainville a Debarqué sur ce rivage le 6 Avril 1768.” A flaming bougainvillea, the blossoming vine named for the Frenchman, was the only other memorial to the explorer. We parked and gazed at the scene. Unlike Point Venus, this part of the island remained the “Nouveau Cythera” of which Bougainville wrote: azure sea, a lazy river winding into tropical green hills, two boys pulling fish from the stream with a simple line and hook, no reel or rod attached.

  We wandered up the road to a store marked “Boulangerie Alimentation” and chatted with the young Frenchman who ran it, Stéphane Petris. He had come to Tahiti as a sailor ten years before, married a Tahitian, and settled down. “I say, ‘Why not? The sun, the sea, a beautiful woman, it is better than Toulouse.’” He rolled a cigarette. “But you can only have paradise for a month and then it is lost. You are bored, you need air, you need a plane to go away. I fly to New Zealand just to see snow. It is strange, no?”

  I asked him what he thought about Bougainville’s famous impression of the island. Stéphane pondered this for a minute, puffing on his cigarette. “What he saw, it is still true in a way. ‘I need water, I drink.’ That is how Tahitians think. Not like in France. We make so many complications. I need a glass, ice; I must decide, water with gas or without gas? Here it is very simple. They live for today. A little house, a little boat. That is all. Fish or go to the mountain for fruit.”

  Or to Stéphane’s shop for steak frites and chao-men, the French-Tahitian rendition of Chinese food. He ran another business that delivered baguettes to the curious, tubular mailboxes we’d seen along the road, called boîtes de pain. “Every citizen of France must have his fresh bread, no?” Stéphane said, excusing himself so he could serve several customers who had patiently stood waiting while we talked.