The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  It was probably no coincidence that Cook now decided that he would take his botanist off on a separate expedition. This was planned as a circumnavigation of the entire island in the Endeavour’s small sailing boat. Its official naval objective was to chart all possible harbours, and discover any signs of previous European landings — notably French or (as it was supposed) Spanish. For Banks, however, it was a glorious scientific field expedition, and a tantalising extension of his new anthropological investigations.

  Starting at Matavi Bay in the north of the island, the circumnavigation took six days. They set out with a small crew and a handful of marines at 3 a.m. on 26 June, heading eastwards. There was considerable uncertainty about their reception once they passed beyond the territory of Matavi Bay, where Oborea and Dootah had influence. One of their guides said that ‘people not subject to Dootah’ would kill them. Accordingly they adopted a cautious mode of advance. Banks and Cook travelled mostly on foot along the shoreline, while the pinnace, its marines armed with loaded muskets, was rowed just offshore, keeping pace and overseeing their progress. A number of native canoes followed them.

  ‘Banks as usual explored, botanized, conversed,’ noted Cook with a smile.47 Indeed he was soon plunging inland and out of sight, claiming to be in search of specimens, waving a large butterfly net as his preferred weapon of defence. Banks thought nothing of foraging by himself ashore, once disappearing at dusk to hunt for provisions. He shot a duck and two curlews, then pressed on deeper inland. ‘I went into the woods, it was quite dark so that neither people nor victuals could I find except one house where I was furnishd with fire, a breadfruit and a half, and a few ahees [nuts].’ That night he slept under the awning of a native canoe.

  Some discoveries were reassuring. In one village they found an English goose and a turkey cock which had been left behind by the Dolphins crew two years previously. ‘Both of them immensely fat and as tame as possible, following the Indians every where who seemd immensely fond of them.’ Other sights were less so. In a longhouse in this neighbourhood Banks spotted a rather ominous wall decoration. Proudly mounted on a semi-circular board at the end of the hut were a collection of human bones. Banks carefully inspected them — they were all under-jaw bones – no less than fifteen in all: ‘They appeard quite fresh, not one at all damagd even by the loss of a Tooth.’ These were evidently war trophies, and even perhaps signs of cannibalism. Banks enquired boldly, but could get no reply. ‘I askd many questions about them but the people would not attend at all to me and either did not or would not understand either words or signs upon that subject.’48 Later he learned they had been ‘carried away as trophies and are usd by the Indians here in exactly the same manner as the North Americans do scalps’.49

  Some receptions were welcoming, but deceptive. ‘Many Canoes came off to meet us and in them some very handsome women who by their behaviour seemd to be sent out to entice us to come ashore, which we most readily did.’ They were received in a very friendly manner by Wiverou, who was chief of the district. A splendid feast was prepared, accommodation offered, and Banks confidently paid court to the women, ‘hoping to get a snug lodging by that means, as I had often done’. This is a revealing admission, and as it turned out it was wholly unjustified. As the evening drew on, and the women found Banks more importuning, ‘they dropped off one by one’. He ruefully remarked that at last he found himself in the position of being ‘jilted 5 or 6 times, and obliged to seek out for a lodging myself’. He slept alone in a hut, naked as was now his custom, except for a piece of Tahitian cloth thrown over his waist. For once he implies that he felt himself to be the outcast, and this rejection evidently gave him pause for thought.

  Indeed, for all the apparent hospitality, their situation always remained surprisingly uncertain away from Fort Venus and the guns of the Endeavour. It could easily become alarming. Banks noted a tense moment on the third morning: ‘About 5 O’Clock our sentry awakd us with the alarming intelligence of the boat being missing. He had he said seen her about ½ an hour before at her grapling which was about 50 yards from the shore, but that on hearing the noise of Oars he lookd out again and could see nothing of her. We started up and made all possible haste to the waterside. The morn was fine and starlight but no boat in sight. Our situation was now sufficiently disagreable: the Indians had probably attackd her first and finding the people asleep easily carried her, in which case they would not fail to attack us very soon, who were 4 in number armd with one musquet and cartouch box and two pocket pistols without a spare ball or charge of powder for them.’

  For fifteen minutes the little party stood alone on the Tahitian beach, suddenly very conscious that they were white Europeans, isolated and ill-armed, on the remote beach of an island that did not belong to them. They watched the sun come up, and waited to be massacred. Then, to their immense relief, the pinnace reappeared around the point of the bay. She had simply slipped her mooring and drifted out to sea while her crew slept. They told themselves that the murderous party of attacking Tahitians had been a figment of their European fears.50

  Other experiences were unsettling in a different way. On their last day they discovered an enormous stone ‘marai’ or funeral monument, shaped like a pyramid, some forty-four feet high and nearly 300 feet wide, with steps of superbly polished white coral down both sides. This, the ‘masterpiece’ of Tahitian architecture on the island, was unsettling to Banks because its construction seemed technically inexplicable. ‘It is almost beyond belief that Indians could raise so large a structure without the assistance of Iron tools to shape their stones or mortar to join them.’

  Not far away was another mystery: a huge wicker man constructed of basketwork, evidently for some obscure sacrificial rite. ‘The whole was neatly coverd with feathers, white to represent skin and black to represent hair and tattow. On the head were three protuberances which we should have calld horns but the Indians calld them tata ete, little men. The image was calld by them Maúwe; they said it was the only one of the kind in Otahite and readily attempted to explain its use. But their language was totaly unintelligible and seemed to referr to some customs to which we are perfect strangers.’

  By the time of their return to Fort Venus on 1 July, Cook had completed a beautiful and lucid chart of the island, the figure of eight with its ‘marshy isthmus’ at the join, which would serve European mariners for generations to come, a model of clarity and accuracy. Banks had hugely increased his supply of botanical specimens, and his knowledge of the fruit and animal resources of the island. But the human mystery of Tahiti had deepened. Its history, customs, religious practices, sexual rites all challenged European understanding, and demanded a new science of explanation.

  One of the most puzzling and disturbing of all the ceremonies that Banks witnessed was the tattooing of a young girl’s buttocks. Tattooing was universal in Tahiti, and its function among young male warriors was self-evident. Complex patterns were worked across the legs, the upper torso, on the fingers and ankles, and around the loins: proof of a young man’s courage, and also of his place in the social hierarchy. The skin was pierced with a block of sharpened wooden pins, and impregnated with a purple-black vegetable dye mixed with coconut oil. The operation was long and exquisitely painful, usually performed in stages over several months, and was itself a form of male initiation rite.

  Banks could understand all this very well. What he could not understand was why women were forced to undergo it also, moreover at a cruelly young age. Was it a form of sexual initiation? Or purely decorative? Or a form of tribal identity marking? Tahitian women decorated themselves with flowers, and wore beautiful mother-of-pearl earrings, of which Banks made an entire collection. But they used very little other decorations or jewellery.

  5 July 1769. This morn I saw the operation of Tattowing the buttocks performd upon a girl of about 12 years old. It proved as I have always suspected a most painfull one. It was done with a large instrument about 2 inches long containing about 30 teeth, every stroke
of this hundreds of which were made in a minute drew blood. The patient bore this for about ¼ of an hour with most stoical resolution; by that time however the pain began to operate too stron[g]ly to be peacably endured. She began to complain and soon burst out into loud lamentations and would fain have persuaded the operator to cease. She was however held down by two women who sometimes scolded, sometimes beat, and at others coaxd her.

  Banks became more and more restless as this operation proceeded. ‘I was setting in the adjacent house with Tomio for an hour, all which time it lasted and was not finishd when I went away, tho very near. This was one side only of her buttocks for the other had been done some time before. The arches upon the loins upon which they value themselves much were not yet done, the doing of which they told caused more pain than what I had seen.’

  Finally he could stand it no more, and went back alone to Fort Venus. He was clearly both disturbed and fascinated by the whole procedure, though he gives little away about his deeper feelings — whether he was repulsed or shocked, or even sexually excited. He later wrote: ‘For this Custom they give no reason, but that they were taught it by their forefathers … So essential is it esteemed to Beauty, and so disgraceful is the want of it esteemed, that every one submits to it.’51

  On 3 July Banks made one last expedition into the interior, this time accompanied only by the surgeon Monkhouse. His choice of companion seems to have been deliberate. They pursued a river line up into the mountains, pressing on as far as they could go, painfully clambering up the riverbed, sweating and stumbling, searching for plants and minerals. On the way Banks concluded rightly that Tahiti must be volcanic in origin, ‘a volcano which now no longer burns’; which also explained the fact that the Tahitian god was known as ‘the Father of Earthquakes’.

  Twelve miles inland, further than any previous expedition had ever penetrated, they were brought to an abrupt halt by an enormous and beautiful waterfall, surrounded by ‘truly dreadful’ cliffs more than a hundred feet high. Beneath it lay ‘a pool so deep that the Indians said we could not go beyond it’. Here, in this enchanted but faintly menacing place, the secret heart of the Tahitian island, it seems the two men bathed and talked together, until European rivalries were happily forgotten.52

  6

  After a stay of three months, the British expedition prepared to leave in the second week of July 1769. Banks spent a whole day sowing South American fruit seeds for the Tahitians to harvest after they were gone: lemons, limes, watermelons, oranges. While he loaded his final specimens of Tahitian plants and animals aboard, he considered the possibility of taking a human representative of Paradise back to England. The matter had been raised with Tupia, the wise priest, who proposed that he himself should make the perilous journey together with his young son: ‘This morn Tupia came on board, he had renewd his resolves of going with us to England, a circumstance which gives me much satisfaction. He is certainly a most proper man, well born, cheif Tahowa or priest of this Island, consequently skilld in the mysteries of their religion. But what makes him more than any thing else desireable is his experience in the navigation of these people and knowledge of the Islands in these seas. He has told us the names of above 70, the most of which he has himself been at.’53

  Although Tupia was evidently enthusiastic to make the journey, Captain Cook would not underwrite the decision. He did not feel that the Tahitian could be signed on as an official member of the expedition, and he thought that once he was in England the Admiralty and the Crown would ‘in all human probability’ refuse to support him financially. Banks had no such hesitations, and resolved to be responsible for both Tupia’s welfare and his upkeep, saying he was taking on Tupia as his friend and his guest. Cook agreed, and would find Tupia’s help as the expedition’s South Seas navigator and Polynesian translator invaluable.

  Banks added a comment that seems extraordinarily revealing. He suddenly thinks of outdoing his fashionable country-house friends back in Yorkshire with their exotic pets. ‘I do not know why I may not keep [Tupia] 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.’ The idea that his friend and adviser could have been considered, even for a moment, as a ‘curiosity’, or a wild animal specimen, comes as a shock. It shows that Banks, for all his sympathy and humanity, could easily revert to his role as Linnaean collector and wealthy European landowner on a jaunt among the natives. However one explains it, the remark hangs uneasily in the air, never quite dissipated, never quite forgotten: the snake in the garden.

  Nonetheless, Banks closed this entry on a more typically generous note: ‘The amusement I shall have in [Tupia’s] future conversation, and the benefit he will be of to this ship, as well as what he may be if another should be sent into these seas, will I think fully repay me.’54

  There was a last-minute drama when, as Fort Venus was being dismantled, two of the marines slipped away into the woods, having said they had beautiful Tahitian wives, were content to resign His Majesty’s service, and intended to stay. Cook sent out a tracking party, but also took native hostages, which caused a good deal of ill-feeling. Once again it was Banks who defused a potentially ugly situation, by agreeing to spend the last night onshore with his Tahitian friends, until the marines should return. ‘At day break a large number of people gatherd about the fort many of them with weapons; we were intirely without defences so I made the best I could of it by going out among them. They wer[e] very civil and shewd much fear as they have done of me upon all occasions, probably because I never shewd the least of them, but have upon all our quarrels gone immediately into the thickest of them. They told me that our people would soon return.’

  The marines did return, to everyone’s huge relief, at eight o’clock that morning, and Banks watched carefully through his telescope as they were hauled aboard the Endeavour while the hostages were released in exchange. Once he saw they were all ‘safe and sound’ he discharged his own Tahitian ‘prisoners’ from his tent, ‘making each such a present as we though[t] would please them with which some were well content’.55 Though he does not mention it, this may also have been his last chance to spend a night with Otheothea.

  The Endeavour finally hoisted anchor early on the morning of 13 July 1769. ‘After a stay of 3 months we left our beloved Islanders with much regret,’ reported Banks, with careful understatement.56 The whole of Matavi Bay was full of Tahitian canoes. Oborea and Otheothea came aboard briefly to say tearful farewells. Banks and Tupia then climbed the rigging and stood together in the crow’s nest, waving. Sydney Parkinson wrote: ‘On our leaving the shore the people in the canoes set up their woeful cry — Awai! Awai! – and the young women wept very much. Some of the canoes came up to the side of the ship, while she was under sail, and brought us many cocoas.’57

  7

  Banks had gained a complicated impression of Paradise. As the Endeavour sailed westwards towards New Zealand throughout August 1769, with brief stops at other Polynesian islands (seventeen in all), he sat down in his sweltering cabin to put his reflections in some kind of order. The result was his long anthropological essay ‘On the Manners and Customs of the South Sea Islands’, perhaps the most original paper he ever wrote.

  Tahiti was indeed a kind of Paradise: astonishingly beautiful, its people open and generous, and its way of life languid and voluptuous. But there were many darker elements: strong, even oppressive social hierarchies; endemic thieving; a strange religion haunted by ghosts and superstitions; infanticide; and warlike propensities just below the surface. Nonetheless, Banks’s essay is full of his glowing memories, which would later stand him in good stead on the bleakest moments of the journey home: ‘No country can boast such delightfull walks as this, the whole plains where the people live are coverd with groves of Breadfruit and cocoa nut trees without underwood; these are intersected in all directions by the paths which go from one house to the other, so the whole countrey is a shade than which nothing can be more gratefull in a clima
te where the sun has so powerfull an influence.’58

  The essay is packed with technical information: Tahitian methods of cooking, boat-building, house-construction, tool-making, fishing, dancing, drum-making, navigation, weather-predicting, ceremonial dramas, tattooing (again). Banks also writes tenderly of shared meals, enchanting dresses and languid afternoons. His remarks on the innocence of Tahitian ornaments are characteristic: ‘Ornaments they have very few, they are very fond of earings but wear them only in one ear. When we came they had them of their own, made of Shell, stone, berries, red pease, and some small pearls which they wore 3 tied together; but our beads very quickly supplyd their place; they also are very fond of flowers, especialy of the Cape Jasmine of which they have great plenty planted near their houses; these they stick into the holes of their ears, and into their hair, if they have enough of them which is but seldom. The men wear feathers often the tails of tropick birds stuck upright in their hair.’

  There is a long passage on the beautiful cleanliness of the Tahitian body, both male and female. All Tahitians wash themselves at least three times a day in the rivers, making their skin smooth and glowing. Their teeth are dazzling white, and they remove all body hair. Banks even grew accustomed to the strange, unforgettable smell of their hair oil: ‘This is made of Cocoa nut oil in which some sweet woods or flowers are infusd; the oil is most commonly very rancid and consequently the wearers of it smell most disagreably, at first we found it so but very little use reconcild me at least very compleatly to it. These people are free from all smells of mortality and surely rancid as their oil is it must be preferrd to the odoriferous perfume of toes and armpits so frequent in Europe.’