by A. N. Wilson
The pain in George’s swollen legs had not gone away. There was no possibility of his walking far. By the time their boat had been pulled on to the black shingle, over a hundred natives, most of them males, had assembled to meet them. Barratt, one of the oarsmen, let out a guffaw at the sight of them: brown, all but naked save for little loincloths made of what appeared to be mulberry bark, many of them heavily tattoo’d. Some of their faces were painted with yellow turmeric stripes, some with a reddish dye. The cause of Barratt’s mirth was that two of the three, with the red and yellow face-paints, also sported feathered, fringed tricorn hats, inconceivably battered, possibly of Spanish origin. One of the men had a red and white chequered cloth which he wore as a bandana, while a third man – this is what really made Barratt and the other oarsman, Smith, whoop – was wearing a wide-brimmed dark blue felt wideawake hat which was unmistakeably the property of Herr Doktor Forster.
—That bleeder’s only gawn ’n’ swiped Farty’s ’at.
Even the Captain joined in the hilarity.
Peaceful and friendly as the islanders clearly were, they shrank from the sight of the Captain’s pistol. It was obvious that they had seen European firearms before.
After the shock of seeing the Easter Islanders in European hats, the next remarkable fact was the fearlessness of the wild birds. One of the islanders, a tall man with a rugged, majestic, bony face, which burst into a grin as George approached him, had a noddy sitting on his shoulder, seemingly tame as a pet grey parrot. Nor was this an isolated knack achieved by one bird-loving individual. To George’s huge delight, another noddy, spreading its dark plumed wings, flapped towards him and landed on his shoulders.
While Odiddy attempted to communicate with their new friends (it appeared their languages, though cognate, were not interchangeable, as different, George decided, as Dutch and German), the Captain ordered Barratt, Smith and the two oarsmen from the other jolly boat to set up the stall. This was ever his custom upon arrival in a new place (if inhabited). A row of upturned crates served as his counter and, with Odiddy’s help, it was explained that the islanders were welcome to help themselves to these gifts – coconut shells, medals of King George III made by Mr Boulton, pieces of Tahitian cloth, nails, a few glass beads. Nobody wanted beads, but there was some healthy bickering when the coconut shells ran out.
The islanders offered in return what George craved more than anything: fruit, yams and bananas. George, Odiddy and the Captain engaged the man wearing Reinhold’s hat in conversation. In the interval of ravenous sucking on yams and gobbling of bananas, they indicated a wish to see some of the famous gigantic statues.
The hat man gave his name, something like Maroowahai.
—Ahu, Ahu . . . Mo’ai?
After a few repetitions of these syllables, it was clear they were all discussing the same things. Captain Cook, not hitherto conspicuous as a play-actor, did rather a convincing rendition of an Easter Island statue, and George thought, in his deep set eyes and marked cheek-bones, that there were resemblances. Maroowahai led them round the corner of the bay, a short walk, but for George’s swollen legs, a difficult one. Maroowahai spoke earnestly and sadly, pointing to the far distance inland and gesturing wildly, sometimes with both hands at his throat – miming a throttling – sometimes waving his fist.
Odiddy said,
—Some months ago, fierce fighting between West of Island people here and East people. West high people, East – Smith and Barratt.
—So the West are the aristocracy, said the Captain bluntly, and they were attacked by the plebeians.
—Pleb Eeen, but very good fighter, explained Odiddy. They kill many West men. Take West women. Fuck many.
—Steady the buffs, there, Odiddy, said the Captain. Our George . . .
He jerked his head sideways to indicate that the final words were unsuitable for one so young. It was a strange piece of delicacy from a man who swore so freely when speaking to sailors; George wondered if Cook did not quite know how much he swore.
—They kill the great-grandfathers, great-great-grandfathers. Kill long-ago people.
—Kill their ancestors.
Odiddy smiled enthusiastically at his promising pupils.
—The statues. They are the statues of their aristocratic ancestors?
—This true. Statues their many-time-ago fathers. Statues their gods. Power in the statues. Power to Aha . . . Mo’ai.
Maroowahai nodded his head. Then, with a sweeping gesture of his long brown arm he pointed to one of the saddest sights which had ever appeared to George’s eyes. Across a barren, scrubby stretch of land where underfoot there was no grass, just grey-black cinders, was a row of pillared statues, some fifteen feet in height. Morning sun, not yet high, cast long shadows behind these massive structures. Only two were standing. Their heads appeared to be leaning slightly backwards, an attitude in part defiant, in part hurt, as if, having just heard bad news, they were determined to bear their misfortune stoically. The strong light cast the sculpted faces into deep shadows, the beetling brow, which was of a reddish stone, contrasted to the huge grey of the pillar-bodies. Beneath the semi-circle of brow, the eye sockets were shaded pits, the deep nostrils and pronounced lips seemed pursed in pride so badly wounded that nothing could ever be sufficient reparation. The glory was departed. The two figures who remained standing mourned over the mutilated ancestors lately toppled – toppled, decapitated, deprived of spiritual power.
Maroowahai stood beside one detached giant head, raised aloft his arms, and wept. He let out moans of grief. Instinct made the Europeans freeze at the display of emotion. George removed his hat, the only mark of respect he could think of. Maroowahai continued to wear Reinhold’s hat, to keen and to sway. Unnecessarily, Odiddy said,
—He weep for grandmother. Great fathers of old, old people, family people many year ago. He weep for old days no more. He weep for aristocracy no more. All power in head. Pleb people take power from head.
—Ask him why there was a war. Why did East come attacking the West? Was it becoss they were hungry?
Cook’s practical mind looked at first for simple explanations.
Odiddy put the question as posed. Maroowahai was silent. He was trying to master his emotions, that much was evident. George felt instinctively that it had not been a food war, but that the answer lay at their feet, the huge toppled grey granite, the detached red sandstone heads on the cindery ground.
He spoke. Odiddy translated.
—Hungry for spirit of the old days. Not hungry for yams. They take the spirit of the grandfathers. The power of the Western gods. Eastern people no spirit. They envy spirit of old gods. No heads, no power. Eastern people make the Western people like them – take their spirit, their power.
Maroowahai, who, from the first, had recognized the Captain as the Chief of the Resolution party, took Cook’s elbow and led him up to one of the statues which lay on its side. He pointed in the stinking darkness beneath the angled granite. A truly intolerable smell emanated.
—Eevee – eevee.
—What’s he saying, lad?
—Bones, Captain – this was George who spoke. (By the end of the first day he had a hundred words of the Easter Island language and was beginning to master the sentence structures.)
Odiddy said,
—Mother bones.
—His own mother? There was real horror in the Captain’s voice.
—They seem to have the same word for wife and mother, said George.
The Captain allowed himself a little pleasantry.
—Rather Greek of them.
—They come from East, said Odiddy. Fuck mother. Kill her. Put bones everywhere. Maroowahai he gather bones, gather her flesh, bury her near the head of old gods, maybe some little power left near one god’s head. But he weep. No power any more. The old gods lost power.
It was a relief, a great delight, to be rowed back to the Resolution in the sunshine of late afternoon in a boat laden with provisions. The islanders gave the
m chickens ready dressed – they were cooked in holes in the ground, wrapped in stones and straw. There were sweet potatoes, and more bananas. Though it was hours past dinner time, every man aboard had a rich supper that day. Before eating, however, there was a surprise in store.
—Ee oop! said the Captain. Look who’s swam out to see us!
Two or three male islanders were sitting on the main deck in the sunshine trying with smiles and sign language to offer fish to the men. They also brought little wooden totems and fetishes which were miniature versions of the melancholy stone giants so lately despoiled. As well as these enterprising male entrepreneurs, some ten women had swum out to the Resolution. Several of the shore party had remarked, in the morning, on the scarcity of women. The huge preponderance of islanders awaiting the visitors were men. Cook had said,
—It’s a case of lock up your daughters when sailors come to visit.
Clearly, any woman with a care for modesty or chastity had remained concealed in one of the low-lying huts visible from the boat. The women who’d come aboard the Resolution were – in a phrase which George took some pride when he wrote about it in A Voyage – carrying on a particular traffic of their own. These women were neither reserved nor chaste and for the trifling consideration of a small piece of cloth, some of our sailors obtained the gratification of their desires. Even by South Seas standards, these girls were flagrant.
—Don’t stare, lad, just come along o’ me and I’ll gi’ thee a glass o’ brandy and water, was Cook’s only comment as George watched transfixed, as the women knelt in front of the sailors, gobbling their private parts. Other groupings, in various stages of undress, recalled the writhing statue of Laocoön rescuing his two sons as they were strangled by sea serpents.
The women were still entertaining the men of the Resolution when the second rowing boat came aside bearing officers and the resident naturalist.
—He led us through banana groves. Through scrub, Mr Pickersgill. I told him – yes you, sir, I told you. We were going in quite the wrong direction. We saw almost no tree but banana and mimosa. We marched to an elevated place in the midday heat and I had no hat. I assure you, no hat. Did Mr Pickersgill complain to the savage who stole my hat? I put it as a question. And now, Kapitän Cook, we climb up the ladder on to the quarter-deck, and what do we see? Those women! Do they know I am a minister of the Church? That I am a Doctor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford?
The late supper of roasted chicken, sweet potatoes, followed by a banana duff laced with one of Pattinson’s very finest egg custards, put most of the human beings on board in a very good humour. Even Reinhold seemed much happier after the meal as he smoked a pipe over his brandy and water, positively gloating in his discovery, which happened to be wrong, that the heads of the great statues were made of wood, not stone.
—Ja, ja, Mr Wales. You would see if you examined them more closely they are a species of petrified wood. I imagine they fell down quite of their own accord – not erected with sufficient foundations.
From Easter Island, which they left on 17 March, they sailed northwest, then west, to the Marquesas, and from there began their second South Pacific Island Sweep. Cook’s purpose was less to give his crew a six-month sunshine cruise than to map the coastlines of the islands, to give the astronomer and the naturalists more time to investigate trees, plants, birds and beasts, and, by the way, to settle other incidental matters, weighing on his orderly, if somewhat inscrutable, mind. He wanted to eat no more dogs. In the Marquesas, he managed to acquire, in exchange for some six-inch nails, no fewer than eighteen pigs, so that the quarter-deck of the Resolution came to resemble the farm in Mile End, which it was to be presumed often occupied the thoughts of that silent and family-loving man. Reinhold was torn between unexpressed thankful acknowledgement that pork dinners were in prospect for the foreseeable future, and a wish to draw everyone’s attention to the noise and the smell. He and the Captain had other things on their minds beside pigs, and one of these matters was the future of Odiddy.
Much of May and June was spent in Tahiti and Raiatea. Reinhold took a shine to a twelve-year-old boy called Noona, who followed him about on his botanizing expeditions, and carried his plant-bag. George liked the boy, too, conversed with him in primitive phrases and, together with Odiddy, began to teach him English. At nineteen and a half, George had begun to feel very old. Watching his father’s tenderness towards Noona – holding the boy’s hand as they negotiated the seawater swamps, taking note of the multifarious plants, trees and ducks – George remembered his boyhood journey down the Volga, and his pleasure in Reinhold’s companionship. Although it was obvious (without their so often saying it) that Mr Gilbert and Mr Wales felt tempted to murder Reinhold, he was kind – perhaps at his best with child-friends. Noona was soon expressing a wish to come ‘home’ with the Forsters to Britannia, and to meet Reinhold’s ‘friend’ the King. Odiddy told them that he too would accompany them, just as Omai, Captain Furneaux’s companion on the Adventure (who had been taken back to England by Mr Banks after the Captain’s first voyage), had delighted London, been painted by Sir Joshua, and achieved celebrity.
Clearly Captain Cook was divided. His libertarian instinct warred with wisdom; his fondness for Odiddy’s company warred with a desire to spare him the horror and hardship of another visit to Antarctica; his respect for his officers, all of whom opposed adopting islanders, warred with the fact that Reinhold had begun to educate, hence, to improve, these boys. Odiddy and Noona could say the Lord’s Prayer and sing ‘God Save the King’. These things moved Cook.
After several days’ silence upon the question, however, Cook acted, with the same forthrightness and expedition which George had so often seen, feared and admired. He chose to invite Odiddy, Noona, George, Reinhold and two officers – Clerke and Pickersgill – into his cabin after dinner.
—Now, Odiddy. I’m having to speak to you, lad, becoss you know English better ’n Noona. But these words are for you both. If you stayed wi’ us, you might never get to England, never see the King – becoss – no, let me speak, please, Dr Forster – becoss – we might all perish. In some months’ time, I am going to ask my gallant comrades to accompany me just one last time into a land of ice and snow and wind and more ice. We’ll have no other ship besides us to help us if we freeze solid in the ice. No other ship to rescue us if we are destroyed in gales and hurricanes. But let me suppose you are brave enough lads to stay wi’ us. And you’re good lads. I know that. But even if you survive and even if you come back wi’ us to England, you’ll be homesick. You’ll miss your own kind. I’m homesick every day of my life – but I’m in a ship full of Englishmen. And that’s why I’ve decided – no buts, Dr Forster – no protests – this is my decision – you must go home.
Odiddy, who had deduced what the Captain was saying before the speech was done, openly sobbed, and Reinhold’s cheeks were moist.
—We’d all like you to stay till the King’s Birthday – we celebrate it in style – and then – it’s worth your tears lad, but a life at sea is punctuated wi’ the tears o’ farewell.
Some weeks earlier there had been another unscheduled farewell. As the ship was leaving Tonga, the gunner’s mate, an Irishman by the name of John Marra, dived over the edge and swam to a native canoe. Two of the ratings, accompanied by Mr Midshipman Elliott, went after him in a rowing boat. He told them he had only come aboard the Resolution as a student. He wished to write an anthropological study. Now all he asked was a house and a pretty wife. Cook had entrusted the midshipman with a message. He had deserted His Majesty’s ship. If he returned to it without a struggle, he would avoid a flogging. The Captain was as good as his word. As they approached Raiatea, however, Marra had made another attempt at desertion. He was not flogged but he was put in irons.
They kept the 4th of June, the King’s Birthday, moored off. It was a day given over to drunkenness. Some of the hogs collected in the Marquesas were roasted, and two or three gallons of brandy were consumed. Od
iddy, his last hours on board, gave a tearful toast to His Majesty and tried to join in a rendition of ‘Hearts of Oak’ before being helped into a jolly boat. Marra, who had been released from his chains in honour of His Majesty, and who had also been applying himself liberally to the grog, somehow managed to lurch up to Nally, himself far from sober, to ask whether, as an Irishman, he wished to serve in an English ship.
—I’m a scholar, Marra kept saying. Anthropo – anthropo – researcher – anthropo—
—And no one ever denied it, Mr Marra.
—A pretty wife. A bit o’ land. Is it too much to ask?
—It’s not for me to say, Mr Marra, though I’m sure—
—A bit o’ land. Is it too much? I said to the Captain, a pretty wife. Anthropological.
It had reached the stage of the afternoon when it would have been difficult to tell the difference between the natural heave of the ship at sea and the undulations of vision occasioned by the brandy. Everyone saw a world in motion, some of it double, some of it misty. Neither Nally nor Marra could necessarily distinguish between dream and reality, and if Captain Cook was not as drunk as they were, he had nonetheless found himself wandering from deck to deck – in part to show his face to every member of the crew, lest discipline broke down altogether, and in part because a journey to the privy had turned, without much planning, into a random ramble.
Two midshipmen and a Lieutenant being by, the Captain called them to witness.
—Mr Marra thinks hissel’ entitled to a pretty wife and a bit of land.
—Only a pretty wife, said Marra.
—They seem reasonable enough requests, said Cook. When did I pick you up, Marra? When did you come aboard – on my first voyage – on board the Endeavour?
