ELEVEN
THWARTED AMBITIONS
This is an ambitious man who wants to leave his mark on the world. Every distant latitude he charted added to the map of his ambitions. He would not yet admit this but his actions speak volumes. Cook wished to make his own name synonymous with the name of the Pacific Ocean. There is no question that he achieved that.
SAM NEILL
Cook’s second voyage was underpinned by one thing – ambition. And the thing about ambition is that it’s not at all unusual for it to be frustrated, not to mention frustrating. Although Cook might have liked to discover the Great Southern Continent, he got the next best thing. As he sailed away from the Antarctic Circle for the final time, he knew he had confirmed once and for all that this continent was nothing more than a cartographer’s pipe dream. But as one imaginary continent vanished from the hypothetical horizon forever, Cook also understood that he was shedding light on another important and very real, if also very watery, world. You win some, you lose some.
The maritime possessions of the Polynesian residents of the Pacific would become a crucial bridge for Britain’s expansion into Asia. Although Cook, cut off from the homeland, was quite unaware of the renewed sense of urgency in Westminster, the lands he was charting would be the British Empire’s saving grace, filling in for the American colonies whose time was fast drawing nigh. In December 1773, as Cook turned his attention to Antarctica for the second time, Boston was having its Tea Party. Considering that the War of Independence kicked off about a year and a half later, Britain’s control of its American colonies was on borrowed time. And that made the Pacific all the more important to Mother England.
That doesn’t mean that the well-established Pacific nations were planning to give in without a fight. They harboured their own ambitions. Anchored in the shadows cast by the hundreds of monolithic stone statues looming above the barren landscape of Rapa Nui, Cook could be in no doubt that the race of determined and brave people – who had settled this island at the furthest edge of their world – would have their own, very clear, ideas about how their future should look. This was true of all Polynesians, including those in the 170-island-strong archipelago of Tonga.
The first European encounter with Tonga occurred in 1616 when Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire, sailed by the Niua Islands. In 1643 Abel Tasman visited the island of Tongatapu and bestowed upon it the name ‘New Amsterdam Island’. With nary a canal, a windmill or a clog in sight, the poor man must have been suffering severe homesickness. Tasman warmed to the Tongans, describing the locals as ‘good and peaceful people’.
These early visits made quite an impact on the locals. Today the Tongan word for white-skinned foreigners is pālangi, a term recorded by Cook in a phrase he transcribed, ‘towacka no papalangie’, and interpreted to mean ‘cloth ships’, referring to the billowing white sails that carried European vessels to Tongan shores.
When the Europeans began crisscrossing the Pacific, Tonga was a local superpower, and the island of Tongatapu its capital and home to its supreme leader. Blessed with fertile volcanic soils and cooperative prevailing winds that allowed its navigators to journey across the Pacific with ease, Tonga established itself as a wide-ranging maritime chiefdom reaching as far Uvea Island (named Wallis Island by the Europeans), Fiji’s Lau Islands and Samoa. Tongan naval might was so impressive that its tentacles extended across almost three thousand kilometres of open ocean to strike fear into the hearts of the Melanesian inhabitants of the Solomon Islands.
PRINCESS KALANIUVALU – LADY FOTOFILI, Tongan Royal Family
It’s a story that’s told from one generation to the other. It is a significant thing that Cook came here, because his encounter with Pau proves that our history was actually here . . . it was a fact that there was a Tu’i Tonga here and this is something we’re proud of.
Cook was to visit Tonga three times – twice on his second voyage, and once on his third. On this, his second voyage, he stopped by the islands in 1773 after his sojourn in Dusky Sound, and then followed up with another quick visit in 1774.
Both times Cook was concerned principally with restocking his depleted ships with water and fresh food, of which there was no shortage on Tonga. Cook was so impressed by the fertility of the islands that on his third voyage in 1777 he decided to stick around a little longer, parking his ships on Tongatapu for two and a half months.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
I thought I was transported into one of the most fertile plains in Europe, here was not an inch of waste ground, the roads occupied no more space than was absolutely necessary . . . Nature, assisted by a little art, nowhere appears in a more flourishing state than at this isle.
His men were also much taken by Tonga and its inhabitants, with the surgeon David Samwell falling back on the well-worn trope of likening the tropical islands to the mythological paradise of ancient Greece.
DAVID SAMWELL (1751–1798), Welsh Naval Surgeon on Cook’s third voyage
Nothing can be more agreeable than the enclosures in which their houses stand, round which the breadfruit & plantain trees grow & extend their friendly shade over the natives . . . Such enchanting prospects does this little isle afford that it may be said to realise the poetical descriptions of the Elysian Fields in ancient writers, it is certainly as beautiful a spot as imagination can paint.
Cook formed quite an attachment to the archipelago, naming it the ‘Friendly Isles’ because, as he put it: ‘a lasting friendship seems to subsist among the inhabitants and their courtesy to strangers entitles them to that name’.
PRINCESS KALANIUVALU – LADY FOTOFILI
Captain Cook named us the Friendly Islands, and as all those years passed and centuries passed we are still referred to as the Friendly Islands and we live by that and everyone is proud of being friendly.
Compare that with the name Cook came up with for Niue – ‘Savage Island’. He must have been in a very uncharitable mood that day. But he certainly viewed Tonga most favourably and reciprocated what he thought of as the locals’ friendship with generous gifts, including – according to local legend – a giant Madagascan tortoise. He gifted the lumbering beast to Tonga’s paramount chief, or Tu'i Tonga. It was named Tu'i Malila (King of the Residence), and it’s said to have survived to a ripe old age, wandering around the palace grounds until its death in the 1960s of natural causes.
PRINCESS 'OFEINA-'E-HE-LANGI, Tongan Royal Family
The tortoise was brought here by Captain Cook. It ended up with the King and was brought over to the palace in the 1920s. I grew up seeing that tortoise outside. And it was brought out when Queen Elizabeth came over, and it was presented to her. He went through a lot. He’s been through a fire, was hit by a horse, and I think he was blind when he died.
Today Tu'i Malila’s remains are preserved in the Tongan museum.
Cook was blissfully unaware that while he was basking in the convivial hospitality of his newfound Tongan acquaintances, the chieftains of the ‘Friendly Isles’ were planning to become decidedly less friendly. Cook had laid the seeds for this turnabout himself. The standard approach when meeting a new group of locals was to impress upon them the superiority of British weapons.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
The best method in my opinion to preserve a good understanding with such people is first to show them the use of fire arms and to convince them of the superiority they give you over them and to be always upon your guard; when once they are sensible of these things, a regard for their own safety will deter them from disturbing you.
This may well have been an effective way to discourage a futile attack on a British vessel in the short term. But it had the potential to have another, less positive, outcome they certainly didn’t foresee. Imagine you’re a fierce and proud warrior standing on the beach. The peculiar pale-skinned strangers who’ve just landed on your island put on a display of military might featuring an assortment of weapons more powerful than any you’ve seen, even in your wildest fantasies. You’re left
in no doubt about their capacity to do colossal damage. What are you going to do? Do you doff your cap, turn tail and succumb? Of course not! Ambition will out. You’ll find a way – any way – to get your hands on those weapons of mass destruction. And that’s exactly what happened.
During his extended stay in Tonga in 1777 during his third voyage, Cook accepted an invitation from the great chief, Finau, to attend a celebration on the island of Lifuka. It was a right royal knees-up, and Cook and his fellow officers enjoyed the entertainment immensely. Cook lavished praise on the Tongan performances, acknowledging they would have ‘met with universal applause in a European theatre’. He had no reason to suspect that anything was amiss. Having delighted in a lovely evening of fine food and entertainment, he and his men retired for the night.
What they didn’t know – and, in Cook’s case, never would – was that they had narrowly escaped a plot to murder them while they were distracted by the delightful dinner and show.
We now know this thanks to the misadventures of a young British sailor, the aptly named William Mariner. At the tender age of fifteen, Mariner took to sea aboard the British privateer ship Port au Prince. A privateer was basically a pirate with a letter of sanction from the British Crown, so such ships were armed to the gills. When the Port au Prince anchored in Tonga in 1806, the captain was clubbed to death, the crew murdered, and the ship relieved of its cannon and ironwork. This was what had been planned for an unsuspecting Cook and his men. The cannon were then used in the intertribal wars raging across Tonga and, legend has it, today reside at the former residence of the British High Commission in Tonga.
The man leading the Tongan charge was Finau, the son of the man also known as Finau, who Cook had befriended, and he gave the order to save Mariner’s life – because the Tongans knew they needed someone to show them how to work the cannon. Along the way, Finau became fond of Mariner, who reminded him of a deceased son. He gave the young Englishman his son’s name – Toki ‘Ukamea (Iron Axe) – and adopted him as a member of his household. During the four years Mariner lived on Tonga, he became fluent in the local language, and was given his own estate on the islands. He remained there until a passing ship offered him passage back to England, and Finau permitted him to leave. Upon his return to England, a book was published that recounted Mariner’s experiences and revealed the fate Cook had narrowly escaped.
When Cook left Tonga in July 1777, he wrote: ‘took leave of the Friendly Islands and their inhabitants after a stay of between two and three months, during which time we lived together in the most cordial friendship’, and concluded that ‘the advantages we received by touching here were very great’. He had no idea what Finau intended to do to him, which is probably for the best.
PRINCESS 'OFEINA-'E-HE-LANGI
Was it good that Cook came here? Probably . . . I mean eventually somebody would have turned up, and I’d rather have Cook than somebody else who came with a gun and took us by force. So, yes, I would say it was a good thing.
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After departing Tonga on his second voyage in 1774, Cook set sail for a group of islands first spotted by the Spanish navigator Pedro de Queirós, who meandered about the Pacific in 1605 and 1606 in search of – you guessed it – Terra Australis. Affected by the quixotic optimism that characterised so many early explorers, Queirós landed on Vanuatu’s largest island in 1606 and declared it part of the Great Southern Continent. The next European visitor in 1768 was the navigator Louis Antoine de Bougainville – the Frenchman who had felt Tahitian sand between his toes prior to Cook.
In 1774, Cook carried with him the charts these first visitors had drafted on their voyages. Over a period of six weeks he sailed past or visited nearly all the islands in the archipelago he named the New Hebrides. This name would persist on Western maps until Vanuatu won its independence in 1980.
JOHNNY KOANAPO, Vanuatu Politician
After Cook, Europeans realised you could travel beyond the horizon without falling into a bottomless pit. And so they started to come here. They found a lot of resources on the islands and took them to their own countries. But I don’t think we can blame any explorer for that.
Cook’s attempts to land on two islands – Malekula and Eromanga – were unsuccessful by any measure.
SAM NEILL
Cook’s contact with the people of Vanuatu was equally volcanic. At Eromanga, it’s as bad as it gets. Threatened by men with darts and bows and arrows, Cook aims at one with his musket. It doesn’t fire so he orders the rest of his men to shoot. Perhaps the extreme state of nature in which the people of Vanuatu lived brought out something raw in Cook. Whatever the reason, he is in dangerous territory. He’s at risk of being overwhelmed and this time gets away with it.
Heavily armed locals kept Cook’s men at bay, as the brandishing of wooden weapons was answered by cannon fire and lead shot. Cook was at a loss. This was new territory, figuratively and literally. The first people who settled Vanuatu arrived 3300 years or so prior to Cook, and they were the ancestors of the people Cook encountered when he arrived there in 1774. They were Melanesian and, like the Aboriginal people Cook encountered in Australia, they had no cultural relationship whatsoever with the Polynesian Pacific Islanders. They spoke different languages and had different customs. So unfortunately for Cook and his men, when they dropped anchor in Vanuatu their storehouse of cultural and linguistic knowledge was useless.
SAM NEILL
Travelling west from Tonga, Cook was leaving the familiar zone of Polynesia for an entirely new world. Reaching Vanuatu he was desperate for water. Meeting with fierce resistance at the first two islands he reacted as always with musket fire, leaving wounded islanders – some fatally. Then, surprisingly, here at Tanna things went well. One lone man paddled out to the Resolution with a gift of coconuts. Cook’s luck persisted but only because, unbeknownst to him, he was fulfilling a prophecy.
Cook, true to character, persisted. On 5 August 1774, he steered the Resolution towards the island of Tanna and the flame-spitting, smoke-billowing cone-shaped summit of its resident and very active volcano, Mount Yasur. It put on quite a show against a soundscape of ominous rumbling as it propelled molten lava into the air. Cook couldn’t resist. He tacked along the coast until he found a likely harbour, dropping anchor in Uea, which he promptly renamed for his trusty vessel: ‘I named the harbour, Port Resolution after the ship as she was the first whoever entered it.’
As Cook clambered down into his launch with an escort of men armed to the teeth, the islanders watched from the shore in complete silence. The locals were naked, other than some curious genital embellishments that were impressive enough to inspire an extensive journal description from Cook.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
The men go naked, it can hardly be said they cover their natural parts, the testicles are quite exposed, but they wrap a piece of cloth or leaf round the yard [nautical slang for the penis] which they tie up to the belly to a cord or bandage which they wear round the waist just under the short ribs and over the belly and so tight that it was a wonder to us how they could endure it.
Eventually a handful of canoes approached the Resolution cautiously and an old man threw a coconut towards the British. This wasn’t just an offering of food to a starving boatload of sailors – it was a tribute. Traditional cosmological beliefs on Tanna hold that the world is a sea scattered with islands capped off with a domed sky; the world beyond the horizon line belongs to the spirits. So when white-skinned creatures appeared over the horizon, they assumed they were spiritual beings.
The coconut was a ritual gesture, and the man who made it, Paowang, would become Cook’s envoy on Tanna. As Cook reciprocated with gifts from the Resolution’s stores, seventeen outrigger canoes surrounded the launch and the islanders set to trying to strip everything they could from the boat, including the anchor buoys and the British ensign from the launch’s bow.
Apparently being a spirit didn’t mean that living human beings left your stuff alone. Shots w
ere fired, and the warriors fled into the forest.
The sun rose the next day and revealed a daunting sight. Journal accounts from that day estimated that nine hundred or so armed locals stood on the shore divided into two distinct groups. It didn’t look good for Cook and his men.
CHIEF SAM USUA ESKAR, Tanna Traditional Owner
When Cook landed there were two different tribal groups who came down to the beach. My tribe were coastal people and their beliefs were tied to the sea. We were accustomed to visitors and accepted and welcomed Cook. But the other tribe, the Enkahi, came from the hinterlands and were fierce warriors who practised cannibalism and traded in human bodies. During his stay Cook was warned to stay within the safe zone defined by my tribe. The volcano in particular was off limits.
But Paowang again approached the Resolution, bringing with him another offering for the pale-skinned visitors: yams, sugar cane and coconuts. In exchange, Cook gave him a red Tahitian outfit that must have made him the envy of his peers. After Paowang left the ship, Cook decided to go with him. He ordered the marines and a group of well-armed sailors to attend him as he went to shore. As the two groups of warriors from different worlds faced off against each other, Cook stepped onto the beach, then Paowang and two other men gestured towards a pile of taro roots, yams and bunches of plantains, a traditional welcoming gift. The old man had laid out a path with reeds on the beach leading from the water to the offering, and he beckoned for Cook to approach.
With one group of warriors clearly hostile and the other apparently benign, and both advancing towards the British despite Paowang’s admonitions that they stay back, Cook ordered his men to fire shots above the heads of the aggressive group on their right. The men ran away, other than one foolhardy warrior who bared his backside at the strangers, proving that ‘mooning’ is a universal gesture of contempt. He copped a buttock full of lead shot for his trouble.
The Pacific Page 19
