Читать книгу Sea People - Christina Thompson, Christina Thompson - Страница 16
Оглавление“Review of the war galleys at Tahiti” by William Hodges, 1776.
NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH, LONDON.
WALLIS ARRIVED BACK in England in May 1768, and Cook sailed for Tahiti in August. The end of January found him off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, on the Pacific side of Cape Horn. From then until the end of March, when the first unmistakable signs of land began to appear, the Endeavour was abroad on the great ocean. They were making anywhere from twenty-five to one hundred forty miles a day, keeping to a general northwesterly direction, though periodically the wind would force them round to the southwest. Cook logged the distance and direction traveled, the speed and strength of the wind, the latitude and longitude of their position. But as January bled into February, and February gave way to March, there was little else to report. Mile upon mile of ocean slipped by; masses of cloud swept in and were torn away by the wind; the sea rose, whipped to a froth, and then fell to a smooth, flat calm. There were creatures of the deep—porpoises and bonitos—and of the air: red- and white-tailed tropic birds replacing the high-latitude shearwaters and petrels as the Endeavour plowed steadily northward, enclosed in the great circle of sea and sky.
Inside the great cabin, Cook plotted their progress, aware that oceans were known for their deceits. Others passing this way had written of cloud banks looming in the distance like high land, and one of the maps he consulted—Alexander Dalrymple’s “Chart of the South Pacifick Ocean, Pointing Out the Discoveries Made Therein Previous to 1764”—showed numerous “signs of continent” in this quadrant of the sea. This chart, and the history in which it appeared, had been drafted in support of Dalrymple’s fervid belief in the existence of Terra Australis Incognita and thrust into Joseph Banks’s hands on the eve of their departure. It detailed all the known landfalls of the previous two centuries, as well as all the unsubstantiated rumors, but Cook encountered none of these. Keeping his ship’s head pointed for Tahiti, he tracked steadily through the emptiness of the southeastern Pacific, making a long, clean, northwesterly run of more than four thousand miles.
The atmosphere on board the Endeavour was increasingly one of anticipation as each day brought them closer to the island they had all heard so much about. At 39 degrees south latitude, Banks reported that the weather had begun to feel “soft and comfortable like the spring in England.” The next day the ship was surrounded by killer whales. On March 1, Banks wrote that he had begun the new month “by pulling off an under waistcoat,” and the next day he “began to hope that we were now so near the peacefull part of the Pacifick ocean that we may almost cease to fear any more gales.” Soon, however, they discovered a new kind of discomfort: the weather turned hot and damp, and everything began to mold. When, a few days later, the wind increased, they thought briefly they had picked up the trades. But there was more troublesome weather ahead: heavy squalls of rain and hot, damp air and days of frustratingly light wind.
Toward the end of March, Cook reported some egg birds, a kind of tern seen only in the vicinity of land, as well as some man-of-war (i.e., frigate) birds, which were never known to rest at sea. “All the birds we saw this Day went a way to the NW at Night,” observed the master’s mate. A few days later, a log of wood floated past the ship. The next day someone spotted a piece of seaweed—all noteworthy events after fifty-eight days of blue-water sailing. About this time, a disturbing incident occurred: a young marine named William Greenslade threw himself overboard. Caught in a minor act of thieving while on duty, he had been hounded by his fellow marines and, according to Banks, was so demoralized that, on being called to account, he slipped over the side instead. Poor Greenslade—just nine days later their first Pacific island hove into view.
It was an atoll about four miles long, with an oval lagoon, a handful of small islets, and long stretches of barren beach and reef. At one end there was a clump of trees, and near the middle a pair of tall coconut palms, which, with their fronds flying before the easterly wind, reminded Cook of a flag. It was inhabited by men who “March’d along the shore abreast of the Ship with long clubs in their hands as tho they meant to oppose our landing.” Cook sounded but found no bottom, and in the absence of an anchorage, he ordered the ship to sail on. He named this, his first Pacific atoll, Lagoon Island—a lot of them would have lagoons, as it turned out. Historians have concluded that it was Vahitahi, an island at the southeastern end of the Tuamotu Archipelago.
As he picked his way through the reefs and islands over the next few days, Cook sighted several of the Tuamotus, naming them mostly according to shape: Bow Island, Chain Island, Two Groups. Some were inhabited, and on a couple of occasions he slowed the ship and waited to see if the islanders would come off in their canoes—they did not. From a distance, he admired the palms and the reef-enclosed bodies of water, which, with a kind of persistent Englishness, he described as “lakes” and “ponds.” But there was nowhere to stop, and in any case he was not particularly interested in stopping, for they were now getting close to their destination. Then, on the morning of April 11, they sighted Tahiti, rising dark and rugged from the sea, a dramatically different vision from the flat, bright rings of coral in their wake.
Cook quickly established himself in the same bay that Wallis had occupied, setting up camp on a point of land that he named Point Venus—not for the reasons that had inspired Bougainville but in honor of the event they had come to observe. No one would have missed the double entendre, however; even before the ship had come to anchor, Cook implemented a prohibition against the giving of “any thing that is made of Iron . . . in exchange for any thing but provisions.” The Tahitians showed no signs of aggression, welcoming Cook and his officers and leading them on a pleasant ramble through the woods. The shade, wrote Banks, was deep and delicious among “groves of Cocoa nut and bread fruit trees loaded with a profusion of fruit.” Houses were scattered picturesquely here and there. It was, he wrote, “the truest picture of an arcadia . . . that the imagination can form.”
And yet, something was amiss. Four of the Endeavour’s men had been to Tahiti with Wallis, and it was clear to them that something had happened in the intervening years. Several of the large houses and canoe sheds that had formerly lined the bay were gone, and many of the people they had expected to see were nowhere to be found. One of these was Purea, the chiefess whose star had been in the ascendant in 1767. She had since been defeated by a rival and forced to flee to another part of the island, but once word got around of the Endeavour’s arrival, she put in an appearance, accompanied by her counselor Tupaia.
And here steps onto the stage one of the most intriguing figures in this story. Tupaia, who is variously described as Purea’s right-hand man, her chief priest, and her lover, was a tall, impressive man of about forty, with the bearing and tattoos of a member of the chiefly class. He belonged to an elite society of priests and performers known as the ‘arioi and was an expert in the arts of politics, oratory, and navigation. Banks considered him “a most proper man, well born,” and “skilld in the mysteries of their religion.” Cook admired him but was inclined to think him proud. Georg Forster, who sailed with Cook on his second voyage and knew of Tupaia only secondhand, described him as “an extraordinary genius.” Richard Thomson, a missionary writing some seventy years later, observed that he was “reputed by the people themselves . . . to have been one of the cleverest men of the islands.”
Although he is generally referred to as a “priest,” a better term, as Banks suggested, might be “Man of Knowledge.” The Tahitian word is tahu‘a (tohunga in Māori, kahuna in Hawaiian), and its core meaning is something like “an adept,” that is, a master, expert, or authority. The idea can be narrowly associated with a particular craft or specialization, like canoe building or oratory, but when used in a general sense it implies a remarkable constellation of different types of knowledge. A man like Tupaia might be responsible for maintaining not only the history and genealogy of the ruling family to which he was attached, including their sacred rituals and rites, but all the esoteric knowledge of the people in general—“the names and ranks of the different . . . divinities, the origin of the universe and all its parts,” as well as the “Practise of Physick and the knowledge of Navigation and Astronomy.” His fields, if one can refer to them as such, included cosmology, politics, history, medicine, geography, astronomy, meteorology, and navigation, all of which, in a world with no clear division between natural and supernatural, were inextricably entangled with religion. But Tupaia was not just a repository of information; he clearly had a deep and inquiring mind. The anthropologist Nicholas Thomas describes him as an “indigenous intellectual with experimental inclinations”—a phrase that seems to capture something of both the man and the age in which he lived.
WALLIS’S FIVE-WEEK SOJOURN in Tahiti had been long by comparison with those of other European explorers, but Cook’s was of another order altogether. The Endeavour remained in the Society Islands for a full four months, arriving in April, in good time to observe June’s transit of Venus, and not leaving until the beginning of August. This meant that there was ample time for the visitors to learn about Tahitian ways, and Banks, with no official duties, was at leisure to explore. In the end, he compiled a substantial account of Tahitian manners and customs, based both on what he himself had observed and what Tupaia and others told him. As with much ethnography, it is heavily weighted in favor of the observable—how to make fishing nets and breadfruit paste, the distribution of houses, procedures for tattooing, varieties of tools, weapons, and musical instruments, the dimensions of various structures, and so on.
Many of Banks’s observations are fascinating for their novelty, like his claims that “a S[outh]-Sea dog was next to an English lamb” in tenderness and flavor, that Tahitians bathed three times a day, and that both men and women plucked “every hair from under their armpits” and looked upon it “as a great mark of uncleanliness in us that we did not do the same.” He observed that while Tahitians were often ribald in gesture and conversation—one of the most popular entertainments for young girls was a dance that mimicked copulation—they observed the strictest of food taboos, expressing “much disgust” when told that in England men and women ate together and shared the same food. But he also made a number of valuable technical observations, including remarks on the size, shape, and seaworthiness of different types of canoes.
Banks described both the regular va‘a—a single-hulled canoe with an outrigger, used for fishing and shorter trips—and the larger pahi, a double-hulled vessel with V-shaped hulls, a large platform, and one or two masts, which was used both for fighting and long voyages. Pahi, wrote Banks, ranged in length from thirty to sixty feet, but the midsize ones were said to be the best and least prone to accidents in stormy weather. “In these,” he adds, “if we may credit the reports of the inhabitants[,] they make very long voyages, often remaining out from home several months, visiting in that time many different Islands of which they repeated to us the names of near a hundred.”
Much of this information came from Tupaia, who gave lists of islands to both Cook and the Endeavour’s master, Robert Molyneux, along with information about whether the islands were high or low, whether they were inhabited and, if so, by whom, whether they had reefs or harbors, and how many days’ sail they were from Tahiti. As evidence of Tahitian geographic knowledge, these lists are unparalleled—no other European in the first two-hundred-odd years obtained anything of the kind—but they are not without complications. To begin with, there is no single authoritative version: Cook’s list contains seventy-two island names, Molyneux’s fifty-five, and the two lists share thirty-nine names between them. Cook reported that Tupaia had at one time given him an account of nearly one hundred thirty names and that he had collected some seventy-odd from other sources, but that all of these accounts differed in both the number of islands and their names.
Then there is the problem of transcription. Both Cook and Molyneux wrote the names phonetically, but English is a terrible language in which to try to represent sounds—think of the number of sounds represented by the letters ough—uff, oh, ow, oo, and so on. The result of Cook’s and Molyneux’s efforts is a list of words that is quite mystifying at first glance. The name Fenua Ura, for example, appears as “Whennuaouda”; the island of Tikehau is rendered as “Teeoheow”; the island of Rangiroa as “Oryroa.” The British also frequently made the mistake of attaching the grammatical prefix “O” to the beginnings of proper nouns. Thus, “O Tahiti,” meaning something like “the Tahiti” or “this is Tahiti,” was heard as “Otaheite,” Cook’s standard name for the island. A third complication arises from the fact that Tahitian is short on audible consonants; a name like Kaukura might be rendered in some dialects as “‘Au‘ura,” where the k’s have been replaced by glottal stops and then written down by an eighteenth-century Englishman as “Ooura.” One of the islands on Cook’s list is actually spelled “Ooouow.”
Some of the islands on these lists might not even be specific locations. They might be islands with no cartographic equivalent—“non-geographic” or “ghost” islands, mythological locations, or names taken from stories of ancestor gods. Some of the names begin with a prefix meaning “border” or “horizon,” while others include terms meaning “leaning inward” or “leaning away,” suggesting that perhaps these are concepts or ideas rather than actual locations. Still others may belong to an earlier era, for even within the historical period the names of many Polynesian islands have changed.
But even when you set aside all of the islands on the list that, for one reason or another, cannot be identified, quite a number remain. Fifty of the names on these lists can be correlated with islands that we can identify today. The implication is striking: Tupaia and his fellow Tahitians appear to have had knowledge of islands stretching east–west from the Marquesas to Samoa, a distance of more than two thousand miles, and south some five hundred miles to the Australs. Tupaia did not claim to have visited all of the islands whose names he knew; he told Cook that he himself had firsthand knowledge of only twelve. But he had second- or thirdhand knowledge of several more; he spoke at one point of islands that were visited by his father. The rest may have been islands that no one in living memory had seen but that were known to have been visited at some point in the past. They may, in other words, have belonged to a body of geographical knowledge that was handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation.
Cook’s reaction to Tupaia’s list of islands was composed, in almost equal parts, of admiration and skepticism, and here it helps to know a little something about Cook. In the years before he was picked for the Endeavour command, he had been engaged in a detailed survey of the coast of Newfoundland. This was one of Cook’s areas of expertise; his biographer, J. C. Beaglehole, wrote that “nothing he ever did later exceeded in accomplishment” his surveys of the Canadian coast, which is saying something, given his achievements. And so, when Cook looked at the Pacific, it was not, as Keats would later have it, with “a wild surmise,” but with the eyes of a surveyor. Everywhere he went, he examined the coastlines, often going beyond the call of duty and far beyond what any of his predecessors had done. Seen from this perspective, Tupaia’s information was tantalizing but awkward. Cook felt that it was “vague and uncertain,” lacking as it did any fixed coordinates or objective measures of distance, and he was not sure how far it could be trusted. At the same time, it was clear to him that Tupaia knew “more of the Geography of the Islands situated in these seas . . . then any one we had met.”
Tupaia, for his part, also appears to have taken an interest in the ways in which these strangers conceived and represented the physical world. A striking example of this, which has only fairly recently come to light, is a series of watercolors depicting various subjects in Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia. For two centuries it was assumed that these sketches had been painted by Joseph Banks, since they were found among his papers. But in 1997, a letter surfaced in which Banks made it clear that “Tupia the Indian who came with me from Otaheite” was the artist. This information was oddly startling; seeing the work of Tupaia’s own hand brings him close in a way that secondhand accounts of his actions have never been able to do. But the watercolors are also interesting from an anthropological perspective. Polynesia is famous for its decorative arts, but there was no naturalistic tradition of illustration in the islands. Tupaia’s paintings, while stylistically naive, are closely observed and seem to confirm what was so often said about him: that he was a man of boundless curiosity and a natural experimenter.
Nothing proves this point so conclusively, though, as the fact that when Cook decided it was time for the British to leave Tahiti, Tupaia announced that he would like to go with them. He was not the first Polynesian to sail away on a British ship; a Tahitian named Ahutoru had joined the French expedition under Bougainville and was, at that very moment, being feted in France. And there would be others—both of Cook’s ships on his second voyage carried Tahitian passengers part of the way, and on his third voyage he gave passage to a pair of Māori boys. But the insouciance with which Polynesians, including Tupaia, sailed away from their islands in the eighteenth century is quite stunning. No doubt it seems more so to us than it did to them—they were seagoing people, and the idea of sailing off to a new place may not have struck them as exceptionally adventurous. In truth, though, it was hideously dangerous—especially for them. Of the first three Tahitians to join European expeditions, only one returned. Beyond the rigors of the voyages themselves, which could last years and which exposed the islanders to a whole range of unfamiliar hardships, including extreme cold, unfamiliar and often undigestible food, loneliness, and social isolation, there was the very real danger of contact with diseases to which they had no immunity.
One wonders whether they understood how far they were going, how long it would take, what kinds of risks they were running. It is hard to see how they could have, and yet they certainly knew they were going farther than they had ever been, to places that until recently they had never heard of, with people they had only just met. This speaks to the daring of men like Tupaia, but it also says something about the cultures of Polynesia. Within a very few decades, Polynesians of all stripes would be crisscrossing the ocean—Tahitians, Marquesans, Hawaiians, Māori—signing on as deckhands on ships out of Sydney, San Francisco, Nantucket, Honolulu. Described by one European traveler as “cosmopolites by natural feeling,” with “a disposition for enterprise and bold adventure,” they quickly became ubiquitous in sea stories of the nineteenth century. One has only to think of Richard Henry Dana’s Hawaiians camped out on the California coast, or Melville’s Queequeg the harpooner.
Cook was not, at first, very interested in the idea of taking on a passenger. He had no need of extra hands, and he worried about what would happen when they got back to England. He himself was not a man of means, and he did not think the government would thank him for bringing back someone it would be obliged to support. Banks, however, had other ideas. “Thank heaven,” he wrote, “I have a sufficiency and I do not know why I may not keep him . . . the amusement I shall have in his future conversation, and the benefit he will be of to this ship . . . will I think fully repay me.” With this aspect of the problem solved, Cook relented, acknowledging that, of all the Tahitians they had met, Tupaia “was the likeliest person to answer our purpose.”
That purpose was to lay down as much geography as possible, and the first order of business after leaving Tahiti was a survey of the “islands under the wind,” the Leeward Society Islands. This was Tupaia’s home territory; originally from Ra‘iatea, he had been forced to flee when his island was overrun by warriors from neighboring Bora Bora. On the voyage there, Tupaia proved himself an excellent navigator, each of the islands appearing precisely when and where he said it would. He further impressed Cook when, on their arrival at Huahine, he instructed a man to dive down and measure the Endeavour’s keel to make sure it would clear the passage into the lagoon. He was useful in all kinds of ways: piloting the ship, mediating with the chiefs, instructing the British on how to behave. There is a suggestion that he may have had his own motives, that perhaps he was hoping Cook would help him exact vengeance on the Bora Borans who were still in control of his ancestral lands. But Cook would not be drawn into local politics. He had other objects in mind, and on the tenth of August, under cloudy skies, he bade adieu to the Society Islands and, as Banks put it with characteristic brio, “Launchd out into the Ocean in search of what chance and Tupia might direct us to.”
