Читать книгу The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science - Richard Holmes - Страница 11

Tahiti lies roughly east-west just below the 17th parallel, one of the largest of what are now the Society Islands, roughly halfway between Peru and Australia. It is shaped not unlike a figure of eight, some 120 miles (‘40 leagues’) in circumference. Most of its foreshores are easily accessible, a series of broad, curving bays with black volcanic sands or pinkish-white coral beaches, fringed by coconut palms and breadfruit trees. But a few hundred yards inland, the ground rises sharply into an entirely different topography. The steep, densely wooded volcanic hills lead upwards to a remote and hostile landscape of deep gullies, sheer cliffs and perilous ledges.

Contrary to legend, the Endeavour, commanded by Lieutenant James Cook, was not the first European ship to make landfall in Tahiti. Spanish expeditions, under Quiroz or Torres, had probably touched there in the late sixteenth century, and claimed it for Spain.⁵ A previous English expedition, under Captain Wallis of the Dolphin, had definitely landed there in 1767, when it was described as ‘romantic’, and claimed for England. A French expedition under Louis-Antoine de Bougainville had anchored there the following year, and claimed it for France.

The French had racily christened Tahiti ‘La Nouvelle Cythère’, the New Island of Love. Banks’s opposite number, the French botanist Philibert Commerson (who named the bougainvillea after his captain), had published a sensational letter in the Mercure de France describing Tahiti as a sexual ‘Utopia’. It proved that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was right about the existence of the Noble Savage. But then, the French had only spent nine days on the island.^♣

Cook was more sceptical, and had every member of his crew (including the officers) examined for venereal infections four weeks before arriving, by their surgeon Jonathan Monkhouse. He issued a series of Landing Instructions, which stated that the first rule of conduct ashore was civilised behaviour: ‘To Endeavour by every fair means to cultivate a Friendship with the Natives and to treat them with all Imaginable Humanity.’⁶ It was no coincidence that he enshrined the ship’s own name in this instruction.

Joseph Banks had his own views on Paradise. He gave a whimsical account of his first night ashore in his Endeavour Journal. He dined deliciously on dressed fish and breadfruit, next to a Tahitian queen, who ‘did me the honour with very little invitation to squat down on the mats close by me’. However, the queen was ‘ugly enough in conscience’. Banks then noticed a very pretty girl, ‘with a fire in her eyes’ and white hibiscus in her hair, lingering in the ‘common crowd’ at the door. He encouraged her to come and sit on his other side, studiously ignored the queen for the rest of the evening, and ‘loaded’ the Polynesian beauty with bead necklaces and every compliment he could manage. ‘How this would have ended is hard to say,’ he observed later. In fact the amorous party broke up abruptly when it was discovered that his friend Solander had had a snuffbox picked from his pocket, and a fellow officer had lost ‘a pair of opera glasses’. It is not explained why he had brought opera glasses ashore in the first place.

This thieving proved to be completely customary in Tahiti, and led to many painful misunderstandings on both sides. The first occurred the following day, when a Tahitian quite openly made off with a marine’s musket, and was immediately shot dead by a punctilious guard. Banks quickly grasped that some quite different notion of property must be involved, and noted grimly: ‘We retird to the ship not well pleased with the days expedition, guilty no doubt in some measure of the death of a man who the most severe laws of equity would not have condemnd to so severe a punishment. No canoes about the ship this morning, indeed we could not expect any as it is probable that the news of our behaviour yesterday was now known every where, a circumstance which will doubtless not increase the confidence of our friends the Indians.’ Nonetheless, to Banks’s relief and evident surprise, good relations were restored within twenty-four hours.

The Endeavour expedition remained for three months on Tahiti. Its main object was to observe a Transit of Venus across the face of the sun. (Cook stated that this was the reason their settlement was named Fort Venus, though his junior officers gave a different explanation.) This was due on the morning of 3 June 1769, and there would be no other transit for the next hundred years (not until 1874). It was a unique chance to establish the solar parallax, and hence the distance of the sun from the earth. This calculation depended on observing the exact timing at which the silhouette of Venus first entered, and then exited from, the sun’s disc.

Banks was not part of the astronomical team, but when the expedition’s quadrant was stolen one night shortly before the transit was due, he reacted with characteristic energy and courage. He knew that without this large and exquisitely calibrated brass instrument, used to measure precise astronomical angles, the entire observation would be rendered valueless. Not waiting for Cook or his marine guards, Banks roused the expedition’s official astronomer, William Green, and set off immediately on foot in pursuit of the thief. In the dizzy heat, Banks followed the trail far up into the hills, accompanied only by a reluctant Green, one unarmed midshipman and a Tahitian interpreter. They penetrated seven miles inland through the Tahitian jungle, further than any European had been before: ‘The weather was excessive hot, the Thermometer before we left the tents up at 91 made our journey very tiresome. Sometimes we walk’d sometimes we ran when we imagind (which we sometimes did) that the chase was just before us till we arrived at the top of a hill about 4 miles from the tents. From this place [the interpreter] Tubourai shew’d us a point about 3 miles off and made us understand that we were not to expect the instrument till we got there. We now considerd our situation. No arms among us but a pair of pocket pistols which I always carried; going at least 7 miles from our fort where the Indians might not be quite so submissive as at home; going also to take from them a prize for which they had ventured their lives.’⁷

Banks decided to send back the midshipman with a brief message to Cook that armed reinforcements would be welcome. Meanwhile he and Green would press on alone, ‘telling him at the same time that it was impossible we could return till dark night’.

Before dusk, Banks ran the thief to ground in an unknown and potentially hostile village. A crowd quickly gathered round them, ‘rudely’ jostling them. Following a Tahitian custom he had already learned, Banks quickly drew out a ring on the grass, and surrounded by ‘some hundreds’ of faces, sat quietly down in the centre. Here, instead of threatening or blustering, he began to explain and negotiate. For some time nothing transpired. Then, piece by piece, starting with its heavy wooden deal case, the quadrant was solemnly returned. ‘Mr Green began to overlook the Instrument to see if any part or parts were wanting…The stand was not there but that we were informed had been left behind by the thief and we should have it on our return…Nothing else was wanting but what could easily be repaired, so we pack’d all up in grass as well as we could and proceeded homewards.’

By the time armed marines came up, sweating and jittery, about two miles down the track, Banks had completed the transaction and made several new friends. Everyone returned peacefully to Fort Venus on the shore. For this exploit, all conducted with the greatest calm and good humour, Banks earned the profound gratitude of Cook, who noted that ‘Mr Banks is always very alert upon all occasions wherein the Natives are concerned.’⁸ Banks concluded mildly in his journal: ‘All were, you may imagine, not a little pleased at the event of our excursion.’⁹

Banks and Cook were a seemingly ill-matched pair. They were divided by background, education, class and manners. Yet they formed a curiously effective team. Cook’s cool and formal manners towards the Tahitians were balanced by Banks’s natural openness and enthusiasm, which easily won friends. With their help he would gather a mass of plant and animal specimens, and make what was in effect an early anthropological study of Tahitian customs. His journal entries cover everything from clothes (or lack of them) and cookery to dancing, tattooing, sexual practices, fishing methods, wood-carving, and religious beliefs. His accounts of a dog being roasted, or a young woman having her buttocks tattooed, are frank and unforgettable. He attended Tahitian ceremonial events, slept in their huts, ate their food, recorded their customs and learned their language. He was pioneering a new kind of science. As he wrote in his journal: ‘I found them to be a people so free from deceit that I trusted myself among them almost as freely as I could do in my own countrey, sleeping continually in their houses in the woods with not so much as a single companion.’¹⁰