The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

4

Through the brilliance of Cook’s navigation, and the skill of his crew management, the Endeavour arrived at Tahiti with over six weeks in which to prepare for its main task, the transit observations. Previous expeditions had often been decimated by this stage, but Cook had lost only four men, and none to disease. The crew’s diet included a serving of cabbage sauerkraut ‘fresh every morning [as] at Covent Garden market’, and Banks had shot seabirds wherever possible for fresh meat, including several large albatross with nine-foot wingspans.

The first death was the result of an accident with an anchor chain in Madeira. The next two occurred on land, and involved Banks. A field expedition he was leading had been overtaken by a snowstorm on Tierra del Fuego. It was a grim and confused story, which revealed something of Banks’s qualities in a crisis. The party of twelve men (including Green, Solander and several sailors) had first run into trouble when one of Banks’s young artists, Alexander Buchan, suffered an epileptic fit. Then a sudden blizzard cut off their retreat to the ship, several hours away down the mountains, and the party became separated in a birch wood as night fell.

Overcome by the biting cold, Banks’s two black servants drank a stolen bottle of rum, and lay down in the snow and refused to go on. Meanwhile Solander, always rather stout and unfit, simply collapsed. Disintegration and disaster threatened the entire expedition. As darkness came on and the temperature plummeted, Banks tried to hold them together. First he regrouped the scattered men further down the mountainside with Green, made a fire and organised a brushwood ‘wigwam’, where Buchan was revived. Then Banks went back through the sub-zero night, with as many hands as he could muster, to drag the half-conscious Solander down through the birch wood to safety. It was an act which cemented their friendship. Banks also sent hands to save his black servants, but they were ‘immoderately drunk’, and could not-or would not-be carried back to the camp.

It was now past midnight, and everyone was stunned with cold, but Banks went out again in a last attempt to save them. ‘Richmond was upon his legs but not able to walk, the other lay on the ground insensible as stone.’ Banks tried to light a fire, but it was doused by falling snow. It was ‘absolutely impossible’ to bring the two men down. Finally he laid them out on a bed of branches, covered them with brushwood, and left them, hoping they would survive the night, insulated by alcohol. Going back at dawn, he found them both dead.21

When the rest of the party finally returned to the Endeavour, Cook noted that they all retired to their hammocks except Banks. After making his report and classifying his specimens, he insisted on going out in one of the ship’s small boats alone, and spent the rest of the day in the bay, a solitary figure hunched over the stern, fishing with a seine net. Cook had not blamed him for his companions’ deaths; but for the first time perhaps, he felt the weight of his responsibilities.

The third death was a suicide in the Pacific. This revealed another side to Banks. He made a long, thoughtful entry over the incident, in which a young able seaman, ‘remarkable quiet and industrious’, had apparently jumped overboard after being accused of stealing a sealskin tobacco pouch from the captain’s cabin. Banks was struck by the melancholy event, remarking thoughtfully that ‘it must appear incredible to every body who is not well acquainted with the powerfull effects that shame can work upon young minds’. Cook did not pursue the incident, but it seems clear from Banks’s entry that he suspected homosexual bullying by an older member of the crew.22

The initial days on Tahiti were obviously exciting, but curiously tense. There was the unfortunate shooting in the first week, and the scare over the quadrant in the third. Young Alexander Buchan was taken ill again, and died from what appeared to be a repeat of the epileptic fit in Tierra del Fuego. Banks wrote in his journal: ‘Dr Solander Mr Sporing Mr Parkinson and some of the officers of the ship attended his funeral. I sincerely regret him as an ingenious and good young man, but his Loss to me is irretrievable, my airy dreams of entertaining my freinds in England with the scenes that I am to see here are vanishd.’ Banks’s comments seem curiously harsh, and suggest his instinctive sense of entitlement. ‘No account of the figures and dresses of men can be satisfactory unless illustrated with figures: had providence spared him a month longer what an advantage would it have been to my undertaking. But I must submit.’23

This note would be repeated elsewhere in his journal. Yet the expedition’s other artist, the eighteen-year-old Sydney Parkinson, had no doubts about his employer’s humanity. He had witnessed how Banks had nursed Buchan in the Tierra del Fuego débâcle, and wrote a long entry in his own journal reflecting on Banks’s response to the unnecessary shooting of the Tahitian over the stolen musket. ‘When Mr Banks heard of the affair, he was highly displeased, saying, “If we quarrel with these Indians, we should not agree with Angels.” And he did all he could to accommodate the difference, going across the river, and through the mediation of an old man, prevailed upon many of the natives to come over to us, bearing plaintain trees, which is a signal of peace among them; and clapping their hands to their breasts, cried “Tyau!”, which signifies friendship. They sat down by us; sent for coa nuts; and we drank milk with them.’24

With the security of the entire expedition in his hands, Cook was naturally cautious. He decided that a permanent armed encampment, Fort Venus, should be built on the beach to protect the expedition ashore and assert its authority. Banks says the Tahitians approved of this, and helped with the construction. Drawings by Parkinson, though the fort’s situation among the palm trees is intended to look idyllic, show a square earthen stockade surmounted by a wooden palisade with naval swivel cannons mounted along the top. The fort was fifty yards wide by thirty yards deep, commanding a stretch of river on the inland side. In front along the shore was a trading area, where boats and canoes were drawn up, but all stores and arms were kept inside under guard, except for barrels of water by the stream. There were wooden gates which were closed at dusk, with armed sentries.

Within the perimeter, Cook established an official reception area, with a flagstaff flying a large Union Jack. There was a big rectangular marquee for gatherings and feasts, surrounded by an encampment of smaller supply tents and sleeping quarters, together with a bakery, a forge and an observatory. Banks had brought his own bell tent, only fifteen feet in diameter, but obviously the most well-equipped and comfortable. It soon became a popular destination with visiting Tahitians, and there was great rivalry for invitations to dine and sleep there. He noted in his journal: ‘Our little fortification is now compleat, it consists of high breastworks at each end, the front palisades and the rear guarded by the river on the bank of which are placed full Water cask[s]. At every angle is mounted a swivel and two carraige guns pointed the two ways by which the Indians might attack us out of the woods. Our sentrys are also as well releived as they could be in the most regular fortification.’25

This security was regarded as important for good relations, and the fort may have been as much designed to keep the sailors in, as the Tahitians out. Cook enforced a basic naval discipline, which included having one able seaman flogged on the quarterdeck for threatening a Tahitian woman with an axe.26 Naturally there was a night curfew, but it was not very strictly observed, especially by the officers.

The constant theft of goods, especially of anything made of metal, regularly disrupted relations between the two communities. It was theft, too, that most clearly demonstrated the cruel gulf between the two civilisations. To the Europeans theft was a violation of legal ownership, an assault on private property and wealth. To the Tahitians it was a skilful affirmation of communal resources, an attempt to balance their self-evident poverty against overwhelming European superfluity. There was no source of metal anywhere on the island. The Tahitians’ hunting knives were made out of wood, their fish hooks out of mother-of-pearl, their cooking pots out of clay. The Europeans clanked and glittered with metal.

As Cook himself observed, the Endeavour was an enormous treasure trove of metal goods: from iron nails, hammers and carpenters’ tools to the most puzzling of watches, telescopes and scientific instruments. To the Tahitians it was wholly justifiable to redistribute such items. Banks, who had to keep a watchful eye on his scientific equipment, noticeably his dissection knives and his two solar microscopes, noted: ‘I do not know by what accident I have so long omitted to mention how much these people are given to theiving. I will make up for my neglect however today by saying that great and small Chiefs and common men all are firmly of opinion that if they can once get possession of any thing it immediately becomes their own.’27 ♣

Ruminating on these larger ethical questions did not allow Banks to ignore simple practical problems, like the ubiquitous flies: ‘The flies have been so troublesome ever since we have been ashore that we can scarce get any business done for them; they eat the painters colours off the paper as fast as they can be laid on, and if a fish is to be drawn there is more trouble in keeping them off it than in the drawing itself.’28 The men tried many expedients: fly swats, flytraps made of molasses, and even mosquito nets draped over Parkinson while he worked.

Much time was spent in bargaining for sexual favours. The basic currency was any kind of usable metal object: there was no need for gold or silver or trinkets. Among the able seamen the initial going rate was one ship’s nail for one ordinary fuck, but hyper-inflation soon set in. The Tahitians well understood a market economy. There was a run on anything metal that could be smuggled off the ship-cutlery, cleats, handles, cooking utensils, spare tools, but especially nails. It was said that the Endeavour’s carpenter soon operated an illegal monopoly on metal goods, and nails were leaving the ship by the sackful.

Later in June there was a crisis when one of the Endeavour’s crew stole a hundredweight bag of nails, and refused to reveal its whereabouts even after a flogging: ‘One of the theives was detected but only 7 nails were found upon him out of 100 Wht and he bore his punishment without impeaching any of his accomplices. This loss is of a very serious nature as these nails if circulated by the people among the Indians will much lessen the value of Iron, our staple commodity.’29

Cook disapproved of sexual bartering, and made attempts to regulate the trade in love-making-‘quite unsupported’, he later drily observed, by any of his officers. He remained philosophical, observing, not without humour, that there was a cautionary tale told about Captain Wallis’s ship the Dolphin: when leaving Polynesian waters two years previously, so many nails had been surreptitiously prised out of her timbers that she almost split apart in the next Pacific storm she encountered. It was only later that the full, disastrous medical consequences of this spontaneous sexual trade became apparent.

Yet Cook was already aware of the terrible risk and burden of spreading venereal disease, and wrote a long entry in his journal for 6 June 1769 reflecting on them. Certainly he had taken every precaution that his own crew were free from sexual infection when they arrived. They had been examined by Mr Monkhouse, the Endeavour’s surgeon, and they had in effect been in shipboard quarantine for eight months. But the Tahitian ‘Women were so very liberal with their favours’ that venereal disease had soon spread itself ‘to the greatest part of the Ship’s Company’. The Tahitians themselves called it ‘the British disease’, and Cook thought they were probably correct, though he wondered if it was already endemic, brought either by the French or by the Spanish. ‘However this is little satisfaction to them who must suffer by it in a very great degree and may in time spread itself over all the Islands of the South Seas, to the eternal reproach of those who first brought it among them.’30 ♣

Some crew members had moral scruples from the start. Young Sydney Parkinson noted disapprovingly in his journal: ‘Most of our ship’s company procured temporary wives amongst the Natives, with whom they occasionally cohabited; an indulgence which even many reputed virtuous Europeans allow themselves, in uncivilised parts of the world, with impunity. As if a change of place altered the moral turpitude of fornication: and what is a sin in Europe, is only a simple innocent gratification in America; which is to suppose that the obligation of chastity is local, and restricted only to particular parts of the globe.’31

Banks appeared to have no such scruples. He made a point of leaving the camp most nights and, as he put it, ‘sleeping alone in the woods’. He told himself, perhaps with the easiness of birth and privilege, that his intentions were as much botanical as amorous, and that no moral code was seriously infringed. After all, it was all research. Yet it is difficult to see him as a simple predator. He was clearly attractive to Tahitian women-robust, generous, good humoured-and it is striking how quickly he gained a footing (if that is the term) in Tahitian society generally.

He reached an important and lasting understanding with the Tahitian queen, Oborea. This included the pretty girl ‘with fire in her eyes’, who conveniently turned out to be one of the queen’s personal servants, Otheothea. But it was much more than a sexual agreement. Almost uniquely, Banks was welcomed into many hidden aspects of Tahitian life, including dining, dressing and religious rituals. It also brought him his most vital contact, with one of the Tahitian ‘priests’ or wise men, Tupia, who taught him the language and many of the island customs.

Characteristically, Banks was virtually the only member of the Endeavour who bothered to learn more than a very few words of Tahitian. His journal contains a basic vocabulary. The words fall into four main sections, which perhaps suggest his particular areas of interest: first, plants and animals (’breadfruit, dolphin, coconut, parroquet, shark’); then intimate parts of the human body (’breasts, nails, shoulders, buttocks, nipples’); then sky phenomena (’sun, moon, stars, comet, cloud’); and finally qualities (’good, bad, bitter, sweet, hungry’). There are also some verbs, including those for stealing, understanding, eating, and being angry or tired. But the list cannot be very complete, since there are no words for love, laughter, music or beauty-and it would be difficult to talk Tahitian without any of these.

Banks’s skill with language gave him a new role as the chief trading officer or ‘marketing man’ for the Endeavour. He established himself in a canoe drawn up on the shore outside Fort Venus, and every morning would negotiate for food and supplies. He was acutely aware of the shifting trading rates, noting on 11 May: ‘Cocoa nuts were brought down so plentifully this morn that by ½ past 6 I had bought 350. This made it necessary to drop the price of them least so many being brought at once we should exhaust the country and want hereafter. Not withstanding I had before night bought more than a thousand at the rates of 6 for an amber coulourd bead, 10 for a white one, and 20 for a fortypenny nail.’

Trading also brought him into regular contact with Tahitians of every class, and helped him establish a broad base of good friendships, while Cook and the other officers remained more aloof. His journal shows him constantly enlarging his Tahitian social circle, referring to people by their names, many of them in terms of trust and affection. When this trust was broken or shaken, Banks was often mortified. He frequently blamed himself, rather than the Tahitians, for misunderstandings or false accusations of theft.

He learned the local name for the island, which he transliterated into English: ‘We have now got the Indian name of the Island, Otahite, so therefore for the future I shall call it.’ His spelling was simply based on the pronunciation ‘O Tahiti’. He also found that the Tahitians had in turn transliterated their visitors’ English names, but after their own fashion. ‘As for our own names the Indians find so much difficulty in pronouncing them that we are forced to indulge them in calling us what they please.’ The results were rather odd, and Banks suspected that they were partially amusing nicknames. Captain Cook was ‘Toote’; Dr Solander was ‘Torano’; the chief mate Mr Molineux was ‘Boba’ (Banks guessed from his Christian name, ‘Robert’); and Banks himself was ‘Tapáne’, which appeared to mean a drum. Whereas the English had difficulty in recognising more than a handful of Tahitians by name, Banks observed that the Tahitians were much quicker, and soon had names for ‘almost every man in the ship’.32

Banks’s new role expanded to that of civilian diplomat and social secretary. Not being an official part of Cook’s naval command gave him a certain flexibility between ship and shore. He helped to arrange many of the informal dinners at Fort Venus, as well as the official visits to the ship. He was also able to partake in Tahitian ceremonies not strictly approved of by Cook. As a result, from May 1769 onwards, Banks’s journal entries steadily change their character. They are still full of exquisite botanical and zoological details, but they become more and more anthropological. People begin to replace plants. The daily journal entries begin to cover an astonishing range of phenomena: tattooing, nose-flute-playing, naked wrestling, roasting dogs, surfing.

The young Linnaean collector, with his detached interest in cataloguing, dissection and taxonomy, was being transformed by his Tahitian experience. The Enlightenment botanist, the aristocratic collector and classifier, was steadily being drawn in to share another ethnic culture and its customs. His Endeavour Journal would become fuller for Tahiti than for any other part of the Pacific. Eventually it would expand into a long report, couched in anthropological terms, ‘On the Manner and Customs of the South Sea Islands’. It would be the most detailed monograph he ever wrote.33 Banks was becoming an ethnologist, a human investigator, more and more sympathetically involved with another community. The Tahitians are no longer ‘savages’, but his ‘friends’. He was trying to understand Paradise, even if he did not quite believe in it.

5

The occasion of the Transit of Venus, on 3 June 1769, provided a good opportunity for Banks’s new approach. In late May, Cook had set up three astronomical observation points to insure against the possible interference of localised cloud cover. Banks accompanied the furthest group of observers to the outlying island of Moorea. While recording the transit was one of the main objectives of the entire expedition, it was one which the Tahitians could not be expected to understand. Yet Banks’s journal entry for 3 June 1769 shows the consideration with which he treated the islanders during this crucial piece of scientific research.

Banks had set up the instruments at a camp above the shoreline by 8 a.m., and had also provided ‘a large quantity of provisions’ for trade and diplomatic gifts. Leaving the telescopes, he waited down by the beach. Two large canoes appeared, carrying the king of the island, Tarróa, and his sister Nuna. Banks was standing in the shade of a tree, and immediately went down to them: ‘I went out and met them and brought them very formally into a circle I had made, into which I had before sufferd none of the natives to come. Standing is not the fashion among these people. I must provide them a seat, which I did by unwrapping a turban of Indian cloth which I wore instead of a hat, and spreading it upon the ground. Upon which we all sat down and the king’s present was brought Consisting of a hog, a dog and a quantity of Bread fruit Cocoa nuts &c. I immediately sent a canoe to the Observatory to fetch my present, an adze a shirt and some beads with which his majesty seemed well satisfied.’

This was a customary exchange of gifts. But Banks was determined to explain to the king what his men were doing. ‘After the first Internal contact [of Venus with the sun’s disc] was over I went to my Companions at the Observatory carrying with me Tarroa, Nuna and some of their chief attendants. To them we shewed the planet upon the sun and made them understand that we came on purpose to see it. After this they went back and myself with them.’

Yet the nonchalant end of this journal entry shows that Banks was also perfectly prepared to take advantage of his privileged situation: ‘At sunset I came off having purchased another hog from the King. Soon after my arrival at the tent 3 handsome Girls came off in a canoe to see us. They had been at the tent in the morning with Tarroa. They chatted with us very freely and with very little persuasion agreed to send away their carriage and sleep in [the] tent. A proof of confidence which I have not before met with upon so short an acquaintance.’34

The next day Banks added mischievously: ‘We prepared ourselves to depart, in spite of the intreaties of our fair companions who persuaded us much to stay.’ But who was seducing whom? Who was exploiting whom? Many of Banks’s most striking observations on Tahiti record behaviour which seems difficult to evaluate or interpret. Once in late April, one of his closest friends among the Tahitian women, Terapo, appeared at the gate of Fort Venus in great distress. Banks carefully recorded what followed: ‘Terapo was observed to be among the women on the outside of the gate, I went out to her and brought her in, tears stood in her eyes which the moment she enterd the tent began to flow plentifully. I began to enquire the cause; she instead of answering me took from under her garment a sharks tooth and struck it into her head with great force 6 or 7 times. a profusion of Blood followed these strokes and alarmed me not a little. For two or 3 minutes she bled freely more than a pint in quantity, during that time she talked loud in a most melancholy tone. I was not a little moved at so singular a spectacle and holding her in my arms did not cease to enquire what might be the cause of so strange an action.’

Terapo consistently refused to explain, though Banks’s gesture of taking her in his arms suggests the possibility of some kind of emotional upset between them. There were several other Tahitians in the tent at the time-yet ‘all talked and laughed as if nothing melancholy was going forward’. This only deepened the mystery. Terapo’s recovery was no less abrupt and inexplicable: ‘What surpriz’d me most of all was that as soon as the bleeding ceas’d she looked up smiling and immediately began to collect peices of cloth which during her bleeding she had thrown down to catch the blood. These she carried away out of the tents and threw into the sea, carefully dispersing them abroad as if desirous that no one should be reminded of her action by the sight of them. She then went into the river and after washing her whole body returnd to the tents as lively and chearfull as any one in them.’35

Banks later discovered that this dramatic way of expressing grief was universal among the Tahitian women, and he saw many who had permanent ‘grief scars’ on their heads. He learned something about such things from queen Oborea’s little family circle. This group-consisting of the queen, her twenty-year-old lover Obadee, her servant Otheothea (Banks’s lover) and several close male friends-seems to have adopted Banks, and looked after his welfare. They frequently all came to sleep in his tent, when feasting and love-making seems to have taken place easily and indiscriminately. Sometimes this could lead to comic-opera complications, as Banks would smilingly hint in his journal.