This morn Tupia came on board, he had renewed his resolves of going with us to England, a circumstance which gives me much satisfaction. He is certainly a most proper man, well born, cheif
Tahowa or preist of this Island, consequently skilld in the mysteries of their religion; but what makes him more than any thing else desireable is his experience in the navigation of these people and knowledge of the Islands in these seas; he has told us the names of above 70, the most of which he has himself been at. The Captn refuses to take him on his own account, in my opinion sensibly enough, the government will never in all human probability take any notice of him; I therefore have resolvd to take him. Thank heaven I have a sufficiency and I do not know why I may not keep him as a curiosity, as well as some of my neighbours do lions and tygers at a larger expence than he will probably ever put me to; the amusement I shall have in his future conversation and the benefit he will be to this ship, as well as what he may be if another should be sent to these seas, will I think fully repay me.
1
This citation comes from an entry in the journal of Joseph Banks, written from Tahiti on July 12, 1769. It records Banks’s pleasure in learning that Tupaia, the Raiatean priest who had been a valuable guide and interlocutor during his sojourn on the island, has resolved to travel to England on the
Endeavour. His delight is easy to comprehend. Tupaia, as Banks indicates, was an authority on Society Islands religion, history, and culture; a linguist and a traveler; a navigator and an ethnographer. But as he imagines Tupaia sailing beyond the Oceanic world and back to England, Banks finds himself unable to maintain his respectful recognition of Tupaia’s intellectual authority. Instead, he foresees a world in which Tupaia will be regarded as curiosity rather than curious. Matching his rhetoric to his anticipations, he frames a now notorious comparison of the eminent Tahitian with an exotic animal.
Banks’s diary entry, to which I will return later in more detail, sets out the problematic that I will examine in this chapter. From the earliest contacts, the expansion of European knowledge has depended on cultural intermediaries willing to act as local informants, translators, and guides, as well as in more profound capacities such as Tupiaia’s, as intellectual interlocutors able to negotiate between not just languages but also epistemologies, methodologies, genres, and practices. The retrieval of these intermediating subjects from the archive is a fraught process precisely because of the shift we see played out in slow motion in the passage from Banks’s journal. As they become embedded in writing, cultural intermediaries become subject to rhetorical and discursive imperatives that occlude or diminish their agency, subtly transforming them from subjects into objects of knowledge. This is a particular problem when considering the role of such intermediaries in intellectual history, whose relationship to writing is one of special privilege.
Intellectual History and the Cultural Intermediary
This volume’s goal of extending the “global turn” to intellectual history begs the question of the cultural intermediary. Bearing in mind the global frame of reference, however, also enables us to question assumptions that inform the dominant construal of both intellectual history and cultural intermediarism. The concept of the cultural intermediary is still, in historical and sociological circles, frequently derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his critique of cultural capital. In his
Distinction, cultural intermediaries (equated with “the new petite bourgeoisie” and comprising “all the occupations involving presentation and representation [sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration, and so forth] and all the institutions providing symbolic goods and services”) figure precisely as those who blur distinctions, between high and popular culture, facilitating a new cultural accessibility. In class terms, they represent a transitional status between the middle and the newly educated working classes, because “the indeterminacy of the new or renovated occupations means that the heterogeneity of the agents’ trajectories is particularly marked.”
2 Although Bourdieu’s broader recognition of indeterminate status as critical to the role of the cultural intermediary is widely applicable, his specific critique of class relations is endogenous. In contrast, the notion of intermediarism that I am exploring here is, in keeping with the theme of the volume, exogenous. “Cross” is a silent qualifier in my use of “cultural intermediaries,” and my primary emphasis in considering the concept of “culture” is on horizontal relations rather than Bourdieu’s vertical axis of cultural authorization.
Either explicitly or implicitly, intellectual history is understood as textual history.
3 Given the intensity and acute reflexivity with which intellectual historians engaged and debated the pressures of a “linguistic turn” in the late 1980s, the conflation of intellectual with written history may be more a product of slippage than polemics.
4 The turn to a global intellectual history highlights the problems of equating the intellectual with the written, and it invites a new emphasis on the contributions of participants from cultures in which writing is a belated mode of communication (a move that, in turn, foregrounds the politicized dimensions of written production). It is in confronting the implicit bias toward written contributions in the production of knowledge that the work of postcolonial theorists becomes particularly useful to a globalized intellectual history. The analysis of cross-cultural encounter has engaged with increasing subtlety with the problem of imbalance in the written record. Edward Said’s landmark
Orientalism defined the discipline and discourse he examined in three increasingly nuanced ways, all archival and textually generative. Traditionally, he noted, “Anyone who teaches, writes about or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either in its specific or general aspects is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism.” Said extended this academic definition to incorporate
a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists and imperial administrators, [who] have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as a starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on.
Finally, he drew on the discourse theory of Michel Foucault to politicize Orientalism as “the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.”
5 As many scholars have since noticed, Said’s critique ironically repeated the gesture of consigning the Oriental subject to the status of object of European representation, by allowing no space for the emergence of Oriental agency. This paradox was seen to be intensified in the more virtuoso deconstructive theory that emerged in Said’s wake: Gayatri Spivak’s fine-grained analyses of the inevitable imprisonment of subaltern women within Western discourse, or Homi Bhabha’s recognition that “native subjects” might destabilize Western documentary regimes from within by practicing an unsettling replication of Western law and its practices of inscription that was at once identical and different.
6In expanding the purview of Said’s analysis from the discipline of anthropology to the practice of ethnography, whose methodologies had, since the fieldwork manifesto of Bronislaw Malinowski, been predicated on the primarily oral intermediating work of local informants, a first wave of scholarship remained focused on the textual trace.
7 The
Writing Culture project of James Clifford and George Marcus inaugurated a new emphasis on writing as the “occulted” dimension of an anthropological fieldwork that claimed a kind of transparency in conveying the knowledge of indigenous informants to Western audiences. Clifford and Marcus turned from the dialogues of participant-observation foregrounded by Malinowski “to highlight the constructed, artificial nature of cultural accounts,” and they promoted a radical self-consciousness in ethnographic writing.
8 The
Writing Culture project highlighted the degree to which oral and written cultural practices combined to produce ethnographic knowledge. As Felix Driver and Lowri Jones show, there is a reciprocal requirement to exhume intermediating bodies and voices from the archive of ethnographic exchange. Driver and Jones’s work focuses on the collections of the Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830, now comprising an archive of more than a million maps, half a million photographs, and thousands of books, articles, manuscripts, artifacts, and artworks. Their project, representing the collection to a public audience via both text and exhibition, reevaluates imperial exploration as “a joint project of work, undertaken for different reasons and with different results for the parties concerned, but a joint project nonetheless.” Their description of the “work” of imperialism necessarily extends to the archive that enshrines its traces. As Driver and Jones concluded, “We can think of the resulting contributions to geographical knowledge as co-productions.”
9For situations in which intermediaries are the representatives of oral cultures, doing justice to their role in the historical record requires the development of reading practices sensitized to both rhetorical imbalances and obfuscations in the sources. In simple quantitative terms, the entire literary archive of oral societies reifies the unevenness between Western recordation and indigenous objectification that postcolonialists have long critiqued. The most influential monograph to have grown out of the Writing Culture project, Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, describes the discrimination inherent in archival evidence:
The more I studied the huge corpus of travel literature written by Europeans over two hundred and fifty years, the more aware I became of the participants whose voices I wasn’t hearing. There was a huge gap in the archive. What had the people who received these visitors thought of them and the imperial designs they brought with them? How and in what forms of expression had they interpreted the historical processes they were living?
10
The process of reading against the grain of the imperial record is potentially circular: evidence of local knowledge with which to counter European representations must often be extracted from the same sources that enshrine those representations. Moreover, when indigenous voices captured in recorded versions of chants, songs, and oral histories appear to offer the promise of a counterarchive to the European one, these too cannot be regarded as pure or original sources, since they also bear, however discreetly, the traces of the imperial, missionary, or administrative contexts in which they were produced. Another anthropological response has sought in modern indigenous versions of cultural practice a key to the cultural references in historical documents. This, however, risks reinforcing a long-standing separation between so-called modern, historied societies and so-called primitive societies that are regarded as locked in a perpetual present, able to comment with a timeless continuity on customs untouched by the politics of historical change.
11A number of strategies developed in relation to contact scenarios between European and nonliterate cultures may continue to help recast a globalized intellectual history. Mary Louise Pratt further remarked on a persistent indigenous presence in the archive: “From time to time as I read, I glimpsed the ongoing ways empire was coded by those in whose lives it intervened—coded in ceremony, sculpture and painting, in dance, parody, philosophy and history; in expressions unwitnessed, suppressed, lost, or simply overlaid with repetition and unreality.” Her response to this recognition was to develop dialectical ways of reading designed to extrapolate the indigenous perspective veiled or silenced in historical accounts. Pratt coins the term “contact zone” for the notion of encounter that her analysis emphasizes. “Contact zone” evokes the copresence of imperial and indigenous subjects and “foregrounds the interactive, improvisational dimensions of imperial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by accounts from the invader’s perspective.”
12 Pratt’s theorization of the contact zone is comparable to Greg Dening’s compelling metaphorization of “the beach” as a liminal space that stages the ambiguous power relationships of early contact, before territorial claims, and in which the two sides of encounter may be viewed as more evenly pitched and mutually inquiring.
13 Bronwen Douglas’s critical practice stresses the need, through a process of actively contestatory reading against the grain of imperial texts and images, to unearth “countersigns” of indigenous agency. In a series of essays and books, she applies her method to all the texts identified by Driver and Jones: written accounts, images, cultural practices, maps, and artifacts.
14 Greg Dening’s reenvisioning of contact in theatrical rather than essentialized terms exemplifies a turn to the performative in ethnohistorical and ethnographic analysis of intercultural exchange, which seeks to enable oral cultural practices to dictate the terms of analysis. Dening disrupts his historical narrative with first-person interpolations to remind his readers of the relativized and performative aspects of historical knowledge.
15 More radically, in his book
Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, Michael Taussig uses a dialogic mode of writing to perform the shamanistic ritual that he describes to his readers, thereby attempting to “heal” ingrained perceptions. He aims to enable the subject of writing to dictate the mode of communication of cultural knowledge and to produce ontological transformations in his Western readership. The imbalances of the written record have prompted others to depreciate texts in favor of studying artifacts. Nicholas Thomas’s redirection of anthropological attention toward the object, both functional and artistic, recognizes the “entanglement” of local and European practices and agendas in colonial cross-cultural exchange, deprivileging the written archive as the primary site of historical traces of encounter.
16The work of historians of science has reprised these evolving critiques of archival history by moving toward a greater recognition of the intellectual contribution of non-European subjects to the development of global scientific knowledge. Bruno Latour’s identification of metropolitan “centers of calculation,” epicenters at which knowledge was gradually gathered and archived in the service of projects of empire, has proved hugely influential in the Orientalism mode. Latour’s analysis, equally indebted to Foucault’s theories of discourse and discipline, exposed the operations of an imperial will to know that sought to render alterity portable, abstractable, and translatable for accumulation at imperial centers.
17 More recent historians of science, in turn, have highlighted the ways in which such Eurocentric formulations continue to occlude indigenous voices in the archive, instead emphasizing the coproduction of scientific knowledge across global and imperial boundaries. Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib, in their
Domesticating Modern Science: A Social History of Science and Culture in Colonial India (2004), and Kapil Raj, in
Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, focus on the South Asian appropriation of European scientific ideas and the reciprocal contribution of South Asian cultural intermediaries to the shaping of European scientific developments during the long nineteenth century. Raj rehearses a broader movement in his discipline from a “big-picture,” grand-narrative account of Western scientific development to one through which “scientific knowledge turns out … to be local everywhere.” Attendant on this disciplinary turn, he points out, is an emphasis on the intercultural
constitution of knowledge:
In particular, [the recent history of science] looks at the role of intercultural encounter in the circulation of the specialized knowledges that constituted science in this period. It addresses the following questions: What was the nature of the vectors of knowledge transmission? Who were the agents involved in the transmission and appropriation of knowledge and skills in the spaces of intercultural encounter? Was this a simple process of diffusion and acceptance or was there an active process of reception and reconfiguration of the circulating knowledges and skills? If the latter, where—outside of European metropolitan centres—was knowledge being reconstructed and certified? What was the relationship of this knowledge with its metropolitan sibling? Were these knowledges transportable? If so, what happened in the process of displacement?
18
The kinds of intellectual historical investigation with which Raj affiliates himself do not reaffirm that “colonial science” or “colonial knowledge” constitute classifying discourses that exclude or forcibly appropriate indigenous or local knowledges from an imperial center. Rather, they “advance an alternative vision of the construction and spread of scientific knowledge through reciprocal, albeit asymmetric, processes of circulation and negotiation, a vision at odds with current post-colonial thinking.” Raj sets out to demonstrate
that South Asia was not a space for the simple application of European knowledge, nor a vast site for the collection of diverse information to be processed in the metropolis, nor indeed “of complicated and complex knowledge created by Indians, but codified and transmitted by Europeans.” On the contrary, South Asia was an active, although unequal, participant in an emerging world order of knowledge…. The contact zone was a site for the production of certified knowledges which would not have come into being but for the intercultural encounter between South Asian and European intellectual and material practices that took place here. In other words, although these knowledges had different trajectories in specialist communities in South Asia and Europe and were appropriated and integrated differently in the two regions (not least because of colonial domination), they partook of, and were constructed through, the same circulatory processes.
19
Although Raj rejects a conventional postcolonial analysis here, his adoption of Mary Louise Pratt’s term “contact zone” indicates the influence that certain second-wave postcolonial theories have had in rethinking the history of science. Whereas the work of South Asian historians of science has promoted the reconsideration of the role of cultural intermediaries in shaping both European science and its peripheral redactions, in a final revisionist twist Alix Cooper argued that the opening up of contact with foreign cultures during the early modern period, including the global circulation of indigenous knowledge, technologies, and practices, led to a reconceptualization of the “indigenous” in Europe—to a valuing, recording, and archiving of European local knowledge. Her work complicates the polarization of European and “exotic,” demonstrating instead that in the realm of nature and its attendant cultural practices, the exotic gradually began to be perceived as a prerogative of home.
20Banks’s Networks of Knowledge
The variety and texture of recent thinking about the intercultural production of knowledge offer new lenses for reexamining key figures in intellectual history, as well as the debts and entanglements of the facts they employed and the methodologies and epistemologies of their investigations. In the rest of this chapter, I consider one such figure: Joseph Banks, botanist on the
Endeavour, long-term president of the Royal Society, and object of veneration and scandal.
21 I contend that what might be said to link these disparate and, at times, apparently contradictory aspects of Banks’s career is in fact an engagement with and a gradual reconceptualization of the role of the cultural intermediary. This is not to dispute influential and compelling alternative conceptions of Banks’s role as a “servant of empire” or as an exemplary recipient and dispenser of patronage, occupying a Latourian “center of calculation.”
22 Each of these models, however, in seeking to do justice to the unequal power relations of empire, continues to privilege the metropole in conceptualizing the development of botanical knowledge. By foregrounding the significance of Banks’s early travels and encounters in inaugurating a model of dialogue that was put into practice with later informants and interlocutors across the globe, I hope to show the fundamental role of indigenous cultural intermediaries in one branch of Enlightenment intellectual investigation. I should stress here that my concern in the ensuing discussion is not, as with much of the history of science scholarship I have discussed, with reclaiming particular, purportedly European, objects or inventions as cultural coproductions. Rather, my focus is on a reconceptualization of cultural intermediation itself that, I argue, followed on Banks’s experience of indigenous interlocution.
Studies of Banks’s legacy have recognized the fundamental role of knowledge networks in both the development of the Royal Society under his presidency and the shaping of colonial agriculture under his remote direction. Building on the precedent offered by Carl Linnaeus, the inaugurator of the classificatory method, who corresponded with travelers, collectors, and gardeners across the globe in applying his classificatory system to botanical and biological specimens, Banks built up a wide network of correspondents among travelers, administrators, and agriculturalists across the world of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European empire. David Philip Miller early and influentially recuperated Banks’s modus operandi to the Latourian paradigm of knowledge accumulation, arguing that “there is little doubt that Joseph Banks, more than any other individual of his times, did … make himself a centre of accumulation.”
23 John Gascoigne provided the definitive account of the ways in which Banks’s presidency of the Royal Society built on the seventeenth-century tradition of a Republic of Letters: a virtual scientific community that communicated across national boundaries and in spite of national conflicts, using Latin as its shared language, in a quest to extend European scientific knowledge. Gascoigne argues that
Banks was more than an ex officio citizen of the Republic of Letters, for it became part of his programme for the betterment of the Royal Society and of science more generally to establish an international network of correspondence and exchange. He did so on a scale which foreigners recognized as exceptional and as betokening a real commitment to European rather than British science.
24
Harry Liebersohn develops Gascoigne’s notion of networks of knowledge into a detailed account of the ways in which European naturalists, artists, and philosophes—French, German, Russian, and Spanish as well as British—became involved in voyaging projects, coimplicating their different national politics, disciplines, knowledges, and texts in early encounters. Liebersohn is particularly attentive to the operations of patronage in the eighteenth century, offering an engrossing analysis of its role in establishing and consolidating Banks’s scientific empire. Indeed he asserts that “one can almost write a history of voyage patronage in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century England through the career of [this] one individual.” Liebersohn, like Gascoigne, links Banks’s objectives to those of the Republic of Letters but emphasizes the importance of his class status in mobilizing networks and discourses of patronage.
25Yet although the plurality of Banks’s Royal Society projects is increasingly recognized, this expanded vision remains Eurocentric. An emphasis on the Republic of Letters as the main context for the development of correspondence networks has the potential to relegate the contributions of nonliterate indigenous subjects, who are understood to occupy, always and only, a highly mediated position in European letters, journals, and documents. In the texts of European intermediaries, European subjects play the role of “local” informant, dispensing local knowledge gathered from indigenous intermediaries, who typically remain unnamed and frequently unmentioned. In rethinking the role of the cultural intermediary in the Banksian archive, I want to retrieve the contribution of individual local informants to Banks’s knowledge and also to suggest an alternative lineage for Banks’s developing practice as president of the Royal Society. Rather than linking this to the textual tradition of the Republic of Letters or to British and European networks of patronage, I propose that Banks’s taste for interlocution and intermediation was formed from, and his practice modeled on, conversations he had with Tupaia aboard the
Endeavour. Moreover, I argue that his relationship with Tupaia was equally significant for his later negotiations of systems of patronage and publicity in the metropole.
“A Most Proper Man”
Although Tupaia came from Raiatea, where he was a high priest of the dominant war god Oro, when Banks encountered him he was an exile in Tahiti, deposed after the Boraboran invasion of Raiatea. For some time he had been an influential religious adviser to Purea, the most powerful chief in Tahiti.
26 By the time of James Cook’s visit in 1769, Purea, and hence Tupaia, had lost local political favor.
27 Nonetheless, his huge repository of ritual and cultural knowledge and, indeed, his very in-between status, neither inside nor outside the culture under scrutiny, made Tupaia an important and acknowledged authority for both Banks and Cook. An appreciation of his value was reflected in both men’s responses to his decision to sail with the
Endeavour. Banks’s reference to Tupaia as “a most proper man” in the journal entry quoted at the beginning of this chapter is affirmative in an unbounded sense: referencing both his eminent suitability as a cultural intermediary and his propriety in performing that role. Yet when Banks returned to England, it was in regard to issues of propriety that his and Tupaia’s interlocutory relationship and the knowledge it brought to light came under scrutiny. In contrast, Cook’s comments are those of a captain required to justify the presence of a new body on shipboard in terms of its usefulness to the expedition:
For some time before we left this Island several of the natives were daily offering themselves to go away with us, and as it was thought that they must be of use to us in our future discoveries, we resolved to bring away with us one whose name is
Tupia, a Cheif and a Priest: This man had been with us the most part of the time we had been upon the Island which gave us an oppertunity to know some thing of him: we found him to be a very intelligent person and to know more of the Geography of the Islands situated in these seas, their produce and the religion laws and customs of the inhabitants then any one we had met with and was the likeliest person to answer our purpose.
28
The intellect and knowledge Tupaia demonstrated at a local level in Tahiti are understood to be applicable to a broader scene: his personal intelligence and acquired knowledge combine to make him a worthwhile addition to the Endeavour community. However, Cook also hints at local values and agendas of advancement that his own set of criteria does not encompass. Like most of the European explorers of the Pacific at this time, he acknowledges a context of wider importuning, in which not one but “several” natives offer themselves to accompany the voyage and which is accorded different motivations: personal connection, desire for status, and interest in the customs of elsewhere.
A number of critics have distinguished between Cook’s and Banks’s interactions with cultural intermediaries by addressing Banks’s affectively engaged enthusiasm for cross-cultural exchanges of knowledge. In
Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities, Lee Wallace summed up a tendency in previous scholarship to “map … the outer limits of disciplinary and affective masculinity” onto the figures of James Cook and Joseph Banks, commenting that “the figures of Cook and Banks have routinely been used as markers for opposing poles of masculine definition with regard to British adventure in the South Seas.” She noted the contrast between positive depictions of Banks’s willing self-immersion in Tahitian cultural practice and ritual and those of Cook’s imperialist detachment. Wallace’s own contribution was to recognize that these two, apparently oppositional, modes of encounter might be read as “flip sides of the same coin.” This was not merely a version of the more commonplace understanding that the Royal Academy’s protoscientific explorations functioned “in the service of empire,” just as the Admiralty’s territorial explorations did. Wallace further probed the sentimentalism that framed Banks’s, and more significantly, John Hawkesworth’s, construction of his encounters as affectively and sexually engaged: “Representationally shackled to Cook, Banks’s masculine affect, his sympathy for and susceptibility to Polynesian femininity, rhetorically mitigates the aggression of encounter and so legitimates British presence in the Pacific.”
29 In his comparison of Cook and Banks, David Turnbull fixes on Cook and Tupaia as the parallel authorities of the
Endeavour voyage, close in age (they both were in their mid-forties at the time they met) and status, and sharing projects of knowledge centered on mapping and voyaging.
30 Yet Cook and Tupaia emerge in Cook’s writings more as epistemological competitors than coexplorers. Banks, in contrast, who at twenty-five was at the time of the
Endeavour’s visit to Tahiti just young enough to have been Tupaia’s, or indeed Cook’s, son, seems to have had a relationship with Tupaia that included aspects of mentoring. Banks was able to acknowledge the Raiatean as senior in both age and knowledge. His exchanges with Tupaia are characterized by an enabling perception of similarities; each appears to recognize the other as an informant and a cothinker.
Once the
Endeavour set sail from Tahiti, Tupaia’s authority emerged as both immediate and comprehensive. He had, as Banks mentions in his journal entry, mapped numerous Polynesian islands on paper. Although these do not appear in cartographic perspective, the voyage accounts acknowledge that he accurately calculated the number of days required to sail between different islands.
31 Since only minor consonantal shifts distinguish Oceanian dialects, Tupaia was well equipped to communicate with other Polynesians, and this in turn led to a wide perception of his authority among the islanders that the ship encountered. William Monkhouse, the
Endeavour’s surgeon
, recorded in his journal at Poverty Bay in New Zealand that “Topia’s name was now ecchoed incessantly—he talked with them—.”
32 As interpreter he was also, of course, free to translate British information on his own terms, as he was the sole conduit for European knowledge in these early exchanges. Here postcolonial theory’s acknowledgment of the power of the medium finds its indigenous equivalent. It is clear that Tupaia was not simply a transparent translator. Instead, he figures in Banks’s journal as a conscious cultural comparativist who registered similarities and subtle distinctions between Society Islands practices and those farther afield. Moreover, Banks represents Tupaia’s ability to extrapolate and relativize as he translates. Reporting an occasion on which relations with local inhabitants began to sour, he tells of how
Tupia who I beleive guessd that they were coming to attack us immediately went upon the poop and talkd to them a good deal, telling them what if they provokd us we should do…. They answerd him in their usual cant “come ashore only and we will kill you all.” Well, said Tupia, but while we are at sea you have no manner of Business with us, the Sea is our property as much as yours. Such reasoning from an Indian who had not had the smallest hint from any of us surprizd me much and the more as these sentiments I never had before heard him give a hint about in his own case.
33
Both Cook and Banks were equally aware of Tupaia’s value to the expedition, but their sense of this value is linked to alternative perceptions of the role of the intermediary. Whereas Banks figures this as dialogic in the proper sense—reciprocal and interlocutory—Cook stresses Tupaia’s role as functionary, focusing on the ways in which his capacities as translator, navigator, and informant served the greater purpose of the British expedition. As I noted, while his journal entry mentioning Tupaia’s decision to accompany the voyage acknowledges Tupaia’s superior qualifications, Banks also links them to his own project of exploration. As the account of the voyage progresses, Cook, while recording Tupaia’s initiatives in directing the ship’s course and parleying with the local people, continues to stress his supplementary and functional role: “Tupia always accompanies us in every excursion we make and proves of infinate service.” His attitude is encapsulated in a recurring phrase in his journal, “by means of Tupia.” On January 31, at Queen Charlotte’s Sound, he writes: “I next, by means of Tupia, explained to the old man and several others that we were come to set up a mark upon the Island in order to shew to any ship that might put into this place that we had been here before.”
34 On leaving New Zealand, projecting further voyages of Pacific exploration, he refers to the advantage that Tupaia would give the British, primarily in his ability to serve as an ambassador in promoting friendly relations:
But, should it be thought proper to send a ship out upon this service while
Tupia lieves and he to come out in her, in that case she would have a prodigious advantage over every ship that have been upon discoveries in those seas before; for by means of Tupia, supposeing he did not accompany you himself, you would always get people to direct you from Island to Island and would be sure of meeting with a friendly reseption and refreshments at every Island you came to.
35
Banks, by contrast, always acknowledges Tupaia’s initiative. There is no sense that orders are issued that Tupaia carries out effectively: rather, Banks records Tupaia’s practices and strategies of cross-cultural interaction, which appear, in the absence of any other source of command, to be self-motivated. Thus, in New Zealand, interchange with the Maori is represented not as an act of translation via Tupaia as the interpreter but as a conversation between Maori and Tupaia that is later translated to include the British: “They came tolerably near and answerd all the questions
Tupia askd them very civily”; “After they had done this for some time they came nearer and
Tupia talkd with them from the stern; they came into better temper and answerd
his questions”; “Just then Tupia came upon deck, they ran
to him immediately,
he assurd them that their freind would not be killd.”
36 Instead of asking what the British would achieve “by means of Tupia,” he asks what Tupaia seems to manage by way of the British. This impression is augmented by Banks’s tendency to figure Tupaia as in every way capable: he alone was equipped to “comfort” and “make easy” two Maori boys taken on board the
Endeavour, able to cure himself of scurvy or to find a way of roasting coconuts that “made them lose intirely their acridity.” He embraces the spectrum of useful skills: nurturer, surgeon, cook, preacher (“he however seemd to be much better vers’d in such legends than any of them, for whenever he began to preach as we calld it he was sure of a numerous audience who attended with most profound silence to his doctrines”).
37 Tupaia appears to encompass traditionally masculine and feminine spheres of knowledge with a self-sufficient expertise of which Banks is clearly in awe.
Tupaia’s illustration of longhouses and canoes in Tahiti. (Add. 15508, f.12 © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 2012)
One of the things that Banks and Tupaia seem to have shared was an interest in specific forms of local manufacture and in individual botanical specimens. Among a series of pictures that have recently been identified as drafted by Tupaia while he was aboard the
Endeavour is one illustrating a view toward the shore, showing two different types of canoe, a longhouse, and different varieties of trees and plants with reticulated branches and leaves and carefully rendered fruits. These include coconut and banana palms, taro, breadfruit, and pandanus. Jennifer Newell claims that the drawing “provides unique insights into the conceptions and priorities of a Polynesian man of the late eighteenth century,” noting that “he has drawn each plant as a specific type.”
38 Tupaia’s typology, as evidenced in the image, comes close to the Linnean system favored by Banks, in appearing to categorize according to edibility and usefulness. The image appears to have been drawn while the
Endeavour was still in the Society Islands. Another shows Banks trading a handkerchief for a lobster during the ship’s visit to New Zealand. Here Tupaia appears to have shifted his interest from use to exchange value and to be thinking about natural productions as both subsistence and trade, much as Banks did on his return to Britain. The first image is framed from the vantage point of the ship, and the second records an exchange between a representative of the land and one who has come across the sea. Tupaia appears to be using the perspective of the traveler to elaborate from a local to a global perspective.
Tupaia himself never reached England, so Banks was unable to host him, to continue their exchanges, and to see what kinds of knowledge the Raiatean was interested in gathering in Britain for dissemination in the Society Islands. He died in Batavia and is mourned in the pages of Banks’s journal. Throughout this text, Banks’s ethnographer’s accreditation of Tupaia’s learning, his recognition of his sensibility and reason, and his noninstrumentalism in comparison with Cook all speak to an understanding that they were coparticipants both in the discovery of facts and in the establishment of modes of interpretation. But Banks and Tupaia also were linked by a form of Tahitian patronage. Tupaia was Purea’s erstwhile lover as well as her chief adviser. Banks subsequently became Purea’s lover while in Tahiti, a relationship that, once it was intimated in Hawkesworth’s
Voyages, scandalized British society. In Tupaia’s case, the role of consort had been one of personal advancement and power. In turn, he appears to have encouraged the union between Banks and his own former lover, while the preeminent woman implicitly ratified the bond between the two men. When Banks returned to England, however, he and Tupaia became scandalously identified in the British public imagination, through the figure of Purea (“Oberea”), as exchangers of sexual, not cultural, knowledge. The legacy of Purea’s Tahitian patronage threatened to destabilize those metropolitan patronage networks that Banks was trying to consolidate in the period between the
Endeavour voyage and his presidency of the Royal Society. Botanical and sexual knowledge become figures for each other in the cycle of Banks satires that followed the publication of Hawkesworth’s
Account of the Voyages in 1773. In John Scott’s
Epistle from Oberea, Queen of Tahiti, to Joseph Banks (1773), Purea is portrayed in “wise debate” with her “faithful senate,” formulating policy regarding the arrival of British ships. By opting for gift exchange over war, she is said to have “sooth’d the terrors of Tupia’s mind.” A footnote suggests that Tupaia himself represents the greatest token of her intimacy with Banks: “Tupia was Prime Minister to Oberea. She consented that he should come to England with Mr. Banks, and thereby gave the strongest proof of her attachment to that gentleman. Unfortunately this great politician and philosopher died on the voyage.”
39 The rest of the poem unfolds as a catalog of the sexual highlights of Banks’s voyage, cribbed from Hawkesworth. In this context Tupaia’s death implicitly represents both the death of the possibility of authorization through cultural exchange and its substitution with the scandalous figure of an excessively libidinized Banks.
“Not a Proper Sample”
Although keen to return to the Pacific, Banks eventually disengaged from Cook’s second expedition after his attempts to redesign the
Resolution to accommodate “all kind of curious things, for use, amusement and pleasure,” modifications for which he “had put himself to very great expence,” led to the ship’s being declared top heavy and restored to its original form.
40 There were other ways in which Banks was considered inappropriate as a representative of science for the second voyage. Not just luxury but libido played a role: the scandal of his relations with Tahitian women had begun to surface, and it later transpired that a disguised female companion was awaiting him at the Cape of Good Hope, intending to join him as a transvestite assistant. If Banks hoped for further exchanges of knowledge in the mode he had enjoyed with Tupaia, it was not until July 1774, when the
Adventure returned from Cook’s second circumnavigation, that Banks got his proxy “Tahitian” friend: Mai. Like Tupaia, Mai was a Raiatean refugee who had been living in Tahiti since the early 1760s. Unlike Tupaia, he reached Britain and later returned to Tahiti. Anne Salmond’s assessment of the relationship between Banks and Mai foregrounds the latter’s role as a replacement exotic: “Mai’s arrival in London was reported by the British press, who delighted in this exotic visitor. For Banks, who had hoped to bring Tupaia to Britain, his advent was a godsend. He carried Mai off and lodged him in his townhouse.”
41 Mai is represented here as both substitute and trophy. But like Banks at this stage of his career, Mai figures in the literature of his visit as a less than ideal scientific interlocutor: much more specimen than authority.
42Cook’s comments on Mai exemplify the skepticism with which he was greeted:
I at first rather wondered that Captain Furneaux would encumber himself with this man, who, in my opinion, was not a proper sample of the inhabitants of these happy islands, not having any advantage of birth, or acquired rank; not being eminent in shape, figure or complexion. For their people of the first rank are much fairer, and usually better behaved, and more intelligent than the middling class of people, among whom Omai is to be ranked.
43
As “improper sample” rather than acknowledged authority, Mai is regarded as unfit to mediate Tahitian culture. Cook’s comments make clear the ways in which issues of “rank” were interwoven with perceptions of intelligence. Mai is understood to belong to the second level of Tahitian status hierarchy (the ra’atira class, who were tenant farmers rather than rulers), a distinction made primarily in terms of physical description. Bougainville, who had brought a Tahitian, Ahutoru, back to Paris some years earlier, had been forced to defend his visitor against similar hierarchies:
The inhabitants of Taiti consist of two races of men, very different from each other, but speaking the same language, having the same customs, and seemingly mixing without distinction. The first, which is the most numerous one, produces men of the greatest size; it is very common to see them measure six (Paris) feet and upwards in height. I never saw men better made, and whose limbs were more proportionate: in order to paint a Hercules or a Mars, one could no where find such beautiful models. Nothing distinguishes their features from those of Europeans: and if they were cloathed; if they lived less in the open air, and were less exposed to the sun at noon, they would be as white as ourselves: their hair in general is black. The second race are a middle size, have frizzled hair as hard as bristles, and both in colour and features they differ but little from mulattoes. The Taiti man who embarked with us, is of this second race, though his father is chief of a district: but he possesses in understanding what he wants in beauty.
44
Like Mai, Ahutoru is perceived to be a member of the “second race” in Tahiti and becomes the subject of an anxiety that second-rate (“second race”) products may be veritable cultural imposters, misrepresenting themselves at the metropole.
The notion of a hierarchy, ostensibly intellectual but implicitly in rank, between Banks’s two friends Tupaia and Mai, is rehearsed throughout the archive of Mai’s visit to London. In the preface to his A Voyage Round the World, George Forster figured Mai as the sensual child to Tupaia’s self-regulating adult:
He was not able to form a general comprehensive view of our whole civilized system, and to abstract from thence what appeared most strikingly useful and applicable to the improvement of his country. His senses were charmed by beauty, symmetry, harmony, and magnificence; they called aloud for gratification, and he was accustomed to obey their voice. The continued round of enjoyments left him no time to think of his future life; and being destitute of the genius of Tupaïa, whose superior abilities would have enabled him to form a plan for his own conduct, his understanding remained unimproved.
The comparison between Mai’s concupiscence and Tupaia’s austere authority is sustained implicitly in Forster’s discussion of the complicity between Mai’s avidity for British objects and a British desire to load him with what would prove, once decontextualized, to be useless gifts:
He carried with him an infinite variety of dresses, ornaments, and other trifles, which are daily invented in order to supply our artificial wants. His judgment was in its infant state, and therefore, like a child, he coveted almost every thing he saw, and particularly that which had amused him by some unexpected effect. To gratify his childish inclinations, as it should seem, rather than from any other motive, he was indulged with a portable organ, and electrical machine, a coat of mail, and a suit of armour. Perhaps my readers expect to be told of his taking on board some articles of real use to his country; I expected it likewise, but was disappointed.
45
Figured repeatedly as greedy child, Mai is regarded as ill equipped to reciprocate British generosity with authentic gifts of Society Islands cultural knowledge: he is consistently represented as recipient rather than donor.
Between the death of Tupaia and the forging of his fortuitous allegiance with Mai, Banks, as we have seen, had achieved a two-sided public identity: his scientific reputation became coimplicated with sexual notoriety. A related phenomenon was manifest in relation to Mai, whose metropolitan explorations were reported as double entendre. Thus, as earlier with Tupaia, Banks and Mai also seem to have become interchangeable, being paired in the public imagination by perceived resemblance. The satirical verse written after Mai’s arrival in Britain teases out the meaning of the association between two men understood to be united by a dubious similarity rather than enduring contact. In An Heroic Epistle, from Omiah to the Queen of Otaheite (1775), London is depicted as a city
Where Macaronies, Sçavoir vivres rife,
And varied whims of puppyhood surprise:
Whose only care is in ambiguous dress
To veil their sex, that wiser folks may guess.
Banks, famously caricatured in 1772 as both the “fly-catching” and “botanic macaroni” and depicted in variously “ambiguous” states of cross-cultural dress and undress during his time in Tahiti, is a shadow presence in the epistle. Meanwhile, Mai, as commentator, stands aloof from a declining metropolitan civilization, criticizing its arts and sciences, including the transactions of the Royal Society. William Preston’s Seventeen Hundred and Seventy-Seven concludes with a call for sexual exchange (a concept rendered synonymous, by means of the popular image of Banks, with scientific exchange) between London and Tahiti:
In pleasure’s sources, what a gainful trade!
Of mutual science, what exchanges made!
46
In this compromised context of exchange, Mai and Banks are depicted as both passive and active: swapping roles of overweening carnality and curious effeminacy, their associated authority undermined even as it is acknowledged.
Conclusion: Taking Notice
It is this co-identification of the nascent figure of the scientist with the exotic figure of the cultural intermediary that, it seems to me, was anticipated by Banks in the journal entry I cited at the beginning of this chapter. Banks’s skeptical anticipation that “the government will never in all human probability take any notice of” Tupaia anticipates a lack of official curiosity about indigenous cultures that must be compensated for by the compromised curiosity of the privately wealthy. Indeed, Banks intimates that a figure like Tupaia, despite the wealth of cultural and navigational knowledge he conveys, can be understood in British terms only as something collected on the whim of a wealthy gentleman. But such a perception constrains Banks as well as Tupaia. Caught between the identities of serious scientist and wealthy dilettante, Banks is relegated, in a society that can see the curious exotic only as exotic curiosity, to the role of undiscriminating aristocratic collector. Tupaia’s and Banks’s authority as voyaging subjects are, in other words, codependent. If Tupaia is to be disregarded, Banks knows he will find himself equally reduced, from man of science to showman. Banks’s turn at the end of the passage to the prospect of improving and interesting conversation, mutual respect and admiration, and real amusement clearly frames the notorious tiger comparison as a false perception, effectively a joke between engaged interlocutors at the expense of British society and, belatedly, of some of the more humorless versions of postcolonial reparative reading.
Once Banks was confined to the metropole, his notion of the cultural intermediary also became confined to European interlocutors: travelers and settlers, gardeners and collectors, who could engage in detailed correspondence first and foremost on the climate, soil, and botanical productions of new territories. As Banks’s interests centered more on the acquisition of botanical specimens and on colonial agriculture, his interest in local manners and customs beyond the realm of cultivation was undoubtedly increasingly sidelined. Even by the time he drafted his instructions for Archibald Menzies, botanist on the Vancouver expedition (1791–1795), Banks’s curiosity regarding local practice seems largely confined to a preoccupation with determining the existence of cannibalism:
In all instances where you can procure a friendly intercourse with the natives you are to make careful enquiry into their manners, customs ceremonies Religion Language manufactures and every other thing in your opinion likely to interest mankind & if you find the Abominable Custom of Eating human Flesh which they are said to Practice to be really in use among them you are if you can do it with safety & propriety to be present at some of their fam’d repasts in order to bear witness to the existence of a Practice all but incredible to the inhabitants of Civilis’d Countries and discern if you can the original motives for a custom for which it seems impossible to suggest any probably Cause.
47
Again, a classic transition appears to have been effected, with interest in mediated cultural knowledge reduced to observation (“bear witness”) and prejudiced by exoticizing speculation. Yet the influence of Banks’s first and, I would argue, formative cultural intermediary, Tupaia, can be sensed even in an archive in which more immediate indigenous presence dwindles. I earlier suggested that Tupaia’s drawings from the
Endeavour voyage reflect an interest both in the typological observation and recordation of botanical productions and in their incorporation within cross-cultural exchange. Whether these emphases reflected Tupaia’s own priorities or his exchanges with Banks, it remains notable that Banks was to continue to promulgate these principles in his instructions to his botanical informants across the globe. The illustrations of George Tobin from William Bligh’s
Providence voyage to transport breadfruit specimens to the Caribbean, a key Banksian project, were, as Jenny Newell points out, distinguished by their attention to “illustrating the resources in the landscape”: they testify to natural use value as seen from the perspective of the ship and of exchange. Tupaia’s illustration of the Polynesian shoreline is prototypical of the kinds of detailing and focus that Banks later required of European cultural intermediaries like Tobin. Moreover, each of the types of Europeans that Banks later found qualified to act as his intermediaries belongs to one or two of the range of categories encompassed by Tuapai’s exemplary expertise. As David Mackay summarizes, “Occupationally the Banksian collectors fell predominantly into four groups: horticulturalists, gardeners, and botanists; physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries; civil servants, officials and army officers; and naval and merchant officers, navigators and explorers.”
48 Earlier I drew attention to Banks’s expressions of awe in detailing the range of accomplishments demonstrated by Tupaia, Purea’s chief “official,” who is represented as combining the skills of the physician and apothecary, navigator, and explorer with those of a mediator of botanical and religious expertise. As a traveling local informant, with an interloper’s authority, Tupaia modeled the qualifications for informed cultural observation and analysis. Perhaps, then, it was his subsequent European intermediaries who constituted the “repetition of
partial presences,” the mimic versions, of Banks’s first and greatest interlocutor, Tupaia.
49 Certainly Tupaia continues to interrogate a globalized intellectual historical project, critiquing its assumptions and expanding its frame.
Notes