LITTLE CAN BE SAID WITH ASSURANCE ABOUT THE EARLY LIFE OF THE YOUNG Polynesian who came to be known as Omai. It is generally agreed that he was a native of Raiatea, an island of the Society Group to the northwest of Tahiti. There is less unanimity concerning his age, but he seems to have been born, by European reckoning, soon after the middle of the eighteenth century — about the year 1753 according to one reliable witness.1 The rest can be pieced out from his own uncertain testimony or is to be inferred from the recorded customs of his people.2
Mai, as he was called by his family, was, it appears, a younger son and a member of the raatira, the second order of Raiatean society. Hence his birth would not have been celebrated with the observances that marked such an event in the superior class, the arii. Not for Mai the elaborate ceremonies attending the first public appearance of a future chief; and not for Mai the human sacrifice. Nevertheless, all unconsciously in earliest infancy he was introduced to those traditional rites that were to govern his actions throughout every stage of his future existence. With whatever trophies they could muster, his relatives gathered at their meeting place, the ancestral marae, to greet the newborn child. There in an atmosphere of high seriousness the religious offices were performed, perhaps by his father. The prescribed incantations were recited and a sacrifice was probably offered up in the form of a slaughtered pig. Then in the customary Polynesian manner followed speeches, feasting, the exchange of gifts.
After his ceremonial début Mai returned to his female kin, remaining in their indulgent care till he emerged from babyhood. They fed him with the best of food to make him fat, they bathed him in cold water to make him strong, they rubbed his body with scented oils, they pampered him, they petted him. Gradually he came to recognize their faces and in time learned to distinguish the names and features of the small group that assembled at the local marae. Precise relationships were at first obscure or may have seemed unimportant, since all were linked by ties of blood and joined in reverence for their common ancestors. Later, however, Mai was taught to differentiate carefully among his various kinsfolk and would have applied to each a special term indicating the place he or she held in the intricate network of family affinities.
From an early age the boy would have grown familiar with the bays and lagoons of his native island. He learned to swim almost as soon as he began to walk and even in childhood would have picked up fragments of traditional lore from the men and women thronging the palm-fringed beaches. The Raiateans were a great seafaring people, renowned fishermen and expert canoe-builders. Most revered of all their deities was Taaroa, god of the sea, and in common with other Polynesians they delighted in the legends of Maui, supreme angler of all creation. Mai heard of the hero’s exploits as he played on the beach with his brothers or listened at night while members of his family diverted themselves with the telling of tales. In addition he heard and memorized practical hints thrown out by his elders — the best shells to use for making fish-hooks, the various methods of weaving nets, the techniques and ritual followed in fashioning a canoe.
1 Fishing by torchlight
His knowledge expanded when, perhaps in the company of a taio or special friend, he explored the fertile valleys and steep volcanic hills of the interior. Like Taruia and Vini of Tahitian legend, they scaled the heights in search of prized feather birds or with boyish abandon slid over slippery cascades into the pools below. But these expeditions were fraught with peril to the uninitiated. All Society Islanders and Tahitians venerated Raiatea as the most ancient of the group, the primal source of their being. The island abounded in burial sanctuaries and marae, one of which, Taputapuatea, was the most sacred in Polynesia. Mai and his companions learned that they must avoid such places in case they infringed the laws of tapu and incurred the fearful penalties imposed by gods and men.
The laws of tapu, the growing child soon realized, governed many of his actions. He must not approach the men working on a sacred canoe or the builders of a chieftain’s marae — they were strictly tapu. He must not deface the great forest trees or hunt the rarer birds — they, too, were tapu. The crops of taro and breadfruit were tapu until ready for harvesting, and so were certain delicacies reserved for the chief. This and other prohibitions were formulated in the sayings Mai learned from his elders. ‘These things which are tapu to the arii must not be eaten’, they told him, specifying further: ‘the turtle, the cavally, the chest and fillet of the hog, the first fruits of the land. All these are tapu.’3
Other precepts defined his duties to his birthplace, to the chiefly class, to his parents, to the members of his family:
To the land that bore you, all owe respect: it is the parent.
To the arii, to his children, to his family, all owe respect. The arii is sacred as a god. He is the descendant of the gods.
2 A marae in Tahiti
To the blood of their parents, all owe respect. Beware that you do not sin against it.
To your relations by blood or adoption you must be faithful, and to your stock. Do not avert your eyes from the misfortune of your stock.
Others again prescribed the sacred laws of hospitality and laid down the rules covering property:
Let your eye not fall upon a man who passes your door without bidding him come in to eat. You must share your food with your neighbour.
Let your hands be always open. You must never refuse to give anything that is demanded from you.
Such guides to conduct were instilled into the boy or absorbed unconsciously when he was allowed to accompany his father to welcoming ceremonies for visitors and the annual festival of first-fruits. On that occasion vast quantities of breadfruit and pork were baked in ovens of heated stones covered with leaves and earth. After it was cooked the food was placed in gourds or wooden dishes and served in long sheds decorated with greenery and garlands of flowers. Strict protocol governed the placing of guests, and the women were housed apart from the men. When he was considered big enough to sit with his father and older brothers, Mai had left infancy behind him. At the age of ten or so he passed another milestone: he was taken to an expert in the art of tatau and received the first painful incisions of designs that would, in the coming decade, cover legs, thighs, and much of his body.
At about this time — or perhaps even before the ordeal of tattooing had begun — the boy was caught up in a disaster of which only the barest facts are known.4 Warriors from the nearby island of Borabora, under their chief Puni, invaded Raiatea and overwhelmed the defenders. Mai lost his father in battle and fled with his surviving relatives to Tahiti, one hundred miles away. Apparently the dispossessed family settled at Haapape, a district in the north of Tahiti Nui, the larger of the island’s two circular peninsulas. Other refugees, among them an arii and priest called Tupaia, sought asylum farther south at Papara, domain of the high chief Amo and his redoubtable wife Purea.
Haapape resembled Mai’s old home in most respects. There was a similar setting of beach and lagoon backed by forest-clad hills; except for minor differences the language was the same; and in essentials the religion and social customs of the two places were identical. Tahitian children spun their tops and launched their toy canoes and played hide-and-seek just as Mai had done in Raiatea. The Tahitian people ranged themselves in the same immutable order — the arii at the top, the raatira in between, and beneath them the lowly and landless manahune. And, exactly as in Raiatea, the Tahitians assembled at their marae to minister to the gods and carry out their age-old observances. All this was only natural, for, as the Tahitians themselves acknowledged, Raiatea was their ancient parent, the revered Havaii of myth and legend.
Mai and his people were thus not strangers in completely alien surroundings. They came to Tahiti as honoured guests, greeted with all the consideration due to kinsmen in distress, even the most distant of kinsmen. But nothing could alter the fact that, like the despised manahune, they were landless and, once the first lavish hospitality of their hosts was expended, must contrive a living wherever they could. More galling still, they were far removed from their own marae and must, in the manner of exiles, gather at the seashore to practise their devotions. There they may be pictured as they directed incantations at the heads of their conquerors or renewed their vows to avenge the dead and regain their lost homeland.
Mai spent the next few years in Tahiti, adding to his stores of knowledge and experience while he passed from childhood to adolescence. It seems unlikely that he, an outsider, was admitted to the seminaries reserved for priestly initiates. But he may well have attended one of the secular houses of learning where pupils memorized the chants which preserved traditional lore — the names and movements of the stars, the divisions of time, the sequence of seasons, the ancient myths and genealogies. Whatever its source, his formal learning was supplemented, as in Raiatea, by practical lessons imparted by elders or picked up casually on beaches and plantations. Having outgrown childish games, he now competed with his friends in such manly sports as boxing, wrestling, and surf-riding; and in their company he watched the dances and dramatic spectacles performed by bands of roving entertainers, the arioi. Like youths in other ages and countries, Mai would have taken pride in his developing body and, more fortunate than many, would have learned to make love in the uncomplicated Tahitian fashion. He was approaching, or had already undergone, initiation into manhood — a solemn event marked by the rite of supercision — when, at about the age of fourteen, he was again overtaken by disaster. Mai was a victim in the Tahitians’ last forlorn stand against intruders from Europe.5
THROUGHOUT THE FIRST FLEETING DECADE OF MAI’S EXISTENCE, distant rulers, geographers, and philosophers had been shaping the destiny of his people and his own future. In 1753, the probable year of his birth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau began the famous discourse where he attempted to answer questions posed by the Academy of Dijon concerning the origins of human inequality. Earlier he had shown to his satisfaction and apparently to the Academy’s (since they awarded him their prize) that so far from purifying society the arts and sciences had corrupted it. Now he addressed himself to the new topic which, as he conceived it, called for an inquiry into the nature of man. Tor how’, he asked, ‘is it possible to know the Source of the Inequality among Men, without knowing Men themselves?’6
Rousseau gave a novel twist to an ancient debate by enlarging its scope and bringing to it the resources of a probing mind and imagination. He claimed that, unlike most of his predecessors, he was concerned not with Europeans alone and not only with his own time. His subject was the whole of human kind since its primeval beginnings. Accordingly he proceeded to trace stage by stage man’s course through dark aeons of history to his present condition of wickedness and folly. Only one shaft of light relieved the sombre picture. It was Rousseau’s far from idyllic evocation of ‘the real Youth of the World’ — that epoch when, after emerging at length from the primal state of nature, human beings lived in rustic cabins, dressed in animal skins, used feathers and shells as ornaments, and with sharp-edged stones scooped out little fishing-boats or fashioned clumsy instruments of music. Most savage nations had been found in this condition, he said, and, as their example showed, it could be sanguinary and cruel. Yet despite its imperfections it was, Rousseau held, the state best suited to men, the one in which they might have remained but for a fatal accident — the invention of metallurgy and agriculture. ‘With the Poet, it is Gold and Silver,’ he proclaimed, ‘but with the Philosopher, it is Iron and Corn, which have civilized Men, and ruined Mankind.’7
3 Opening page in the first English translation of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality
The Discourse on Inequality was not merely a bleak essay in speculative reasoning. At each step of his argument, often in extended asides, Rousseau supplied examples drawn from diverse sources, ancient and modern, acknowledged or unacknowledged. When illustrating the probable attributes of primitive man he took from de Condillac details of the child who in 1694 had been discovered living among bears in the forests of Lithuania: ‘He did not shew … the least Mark of Reason, walked upon Hands and Feet, had no Language but some uncouth Sounds, which had nothing common with those of other Men.’ No authorities were cited, however, in a summary account of other Europeans on the border line between the human and the animal: the little Hanoverian recently befriended by the English royal family; the two wild creatures, resembling quadrupeds, found in the Pyrenees in 1719; and, more remotely in the fourteenth century, the infant who had been suckled by wolves and who ‘used afterwards to say at the Court of Prince Henry, that had he his Choice, he would much rather take up with their Company again than live among Men.’8
4 The legendary Lithuanian bear child
Of human beings in the following era — or their modern and perhaps debased representatives — Rousseau spoke at greater length. Here he derived most of his facts from Peter Kolb, the German naturalist, from Father du Tertre, the missionary, and from the travellers represented in the Abbé Prévost’s Histoire Générale des Voyages. All such witnesses, he held, agreed about the physical prowess of barbarous nations and the acuteness of their senses. The Hottentots, according to Kolb, were better fishermen than the Europeans at the Cape of Good Hope; in swimming nothing could compare with them; their nimbleness in running was altogether inconceivable; and they could distinguish with the naked eye ships which the Dutch saw only with the aid of glasses. Du Tertre said much the same of the West Indians, praising above all their skill at shooting with their arrows birds in flight or swimming fishes. The Americans were no less famous for strength and dexterity and had tracked down the Spaniards as exactly as the best dogs could have done. ‘Give civilized Man but Time to gather about him all his Machines, and no doubt he will be an Overmatch for the Savage’, Rousseau conceded, ‘but if you have a mind to See a Contest still more unequal, place them naked and unarmed one opposite to the other ….’9
As for the supposed superiority of civilization in other respects, Rousseau was far from convinced. Europeans had toiled for years to make savages conform to their own manner of living, he observed, yet they had been unable to prevail, even with the aid of religion. Missionaries sometimes made Christians but never civilized men. If these poor creatures were as unhappy as some people would have, why did they so constantly refuse to be governed like ourselves or live among us? Further, he pointed out:
Savages have been often brought to Paris, to London, and to other Places; and no Pains omitted to fill them with high Ideas of our Luxury, our Riches, and all our most useful and curious Arts; yet they were never seen to express more than a stupid Admiration at such Things, without the least Appearance of coveting them.
There was, for instance, the North American chief who had been presented to the English Court some thirty years before and offered a thousand gifts. He refused everything: our fire-arms seemed heavy and inconvenient; our shoes pinched his feet; our clothes encumbered his body. Again there were those young Greenlanders and Icelanders whom the Danes had tried to educate and who had only pined away with grief or perished in attempting to swim back to their own country. Finally there was the well-attested case of a Hottentot boy brought up a Christian by the Governor of the Cape, trained as a European, and sent to the Dutch Indies. Soon after returning, he visited his Hottentot relations, exchanged his European finery for a sheep’s skin, rejected Christianity, and announced his firm resolution to live and die in the manner of his ancestors.10
How varied was the human species, Rousseau reflected: some black, some white, some red, some beardless, some covered with hair. There had been and might still be people of gigantic size; it was even said there were whole nations with tails like quadrupeds. Possibly, he speculated, the orang-outangs and similar creatures reported by European travellers were those very beings which the ancients exalted as divinities under the name of satyrs and fauns. Perhaps more exact inquiries would show them to be men. Rousseau, however, was no mere credulous theorist but a pioneer of the nascent science of anthropology. The accounts in Prévost and similar collections, he complained, were gathered by ignorant or prejudiced voyagers — sailors, merchants, soldiers, missionaries. Better qualified observers, he urged, should now undertake the study of mankind:
… I am amazed that in an Age, in which Men so much affect useful and polite Learning, there does not start up two Men perfectly united, and rich, one in Money, the other in Genius, both Lovers of Glory, and studious of Immortality, one of whom should be willing to sacrifice twenty thousand Crowns of his Fortune, and the other ten Years of his Life to make such a serious Voyage round the World, as would recommend their Names to the present and future Generations; not to confine themselves to Plants and Stones, but for once study Men and Manners ….11
Rousseau’s plea, buried in a lengthy footnote, went unheeded at the time. Nor did his pessimistic exercise meet with approval from the academicians of Dijon, for on its appearance in 1755 they failed to award him a further prize. A year later, however, Charles de Brosses, one of Dijon’s most eminent citizens and President of the Burgundian Parliament, published a work that not only won acceptance in official circles but directly influenced the course of Pacific history. In his Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes, following the lead of his friend Buffon, de Brosses issued a blue-print for the exploration of the unknown south and, incidentally, used the term Polynesia to define the island-studded Pacific.12
De Brosses went beyond most other geographers in thinking undiscovered land might lie in the southern ocean. He believed a great continent — perhaps more than one — must exist in order to maintain the equilibrium of the globe. Within easy reach of the French possessions in India, he advised, a settlement should be established whence an expedition could set out to explore these vast regions with their wealth of spices, gold, and precious stones. Such treasure might be exchanged for trifles or the iron for which islanders showed an insatiable desire. But the aims, he emphasized, should not be purely commercial, while the leader must be not only brave and capable but also humane. And (here de Brosses was more lavish and more specific than Rousseau) he should take with him cartographers, astronomers, botanists, painters, and such men as might win the friendship of savages — physicians, surgeons, even musicians. This, he proclaimed, was an enterprise wherein the French monarch might win glory not through war (engulfing his subjects and his neighbours in common misery), but through peaceful exploration and settlement.13
The sequel to de Brosses’s benign planning was the outbreak of a bloody and protracted conflict that spread from Europe to the Indies and the Americas. The Seven Years War, nevertheless, made its contribution to the grand design of Pacific discovery. Future explorers, ranging through eastern waters and the Atlantic, acquired or perfected the skills of seamanship until, with the coming of peace in 1763 (about the time Mai was expelled from his childhood Eden), the rival nations resumed their search for colonies and markets. In this new phase of the struggle the initiative was taken by the British who in the years immediately following the Peace of Paris sent three expeditions to the south and produced their own continental theorist, the Scottish-born Alexander Dalrymple.
A correspondent and admirer of de Brosses, Dalrymple printed in 1767 a small book, Discoveries made in the South Pacifick Ocean, wherein he presented his views on that vast area of the globe together with some personal details. Almost since infancy, he wrote, exploration had been ‘the fond object of his attention’. Stirred by the example of Columbus and Magellan, he had been ‘inflamed with the ambition to do something to promote the general benefit of mankind, at the same time that it should add to the glory and interest of his country.’ His ambition focusing on the discovery of Terra Australis, this had become ‘the great Passion of his life’. Not its discovery, he went on to correct himself, for since the continent had been seen by Abel Tasman and others, no one could possibly discover it. Such certitude would seem to have called for no support beyond the relevant voyage narratives which Dalrymple did in fact publish in this and a later more extensive compilation. But he also provided scientific proof along lines similar to that given by de Brosses. The continent, he argued, was essential in order to counterpoise the weight of land in the north and maintain the earth’s equilibrium. He too urged the dispatch of an expedition to visit Terra Australis, there to open up ‘a very beneficial commerce’, and, again following de Brosses, set out the desirable qualities of its leader. ‘Intrepidity’ and ‘every naval accomplishment’ were required but also ‘knowledge … of past discoverers’, ‘a philosophick idea of winds and seasons’, ‘freedom from prejudice’, ‘and, perhaps, not less than all, a consideration of the rights and value of man’s life, to secure a patient abstinence from the use of fire-arms against the native Indians’.14
There can be no doubt that Dalrymple saw in himself the ideal leader but, as he was forced to acknowledge, he had been ‘disappointed in his hopes’ and compelled ‘to forego all thoughts of being employed in the manner he wished’. When an expedition was dispatched in 1767 his claims were passed over by the Lords of the Admiralty. Nor in appointing commanders for its two forerunners had they shown much concern for the qualities advocated by successive writers. They chose veterans of the late war more renowned for martial prowess and navigational skill than scholarship or humanity. The Hon. John Byron’s voyage in the Dolphin between 1764 and 1766 added little either to geographical knowledge or to history. But the next explorer, Samuel Wallis, while searching for the Southern Continent in the same vessel, lighted on Tahiti and so uncovered abundant material for poets and students of man.15
5 Tahitians and British clash; Omai was wounded on One Tree Hill at extreme right
LYRIC WRITERS AND HIGH-PRINCIPLED THEORISTS would have found nothing to inspire them in Wallis’s account of that seminal event. Rousseau, on the other hand, might have drawn from it support for his views on the wickedness of civilized man. Within hours of sighting the main island on 19 June 1767 the captain was already exasperated with the light-fingered natives who climbed aboard from their thronging canoes. The same day he cleared the ship by firing over the heads of his troublesome visitors — the Veriest Thieves I ever met’ he characterized them. As he sailed northwards in search of shelter and refreshment for his scurvy-stricken crew, such incidents multiplied and grew more serious, reaching a climax when he took refuge in a bay at the north-western tip of the island.16
On 24 June, while the ship was being warped into the harbour, a large fleet, commanded by a man seated on the canopy of a double canoe, gathered round the Dolphin and at a signal from the leader repeatedly showered it with stones. Wallis retaliated by ordering the guns to fire, which they did with destructive and dramatic effect. Half an hour later not a canoe could be seen and the inhabitants had vanished. The following day an armed party went ashore to take formal possession of the country, naming it at Wallis’s behest King George the Third’s Island. The captain and his lieutenant were both ill, so the ceremony was performed by Second Lieutenant Tobias Furneaux.17
Since all seemed quiet on the 26th, men were sent to fill water-casks at a river mouth near the anchorage. They were still busy when Wallis observed two fleets converging on the Dolphin from opposite ends of the bay while numerous warriors made for the watering party. Thinking, he explained, ‘it was necessary to conquer them in the beginning’, he ordered the crew to fire at the approaching canoes and then turn their guns on the shore. Immediately the fleets withdrew and the warriors fled to a hill overlooking the bay where crowds of women and children had already gathered. To drive home his stern lesson, Wallis next directed the guns at the multitude on the hill. They fired four shots, inflicting many casualties on combatants and onlookers alike. Among the wounded was the youthful Mai.18
Wallis had succeeded in blasting his reluctant hosts into submission. On the afternoon of the final clash, when the ship’s carpenters had destroyed every canoe they could find, abject envoys came to the watering-place bearing green emblems of peace together with gifts of food and cloth. The sick went ashore to recuperate and trading began for pork, poultry, fruit, and soon for sexual favours, purchased, like other commodities, with spikes and nails. Supplies were becoming scarce and prices dear when, on 13 July, Wallis was introduced to a ‘well looking Woman about forty five years old’, tall, and of Very Majestic Mein’. He called her simply ‘the Queen’, but she was in reality Purea of Papara on a visit to her husband’s northern kinsmen.19 Then at the height of her power, she had evidently heard of the strangers and decided to inspect them in person.
‘The Queen’ dominated proceedings in the fortnight that remained of the Dolphin’s stay. She entertained Wallis ashore, called on her maidens to massage him, and on their way back to the ship lifted him over every ‘Slough’ and stream with as much ease as he would have carried a child. She supplemented these and other courtesies with lavish gifts of food and scoured the countryside for further supplies. The captain was duly grateful. On 24 July, having informed his tearful hostess that he must soon leave, he consoled her with a tribute of truly regal proportions — ‘two Turkeys Two Geese, three Guinea hens, a Cat big with Kitten’ and in addition garden seeds, shirts, glass bottles, iron pots, cutlery. Three days later, while the men of the Dolphin were preparing to leave Port Royal Harbour (as Wallis named his anchorage), she came aboard, embraced her friends in the most affectionate manner, and, weeping bitterly, bade them farewell.20
Wallis was no naïve sentimentalist. In summing up his impressions of the islanders he wrote with candour: ‘notwithstanding all their civility, I doubt not but it was more through fear than love that they respected us so much ….’ His account of the country and its inhabitants, while appreciative, fell far short of ecstasy. They were, he observed, stout, clean-limbed, the men of a tawny colour, the women very handsome, some ‘really great beauties’ — yet they would prostitute themselves for a nail. He mentioned their walled enclosures decorated with ‘uncouth’ figures, praised their culinary practices, and with a professional seaman’s ardour supplied full details of their nautical accomplishments. The climate seemed very good, there were few ‘Muskettoes’ or ‘Flyes’ and no noxious reptiles. For the rest, the people drank no kind of liquor, used no sauce but salt water, and — an afterthought — all, both men and women, had their backsides marked black.21
The report made no mention of the islanders’ language and said virtually nothing of their social customs or religion. Wallis might have added to his knowledge of such topics had he, like later explorers, carried away a native-born informant. During the visit there had, in fact, been talk of recruits joining the crew for the homeward voyage, but they were not at the anchorage when the ship finally sailed.22 Nor was Mai one of their number; presumably the youth was still recovering from the wound inflicted when the Dolphin opened fire on 26 June.
MAI AND THE PEOPLE OF HAAPAPE were not directly involved in the next encounter with Europeans in the year following the Dolphin’s departure. After sighting the island on 2 April 1768, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville took the same northerly course as Wallis but turned back before reaching Port Royal Harbour and finally brought his ships into a lagoon off the district of Hitiaa. A seasoned navigator might have sought a less exposed roadstead, so sparing himself future anxieties. Bougainville, however, was a soldier-diplomat by profession and a sailor only at the call of patriotism. He had served under Montcalm in Canada and, influenced by his friend de Brosses, had set out to restore France’s honour by extending its dominions to the south. Brave, accomplished, humane, he approached de Brosses’s ideal of leadership, while his expedition fulfilled most of that theorist’s requirements. The two ships, the Boudeuse and the Étoile, carried an astronomer, a naturalist (Philibert Commerson), doctors, and a number of privileged supernumeraries, of whom the most eminent was the Prince of Nassau-Siegen. Only amateur musicians were included and unfortunately there were no artists.23
6 Captain Walls in conversion with ‘the Queen’
The French met with the same thronging reception as Wallis and unknowingly benefited from his harsh example. On 5 April, while they were still seeking an anchorage, one ‘savage’, a man of chiefly bearing, boarded the Étoile from a double canoe and insisted on staying the night. He was decked out in European clothes, treated to a meal in the sailors’ mess, and taken over the ship. At the sight of guns he grew pale, and he appeared to recognize muskets, for on seeing them in the great cabin he cried ‘poux, poux’, while gesturing to show that they caused death. Still dressed à la française, the same ‘Indian’ was one of the crowd that greeted Bougainville when he landed from the Boudeuse next morning. The leader and his party were received by a chief of even higher degree — Reti by name (or Ereti as it was rendered) — who guided them through a verdant landscape to his home where he entertained them with a simple meal of fruit and fish, served on the lawn outside the house and washed down with draughts of clear water. To Bougainville it seemed like a feast of the golden age in the company of people still living in that happy epoch. An idyllic episode came to a close as the visitors embarked to the ‘anacreontic’ strains of a native flute.24
Similar allusions would adorn the journals of Bougainville and his more erudite companions throughout the ensuing week. The tattooed warriors were compared with the painted Britons described by Julius Caesar, their more than compliant women were variously likened to the goddess Venus, Helen of Troy, Queen Dido, and Eve before the Fall. Once assured that the visit would be brief, these denizens of the antique world were lavish in their hospitality. Ereti provided an immense shed to house the sick, he brought badly needed supplies to the French, he supped with them, stayed overnight in their camp, and summoned one of his wives to sleep with the Prince of Nassau. His subjects followed suit, displaying only venial faults. They were, alas, ‘the most dexterous thieves in the Universe’, while their uninhibited curiosity could cause embarrassment or worse. They seemed to delight in witnessing the sexual act and one day, surrounding Commerson’s valet, they made unmistakable signs that the pretended manservant was a woman. Their victim was saved from further indignities by an officer who warded off the assailants by flourishing his sword. More serious incidents occurred, some with fatal results. On the morning of 10 April a native was shot dead; on the 12th three more were bayoneted in a brawl. Bougainville ostentatiously put the suspects in irons, but Ereti fled with his household and was reconciled only through Nassau’s patient diplomacy. ‘Are these the savages?’ asked one observer of the touching scene when the chief and his tearful wives made peace with the prince.25
Tahiti, showing principal districts and chiefs
These fatal clashes, combined with the onset of bad weather, convinced Bougainville it was time to leave. Accordingly he pressed on with the collection of supplies and drew up an Act of Possession naming the island New Cythera and the whole group the Bourbon Archipelago. As the Boudeuse unfurled its sails, Ereti arrived in a canoe, bringing not only his wives but a companion — none other than the Étoile’s first intrepid visitor — who now wished to join the expedition. Since he thought the volunteer might be of great service to the nation, Bougainville explained, he gave his consent; further, he promised Ereti to restore Louis (as the man was known) to his home. Following an exchange of gifts and embraces, the French bade farewell to their weeping hosts and set off. The Étoile had already reached the open sea in safety, but the Boudeuse struck serious trouble and left behind two of its anchors. Altogether, lamented the commander, he had lost six in nine days.26
The anchorage had been ‘detestable’ wrote Bougainville, but no other complaints marred his recollections of the landfall as he voyaged westward. Nature (to summarize an extended rhapsody) had placed the island in the world’s loveliest climate, embellished it with the most charming prospects, enriched it with every gift, peopled it with perhaps the happiest nation on earth. Legislators and philosophers should, he urged, go there to see as an established fact what they had not even dreamed of — a thronging populace of handsome men and beautiful women living together in health, plenty, and ordered amity. Not far removed from the state of nature, they practised their simple arts, toiled little, and enjoyed all the social pleasures of dancing, music, discourse, love. The last, Bougainville truly believed, was the only god they worshipped. Nor did they celebrate their devotions in solitude — the lovers’ transports were a public spectacle. Among other felicities, he noted, nature had denied them anything that would excite European cupidity and attract all the evils of the iron age. ‘Farewell, wise and happy people,’ he ended, ‘remain always as you are. I shall never recall without pleasure the brief time I spent in your midst and as long as I live I shall extol the happy isle of Cythera: it is the true Utopia.’27
Utopia, it soon appeared, was not exempt from civilized evils. By the middle of May men on both ships were found to be afflicted with venereal complaints. One of them was the native recruit who, though badly infected, made light of the malady, indicating that his fellow islanders treated it with herbs. While showing little aptitude for the French tongue, he made it clear that his country was called Taiti, while he himself was known as Ahutoru or, in the French rendering, Aoutourou. This name ultimately replaced both Louis and Boutaveris, his version of Bougainville which, following Tahitian custom, he adopted to honour the commander. He was a chief but of uncertain antecedents. Apparently he was a kinsman of Ereti or, as some said, a brother; one chronicler, on the other hand, held that his home was not Hitiaa but a different part of the island.28
During his perilous course through the south-western Pacific, Bougainville sometimes turned from more urgent concerns to contemplate his exotic passenger. Though he made little headway with the French language, Aoutourou did not lack intelligence. He showed detailed knowledge of the stars and took a keen interest in the navigation of the ship. He was evidently a man of delicate sensibilities, for he found the sight of routine shipboard punishments a torture. Bougainville described him as timid and sweet-natured. But he was not too timid to stand naked in defiance of his Polynesian cousins (whose dialect he failed to comprehend). With growing intimacy the commander picked up Tahitian words from his charge and learned of Tahitian customs — that of human sacrifice, for example. Aoutourou for his part displayed increasing admiration for French ways while blushing for his own. He was much impressed by his first glimpse of civilization, a small trading post in the Dutch East Indies, and asked whether Paris was as beautiful. His enthusiasm for the sights of Batavia had, in Bougainville’s view, saved Aoutourou from the effects of its pernicious climate, but he sickened before leaving the port and called it ‘the place that kills’. He is finally depicted at Mauritius in the tantalizing phrase of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre — ‘open, gay, a trifle dissolute’.29
Reaching Paris on 19 March 1769, Bougainville installed Aoutourou in his own home, but it was some weeks before he introduced him to his circle. The man had been unwell, he explained to his friends, the much travelled La Condamine and Pereire, the royal interpreter, who late in April scrutinized this novel specimen in two gruelling interviews. He was, they recorded, thirty years old, of average height, resembling in colour an East Indian or a Moor; his features were irregular but not deformed. The examination, interspersed with Bougainville’s praise of New Cythera, covered many subjects but dwelt more especially on language. Following exhaustive tests, the experts found Aoutourou incapable of pronouncing certain French sounds, while his vocabulary disclosed scarcely a word from any known tongue — a fact which, in their opinion, argued the isolation of his people. They listened with interest to the anecdote of Commerson’s valet and from it inferred that the natives’ sense of smell was so acute that they could distinguish female odours from male. Adding a personal touch to their observations, they noted the navigator’s solicitude for his charge and the affection each showed for the other. Soon after the second interview, on 30 April, Bougainville launched Aoutourou into society by presenting him to Louis XV and the young princes at Versailles. They displayed a gratifying curiosity but accounts of his response differ: according to one, he was dazzled by the regal spectacle; another states that the ‘savage’ expressed no emotion at all — not even, it seems, Rousseau’s ‘stupid Admiration’.30
Aoutourou was now à la mode, sought out by aristocrats and savants, welcomed into fashionable salons where the ideas of Rousseau had been simplified, sentimentalized, and associated with the ancient myth of a golden age. He was introduced to the Duke of Orleans and the young Duke of Chartres and the Prince of Conti; Mademoiselle de Lespinasse received him and the Duchess of Choiseul became both patroness and friend. At a dinner party given by Lacurne de Saint-Palaye of the French Academy, the President de Brosses saw his first Polynesian and, hearing the story of Commerson’s pretended valet, learnedly discussed its implications. Buffon inspected the unique representative of Austral man in the royal gardens and, as he contemplated the exile in a similar setting, the Abbé Delille was moved to sentimental versification. Rousseau was not ‘invited to study the uncorrupted descendant of natural man, but Diderot met him and wrote the probing and subversive Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville which he prudently refrained from publishing. Bougainville himself, who at first escorted Aoutourou everywhere, says little of his conduct in the polite world of the capital. He does, however, mention his protégé’s pleasure in the opera, his passionate love of dancing, and his delight in the theatre where he was taken backstage and presented to the singer Sophie Arnould and the tragedienne Mademoiselle Clairon. In time he learned to find his own way to performances and, though he still had only a smattering of French, could take daily excursions alone and make purchases, rarely paying more than their worth.31
By December Bougainville decided it was time for Aoutourou to return. He could not support the man for ever and the fickle Parisians had lost interest in this living witness to his own discoveries. Moreover, his plans for founding a Pacific empire, with himself as governor, had come to nothing, frustrated by official indifference and an empty treasury. So, at heavy expense to himself, he arranged for his friend’s passage to Mauritius, whence he would be transported to Tahiti. At the end of February 1770 the weeping Aoutourou embraced Bougainville for the last time and, bearing gifts from the Duchess of Choiseul to his distant countrymen, left for La Rochelle.32 More than four years were to pass before a second Polynesian — in the person of Mai — would make his appearance in Europe.
WHILE AOUTOUROU WAS FÊTED AND EXAMINED IN PARIS, the district of Haapape had again been visited by the British. On 13 April 1769 Lieutenant James Cook, Dalrymple’s successful rival, steered H.M.S. Endeavour into Port Royal Harbour and, escorted by an armed guard, went ashore with his party. The guard proved to be superfluous. It was less than two years since the Dolphin’s arrival and Wallis’s forceful lesson had not been forgotten. ‘No one of the Natives’, wrote Cook, ‘made the least opposission at our landing but came to us with all imaginable marks of friendship and submission.’ The natives had little reason to fear, for the newcomers’ aims were entirely peaceful. They came not to colonize or conquer but to observe the transit of Venus across the sun in the following June; and their choice of anchorage was due to a happy chance. Preparations for their voyage were already in train when Wallis returned to England and as a result of his report the newly discovered island was chosen as a base for their observations. The expedition was well qualified to carry out its mission. Cook, another veteran of the late war, was skilled in all the arts of navigation (among them astronomy), while one civilian member was Mr. Green, assistant to the Astronomer Royal. Of even greater moment for the future of learning (and the fortunes of Mai), the enterprise had been promoted by the Royal Society which had recommended the inclusion of one of its fellows, Mr. Banks, who had brought with him another fellow, Dr. Solander.33
Joseph Banks, wealthy patron of science, and Daniel Carl Solander, gifted pupil of Linnaeus, seem like the answer to Rousseau’s plea for two enlightened men who would travel the world and study their own species. The resemblance is probably coincidental. In setting out for the Pacific, Banks was following his own inclinations rather than a philosopher’s precepts. His first concern, moreover, was not mankind but inanimate nature. No mere moneyed dilettante, he had been an ardent botanist since boyhood and in the company of his like-minded friend Constantine Phipps had already journeyed far afield to Newfoundland and Labrador. When preparing for the present voyage he had spared neither trouble nor expense. At a cost of ten thousand pounds, Solander estimated, he had gathered a staff and supplied them with every possible facility. This was the best equipped expedition which had yet entered the Pacific and also the most accomplished. Besides Cook and Green there were navigators, map-makers, surgeons, and, in Banks’s entourage, another Swedish naturalist, two artist-draughtsmen, and his own personal servants. Only musicians were lacking from the specifications of de Brosses whose two volumes were included in the ship’s extensive library.34
To Banks, Port Royal seemed the ‘picture of an arcadia’ peopled by heroic figures on whom he conferred such names as Lycurgus, Hercules, and Ajax. Veterans of the Dolphin, on the other hand, noted the comparative fewness of inhabitants, the destruction of houses, and the scarcity of supplies. The position improved next day with the arrival of chiefs who led the British to the neighbouring district of Pare, about two miles to the west, and treated them with the hospitality shown to previous explorers. Banks, in the full vigour of early manhood, entered into the feasting and ceremonial with gusto. Forgetting his English fiancée and ignoring his obligations to a chief’s wife, he was soon in pursuit of a pretty girl ‘with a fire in her eyes’. On this happy occasion the natives fully sustained their reputation for generosity — but also for thievishness. Both Dr. Solander and the ship’s surgeon had their pockets picked; still more disastrously a day later, a man was shot by overzealous marines after snatching a musket. A loss that touched Banks more closely was the death on 17 April of his landscape-painter whose duties now fell on the accomplished botanical draughtsman, Sydney Parkinson.35
Haapape and the surrounding districts proved a paradise for Banks and his diminished staff. On the 18th he moved ashore to tents set up on the site of a fort then being built to serve as a depot and enclose the observatory. Soon he was immersed not only in botanical studies but in observations of this engaging if often exasperating people. He took charge of trade, he traversed the countryside with Cook and Solander, and indefatigably he probed into every aspect of island life. He acquired fresh informants with the arrival on the 28th of the Dolphin’s ‘Queen’, bringing in her train the Raiatean exile Tupaia whom he termed Tupia. The regal personage appeared in shipboard records as Oberea (or some similar variant), a form due to the mistaken fusion of the article ‘o’ with an English version of Purea. Other proper nouns (though not all) were likewise distorted, notably Otaheite which superseded Wallis’s King George’s Island on shipboard charts. Cook usually preferred local names to European and replaced Port Royal Harbour with his approximation to Matavai Bay; but he called the target of Wallis’s final fusillade One Tree Hill, not Taharaa, as it was known to the Tahitians. The palisaded encampment, completed at the end of April, received the doubly appropriate designation of Fort Venus.36
Oberea’s authority had visibly declined since the Dolphin’s departure. She and her husband, it was gradually disclosed, had suffered defeat in a factional war also involving the people of Haapape; hence the destruction noted by the Endeavour’s landing party. But she still retained some influence and in her personal affairs seemed as exuberant as ever. The day after she arrived Banks found her in bed with a ‘lusty’ young lover and later, he implies, was invited to replace that ‘gallant’ — an offer he evaded. An erotic note entered voyage journals in the carefree month of May. Cook describes a fertilization ceremony performed before Mr. Banks and a ritual act of copulation, apparently arranged by Oberea and carried out near Fort Venus. Banks says nothing of the second incident but coyly mentions his ‘flame’ and mildly censures Tupia for providing himself with a ‘bedfellow’, ‘tho’, he adds, ‘the gentleman cannot be less than 45.’ On his first appearance Banks characterized Tupia as ‘Obereas right hand man’. Soon the virile major-domo occupied a similar place in his own circle, acting as his ‘deputy’ in the reception of visitors or performing the roles of policeman and peace-maker in successive contretemps with his incorrigibly thievish hosts. He escorted Banks on several excursions but not when the botanist left with a party for the nearby island of Moorea to watch the transit of Venus on 3 June. It was a perfect day for observers both there and at Matavai Bay.37
Their official mission was completed, but Cook and his companions stayed on for more than a month, constantly adding to their knowledge of Tahitian customs. They witnessed a mourning ceremony in which Banks, stripped of his clothes and blackened with charcoal, took a leading part. They attended a performance given by the arioi who, ‘like Homer of old’, were poets as well as musicians and practised the ‘devilish’ crime of infanticide. They feasted on a ‘most excellent dish’ of roast dog, prepared by the versatile Tupia. They met Oberea’s husband Oamo (more correctly Amo) with their young son, already betrothed to a chieftainess ten years his senior. Further revelations followed towards the end of the month when Cook and Banks made a circuit of the island. At Hitiaa they spoke to Ereti and confirmed rumours that two ships, supposedly Spanish, had called there and carried away his ‘brother Outorro’ (brother perhaps in the broad tribal sense). Crossing to the smaller peninsula of Tahiti Iti, they reached Vaitepiha Bay in the domain of a hereditary chief, the Vehiatua. In this district they saw a grisly display of human jawbones and, more spoils of the recent fighting, a goose and a turkey given by Wallis to Oberea. When they moved on to the southern coast of Tahiti Nui, they were shown a ‘singular curiosity’, the lofty basket-work image of ‘Mauwe’ (the demigod Maui), ornamented with feathers. But the supreme spectacle of the tour awaited them farther along the coast at Papara. Here they found the ‘masterpiece of Indian architecture’, an immense marae built by Oberea in overweening pride to honour her son. And strewing the nearby coast lay ‘numberless’ human bones, the remains of warriors slain by her jealous rivals.38
At the beginning of July they returned to Matavai Bay to prepare for the voyage which, following Admiralty instructions, Cook would now undertake in search of the Southern Continent. While the ship’s gear was repaired and the fort dismantled, Banks continued to botanize and observe. He followed a river to its cascading headwaters, he planted citrus seeds brought from Brazil, he watched while a struggling girl was tattooed on the buttocks. The last days ashore were troubled by discord arising from the desertion of two love-stricken marines who were recovered after Oberea and others were held as hostages. Despite this indignity, the magnanimous woman was on the Endeavour when the ship weighed anchor on the 13th. She came to farewell not only her European friends but also Tupia. He had resolved to visit England, much to his own satisfaction, remarked Banks, for the Raiatean was ‘a most proper man’, well born, versed in the mysteries of his religion, and above all an experienced traveller. Since Cook refused responsibility for the recruit, Banks took him on his own account. ‘Thank heaven’, he exclaimed, ‘I have a sufficiency and I do not know why I may not keep him as a curiosity, as well as my neighbours do lions and tygers ….’ With Tupia went his servant, a boy aged about twelve, whom Banks called Tayeto.39
And what of Mai during this fresh incursion of European explorers? Facts again are few and often open to question. Now some sixteen years old, he was still living at Matavai Bay and, if one witness can be credited, was the pupil of a tahua or priestly expert. In that close-knit community he was certainly well aware of Cook, Banks, and Solander and knew them by their Tahitian names — Toote, Tapane, and Torano (alternatively Tolano). In spite of some vague evidence to the contrary, however, it is doubtful whether he was more to them than one of the anonymous crowd. He was too young, too lowly, too undistinguished to join the dignitaries who consorted with the visitors and figured in their journals. If he volunteered to sail with the expedition (and such offers, according to Cook, occurred daily), he could hardly have competed with the mature and accomplished Tupia. His own time was yet to come. Meanwhile, inspired by motives of revenge, he seems to have been meditating less extensive travels in the direction already taken by the Endeavour.40
Before they set out on their continental sweep, the navigators spent three agreeable weeks in the islands to the north-west of Tahiti. First sheltering in the small harbour of Fare on the coast of Huahine, they then crossed to Opoa in southern Raiatea (Ulhietea in Banks’s rendering). Next they sailed past adjoining Tahaa and the forbidding, seemingly inaccessible Borabora (or Bolabola) to their final anchorage, Tupia’s old home in the north of Raiatea. Cook took possession of the group in His Britannic Majesty’s name and called them the Society Isles ‘as they lay contiguous to one another’. In this excursion Tupia more than fulfilled Banks’s expectation. He prayed for wind when the ship was becalmed and navigated it through perilous reefs; he conducted the rituals of greeting and propitiated local deities; he was guide, interpreter, adviser, easing the way everywhere for his grateful patrons. Neither of the two main islands, they found, differed in essentials from Tahiti. Huahine, under its benevolent ‘King’ Ori (Cook’s Oree), was a scene of fruitful harmony. In Raiatea, by contrast, displays of human jawbones were a reminder that the place was in the hands of Boraboran conquerors. Yet the people seemed carefree, diverting themselves with dramatic and musical spectacles — heiva — to which the visitors were invited. Towards the end of their stay they met Tupia’s enemy, the renowned Opoony (Puni) of Borabora, and found ‘an old decrepid half blind man’, not the young warrior chief they had pictured. Laden with fresh produce, they left on 9 August ‘in search of what chance and Tupia might direct us to’, as Banks expressed it.41
Tupia disclaimed all knowledge of a continent in the surrounding seas but named numerous islands of which the Endeavour sighted only one in its southward course. For the rest, as week followed week, there was nothing but a limitless expanse of ocean with lonely dolphins or whales and a multitude of birds. Once they saw a waterspout and for some nights watched a comet which in Tupia’s view portended disaster for his fellow Raiateans at the hands of their Boraboran masters. Lacking other occupations, Banks worked to impose order on the notes and impressions gathered in the four months since he had landed at Matavai Bay. He left the natural history of the islands to be recorded in Parkinson’s drawings or in the specimens he and his assistants had gathered. But man, more especially Tahitian man, he described in detail — his appearance and dress, his social customs and occupations, his diversions, his religious beliefs, his language. For the first time Polynesians were presented without prejudice and in something of their complexity. Banks occasionally erred or theorized from faulty evidence: European preconceptions led him to interpret Tahitian society in feudal terms, while he accused their ‘Spanish’ forerunners of introducing venereal disease (his contribution to an unending and necessarily inconclusive controversy). Generally, however, he confined himself to the facts he had observed or, on such esoteric subjects as cosmogony, derived from Tupia. His was a major addition to the infant science of anthropology, precisely that informed study of men and manners which Rousseau had called for. And if his account failed to confirm either Rousseau’s thesis or Bougainville’s rhapsody, it celebrated the felicity of a people ‘exempt from the curse of our forefather’ — one of the phrases Cook borrowed in his more summary report.42
After fruitless searching in Pacific wastes, on 7 October they sighted New Zealand, directed there not by chance or Tupia but by its Dutch discoverer. Was this then the elusive continent, as Abel Tasman had conjectured in the previous century? Banks thought so, but Cook proved otherwise. As a result of six months’ navigation he showed that the country consisted of two large and many smaller islands. By a narrow margin he forestalled another Frenchman, de Surville, less concerned with exploration than commerce and notorious for kidnapping a chief, Ranginui, who succumbed to scurvy during the passage to South America. The British were responsible for more numerous and more violent deaths in the first unhappy clashes with a people not yet inured to naval discipline and, moreover, kidnappers on their own account (their intended victim being the boy Tayeto). The score of casualties might have been far higher but for Tupia’s benign presence. He was, Cook acknowledged, of ‘infinate service’ in their dealings with these aggressive ‘Indians’ who, surprisingly, spoke a tongue like his own and who, to his horror, were cannibals. He comforted youthful captives, he preached moderation to defiant warriors, he intervened in the flogging of a thief — repeatedly, in short, he smoothed over difficulties with his kindly tact. He was present when the country was added to His Majesty’s dominions at a ceremony in Queen Charlotte Sound, the spacious haven where the ship was overhauled before Cook made his circuit of the southern island and at the end of March 1770 left for New Holland. Tupia found little scope for his talents while the Endeavour pursued its hazardous course towards the Dutch East Indies. The naked inhabitants of New South Wales spoke an unknown language and were usually too shy to respond to his friendly approaches. And it was not Polynesian incantations but British skill that saved the ship from destruction in reef-strewn waters. To Banks’s concern his protégé showed symptoms of scurvy and was both dispirited and unwell when they reached Batavia early in October.43
7 Tayeto, Tupia’s servant, after Sydney Parkinson
The Endeavour was now in urgent need of repairs and, since their stay in the port would be lengthy, Banks rented a house where Tupia and his servant were also lodged. Tayeto, who was in the best of health, went ‘almost mad’ with excitement as he danced about the streets examining the ‘numberless novelties’. The ailing Tupia responded more soberly but seemed to grow better and, dressed in Tahitian costume, walked through the city with his patron. On one outing a man stopped them to ask whether the ‘Indian’ had not been there before. So Banks learned the truth about the expedition of which he had heard at Hitiaa. It was, he discovered, not Spanish but French, under the command of Monsieur Bougainville, and had passed through Batavia eighteen months before with a native very like Tupia and a woman in men’s clothes.44
Aoutourou had called Batavia ‘the place that kills’, and so it proved to his successors. By the end of October both were so ill with ‘a putrid dysentery’ that Banks took them back to the ship for a change of air before he himself sickened and left for the country. His charges at first showed some improvement but gradually declined under the compassionate eyes of Sydney Parkinson. Tupia ‘gave himself up to grief’, refused all medicines, and ‘in the highest degree’ regretted that he had ever left Tahiti. The more patient Tayeto was the first to succumb, on 17 December. Tupia was then ‘quite inconsolable’, frequently repeating the boy’s name until he, too, died three days later. Cook thought his illness was due as much to dietary changes as to the unhealthiness of Batavia and characterized him as ‘Shrewd Sensible, Ingenious … but proud and obstinate’.45
On Christmas Day they left the fatal port, bound for the Cape of Good Hope. Weakened by tropical heat and sickness, Banks and Solander barely survived the passage, but they were more fortunate than Green, Parkinson, and a score of others who died on the way. From French vessels at the Cape they learned that ‘Otorroo’ was then at Mauritius awaiting his return to Tahiti. Further details of Bougainville, picked up from the same source, prompted Banks to hope that, in order to forestall French claims, an account of the Dolphin’s and their own discoveries would be published without delay. He reached the Downs on 13 July 1771, and, disembarking with Cook and Solander, set out for London.46
