As Endeavour moved forward across space, some of her crew looked backwards into the past. They looked into history so they could better anticipate what they were to confront. As they neared Cape Horn there was no more relevant book than A Voyage Around the World (1748), compiled from Lord Anson’s papers and recollections. As Anson’s ships had approached the hooked tip of South America, his crew had seen Staten Island. Situated twenty miles into the ocean, they described a place ‘entirely composed of inaccessible rocks’, terminating in ‘ragged points, which spire up to a prodigious height, and are all of them covered with everlasting snow’:
the points themselves are on every side surrounded with frightful precipices, and often overhang in a most astonishing manner; and the hills which bear them, are generally separated from each other by narrow clefts, which appear as if the country had been rent by earthquakes; for these chasms are nearly perpendicular, and extend through the substance of the main rocks, almost to their very bottoms: So that nothing can be imagined more savage and gloomy, than the whole aspect of this coast. But to proceed.1
A copy of Anson’s book was on Endeavour. It may already have influenced Alexander Buchan, whose seascape is reminiscent of a woodcut of Anson’s squadron, passing the Patagonian coast. Banks had picked up the book, too. ‘Staten land is much more craggy than Terra del Fuego’, he decided, ‘tho the view of it in Ld Ansons Voyage is exaggerated.’2 Sydney Parkinson, one of Banks’s draughtsmen, seems to have been the third to consult the work. An echo in his journal entry betrays him:
The land on both sides, particularly Staten-land, affords most dismal prospect, being made up chiefly of barren rocks and tremendous precipices, covered with snow and uninhabited, forming one of those natural views which human nature can scare behold without shuddering … But to proceed.3
If Parkinson sounded tremulous, then he had good reason. For readers of Anson, the Cape was a region of elemental terrors. What Anson’s men – among them Adam Hayes – had experienced in the surrounding seas went beyond language. In 1741 they had arrived late in the season as the equinoctial gales were rising. The wind had blown so strongly it had left sailors crawling along the decks, cowering in the lee of the gunwales, breathing as much water as air. It had been hellish energy: black nights, white snow, sails wrenched from hands or yards disappearing noiselessly in the screaming wind. Ships had disintegrated. Masts had sprung. Brittle sails had torn like paper. An unforgettable episode had distilled their manifold sufferings into a single tragedy:
one of our ablest seamen was canted over-board; and notwithstanding the prodigious agitation of the waves, we perceived that he swam very strong, and it was with the utmost concern that we found ourselves incapable of assisting him; and we were the more grieved at his unhappy fate, since we lost sight of him struggling with the waves, and conceived from the manner in which he swam, that he might continue sensible for a considerable time longer, of the horror attending his irretrievable situation.4
It was the carpenters like Hayes who had seen Anson’s squadron through these evil weeks, working up new yards and fixing damaged ones. Sometimes they had been ferried between ships like emergency mechanics. On 21 January, Parkinson and Endeavour were on the cusp of these waters. The prospect struck Parkinson with foreboding:
How amazingly diversified are the works of the Deity within the narrow limits of this globe we inhabit, which, compared with the vast aggregate of systems that compose the universe, appears but a dark speck in the creation! A curiosity, perhaps, equal to Solomon’s, though accompanied with less wisdom than was possessed by the Royal Philosopher, induced some of us to quit our native land, to investigate the heavenly bodies minutely in distant regions, as well as to trace the signature of the Supreme Power and Intelligence throughout several species of animals, and different genera of plant in the vegetable system, ‘from the cedar that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall’; and the more we investigate, the more we ought to admire the power, wisdom, and goodness, of the Great Superintendent of the universe; which attributes are amply displayed throughout all his works; the smallest object, seen through the microscope, declares its origin to be divine, as well as those larger ones which the unassisted eye is capable of contemplating.5
Parkinson exists today in the shadow of Cook, Banks and Solander. But in several ways his perspective is the most revealing of them all. Younger than Cook and Banks, his character was correspondingly less formed. Here he grappled with a central question: why he exchanged the comforts of home for the dangers of the sea. His answer was a mix of Enlightenment impulse – ‘to trace’ the ‘genera of plant in the vegetable system’ – and something more theologically profound.
Like so many of Whitby’s sailing families, Parkinson was a Quaker. His was a faith that placed less store in preachers, scriptures and dogmas than conformists, instead promoting a more meaningful and pure relationship with God. The divine was not to be found in a church but rather by standing ‘in the light’. Ever since George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, had experienced ‘the Light’ while walking through a dew-filled field, their worship had focussed more on the natural world than the supernatural one. A spire of rock, a wheeling albatross, a climbing vine or a frail insect, all these equally contained ‘the signature of the Supreme Power’, nourishment for Parkinson’s inner Light. And however much he was daunted by the world, this passage in his journal shows him as determined to experience it.
Parkinson can also be forgiven his trepidation. In stark statistics, travelling on Endeavour was as dangerous as entering a battlefield. Two out of three of those to sail with Anson had perished. Were Endeavour to return without any fatalities it would have been thought astonishing. Reconciled to the inevitable, the only uncertainty was how much death there would be. Already the count had begun. First to die had been a Mr Ware, one of the mates, at Madeira. Parkinson had regarded him ‘a very honest worthy man’. Ware had been wretchedly tangled in an anchor and dragged to the bottom. Second had been Cook’s old companion, Peter Flowers, who had fallen from the shrouds at Rio. Banks had not considered either of these incidents important enough to note in his journal. Parkinson, though, had marked them in entries shaded with self-reproach. Flowers ‘was drowned before we could reach him’.6
Death had crept nearer still. Perhaps overzealous after missing out at Rio, Banks had led one of his collecting rambles ashore in mid-January. Straying too far into the hills, the party – which included all of Banks’s suite except Parkinson – had lost their way. There had been no sign of them for a whole, freezing night. Only the next morning, ‘to our great joy’, had Banks, Solander, Buchan, the artist, and several servants appeared, shivering on the beach. Relief was tempered by the discovery that Richmond and Dorlton, ‘having made too free with the brandy-bottle’, had become separated and had perished in the cold. Faced with being the sole survivor of Banks’s enterprise, Parkinson had been left to grieve the death of two companions, but to be thankful at the deliverance of the rest.
Now worse might await. The gap between Staten Island and Tierra del Fuego marked the entrance to the Strait of le Maire: gateway to Cape Horn. This was exactly the route Anson had taken. In A Voyage Around the World the strait had formed an ominous prelude to the ghastly events that followed. Running through on the tide, ‘we presumed we had nothing now before us but an open sea’. Anson’s men indulged their ‘imaginations in those romantick schemes, which the fancied possession of the Chilian gold and Peruvian silver might be conceived to inspire’.7
The infamous Chapter VIII of A Voyage Around the World documented the misery that followed: storms upon howling storms, sailors canted into the sea, others with their necks dislocated, their collar bones broken and thighs smashed in two. Ever since Anson’s time the Royal Navy had avoided Cape Horn, favouring the Strait of Magellan instead. The conditions there, though, had turned out equally foul. It had taken Wallis a whole southern summer to fight through the strait on the Dolphin’s last voyage. With time short the Admiralty had decided to attempt the Cape again. Endeavour neared the Strait of le Maire at a similar month to Anson. Yet all nerves were quickly soothed. Endeavour sailed through with an eerie tranquillity. There were no storms, only a steady undertow that checked their way. On 25 January, Parkinson, relaxing, was looking at the Cape, five leagues away, ‘which, contrary to our expectations, we doubled with as little danger as the North Foreland on the Kentish coast; the heavens were fair, the wind temperate, the weather pleasant’.8
From here Cook plied south-west, the best he could do with the contrary winds. It took them into a region of dank mists, surging winds and squalling showers of rain and hail. Increasingly south of the Cape, Endeavour and the royal albatrosses overhead were left as the only punctuating signs of life. Each must have looked odd to the other. By 30 January 1769 they had progressed to 60° 4'S. Few had ventured so far into the high southern latitudes. The next day the wind backed from west to east. For Cook this was a golden chance. He spread all the sail he could. Not satisfied with that, he had the lower yards extended so they stretched beyond the breadth of the deck. He then let his studding sails fly. In the most dangerous waters on the planet, Cook opened Endeavour’s wings as if she were a swan.
It was the start of the dash into the South Seas that everyone had anticipated. Cook would make good use of these studding sails in the next month as they raced towards the location they had been given for George’s Island. ‘There is not anything’, John Ruskin wrote, ‘in nature so absolutely notable, bewitching and, according to its means and measure, heart-occupying as a well-handled ship under sail on a stormy day’.9 He would have relished the sight of Endeavour in February 1769. Cook had his studding sails set again on 24 February, much to the approval of Banks. ‘At 12 last night the wind settled at NE; this morn found studding Sails set and the ship going at the rate of 7 knotts’, he cheered, ‘no very usual thing with Mrs Endeavour’.10
Later in life Banks was to earn a reputation as a talent-spotter, elevating the work of clever amateurs and allowing them to operate on higher stages. In time he would have a long list of protégés, encompassing all the branches of the sciences. But his first find would forever remain one of his very best: Sydney Parkinson, his botanical draughtsman.
Banks met Parkinson in about 1767 through James Lee, a mutual acquaintance. Lee, a Scotsman and a Quaker, was a prominent figure in London’s horticultural community. He ran the Hammersmith Vineyard Nursery, which was known for the quality of its blooms and the diversity of its exotics. Lee was also a devotee and a populariser of Linnaeus, having translated Philosophia botanica into English as Introduction to Botany. All this made Lee an obvious connection for Banks. And it was through Lee that Banks met the bright and aspiring young friend, Parkinson.
Parkinson was still relatively new in London. He had moved south from his home town of Edinburgh with his mother and two siblings after the death of their father, a brewer, Joel Parkinson. For the Parkinsons, the move had been a fresh beginning. Sydney was perhaps their best hope. He was inquisitive and able and had, it seems, already received some tuition in draughtsmanship. In London this had been sharpened into a professional trade. His elder brother, Stansfield, related that Sydney took a ‘particular delight in drawing flowers, fruits, and other objects of natural history’.11 With Linnaean botany all the rage, soon Sydney was exhibiting at the Free Society and working as a private tutor to Lee.
An oil on canvas of Sydney Parkinson – possibly a self-portrait – survives from this time. It shows a slight figure with flushed cheeks, stretched to the maximum of his height in an immaculately tailored jacket. His face is caught between an eagerness to please and daunted apprehension, the sort of terror that accompanies a first day at school. This was the figure Banks met in 1767. Seeing something in the boy, he commissioned Parkinson to complete some zoological paintings from his Newfoundland expedition. More commissions followed. After several hard years for the family, Sydney’s career could not have taken a more auspicious turn. By 1768 Parkinson had Banks and Lee as wealthy, ambitious clients, both of them with connections to Linnaeus himself. Then came the Endeavour voyage.
It was entirely natural that Banks should approach Parkinson. Banks never displayed any aptitude for painting himself but it was important that someone should sketch as they went. Few of Linnaeus’s publications were illustrated, and with artists he would be able to bring life to the visually dull fare of botanical books – mostly endless pages of Latin names and tables. And for a voyage artist, Banks needed someone with special qualities: a sharp eye, a talent for working quickly, enough skill to bring a specimen to life, but not too much imagination to mar its authenticity. He required someone with enough learning to understand the tenets of natural history but no one so grandly educated they would not tolerate the hardships of life aboard. Parkinson seemed an obvious choice. He was young, ‘of unblemished character, and strict veracity’.12 Banks offered him £80 per annum and the chance to see the world. The proposal meant that Parkinson would have to leave his family, a possible sweetheart – a cousin, Jane Gomeldon – and his prospects in London. But he made his will and within a few months he was gone.
From the start Parkinson had been a paragon of an employee. He had reported aboard three weeks early at Deptford and as soon as Endeavour sailed, his diligence began to show. He struck up a friendship with Molyneux, helping Endeavour’s sailing master out with sketches for his journal. Another shipmate noticed his assiduity, commenting that ‘he frequently sat up all night, drawing for himself or writing his journal’.13 Banks admired Parkinson’s ‘unbounded industry’. He was soon producing tender watercolours, of date plums with their golden orbs of fruit, or of enticing evergreen trees like the Myrsinaceae from Madeira. Beauty was one thing, but Parkinson knew it was far more important to represent the anatomical features of a specimen – its buds, edges, tips, margins, sub lateral and lateral veins – so it might be properly appreciated and classified. A knack for form is evident in his watercolour of a climber, Convolvulus serpens, collected in one of the surreptitious forays at Rio. There is a dynamism to the painting, a boldness in the inviting greens of the leaves, offset by delicate splashes of rose-purple in the flowers.
The relationship between Banks and Parkinson was a formal one. It was ‘Mr Parkinson’ as much as it was ‘Mr Banks’. But there was also levity, as when a roguish Atlantic wave sent ‘Mr Parkinson and his potts going to leeward, which diverted us more than it hurt him’.14 The vision of Parkinson in motion is apt. He was required to paint fast to fix the shade or texture of a specimen before it faded. Banks wanted the bright vivacity of a leaf, the gleam of a bird’s eye, the iridescence of a fish’s scales. The young Quaker did his best to please. By the time they reached Rio he had already, according to a letter to his brother, finished ‘100 drawings on various subjects, and taken sketches of many more’.
While taking pride in his duty, the voyage also presented Parkinson with chances for the occasional transgression. He went ashore on Banks’s clandestine visits to the Rio countryside. He described how they stole out of one of Endeavour’s cabins and lowered themselves to a boat with a rope. They had then pulled, silently, to an ‘unfrequented part of the shore, when we landed, and made excursions up into the country, though not so far as we could have wished to have done’.15
There is a delight in Parkinson’s telling of this story. He revels in the subterfuge, explaining how the following morning he had ‘feasted’ on a collection of ‘many very curious plants’. One can’t help thinking the specimens were all the more alive, because they were forbidden. It is a testament to Banks’s character that a bashful soul like Parkinson should find himself on covert collecting missions on the far side of the Atlantic. Writing up his journal after the escapade, the thrill of their enterprise, simply ‘to gratify our curiosity’, still reverberated.
By the time Endeavour rounded the Cape, Parkinson and his fellow artist Buchan had grown accustomed to seafaring life. The draughts men, Banks wrote, ‘are now so used to the sea that it must blow a gale of wind before they let off’. Parkinson spent his leisure hours working at his journal and reading. His ‘Memoranda of Books etc’ from his sketchbook gives a flavour of his tastes. He had poetry, Virgil, Chaucer, Pope, Dryden and Spenser. He had the plays of Shakespeare and Don Quixote as well as Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey. Then there were more instructive works like Hogarth’s Anatomy of Beauty, and monographs on portraiture and architecture.16 Along with his journal, these books depict a young man with a hungry mind, a desire for self-improvement and something of a voyaging soul.
By now Endeavour had crossed from the Atlantic into the South Seas. This ocean, called ‘Mar Pacifico’ by Magellan, spanned a third of the globe’s surface, yet little was known of it. To look at charts before the 1760s was to see a void, a territory the Spanish claimed, but a place in reality they knew almost as little about as anyone else. In an increasingly mapped world the South Seas stood at a forbidding remove, like a locked room in a manor house. Into this void people could transpose desires of undiscovered islands, or continents of splendid wealth and greater beauty, lands without the taint of slave trades or dynastic wars, free, depending on their politics, from King Georges or John Wilkeses.
The discovery of George’s Island by Wallis and the Dolphin had at last given the Pacific some definite form. The Dolphin’s had spoken of thundering waterfalls, enchanting beaches and, above all, the amorous women. One sailor, Francis Wilkinson, had depicted their lustrous lures:
The Women were far from being Coy. For when A Man Found a Girl to his Mind, which he might Easily Do Amongst so many, there was not much Ceremony on Either Side, and I believe whoever comes here after will find Evident Proofs that they are not the First Discoverys. The men are so far from having Objaction to an Intercourse of this Kind that they Brought down their Women & Recommend them to us with the Greatest Eagerness, which makes me Imagine they want a Breed of English Men Amongst them.17
The navigational and topographical descriptions of the islands had been lost in the torrent of such accounts. George Robertson, the Dolphin’s master, had elaborated. ‘All the sailors swore that they never saw handsomer made women in their lives and declard that they would all to a man, live on two thirds allowance, rather than lose so fine an opportunity of getting a Girl apiece.’
Robertson, who wrote with an entertaining bluff prose, noticed the ameliorating effect these girls had on the Dolphin’s sick list. Sailors rose from convalescences, he noted, and ‘declard they would be happy if they were permited to go ashore, at same time said a Young Girl would make an Excelent Nurse’.18 So many ship’s nails had been bartered for sex that not a sufficient number remained to sling the hammocks, or so the story went. The crew had taken to sleeping on deck or even on the island itself, a hardship they bore cheerfully enough.
Three and a half months out from Rio, with a heavily manned ship, these stories were charged with potency. But there were other reasons for wanting to see the land. For Cook and Charles Green it marked the site of their Venus observations. For Banks and Solander there was the possibility of botanical treasures. Then for them all there was the prospect of fresh food. For months they had been fed endless rounds of salt beef, salt pork, suet, peas and oatmeal, boiled to varying magnitudes by the cook, a one-armed man called John Thompson. Twenty-five years before, it had been this diet that had caused a massive outbreak of scurvy on Anson’s voyage. It was perhaps the worst instance of the disease in maritime history. The ghastly list of symptoms – the ‘low unequal Pulse, lixivial Urine, a pale-brown or livid Complexion, a Weakness and Swelling or sometimes Wasting of the Legs, a Difficulty in walking, acute transient Pains, frequent Bleeding at the Nose, stinking Breath, putrid Gums, loose Teeth, ill-condition’d Ulcers, and rotten Bones’19 – had cascaded through his ships.
To some, scurvy was a toxin that rose up from the sea or fell down out of the atmosphere, seeping into the timbers of a ship then infecting the bodies of the sailors, suffocating, dry-drowning them. To others it was a dietary complaint, although they could not tell what. In an effort to check the disease, sailors were aggressively physicked. Anson’s crew were compelled to swallow elixir of vitriol, a mix of sulphuric acid, spice and alcohol. Mustard was tried, as were thimbles of vinegar or rations of pickled cabbage. The last of these were served out when it struck the Dolphin, as was wort – a liquid yielded in the brewing process. The ideas of James Lind, who in the 1750s had demonstrated experimentally that citrus juices had a favourable effect, were generally lost in the babble of competing theories.
On Endeavour Cook trailed a selection of remedies with an eagerness that would bring him the reputation of an innovator, something, in the navy, that could be a slur as much as a compliment. Cook was later lampooned for his ‘experimental beef’, his ‘experimental beer’, his ‘experimental water’ distilled from the sea. But it was in his character to seek out better ways of doing things. From the start he kept a careful eye on the men’s diets, making sure they ate their sauerkraut. ‘Every man that had the least symptoms of Scurvy upon him’, Cook later wrote, was treated with a quick dose of malt.20
It would be the 1920s before the discovery of vitamin C and the earliest understandings of its role in human biology. Vitamin C depletion inhibits the body’s production of collagen – ‘the glue of the cell and the scaffold of the body’ – provoking the familiar symptoms. There is a second consequence of vitamin C deficiency, not so well known. As well as stimulating the production of collagen, it regulates the stable operation of the nervous system, in particular the production of dopamine and serotonin. The resulting cognitive disturbances are now thought to have left sufferers emotionally vulnerable: elated, lonely, dejected, and frequently suspended between ebullience, euphoria, despair.
Such emotions may well have been on the loose as Endeavour entered the Pacific. We know Banks was experiencing the early physical signs of the disease – swollen gums and pimples in his mouth – symptoms he successfully treated with lemon juice. That Banks, with all the perks of the officers’ table, was inflicted suggests that less fortunate others may have been stricken too. It is with this in mind that one has to interpret the events of 25 March, when one of the marines, William Greenslade, threw himself overboard.
It was a strange affair. Greenslade had been standing sentry at a cabin door when one of his shipmates had given him a piece of seal-skin to look after, which was to be cut into small pieces so that it could be used for tobacco pouches. Greenslade, as Cook and Banks later found out, had taken it into his head that he was to be excluded when the skin was divided up. So while he had his opportunity he had stolen a piece of the skin ‘and was of course found out immediately.’
The misdemeanour, such as it was, happened at midday. During the afternoon Greenslade had been taunted by his fellow marines, who represented ‘his crime in the blackest coulours as a breach of trust of the worst consequence’. His sergeant had decided to bring Greenslade before Cook. But on the way Greenslade had slipped free and, as Cook wrote, ‘was seen go upon the Fore Castle, and from that time was seen no more’. That a marine would prefer death to being reprimanded was seen as a peculiar thing. ‘He was a very quiet young man scarce 21 years of age, remarkably quiet and industrious’, wrote Banks, ‘and to make his exit the more melancholy was drove to the rash resolution by an accident so trifling that it must appear incredible to every body who is not well acquainted with the powerfull effects that shame can work upon young minds.’21
It is a story that bears at least a trace of a scurvied mind. And if scurvy plays with the emotions, it also toys with perceptions. The scholar Jonathan Lamb has written of the malfunctioning senses of a scurvy sufferer:
When these sensory modulators fail to work, the ear will hear too much, the palate taste, and the nose smell, more than can possibly be pleasant, and the eye become inordinately sensitive to light and color. These uninhibited sensations are commonly called ‘sensory phantoms’, the offspring of unregulated excitations in the cranial nerves, but actually they are intensifiers, carrying more information from the senses to the brain than it can handle, so that fragrance becomes disgusting, light blinding, and music deafening.22
Literature from the age of exploration is filled with curious, warped accounts, of blood-red oceans, towering precipices, booming waterfalls and sailors shrieking at the smell of flowers. Even the equanimous Cook would one day fall into a trance at the beguiling twinkle of ice on the rigging. To read of scurvy’s effects on perception in the voyaging age is like first learning of unreliable narrators in fiction. But this was not wilful deception. These were worlds constructed inside sailors as much as they were realities existing outside them. As their bodies declined, their senses soared. And it was with scurvied eyes the sailors on the Dolphin had glimpsed George’s Island in 1767. Robertson, the master, had written:
the countrey hade the most Beautiful appearance its posable to Imagin, from the shore side one two and three miles Back there is a fine Leavel country that appears to be all laid out in plantations … the Interior part of this country is very Mountainous … from that to the very topes of the Mountains is all full of tall Trees, but what sort they are I know not but the whole was Green.23
This was the island Endeavour approached in early April 1769. From 4 April when Banks’s lad Peter Briscoe sighted land, they passed atolls and little islands. Parkinson was among those to crowd the decks so he could savour the sight. He saw semicircular bays, reefs and lagoons with the water ‘as smooth as a mill-pond’, abounding in flying fish. The islands spired up from unimaginable depths, because ‘to our surprise, we could not reach the bottom with 130 fathom of line’ not a mile from the shore.
After emptiness, there was luminosity, a vibrancy so different to the washed skies and silvery seas of Britain. Gazing around, the ocean was divided up into zones of colour like an artist’s palette with lapis blue or indigo for the deep sea, turquoise for the lagoons, vitreous teals making the shallows and, here and there, a broken white line tracing the surf over hidden reefs. Out on the bowsprit netting, the sailors could listen to the thump of the hull, see the splash of the water as it ran under the bows, feeling the rhythmic lift and fall of the hundreds of tons of oak behind them. Endeavour, built by Fishburn for the dreary northern seas, was thriving in the sparkling tropical ocean.
The morning sun warming their faces, on 13 April 1769, Cook brought Endeavour into Port Royal Harbour, George’s Island. Beyond the black sand of the palm-fringed beaches, Parkinson gazed across this place they had all longed to see. It was as ‘uneven as a piece of crumpled paper, being divided irregularly into hills and valleys; but a beautiful verdure covered both, even to the tops of the highest peaks’, he wrote.24
After months of solitude the ship was instantly a focal point for the scores of canoes that pushed off from the shore. Coming to anchor, boats were hoisted out for Cook, Banks ‘and the other gentlemen with a party of Men under arms’ who intended to venture ashore to establish relations.
It was perhaps a hint of Parkinson’s Quakerism that he never joined the initial shore-going parties. His religion demanded pacifism and these opening encounters provided the greatest potential for violence. But this did not stop him from seeing the ‘Georgians’ who approached the ship with an eagerness to trade. Parkinson spent the ‘forenoon’ in ‘trucking’. Coconuts, breadfruit, bananas, apples and small fish were all offered for nails and beads. In these earliest exchanges Parkinson managed to acquire some bark cloth. He would also get something else that it would take his shipmates weeks to discover. This place, famous in Britain as ‘George’s Island’, had, of course, a name of its own. It was the island of ‘Otaheite’.*
Fond of numerical precision, Cook must have been satisfied to note that exactly a year divided the Admiralty’s earliest correspondence with him about the voyage and Endeavour’s arrival in Tahiti. In that time Cook had followed his orders to the letter. Each of his navigational instructions – ‘to stand well to the Southward in your Passage round the Cape’, to ‘fall into the parallel’ of the island well in advance and to ‘arrive there at least a month or six Weeks before the 3rd day of June next’ – had been complied with. He might have been allotted a lumbering collier, but it had not much mattered. They had arrived with seven weeks to spare.
Something like 10,000 miles separated the site where Endeavour now lay at anchor from Deptford Dockyard. This was isolation. It was isolation in some ways beyond even that which the astronauts of Apollo 11 experienced in 1969 as they stood on the moon, exactly two centuries on. The Endeavour’s crew were nine months from Europe, five from Rio. They were not only isolated geographically, but were also disconnected from the increasingly intense blare of news in Europe. Johnson had pondered in the Idler, ‘it is difficult to conceive how man can subsist without a news-paper, or to what entertainments companies can assemble, in those wide regions of the earth that have neither Chronicles nor Magazines, neither Gazettes nor Advertisers, neither Journals nor Evening Posts’.25
Endeavour had sailed well into these regions and inevitably questions must have nagged. What of Wilkes? For Gore what of the disturbances in America? For Cook there was his wife Elizabeth to think about in Mile End and the fate of their baby – unborn when he had left the previous summer. But the futility of speculation was something every sea officer knew. To quell a wandering mind Cook had a date to concentrate on. What happened on 3 June would shape the fate of the voyage more than anything else. Should they succeed in their observations then they must surely return home triumphant. Should they not, all Cook’s early promise would count for nothing.
One of Cook’s shipmates now became more significant than the rest. Charles Green was the Royal Society-appointed astronomer. He had trained at Greenwich under Maskelyne, a man whose zest for precision was legendary. If Maskelyne couldn’t be with Cook himself, then Green was the next best thing. Green was already a veteran of scientific voyaging – he had joined the trials for John Harrison’s marine timepieces in a crossing to Barbados – and his presence had been felt on Endeavour’s outward passage when he joined in with the daily observations. Just as Solander’s erudition outstripped Banks’s, Green’s outdid Cook’s. Cook had meddled in astronomy before – he had recorded an eclipse of the sun while in Newfoundland – though he had never received any formal training. But as Banks and Solander had turned the great cabin into a botanist’s workshop, Green had converted the quarterdeck into something of an astronomy school. Adept and avuncular, Green had tutored Cook and the ‘young gentlemen’ in the art of taking lunars – a method for establishing longitude at sea by tracking the position of the moon. It took a lot to impress Cook, but Green – proclaimed an ‘indefatigable observer’ – had done so.
Whatever precision Cook and Green had achieved at sea, much more was expected now. Their first task had been securing an observation site on the island. Cook settled on the north-east point of the bay:
I went a Shore with a party of men accompanie’d by Mr Banks, Dr Solander and Mr Green. We took along with us one of Mr Banks Tents, and after we had fix’d upon a place fit for our purpose we set up the Tent and Mark’d out the ground we intended to occupy. By this time a great number of the Natives had got collected together about us, seemingly only to look on as not one of them had any weaphon either offensive or defensive. I would suffer none to come within the lines I had marked out excepting one who appear’d to be a Chief and old Owhaa, to these two men we endeavour’d to explain as well as we could that we wanted that ground to sleep upon such a number of nights and then we should go away.26
So goes the earliest account of British colonial presence in the Pacific. Cook explained that he selected this site not so much for topographical reasons, but rather because it lay far away from ‘any of their habitations’. On 18 April Cook had ‘as many people out of the Ship as could possibly be spar’d and set around Erecting a Fort’. The sailors dug trenches and chopped wood to make pickets. ‘The natives were so far from hindering us that several of them assisted in bring[ing] the Pickets and Faccines out of the woods’. This exceeded Cook’s hopes. The transit expeditions of 1761 had been hindered by diplomatic misunderstandings. One Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Chappe, had caused consternation when he arrived with his telescope, clock and quadrants in Siberia where the local population had declared him a magician, and a protective guard had been required to guarantee his safety.
But there was an extra dynamic at play in Tahiti. Two years earlier the Dolphin had been warmly greeted. The intrigue at the strange arrival had soon, however, turned to something else. On the morning of 24 June – Midsummer Day in Old England – the Dolphin had been, as ever, surrounded by trading canoes. Robertson, the master, estimated there were 300 of them, ‘and at a Moderate Computation there was near four thousand men’. The whole bay, he added, ‘was all lined round with men women and children, to see the Onset which was now near at hand’.
A double canoe had drawn from the beach, ‘and was observed to hoist some signal’. ‘In a few secants of time all our Decks was full of Great and small stones’, with the sailors left cradling bleeding heads. As more stones rattled aboard, rifles had echoed in reply. Wallis had ordered the guns run out: twelve on each side of her gun deck, four more either side of the quarterdeck. The Dolphin, roused, let fly. It ‘struck such terror amongs the poor unhapy croad that it would require the pen of Milton to describe’, Robertson conceded, ‘therefor too mutch for mine’.27
In Britain accounts of the ‘battle’ had gained wide circulation, with people transfixed by what was perceived as the futile bravery of the islanders. Less thought was given to the question of whether the ‘Georgians’ were within their rights to defend their land. The story told in Britain – a woodcut of the battle was made, and a patriotic poem by one of the Dolphin’s sailors was circulated widely in publications like the Gentleman’s Magazine – glossed over other facts too: that the Tahitians had continued to fight long after the discharge of the Dolphin’s guns, and that the day had ended in impasse rather than neat triumph.
Cook may have guessed there was more to the story. But he also grasped Endeavour’s use as a defensive weapon. On 16 April he warped the ship in, ‘and moor’d her in such a Manner as to command all the Shore of the NE part of the Bay, but more particularly the place where we intended to Erect a Fort’.28
This site soon acquired a name ‘Fort Venus’. By 10 May the encampment was complete. The section of the beach had been encircled by trenches and a wooden palisade, a barrier further defended by swivel guns. Inside stood a cluster of tents, a forge and several sheep pens. Two tents housed the scientific instruments. In one ticked the Royal Society’s astronomical clock. Cook had it ‘fixed firm and as low in the ground as the door’ allowed, adding an extra protective framing around it ‘to prevent its being disturbed by any accident’. This gave the observatory its calm, beating heart. Twelve feet away was the observatory. This consisted of a smaller, conical tent, with gaps in its roof through which telescopes could be pointed. Here Cook erected a second clock and stood an astronomical quadrant – used for measuring the altitude of celestial objects – on a large cask, which was weighed down with ‘wett heavy sand’.
Cook and Green were left to fret about the transit throughout the rest of May. The degree of their dependence on fragile instruments was displayed when an astronomical quadrant was briefly stolen. Another, more persistent worry was the weather. The strongest telescope and sharpest eye in Britain would be rendered helpless by an awkward cloud or some other interference in the atmosphere. On 22 May, Fort Venus was beset by a rainstorm, ‘accompanied with thunder and lightning’, Parkinson wrote, ‘more terrible than any I had ever heard, or seen, before’. Water came racing through Banks’s tent ‘and wetted everything in it’. So intense was the downpour that Parkinson feared for the ship, which ‘providentially escaped’.29
Should anything like that happen on 3 June, it would be disastrous. To circumvent the threat Cook decided to dispatch supplementary teams to other regions of the island, ‘for fear we should fail here’. On 1 June John Gore, Monkhouse the surgeon and Banks’s personal secretary, Herman Spöring, were sent to neighbouring ‘York Island’. The next day Zachary Hicks, Charles Clerke and several sailors were dispatched in the opposite direction, to the eastern coast. Solander was also incorporated into the observing team, though Banks, revealingly, was not given any responsibility – perhaps an indication Cook deemed him too much of a maverick to be trusted with the delicate task of exact measurement.
As the sun set on 2 June 1769, Fort Venus was tense with anticipation. Banks, who had travelled with Gore and Monkhouse, wrote: ‘Before night our observatory was in order, telescopes all set up and tried &c. and we went to rest anxious for the events of tomorrow; the evening having been very fine gave us however great hopes of success.’30
The eighteenth-century world was a localised one. It was still decades before the first semaphore telegraphs, and news concertinaed across space at a stagger. It took a day for a letter to travel between New York and Philadelphia. The same letter might rattle over the turnpikes between London to Edinburgh in three days, or cross from London to Paris in a week, but a minimum of a month was needed for it to pass between Boston and Portsmouth.
In a globe parcelled up in parishes and towns, provinces and colonies, the Transit of Venus is a rare instance of simultaneous experience, of people undertaking the simple action of pausing, looking and counting across dispersed space. As Cook and Green sat at their chairs in Fort Venus, another of the Royal Society’s observers, Jeremiah Dixon, was gazing upwards from Hammerfest Island in the Arctic Circle, and William Wales was peering through a telescope at Hudson’s Bay. In Newport, Rhode Island, Reverend Ezra Stiles braced himself for the observation. Nearby in Cambridge, New England, John Winthrop, professor of mathematics at Harvard, looked through smoked glass at the sun, as did Maskelyne at Greenwich, London.
But not everyone who looked was a trained professional. Hundreds of amateurs followed instructions laid down by the press. At Whitby in Yorkshire several enthusiasts crowded into a darkened room to see what they could in the fading light of a summer’s evening. An unsigned report from Whitby made the newspapers (might these be the words of Lionel Charlton?):
Intervening Clouds hindered us from observing the exact Time of the Transit’s beginning; and too much Company prevented our taking the nearest central Distance, though Venus did not appear to us to be above one Thirty-second of the whole Diameter within the Sun’s Disk.31
As they watched the black speck melt into the night, perhaps the Whitby conversation dwelt, for a proud moment, on Milner’s old ship and Walker’s old apprentice, who had travelled halfway around the world to observe the very same thing.
‘Various were the Changes observd in the weather during the course of last night’, Banks wrote in his journal on 3 June, ‘some one or other of us was up every half hour who constantly informd the rest that it was either clear or Hazey. at day break we rose and soon after had the satisfaction of seeing the sun rise as clear and bright as we could wish him.’ Pickersgill, one of the mates, added, rather unsympathetically, that ‘if the Observation is not well made it is intirely owing to the Observers’.32
Cook was equally sanguine: ‘not a Clowd was to be seen the whole day and the Air was perfectly clear’, he wrote, ‘so that we had every advantage we could desire in Observing the whole of the passage of the Planet Venus over the Suns disk’. The observation was split into four sections. The first was the external ingress, when Venus’s outer rim touched the edge of the sun. The internal ingress followed this, when Venus’s entire body passed in front of the sun’s face. Then the pattern was repeated with an internal egress, when Venus’s disc first began to slip outside the sun, and finally an external egress when Venus had gone, her transit at an end. With a clock ticking beside them, each observer was to record these four crucial steps.
At 09:21:45 Green saw something first: a slight blackened blemish like a shadow on the sun’s limb. Presumably he said nothing, keeping silent to avoid interfering with Cook’s observation. Green was five seconds ahead of Cook, who jotted down 09:21:50. But, then again, it was 09:22:00 before Green was ‘Certain’. Eleven seconds later and not far away, Solander jotted down his initial contact, though he conceded a ‘wavering haze’ seconds before.
A little more than quarter of an hour passed before, at 09:39:20, both Cook and Green recorded the internal contact, as the black dot slid completely within the sun. Thereafter they waited. For five hours they sat at their stations in the sweltering heat, watching the black dot drift across the sun’s surface. Perhaps it was the longest stretch of physical inactivity Cook had for the entire voyage. Only after three o’clock in the afternoon were he and Green called into action. At 15:10:15 Cook saw Venus break through the far edge of the sun. Again Green was ten seconds ahead, but for the final milestone, Venus’s exit, Cook was fourteen seconds in advance of Green, setting down the time 15:28:04.
They had the numbers they had travelled halfway around the world to collect. The relief at gathering them was tempered with frustration. They had been warned about an interfering haze that had clung to Venus during the 1761 observations. Sure enough it had come again. Cook reasoned it was ‘only the penumbra’ – the shaded outer region of an opaque object – and not Venus herself. Later this phenomena would become known as the ‘black drop effect’, when the sun appeared to stretch out to embrace Venus as she neared. In 1769 the reasons for this were not yet comprehended, but the beguiling fuzz had made difficult what should have been straightforward. It made the determinations of the entry and exit points so fraught that Cook felt it necessary to depict the problem in a series of sketches. That two observers with identical equipment in the same location should differ to such a degree was confounding. Perhaps Cook could hear Maskelyne’s voice in his head as he jotted the final word beside his last observation: ‘dubious’.33
Sydney Parkinson also watched Venus cross the sun. It seems he exploited the occasion to elicit some words for his growing ‘Vocabulary of the Language of Otaheite’:
|
Manaha |
|
The Sun |
|
Taowruah |
|
The Planet Venus |
|
Eparai |
|
The horizon |
|
Tota, also Eeno |
|
A looking glass34 |
It was now almost two months since Parkinson had stepped ashore on Tahiti. That afternoon, 14 April, he had joined ‘a small party’ on ‘an excursion into the country’. Parkinson had found the walk from the beach into the shaded canopy of the woodland exhilarating. ‘The first experience can never be repeated’, another Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, described the sensation a century on. ‘The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island are memories apart and touched by a virginity of sense.’35 In April 1769 Parkinson felt this intensity of experience. Growing weary, his party had ‘sat down under the shade of some lofty trees’:
the undulation of whose leaves rendered it very cool and pleasant. The high cocoas, and the low branching fruit trees, formed an agreeable contrast; while the cloud-topt hills, appearing between them, added to the natural grandeur of the prospect … We feasted on the cocoa nut milk, which afforded us a pleasing repast.36
This was the kind of undiluted nature that Parkinson had sacrificed his London life to see. For three months after this he engaged in a heartfelt relationship with the island. He worked, as ever, at an outdoor table at Fort Venus, depicting spiky green herbs and fleshy-leaved shrubs, striking orchids, and fiery red hibiscus as Banks or Solander brought them to him. In all he painted about a hundred specimens in his time in Tahiti, at a rate of about one a day. But painting was not everything. Leaving Hammersmith, James Lee had cautioned him that he was ‘to minute everything he saw and trust nothing to his memory’.37
One of his shipmates recalled Parkinson’s assiduity ‘in collecting accounts of the languages, customs, and, manners of the people’, as he drew up ‘a very fair journal, which was looked upon, by the ship’s company, to be the best that was kept’, particularly in relation to Tahiti.38 The ‘fair copy’ of Parkinson’s journal is the great lost document of the Endeavour voyage. For reasons that will later emerge (though will never entirely be reconciled), it would never be published. What did go into print is the ‘foul copy’, of drafts, snatched observations, inchoate reflections and insights. These were subject to the interfering hand of a London editor, but enough survives to intrigue. Reading over it today, there is a rawness to Parkinson’s writing. As might be expected of a draft, there’s no literary polish but there’s a lucidity and a sense of striving for truth. The whole of Parkinson’s journal stretches for 200 pages, but it is the section on Tahiti – spanning fifty pages, about a quarter of the total – which feels most alive.
Cook and Banks also compiled surveys of Tahiti, and both of them had talents as observers. Cook had the finely tuned surveyor’s eye. Banks had an abundance of enthusiasm, his vigorous prose and a journalistic knack for unearthing stories. Parkinson’s stance was different. Rather than being the star of a scene, like Banks, or burdened with the status of the ‘leader’, as Cook was, Parkinson was a far less obtrusive figure. In his observations, he often exists on the periphery of scenes, quietly watching, recording and absorbing the meaning of actions as they happen. This makes for something that feels more authentically ethnographic than produced by Cook or Banks. Of everyone on Endeavour, the historian Bernard Smith has written, it was Parkinson who developed ‘the most sympathetic relationships with but also the greatest sympathy for the peoples of the Pacific’.39
Parkinson began his study in even steps. He recorded the Tahitians’ appearance as ‘pale, tawny’, and with ‘long black hair’ which they cut with a shark’s tooth. The men, he observed, were physically impressive, standing at more than six feet tall while the ladies were much shorter. Although they had mastered the art of dyeing fabrics, they seldom wore more than a few clothes around their middles. This made it all the easier for them to bathe in the rivers, he noted, something they did ‘three times a day’, a striking preference for cleanliness, as was the habit of washing ‘hands and teeth after every meal.’ Most of them, he noticed, carried a strong scent of cocoa oil.40
In contrast to Endeavour’s crew, many of whom could not swim, the Tahitians thrived in the water. He watched the boys playing in the surf and fishing, dragging the bottom with a net made of convolvulus leaves, or ingeniously hooking fishes with an oyster shell. He noticed more subtle behaviours. When Tahitians beckoned at a distance they did so with their fingers pointing downwards, something ‘contrary to our mode’. Another contrast was their manner of greeting friends, especially those who had been separated for some time. Parkinson explained ‘they affect to cry for joy’, but judged, cynically, that ‘it seems to be entirely ceremonial’.
Parkinson was brave enough to venture out alone in the evenings after his work at Fort Venus was completed. Although many of his shipmates did the same, it is worth recalling that almost all his peers carried firearms or weapons for protection, but Parkinson, a Quaker, would not have done so. Unarmed he wandered along beaches and through glades, being ‘almost stunned with the noise of the grasshoppers’. All the while Parkinson passed the steady string of huts, ‘built at a considerable distance from each other; so that the island looks like one continued village’. On one occasion he was delighted to be invited inside one. To welcome his visitor a father sent his son ‘up a tall cocoa-tree to gather nuts’. Parkinson watched as the boy ‘climbed it very dextrously … tying his feet together’ and then ‘vaulting up very swiftly’.41
On one of his evening strolls Parkinson stumbled across a breadfruit market, where islanders were gathered at a long open house, dividing the breadfruit into baskets. This was a culture far more authentic than that at Fort Venus, where Cook had set up Endeavour’s trading hub under Banks’s and Solander’s command. Banks had thrived as a ‘market man’ – one morning ‘trafficking’ 350 coconuts by half past six – but here Parkinson watched something very different. It was the social mechanics of Tahiti as they really existed. He listened to the boys playing their nose flutes. He watched little knots of girls ‘divert themselves’ in the evening, dividing ‘into two parties, one standing opposite to the other, one party throws apples, which the other endeavours to catch’.42
This was a society so different to the dank Edinburgh of Parkinson’s youth or the glitz and grime of London. To help him understand it Parkinson looked to the writings of the Genevan social philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau had risen to prominence in 1750 with his prize-winning essay, Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences. Ever since, he had remained a combative voice in a restless European world. In 1766 the Scots Magazine had printed a generous profile of ‘an extraordinary man’ with the ‘paradoxical turn of thinking’.43 Rousseau, everyone realised, was the counterpoint. He lived and wrote in opposition to everything the enlightening, endeavouring classes were striving to achieve.
For Rousseau civilisation was not an achievement, it was a curse. Immersing humanity within it, as far as he was concerned, was like smothering a body in clothes until it was so swaddled that it could neither move nor breathe. Rousseau had cast his imagination back through time, envisioning humanity in its original ‘state of nature’. Comparing his ‘natural man’ with ‘man-made man’, Rousseau wrote, he had ‘discovered that his supposed improvement had generated all his miseries’.44 Civilisation was a wasting force. Look, for instance, at the sickly, stressed Europeans, and then picture a natural man, at one with his body, ‘the only Instrument that savage Man is acquainted with’:
Had he a Hatchet, would his Hand so easily snap off from an Oak so stout a Branch? Had he a Sling, would it dart a Stone to so great a Distance? Had he a Ladder, would he run so nimbly up a Tree? Had he a Horse, would he with such Swiftness shoot along the Plain?45
Rousseau’s ideas were not new. Arguments about primitivism – that truer versions of human nature were to be found in less-developed places – had existed for years. But the force of his prose as well as his platform as one of the French philosophes had made them notorious. All the intellectuals on Endeavour would have known about Rousseau, but they held a particular appeal for Parkinson who was part of the generation to come of age as Rousseau’s arguments about the state of nature, the lost joys of savage existence and the corrupting force of civilisation, had their greatest appeal. Cook plotting the perimeter of Fort Venus was oddly reminiscent of one of the central passages from Rousseau’s ‘greatest and best performance’, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1755):
The first Man, who, after enclosing a Piece of Ground, took it into his Head to say, This is mine, and found People simple enough to believe him, was the true Founder of civil Society. How many Crimes, how many Wars, how many Murders, how many Misfortunes and Horrors, would that Man have saved the Human Species, who pulling up the Stakes or filling up the Ditches should have cried to his Fellows: Be sure not to listen to this Imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the Fruits of the Earth belong equally to us all, and the Earth itself to nobody!46
It is tempting to make the connection between this and the scene at Matavai Bay in April 1769. But to do so would be to distort well-known facts. Even before Endeavour had reached ‘George’s Island’ there was an understanding that it was a place of some complexity. There was talk of a queen, which implied a social hierarchy. Trade with the Dolphin’s crew – despite the thieving – had otherwise carried on regularly enough. George’s Island was ‘pretty much civilized’, explained the earliest reports of Wallis’s discovery in the newspapers. No one expected to find a state of nature, but a devotee of Rousseau’s ideas might encounter what he had termed ‘nascent society’. This was Rousseau’s ‘juste milieu’ or happy medium: a stage in human development suspended between the ‘stupidity of brutes and the disastrous enlightenment of civil man’.47
These were the ideas Parkinson brought to Tahiti with him. There is a feeling of him evaluating what he sees in his journal. He wonders whether the abundance of ‘cocoa, bread-fruit, and apple-trees, the fruit of which drops, as it were, into their mouths’ resulted in them being ‘an indolent people’. But he counters this. The people seem ‘contented’, he writes, ‘with what is spontaneously produced, as if they had attained to the ne plus ultra, and are therefore happier than Europeans generally are, whose desires are unbounded.’48
In a few short weeks Parkinson was grasping at a better understanding of Tahiti than the crew of the Dolphin ever had. They had merely depicted a permissive paradise of culinary and sexual plenty. The subsequent invention, ‘George’s Island’, Parkinson recognises, was a nonsense. The icy winters and entrenched inequality, political upheavals and relentless wars of Europe made it all the easier for people to conjure up an island they would love to exist. That Parkinson never used the label ‘George’s Island’ is suggestive. But Rousseau’s theories did attract him. Although the Tahitians continued to be great thieves, he pondered, ‘They must be very honest amongst themselves, as every house is without any fastening. Locks, bolts and bars are peculiar to civilized countries, where their moral theory is the best, and their moral practices too generally of the worst’. This:
might induce a celebrated writer to conclude, though erroneously, that mankind, upon the whole, are necessarily rendered worse, and less happy, by civilization, and the cultivation of the arts and sciences. Nature’s wants, it is true, are but few, and the uncivilized part of mankind, in general, seem contented if they can acquire those few. Ambition, and the love of luxurious banquets, and other superfluities, are but little known in the barbarous nations: they have, in general, less anxious thought for the morrow, than civilized; and therefore feel more enjoyment while they partake of heaven’s bounty in the present day.49
Whether swayed by Rousseau or not, visiting Tahiti allowed Parkinson and his shipmates to cast off their fetters temporarily. ‘Most of our ship’s company procured temporary wives amongst the natives’, Parkinson conceded. Attempting to justify the transgression, Parkinson wrote ‘even many reputed virtuous Europeans allow themselves, in uncivilized parts of the world, [to act] with impunity; as if a change of place altered the moral turpitude of fornication; and what is a sin in Europe, is only a simple innocent gratification in America’.50
In Britain, Parkinson’s reference to the ‘many reputed virtuous Europeans’ would no doubt be interpreted as code for Banks and Solander, both of whom conducted amorous relationships on Tahiti. But perhaps that was not all. One day, as Solander reported it, when Banks was returning with a female companion, he revealed that ‘the first thing he saw was Shyboots Parkinson in bed with the girl’s sister’.
Three days after Endeavour had arrived in April, Parkinson’s fellow draughtsman, Buchan, had suffered an epileptic fit. He ‘remained insensible’ for some hours, then died. Parkinson, Solander, Spöring and several of the officers had rowed out to the offing and slid him into the sea. ‘I sincerely regret him as an ingenious and good young man’, Banks had written:
but his Loss to me is irretrevable, my airy dreams of entertaining my friends in England with the scenes that I am to see here are vanishd. No account of the figures and dresses of men can be satisfactory unless illustrated with figures: had providence spard him a month longer what an advantage would it have been to my undertaking but I must submit.51
Buchan’s death doubled Parkinson’s workload. Originally he had been engaged solely as a natural-history painter, but from this moment onwards he worked more diversely across subjects. One day Parkinson climbed One Tree Hill, an iconic eminence that commanded the view over the bay. The ‘one tree’, a massive, wizened specimen, dominates the view. Several figures mill nearby, caught in the business of life. Then, almost easy to overlook, is the slight form of an artist in the foreground, sat sketching on the grass. In the shade of the tree he gazes over Matavai Bay where Endeavour lies at anchor. His presence transforms the picture into a self-portrait. Here is Parkinson, as far from Edinburgh as can be, gazing over the Great South Seas.
Parkinson continued to work, too, on his ‘Vocabulary’. As Banks picked flowers, Parkinson gathered words:
|
Eahoo |
|
The nose |
|
Ohaa te manoo |
|
A bird’s nest |
|
Earoc |
|
The swell of the sea or the surf |
|
Anooa nooa |
|
The rainbow |
Reading these translations today you are left with the impression of distant conversations: Parkinson – pointing, mimicking, nodding, smiling, eking out phonetic sounds, jotting them down. His list would graduate from single words to complex phrases, some of which bring island life in 1769 echoing down the ages. Tai poe etee noow (pray give me a little bead), eeyaha (get you gone), ara mai (follow me or come hither). Just one word would complete the journey from Tahitian to English: ‘tatau’, the name given to the ceremonial process of imprinting a person’s skin with artistic markings. Intrigued, Parkinson would ‘undergo the operation’ himself, anticipating an age to come by commemorating a significant moment in his life with a tattoo.
By the end of Endeavour’s stay in Tahiti in July, Parkinson had recorded 403 words, a list of popular names, numbers from one to twenty and the transcription of an Otaheitian song. This was an impressive achievement, but one that he could only ever take so far. He might be able to point to a nose or a foot, but it was much harder to confirm or comprehend the intricacies of this different belief system he was encountering.
Tahiti was a far more complex place than anyone had grasped. Far from romanticised ideas about equality, Cook found that every fruiting tree on the island was the property of some person or other. The beauty of the landscape, too, seemed to conceal darker truths. Skeletons were sighted and Banks came across a number of jawbones, hanging as trophies. Other things were inexplicable. One day Parkinson watched as a lady mutilated herself with a shark’s tooth in public.
Then there was a perplexing scene one morning at Fort Venus. Banks had been presiding over the market as usual when a double canoe rounded the point of the bay and glided to the shallows. A man and two women alighted and beckoned to him. In a fluid movement, a lane was made, running between the visitors and Banks. The man approached with ‘a small bunch of parrot’s feathers’.52 Six times he passed to and fro, bringing gifts. Cloth was then spread over the sand. The scene now prepared, one of the women walked towards Banks. She wore ‘a great many clothes upon her’, wrote Parkinson. She twice twisted around, allowing the cloth to fall to the floor ‘and exposed herself quite naked’. The girl was then handed more garments, which she arranged on the floor, before she ‘exposed herself as before.’
Although the meaning of the performance was lost on Banks, he was delighted at what he interpreted as a sexual invitation. He led both ladies to his tent, although he ‘could not prevail upon them to stay more than an hour’. But Banks noted a second, subtle significance to the ceremony in his journal. All the while a man called Tupaia had stood beside him and ‘acted as my deputy’, Banks wrote, helping to receive gifts and place them in the boat. It is a telling detail. Episodes of cultural confusion usually progressed along similar lines. Two parties would be divided. There would be a moment of contact or exchange, often misunderstood, generating powerful responses: bewilderment, anger, hilarity, embarrassment. That morning the choreography was confused by Tupaia’s presence. He straddled both worlds. He participated, he understood, but he sided with Banks.
Reading back through the Endeavour journals today, it is difficult to get an authentic impression of the Tahitian people. Responding to a place they considered ethereal or exotic, the sailors allotted many Tahitians names from the classical world like Hercules, Lycurgus or Epicurus that served only to mask their true identities. Other people feel cartoonish. When they finally met the fabled ‘Queen Oboreah’, her true biography was entirely missed. ‘Oboreah’ was not a ‘queen’, but rather she was Purea, a formidable, high-born woman, embroiled in active power tussles around Matavai Bay. It was through their dealings with Purea that Endeavour’s crew got to know Tupaia. He celebrated King George’s birthday with them. He prepared a dinner of roasted dog for the officers and gentlemen and he assumed the general role of fixer, diplomat and translator. Of everyone, Tupaia seemed to especially align himself with Banks.
Amid all the watercolours and sketches of flowers and birds, coastal and other scenes, it is surprising no portrait of Tupaia survives. Nor did anyone commit to history a physical description of him. In the beginning they only had an approximate understanding of his status within Tahitian society, as ‘Oboreah’s favourite’ or ‘a sort of high-priest of Otaheite’. Banks dubbed him a ‘cheif Tahowa or preist of this Island, consequently skilld in the mysteries of their religion’.53 Only in time was Banks’s clumsy, catch-all definition of ‘A Man of Knowledge’ sharpened into something meaningful. Later it would become evident they had met one of the most inquisitive, learned and perceptive people in all of these islands. Within a decade Georg Forster, the German naturalist who sailed with Cook on a later voyage, described Tupaia as ‘an extraordinary genius’.
For decades, even centuries, after the Endeavour voyage the story was retold within the framework of a traditional European exploration narrative. This not only emphasised the clear division between the ‘civilized’ visitors and the ‘savage’ or ‘barbarian’ natives, it also implied that the explorers were always the active, controlling participants in the drama of encounter while those they met played passive roles. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how wrong this assumption was. In 1769 Endeavour did not sail into a benign, ahistorical world. The people the sailors met had strong and distinct motivations for behaving the way they did. In no one is this truth more clearly expressed than in Tupaia.
Rather than meek generosity Tupaia’s interactions with Endeavour’s crew, and Banks in particular, were shrewd and calculated to serve a purpose. With little direct testimony from him his motivations can never entirely be known. But it seems clear that not long after Endeavour’s arrival in Matavai Bay he conceived a plan to travel with the ship when she left. Towards the end of the sailors’ three-month stay in Tahiti he made his request. He was persistent. On 12 July 1769, the day before Endeavour was due to sail, Tupaia came aboard and, as Banks put it, he ‘renewd his resolves of going with us to England’.
At about ten the next morning the collier caught a breeze from the west. As Endeavour gathered way, Matavai Bay was dotted with canoes. Parkinson heard the woeful cry ‘Awai! Awai!’, ‘to go or pass away’. Some drew alongside, offering parting gifts of coconut and bananas. Looking up, they must have been startled at the familiar figure standing on the quarterdeck.
‘By Tobias Directions’, Pickersgill wrote, ‘we stood to the Wt in Quest of some Islds which he said lay that way not far distant’. Banks watched as Tupaia shed ‘a few heartfelt tears, so I judge them to have been by the Efforts I saw him make use of to hide them’.54 The voyage in motion once again, Banks took his newest shipmate to the masthead, where they ‘stood a long time waving to the Canoes as they went off’. Tahiti faded into the horizon behind them, never to be seen by Banks or Parkinson or Tupaia again.