‘Tōtaiete mā’ is one phrase Parkinson did not record. It is the collective Tahitian name for the archipelago of islands, sprinkled midway across the Pacific, that Cook would name the Society Islands. Prior to the Endeavour’s visit in 1769, these islands – ranging over 250 miles of longitude, from Tahiti in the east to Bora Bora in the west – had yet to be reconciled into the western unit of geographical comprehension: a chart. But, as Tupaia knew, there was order here. Each island or atoll in the group was knitted together by a matrix of sea paths that ran, like the threads in a spider’s web, from one to another. However hard they looked none of the Endeavour’s crew could see these, but Tupaia had no problems finding them. It was onto one of these paths he guided Endeavour as she left Matavai Bay. Banks had watched the few ‘heartfelt tears’ gather in Tupaia’s eyes. He might have concluded, reasonably enough, that Tupaia was weeping for Tahiti. But there might have been another reason. For Tupaia was not leaving at all. He was going home.
Huahine, Ra’iātea, Bora Bora, the islands the Endeavour’s crew saw, shared much of Tahiti’s aesthetic charm. They rose jagged and jade green out of a lapis sea. They were all ringed by the same shimmering turquoise shallows, with the same palm-skirted beaches. Unadorned with solid architecture and the smoke of forges or factories, it was easy enough for people to equate this natural beauty with Rousseau’s ideas of calm innocence. But the reality was quite different. Endeavour was not gliding over tranquil waters. Rather in 1769 she was sailing through a contested geographical space riven by an intergenerational conflict. The source of the discontent was the island of Ra’iātea. Smaller than Tahiti in both size and population, Ra’iātea was nonetheless more revered. On its southern shores, in the district of Opua, stood the Marae Taputapuatea, the most sacred temple in Tōtaiete mā. To explain Taputapuatea’s significance to an Enlightenment man like Banks would be to ask them to imagine Oxford, Rome and Uppsala blended into one and concentrated into a small collection of flattened rocks and pillars by the sea. Taputapuatea was the lodestone, the beating magnetic heart for the islands, where priests prayed, scholars chanted and human sacrifices were offered. This was the place of Creation and birthplace of the gods, like Oro, the great god of war.
The eighteenth century is often remembered as an era of colonial expansion, when belligerent European nations probed further and further into North America, the Caribbean and India. The conflicts within Tōtaiete mā hardly seem to belong to the same historical universe, but as red-coated British soldiers marched across ever wider territories, at the same time the worship of Oro was radiating outwards from Taputapuatea: to Bora Bora in about 1710 and Tahiti about a decade later. Red was Oro’s colour too. His cult was carried from Ra’iātea to the outlying islands by an exclusive, priestly order named the arioi. The arioi existed beyond the normal, rigid binds of class identity. Exclusive and mostly non-hereditary – arioi were not permitted offspring, being limited like Catholic priests to unmarried life – only the most gifted, the most physically attractive and capable members of either sex were admitted. In an arioi was combined wisdom and physical prowess. Fond of travel, wherever the arioi went festivals of feasting, dancing, sacrifice, dark comedies and sex were held. One European visitor to the Society Islands, shortly after Endeavour’s time, watched as a flotilla of arioi approached a shore. Their canoes:
advanced towards the land, with their streamers floating in the wind, their drums and flutes sounding, and the Areois, attended by their chief, who acted as their prompter, appeared on a stage erected for the purpose, with their wild distortions of person, antic gestures, painted bodies, and vociferated songs, mingling with the sound of the drum and the flute, the dashing of the sea, and the rolling and the breaking of the surf.1
The arioi policy was of shock and awe and their principal aim during the first half of the eighteenth century was to convert the people of Tōtaiete mā to the cult of Oro. Banks, who on 13 July 1769 sat beside Tupaia on Endeavour’s masthead, comprehended none of this. He was unconcerned with spiritual matters, instead confining his attention to temporal things that he could see and evaluate. What was the purpose in speculating about things that could be proved neither true or false? ‘Religion has been in ages’, he wrote in his survey of the South Seas islands, and ‘is still in all Countreys Cloak’d in mysteries unexplicable to human understanding.’ There was an additional disadvantage, he explained: ‘the Language in which it is conveyd’.2
Endeavour’s topmast head was a tiny space, a mere few feet square. Huddled together, to those who looked up at them, Banks and Tupaia must have almost blended into one. Perhaps this is how Tupaia envisioned it. It seems that midway through Endeavour’s visit to Tahiti he had decided to enter into a ‘taio’ relationship with Banks, a type of formalised friendship, forged for mutual benefit. Taio meant a melding of two into one: of aims, outlooks, identities and names. Rarely can a taio friendship have had stranger constituent parts. On one was the Lincolnshire gentleman with £6,000 a year and his town house in Mayfair. On the other was Tupaia, a priest, a star navigator and a political refugee from Hamanimo Bay, Ra’iātea. Later, when the officers were trying to impress Tupaia with stories of Britain and brave King George and his many children, he replied that he ‘thought himself much greater, because he belonged to the arreoys’.3
Tupaia’s life had been, in equal measure, privileged and confused. Born in Ra’iātea in about 1725 he had not only come from a hallowed island, he had received oral instruction at Taputapuatea itself. Only a select few were afforded this honour. Concentrated into the minds of the chosen was the knowledge of the islands. Their skills took in practical as well as spiritual matters. Tupaia is said to have come from a family particularly talented in the art of maritime navigation. From his boyhood he would have learned to analyse te moana, the sea, treating it not as an indistinct mass, but rather a combination of aspects: the water’s colour and its hue, the pattern of the waves, the height of a swell, the tug of a current, the loom of the land and the behaviour of migratory birds and insects. Admitted into the third order of the arioi, Tupaia’s status must have been confirmed by the elaborate tattoos that criss-crossed his body, from the small of his back to the insides of his elbows. As a man of consequence, he had sailed across Tōtaiete mā on arioi missions during his young adulthood, accompanied, no doubt, by the requisite ceremony and fiery symbolism of Oro.
These early missions had run their course by the time Tupaia reached adulthood. Oro had been established on many islands and, soon, had come the backlash. The cause of the trouble, as Tupaia explained it to Parkinson, was an ill-fated decision to banish thieves from across the Society Islands to the ‘almost barren and uninhabited’ island called Bora Bora. Hoping to rid themselves of a problem, the move compounded it. Parkinson sketched the account: ‘In process of time, their numbers so greatly increased that the island was insufficient for their subsistence. Being men of desperate fortunes, they made themselves canoes, turned pirates, and made prisoners such of the people of the islands near them as had the misfortune to fall in their way, and seized their canoes and effects.’4
It was during the incursions of the Bora Borans that Tupaia had been forced from his comfortable lifestyle and ancestral homeland in Ra’iātea. Years of restlessness between the Bora Borans and Ra’iāteans had led to a bloody climax off the coast of Ra’iātea in about 1763. The contest had ended in ‘great slaughter’. Betrayed in the heat of battle, the Ra’iāteans had been defeated and Tupaia had nearly been killed. Engulfed in the fighting, he had been struck by a stingray barb which ‘peircd quite through his body, entering at his back and coming out just under his breast’.5 More than five years later the injury was still visible. Banks saw the scar, and thought it ‘as smooth and as small as any I have seen from the cures of our best European surgeons’. Tupaia survived but his previous life was over. It was only then, it is said, that he adopted ‘Tupaia’ for a name, a word that signified ‘beaten’. As Molyneux, Endeavour’s master, laconically summed up the story, he was driven ‘from his Possessions & Oblig’d him to Fly to Queen Obree[a] for shelter’.6
Tupaia was among many Ra’iāteans to find refuge on Tahiti. He may have been wounded and shorn of his lands, wealth and previous identity, but Tupaia remained an arioi, a priest of Oro and a gallant survivor of the Bora Boran hostility. In Tahiti he had soon found a new powerbase, allying himself with Purea – the much-vaunted ‘Queen Oboreah’ – becoming her lover. Recovering physically and socially rejuvenated, Purea and Tupaia had schemed to consolidate and expand their status around Papara in the southern part of Tahiti. This was how matters had stood in the mid-1760s. So far Tupaia had experienced the ebb and flow of life. He had been elevated to a status of enormous power and reduced to an existence of homeless despair. But what came next must have been more perplexing than anything that had gone before.
Within two years of the sea battle off Ra’iātea, sightings were swapped among the islands of massive, floating objects to the north. These were provoking reports. Recent prophecies had spoken of the coming of strange canoes ‘without outriggers’, carrying even stranger people, or of sacred birds returning home. Many of the foundation stories in Tōtaiete mā centred on the concept of voyaging. The gods travelled the skies in marvellous winged canoes, like Tane, the god of peace and beauty, or Maui and Ru, who had traversed the world, filling it with islands. The mention of birds, too, added gravity. Banks had noticed the special status of birds among the people. Each island had its own sacred bird. At one it was a heron, for another ‘a kind of kingfisher’. These were neither molested nor killed, instead they were considered the bringers of good or bad fortune. Just like the voyaging gods, the birds symbolised freedom for a geographically isolated people. The scholar Anne Salmond has described the South Seas islanders’ feeling of ‘cosmic loneliness’.7 The tiny islands that were their home merely pricked the surface of a massive ocean. Lost within it, what existed over the horizon’s rim was only half known. And from the eastern horizon had appeared, in short order, four great canoes. The Dolphin, then – though Cook did not yet know this – two French ships commanded by de Bougainville, and finally, Endeavour.
It is impossible to know exactly what people thought of the ships. Oral histories tell of a strange apparition, floating islands or a godlike creature. ‘They were struck with astonishment at so extraordinary an appearance’, wrote a descendant of one who witnessed the Dolphin’s arrival, they ‘could not account for such an amazing phenomena, which filled them with wonder and fear’. This feeling of wonder seems to have been transient, but the fear lasted longer. Banks acknowledged ‘terrour which the Dolphins guns put them into’ and when he asked how many had died in the battle, ‘they number names upon their fingers, some ten some twenty some thirty, and then say worrow worow the same word as is usd for a flock of birds or a shoal of fish’.8
That Tupaia should be attracted to Endeavour in 1769 was entirely natural. From his childhood as an arioi, to his relationship with Purea, he had stayed close to power. Endeavour was the second ship he had visited, and perhaps his idea for leaving had its origin the year before when he had toured the Dolphin. Furthermore, water was Tupaia’s medium. He might be venerated on land, but an arioi was never quite so magnificent as when navigating the sea. Another clue into Tupaia’s motivations is, perhaps, hidden in a compelling archival document.
We know that at some point during the summer of 1769, Tupaia started to sketch with Parkinson. Tupaia’s watercolours – mostly domestic scenes of boys playing the nose flute, or of mourning ceremonies – have only recently been acknowledged as his work. At first view they look awkward and stiff. The figures are coarsely drawn, linear and flat against the paper. But when one learns these are the earliest attempts of a man from Ra’iātea who had never previously seen watercolour and had no experience or technical training in form, colour, composition or perspective, the traditional frame of reference melts away.
Among Tupaia’s sketches is a particularly intriguing one, more technically complex and confident than the rest. It is known as A Scene in Tahiti. Outlined in pencil and partly finished with watercolours, it shows a long meeting house, overhung with palm, banana and breadfruit trees. The trees are delicately rendered – one wonders whether it is a joint composition with Parkinson – the trunks are filled with an oaky brown, the leaves with a juniper green. But it’s the foreground that holds the drama. Here Tupaia depicts the scene of a sea battle, with fighting canoes. Three are shown in combat. One hurries out of the frame to the right as the others join in battle. The warriors stand on platforms, gripping clubs and lances. Unfinished pencil figures muster in the bellies of the canoes, poised to join the fray.
There are two ways of reading this picture. It may be an entire, coherent scene; but equally it may be a layered narrative, like the Bayeux Tapestry. In this reading A Scene in Tahiti becomes something different, turning the piece from a portrait of Tahitian life, into a pictorial autobiography. The watercolour is incomplete, as, perhaps, was Tupaia’s story. From the middle of May 1769, he appears to have made it his ambition to join Endeavour, to forge a taio relationship with Banks, to guide them all to Taputapuatea and, perhaps, even to harness the power of Endeavour’s lethal weapons to revenge himself on the Bora Borans.
Several Tahitians had offered to sail with the British, but Tupaia had been the most insistent. He ‘has appear’d always to be infinitely superiour in every Respect to any other Indian we have met with, he has conceiv’d so strong a Freindship for Mr Banks that he is Determind to Visit Britannia’, Molyneux the master had observed.9 Hearing the news, Banks had been thrilled. He had promised to provide for him when they reached Britain and admitted him as part of his suite. On 12 July 1769, Tupaia had spent his last day in Tahiti, praying and bidding farewell to friends. Before nightfall, accompanied by a boy servant Taiato, he was rowed aboard to take up ‘lodgins for the first time’. ‘He is certainly a most proper man, well born’, Banks wrote:
Thank heaven I have a sufficiency and I do not know why I may not keep him as a curiosity, as well as some of my neighbours do lions and tygers at a larger expence than he will probably ever put me to; the amusement I shall have in his future conversation and the benefit it will be of to this ship, as well as what he may be if another should be sent into these seas, will I think fully repay me.10
This is one of those passages in Banks that jars, seemingly outing him as a rapacious imperial meddler, seizing what he fancies and hauling it home for display. This verdict is not entirely fair. The scholar Nicholas Thomas has contextualised Banks’s ‘rightly notorious’ depiction of Tupaia, pointing out in mitigation, ‘his attitude was entirely unlike that of nineteenth-century imperial entrepreneurs who really did collect indigenous people, really did keep them in zoo-like conditions, and really did exhibit them in precisely the way they exhibited animals’:
Banks saw Tupaia as a collectible, but also as a companion, and he was not someone who would use the expression ‘a most proper man’ lightly. He goes on to make it clear that what he means is that Tupaia is a man of rank and social eminence. Banks would never have described any of the common seamen in these terms, and no doubt saw Tupaia as a fitter person to conduct a conversation with than any of them. In any case, Tupaia was not ‘collected’ by anyone on the Endeavour. He made a decision to voyage (and he took a boy, usually described as his servant, with him).11
Nor was Tupaia an ornamental presence aboard. In the weeks after they left Tahiti his influence infused the ship. Within days he had brought Huahine into view. Lying behind a reef, Tupaia summoned islanders to dive beneath the hull to test the depth of her keel. The ‘chief’ of Huahine had been rowed, ‘trembling’, to meet them but his anxiety vanished at the sight of Tupaia who then led the officers and gentlemen ashore. There he performed a speech or prayer, stripped to his waist and made gifts of beads and handkerchiefs. Whatever confusion the Europeans felt at this display was repaid instantly by the officers, who hammered a staff into the earth, hoisted up a Union Jack, and claimed the island for King George.
By 20 July, Tupaia had navigated them across the short passage to the place he most held dear, Opua, and Taputapuatea. Here, again, ceremonies were repeated, Tupaia offering thanks, the British taking possession with a flag. They were then at liberty to explore the marae. Banks detected the different aura to this site than those he had experienced in Tahiti, but the gravity he sensed did not prevent him from meddling. In his most crass moment of cultural vandalism, he jammed his hand inside one of the god-houses and tore at the wrappings, ‘with my fingers till I came to a covering of mat made of platted Cocoa nut fibres which it was impossible to get through so I was obligd to desist, especialy as what I had already done gave much offence to our new freinds’.12 There was nowhere Banks’s curiosity would not lead him. But one wonders how Banks would react if a South Seas islander toured Canterbury Cathedral, prised open the lid of Thomas Becket’s tomb then stirred round the bones.
Endeavour was soon back at sea. Tupaia thrived in these tricksy coastal waters, where spires of coral jutted up and reefs threatened to cut into Endeavour’s side. Despite all the care they almost scraped against a shoal off Opua, only veering away at the last minute. They went on to circle Ra’iātea, and at the start of August, with a leak in the powder room needing attention, Tupaia led Endeavour into a commodious bay on Ra’iātea’s western shore. ‘We have now a very good opinion of Tupias pilotage’, Banks confirmed in his journal.13
For some days they lay at anchor at Hamanimo Bay, where they were ‘very agreably entertaind’. This was Tupaia’s home and his return was marked with feasting and dancing. For Tupaia the last weeks must have been the most thrilling and disorientating of his life. He was an arioi touring Tōtaiete mā, following old sea paths, performing ceremonies, meeting and dancing and eating in familiar island settings. Only this time he was not commanding the ceremonial canoes or pahi, but something far bigger. During these heady weeks in 1769 Endeavour, now five years old, was at her most magnificent. She was a hybrid of astonishing parts. A Whitby coal collier, converted into a Royal Navy exploration vessel, was sailing in the South Seas under the direction of an arioi according to a lore and method alien to all of her officers.
Cook had worried about Tupaia joining the crew from the start. He had discussed the idea with Banks before they left Tahiti. Cook argued that the British government ‘will never in all human probability’ provide financially for Tupaia. Banks had countered Cook’s argument, admitting Tupaia into his suite – Buchan’s death had freed a cabin – and resolving to support him when they reached home. Mollified, Cook had retreated to his journal to rationalise the decision, Tupaia being ‘a very intelligent person’ who knew ‘more of the Geography of the Islands situated in these seas, their produce and the religion laws and customs of the inhabitants then any one we had met with and was the likeliest person to answer our purpose’.14
Before Endeavour sailed, consideration had been given to how they should behave towards the peoples they met. Dalrymple had been resolute that no ‘accession to the British Empire’ be made by ‘fraud or violence’, and perspectives had long changed since John Cabot had sailed the first English ship to the Indies with instructions ‘to attract on board all the natives of foreign lands, and to intoxicate them with beer and wine, so as to grow acquainted with the secrets of their hearts’.15 The Earl of Morton, president of the Royal Society, had composed a series of ‘hints’ for ‘Captain Cooke, Mr Banks, Doctor Solander, and the other Gentlemen’. It began:
To exercise the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the Natives of the several Lands where the Ship may touch.
To check the petulance of the Sailors, and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms.
To have it still in view that sheding the blood of those people is a crime of the highest nature:– They are all human creatures, the work of the same omnipotent Author, equally under his care with the most polished European, perhaps being less offensive, more entitled to his favor.
They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit.
No European Nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent.16
It was important that thought be given to interactions with indigenous peoples as, if the voyage progressed as planned, interaction was inevitable. But how to make sense of those they met? As Rousseau had pointed out, ‘The most useful and the least developed of all the science seems to me to be that of man.’ He, of course, argued that humans should best be understood from their social context, which put them somewhere on a scale between civilised and savage. Then, in tune with the classifying urge of the times, there were those who sought to divide humanity into races. High on his success with the botanical world, Linnaeus had proposed four ‘types’ of Homo sapiens: the white Europaeus albus, the yellow Asiaticus luridus, the black Afer niger and the red Americanus rufus. A forerunner of the nasty racial ideas of future ages, on Endeavour no one took any notice of Linnaeus’s crass method – not even Banks or Solander. Even then they sensed humans were more awkward to divide up than plants.
There were other ambitious ideas too. One was that the two extremes of the human condition – civilisation and barbarism – were created by contrasting climatic zones, that we ‘can impute freedom and slavery to the temperature of the air, can fix the meridian of vice and virtue and tell at what degree of latitude we are to expect courage or timidity, knowledge or ignorance’, lampooned a sceptical Samuel Johnson. Then, in the face of all this determinism, were the arguments of the French statesman Anne Robert Jacques Turgot who suggested ‘a lucky arrangement of the fibres in the brain, a greater or lesser quickness of the blood, these are probably the only differences which nature establishes among men.’17
As with scurvy remedies, there was plenty of conjecture, but really those aboard were left to feel their way. After their time in Tahiti all of them were familiar with the complexities inherent in encountering ‘natives’ or ‘Indians’ for the first time. No one was going to stand still to be studied. People’s attitudes were bound to change depending on whether an encounter was friendly or not. But their relationship with Tupaia changed this. With him they were forced into the close confinement of shipboard life. Traits might be concealed during a fleeting visit, but it was impossible to maintain a mask for twenty-four hours a day.
As Banks’s intriguing companion, Cook must have recognised the benefits Tupaia brought. Banks and Cook completed lucid, perceptive ‘Manners and Customs of S. Sea Islands’, much of the information of which was gleaned from Tupaia after they had sailed. But it must have been with some unease that Cook gave Tupaia the right to the great cabin. So far this had been a place of precision. There was Cook and his charts, Banks and Solander and their specimens, or Green the astronomer with his mathematical reductions. It was an inner sanctum of rationalism in a voyage sent out to measure, classify and discover. It must have come as a shock to Cook, then, to see Tupaia praying at the stern windows. Parkinson was there. He heard him call ‘with much fervor: O Tane, ara mai, matai, ora mai matai’; Parkinson rendered this into English: ‘Tane (the God of his Morai) send to me, or come to me with a fair wind’. ‘His prayer proving ineffectual’, Parkinson wrote, Tupaia called out ‘Wooreede waow, I am angry.’18
In his journal Cook passed over the incident in silence. It would have been hard to admit to such a thing in the officers’ quarters of one of the king’s ships. Tupaia represented everything Cook was trying to flee: opaque methods, an over-reliance on the empirical not the mathematical, the veneration of a flaunting, mystic world of spirits, rather than one of clocks, telescopes and sextants. Prayers were encouraged on Endeavour, but only during allotted hours on a Sunday morning. But Cook did benefit from the expertise Tupaia brought. The care Tupaia took about the reefs was not so removed from the vigilance practised on the Yorkshire coast. And in his month observing Tupaia, Cook had come to a tentative conclusion that was later admired for its foresight.
Ever since European sailors had broken into the South Seas in the sixteenth century they had been perplexed by the dispersed human populations. Without any of the Europeans’ technological advantages, here in front of their eyes were navigators who seemed equally as good as them. One of de Bougainville’s officers had posed the conundrum in a burst of exasperation: ‘Who the devil went and placed them on a small sandbank like this one and as far from the continent as they are?’19 Two centuries of further study were required to begin to solve the question of how islands, islets and atolls, altogether distributed across an area larger than Africa, had been populated by people with cultural, biological and linguistic ties. In 1769 Cook proposed an answer:
these people sail in those seas from Island to Island for several hundred Leagues, the Sun serving them for a compass by day and the Moon and Stars by night. When this comes to be prov’d we Shall be no longer at a loss to know how the Islands lying in those Seas came to be people’d, for if the inhabitants of [Ra’iātea] have been at Islands laying 2 or 300 Leagues to the westward of them it cannot be doubted but that the inhabitants of those western Islands may have been at others as far to westward of them and so we may trace them from Island to Island quite to the East Indies.20
This is one of the earliest Western appreciations of what the writer Lincoln Paine termed ‘the oldest, most sustained, and perhaps most enigmatic effort of maritime exploration and migration in the history of the world’. The Polynesians had not floundered across in the darkness, but rather they had progressed from one island to the next in a migration that had begun in South East Asia 5,000 years before. They had travelled in great canoes fitted with sails, carrying pigs, dogs and chickens, traversing almost the entire Pacific from Hawaii to New Zealand. Though the period of long-distance voyaging had lapsed by the eighteenth century, with the various peoples confined to their specific territories, tales of epic voyages continued to live on in the collective memory. Tupaia was among the heirs to the corpus of knowledge that had made the voyages possible. The key was a simple, elegant system. All of nature’s signs would be studied but, figuratively and literally, above all would shine the stars. Once an island had been found and settled it would be assimilated into the Polynesian world with its location coordinated with a star in the sky. From childhood, navigators would learn the solar chart. The trick was to know which star shone above which island on a given day in the year. Banks would record his astonishment at this feat of memory, which was something hardly to be ‘beleivd by an Europaean astronomer.’21
Later Dalrymple heard a story from Cook: Tupaia ‘could shew them at all times during the course of their voyage, to half a point of the compass, the direction in which Otaheite lay’.22
The system was at once incredibly simple and enormously complex. To know it took an unusual capacity of memory. But it was not a system for all. Rather, star navigators were a select few of the very best. This was the history Cook was beginning to recognise in August 1769. In one sense this idea was utterly at odds with his instincts for technical precision. But in another way, perhaps it wasn’t so different after all. On leaving London, Green had brought a copy of Maskelyne’s Nautical Almanac with him, an innovative navigational tool that helped mariners derive longitude by tallying observations of the moon or other celestial objects. It is striking to picture Cook and Green taking lunar readings on one of those dazzling Pacific nights. Beside them Tupaia was gazing upward too.
Cook had acquiesced to a tour of the Society Islands. The transit observations had been completed and there was no need to hurry. Endeavour and her crew were in tolerable health and, having fulfilled his first objectives, Cook wanted to see what Samuel Wallis had not. It was roughly two years since the Dolphin had left these waters. She had been in as trim a state as Endeavour. But for Wallis and a few lieutenants, ‘all the rest of our Ships Company was mutch healthyer [than] the day we left Plymouth’, wrote the Dolphin’s master, George Robertson. ‘The Ship was light’, he went on, ‘Sails and Rigging all in good Order’, so he was bemused at Wallis’s order to steer to westward. The ‘princaple Officers wanted to go post home’, he explained, ‘for the recovery of their health, and to receive the reward of their Merit and good Luck in finding out a Country’.23
Wallis’s decision had irritated Robertson, who thought a southern continent stood just to the south. Cook had been told as much. On leaving Tahiti he turned to the second part of his orders:
You are to proceed to the southward in order to make discovery of the Continent above-mentioned until you arrive in the Latitude of 40°, unless you sooner fall in with it. But not having discover’d it, or any Evident signs of it in that Run, you are to proceed in search of it to the Westward between the Latitude before mentioned and the Latitude of 35° until you discover it, or fall in with the Eastern side of the Land discover’d by Tasman and now called New Zeland.24
Cook was about to plunge into a part of the world few had visited. Here, directly to the south of the Society Islands, midway across the South Seas, was the heart of the region Dalrymple had outlined as the space for a southern continent. Cook, in all probability, was sceptical already. Tupaia had been quizzed about ‘a Continent or large track of land’, but had no knowledge of one. Getting no aid from that quarter, Cook had been left to run his eye over his instructions again. They mentioned one place that Europeans knew to exist in the lower regions of the South Seas: New Zealand.
In a chart full of enigmas, New Zealand was yet another. It existed only as a single curved line adrift in the higher latitudes of the South Seas. Its coastline seemed to run broadly from north to south and it had a kink in the middle, a sign to an inquisitive mind like Cook’s of a possible strait or river. These tenuous details were the fruits of Abel Tasman’s well-known seventeenth-century voyage. In the 1640s Tasman was in the service of the Dutch East India Company and he was sent to probe the Indian Ocean and South Seas for signs of a continent. Sailing east from Mauritius, he skirted past one land mass he named Van Diemen’s Land and, on 13 December 1642, after months on a boisterous ocean of ‘huge billows and swells’, his ships neared a coastline. They skimmed along it, coming to anchor in a bay. The story of what happened next was well enough known. Tasman was greeted by people who were ‘rough, uncivilised, full of verve’, paddling in canoes. Attempting to establish communication, some of his men were ambushed. Four sailors were clubbed to death and, within a day, Tasman hurried away, leaving behind nothing more than a name: ‘Murderers Bay’. Tasman followed the coast northward until it vanished behind a cape and he rejoined the open ocean.
No Europeans had returned to this place, ‘Zeelandia Nova’, since, and the Dutch East India Company had suppressed Tasman’s journal to conceal news of the discovery. But reports had seeped out, adding one more faint line onto the confused cartography of the South Seas. Dalrymple had interpreted New Zealand as the western coastline of the southern continent, and it remained as Cook’s only sound point of reference, far to the south-west of the Society Islands. First, though, Cook took Endeavour south. Soon the sea lost its lustre, the waves rode higher and a chill returned to the air.
Having dropped to the prescribed latitude of 40°S by 1 September they reached a zone of ‘great seas’, high handsome waves with a long, languid fetch. There was no trace of land. If their hunt for Terra Australis seemed futile to the officers, it must have seemed all the worse for Tupaia who by now had succumbed to ‘a distemper’ and pains in the stomach. It was not only Tupaia’s body that had suffered, but also his standing aboard. One of Cook’s later sailors attested that Tupaia:
was a man of real genius, a priest of the first order, and an excellent artist; he was, however, by no means beloved by the Endeavour’s crew, being looked upon as proud and austere, extorting homage, which the sailors who thought themselves degraded by bending to an Indian, were very unwilling to pay, and preferring complaints against them on the most trivial occasions.25
Having progressed far enough to the south, Cook now took Endeavour westwards, tracing a line along the thirty-eighth parallel where New Zealand was said to lie. To sharpen eyes, he ‘promised one gallon of rum to the man who should first discover it by day and two if he should discover it by night’. September turned into October and there was a noticeable alteration in the colour of the water. A pair of sleeping seals were spotted. Then some small birds ‘which Mr Gore calls Port Egmont hens’ were seen. After many weeks of sailing, these had a jollifying effect on Banks. On 3 October he sketched a merry portrait:
Now do I wish that our freinds in England could by the assistance of some magical spying glass take a peep at our situation: Dr Solander setts at the Cabbin table describing, myself at my Bureau Journalizing, between us hangs a large bunch of sea weed, upon the table lays the wood and barnacles; they would see that notwithstanding our different occupations our lips move very often, and without being conjurors might guess that we were talking about what we should see upon the land which there is now no doubt we shall see very soon.26
On the afternoon of 8 October, Cook took Endeavour into a three-mile-wide bay that cut into the landscape in a perfect semicircle. Passing the bluff, chalky headland at the southern tip of the bay, Cook could be forgiven a fleeting memory of Flamborough Head thousands of leagues and half a turn of a globe away on the North Yorkshire coast, with its gannets and puffins, razorbills and guillemots. He could have no idea what wildlife might exist here. There had been a ‘difference of opinion and many conjectures about Islands’, wrote Banks, ‘rivers, inlets &c, but all hands seem to agree that this is certainly the Continent we are in search of’.27 Cook, more careful than excitable, knew that in all likelihood this was the eastern edge of New Zealand. Being in need of water and provisions, he stood in. As Endeavour neared shore several canoes pulled out, crossing their path. Parkinson saw more people, ‘seemingly observing us’. At about four o’clock in the afternoon, Endeavour dropped anchor at the mouth of a small river.
Cook and his party were rowed ashore, landing on the north lip of the river. It was then Cook saw ‘some of the natives’, on the opposite bank. Striving to speak with them but finding the water impossible to ford, he called for the yawl – a boat with two pairs of oars – to ferry them over while the pinnace – the larger of the boats – stayed guarding the entrance. Among Cook’s party was the ship’s surgeon, William Monkhouse, a Cumberland man. He kept a careful account of what happened next. Seeing the yawl approach the people ‘made off’. Free to examine the shoreline, Monkhouse, with Banks, Solander and Cook, pried into some reed huts ‘of the wigwam construction’ and sifted the contents. Inside were the remains of a fishing net, a grass dress, a pile of burnt sticks. Outside limpet and lobster shells were scattered about. Monkhouse and the others were ‘thus amused’ when ‘we were suddenly alarmed with the firing of a musket’.28
They hurried back to a dismal scene. The boys left guarding the yawl had been surprised by an ambush, launched by ‘four of the Natives’. Armed with lances, they had approached the boys. Noticing the attack, the coxswain had fired a musket in the air, ‘which our friends paid no other reguard to than brandishing their weapons’. A second shot had then been fired. This had no effect. The coxswain had ‘then levelled at the headmost of the party and shot him’. His friends had ‘instantly’ fallen back. A moment later they had returned and had carried his body fifty yards, but ‘now finding him dead’ had left him ‘and retired tho’ in no kind of haste’. Monkhouse examined the body. ‘He was a short, but very stout bodied man – measured about 5 f 3 I’, he wrote. He had three arched tattoos over his left eye and ‘spirals of tattaou’ on his right cheek and nose. ‘The ball had passed from the sixth rib on the left side thro’ the right shoulder blade. Some nails and beads were put upon the body, and we took our leave from the shore.’29
Back aboard, Monkhouse could hear ‘a loud clamour of voices’, and Cook ordered a ‘strict watch to be kept all the night’. Parkinson looked out towards the beach, too, where a large ‘clamorous’ meeting was being held, a sight that left him uneasy.
The dead man was Te Maro of the Ngati Rakai hapu. Te Maro had lived in a bay the Māori called Tūranganui-a-Kiwa where the Tūranganui River reached the sea. This was a special place. Traditions hold that, centuries before, it was the landing place of the Horouta waka, one of the great ocean-going canoes of the early migrations. The Horouta is known for bringing dried kūmara (sweet potato) to Aotearoa (New Zealand) from the ancestral homelands at Hawaiki* and, in turn, it brought the first inhabitants to the east coast.
A story is told about the voyage of the Horouta to Tūranganui-a-Kiwa. The waka set out from Ahauhu (Great Mercury Island) after a dispute over the ownership of some trees. On its way along the north coast, the Horouta collided with a sandbar or a sunken rock and capsized. Its haumi or headpiece was ripped off and some of the cargo had to be retrieved from the sea floor. Unable to carry everyone, a man called Kiwa was made the commander of a skeleton crew and told to continue to the east coast. Others progressed overland. Kiwa then brought the Horouta to the Tūranganui River, where he decided to wait for the overland party to join them. ‘To commemorate this decision, Kiwa gave the title Tūranganui-a-Kiwa (the rendezvous selected by Kiwa) to the neighbouring land, sea, streams.’30
In October 1769, Endeavour approached the same landing site. Visiting the area two generations later, an English traveller called Joel Polack recorded various stories connected to Endeavour’s arrival. One stated that she was initially taken for a bird, ‘and that many remarks passed among the people as to the beauty and the size of its wings’. Watching the long boat, yawl and the pinnace being lowered was like seeing small birds ‘unfledged’. Another account described the ship as a floating island. A third suggested it was a ‘houseful of divinities’. The astonishment of the people, Polack wrote:
on seeing Cook’s ship was so great that they were benumbed with fear, but presently, recollecting themselves, they felt determined to find out if the gods (as the newcomers were thought to be) were as pugnacious as themselves … Many of the natives observed that they felt themselves taken ill by only being particularly looked upon by these atuas (gods) and it was, therefore, agreed that, as these newcomers could bewitch by a simple look, the sooner their society was dismissed the better it would be for the general welfare.31
In Tahiti Endeavour’s safety had been guaranteed by the violence of the Dolphin’s visit. None of that power was known here. There were no terms of reference, no traditions of friendship. They had been in the bay just two hours yet already they had contravened the first two rules the Earl of Morton had set down in his ‘hints’: ‘To exercise the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the Natives of the several Lands where the Ship may touch’, and ‘To check the petulance of the Sailors, and restrain the wanton use of Fire-Arms.’
Looking through his glass at dawn the following morning, Banks saw ‘but few people’ on the beach. Those he could make out were walking towards the river where they had landed the previous day, though most of them seemed unarmed, just ‘3 or 4 with long Pikes in their hands’. Cook disagreed, recording ‘a good number’ in his journal. He ordered all the boats – longboat, yawl and pinnace – to be filled with seamen and marines. They were to go and ‘try to establish a communication with them’. Their task was made difficult by a short, lively sea and a high surf. They eventually weathered this and landed again at the river mouth. Banks was there, as always, and Solander. And Cook had brought Tupaia too. ‘The moment the first party landed’, Monkhouse wrote, the Māori ‘formed into a close body upon the bank of the river’, and ‘set up a war dance’. This was the first haka ever witnessed by a British crew. Gore described it:
About an hundred of the Natives all Arm’d came down on the opposite side of the Salt River, drew themselves up in lines. Then with a Regular Jump from Left to Right and the Reverse, They brandish’d Their Weapons, distort’d their Mouths, Lolling out their Tongues and Turn’d up the Whites of their Eyes Accompanied with a strong hoarse song. Calculated in my opinion to Chear Each Other and Intimidate their Enemies, and may be call’d perhaps with propriety A Dancing War Song. It lasted 3 or 4 minutes.32
Cook attempted to shout across in ‘the George Island Language’. They replied by ‘flourishing their weapons over their heads and danceing’. He next ordered the marines to file up 200 yards behind so they commanded the scene. Then an entirely unanticipated thing occurred. Tupaia, so far a quiet presence, called over ‘in his own language’. It was, Cook reported, ‘an [a]greeable surprise to us to find that they perfectly understood him’. An extraordinary conversation followed. On one side of the river stood the Māori, on the other the British. Between them was Tupaia: a man who belonged to neither country, or knew much of either of the cultures he was trying to bridge.
Banks, who must have elicited the content of their conversations later, wrote how Tupaia ‘immediately began to tell them that we wanted provisions and water for which we would give them Iron in exchange’. The Māori agreed to this, but refused to ‘lay by’ their arms, something Tupaia ‘lookd upon as a sign of treachery and continualy told us to be upon our guard for they were not our freinds’. Cook also recorded his warning, that ‘they were not our friends’. But the conversation did ease tensions. Monkhouse noticed how Tupaia ‘at length prevailed on one of them to strip of his covering and swim across’.33 This man came to a rock ‘surrounded by the tide’ and beckoned for the officers to approach. Cook responded. He gave away his musket ‘to put himself on a footing’ and managed to meet the man at the river’s edge.
The brief encounter that ensued between Cook and the unknown Māori man was one of true historical significance. Not only was this the first formal greeting between the Europeans and Māori, it happened at a place infused with cultural and historical meaning. The rock was named Te Toka-a-Taiau. Oral histories later explained that it was connected with a man called Maia, one of the earliest migrants from Hawaiki. In these distant days, Maia used frequently to ford the Tūranganui River here. One day when he was crossing he encountered a young girl called Taiau. He beckoned for her to cross and meet him. Taiau obeyed Maia. But when she approached he drowned her and transformed her body into the treasured rock which bore her name. In the centuries since, Te Toka-a-Taiau had marked tribal boundaries. It had acted as a spiritual gathering place, as a favoured location for mooring waka and fishing. On 9 October 1769, James Cook and this unknown Māori man met at Te Toka-a-Taiau. Monkhouse watched as they ‘saluted by touching noses’.
It was now the Europeans’ turn to lose their terms of reference. A handshake between friends, a tip of a hat to a superior, a bow to the great and worthy; their own culture was embroidered with its own coded intricacies. But this greeting was entirely new. This hongi – the traditional Māori greeting when two breaths are joined into one bond of friendship – undertaken in front of such a gathering of people, is an iconic first encounter. For a fleeting moment it joined two cultures in parity and goodwill. It broke the tension. ‘A few trinkets put our friend into high spirits’, Monkhouse wrote, and soon he was followed by ‘20 or 30 more.’ The first man had dropped his weapons; those who followed did not. Presents were exchanged: iron and beads, though ‘they seemd to set little value upon either’, Banks wrote. Instead what appealed were the swords, hatchets and firearms, which were grabbed at. ‘We were upon our guard so much that their attempts faild and they were made to understand that we must kill them if they snatched any thing from us’.
Not all of the ship’s company were as vigilant. In particular Monkhouse had an eye on Green, the astronomer, who was being ‘much teased’ by the people who ‘expressed a desire’ to have his hanger – or hunting sword. As Green backed away from the melee, a man seized his chance, laying hold of the sword, tearing it from his belt and immediately making away with his prize. Events now happened apace. Green, furious, ‘snapt his musket’ while Banks ‘pronounced aloud’ his opinion ‘that so daring an act should be instantly punishd’. A roar was put up. Banks fired a volley of small shot into the man’s back. It had no effect. The man ‘ceasd his cry but instead of quitting his prize continued to wave it over his head retreating as gently as before’. Monkhouse, even closer to the incident than Banks, then fired a ball at the man, ‘at which he dropt’.34
As Monkhouse wrote later, ‘matters were now in great confusion’. The Māori were flying across the river. Two stayed behind and tried to rescue a treasured object from the body. ‘Some of our party unacquainted with the true state of things’, the surgeon wrote, ‘begun to fire upon them by which two or three were wounded.’ The last of the guns Banks saw fire was aimed by Tupaia, a burst of shot which he ‘clearly saw strike two men low down upon their legs’. The Māori, wrote Monkhouse, ‘now set up a most lamentable noise and retired slowly along the beach’.
The Shot man had a human tooth hanging at one ear and a girdle of Matting about four inches broad was passed twice round his loins & tied. He had a paddle in his hand which, tho’ drawing his last breath, he would not part with without the greatest reluctance.35
It was a calamitous end to a fraught meeting. To add a trivial disappointment to the personal tragedies, the ship’s company were not able to collect any water from the river, finding it brackish. In exasperation, Cook reboarded the pinnace with Banks, Solander and Tupaia, and they pushed off, aiming to skirt the bay to the south and round the headland in search of water. Cook also devised what Molyneux called ‘a generous christianlike Plan’, to surprise some of the Māori, ‘take them on board and by good treatment and presents endeavour to gain their friendship’. Approaching the headland, Cook saw his chance. A fishing canoe was standing in towards them. It was returning from a trip to sea. Behind it followed a second.
Thinking this the best time to spring his plan, Cook ordered the pinnace brought up, abreast of the canoes. He did not anticipate trouble. As fishermen they ‘probably were without arms’, reasoned Banks, and they were drawn up ‘in such a manner that they could not well escape us.’ The pinnace neared the canoes. As they approached, the first spotted them and ‘made immediately for the nearest land’. The second, though, continued as before. Almost alongside, Tupaia called over the water, to tell the fishermen they would not be hurt. Instead of submitting, the canoe struck sail and ‘began to paddle so briskly’, Banks wrote, ‘that she outran our boat’. Cook ordered a musket to be fired over the canoe. But rather than stopping, the fishermen ceased paddling and all seven of them began to strip their clothes. Banks thought they were poised to jump into the water, to make for shore. As soon as the pinnace ran alongside, they began to attack.
The fishermen fought desperately. They threw ‘Pikes or Spears from 18 to 10 feet long’, ‘and Fought as long as ever they had things to Throw’, even ‘a Parcel of Fish which they had in the Canoe they flung’.36 Those in the pinnace retaliated with gunfire. Cook estimated in his journal that ‘two or three’ were killed, while Banks set the number at four. Three other boys had leapt overboard, one swimming ‘with great agility’ towards the shore, ‘and when taken made every effort in his power to prevent being taken into the boat, the other two were more easily prevaild upon’.37
The boys were carried to Endeavour, where they cowered on the deck, anticipating death. An order was given for them to be clothed and ‘treated with all immaginable kindness’, and both Cook and Banks observed an immediate shift in their moods, they becoming ‘as cheerful and as merry as if they had been with their own friends’. They were young boys, the eldest about twenty, the youngest ten or twelve. Retiring to his cabin after the miseries of the day, Cook retreated to his journal in self-reproach:
I am aware that most humane men who have not experienced things of this nature will cencure my conduct in fireing upon the people in this boat nor do I my self think that the reason I had for seizing upon her will att all justify me, and had I thought that they would have made the least resistance I would not have come near them, but as they did I was not to stand still and suffer either my self or those that were with me to be knocked on the head.38
Banks, too, was disturbed. He was with the boys at sunset as they continued to eat vast quantities of food, relishing the salt pork above all else. Banks seems to have helped in the making of beds ‘upon the lockers’, a rare concession to domesticity for him. Then, with angry voices audible from the shore, he retired to his cabin. There survives a coastal profile of this bay, drawn for Banks. Onto it Banks inserted a numeric key, each number relating to one of the day’s incidents. He mapped out the fatal progression of events as a twenty-first-century detective might depict a crime scene. He finished the day’s journal entry, ‘Thus ended the most disagreable day My life has yet seen, black be the mark for it and heaven send that such may never return to embitter future reflection.’39
Both Cook and Banks are betrayed by their journal entries. That Cook errs into approximation, with ‘two or three’ deaths, rather than Banks’s unambiguous ‘four’ is revealing. Either he found it traumatic to reduce the calamity into precision, or by diminishing the numbers he was trying to absolve his guilt. But for a man with a mania for accuracy, the lapse is telling. Cook would not brook such an approximation for a longitude, yet at this moment he cannot bring himself to count to four. Banks’s entry, meanwhile, is more precise, though one wonders whether it is entirely candid. Banks was not one to dwell. He dispelled unpleasant thoughts, as if by doing so he stops them from manifesting into melancholy. Even on this, of all days, he managed to record a snippet of natural history. But as with Cook there was a fact Banks shied away from committing to paper. As Parkinson detailed it in his journal, Banks was among those who fired. The ‘black mark’ he allocated to the day, therefore, perhaps, carries a personal as well as a general meaning. It stands against the date he first killed a fellow person.
As night fell, Banks heard the boys ‘sighing often and loud’, from their beds. ‘Tupaia’, though, Banks added, ‘was always upon the watch to comfort them’ and he ‘soon made them easy’. Banks listened as they all sang a song. ‘It was not without some taste, like a Psalm tune and containd many notes and semitones; they sung it in parts which gives us no indifferent Idea of their taste as well as skill in musick.’40
Cook sailed from the bay on 11 October, returning the boys to the shore as soon as he could. Endeavour had lain at anchor for two days and fourteen hours. In all that time they had failed every bit as much as Tasman had to secure provisions or forge any meaningful relationship with the people. Botanically speaking, the bay had yielded little to excite Banks and Solander, but this seemed insignificant when they dwelt on the lives lost. Cook had formed an ill view of this place, which, he ruminated, offered no fresh water and stood open to the east winds. Originally he had planned to designate it ‘Endeavour Bay’, a name he had jotted in his journal. But on almost instant reflection he changed his mind, blotting ‘Endeavour’ out and amending it to ‘Poverty Bay’, ‘because it afforded us no one thing we wanted’.41
Leaving the bay, Cook exchanged fraught diplomacy for something he knew far better. For the first time on the voyage he was faced with the prospect of surveying an unknown shoreline. Now he could do what he had done so well in Newfoundland: sail, watch, measure and map until, by degrees, a frail line would develop into something more intricate. Looking at Cook’s charts today they have a visual austerity. There are no embellishments, no splashes of colour or jaunty, illustrative waves. Instead all his attention was concentrated into accurately depicting the run of the coastline. Rounding the headline at the bottom of Poverty Bay, Cook followed the land as it trended south. Soon he was in another bay, this time a wider, more elegant one, ten times the dimensions of that he had just left. Skimming the shoreline with a sounding lead, he kept his eyes open for rivers, gulfs, havens, estuaries and headlands, each day the line getting a little longer.
In October 1769 Cook embarked on a survey that occupied him for the next six months. As pencil lines replaced the open sea, he began to confer an identity on the places he mapped to make them memorable. Sometimes names were taken from the transient events of daily life. ‘Cape Kidnappers’, a little to the south of Poverty Bay, marked a headland where Tupaia’s servant Taiato was briefly abducted by a passing canoe. A little further south than this was ‘Cape Turnagain’, where Cook opted to halt Endeavour’s drive towards the south and double back towards Poverty Bay. Later there was ‘Cape Runaway’, named after a brief skirmish with a Māori canoe, and ‘Mercury Bay’, where they paused to observe a transit of the planet Mercury. Other names – Table Cape, White Island, the Bay of Islands, Dusky Bay, Gannett Isle or the Snowy Mountains – had more straightforward origins. Then there were the transplanted names from Britain. Perhaps it felt appropriate to foist an Isle of Portland, a River Thames and an Admiralty Bay onto this green and pleasant coastline they looked at, something in its geography feeling intrinsically ‘British’. Spying ‘a cluster of Islands & rocks’ that spired out of the sea, Banks wrote playfully:
we calld [them] the Court of Aldermen in respect to that worthy body and entertaind ourselves some time with giving names to each of them from their resemblance, thick & squat or lank and tall to some one or other of those respectable citizens.42
Perhaps the joke was also a play on the alderman’s ponderous docility, or inflexibility. Less cryptic were the slew of headlands, bays and islands named for various worthies or members of the crew, for Cook was able to play God over the geographical world as Linnaeus had over the botanical one. Nicholas Young, the boy who had first spotted land on 6 October, was rewarded with Young Nick’s Head.* Ten years after the Battle of Quiberon Bay, Admiral Hawke was recognised in Hawke’s Bay, the elegant bay south of Poverty Bay. Others bays were named for the second and third lieutenants, Hicks and Gore, while Cook also remembered his mentor, Hugh Palliser, and the Admiralty secretary, Philip Stephens, with capes. This whole process of renaming land roused Dalrymple’s ire back home. He derided the habit a ‘ridiculous affectation’, ‘giving new names to places before known is inexcusable, as it introduces perplexity and confusion instead of elucidating the Geography of those parts; the custom of giving the native names is highly commendable’.43
From October into the new year, 1770, Cook hugged the coastline. Progressing in an anticlockwise direction he revealed an island as sprawled and jagged and vividly coloured as one of Banks’s jellyfish. Fierce storms chased them, but when the weather broke the Endeavour’s crew were treated to captivating views. Intersecting Tasman’s path as they rounded the north cape and turned south again, they saw a vast mountain. ‘How high it may be I do not take upon me to judge’, Banks wrote, ‘but it is certainly the noblest hill I have ever seen.’ This – named Mount Egmont for the erstwhile First Lord – seemed a lone giant when compared with what was to come. Having completed their circuit of the northern island they plunged into even higher latitudes, passing shorelines with ‘a most romantick appearance from the immence steepness of the hills’, many of which were capped with everlasting snow.44
All this time Cook was achieving the geographical clarity he sought. When they had first sighted land back in October there was some hope that it might comprise some part of a southern continent. Perhaps New Zealand was an outreached arm, or something of the sort. Banks had enthusiastically adopted this viewpoint, proclaiming himself part of the ‘Continent party’ in opposition to Cook’s saturnine ‘No Continents’. Cook was proved right. As Endeavour rounded the cape at the bottom of the southern island, it was clear to everyone that New Zealand comprised two secluded islands. In his journal, Banks was forced to concede ‘the total demolition of our aerial fabrick calld continent’.45 A century later, the Victorian hydrographer William Wharton wrote that:
the astonishing accuracy of his outline of New Zealand must be the admiration of all who understand the difficulties of laying down a coast; and when it is considered that this coastline is 2,400 miles in extent, the magnitude of the task will be realised by everybody. Never has a coast been so well laid down by a first explorer, and it must have required unceasing vigilance and continual observation, in fair weather and foul, to arrive at such a satisfactory conclusion; and with such a dull sailer as the Endeavour was, the six and a half months occupied in the work must be counted as a short interval in which to do it.46
Wharton’s appraisal of Cook is justified, though his derision of Endeavour is hardly merited. Few frigates or sloops could weather what Fishburn’s collier did over these months. Tough and flat-bottomed, Endeavour was sailing in just the environment she was designed to withstand.
If Cook’s mastery of his surroundings was one exceptional thing about Endeavour’s circumnavigation, then Tupaia’s presence was another. After the incident at Poverty Bay, he acted as Endeavour’s interpreter and chief diplomat. Easing relations, he made it possible for them to trade in mussels and lobsters with the coasting fishermen. He was alive to danger too. One day, when Endeavour was approached by war canoes, he hurried ‘immediately’ to the deck, ‘and talkd to them a good deal, telling them what if they provokd us we should do and how easily we could in a moment destroy them all’. His cautions not being heeded, he said something that struck Banks:
Well, said Tupia, but while we are at sea you have no manner of Business with us, the Sea is our property as much as yours. Such reasoning from an Indian who had not had the smallest hint from any of us surprizd me much and the more as these were sentiments I never had before heard him give a hint about in his own case.47
Wherever they went they would hear Tupaia’s name called out. Banks marvelled at this, ‘we never suspected him to have had so much influence’. As they travelled, Cook and Banks learned to respect the qualities of the Māori they encountered. They saw an intricate society; strong, active people who were generally honest, and zealous in defence of their own. Only the disquieting possibility of cannibalism – something they at length found evidence of – really troubled them. But their interactions with the Māori would have been far less vibrant had Tupaia not been permitted aboard. Beyond his quarterdeck diplomacy, on several occasions he drifted ashore, interacting with the Māori, discussing the ship, their shared homeland and the purpose of their visit. The most significant of these interactions came at Tolaga Bay, a little distance north of Poverty Bay on the North Island.
Tolaga Bay was one of the great centres of Māori culture and learning, a community not only renowned for its carvings but also as a spiritual centre. Here Tupaia had ‘much conversation’ with one of the priests. Banks wrote how the two ‘seemd to agree very well in their notions of religion only Tupia was much more learned than the other and all his discourse was heard with much attention’. It is difficult to underplay the gravity of what must have passed between them. Memories of Tupaia’s and the priest’s shared ancestors were only kept alive in song and story. But here the Polynesian heritage was joined again, with the two of them left to reconcile the reality of what Banks called ‘This Universe and its marvelous parts.’ Tupaia ‘seemd to be much better vers’d in such legends’, Banks observed, ‘than any of them, for whenever he began to preach as we calld it he was sure of a numerous audience who attended with most profound silence to his doctrines’.48
Touring the district Banks came across ‘an extraordinary natural curiosity’, a great arch or cavern that guided a walker directly to the sea. ‘It was certainly the most magnificent surprize I have ever met with’, Banks wrote. Near this arch was a cavern, in which Tupaia was said to have slept at night. Two generations later, when Joel Polack visited this cave, he saw a painting ‘evidently faded by time’. It was ‘a representation of a ship and some boats, which was unanimously pointed out to me by all present as the reproductions of the faithful follower of Cook – Tupaea’.
Tupaia became a local favourite. When Cook visited again in later years, he was crowded with questioners, asking for news of Tupaia. When they heard he was not among them, they performed ‘a kind of dirge-like melancholy song’ in his memory.49
During his hydrographical tour of New Zealand, Cook found a place he liked better than any other. It lay at the very northern tip of the South Island, where the landscape fractured into scores of bays, coves and inlets that provided shelter from the winds and currents of the nearby strait. It was a green, fresh, lively place. In the morning, tunnels of gauzy light angled over the triangular tops of the surrounding hills, giving life to the shallows where shellfish abounded. Nearby were deeper channels where dolphins, porpoises and orca could be seen. Cook first visited this anchorage he called Ship’s Cove in January 1770. The beauty of the view was matched by a melodious soundscape. Bellbirds, tui, kākā and kokako chattered in the beeches that lined the hills, singing their convivial songs. Banks declared it ‘certainly the most melodious wild musick I have ever heard, almost imitating small bells but with the most tuneable silver sound imaginable.’50
It was to this region that Cook returned at the end of March with his circumnavigation complete. The inlet was a short distance from Ship’s Cove and Cook named it Admiralty Bay. The name was suggestive. Cook was thinking of home again. They had so much to report back: the transit observations, the charts of the Society Islands and New Zealand, and all of Banks’s treasures. Cook’s ‘most wished’ route was to return across the South Seas in the high latitudes, to check again for the continent. Whether the masts and sails were up to such a crossing, though, was doubtful. And if they couldn’t get across the Pacific at high latitudes, then they could neither sail around the Indian Ocean in the opposite direction.
There was a third option. Cook carried with him a chart of the southern hemisphere that included Tasman’s discoveries. Along with New Zealand it also showed Van Diemen’s Land, which seemed joined to the speculative land mass called ‘New Holland’. In 1770 there remained confusion over what ‘New Holland’ actually was. What knowledge there was came primarily from Dutch merchants, who had sighted – and sometimes collided with – its western and northern edges as they sailed through the Indian Ocean, towards their trading hubs in the East Indies. Over the years sightings had accumulated. By the mid-eighteenth century they had come to show, in outline, a potentially huge land mass. Lying to the west rather than the east of New Zealand, it existed in quite a different place to Dalrymple’s southern continent. But if Cook found Van Diemen’s Land, he could sail up the unknown, eastern edge of New Holland, and then follow that northwards all the way to Batavia and the Dutch East Indies.
This was the plan that Cook constructed in the gentle surroundings of Admiralty Bay. With the hills rising up in jade-green triangles behind him, the air filled with the morning concerts of their ‘musical neighbours’, it must have seemed that the worst of their hardships – the Cape, the South Seas, the beating storms and wicked waves of New Zealand – were left behind them. There was no need to return to the high latitudes at all. And yet the central drama of the voyage, and of Endeavour’s life, lay ahead in the place Europeans came to call Australia.