INTERLUDE.
INTO THE UNKNOWN
South Seas, July to October 1769
Tupaia showed his worth from the beginning.
To help his crew settle to shipboard life again and replenish food stocks, Cook spent several weeks exploring the islands around Tahiti. These were seas Tupaia knew well. He helped Cook produce a map showing more than seventy islands: not drawn to the Captain’s precision, but good enough to indicate how the Pacific had been peopled over time by skilled voyagers in their large travelling canoes – tipairua – with flexible mat sails that, as Tupaia reminded Toote, sped across the ocean faster than Endeavour with all her canvas.
Tupaia called on the god Tane to bring them wind. He was usually given a favourable answer – especially when Joseph Banks sensed a breeze was already springing up. And the high priest helped ease tensions with a ceremonial peacemaking whenever they landed on a new island.
On Huahine, Tupaia stripped to the waist and made Dr Monkhouse do the same. He sat before the chiefs in front of the longhouse reciting prayers, before handing over gifts of linen, beads and feathers. He went to the marae for more oblations. Was given coconuts and a pig for the gods of Endeavour (quickly sacrificed to her crew). And thereafter the strangers were accepted by the islanders.
As it turned out, supplies were not as plentiful as hoped. But things were better on Ra’iatea, where Tupaia had been born – until he was forced to flee after an invasion by warriors from nearby Bora Bora. Ra’iatea was the centre of the Oro cult, and perhaps Tupaia hoped Cook would use Endeavour’s guns to restore his lands. But the Captain refused to interfere in local disputes: on the contrary, Cook ran up the Union Jack and claimed possession of Ra’iatea for King George! Whatever the islanders thought of that, they still welcomed Tupaia’s friends, and Robert Molineux was often away in the longboat bartering for food.
He generally took Tupaia’s boy, Taiata, with him as interpreter, and Isaac came as well for company. The two were becoming friends. Taiata was only twelve – a softly spoken, chubby lad, with a mass of dark curly hair, who slept near Isaac and Nick Young in the hammock once occupied by the negro servant, Tom Richmond.
The ship was a new world for him, and Isaac and Nick took it upon themselves to help Taiata find his sea legs: to show him the ropes, the rigging, and the whole ritual of mess deck living. Like every islander, Taiata had the sea in his blood; and before long, the boy who could shin up any coconut tree was climbing Endeavour’s masts like a topman.
‘Look at him!’ exclaimed Isaac. ‘First time I went aloft I thought the ship would hurl me into the ocean. But Taiata is as much at home up there as if he was born to it.’
‘He were,’ replied Nick with admiration. ‘He climbs even better than me. I don’t fink there’s ever been a lubberly bone in ’im.’
In return for these compliments, Taiata smoothed their way about the islands. Wherever Molineux landed, the young priest would make ceremony, speak to the people, and the Master usually had his longboat filled with supplies. And sometimes when they went to a heiva, Taiata played on his nose flute – soft, fluent notes breathed through one nostril, the other stopped by his thumb – while the arioi danced.
Isaac sat there enchanted. Much seemed the same as Tahiti, but there were differences. People on Ra’iatea seemed fairer skinned, almost like Europeans. The women danced in wide cloth dresses, and moved their feet to the drumming in a way that reminded the lad of a ballet he’d seen with his parents in a London theatre. Then he thought of Heimata. And Isaac knew where he’d rather be.
Yet his young mind was still easily distracted. Like the playhouse, dancing was followed by a pantomime – in which the men, dressed as armed warriors, their faces all distorted, showed how the Bora Bora chief Puni had triumphed over the people of Ra’iatea. Love and war together, as always, on the same programme. In fact Isaac saw Puni a while later. He was an old man at that time, half blind and decrepit. Nick Young joked that he wasn’t so much Puni as puny! His fighters weren’t though. They were known as the Club Men, and would bash out an enemy’s brains in a trice. As terrifying as the Maori warriors they would see in New Zealand . . .
For with August, and spring approaching in the south, Cook knew it was time to depart the tropic islands around Tahiti – the Society Islands he called them, in honour of the Royal Society that had sponsored his expedition – and turn Endeavour’s bows toward colder latitudes in search of the unknown south land: Terra Australis Incognita. And Incognita was soon the operative word.
During the first week or so, Tupaia directed them to islands within his knowledge. But there came a time when the priest admitted he didn’t know what lay beyond.
‘My father told me there are islands two days from here,’ Tupaia said. ‘But after that I cannot say.’
‘Did thy father ever speak of a continent . . . a big land?’ asked the Captain.
‘No. If Toote were to sail west he would find more islands.’
‘Their Lordships have ordered me south. Well, then . . . we will all be sailing into the unknown.’
For it was the huge expanse of the southern Pacific that lay beyond the knowledge of European mapmakers. Endeavour certainly had her charts – in particular one given to Banks by Cook’s rival Alexander Dalrymple, showing the routes taken by Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese navigators in previous centuries, and the discoveries to 1764.
To the east lay the long coastline of the Americas. To the west was the incomplete outline of New Holland, Torres’s track below New Guinea, and those fragments of Van Diemen’s Land and New Zealand discovered by Tasman and named by the Dutch geographers. Arching across the central Pacific were the points of many islands and ‘signs of land’. But to the south was simply a vast blank space on the paper. Here, many people believed, the fabulous continent would be found, with riches to rival the Indies.
The further Endeavour sailed into this Incognita, the higher rose the human tensions of those aboard her. By day every weather eye was straining for a sight of land. And at night, no man knew when he’d be called from sleep by the sounds of breakers sweeping the ship onto an unknown shore. Nobody rested easy.
Suspended in their hammocks under the low bulkhead, Nick and Taiata and Isaac never more than half slept. Always, parts of their minds were alert for the bell ringing the half hours of the watch. Eight bells when it was over; and then creaks and murmurs as the men came down to rest, and the new watch went up on deck.
There was a comfort in that. The boys may not have slumbered deep, but at least the familiar, darkling sounds told them they were not yet wrecked on subconscious rocks.
They crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. Days of calm and heat were followed by squalls and winds laced with icy chill. The Tahitians felt the cold more than anyone, and Taiata exchanged his loincloth and mat cloak for a pair of canvas trousers and some of Isaac’s shirts. They were too small for Isaac, anyway. He’d grown much this past year, and was having to draw fresh clothes from the ‘slops’ store, the cost charged to his wages.
To warm himself even further, Isaac took to smoking a clay pipe: his mouth having all the sensations of a brick kiln at first, but before long his pay was also being docked ten shillings a month for tobacco.
On 25 August, twelve months after leaving Plymouth, Endeavour celebrated with Cheshire cheese and porter in the Great Cabin, and an extra rum ration below.
That wasn’t enough for John Reading, the flogger nobody liked, and who was feeling the strain of sailing uncharted seas. So Boatswain Gathrey gave him a bottle of rum for consolation – which Reading drank all at once. He was insensible that night and had to be lifted into his hammock. He was still speechless when they roused him next morning – and an hour later John Reading was dead.
That evening Isaac saw a comet in the sky near Orion, with a long fiery tail. Everyone saw it as an omen. Tupaia said the Bora Bora men would surely take it as a sign to start killing their enemies. But the only harm that befell Endeavour was to be hit by a violent storm.
She ran before it with just her foresail, the Captain seeming certain by the heavy ocean swell there was no danger of running into land hereabouts. Indeed, when the tempest blew itself out, Cook found he’d passed latitude thirty-nine degrees south. He’d almost reached the Admiralty’s limit without any sign of a continent. To go further would risk more damage to his sails and rigging.
First rise after low foretells an even greater blow.
Thus, in early September, he turned north.
The comet continued to appear for the next few nights, and Isaac saw it as a good omen. Time to push himself a little further forward. Finding Mr Molineux in pleasant humour with the change of course, he asked if the Master would show him how to use the sextant.
‘Dost want to navigate the ship now, lad?’
‘I’ve got to learn.’
‘Still fancy thyself as officer material?’
‘I’ve tried to show willing.’
‘Aye,’ Molineux nodded at his servant, ‘you have that! Well then, you may join the other young gentlemen on the quarterdeck at noon tomorrow.’
Isaac was there long before midday, practising with a brass sextant. Molineux was a willing teacher, but a little short on patience.
‘No, no lad! Don’t hold the instrument by any of its moving parts! Use the handle or frame. And never look at the sun through the sights without a dark glass shade. You’ll burn thy bloody eyes out in fifteen seconds flat! There . . . now bring the sun down to the horizon.’
Bring the sun down? What was he talking about?
Isaac squinted through the lens, but all he could see in the sextant’s mirror was a wavering blur of grey sea and sky. It was so difficult to keep the sextant pointed steadily at the sun while trying to keep his balance on a heaving deck.
Then, for a moment, he saw it! The glowing, orange ball of the sun reflected through a dark shade into the mirror.
‘I’ve got it.’
‘Now turn the minute knob to adjust the mirror and bring the sun down to the line where sea and sky meet.’
‘I’ve lost it.’
‘Don’t be daft. Try again.’
And again. At last the boy was able to keep the sun fixed in his sights long enough to tilt the mirror with the knob and bring the sun’s reflection down to the horizon.
‘Now, when the lower edge of the sun touches the line at midday, you’ll be able to work out our latitude. The sextant’s arc will show you the degrees, and the adjustment the number of minutes. What does your instrument show?’
‘Um . . .’ Isaac peered at the markings on the sextant’s arc. ‘I think twenty-three degrees and forty-six minutes.’
‘Good God, lad! You’ll have us back in Tahiti. If only . . .’ Robert Molineux remembered. As did Isaac. ‘Do it once more.’
It took much practice before Isaac became competent with the sextant. Day after day he stood with the officers and Midshipmen on the quarterdeck to get a reading at noon with the sun at its zenith. And eventually his readings began to tally with everyone else’s.
‘I have thirty-five degrees and seventeen minutes, sir . . . thirty-two degrees and eighteen minutes . . . thirty-seven degrees forty-six, Mr Molineux . . .’ as they turned south-west again ‘. . . thirty-eight degrees twenty-nine . . .’
The Captain looked on and was pleased.
Day after day, veering northward once more, they approached the latitude and longitude where Tasman had marked the few lines on his map he called Cape Maria van Diemen. New Zealand!
Hopes rose. Perhaps it would prove to be part of the unknown continent. After nearly two months at sea, men were longing for the land again.
To be sure, supplies were holding out well. The sauerkraut was as good as ever. There were few signs of scurvy: a remark able thing for such a voyage. The quarterdeck resembled a farmyard with its sheep, chickens, ducks and pigs, and the goat’s milk seemed inexhaustible. Certainly, the ship’s biscuit was full of weevils that burned like mustard when you bit them: but hard tack always had weevils. The taro roots from Tahiti went bad, and the plantains ran out. But Taiata was able to remind himself of home whenever John Thompson served yams and sweet potato with salt pork.
Yet it could not be denied that everyone was impatient. Birds clustered around the ship: shearwaters, albatrosses, and some birds that were thought never to fly far from land.
Clumps of seaweed were seen in the water. Then rockweed, and pieces of wood encrusted with barnacles. They passed a seal floating sound asleep. Anticipation rose higher when Captain Cook announced, ‘I will name part of the coast after the man who first sights it. Aye, and give him a gallon of rum as reward.’
The competition was really on! Many positive sightings turned into the clouds of ‘Cape Flyaway’. Yet the honour went not to a man – but a boy. Nick Young was at the masthead at two o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday, 7 October, when he saw a daub on the painted horizon.
‘Land! Land ho!’
‘Where away?’
‘West by north.’
‘Steersman, set your course.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
By sunset the land was visible from the quarterdeck. At noon next day they saw mountains stretching from sou’-west to nor’-west-by-north. This was no small island like Tahiti.
‘It must be a continent,’ enthused Mr Banks, ‘our very Land of Promise.’
Nick Young, at least, got his promised reward. When Endeavour entered a large bay two days later, the Captain named the cliffs at its southern point Young Nick’s Head. As such it is known to this day. Nick was given his gallon of rum, too. Though in tender consideration of what happened to John Reading, the crew all helped Nick drink it.
Whatever else the country promised, however, the warriors of New Zealand would make them fight for it.