3. The chief mourner's costume
Religion and political change in the Society Islands, 1768–73
PAUL TURNBULL
The Cook–Forster South Seas Collection of the Georg-August University of Göttingen contains many objects of great artistry, ingenuity and spiritual significance. The 2006 tour of this collection — more than two centuries after its creation in the wake of James Cook's three Pacific voyages — was a remarkable event. The presence of these treasures, exhibited in the Southern Hemisphere for the first time, stimulated much reflection about the world of the Polynesian peoples during the second half of the eighteenth century. My concern in this essay, however, is with one particular item in the collection: the elaborate costume (heva) worn by the chief mourner during funerary ceremonies for high-ranking Maohi1 men and women. Voyagers on Cook's expeditions eagerly sought to acquire examples of this ‘fantastical dress’; and what we can reconstruct of the circumstances in which they were acquired can tell us much about the lives of the people of the Society Islands at the time of their first encounters with Europeans in the 1760s and 1770s. Among other things, it alerts us to how profoundly inaccurate was the vision of the islands as an Arcadian paradise in European literary and cultural circles of the last third of the eighteenth century. The story of how mourning costumes came into European hands offers important insights into how, by the time of encountering the Cook voyagers, the tribal polities of the Society Islands were undergoing religious and political changes with origins in events long predating European contact. Maohi inhabited a world as complex, productive of change and as violent as that contemporaneously shaping the lives of eighteenth-century Britons.
Cook at Matavai Bay
The Endeavour came to anchor in Matavai Bay on the north-eastern coast of Tahiti in the evening of 12 April 1769. It was warm. The sky was clear. Light breezes played across the water. Cook had reason to both feel relieved and to quietly take pleasure at his arrival, for the voyage from England across the great and still largely unknown South Seas had been remarkably easy. The ship had reached Strait Le Maire, the starting point for ships attempting the open-sea route around Cape Horn, on 20 January 1769, and had begun tracking northwards into the Pacific by the end of the month.
The relatively smooth passage was in stark contrast to other recent expeditions. Commodore George Anson had attempted Strait Le Maire with a squadron of seven vessels some 30 years earlier when attempting to seize the Spanish treasure galleon that made the annual voyage from Acapulco to Manila. It took Anson's squadron nearly three months to round Cape Horn in conditions that haunted his crew for the rest of their lives. One survivor of the voyage wrote,
Methinks I still hear the humble Roaring of the Winds, and see the Sea rising into Mountains, the Ships clambering as it was those Hills, and then sinking into the most frightful Valley, the Rigging torn from the Mast, and the Sails split into a thousand Pieces shivering in the Wind; Wildness and Despair in every Man's Countenance, as thinking each Moment would be his last.2
A number of the Endeavour's crew had been on the Dolphin under Samuel Wallis, two years before Cook's voyage, when Wallis chose to enter the Pacific via the Strait of Magellan, rather than brave the open-sea passage round Cape Horn. In choosing the Strait of Magellan, Wallis and his men nonetheless suffered almost perpetual danger of shipwreck for nearly four months. The Dolphin limped into the Pacific with its crew weakened by hypothermia, dysentery and scurvy, forced while under sail to repair as best they could the damage caused to Dolphin's hull and superstructure by 15 weeks of unrelenting hard gales and heavy seas. By the time they sighted Tahiti, the voyagers were desperate for fresh water and food. Wallis and William Clarke, his first lieutenant, were both ‘very bade and not able to keep the Deck’ by the time the vessel sought safe anchorage off Matavai.3
By way of contrast, Cook recorded in his journal having entered the Pacific:
without ever being brought once under our close reefe'd Topsails since we left Strait La Maire a circumstance that perhaps never happen'd before to any Ship in those seas so much dreaded for hard gales of wind with its dangerously unpredictable weather and seas off its rocky shores.4
The ease of the voyage from Strait Le Maire all the way to Tahiti meant the Endeavour's crew arrived ‘in general very healthy’ and ready to fulfil their instructions to undertake the observation of the transit of Venus.
The meanings and values of trade
Regardless of how Cook interpreted his good fortune, he knew that successfully observing the Venusian transit hinged on securing friendly relations with the Maohi people whose beach they would cross the following day. Strict rules were read to the assembled ship's company the next morning governing ‘trafficking with the natives’. Cook was determined that good value in water, food and materials for the maintenance of his vessel would be had for the limited stock of trade goods they carried. He also wanted the type and value of goods that were exchanged strictly policed, to avoid bringing ‘on confusion and quarrels between us and the natives’ as had happened in the course of the Dolphin’s visit.5 Cook was especially mindful that a large fleet of war canoes had attacked the Dolphin soon after it had anchored. The attack had only been repelled by Wallis's ordering the ship's great guns to fire on the canoes and on the Maohi gathered on the beach, causing what George Robertson, master of the Dolphin, later recalled to be ‘such terror amongst the poor unhappy crowd that it would require the pen of a Milton to describe, therefore too much for mine’.6
Wallis's expedition was subsequently to land and manage to establish peaceable relations with Maohi, but interactions between voyagers and Islanders remained tense. Only high-ranking Maohi seeking to exploit the voyagers’ presence and military power for their own political ambitions curtailed further violence.
Cook's orders governing trade and exchange with Maohi were pragmatic in intent, and reflective of the importance of commerce, trade and exchange in shaping British perceptions of self, community and nation by the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Although capitalist forms of production and consumption had shaped the lives and outlook of Britons since the early thirteenth century, what was new about Britain in the eighteenth century was the expansion and acceleration of its market economy, especially from the mid-century onwards. ‘There was never, from the earliest ages’, wrote Samuel Johnson, in a preface to Richard Rolt's Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1761), ‘a time in which trade so much engaged the attention of mankind, or commercial gain was sought with such general emulation’.7
Britain's economic dynamism during the course of the eighteenth century owed much to the success of colonial ambitions. Fuelled by commerce, ‘in an international setting [it was] an acutely competitive affair, in which the full power of the States competing was exerted to strengthen the national economy’.8 Over the course of the eighteenth century, English, French and Dutch commercial ambitions were the direct cause of international rivalry and conflicts, notably the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and the American War of Independence (1776–82). And while, by the mid-1760s, Britain had established itself as the pre-eminent colonial power in North America and the Indian subcontinent, it had been at great cost to government and commerce. British national interest thereafter came to be seen to depend on trade and the exploitation of natural resources in Asia and, as reflected in the aims of Cook's voyages, the Pacific.9
Within British urban centres and provincial towns, new patterns of consumption and consumerism arose as the purchasing power of merchants, artisans and skilled labourers grew. Many artisans came to enjoy incomes that allowed them to furnish their dwellings with a wide range of material goods that traditionally could only be afforded by wealthy merchants and the landed gentry. As Roy Porter has observed, middle-class Britons in the years between 1714 and 1800 took pride in possessing objects, though their materialism was conspicuously outgoing and social: ‘they loved poring over factories, inspecting machinery, peering down microscopes, going to galleries, collecting curios’.10 Much as in our own time, the consuming passions of eighteenth-century Britons were intimately connected to their social aspirations. They sought to emulate their social betters in attending theatres, spectacles and by spending money on fashionable clothing. As John Brewer has said of eighteenth-century London, it was ‘a city of riches, conscious of its rising status and eager to clothe its naked wealth in the elegant and respectable garments of good taste’.11 Moreover, the getting and enjoying of material goods and cultural activities functioned to affirm status within a society undergoing momentous economic and social change, but which in its institutional framework remained an intensely hierarchical state grounded in deference to established privilege.
For the middle classes especially, but also the more progressively minded among the landed elite ruling eighteenth-century Britain, trade and economic exchange were seen as the means of achieving orderly social progress and political reform. They saw commerce as generating new forms of social interaction and cooperation, bringing about refinement in manners, civic stability and commitment to the wellbeing of the nation in an era of growing international rivalry.12 Indeed, within intellectual circles, commerce was seen as the source of Britain's emergence to national greatness. As Paul Langford has stressed:
Commerce did not merely signify trade. Rather it suggested a definitive stage in the progress of mankind, as evidenced in the leadership of western Europe, and the manifold social and cultural consequences thereof. The eighteenth century had many anthropologists, economists, and sociologists, though it did not call them by these names. Most of them agreed that they lived in a commercial age, an era in which the processes of production and exchange had dramatically increased the wealth, improved the living standards, and transformed the mores of western societies still to be found in much of Europe, and with still more primitive societies discovered overseas.13
The conceptual sophistication of British thinking about commerce was reflected in the receptivity of educated Britons by the mid-eighteenth century to a new genre of intellectual inquiry that came to be known as philosophical or conjectural history.14 Particularly influential writers in this genre were the Scots historians and political economists, notably David Hume (1711–76), William Robertson (1721–93), Adam Smith (1723–90) and Adam Ferguson (1723–1815), whose influential Essay on the History of Civil Society was published to widespread acclaim in 1767, the year before Cook and Joseph Banks sailed for the Pacific. Critical of conjectural accounts based on a priori or in other ways speculative reasoning as to the origins of social institutions, these authorities were convinced that surviving ancient historical texts and what, since the early seventeenth century, had become a wealth of testimony in voyaging and exploration journals, suggested that the varying degrees of civilisation exhibited by different nations corresponded to their engaging in particular forms of economic activity. The task of the philosophic observer of humanity was to scrutinise historical evidence and testimony deriving from exploration to understand how and why some societies had reached higher stages of economic development and social refinement.
By the 1760s, the writings of Robertson, Smith and Ferguson in particular were largely responsible for wide acceptance in British intellectual circles of what, for the times, was a daringly materialist theory of history, indeed one that some 80 years later was to captivate the interest of the young Karl Marx.15 These writers postulated that peoples of all ‘nations’ had the capability to develop similar, increasingly sophisticated and beneficial forms of social organisation, provided they were able to exploit natural resources and other environmental advantages. The history of humanity was envisaged as the story of the dispersal of tribes with a common ancestry, traces of whose experiences were to be found recorded in scripture and other equally ancient historical sources. Social and environmental factors had led to the descendants of these peoples migrating to find new grazing lands. Some eventually came to adopt agriculture and, in the case of those peoples who established themselves in Western Europe, engaged in forms of commerce productive of new levels of material and moral progress. The fate of others, however, was to inhabit country so inhospitable that they were forced to abandon pastoralism for hunting and gathering. The savage ‘life of the chase’ was presumed to have left these peoples neither time nor resources to preserve other than the barest rudiments of religious sensibilities or civilisation. They became peoples fallen into historical amnesia until their encounter with European voyagers and travellers.16
British thinking about relations between history, commerce and civilisation provides the context in which to understand why the commissioners of the British Admiralty should instruct Cook, before he embarked in August 1768 on what was to be the first of three momentous voyages of discovery in Oceania, to ‘observe the Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives, if there be any, and endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a Friendship and Alliance with them’. He was also to give the people he encountered in the South Seas ‘such Trifles as they may Value’, inviting them to ‘Traffick’, and ‘Shewing them every kind of Civility and Regard’.17 The implicit assumption was that, while commerce licensed colonial ambition, it equally bestowed on Britons responsibility for the enlightenment of the peoples they encountered in the Pacific.
Consider, in this regard, Benjamin West's famous portrait of the young Joseph Banks as triumphant explorer of the South Seas (see page 104). In the painting, Banks stands, surrounded by objects from New Zealand and the Society Islands, in front of a raised curtain styled to represent tapa (bark) cloth. At his feet lie a Tahitian adze and one of the many presses of botanical specimens gathered during the course of the Endeavour voyage, opened to display new species of flax, the most commercially valuable plant discovered. Yet the eye is drawn to Banks, garbed in a flaxen cloak fringed with dog hair.18 We can view Banks as having assumed the mantle of authority in Polynesian society, but equally we can regard the portrait as visually epitomising the voyager as philosophical historian. A beneficiary of the intellectual enlightenment that imperial commerce has enabled, Banks is able to explain the nature of customary authority within Polynesian society and its symbolic expression through the artistry of the cloak within the wider context of human societal development.
The journal Banks kept during the course of the Endeavour voyage similarly illustrates, in many obvious and subtle ways, how commercial ambition and philosophical curiosity were conceptually interrelated in motivating the Cook voyagers in trade and exchange with the peoples of the South Seas. With the aid of fellow naturalist Daniel Solander (1733–82), Banks catalogued and qualitatively assessed in his journal the horticultural potential of fruit and vegetables that formed the basis of the diet of the Maohi peoples of Society Islands. Of the breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis), he particularly noted its similarity to the potato, which, by the late 1760s, was increasingly perceived by Britain's landed gentry to be a crop ideally suited to enclosed cultivation, with growing markets as fodder for cattle and poultry in the countryside and human consumption in urban centres.19 Similarly, Banks took care to describe at length how Maohi fashioned tapa cloth, specimens of which, incidentally, were among the earliest items from Polynesia to find their way into the Göttingen collection.20 What particularly struck Banks was that Maohi knew how to dye tapa cloth in various colours, including a ‘most beautiful, I might also venture to say a more delicate colour than any we have in Europe’, using the fruits of a small fig tree native to the South Pacific, now commonly known as the dye fig (Ficus tinctoria).21
Though Banks was concerned to appraise the commercial potential of Maohi husbandry and material culture, we find his observations interspersed with and often subordinate to his philosophical curiosity about the manners, customs and history of Maohi. In writing of breadfruit and coconut (Cocos nucifera), he was drawn to speculate on the social consequences of ‘benevolent nature’ supplying Maohi with not only ‘necessaries but with abundance of superfluities’.22 Banks was equally drawn to explore how the production, wearing and exchange of tapa and personal ornaments were bound by strict convention and rituals, some clearly analogous to clothing's symbolic affirming of rank and power in European society, others signifying things that he could only dimly grasp and yet hungered to understand.
Perhaps the most remarkable illustration of Banks's fascination with the meanings of Maohi material culture was his response to encountering at Matavai one of the elaborate heva or mourning costumes worn by the male kinsperson of a high-ranking Maohi man or woman in a ritual occurring several days after their death. The heva was being prepared for Tupura‘a i Tamaita, a close ally of Tutaha, then chief of the Pare–Arue district. Tupura‘a had strategically established a friendship (taio) with Cook and Banks, and eased the voyagers’ routine acquisition of food (resulting in Banks light-heartedly nicknaming him Lycurgus, after the legendary Spartan lawgiver). Tupura‘a was to be chief mourner for a female relative whose body had been laid, as funerary custom dictated, inside a specially built structure, called a fare tupapa‘u (ghost house). In the case of some high-ranking male chiefs, their corpse would lie within a fare tupapa‘u for a year or longer.
In the Cook–Forster collection is one of only six more-or-less complete surviving examples of the mourning heva. Its provenance is unknown beyond its having been one of three items additionally purchased in 1782 by the British Crown, for gifting to Göttingen, from George Humphrey, a prominent London dealer in natural history and ethnographic specimens. Humphrey had acquired a near complete heva from Cook's second voyage of 1772–75 and sold it as five separate lots in 1779. He may possibly have bought back some or all of these pieces to assemble the heva sent to Göttingen.23 As the heva that survives as one of the most striking treasures of the Göttingen collection demonstrates, the costume consists of a number of elaborately decorated parts, including white tapa robes, a feather and netting mantle, and a headpiece of pearl and turtle shell adorned with tail feathers of the sacred red tailed tropic bird (Phaethon rubricauda). Each part of the costume affirms the high standing of the deceased and their kin's close proximity to and favour with Maohi's gods.
One of the most detailed and informative accounts of the ceremony for which the heva was worn is that recorded by James Morrison. Morrison served as boatswain's mate aboard the Bounty on William Bligh's ill-fated voyage of 1787–89 to collect breadfruit from Tahiti for planting in the West Indies. After the mutiny of April 1789, Morrison chose to remain on Tahiti where he lived for six months as a member of the entourage of Tu Nui e A‘a i Te Atua (Pomare I), at that time paramount chief of the Pare–Arue region. Morrison wrote how the chief mourner would appear in the costume, armed with a pike edged with shark's teeth and accompanied by up to 50 young men and women wearing only tapa loincloths, their bodies and faces blackened with candlenut soot and overlaid with ochre decorations. The chief mourner's entourage was also armed with spears and clubs and, according to Morrison,
parade about the district like Madmen and will beat Cut or even kill any person who offers to stand in their Way — therefore when any one sees them Coming they fly to the Morai, it being the only place where they can be safe, or Get refuge from the rage of the Mourners who persue all that they see. The Morai alone they must [not] enter, and while this Ceremony lasts, which is somtimes 3 weeks or a month, they pay no respect to persons nor are the Chiefs safe from their fury unless they take sanctuary in the Morai; the Weomen and Children are forced to quit the place as they Cannot take refuge in the Morai.24
Drawing on oral histories recorded between 1817 and the late 1840s by her grandfather, the missionary JM Orsmond, Teuira Henry has explained that in the intensity of their grief, mourners were vulnerable to possession by unruly and possibly malevolent spirits from the realm of the dead. If this happened, they were viewed as incapable of being held responsible for seriously wounding or even killing those they encountered in the course of enacting the ceremony. Further, from Henry's description of the mourning ceremony it would appear that, like popular ceremonies occurring during carnival and other festive occasions in medieval and early modern Europe, symbolic subversion of social hierarchy and relaxation of law had the potential to cause real political upheaval. As Henry observes, mourning ceremonies for high-ranking, kin-title holders saw mourners enter neighbouring tribal districts, requiring leading men of chiefly rank to end the ceremony by ritualised hand-to-hand fighting. This, Henry writes, ‘became serious when allied parties joined in. Sometimes whole districts were involved, many being killed before the chiefs interposed’.25
Over 40 years ago, John Cawte Beaglehole judged that Banks, ‘in his excitement, his capacity for throwing himself into native ceremonial, his greed for recording everything, [became] … the founder of Pacific ethnography’.26 We may now feel that this verdict fails to capture adequately the nature and complexities of cross-cultural observation that occurred during Cook's voyages. For example, from Greg Dening we have learnt that Tupaia, the Ra‘iatean priest whom Banks and Cook met during their first stay at Matavai, has as much a claim to be considered a founder of Oceanic ethnography as Banks.27 Still, Banks was undeniably remarkable for his willingness to immerse himself in Maohi life-ways and culture — as is most strikingly evidenced by his actually participating in a mourning ceremony.
On learning that Tupura‘a i Tamaita was to be chief mourner for a female relative, Banks had the purpose of the heva explained by Tupura‘a, as best that gesture and limited understanding of each other's language allowed, and Banks pressed Tupura‘a to allow him not just to witness the mourning ceremony, but to participate as one of the mourner's entourage. By this time, the leadership of the Endeavour expedition was well aware that Maohi believed in a seamless continuum of ancestral creation, life and translation to a realm of death. Spiritual entities were seen as active in every aspect of nature and human activity. Their presence and agency could be a force for good or ill, and at no time more so than when Maohi reached the predestined time (poi) when the life force or soul (vãrua) began to be drawn from the body (tino) by spirits.28 Banks saw the impending mourning ceremony as offering a unique chance to gain insights into Maohi religious beliefs, knowledge of which might yield important clues to Maohi history when compared with ancient European and Asian religious traditions and folk-beliefs. Whatever Tupura‘a made of Banks's curiosity, he agreed to his participating in the ceremony, most likely seeing it as a way of further strengthening the prestige (mana) that the friendship he had assiduously cultivated with the voyagers gave his politically ambitious family. Banks afterwards described in his journal preparing for the event by stripping off his clothes and wrapping a small strip of tapa cloth around his waist. ‘I had no pretensions to be asham[e]d of my nakedness,’ he wrote, as the dead woman's closest female relatives were ‘neither … a bit more coverd than myself.’ Banks's face and upper chest were then blackened with moistened burnt candle nut.29
The mourners then set off led by Tupura‘a, who had been carefully dressed in the chief mourner's costume. Prayers were offered by Tupura‘a near the woman's corpse and again near his own house. The mourners then proceeded to the fortified camp that Cook's men had built ashore. Tupura‘a told Banks ‘it was necessary … that the procession should visit that place … but they dare not do it without the sanction of some of us’. Indeed, Banks found that it took ‘many assurances of our consent’ before Tupura‘a was ready to lead the mourners to the voyagers’ camp, and then Banks had to make sure that their arrival did not so surprise and alarm those of the Endeavour party ashore as to provoke a violent response. Even so, the appearance of the chief mourner and his entourage caused ‘the surprize of our freinds and affright of the Indians who were there’, causing the latter to flee from the mourners ‘like sheep before a wolf’.30
Leaving the fort, Banks wrote, the mourners:
proceeded along shore towards a place where above 100 Indians were collected together. We … had orders from the … [chief mourner] to disperse them, we ran towards them but before we cam[e] within 100 yards of them they dispers'd every way, running to the first shelter, hiding themselves under grass or whatever else would conceal them. We now cross[e]d the river into the woods and pass[e]d several houses, all were deserted, not another Indian did we see for about an hour that we spent in walking about. We … then came to the [chief mourner] … and said imatata, there are no people; after which we repair[e]d home, … [Tupara‘a] undress[e] d and we went into the river and scrubb[e]d one another till it was dark before the blacking would come off. 31
Banks failed to gain deeper insight into Maohi religious beliefs by participating in the mourning ceremony. Nor, despite his best efforts, could he get Tupura‘a or any other high-ranking Maohi to exchange heva for any kind or amount of European objects. Yet his description of the ceremony and the engravings of the ‘fantastical dress’ of the chief mourner as they appeared in John Hawkesworth's official account of the voyage, published in 1773, were to capture the imagination of the educated European public.32 The costumed chief mourner was to be one of the most widely circulating images of Tahitian life in Europe during the last third of the eighteenth century. The chief mourner was even brought to life on the London stage during the 1780s in the spectacular and hugely popular pantomime, Omai: or, A Trip around the World, designed by the romantic painter and occultist, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812).33
Subsequent voyagers and missionaries fared little better than Banks in understanding the meanings of the ceremony, and were unable to say much beyond speculating, as Georg Forster, naturalist aboard Cook's second voyage, did, that ‘this singular custom’ appeared:
calculated to inspire horror; and the fantastical dress in which it is performed, has so much of that strange and terrifying shape which our nurses attribute to ghosts and goblins, that I am almost tempted to believe some ridiculous superstition lurks under this funeral rite. The spirit of the deceased, exacting a tribute of grief and tears from its survivors, and therefore wounding them with the shark's teeth would not be an idea too extravagant for men to have adopted.34
Where Forster and others had better luck than Banks was in being able to acquire examples of the mourner's costume. As Forster was to recall in his published account of voyaging on Cook's second expedition of 1772–75, ‘[a] number of complete mourning dresses, not less than ten, were purchased by different persons on board, and brought to England’.35 Moreover, it was not just the leadership of the expedition who managed to procure heva. Forster tells us that one sailor was able to profit handsomely from the great curiosity the costume had aroused in English intellectual circles by selling one on his return for 25 guineas.
Forster was surprised and delighted that leading Maohi were now willing to part with heva. However, what was intriguing was that high-ranking Maohi were ready to part with heva for red parrot feathers, a ‘considerable quantity’ of which the voyagers had acquired in the Tongan archipelago. As another member of the expedition was to recall, news that the voyagers possessed this cache of red feathers spread quickly throughout the north-west districts of Tahiti and ‘all the Principal people of both Sex endeavour'd by every means in their power to Ingratiate themselves into our favour in order to obtain these Valuable Jewels’.36
It soon became apparent to the voyagers that Maohi regarded red feathers as especially desirable offerings to their gods. Indeed, they were among the most sacred objects of the Maohi prior to the coming of Europeans. Feathers were essential for prayer. They were critical for gaining the attention of gods and spirits, and to respectfully acknowledge their presence and impulsive, volatile agency in all aspects of Maohi life. Red feathers were essential for performing the most sacred of ceremonies at principal marae. Successive generations of highest-ranking chiefly families used them also to adorn maro, the long waist belts of tapa infused with the power of the gods and worn, generally, by those first-born males in the family who by ancestry inherited the dynasty's kin-title. Further, on correlating descriptions of the religious use of red feathers by early voyagers with what appears in oral histories recorded by missionaries in the first decades of the nineteenth century, it seems that, in the five years since Cook's first landing at Matavai, the play of religious innovation and political ambition among Tahiti's chiefly dynasties appears to have rendered the preciousness of red feathers such that high-ranking Maohi were now prepared to trade items as sacred as heva costumes to secure them.
How are we to explain this new willingness to part with heva? What survives by way of European testimony and Maohi genealogical histories recorded during the course of the nineteenth century needs to be interpreted cautiously. However, both European and Maohi sources suggest that the acquisition of heva by the time of Cook's second stay at Tahiti was reflective of Maohi polities having proved as dynamic and susceptible to the effects of historical contingencies and cultural innovation as those of eighteenth-century Europe.
When Cook first encountered Maohi, the cult of the war-god ‘Oro had become well established on Tahiti. Originating on the island of Ra‘iatea, the cult may have gained some Tahitian converts between 1650 and 1700. However, the rise of the ‘Oro cult on Tahiti appears to have been linked to the conquest of Ra‘iatea and the island of Tahaa by the Hau Fa‘naui, the most powerful tribal polity of the island of Borabora. This invasion appears to have occurred some time early in the 1760s. ‘Oro continued to be worshipped at the great Marae Taputapuatea at Opoa on Ra‘iatea, but the power of the district's sacred chief and priests was greatly reduced. According to tradition, the god's sacred images and maro were brought to Tahiti, and a centre of religious knowledge was established shortly afterwards at Haapape by the Opoan chief Toa-te-manava. ‘Oro worship appears thereafter to have been integral to interdynastic ambitions and conflict in the wake of the changes in political fortune and alliances after the triumph of the Hau Fa‘naui. Strategic marriages took place between leading chiefly families on the Leeward and Windward Islands. Dynasties now sought to legitimate their titles by consecrating familial alliances before ‘Oro and affirming the sacredness of their kin-titles by association with Marae Taputapuatea at Opoa.
Red feathers were profoundly sacred to the worshippers of ‘Oro.37 Maohi believed the god appeared in various forms, the most important being the great frigate or man-of-war bird (Frigata minor), the males of which species have a striking inflatable red throat pouch. To‘o, sacred images of ‘Oro, were carved from ironwood and covered with braided cord to which red feathers were attached. Similarly, the sacred maro of the god said to have come to Tahiti from Opoa was distinctively adorned with red feathers.
As Douglas Oliver and Hank Driessen have stressed, prophecy was fundamental to ‘Oro worship.38 As elderly high-ranking Maohi told early nineteenth-century missionary and ethnographer William Ellis, the great Marae Taputapuatea sacred to ‘Oro at Opoa ‘was the seat of their oracle and the abode of those priests whose predictions for many generations regulated the expectation of the nation’. For example, one prophecy in circulation prior to the upheavals on Ra‘iatea centred on the destruction of an ancient tamanu tree growing within the precincts of the Marae Taputapuatea. In one version of the prophecy a whirlwind left the tree bare and its trunk broken. Another prophecy foretold the felling of the tamanu by enemy warriors. In both versions, the language of prophecy drew richly on traditional belief in trees within the sacred ground of marae being infused by spirits who made known their will by rustling the trees’ leaves. For the Maohi, song and poetry trees were similes for warriors of renown or brave people. The cutting down of the tree signified the death of a warrior, or a chief and his followers.
This same prophecy also spoke of how the destruction of the tree would be accompanied by the appearance of glorious offspring of the god Te Tumu and Atea, his daughter-wife: strangers who would appear from far seas in a canoe without an outrigger — the embodiment of Tane no te mau mea purotu (Tane, god of all things beautiful).39
Driessen has suggestively reasoned that this prophetic vision may have been connected to Indigenous encounters with European vessels in the early 1720s, when three ships commanded by Jacob Roggeveen, the Dutch navigator, entered the Tuomotu atolls. One vessel was wrecked on the windward side of the atoll of Takapoto. Five men from the ship deserted and may have repaired the vessel well enough to reach the island of Anna. Iron cannon were left on Takapoto and were still visible in the 1830s. John Byron, whose expedition reached the Tuomotu atolls in June 1765, landed at Takaroa where, in a settlement, he found the carved head of a Dutch longboat's rudder, hammered iron and well-worn tools. Byron was to record that the inhabitants seemed ‘prodigiously fond of iron’.40
Driessen further suggests that the presence of Roggeveen's expedition and material legacy may account for how Maohi reacted to the arrival of Wallis's and Cook's expeditions from far seas.41 For Tahitians and other peoples of the Society Islands, the sea was sacred to all, the realm of the god Tane. Before leaving land, Tahitian voyagers would implore Tane to allow them to journey between islands without committing hara, or spiritual transgression, and to return safely, bringing no sickness or misfortune to their community. Setting out and returning across open sea required strict observance of special ceremonies, not only by mariners, but also by those they left ashore, and by the communities on whose shores they landed. The behaviour of high-ranking Tahitians as recorded by Banks and Cook parallels how they reacted to earlier unexpected arrivals on Maohi shores, the contents of whose vessels were seen by local communities as divinely gifted to them.
This certainly makes sense, for example, of the behaviour of Tutaha, an influential elder of the principal title-holding family of the Pare–Arue district, in response to Cook's arrival at Matavai in April 1767. After much solicitation, Tutaha eventually agreed to come aboard the Endeavour and, as Cook wrote in his journal, proved ‘very desirous of seeing into every chest and drawer in the cabin’. Yet of all the things that Tutaha discovered, what astonished him most, and what he implored Cook give him, was an iron or possibly steel copy of a Tahitian adze that Wallis had carried back to England with him. The copy appears to have been made at the request of Philip Stephens, secretary of the Admiralty from 1763 to 1795.42
Tutaha may have desired Cook's iron adze because it was a more robust and functional version of an implement highly prized by Tahitians, but it may well have been that Tutaha believed that by his possession of the iron adze Cook had a special affiliation with the god Tane and that, by giving him the adze, Cook would bestow on Tutaha the spiritual power and protection of the great ancestral god. Certainly, by the time of Cook's arrival, Tutaha was greatly concerned to enhance his spiritual power in order to capitalise upon the failed political ambitions of Purea, known formally to Maohi as Te Vahine Airoro atua i Ahurai i Farepua, a high-ranking woman whom Wallis had mistakenly assumed was the ‘Queen of Otaheite’.43
Purea had sought to enlist Wallis in making her only son Teri‘irere the pre-eminent chief on the islands of Tahiti and Mo‘orea. After the Dolphin's departure, Purea and her husband, Tevahitua, the paramount chief of the Papara district on the south-west coast of Tahiti, audaciously sought to establish their son's chiefly power by investing him with a new ancestral title sanctified by the war-god ‘Oro. To this end, they exploited their authority over the people of the Papara district to construct Mahaiatea, the largest and most imposing marae ever built on Tahiti in honour of ‘Oro. Banks visited Marae Mahaiatea in late July 1769, and in his journal wrote of having been ‘struck with the sight of a most enormous pile, certainly the masterpeice of Indian architecture in this Island so all the inhabitants allowd’. He found it ‘almost beyond beleif that Indians could raise so large a structure without the assistance of Iron tools to shape their stones or mortar to join them’.44
On the structure's completion, Teri‘irere was invested with the new title, which may have involved his being wrapped in the actual maro ura (red-feather girdle) of ‘Oro, brought from Marae Taputapuatea to Tahiti. Purea and Tevahitua also declared a rahui or spiritual prohibition of various everyday activities over the length and breadth of Tahiti.45 This, however, provoked the anger of ruling dynasties in neighbouring districts. Worse, the rahui led Vehiatua i te Mata‘i, paramount chief of the Taiarapu Peninsula, to invade Papara in late 1768. Tevahitua and his allies among the chiefly families of the north-western districts of the island proved no match for Vehiatua. Tevahitua and Purea fled with their son into the mountains after a bloody clash in which many were slain, and villages in the vicinity of Marae Mahaiatea were looted and burnt. As Banks recorded in his journal, on returning from the marae he took a path following the shoreline ‘where under our feet were numberless human bones cheifly ribbs and vertebrae’.46 Purea worked hard to restore Teri‘irere's prestige, courting as best she could the friendship of Cook and Banks. However, she and Tevahitua never regained their former power, becoming, as Forster rather portentously reflected on meeting them during Cook's second expedition, ‘living examples of the instability of human grandeur’.47
Oral testimony recorded by the missionary Robert Thomson in the 1790s tells of Tevahitua and his allies having escaped Vehiatua, bringing ‘away with them the priest of ‘Oro, who had charge of the sacred and royal girdle, and various other relics brought with the idol from Ra‘iatea. These were safely deposited in the marae at Atehuru’.48 There they were to become the focus of new ambitions unleashed by Tevahitua's downfall and with it the dissolution of long-standing dynastic alliances. Foremost among these new ambitions was a bid by Tutaha to establish his nephew, Teu, as paramount chief of the island. However, on returning to Tahiti on his second voyage, in August 1773, Cook learnt that Tutaha had been killed battling warriors from Taiarapu led by Vehiatua, with the result that political power on the island was now divided among the leading chiefly dynasties.
Given this history of shifting alliances and warfare, we can well understand why, by the time of Cook's second voyage, Maohi were resigned to trading things as sacred as heva for what, in the eyes of Forster and other participants on Cook's expedition, were simply red feathers. For, like iron, red feathers held out the promise of securing the favour of ‘Oro, a god whose capriciousness and wrath was well-evidenced by the violence flowing from the ambitions of his principal followers — violence that was to continue until 30 years later when ‘Oro was displaced by Jehovah.
In a symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition of the Cook–Forster collection in Hawai‘i, Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin warned that, in encounters with the collection, we need to keep in mind that ‘difference in time and context … render exact and authentic re-experience impossible: the eighteenth century perspective is simply not the same as today's’.49 This is certainly true: eighteenth-century Oceania was a very different world. However, methodological pronouncements about the impossibility of authentically experiencing the past through its artefactual traces should have no greater weight than being a counsel of prudence. Reconstructing the past, conscious of personal subjectivity, appreciating the contingent nature of language and culture, but yet applying probabilistic reasoning and sensitivity to surviving textual, visual and artefactual evidence can foster new ways of seeing beyond our own horizons. For us in Oceania, engaging with the Cook-Forster collection allows us to imagine our past in ways that recognise and respect its interconnected histories and cultural traditions.
Notes
1 Maohi is the term used to describe the ancestors of the Polynesian people, particularly those from Tahiti.
2 Anon., A Voyage to the South Seas … By Commodore Anson (1745), cited in Glyn Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans: The Dramatic True Story of Commodore Anson's Voyage Round the World … , Viking, New York, 2000, p. 29.
3 George Robertson, The Discovery of Tahiti: A Journal of the Second Voyage of HMS Dolphin round the World, under the Command of Captain Wallis, RN, in the Years 1766, 1767 and 1768 …, Hugh Carrington (ed.), Hakluyt Society, London, 1948, p. 148.
4 See JC Beaglehole (ed.), The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, 2 vols, The Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1955, vol. I, The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771, p. 58.
5 ibid., pp. 76–7.
6 Robertson, The Discovery of Tahiti, p. 155.
7 Samuel Johnson cited in John H Middendorf, ‘Dr Johnson and mercantalism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 21, no. 1, 1960, 68.
8 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989, p. 3; see also John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1990.
9 See Howard T Fry, Alexander Dalrymple and the Expansion of British Trade, Royal Commonwealth Society, London, 1970, especially pp. 136–65.
10 Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1982, p. 243.
11 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Harper Collins, London, 1997, p. xix.
12 ibid.
13 Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p. 3.
14 See PJ Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1982.
15 RL Meek, Smith, Marx and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought, Chapman and Hall, London, 1977, pp. 123–9.
16 JGA Pocock, ‘Gibbon and the shepherds: The states of society in the Decline and Fall’, History of European Ideas, vol. 2, no. 3, 1981, 193–202.
17 ‘Additional instructions for Lt James Cook’, in Beaglehole (ed.), vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771, p. cclxxiii.
18 I am indebted to Paul Tapsell for explaining the symbolic importance of cloaks incorporating dog fur in Maori society.
19 Redcliffe N Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato, 2nd edn, JG Hawkes (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, 1985, pp. 475–86.
20 Manfred Urban, ‘The acquisition history of the Göttingen collection’, in Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin and Gundolf Krüger (eds), James Cook: Gifts and Treasures from the South Seas: The Cook/Forster Collection, Göttingen, Prestel, Munich, 1998, p. 57.
21 Joseph Banks, ‘The Endeavour journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771’, part 1, ‘Banks's daily entries in his journal’, transcribed by the State Library of New South Wales, in South Seas: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific, 1760–1800, National Library of Australia, Canberra, http://nla.gov.au/nla.cs-ss-jrnl-banks-17680904, accessed 17 July 2006.
22 Banks, ‘The Endeavour journal’, part 2, ‘Banks's descriptions in the journal of places and peoples encountered during the Endeavour voyage’, http://nla.gov.au/nla.cs-ss-jrnl-banks_remarks-102, accessed 17 July 2006.
23 Gundolf Krüger, ‘Tahiti and the Society Islands’, in Hauser-Schäublin and Krüger (eds), James Cook, p. 154.
24 Owen Rutter (ed.), The Journal of James Morrison, Boatswain's Mate of the Bounty, Golden Cockerel Press, London, 1935, p. 233.
25 Teuira Henry, Ancient Tahiti, Based on Material Recorded by JM Orsmond, Bernice P Bishop Museum, Honolulu, 1928, p. 294; Douglas Oliver cites these observations by Henry, emphasising the potential for the mourning ceremony to cause political instability, in his Ancient Tahitian Society, 3 vols, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1974, vol. 1, p. 505.
26 JC Beaglehole, cited in Lee Wallace, Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2003, p. 9.
27 Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures and Self, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2004, pp. 171–4.
28 Oliver offers a comprehensive summary of the evidence relating to pre-contact Maohi cosmology and religious beliefs in his Ancient Tahitian Society, vol. 1, pp. 47–122.
29 See Banks, ‘Banks's daily entries’, http://nla.gov.au/nla.cs-ss-jrnl-banks-17690610, accessed 17 July 2006.
30 ibid.
31 ibid.
32 John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken … for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere … successively performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Carteret, Captain Wallis and Captain Cook …, 3 vols, Strahan and Cadell, London, 1773, vols 2–3, pp. 147–8. The costumed chief mourner is depicted in Plate V, p. 235.
33 Rüdiger Joppien, ‘Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg's pantomime Omai, Or, A Trip Round the World and the artists of Captain Cook's voyages’, in TC Mitchell (ed.), Captain Cook and the South Pacific, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1979, pp. 81–136.
34 Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 2 vols, Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof (eds), assisted by Jenny Newell, University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2000, vol. 1, p. 363.
35 ibid., pp. 361–2.
36 Charles Clerke, in Beaglehole, vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771, p. 382.
37 Anne Salmond, ‘Their body is different, our body is different: European navigators in the 18th century’, History and Anthropology, vol. 16, no. 2, 2005, 167–86.
38 Oliver, Ancient Tahitian Society, vol. 1, pp. 75–6; HAH Driessen, ‘Outriggerless canoes and glorious beings’, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 17, no. 1, 1982, 3–28.
39 Driessen, ‘Outriggerless canoes’, 8–9; Salmon, ‘Their body is different’, 171.
40 John Byron cited in Driessen, ‘Outriggerless canoes’, 18.
41 Driessen, ‘Outriggerless canoes’, 26.
42 Beaglehole (ed.), The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771, vol. 1, p. 86, note 2.
43 See Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken, vol. 1, pp. 461–9; Oliver, Ancient Tahitian Society, vol. 3, pp. 1200–01.
44 Banks, ‘The Endeavour journal’, http://nla.gov.au/nla.cs-ss-jrnl-banks-17690629, accessed 17 July 2006.
45 This seems likely given the account of Purea and Tehavitua's ambitions for their son that was recorded by Henry Adams, Memoirs of Arii Taimai …, privately printed, Paris, 1901, pp. 42–46; although Oliver notes that the provenance of the feather girdle in which Teri‘irere was wrapped cannot be determined, Ancient Tahitian Society, vol. 3, p. 1220.
46 Banks, ‘The Endeavour journal’, accessed 17 July 2006.
47 Forster, Voyage Round the World, vol. 1, p. 375.
48 Robert Thomson cited in Oliver, Ancient Tahitian Society, vol. 3, p. 1223.
49 Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, ‘Changing contexts — shifting meanings: The Göttingen Cook/Forster collection, for example’, abstract, public lecture, Honolulu Academy of Arts, 26 February 2005.