10

revelation

Tahiti, April 1768

To stand on the edge of a volcanic island as long tongues of lava flow inexorably to the shore, to see the red-hot fissures spit and hiss as they strike the cold sea, to watch the light of primordial rock fade as it freezes mid-motion, forged unwilling into fierce solidity, is to bear witness to the world’s creation.

Amid the sulfuric stench and heat, a beetle blows ashore on a leeward breeze, catches a foothold and clings, before crawling off into the darkness. On the black sands of the beach, a pile of driftwood washes ashore, laden with seedpods and debris from other lands. A white gull inspects the booty with an unblinking eye in the dying light.

This bleak and sterile birthplace has generated a panorama of islands that illuminate the origins of life on land: the endless progression of ecological establishment – succession, radiation and speciation. Each island in the chain, shifting with the moving plates away from the crack in the earth’s crust that created it, represents a step in the process from raw, bald, rocky infancy to the lush, verdant maturity of the oldest, most distant isles.

Tahiti is part of just such an island chain. It is one of the Society Islands that started erupting from a volcanic hotspot in the middle of the Pacific plate some 4 kilometres below the ocean surface 4.5 million years ago, completing its construction with Maupiti less than a million years ago. Like all Polynesian islands, like all landmasses ultimately, Tahiti emerged from the molten depths of the earth’s mantle to create the terrestrial plane on which we walk, on which our very existence depends.

The terrestrial species that live in Tahiti have come from far away, diversified and speciated, into a range of distinctive yet related forms. In a process common to all oceanic islands, a few hardy colonisers settled, occupied and took up new niches. They separated across valleys and mountains, across habitats and ecosystems, and evolved new forms different from each other. Plants arrived first, courtesy of the specialised survival and dispersal pods in which they often package their seeds, or their capacity to take root and regrow from broken fragments of themselves washed ashore. Insects, perhaps, arrived next, lightweight and aerial, capable of surviving even the freezing turbulence of the stratosphere. Eventually a few birds too, found their way across 4000 kilometres of ocean. Even terrestrial reptiles swept ashore, thanks to their slow metabolism and resilience. Lizards (and on some islands even giant tortoises) arrived via sea drift. A bat or two might find their way here, but other than the marine mammals, it is rare to find any terrestrial mammal or amphibian native to an oceanic island.

It is the unique combination of their isolation and sparse seeding with original species that seems to supercharge evolution, resulting in intense diversity in a remarkably small area. Of the 467 species of plants found on the island of Tahiti, 212 are found nowhere else. When the first Polynesians approached these islands in their large ocean-going canoes in 300 CE, they would have known they were approaching a rich and fertile land, perhaps even before the mountain peaks had broken the horizon. They would had known from the cries of the seabirds wheeling overhead, from the subtle shift in the currents, from coconuts and palm fronds floating offshore, and from the shifting seasonal, geographic and vertical distributions of fish species. And soon enough, the damp rich scent of fecund forest and foreshore would have confirmed their hopes and drawn them ashore to a land of perfect weather, abundant food and easy living.

When the French ships arrived here 1500 years later, after two months at sea, they too would have quickly realised they had arrived in a paradise for sailors and biologists alike.

‘Scarcely did we believe our eyes,’ wrote Bougainville, ‘when we discovered a peak laden with trees up to its isolated summit . . . it would have been taken from afar for a pyramid of immense height, which the hand of a skilful decorator had adorned with garlands of foliage . . . The less elevated land is interspersed with meadows and groves, and all along the coast, at the foot of the high country, there is a low level margin covered with plantations. It was there that among the banana trees, coconut palms and other fruit-bearing trees, we could see the houses of the islanders.’

At least here Jeanne would not have to slog through ice and snow. Here, she could expect to collect in ease and comfort, with a bevy of laughing women and children to help her, and know that every second species she picked up would be new to science.

Voyages are always demarcated by their destinations, by landfall. No-one wants to hear about endless days at sea, fair winds and good weather. They will listen to stories of near disaster or adversity but otherwise it is only the ports of call that are of interest.

I recount my own childhood travels, destination by destination as we daytripped our way north from Eden to Bermagui to Batemans Bay to Ulladulla and Jervis Bay. I collected fossil sea urchins from shaly cliffs and admired the bleeding tooth nerites that replaced the plain black periwinkles from home. A large orange seahorse that washed ashore quickly faded in the alcohol I tried to preserve it in. Clouds of blue soldier crabs swept in waves across the mudflats at our approach. Some of my collections grew legs and ran away. Hermit crabs had claimed prior residency to my treasures and regretfully I returned them all to the beach, simultaneously enchanted and disappointed by this new obstruction.

The trip to Sydney was an overnighter from the serene and beautiful Jervis Bay. Behind the cliffs and cloak of dark vegetation the city was barely visible but for the great halo of light that warned us hours ahead of civilisation’s approach. I wrote a terrible poem about it for an English assignment, which was duly published in the school magazine. I favoured poetry over prose at the time because it was shorter and I was lazy. As I struggle now to recall the details of a journey so long ago, I wish I’d written more.

As we rounded Barrenjoey Head, Broken Bay opened north to Gosford Waters, south into the Pittwater, and west into Cowan Creek, Berowra Waters and the sinuous Hawkesbury River, all encased in sandstone cliffs and eucalypts. These are some of the most beautiful and most spectacular natural waterways in the world. And, aside from the mansions lining the north shore and the armada of yachts at anchor, you might never even know you were on the edge of Australia’s largest city.

The diaries from the Bougainville expedition are full of hastily sketched profiles of Tahiti’s mountainous islands, drawn from the deck of the ships. I could tell you what the Frenchmen saw, what they thought, and what they imagined as they approached. But I cannot tell you what Jeanne saw or thought or felt as she approached the moment of her dénouement.

Tahiti is not just a turning point in Jeanne’s story and hers is not the only voice silenced here. We hardly ever hear what the Tahitians thought as these European ships approached, carrying their weapons of violence, their plagues of contagion and their seeds of religious and political corruption. The first woman to sail around the world is as obscured here as the first Tahitian to discover Europe. Ahutoru is central to Jeanne’s story. This is his story too.

As with Jeanne’s story, I have to pull the strands of Ahutoru’s narrative from many different sources. Bougainville tells me one thing, Vivez another and Caro still more. Microscopic fibres carefully separated and woven back together into a delicate filamentous fabric that is barely a shadow of its original form.

Word had travelled fast on the islands of the approaching canoes. They were longer and higher than the largest war canoe. Just one of them could conceal a raiding party of 100 men. The trees that grew from their decks were so large that men clambered through them like bats in the canopy.

This time there were two – even from the shore Ahutoru would have seen that these vessels, these people, were different from the last ones to visit Tahiti.

The ships tacked back and forth up the coast. For a while it looked as if they might sail past, back into Matavai Bay near the marai of Purea where the last canoe had landed. But they doubled back, coming in at Hitia‘a, near the marai of Ahutoru’s own chief and Purea’s rival, Reti. Ahutoru had no time to waste getting on board.

No-one knew where these strangers had sailed from or what they were doing. They did not really seem to know themselves. They had no knowledge of where they were or where they were going. But they had weapons more powerful than anyone had ever seen, as the blood spilt in Matavai Bay last year had attested. After a brief but decisive battle, Purea had decided to make allies of her unwelcome visitors. Reti had been unimpressed by this enhancement of his rival’s status. This time, he wanted his own allies.

Ahutoru, as Reti’s envoy, set out to intercept the ships, keen to make the acquaintance of these strange men. And, more importantly in Ahutoru’s opinion, make the acquaintance of any new women.

There was a good reason for Tahiti to be known as Aphrodite’s Island. Bougainville called it New Cythera, after the Greek island devoted to the goddess of love. Every journal from the voyage was suddenly filled with woman, young or old, nubile or unattractive, all offering sex, willingly, unwillingly, boldly or shyly. It all depends on the telling. These women have no names and no voices. Only their actions and bodies are described.

If Bougainville had landed in Matavai Bay, where the English explorer Samuel Wallis had arrived a year earlier in the Dolphin, he might have had a different view of the women. Wallis dealt exclusively with Purea (or Oberea), whom he described as the Queen of Tahiti. When Cook visited in 1769, he too met Purea, whom he described as ‘head or Chief of her own Family or Tribe but to all appearance has no authority over the rest of the inhabitants whatever she might have had when the Dolphin was here’. Cook described her as ‘masculine’, while his botanist Joseph Banks described her as ‘lusty’.

Bougainville did not meet with Purea during his visit. He dealt exclusively with Reti, a neighbouring chief. He talked only to the men. When he mentioned their wives, his descriptions were clear and precise – as if these were women he could understand: women under the authority of their husbands, required to do as they were told. The younger unmarried women, who had made their presence felt almost as soon as the ships arrived, confounded him. He struggled to find words to explain women who appeared to be under no-one’s control. His language became flowery and romantic, referencing nymphs and classical goddesses, as if he could not find a model to describe these women who seemed to operate with complete sexual freedom.

‘A young and fine-looking girl came in one of the canoes, almost naked,’ commented Bougainville prosaically in his journal on the first day, ‘who showed her vulva in exchange for small nails.’

By the time he was writing up his account for publication, however, he had refined his literary style.

‘In spite of all our precautions, a young girl came on board, and placed herself upon the quarterdeck, near one of the hatchways, which was open, in order to give air to those who were heaving at the capstern below it. The girl carelessly dropt a cloth which covered her, and appeared to the eyes of the all beholders such as Venus shewed herself to the Phrygian shepherd having, indeed, the celestial form of that goddess. Both sailors and soldiers endeavoured to come to the hatchway and the capstern was never hove with more alacrity than on this occasion.’

There was much in Tahitian customs that the Europeans did not, could not, or would not understand. Sex and property, the twisted shackle at the heart of nuptial relations, were equally incomprehensible.

‘The king is the first and greatest of thieves,’ Caro observed of the Tahitians, entirely without irony, even as his own commander demanded free wood, water and food, without the slightest knowledge of the currency of exchange. The laws of tapu and muru and their variants, which reigned over Polynesian communities, were invisible and inconceivable to the Europeans. No wonder men like Cook and Marion du Fresne fell fatally foul of them. It has taken decades for anthropologists to try to reach the most basic of understandings of these systems, scurrying to document them as fast as religious and secular forces erased them from collective memories.

Frederick Edward Maning, known as a ‘Pākehā Māori’, was Irish-born but chose to live and marry into the Hokianga Māori community. His recollections in Old New Zealand illustrate that to be robbed, to be thought worthy of being robbed, was both a privilege and an honour. What the European’s saw as theft, the Polynesians saw as a vital redistribution of wealth through the community: a social and economic necessity. Thousands of pages of text have been devoted to concepts of property – the spirit of the gift – the obligations generated by gift-giving and the consequences of failing to meet those obligations.

I could not hope to explain any of the complexities of either this field of research or the cultures it seeks to explain. I am as blinded by my own cultural and historical blinkers as any of the early explorers. My inability to fathom Tahitian attitudes towards death, violence and sexuality matches my inability to understand eighteenth-century French attitudes towards – well – death, violence and sexuality. Cannibalism or Catholicism, tapu or the divine rights of kings. It’s all a foreign country to me.

I suppose the best we can do is to recognise that our blinkers are our own impediment, and that just because we can’t see something, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

I don’t really understand why Commerson spent so much time writing about the people he visited and so little time describing the natural history that was supposed to be his passion. He seemed to write more about the Patagonians and Fuegians than he did about the rich marine life of the Magellan Straits. He went into graphic detail about the lives of the Tahitians while barely mentioning the extraordinary coral reefs or the distinctive ecology of these volcanic islands. I don’t understand his fixation on humans when there was so much that was new and unknown around him.

I started by studying psychology and anthropology but quickly slid sideways into animal behaviour then zoology, once I realised that animals were much more interesting and diverse than humans. Commerson, at the very beginning of modern biology and anthropology, had a different view. The study of humans – more particularly ‘other’ humans – was natural history, and was at the forefront of Commerson’s mind as a naturalist traveller. When the Duc de Praslin asked him to advise on the study of natural history for future naturalist travellers, Commerson put the observations of humans first.

‘What is there in fact more essential to observe in any country you enter for the first time than the races of men who inhabit it, their faces, their manners, their people, their clothing and their weapons?’ Commerson asked.

It’s also an artefact of the way he wrote science. He was, like most naturalists of the time, a taxonomist. He was interested in discovering, describing, labelling, naming and claiming. Biology had yet to develop an interest in the behaviour, ecology, environment or biogeography of species. Commerson confined his descriptions to his notebooks, organised by class and species and written in Latin. Hardly anyone seems to have even read them.

I shouldn’t be disappointed. And I can’t really blame him. After all, I thought there would be a lot more natural history in this book, too, but instead, I find myself writing more about the people.

I can find only one species collected from Tahiti by Jeanne and Commerson. It’s a fish – a birdnose wrasse. A strange little creature, it has a distinctive long pointed snout and a jerky flapping motion when it swims, as if it was indeed masquerading as a bird. In life they are an unvarying shade of blue, save for a tint on their fins and a beautiful emerald and aquamarine eye. But they lose their fine colours very quickly in death, and after 250 years in a museum collection the three specimens that Jeanne and Commerson collected are desiccated, shrivelled and yellow, best recognised from the tag on their tails.

These fish are hard to identify when young, before they have developed their characteristically long nose. Like many wrasse, they are hermaphrodites. They begin life as small, rather dull, females but in older age develop brighter colours and turn male. In some other wrasse species, the females can change sex and function as males at various times.

Commerson would not have been aware of the wrasses’ interesting sex-changing habits at the time. And he did not think it looked like a bird either. Instead, he described its snout as being like a clou – a nail.

Nails were on everyone’s mind. The Tahitians might have been impressed by the European’s guns and axes, but nails revolutionised canoe-building. Even the smallest of nails could be traded for sexual favours. And clearly even the biologist could not stop thinking about them.

Perhaps it was no great surprise that Commerson was distracted from his focus on natural history while he was in Tahiti, where human activities were so diverting.

‘The act of creating a fellow human being is a religious one,’ he observed, ‘the preludes to which are encouraged by the vows and the songs of all the assembled people, and the climax celebrated by universal applause.’

It seems likely this went beyond mere observation.

‘Every stranger is admitted to share these delightful mysteries; it is even a duty of hospitality to invite them to do so. So the good Utopian ceaselessly thrills at either the sensations of his own pleasures or the spectacle of those of others.’

Nassau-Siegen left no doubt about his participation either.

‘I was strolling in a charming place,’ he recounts, ‘carpets of greenery, pleasant groves, the gentle murmur of streams inspired love in this delicious spot. I was caught there by the rain. I sheltered in a small house where I found six of the prettiest girls in the locality. They welcomed me with all the gentleness this charming sex can display. Each one removed her clothing, an adornment which is bothersome for pleasure, and, spreading all their charms, showed me in detail the gracefulness and contours of the most perfect bodies. They also removed my clothing. The whiteness of a European body delighted them. They hastened to see whether I was made like the locals and pleasure quickened this research. Many were the kisses, many the tender caresses I received.’

I sometimes wonder if it is ever possible for anyone within a Christianised society to comprehend a world of sexual freedom or promiscuity, in whatever form it takes. Particularly through the even more recent lens of Reformation, then Victorian, prudery. Christianity came fast and fierce to Polynesian society, exposing them to their nakedness and bringing shame to the Garden of Eden. This conversion has closed a door to the past, making it almost impossible to understand what has been lost.

As George Orwell once said, ‘the most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.’

For the European observers, the Tahitian women (like their own) were invariably discussed in terms of trade and commerce. They were given by men, or were trading or bartering their services in return for nails. I have read papers in which every sexual encounter in Tahiti is described in terms of rape. Others use the language of coercion or prostitution. Few are willing to consider that maybe these young women were, like Ahutoru, just interested in the sex. Perhaps there wasn’t anything more to it than that.

The Tahitians must have been even more confused about the sexuality of their visitors. For one thing, at first sight, it seemed almost impossible to tell whether they were male or female or something else entirely. The Europeans all looked much alike – small, thin and pale, with no beards, unadorned by the tattoos and decorations of either men or women or status, and covered in bland indiscriminate clothing that concealed their genitals. Nor did any division of labour distinguish them – they sewed, cooked, cleaned, hunted and swept – performing men’s as well as women’s tasks. They were sexually ambiguous.

And what kind of people travelled long distances in a boat without bringing any women with them? Apart from a raiding party. No wonder Indigenous people throughout the Pacific were puzzled and concerned by these strange visitors.

The travel narratives are full of stories of sailors having to strip naked to prove their manhood. Bougainville’s cook discovered this when he slipped ashore against his commander’s direct orders.

‘He had hardly set his feet on shore,’ reported Bougainville, ‘when he was immediately surrounded by a crowd of Indians, who undressed him from head to foot. He thought he was utterly lost, not knowing where the exclamations of those people would end, who were tumultuously examining every part of his body.’

Bougainville’s cook thought he was going to be eaten, but his clothes, if not his dignity, were soon restored. He was offered the opportunity to demonstrate his manhood with a young girl, but he was in no state to achieve that which he had so ardently desired when he snuck ashore and, with all good will, he was taken back to the ship to beg his commander’s forgiveness.

The Tahitians soon realised there were plenty of men aboard the ships, but they still wondered where all the women were hidden.

Ahutoru was the first Tahitian to board the Étoile. He would also become the first Tahitian to discover Europe, when he returned with Bougainville to France. A native of Raiatea originally, and exiled from his home island by Bora Bora warriors, he was about 30 years old when the French ships arrived. Yet we know relatively little about this great adventurer and explorer. There are no pictures of him, little information about his family, his upbringing, his life or his thoughts. He was variously described as larger and stronger (than the French), smaller than other Tahitians, or of mediocre size; as both black or ‘mulatto’ in complexion, as attractive and handsome or ugly and stunted, as highly intelligent and articulate or incredibly stupid with a speech or mental defect. There is not much to go on beyond long black hair, a beard and tattooed hands and thighs. Like Jeanne, he is an anomaly, a diversion to the main story of European discovery, worthy only of a passing paragraph here and there, a humorous anecdote or dismissive comment. But he is also central to Jeanne’s story.

Ahutoru came alongside the Étoile in a large canoe, which effortlessly kept pace with a ship making a good few knots under sail. An imposing figure, almost Romanesque in a sleeveless white shift, he gestured imperiously that he wished to board. The crew threw him a rope, which he grabbed with both hands, wedging his feet in the bow of his canoe as it surged against the pull of the ship. The rope stretched perilously taut under the strain. The crew shouted for him to let go, but Reti’s envoy could hardly fail a show of strength. Ahutoru tightened his grip and hauled himself in, hand-over-hand.

He seized the rigging chains in one fist and swung himself aboard, leaving his retinue to trail in the ship’s wake. He strode the deck as if he owned it, dwarfing the Frenchman not so much in height as in strength and stature. It was as well he came armed only with a peaceable expression, a green branch and a ready smile. He was here to charm, as well as impress.

Ahutoru invited the French ashore, promising an abundance of food and drink while he inspected every aspect of the ship and crew. In a show of good will, they exchanged his gift of tapa cloth for European clothes, although it was hard to find any big enough to fit. Despite the captain’s protestations, Ahutoru waved his vessels away, deciding to stay the night and dine with his visitors, as oblivious to his host’s discomfort as the French would be to the Tahitian’s concerns on their landing.

Both Vivez and Caro describe how Ahutoru laughed, drank and ate in the mess, his keen interest in women and how he watched the crowd who gathered around him. Everyone told him there were no ayenne, no women, on board, but he clearly did not believe them. They would be standing back perhaps, watching from the sidelines. According to Vivez, Ahutoru spotted Jeanne and Commerson, standing near Labare, the armourer, at the back.

He leapt up, pointing, ‘Ayenne!’

Everyone looked at Labare, a delicate young man who might easily be mistaken for a girl. But the Tahitian was not looking at Labare. He singled out Jeanne.

If Vivez was delighted by this turn of events, Commerson was aghast and Jeanne fled.

Ahutoru was left to puzzle over these strange creatures who concealed their women and shot rockets into the night sky like angry spirits for amusement. He slept on the deck and followed the ship’s route by the stars as it tacked back and forth off shore, so that at least he would know where they were going, even if his hosts did not.

The next day the two ships managed to find a space between the reef and the shore where they could anchor safely and load water. The commander ordered the sick ashore, but no sooner had they landed and begun erecting their tents than Reti and Reti’s father arrived, directing them to load their luggage back into their boats.

The French were no more welcome to sleep ashore than Ahutoru had been on the Étoile.

There was a careful discussion between the commander and Reti. Bougainville explained with eighteen stones the number of nights they planned to stay. Reti countered with nine stones. An agreement was reached. The tents were erected and both Reti and Bougainville, along with their respective entourages, spent a wary night in each other’s company.

While the crew loaded water the next morning and others traded nails for coconuts, bananas, fish, crabs and crayfish, Commerson and Jeanne came ashore, eager to do some collecting.

They were met by an enthusiastic crowd of Tahitian men, shouting ‘Ayenne! Ayenne!’

There was no doubting their intentions. It was obvious that, like Ahutoru, they thought she was a woman. And it was equally obvious that they were offering her the same attention and hospitality that the young Tahitian women had been offering the French men.

One of the Tahitians picked up Jeanne and swung her easily over his shoulder, intending to carry her away. The French officer on guard swifly drew his sword and intervened. Jeanne hurried back to the longboat and returned to the ship.

But everyone who was ashore had seen it. And before long everyone who was aboard the ships soon heard. There could be no doubting it now. Every suspicion, every rumour and every tattle of gossip that had smouldered over the last year, now flared and exploded into life. The Tahitians had seen through Jeanne’s disguise. No-one would believe her denials and her explanations any more. Her cover had been catastrophically blown.

Jeanne Barret was a woman.

There was no reprieve for Jeanne on the ship. Ahutoru paid court assiduously and persistently. Now Commerson could not go ashore either for fear of leaving Jeanne alone with this new admirer. Ahutoru plied them both with questions that they did not really understand and they answered with words whose meanings they did not know. Perhaps Commerson tried to explain, as he had done before, that Jeanne was a eunuch. However it came about, somewhere in the conversation māhū was mentioned – a Tahitian word for one who combines both genders.

According to Vivez, Ahutoru’s attitude changed immediately. He remained attentive and appreciated being combed, powdered or dressed by Jeanne, a very common activity among all the sailors, but he ceased pursuing her. He remained respectfully friendly until the ships left Tahiti, when he transferred to the Boudeuse, to continue the voyage with his new friends.

Ahutoru’s description of Jeanne as māhū must be the first record of the Tahitian term for transgender people in the European literature. This word refers to someone with the physical characteristic of one gender but who lives and identifies as the other gender. It is something people are born with, not something they choose, and māhū occupy a respected and acknowledged place in Polynesian societies.

In the historical and contemporary accounts, though, māhū are almost exclusively described as males who dress and behave as women. In English at the time they would be termed transvestites or in French, travesti. But this does not seem to reflect the way Tahitians see the term.

‘Māhū,’ explained a Tahitian woman to a researcher, ‘that can be a man or woman because that’s what it means, someone who’s both.’

Māhū is the Tahitian and Hawai‘ian term for what Samoans and Tongans call fa‘atama or fafine tangata (to become female) and fa‘afafine or fakafefine (to become male). The terms refer to someone’s gender, not specifically their sexuality, but the sexuality of māhū seems to follow the traditional heterosexual preferences of the gender they have adopted.

The French were amazed that Ahutoru and the other Tahitian men could so readily identify a woman who had convinced them for so long that she was a man. Charles-Marie de la Condamine would later implausibly argue that Ahutoru had ‘a sense of smell so exquisite as to distinguish . . . the difference between the sexes’. Besides, the question was not how the Tahitians knew that Jeanne was a woman, but how Jeanne had managed to convince the Frenchmen that she was not. As Bougainville would ask, ‘how could we discover the woman in the indefatigable Baret’ when she did not behave at all like a woman? Appearances are everything. If a woman knows herself by her coat, as the French saying goes, but she refused to wear the right coat, how was anyone to know who she was?

For much of the journal that Duclos-Guyot and Commerson shared, it was the young Pierre who wrote the main entry and Commerson who added marginalia or an occasional postscript. But on 6 April, shortly after their arrival in Tahiti, Duclos-Guyot stopped journal entries and for the next week the only entries were made by Commerson. Duclos-Guyot had barely missed an entry in the entire voyage. I can only assume he was ashore for most of the stay in Tahiti. The day Commerson took over the journal was the day Jeanne’s identity was revealed on shore. He does not mention it.

Commerson wrote about the ships being surrounded by canoes on the first few days. He described the large handsome Tahitians – ‘affable, nude and unarmed’ – with long black beards and beautiful teeth, inviting themselves on board. He described their gifts of coconuts and bananas and the prodigious fires that burnt all along the shore at night.

But he said nothing about going ashore on the 6th. There are no entries for the next three days. I assume he went ashore on the 10th because he says that 700–800 ‘Indiens’, both men and woman, crowded around their tents to admire them.

It was not until they had been in Tahiti for a week that Bougainville noted, ‘Mr de Commerson began making botanical specimens this afternoon’. The Tahitian women and children vied with each other to bring him bundles of the plants and buckets full of assorted shells. Limpets, mud creepers, oysters, scallops, cockles, cones and cowries. A giant trumpet shell used in ceremonies. Turban shells and trochuses that hid their pearlescent nacre beneath bland and unassuming attire. Surely many of these must have made their way into the collections on the ship.

On the 12th and 13th, Commerson discussed a dispute in which three or four Tahitians were killed and described Bougainville’s subsequent efforts to make peace. It sounds like Commerson was ashore then too. On the 14th, they had all returned to their ships and prepared to leave.

All up, I can account for just four days when Commerson was ashore on Tahiti. It doesn’t leave a lot of time for botanising. For this period, while Jeanne was stuck on the ship, I cannot find a single Tahitian specimen represented in any of the herbaria records from this voyage. Her absence was a costly one.

Ahutoru boarded the Boudeuse on 15 April. Caro said that the islander’s main motivation was his interest in European women. If that were true he could have stopped in Jakarta or Mauritius, but he sailed on to France, where he remained for a year as Bougainville’s guest. Ahutoru himself tells us nothing of his intentions – he never learnt to speak French for all he nonetheless managed to communicate extremely well, charming and navigating his way successfully through all levels of French society from the King and the Duchess of Choiseul to the dancers and singers at the opera.

George Forster, the pompous yet brilliant linguist who sailed with Cook on the Resolution, and who translated Bougainville’s narrative into English, regarded Ahutoru as ‘one of the most stupid of fellows’ of ‘very modest parts’, even though Forster does not appear to have met him. Others criticised Ahutoru for his failure to speak French. Perhaps Ahutoru thought the same of his hosts, whose proficiency in his language remains unknown.

Ahutoru certainly had a good knowledge of navigation by the sun and constellations, was aware of the recurrent nature of comets, as distinct from shooting stars. He knew of the location and distances of the surrounding islands up to, as far as Bougainville could tell, fifteen days sailing.

For all he did not seem able to pronounce French consonants or nasal vowels (an inability with which I have much sympathy), Ahutoru was fluent in his own language. On notable occasions during the voyage he would extemporise in long rhythmic stanzas which seemed to be recording the events in his memory. Similarly he often recited a long prayer – the prayer of kings. Perhaps it was his role as a storyteller or performer that gave him such a love of the opera and ballet when he was in Paris.

I cannot help but wonder what was contained in Ahutoru’s account of the voyage. Just like Jeanne, his history has been lost.

That the Society Islanders, or the Raiateans to be precise, were great travellers was evidenced by more than just Ahutoru’s voyage in 1767. Two years later, in 1769, another Raiatean, Tupaia – a priest and senior adviser to the female chieftain Purea – travelled with Cook on the Endeavour. Tupaia was a hugely influential figure, particularly in New Zealand, where his language skills and sharing of cultural knowledge greatly assisted Cook to successfully navigate tricky waters. From Tupaia’s perspective, his main interest seems to have been in reconnecting with this Māori outpost of Polynesian society that had long been isolated. A few years later, in 1773, Mai (often known as Omai), also exiled from Raiatea, left Huahine with Tobias Furneaux on the Adventurer, arriving in London in 1774, and was immortalised in a painting by Joshua Reynolds. He returned with Cook’s third voyage to his home island in 1777, the first to complete the journey.

Even from Wallis and Bougainville’s first brief visits to Tahiti, it was apparent that the islanders recognised immediately that a great change had arrived, and they took every opportunity to learn and adapt to that change. For the next decade, the Society Islands were wracked by warfare as local chiefs, male and female, sought to align their control with this new external force. In the end, though, the explorers themselves were of the least concern for the islanders. For next came the whalers, and the traders, and the missionaries, and all of them brought devastating diseases, and life in Tahiti would be irreversibly transfigured.