The Age of Wonder (4 page)

When the naturalist Gilbert White, snug in his Hampshire village, heard of Banks’s departure on the high seas, he wrote thoughtfully to their mutual friend Thomas Pennant: ‘When I reflect on the youth and affluence of this enterprizing young gentleman I am filled with wonder to see how conspicuously the contempt of dangers, and the love of excelling in his favourite studies, stands forth in his character…If he survives, with what delight we shall peruse his Journals, his Fauna, his Flora! If he falls by the way, I shall revere his fortitude, and contempt of pleasures and indulgences: but shall always regret him.’
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4

Through the brilliance of Cook’s navigation, and the skill of his crewmanagement, the
Endeavour
arrived at Tahiti with over six weeks in which to prepare for its main task, the transit observations. Previous expeditions had often been decimated by this stage, but Cook had lost only four men, and none to disease. The crew’s diet included a serving of cabbage sauerkraut ‘fresh every morning [as] at Covent Garden market’, and Banks had shot seabirds wherever possible for fresh meat, including several large albatross with nine-foot wingspans.

The first death was the result of an accident with an anchor chain in Madeira. The next two occurred on land, and involved Banks. A field expedition he was leading had been overtaken by a snowstorm on Tierra del Fuego. It was a grim and confused story, which revealed something of Banks’s qualities in a crisis. The party of twelve men (including Green, Solander and several sailors) had first run into trouble when one of Banks’s young artists, Alexander Buchan, suffered an epileptic fit. Then a sudden blizzard cut off their retreat to the ship, several hours away down the mountains, and the party became separated in a birch wood as night fell.

Overcome by the biting cold, Banks’s two black servants drank a stolen bottle of rum, and lay down in the snow and refused to go on. Meanwhile Solander, always rather stout and unfit, simply collapsed. Disintegration and disaster threatened the entire expedition. As darkness came on and the temperature plummeted, Banks tried to hold them together. First he regrouped the scattered men further down the mountainside with Green, made a fire and organised a brushwood ‘wigwam’, where Buchan was revived. Then Banks went back through the sub-zero night, with as many hands as he could muster, to drag the half-conscious Solander down through the birch wood to safety. It was an act which cemented their friendship. Banks also sent hands to save his black servants, but they were ‘immoderately drunk’, and could not-or would not-be carried back to the camp.

It was now past midnight, and everyone was stunned with cold, but Banks went out again in a last attempt to save them. ‘Richmond was upon his legs but not able to walk, the other lay on the ground insensible as stone.’ Banks tried to light a fire, but it was doused by falling snow. It was ‘absolutely impossible’ to bring the two men down. Finally he laid them out on a bed of branches, covered them with brushwood, and left them, hoping they would survive the night, insulated by alcohol. Going back at dawn, he found them both dead.
²¹

When the rest of the party finally returned to the
Endeavour,
Cook noted that they all retired to their hammocks except Banks. After making his report and classifying his specimens, he insisted on going out in one of the ship’s small boats alone, and spent the rest of the day in the bay, a solitary figure hunched over the stern, fishing with a seine net. Cook had not blamed him for his companions’ deaths; but for the first time perhaps, he felt the weight of his responsibilities.

The third death was a suicide in the Pacific. This revealed another side to Banks. He made a long, thoughtful entry over the incident, in which a young able seaman, ‘remarkable quiet and industrious’, had apparently jumped overboard after being accused of stealing a sealskin tobacco pouch from the captain’s cabin. Banks was struck by the melancholy event, remarking thoughtfully that ‘it must appear incredible to every body who is not well acquainted with the powerfull effects that shame can work upon young minds’. Cook did not pursue the incident, but it seems clear from Banks’s entry that he suspected homosexual bullying by an older member of the crew.
²²

The initial days on Tahiti were obviously exciting, but curiously tense. There was the unfortunate shooting in the first week, and the scare over the quadrant in the third. Young Alexander Buchan was taken ill again, and died from what appeared to be a repeat of the epileptic fit in Tierra del Fuego. Banks wrote in his journal: ‘Dr Solander Mr Sporing Mr Parkinson and some of the officers of the ship attended his funeral. I sincerely regret him as an ingenious and good young man, but his Loss to me is irretrievable, my airy dreams of entertaining my freinds in England with the scenes that I am to see here are vanishd.’ Banks’s comments seem curiously harsh, and suggest his instinctive sense of entitlement. ‘No account of the figures and dresses of men can be satisfactory unless illustrated with figures: had providence spared him a month longer what an advantage would it have been to my undertaking. But I must submit.’
²³

This note would be repeated elsewhere in his journal. Yet the expedition’s other artist, the eighteen-year-old Sydney Parkinson, had no doubts about his employer’s humanity. He had witnessed how Banks had nursed Buchan in the Tierra del Fuego débâcle, and wrote a long entry in his own journal reflecting on Banks’s response to the unnecessary shooting of the Tahitian over the stolen musket. ‘When Mr Banks heard of the affair, he was highly displeased, saying, “If we quarrel with these Indians, we should not agree with Angels.” And he did all he could to accommodate the difference, going across the river, and through the mediation of an old man, prevailed upon many of the natives to come over to us, bearing plaintain trees, which is a signal of peace among them; and clapping their hands to their breasts, cried “Tyau!”, which signifies friendship. They sat down by us; sent for coa nuts; and we drank milk with them.’
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With the security of the entire expedition in his hands, Cook was naturally cautious. He decided that a permanent armed encampment, Fort Venus, should be built on the beach to protect the expedition ashore and assert its authority. Banks says the Tahitians approved of this, and helped with the construction. Drawings by Parkinson, though the fort’s situation among the palm trees is intended to look idyllic, show a square earthen stockade surmounted by a wooden palisade with naval swivel cannons mounted along the top. The fort was fifty yards wide by thirty yards deep, commanding a stretch of river on the inland side. In front along the shore was a trading area, where boats and canoes were drawn up, but all stores and arms were kept inside under guard, except for barrels of water by the stream. There were wooden gates which were closed at dusk, with armed sentries.

Within the perimeter, Cook established an official reception area, with a flagstaff flying a large Union Jack. There was a big rectangular marquee for gatherings and feasts, surrounded by an encampment of smaller supply tents and sleeping quarters, together with a bakery, a forge and an observatory. Banks had brought his own bell tent, only fifteen feet in diameter, but obviously the most well-equipped and comfortable. It soon became a popular destination with visiting Tahitians, and there was great rivalry for invitations to dine and sleep there. He noted in his journal: ‘Our little fortification is now compleat, it consists of high breastworks at each end, the front palisades and the rear guarded by the river on the bank of which are placd full Water cask[s]. At every angle is mounted a swivel and two carraige guns pointed the two ways by which the Indians might attack us out of the woods. Our sentrys are also as well releivd as they could be in the most regular fortification.’
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This security was regarded as important for good relations, and the fort may have been as much designed to keep the sailors in, as the Tahitians out. Cook enforced a basic naval discipline, which included having one able seaman flogged on the quarterdeck for threatening a Tahitian woman with an axe.
²⁶
Naturally there was a night curfew, but it was not very strictly observed, especially by the officers.

The constant theft of goods, especially of anything made of metal, regularly disrupted relations between the two communities. It was theft, too, that most clearly demonstrated the cruel gulf between the two civilisations. To the Europeans theft was a violation of legal ownership, an assault on private property and wealth. To the Tahitians it was a skilful affirmation of communal resources, an attempt to balance their self-evident poverty against overwhelming European superfluity. There was no source of metal anywhere on the island. The Tahitians’ hunting knives were made out of wood, their fish hooks out of mother-of-pearl, their cooking pots out of clay. The Europeans clanked and glittered with metal.

As Cook himself observed, the
Endeavour
was an enormous treasure trove of metal goods: from iron nails, hammers and carpenters’ tools to the most puzzling of watches, telescopes and scientific instruments. To the Tahitians it was wholly justifiable to redistribute such items. Banks, who had to keep a watchful eye on his scientific equipment, noticeably his dissection knives and his two solar microscopes, noted: ‘I do not know by what accident I have so long omitted to mention how much these people are given to theiving. I will make up for my neglect however today by saying that great and small Chiefs and common men all are firmly of opinion that if they can once get possession of any thing it immediately becomes their own.’
^27
♣

Ruminating on these larger ethical questions did not allow Banks to ignore simple practical problems, like the ubiquitous flies: ‘The flies have been so troublesome ever since we have been ashore that we can scarce get any business done for them; they eat the painters colours off the paper as fast as they can be laid on, and if a fish is to be drawn there is more trouble in keeping them off it than in the drawing itself.’
²⁸
The men tried many expedients: fly swats, flytraps made of molasses, and even mosquito nets draped over Parkinson while he worked.

Much time was spent in bargaining for sexual favours. The basic currency was any kind of usable metal object: there was no need for gold or silver or trinkets. Among the able seamen the initial going rate was one ship’s nail for one ordinary fuck, but hyper-inflation soon set in. The Tahitians well understood a market economy. There was a run on anything metal that could be smuggled off the ship-cutlery, cleats, handles, cooking utensils, spare tools, but especially nails. It was said that the
Endeavour
’s carpenter soon operated an illegal monopoly on metal goods, and nails were leaving the ship by the sackful.

Later in June there was a crisis when one of the
Endeavour
’s crew stole a hundredweight bag of nails, and refused to reveal its whereabouts even after a flogging: ‘One of the theives was detected but only 7 nails were found upon him out of 100 Wht and he bore his punishment without impeaching any of his accomplices. This loss is of a very serious nature as these nails if circulated by the people among the Indians will much lessen the value of Iron, our staple commodity.’
²⁹

Cook disapproved of sexual bartering, and made attempts to regulate the trade in love-making-‘quite unsupported’, he later drily observed, by any of his officers. He remained philosophical, observing, not without humour, that there was a cautionary tale told about Captain Wallis’s ship the
Dolphin:
when leaving Polynesian waters two years previously, so many nails had been surreptitiously prised out of her timbers that she almost split apart in the next Pacific storm she encountered. It was only later that the full, disastrous medical consequences of this spontaneous sexual trade became apparent.

Yet Cook was already aware of the terrible risk and burden of spreading venereal disease, and wrote a long entry in his journal for 6 June 1769 reflecting on them. Certainly he had taken every precaution that his own crew were free from sexual infection when they arrived. They had been examined by Mr Monkhouse, the
Endeavour
’s surgeon, and they had in effect been in shipboard quarantine for eight months. But the Tahitian ‘Women were so very liberal with their favours’ that venereal disease had soon spread itself ‘to the greatest part of the Ship’s Company’. The Tahitians themselves called it ‘the British disease’, and Cook thought they were probably correct, though he wondered if it was already endemic, brought either by the French or by the Spanish. ‘However this is little satisfaction to them who must suffer by it in a very great degree and may in time spread itself over all the Islands of the South Seas, to the eternal reproach of those who first brought it among them.’
^30
♣

Some crew members had moral scruples from the start. Young Sydney Parkinson noted disapprovingly in his journal: ‘Most of our ship’s company procured temporary wives amongst the Natives, with whom they occasionally cohabited; an indulgence which even many reputed virtuous Europeans allow themselves, in uncivilised parts of the world, with impunity. As if a change of place altered the moral turpitude of fornication: and what is a sin in Europe, is only a simple innocent gratification in America; which is to suppose that the obligation of chastity is local, and restricted only to particular parts of the globe.’
³¹

Banks appeared to have no such scruples. He made a point of leaving the camp most nights and, as he put it, ‘sleeping alone in the woods’. He told himself, perhaps with the easiness of birth and privilege, that his intentions were as much botanical as amorous, and that no moral code was seriously infringed. After all, it was all
research.
Yet it is difficult to see him as a simple predator. He was clearly attractive to Tahitian women-robust, generous, good humoured-and it is striking how quickly he gained a footing (if that is the term) in Tahitian society generally.