The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Richard Holmes
American fruit seeds for the Tahitians to harvest after they were gone: lemons, limes, watermelons, oranges. While he loaded his final specimens of Tahitian plants and animals aboard, he considered the possibility of taking a human representative of Paradise back to England. The matter had been raised with Tupia, the wise priest, who proposed that he himself should make the perilous journey together with his young son: ‘This morn Tupia came on board, he had renewed his resolves of going with us to England, a circumstance which gives me much satisfaction. He is certainly a most proper man, well born, chief Tahowa or priest of this Island, consequently skilld in the mysteries of their religion. But what makes him more than any thing else desireable is his experience in the navigation of these people and knowledge of the Islands in these seas. He has told us the names of above 70, the most of which he has himself been at.’53
Although Tupia was evidently enthusiastic to make the journey, Captain Cook would not underwrite the decision. He did not feel that the Tahitian could be signed on as an official member of the expedition, and he thought that once he was in England the Admiralty and the Crown would ‘in all human probability’ refuse to support him financially. Banks had no such hesitations, and resolved to be responsible for both Tupia’s welfare and his upkeep, saying he was taking on Tupia as his friend and his guest. Cook agreed, and would find Tupia’s help as the expedition’s South Seas navigator and Polynesian translator invaluable.
Banks added a comment that seems extraordinarily revealing. He suddenly thinks of outdoing his fashionable country-house friends back in Yorkshire with their exotic pets. ‘I do not know why I may not keep [Tupia] as a curiosity, as well as some of my neighbours do lions and tygers, at a larger expence than he will probably ever put me to.’ The idea that his friend and adviser could have been considered, even for a moment, as a ‘curiosity’, or a wild animal specimen, comes as a shock. It shows that Banks, for all his sympathy and humanity, could easily revert to his role as Linnaean collector and wealthy European landowner on a jaunt among the natives. However one explains it, the remark hangs uneasily in the air, never quite dissipated, never quite forgotten: the snake in the garden.
Nonetheless, Banks closed this entry on a more typically generous note: ‘The amusement I shall have in [Tupia’s] future conversation, and the benefit he will be of to this ship, as well as what he may be if another should be sent into these seas, will I think fully repay me.’54
There was a last-minute drama when, as Fort Venus was being dismantled, two of the marines slipped away into the woods, having said they had beautiful Tahitian wives, were content to resign His Majesty’s service, and intended to stay. Cook sent out a tracking party, but also took native hostages, which caused a good deal of ill-feeling. Once again it was Banks who defused a potentially ugly situation, by agreeing to spend the last night onshore with his Tahitian friends, until the marines should return. ‘At day break a large number of people gatherd about the fort many of them with weapons; we were intirely without defences so I made the best I could of it by going out among them. They wer[e] very civil and shewd much fear as they have done of me upon all occasions, probably because I never shewd the least of them, but have upon all our quarrels gone immediately into the thickest of them. They told me that our people would soon return.’
The marines did return, to everyone’s huge relief, at eight o’clock that morning, and Banks watched carefully through his telescope as they were hauled aboard the Endeavour while the hostages were released in exchange. Once he saw they were all ‘safe and sound’ he discharged his own Tahitian ‘prisoners’ from his tent, ‘making each such a present as we though[t] would please them with which some were well content’.55 Though he does not mention it, this may also have been his last chance to spend a night with Otheothea.
The Endeavour finally hoisted anchor early on the morning of 13 July 1769. ‘After a stay of 3 months we left our beloved Islanders with much regret,’ reported Banks, with careful understatement.56 The whole of Matavi Bay was full of Tahitian canoes. Oborea and Otheothea came aboard briefly to say tearful farewells. Banks and Tupia then climbed the rigging and stood together in the crow’s nest, waving. Sydney Parkinson wrote: ‘On our leaving the shore the people in the canoes set up their woeful cry-Awai! Awai!-and the young women wept very much. Some of the canoes came up to the side of the ship, while she was under sail, and brought us many cocoas.’57
7
Banks had gained a complicated impression of Paradise. As the Endeavour sailed westwards towards New Zealand throughout August 1769, with brief stops at other Polynesian islands (seventeen in all), he sat down in his sweltering cabin to put his reflections in some kind of order. The result was his long anthropological essay ‘On the Manners and Customs of the South Sea Islands’, perhaps the most original paper he ever wrote.
Tahiti was indeed a kind of Paradise: astonishingly beautiful, its people open and generous, and its way of life languid and voluptuous. But there were many darker elements: strong, even oppressive social hierarchies; endemic thieving; a strange religion haunted by ghosts and superstitions; infanticide; and warlike propensities just below the surface. Nonetheless, Banks’s essay is full of his glowing memories, which would later stand him in good stead on the bleakest moments of the journey home: ‘No country can boast such delightfull walks as this, the whole plains where the people live are coverd with groves of Breadfruit and cocoa nut trees without underwood; these are intersected in all directions by the paths which go from one house to the other, so the whole countrey is a shade than which nothing can be more gratefull in a climate where the sun has so powerfull an influence.’58
The essay is packed with technical information: Tahitian methods of cooking, boat-building, house-construction, tool-making, fishing, dancing, drum-making, navigation, weather-predicting, ceremonial dramas, tattooing (again). Banks also writes tenderly of shared meals, enchanting dresses and languid afternoons. His remarks on the innocence of Tahitian ornaments are characteristic: ‘Ornaments they have very few, they are very fond of earings but wear them only in one ear. When we came they had them of their own, made of Shell, stone, berries, red pease, and some small pearls which they wore 3 tied together; but our beads very quickly supplied their place; they also are very fond of flowers, especialy of the Cape Jasmine of which they have great plenty planted near their houses; these they stick into the holes of their ears, and into their hair, if they have enough of them which is but seldom. The men wear feathers often the tails of tropick birds stuck upright in their hair.’
There is a long passage on the beautiful cleanliness of the Tahitian body, both male and female. All Tahitians wash themselves at least three times a day in the rivers, making their skin smooth and glowing. Their teeth are dazzling white, and they remove all body hair. Banks even grew accustomed to the strange, unforgettable smell of their hair oil: ‘This is made of Cocoa nut oil in which some sweet woods or flowers are infusd; the oil is most commonly very rancid and consequently the wearers of it smell most disagreably, at first we found it so but very little use reconcild me at least very compleatly to it. These people are free from all smells of mortality and surely rancid as their oil is it must be preferrd to the odoriferous perfume of toes and armpits so frequent in Europe.’
The Tahitians’ simplicity and innocence (the question of theft aside) came out in innumerable ways, as for example in their attitude to alcohol: ‘Drink they have none but water and cocoa nut Juice, nor do they seem to have any method of Intoxication among them. Some there were who drank pretty freely of our liquors and in a few instances became very drunk but seemed far from pleased with their intoxication, the individuals afterwards shunning a repitition of it instead of greedily desiring it as most Indians are said to do.’59
The idea of sexual innocence proved more complicated for a European to accept: ‘All privacy is banishd even from those actions which the decency of Europaeans keep