Quotes: Tahiti (1983) by David Howarth

Part I: Innocence, 1767–68

 

1. Misty Dawn

 

On 18 June 1767 an unknown island was sighted in mid-Pacific from the British frigate HMS Dolphin, Captain Samuel Wallis, on a voyage round the world. She approached it cautiously in the night. Dawn was misty, but as the sun rose the mist rose with it, like a theatrical curtain, to reveal an unexpected scene – the first scene, as it turned, of a century’s drama. The ship was close under the shore of the island, which rose in tier after tier of wooded peaks, and she was surrounded by hundreds of canoes. They were full of tall, bronze, conspicuously handsome men, who were gazing at her in amazement and eagerly discussing what they saw. It was the first time Europeans had met Tahitians, and the first time Tahitians had met any strangers at all.

Nobody knows for certain how long these Polynesian people had lived alone on their island. It was probably fifteen hundred years. If so, while Europe was still under Roman rule, Polynesians were putting to sea somewhere on the eastern coast of Asia, and sailing in canoes from island to island, west to east across the Pacific. At all the prolific islands they came to, they dropped off families or clans; but some were always impelled to go further to find what lay beyond. The impulsion may have been a growing population, or perhaps a native restlessness, or perhaps the threat of the warlike Melanesians to the west. No doubt a good many met disaster, and starved or drowned at sea. If it was restlessness that drove them on, it vanished as soon as they came to an island they liked which had nobody to disturb them, and everywhere from Hawaii to New Zealand they settled down to a life that was usually peaceful and always uneventful. Alone through the ages, they forgot how they came to be there, and ceased to imagine a world beyond their neighbouring islands. Their climate hardly changed from season to season, so they never took much account of time. They lived from day to day, with no memory of the distant past and no fear of the future. All through the hectic evolution of northern Europe from the barbaric fringes of the Roman Empire to the brilliant age of the eighteenth-century savants, the Tahitians stayed the same.                       

So when they saw the frigate in the mist of dawn, it surprised them as much as a flying saucer would surprise us now, or perhaps even more, and they reacted as we would react, with a mixture of fear and fascination. But the explorers, too, were soon amazed, for they found that the Tahitians, far from being the savages they expected, had created in their solitude a human society which seemed to be happier, more kindly, more stable and harmonious than any in Europe.

Such an unexpected discovery needs qualification. The Tahitians did not write, and their society was destroyed by Europeans in the next seventy-five years; so the only descriptions of it are in the writings of voyagers who saw the island and its people in their pristine state. Yet all history has this same defect of being second-hand. It all derives from documents, written at best by eye-witnesses of events; and all the people who wrote the documents had human failings, sometimes an axe to grind, and often a natural inclination to make a good story better. Some historians have been driven to say that no historical fact has reality. But facts, they would probably agree, come closer to reality if they are reported by several diverse and independent witnesses whose idiosyncrasies cancel each other out. Scores of witnesses wrote about what they saw of Tahitian life, and they were certainly diverse. It is true that they were all eighteenth-century Europeans and observed with European eyes – true also that none of them understood the foundations of Tahitian life. But some had experience and education – naval captains, scientists, mathematicians, astronomers and artists – and some had no education at all. There were Englishmen, Spaniards, Frenchmen and Russians, a few Swedes and Germans, and Americans from New England. Some, the more prudish or inhibited, were shocked because Tahitian inhibitions were quite different from their own, while others were perceptive and broad-minded; yet when one allows for all their preconceptions they are unanimous in their affection and admiration – even the earlier missionaries, who came with a prejudice of their own. The quality of Tahitian society is therefore as real a fact as most of the rest of history. One has to accept it.

This is the story of that old society: the facts of what it was like, from the many journals of people who saw it, and the facts of what happened to it. It is a difficult bit of history to write, because the sober accounts of the explorers were received with strong prejudice in Europe: some people over-praised the Tahitians, and others reacted by being over-critical. So the facts were obscured by a layer of legend. One has to weed out the prejudice and legend, yet try to see the events with sympathy through the eyes of late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the end, of course, one is left with twentieth-century prejudice: one has to recognize that for what it is, and hope that most readers will share it.

It is no use looking for the story in Tahiti now. The island and the people have changed too much. The old society died hard, but it was dead by the 1840s – and so were nineteen out of twenty of the old Tahitians; not on the whole through cruelty, but just because they did not want to go on living in a world that changed. Since then, for 140 years, the remnant has been ruled by France, a rule that began with harshness but became, as time passed, benign. Recently, the island has been well and gently led into the modern world. It has begun a new life, but modern it is. It used to take six months to get there and six months to get back. Now Tahiti has an international airport, the jets land there from both sides of the Atlantic, and that is a measure of the difference.

The people are somewhat international too. A majority is Polynesian, but few if any pure-blooded Tahitians remain. One in five is a European, and a good many are Chinese. It used to have no town, but it has one now, the very sophisticated seaport of Papeete, and a third of the people live there. Not many of them know about the ancient civilization the island used to have, and probably they would not be pleased if they did. They are happy as they are.

The story therefore scarcely exists in the place where it happened, or in folk-memory, or human relics. Even today, the splendid scenery of Tahiti is easy to recognize from the explorers’ accounts, and places outside of Papeete can be recognized too. But most of the buildings and artefacts of the old Tahitians were wooden, and they disappeared long ago, or were purposely destroyed. Some bits of the story are very well-known in English history – Cook’s voyages, and the mutiny of the Bounty. But in detail, it exists only in the furthest shelves of the biggest libraries.

 

The Dolphin’s crew stayed only a matter of weeks on the island, long enough to grow fond of its people, but not long enough to learn more than the obvious facts about them. But other voyagers followed quickly in the next decade: first, two French ships under Louis de Bougainville in 1768; then James Cook on his first voyage in 1769; two Spanish ships from Peru three times between 1772 and 1775; and Cook on his second and third voyages, in 1773 and 1777. Then the Tahitians were left alone again for eleven years, until the disastrous voyage of William Bligh in the Bounty marked the end of the era of exploration and the start of the era of exploitation. Each of these early voyages added a little more knowledge of Tahitian life.      

 

Not only Wallis but all three of the Dolphin’s commissioned officers were sick when they found Tahiti. Wallis himself had what he called a ‘bilious cholic’, so bad that he could only drag himself out of his cabin when there was a crisis. The first lieutenant, William Clark, had been sick through most of the voyage and unable to stand his watch; and the second lieutenant, Tobias Furneaux, was also ill from time to time and confined to his bunk. Thirty of the hundred and twenty lower-deck men were in various stages of scurvy, but nobody had yet died.

Most men who made discoveries at sea were young when they did it, and Wallis, who was thirty-eight, was much older than any of his officers, and probably the oldest man in the frigate. Clarke and Furneaux were both in their twenties, and so were the two senior warrant officers, George Robertson, the ship’s master, and George Gore, master’s mate. The midshipmen, or ‘young gentlemen’, of whom there were eight in training, were teenagers, and the average age on the lower deck was normally not much over twenty. Robertson and Gore were both acting officers of the watch, and all the young officers were carrying responsibility beyond their age and rank. Not that they were incapable: Furneaux in particular was a born explorer, who went on to command the Adventure on Cook’s second voyage and became the first man to go round the world in both directions; and Gore, the master’s mate, who was American born, had already gone round it in the Dolphin under Byron, and went round a third time in Cook’s Endeavour.

But without a captain fit to keep them in order, there were rivalries and smouldering quarrels. Everyone like Tobias Furneaux, ‘a gentle, agreeable, well-behaved, good man’, Robertson wrote. But nobody like the first lieutenant, Clarke, and Robertson especially detested him. He rejoiced when Clarke did something stupid, like trying to anchor in 120 fathoms of water, and in his journal he always called him ‘Mr Knowall’, or ‘Old Groul’. Clarke, for his part, was always trying to humiliate Robertson. It was a disorganized ship that made the first encounter.

 

Trouble began, however, when boats went in through gaps in the reef to take soundings. Robertson and Gore took charge of these expeditions, and found themselves surrounded by hundreds of canoes. It was certainly enough to put anyone’s nerves on edge: two boats and perhaps two hundred canoes, a couple of dozen of Englishmen among a couple of thousand Tahitians, who for all the English knew might be cannibals; no weapons except muskets, which did not awe the Tahitians because they did not know what they were for, and not a single word of communication. To the English it seemed the Tahitians were in two minds. Some, with apparently friendly gestures, were urging them to come ashore; some were trying to drive them away. The canoeists grew bolder, and began to try to ram the boats. At last one succeeded. Three or four men in it were poised to jump on board, and Robertson, thinking to save his own crew, told two Marines to shoot. One Tahitian fell wounded in the sea and another dead.

Next day, though, one boat got so near the shore that its crew could make signs for water, which was the most pressing of their needs. Some of the islanders cheerfully filled calabashes at a river and swam out with them to the boat. To tempt the English ashore, they also lined up a sort of parade of girls, and with lascivious gestures invited them to come and take their pick.

To say this sight surprised the English sailors would be the most ridiculous understatement. It was exactly a year since they had said goodbye to their wives or the prostitutes of Plymouth, or perhaps to both, and they expected another year to pass before they would see them again. Yet here, just half-way round the world, were girls in dozens; and not unattractive savages, but girls of astonishing beauty, very young, some dark brown and others as white as Europeans, all with long, black hair hanging sleekly over their shoulders and decorated with flowers, bare-legged and dressed with provocative simplicity, some naked to the waist. What was more, they were all cheerful, laughing and excited, and giving every sign of being eager to meet the sailors; while their men, far from disapproving, were clearly encouraging them. The sailors could not believe it, but being sailors they were quite determined to put it to the test. When, under orders, they put off in their boat again, the girls, still laughing, but now in derision at their feebleness, pelted them with apples and bananas.

Alongside the ship, the bartering grew busier every day. The canoes came off with pigs, fowls and bundles of fruit, and the English offered the usual trinkets that ships of exploration carried for natives: cheap beads, knives, and looking-glasses. But they found that what the Tahitians wanted most were nails. Nobody knew at first why they wanted nails, and since they had never seen iron before, it is still remarkable how quickly they saw how it could be used: the nails could be made into fish-hooks, which hitherto they had carved, with long labour, from mother-of-pearl. It was the best of good bargains for the Dolphin. Nails in those days were known by their price. A five-penny nail, which was 1½ inches long, cost five pence per hundred; a ten-penny nail, 2½ inches long, ten pence per hundred and so on up to forty-penny nail, 4½ inches long, at forty pence per hundred. A twenty-pound piglet cost the Dolphin one ten-penny nail; the Dolphin was getting 200 pounds of fresh meat for a penny. But the Tahitians were delighted, so it seemed fair enough.

On the fifth day, Robertson found an excellent anchorage, sheltered behind a low point of land and offering what they needed most – fresh water: a river ran along the back of the beach, only twenty yards from the sea. This was Matavai Bay, which Cook was to make the most famous harbour in the South Pacific. On the way in, the Dolphin run aground on a shoal in the entrance, known ever after as the Dolphin Bank; but on 23 June she was at anchor.

When she was moored close in to the shore, the bartering came to a climax. By eight o’clock next morning, Robertson reckoned five hundred canoes were round her, with four thousand men in them jostling to get close enough to show their wares. He noticed the girls – not boatloads of them, as the first report had put it, but ‘a fair young girl in each, who played a great many droll wanton tricks, which drew all our people upon the gunwales to see them... The whole traded very fair and honest, and all the men seemed as hearty and merry as the girls.’

One very large canoe, a catamaran, had come out from the beach and was lying apart from the rest, and some of the Englishmen thought it gave a signal. Suddenly the trading and merriment stopped and a hail of stones was thrown at the Dolphin. A lot of her men were cut and bruised. Somebody ordered the sentries to shoot, but that had no effect: ‘they all gave another shout and poured in the stones amongst us.’ The ship opened fire with grape and roundshot from her guns, ‘which struck such terror among the poor unhappy crowd that it would require the pen of Milton to describe, therefore too much for mine.’ Of course a roundshot that hit a canoe smashed it to pieces, and at point-blank range the gunners could hardly miss the crowd. The grape, three-pounders loaded with seventy musket balls, did awful slaughter. The frantic canoeists tried to paddle away and haul wounded friends from the water, and when they had been scattered far enough the ship ceased fire. But when the story spread that the large canoe had signalled the attack, the English concluded that the king of the island was in it, and they shot at it until it broke in half. Robertson was surprised to see half a dozen small canoes rally round it, rescue its wounded and try to tow its shattered ends away while it was still under fire. That was bravery he had not expected in savages, and it made him wonder ‘what these poor ignorant creatures thought of us.’

Even now, when one understands the Tahitians a little better, one can only surmise what they thought when they first saw the frigate. To them, the Dolphin was literally supernatural, something that had never existed in their experience of the natural world. It would not be surprising if some of them had tried to fit it into their concept of the spiritual world. But they did not make the mistake – or not for long – that the Californians made with Drake or the Haitians with Cook, of treating the ship’s leaders as gods. Robertson thought their opinions were divided, and he was certainly right. One party, led perhaps by their numerous and influential priests, regarded the giant canoe as a threat to be driven away by stones, which was what they did if they were threatened by people like themselves from other islands. The other party saw it as novel and interesting and a source of nails, and they welcomed the strangers with the cheerful, indiscriminate friendliness which proved to be the most notable trait of Tahitians.

Evidently, at least some of the canoeists who came off to the ship on that fatal day came ready for both possibilities: they brought their goods for barter, and their girls to amuse the strangers, but they also brought their stones. What turned it from a fair to a fight remains a mystery. It could not have been a signal: the Tahitians were quite incapable of feigning merriment then abruptly starting a battle when they were told. Perhaps something suddenly frightened them, or perhaps the warlike party started it and it spread in a panic. But anyhow, they provoked a much more terrible retaliation than they had ever dreamed of, and whoever had favoured war was discredited. With one accord, they set about showing they were sorry.

But the English were still very far from understanding the Tahitians’ thoughts. They expected them, as savages, to be fierce and cruel. They had no idea as yet that they had come across a simple but ancient civilization, with religious beliefs, moral standards, and social conventions all its own. The stone-throwing had been frightening – not perhaps the stones themselves, because a naval frigate could not conceivably be defeated by throwing stones at it, but the vast numbers of men and their incomprehensible shouts. Perhaps it might have been argued that a quick, decisive show of strength was merciful. But the Dolphin went beyond that. The Tahitians never attacked her or threatened her, or indeed any other ship, again, but two days later, when another crowd of canoes came into the bay, the Dolphin opened fire again with grape and roundshot, and also fired at people on the shore.

 

After that, armed parties were landed every day to barter, but, on Wallis’s orders, the river became a frontier. The gunner was put in charge of it because no senior officer could be spared, and he was the only man allowed to trade. Sailors were forbidden to cross it, and although there were always crowds of people on the other side with offerings of pigs and fruit, only bearded old man, with a youth who was thought to be his son, was allowed to wade over, bringing the goods and taking back a nail or two in payment.

Not even naval discipline could take the strain. The beach was narrow and intolerably hot. Beyond the river, the shady groves of palms and breadfruit trees were irresistibly alluring. So, above all, were the girls, openly inviting the sailors with their ‘droll wanton tricks’, and the men who beckoned the sailors over to enjoy the girls. The Marine guard began to take turns off-duty and sneak across while the gunner pretended not to be looking. Every day, more and more men proposed jobs which would take them across the river – parties for collecting wood, others for cutting grass to make hay for the livestock on board, the coopers to mend the barrels. Finally, the surgeon decided to land his thirty scurvy patients every morning. They were put on an island in the river with a sail to shelter them from the sun, and instantly, the girls invaded. Before long, there was not a man in the crew, or a midshipman, who was not defying the captain’s orders, crossing the river and wandering off into the woods, each with a thirty-penny nail, which was the only reward the irrepressibly cheerful girls expected.

It was a sexual orgy, but not only that. The whole land between the sea and the foothills was a well-tended orchard of exotic fruit, and to any sailor who had not been ashore for six months – and then only on the barren rocks of Magellan’ Straits – it was delightful simply to stroll around in the shade of the trees among the streams which fell in cool cascades from the mountains. They soon found that the people were afraid of them if they carried muskets, so they went unarmed. Nobody molested them; on the contrary, everywhere they went they were welcomed, invited into the houses and fed until they could eat no more, by people who always seemed to be happy and laughing. They played with the children, taught English words   to the men and the old women, and learned a few Tahitian words in exchange.

This went on for nearly a fortnight before the senior officers found out. The gunner told Robertson that trade was falling off, and prices in nails were rising – and no wonder: there was not much point in parting with a pig for a nail when the girls were getting all the nails they wanted. Robertson had only one moral qualm about it. He consulted Furneaux, who was acting captain, and they both consulted the surgeon. Was there a risk they might be bringing syphilis and gonorrhoea to a people who seemed to have no disease at all? The surgeon told them there was no venereal disease in the ship. No doubt he believed he was right. But there had been twenty cases when they left England, the last reported cure was in the Strait of Magellan, and no surgeon could then be sure his cures were complete. Moreover, a man under treatment for venereal disease lost part of his pay, so victims had an incentive to hide the symptoms if they could. In fact, one of the very early crews of explorers brought this scourge to Tahiti. Perhaps they all did, but every one blamed the others.

Robertson’s only other worry, when he heard what was going on, was where all the nails were coming from. He asked the carpenter, who assured him his stores were safe under lock-and-key. But once alerted the carpenter soon found that all the cleats in the ship, to which the running rigging was made fast, were loose. The nails had been pulled out of them. And the boatswain discovered that two-thirds of the crew were sleeping on the deck, because the nails their hammocks were slung on had gone. This had to stop, before the ship was damaged beyond repair. The officers talked of stopping shore leave, but the surgeon opposed it: the girls, or the change of air, were curing his patients. Not one man of the crew would admit he had taken a nail. At length they agreed to make a scapegoat of one man they all disliked, and several of them accused him. Robertson condemned him to run the gauntlet: to run three times round the deck while every man in the crew took a swipe at him with an unravelled rope-end. But Robertson knew very well that this man was not the only culprit, and let him off when he had gone round twice, threatening worse punishment to anyone caught going ashore with a nail in the future. The sailors then started giving their shirts to the girls.

 

So the Dolphin had discovered Tahiti; but she discovered almost nothing about the Tahitians, as Wallis admitted – with the explanation that he had been sick all the time. They had not sailed round the island to look at the other side, and only one party, led by the master’s mate, John Gore, had explored on land, taking a day’s walk into the mountains. Her crew had learned that the islanders were happy, kind, hospitable, and carefree except when they were frightened; and of course the crew had one and all discovered that the girls were beautiful and willing. But they still knew nothing about the way the island was governed, what religion it had, what laws or conventions. All this remained for later explorers to discover. None of the Dolphin’s people, so far as one can tell, had even paused to wonder how a human society could exist and prosper without any sexual inhibition. But that was the core of the story they took back to England: Tahiti was the fulfilment of a sailor’s dream, a dream as old as the legend of the Sirens. And that was also the beginning of the Tahitians’ downfall. The cheerful welcome of their girls, in the course of time, attracted the toughest of sailors to enjoy it, and the strictest of missionaries to suppress it.                                                                

2. ‘The Real Youth of the World’

 

It is easy enough to imagine a distant voyage from a European point-of-view: sea convention produced the officers’ logs and journals, and all sorts of people with nothing much to do started to keep diaries. It is more difficult to see things from the Tahitian point of view, but one can get some idea of what Tahitians did, and what they thought, before the Europeans came by putting together the observations of scores of people.

In European history, the day the Dolphin anchored was the start of an epoch that was not unimportant, but in Tahiti it was much more than that. History implies change, and until that day nothing had changed in Tahiti, certainly nothing in the Tahitians’ memory and probably nothing in centuries. So it is no exaggeration to say that Tahitian history began that day.

After the Dolphin’s fight there was mutual goodwill and affection, but hardly any mutual understanding. The fact was that nobody on either side could understand the other – even when he had learned a little of the language – unless he was willing and able to discard, for the moment, all his own ethical ideas and start again from the very beginning. That was a feat of mental gymnastics that nobody in the eighteenth century could perform, except the most erudite theorists, and it is not perfectly easy even now. But at least one can do one’s best.

Tahiti and some of the other Polynesian islands had a combination of qualities that was unique. They had been left entirely alone since mankind first came to live in them, and they had all the needs of human life and comfort. So the people had an opportunity nobody else had ever had. Unthreatened and untaught, they created a society and a religion on the basis that there was plenty of everything for everyone, and nobody had to be either poor or rich. They were perfectly content with what they had, and never yearned for more.

The islanders made sure that everyone had what he needed by custom of mutual giving. It was not trade, because they had no money; nor was it barter. A Tahitian would give anything to anyone who needed it, and expect nothing in exchange except the knowledge that if he was ever in need himself, somebody would do the same for him. As a matter of course, they gave food to anyone who was away from his home and hungry, and with equal innocence they gave the pleasure of sex to anyone who was hungry for that. If a man’s canoe was wrecked, his house blown down, or his net thorn by sharks, his neighbourhood would give him their own and set to work to help him build another canoe or house or make another net. Nobody thought of himself as the permanent owner of anything. They had never heard of private property, except perhaps family ownership of land. So they were never tempted into the sins of envy, selfishness, or avarice. Nor were they cruel or unkind, either by nature or example.

Therefore, the religion they created did not have to assume that mankind was sinful, as European religions did. Apart from that, it was not entirely unlike them. It had one supreme god, called Te Atua, which simply appears to have meant the godhead, the concept of god. He could not be personified. There were also lesser gods who were known by personal names, and innumerable spirits. These were the spirits of ancestors, who were revered; people called on them for help or protection in special circumstances, much as some Christians pray to saints. Te Atua was the arbiter of life and death, but the only demands he made of mankind were reverence to divinity and kindness to each other. Lack of reverence he might punish by sickness, even mortal sickness. But he threatened no other punishment in life, and none after death. Tahitians conceived a heaven but no hell. Nor did they think of a devil. There were malevolent spirits, who prowled about in the dark in the form of mists and frightened people, but these were symbols of temptation, like the Devil in Christianity.

Tahitians found it easy to satisfy Te Atua’s demands. Reverence was no trouble, nor was kindness to each other, partly because they were made that way and it was the general habit, and partly because they were very much like each other. They were uniformly intelligent, although their only education was gained by copying their elders. Some Tahitians must have had better brains than others, but nobody’s intellect had to be trained or stretched above the norm, because society did not evolve, and there was thus no call for innovation or inventiveness. On the contrary, everyone’s experience of life was the same, and everyone could perfectly understand the environment and the place of mankind in it. So everyone thought the same. Some of course had special skills, in building canoes, for example, or navigating, but their only reward was in thanks and the pleasure of craftsmanship: their skill did not make them rich. They did not need to be told to love their neighbours: everyone did, and when they met strangers they expected them to be very much like themselves, and instantly lovable. An outsider might think such uniformity was dull, but no outsider yet had ever seen it, and it did not seem dull to the Tahitians, only natural. And dullness was relieved because every man and every woman had a ‘best friend’, called a taio – a word which also meant friendship in general. A man and his taio exchanged names and had a uniquely close friendship, and every attractive European was invited by somebody to become his taio.

Their laws and system of government were as simple as their religion, and as effective. There was no formal code of law, because they did not write; but there was a very strong tradition of what was right and what was wrong, based, like the religious rules, on whether an act was kind or unkind. Unkindness was taboo – one of the Tahitian words that crept into English. This law had the merit, unlike European law, that everyone could understand it. The people were loosely governed by their chiefs, some superior chiefs who ruled a number of districts, and some lesser chiefs, each of whom ruled a little district of his own; and some of the reverence due to Te Atua rubbed off on the chiefs and their families, because they were directly descended from gods.

But day-to-day legal decisions belonged to the heads of families. A Tahitian family was very large. It was not just a man and his wife and their children, but included all the aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, nephews, and nieces, who lived together in a group of houses. The family was so closely united that that only one word existed for each generation: the word for ‘mother’ was also the word for all the aunts; ‘father’ also covered all the uncles; ‘son’ and ‘daughter’ included all the small nephews and nieces, everyone who was not quite grown-up; and bringing up the children was everyone’s concern.

Each family chose one patriarch, or a council of patriarchs, to uphold the law. If anyone was decreed to have broken the law, his whole family was responsible, and public opinion, or family opinion, was the strongest possible deterrent. To be arraigned by one’s grandfathers, to disgrace and be held in disgrace by all one’s relations, and to have to undo one’s wrong or know that one’s family had to undo it was enough to make crime very rare, and although other more drastic punishments were hinted at (taking a miscreant out to sea and drowning him, for example), no European ever reported that they were used.

 

As time went on, the explorers also observed that the Tahitians had a few customs which in the Europeans’ eyes were outrageous sins. One was human sacrifice: sometimes, but not often, their gods required a human sacrifice to support a particularly urgent prayer. Another was infanticide – as when a baby was born to a chiefly boy and a lowly mother – which took the place of contraception and abortion. (They sometimes tried abortion, but did not often succeed.) Of course these things were neither sinful nor illegal to Tahitians: they were custom, regrettable perhaps, but necessary. A third thing often judge sinful was their sexual freedom – though most Europeans enjoyed it, sinful or not.

Sex became for Europeans the most astonishing and important thing about Tahiti, and the most discussed, so it needs to be specially mentioned and the Tahitian view of it made plain. Nobody had ever suggested to them that sex was ever sinful, much less a matter for salacity, secrecy, or self-restraint. It was simply a normal hunger, to be satisfied as naturally as eating, and the pleasure it gave was simply one – though perhaps the greatest – of the shared pleasures of life.

Accordingly, from the earliest possible age, Tahitian children were taught its refinements by their elders, and as teenagers they were allowed and encouraged to practise it, in pairs or groups, whenever and wherever they wished. Any chance encounter of boy and girl was likely to lead to sex. As they were mentally so much alike, physical beauty and sexual skill were what they most admired, and these were also sources of pride for their parents. The more lovers young people had, the better their chance of making a good choice in the end – and better still if a young girl became pregnant, though that seems to have happened less often than one would expect. It proved she was fertile. When she finally made her choice and married, her husband gladly accepted extra babies, and in the meantime there were plenty of parents, aunts, and uncles all eager to help her.

They all married in the end, after eight or ten years of cheerful promiscuity. Marriage was normally monogamous, except for chiefs who needed an heir, but it was not exclusive or possessive: so although divorce was easy, it seldom happened. It was perfectly proper for a wife to have sexual relationships with her husband’s brothers and cousins and best friend – she married the whole family – and likewise for a man; and for both, though more often the wife, sexual hospitality was an accepted obligation, unless there was a suitable teenager to take over. Only two things were banned: one was marriage across the class barrier, and the other was incest.     This curious system worked perfectly well. Sailors who encountered it made an orgy of it, and others who heard of it, imagining themselves in such a world, supposed that the Tahitians lived in a permanent orgy. But they did not. People do not overeat when food is free unless they are afraid it will rationed tomorrow, and Tahitians, with perpetual plenty in food and sex, lived in perpetual mental and physical health. Captain Cook observed them longer than anyone else and took only a philosophical interest in their sexuality. With his usual wisdom he remarked that ‘it can hardly be called a Vice, because neither the State nor Individuals are the least injur’d by it.’

Although the custom of giving was not barter but simple mutual kindness, it passed very easily to barter when the frigates came. The strangers were evidently far from home and hungry, so the Tahitians gave them food. They were delighted when the strangers gave them nails, but at first they did not see it as a direct exchange, or understand that the strangers, in their own minds, had fixed a price in nails for every pig. Indeed fruit, which everyone could afford to offer, remained a free gift all the time. But barter passed equally easily to bargaining. The Tahitians found that the strangers would give two nails where before they had given only one. So they started to ask for two: they were not stupid. And likewise with the girls: the Tahitians assumed the strangers must be hungry for sex, so they offered sex, and gladly offered it for nothing. But when the girls were given nails and shirts, they soon began to ask for nails and shirts, and their happy gift became a sort of prostitution.                              

Everyone began to stir at dawn, and the first thing all of them did was bathe in a river pool or under a waterfall. This does appear to have been a general rule: there are stories of old people dying from the effort of staggering to the river because they could not contemplate a day without two or three baths. The bathing was done with decorum. Women thought no more than men of revealing their upper half, but both men and women were embarrassed to be entirely naked in public. They could not bathe in their clothes because the cloth they dressed in was really a kind of paper, made from the bark of certain trees, and it tended to fall to pieces like paper when it was wet; so they took their clothes off and discreetly slipped into the water, hiding whatever they wanted to hide with a handful of leaves. There must have been a lot of laughter, horse-play, shouting, splashing, and practical jokes. Tahitians always showed their feelings.

Then breakfast. Meals and going to temples were the only times men and women were segregated. Although they bathed together, many accounts agree that women did not eat with men, even their closest relations, and some say men’s food was prepared by boys and women’s by girls. But all of them ate under trees in the open air unless it was raining, when they had to go under the roofs to keep their clothes intact. The food was laid out on fresh plantain leaves, in calabashes and polished coconut shells. They lived on fruit and vegetables, fish and shellfish when someone had caught some, and pigs and occasionally dogs for feasts. The invaluable breadfruit, which Europeans had never seen, was a basic food. All the food except meat and breadfruit was eaten raw, because the Tahitians had no cooking pots, iron, or earthenware, and the only they could cook was by baking in underground ovens. These were simply holes in the ground, heated by a layer of hot stones in the bottom. The stones were covered with leaves, then the pig or the breadfruit, also wrapped in leaves, was laid on top, followed by another layer of stones and leaves and a covering of earth. After two or three hours, it was all dug up again. Every European who tried it agreed it was the most delicious way of cooking pork. All in all, the Tahitians had the healthiest possible diet, and it showed in their physique and especially their teeth, which were perfect. They drank only water and the milk of coconuts, and got enough salt by dipping their fingers in shellfulls of sea water and licking them.

Some chiefs had a drink of their own, which was made from roots of the shrub called ava. Only chiefs could afford it, partly because the shrub was rare and partly because a squad of willing servants was needed to prepare it. They chewed the tough roots and spat the proceeds into a bowl. A privileged lady filtered the saliva and mixed it with water, and that was what the chiefs liked to drink. Although it was not alcoholic, it contained a drug which had the same effects as alcohol. Some chiefs were addicted to it, and often seemed to be drunk. European preachers, of course, declared it sinful.

Europeans often said the Tahitians were lazy. So they were, when colonists in later years tried to make them work regular hours for money. But it was not strictly true when they were left to themselves. Even in a perfect climate, self-sufficiency needs effort, and it needed particular effort in Tahiti because the islanders had no beasts of burden and had not invented wheels, so everything that had to be moved had to be carried, dragged or rolled along the ground, or floated down the rivers. They entirely lacked the European idea that hard work was a virtue in itself; though there are no reports of anyone shirking his part in the family chores. Nobody had ever hustled the Tahitians, or told them they ought to work, or what work they ought to do. It was just natural that everyone should do something useful for a short time every day, and everyone did it, in his own time, at his own speed, and according to his own ability. There was always plenty to do.

After breakfast, the teenagers disappeared for their amorous enterprises; nobody expected them to do anything else. The smaller children went out to play; the dangers were negligible, they could swim as soon as they could walk, and there were no prized possessions they could damage, so they looked after themselves. The adults wandered off at a leisurely pace to fish, to tidy the houses and prepare the food, to cut down trees with stone axes for building houses or canoes, to do a little simple gardening, to carve fish-hooks from bones or mother-of-pearl, to make nets and fishing lines from coconut fibre or – the finest sort – from plaited human hair, to make mats or baskets, or climb the more convenient trees and pick the fruit before it fell. They were not hunters, because there were no animals to hunt. There was no need to hurry. The women made cloth, but spent more time making themselves attractive. The old men, in the shade of a meeting house, discussed the affairs of the family, the administration of justice, and even, perhaps, matters of wider philosophy. As the day grew hotter, everyone gave in to a comfortable lethargy. In the afternoon, most of them fell asleep again, and when they woke up they all went to bathe again, and then had their second meal. Somehow, everything important got done, enough to ensure forever that tomorrow would be the same as yesterday.

Intermingled with things that might be called work were things that were purely pleasure. In practice, there was no very clear division between the two. The only object of work was to maintain the pleasures of life; anyone could see they could not enjoy the refinements of sport or dancing or sex unless they had provided food and cleanliness and comfort.

Lazy or not, the Tahitians put plenty of energy into entertaining themselves and each other. When they had caught enough fish (it was no good catching too many because they could preserve them) the fishing expeditions turned to the pleasures of sailing, which they loved, swimming, especially in the breakers on the reef, and surf-riding, which they invented. Ashore, almost anything could become a competitive game. Picking breadfruit could turn into a kind of football which was both a game and a dance, with rules of its own which no foreigner understood. If somebody got out his bow to shoot a bird, an archery competition began – but not to hit a target, only to shoot the arrow as far as possible and further than anyone else. Damming streams and making irrigation channels was as much fun as it was a necessity. Climbing trees could soon become a race, and so could the least of journeys. The only prizes were prestige and the admiration of the other sex.

Whatever they were doing, there was always time to stop and talk, or sing, or dance, or make love, or listen to someone telling stories or reciting poems. Some were love-stories, but most were a kind of heroic ballad designed to be sung, with verses for soloists and refrains for a chorus. Without any writing, there was no other way of preserving traditions of the past, no other history.                  

The only welcome interruptions in this placid life, the only days that were different, occurred when the arioi came. The arioi were a religious sect which, it was believed, had been founded in a distant age by a god named Oro. But they were so unlike any Jewish or Christian sect that visitors often refused to believe they had any religion at all; for they were not only a kind of priesthood but also travelling players, men and women, who gave professional and highly polished entertainments, called heivas, of singing, dancing, play-acting, and wrestling, which everyone from miles around attended. Some of their plays were historical, but most were satires or comedies which made fun of the mannerisms of chiefs and later of Europeans. All the dances were more or less erotic; some were performed in the nude and gave demonstrations of special sexual techniques.

Off-stage, too, their behaviour was not what Europeans expected of a priesthood: they did not marry, but, among themselves, continued the teenage practice of free indiscriminate love into adult life. [...] They travelled in parties large and small all over the Society Islands, the group of islands of which Tahiti was part, and there were similar institutions in some other parts of the Polynesian world. Large parties sailed from island to island in fleets of sea-going canoes, festooned with flowers and wearing – if they wore anything – a uniform of yellow girdles of leaves and red cloaks, singing rhythmical choruses and playing flutes and drums. One of Cook’s reliable observers saw them in a fleet of seventy canoes which he reckoned carried seven hundred arioi. They must have been like a plague of locusts – they all expected to be fed wherever they went – but when they were heard or seen approaching everyone prepared to welcome them, all other work was abandoned, and the day became a gala.

 

Of all the many misunderstandings between Tahitians and Europeans, misunderstanding of sexual morals was the most profound, or at least the most talked about. It was fifty years before the Tahitians began to understand European prohibitions, which were finally made clear to them by English Calvinists missionaries; and even now, many Europeans know of Tahitian sexual freedom but do not understand it. Of course when they first heard of it, and especially if they heard of the arioi, some were scandalized and felt it was their duty to put an end to it. Others, a large majority perhaps, imagined what they would do if they were suddenly freed from all restriction, and indulged in fantasies of a perpetual orgy. The few Europeans who had the chance, in particular the English crews, did make an orgy of it while they could. But by making sex as commonplace as dinner, the Tahitians run a risk of making it as unexciting as cookery. Even the arioi, with their exceptional freedom in adult life, must have been limited like anyone else by their physical ability. What the Tahitians achieved was not excess but a healthy balance which was enjoyed by everyone and did no harm to anyone, either social, psychological or physical – unless to the infants allowed to die before they drew breath, who one might say ought not to have been conceived. And trying to put all prejudice aside, one has to say that freedom, unless it does proven harm, is always better than compulsion or prohibition.

 

The early explorers observed Tahitian life, admired its virtues and exploited its customs. But none of them perceived a whole viable system of ethics fundamentally different from their own; or if they did, they lacked the courage to say so.

Tahiti was a small civilization perfectly in balance. But the balance was pathetically easily upset by intrusion. In spite of their good intentions, Europeans fatally upset it merely by their presence, and especially by the introduction of their diseases and two of their ineradicable concepts: the concept of private property and the concept of sin.

 

3. The French in Arcady

 

It was pure chance that no European had seen Tahiti before 1767. Two hundred and fifty years had passed since the Spanish soldier Balboa marched across the isthmus of Panama and found the Pacific Ocean and claimed it all for his king; and only eight years after that discovery, in 1521, Ferdinand Magellan had entered the ocean by the straits that bear his name and sailed, with unimaginable hardship, right across it to the known islands of the East Indies. Since then, probably a score of captains had sailed across, most notably the Spaniards Mendana and Quiros, the Dutchmen Schouten and Le Maire and later Roggeveen, the Englishmen Drake and Cavendish, and several buccaneers of dubious nationality. For the past thirty years, indeed, a Spanish ship known as the Manilla Galleon had made a more or less regular double crossing there and back, starting from Acapulco in Mexico, taking millions of dollars in Peruvian silver and bringing back the goods of the east to the Spanish American colonies. Among the most recent crossings were the British naval expedition of Anson in 1740, who captured the Galleon, and Byron in 1760, who used the same frigate as Wallis, HMS Dolphin, the first ship to go twice round the world.

From a modern map of the Pacific, one would think it unlikely that a ship could sail across without seeing plenty of islands. But the early Europeans found few. One reason, of course, was that the islands were far less conspicuous in the ocean than they are on a map. Charles Darwin crossed in 1835 and observed: ‘It is necessary to sail over this great ocean to comprehend its immensity... Accustomed to look at maps drawn on a smaller scale, where dots, shading and names are crowded together, we do not rightly judge how infinitely small the proportion of dry land is to the water of this vast expanse.’

 

However, while Wallis was still on his way home, in April 1768, Tahiti was found, again accidentally, by two French ships, the frigate Boudeuse and the stores ship Etoile, commanded by Louis de Bougainville.

Bougainville was a more distinguished man than Willis, a man with the breadth of interest typical of an eighteenth-century gentleman. Among other things, he was a classicist, a mathematician, and a diplomat. When he was twenty-five he wrote a thesis on the integral calculus which earned him membership of the Royal Society in England. In that century of frequent wars, he was drawn into the army, and through his elegant manners became aide-de-camp to the Marquis de Montcalm in Canada. He fought against the English in the siege of Quebec, and rose to become a colonel. Then he moved to the navy, and volunteered to found a colony in the Falkland Islands at his own expense. He survived the French Revolution, and ended his life as an admiral, a senator, and a member of the Legion of Honour. His name survives today in the climbing shrub Bougainvillea, which he found in South America and brought back to adorn the houses of the Mediterranean. He was the first explorer to fall in love with Tahiti.

 

So on their very first day, the French discovered the three most obvious qualities of the Tahitians: their inborn friendliness, sexual freedom, and inclination to steal. But Bougainville was more able than Wallis to be philosophical about these things, and to look below the surface – and so was his surgeon-botanist Dr Philibert Commerçon. Theft was a perpetual nuisance to explorers, not only in Tahiti but anywhere they met simple races of people. The Spaniards called one group of islands in the Western Pacific the Ladrones, the Islands of Thieves, and the name is still on the map today. The Elizabethans Davis and Frobisher, searching for the North-West Passage, had just the same trouble with Eskimos. Some took awful reprisals, but most felt an exasperated admiration for the natives’ sleight of hand. The skill of Tahitians, Bougainville wrote, was worthy of the best – or worst – of Parisian pickpockets.

He came near to understanding it. The Tahitians, he noticed, never stole from each other. Whether they were at home or not, their houses were always open. Their furniture, such as it was – not much more than baskets and sleeping mats – lay around unguarded. So did their clothes and ornaments, their simple home-made tools, and even their canoes. But nobody took these things. Everyone helped himself to fruit from any tree, and knew he would be fed in any house he entered. Necessities belonged to everyone, and nothing more than necessities existed.

Dr Commerçon was even more philosophical. ‘What is theft?’ he wrote in a letter. ‘It is taking a thing that is somebody else’s property. To complain justly of having been robbed, one must claim than an object has been taken to which one’s right of property has been established and recognized. But does this right of property exist in nature? No, it is pure convention. A convention is not binding unless it is known and recognized. The Tahitian, who owns nothing, but offers and gives generously whatever one desires, knows nothing of this exclusive right.’ Tahitians who gave pigs and other gifts to the visitors, he thought, were not giving their own property but the joint property of their families or of the whole community; and by the same token, those who stole things that caught their fancy had no thought of making them their personal property, but took them for the pleasure of sharing them or giving them to somebody else. It seemed that the idea of theft as a crime or a sin had not existed in the island before the Europeans brought it.

 

Bougainville tried to discover how the island was governed, and observed that it was divided into many small districts, each with its own chief. ‘Yet there does not seem to be any civil war,’ he added with an air of surprise, ‘or any private hatred in the isle. It is probable that the people deal amongst each other with unquestionable sincerity.’ They always did what Ereti [the local chief] told them to do, except in stealing. Ereti disapproved of stealing, or at least knew that the Europeans disapproved of it, and when they pointed out a thief he chased him, and made him give back whatever he had taken. But he could not stop them doing it.

Commerçon came nearer to the point. The people, he said, were not governed by a king but by the fathers of their families, who kept them in order just as any old-fashioned father kept his children in order. The French would have understood better how it worked if they had come across the Tahitian word taboo. It simply meant forbidden. Some taboos were Te Atua’s: it was taboo to desecrate holy places. Some were empirical: a chief could make fishing taboo while the fish were spawning, or picking breadfruit taboo before it was ripe; or he could make his own servants taboo, which protected them when they had to run errands to other districts. But the great majority of taboos were simply the age-old matter of custom, things that everyone recognized were ‘not right’. Stealing amongst themselves was a taboo so ancient and well established that nobody thought of it; if you needed something, you only had to ask. But the arrival of the Europeans, with their concept of private property and their own taboos about it, upset the delicate balance of behaviour. It was something entirely new, probably the first novelty in Tahitian morals for centuries, and there was no established custom to meet the problem. Did the old taboo extend to the visitors’ goods? Evidently some people thought it did not. It was in the power of the chiefs to extend the taboo or create a new one, but they seem to have hesitated to do so, perhaps because it needed consultation with other chiefs, or perhaps because they feared it would be defied, and they had no power to enforce it.

The Tahitians’ sexual behaviour also collided head-on with a European taboo, but this collision the explorers were happy to accept. Some of them wrote about it with salacious chuckles, some with classical rhapsody, and some with clinical analysis. Bougainville, on the whole, was one of the chucklers. ‘Our people were daily walking in the isle without arms, either quite alone or in little companies. They were invited to enter the houses, where the people gave them to eat; nor did the civility of their landlords stop at a slight collation; they offered them young girls; the hut was immediately filled with a curious crowd of men and women, who made a circle round the guest, and the young victim of hospitality. The ground was spread with leaves and flowers, and their musicians sung an hymeneal song to the tune of their flutes. Here Venus is the goddess of hospitality, her worship does not admit of any mysteries, and every tribute paid to her is a feast for the whole nation. They were surprised at the confusion which our people appeared to be in, as our customs do not admit of these public proceedings. However, I would not answer for it, that every one of our men had found it impossible to conquer his repugnance and conform to the customs of the country.’

[...]

Dr Commerçon, on the other hand, was a rhapsodist. ‘They know no other god than love,’ he wrote. ‘Every day is consecrated to him, the whole island is his temple, all the women are the idols and the men the worshippers. And what women! The rivals of the Georgians in beauty, and the sisters of the unveiled graces. Here, modesty and prudery lose their tyranny. The act of procreation is an act of religion; its preludes are encouraged by the voices and songs of the assembled people, and its end is greeted by universal applause.’

This was all nonsense. The Tahitians did not take sex so seriously, and it had nothing to do with religion. They simply enjoyed it, men and women, in perfect innocence, as one of the many pleasures of their lives, like eating or sleeping, dancing or singing; and it had never occurred to them that anyone might do otherwise. Nor was it normally a public performance. Nobody ever minded if there was anybody looking or not, and the girls laughed when English sailors wanted to hide in the bushes. The crowds of spectators the French reported were probably only inquisitive to see if the strangers had brought any novel ideas.

But Commerçon was more nearly right when he added: ‘Perhaps austere censors will see this as merely a debauchment of morals, a horrible prostitution, a bare-faced cynicism; but is it not really the state of natural man, born essentially good, free from all prejudice, and following without guilt the gentle prompting of an instinct that is always sure, because it has not yet been corrupted by reason?’ Both these men observed that it was only the young boys and girls who were totally promiscuous. But even among older people in monogamous marriage, sexual jealousy was an unknown passion, and the husband commonly persuaded his wife to ‘yield to another’.

 

Part II: Trespass, 1769–89

 

4. Endeavour

 

But there was the question of a captain. The Royal Society had assumed all along that a man called Alexander Dalrymple would command the expedition. Dalrymple was an eccentric, who believed and repeatedly said that he was a scientist, an astronomer, a navigator, an explorer, and a ship’s captain. Strictly speaking he was none of these things. He had worked for the East India Company and had travelled quite a lot in the Indies, but never as a captain and never more than twenty miles from land.  The rest was a dream: he was passionately excited by exploration, but all he knew about it was second-hand, from the journals of real explorers; and as for astronomy and navigation, anyone could have learned what he knew from books. However, he was an expert salesman, and persuaded the pundits of the Royal Society, very clever but perhaps unworldly men, that he was everything he said he was.

Not so the Admiralty. One thing he could not pretend to be was a naval officer, and the Admiralty was adamant: it was happy to provide a ship and crew, but only a naval officer could possibly be allowed to command it. It merely informed the Royal Society that it had bought a ship into the navy for the voyage, and asked what instructions the Society wished it to give its commander. When Dalrymple was told of this, he refused to go on the expedition at all.

Yet the Admiralty’s choice has surprised historians ever since. There were many captains and lieutenants on half pay who would have been happy to go, but the main it chose was not a commissioned officer at all. Mr Cook was a master, which was the highest rank of warrant officer, and normally a dead end with no hope of further promotion. A master’s usual job was the practical and technical work of sailing a ship wherever her captain decided she should sail, and Mr Cook had done this too: but his main job had been surveying, and his only command had been a surveyor’s schooner. He had made a name for himself in the highest naval circles by the meticulous accuracy of his charts of the River St Lawrence and the coast of Newfoundland, but it needed a stroke of brilliance in the Admiralty to detect his latent genius: the genius for always going further than anyone else would have gone, for commanding utterly isolated ships on voyages years long, for keeping men healthy and contented, and for understanding people of distant races.

 

Among the last additions to her [Endeavour’s] company was Mr Joseph Banks, who brought with him a ‘suite’ of eight people. Banks was twenty-five years old: when he was eighteen, he had inherited a large estate in Lincolnshire and a very large income to go with it. He had been to school at both Harrow and Eton, and had then read botany at Oxford. His home and Cook’s were not very far apart, but they could not have been further apart in background: Cook the self-made man, the son of a farm labourer, and Banks the spoiled child of landed gentry. It was astonishing that they survived three years of claustrophobic confinement together, and were still friends at the end of it. It might have been a disaster, but it was saved by Cook’s patience and tolerance and Banks’s boyish, exuberant charm.

Banks might easily have been a playboy; most men who were so rich so young would have gone that way. But he had a passionate hobby: botany. The great Linnaeus, who began the classification of plants, was still alive and active in Sweden, and Banks regarded himself as one of his many disciples. He was perfectly willing to spend his vast income on two things: social life in London, where he bought a house and made friends of most of the leading scientists of the day; and collecting new species of plants from the remotest places he could reach. He expected that this voyage would help him in both activities, and it did: it made him a social lion, and also a respected figure in the world of science.

One begins by feeling suspicious of Joseph Banks, as Cook must have felt when he met him. Nobody deserves to be so rich. But he certainly became an asset, and so did his ‘suite’. This was an age when no firm boundaries separated the sciences, and an inquisitive man could comprehend them all. Banks’s botany could easily be stretched to all kinds of biology and zoology, and even to facts that finally found a place in ethnology, sociology, or psychology. He collected not only plants but animals, insects, birds and fishes, pickled them all and brought them home. With the same impulse, he tried to collect a man and bring him home alive. Cook did not like that idea, and it failed; the man died on the way, and so did a boy he brought with him as a servant. But Banks extended his energy to studying Tahitians, and got to know them better than most.

 

From March to August 1768, the history of Tahiti had passed from the island, where nothing unusual was happening, to the august headquarters of the Royal Navy in Whitehall and the Royal Society in the City of London, and many of the finest brains of Britain had been applied to it. Not that the island or its people were their prime concerns: those were, first, the transit of Venus and then, as ever, the discovery of the great southern continent. But they recognized that their bevy of scientists could not visit Tahiti without observing Tahitians, and among the voluminous instructions the Endeavour carried was one that applied to the people they would meet. It was written by the Earl of Morton, who was president of the Royal Society, under the modest heading ‘Hints offered to the consideration of Captain Cooke, Mr Banks, Doctor Solander, and the other Gentlemen who go upon the Expedition.’ It reminded the gentlemen to observe the utmost patience and forbearance with the natives, to check the petulance of the sailors, and restrain the wanton use of firearms. Shedding the blood of such people would be a crime of the highest nature. ‘They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit... They may naturally and justly attempt to repell intruders, whom they may apprehend are come to disturb them in the quiet possession of their country.’ If violence could not be avoided, then ‘the Natives when brought under should be treated with distinguished humanity, and made sensible that the Crew still considers them as Lords of the Country.’ The gentleness was the same that most rulers recommended to most explorers, but there were two remarkable omissions: the Endeavour carried no instructions to claim possession of the island – on the contrary; and although Lord Morton hoped the captain, having no chaplain, would lead the crew in prayers, there was no suggestion whatever of preaching Christianity to the natives.    

 

5. The Transit of Venus

 

It goes without saying that the Tahitians knew even less about the Europeans than the Europeans knew about them. They knew that they disguised their bodies with outlandish clothes, and that they had ordinary sexual appetites but no women – a regrettable state of affairs in Tahitian eyes. Up to a point, they could understand their ships, how they were built and rigged and sailed; there was nothing entirely mysterious in that. They could understand their apparently simple, with its one supreme chief – the captain – and its lesser chiefs, whom everyone else obeyed. Perhaps they supposed the officers were descended from gods. But where they came from, and why, and where they were going, and, above all, their behaviour, especially their taboos, remained a puzzle. Obviously they were immensely rich, but they did not share their riches, unlike even the meanest chiefs in Tahitian society. Sometimes they were surprisingly generous, and gave away beautiful nails and very valuable hatchets and rather useless clothes; but most of the time they were miserly and made an inexplicable fuss if anyone helped himself to things he needed, even although they had plenty. They had very little sense of decorum, bad manners, and no respect for religion. They were apt to fall into rages for no reason that anyone could understand, and they punished their own people brutally; yet in many ways they seemed to mean to be kind, and occasionally they showed a sense of humour. It was a pity they were so dirty. 

 

The Europeans never did understand that their very presence, however well they tried to behave, upset the stability of Tahitian society; but it was so. It redistributed wealth, aroused jealousy and ambition, and created new desires. Oberea, as mother of the boy-chief of the district and self-appointed regent, had probably always been too ambitious for her son. The presence of the Dolphin had made it worse; it enhanced her importance, at least in her own eyes, and made her richer and prouder. She began to misuse her authority and to oppress her people beyond the limits a chief was allowed. In particular, she made them build an immense marae, or temple, in honour of her son. Cook and Banks saw it and measured it towards the end of their stay, when they made a surveying trip round the island by boat. It was a solid pyramid, mainly faced with squared and polished stones, 267 feet long, rising in 11 steps, each about 4 feet high. It stood on a plot of land 360 feet square, enclosed by a stone wall. The other chiefs could not put up with such ostentation, the toil it caused, and the disruption of ordinary life it represented; so they ganged up to humble her. The war was fought, and Oberea was beaten. Cook and Banks saw the relics of it: fourteen human jaw-bones hung up on a board, and other bones scattered on a beach. Neither Oberea nor her son were injured or punished – that was not the object – but they lost their chiefly power and privilege; and by the time Cook arrived, there were at least two men, and probably more, who were recognized as supreme chiefs, arii rahi: Vehiatua in the smaller south-easterly part of the island, and Tu in the larger part (both these names were titles rather than personal names). Cook met Vehiatua, an old man, white-bearded and white-haired, but he did not understand his rank; he did not meet Tu until his later visits, because he was a timid young man who was controlled and kept out of the way by Lycurgus, whose real name was, approximately, Tuteha. Cook never succeeded in sorting out the relationships of all these people – they were in fact all related, but Tahitian family trees were always difficult to disentangle.

Cook knew very well when he had to be reticent in his journal: a journal written for the Admiralty was not the place for revelations. On things he did not understand he often made no more than a wryly humorous comment, often wise. On religion, for example: some of the gentlemen saw the body of the man who had been shot near the tent exposed, according to Tahitian custom, on a raised bier inside a small hut that was built for the purpose, and left there with offerings of food until it had rotted away. The offering made him conclude that Tahitians had a supreme god and believed in an after-life. ‘It is most likely’, he wrote, ‘that we shall see more of this before we leave the Island but if it is a religious ceremony we may not be able to understand it, for the Misteries of most Religions are very Dark and not easily understood, even by those who profess them.’

He wrote almost nothing at all about the sexual escapades of his crew, although they were going on all the time. His journal was sure to be widely read, even perhaps by the men’s wives. In fact Cook was thought to be the only man in the ship who resisted the girls’ allures; they were said to have laughed at him as old and good for nothing. If they did, he did not seem to care: it was anyway quite untrue – he was only forty, and his wife bore him six or seven children. He was either a faithful husband or else had too much on his mind, or both. After he reached home and was preparing his journal for publication, he wrote in a letter that he wished it to be ‘unexceptionable to the nicest readers’, with nothing indecent in it.

He had only one interest in the morality of what his crew were doing: the ‘venereal distemper’. Whether that meant syphilis or gonorrhoea, something like half his men were soon infected. But that was not his worry: sailors always caught it in harbour, but seldom badly enough to stop them working. His worry was that so far as he knew, the same thing had not happened to the Dolphin. Therefore, somebody must have brought the infection to the island, which he rightly felt was a crime, and he feared it was his own men – in spite of the tests his surgeon had given them. He was vastly relieved when the islanders told him the Endeavour had not begun it: it had been brought by two ships that had come in since the Dolphin, commanded by a man named Tootteraso. Cook showed the islanders flags, and they picked out the Spanish one. It was not until he reached Batavia, long afterwards, that he learned the ships were French, not Spanish, and that Tootteraso was a Tahitian version of Bougainville. The Tahitians always got names wrong, but seldom so wrong as that. Cook was known to them as Tooté, for a good reason: there was no k sound in their language, and words always ended with vowel. Nor was there any b, so Banks was Tapané, which may have had a meaning of its own.                                

 

Thievery was a problem Cook never solved in Polynesia: indeed, it led to his death years later in Hawaii. ‘Their behaviour to strangers and to each other,’ he wrote, ‘is open, affable and Courteous, and from all I could see, free from treachery, only that they are thieves to a man.’ He was not unforgiving: ‘One ought not to be too severe on these people when they do commit theft since we can hardly charge them with any other Vice.’ Yet he always regarded it as a vice, both a sin and a crime. He never went so far as the Frenchmen in seeing the European sense of property as sacred. It puzzled him because they never stole from each other, and annoyed him because it seemed so foolish of the Tahitians to steal things they could not possibly use, like muskets without any powder or shot, or the doctor’s snuff box when they did not know what to do with the snuff, or his own stockings when they never wore stockings or shoes. But sometimes they were things he could not do without. The famous quadrant was typical. No Tahitian could have imagined what it was for, or invented any possible use for it; but without it Cook could not make the observation of Venus, and unless it was found and returned the main purpose of the voyage would be missed.

The only means he invented of getting things back were either to impound canoes (but not to smash them up as Wallis had done), or else to take chiefs and keep them in custody. Those were his first thoughts when the quadrant vanished, but Banks and Green dashed off into the woods with the chief they had called Lycurgus, hot on the trail. Cook followed a little later with a small party of men, and met them four or five miles away on their way back, exhausted but triumphant, with the quadrant. By then it was in several separate pieces, which Green said could be put together again. Meanwhile, Cook’s orders had been misunderstood and the chief Tuteha had been interned in the fort. He was waiting there gloomily, expecting to be killed. When Lycurgus came back and found him there, the scene, Cook said, was ‘really moving. They wept over each other for some time.’ The whole episode ended, as such things usually did, with tears, embraces, and gifts all round.

It may be presumptuous now to suggest a reason for the thievery when Cook did not think of one; but such strange behaviour demands to be explained, and a reasonable explanation does exist. Some of his people seem to have thought of it. It was this: that the Europeans’ idea of private property and the care they took to defend it appealed to some Tahitians as a challenge to their ingenuity and courage. Meeting the challenge was not a moral matter, and not malicious: it was quite simply a game of skill.

One learns not to generalize about Tahitian customs, and this could not explain every petty unpremeditated theft, but it does make sense of the more spectacular ones. Obviously, to snatch a musket from a member of a squad of armed Marines was very dangerous indeed. Nobody in his senses would have done it for the sake of the musket, but he might have done it to prove to himself and his friends that he had the cunning to plan a way of doing it and the courage to try. To pick somebody’s pocket and vanish into the crowd was another demonstration of skill: or to see some cumbersome bit of ironwork on board the ship, and choose a moment to prise it loose, and hide it, and then come back in the dark, creep on board again and lower it into a canoe in spite of the sentries. As soon as they had succeeded, they lost all interest in the thing they had taken. They did not want to possess it. The game was over by then, and it only remained to hand the thing back to avoid reprisals, which they usually did by giving it to a chief.

Seen as a game, taking the quadrant was a masterpiece. Whoever did it did not want the thing or intend to keep it; but it was surrounded by all the protection the Europeans could devise, the fort, the guns, the armed guard, scores of people. Also, it was large and heavy. To get it away was irresistibly dangerous and difficult; it needed the most ingenious plan and plenty of courage, and it was a triumphant success. It stirred up a most satisfactory hornet’s nest and exciting chase. Of course, having taken it miles away they could easily have hidden it where nobody would ever find it, but they did not. The fun was over, they had dared and won and no doubt they were proud of themselves, and they gave it back as soon as they safely could – unluckily, not quite soon enough to save Tuteha from indignity. Cook never tried to find out who had done it. Not even the chiefs would have told him, although they certainly knew not only who had done it, but also why.

 

One cannot help feeling that Cook was never at his best and greatest in Tahiti. There is no doubt whatever that he loved the place and its people: he went back there whenever he could, wrote of it all with affection, and always sought for and found excuses for everything the people did. Yet perhaps it was rather too soft for him, too languorous and easy-going – in fact, too paradisiacal. He was at his best in adversity and hardship, in the Antarctic ice, in gales at sea, on dangerous shores or in the endless fight against scurvy. He was equally patient and gentle, or more so, with people much less conspicuously attractive than the Tahitians: the Alaskans, for example, or the Australian Aborigines. It must have been hard to care so much about those other peoples: the Alaskans’ life, for instance, seemed so dismal that nothing civilization could do to them could make it very much worse. It was the Tahitians’ happiness that made them so vulnerable, and Cook cared desperately about what civilization was going to do to them.

Perhaps the transit was a bad beginning in Tahiti. It was an alien job, not a job for an explorer, and put Cook in a position he would never have chosen: he had to send almost all his men ashore every day to build and then demolish the fort, and about one half of them every night to man it. He could not control them when they were ashore as he could when they were on board, whatever rules he made; he could not know how they were treating the Tahitians, or what impression they were leaving on their minds. To trespass in paradise was a grave responsibility; he did not need Lord Morton’s hints to make him feel it keenly. But sailors could not be expected to feel the same. No doubt there kind, gentle, and even sensitive men among them, but most, one cannot deny, were ignorant, tough, drunken, and probably sadistic, and only cared for the most they could get for a cut-glass or a stolen nail. Yet it was the sailors who were giving the Tahitians their introduction to civilization.

Banks, too, may have been sensitive, but he was selfish; he had got his own way all his life, and was not inclined to change. Cook could cope with him aboard the ship, but ashore it was certainly harder. Everywhere Cook went, Banks went too, usually bringing Solander. His youth, good looks and self-confidence made him as much at home in a Tahitian hut as he was in a London drawing-room. He made himself very useful, but he behaved as he liked: he made his own friends, did not care if he made enemies, and had no hesitation in charming any woman into his bed, sometimes two or three at a time – nor, to get his own way again, did he hesitate to treat Tahitians chiefs like under-gardeners in Lincolnshire. This must have put Cook under a strain, and perhaps caused him a twinge of either envy or disapproval. He never let it show, but it cannot have been easy.

Nor was Cook the least bit satisfied with his own behaviour. The shooting, the venereal infection, the internment of chiefs – all these he felt he should have avoided, without knowing how he could have done it. ‘We are likely to leave these people in disgust at our behaviour,’ he wrote, two days before he raised his anchors. But this remorseful comment was too gloomy. Tahitians were always forgiving, and in spite of everything they still liked the Europeans, and wept sincerely when they saw them go.

         

7. ‘Noble Savages’

 

The idea of the ‘Noble Savage’ is connected mainly with the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was still alive, though old and scarcely sane, when the first news came from Tahiti. But the central idea – that simple mankind was essentially good and not essentially evil – is much more ancient. The English phrase itself, with its strangely chosen adjective, seems to have started with Dryden a century before:

I am as free as Nature first made man,

Ere the base laws of servitude began,

When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

The word noble may, in fact, have been applied to savages only to give scansion to those lines. A savage, by definition, could not be noble: to be noble he must be more complex than a savage, a barbarian at least. But the idea goes back much further still, to the ancient concept of the Golden Age, or indeed to the story of Eden.

The thought that men and women might somewhere still exist in a state of primal innocence, like Eden before the fall, clung on through the Middle Ages in the legends of the Islands of the Blest, Atlantis, Lyonesse or Hy Brasil – all islands to the west. Those legends were given a kind of reality when Columbus discovered the islands of the West Indies and the Caribs who lived in them – people he greatly admired but, with his successors, cruelly destroyed. For a while the concept of the Noble Savage was transferred to the Aztecs and Incas, until they also were destroyed by Spain. Then it passed to the North American Indians, and English travellers added to it: Drake in the west and Raleigh in the east, for example. By 1770 those savages too were fighting for their lands and lives against the European invaders.

The pure romance of islands also had a long run in English literature, sometimes as simple story-telling in prose, verse, or plays, and sometimes with a satiric or philosophical intent. It had a peak in the 1720s with Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels which, each in their own way, were satirical: Man Friday was a Noble Savage, and so were the Houyhnhnms, in spite of looking like horses. In the next few decades there were many more such stories, popular at the time but forgotten now. People’s minds were well attuned to islands.

Rousseau had given the Noble Savage a new dimension. He did it in three published ‘Discourses’, the first in 1750 and the last in 1762. In France he pointed the way which led to the Revolution, but in England he was not deeply or widely understood. Broadly speaking, he believed that man in his earliest stages had no instinct beyond survival and reproduction: all he needed or enjoyed was food, sleep and a woman – any woman. He had little to fear, because nobody envied him; he was not jealous, because one woman was as good as another; he was not unhappy, because he had no ambition; and he had no vice, because he had not been taught what evil was.

But he was blessed or cursed by learning to feel compassion. Its first expression was in family love; but that led him later to vanity, shame and envy – and to industriousness and property. ‘The first man who enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying “This is mine”, and found enough people to believe him, was the real founder of civic society.’ This stage of man’s evolution, he thought, with compassion but little else, was the happiest and most stable era, the least subject to revolutions and altogether the very best that man could experience; there was a balance then between the indolence of primitive man and the ‘petulant activity of our own egoism’. Most savage races, he said, had been in this state when they were discovered, which ‘seems to prove that men were meant to remain in it, that it is the real youth of the world, and that all subsequent advances, apparently steps towards the perfection of the individual, are in reality only steps towards the decay of the species.’

It made fascinating conversation, not only among philosophers who understood what Rousseau was talking about, but also in fashionable parlours, where people only half understood, but were free to express whatever hypothesis enter their heads, or to quote, if they could, some of Rousseau’s provocative remarks: ‘It was iron and corn which first civilized man, and ruined humanity.’ If they said, as many in England said, that Rousseau wanted man to go back to the woods and resume the life of savages, they were wrong. He admitted the process of learning could not be reversed: once the complexities of civilization were adopted, they could never be discarded, whatever vice and misery came in their train. But the general impression, at least on the minds of the English, was quite entrancing: that man in his natural state was both happy and good; that evil was not due to sin, but to the unnatural bonds of civilized society.

Into this receptive philosophic mood, the news from Tahiti rolled like a tidal wave over a low-lying shore, flowing into every cranny.

The savages discovered before had never exactly fitted Rousseau’s concept. Africans were regarded only as fodder for slavery; Caribs had the misfortune to be cannibals; Aztecs and Incas were not savages but (in European eyes) barbarians, and North American Indians were a little too warlike in their own defence. But Tahitians seemed to fit perfectly: beautiful, compassionate people, living in simplicity and peace on a beautiful island. This did appear to be, in Rousseau’s phrase, the real youth of the world: mankind in the state he had predicted, the happiest and best of all experience, a race preserved by isolation, encapsulated in the innocence of creation.            

In France, Bougainville’s journal was published in 1771, just before the last of Rousseau’s ‘Discourses’, and was received with the ecstasy he had felt when he wrote it. It seemed to clothe Rousseau’s theories with reality, and it enhanced his reputation in revolutionary circles both as philosopher and politician – so that one comes to the unexpected conclusion that the discovery of Tahiti may have hastened the French Revolution. In England the first brief news had been given in Wallis’s message to the press; but that said little about the Tahitians except that they were ‘pretty much civilized’. The first solid information came in Dr John Hawkesworth’s compilation from the journals of Byron, Wallis, Cook, and Banks, in 1773. But Hawkesworth was a journalist, not an explorer or a seaman. He was writing for a public he knew, or thought he knew, and he gave them what he thought they needed. Many observations in his massive book were entirely his own, and it was put together in such a way that a reader could not tell what was Hawkesworth and what was Wallis, Cook, or Banks. This was the first of many misleading accounts of Tahiti. One has to suppose the explorers themselves told the truth as they saw it: they corroborated each other well. But other writers, and general gossips too, were inclined to give the island the qualities they wanted it to have.

Of course it was through gossip, at dinner parties or in clubs or pubs or cafes, that the news first spread, before any official reports came off the press. This was particularly so in England after Cook’s first voyage, because that voyage had its rich and influential passenger, Banks. Banks displayed his collections and curiosities at his house in New Burlington Street and invited the nobility and gentry to see them; he presented plants to the Dowager Princess of Wales. He became the greatest lion a society hostess could hope for. Everywhere he went he was the centre of conversation, and Tahiti was its subject; and without much doubt he painted its joys in more or less lurid colours to suit his audience. So the idea of Tahiti was launched in England.

Quite separately, it was also launched at the other very distant end of the eighteenth-century social scale: for the aristocratic society and intellectual brilliance of the age were founded on abject poverty. As the sailors’ stories spread, beginning in dockyard towns, Tahiti became the centre of them. One might say that Tahiti’s Noble Savage was the first philosophical concept other than the teachings of the church to be eagerly discussed by labourers and the people of the slums; and it was the hopeless poor who had most reason to rejoice that somewhere in the world there was a place which had no poverty, no hunger or oppression, where a man (they believed) could live and make love and bring up his family in honest peace, free from the fear of justice or injustice. This was one distinction between England and France. In England, the novel idea made poor men dream of escaping from the over-civilized world: in France, it made them want to destroy that world and build it anew.

 

10. Cook’s Last Visit

 

But all Cook’s biographers have said he was not his old self on this final voyage. He may have been chronically sick – many sicknesses could go unnoticed then – or perhaps he was merely worn out by the strain of years of voyaging. Nobody can doubt it was a strain. A sailing ship’s captain had more personal authority – and responsibility – than anyone in other walks in life. He was never off-duty, night or day, year after year; there was nobody he could turn to for advice or orders; he and his crew were entirely cut off from the world, and never entirely out of danger; and not only success but the safety, discipline, health and happiness of all of them depended on him. And prime exploration multiplied every strain. Perhaps, after nine years of it, no man could have remained unscarred. At all events, on his final voyage, his young officers still admired him greatly, but now went in fear of his anger and sometimes, in the privacy of their journals, were critical of his treatment of the natives. It did not show in Tahiti because this time there were hardly any thefts, and stealing was the only thing the islanders did that really provoked him.

It was not so peaceful in the nearby islands: there, theft was rampant again, and Cook took action with a kind of rage he had never shown before. When the ships left Matavai Bay they went first to the island of Eimeo (Cook had never been there before, although it was only ten miles away); and in Eimeo it was a goat, of all things, that caused the trouble. Cook still had a few on board, and he put them ashore to graze, and two were taken. One was brought back the next day, and the thief explained that the man in charge of them had forcibly taken something from him, and he only took the goat in revenge. The retrieve the other goat Cook led a punitive expedition across the lovely island, threatened the thief, burned houses, and smashed up canoes.

It must be said that the islanders recommended more violence: a party of elders said he should march round the country and shoot every man he met (and so did Omai). That he would not do, but before he finished his destruction he regretted he had ever started it. So did some of his officers. James King, the second lieutenant, wrote, ‘I cannot think it justifiable; less destructive measures might have been adopted and the end gained... I doubt whether our Ideas of propriety in punishing so many innocent people for the crimes of a few, will ever be reconcilable to any principle one can form of justice... In future they may fear but never love us.’ Among the wreckage, the worthless goat was returned.

 

There were other troubles in those final days. The threat of mass desertion rose again, to the extent that Cook mustered all his crew on deck and lectured them sternly. They might run off if they pleased, he declared, but wherever they went he would bring them back: dead or alive, he would have them. In the upshot, only three men ran. One was a rather simple-minded Marine, who vanished with his musket. He was found again with two girls in a native house, wearing native dress. The others were a sixteen-year-old midshipman and a gunner’s mate. They departed with a Tahitian in a canoe, and had to be chased from island to island. A few others had the same idea, but got no further than the beach before giving up. A more serious plan was discussed by William Anderson the surgeon and no less a person than Charles Clerke, the captain of the Discovery – though Cook never heard of it. Both these men had consumption: they had come aboard with it. Anderson knew, and Clerke at least suspected, that neither of them would survive the far north where the ships were bound; but in the perfection of Tahiti’s climate they might have a chance of life, or even cure. This of course was not a question of desertion: they meant to ask Cook for leave to resign their ranks and stay. They talked about it for weeks, but kept putting it off, and they left it too late. The last chance went by: both of them stayed at their posts, and both died in the Arctic.

The threat had been scotched by Cook’s authority, but the temptation was strong and real. Many men – most, perhaps – had been begged to stay by the girls they fancied they were in love with, by the taios they were attached to, or by general friends and well-wishers. Wherever they looked, they saw idyllic sites for building a simple hut beneath the trees, by a stream or fronting a still lagoon. A life of love and leisure, simplicity and kindliness and dignity, an escape from the labour and oppression of life on board and the poverty and degradation of their lives at home – it seemed to be theirs for the asking. They longed just to lie down and rest, and watch the ships sail away, and sleep and wake up again to peace. Perhaps it was illusion, a kind of dream, but it appeared to be true, and they believed it.

But no: there were scores of beautiful, loving girls on board who had come all the way from Tahiti, and scores more who had come aboard in Huahine; and all of them were put ashore in tears, leaving men who thought themselves broken-hearted.

This time, when he left – and this was the final time – Cook did not express any sorrow in his journal. Was he, one wonders, disenchanted with by the final outbreak of thefts? Was he seriously worried that his command would break up as a result of desertions? Or was he perhaps remorseful, knowing, as he certainly did, that he had launched a course of destruction that would never end? He put his foreboding in two well-known and eloquent passages in the journal. First he mentioned the shame of civilized Christians: ‘We debauch their Morals already too prone to vice and we interduce among them wants and perhaps diseases which they never before knew and which serves only to disturb that happy tranquillity they and their fore Fathers had injoy’d. If anyone denies the truth of this assertion let him tell me what the Natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with the Europeans.’

He wrote that earlier, in New Zealand. It was even more appropriate to the smaller Pacific islands. Now, leaving Tahiti for the last time, he was more prophetic: ‘I own I cannot avoid expressing it as my real opinion that it would have been far better for these people never to have known our superiority in the accommodations and arts that make life comfortable, than after once knowing it, to be again left and abandoned.’

 

11. Mutiny

 

In modern times, the blame for what happened to the Bounty has been heaped on her captain, William Bligh. But it is risky to blame a man for events so long ago – by what standard is one judging him? – and all the evidence against Bligh was given by men on trial for their lives, so it is not without prejudice. He cannot be proved to have been exceptionally cruel or wicked for a naval captain of his era. He had been a success as master of the Resolution under Cook, which speaks well for him, and he survived to be one of Nelson’s captains at Copenhagen and in the end a vice-admiral. But this was 1788, before Nelson had proved that the most efficient way to run a ship was with some sympathy and kindness, and before Wilberforce had argued against slavery and cruelty in general. The worst one can say of Bligh is that he was insensitive, tactless, rude, unreasonably stern, and given to childish rages: and the same could be said of many sea-captains then. Certainly he and Cook were very different. Cook looked for and brought out the best in men: Bligh looked for and brought out the worst. On the other hand, Fletcher Christian, the master’s mate who led the mutiny which was to follow, seems neurotic and childish in the grudges he bore, and John Fryer the master, who refused to join it, was certainly a weak, mean-spirited man who hated Bligh simply because he was strong.                  

All of them had suffered a longer and closer confinement than most before they reached Tahiti. The Bounty was a very small ship, ninety feet in length overall and twenty-four in beam. The object of her voyage was the most extraordinary use that had yet been made of a naval ship and crew: to collect a huge number of seedlings of the breadfruit tree and transport them to the West Indies, where it was hoped they could be grown to feed the slaves. Her main cabin had been fitted to carry the seedlings in flowerpots and extended to take up a third of her length, and the whole ship’s company lived in the remaining effective length of her, about forty feet: Bligh himself, eleven warrant officers and midshipmen, thirty other hands and two gardeners: forty-four men in all.

Bligh had intended to sail by way of Cape Horn, and he tried; but it was too late in the season, and the ship could make no headway against the westerly gales. So he turned and went round the world the opposite way; and in all that tremendous outward voyage, 27,086 miles by the log and a little over ten months, he touched land only three times, in Tenerife, the Cape of Good Hope and an uninhabited bay in Tasmania. His crew were therefore more astonished and impressed by Tahiti than most – its space and freedom, its shaded groves and rivers, and the uninhibited welcome of its people.

Bligh loved the Tahitians as much as anyone. ‘I left these happy islanders in much distress’, he wrote in his first dispatch to the Admiralty, ‘for the utmost affection, regard and good feeling was among us during my stay. The King and all the Royal Family were always with me, and their good sense and observations joined with the most engaging dispositions in the world, will ever make them beloved by all who become acquainted with them as friends.’ But his long journal revealed him only too clearly. It was well written, detailed, observant, but it was entirely concerned with his own experience and scarcely mentioned the experience of his crew. It was not that he was blind to what they were doing. In such a small ship, he could not have avoided knowing that every bunk and hammock had a girl in it every night, but he only admitted it obliquely. ‘At sunset all our male visitors left the ship,’ he wrote on the second day. The thoughts and emotions of his men did not concern him.

The snobbish pleasure he betrayed in writing of the king and the royal family was a repetition and exaggeration of Cook’s. It was true they had to find and identify the highest chiefs they could, but it was pure invention to give them European titles. In reality, Tahiti still had nothing like a king. It had several chiefs who were or claimed to be a step above the rest. But Bligh followed Cook in treating Tu as king.

Tu was married by the time Bligh was there, to a lady named Iddeah. He was still lethargic, though perhaps less timid than he had been; but Iddeah was a very forceful person, large and strong and reputed to be a warrior, a surf-riding champion and an expert wrestler. When she had a chance, she quickly became a crack shot with a pistol, and she thought nothing of paddling off to the ship alone in a canoe on a day of storm. They had had four children, but the first had been allowed to die at birth, according to custom, because Tu was a member of the arioi. After that, perhaps because they both wanted children, he left the society, and – again according to custom – he abdicated in favour of his eldest son. The boy, who was six when Bligh saw him, took not only his father’s title of arii rahi, supreme chief, but also his name, Tu. The older Tu, after that, was known by a series of names, the last of which was Pomare. As regent, Pomare, as he must now be called, exercised the practical power, largely pushed and guided by his wife. He remained on the friendliest terms with her although, at his own suggestion, she had left his bed for one of his servants, and he took her younger sister as a second wife.

This was the royalty whose favour Bligh enjoyed. Tu’s, or Pomare’s, father, brothers, uncles, and their wives dined with him on the ship nearly every day, or he with them; so did many lesser local chiefs. He often gave them all lavish presents, according to what rank he thought they held, and they fed the whole ship’s company with pigs and fruit. But he was not allowed to visit the new Tu, the boy chief, because he refused to show his respect by stripping to the waist, which everyone else did, even the father and mother. Bligh offered to take off his hat, which he pointed out was how he would salute King George in England; but that would not do, and he was only allowed to speak to the boy across a river, and to send over presents for him and his younger brother and sister.

That may have been a double disappointment for him, because he was a family man and adored the Tahitian children. ‘They are very handsome and sprightly, ‘ he wrote, ‘and full of antic tricks. They have many diversions that are common with the boys in England; such as flying kites, cats cradle, swinging, dancing or jumping in a rope, walking upon stilts, and wrestling.’ Droves of them followed him on his walks through the woods – largely because of the sweets and toys he carried in his pockets. Strapping boys and girls of ten contrived to get themselves carried to him pretending to be infants in arms – which made him laugh as much as they laughed themselves. The stern and dreaded man could be seen off-duty playing these childish games. He did not have many attractive traits, but this was one.

Bligh certainly enjoyed his long stay in Tahiti and thought he had done well. He persuaded Pomare that the tools and clothes he gave him were presents from King George; and when Pomare asked what King George would like best in exchange, Bligh told him he would value breadfruit more than anything, and that he himself would do Pomare the favour of transporting them. So the two gardeners, with the Tahitians’ help, dug up and collected and potted 774 seedlings, which filled the whole cabin in the ship. Yet all the time Bligh unwittingly sowed the seeds of disaster for himself and his crew, and also for the Tahitians. For himself and the crew, the disaster was caused by his own absorption in the ‘royal’ friends and his lack of interest in what the crew was doing. It never crossed his mind that they might be under a temptation some could not resist. Even when three men tried to desert, he was unconcerned. That had happened to Cook, and like Cook he set the chiefs to work to chase them to a neighbouring island where they were hiding and bring them back again. He flogged them and put them in irons.

For the Tahitians the pending disaster was less direct. Bligh continued what Cook had begun. By insisting that Pomare was king, by making him a favourite and loading him with gifts that nobody else possessed, Bligh persuaded him – or more probably his wife Iddeah – that he was, or ought to be, all-powerful, and created intense resentment in other neglected chiefs. That began to undermine the whole old-established structure of Tahitian society, the casual delegation of power from the supreme chiefs to lesser chiefs, and from them to the grandfathers of families. It made a centre of power when none had been before, and introduced jealousy. Grandfathers could no longer make their patriarchal judgements for fear they would be quashed by rulings from above. Family opinion could no longer be the arbiter of law when a new law, the king’s, might contradict it, and when one man had the power to enforce his opinion.

Of course, it was not an instant change. It took time, largely because Pomare himself was reluctant and afraid to exercise the power the English offered him. Bligh became dimly aware of this near the end of his stay, when Pomare confessed he was afraid for his life. As soon as Bligh had gone, he said, he would be attacked by jealous rivals, and if they combined he would not be able to beat them. He begged Bligh to rescue him, to take him and his wife and two of his servants to England, where he was sure King George would be glad to see him. Possibly Oddidy had something to do with this request. He was still in Tahiti, and still had an ambition to go to England, and he had won himself some authority by marrying one of Pomare’s aunts. To keep Pomare quiet, Bligh promised to ask King George for permission to take him the next time he came to Tahiti; and he let it be known that when he came again he would take revenge on anyone who harmed Pomare. But these threats and promises were hollow and insincere: he never expected to come back again.

He had Pomare to a position of power which Pomare could only sustain by fighting, a position that had never existed before; and having done it he left him to fend for himself. His only thought was to give him even more of the instruments of power, now including muskets, a brace of pistols, powder and shot. Pomare, still somewhat timid, looked askance at these dreadful weapons and remarked that his wife Iddeah would fight with one pistol and Odiddy with the other: Odiddy was already known to be a marksman, while the mannish Iddeah had ‘learned to load and fire a musquet with great dexterity.’

In retrospect, it seems like appointing a new head of state to a peaceful, small, and backward country, and giving him a supply of atomic bombs.

On the verge of the most famous of mutinies, Bligh had no suspicion at all that trouble was brewing. He never admitted any blame himself. Long after, he blamed the attractions of Tahiti: ‘The women at Otaheite are handsome, mild, and cheerful in their manners and conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make them admired and beloved. The chiefs were so much attached to our people, that they rather encouraged their stay among them than otherwise, and even made them promises of large possessions... It is now perhaps not so much to be wondered at that a set of sailors, most of them void of connections, should be led away... when they imagined it in their power to fix themselves in the midst of plenty, on one of the finest islands in the world, where they need not labour, and where the allurements of dissipation are beyond any thing that can be conceived.’

Perhaps he wrote that to shift the blame from himself; but it was another admission of the grudging sympathy Cook had begun to feel towards deserters. And it was certainly right; the charm of Tahiti was the main cause of the munity. Naval sailors in those days were a mixed bunch: some willing volunteers who had chosen a naval life, some rounded up by press gangs, and some minor criminals, sentenced to the ships instead of prison. By any standards, their life was extremely hard; but by naval rules mutiny was a crime as bad as murder, and they were always very reluctant indeed to think of it. Mutiny at that time was perhaps more in the air that at any other; the great mutinies at Spithead and the Nore were only eight years in the future. Certainly some of the Bounty crew intensely disliked their captain. But they would never have done what they did if they had not seen in Tahiti a kind of life which was really much better than life in a ship or life at home in the purlieus of English cities.

 

Part III. Original Sin

 

12. The Mission of the Duff

 

At six o’clock on the morning of 10 August 1796, a ship named the Duff dropped down the Thames on the ebb tide, with a flag at the mizzen top-gallant which bore three silver doves on a purple field with olive branches in their beaks. On board a hundred voices were singing the hymn ‘Jesus at Thy command, We launch into the deep’, which the sailors in the ships they passed her ‘with silent astonishment’, as well they might. The London Missionary Society, newly founded, was sending a mission to Tahiti.

Nobody now could write about this expedition and hide his own prejudice, for or against it. The only honest thing is to let the prejudice show when it must, but not let it distort the recorded facts.

The directors of the London Missionary Society were said to hold ‘the doctrinal articles of the Church of England in the sense usually termed Calvinistic’. Of course they were learned theologians, but inevitably the missionaries they sent on the first of their missions were not of the same intellectual calibre. They represented the most primitive, inflexible end of the range of eighteenth-century Calvinism. They meant well, they worked without sparing themselves for what they thought was right, they were often brave, and they soon came to like the Tahitians; but one has to add that they were fearsomely narrow-minded. All their thoughts came from literal reading of the Bible, ‘that inestimable book, compared with which all beside is pompous ignorance.’ They believed unshakably that they knew the only and absolute truth, and were bidden by God to take its blessing to heathen idolators. One of them wrote, ‘the real Christianity in every situation of life possesses peculiar excellence’; and in that confident self-esteem they were ready to destroy whatever the Devil put in their way. They most firmly believed in original sin: mankind, since the fall of Adam, was essentially wicked; every baby was born in sin, and the only possible way to redemption and the mercy of God was through true repentance, baptism, faith and the sacrament of the Last Supper. In their view, since no Tahitian had followed that way all Tahitians must be wicked, and condemned to eternal hell-fire unless they could be rescued by conversion. It was a view extremely opposed to Rousseau and the theorists of the innocence of the Noble Savage; and it was a doctrine the Tahitians for many years found quite impossible to credit.    

 

Even these stern Calvinists found only three specific sins in Tahiti. Two were the same that many other visitors had reported: infanticide and human sacrifice. The third was something new: what they called ‘onanism’, which to them meant any kind of homosexual activity. This was probably common in Tahiti. The women, as the brethren had observed, were not so purely feminine as European women were supposed to be: nor were the men so purely masculine. After the way they were all brought up, nothing was likely to uncommon or disapproved of unless it was harmful or unkind. Probably it had passed without comment from most of the visitors for two reasons: they had not noticed it in the deluge of women, and in the late eighteenth century, as in the nineteenth, homosexuality was a thing one mentioned only obliquely in writing. The missionaries wrote of ‘many unnatural crimes, which we dare not name, committed daily without the idea of shame or guilt’. They closed their eyes and minds to it, except among ‘a set of men of the most execrable cast, called mahoos, affecting the manners, dress, gestures, and voice of females, and too horrid to be described.’ Nevertheless, other people did describe the mahoos or mahus, but without discovering whether their odd behaviour was mainly sexual or mainly a social convenience, a way of getting a desirable place in the household of a chief. Tahitians showed no disapproval of them at all. But how widespread and commonplace true homosexuality really was must remain an inquisitive question that cannot be answered, because nobody answered it clearly at the time.

Nor is it clear what standards the missionaries used in their judgement of Tahitians. Much later, they said it was the Ten Commandments. If so, they must have found that rules made for Jews in the time of Moses were hard to apply to Tahiti. In those that could be applied, the Tahitians showed well. No doubt there were bad men among them, but in general they coveted nothing, honoured their fathers and mothers, did not steal except, as a kind of sport, from Europeans, and bore no false witness. They were adulterous by the European definition of adultery, but not by their own. If they made graven images they did not worship them, and they committed no murder except (like the Christians) in war, and in the two circumstances of sacrifice and infanticide. Nor did they take the name of their in vain: on that, the missionaries quoted Cook with approval: ‘Captain Cook does the Otaheiteans but justice in saying, they reproach many who bear the name of Christian. You see no instances of an Otaheitean drawing near the Eatooa [Te Atua] with carelessness or inattention; he is all devotion; he approaches the place of worship with reverential awe; uncovers when he treads on sacred ground; and prays with a fervour that would do honour to a better profession. He firmly credits the traditions of his ancestors. None dares dispute the existence of deity.’

That left only two Commandments. The Tahitians did not observe the Sabbath because they had never heard of it and besides, did no burdensome labour on any day of the week, let alone the Sabbath. More fundamental was the first Commandment, ‘Thou shalt have none other gods but me’;           that was where the Tahitians failed. Undeniably, Te Atua was not a derivative of the Jehovah of Moses. He was not the Christian God – although the likeness was remarkable; the missionaries even learned when they enquired that Te Atua could be conceived as a trinity: god the father, god the son, and god the bird or spirit.

On the other hand, if the missionaries judged by St Paul’s three criteria, they found the Tahitians had perfect faith, though in their own version of God; they had not much need of hope, because they were not threatened by gods or men; and of charity, the greatest of the three, they had an abundance.

Perhaps less stern and more forgiving Christians would have left well alone, and found some way of combining the different faiths and preserving the best of both; but the doctrine of original sin stood in the way. In that view, a man could not claim to be virtuous if he had never been tempted. Virtue had to be achieved by battle against the devil. The creed required the Devil as well as God, Hell as well as Heaven, a constant war in which one had to take sides. The missionaries found a semblance of God in Tahiti: what they had to import was the Devil.           

 

Meanwhile they could only claim four things with satisfaction. The Tahitians had given up having feasts or heivas within the missionaries’ hearing; they behaved with decency round the mission house on the Sabbath; their dress and manners showed ‘a great improvement on the side of modesty’; finally, a most pathetic and revealing claim, their own example had ‘already restrained the natural levity of the natives.’

They had discovered they could not destroy the Tahitians’ creed simply by offering them another. Tahitians were quite unaware of sin, or of themselves as sinners: there was nothing to attract them to a god who threatened to burn them eternally in hell. Nor was there anything attractive in the brethren’s life of religious melancholy. There was only thing the brethren could do, and they set to work with awful determination to do it: destroy the contentment and happiness the Tahitians’ belief had brought them and reduce them to the misery of the poor in England, to whom the message of preachers could be joyful news.

So, at the end of the first four months, the missionaries’ opinion of the Tahitians was the same as everyone else’s: they were good people, generous, kind, and happy. The report which expressed this joint opinion was put together by the Society when the Duff brought back their letters to England, and it was published in 1799.

Very much later, in 1845, another report was published, with the directors’ blessing, in a history of the Society, and it said exactly the opposite: the Tahitians, before the missionaries came, had been mean, cruel, malignant, oppressed by their rulers, dishonest, untruthful, depraved, ferocious, quarrelsome, and warlike. They were idolators sunk to the lowest possible depth of moral degradation, whose ‘system of superstition was one of the most absurd and sanguinary that ever prevailed among mankind.’

Beyond any reasonable doubt, this was a string of lies; yet the directors of the Society were not the men to tell deliberate lies. They must have been persuaded by the passage of forty-six years that it was true. What then had happened to make them so contradict their predecessors, and contradict everyone who had seen and described Tahiti in its early days?

The answer is not perfectly simple, because many things were changing. The whole principle of missionary work was changing: it was becoming rather gentler, and less self-righteous. In the meantime, also, the missionaries had fundamentally changed the Tahitians. There were still a few people alive who remembered the Tahitians as they had been – Joseph Banks for one – but there were not many. Nearly all the original thirty brethren were dead or retired from active life, and only two were still in Tahiti. Mission work had come under widespread criticism, especially for what it had done to the Tahitians. The Society was prepared to admit mistakes had been made in Tahiti, which was its first experiment; but it could not admit, as some people were saying, that its results were entirely evil. Tahitians in 1845 were certainly unsatisfactory people, to themselves and everyone else. But the missions could not admit they had made them so; they had to maintain they had been even worse before the missionaries came.

13. Muskets and Mercenaries

That was the year 1800 – a convenient date to look back at the thirty-three years since the Dolphin fired her broadside, and to see what changes the Europeans had so far brought to Tahiti.

The changes were remarkably small. Visually, there were none. Even Matavai Bay, where most of the visitors landed, still seemed the beautiful, virginal place it had always been, and people landing for the first time still felt ‘imparadised’. Any marks they made on it were soon obliterated by its verdant growth, as surely as their footprints on the sandy beach were obliterated by the winds and waves. A botanist might have noticed one or two new species of trees; but to anyone else’s eyes the hectic adventures of those years might never have happened. The Tahitians imposed on the island the patterns of their ancient way of living, which were unchanging: their houses fell down but were built again in the same way, scattered haphazardly in the shade of the trees and joined by meandering, footworn paths. There were still no other kinds of tracks. Probably somebody had tried to explain about wheels, but nobody yet had made one; and the horses and cattle the Europeans had left there, thinking they would be useful, had all died out. The only foreign animals were goats, which flourished in flocks in the mountains, untamed and of no practical use to anyone.

But the Tahitians themselves had begun to change. It was not a drastic change so far, no more than a seed of change which was germinating in their minds, as new diseases were germinating in their bodies. From the very day they learned that there were other people in the world, things could never be quite the same again. Primeval innocence had been shaken for ever by the Dolphin’s broadside.

 

By 1800 they may already have been – they probably were – less sure of themselves, less trustful of their own institutions; but it did not show. Superficially, they were as kind, carefree, and happy as they had always been, and no visitor could have noticed the incipient mental change. But one change, the most drastic and cruel of all, was growing obvious. They were dying.

Guesses at the population of the island were very vague, but there was no doubt it was falling fast. [...] During the next fifteen or twenty years, while the missionaries were active, the numbers continued to fall, until there were no more than six or seven thousand Tahitians left. If the figures were right, twenty-nine out of every thirty people had died without any child to take their place; and however far wrong the figures were, there was no possible question that the race was being driven to extinction.

The missionaries put it down to the people’s sins – specifically idolatry, infanticide, and sacrifice. The Tahitians knew it was happening too, and in their philosophy the explanation was probably much the same: they were giving offence to Te Atua. Factually, the only possible primary cause was disease, though the psychological assault of the European presence may perhaps have been a secondary cause.

It was not only the ‘venereal distemper’, though that had become so widespread it might almost have been called universal. Tahitians, hitherto free from almost all infection, had no immunity from any disease the ships brought with them. Of course there was nobody there who could diagnose them, but it seems likely that diphtheria, tuberculosis, smallpox, viral infections, and pneumonia were among the fatal diseases. Tahitians said the sailors had infested their houses with fleas, and no doubt they brought lice and rat fleas too – sailors always had them – and hence typhus, which was commonly known as ‘ships’ fever’. When any of these diseases got a grip ashore, there was nothing to stop it. Whole families were commonly wiped out. One remote valley, which originally had four hundred people, was infested first by smallpox and then by tuberculosis, and in less than a year two survivors, one man and one woman, fled from its desolation. But the missionaries flourished, either blessed or immune.

 

Wallace’s [sic] and Cook’s mistake, carried forward by their successors and now perpetuated by the immensely valuable gifts given by the missionaries, had destroyed the old balance of power which had kept Tahiti peaceful and – within its limits – prosperous for longer than anyone remembered. But the other arii rahi did not give up their own hereditary rights without a struggle. The next decade, from 1800 to 1810, was a history of unprecedented wars as the other arii rahi, in ever-changing alliances, fought to overthrow the pretensions of Pomare and Tu.

So the English had created a perennial cause of civil war; and next they introduced the means of making wars more dangerous and bloody than they had ever been: muskets and mercenaries.

By the middle of that same decade, Tahiti had become a famous place. Most Englishmen in any walk of life must have heard of it, many North Americans, and certainly all Protestant churchmen and sailors. Consequently, all ships that passed anywhere near it found some excuse to put in to Matavai Bay to see for themselves. In a rather later period, the majority were American whalers; but in the 1800s most were still English, and most were sailing between the home country and the penal colonies, thousands of miles west of Tahiti, first at Botany Bay and later elsewhere in Australia. A few were naval ships, some were privateers, and most were merchantmen on government charter which had taken out a cargo of convicts by way of the Cape of Good Hope and were trying to make the homeward voyage by Cape Horn. So it came about that most of Tahiti’s contact with the outside world was by way of Botany Bay, and most of the ships that came in were infected by an atmosphere of crime and punishment. They were the toughest of ships with the toughest of captains and crews. The news spread among them that you could trade old muskets for anything you wanted in Tahiti; so old muskets were what they brought.

Some of the trade in muskets, powder, and ball was an official affair organized by successive governors of the penal colony. (One of these was Captain Bligh, who was appointed governor in 1805 and lasted three years before he caused another mutiny, this time in the army garrison, who put him in his own prison.) These representatives of the British Crown often sent ships to Tahiti specifically to barter for pigs to feed the garrison, and they paid for the pigs with muskets.

 

Muskets, especially old second-hand ones, were inefficient weapons, impossible to aim with any accuracy. Lord Nelson was killed by one in the middle of this decade at Trafalgar, at a range of about fifty yards, but a shot like that was exceptional and needed more luck than skill. But muskets were much more efficient, and above all more frightening, than the sticks and stones the Tahitians had used in their wars before. They transformed the whole character of Tahitian wars; and mercenary European fighters changed it even more. These were sailors who had deserted their ships.

One cannot generalize about the deserters, as one can perhaps about the missionaries; some of them may have been good men in bad ships, victims of injustice who simply could not stand the life on board. But some were certainly very bad men indeed. Sailors in that era were not, on the whole, a high grade of humanity. The navy was a cut above the rest, but even a British naval crew had convicted criminals in it. Some of the Bounty mutineers meant well, but most of the men who jumped ship in the 1800s came from merchantmen; and most Europeans who found themselves merchant seamen in the far Pacific had something dark in their past that they were running away from. It was these men, good and bad, and not the heathen islanders, who became the missionaries’ main opponents.

The reasons for their desertions were always the same: women and what seemed to them to be freedom. In the old days, the Tahitians would gladly have given them all they wanted of both, but now the chiefs expected something in exchange. It was easy for any deserter to find a chief who would promise him a hut, a willing wife and a life of plenty – and, most important of all, a chief who would hide him from his ship’s search parties. All the chief asked was that he should fight for him in wars, and most sailors were happy to do that. It passed the time.

Of course they were far more expert at fighting than the Tahitians were. They laughed at the old-fashioned Tahitian rules of war, which made it honourable to run for the hills and hide when things were going badly, and most honourable to sue for peace. The deserters brought with them the ruthless conventions of Christian wars: the virtue of fighting to the death, of asking and giving no quarter. There were never very many of these men, perhaps forty or fifty at the most, but they terrorized everyone and transformed Tahitian life. Where people had lived in mutual confidence and kindness, they now lived everyday in fear.

 

Throughout it all, the missionaries continued to live in the mission house, pressing on with their ‘great object, the spiritual benefit of the people’, and taking as little notice as they could of the confusion of war around them. The Tahitians continued to give them more food than they could eat, and anything else they asked for. Their progress in learning the language was very slow, but in August 1801, after four-and-a-half years in the island, the first of them was able to compose a simple sermon and deliver it in Tahitian. This was Brother Nott. Soon after, Mr Jefferson could do it too. These two preached every Sunday, first at the mission itself, and later at meetings in the neighbourhood of Matavai Bay. But all to no avail. A lot of people turned up and listened carefully. Month after month and year after year, they persevered with their preaching. Ten more missionaries arrived and joined in the work when they had picked up enough of the language. But not a single Tahitian confessed that he was converted. On the contrary, as time went on, the congregations became more argumentative, and the people ‘cavilled at their discourses, or ridiculed their statements; ascribing all the evils they suffered, to the supposed malign influence of the God of the missionaries, and avowing their determination never to acknowledge his claims to their beliefs and obedience.’ And, in a manner of speaking, it cannot be denied that they were right; for the Europeans who had brought the Christian creed had also brought all the evils, the wars and diseases.

Another evil they brought (though the Tahitians welcomed it) was alcohol. The English of that time were hearty drinkers, to say the least, and ships in particular were pickled in rum. The naval ration was so enormous that sailors could hardly avoid becoming alcoholics. Even the Calvinists saw some virtue in what they called ‘ardent spirits’, and physicians prescribed them as cures. Consequently, all captains and officers from the very beginning had entertained chiefs and their families at drinking parties – they laughed when their guests, to their own astonishment, got dead drunk – and probably the sailors had done the same with their humbler friends. At first, the Tahitians liked the officers’ wines but disliked the brandy and rum; but they soon got a taste for those too, and the chiefs entirely gave up the chewed ava root which had been their only intoxicant. Things were not too bad while they depended on bottles of rum as gifts, or rewards for the services they rendered, but in the 1800s the deserters, needing more drink themselves, began to set up stills, and taught the Tahitians how to make a sort of brandy of their own.

The first man who succeeded was an armourer or blacksmith with the unusual name of Savary. He deserted his ship and lived for two years in Tu’s entourage. He made a still, and kept the chief in drink until he was picked up by another ship and forcibly taken back to Botany Bay. Tu supposed the missionaries had insisted that he should be deported, and perhaps they had – they did not want Tahitians to get their drink too easily – but Tu of course resented losing such a useful man. His still broke down, but other Tahitians were able to copy it. Soon there were stills all over the island. The Tahitians were made a nation of drunks.

 

In October 1809, all the missionaries except three embarked for Botany Bay: of those three, one went to Eimeo and two to the island of Huahine, where Cook had become the old chief’s friend. The mission house in Matavai Bay fell into the hands of the mercenaries, and so did Captain Bishop’s artillery. They burned the house, melted down the type from the printing press to make bullets and tore up the holy books for cartridge paper. A large picture of King George III, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York was rescued by Tahitians, taken to a temple and offered to the god Oro.

‘To all human appearance,’ the Society history said, ‘the Tahitian misison was now at an end.’

 

14. Laws and Commandments

 

For two years, Tahiti was at peace: Pomare in exile, his father dead, and the missionaries gone. Pomare’s rivals may have argued, but they did not fight each other. Even the deserters, with nobody left to fight against, began to settle down, some to a semblance of domesticity, and some in attempts to join the teenage promiscuity. The Tahitians, it was true, could never be independent again. As Cook had predicted, they had forgotten their ancient handicrafts and had to rely on European products, especially tools; but these they bartered from visiting ships, together with more muskets, powder, and rum. And by then they were irrevocably infected not only by European diseases, but by European sins – envy, greed, unkindness, covetousness. They had an unaccustomed amount of work to do in repairing the damage of wars, rebuilding houses and replanting trees. Nevertheless, they returned to many of their old ways, and they had never lost their old beliefs. Happiness and contentment began to seep back.

At the end of those two years, something quite unexpected happened. Pomare sent a message to the missionaries by way of Huahine. He wanted to be baptized. The request, they said, ‘came like a breath of life’; they were astonished and delighted – ‘even unto tears’. After their early admiration, they had come to think of all Tahitians as wicked, and had thought Pomare the most wicked of them all. In their eyes, he was a chronic drunk, cruel, a stubborn idolator, a murderer, and a fornicator – all the bad things he could have been. He was even suspected of the ‘nameless crimes’. They knew his knowledge of the Christian faith could only be very crude. It was hard for them to believe he had truly seen the light. Several of them hastened to Eimeo, and found him insisting he was a Christian. They had to explain that they must be sure he repented of his past and understood essence of Christianity before they could baptize him, but he accepted that. He said he would attend to their lessons, and they should baptize him as soon as they were satisfied. So they set to work on him, and on growing number of his domestic and political followers whom he told very firmly they had to be Christians – or else.

Pomare’s portrait shows a stolid, heavy man, with all the signs of premature aging (he must have been well under thirty) which can be caused by a dissolute life, and especially by alcoholism. But he must have been cleverer than he looked, because he had undoubtedly taught himself to read, using the written version of his language which the missionaries had devised in the last decade. The only things were in that language were the missionaries’ simplified catechism, their Bible stories, and the bits of the Bible they had managed to translate – mainly the gospel of St Luke. Pomare must have read these again and again for practice.

To the missionaries, the conversion was plainly miraculous. It had happened while they were not there: it was the hand of God. This seemed to them the more evident when they heard that members of the Society in England had been praying for this very event. In fact, Pomare had been converted before they began their prayers, though news of it had not reached England. But that was no obstacle. The missionaries were seldom stuck for a biblical quotation, and now they recalled Isaiah: ‘Before they call I will answer: and while they are yet speaking I will hear.’

However much he declared his penitence, it was sadly obvious that Pomare was the same man: he was certainly still drinking, and probably fornicating too. No sinner in England would have been welcomed in the church on the evidence he provided, and the missionaries knew they were stretching a point. It merely seemed to them that that was the path God had led them to. Nobody, then or now, could know what really went on in Pomare’s mind, but perhaps it is not too cynical to mention the political advantage to him in saying he was a Christian. He was a high chief, and had been led to think he was the highest, by right, in Tahiti. He was in exile, and had no hope of getting his chiefdom back without wholehearted European support. The mercenaries were not enough: his rivals had them too. But the mercenaries were of junior rank, and despised by the European captains. Missionaries were senior: they talked to the captains as equals. It must have been clear to Pomare that if he was a Christian, the missionaries and all the captains in future would be on his side. By that means, and only by that means, he had chance of going back to Tahiti and winning. He may even have thought that King George, who had plenty of soldiers, would send a few to help him: his father had suggested it to Bligh.

If that was his plan – half-conscious perhaps – it worked perfectly, except for King George’s soldiers. Soon, hundreds of Pomare’s followers in Eimeo declared that they were Christians. Among them were the two chiefs of Huahine, who had always been on his side. The missionaries rejoiced, set up a school for them all and tried to tell them what their decision meant. A rumour spread that many more in Tahiti were willing to follow. In due course, Pomare ventured back to Tahiti. Two missionaries followed close behind – one of them the faithful Brother Nott. Their first intention was to take care of him: they were afraid he would be exposed to temptation. Pomare, on the other hand, was spoiling for war, and soon Tahiti was at war again, more bloodily than ever before: now not merely a war in which one chief fought against another, but in which Christians fought against the rest.

Until this final war, the missionaries’ narrative of events, although it was partisan, was understandable. But now it degenerated, with so many contradictions and such evident self-deception that it represents nothing but the groping of their own uneasy conscience. People were to ask ever after if Christianity was imposed on Tahiti by force. The answer must be that it was. But the missionaries, to do them justice, had not wanted it to happen that way. Their avowed plan had always been to destroy the Tahitians’s own religious faith, however cruel that process might have to be, in the hope of intruding Christianity into the void that would be left. But the Tahitian faith was too strong for them. They had failed to destroy it for eleven years, and had given it up as a bad job two years before Pomare offered – for whatever reason – to do it for them. It was Pomare who led the Christian throng, the missionaries following in its wake like army chaplains, answering each other’s doubts with hollow arguments that this was the work of God.

Two pitched battles were fought in the autumn of 1815 – springtime in Tahiti – within a few weeks, as it happened, of the Battle of Waterloo. The missionaries’ account of them tells nothing of the tactics or technique, nor of the pain, or fear, or horrors: it is only a set of the clichés that clerics had used for hundreds of years when writing about battles: stories of the enemy spending the night before the battle in feasting, while the Christians spent it in prayer; of the Christians and singing hymns as the hostile hordes advanced; of the commander addressing his men and ending with the words ‘Now go, and may the presence of Jesus go with you.’ Such tales go back at least to the Battle of Hastings.

The Christians won both fights, and after the second they gave their enemies a feast, and baked a hundred hogs for it. One has to imagine this scene: some thousands of people must have been there, but nobody described it; and it was very important, more important indeed that the battles themselves. The missionaries claimed it afterwards as an example of Christian forgiveness and mercy, but they were mistaken; feasting their enemies was not a common Christian or European practice – there had been no feast for the French on the evening of Waterloo. On the contrary, it was a reversion to old Tahitian manners, and all the Tahitians knew what it signified.

The feast was probably held at the head of a beach, where there was plenty of room and plenty of large round stones which could be heated for the cooking pits. It was a long, hot job to slaughter a hundred pigs, dig a hundred pits, and gather fuel for a hundred fires. Pomare’s army and camp followers would have done the work, while, as guests, the beaten army waited, their apprehension slowly turning to pleasant anticipation, some of them hiding their wounds perhaps, because they had not yet learned to be proud of battle scars. And then a long wait again – three hours – while the pigs cooked out of sight, each under a mound of earth. There was plenty of time, when everyone knew he was to be fed, not massacred, to discuss what they had all been fighting about. It must have been dusk or dark when the ovens were dug open: starlight perhaps, cool and calm, a bar of moonlight motionless on the lagoon, the crowns of the coconut trees all black against the sky, and the savoury smell of the pork overcoming the scents of sea and earth and flowers.

The beaten warriors, it was said, were too bemused, and probably too tired, to enjoy the food; but every one of them knew what it meant. Pomare had won the battle, which was all very well; but he had the greater honour of being the first to offer peace. By accepting his feast, the others accepted his terms of peace. They accepted him as chief, and even accepted whatever version of god he chose to give them. Nobody in Tahiti had ever gone back on such a pledge.

Next day, they all began an orgy of tearing down their ancient temples and burning the emblems of their gods.

The political struggle, and then the final battle and then the feast, broke down the Tahitians’ old beliefs, and the whole of their method of government broke down with them. The old, cosy devolution of rule from the superior chiefs to the lesser chiefs, and from them to the heads of families, could not be made to work with a single king. What was more, Pomare – the king the Europeans had chosen – had no intention of surrendering any power to anyone: he wanted it all himself. Yet he had no idea how to set up a single-handed rule. He had never seen it done. He refused to consult any other chief. In some desperation, when everything was falling into chaos, he asked the missionaries how to do it: how did King George do it? There were a dozen of them on the island by then, and they racked their brains for all they had ever heard of English law and the English judicial system. It was very little, as little as one would expect from impractical men who scorned all knowledge that was not in the Bible. Governing was not their job.

Yet governing was what they had to do. They had fought for spiritual authority, and had won themselves secular responsibility too. It was a supreme opportunity – to create an entirely new social system even better, kinder, and fairer than the one they had destroyed. But it was also a very difficult job indeed, and one has to sympathize with them: it needed a genius, and none of them would have claimed to be a genius. Cook could have done it: Tahiti would have elected him king without hesitation if he had still been alive around 1800. He might have created a state on the lines of a well-run naval ship. Joseph Banks might possibly have done it, if he had been more patient than usual, and created some theoretical Arcadian state of his own. The missionaries, faced with a problem that was beyond them, turned to the Bible again.      

16. A Different Dawn

 

If anyone goes to Tahiti now in the hope of finding the traditional South Sea he will be disappointed. He will have to go further to find it, if it can be found at all: to the smallest, remotest islands. Colonization is ebbing, but the tentacles of tourism extend ever further, year after year, all over the world; and if one reaches a place they have not reached, one’s very presence there is extending them further still. One may try to escape from the world, but it goes without saying one cannot escape from oneself.

 

Tahitian society never grew up: it never had a chance. It passed straight from the innocence of youth – ‘the real youth of the world’, as Rousseau had called it – to the distresses of terminal sickness, and by the time the French arrived in the 1840s it was dying. Tahiti is not the place to look for it now. Most modern Tahitians, living as ever in the present, have no recollection of it, and an official French document dismisses it as a legend. This book will be accused of reviving a legend.

But it is not a legend. The doctrine of the Noble Savage was legendary; the quality of Tahitian society is not. Like all historical fact, it only exists in documents of the time, which can only be found in the largest libraries – in this case the journals of the scores of people, up to the early years of the nineteenth century, who saw the Tahitians in their primal state.

In retrospect, the destruction of their culture seems a cruel tragedy; yet the tragedy was seldom deliberate, and nobody was to blame. All these people, sailors, sea captains, and missionaries, British, Spanish, American, and French, were men of their time, not ours; and one cannot blame them for being what their time had made them. There was no room for innocence in the nineteenth-century world.         

Nor was the tragedy purely black in Tahitian philosophy. Tahitians, with no sense of history, could never have felt nostalgia. Happiness, they knew, was transient; life was ephemeral. All men had to go into night, and they would have said, when they thought about it, that all human institutions also had to go into night. Tahitian society was good, and it was good that it had existed; it mattered less that it could not exist forever.       

Yet it would be a pity, towards the end of the twentieth century, to forget entirely what the Tahitians achieved. They did make a society which, in a simple way, came near perfection: nearer perhaps than any other that has been recorded. They were able to do it because they were left alone, and because the place where they lived provided plenty of all the needs of human life: enough food, enough warmth, enough beauty and leisure and fun; and because they had no ambition to struggle for anything more, and were generous and unselfish people, happy to see that everyone else, not only themselves, had enough.

In the near future, for the first time in our history, we also seem to be promised enough of these needs for everyone, through technological revolution. Shall we make a good use of it, like the Tahitians, or did they have innate qualities we have lost and can never retrieve? It is at least an arguable question, without a simple answer. Even Rousseau admitted that people can never go back. Neither he nor anyone else until the last few years thought civilization itself might offer enough for all. It has always offered too much for a few and too little for most, dividing people into rich and poor, and creating envy and strife.

Technology can only cure the second part of that inequality – too little for most. The first part, too much for a few, needs a more difficult change. It is a deep-rooted feeling that special skills, long training or hard work should have extra material rewards – and that unskilled, untrained, or lazy people scarcely deserve to have enough and would not know what to do with wealth or leisure. In the civilized world it has always been so, but it was not so in Tahiti. Clever Tahitians – canoe-builders or navigators, say – use their skill for no reward except the pleasure of using it and knowing other people would be grateful for it, not envious. They did not grow rich, and no Tahitians were poor. Perhaps we shall find a reward for skill which is immaterial, yet as acceptable as wealth. The change would need the virtue Christianity enjoins and Tahitians had by instinct: kindness.

It is not the job of a simple history book to stray into sociology. All it can do is offer the example of Tahitian history, in the distant hope that wiser people may think about it, for the benefit of all.