The Pacific

In the Wake of Captain Cook, with Sam Neill

Meaghan Wilson Anastasios

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781460710364
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

A rich, complex and engaging account of Cook's voyages across the Pacific, from actor and raconteur Sam Neill, in which Sam Neill retraces Cook's footsteps, in the 250th anniversary year of Cook's first voyage.

Captain James Cook first set sail to the Pacific in 1768 - 250 years ago. These vast waters, one third of the earth's surface, were uncharted - but not unknown. A rich diversity of people and cultures navigated, traded, lived and fought here for thousands of years. Before Cook, the Pacific was disconnected from the power and ideas of Europe, Asia and America. In the wake of Cook, everything changed.

The Pacific with Sam Neill is the companion book to the Foxtel documentary series of the same name, in which actor and raconteur Sam Neill takes a deeply personal, present-day voyage to map his own understanding of James Cook, Europe's greatest navigator, and the immense Pacific Ocean itself.

Voyaging on a wide variety on vessels, from container ships to fishing trawlers and sailing boats, Sam crosses the length and breadth of the largest ocean in the world to experience for himself a contemporary journey in Cook's footsteps, engaging the past and present in both modern and ancient cultural practice and peoples.

Fascinating, engaging, fresh and vital - this is history - but not as you know it.

PART ONE

ONE

PARADISE ON EARTH

As restrained as he was in his logbooks, Cook did describe

places like Tahiti as being particularly beautiful. How

could he not? The world is full of beautiful places but

there’s nowhere quite like the Pacific.

SAM NEILL

The Tahitians would have caught a whiff of them on the breeze before they saw them: ninety-four men jammed into a timber sailing vessel in the tropics. Although the captain of the Endeavour was as diligent as he could be about his crew’s health and general sanitation, hot baths and bars of soap were few and far between on the high seas. Based solely upon the new arrivals’ questionable personal hygiene, the Tahitians would have been justified in repelling the Endeavour and her crew from their shores.

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JOSIANE TEAMOTUAITAU PhD, Historian

When the Endeavour arrived here, and the men on the ship saw those people on the beach who were not too dark but just the right colour, and they were clean, and always wearing scented flowers . . . the sailors were impressed because our people would bathe twice a day and they had all their teeth, which was not the case on board. So, of course, who wouldn’t have been attracted?

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The locals standing on the soft sands of Matavai Bay and watching the approach of the British ship were fastidious about cleanliness. They washed themselves at least two times a day in a freshwater river near Point Venus, removed the hair from their armpits, dressed their silken tresses with snow-white blossoms, and anointed their skin with an intoxicating blend of coconut oil infused with tiare flowers known as mono’i.

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SAM NEILL

Everyone living on the island was like a god to the men on the Endeavour – they were muscular and beautiful. I don’t know why they put up with these miserable little buggers from the East End . . . Why would you? But I suppose it was a matter of mutual curiosity. And so, the first thing that happened when the ship arrived was that sailors did what sailors do. It must have absolutely blown their minds.

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When the excited and malodorous crew of the Endeavour arrived on 13 April 1769, led by Captain James Cook, they received a warm welcome complete with a full array of sexual favours. One can only ask: why?

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MOETAI BROTHERSON, Mā’ohi Tribe, French MP

You have to put yourself in Polynesian shoes of the time. I can just imagine their curiosity. Those new weapons. The language and the maps. All the written things that we didn’t have. It must have been very exciting for the Polynesians, because we are curious people by nature. I’m sure our ancestors were looking at everything these strange, pale men had.

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The cause of the sailors’ erotically charged reception can be laid firmly at the prow of the two European voyages that had found their way to Tahiti prior to Cook. In 1767, Samuel Wallis had arrived aboard the Dolphin and named Tahiti ‘King George’s Island’; and the two ships of French navigator Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the Boudeuse and the Étoile, had dropped anchor in 1768.

It hadn’t taken long for the Tahitians to work out that the new arrivals could be useful.

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JOSIANE TEAMOTUAITAU PhD

Tahitians are very pragmatic. We evolve and manage and try to cope with what is given to us. When Cook and the other Europeans arrived on the island they tried to make the best of it. They knew they couldn’t fight guns. So this trade began: these exchanges, these friendships.

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There was one thing in particular the Tahitians knew they could get from the Europeans: metal. The Tahitians had been introduced to the wonders of metallurgy after salvaging parts from a European wreck that had foundered on a nearby island in 1722. To a people who worked architectural and nautical miracles with tools made of coral, stone, wood and (usually human) bone, the potential of metal was immediately apparent.

When the Dolphin turned up in 1767, it dawned on the Tahitians they had something the unwillingly abstinent sailors would happily exchange for iron: sex. And so a febrile and enthusiastic trade ensued. As one of the sailors on board put it, ‘The women were far from being coy. For when a man found a girl to his mind, which he might easily do amongst so many, there was not much ceremony on either side.’ So eager were Wallis’s men that they absconded with the iron nails used to hold their hammocks in place below deck. It must have made for an uncomfortable trip home for those sailors silly enough to dismantle their sleeping quarters.

Comfort was one thing, but seaworthiness was another altogether. When the Dolphin’s amorous crew began to pry the nails out of the ship’s hull to continue their exploration of Tahiti’s garden of earthly delights, things took a more serious turn. Shipwreck, piracy, mutiny and foundering at sea were all well-documented means of losing one’s vessel – but sabotage by a randy crew didn’t appear in the shipmaster’s manual. Even the threat of a flogging wasn’t enough to deter them, and as the Tahitian women began to up the ante, demanding longer nails – not in a metaphorical sense . . . they literally wanted longer nails – in exchange for a sexual encounter, the Dolphin was in serious danger of collapsing into a pile of floating planks.

Cook had been apprised of these perils before he set sail from Plymouth on 25 August 1768. So as the Endeavour dropped anchor in Matavai Bay and the Tahitians surrounded the boat calling out ‘taio’ – ‘friend’, Cook knew that most of the men on board had more than friendship in mind. To discourage his crew – or ‘The People’, as he called them – from dismantling his ship, he had set in place a severe regime of punishment for any man caught trading necessities for sexual favours.

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CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

Endeavour by every fair means to cultivate a friendship with the natives and to treat them with all imaginable humanity . . . No sort of iron, or anything that is made of iron, or any sort of cloth or other useful necessary articles are to be given in exchange for anything but provisions.

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He had the best of intentions. But it was a lost cause.

Cook was prone to wishful thinking. A fair to middling state of optimism must have featured fairly high on his list of personal attributes, considering the monumental challenges he would go on to confront and the milestones he achieved in a stellar naval career. Not that you’d guess it from his journal: more often than not, Cook’s phlegmatic entries from his first voyage reveal more about his personality through what he doesn’t tell us than what he does.

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SAM NEILL

Cook left a lot of stuff for historians – logs, journals, charts and sketches – but the man is still hard to read. He was the consummate professional. He didn’t write about his hopes, his fears, his loves or ambitions. He just recorded his actions, those of the crew and the progress of his ship.

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Cook was disciplined, focused and temperate. At over six feet in height, he had a dark complexion and was strong featured and generally regarded as a bit of a looker. But a poet, he was not.

For a vivid description of the effect of the Tahitian welcome upon a ship full of sexually frustrated European sailors we must look, perhaps not surprisingly, to a Frenchman. The navigator Bougainville, who had arrived on the island with his two ships in 1768, wrote in lyrical terms about the irresistible temptations laid at the French sailors’ feet.

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LOUIS ANTOINE DE BOUGAINVILLE (1729–1811),

French Admiral and Explorer

I ask you, how was one to keep four hundred young French sailors, who hadn’t seen women in six months, at their work in the midst of such a spectacle? Despite all the precautions which we took, a young girl got on board and came onto the forecastle and stood by one of the hatchways which are over the capstan. The girl negligently let fall her robe and stood for all to see, as Venus stood forth before the Phrygian shepherd; and she had the celestial shape of Venus . . . We managed to restrain these bedevilled men, however, but it was no less difficult to control oneself.

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The men who arrived on Tahiti on board the Endeavour were no different, regardless of their commander’s most fervent wishes. Part of the problem was that they already knew what to expect.

Of all the peddlers in tall tales, seamen would have to rank as the most creative. Embedded in Cook’s crew were five men with firsthand experience of what the Endeavour’s sailors had to look forward to when they arrived on Tahiti’s palm-fringed beaches. John Gore, Charles Clerke, Richard Pickersgill, Francis Wilkinson and Francis Haite had all visited the South Pacific on earlier voyages of exploration. The salty tales recounted on the excruciatingly long journey would have been fuelled by the prodigious amount of alcohol on tap – with 4500 litres of beer, 6000 litres of spirits and 11,500 litres of wine on board, the Endeavour’s circumnavigation of the globe was as much booze cruise as it was voyage of exploration.

The ninety-four men on the Endeavour were a mixed bunch. Naval officers, gentlemen scientists, marine guards – to enforce order – and artists rubbed shoulders with the sailors, some of whom had barely entered their teens; the youngest amongst them was aged just twelve. But monotony, physical deprivation and discomfort know no class boundaries. The hardships experienced during the long voyage were common to all. Suffice to say as the emerald peaks of Tahiti appeared on the horizon, anticipation on board would have been high.

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SAM NEILL

Cook was quite a remote man. He was a working-class man from very humble origins. All his crew, apart from the officers, were from similar humble backgrounds. But Cook was remote from them and remote from his officers. He got on well with people but he didn’t make any close connections with the other people on board. That’s the thing about being commander – you can’t be overly familiar with your shipmates.

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James Cook was cut of a different cloth. Debauchery and excess were anathema to him. Born on 27 October 1728 in North Riding, Yorkshire, to a Scottish labourer of modest means and his Yorkshire wife, Cook’s outlook was shaped by the time he spent as an apprentice in Whitby with the Quaker coal-shipper, Captain John Walker. The constraints of this particular lifestyle are made clear in a line from the contract Cook signed with Walker; he agreed not to: ‘play at dice, cards, bowls or any other unlawful games . . . [nor] haunt taverns or play houses . . . [or] commit fornication’.

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JOHN ROBSON, Map Librarian, University of Waikato

He was a great leader of people, he was a great seaman, he was a great navigator, and a wonderful cartographer. As to whether he was somebody that you would invite to dinner and expect to be the life and soul of the party, I suspect not.

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Quakers cherish purity, plain speaking and a modest way of life, and they abhor drunkenness and hedonism – the latter being foremost in Cook’s men’s minds as the Endeavour dropped anchor. Cook would not have approved. But it soon became apparent there was little he could do to stop it. As the ship’s master, Robert Molyneux, put i...