Beyond the Coral Sea: Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West Pacific. Michael Moran
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a promising beginning. He had a refined, educated air and wore fine-rimmed glasses. Underneath the banter I felt a moral outlook at odds with the modern political world.
We sat down and began to talk. An islander from Kwato in Milne Bay Province, he had attended the mission school as a child, secondary school in Sydney, studied Law at the University of Papua New Guinea and was Crown Prosecutor at the Public Prosecution Office until 1994 when he was subsequently appointed to the post of High Commissioner. Married to a ‘Lancashire lass’, he should have left London two years ago.
‘Britain has little interest in PNG but all the Commonwealth High Comms cooperate very well.’
Grotesque Sepik river masks grinned down like a nightmare from another world.
‘Where are you off to?’ he enquired vaguely, settling uncomfortably into a leather chair.
‘I’m planning a trip around the islands next year. I don’t intend to go to the Highlands at all. Far too violent. Just the islands.’
‘Yes – the violence. Moresby is pretty bad. The police are so under-funded that corruption is rife … the jungle hardly lends itself to strict policing. Not like Surrey!’
He laughed with a hint of derision at the ease of civilised life.
‘I used to live on Norfolk Island off the coast of Australia. Home to the descendants of the Bounty mutiny.’
I was fighting to establish a rapport with this fellow islander, some common ground. The masks seemed threatening in Waterloo Place. The contrast was suffocating.
‘Really? Islands are special places. I miss the sweet waves of Samarai and Kwato on moonlit nights. Cities, well …’
He drifted off into an unexpected romantic reverie. I explained myself.
‘I got bored with catching the seventy-three bus down Oxford Street to Victoria every morning. Threw it up in the end. The job I mean.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘Teaching languages.’
‘I had fine English teachers at the Mission. The very best.’ He paused. ‘Now we only bash the missionaries during election time!’ He grinned broadly.
After some desultory chat about the independence movement in East Timor and the excitement of family life in Hampstead Garden Suburb I rose to leave.
‘I’ll send you some family contacts and useful people to look up. They’ll look after you, or eat you!’ More good-natured laughter.
I signed the visitor’s book and left the office. I was heading for Berry Bros in St James’s to collect a good bottle of red Graves. A final farewell to civilisation. A feeling of exhilaration passed over me as I glanced back through rain-lashed Waterloo Place at the windows harbouring that alien world. For a moment I watched the beads of water running off the polished bonnet of his midnight-blue diplomatic Jaguar.
I was about to escape from Pudding Island.
The original idea of sailing a copra schooner called Barracuda around the islands of Eastern Papua New Guinea in the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson had faded, as do so many boyhood dreams. I. had always wanted to sail the old vessels of the past on those remarkable voyages of discovery. My friends at the Royal Papua Yacht Club laughed at the idea and told me that all the old ketches and schooners had rotted in the mud. The price of copra had collapsed and the corpse of the industry was barely twitching. No one would dream of wasting money building or even repairing an old copra schooner. There were no more sailing ships plying the islands. Traditional sailing canoes like the majestic lakatoi of Port Moresby with their towering crab-claw sails and multiple hulls had by now almost completely disappeared. Chartering a vessel as an individual was prohibitively expensive. Even if I had sailed my own yacht I could easily become a victim of unfavourable trade winds or worse, piracy. Unless I was prepared to wait for unreliable boats from Thursday Island in the far north of Australia, it was impossible legally to enter Papua New Guinea except by air through Port Moresby or Mount Hagen in the Highlands. I was disappointed but determined to sail at least part of the Australian coastline in the old style, completely dependent on the vagaries of wind and weather.
A rare opportunity arose to ‘take passage’ on the replica of Captain Cook’s ship Endeavour as a supernumerary member of the crew. That it was sailing in precisely the opposite direction to my intended destination did not disturb me. I would experience sailing a tall ship along the New South Wales coast for a week from Southport (near Brisbane) to Sydney. A suitably nautical frame of mind would then enable me to jet off to Port Moresby with equanimity.
Endeavour is a handsome vessel and a magnificent replica of the original ship. It was constructed as Australia’s flagship from 1988–94 in Fremantle in Western Australia. She is built of jarrah and has upper sides of varnished pine, finished in the Royal Navy colours of blue, red and yellow. I took Sir Joseph Banks’s cabin on the after fall deck – a small space that I later discovered was occupied not by Sir Joseph himself but by his dogs – a bitch spaniel called Lady used as gun dog, and a greyhound taken on board to run down game.
Joseph Banks was only twenty-five when word reached him on 15 August 1768 that Endeavour was ready to take him aboard on a great adventure to the South Seas. He was at the opera in London with Miss Harriet Blosset, a French ward to whom he was engaged and in love, but with whom he lamentably lacked the French language to communicate. Confessing himself to be of ‘too volatile a temperament to marry’, and unable to explain the meaning of his imminent departure, he drank heavily in a romantic funk the night before he left London for Plymouth. Poor weather delayed the sailing until 25 August.
Banks’s father was an MP and the family were wealthy and well-connected, living at Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire. He had been to Eton (which trained him no doubt for the rigours of the voyage but not for the travails of love), spent seven years at Oxford studying botany, and worked at the British Museum in London. In February 1768, the Royal Society decided that observing ‘the passage of the Planet Venus over the Disc of the Sun … is a Phaenomenon that must … be accurately observed in proper places’. The Admiralty decided on Tahiti as a place of observation, and James Cook was appointed chief observer of the transit. He selected a Whitby ‘cat’1 called the Earl of Pembroke as the most suitable vessel for such a voyage, refitted and renamed her the Endeavour.
As a Fellow of the Royal Society, Banks contributed ten thousand pounds to purchase a vast quantity of both practical and elegant equipment for the voyage, and transported a comprehensive library of some one hundred and fifty volumes. A party of nine made up his gentleman’s entourage, all trained in the techniques of collecting and preparing specimens. He became almost more famous than Cook himself, but remained dogged by the unfortunate repercussions of the ‘caddishly abandoned’ Miss Blosset (‘Miss Bl: swooned &c’, his journal coolly observes).
Cook had a complement of some ninety-four souls together with chickens, pigs, a cat and a milch goat that had already circumnavigated the globe. In a letter to Banks in February 1772, Dr Johnson included a Latin elegy for the celebrated animal, part of which runs:
In fame scarce second to the nurse of Jove,
This Goat, who twice the world had traversed round,
Deserving both her master’s care and love,
Ease and perpetual pasture now has found.
His adventurous friend James Boswell records that Johnson was sceptical of what a traveller might learn by taking long voyages, despite on one occasion when dining with the Reverend Alexander Grant at Inverness, divertingly ‘standing up to mimic the shape and motions of a kangaroo’ and making ‘two or three vigorous bounds across the room’.
By 16 August 1770, Cook had reached the Great Barrier Reef, courageously searching for the elusive passage between New Guinea and Australia. The passage had originally been