The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Richard Holmes
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by the loss of a Tooth.’ These were evidently war trophies, and even perhaps signs of cannibalism. Banks enquired boldly, but could get no reply. ‘I asked many questions about them but the people would not attend at all to me and either did not or would not understand either words or signs upon that subject.’48 Later he learned they had been ‘carried away as trophies and are used by the Indians here in exactly the same manner as the North Americans do scalps’.49
Some receptions were welcoming, but deceptive. ‘Many Canoes came off to meet us and in them some very handsome women who by their behaviour seemed to be sent out to entice us to come ashore, which we most readily did.’ They were received in a very friendly manner by Wiverou, who was chief of the district. A splendid feast was prepared, accommodation offered, and Banks confidently paid court to the women, ‘hoping to get a snug lodging by that means, as I had often done’. This is a revealing admission, and as it turned out it was wholly unjustified. As the evening drew on, and the women found Banks more importuning, ‘they dropped off one by one’. He ruefully remarked that at last he found himself in the position of being ‘jilted 5 or 6 times, and obliged to seek out for a lodging myself’. He slept alone in a hut, naked as was now his custom, except for a piece of Tahitian cloth thrown over his waist. For once he implies that he felt himself to be the outcast, and this rejection evidently gave him pause for thought.
Indeed, for all the apparent hospitality, their situation always remained surprisingly uncertain away from Fort Venus and the guns of the Endeavour. It could easily become alarming. Banks noted a tense moment on the third morning: ‘About 5 O’Clock our sentry awaked us with the alarming intelligence of the boat being missing. He had he said seen her about 1/2 an hour before at her grapling which was about 50 yards from the shore, but that on hearing the noise of Oars he looked out again and could see nothing of her. We started up and made all possible haste to the waterside. The morn was fine and starlight but no boat in sight. Our situation was now sufficiently disagreable: the Indians had probably attacked her first and finding the people asleep easily carried her, in which case they would not fail to attack us very soon, who were 4 in number armed with one musquet and cartouch box and two pocket pistols without a spare ball or charge of powder for them.’
For fifteen minutes the little party stood alone on the Tahitian beach, suddenly very conscious that they were white Europeans, isolated and ill-armed, on the remote beach of an island that did not belong to them. They watched the sun come up, and waited to be massacred. Then, to their immense relief, the pinnace reappeared around the point of the bay. She had simply slipped her mooring and drifted out to sea while her crew slept. They told themselves that the murderous party of attacking Tahitians had been a figment of their European fears.50
Other experiences were unsettling in a different way. On their last day they discovered an enormous stone ‘marai’ or funeral monument, shaped like a pyramid, some forty-four feet high and nearly 300 feet wide, with steps of superbly polished white coral down both sides. This, the ‘masterpiece’ of Tahitian architecture on the island, was unsettling to Banks because its construction seemed technically inexplicable. ‘It is almost beyond belief that Indians could raise so large a structure without the assistance of Iron tools to shape their stones or mortar to join them.’
Not far away was another mystery: a huge wicker man constructed of basketwork, evidently for some obscure sacrificial rite. ‘The whole was neatly coverd with feathers, white to represent skin and black to represent hair and tattow. On the head were three protuberances which we should have calld horns but the Indians calld them tata ete, little men. The image was calld by them Maúwe; they said it was the only one of the kind in Otahite and readily attempted to explain its use. But their language was totaly unintelligible and seemed to referr to some customs to which we are perfect strangers.’
By the time of their return to Fort Venus on 1 July, Cook had completed a beautiful and lucid chart of the island, the figure of eight with its ‘marshy isthmus’ at the join, which would serve European mariners for generations to come, a model of clarity and accuracy. Banks had hugely increased his supply of botanical specimens, and his knowledge of the fruit and animal resources of the island. But the human mystery of Tahiti had deepened. Its history, customs, religious practices, sexual rites all challenged European understanding, and demanded a new science of explanation.
One of the most puzzling and disturbing of all the ceremonies that Banks witnessed was the tattooing of a young girl’s buttocks. Tattooing was universal in Tahiti, and its function among young male warriors was self-evident. Complex patterns were worked across the legs, the upper torso, on the fingers and ankles, and around the loins: proof of a young man’s courage, and also of his place in the social hierarchy. The skin was pierced with a block of sharpened wooden pins, and impregnated with a purple-black vegetable dye mixed with coconut oil. The operation was long and exquisitely painful, usually performed in stages over several months, and was itself a form of male initiation rite.
Banks could understand all this very well. What he could not understand was why women were forced to undergo it also, moreover at a cruelly young age. Was it a form of sexual initiation? Or purely decorative? Or a form of tribal identity marking? Tahitian women decorated themselves with flowers, and wore beautiful mother-of-pearl earrings, of which Banks made an entire collection. But they used very little other decorations or jewellery.
5 July 1769. This morn I saw the operation of Tattowing the buttocks performed upon a girl of about 12 years old. It proved as I have always suspected a most painfull one. It was done with a large instrument about 2 inches long containing about 30 teeth, every stroke of this hundreds of which were made in a minute drew blood. The patient bore this for about 1/4 of an hour with most stoical resolution; by that time however the pain began to operate too stron[g]ly to be peacably endured. She began to complain and soon burst out into loud lamentations and would fain have persuaded the operator to cease. She was however held down by two women who sometimes scolded, sometimes beat, and at others coaxed her.
Banks became more and more restless as this operation proceeded. ‘I was setting in the adjacent house with Tomio for an hour, all which time it lasted and was not finishd when I went away, tho very near. This was one side only of her buttocks for the other had been done some time before. The arches upon the loins upon which they value themselves much were not yet done, the doing of which they told caused more pain than what I had seen.’
Finally he could stand it no more, and went back alone to Fort Venus. He was clearly both disturbed and fascinated by the whole procedure, though he gives little away about his deeper feelings-whether he was repulsed or shocked, or even sexually excited. He later wrote: ‘For this Custom they give no reason, but that they were taught it by their forefathers…So essential is it esteemed to Beauty, and so disgraceful is the want of it esteemed, that every one submits to it.’51
On 3 July Banks made one last expedition into the interior, this time accompanied only by the surgeon Monkhouse. His choice of companion seems to have been deliberate. They pursued a river line up into the mountains, pressing on as far as they could go, painfully clambering up the riverbed, sweating and stumbling, searching for plants and minerals. On the way Banks concluded rightly that Tahiti must be volcanic in origin, ‘a volcano which now no longer burns’; which also explained the fact that the Tahitian god was known as ‘the Father of Earthquakes’.
Twelve miles inland, further than any previous expedition had ever penetrated, they were brought to an abrupt halt by an enormous and beautiful waterfall, surrounded by ‘truly dreadful’ cliffs more than a hundred feet high. Beneath it lay ‘a pool so deep that the Indians said we could not go beyond it’. Here, in this enchanted but faintly menacing place, the secret heart of the Tahitian island, it seems the two men bathed and talked together, until European rivalries were happily forgotten.52
6
After a stay of three months, the British expedition