“A View taken in the bay of Oaite Peha [Vaitepiha] Otaheite [Tahiti]” by William Hodges, 1776.
NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH, LONDON. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
BETWEEN MENDAÑA’S VOYAGE of 1595 and the midpoint of the eighteenth century, there were just five European expeditions that intersected in any significant way with the Polynesian world. But beginning in 1764, the number and intensity of these “visitations” increased dramatically, with ships coming thick and fast from England, France, Spain, and Russia—so many that there were sometimes two or three expeditions in the Pacific at one time—and encounters that lasted not days but weeks and months.
The reasons for this were many, but one important factor was the conclusion, in 1763, of the Seven Years’ War, a messy international conflict involving all the great European powers and several colonies, from which Britain emerged as a dominant power with the world’s most formidable navy. No longer tied up fighting its enemies, the British crown quickly set out to secure new territories and new routes, dispatching Commodore John Byron in 1764 on the first of a series of expeditions to the Pacific. Byron sailed in His Majesty’s Ship Dolphin, and when he returned in 1766, the Dolphin was immediately sent out again under the command of Captain Samuel Wallis. When Wallis returned in 1768, a third expedition was on the verge of departure. The aim of the first two voyages was largely strategic: Byron was to stake a claim to the Falkland Islands, examine the coast of New Albion (California), and look for a Northwest Passage; Wallis was to search for a continent between New Zealand and Cape Horn. But the goal of the third voyage was explicitly scientific: to carry a crew of scientists to a location from which they would be able to observe a celestial event known as the transit of Venus.
A transit of Venus occurs when the planet Venus passes between the earth and the sun. It was of interest to eighteenth-century astronomers because accurate measurements of the event’s duration could be used to calculate the size of the solar system, thereby answering one of the burning astronomical questions of the age. Unfortunately, the transit of Venus occurs only infrequently: twice in a period of eight years and then not again for a century or more. It was observed for the first time in 1639 (having passed unnoticed in 1631) and did not occur again in the seventeenth century. Late-eighteenth-century astronomers knew they would have two bites at the cherry—one in 1761 and another in 1769—after which their chances would be over, since it would not come again until 1874. A major international effort to document the transit of 1761 had produced disappointing results, and in the years leading up to 1769, members of the international scientific community, including Britain’s Royal Society, mounted a major campaign to ensure that the last opportunity of their lifetimes would not be lost.
An important consideration in all of this is where on the earth the transit can be seen, since it is fully visible only from those places that are in daylight for the duration of the event. In 1761, this had included most of the Eurasian continent, but in 1769 the ideal place from which to observe it was, most inconveniently, the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The only suitable islands known to fall within the “cone of visibility” were, on the eastern end, the Marquesas, last seen in 1595 and none too securely charted, and, in the west, the islands of Tonga, last visited by Abel Tasman in 1642. Between these, so far as anyone knew, there were only low coral atolls with terrible reefs and not a single safe harbor, and no reliable sources of food or water. Still, the Royal Society was committed, and plans were drawn up for an expedition with a final destination to be determined.
The man chosen to lead this expedition was a little-known lieutenant with a solid if undistinguished naval career and a reputation for being extremely good at survey work. At forty years of age, James Cook was not young, nor was he a man of rank or birth. He was tall, strong-featured, intelligent, disciplined, and extremely hardworking. Though largely self-taught, he was known as a talented mathematician and admired for his astronomical work, including an observation of a solar eclipse made while he was surveying the coast of Newfoundland. The voyage for which he had been selected was also somewhat out of the ordinary for a Royal Naval expedition. With only one ship (and a small one at that) and a very great distance to be covered, across a vast and largely uncharted sea, there was potential for glory but also significant risk.
The commander appointed, a suitable vessel was selected and rechristened the H.M.S. Endeavour, and a complement of sailors, scientists, and supernumeraries were named. These included the lively and observant young gentleman Joseph Banks—“one of the spoilt children of fortune,” as his biographer affectionately dubs him—who traveled as a passenger at his own expense, with an entourage consisting of two artists, a secretary, four servants, and a pair of dogs. But with just two and a half months to go before the Endeavour’s departure, the expedition still had no clear destination. And then, out of the salt-stained blue, the Dolphin returned, bringing news of an unexpected discovery.
THE DOLPHIN HAD been sent out under the command of Captain Wallis to scour the southern reaches of the Pacific Ocean. Wallis’s instructions directed him to sail west from Cape Horn for 100 to 120 degrees of longitude (some four to five thousand miles), a course that, had he been able to maintain it, would have brought him all the way to New Zealand. This was plainly impossible, given the strength and direction of the prevailing winds. Emerging into the Pacific from the Strait of Magellan, he was pushed north even as he tried to sail west, and his first sight of anything at all was in the Tuamotus. There was nothing surprising about this—a landfall in the Tuamotu Archipelago was by now to be expected. But Wallis’s path intersected the island chain at a point somewhat south of the routes taken by his predecessors, and this put him on the path to one of the most significant landfalls of the eighteenth century: “The island of Tahiti, famous name, the heart of Polynesia.”
Tahiti is the largest of a group of high islands known collectively as the Society Islands. They are located in the very center of the Polynesian Triangle and consist of two clusters: a windward group, which includes Tahiti and Mo‘orea, and a leeward group, which includes Ra‘iatea and Bora Bora. While not objectively large, they are large for islands in this part of the sea; Tahiti itself, though less than forty miles long, is the largest landmass for a thousand miles in any direction. To the modern eye, the Society Islands are perhaps the most striking omission on early maps of the Pacific—the islands it is hardest to believe no one had yet found. In fact, Magellan, Mendaña, Quirós, Schouten and Le Maire, and Byron had all sailed right past them, sometimes at a distance of less than a hundred miles. Roggeveen even caught sight of the peaks of Bora Bora, assumed it was an island discovered by someone else, and inexplicably sailed on.
From the European point of view, the discovery of Tahiti was a dramatic and fortuitous event. Not only had Wallis located an island that was right in the center of the cone of visibility for the 1769 transit of Venus, it was the island of a navigator’s dreams. Tahiti is mountainous, like the Marquesas, but, with its habitable coastline, fringing reef, and long stretches of crystalline blue lagoon, its topography is considerably more congenial. Its location, about 2,500 miles due south of Hawai‘i, is also meteorologically ideal: not too hot, not too dry, not too wet, not overly subject to hurricanes or typhoons. To the modern visitor it is delightful; to the eighteenth-century voyager it was a paradise on earth.
But, of course, such an island was bound to be inhabited, as indeed it was. When the crew of the Dolphin first sighted Tahiti, it appeared to them as a great cloud-covered mountain rising out of the sea. It was still many miles away at that point and, as evening was coming on, Wallis decided to put