Although he is generally referred to as a “priest,” a better term, as Banks suggested, might be “Man of Knowledge.” The Tahitian word is tahu‘a (tohunga in Māori, kahuna in Hawaiian), and its core meaning is something like “an adept,” that is, a master, expert, or authority. The idea can be narrowly associated with a particular craft or specialization, like canoe building or oratory, but when used in a general sense it implies a remarkable constellation of different types of knowledge. A man like Tupaia might be responsible for maintaining not only the history and genealogy of the ruling family to which he was attached, including their sacred rituals and rites, but all the esoteric knowledge of the people in general—“the names and ranks of the different . . . divinities, the origin of the universe and all its parts,” as well as the “Practise of Physick and the knowledge of Navigation and Astronomy.” His fields, if one can refer to them as such, included cosmology, politics, history, medicine, geography, astronomy, meteorology, and navigation, all of which, in a world with no clear division between natural and supernatural, were inextricably entangled with religion. But Tupaia was not just a repository of information; he clearly had a deep and inquiring mind. The anthropologist Nicholas Thomas describes him as an “indigenous intellectual with experimental inclinations”—a phrase that seems to capture something of both the man and the age in which he lived.
WALLIS’S FIVE-WEEK SOJOURN in Tahiti had been long by comparison with those of other European explorers, but Cook’s was of another order altogether. The Endeavour remained in the Society Islands for a full four months, arriving in April, in good time to observe June’s transit of Venus, and not leaving until the beginning of August. This meant that there was ample time for the visitors to learn about Tahitian ways, and Banks, with no official duties, was at leisure to explore. In the end, he compiled a substantial account of Tahitian manners and customs, based both on what he himself had observed and what Tupaia and others told him. As with much ethnography, it is heavily weighted in favor of the observable—how to make fishing nets and breadfruit paste, the distribution of houses, procedures for tattooing, varieties of tools, weapons, and musical instruments, the dimensions of various structures, and so on.
Many of Banks’s observations are fascinating for their novelty, like his claims that “a S[outh]-Sea dog was next to an English lamb” in tenderness and flavor, that Tahitians bathed three times a day, and that both men and women plucked “every hair from under their armpits” and looked upon it “as a great mark of uncleanliness in us that we did not do the same.” He observed that while Tahitians were often ribald in gesture and conversation—one of the most popular entertainments for young girls was a dance that mimicked copulation—they observed the strictest of food taboos, expressing “much disgust” when told that in England men and women ate together and shared the same food. But he also made a number of valuable technical observations, including remarks on the size, shape, and seaworthiness of different types of canoes.
Banks described both the regular va‘a—a single-hulled canoe with an outrigger, used for fishing and shorter trips—and the larger pahi, a double-hulled vessel with V-shaped hulls, a large platform, and one or two masts, which was used both for fighting and long voyages. Pahi, wrote Banks, ranged in length from thirty to sixty feet, but the midsize ones were said to be the best and least prone to accidents in stormy weather. “In these,” he adds, “if we may credit the reports of the inhabitants[,] they make very long voyages, often remaining out from home several months, visiting in that time many different Islands of which they repeated to us the names of near a hundred.”
Much of this information came from Tupaia, who gave lists of islands to both Cook and the Endeavour’s master, Robert Molyneux, along with information about whether the islands were high or low, whether they were inhabited and, if so, by whom, whether they had reefs or harbors, and how many days’ sail they were from Tahiti. As evidence of Tahitian geographic knowledge, these lists are unparalleled—no other European in the first two-hundred-odd years obtained anything of the kind—but they are not without complications. To begin with, there is no single authoritative version: Cook’s list contains seventy-two island names, Molyneux’s fifty-five, and the two lists share thirty-nine names between them. Cook reported that Tupaia had at one time given him an account of nearly one hundred thirty names and that he had collected some seventy-odd from other sources, but that all of these accounts differed in both the number of islands and their names.
Then there is the problem of transcription. Both Cook and Molyneux wrote the names phonetically, but English is a terrible language in which to try to represent sounds—think of the number of sounds represented by the letters ough—uff, oh, ow, oo, and so on. The result of Cook’s and Molyneux’s efforts is a list of words that is quite mystifying at first glance. The name Fenua Ura, for example, appears as “Whennuaouda”; the island of Tikehau is rendered as “Teeoheow”; the island of Rangiroa as “Oryroa.” The British also frequently made the mistake of attaching the grammatical prefix “O” to the beginnings of proper nouns. Thus, “O Tahiti,” meaning something like “the Tahiti” or “this is Tahiti,” was heard as “Otaheite,” Cook’s standard name for the island. A third complication arises from the fact that Tahitian is short on audible consonants; a name like Kaukura might be rendered in some dialects as “‘Au‘ura,” where the k’s have been replaced by glottal stops and then written down by an eighteenth-century Englishman as “Ooura.” One of the islands on Cook’s list is actually spelled “Ooouow.”
Some of the islands on these lists might not even be specific locations. They might be islands with no cartographic equivalent—“non-geographic” or “ghost” islands, mythological locations, or names taken from stories of ancestor gods. Some of the names begin with a prefix meaning “border” or “horizon,” while others include terms meaning “leaning inward” or “leaning away,” suggesting that perhaps these are concepts or ideas rather than actual locations. Still others may belong to an earlier era, for even within the historical period the names of many Polynesian islands have changed.
But even when you set aside all of the islands on the list that, for one reason or another, cannot be identified, quite a number remain. Fifty of the names on these lists can be correlated with islands that we can identify today. The implication is striking: Tupaia and his fellow Tahitians appear to have had knowledge of islands stretching east–west from the Marquesas to Samoa, a distance of more than two thousand miles, and south some five hundred miles to the Australs. Tupaia did not claim to have visited all of the islands whose names he knew; he told Cook that he himself had firsthand knowledge of only twelve. But he had second- or thirdhand knowledge of several more; he spoke at one point of islands that were visited by his father. The rest may have been islands that no one in living memory had seen but that were known to have been visited at some point in the past. They may, in other words, have belonged to a body of geographical knowledge that was handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation.
Cook’s reaction to Tupaia’s list of islands was composed, in almost equal parts, of admiration and skepticism, and here it helps to know a little something about Cook. In the years before he was picked for the Endeavour command, he had been engaged in a detailed survey of the coast of Newfoundland. This was one of Cook’s areas of expertise; his biographer, J. C. Beaglehole, wrote that “nothing he ever did later exceeded in accomplishment” his surveys of the Canadian coast, which is saying something, given his achievements. And so, when Cook looked at the Pacific, it was not, as Keats would later have it, with “a wild surmise,” but with the eyes of a surveyor. Everywhere he went, he examined