Sea People. Christina Thompson

At the same time, it was clear to him that Tupaia knew “more of the Geography of the Islands situated in these seas . . . then any one we had met.”

      Tupaia, for his part, also appears to have taken an interest in the ways in which these strangers conceived and represented the physical world. A striking example of this, which has only fairly recently come to light, is a series of watercolors depicting various subjects in Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia. For two centuries it was assumed that these sketches had been painted by Joseph Banks, since they were found among his papers. But in 1997, a letter surfaced in which Banks made it clear that “Tupia the Indian who came with me from Otaheite” was the artist. This information was oddly startling; seeing the work of Tupaia’s own hand brings him close in a way that secondhand accounts of his actions have never been able to do. But the watercolors are also interesting from an anthropological perspective. Polynesia is famous for its decorative arts, but there was no naturalistic tradition of illustration in the islands. Tupaia’s paintings, while stylistically naive, are closely observed and seem to confirm what was so often said about him: that he was a man of boundless curiosity and a natural experimenter.

      Nothing proves this point so conclusively, though, as the fact that when Cook decided it was time for the British to leave Tahiti, Tupaia announced that he would like to go with them. He was not the first Polynesian to sail away on a British ship; a Tahitian named Ahutoru had joined the French expedition under Bougainville and was, at that very moment, being feted in France. And there would be others—both of Cook’s ships on his second voyage carried Tahitian passengers part of the way, and on his third voyage he gave passage to a pair of Māori boys. But the insouciance with which Polynesians, including Tupaia, sailed away from their islands in the eighteenth century is quite stunning. No doubt it seems more so to us than it did to them—they were seagoing people, and the idea of sailing off to a new place may not have struck them as exceptionally adventurous. In truth, though, it was hideously dangerous—especially for them. Of the first three Tahitians to join European expeditions, only one returned. Beyond the rigors of the voyages themselves, which could last years and which exposed the islanders to a whole range of unfamiliar hardships, including extreme cold, unfamiliar and often undigestible food, loneliness, and social isolation, there was the very real danger of contact with diseases to which they had no immunity.

      One wonders whether they understood how far they were going, how long it would take, what kinds of risks they were running. It is hard to see how they could have, and yet they certainly knew they were going farther than they had ever been, to places that until recently they had never heard of, with people they had only just met. This speaks to the daring of men like Tupaia, but it also says something about the cultures of Polynesia. Within a very few decades, Polynesians of all stripes would be crisscrossing the ocean—Tahitians, Marquesans, Hawaiians, Māori—signing on as deckhands on ships out of Sydney, San Francisco, Nantucket, Honolulu. Described by one European traveler as “cosmopolites by natural feeling,” with “a disposition for enterprise and bold adventure,” they quickly became ubiquitous in sea stories of the nineteenth century. One has only to think of Richard Henry Dana’s Hawaiians camped out on the California coast, or Melville’s Queequeg the harpooner.

      Cook was not, at first, very interested in the idea of taking on a passenger. He had no need of extra hands, and he worried about what would happen when they got back to England. He himself was not a man of means, and he did not think the government would thank him for bringing back someone it would be obliged to support. Banks, however, had other ideas. “Thank heaven,” he wrote, “I have a sufficiency and I do not know why I may not keep him . . . the amusement I shall have in his future conversation, and the benefit he will be of to this ship . . . will I think fully repay me.” With this aspect of the problem solved, Cook relented, acknowledging that, of all the Tahitians they had met, Tupaia “was the likeliest person to answer our purpose.”

      That purpose was to lay down as much geography as possible, and the first order of business after leaving Tahiti was a survey of the “islands under the wind,” the Leeward Society Islands. This was Tupaia’s home territory; originally from Ra‘iatea, he had been forced to flee when his island was overrun by warriors from neighboring Bora Bora. On the voyage there, Tupaia proved himself an excellent navigator, each of the islands appearing precisely when and where he said it would. He further impressed Cook when, on their arrival at Huahine, he instructed a man to dive down and measure the Endeavour’s keel to make sure it would clear the passage into the lagoon. He was useful in all kinds of ways: piloting the ship, mediating with the chiefs, instructing the British on how to behave. There is a suggestion that he may have had his own motives, that perhaps he was hoping Cook would help him exact vengeance on the Bora Borans who were still in control of his ancestral lands. But Cook would not be drawn into local politics. He had other objects in mind, and on the tenth of August, under cloudy skies, he bade adieu to the Society Islands and, as Banks put it with characteristic brio, “Launchd out into the Ocean in search of what chance and Tupia might direct us to.”