to be delicious. ‘A most excellent dish he made for us who were not much prejudiced against any species of food. I cannot however promise that an European dog would eat as well, as these scarce in their lives touch animal food, Cocoa nut kernel, Bread fruit, yams &c, being what their masters can best afford to give them and what indeed from custom I suppose they preferr to any kind of food.’
Banks was also more at odds than previously with his naval companions, and there was some kind of quarrel with the insensitive surgeon Monkhouse. Banks tactfully omitted this from his journal, but young Sydney Parkinson recorded a confrontation between the two, and thought it arose over Monkhouse propositioning Otheothea. Several of Oborea’s Tahitian girls had arrived at Banks’s tent ‘very earnest in getting themselves husbands’. They behaved ‘very agreeable until bedtime, and determined to lie in Mr Banks’s tent, which they accordingly did, till the Surgeon having some words with one of them…he insisted she should not sleep there, and thrust her out’. Otheothea was then heard crying for some time in the tent. Parkinson noted dramatically: ‘Mr Monkhouse and Mr Banks came to an eclaircisement some time after; had very high words and I expected they would have decided it by a duel, which, however, they prudently avoided.’ Oborea and her retinue then left in their canoes, and would not return to the camp. ‘But Mr Banks went and staid with them all night.’46
It was probably no coincidence that Cook now decided that he would take his botanist off on a separate expedition. This was planned as a circumnavigation of the entire island in the Endeavour’s small sailing boat. Its official naval objective was to chart all possible harbours, and discover any signs of previous European landings-notably French or (as it was supposed) Spanish. For Banks, however, it was a glorious scientific field expedition, and a tantalising extension of his new anthropological investigations.
Starting at Matavi Bay in the north of the island, the circumnavigation took six days. They set out with a small crew and a handful of marines at 3 a.m. on 26 June, heading eastwards. There was considerable uncertainty about their reception once they passed beyond the territory of Matavi Bay, where Oborea and Dootah had influence. One of their guides said that ‘people not subject to Dootah’ would kill them. Accordingly they adopted a cautious mode of advance. Banks and Cook travelled mostly on foot along the shoreline, while the pinnace, its marines armed with loaded muskets, was rowed just offshore, keeping pace and overseeing their progress. A number of native canoes followed them.
‘Banks as usual explored, botanized, conversed,’ noted Cook with a smile.47 Indeed he was soon plunging inland and out of sight, claiming to be in search of specimens, waving a large butterfly net as his preferred weapon of defence. Banks thought nothing of foraging by himself ashore, once disappearing at dusk to hunt for provisions. He shot a duck and two curlews, then pressed on deeper inland. ‘I went into the woods, it was quite dark so that neither people nor victuals could I find except one house where I was furnishd with fire, a breadfruit and a half, and a few ahees [nuts].’ That night he slept under the awning of a native canoe.
Some discoveries were reassuring. In one village they found an English goose and a turkey cock which had been left behind by the Dolphin’s crew two years previously. ‘Both of them immensely fat and as tame as possible, following the Indians every where who seemed immensely fond of them.’ Other sights were less so. In a longhouse in this neighbourhood Banks spotted a rather ominous wall decoration. Proudly mounted on a semi-circular board at the end of the hut were a collection of human bones. Banks carefully inspected them-they were all under-jaw bones-no less than fifteen in all: ‘They appeard quite fresh, not one at all damaged even 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
