they abound.”16
Here is Menzies’s version of the same passage: “The trade wind freshening again at night enabled us to pass the west end of Molokai, which, like Lana‘i, presents a naked, dreary barren waste without either habitation or cultivation; its only covering is a kind of thin withered grass, which, in many parts, is scarcely sufficient to hide its surface apparently composed of dry rocky and sandy soil.”17
Molokai was attractive neither to trade nor navigation nor to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Euro-American Romantic aesthetic sensibility. The missionary Charles Stewart, passing the island en route from major ports in Honolulu, Maui, and Hawai‘i, was typical in writing: “The islands of Lana‘i, Molokai, and Kahulawe . . . at the distance of fifteen or twenty miles, are as dreary as the gloomiest imagination could paint them. Almost constantly enveloped in lowering clouds, they are as emphatically the dark mountains of the natural, as they are figuratively those of the intellectual and spiritual world. We here look in vain for those beauties in nature with which we once feasted our admiration to enthusiasm; for Objects we find none, Except before us stretched the toiling main, And rocks and wilds in savage view behind.”18
Molokai, close at hand but far away, familiar yet inaccessible, remained comparatively isolated and insulated from the changes brought by foreign vessels, at least for a time.
TRADE AND BIOLOGICAL EXCHANGE IN THE PACIFIC
It has been said that when Captain Cook stepped ashore at Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island in December 1778, greeted by hundreds of Hawaiian chiefs, warriors, and priests, it was not simply another collision between the Stone Age and modern, industrializing Europe but an encounter, from a certain point of view, between two remarkably similar societies. The ships of the Royal Navy, each miniature models of the British class system, strict rank hierarchies buttressed by caste and run with autocratic discipline, found their counterparts in the Hawaiian chiefdom as baroquely stratified and authoritarian as any in the Pacific. “At Kealakekua,” Patrick Kirch wrote, “one chiefdom met another, recognizing in the other the essential structures of hierarchy and power.”19 The participants may also have recognized another point of similarity—that theirs was an encounter between two of the greatest seaborne colonizing societies in history. As Crosby and others have shown, Europe’s “portmanteau biota” was as critical to its expansion as the Polynesians’ was to their own colonization of the Pacific Islands. Cattle, white clover, wheat, weeds, and diseases underwrote the efforts of the British and others to colonize most of the world and, in temperate climes, to create “neo-Europes,” full-dress biological recreations of the home landscapes. Whereas in the Atlantic in previous centuries ecological imperialism had been a subordinate part of the project of implanting European colonists or garrisons, in the Pacific from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, imperialism’s strategy aimed primarily at implanting not populations but preferential, advantageous relations and trade flows between mobile agents of the European metropole and native groups in situ.20 Biological traffic was both a means and an end to this effort, and the transfer of organisms was quickly organized and systematized to provide fuel for an intricate globalization machine.
Cook has been called the “avatar” of the “Second” British Empire: an imperialism reconfigured after the loss of the American colonies and the atrophying of the mercantile system and no longer interested in territorial jurisdiction or conquering native peoples but in spreading a newly articulated, more humane form of control, whether by direct or indirect sovereignty, manifested through trade and diplomatic relations.21 “We prefer trade to dominion,” asserted one British official in 1782. The British-French wars of 1790–1815 left the imperial project tired, spent, and distracted; its limited resources available outside the North Atlantic theater were deployed to search for “footholds” and way stations and a supply archipelago to support the Royal Navy, advancing trade and scientific exploration. On his Pacific cruise to attack Spanish shipping from 1740 to 1744, George Anson attempted to establish a South American base—a “halfway house” like the Dutch had at the Cape of Good Hope.22 The voyages of Byron in 1764–1766, Wallis in 1766–1768, and Cook’s three voyages from 1768 to1779 marked, in addition, a renewed search for the Northwest Passage, a British dream dating from the Tudor era, and the supposed terra australis, or southern continent. In all of these efforts, the figure of the scientist-naval officer was central, commanding small expeditions with explicit instructions to cultivate ties and trade relations with the natives and to pursue biological exchange: to seed and stock the (is)lands found along the way and to bring back potentially useful seeds to the empire.23
Cook’s orders on the first trip had been to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti and to catalog what he saw along the way. On the third voyage, he had, in addition, secret instructions to find “a North East, or North West Passage, from the Pacific Ocean into the Atlantic Ocean” and to “carefully to observe the nature of the Soil & the Produce thereof; the Animals & Fowls that inhabit or frequent it” and “to bring home Specimens of . . . the Seeds of such Trees, Shrubs, Plants, Fruits, and Grains, peculiar to those Places, as you may be able to collect.” No secret was his duty to leave specimens from his own country behind: when the Resolution left London in June 1776, it “was a floating barnyard” loaded with “cattle, horses, sheep, goats, hogs, and poultry for New Zealand, Tahiti, and Tonga” and a Tahitian named Omai, returning with Cook from a celebrated sojourn in England after the second voyage. At Huahine, Cook had a garden planted for Omai; he had previously planted a garden in Tahiti in 1769, as Wallis had planted citrus trees there in 1767. At Ni‘ihau in 1777, Cook contributed to the Hawaiian biota English pigs and goats and melon, pumpkin, and onion seeds.24
The historian David Mackay remarked that “planting a garden in Tahiti was the botanical equivalent of taking coals to Newcastle.” Others, such as Gannanath Obeyesekere, have interpreted it as an expression of the European imperialist “improvement narrative,” wherein Cook the Civilizer introduces order into the untended wilderness “to domesticate a savage land,” rendering his imperialist mission “morally persuasive.”25 It was more likely simply pragmatic. In the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, few transoceanic voyages left port without a menagerie on deck—supplies both to consume and, where practicable, with which to stock passing shores as an investment in future voyages. The French explorer La Perouse landed goats on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and planted seeds on his march into its interior—and commented accurately in his journal that the natives had “foolishly cut down” the island’s trees “ages ago,” causing desertification.26 Even American traders did it, at their own expense, considering it a wise investment in the success of future voyages and good baksheesh to grease trade with native rulers. John Meares wrote of a voyage from Canton in 1788: “A certain number of cattle and other useful animals were purchased, for the purpose of being put on shore in those places where they might add to the comfort of the inhabitants or promise to supply the future navigators of our own, or any other country, with the necessary refreshments. On board of each ship were embarked six cows and three bulls, four bull and cow calves, a number of goats, turkeys and rabbits, with several pair of pigeons, and other stock in great abundance.”27 To various Hawaiian chiefs, Vancouver gave out “some vine and orange plants, some almonds, and an assortment of garden seeds” as well as goats, sheep, and a pair of cattle, one pregnant, for Kamehameha in 1790.28 In 1803, William Shaler and Richard Cleveland brought four horses from Mexican California to Hawai‘i as presents for Kamehameha (the king bought their ship, the Lelia Byrd, as the flagship of an armada to invade Kaua‘i). American whaler captains, generally unconcerned with moral persuasion, left livestock on even the smallest rocks, such as the Bonins south of Japan.29
By the 1780s, Sir Joseph Banks, veteran of Cook’s first voyage and director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, had launched a global scheme for rebuilding the mercantile system with an “unabashedly economic” program of “plant transfer” to bring production of raw materials inside the British Empire. “Botany and great power rivalry became curiously intertwined, as nations endeavoured
