Discoveries by Nicholas Thomas

Author:Nicholas Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141988177
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

27. Ngatu, decorated barkcloth, Tonga.

Material acquisitions were more considerable. Once Cook judged sufficient food had been obtained, he relaxed the rule against trading for curiosities, at which point, it appears, officers, naturalists and common seamen alike were carried away in a sort of orgy of collecting. Cook, who makes no mention of seeking or obtaining anything himself, observed that ‘it was astonishing to see with what eagerness every one catched at every thing they saw’. The indiscriminate enthusiasm appeared ridiculous to the Tongans, who parodied the mariners, ‘offering pieces of sticks stones and what not to exchange, one waggish Boy took a piece of human excrement on the end of a stick and hild it out to every one of our people he met with’.

Cook here sides with the Tongans in finding his crew’s passion for curiosities so avid as to be ludicrous, but does not mention that the shells, natural specimens, ornaments and weapons brought back from his first voyage had quickly acquired a market among antiquarians and dilettantes. Such objects were also regarded as appropriate gifts to superiors and patrons in the naval hierarchy. Cook himself gave Sandwich a set of pieces from Tahiti, New Zealand and elsewhere; and other officers no doubt also presented their unusual souvenirs strategically. The enthusiasm thus had a rational basis – a basket, mat, club or spear had exchange as well as curiosity value – but it nevertheless seems here to have outrun any profit motive, to have had a crazy and obsessive quality. Collecting was, perhaps, a common seaman’s way of making the voyage his own, not through maps or discourses, but through assembling a set of odd and interesting things that he could personally discover, delight in and control. To collect was to prise the business of exploration out of its official order. It was to privatize it. It is perhaps no wonder that Cook resented this.

The ships spent less than a week at these two islands. Yet Cook’s tendency to write more reflectively about the peoples he encountered was again manifest in a description of Tongan products, persons and practices of some 3,500 words, which he appended to his journal entries from here. He noticed similarities with Tahitian customs that he discussed with Mahine, for whom he had increasing regard. Although Cook failed to recognize that the workings of rank and chieftainship in Tonga were quite different to the Tahitian system, his report of less abstract matters was precise, so far as it went. Knowing the pain that tattooing on any part of the body produced, he must have been astonished to learn that the men were marked not only on their thighs and hips but on ‘their gentiles’. He was more positively impressed by the size and workmanship of Tongan canoes, which Hodges evoked in a beautiful watercolour. Cook had long been aware that the peoples of the South Sea were related, and had at some time migrated from island to island, but seeing these great double canoes,

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