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The Life of Captain James Cook

XIV — The First Island Sweep

page 331

XIV
The First Island Sweep

Furneaux came on board. His report interested Cook. When the ships parted cómpany on 8 February he had done his best to carry out his instructions, but he could not regain position, and after waiting around three full days decided to bear away for the rendezvous in New Zealand. Although, as we can see from his log, he was anxious to make a landfall as soon as possible, he pursued the sensible course Cook thought he would. He knew that Cook had the Van Diemen's Land problem in his mind, he knew what course Tasman had sailed across the southern Indian Ocean, he had a fair idea what course Cook was intending to sail, and he therefore sailed roughly midway between them. In this way, though it would be possible to miss islands, the possibility of any large piece of land escaping notice could hardly arise. At the beginning of March, when his longitude was about 106° E, he began to decrease his latitude significantly in the direction of Van Diemen's Land. He had favouring winds though poor weather; no very remarkable events on board apart from signs of madness shown by his lieutenant of marines, and one mistaken cry of land just before he made north; and on 9 March did unmistakably see land—in modern terms, that around the South West Cape of Tasmania. He was not the first man on that coast since Tasman. Marion du Fresne had been there the year before; but Marion was not interested in the geography of the country, only in repairs to his ships and fresh water. The south coast was inviting to neither man. Furneaux, after getting a boat's crew, ashore briefly at Louisa Bay, on the 11th anchored in a likeable spot further east that he called Adventure Bay, on the east side of Bruny island—which he mistook for the Tasman peninsula.1 There was what he most needed, good water; the hillsides were thickly covered with eucalypts. He found few animated things, but he was no

1 Furneaux, by beginning to identify from too far west the features Tasman had named—he thought, or was persuaded by Cook that his South West Cape was Tasman's South Cape—got them all wrong. He thought that the wide entrance to D'Entrecasteaux Channel was Tasman's Storm Bay. This latter however, was his own Adventure Bay.

page 332 naturalist; there were many signs of the native people, primitive huts, heaped mussel and scallop shells, fire-places, inland smoke, some large fires; none appeared, however, and having in four days got all the wood and water he needed, he left, intending to coast northwards till he came to Cook's landfall in New Holland and see if the two countries were joined. The weather was squally, there were islands and breakers closer in; Furneaux thought the coast generally dangerous. On 18 March, in latitude 40°50', he was off a break in the land which he concluded, with little encouraging evidence, to be a deep bay, though his officers took it for a strait. On the morning of the 19th, in about 39° S, Bass Strait lay open before him. He had some shoal water. ‘I should have stood further to the Northward’, he writes, ‘but the wind blowing strong at Sse and looking likely to haul round to the Eastward, which would have blown right on the land, I therefore thought it more prudent to leave the Coast and steer for New Zealand.’ And the geographical query?—‘it is my opinion that there is no Streights between New Holland and Van Dieman's Land, but a very deep bay.’1 All his company, we learn from one of them, were looking forward to winter quarters, ‘Spending a few Months in Ease & Quietness’.2 The passage of the Tasman Sea threw up one storm. Early on 7 April the Adventure was moored in Ship Cove, and Furneaux celebrated by serving out an extra half-allowance of brandy.
Cook studied Furneaux's journal, possibly cross-examined him on it, and made his own analysis. Furneaux's consistent westerly winds were in contrast with the prevalent easterlies south of 58° or 60°: the southern oceanic wind system was obviously different from the simple pattern he had had in his mind at the outset of the voyage. He does not seem to have seen the journals of any of Furneaux's officers, or he might have hesitated longer over accepting Furneaux's verdict on the main point. A ‘deep bay’ and a ‘very deep bay’? Curiously enough, those officers did not argue for a strait in the position of Bass Strait proper—the ‘very deep bay’—or even raise its possibility. The ‘deep bay’ they took for a strait, however, was indeed a strait, Banks Strait, which communicates with Bass Strait between Tasmania and the Furneaux islands; and Bass Strait opens widely to the north of the Furneaux islands. Furneaux ‘supposes’ (perhaps under cross-examination) ‘that there is a Strait or Passage behind’ these islands; but neither he nor Cook supposes the possibility

1 Furneaux's Narrative, B.M. Add. Ms 27890, printed in Journals II, 736.

2 Journals II, 153, n. 4: ‘Every one being of Hopes to meet with our Concort, and Spending a Few Months in Ease & Quietness, After Beatg the Seas For 4 Months without Intermission.’—Midshipman Wilby.

page 333 of this strait or passage joining a larger strait or passage. Cook considers the land seen and the distance estimated by Furneaux on 19 March: ‘it is therefore highly probable that the whole is one continued land and that Van Diemen's Land is a part of New Holland, the Similarity of the Countrys, Soil Produce Inhabitents &ca all serve to increase the probability.’1 Admittedly Furneaux had seen none of the inhabitants. One is left with the impression that Cook, who had himself turned Zeehanes bocht, another deep bay, into Cook's Strait, was persuading himself hard to agree with Furneaux, and that the man who had clung on through storm to the northern end of New Zealand and negotiated the shoals of New Holland would not have retired from Van Diemen's Land without proof one way or the other. We may remember also that Cook's own journal was a report to the Admiralty, and that all his journals indicate that he disliked acquainting his masters with a defect he might perceive in his subordinates.
He now formulated his plan for the immediate future. This entailed some disturbance of the expectation entertained by his second in command. Furneaux, like any orthodox naval captain, regarded the winter months as a time for winter quarters, for ‘ease and quietness’, and had stripped his ship and settled down accordingly. The first two or three weeks he divided between Ship Cove, in the usual work about the vessel, and the island Motuara, where he put up tents, moved his sick (he had some bad cases of scurvy), and planted vegetable gardens. On the rocky islet at its end Bayly had his observatory. The New Zealanders came daily both to ship and shore, trading freely their fish, and almost anything they had, for nails and old bottles and whatever else they could get: they would certainly not part with the freshly severed head they had in one of their canoes. They enquired about Tupaia. With some notable exceptions they were, thought Burney, ‘Thieves and cursed lousy’. Towards the end of April Furneaux transferred the tents to Ship Cove, close to the watering place, and moored the ship closer in shore. Here it was that two severe shocks of an earthquake were felt, followed a week later by the possibly worse shock of Cook's arrival—though for the moment, after a separation of fourteen weeks, and a little despair of ever seeing the Resolution again, there was on both sides ‘an uncommon joy’. Cook immediately had his men out, and went himself, to look for wild celery and scurvy grass; and, if his orders were obeyed, there was a radical revision of the Adventure's diet. It is not clear that they were obeyed with a literal adherence

1 ibid., 165.

page 334
Islands of the South Paćific

Islands of the South Paćific

page 335 Sadly enough, it was two members of the Resolution's company that proved unequal to the land. These were a ram and a ewe, last of the sheep that Cook had brought from the Cape. At Dusky Sound they had tottered off the ship almost dead of scurvy; now, with herbage abundant, they survived a bare three days—the reason being ‘some poisonous plant’, thought Cook; ‘thus all my fine hopes of stocking this Country with a breed of Sheep were blasted in a moment.’1
The shock of Cook's arrival arose from his announcement that there was to be no more ease and quietness, that winter quarters were over. Since Furneaux had ‘in a great degree’ cleared up the Van Diemen's Land question he would not go there himself; but he would not—to use his own uncompromising language—idle away the whole winter in port, he would explore the unknown parts of the sea to the east and north. This he ‘proposed’ to Furneaux; to this proposition Furneaux ‘readily agreed’; really there was nothing else he could do, in the face of this overwhelming commander, and accordingly began to get his sloop ready for sea again, as he was ‘disired’, as quickly as possible. In the meantime Cook wasted few moments. He inspected the vegetable gardens, and encouraged the native people to look after them, cleared more ground on Motuara and planted wheat and peas, carrots, parsnips and strawberries; released a pair of goats, hoping, as Furneaux had already put a boar and sow on shore, that in time goats and hogs, even if not sheep would populate the country (he trusted too much in the fear that he thought the people had of these animals); he added to his observations of the New Zealanders' habits, their divisions, their unsettled nature, and noted that the visits of his own ships had done nothing to improve their morals. Alas, for wives and daughters; alas, for the ‘happy tranquillity’ enjoyed by this people and their forefathers before the arrival of civilised Christians—which he had so signally failed to notice himself when he first arrived three years before. There is a naïve oddity about these bursts of sentimental nonsense from Cook. Had the captain this time been too much exposed to the oratory of J. R. Forster? Well, he has a hard demand of us: ‘tell me what the Natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.’ Perhaps it was a useful diversion from these gloomy thoughts to be able to spend some of his royal master's birthday in festivity, with the officers of both ships to

1 Journals II, 167. The poisonous plant theory is quite likely to have been correct. The sheep could very easily have come on the attractive, but deadly, Tutu (Coriaria sarmentosa)—the New Zealand farmers' ‘Tute’—a bane of wandering stock.

page 336 dinner, and a jovial afternoon, a double allowance of rum to the seamen, and twenty-one guns echoing about the sides of the primitive hills and islands. Certainly (to leave both philosophy and commemorative joy) there was great interest in other observations, the scientific observations of Mr Bayly. There was no surprise in his latitude, his variation of the compass, dip of the needle, his tides; but his longitude, his 173°48′55 1/2″ East of Greenwich? If that was correct then Cook had charted the whole country 1°20′ too far to the east. Were Cook and Green wrong in their 175°9′? Bayly's observations were borne out by Wales's at Dusky Bay, reduced to Queen Charlotte Sound by the Watches; it was—we can see from the way Cook recurs to it, in copy after copy of his journal, much more than from the words he employs—astounding. There is no doubt a little point of professional pride: ‘errors as great as this will frequently be found in such nice observations as these,’ he writes in his log, ‘Errors I call them tho’ in reality they may be None but only differences which cannot be avoided'. He had made a great number of observations himself; ‘I cannot think the error so great as these two Astronomers have made it,’ (he now writes his journal): ‘but supposing it is it will not much effect either Geography or Navigation but for the benifit of both I thought proper to mention it though few I beleive will look upon it as capital error.’1 Few indeed in that age would look on such an error as capital; and few would have been disturbed by the subtle line to be drawn between difference and error. The captain was right in thinking the astronomers had made the error too great. Cook had put Queen Charlotte Sound not 1°20′, but 40′, too far east; Bayly put it 40′ too far west. In the end Wales came to think less than well of Bayly; but Wales, for all his trouble, had not produced an impeccable result for Dusky Bay.2
By the beginning of June both ships were ready for sea. Cook summarised his programme anew and gave it to Furneaux in writing. He would sail east between the latitudes of 41° and 46° S until he came to longitude 140° or 135° W; then, if he had discovered no land, make for Tahiti to refresh: from Tahiti he would return ‘by the Shortest rout’ to his New Zealand base, whence he would plunge south for the completion of his instructions. That is, he would cross, first, a part of the ocean untouched on his previous voyage, when he had come down from Tahiti to latitude 40° and turned west to New Zealand; and second, another part where theoretically a

1 Journals II, 174; and 579–80.

2 Wales's own longitude for Dusky Sound was not quite accurate: he made it 166°2′461/2″ E (Journals II, 138) compared with the correct 166°33′56″E.

page 337 continental peninsula might thrust upwards on the map, ‘between his southerly track in August 1769 and the north-westerly one from the Horn to Tahiti in the earlier months of that year. He had not then considered land likely in this great sector, because of the run of the sea, but it must now certainly be explored to remove all doubt. We get another of Cook's little meditations as he considers the prospect:
It may be thought by some an extraordinary step in me to proceed on discoveries as far south as 46° in the very depth of Winter for it must be own'd that this is a Season by no means favourable for discoveries. It nevertheless appear'd to me necessary that something must be done in it, in order to lessen the work I am upon least I should not be ablel to finish the discovery of the Southern part of the South Pacifick Ocean the insuing Summer, besides if I should discover any land in my rout to the East I shall be ready to begin with the Summer to explore it; seting aside all these considerations I have little to fear, having two good Ships well provided and healthy crews.1

A dangerous expedition, thought Forster; a ‘party of Pleasure’, fancied others, their minds no doubt a little bemused with the notion of Tahiti. For two days a contrary wind kept the ships in harbour; on 7 June they were able to put to sea and next morning were clear of the strait. It was on this day, the 8th, that the Arnold chronometer on board the Resolution would not wind, and had to be let finally run down; the surviving Adventure one was still keeping reasonably good time. The Harrison-Kendall watch ticked steadily on.

The winter weather was unpleasant, though not intolerably so. There was no ice to coat the rigging and jam the blocks. There was some fog, a great deal of haze and rain, dark gloomy weather, a succession of southerly gales, fresh gales, strong gales, hard gales, squalls, high seas; when the wind went round to the north it generally blew a gale; topsails split; there was continual reefing and double reefing and striking of yards. There were a few calm, even pleasant, intervals, some gentle breezes. Once Cook was able to set his studding. sails. The great swell continually came in from the south or southwest, with very few changes to the north. A little rockweed was seen, pretty clearly drifted from New Zealand. The Resolution's wheel, bucking, carried two steersmen in succession right over it in opposite directions, one of them twice. A goat fell overboard, was rescued and died of the immersion. In the Adventure, said Bayly, there was very

1 Journals II, 173.

page 338 little amusement save reading; but Bayly did not have to climb ropes and reef sails—if that can be called amusement, Cook, who was watching his longitudes narrowly, recorded them in relation to Cape Palliser as well as to Greenwich, noting that they were consistently farther: east than they should have been had Bayly's Motuara observation been correct. Wales lost no chance of comparing the going of the two watches that remained in order. As for the track, the ships made southward to latitude 46°56', not far short of the latitude of the southernmost point of New Zealand, when they were according to reckoning in longitude 172°49', on 16 June, before Cook altered course north-east, then east inclining to north. June passed into July with moderately good weather. Cook gradually and irregularly lessened his latitude over almost forty degrees of longitude till he crossed the fortieth parallel at about 133°30' W, on 17 July, having run down the whole of the longitude he had. intended—indeed, a degree and a half farther—and was nearly midway between his tracks north and south in 1769. Here he turned almost directly north, to bisect the unknown area, the last area possible in a temperate zone for the existence of a continent.

There was a flurry, not quite the last, of strong gales and squalls; after which the weather turned to gentle breezes and fair pleasant days, and sighs were heard for the trade wind. The temperature rose; lighter clothes were necessary. Then the Adventure's men began to go down with scurvy. Her cook, a dirty indolent man, a natural prey, died of it on 23 July, though Cook learnt nothing of sickness for five days more. He was able to send a boat on board the day after that and was told of twenty men sick with scurvy and flux. He immediately despatched a new cook, and urged every method he could think of on Furneaux to stay the disease. A few of his own crew were showing slight symptoms but were already being specially dieted; a single man, a marine, was seriously ill, of dropsy—he had been ailing since the ship left England. Furneaux, it seems, was doing his best, too late: he could not, Cook thought, have insisted on a proper use of greens at Queen Charlotte Sound. Tropic birds appeared in the sky, the winds were uncertain, tending to go round to the north, the passage became tedious to many persons. Where was the trade wind? Furneaux on 6 August reported great improvement in his men, the flux gone; from that night the trade wind blew. But the improvement was temporary only: by the 10th more than a third of them were scurvy cases. His lieutenant Burney hit on one of the reasons, the ship's ‘being greatly Lumber'd, the people have scarce room to stir below,' and they were depressed at the length of page 339 the passage; yet Cook's men, in equally crowded quarters, did not suffer from lack of exercise. It is true that one of his junior officers thought that it was ‘d-d hard’ to set this cruise! down ‘under the Article of Refreshment’.1 The officer would find refreshment enough in Tahiti, if he could wait. Meanwhile Cook considered his progress again. He had crossed Carteret's track of 1767, in about latitude 25° S, on 1 August, looked out for Pitcairn Island in the east, and seen only two tropic birds: crossed his own track of 1769, in 19°, on 7 August: where was the continent? ‘Circumstances seem to point out to us that there is none but this is too important a point to be left to conjector, facts must determine it’; there was sea still to be examined south of his present track. That could wait, now he must get to the north of his outward track in 1769; for something new might lie in the way to be discovered. But he could not press ahead recklessly in the now steady trade; there must be caution, he must bring to or shorten sail in the moonless nights; and thus delay the arrival of scurvy-stricken men at their salvation.

In the evening of 11 August, as the ships sailed almost west, an atoll was sighted to the southward—perhaps one of those discovered by Bougainville, vaguely placed by him? It was not, it was the islet Tauere; ‘this Sea abounds in these little paltry Islands’, says Clerke, islands producing nothing but coconuts and surrounded with dangerous coral reefs. In the evening there was another, Tekokota; and the following daybreak still another, right ahead not more than two miles distant, a large shoal or reef twenty leagues round, dotted with islets on its north side, a dreadful surf on the south—Marutea, one of the most dangerous atolls in the Tuamotus.2 Well had Bougainville called this cluster the Dangerous Archipelago. There was another at daylight on the 13th: luckily, smooth as the sea was the ship had brought to for the night. That afternoon Anaa was visible, Chain Island of the first voyage; and Cook, reluctant to incur further delay by bringing to, met the night by sending his cutter ahead with a masthead light for signalling. By morning there

1 The guess that it was a junior officer—a midshipman?—who delivered himself of this judgment may be wrong. We get it from Burney, Ferguson Ms: ‘One of the Resolution's gentlemen says Nothing hurts him more than this Cruize being mentioned as a patty of Pleasure, if, says he, they had put it down to the account of hard services, I had been content & thought myself well off, but to have it set down under the Article of Refreshment is d-d hard.’—Journals II, 191, n. 4.

2 Journals II, 194, 196. Tauere was not discovered by Bougainville, but by Don Domingo de Boenechca, in the Aguila, in 1772. The printed Voyage calls it Resolution Island. Cook was the first discoverer of Tekokota—the printed Voyage calls it Doubtful Island—and also of Marutea, called Furneaux in the printed Voyage. The atoll discovered on the 13th was Motu Tu'a. Cook tried various names, Stephens Isle, Sandwich Isle, Harveys Isle, and finally in the printed Voyage came down on Adventure Island. Wales called it The Devil's Girdle.

page 340 was a large swell from the south again, which convinced him that he was clear of danger from low islands, so he hoisted in the boat. He was right: the next island was the high Osnaburg, or Mehetia, the pointer to Tahiti. He had resolved to put in at once at Vaitepiha Bay at the east end of the island for refreshment before going on to Matavai Bay. As dusk began to fall on Sunday, 15 August, the Tahitian mountains stood clear in the west. The Adventure was so sickly that Furneaux had to borrow men from the Resolution to work the ship.

Cook estimated the shore to be about eight leagues off—some thirty miles. He sailed on till midnight, then brought to till 4 a.m., then stood in for the land. When he retired to bed he left directions for the steering of the ship; when he rose at dawn he found that ‘by some mistake’—a dozing officer of the watch?—she was on a wrong course and not more than half a league from the reef. He immediately gave orders—no doubt delivered with some force—to haul off to the north. Had the breeze continued all would have been well: it flattened to a calm, and the set of the sea carried the ships closer and closer in. The boats were towing; for a short time it looked as if they might get them round the point of the island into the bay. Even then natives were on board' and round them in canoes, busily trading fruit and fish for nails and beads. About two in the afternoon they were before an opening in the reef. The situation outside was becoming more and more dangerous. It was too deep to anchor. Perhaps they could get through that opening into safety? No, it was too shallow: worse, it caused such an indraught that both ships were carried towards the reef at an alarming rate. Cook held in readiness one of the warping-machines he had extorted from the Admiralty: now was the time to use it, and it was quite useless. He dropped a bower anchor; by the time the Resolution was brought up she was in less than three fathoms; the sea was breaking violently close under her stern, and at every fall of a wave her bottom struck. To add to this danger there was the other danger of collision; the Adventure was driving down on her, even with her own anchors let go. When Furneaux's anchors held, the ships were so close that a plank would have gone gunwale to gunwale. Cook sent out his kedge and coasting anchors; heaving on these, with the bower anchor cut away, sheer power of human muscle, saved the Resolution; when the current slackened all the boats towed, the anchors were hove up, and at that moment, as the day began to close in, a very light air came from the land. It was sufficient to help her to an offing of two miles by 7 o'clock, when all her boats were sent to the assistance of the page 341 Adventure; but before they could reach her she was safely under sail, leaving behind her three anchors, a cable and two hawsers. It had been an uncomfortable twelve hours, of long strain for sailors and civilians both. At least the sailors had something to do. Mr Sparrman, even in his anxiety, watched his fellow-men, and was pleased to observe the celerity and orderliness with which all commands were carried out. He was a little wounded by the stream of ‘Goddams’ which poured from the officers, ‘and particularly the Captain, who, while the danger lasted, stamped about the deck and grew hoarse with shouting’; and he distributed speaking-trumpets, he modestly adds, to those officers who appeared to him the most efficient in handling the vessel; for which they were grateful. He may be largely correct in what he says about Cook: ‘As soon as the ship was once more afloat, I went down to the Ward Room with Captain Cook who, although he had from beginning to end of the incident appeared perfectly alert and able, was suffering so greatly from his stomach that he was in a great sweat and could scarcely stand. It was, indeed, hardly remarkable that, after so great a responsibility and so prodigious a strain on both his mental and physical capacities, he should be completely exhausted.’ Sparrman prescribed ‘an old Swedish remedy’, a good dose of brandy. ‘His aches vanished immediately, his fatigue a few minutes later and, after a good meal, we soon regained our accustomed energy.’1 Cook himself, no chronicler of personal pains, does not mention this appendix to near-shipwreck; from him we learn that they spent the night, a rainy and squally one, making short boards, and next day anchored about noon in Vaitepiha Bay.

The purpose in coming first to this bay, in the Tautira district of Tahiti, was to get the Adventure's sick men on shore, and fed with fresh food, as soon as possible. Cook's own sick man, the marine Isaac Taylor, died a short time after the ships arrived, from a complication of disorders in which scurvy had no part. He was taken out to sea for burial, like Buchan on the first voyage. The others, sent on shore in the morning and brought back at night, under the care of a surgeon's mate, rapidly recovered. There was a sufficient supply of fruit and roots, but hardly a hog for sale; those that were seen, it was explained, all belonged to the great chief Vehiatua, and Vehiatua was himself for some days nowhere to be seen. In the meantime Cook twice had boats out to look for the anchors left behind. They found the Resolution's; the Adventure's were lost beyond

1 Sparrman's account is in his Voyage Round the World (London, 1953), 51–2.

page 342 recovery. Cook was philosophic: considering the danger they had been in, they might think themselves happy in coming off so well. The usual orders to regulate trade, such as it was, were published. Contretemps there were, none the less caused by nimble-fingered Tahitians; and the capacity of a whole community to disappear when a monitory gun was fired along the shore made justice difficult to impose. When an ari'i knocked down a thief and returned a stolen musket Cook was heartily glad; for as he said, he himself could not have got it back by gentle means, while other means would have cost him more than ten times the value of the musket, in interrupted trade and bad relations. He could think back to the experience of his first voyage; and the longer the experience he had, the deeper the embarrassment was borne in on him. This particular occasion was a minor one. His relations with the people were on the whole amicable, he did in the end manage to meet Vehiatua and get a few hogs. It was not Vehiatua the thin old man with a white beard that he had met on his island tour in 1769; it was the old man's son and recent successor, a pleasant youth with whom he now spent most of a day, sharing his ari'i's stool, walking arm in arm with him, giving him news of Banks and others he remembered, giving him presents, explaining that he could not stay for some months. Pickersgill, left behind with a boat's crew to trade when the ships left, managed to obtain more hogs; managed to obtain also, after Cook's departure, a night's entertainment from the chief Reti, the friend of Bougainville, and some of his young ladies. ‘The Hymeneal Songs being allready perform'd we retired to rest: untell the Blushing Morn told us it was time to depart'—how distinctly the lieutenant stands before his readers!
Cook sailed from Tautira on 24 August, after only a week's stay, in the hope that supplies would be greater at Matavai. He had in the week learnt more about island politics than the change in one great chieftainship, and was consequently prepared for further changes at Matavai and Pare, though he could not understand the innermost nature of chiefly rivalries. Just as the interval between Wallis's arrival and his own earlier one had humbled the proud Purea, so had the period since then cast down others of the mighty. It was a coalition between the great Tuteha and the great Vehiatua that had broken Purea: the success of the coalition had been its solvent, Tuteha had set out to crush his ally. He tried by sea, and the battle was drawn; he tried by land, and, overwhelmingly defeated by the old man, was himself killed together with that other notable whom Cook had known, Tepau-i-Ahurai Tamaiti. This was in March page 343 1773, no more than five months before Cook's re-appearance. Vehiatua marched to the Porionu'u—the Pare-Arue-Haapape district, which included Matavai Bay—laying waste the land, imposing mild terms on the conquered; then he too died. The principal surviving conquered chief, who had lived by fleeing to the mountains, was the ari'i rahi Tu, or Tu-nui-ea-i-te-Atua, of Pare, personally unimpressive in spite of his name, ‘Great Tu wondrous next to God’—of character even mean, but with advantageous family connections, ambitious, persistent. He was the young man sedulously kept out of sight by his dominant great-uncle Tuteha, during Cook's first visit; he was the person, his family was the family, to profit by the partiality for Matavai Bay as a port of call shown by Cook and Cook's English successors. If Cook had shown a preference for Vaitepiha Bay, for the Tautira district, it is possible that the later abode of power in Tahiti might have been different, because the presence of British ships meant prestige, alien goods, the musket. Those Europeans who came to the eastern part of the island made less impression because they traded less and broke off their visits too soon. Cook in 1769 had heard of Bougainville and took him to be Spanish; he now heard of a visit from Spaniards and took them to be French. Some of his men even said they had seen a Frenchman on shore.1 A ship had come to Vaiurua harbour, commanded by one Opeppe, had taken away four young Tahitians, and left behind a sickness called ‘Apa no Peppe’. It must, concluded Cook, have been one of the French vessels he had heard of at the Cape, which had intended to restore Ahutoru to his island. It was not: it was the Spanish frigate Aguila from Lima, sent on reconnaissance by the viceroy of Peru, Don Manuel de Amat, who was greatly alarmed by the news of English discovery of a large and fertile island in an ocean which he continued to regard as a preserve of Spain. His commander, indeed, called the place the Isla de Amat. The Aguila had remained for a month, in November and December 1772; the four

1 The difficulty of communication, with other difficulties, is illustrated by Wales's longer account, 22 August: ‘Several of our People being on shore to Day, told us on their return that they had seen an European who ran directly from them into the Woods, and that by his appearance they judged him to be a Frenchman: some Gentlemen who were then on shore endeavoured to enquire of the Natives concerning him and understood that a French Ship had been late here whose Capt had told them he would return in 5 Months and that the Person who had been seen was left behind untill his return.’ 23 August: ‘To day a more strict enquiry has been made into the Affair of the Frenchman by some who pretend to understand the language best…. The ship is now spanish; and the Capt, whilst here, hanged three or four of his People, and this escaped from him…. On the whole that there may have been a French or spanish Ship here since the Endeavour is very probable; but, in my opinion, all the rest of the story is a mere Fiction.’—Journals II, 792–3. Wales made a very accurate judgment. Cook paid very little attention to the story.

page 344 youths had been taken for instruction in Christian principles, so that they might be returned as the spearhead of a benevolent Spanish sovereignty; the disease, e pohe no Pepe (the name was one the islanders must have heard much), was perhaps some sort of gastric influenza, fatal to those without natural defence. The Spaniards came again more than once, always in intervals between Cook's visits; he was to keep on hearing about them, sometimes as being almost round the next corner; it must have seemed sometimes almost a game of hide and seek; he was never to meet them. It was they, however, who first met Tu, whom Cook thought ‘now the Reigning Prince’.

Reigning prince he might be: what struck the visitors, for the week of their stay, apart from his fine stature (he was three inches over six feet) was that he was ‘timorous’. He made no bones about it. He did not like the noise of guns, he disliked swords; his people did not hesitate to report, when he missed an appointment, that the ari'i was matau, or frightened. He liked presents, he liked the bagpipes, he did not like others to get too much attention—not even the aged and sorrowing mother of Tuteha, whose tears on meeting Toote, her son's friend, almost reduced Cook to tears himself. Tu played his part reasonably well with reciprocal gifts of food and cloth, and the entertainment of a ‘Dramatick Heava or Play’ in which his own sister danced; yet here, as at Tautira, supplies were not plentiful. Pickersgill, sent along the coast, could get very little—all hogs belonged to the ari'i, he was told—and Purea, whom he encountered, seemed herself reduced to poverty. For a captain who wanted to lay in stocks, the island had not turned out well: twenty-five hogs, not large, and one fowl in a fortnight, was not much; and it was not the breadfruit season. Neither captain was backward in trying to please; some seamen and marines who had quarrelled riotously one night with the people on shore were duly punished. The shortage was, probably, due to the destruction of war; perhaps also to a rahui, a solemn embargo laid by an ari'i rahi on consumption, to build up resources, which only he could remove: thus it could be said that in one place all hogs belonged to Vehiatua, in the other to Tu. On the other hand, the sick had recovered, fresh water had been obtained, all necessary repairs completed, so that the stay could be considered valuable; while Wales had been able to take an observatory on shore and make observations on the very spot from which the Transit of Venus had been observed, astonished by the tractability of the four or five hundred Tahitians who always surrounded him, kept off only by a rope and four sentinels. page 345 They were a happy four days for Wales. Cook decided to move on. A number of young men wanted to sail with him, undeterred by the failure of Ahutoru or Tupaia to return. Indeed there was here a remarkable lack of interest in the fate of those voyagers; it was not till Raiatea that people enquired after Tupaia. He consented to take one Porio, for the sake of his possible usefulness; and late on 1 September stood out of the bay. Porio wept as the land fell astern—‘the Dear Isle’, to quote Clerke: ‘Poor Porio's are not the only tears I've seen rous'd upon leaving this good Isle by some hundreds, tho' I've been in a condition myself at the time not to see a great way.'1

There were to be calls at the leeward islands Huahine and Raiatea. It was not a long passage to Fare harbour, on the west side of Huahine, where the Adventure missed stays and went on the reef; but Cook was ready for this, with his launch in the water, and she was soon off again.2 Supplies here were plentiful, even before Cook met his friend the ‘brave old Chief’, Ori, when there was an elaborate ceremonial exchange of plantain plants, accompanied on one side by pigs, a dog, and Ori's pewter plate—on the other by nails, beads, and medals. Ori fell on Cook's neck and embraced him; ‘the tears which trinckled plentifully down his Cheeks sufficiently spoke the feelings of his heart.’ Cook gave him the most valuable articles he had, ‘for I regarded this old man as a father’; Ori on his part ‘receive'd me more like a son he had not seen these four years than a friend'.3 Pork, yams and fruit abounded; the men were taken off ship's food entirely. Wales and Bayly went for a walk together across the island; they found it ‘a perfect Orchard from one end to the Other, interspersed with the Houses of the Inhabitants who nowhere offered us the least incivillity unless picking our Pockets, unknown to us, may be thought so’.4 Some of the inhabitants, however, lived up to their reputation for incivility: one bravo paraded on the beach in full war habit as if intending mischief, until Cook took his clubs and broke them; poor Sparrman, incautiously botanising alone, was set upon, assaulted, and stripped of all his clothes except his trousers. Ori insisted on going with Cook in search of the robbers—a vain search—and in spite of his people's expostulations placed

1 Journals II, 211, n. 5. The cheerful Clerke had a very sentimental side.

2 According to Wales, the Adventure went on the reef twice. The launch carried out an anchor for her, by which her men hove her off; ‘but as they were going to carry out another, the first came home, and she fell again on the Reef where she lay untill we got to an Anchor, when the Master was sent with Hands to assist them farther, and by Noon they were clear of the Reef, & soon after safe at an Anchor.’—Journals II, 801.

3 ibid., 217. Ori, according to Wales (ibid., 802), was ‘a thin elderly man, very grave & seems to be much reverenced by his Subjects.’

4 Wales, ibid., 801.

page 346 himself entirely in Cook's hands by going on board the ship to dinner. One or two of Sparrman's things were restored, with some other things stolen from an officers' shooting party, interrupted trade was resumed with vigour, and all was good fellowship. It was suggested to Cook that he should attack the Borabora men on behalf of Huahine—not by Ori, who felt quite capable of dealing with them himself, and in addition claimed their chief, the dreaded Puni, as a friend. Vastly richer in provisions after four days here than he had been after fourteen at Tahiti,1 lesser as this island was, Cook presented his friend with a small copper plate engraved with a record of his visit, to add to the pewter one, and on 7 September made sail for Raiatea. Furneaux brought away a man who had haunted his ship from the moment she anchored. He expressed the greatest desire to go to ‘Britania’, said Furneaux; his name was Mae.
The passage to Raiatea was again a short one, round its southern end, where Cook corrected his chart, and up the west coast to Haamanino harbour by night—a dark night, wherein the lights of fishermen on the reef were sufficient signals of danger. Next morning, the 8th, with the wind blowing right out of the harbour, Cook proved his seamanship by ‘borrowing’ close to the reef on the south side of the channel, then shooting through it with all sails set to where a boat marked his chosen anchoring place. He warped further in and moored; the Adventure followed suit. It was the end of the day by the time both ships were settled, and long before then, crowded round with canoes offering the plantain plants of welcome, they were embarrassed at the quantity of hogs and piglets and fruit thrust on them, with nothing but beads and nails expected in return. To describe all that happened in the next week would be but to trace the details of a pattern. The hospitality was vast. The chief, Orio, though not so close to Cook's heart as Ori, put aside all ceremony, insisted on exchanging names with him, exchanged visits and dinners, brought along his young son for inspection and presents, had his beautiful daughter Poetua dance and act, arranged a ‘Comedy or Dramatick Heava’ every day when there was not a performance for the islanders as of course. The ‘young Princess’, slender and graceful, made an impression on more than one heart. It was remarked that a not infrequent theme of the drama in these islands was successful theft; and the people were as enthusiastic in stealing as they were in trade or in making presents. It would not

1 '…during our short stay we procured not less than 300 Hogs to both Sloops, besides Fowls & Fruit…'—ibid., 221; and in Cook's log, ‘we have got by purchase & presents in both sloops about 400 Hogs & half as many Cocks.’—ibid., n. 5. The men bought cocks for cock-fighting; Forster, Voyage, I, 458–9.

page 347 do: whenever one was caught red-handed, he was tied to the rigging, given a flogging and tossed overboard to swim ashore—as he had to, because his self-righteous fellows would never pick him up. Pickersgill was once again sent off on independent trading, to Tahaa in the north, both for fruit and (so many were the hogs accumulated) for a sea-store of food for the stock. He had his own difficulties with theft, triumphantly surmounted, and came back successful. He was away two nights. What he says about his men on the first of the subsequent mornings indicates a perennial possibility of conflict: ‘I got up by times for to get a way as early as possible, but enquireing for the people I found most of them absent and on a further examination found them one in one house and one in an other all stragled about the Woods each man with his Mistress.’1 It was therefore hardly surprising that, while he was still away, everybody suddenly decamped from the beach, though Cook was surprised. Getting a garbled account of an affray in which islanders had been killed and wounded by muskets, he feared for Pickersgill's party, so long away. It was all quite untrue, confidence was restored, and Pickersgill himself picked up a story that, perhaps fortunately, never came to Cook's ears—of the gunner and a midshipman out shooting, followed, in the island fashion, by a pressing mob of curious people who would not go away; so that, exasperated, one of the sportsmen fired at them with a little gunpowder and sand, and this doing no damage, both were indignantly seized and taken before a chief. The chief painted a vivid picture of Cook's annoyance at this seizure—he would come and kill them all—and sent the two back in a canoe, while the people made for the hills. This perhaps was behind the departure that puzzled Cook; and it may be put beside the other story, of Forster, the panic stricken moralist, peppering an ‘Indian’ in the back with small shot, which led to some coolness between him and the captain.2 Behind the general goodwill, that is, there was always the chance of misunderstanding, which might be converted to ill will, for a commander to bear in mind; he must somehow be able to predict, or at least to avoid the unpredictable. Meanwhile the sociable meals went on; and whenever Orio came to dinner he never failed to drink his glass of Madeira.
After eight days Cook was resolved to leave. There was no more to be done; his decks were so heaped with supplies it was almost impossible to move. The young Tahitian Porio had decided to

1 Journals II, 772.

2 Bayly has a brief account of the matter, ibid., 226, n. 3. See also Wales, Remarks, 97–8, and George Forster, Reply to Mr. Wales's Remarks, 36–8.

page 348 relinquish adventure for love; his place in the Resolution was taken by another youth called Hitihiti—or, as he was known to his shipmates; Odiddy. Furneaux still had his Mae, the young person who was to figure on the stage of the world and for ages to come, as Omai. When would Cook return? asked Orio; let him bring his sons with him. The aging Ori had thought that he and Cook might not meet again; perhaps, in another four years, they would both be dead; but ‘Let your sons come, they will be well received.’ On 17 September in the morning the ships sailed. Cook had a good deal to commit to his journal as a result of this last month, in addition to the record of events. He had to modify or expand some of his earlier impressions; wherever he had gone he had tried to have the marine Gibson, the attempted deserter of the first voyage, with him, as the man best acquainted with the language; he had some pages of criticism of Bougainville's account of Tahiti, but with Gibson's help had verified Bougainville's assertion of human sacrifice there (only of taata ino, evil folk, he was told); at Raiatea he had tasted kava for the first time; he meditated once more—not improbably with the help of Wales, to judge from Wales's own journal—on the nature of island morals. ‘One ought not to be too severe upon these people when they do commit a thieft sence we can hardly charge them with any other Vice, Incont[in]ency in the unmarried people can hardly be call'd a Vice sence neither the state or Individuals are the least injured by it.' Past criticism had undoubtedly gone too far. Were English women to be judged from visitors to the ships of a naval port, or the commerce of Covent Garden or Drury Lane?1 He suddenly, after some remarks on the latitude and longitude of Tahiti, breaks into a defence of Green against Maskelyne, forgetting that he himself had had something to say about the confusion of Green's papers; or perhaps, as Maskelyne had supposed ‘a want of care and address in the observers’—a plural word—he took it that he himself was implicated.2 But the important thing, immediately, were not interpolation or argument, it was the voyage.
He had modified his plan again. He had intended, when he left New Zealand, to return to it from Tahiti ‘by the Shortest rout’. Now, leaving Raiatea, he steered a western course inclining to the south, not as the shortest route, but ‘as well to avoid the tracks of former Navigators as to get into the Latitude of Amsterdam Island discovered by Tasman in 1643, my intention being to run as far west

1 Journals II, 236, 238–9. Cook must undoubtedly have read Wales's journal, at an early stage; compare Cook, 238–9, and notes 1 and 2 on 239, with Wales, 796–7.

2 ibid., 237–8.

page 349 as that Island and even to touch there if I found it convenient before I proceeded to the South.’1 Thus, almost casually stated, we have the beginning of the programme of verification and co-ordination of earlier discoveries which was one of the great, and unexpected, works of this voyage. We begin to be treated to the curious sight of a sort of collaboration between Cook and Dalrymple—as Cook studies the Historical Collection of Voyages carried in the ship, and gives precision, and even reality, as it were, to island groups that were almost shadows from the past. So he pursued his chosen course through the rest of September, in generally good weather—generally shortening sail and bringing to at night. A week after his departure, the island plantains and bananas were exhausted; the people were on to ‘Sea Bisket’ again, but pork was still plentiful enough to give every man his fill. A day out peaked Maupiti, one of the most westerly of the Society Islands, was sighted; then nothing more than birds and sharks till 23 September and the atoll to which Cook gave successively the names of Sandwich, his Noble Patron, and, changing his mind, his friend the dashing Captain Augustus John Hervey—still called the Hervey islands, in the Lower Cook group. It lay much in the position that Dalrymple gave to Quiros's La Dezena, but Cook could not believe in Dalrymple's route for Quiros, and he was right.2 On the first day of October he recognised Tasman's Middelburg, lying west-south-west, and next day as he turned the southern point of this island, Amsterdam—or, as we should say, ‘Eua and Tongatapu of the group called Tonga. He was to sail a good deal in and out of this group, coming in to it, as he did this time, always from the east.
The Tongan islands are like a narrow net flung irregularly over the ocean, 175 miles from north to south, falling more thickly in some places than in others, in places torn, so that we get a number of clusters or sub-groups—Tongatapu—-‘Eua in the south, Nomuka and Kotu as one moves north, then Ha'apai, then Vava'u; while beyond these limits, both north and south, are detached fragments that by settlement or nearest contiguity must be reckoned parts of the same system. The greater number of the more than hundred islands and islets, ranging from quite considerable pieces of land to specks almost awash, are coralline—Tongatapu itself is a raised atoll—and lie on the eastern side of the group; the waters that flow between them have a frightening floor of shoal and reef. To the west

1 ibid., 239.

2 Quiros's La Dezena or La Decena was most probably the Tuamotuan atoll of Tauere, lat. 17°23' S, long. 141°30' W, already seen by Cook, and a considerable distance from the Hervey Islands.—H. E. Maude, Of Islands and Men (Melbourne, 1968), 70.

page 350 of a ship's track northward through the whole group is a shorter volcanic line, the units of which are very scattered. In the eastern clusters only ‘Eua, Tongatapu and Vava'u are of any height, but even the lowest and smallest bit of land is green with the vegetation of the islands, from the common beach hibiscus with its yellow blossom—one of the simplest and loveliest of flowers—to the tall close congregations of coconuts. On the windward side of these clusters the impeded ocean explodes infinitely in a long ribbon of white; it has worn away and undercut the low ledges of coral, the liku, which mark the raised island—low ledges, except the great cliffs of ‘Eua, looking down on the thick leafy covering of a narrow strip of flat land, and beyond that to the vast surface of the sea, the plunging miles of the Tonga Deep. The defect of the islands for explorers, as Tasman found before Cook, is the scarcity of fresh water. Rain seeps away through the coral formation and the sea seeps in; ponds and wells are few and brackish, it is a brackish fluid that comes with digging. There is a little stream among the hills of ‘Eua, which makes that island enviable; there is no other. For the islanders this mattered less; they drank from the coconut. In one respect, therefore, these islands were not profitable places of call—though it must be remembered that to seafarers sweetness of water could be a relative thing: in other respects they were highly profitable, because they were well cultivated, fresh food abounded, and the people were friendly Tasman had roughly indicated on his chart the main groups from south to centre; Schouten and Le Maire, a hundred and fifty years after them Wallis, had touched on or noted one or two of the most northerly outliers, without suspecting any larger archipelago beyond. Cook now began his exercise in connection and accuracy.
This first visit was confined to ‘Eua and Tongatapu, the native names of which he was not long in finding out. Sailing up the western coast of ‘Eua, inside an off-lying islet called Kalau, he anchored before a small opening in the rocks which led to the shore—the only anchorage the island provided on this side, as it turned out—in a place which he called English Road. Here the land rose immediately from the beach in a gentle grassy slope. The ships were surrounded by canoes; islanders, quite unarmed, eagerly clambered aboard, with tapa cloth to exchange for nails. A chief appeared, ‘Tioonee', who took the two captains ashore with a party of others, through a crowd so thick they could hardly land, up the slope to his house. The situation was delightful, the people amiable, a performance on the ships' bagpipes was returned by a song from the young women; page 351 there was kava to drink, fruit to eat, neatly fenced plantations to examine. In the afternoon the visit was repeated, the gentlemen walked out into the country botanising and admiring, enchanted by the perfumed airs and continued friendliness. Cook had his eye on the hogs and poultry he saw running about; but it soon became clear that these people had no interest in that sort of trade, and he decided to cross over to Tongatapu. He did so the next day, Sunday, 3 October, round the southern coast of the island and its western end, anchoring securely not far outside its north-west point, in what he took to be the Van Diemen's Road of Tasman. Even on the passage between one island and the other he had been met by canoes, and now great numbers of both men and women swam off to the ships in addition to the canoe-borne throngs. They brought cloth and ‘curiosities’ neither of which Cook wanted, though the seamen would barter away their clothes for them; he therefore issued stringent orders against the purchase of such things, with the result that provisions began to arrive in exchange for nails and pieces of English cloth. Inside the reef and the breakers, there was a good landing place; Cook was guided there in the morning by a young and useful man, one ‘Otago’ or Ataongo, a chiefly person whom we know to have been closely related to some of the island's ruling dignitaries. Cook could tell that this man had influence; it took much enquiry and repeated visits even to begin to get a preliminary idea of the complicated hierarchy of Tongan authority and respect. In the meanwhile it was enough to meet Ataongo half-way in his desire to be on good terms, so that Cook willingly exchanged names with him, willingly fell in with all his suggestions as a cicerone. The captain let himself be inspected as fully as he wished to inspect, viewed whatever he was shown with a certainly quite unforced attention—for the Tongan fa'itoka, or chiefly burial mount, was something quite new to him, he was glad to lay there his own offering of medals and nails, and to listen to what seemed to be the invocation of priests; was glad to meet and mark great men and to perambulate the ‘delightfull Walks’ of Tongatapu: ‘I thought I was transported into one of the most fertile plains of Europe… . Nature, assisted by a little art, no where appears in a more florishing state than at this isle.’1 Everybody—botanists, sportsmen out shooting, Hodges out drawing—was civilly treated; trade in bananas, coconuts, yams, pigs, fowls, was brisk. By the end of the following day so much had been obtained that Cook gave permission to his men to buy whatever they liked, whereon the foolish fellows sought curiosities with such

1 Journals II, 252.

page 352 eagerness that humorous Tongans proceeded to offer them sticks and stones.

Cook stayed here four days, till the afternoon of 7 October. It could not be all paradise, the people could not all be irreproachably civil and cheerful. The chief to whom the greatest reverence was paid—he must certainly be the king, Cook thought wrongly—seemed a very dull stupid person indeed, though he did reciprocate gifts with generosity.1 Wales, who considered the women of ‘Eua to be ‘the most lively laughing creatures I ever saw’—was charmed indeed with both sexes—at Tongatapu, when he first waded ashore, had his shoes snatched from behind him by another lively person, finding himself in a position ‘ludicrous enough’, with a thief to chase bare-footed over sharp coral rocks. Luckily he saw the captain with Ataongo, who reclaimed the shoes, and was rewarded with a large nail. That was trivial; Wales could laugh, and Cook could laugh at him. There were less trivial things, as when a boat's grapnel was spirited away, and next day an attempt was made to denude her of everything, oars and all; or when a man sprang out of the master's cabin of the Resolution with an armful of navigational books, as well as the master's sword and other sundries; at the landing place, said Wales, they ‘several times attempted to take the Cloaths of our Back.’ There was a little rough treatment in return, a few discharges of small shot—which, surprisingly enough, alarmed no one. Outside the ships, such things happened only at the landing place; in the country everyone, even if alone and unarmed, was perfectly safe. It was perhaps as well not to risk outwearing a welcome. The possibility did not, however, arise; Cook had his programme of work to keep up with.

The dozen or so pages of his journal which he devotes to the description of these two islands, after a stay of less than a week, summarise excellently what could be learnt by an assiduous observer in that time, and they seem to be founded almost entirely on his own observation. He is precise in latitude—between 21°29' and 21°3' S—and longitude, between 174°40' and 175°15' W, ‘deduced from Observations of the Sun and Moon made on the spot. Mr Kendals Watch places them 34’ more westerly.' Others speak in admiration of visible aspects, the Forsters can in some ways be more professional as well

1 His name was Latunipulu; he was a male tamaha, or ‘sacred child’. The Tongan chiefly system was very complicated. The titular ruler was the Tu'i Tonga (Tu'i, a king or governor). His eldest daughter by his principal wife was the Tu'i Tonga fefine, the female Tu'i Tonga. She was so sacred that no Tongan could marry her, and her traditional mate was the Fijian chief the Tu'i Lakeba. Their first born was the tamaha, sacred child. Dullness did not make him any less sacred or reverenced.

page 353 as more personal, but Cook himself gives us an account which is objective, full and running over. He is once more taking literally those instructions to report. Everybody is agreed about the beauty, whether of the unevenly rising ‘Eua or the uniformly flat Tongatapu. ‘Eua, to Wales, ‘affords, without exception, the most beautiful & varigated Prospect I ever beheld.’ For Kempe it is ‘the most delightfull prospect that can be seen, & which I shall leave to a more able pen to discribe what is due to that pleasing spott.’ For Gilbert it seems ‘one intire Garden’—an English country house's park and garden, perhaps; for, as Cook, more discriminating, points out, the interior parts were not cultivated, there was ‘a beautiful disorder’, in contrast to the wholly cultivated aspect of Tongatapu, where the plantations, with their houses and sweet-smelling shrubs, seemed to him extremely beautiful. Is there, after all his experience of wild and craggy lands, a lingering trace of the farm boy in Cook? The people are neither ugly nor handsome; the men are tattooed from the mid-thighs to the hips, the women only slightly on the arms and hands; both sexes are naked above the waist, wearing a sort of skirt of tapa that falls below the knees; some colour their hair red or blue, they dye their cloth; they wear handsome bracelets and necklaces of shell, and rather despise the English beads. Their teeth are perfect. Very many have lost a joint or two of the little fingers, which, after much shipboard discussion, is taken to be a sign of mourning. Many have had their cheeks burnt or otherwise wounded.1 But they are a healthy race, and Cook has done his best to leave them so. ‘As we had yet some Venereal complaints on board I took all possible means to prevent its being communicated to the Natives by not suffering a Man to go on shore on whom there was the least suspicion nor did I permit that any women should be allowed to come on board the Sloops.’2 They drink much a beverage made of the ‘pepper root’ or ava, and their legs are sometimes unsteady as a result. Only Cook among the visitors would drink it, the others being put off by the preliminary chewing and spitting out of the root before its mixture with water. They have no towns or villages, living dispersed in their plantations. They have nose-flutes more elaborate than those of Tahiti, drums of hollowed logs of wood.

1 The partial amputation of the little finger was not a sign of mourning but a propitiatory sacrifice to some god to secure the recovery from sickness of a relative superior in rank to the person concerned. The wounding of the cheeks was however done as mourning: they could be burnt, but might be beaten continually (hence the name for the mourning ceremony, tuki, a blow) or rubbed with coconut husk or some other harsh substance.

2 Journals II, 268. According to Bayly, women could not be kept off the ship at ‘Eua but the rest of the prohibition was put into effect.

page 354 Their large double canoes are extremely well made—Cook describes them with an attentive sailor's eye—accurately put together and sewn, so as not to need caulking, with platforms and little huts on top, and a sort of lateen sail; they are doubled-ended, so that they will sail easily either way. These people are not interested in edge-tools, but have an insatiable appetite for nails, of which they must have taken three or four hundredweight. Cook has added to the island fauna—birds, bats, pigs, fowls—a New Zealand dog and a Society Islands bitch, which the Tongans were exceedingly anxious to acquire. There is certainly property in land. For religion—here Cook, as in Tahiti, finds the matter dark. How otherwise, when language stood between? What was the language? Omai and Odiddy, who should have been of help, would have none of it, they could not understand a single sentence. They were not really very intelligent young men. Cook sighed for Tupaia. He himself, however, and others who knew a few Tahitian words, could both understand essentials and make themselves understood. They were faced with a ‘Provincial dialect'. Consider, too, the vocabulary given in Dalrymple's Collection. Cook was back with a question he had asked himself when he had first met the Tahitians and New Zealanders. He could add other men's experience to his own, to reach the same answer as before: ‘By carefully perusing the Voyages of former Navigators, I find such an affinity in the Language, Manners, and Customs of the different Islanders that I am led to believe they have all had one Origin.’1
With these things in his mind he made sail from Van Diemen's Road late on 8 October, bound for New Zealand. He lost an anchor in unmooring when the cable parted, and another cable was much damaged by the coral bottom. Just before he began to move, a canoe came alongside with a Tongan drum, for which he gave a piece of cloth and a nail, sending back also some wheat and vegetable seeds to Ataongo, additional to what he had already given him. Next day he had in sight the high island of ‘Ata, Tasman's Pylstaert or Arrowtail;2 then for almost a fortnight there was open sea, the weather mainly pleasant, the winds easterly and south-easterly, going round to the north and west from the 17th. These latter winds kept the Adventure too far astern, and Cook had to shorten sail for her. On the

1 Journals II, 275.

2 Cook referred to the island as ‘Pilstart’. Tasman called it ‘hooge pijlsteerten eijlandt’ —High Arrow-tail Tropic-bird Island. Pÿlstaart means ‘arrow-tail’, a sort of duck; he applied the name to the tropic-birds he saw flying about it, because of the two long feathers in this bird's tail.

page 355 night of the 20th a black rain cloud set up an alarm of land directly ahead; the night was so dark that guns were fired and false fires burnt to keep the ships in touch. Next morning New Zealand was in sight in the west, about Table Cape. Cook stretched in for the land. He wanted to give domestic animals and seeds to the inhabitants as far north as possible, regarding the people here as more civilised than those of Queen Charlotte Sound, and therefore more likely to care properly for such acquisitions. It was not till he was some distance down the coast from Cape Kidnappers, however, that canoes came off with a chief to whom he thought it safe to make presents; and what sent the chief into raptures was not pigs and fowls but a spike nail half the length of his arm. Nevertheless when he got his boars and sows, cocks and hens he eyed them jealously, promising not to kill any; he accepted also a large variety of vegetable seeds. Cook was hopeful of having done something to benefit the country; certainly his cabbage stocked the coast from that point south to Palliser Bay.

Not long after the canoes returned to shore the gale started: the afternoon of 22 October. It was one of those long wearing gales, mainly from the north and west, sometimes with a deceptive lull, sometimes with the wind switching round briefly to the opposite direction and then remorselessly back again, which can make so exacerbating the New Zealand spring, particularly in the region of Cook Strait. It began by carrying away the Resolution's fore topgallant mast. Sails were split and torn; topsails were reefed and close-reefed, the gale abated, reefs were shaken out, the gale burst anew with heavy squalls, the men flew to the yards. To get into the strait was impossible. On the 25th, an hour before noon, says Cook, the storm ‘came on in such fury as to oblige us to take in all our sails with the utmost expedition and to lay-to under our bare poles with our heads to the Sw… . The Sea rose in proportion with the Wind so that we not only had a furious gale but a mountainous Sea also to incounter’; at least the sky stayed clear overhead, and they were not apprehensive of a lee shore. At this time they were eight or nine leagues Sse of Cape Palliser. The Adventure was carried to leeward but found again. Day after day the ships beat up and down or lay to; in the dark early morning of 30 October they parted company a second time, and finally. On the 31st the Resolution was off the Kaikoura mountains, in the South Island; in the morning the wind blew with great fury, in the evening ‘with greater fury than ever, in so much that we were obleged to lie to under the Mizen Staysail.’ At midnight it abated, a calm was succeeded by a wind from page 356 the south; on the afternoon of the first day of November the ship was under all the sail she could set, had passed Cape Campbell, was in the strait, would be in Queen Charlotte Sound the next flood tide: and the north-west gale rose yet again. Cook spent the night plying, losing ground continually. He was off Cloudy Bay. In the morning he could at least stretch over across the strait to the coast of ‘Haeinomauwe’—the North Island; where, to the east of Cape Terawhiti, he discovered an inlet which looked as if it might be a good harbour. There was a large bay outside its entrance. Thoroughly tired of beating against the north-westerlies, he resolved to put into the inlet, or at least to anchor in the bay. Just as he reached the entrance the tide turned against him and he anchored a mile off a range of black rocks. Three canoes came out to the ship, a few of their not very attractive occupants came on board, accepting nails with enthusiasm, medals, cocks and hens with indifference. If Cook had had the Adventure with him, he would have investigated further. He was certain she must be already waiting in Queen Charlotte Sound, and that he should rejoin her as soon as possible; so, the wind shifting to the north-east, he weighed anchor again. It went round to the south, a fresh and increasing gale, in which he bore away for the Sound, leaving behind him unexplored the inlet, the superb harbour about which the capital city of Wellington now stands. As he tacked outside the Sound at dark the gale split most of his sails, and he anchored. In the morning there was a calm, then a breeze at north-west. He ran up to Ship Cove, moored, and unbent all his sails for repair. It was 3 November. There was no Adventure.