Abstract
When Captain James Cook's bark the Endeavour arrived in Tūranga-nui in October 1769, the local people were mystified. Many thought that this spectre had appeared from te pō, the dark realm of ancestors. Cook's scientific expedition, sponsored by the Royal Society, was accompanied by Tupaia, a high priest from Ra'iatea. Tupaia joined the ship in Tahiti, where Cook and his companions had observed the transit of Venus. At Tūranga, misunderstandings led to shootings, but when they arrived at Uawa (now Tolaga Bay), the expedition was welcomed ashore. Tupaia and his companions had many friendly exchanges with the priests from Te Rāwheoro, the local whare wānanga or school of learning, which specialised in carving and tattoo. This paper examines differences and resonances between Enlightenment science and philosophy and wānanga (Māori ancestral knowledge), and how exchanges between these knowledge traditions might open up possibilities for new kinds of futures.
On 6 October 1769 Nicholas Young, the surgeon's boy, sighted land from the Endeavour's masthead. On shore, gazing out at the horizon, the people of Tūranga-nui were perplexed, and puzzled. As the ship's sails billowed in the breeze, some thought that the Endeavour might be a great bird, flying across the sea, while others guessed that it was a floating island (Salmond Citation1991:123–124). The pae (horizon) was an edge between worlds—te ao mārama, the world of light inhabited by people, and te pō, the realm of darkness inhabited by ancestors and gods. It was a tapu (sacred) zone, where almost anything might happen.
The Endeavour, commanded by Lieutenant James Cook, was on a scientific voyage around the world, sent by the Royal Society in London to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti. In addition, Cook had instructions from the Admiralty to search for Terra Australis, a mythical continent then believed to lie in the far southern ocean. Tupaia, a high priest-navigator from Ra'iatea, was on board. In Tahiti, where his allies had been defeated in battle, his position had become precarious. After forging a friendship with the botanist Joseph Banks and his Royal Society party of scientists and artists, Tupaia decided to accompany them to England. He was a leading ‘arioi (a cult of warriors, artists and priests dedicated to ‘Oro’, the god of fertility and war), and a skilled navigator who had previously sailed by canoe from Ra'iatea to Tahiti, the Austral Islands and Tonga, and piloted the Endeavour through the Society Islands.
That evening there was a riotous celebration on board. Banks remarked, ‘all hands seem to agree that this is certainly the Continent we are in search of’ (Banks Citation1962:I;399). During the night the wind died, and it was not until 08 October that Cook was able to sail into Tūranga-nui (or Poverty Bay, as he named it). As the boats rowed in, a number of people sat by a house near the beach, watching intently, although when Captain Cook, Banks and Tupaia crossed to the west bank of the Tūranga-nui River, they vanished. While Cook and Banks were collecting plants and inspecting a small fishing village, four warriors armed with spears appeared on the eastern bank of the river, confronting four young boys who had been left in charge of the yawl, and were playing on the beach. Although this was almost certainly a ritual challenge, the boys were terrified and frantically tried to row back out to sea. Noticing their predicament, the coxswain fired a warning shot in the air, and then shot one of the challengers dead (Te Maro of Ngāti Oneone). That night the British heard loud lamentations from the shore.
This shooting set the tone for the exchanges that followed. The mood was fractious and suspicious. When Cook went ashore the next morning with an armed party, about 100 men performed an impassioned haka (war dance) on the west bank of the Tūranga-nui. Tupaia managed to persuade one of the warriors to swim the river, and he stood on a rock surrounded by the tide. This was Te Toka-ā-Taiau, a famous boundary marker associated with the first Polynesian voyagers, which held the sacred mauri or life force for the fisheries in the bay (Williams Citation1888:XXI;395). Laying down his musket, Cook went to meet this man and they pressed noses, mingling their hau (breath of life). Reassured by this gesture, the man and a number of his companions crossed to the eastern bank, where they greeted the Europeans and tried to exchange weapons as a sign of friendship. When one warrior (Te Rākau) seized the astronomer's sword, he was shot dead. As he fell, Tupaia also fired, wounding two other men in the legs.
Captain Cook, who had hoped to establish friendly relations with these people, was distressed. Out in the bay, seeing two fishing canoes heading for the shore, he decided to capture their crews, take them on board and treat them kindly. When a musket was fired overhead the fishermen retaliated, hurling anchor stones, paddles and even parcels of fish at the strangers. In response Cook and his men opened fire, killing three men, wounding one and capturing three boys who were taken on board. That night Cook wrote disconsolately in his journal,
I am aware that most humane men who have not experienced things of this nature will cencure my conduct in fireing upon the people in this boat nor do I my self think that the reason I had for seizing upon her will att all justify me, and had I thought that they would have made the least resistance I would not have come near them, but as they did I was not to stand still and suffer either my self or those that were with me to be knocked on the head. (Cook Citation1955:I;171)
The boys were treated kindly, and the next day when the Endeavour set sail, the ship was becalmed south of Te Kurı a Pāoa (Young Nick's Head). Some canoes came out and were joined by a small canoe from Poverty Bay, bringing the man who had greeted Captain Cook on the rock in the river. He invited the strangers to return to the bay, but Cook had a coastline to survey, and headed south.
As this brief account indicates, these first meetings were complex affairs marred by violence and cross-purposes, although there were flashes of amity and fellow feeling. During their brief visit to the bay, Cook and his sailors, Joseph Banks and the Royal Society artists and scientists had stumbled into a highly charged situation, with the Tūranga-nui River a contested boundary and Te Toka-ā-Taiau a key place of power. Although Tupaia understood some of what the local people were saying, he knew little about local politics, and his advice was not always helpful. As a high ranking priest-navigator from the homeland of Māori, Tupaia regarded himself as their superior. He warned his British companions that they were not to be trusted, and in the armed clashes that followed, used his musket as freely as his shipmates.
Several weeks later, when Cook and his companions landed in Uawa, a beautiful little cove sheltered from the wind, where a river ran down a steep valley into the ocean, they were grateful to have arrived at this peaceful haven. This small community north of Poverty Bay was the home of the high chief Te Whakatātare-o-te-Rangi and his niece Hine Matioro, later described by early missionaries as a ‘Queen’. Many of the houses in the valleys and the fortified village on Pourewa Island (where Hine Matioro had her home) were deserted, and the British guessed that their occupants had fled ‘for fear of us, who, doubtless, appeared as strange kind of beings to them as they did to us’ (Cook Citation1955:I;99). Those who remained were cautious but hospitable, exchanging kūmara (sweet potatoes), fish and large crayfish for white Tahitian bark-cloth and glasses, which they valued very highly, although they refused to hand over any greenstone ornaments or weapons.
When an officer wandered off into the hills, an old woman invited him to join a group who were sharing a meal. After thanking them with gifts, he was offered a very beautiful young woman to sleep with. Afterwards an old man and two women who entered the house pressed noses with the officer, and sent a guide to take him back to his ship, carrying him on his back across rivers and streams. Perhaps Te Whakatātare-o-te-Rangi and his niece Hine Matioro were among them, because, according to local traditions, they met Captain Cook, who presented the ariki with a red scarf and gunpowder, allowed him to fire a musket, and gave Hine Matioro blue glass beads and other ornaments.
During the six days that the Endeavour party spent in ‘Cooks Cove’, collecting fresh food and water and resting from their sea passage, Tupaia slept in a cave where he talked with a priest from Te Rāwhero, the local whare wānanga (school of learning), famed for its master carvers and tattooists. The artist Sydney Parkinson described the tattoo patterns etched on women's lips and the faces and bodies of many of the men, adding that ‘their boats, paddles, boards to put on their houses, tops of walking sticks, and even their boats valens, are carved in a variety of flourishes, turnings and windings … with as much truth as if done from mathematical draughts’ (Parkinson Citation1773:98).
During a visit to Pourewa Island, Banks and his companions visited a large house that was still full of chips from its construction, with a number of finely carved poupou or ‘side posts’ standing inside. A carved side post, almost certainly from this house, was collected during this visit and taken back to England, where it was sketched. In 1995 this carving was rediscovered in a museum in Tuebingen in Germany, where it was recognised from this drawing.Footnote1 According to Joel Polack, who visited Uawa many years later, Tupaia drew a European ship on the wall of the cave where he slept (which is now no longer visible). He also sketched a watercolour of Joseph Banks exchanging a large crayfish with a local man for Tahitian bark-cloth ().
This sketch is the only Tahitian record that survives from the Endeavour's 6-month circumnavigation of New Zealand. Although the presence of a high priest from the homeland transformed the quality of exchanges with Māori, Tupaia's conversations with local people are recorded only in snippets. With his death in Batavia, the information that he had committed to memory was lost. Of the observations made by the Royal Society party and the Endeavour's officers in New Zealand, however, many still survive. In their logs and journals, they described events, landscapes, people and objects, supplemented by graphic records—sketches and paintings, charts, surveys and coastal profiles. The Royal Society party in particular collected botanical and zoological specimens or ‘artificial curiosities’ (artefacts). After the voyage, the journals, logs and charts were handed over to the Admiralty archives, while Joseph Banks either owned, claimed or procured many of the sketches, paintings, artefacts and botanical and zoological items, and these were catalogued and stored in his private collection.
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This asymmetry in lines of surviving evidence about these early encounters is not accidental. Rather, it arises from fundamentally different assumptions about reality, and different knowledge systems. The accounts and collections by the Royal Society party and naval officers on board the Endeavour were artefacts of Enlightenment science, which aimed to observe, record, analyse and understand the cosmos and the globe. Observations were captured in images (sketches, paintings, charts and surveys) or texts (logs, journals, letters, etc.), which were later catalogued and preserved. Specimens of plants and animals from exotic places were collected, pressed or bottled, recorded and taken back to the homeland, where they were stored for future reference. Instruments were devised to allow for increased precision and scope in the recording process—telescopes, quadrants, chronometers, microscopes and so on, although older technologies also continued to be used.
Figure 1 Tupaia, c1769. A Māori man and Joseph Banks exchanging a crayfish for a piece of cloth. © The British Library Board.
On board the Endeavour, for instance, ship's time was measured by an hourglass and corrected at noon when the sun was at its zenith. Ship time thus ran from noon to noon, and the hours for each day were recorded in the first column in the ship's log, the official record of the voyage. The speed of the ship was measured by the chip log, a device with a triangular piece of wood (the ‘chip’) on the end of a rope knotted at regular intervals. Every hour the chip was thrown overboard, the speed at which the rope ran out was measured, and the ‘knots’ and fathoms per hour at which the ship was travelling were recorded in the next two columns in the log. Course and direction were determined by reference to dead-reckoning and the compass, which was oriented to magnetic north (although magnetic variation caused major problems), and recorded in a fourth column, while the direction of the wind was recorded in a fifth column. Comments were added in yet another, wider column, where room was left for textual descriptions of places and events.
In the surveys and charts, the ship's track and new coastlines were traced as lines across sheets of paper gridded with latitude and longitude, fixed by astronomical observation and surveying techniques, with orientation indicated by compass bearings. The depth of the coastal seabed was measured with the lead, especially near harbours or lagoons, and these soundings were also recorded on the charts.
Specimens in the botanical and zoological collections were also classified and recorded—collected, examined, sketched and preserved, and ordered into genera, classes and orders, each with its own binomial descriptor and definition. On board the Endeavour, Joseph Banks used the taxonomic system devised by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, categorising plants by counting their sexual organs. After the voyage, the artefacts collected were also listed and classified using a functional typology (paddle, spear, club, etc.), along with the location where they were collected. To organise his observations of places, people and artefacts Joseph Banks used another system of classification, commenting on topics such as ‘Terrain’, ‘Climate’, ‘Minerals’, ‘Population’, ‘Forts and Leaders’, ‘Religion’, ‘Burial and Mourning’. In addition, he referred to the ‘Great Chain of Nature’ which ranked all phenomena in the cosmos in a graded hierarchy with God at the apex, followed in succession by archangels and angels, divine monarchs, the ranks of the aristocracy, commoners, ‘barbarians’ (who tilled the soil, and thus had land rights) and ‘savages’ (especially those who practised ‘cannibalism’) near the bottom.
This sorting of the cosmos into classes of distinct, mutually exclusive items in different realms at different levels of abstraction is often associated with the Enlightenment, and Euro-American modernity. Here, the cosmos is apprehended as ‘a basic particular writ large’—the universe / globe, ordered into arrays of distinct entities. (Evens TMS: Twins are birds and a whale is a fish, a mammal, a submarine: revisiting ‘primitive mentality’ as a question of ontology. Unpublished:9–10). This approach differs markedly from a ‘relational’ ontological style, characteristic of Polynesian ways of being. Here, reality is an unbounded whole, in which ‘boundaries [are] conceived of as thresholds rather than impervious dividers: [and] the whole denotes a global connectivity, thus rendering all things relative, and intimating infinity in both space and time’. In this style, ‘it is the medial or third term [in other words, the relation] and not the things linked by it that enjoys ontological primacy’ (Evens op. cit.:10, 15).
In te ao Māori (the Māori ‘world’), for instance, ‘global connectivity’ is expressed in all-encompassing networks of kin relations, or whakapapa. According to the cosmological chants, the world began with a surge of energy. Thought, memory and desire emerged, and then te pō, the dark realm of ancestors, and te kore, the void or seedbed of the cosmos. Here, complementary pairs of beings came together to create new forms of life, including earth and sky, the sea, winds, forests, plants, animals and people. As Marshall Sahlins has remarked, ‘The [Māori] universe is a gigantic kin, a genealogy. Natural means of human existence are forms or descendants of the god’ (Sahlins Citation1985:195).
In these cosmological networks, exchanges (utu) between different life forms alternate between gift giving, amity and union, and quarrelling, enmity and exclusion, working towards equilibrium. The networks themselves are often spoken of as plants, rooted in the soil, branching and sprawling across the land. People cared for the hau (the ‘breath of life’ or life force) of these networks and the land and sea on which they grew, giving them ritual offerings (known as whāngai hau or ‘feeding the hau’). Gifts, by carrying part of the donor's hau, created an obligation for reciprocal gifting, and this applies to ancestors, objects, plants and animals, as well as living people.
Life surges in and out of the primal source, and time is a spiral. A person is the ‘living face’ of their ancestors; and a matakite (or person with ‘eyes that can see’) can look into past and future. Knowledge is an ancestral treasure (taonga), passed along genealogical networks to guide and inform future exchanges, stored in the ngākau or ‘mind-heart’ of descendants. When exchanges are in balance, the hau or breath of life flows unimpeded, and the networks (families, communities and ecosystems) are in a state of ora—healthy, prosperous and in good heart. When reciprocity falters, however, entire networks begin to fail and become mate—unhealthy, dysfunctional and destructive.
In Tahiti, where Tupaia and his people inhabited a similar world, the high priest took Joseph Banks as a bond friend. This relationship tangled their lineages together, allowing Tupaia to pass on some of his ancestral knowledge to Banks and his Endeavour shipmates. This included lists of more than 100 islands, together with their bearings from Tahiti and the number of nights elapsed in journeys between particular islands (information that Cook translated into a chart). Islands were linked in networks by star paths (successions of stars that rose and fell on the horizon at night, marking the bearings joining one island with another) and sea paths (marked by various signs including patterns of currents), radiating out from particular coastal marae or ceremonial centres. During the Endeavour's journey through the Society Islands, Tupaia piloted the ship, calling upon ancestral forces including the winds (arrayed around the horizon in a ‘wind compass’), the stars and the sea. He told Banks and Cook about the seasonal wind shifts that he had used in a voyage to and from the Tongan islands, but was unable to explain the star paths. Not only the names of stars and constellations, but the constellations themselves were quite different from European counterparts.
When Tupaia went ashore in New Zealand, he quickly asserted his mana as a high priest from Ra'iatea. As the local people greeted and challenged the strangers, performing haka or dances of challenge on land and in canoes at sea, the high priest understood them, and could say whatever he wanted. Members of the kin groups who met the strangers were engaged in their own relational politics, shaping their conduct during these encounters. In Tūranga-nui, for instance, after confronting the Endeavour party, Rongowhakaata warriors retrieved the body of their kinsman, Te Rākau, but left behind the body of Te Maro, the Ngāti Oneone challenger who was shot on the first day ashore. As the British noted, the young fisher boys who were taken on board the Endeavour were terrified at the prospect of being landed in enemy territory. When Captain Cook, Joseph Banks and Tupaia arrived at Uawa, a district that appeared to be at peace, Tupaia slept in a cave ashore, painted a ship on its rock wall and talked with the local priests. These conversations must have been extraordinary. During Cook's second voyage to New Zealand, when his consort ship the Adventure anchored at Uawa, the people asked for Tupaia, and wept when they were told that he had died—‘Aue, kua mate koe Tupaia!’.
Tupaia and the Endeavour party he escorted made a remarkable impact on the communities they visited, and memories of these meetings were handed down. As European ships landed in increasing numbers, however, bringing guns and epidemic diseases, the local population plummeted. Inevitably, the oral transmission of ancestral accounts was disrupted, and much was lost, so that we now have relatively fragmentary insights into those forms of knowledge. Nevertheless, stories about the Endeavour's arrival were passed on, some of which were written down or told to curious Europeans; and even more was recorded about ancestral relationships in whakapapa books, or recited to the Native Land Court. In part, then, the asymmetry in lines of evidence about the first meetings between Māori and Europeans on the east coast has to do with scholarly bias in favour of written and graphic records, and ignorance of Māori oral sources, rather than a dearth of Māori accounts.
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As this brief discussion suggests, in these early encounters, different ‘worlds’ came together. If time is a spiral and one can travel back to the future, what can we learn from these early meetings? The philosophies that emerged during the Enlightenment in Europe often grasp reality as arrays of separated, bounded entities—markets based on decisions by cost–benefit-calculating individuals; nation states with citizens possessing individual rights and freedoms; property, defined as calculable units, each with a price, including land, water, plants, animals, minerals, time and ideas as well as objects. All the same, as Marcel Mauss pointed out in The Gift (Mauss Citation1954), relational philosophies still apply in realms such as kinship and friendship, and inter-personal exchanges based on ideas such as honour, truth and justice. In New Zealand over many years, these relational ideas and conventions have served as bridgeheads between Māori and their fellow citizens. Relational values have also acted as a counterweight to the inexorable process of dividing reality into autonomous entities, although there appears to be no natural limit to the practice of bringing ever more aspects of the cosmos into this atomistic framework.
At the same time, in New Zealand as elsewhere, life itself is moving in patterns that challenge this kind of ontology and its assumptions—that nation states are bounded entities, that the world is a resource to be exploited, that markets operate apart from people, that individuals are autonomous cost–benefit calculators. Global flows of students, workers and capital engender trans-national and trans-cultural ways of living. Virtual networks of communication (such as the internet, digital TV, Skype and sites like Facebook with their photographs and messages) sprawl around the world, crossing national borders and blurring time–space distinctions. Debates about climate change and losses of biodiversity draw attention to the inter-connection of all forms of life, including people, plants and animals and the earth, while the apparent fragility of the world financial system erodes confidence in the invisible hand of the market and the rationality of self-interested individuals. At the same time, nation-states appear to be poorly organised to take effective action in these spheres, and the disciplines (knowledge organised into entities—subjects, departments, institutes and faculties)Footnote2 struggle to comprehend the complex dynamics of relational exchanges. It may be that the worlds we inhabit are increasingly relational in character, and that style and the types of understanding it engenders are not adaptive for many purposes.
As a number of theorists have pointed out, when people who live very differently come together, taken-for-granted assumptions may come to light and be questioned.Footnote3 Different kinds of encounters become possible, and new kinds of questions, in a spiral of critical, searching exchanges. In New Zealand, a small country with a diverse population and access to a range of intellectual traditions, experiments with new ways of thinking about global challenges are eminently possible. In the Waitangi Tribunal and the settlement process, for instance, a bold attempt to restore some balance to relationships between Māori and other New Zealanders repeatedly brings to light clashes between ontological modes. As soon as fish are turned into quota, to be bought and sold on the market, for instance; or broadcasting frequencies are auctioned; or knowledge becomes intellectual property; and waterways are metered for hydro-electric power, irrigation and water supplies for towns and cities, these transformations are challenged by Māori groups before the Tribunal, and other ways of negotiating these relationships are proposed.
In New Zealand as elsewhere, shifts towards an atomistic way of being have been associated with fragmented social networks, soaring inequalities between rich and poor, market collapses caused by lack of reciprocity, and the degradation of rivers, lakes, land and associated ecosystems—all signs of mate, dysfunction and disorder. These are not the only options available, however. It is possible for cutting-edge science, technologies and ideas (many of which are also relational in character) to work together in innovative modes of exchange between people and the wider world in a quest for improved sustainability, productivity and ora—prosperity and well-being.
Collaborative styles of practice and genuinely shared projects are most likely to open up innovative forms of thought and experience. As Henare et al. suggest, ‘[we] might seize on these engagements as opportunities from which novel theoretical understandings can emerge’ (Henare et al. Citation2007:1)—and, perhaps, new ways of living in the world. During the celebrations of the 2012 transit of Venus in the Tai Rāwhiti, I hope such approaches will be explored, opening up arrays of possible futures sparked off by those early encounters off the east coast of New Zealand, in the Endeavour's Great Cabin and in Tupaia's cave.
Nā taku rourou, na tou rourou, ka ora ai te tangata.
With your food basket and mine, the people will thrive.
Notes
1For an excellent account of the most likely European provenance of the carving, see Harms 1996.
2For comparative reflections upon European and Māori ways of talking about knowledge, see Salmond 1983.
3For a more extended version of the argument in this paper, see Salmond A (forthcoming, 2012). Ontological quarrels: indigeneity, exclusion and citizenship in a relational world. Anthropological Theory.
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