Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [25]
The two men were a formidable team. Cook was a great navigator and resolute captain, willing to enforce his beliefs in warding off scurvy by having those who refused his diet flogged: the expedition reached Tahiti without losing a single man to the disease. Apart from the ‘pestiferous’ flies which even ate the paint off botanical paintings as the artists worked, the island turned out to be a pleasant enough destination, populated by a gentle, sensual people whose women were unusually attractive. The Tahitians proved to have remarkable thieving skills, but the president of the Royal Society, the Earl of Morton, had advised the expedition to treat the native people they encountered kindly. In a note of guidance quite at variance with the usual depiction of brutal imperialists, he asked them ‘To check the petulance of the Sailors, and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms … shedding the blood of those people is a crime of the highest nature … They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit.’ This was a comparatively easy request to heed, for the women wore few clothes and the main currency of barter seems to have been sex, which the islanders readily traded for hard-to-obtain commodities like iron: a British vessel visiting Tahiti not long before was said to have begun to fall apart as sailors levered the nails from the beams before they went ashore. On his return to England at the end of the voyage, Banks was caricatured as ‘the Botanic macaroni’* who had been so seduced by the beauty of the women of this tropical paradise that he had returned to the Endeavour from one field trip stripped of almost all his clothes. As he explained things, it was the misfortune of the British to live in a changeable climate, where they were ‘obligd to Plow, Sow, Harrow, Reap, Thrash, Grind, Knead and bake our daily bread’, whereas in Tahiti, ‘Love is the Chief Occupation … both the bodies and souls of the women are modeled into the utmost perfection for that soft science.’
(In time, this belief in what we might call the climatic theory of empire provided an apparently scientific justification for the expansion of Britain overseas: societies living in changeable, temperate weather of the kind that afflicted small islands off the coast of Europe were obliged to work hard to make the earth yield crops, which in turn created ambitions, markets, banks, law and decent government. Tropical islands, where nature was more obliging, were obviously backward and needed to be brought to a higher level of development.)
Eventually, though, the expedition had to move on. Captain Cook had been issued with a secret set of orders from the Admiralty which he was to follow once the transit of Venus had been observed. These made clear a set of political and commercial objectives, too. From Tahiti he was to sail to explore the Great South Land believed to exist at the bottom of the world, to claim in the name of the king any new territories he came across, to make friends with any natives he encountered, and, at the end of his journey, to seal all logbooks and journals and hand them to the Admiralty. The crew were to be forbidden to talk of where they had been until given official permission to do so. This intelligence-gathering of distant parts would ‘redound greatly to the Honour of this Nation as a Maritime Power, as well as to the Dignity of the Crown of Great Britain, and may tend greatly to the advancement of the Trade and Navigation thereof’. After three months in his Polynesian paradise, Cook departed to fulfil his orders. After a further three months, his ship reached the two islands of New Zealand, which he sailed around in a figure of eight, raising the flag on each and claiming them in the name of George III. Then, on 31 March 1770 he set his vessel westwards. Within a few weeks they had struck land again.
They had discovered the east coast of the world’s only island