Wade Graham

Braided Waters


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natives and to pursue biological exchange: to seed and stock the (is)lands found along the way and to bring back potentially useful seeds to the empire.23

      Cook’s orders on the first trip had been to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti and to catalog what he saw along the way. On the third voyage, he had, in addition, secret instructions to find “a North East, or North West Passage, from the Pacific Ocean into the Atlantic Ocean” and to “carefully to observe the nature of the Soil & the Produce thereof; the Animals & Fowls that inhabit or frequent it” and “to bring home Specimens of . . . the Seeds of such Trees, Shrubs, Plants, Fruits, and Grains, peculiar to those Places, as you may be able to collect.” No secret was his duty to leave specimens from his own country behind: when the Resolution left London in June 1776, it “was a floating barnyard” loaded with “cattle, horses, sheep, goats, hogs, and poultry for New Zealand, Tahiti, and Tonga” and a Tahitian named Omai, returning with Cook from a celebrated sojourn in England after the second voyage. At Huahine, Cook had a garden planted for Omai; he had previously planted a garden in Tahiti in 1769, as Wallis had planted citrus trees there in 1767. At Ni‘ihau in 1777, Cook contributed to the Hawaiian biota English pigs and goats and melon, pumpkin, and onion seeds.24

      The historian David Mackay remarked that “planting a garden in Tahiti was the botanical equivalent of taking coals to Newcastle.” Others, such as Gannanath Obeyesekere, have interpreted it as an expression of the European imperialist “improvement narrative,” wherein Cook the Civilizer introduces order into the untended wilderness “to domesticate a savage land,” rendering his imperialist mission “morally persuasive.”25 It was more likely simply pragmatic. In the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, few transoceanic voyages left port without a menagerie on deck—supplies both to consume and, where practicable, with which to stock passing shores as an investment in future voyages. The French explorer La Perouse landed goats on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and planted seeds on his march into its interior—and commented accurately in his journal that the natives had “foolishly cut down” the island’s trees “ages ago,” causing desertification.26 Even American traders did it, at their own expense, considering it a wise investment in the success of future voyages and good baksheesh to grease trade with native rulers. John Meares wrote of a voyage from Canton in 1788: “A certain number of cattle and other useful animals were purchased, for the purpose of being put on shore in those places where they might add to the comfort of the inhabitants or promise to supply the future navigators of our own, or any other country, with the necessary refreshments. On board of each ship were embarked six cows and three bulls, four bull and cow calves, a number of goats, turkeys and rabbits, with several pair of pigeons, and other stock in great abundance.”27 To various Hawaiian chiefs, Vancouver gave out “some vine and orange plants, some almonds, and an assortment of garden seeds” as well as goats, sheep, and a pair of cattle, one pregnant, for Kamehameha in 1790.28 In 1803, William Shaler and Richard Cleveland brought four horses from Mexican California to Hawai‘i as presents for Kamehameha (the king bought their ship, the Lelia Byrd, as the flagship of an armada to invade Kaua‘i). American whaler captains, generally unconcerned with moral persuasion, left livestock on even the smallest rocks, such as the Bonins south of Japan.29

      By the 1780s, Sir Joseph Banks, veteran of Cook’s first voyage and director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, had launched a global scheme for rebuilding the mercantile system with an “unabashedly economic” program of “plant transfer” to bring production of raw materials inside the British Empire. “Botany and great power rivalry became curiously intertwined, as nations endeavoured to guard their precious colonial treasures while seeking to filch those of their competitors,” in Mackay’s words. Banks sent a Polish spy, Anton Hove, to Gujarat, India, to steal cottonseed. He organized the movement of sago and date palms to avert famines in India, of hemp and flax for naval stores, and of spices to break the Dutch monopoly and then helped sponsor prizes for the importation of cinnamon, “cochineal, silk, indigo, fine cotton, cloves, camphor and coffee.”30 And, responding to pressure from British sugar planters in the West Indies who had lost fifteen thousand slaves to hurricanes and drought from 1780 to 1787, he sent Captain Bligh, another veteran of Cook’s first trip, to Tahiti to collect seedlings of the breadfruit trees they had seen there to transplant to Saint Vincent and Jamaica as food for slaves. After the first expedition foundered on mutiny at Tahiti, Banks sent Bligh again—and succeeded, making his ship, the famous Endeavor, into “a floating garden transported in luxuriance from one extremity of the world to another.”31 As an example of the thoroughness of this traffic, the British had successfully imported over two hundred species of plants to New South Wales by 1803.32

      Pacific natives were also eager for Euro-American goods and organisms. As the Euro-Americans themselves did, they filtered this trade and traffic through their own economic, political, religious, and class frameworks. When Cook stepped off at Tahiti, Kealakekua Bay, and elsewhere to further the march of the British Empire, he met powerful sets of chiefs, many trying to advance their own designs of Polynesian empire. In Hawai‘i and elsewhere, he and his compatriots stepped into long-running cycles of warfare for consolidation and control of districts, islands, and groups of islands. Kamehameha and other chiefs quickly saw the usefulness of Euro-American arms, ships, and personnel and launched expensive arms races that would completely reshape patterns of life in their islands. Some learned the new rules quicker than others. Kehekili, ruler of Maui, Molokai, and O‘ahu in the 1780s, frequently employed thievery and occasionally violence to procure goods; as a consequence, European and American ships gave him a wide berth and traded instead with Kamehameha, who clearly saw the advantage of courtesy and openness in dealing with the newcomers. Along with his hospitality, Kamehameha’s trading acumen was widely praised. His assertion of kapu, or taboo, control over hogs, the cattle that had expanded from Vancouver’s pair into vast herds, and later, sandalwood, won him strategic advantage over Kehekili and all other rivals as he successfully consolidated his rule over the archipelago. Many defeated chiefs blamed the Europeans for the concentration of all power in Hawai‘i in one hand.33 In Tahiti, the Pomares clan rose to dominance through a similarly shrewd control of the pork trade with New South Wales.34

      In time, Kamehameha became a kind of Polynesian Joseph Banks, collecting plants and seeds (including the seeds of apples spit out on the beach by foreigners) and employing a Welsh gardener and Mexican cowboys to train his kanakas (men) to become paniolos (Hawaiian for españoles, or Spaniards). He picked and chose as it suited him: according to Cleveland, he was initially unimpressed with the horses given to him, thinking them too much trouble to feed for the transportation benefit to be had: “He expresses his thanks, but did not seem to comprehend their value.”35 Other Hawaiians, commoners in particular, took more readily to them, and horse riding became a craze. Tobacco became a plague, smoked by “almost every person,” including “children . . . and adults smoking to excess and falling senseless to the ground.”36 Melons, watermelons, “and fruit in general having found the most ready reception next to tobacco” were widely grown.37 Yet, on the whole, Polynesians were uninterested in adopting the European diet. A British officer visiting Kealakekua Bay in July 1796 reported that, of the things left by Vancouver, the ducks had bred, the cattle “had much increased in number,” but “the garden seeds had failed through inattention.”38 In Tahiti, “it was only after three decades of visits that the Tahitians began to nurture some of the alien species or to deplore their introduction such as guavas and goats.” The “shaddock” citrus trees introduced there by Cook and called ooroo no pretany (breadfruit of Britain) had been kept alive only by the attention of one old man. “The natives do not value them,” wrote Bligh.39 Where Bligh had planted Indian corn, a later crew also planted a garden and asked the natives to take care of it. The Tahitians laughed and said that they had everything they needed. Of the horses and cattle left by Cook, they had neglected the cattle and killed the horse but had disliked the meat.40

      Many Europeans thought that the prospect of commerce might entice Polynesians to become farmers of European crops, and to a certain extent, it did. Beginning in 1793 the British governor of New South Wales introduced hogs and potato seeds to Maoris in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand; by 1805, Maoris supplied a considerable