Cook James - Tupaia: the remarkable story of Captain Cooks Polynesian navigator

For more than two hundred years a painting of a Maori in a flax cloak and a European in gentlemans dress exchanging a lobster for a piece of cloth has been the subject of puzzled speculation. Carried to England in 1771 by Joseph Banks, who sailed as a scientific passenger on Captain James Cooks Endeavour, the work is now iconic. As a symbol of first contact between native and westerner, it is so evocative that it has been reproduced many times over the years, though the identity of the artist remained unknown. Held by the British Museum and then the British Library after Bankss death, it was catalogued simply as the work of The Artist of the Chief Mourner, because of another strangely compelling watercolour by the same painter.

THEN THE MYSTERY WAS solved. In 1998, Harold Carter, the biographer of Joseph Banks, described a letter he had found in the Banks collection, dated December 1812, which reads in part:

Tupia the Indian who came with me from Otaheite Learnd to draw in a way not Quite unintelligible The genius for Caricature which all wild people Posses Led him to Caricature me and he drew me with a nail in my hand delivering it to an Indian who sold me a Lobster but with my other hand I had a firm fist on the Lobster determind not to Quit the nail till I had Livery and Seizin of the article purchasd

THE LAPSE OF FORTY-THREE years had misled Banks into remembering that the piece of cloth he had offered for the lobster had been a nail. Despite this, it was now clear that The Artist of the Chief Mourner was the extraordinary Polynesian who sailed with Captain Cook from Tahiti, and acted as the Europeans go-between in dangerous first contacts with the Maori people.

His name was Tupaia.

Tupaia, a gifted linguist and a devious politician, could aptly be called the Machiavelli of eighteenth-century Tahiti. In June 1767, when the first European ship, HMS Dolphin, arrived at the island, Tupaia became Tahitis foremost diplomat. He took on the same role soon after the Endeavour dropped anchor in Tahiti in April 1769, and then, when the ship departed, Tupaia sailed with it.

He was not afraid Polynesians were never afraid to voyage. Over the next two centuries thousands more Polynesians would sign on to European ships with the same confidence and courage, to work side by side with British sailors and American whalemen. Tupaia was special, though, because in his own culture he was a master navigator, highly skilled in astronomy and navigation, and an expert in the geography of the Pacific. In normal times he would have kept his privileged knowledge a deadly secret, never revealed to anyone outside his select group. But, as an exile and a man who had narrowly avoided capture and sacrifice by his enemies he was willing to share this sacred lore.

Yet Tupaia, for all his generosity and brilliance, has never been part of the popular Captain Cook legend. This is largely because he died of complications from scurvy seven months before the ship arrived home. Once he was gone, his accomplishments were easily forgotten indeed, by removing Tupaia from the story, what the Europeans had achieved seemed all the greater. James Cook could have resented the fact that Tupaia had been hailed by the Maori as the admiral of the expedition. Seemingly, too, the sacred gifts that Tupaia had received from New Zealand chiefs had proved useful for presentation to monarchs and museums. It was also important that Tupaia should be forgotten when James Cook received his medal from the Royal Society for the remarkable feat of never losing a man to scurvy!

Partly because of all this, the biography of the unacknowledged Tahitian who contributed so much to the success of the Endeavour voyage has never been written. Polynesia relied on oral histories, and so what we know about the eighteenth-century Pacific comes from the diaries, journals, logbooks and memoirs of European witnesses, and the record has been too one-sided for a rounded account. Lately, however, folklorists and anthropologists, by paying attention to Polynesian myths and memories, have added immensely to our understanding. By consulting this new, rich literature, as well as the journals and memoirs written by the men who dealt with Tupaia on land and sailed with him at sea, the story of this extraordinary genius can at last be told.