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  Kendall was paid the enormous sum of £450 to make K140—and it took him two years to complete. He was also given a £50 reward. For comparison, the total purchase price of the Endeavour was only £2,800.41 As designs and production methods improved, the price of chronometers gradually came down (by the end of the eighteenth century they cost between 60 and 100 guineas—£63 and £105—though to this should be added five or ten guineas a year for maintenance), but they remained beyond the pocket of all but the richest officers until well into the nineteenth century. It was to be many years before the use of chronometers became commonplace. Bearing in mind its customary parsimony, it is not surprising that by 1802 the British Admiralty had supplied only 7 percent of Royal Navy vessels with chronometers at official expense.42 * These would all have been deployed aboard ships destined for service in distant waters, and notable among them were the survey vessels. Several were commanded by men whom Cook himself had trained, and they in turn trained the next generation. The small world of hydrography was a tight-knit one, and it was governed by a kind of apostolic succession.

  Chapter 9

  Bougainville in the South Seas

  Day 10: Weather deteriorating. Up as usual at 0400, in pouring rain and heavy squalls which come creeping up under low black, fast-moving clouds. Wind W by S force 6–7 gusting to 8. At 0730 the wind eased slightly and I put up the No. 1 stays’l and, of course, it immediately blew up again so I had to change back to the No. 2. Repeated the same procedure soon afterwards. With a following wind it’s very hard to choose the right amount of canvas—either too much or too little. Also the boat rolls abominably. Low dark ragged clouds above us, racing past us. No sights today.

  Later that morning the wind increased to gale force, and we switched down to the much smaller storm jib. Even so, our speed through the water increased and we were surfing down steep, breaking waves that grew bigger all the time. The speed of the change was startling: in the space of an hour or two, our world had been completely transformed. I was steering by hand now, as the self-steering gear could not cope with the heavy following seas that were advancing across the surface of the ocean at a much faster pace than ours. As each wave came up behind us, the stern lifted, the bows dipped, and Saecwen accelerated down its face, until the crest passed beneath us, at which point we slid stern-first into the trough behind it. Sometimes the wave started to break just as it reached us and we steered to avoid the mass of hissing foam as it roared past.

  Saecwen was now going very fast, perhaps too fast for safety, throwing up a huge bow wave on either side as she surfed down the waves. It was exhilarating, and I felt as if I were at the helm of a dinghy rather than a heavy yacht. Colin appeared from down below with a tense look on his face I had not seen before. He asked me to douse the jib and took the helm while I went forward to deal with it. I freed the halyard, pulled down the sail, undoing the hanks that clipped it to the forestay, and gathered it, kneeling on the foredeck, which was leaping and plunging in the heavy seas. As the bows dipped sharply downward I was almost weightless, but my knee collided painfully with the anchor windlass when the deck suddenly heaved up again. A moment later, a cascade of cold water poured up inside my oilskin trousers, soaking me to the waist. I yelled in rage and frustration as I struggled to control the sail, but luckily Colin could hear nothing above the noise of the wind and waves. I hugged the wet sail to me and staggered slowly back to the cockpit.

  We were now running under bare poles, and though our speed had slackened, the weight of the wind on the mast and rigging was still driving us through the water at five or six knots. It was blowing a full gale, and the rain and spray had reduced the visibility to maybe half a mile. I went below and got out of my wet clothes. There was no chance of drying anything, so I just squeezed them out onto the cabin floor—which was already running with water—and chucked them into the oilskin locker to wait for a sunny day. My knee was bleeding and I felt very sorry for myself. Down below, the roar of the waves and the howl of the wind were slightly muffled, but the wild swooping and rolling of the boat had pried loose everything that would move. The cutlery was crashing around in its drawer, plastic mugs and plates were jiggling in their racks, cans and bottles carefully stowed in various corners with towels and socks to keep them quiet were now chinking, and several books had jumped out of the bookcase onto the floor. Alexa emerged from her bunk to help me tidy things up and put on the kettle to make hot chocolate. Colin looked tired as I handed up a mug to him. Lunch consisted of stale crackers with pâté from a tin, syrupy tinned peaches slurped out of mugs, and Mars bars. The warmth of the food and drink spread through me and I climbed gratefully into my clammy sleeping bag, to doze rather than sleep, still half aware of the motion of the boat and the swishing and gurgling of the sea running past the curved hull just a few inches away.

  But sleep must have come because I dreamed. I was a small child again, flying high, as free and strong as an eagle, far above an endless sea of clouds that glowed in the golden light of the setting sun. Suddenly I remembered myself and began to fall, faster and faster, until wild waves rushed up toward me. I tried to call out but no sound came. With a crash I hit the water and sank into the dark, knowing that I was dying and would never see the light of day again. Then a big, warm hand gripped mine and pulled me up to safety. I recognized that hand at once: it was my father’s.

  Colin called me later in the afternoon, and I struggled reluctantly into my still-wet oilskins and squelching boots—a surprisingly difficult task when being thrown around the cabin by each lurch and roll of the boat. The scene that confronted me when I came on deck was awe-inspiring. The wind had probably not strengthened much, but the waves had reached majestic proportions. Their crests were perhaps one hundred yards apart, and the wind eased noticeably as we dipped into the shelter of the deep troughs between them. Colin was wearing his safety harness and I put mine on, too, clipping it to a strong point in the cockpit. When he went below Alexa came up to keep me company. Neither of us had ever seen such a sea before, and this was not even a big storm—just a typical North Atlantic gale. It was beautiful, exhilarating, and frightening. There was a lot of noise: the wind whistling through the rigging, the roaring hiss of the breaking waves around us, and the creaks and groans of the boat herself. We were right out in the middle of the ocean now, a long, long way from any help. I had to grip the tiller with both hands to keep Saecwen on course, and for the first time I felt it vibrate as the rudder cut through the water beneath us. There was no question of taking any sights that day as the sky was completely obscured by thick, low, fast-moving clouds, but at least we were more or less on the right course.

  While Alexa and I were together on watch, a really big breaking wave caught us, smothering the cockpit in foaming water and casually flinging Saecwen down on her beam ends. Alexa was now at the helm, and hung on desperately to the tiller as the wall of cold water crashed over us, but she could exert no control whatever. The boat broached to, slewing round through ninety degrees, and for a few moments her masthead almost touched the sea before the weight of her keel slowly righted her. I found myself up to the waist in water in the cockpit, which was completely awash. Having lost her grip on the tiller, Alexa had almost gone over the side and had been badly bruised by the guardrail, but although the canvas spray-hood over the main hatch was torn we were still afloat and—thank God—the mast was still standing. While the water gradually drained from the cockpit I struggled to get Saecwen under control before another wave hit her. The main hatch slid back and Colin’s head appeared: “Everything all right, Mr. Mate?” he asked. Alexa and I laughed nervously, but things were getting too exciting, so now we lay ahull, with no sails up, the helm lashed to one side, very slowly reaching across the track of the advancing waves rather than running fast before them. In this configuration Saecwen could be left to her own devices, even though the occasional comber swept with a roar over her decks, briefly darkening the cabin.* Since the visibility was so poor, we all stayed bel
ow and prepared a fortifying supper: corned-beef hash made with instant mash, onions, and eggs, followed by tinned rhubarb and then whisky. It was a wild night and we only peeped out of the hatch occasionally to make sure that all was well, but we were all in surprisingly good spirits.

  THE BRITISH WERE not alone in exploring the Pacific Ocean and its shores during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Following their defeat in the Seven Years’ War, the French were determined to restore their dented national pride and to play their part in extending the scope of geographic knowledge. Two great French navigators left their marks on the map of the Pacific, though their experiences, and their reactions to them, were markedly different.

  Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1729–1811)—absurdly best known today in the English-speaking world for the tropical plant that bears his name—set sail from France in November 1766 in the frigate La Boudeuse (“the sulky”), almost two years ahead of Cook. Unlike Cook, he was a relative newcomer to the sea. He had started his career on the staff of the French ambassador in London (where he met Anson) and later distinguished himself in the army as aide-de-camp to General Montcalm.1 A highly educated and cultivated man, he had, while still in his twenties, published a two-volume treatise on integral calculus and was already a Fellow of the Royal Society in London. With feigned modesty, Bougainville warned readers of his Voyage autour du monde that his style was “all too plainly” marked by the wild, nomadic life he had for so long been leading. “It is neither in the forests of Canada nor on the breast of the sea that one develops the art of writing,”2 he proclaimed.

  In fact, his Voyage is beautifully crafted, and among the reading public it found an appreciative audience. It even prompted a reaction from the great encyclopaedist Denis Diderot, whose satirical Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville (1772) was influential in spreading the Romantic notion of the “noble savage.” However, Bougainville’s achievements were much less impressive from a purely navigational point of view than those of Cook,3 and his Voyage made only a slight impression on the world of scholarship.4

  Bougainville was the first explorer to be accompanied by a suite of scientists—as well as an artist—an example followed by many of his successors, including Cook. His astronomer, Pierre-Antoine Véron, did not enjoy the benefit of a chronometer, but he was equipped with the latest lunar-distance tables in the Connoissance des Temps (for the moon and sun) and the Abbé de La Caille’s catalog of fixed stars.5Although Véron had brought with him an instrument called a “megamètre” for making lunar observations, Bougainville judged that Hadley’s quadrant was in general preferable.6 In addition to these working “supernumeraries,” Bougainville also invited a paying passenger, the Prince de Nassau-Sieghen, a young man rumored to have been involved in a number of amorous liaisons who had also run up an embarrassing number of debts. They seem to have got on well with each other. In fact, both men were enthusiastic gamblers, and they may well have been lovers of the same famous actress and opera singer, Sophie Arnould.7 Bougainville and Cook could hardly have been more different.

  Having called at Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Bougainville visited the Falkland Islands—or Les Malouines, as they were known to him—in order to hand over to the Spanish, in accordance with the terms of a recent treaty, a colony of displaced French Canadians he had established there a few years earlier. Having returned to Rio, where he was joined by the supply ship L’Étoile (“the star”), Bougainville entered the Straits of Magellan, the narrow passage linking the South Atlantic and Pacific oceans just north of Cape Horn. The weather was miserably cold, wild winds impeded their progress, the anchorages were often insecure, and it was rarely possible to make observations for longitude. The refined Bougainville found the native peoples depressingly primitive—and unbearably smelly.8 The accidental death of a young native boy who ate some of the glass trade goods the French had brought with them deepened his sense of gloom.9 In late January 1768, however, having spent fifty-two days struggling through a channel only 330 nautical miles long, he was delighted at last to see the open Pacific.10

  In April 1768, Bougainville reached Tahiti,11 quite unaware that Captain Samuel Wallis of the Royal Navy had called there eight months earlier in the Swallow.* It could hardly have differed more from Tierra del Fuego. He was entranced by the physical beauty of the island and its inhabitants, and fascinated by the sexual freedom they enjoyed. Even before they had anchored, the two ships were surrounded by canoes filled with islanders “giving a thousand signs of friendship” and “demanding nails and ear rings.” Bougainville considered the women to be at least as beautiful as their European counterparts, and, as he breathlessly observed, “most of these nymphs were naked.”12 The Tahitian men, for their part, pressed the visitors to choose a woman, and “their gestures made it quite clear how we should make their acquaintance.” Bougainville asks rhetorically how he could possibly be expected, in such a situation, to keep four hundred young French sailors at their work.

  Despite all the precautions that we could take, a young girl came aboard . . . [she] negligently let slip a shift that covered her, and made the same impression on everyone as Venus revealing herself to the Phrygian shepherd:* she had the heavenly body of the goddess.13

  Needless to say, this vision caused quite a stir among the sailors, but it was Bougainville’s cook who managed to slip away—though the adventure proved less enjoyable than he must have hoped. Having reached the shore with the girl of his choice, he was immediately surrounded by a crowd of “Indians” who undressed him and inspected him all over. Not surprisingly, he was terrified, as he had no idea what the natives who were excitedly examining him intended. Once they had satisfied their curiosity, however, they gave him back his clothes and the contents of his pockets. They then pressed him to approach the girl and “satisfy the desires that had led him to come ashore with her.” Their efforts were in vain. The islanders eventually returned the poor cook to his ship, where he fully expected to be severely punished, but this prospect, he told Bougainville, was much less frightening than the experience he had just been through.14 The cook was not the only one to be disappointed. A native chief made the prince an offer he could not politely refuse: he sent one of his wives to sleep with him. As the amused Bougainville ungallantly noted, she was “fat and ugly.”15

  A bizarre incident occurred during this visit to Tahiti. A young servant of the naturalist Philibert de Commerson went ashore with him and was—according to Bougainville—instantly surrounded by natives shouting that “he” was a woman. To protect her from their advances she was quickly returned to the ship. Her figure, voice, and behavior had already given rise to strong suspicions among the crew that she was not what she seemed, but it is curious that the Tahitians should instantly have seen through her disguise.

  When Bougainville interviewed her she burst into tears, claiming to be an orphan and to have tricked her master into taking her with him on the voyage by pretending to be a man. Her reason for doing so was that the proposed voyage had piqued her curiosity.16 Her name was Jeanne Baret (or Baré), but she was, it seems, attached to Commerson long before the ship had sailed from France. After her unmasking, Bougainville took steps to protect her, but dropped her and Commerson off on the Isle de France (Mauritius) on his way home, perhaps to avoid a scandal. Later the intrepid Baret returned to France, thereby gaining the distinction of being the first woman to circumnavigate the world. She married and was to receive a royal pension for having “shared the travails and perils of [Commerson] with the greatest courage” and for her “very discreet conduct.”17

  In describing Tahiti, the cultured Bougainville could not resist reaching for comparisons from classical literature, fine art, and even the Bible. When a fine-looking islander sang to them to the accompaniment of “a tender air” played on the nose flute, he judged that the song was “without doubt anacreontic, “ while the whole scene was “worthy of Boucher’s brush.”18 * Walking in the gloriously verdant interior of the island, he felt as if h
e had been transported to the Garden of Eden. On Tahiti, Venus was “the goddess of hospitality,” though here her cult admitted of no mysteries.19 Appropriately enough, he named the island “Nouvelle-Cythère” (New Cythera), after the legendary birthplace of the goddess.20

  Bougainville did not, however, conceal the unpoetic fact that relations between the European visitors and the natives sometimes broke down. Thefts gave rise to many misunderstandings21 and, much to his dismay, some natives were killed.22 He was also aware that the inhabitants of the different islands engaged in brutal warfare and even human sacrifice.23 Nevertheless, Bougainville was very favorably impressed by the manner in which Tahitian society was organized. It was not just that their free and easy sexual habits appealed to him; he noted approvingly that men and women shared the burdens of childcare, while the basic necessities of life were held in common.24 To make the idyll complete, the climate was delightful and there were, as far as he could tell, no troublesome insects or venomous animals.

  Bougainville was also surprised by the skill with which the islanders built their canoes and by their extraordinary navigational skills:

  the learned people of this nation, without being astronomers . . . understand the daily movements [of the stars] and make use of them to find their way in the open sea from island to island. In making these voyages, sometimes of more than three hundred leagues, they completely lose sight of land. Their compass is the course of the sun by day, and the position of the stars during the night, which is almost always fine between the tropics.25

  The sensation that Bougainville’s enthusiastic published account of life in Tahiti caused was reinforced by the appearance in Parisian society of Aotourou—the young, high-caste Tahitian who sailed back to France with him in 1769.