The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (24 page)

The intelligence brought back from the Pacific generated enormous public excitement and assured the early navigator-explorers popular heroic status. Cook towered over all. When he set sail for his first voyage in 1768, he was probably the most skilled navigator of his age. He was a patient, highly professional technician who had risen in the Royal Navy through the sheer force of his talent, since he was the son of a Whitby labourer and largely self-educated. Within ten years he had achieved, through his discoveries, international respect. When, in 1778, France declared war on Britain, French naval commanders were ordered not to interfere with his ships for to do so would hinder the advance of human knowledge. After his death in 1779, Cook entered the pantheon of British imperial heroes. His elevation was advertised in the frontispiece to Thomas Banke’s
New System of Geography
published in 1787. Cook stands in the centre of the engraving, presented by Neptune to Clio, who is about to record his deeds, while above hover a cherub bearing a laurel crown and an angel blowing a trumpet. Below, as a reminder that Cook’s exploits had benefited British trade, Britannia receives the tribute of four kneeling figures who symbolise the four continents. In the distance Cook’s ships,
Resolution
and
Adventure,
head out to sea and new discoveries.

Cook had no need of a muse to exalt his deeds; he had published his own journals which entranced armchair travellers anxious to know every detail of a world completely different from their own. By his fireside in rural north Buckinghamshire, Cowper was able to travel in his mind to the South Seas and see them through Cook’s eyes. His debt to the explorer was acknowledged in ‘The Task’:

[Man] travels and expatiates, as the bee

From flower to flower, so he from land to land;

The manners, customs, policy of all

Pay contribution to the store he gleans;

He sucks intelligence in every clime,

And spreads the honey of his deep research

At his return, a rich repast for me.

He travels, and I too.

Cook’s three voyages between 1768 and 1779 were undertaken, as Cowper suggests, to add to universal (i.e. European) enlightenment by the accumulation of geographical, scientific and anthropological observations of a hitherto secret world. But the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake had not been Cook’s principle objective. While the eighteenth-century mind prized abstract knowledge, it placed a higher value on that kind which could be used to accelerate human progress. Properly interpreted, the data and specimens which Cook’s ships carried back to Britain could be employed to his nation’s advantage. He fully understood this, once admitting that he was no more than ‘a plain man exerting himself in the service of his country’. There was a purely utilitarian purpose to exploration, chart-making, the measurement of winds and currents and the collection and cataloguing of rocks, fish, birds, animals and plants.

Over two hundred years of overseas expansion had taught Europeans that new worlds contained products desired by the old. Some, like potatoes, tomatoes and spinach, were found to flourish in Europe while others, such as cotton and tobacco, had to be cultivated in the tropics. With Cook sailed teams of experts who, as they discovered and recorded new species of plants, were encouraged to find out whether they might be the cash crops of the future. Since Cook’s expeditions served as models for future reconnaissances, subsequent investigations of natural phenomena were always undertaken with an eye to possible profit. In 1790 Captain George Vancouver, bound for Hawaii and the Pacific coast of America, was ordered by the Admiralty to look for evidence of minerals and coal; to record ‘what sort of Beasts, Birds, and Fishes’ he found; and investigate whether they might ‘prove useful, either for food or commerce’. He was also to look out for seals and whales and undertake industrial espionage by probing the secrets of how the natives dyed cloth.
3

Details about the breadfruit plants of Tahiti, collected during Cook’s visits there, provided the impetus for Bligh’s voyage to the island in 1787. These edible plants had been identified as potential money-spinners by Sir Joseph Banks, Cook’s companion, who saw his own speciality, botany, as the handmaiden of British trade. It was Banks who urged the government to secure breadfruit plants which could solve the current economic problems of the West Indian planters who, deprived of American food imports, were looking for a cheap staple with which to feed their slaves. Bligh was ordered to take his breadfruit plants to the botanic gardens at St Vincent, where they were to be replanted and used as a breeding stock. During his outward passage, Bligh was also asked to make a botanic raid on the eastern coast of the Dutch island of Java and carry off cuttings from trees and plants, including rice, which might flourish in the soil of a British tropical colony.
4

Cook was a pathfinder for British commerce. He was also the representative of British seapower. It was essential if Britain was to remain paramount on
all
the world’s oceans that the Admiralty possessed accurate maps of the Pacific, its islands and their anchorages. Furthermore, the appearance in the area of the French navigator, Louis-Anthoine de Bougainville, in 1766 made it an urgent matter that the British flag was seen there and that the Pacific islanders were apprised of the existence and power of Britain. It was also vital, as international interest in the ocean increased, for Britain to find out more about the mysterious southern continents and possibly lay claim to them.

When Cook left England in 1768 he was seeking to do more than satisfy his own natural inquisitiveness and push back the frontiers of knowledge. He was an instrument of national commercial and strategic ambitions, and his most distinguished passenger, the gentleman naturalist and botanic pirate Banks, viewed their destination as a secret garden whose fruits might be harvested to Britain’s advantage. During the next three years their ship, the
Endeavour,
visited Tahiti and then turned southwards to New Zealand and the eastern seaboard of Australia, which Cook named New South Wales. He then proceeded northwards, steering along the Great Barrier Reef and through the Torres Strait to prove that Australia was an island.

Cook carried with him a mandate to declare British sovereignty over any territory which he found to be unpopulated or whose inhabitants were manifestly making no use of their land. His right to do so had the backing of the law, at least as it was interpreted by Chief Justice Blackstone, for whom anyone who owned but did not exploit land forfeited his claim to it. So, with a clear conscience, Cook declared Australia
terra nullus
(land of no one) and annexed it. What Banks saw of George III’s latest dominion convinced him that its climate and soil made it suitable for future colonisation. Its natives, the aborigines, could be discounted. They were nomads who did not till the ground and lacked any discernible form of social organisation or religion. Cook characterised them as ‘the most wretched people’ in the world, although well contented in their condition.

His second expedition to the Pacific (1772–5) was dominated by the search for the second southern continent. He skirted the edge of the Antartic ice pack, got as far as latitude 71° 10′, exclaimed ‘Ne Plus Ultra’, and steered towards New Zealand and Australia. His final voyage, begun in 1776, was intended as a reconnaissance of the coastline of north-west America and Alaska, where, it was hoped, he might discover the outlet of the North-West Passage. Ever since the late sixteenth century navigators had pursued this geographic will-o’-the-wisp, a channel around the edge of northern Canada which linked the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Like his predecessors Cook was unsuccessful, although, while charting Nootka Sound, his sailors accidentally came across large numbers of sea otters, whose pelts fetched a high price in China.

This was Cook’s last discovery; he was killed in a brawl with Hawaiian natives in February 1779 while his ships were wintering by the island. His greatest achievements were the breaking of psychological barriers that had hitherto prevented Pacific exploration and filling in large areas of the map of the ocean. The commercial results of his discoveries were disappointing, but British entrepreneurs were grateful for any new markets, however small. Within a few years the East India Company was developing the sea otter fur trade with China and, sixty years after Cook’s death, Hawaii was importing British manufactured goods worth between £30,000 and £50,000 a year.

It was the people of the Pacific rather than prospects for trade there which captivated the imagination of Cook’s contemporaries. Revelation of their existence and way of life coincided with a period of intellectual ferment in which questions were being asked about the basic assumptions of the European moral and social order. Since the late seventeenth century thinkers had contemplated a semi-abstract creature called the ‘noble savage’. He existed in a state of nature beyond the boundaries of Europe, where he lived without its elaborate social codes and, most importantly of all, that system of rewards and punishments laid down by the Christian religion. In this condition he was imagined a happier man than his European counterpart.

The account of Tahiti by de Bougainville and his surgeon, Philibert Commerson, which appeared in 1772, presented Europe with the living version of the noble savage. Tahiti, the Frenchmen insisted, was an Edenic world in which men and women thrived and found unparalleled happiness by living according to their own reason and consciences rather than following the injunctions of revealed religion. Nature, in the form of abundant fruits and wild creatures, provided for their needs and so the greater part of their time was spent in pleasure, mostly uninhibited sex. The existence of this Utopia (the word was used by de Bougainville) appeared to challenge the entire social-religious order of Europe.

The level-headed Cook was sceptical of de Bougainville’s claims, which bordered on fantasy. The Tahitians were not without vices, and during Cook’s visit were actually in the middle of a long-drawn-out civil war. As for the free and open sexuality of their women, of which the rakish Banks took advantage, Cook drily observed that the Tahitian beauties who tempted his men were not so different from their equivalents who enticed sailors on the quaysides of Chatham or Plymouth, save that the former took payment in iron nails rather than cash. Cook was, however, dismayed that the Tahitians called venereal disease ‘Apa no Britannia’ or, an unfortunate pun, ‘Brit-tanne’ (British disease) and, as a point of national honour, he insisted that it had been introduced to the islands by French sailors.
5

While Cook noticed that the peoples he encountered appeared happy, he never subscribed to the notion of the noble savage. Nonetheless, what he and others had reported provided ammunition for the increasingly powerful humanitarian and evangelical lobby which demanded the abolition of slavery throughout the British empire. Those evangelicals opposed to slavery took on board the evidence of the existence of noble savages to strengthen their case that the negro was not a morally inferior man. There was also some concern for the protection of vulnerable societies from outside oppression and abuse, but this weighed less with the evangelicals than the fear that their Christian countrymen might become contaminated by alien vices. Cook and Bligh were accused of having compromised themselves by the ‘complacency with which they assisted at idolatrous ceremonies’ on Tahiti.
6
Their corruption had parallels with that of slavers, slave-owners and venal and despotic officials in India.

Christian consciences were appalled by reports of what one missionary apologist called the ‘lasciviousness which degrades the Tahitians even below brute beasts’.
7
The evangelical imperative demanded the moral reformation of the South Sea islands and their conversion. The first missionary came ashore in Tahiti early in 1797, bringing with him the Mosaic and Pauline ‘thou-shall-nots’ and a determination to enforce the Protestant work ethic. Within the next ten years others fanned out among the Polynesian islands and were soon sending back reports of tribal wars, torture and cannibalism, which gave the lie to the concept of the noble savage, and appeals for additional missions. Reassuringly, the inhabitants of Tongatabu were found to have a patriarchy, no priests and a legal code which treated adultery as a crime, all factors which made conversion easy.

Missionary activity in the Pacific, well underway by 1815, was an extension of colonisation. By exposure to Western Christianity, the Pacific islanders were made aware of their own apparent deficiencies and the superior culture of their instructors. The process was outlined in a review of an account of New South Wales published in 1803. ‘The savage no sooner becomes ashamed of his nakedness, than the loom is ready to clothe him; the forge prepares for him more perfect tools’ and so on until he is dependent on the artefacts and techniques of Europe.
8
Cook had been disheartened when Omai, a Tahitian whom he had taken to Britain, returned to the island without any wish to apply what he had seen and learned to his homeland. The missionaries changed this for ever; through their efforts the Pacific islanders were integrated into the British commercial system. They supplied coconut oil, arrowroot and fresh pork and in return received guns, metalwares and cloth. It is one of the ironies of history that Cook’s Hawaiian assailants may have been armed with blades manufactured in Matthew Boulton’s Birmingham steelworks, which had been given them as examples of the products of Britain’s new industrial technology.

Cook had not been given a warrant to annex those islands whose natives cultivated their land, but, as trade with them developed, Britain’s naval presence in the Pacific increased. From 1790 onwards warships regularly cruised among the islands and their captains assured chiefs of George III’s goodwill, gave some medals showing his features (a thousand were specially minted for Vancouver’s 1790 voyage), and warned them not to harm European sailors and missionaries. This naval activity provoked the Spanish government to claim prior rights to the Pacific under the terms of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, a scrap of paper which meant nothing to Britain. A Spanish threat to enforce sovereignty over Nootka Sound in 1787 was answered by a partial mobilisation of the fleet which was enough to bring about a sullen but prudent climb-down. It was an admission of weakness by a fading imperial power all too aware of Britain’s proven ability to hurt her trade and colonies.