A World Between Waves

Islands

PROLOGUE: EARLY NATURALISTS AND NATURE WRITING IN THE PACIFIC

FRANK STEWART

THE island of Hawai‘i is the largest in the chain of islands collectively called by that name. Hawai‘i is the home of the most powerful gods, the most devastating earthquakes, the most barren deserts, and the highest mountains. It is also the darkly verdant one in Hawaiian epithets, home of lush, dense rain forests. Rivers of lava set the seas on the southern coast to boiling and snowstorms blow across its cold, high peaks.

Having hiked this island during the past week, from the coastal deserts to the freezing uplands, I’m ready to go home to the more moderate temperatures of O‘ahu. The little island commuter airplane shudders as it climbs through 6,000 feet, and the rising air currents from the warm land mass below bounce the half-empty DeHaviland side to side. The plane banks sharply, giving a last look at a long volcanic plume billowing into the upper atmosphere. The plume rises from just west of the village of Kalapana, buried during the past month under a steaming plateau of black lava. As the plane banks again, the island’s volcanic peaks dominate the view for the last time and are left behind. This winter morning, they are snowcapped in the early light.

The bay at Kealakekua, where I spent part of the previous week, is particularly well sheltered and shaped like a fishhook. The longer part is rocky, lying below a steep cliff called Pali-kapu-o-Keōua, where the early Hawaiians buried the remains of great chiefs. A little calcareous sand beach, called Nāpō‘opo‘o, nestles in the narrow, inner part of the hook’s barb. Here, bathers spread their blankets; these days there are usually more visitors than there is beach to lie on.

From this spot, I have often stood and looked at the cliffs and deep ocean, the vegetation and fauna, and the remnants of human history that comprise Kealakekua. So much is here that I know I cannot see, or don’t yet know how to see, despite having lived several decades in the islands. When I try hard to take everything in together, hold the expanse, the detail, and the history all in the eye, as if they were one thing, a vertigo sweeps them into a blur. For a while, then, I go back to the parts one at a time: the hillside of ēkoa, kiawe, and ‘opiuma; a school of spinner dolphins, glimpsed far out at the point; a wandering tattler skimming low over the water.

The smallness of the bay belies its historic importance. At the northwest end, clear in the sunlight, is a white monument to Captain James Cook, who landed here and was killed in 1779. And here at the beach’s edge looking seaward is an ancient heiau, or Hawaiian temple. Embedded in a low cairn in front of the massive heiau is a weathered marker bearing the name of William Watman, a crewman on Captain Cook’s final voyage. The remains of both Cook and Watman are still here, though no one is sure where.

When I first came to Kealakekua, I was intrigued by the cairn for William Watman. Of all the significant occurrences and presences in this bay, many of which profoundly shaped the fate of the Hawaiian Islands, why was Watman’s life and death so prominently marked and not the lives of the others? Why wasn’t there something here about the great Hawaiian temple that looks out at the bay, and why wasn’t it preserved like the one just south at Hōnaunau, which has become a national park? No one I asked seemed to know.

You have to go to Captain Cook’s journals to find out about William Watman. An ordinary seaman, he was old when he sailed with Cook to Hawai‘i in July 1776; he had also sailed on Cook’s previous voyage, around the world along the high southern latitudes of the Antarctic. Despite his age, he seemed in sound shape, which explains why Cook and the other crewmen were surprised when Watman was suddenly seized with a paralytic stroke and died ten days after the expedition’s ships had reached Kealakekua Bay. The priests of the heiau shared Cook’s sadness and agreed at once that Watman should be buried in sacred ground, within the temple compound.

During the burial ceremony, Cook solemnly pronounced the ritual of the Church of England over Watman’s remains. Then the Hawaiian priests slaughtered animals and performed their own ritual service, placing the burned carcasses of the animals into Watman’s grave with great solemnity; the site was marked with a stake. Cook earlier had committed the same indiscretion of mixing two religious services. Almost as soon as he had arrived in the bay, he participated in a service in which he, a Christian, had allowed himself to be treated as a native deity. This behavior earned him the everlasting scorn of the New England missionaries who later arrived to convert the Hawaiian people. It set a bad example, they said, for the kind of work they were trying to do—separating error from true faith.

Less than a month after Watman died, Cook participated in mixed services a third time, though involuntarily. After he was killed by the Hawaiians, his body was dismembered: a few parts were buried at sea by his crew in a Church of England ritual; other parts were used in a Hawaiian service somewhere on the high bluffs of Pali-kapu-o-Keōua.

THE actions of many early Western travelers to the Pacific, like Cook, are discredited or controversial now, or else their lives and deaths are all but forgotten, like Watman’s. Some, like William Dampier or Abel Tasman, were privateers and buccaneers who seized territory and searched for islands of gold and silver. Many brought a culture of command and submission, willing to torture and murder in order to proliferate their political and religious convictions. Others, though, came because they were awed by the miraculous plenitude of the natural world, and were willing to undertake dangerous Pacific voyages for the chance to see and record as many of the earth’s plants and creatures as possible.¹

The great majority of the early naturalists in the Pacific, especially in Cook’s era, were amateur collectors and observers, not what today we would call scientists. Nevertheless, they laid the groundwork for natural science in the region, and the skilled writers among them wrote descriptions that are often of equal value to the specimens they collected.

Neither their descriptions nor their collections were obtained easily, however. Early voyagers into the South Seas entered an uncharted region larger than all of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Atlantic Ocean combined. To sail there in crowded wooden ships required enormous bravery and ambition. So large and unknown was the region that before the 1760s few Westerners made transPacific voyages without becoming almost hopelessly lost—their ships became wrecked on far-off reefs and their crews died of starvation or disease. Many of the best-equipped expeditions in this period were simply never heard from again.

With the aid of new navigational technology and with the first, primitive means to combat scurvy and other diseases, more and more explorers ventured out in earnest to discover countries hitherto unknown by Westerners. Part of the mission of these explorers was, increasingly, to bring back as much of the undiscovered natural world as possible, usually curious objects and specimens preserved in jars or dried between pages. They also brought back beautiful illustrations from life, however, and firsthand descriptions of plants, insects, fish, and mammals.

Captain Cook was such an observer. On his three voyages into the Pacific he scrupulously measured and described every phenomenon he encountered. Self-disciplined and precise, he knew very well his journals would be read by his superiors, then published for a public as eager to hear about natural history as about adventure. The account of his second voyage, into the Antarctic, sold out on the day after its publication in 1777; the account of his third and last voyage sold out in three days. At their best, the accounts are careful narratives by an explorer of the first rank, recording the human as well as the nonhuman world. Of his initial glimpse of the Hawaiians on Kaua‘i he wrote, in admiration:

They are vigorous, active, and most expert swimmers; leaving their canoes upon the most trifling occasion; diving under them, and swimming to others though at a great distance. It was very common to see women, with infants at the breast, when the surf was so high that they could not land in the canoes, leap overboard, and without endangering their little ones, swim to the shore, through a sea that looked dreadful.

The British public was not interested in Cook, though, but in the collections brought back by the expedition’s gentlemen naturalists, Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander. They, not Cook, were given heroes’ welcomes, audiences with the king, grand parties, and honorary doctorates from Oxford. For a long time, Cook’s first voyage was known popularly as Mr. Banks’s Voyage or The Banks and Solander Expedition. The specimens Banks and Solander collected were extensive: 3,000 plants, about 1,300 of which had not previously been seen by Europeans; plus, according to Banks, 500 fish, as many Birds and insects Sea and Land innumerable. The collections were so extensive that Banks was never able—despite all his personal wealth and resources, and his long tenure as president of the Royal Society—to complete a full account of his findings, nor to have his journal published in his lifetime.

Even the most level-headed and scientific-minded of the early naturalist-explorers registered unrestrained wonder at what they saw. As Christians, these rational gentlemen scientists were encouraged by their faith, as well as by their time and culture, to see a theological design in nature and to respond to it with awe. The pioneer naturalist and taxonomist John Ray had admonished his readers in 1691, in The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation:

Some reproach methinks it is to learned men that there should be so many animals still in the world whose outward shape is not yet taken notice of or described, much less their way of generation, food, manners, uses, observed. If man ought to reflect upon his Creator the glory of all His works, then ought he to take notice of them all and not to think anything unworthy of his cognizance.

ABOUT seven thousand feet up the side of Mauna Loa, on the island of Hawai‘i, I am in a small grove of māmane trees, hiking one of my favorite places and watching for i‘iwi and other endemic birds. The i‘iwi have flame-like crimson feathers and long, salmon-colored beaks that curve downward in a crescent fitting exactly the corolla of certain native lobelias. A local scarlet flower that resembles the bird’s beak is called nukui‘iwi (bill of the i‘iwi). The early Hawaiians made brilliant red capes for their chiefs from the breast feathers of the little honeycreepers, and they gave such a cape to Captain Cook when he landed at Kealakekua. The Hawaiians also ate the i‘iwi, and used their feathers to pay taxes and for barter. Unlike the still, silent creatures in the field guides, in life they are raucous, swift, and aggressive. Their powerful calls have been likened to everything from a police whistle to the creaking of a wheelbarrow, from gurgles and squawks to the sound of a child playing a rusty harmonica and the barking of a dog. More than one person has also found the call sweet and plaintive. In any case, the wild i‘iwi are nothing if not exuberant, singing while they feed and darting from flower to flower.

Here also is the Hawaiian ‘elepaio, a small, reddish brown bird, curious and approachable. Each of several Hawaiian islands has its own subspecies. I used to hear them whistling deep in the forest, often hidden in the treetops, before I ever saw one. I searched without luck for them until one day my hiking companion brought an inexpensive bird caller along and screeched with it in the grove. The ‘elepaio came from all over; they swooped into the trees above us, darted among the low branches, and finally landed next to us, nearly close enough to touch. Some mysteries you have to search for a long time to see, my friend said; others fly to you.

MANY of the early Pacific naturalists, though gentleman travellers, endured formidable hardships while pursuing their scientific observations. Even Charles Darwin, on his first voyage into the Pacific, was more a gentleman than a scientist. Twenty-three years old when he joined the crew of the Beagle in 1831, he intended to become a parson when he returned to England. Nevertheless, his work was astonishing and precise. While the books and papers he wrote much later are models of scientific argument, the Voyage of the Beagle is a model of literary natural history at its best: a combination of close observation of nature, personal narrative, well-written travelogue, and speculation.

Darwin’s lifetime coincided roughly with the decades of the first systematic exploration of the Pacific, and with the years that have been called the golden age of literary natural history, 1770 to 1880. Just prior to this time, anyone attempting to write seriously about nature was quickly discouraged by an awareness of how little was known about the natural world. In contrast, by 1880 so much new information had been collected that the subject was even more daunting and unmanageable; the natural world became the domain of specialists, to be studied in laboratories only, and not to be written about by amateurs.² Nonspecialists by 1880 were regarded by professional scientists as lowly, contemptible species hunters.

What made the golden age of literary naturalists possible was a large rural audience of readers with a practical use for firsthand accounts of landscapes, plants, and creatures. Many readers were themselves amateur naturalists. They expected accuracy and hard information, but also something from the long-standing tradition that recognized elements of spirit, or at least wonder, in the natural world. Even academically trained scientists of the period were free to write about nature using the methods of the literary essay, and when individuals appeared whose skills for writing matched their skills of observation, it was more than fortunate. Their books educated an avid public and altered that public’s understanding of the natural world.

THE early Pacific explorers often had a tremendous capacity to find, collect, and organize what they came upon, but they were not always skillful writers. Those that were gathered a particularly rare treasure—first-hand accounts and descriptions of flora, fauna, and ways of life that, in many cases, no longer exist. When their works were lost, or their lives cut short, we can’t help feeling that human history and natural science both have suffered.

An example of such a loss involves the first professional botanist ever to journey into the Pacific, Philibert Commerson. Commerson sailed under the command of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, on an expedition intended to demonstrate France’s strong maritime presence in the Pacific; the journey was also designed, however, to be a serious scientific enterprise. On board were new devices for astronomy and navigation plus the men to operate them. In addition, Bougainville’s ships were richly equipped to study natural history.

Commerson suffered violent seasickness from the very beginning of the voyage. But with the help of his young servant, Jean Baret, he managed a stormy crossing of the Atlantic. The overloaded Étoile and her sister ship, Boudeuse, were nearly sunk more than once reaching the coast of South America. The expedition rounded the Cape, anchored when it could, and eventually arrived in Tahiti, eighteen months after leaving France. At each landfall, Commerson and Baret combed the countryside for specimens of plants, fish, and mammals, and they sent back to Paris an enormous collection. Relatively few of the plants Commerson collected reached their destination, however. And some specimens that did arrive were largely ignored, such as the fish specimens that were stored in an attic unopened until well after Commerson’s death. But among the flowers that survived the journey to Paris was a genus he named after his captain, the Bougainvillea.

Everywhere the ship anchored, Commerson and Baret gathered specimens with untiring zeal. Baret in particular, according to Bougainville, was seen accompanying his master in all his expeditions amidst the snows, on the frozen peaks of the Straits of Magellan, carrying, even on those laborious excursions, provisions, arms, and bulky portfolios of specimens with a perseverance and a strength which gained for him from the naturalist the nick-name of his ‘beast of burden.’

Tahiti overwhelmed the naturalist with wonder, and when the expedition reached the islands he redoubled his efforts to botanize and explore. Tahiti had been discovered by Europeans less than a year before and almost everything was new to Commerson. Unfortunately for him, however, his personal life was about to get more attention from the captain and crew than his botanical discoveries. The crew had found Commerson to be high-strung and aloof, standoffish even with the officers. And they had developed suspicions about the naturalist’s relationship to Baret—ever attentive, always with him, even sleeping in Commerson’s cabin. Shortly after dropping anchor in Tahiti, these suspicions were finally confirmed. The first Tahitian men who boarded the ship circled Baret several times, then shouted gleefully, It’s a girl!

The Tahitian men were delighted at their discovery of Baret’s true gender. To her consternation, however, it was soon clear they expected from Baret the same favors the Tahitian women were granting to the French sailors. The captain, for his part, could only be philosophical about the deception. For a time, Baret—Jeanne, not Jean—tried to convince Bougainville that she was an orphan who had come aboard to escape her poverty, and that Commerson had had no idea of her gender and thus should not be blamed for smuggling a woman aboard a vessel of the French navy. There is no record that the captain or anyone else believed her.

After nine days in Tahiti, the expedition sailed on, a new relationship having been established between the crew and the naturalist couple. The captain’s disapproving clerk noted dryly in his log, I believe that this girl will be the first of her sex to have circumnavigated the globe. When the ship reached Mauritius, its Pacific journey all but over, Commerson and Baret decided to disembark rather than sail back to France. There, Commerson died five years later—without ever having told the fascinating tale of his travels.

FROM the 1780s to the 1810s, many gifted naturalists from Europe and the West explored the Hawaiian Islands. Among the most prominent in this period was Archibald Menzies, who sailed with George Vancouver in 1789, reaching Kealakekua Bay in 1792. Menzies, a tireless collector, climbed both Hualalai and Mauna Loa on this trip. The expedition returned to England with the first geographical survey of the Hawaiian Islands.

Several years earlier, Nathaniel Portlock and George Dixon, both of whom had sailed with Cook, had been the first Europeans to enter Kealakekua Bay following Cook’s death there. Both published extensively on what they saw. Others from this period included Adelbert von Chamisso, who along with the expedition’s artist, Louis Choris, published rich accounts of the natural history of the Hawaiian Islands.

These men were followed by Louis Claude de Saulces de Freycinet. Like Commerson, Freycinet smuggled a woman aboard his expedition—his twenty-two-year-old wife, Rose. Before this harrowing voyage, which included being shipwrecked in the Falkland Islands, she referred to herself as the gay, the thoughtless madcap Rose. After Rose returned to France—perhaps the second woman to circumnavigate the globe—her friends remarked that she had become more subdued. Though she had kept detailed notes along the way, Rose’s journal from the voyage was not published for more than 100 years, out of consideration for her husband’s reputation.

The next important expedition to reach Hawai‘i arrived in 1825. Naturalists Andrew Bloxam and James Macrae, along with the artist Robert Dampier, arrived aboard HMS Blonde, commanded by George Anson Lord Byron, grandson of Foul Weather Jack and cousin of the English poet. While ascending Mauna Loa, Macrae became the first European botanist to collect and describe the rare silversword plant, which he called truly superb, and almost worth the journey of coming here to see it on purpose. On this expedition, at Hōnaunau village just south of Kealakekua, Byron was given permission by the local chiefs to carry away every artifact he wished to have from the heiau at the City of Refuge—which he and his crew promptly did. Bloxam then drew and wrote a description of the heiau which, just before it was stripped, was the last known in the islands to be still in perfect condition.³

IT GOES without saying that the natural history of Hawai‘i was thoroughly and intimately a part of the lives and culture of the native Hawaiian people long before Western travelers reached their shores. Without a written language, Hawaiians communicated this knowledge through oral means—in chants, songs, prayers, rituals, and sayings—as well as in formal instruction. Where the subject was the natural world, the knowledge was sacred, just as words themselves were sacred and powerful; misuse of words could create havoc just as misuse of nature could unleash destruction and death. Moreover, the spoken Hawaiian language, replete with beauty and subtlety, was a sophisticated form of expression, and whatever was said of importance was firmly retained without loss in the memory of trained listeners. For these reasons alone, it’s not surprising that traditional Hawaiian knowledge about the natural world, for the most part, was not immediately written down after the establishment of a standard Hawaiian alphabet in 1829. To a great degree, that knowledge continues to be unwritten.

Some Hawaiian scholars in the nineteenth century, however, did choose to record a portion of traditional island history and natural science. Among the first native Hawaiians who contributed significantly to written natural history was the educator and historian David Malo. Born near Kealakekua Bay in about 1795, Malo was a man of impressive intellect and character who managed to record—in a written language less than twenty years old—important aspects of his culture and of the natural history of Hawai‘i, both of which were quickly being eroded by foreign contact. Malo’s work was first published in English in 1839.

Another important Hawaiian writer of the period was John Papa ‘I‘i, who was born in 1800 on O‘ahu. ‘I‘i was at various times an attendant to King Kamehameha, a representative to the Hawaiian legislature, and finally associate justice of the Supreme Court of Hawai‘i. A selection of his articles written from 1866 to 1870 for the Hawaiian newspaper Ku‘oko‘a (Independence) has been translated into English and has become a valuable contribution to the written natural history of Hawai‘i. Scholar and legislator Samuel Kamakau, fifteen years younger than John ‘I‘i, wrote in the late 1860s. For his books and articles, Kamakau drew from his own considerable learning and also wrote down the accounts that he collected from older Hawaiians about a range of historical and cultural subjects. The works of Samuel Kamakau, John Papa ‘I‘i, and David Malo are the most important written resources from the nineteenth century that we have, in English, for understanding traditional Hawaiian ways of regarding nature. Among contemporary Hawaiians, George S. Kanahele has contributed a great deal through his book Ku Kanaka: Stand Tall—A Search for Hawaiian Values.

BY THE 1830s, Hawai‘i did not seem as distant to many Westerners as it once had. Honolulu had become essentially an international harbor, according to one amazed traveler, populated by foreigners from Asia, Europe, and America. But Hawai‘i was still not entirely safe for avid Western naturalists, and its natural history remained essentially unexplored.

Among those who attempted the exploration in this period was David Douglas, who was the very embodiment of a century of intrepid naturalists, and was perhaps the most adventurous of them all. His life illustrates again the missing stories of many naturalists in this era who, like him, left only a fragmentary written record of their lives. Douglas’s early and untiring love of natural history lead him from his birthplace in Scotland to a grisly death on the slopes of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawai‘i, mutilated by a wild bull at the bottom of a pit dug to capture feral cattle. How he came to die in this way is still a