Tupaia's Map: The Horizons of a Polynesian Geographer

Gordon R. Lewthwaite San Fernando Valley State College Tupaia's Map The Horizons ofa Polynesian Geographer When Lieutenant James Cook met Tupaia, he knew that his luck was in. The exploration of the South Seas was fairly under way, and local help was more than welcome, but rarely could Cook find any islander "who united the ability and the inclination to give us the information we wanted, and . . . most of them hated to be troubled with what they probably thought idle questions."1 But Tupaia, a chief and priest driven from Raiatea to Tahiti, was a different case. Cook "found him to be a very intelligent person, and to know more of the Geography of the Islands situated in these seas, their produce and the religion, laws and customs of the inhabitants, than any one we had met with." Admittedly, he had hardly any conception of lands larger than Tahiti, and though he initially named nearly 130 islands, the number he ventured to place on a chart was reduced to 74, and the divergent accounts given by other Tahitians tended to limit European faith in Polynesian precision. Nevertheless, Cook considered "a Chart of the Islands Drawn by Tupaia's own hands" to be a valuable acquisition and one rich in clues for future exploration.2 The chart he drew seems not to have survived, but his concepts seem clear enough, both from the copy apparently drawn by Cook in 1 James Cook and James King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean . . . in the Years 1776-80, Vol. I (London: G. Nicol and T. Cadell, 1784), pp. 379-80. 2 J. C. Beaglehole, ed., The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, Vol. I (Cambridge: University Press, for the Hayklut Society, 1955), pp. 117, 291-294. 41 42ASSOCIATION OF PACIFIC COAST GEOGRAPHERS 1769 and found among Banks' papers in the British Museum3 and from the efforts of the Forsters. Describing Tupaia as "the most intelligent man that ever was met with by any European navigator in these isles," J. R. Forster claimed him as a natural geographer who not only "gave an account of his navigations and mentioned the names of more than eighty isles which he knew," but "having soon perceived the meaning and use of charts, he gave directions for making one according to his account, and always pointed to the part of the heavens where each isle was situated, mentioning at the same time that it was either larger or smaller than Taheitee, and likewise whether it was high or low, whether it was peopled or not, adding now and then some curious accounts relative to some of them . . . This chart I have caused to be engraved as a monument of the ingenuity and geographical knowledge of the people in the Society Isles, and of Tupaia in particular."4 Unfortunately, the map that Tupaia at least helped to draw ( Figure 1 ) does not present a clear and undistorted image of Polynesian concepts, for these were filtered through a distorting prism of European misunderstanding—distortions that throw a revealing light on the difficulties of trans-cultural communication. Tahitian enunciation was blurred in the unaccustomed ears of English officers, for Cook, Banks, and Pickersgill were seemingly no linguists, and only a portion of this loss was removed by the truer renderings of more or less contemporary French and especially Spanish navigators.5 But the language difficulty did more than garble island names; it confused the fundamental matter of direction. As Hale and de Quatrefages point out,6 a difference in terminology dislocated parts of the map. Not unnaturally Polynesian navigators described the direction of other islands in terms of the winds that blew that way, and though toerau might mean the north wind and toa the south wind, apatoerau meant the point toward which the north wind blew, i.e., * Beaglehole, op. cit., Portfolio. Chart XI. 4 John Reinhold Forster, Observations made during a Voyage round the World, (London: G. Robinson, 1778), pp. 511-512. " Lewis A. de Bougainville, A Voyage round the World, performed by Order of His Most Christian Majesty, in the Years 1766-9, translated from the French by John Reinhold Forster, (London: J...