CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 512, 14 April 1949, Page 10

CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS

THE DISCOVERY OF TAHITI. By George Robertson. THE TRAVELS OF THE ABBE CARRE, Vol. Ill. Hakluyt Society: our copies supplied by N.Z Secretary of the Hakluyt Society, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. HE two hundred years’ holiday of English navigators from Pacific exploration is an enigma in our naval _ history. Anson, with a warlike mission, and after him Byron and then Wallis, with instructions to explore, were following in the tracks of their ancestors of nearly two centuries before. Between the Elizabethans and the Georgians other nations, chiefly the Dutch, earned all the glory: theirs was soon to be outshone by Cook. . Wallis in the Dolphin made a tedious circumnavigation in 1766-8, the subject of this book. George Robertson, the ship’s master (Wallis was captain), by his office primarily a seaman, left this personal diary of the hazardous voyage; it gives in its matter-of-fact, practical fashion’ a noble picture of the enterprise itself and of the whole ship’s company of "poor unthinking brave fellows.’ H.M.S. Dolphin-in spite of the discomforts and dangers and the malignant ill-temper of "old growl" the first lieutenant-was a "happy" ship. The higher officers were ill for weeks together, and the chief burden fell on Furneaux, Robertson, and Gore, who dealt admirably with the problems, a

navigational and disciplinary, which confronted men in uncharted seas, who needed refreshment at the hands of the Patagonians and the Tahitians. In 1766 the mythical great southern continent still occupied most of the Pacific, and its "high land" was always being sighted, assiduously recorded, and then left unvisited-always for excellent reasons; the most excellent that it did not exist. The ships which entered the Pacific through the Straits of Magellan encountered westerly winds which obstinately refused to fit in with the preconceptions of their lordships at the Admiralty. Like Byron, Wallis was forced north, eventually into the "milky way" of the scattered atolls or green volcanic islands. Here it is chiefly remarkable that H.M.S. Dolphin found so little: the Tuamotu group, Wallis Island, and the gem which was worth the voyage, Tahiti. She stayed for weeks at this idyllic island, whose noble savages, failing to seize the ship by a crude frontal attack, managed to wheedle out of the Englishmen peacefully the very nails in the bulkheads in exchange for such commodities as fowls, pigs, and love. The editdr, the late Hugh Carrington (for many years resident in New Zealand), supplies excellent notes; I am sorry he did not have space for the adventures of Carteret in the "poor dull Swallow" which, after parting company at the edge of the Pacific, made a voyage of epic quality independently. _ The Abbé Carré, an astute, perspicuous Frenchman, who visited the French settlements in India in the 1670's, at the behest of Louis XIV.’s minister of economic warfare, Colbert, wrote a lively and humane account of his travels. He animadverts on the manners and customs of four European nations trading to India and Persia, explains why it is a bad thing for Frenchmen to marry Portuguese, admires the businesslike English, and deplores the quarrelsome vanities of his fellow-countrymen. This is evidently an important source in the history of European relations with India and is good enough to make me regret I have not read the two previous vol-

umes.

David

Hall