Sea of Glory

ironmonger named John Williams two years later, Christianity started to spread not only throughout Tahiti but to islands across Polynesia.
    By the time the Ex. Ex. arrived at the island, seventy-two years after Cook, the paradise of the South Pacific had become thoroughly Christian. Hundreds of Tahitians, the women adorned in full-length dresses and floppy bonnets, the men in a ragged assortment of Western pants and shirts, made their way to church every Saturday (the holy day on Tahiti because the first missionaries had forgotten to take into account the time change). Much to the missionaries’ dismay, Tahiti had recently become an occasional provisioning stop for the British and American whaling fleets, and the boisterous sailors threatened to undermine the natives’ tenuous grasp of Christian morality. All the while, the French and British governments were eyeing each other warily over control of Tahiti. The island that had once been an icon was in danger of becoming a colony.
    Cook had originally come to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, and Wilkes, having just reread his great predecessor’s narrative, was intent on re-creating history. “We anchored in Matavai Bay under Point Venus,” he wrote, “perhaps in the very position once occupied by Captn Cook. . . . The stillness of the harbour with nothing to disturb its placid surface was refreshing, filled as the air was with the fragrance of flowers on shore.” But instead of lovely women offering their charms, the squadron was soon surrounded by canoe-loads of natives offering to wash their laundry. In emulation of Cook, Wilkes ordered his officers to erect the squadron’s portable observatories on Point Venus, where several tents, a forge, and a carpenters’ work station were also assembled as a crowd of Tahitians gathered around them. “[T]hey hovered about us,” Reynolds wrote, “as if it was actually necessary to their happiness to be always near us, & never quitted the Point so long as we remained.”
    Reynolds was quickly introduced to one of the wonders of the South Pacific—the coconut. Soon he was drinking as many as thirty of them a day. “Let me record its praises here,” he wrote in his journal, “I owe my life to the milk of the Cocoa Nut, & like the Natives, I would rather die, than harm a tree.”
    The officers and men of the Expedition quickly learned that the Tahitians’ reputation for sexual promiscuity was still well deserved. Wilkes assured Jane that, unlike former expeditions, whose ships became “floating brothels,” he allowed no women on his vessels and required his men to be back aboard by sunset. “This has won great praise from the missionaries,” he reported.
    Reynolds was shocked by the Tahitians’ sexual openness (like “beasts in the fields,” he recorded), but he was even more disturbed by the conduct of the missionaries. Instead of striving to teach the natives any substantive religious truths, they ruled by spiritual intimidation. “[T]he only evidence of Religion, that I noticed among the Natives, were the observance of External forms, & a fear of the Missionaries.” In the pages of his journal he began to articulate a radical concept for the first half of the nineteenth century—that of cultural relativism. “Who can judge one nation by another?” he wrote. “What man can say, this people shall be my standard, by them I will judge all others? [The Tahitians] differ from us widely, but they are unconscious that they are wrong—that, which we could point at, with the finger of Shame & condemn as obscene & sinful, they deem of no harm, but as worthy of commendation & observance.” In the months ahead, as the squadron made its way west to the islands of Samoa, Reynolds would find even more reason to question his preconceived notions of the innate superiority of Western society.
    Tahiti proved to be an important crossroads for the scientists. Finally, they were set free. Couthouy and Peale would continue to grumble about Wilkes’s dictatorial style, but the rest of the scientists found little to complain about as they rushed about the island on various expeditions into the interior. Charles Pickering was designated a “naturalist,” but his primary interest was in what we would call today anthropology. He was becoming increasingly fascinated by the stunning variety of peoples he had so far seen—from the African slaves of Rio to the Yahgans of Cape Horn, the Native Americans