Philosophische Fakultät Lars Eckstein | Anja Schwarz The Making of Tupaia’s Map A Story of the Extent and Mastery of Polynesian Navigation, Competing Systems of Wayfinding on James Cook’s Endeavour, and the Invention of an Ingenious Cartographic System Suggested citation referring to the original publication: The Journal of Pacific History (2018) DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2018.1512369 ISSN (print) 0022-3344 ISSN (online) 1469-9605 Postprint archived at the Institutional Repository of the Potsdam University in: Postprints der Universität Potsdam Philosophische Reihe ; 154 ISSN 1866-8380 http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-423091 DOI https://doi.org/10.25932/publishup-42309 The Journal of Pacific History, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2018.1512369 The Making of Tupaia’s Map: A Story of the Extent and Mastery of Polynesian Navigation, Competing Systems of Wayfinding on James Cook’s Endeavour, and the Invention of an Ingenious Cartographic System LARS ECKSTEIN AND ANJA SCHWARZ ABSTRACT Tupaia’s Map is one of the most famous and enigmatic artefacts to emerge from the early encounters between Europeans and Pacific Islanders. It was drawn by Tupaia, an arioi priest, chiefly advisor and master navigator from Ra‘iateā in the Leeward Society Islands in collaboration with various members of the crew of James Cook’s Endeavour, in two distinct moments of mapmaking and three draft stages between August 1769 and February 1770. To this day, the identity of many islands on the chart, and the logic of their arrangement have posed a riddle to researchers. Drawing in part on archival material hitherto overlooked, in this long essay we propose a new understanding of the chart’s cartographic logic, offer a detailed reconstruction of its genesis, and thus for the first time present a comprehensive reading of Tupaia’s Map. The chart not only underscores the extent and mastery of Polynesian navigation, it is also a remarkable feat of translation between two very different wayfinding systems and their respective representational models. Key words: Cartography, first contact, wayfinding, star navigation, sea of islands, translation, Indigenous knowledges and ontologies, Tupaia INTRODUCTION Tupaia’s Map is among the most important artefacts to have come from late 18th-century European–Indigenous encounters in the South Pacific region. Depicting, in Epeli Hau‘ofa’s terms,1 a ‘sea of islands’ extending for more than 7,000 km from Rapa Nui in the east to Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz – Institute of English and American Studies, Universität Potsdam, Germany. [email protected]; [email protected] 1 Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’,inA New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau‘ofa (Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, University of the South Pacific, 1993), 2–16. © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 2 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY Rotuma in the west and more than 5,000 km from Hawai‘i in the north to Rapa Iti in the south, it documents the vast geographical knowledge held by master navigators of the Society Islands at the time: the result of centuries of purposeful navigation in the region. The map is also testament to the extent to which this highly specialized knowledge could be shared across cultural, political and epistemological boundaries, despite all difficulties of communication, when Tupaia joined the Endeavour’s crew in 1769 on James Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific. More than anything else, it attests to the great subtlety and sophis- tication of Tupaia’s skills as cultural go-between and mediator between knowledges. Its iconic status as encounter artefact notwithstanding, Tupaia’sMaphasposeda riddle for most of its academic history. Already the German naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster, travelling with the Resolution on Cook’s subsequent voyage, praised the chart as a ‘monument of the ingenuity and geographical knowledge of the people in the Society Isles’ and had a version of it engraved for his Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World.2 Yet, like the American–Canadian ethnographer and linguist Horatio Hale in the 1840s,3 Forster could offer only partial information with respect to the islands the map actually depicts. After the rediscovery of a fair copy of the chart in the papers of Joseph Banks and its publication in 1955,4 Tupaia’s Map became one of the most con- tested items in a heated debate among historians and anthropologists about the capability of ancient Polynesians to carry out purposeful navigation across the Pacific,5 just as it also became an important cornerstone for Oceania’s political and cultural Renaissance.6 The work of the late Ben Finney, more recently, encouraged viewers to assess Tupaia’s Map within the context of precolonial Oceanic navigational practice, drawing both on archival research and experimental voyaging, importantly in close collaboration with Oceanic communities and navigators still practising the art of way- finding.7 Building on his insights, Anne Di Piazza and Erik Pearthree urged readers to acknowledge the distinct Oceanic knowledges of navigation and wayfinding that Tupaia would have brought to the drawing table, and to abandon the idea of a 2 Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World, on Physical Geography, Natural History, and Ethic Philosophy (London: G. Robinson, 1778), 512. 3 Horatio Hale, Ethnography and Philology. United States Exploring Expedition, 1838–42 (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1846), 122–4. 4 James Cook, Charts & Views Drawn by Cook and His Officers and Reproduced from the Original Manuscripts, ed. R.A. Skelton (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1955), viii, chart 11. 5 Andrew Sharp, Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific (Wellington: Polynesian Society, 1956). 6 G.M. Dening, ‘The Geographical Knowledge of the Polynesians and the Nature of Inter-Island Contact’,inPolynesian Navigation: A Symposium on Andrew Sharp’s Theory of Accidental Voyages, ed. Jack Golson (Wellington: Polynesian Society, 1962), 102–53; G.S. Parsonson, ‘The Settlement of Oceania: An Examination of the Accidental Voyage Theory’, in ibid., 11–63. 7 Ben Finney, ‘Myth, Experiment, and the Reinvention of Polynesian Voyaging’, American Anthropol- ogist 93, no. 2 (1991): 383–404; Ben Finney, ‘Nautical Cartography and Traditional Navigation in Oceania’,inThe History of Cartography, vol. 2, part 3, Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, ed. D. Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis (Chicago: The Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1998), 443–94. THE MAKING OF TUPAIA’S MAP 3 chart abiding exclusively by European mapping conventions.8 In their research, they focused on a range of traditionally important islands of departure from which distinct bearing patterns radiate to different targets on the map. Scholars today also mostly follow David Turnbull, who regards the map as the outcome of an act of translation that simultaneously articulates both European and Oceanic worldmaking systems, and thus as a unique ‘knowledge assemblage’.9 Our own research into Tupaia’s Map is deeply indebted to the work of Finney, Turnbull, and Di Piazza and Pearthree in particular, whose critical interventions and inspirations set us on various tracks which eventually enabled us to develop a conclusive interpretation of the chart as a whole. In this long essay, we set out to narrate the story of Tupaia’s Map. Drawing partly on archival material that has been largely overlooked so far, we seek to explain the underlying concepts of the chart, offer a detailed description of its genesis and render Tupaia’s Map readable in its entirety for the first time. Having said this, we must also acknowledge our limits in exploring all signifi- cances of the chart. We owe our success in working toward a more comprehensive understanding of Tupaia’s Map to the fact that Tupaia, as we shall step by step explore, ‘crossed’ the beach, in Greg Dening’s famous phrase,10 and made sure to translate the complexities of his Oceanic knowledge into conceptual and represen- tational models he thought James Cook, Joseph Banks and his other European inter- locutors would understand. It is for these reasons, ultimately, that present-day audiences, too, still have conceptual access to the chart. We are aware of the difficult colonial legacies, but also of the privileges which come with our institutional positions in this context. We therefore hope that our research will find especially Oceanic readers who may productively bring Tupaia’s Map in conversation again with the Oceanic traditions and worldings to which we have neither title nor access. Tupaia’s Map emerged in the context of consecutive European ventures into the Pacific at the end of the 18th century and at a time when competitive British and French imperial expansion was being rebranded as scientific as well as philanthropic endeavours. While still fundamentally motivated by the desire to extend geopolitical influence, in terms of both military and economic dominance in the wider region, voyaging was now also 8 Anne Di Piazza and Erik Pearthree, ‘A New Reading of Tupaia’s Chart’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 116:3 (2007): 321–40; Anne Di Piazza, ‘A Reconstruction of a Tahitian Star Compass Based on Tupaia’s “Chart for the Society Islands with Otaheite in the Center’”, Journal of the Polynesian Society 119, no. 4 (2010): 377–92. 9 David Turnbull, ‘Reframing Science and Other Local Knowledge Traditions’, Futures 29:6 (1997): 551– 62; David Turnbull, ‘Cook and Tupaia, a Tale of Cartographic “Méconnaissance”’,inScience and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the 18th Century, ed.