ENDEAVOUR and HOKULE'a: the THEATRE of RE-ENACTMENT HISTORIES Public Lecture, April 23, 1997
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
GREG DENING 33 ENDEAVOUR AND HOKULE'A: THE THEATRE OF RE-ENACTMENT HISTORIES Public Lecture, April 23, 1997 FIGURE FIGURE 2 Endeavour Replica in Port Phillip Bay Hokule'a approaching Maui from Honolulu It is my honour and my privilege to have University of Melbourne. Since that day been invited by this University to be the concerns of cross-cultural studies Adjunct Professor in the Centre of Cross- have been my life. cultural Research. I am most I have a reflection this evening on two appreciative of the warm welcome and icons of cross-cultural research: the care for our needs by the administrative Endeavour replica, here in a place the staff of the centre: Julie Gorrell, Anne- original Endeavour had never been, Maree O'Brien and Jenny Newell. My first Port Phillip Bay, Victoria. And Hokule'a, association with the ANU was in 1964 the replica of an Hawaiian voyaging when Jim Davidson and Harry Maude canoe, here undergoing sea-trials in offered me a position as research fellow 1975 off the north shore of Oahu in the in Pacific history. But it was forty years Hawaiian islands. ago almost to the day that I began my work in cross-cultural history under the My reflection is about re-enactment tutelage of John Mulvaney at the histories, the sort of social memory 34 GREG DENING evoked by these replicas. I won't be thing to be said about cross-cultural focusing so much on their history, the research, I think. It always begins with a accuracy or otherwise of their replica- little giving, whatever way one crosses. tion, so much as their theatre. Social Endeavour and Hokule'a. Where's the memory, I will be wanting to say is as giving in that? That is what I wanted to much about the present as the past. lecture about. Social memory enlarges the continuities between past and present. Social The Endeavour replica. Perhaps you have memory is, in that word of Aristotle of seen her. I confess I had a lump in my , the theatre, catharsis, getting the plot, throat when I first saw her. Much of my seeing the meaning of things. work has been concerned with the poet- ics of space on an eighteenth century Let me say first that I am not much for re- naval vessel: the rituals of the quarter- enactments. I remember when my deck that were the theatre of Bligh's prejudices about re-enactments were command; how important were the divi- born. It was at a meeting of the American sions between private and public space Historical Association in New York in the and how dangerous it was to blur their 196os. I attended a session on 'New Historical Methods' with high expecta- boundary; how the proper order of that tions only to discover that it was about space was turned upside down in the the advantages for historical realism in reverse world of skylarking and sailors' wearing Napoleon's hat while taking baptism rituals; how a ship was energized hallucinegetic drugs at the same time. by the tempo and rhythm of sailors' bodies. It was not by chance that the That's what I tend to think. The danger in ship's most skilled seamen were also the re-enactments is that they tend to hallu- ship's best dancers. There was much cinate us into seeing the past as us in choreography in a sailing ship. funny clothes. But the past is its total- ity—its postures, its smells and dirt, its That space had a language, too, to tones and accents. The past in its totality describe it, as precise and inventive as is different, as different if you like, as any science. Sailors' lives depended on another culture, another country as the speed with which they could compre- David Lowenthal has said. All history in hend an order. Precision, economy and that sense is cross-cultural. But distinctiveness were the marks of sailors' difference is the hardest thing to see. language. For any landsman pressed into Difference is the hardest thing to accept. His Majesty's service, his first months To see difference we have to give a little were a language school. Joseph Conrad of ourselves: old to young, young to old, called that language 'a flawless thing for male to female, female to male, black to its purpose'. On the Endeavour replica, white, white to black. That is the first this language world was materialized for ENDEAVOUR AND HOKULEA 35 me: sheets, bowlines, chewlines, bunt- when I first saw the Great Cabin. I haven't lines, reeflines, brails, gaskets, halliards, got a slide of it. This will have to do. It did staysails, shrouds. I discovered when I not seem possible that so much could saw her first what was a mainmast heart come out of such a cramped space. and why it was seized around the bowsprit. Where could Joseph Banks, let alone his I won't fool you I know. I've done all my dogs, spread himself out, Sydney sailing in the library I do all my reading Parkinson paint, Daniel Solander cata- in ships logs with a plan of ships rigging logue. And Cook! Where did he find beside me. When Cook or Bligh write in room in his tiny quarters on the side of their logs that a 'severe gale' abated into a the Great Cabin or on that elaborate `mere storm', I reach anachronistically fold-away table, to make his maps, to for my Beaufort Wind Scales to under- write his log. stand what it might mean and what are Now that I have these spaces re-shaped in the signs in the sea to determine it. my mind, why don't I try a little re-enact- It is in the props of re-enactment that the ment of my own. Let me take you to a realism of its theatre is created. Of course part of the Endeavour's voyage that gets there are many compromises. There are perhaps only a line in most histories. It's engines now on the.Endeavour and a the passage from New Zealand and the propellor. Desalinization plants, and sighting of the East Coast of Australia at toilets (Cook once flogged a drunken Point Hicks. This passage took place in marine down in the Arctic Circle because the first nineteen days of April, 177o. he pissed on the sails in their locker You'll be able to re-enact the weather rather than from the heads out amid the for yourselves. ice and snow. The marine, presumably There was a warm and expansive feeling drunk again, was lost overboard later among Cook and his companions in the doing it from the heads). There are metal Great Cabin as they left Cape Farewell. fittings now, and artificial materials in the They felt that they had done well circum- sails. Instead of oak, elm and spruce, navigating the two islands of New there are WA jarrah and other Australian Zealand, proving it to be no part of a hardwoods. And much hidden symbol- Southern Continent. They collected to ism. The tallow wood hanging tree decide what they would do now They had supporting the weather beams came three options. One, to run to the east and from trees near Port Macquarie, old Cape Horn below latitude 4o degrees. enough for Cook to have seen, but That would determine finally whether logged because of the widening of the there was a Southern Continent. Already Pacific Highway. they had narrowed the possibility of a I suppose the most magical moment of Southern Continent to a small part of the all for me on the Endeavour replica was Pacific deep to the south of Tahiti. But 3 6 GREG DENING their rigging and their sails were already It was a reasonably easy run, although in such poor shape that they doubted that old cat-built collier griped into the whether they could complete a voyage in breeze all the way and drove herself these high latitudes. uncomfortably upwind. Endeavour was The second option was to sail westward, near perfect for her discovery tasks, but a south of Van Diemen's Land to the Cape little unforgiving in hard weather. Cook of Good Hope. There was no discoverer's used to say her best sailing was with joy in that, nothing new to be seen. square sails set, a fore topmast staysail What's more they were too well supplied. and a breeze on her port quarter. The They had six months supplies left. The night watches, without Cook looking thought of having to throw out or give over their shoulders in these safer waters, back what had been so hardly earned would let the Endeavour edge more galled them too much for that. northerly and say it was the current that did it. They hankered for warmer climates. They voted unanimously therefore for the third option which was to sail west- Cook drove a hard ship. Halfway between ward slightly north of 38 degrees latitude Cape Farewell and Point Hicks, he gave so that they would come upon the north- Jonathan Bowles, marine, twelve lashes ern extension of Van Diemen's Land, for refusing to do his duty. The marines follow the coast northward or wherever were the men most frequently flogged by it took them, and come across, if they Cook and every other voyaging captain. were there, de Quiros's Solomon Islands. Marines had too little to do. If they happened to be Irish and younger than FIGURE 3 25 years, God help them.