Mapping Cook’s Narratives in Tahiti
Final Report
Professor Jeff Howarth
Assistant Professor of Geography, Middlebury College, Vermont
“Ah, Huahine? Yes, it’s a beautiful island. Huahine is like Moorea fifteen years ago,” said Valentine Brother, as she
drove the rust-torn truck over the fresh asphalt road toward the UC Berkeley Gump Field Station on Cook’s Bay,
Moorea.
“That’s interesting. Someone on the ferry this morning told me Moorea is like Tahiti ten years ago,” I replied.
“Yes. Yes.” She said and then smiled. “Maybe twenty years ago.”
During my first few days traveling in Tahiti, I kept returning to this exchange. If I met someone who had lived
and worked on Tahiti and the Society Islands for a number years, I would tell them the story. Though they might
disagree on the lengths of time that separated the different islands, everyone I talked to seemed comfortable with
the basic premise: one place could stand for the past of another place. By being on the islands, by talking to the
people who knew them, who knew the changes because they had experienced them slowly unfold, I could sense this
common awareness of change. But nobody I spoke with had really tried to systematically document it. It just seemed
to be something they all could think about in their heads. Early on in my stay, I started thinking about how this
would be a good problem for students to solve with cartography.
As a Whiting Fellow, I had traveled to Tahiti because I wanted to improve how I taught students with maps. I
wanted to explore how cartography could help students connect three things: written narratives of travel, the
experiential places of travel, and the minds of people who can only experience the place by reading the text and
looking at imagery of the place from afar. I was lead to Tahiti because of my long interest in Captain James Cook,
this historical character who kept making appearances in my lecture notes, this luminary of discovery through
cartography. I was intrigued by how maps could help me teach students to interpret Cook’s impacts on the islands
in new ways. And I was hungry to experiment with new cartographic methods, particularly new ways I could teach
students to make maps from data collected though photographs and videos.
In January 2013, after a short stint at the field station on Moorea to recover from the long flight, I set out to
Matavai Bay on Tahiti. On April 15, 1769, Captain James Cook had landed there in order “to pitch upon some spot
upon the North-East point of the Bay, properly situated for observing the Transit of Venus, and at the same time
under the command of the Ship’s Guns… throw up a small fort for our defence (sic).” Cook and his crew informally
surveyed the long, black sand beach and began to focus on one small portion of it. Tahitians began to gather around
Cook and his men, perhaps curious at the sight of the uniformed white men dragging their heels in the black sand,
but Captain Cook “would suffer none to come within the lines I had marked out,” and he explained as best he could
that he wanted “the ground to Sleep upon such a number of nights and then we should go away.” Over the next
week, some men under Cook’s command transformed this line in the sand into a high wall that enclosed a small
portion of the beach. This place, not just the wall but the beach that it enclosed, became to be known as Fort Venus.
I had read Cook’s description of this event several times before, but it wasn’t until I visited the historic site on
Matavia Bay as a Whiting Fellow that I began to realize its profound significance. What a novel, precedent-setting,
spatial transformation for the island and people of Tahiti! To transform a rudimentary survey line into a real-world
object: turning a line scratched in the sand into a high wooden wall. And also to enclose a space, to make a place with
an inside, a space to separate and protect those inside from the people outside.
On my first walk from the beach at Matavai Bay
into the island’s interior, the significance of Cook’s
introduction revealed itself to me in a profound way. In
my head, I remembered Cook’s endearing description
of the Tahitian landscape around Matavai Bay from the
journals of his first voyage:
“The Houses or dwellings of these People are
admirably calculated for the continual warmth
of the Climate; they do not build them in
Towns or Villages, but separate each from
the other, and always in the Woods, and are
without walls, so that the air, cooled by the
shade of the Trees, has free access in whatever
direction it hapens (sic) to blow. No country
can boast of more delightful walks than this;
the whole Plains where the Natives reside
are covered with groves of Bread Fruit and
Cocoa Nut Trees, without underwood, and
intersected in all directions by the Paths which
go from House to House, so that nothing can
be more grateful in a Climate where the sun
hath so powerful an influence.”
Figure 1. The road from Point Venus, Tahiti, January 2013.
Figure 2 A side-road near Point Venus, Tahiti, January 2013.
My view from the road that lead away from Point Venus
stood in stark contrast to Cook’s view of the island
(Figure 1). I walked in a space between two long, high
walls and I realized something very simple: I was seeing
the basic form of space that Cook introduced with Fort
Venus, the walled enclosure, repeat itself over and over
again on today’s landscape. The space I was thinking of
as “the road” was basically just the outside space leftover
from the construction of many individual Fort Venuses,
each defining their own private space by enclosing a
space with high walls. When I turned off the main
avenue onto the smaller, residential side streets, this Fort Figure 3. A side road on Raiatea, Society Islands, January 2013.
Venus pattern continued to repeat itself (Figure 2). I
found myself walking inside two long walls, inside what
now remains of the outside.
I realized that Fort Venus was a spatial prototype for
the transformation of the island landscape. It’s a simple
process: a line in the sand (or on a map) becomes a
physical object (a wall) that encloses space in order to
separate insiders from outsiders. And I began to wonder,
how many times has this simple sequence of events
recurred since Cook? Is this a simple way to compare
a human dimension of change across the islands and
get at this idea that one place is like another place was
in the past? Did the roads defined by solid block walls
Figure 4. A road on Nuka Hiva, Marquesas Islands, February 2013.
on Tahiti (Figure 1-2) pass through a stage of being defined by mixed hard- and soft- fences as I found on Raiatea
(Figure 3), and had these kinds of walls pass through an even earlier stage of being defined only by vegetation as I
found on Nuka Hiva (Figure 4)?
When I realized this, when I recognized it by experiencing it, I thought, “Ah-hah!” This is something I can map!
And think of all the questions I could ask students to explore with such a map! What reasons do people have to
enclose space? Is it for security? For privacy? Are newcomers more likely to build walls than old-timers? Do the
walls really function as originally intended? Does a wall keep people out or does a wall signal to people that there’s
something valuable within? What do the walls say about people’s feelings toward the community? Do the walls use
materials that suggest attention to aesthetics in addition to function? Are the walls screened with vegetation? If so,
do the flowers and shrubs screen the view from the outside-in, or just from the inside-out? What does this say about
the people who make these walls?
One of the projects I pursued while traveling in Tahiti and the Society Islands aimed to show students how you
can explore these kinds of questions through cartography and how making maps can help reveal Cook’s legacy on
the islands. I developed a technique that involved wearing a small video camera attached to my hat while biking
island roads and recording a GPS track. This let me map things that I could see in the video. For example, I made
maps that showed the density of residential areas by mapping driveways with cars (Figure 5). I also made maps that
compared two different attitudes of public
space (Figure 6). I showed where people
marked their properties with high, block walls
and used vegetation to screen the view of the
wall from the inside-out but not outsidein (red stars) and then also showed where
people had planted flowers and shrubs on
the outside of the walls to conceal the view
of the wall itself from the outside-in (green
stars). The red stars mark locations on the
road owned by people who don’t seem to care
if outsiders have to look at something that
they themselves don’t want to look at. The
green stars mark locations on the road owned
by people who seem to care about what
Figure 5. Density of driveways along an island road.
their space looks like to those on the outside
looking in.
After January, I kept making connections
from the roadside landscape of the islands
to my immediate surroundings. For
example, in February, I boarded the Sea
Education Association’s 140-foot sailboat,
the Robert C. Seamans, to help teach a new
cartography component in the course titled
“Sustainibility in Polynesian Island Cultures
and Ecosystems.” Over seven weeks, I sailed
and worked with 25 students from Tahiti
to Hawaii. Early on, I was intrigued by the
signage on the boat. Everywhere you looked,
there was a little red sign offering instruction
(Figure 7). It was I think the most densely
Figure 6. Two different attitudes towards public space along a road.
signed space that I have ever dwelled in.
In an early discussion, I asked the students: why are there so many
signs on this boat? Eventually, we agreed that it was because of us.
It was because we were all newcomers to the boat and we didn’t
know how the space worked. So the space itself had to tell us. I had
seen the same basic idea in my travels on the island roads: some
places were littered with roadside signs, while other places had
few if any signs. With the students, I discussed how signs might
provide a way for us to map the insularity of islands as a human
dimension.
So as we made port calls on islands between Tahiti and Hawaii,
the students and I started documenting the signs we encountered.
For example, we found places like the business on Fakarava with a
hand-written sign that only told outsiders whether or not they were
open for business, but not what the business was called (Figure
8). And then later, we found businesses on Kiritimati without any
written signs at all; propped open window shutters served as the
sign that they were open (Figure 9).
Figure 7. Signs on the Robert C. Seamans.
Overall, my experiences reading Cook’s narratives while traveling
and using maps to explore his legacy on
the islands was tremendously inspiring. It
provided a rare opportunity to creatively
explore how maps could help me engage
students to connect historical narratives
of travel with the modern landscape. It
also allowed me to pursue how I could
teach students new ways to make maps
that document subtle qualitative changes
in the human dimension of landscapes.
The technical challenges of this work also
gave me new perspectives on teaching
cartography. I focused on using tools that
I thought would be accessible to students
at liberal arts colleges. I experimented with Figure 8. Open for business on Fakarava.
collecting GPS locations with iPhone apps
and did all the mapping work in an opensource geographic information system that
students can install on their personal laptop
computers for free. I enjoyed the challenges
of doing cartography in remote areas,
without internet access and with limited
data. This gave me a better perspective on
the challenges my students will encounter
pursuing cartography while studying abroad
and away from the resources of Middlebury.
And I’m returning to the classroom now
with a rich collection of images and sounds Figure 9. Open for business on Kiritimati.
that show the perspective a visitor has traveling across the islands. I think this will help me engage students in other
more abstract representations of the place, like maps, satellite images, and historical narratives.
Teaching and learning with students on a sailboat for seven weeks has also inspired changes in the way I teach in the
classroom. For one thing, it was interesting to share a small space with 25 undergraduates for such an extended time.
This allowed me to observe what engaged students and motivated them to learn. I found that the students were
dedicated to learning the nautical science component of the course: the names of the sails, the physics of harnessing
wind power, the methods of shooting stars and the mathematics for calculating locations. In contrast, they
procrastinated writing papers that critiqued historical narratives of travel and tired of looking through microscopes
in the lab to collect data for statistical analysis. For me, witnessing how self-motivated the students were to learn by
doing and progress towards leadership roles has made me more focused here at Middlebury on teaching students
through problem solving that leads to designing their own problems to study. I’m now thinking about ways to
adopt the experiential pedagogy of learning from the nautical science component of the SEA course in my courses at
Middlebury, where students learn by shadowing an expert before taking leadership of more complex tasks.
And finally, I should end by acknowledging my mentor throughout these travels: Captain James Cook. By traveling
on the islands as an outsider, by participating as a crew member on the Seamans, by anchoring on islands and
visiting isolated people for short periods of time, I came to understand Cook in a new way. I experienced the
inherent challenges of being an outsider who depends on the resources of islanders (we looked for fresh supplies at
every port, no matter how remote) and the challenges of providing students with these cross-cultural experiences
while avoiding the trappings of colonialism. I’ve come closer to understanding Cook as a person by placing myself
in rough analogies of his world and reflecting on my own experiences in it. And I’m still inspired by the phrase he
wrote so often in his journals after anchoring in a new harbor: “and then I set about Surveying the Island.”