California Tiki, Polynesian Pop

[sus]

It takes Banks years to settle into conventional behavior and dodge the London scandalmill.

He is famous, alongside Cook, for the expedition—the pair are celebrities, and London society is "agog" with their "national triumph": a thousand new plant specimens, five hundred animal skins or skeletons, native artefacts, and new worlds: Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific. The "armchair travelers" are delighted by his journals.

But he is infamous for the cancelled engagement and his sexual behaviors post-Tahiti. There are rumors of an illegitimate child. He takes up with Sarah Wells, with "no prospect of conventional betrothal or marriage." There is gossip that he and Lord Sanwich are cavorting with unmarried young women on Sandwich's estate. His sister pressures him to become "enlightened with the Bright Sunshine of the Gospel."

He was reported to have taken a young woman—presumably Sarah Wells—on a scandalous fishing party with Lord Sandwich and his mistress Martha Ray, during which the women sang and danced while the men "played the kettle drums" (perhaps in an attempt to recreate the Tahitian timorodee).

 

[sus]

In his old age he becomes very respectable if chair-ridden. Coleridge refers to him as a source for new exotic/experimental drugs including Indonesian bang and cannabis. He presides over several major scientific organizations, and funds many expeditions, but never himself goes on another major journey.

He writes a few small things on Tahiti, based on his journals, but never gets around to publishing the journals in their totality, the way he always hoped to. But what is published—by Banks, or from the posthumous journals of his botanical illustrator Sydney Parkinson, or by others on the expedition and on other e.g. French expeditions to Tahiti—changes European culture forever.

Many of Rousseau's ideas about primitive society surge in popularity and support. It is a bit like the effect of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa on 1920s America. Diderot's Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville (1777) offers Tahiti as a model for reforming European sexual relations, incl relaxing marriage, free love among the young, and physical pleasure during sex.

Cook is killed by natives, on his third Pacific expedition, in Hawaii's Kealakekua Bay. His body is dismembered and distributed piece by piece among the local chieftains.

 

[sus]

He writes a few small things on Tahiti, based on his journals, but never gets around to publishing the journals in their totality, the way he always hoped to

Which is a shame, because the dark underbelly of the sexual utopia—which Banks knew better than anyone, having spent far more time and in far more intimacy with the Tahitians—is never publicized. E.g.:

The only Tahitian practice that Banks found totally alien and repulsive was that of infanticide, which was used with regularity and without compunction as a form of birth control by couples who were not yet ready to support children.

The custom originated in "the formation of communal groups in which sexual favours were freely exchanged between different partners." Banks:

They are calld Arreoy and have meetings among themselves where the men amuse themselves with wrestling &c. and the women with dancing the indecent dances before mentiond, in the course of which they give full liberty to their desires.

Arreoy: these group orgies were only for childless women, and so young women who participated would practice infanticide in order to continue participating, up until the point that her desires to preserve her child begin outweighing her desire to continue participating in Arreoy. Banks:

If she cannot find a man who will own [the child], she must of course destroy it; and if she can, with him alone it lies whether or not it shall be preserv'd.

If the child is "preserv'd" then both mother and father lose their place in the Arreoy and the sexual freedoms that came with it. The woman became known as Whannownow, a "bearer of children," a title (Banks wrote) "as disgracefull among these people, as it ought to be honourable in every good and well governd society."

 

[sus]

What do I think is interesting here? Besides the obvious?

How much of the attitudes and stereotypes, true and false, in 50s exotica are already at play.

The hypersexualized native island girl. Going native. Venereal disease.

Also this combination of romance and trauma that you see in Pacific vets. Haunted by and nostalgic for. Changed by.

 

[sus]

This story also connects exotica more clearly in my mind to the Romantic & the sublime

The beautiful and the terrible of nature, of the unknown

You sail across a sea, which is also sorta like traveling through time (back to an earlier stage of technocultural development). Nature or "the natural state of things," at least to your eyes. You see things no man (read: European) has ever seen before. And it's beautiful and it opens your eyes and it also haunts you.

Shades of the Pocahontas story here too. I was just saying to Nico yesterday that the Pocahontas story and the Nosferatu story are inverses of each other. The pale man who comes and preys on your princess and brings a plague with him that eventually kills her. If you're the culture of the pale man you come up with the Pocahontas love story and if you're the culture of the princess who is stolen/slain, then you come up with the Nosferatu myth.

 

[sus]

And all the perennial dangers of contact (contamination, contagion) between two groups long separated (by mountain ranges, deserts, oceans, or just a river). See also the syphilis outbreaks in the Caribbean (some think brought back by Columbus to Europe)

And this connection between epidemic and sexual promiscuity. I was thinking about AIDS the other day, it's easy to see how easily it fits into an Evangelical worldview. They sinned, and God smote them. I don't think this is literally true, and I don't think there's anything wrong with being gay. But there's something here about breaking from tradition, taking down Chesterton's fence, and the unforeseen consequences that result. I think a lot of that is happening now with the so-called sexual revolution of the dating app era.

 

[sus]

He travels and expatiates, as the bee
From flower to flower, so he lands from land to land;
The manners, customs, policy of all
Pay contribution to the store he gleans;
He sucks intelligence in every clime,
And spreads the honey of his deep research
At his return, a rich repast for me.
He travels and I too. I tread his deck,
Ascend his topmast, through his peering eyes...

William Cowpers

 

[sus]

OK here is the pitch, why all the above is worth reading

I think the story of Joseph Banks braids into many of recent threads

It is about the feeling that modern civilization's many cultural structures have become this labyrinthine prisons you can't escape. And then get a glimpse of freedom, or at least, what feels like it. Like in Leave Words

And like in the Jim Morrison thread. That you need to be turned on by contact. You get a flash you're charged up or changed or infected, by a vision of alterity. A different way the world could be, suddenly your way seems contingent or arbitrary, maybe you convert or maybe you decline but either way it haunts you on your return. Psychedelics do this too

And how shamanic initiations, like Romantic voyages in the Age of Wonder, follow a monomythic structure. You leave the garden you knew & were raised in and venture into wilderness and maybe find another garden and when you return home you bring boons. And the chief boon is knowledge of the other world, the other garden, the other side, the insights and information, the counterfactuals

And to The Master, because Freddie Quell is both more animalistic and also someone who has glimpsed the other side, the sublime of horror of nature ie war, and he can't reintegrate. But how Lancaster Dodds, like a Europe to Tahiti, needs Freddie's 'animal'/raw/directunmediated alterity to rejuvenate his social gaming linguistic manipulating civilized self.

And the aging of Banks, from this young vital libidinal adventurer to an armchair administrator is a parallel for the whole civilizing process, "chained to an armchair," all the titles and honors he gets domesticate him, he needs to correspond via letter with the next generation and live vicariously through them, as others lived vicariously through him.

And all of this tied up with a notion of the poet at someone who engages in literal and psychic travel and is transformed by it and transforms his society's consciousness in turn

 

[luka]

Banks is the only member of the crew to really integrate with the Tahitians. They let him in on their religious rites. Speak to him freely. He's not really part of the Endeavour's command structure, being a botanist. Neither an officer who needs to maintain appearances or a sailor who needs to follow orders. It's like the doctor in Master & Commander. There are always these scientist/doctor/anthropologist/bard/philosopher figures in these stories, yeah?

They're these quasi-neutral third parties. They're on neither side. They're curious and open and want to communicate. Rather than being interested in war and empire

o'brian wrote a biography of banks. theres a lot of banks in the doctor.

 

[william_kent]

OK here is the pitch, why all the above is worth reading

I think the story of Joseph Banks braids into many of recent threads

that was entertaining - I've read something else this week about the use of ship nails to pay for sex, but I can't find the reference

but for some reason it reminded me of this entertaining article about "Torpedo Juice"

As of the beginning of World War II, American torpedoes utilized 180-proof ethyl alcohol as fuel for the miniature steam engines that drove them toward their targets. Lacking consistent access to liquor, opportunistic sailors occasionally drained the torpedoes of their alcohol and mixed it with something to cut the strength. The practice existed before the 1940s, albeit quietly, almost an institutional secret. With the rapid expansion of the Navy during the war, torpedo juice exploded in popularity and quickly became public knowledge.

Intoxication during the war required imagination. Army signalman Stu Lucas was stationed at the remote Ulithi Atoll, a critical Western Pacific Ocean staging point. His favorite recipe: “One drilled a hole in a coconut then added some sugar if available, or a chewed-on, but not swallowed, candy bar like a Hershey, or whatever, which one spit into the coconut. The spit was the vital additive, as the enzymes therein were the key to speed the fermentation. One then sealed it and then placed it in the direct tropical sunlight. The coconut was spun a third of a turn every three days.”

In 1946, the 145th Naval Construction Battalion — Seabees — published a regimental history that included advice on reentering society. “If you are entertaining at home and plan serving any stimulants, you must be very careful. It has been your experience overseas that such drinks as varnish remover and grapefruit juice, hair tonic, or an invigorating combination of torpedo juice and water are highly acceptable. Your civilian friends are more discriminating.”

I'm wondering if the mixtures of 180-proof ethyl alcohol with fruit juices lead to a post war interest in cocktails?

also, there is a scene in The Master where consumption of torpedo juice is depicted

 

[catalog]

See also van goghs frenemy gaughin who specifically went to tahiti to experience free love and become inspired.



And also Mutiny on the Bounty and Pitcairn as the flipside of Tahiti

2004 Pitcairn Islands sexual assault trial - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[catalog]

Bron Taylor talks often about how all the nature religion people he profiles have a moment of epiphany, a nature encounter that makes them re-evaluate everything they hitherto thought about nature.

 

[Benny Bunter]

@sus on a bit of a tangent, but are you into Wallace Stevens? I mention him cos, especially his early stuff in Harmonium, is full of very exotic imagery - tropical birds and fruits, palmy beaches, gaudy colours, Florida, the Carolinas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, but also India, Java, China, Cuba etc etc

 

[Benny Bunter]

His imagination is that same frontier American one, projected out into exotic locations, that you've been talking about

 

[Benny Bunter]

Tea

When the elephant's-ear in the park
Shrivelled in frost,
And the leaves on the paths
Ran like rats,
Your lamp-light fell
On shining pillows,
Of sea-shades and sky-shades,
Like umbrellas in Java

 

[Benny Bunter]

Anecdote of Men by the Thousand

The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world.

There are men of the East, he said,
Who are the East.
There are men of a province
Who are that province.
There are men of a valley
Who are that valley.

There are men whose words
Are as natural sounds
Of their places
As the cackle of toucans
In the place of toucans.

The mandoline is the instrument
Of a place.

Are there mandolines of western mountains?
Are there mandolines of northern moonlight?

The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
In its place,
Is an invisible element of that place
Made visible.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Fabliau of Florida

Barque of phosphor
On the palmy beach,

Move outward into heaven,
Into the alabasters
And night blues.

Foam and cloud are one.
Sultry moon-monsters
Are dissolving.

Fill your black hull
With white moonlight.

There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf.

 

[Benny Bunter]

The Load Of Sugar-Cane

The going of the glade-boat
Is like water flowing;

Like water flowing
Through the green saw-grass
Under the rainbows;

Under the rainbows
That are like birds,
Turning, bedizened,

While the wind still whistles
As kildeer do,

When they rise
At the red turban
Of the boatman.

 

[vershy versh]

 

[Benny Bunter]