'Cook and his men were among the few Westerners even to glimpse the old religion. But the English couldn't penetrate much beyond the surface of what they saw. "The Misteries of most Religions are very dark and not easily understud even by those who profess them," Cook wrote. Later, on his second voyage, Cook had a revealing exchange with a Raiatean chief he'd befriended.
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"He asked the name of my Marai," Cook wrote, "a strange quistion to ask Seaman." Cook interpreted the query in its narrowest sense: the chief "wanted to know the name of the place where our bodies were to return to dust." He replied with the name of the parish his family occupied in London: Stepney. Cook's second in command, Tobias Furneaux, was asked the same question and answered: "No man who used the Sea could tell where he would be buried."
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Neither man grasped that the chief may have sought something more than the name of a London churchyard. Cook's biographer J.C.Beaglehole, a New Zealander who also studied Polynesian culture, describes the marae as " an essential part of a man's social existence, and his relationship to the gods: the question was really, What place are you particularly identified with?" For a man as rootless and secular as Cook, there wasn't a ready answer to this question, even if he'd understood it.'
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From Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz.
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Photo of Gauguin by Mucha (?).
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Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
