Henry’s hardships began instantly. He was housed belowdecks, with the hen coops and the barrels. Poultry and goats complained all around him, but he did not complain. He was bullied, scorned, harmed by grown men with salt-scaled hands and anvils for wrists. The older sailors derided him as a freshwater eel, who knew nothing of the severities of ocean travel. On every expedition there were men who died, they said, and Henry would be the first to die.
They underestimated him.
Henry was the youngest, but not, as it soon emerged, the weakest. It was not much less comfortable a life than the one he had always known. He learned whatever he was required to learn. He learned how to dry and prepare Mr. Nelson’s plants for scientific record, and how to paint botanicals in the open air—beating away the flies who landed in his pigments even as he mixed them—but he also learned how to be useful on the ship. He was made to scrub every crevice of the Resolution with vinegar, and forced to pick vermin from the bedding of the older sailors. He helped the ship’s butcher to salt and barrel hogs, and learned how to operate the water distillation machine. He learned how to swallow his vomit, rather than displaying his seasickness for anyone’s satisfaction. He rode out tempests without showing fear to the heavens or to any man. He ate sharks, and he ate the half-decomposed fish that were in the bellies of sharks. He never faltered.
He landed at Madeira, at Tenerife, at Table Bay. Down in the Cape, he encountered for the first time representatives of the Dutch East India Company, who impressed him with their sobriety, competence, and wealth. He watched the sailors lose all their earnings at gaming tables. He watched people borrow money from the Dutch, who seemed not to gamble themselves. Henry did not gamble, either. He watched a fellow sailor, a would-be counterfeiter, get caught cheating and be whipped senseless for his crime—at Captain Cook’s command. He committed no crimes himself. Rounding the Cape in ice and wind, he shivered at night under one thin blanket, his jaws clattering so hard he broke a tooth, but he did not complain. He kept Christmas on a bitterly cold island of sea lions and penguins.
He landed in Tasmania and met naked natives—or, as the British called them (and all copper-colored people), “Indians.” He watched Captain Cook give the Indians souvenir medals, stamped with an image of George III and the date of the expedition, to mark this historic encounter. He watched the Indians immediately hammer the medals into fishhooks and spear tips. He lost another tooth. He watched the English sailors not believe that the life of any savage Indian had any account at all, while Cook tried futilely to teach them otherwise. He saw sailors force themselves on women they could not persuade, persuade women they could not afford, and simply buy for themselves girls from their fathers, if the sailors had any iron to trade for flesh. He avoided all girls.
He spent long days on board the ship, helping Mr. Nelson draw, describe, mount, and classify his botanical collections. He had no particular feelings of affection for Mr. Nelson, though he wished to learn everything that Mr. Nelson already knew.
He landed in New Zealand, which looked to him precisely like England, except with tattooed girls whom you could buy for a few handfuls of penny nails. He bought no girls. He watched his fellow sailors, in New Zealand, purchase two eager and energetic brothers—aged ten and fifteen—from their father. The native boys joined the excursion as hands. They had wanted to come, they indicated. But Henry knew the boys had no idea what it would mean to leave their people. They were called Tibura and Gowah. They tried to befriend Henry, because he was closest to their age, but he ignored them. They were slaves and they were doomed. He did not wish to associate with the doomed. He watched the New Zealand boys eat raw dog meat and pine for home. He knew they would eventually die.
He sailed to the verdant, tufted, perfumed land of Tahiti. He watched Captain Cook be welcomed back to Tahiti as a great king, as a great friend. The Resolution was met by a swarm of Indians, swimming out to the ship and calling Cook’s name. Henry watched as Omai—the Tahitian native who had met King George III—was received at home first as a hero and then, increasingly, as a resented outsider. He could see that now Omai belonged nowhere. He watched the Tahitians dance to English hornpipes and bagpipes, while Mr. Nelson, his staid botanical master, got drunk one night and stripped down to the waist, dancing to Tahitian drums. Henry did not dance. He watched Captain Cook order that a native man have both his ears shorn off at the temples by the ship’s barber, for twice having stolen iron from the Resolution’s forge. He watched one of the Tahitian chiefs try to steal a cat from the Englishmen, and receive a lash of a whip across the face for his troubles.
He watched Captain Cook light fireworks over Matavai Bay, to impress the natives, but it only frightened them. On a quieter night, he saw the million lamps of heaven in the skies over Tahiti. He drank from coconuts. He ate dogs and rats. He saw stone temples littered with human skulls. He climbed up the treacherous avenues of rock cliffs, beside waterfalls, gathering fern samples for Mr. Nelson, who did not climb. He saw Captain Cook struggle to keep order and discipline among his charges, while licentiousness reigned. All the sailors and officers had fallen in love with Tahitian girls, and each girl was reputed to know a special secret act of love. The men never wanted to leave the island. Henry withheld from the women. They were beautiful, their breasts were beautiful, their hair was beautiful, they smelled extraordinary and they inhabited his dreams—but most of them already had the French disease. He held out against one hundred fragrant temptations. He was ridiculed for this. He held out nonetheless. He was planning something bigger for himself. He concentrated on botany. He collected gardenias, orchids, jasmine, breadfruit.
They sailed on. He watched a native in the Friendly Islands have his arm cut off at the elbow, on Captain Cook’s orders, for having stolen a hatchet from the Resolution. He and Mr. Nelson were botanizing on those same islands when they were ambushed by natives, who stripped them of their clothes, and—far more injuriously—stripped them of their botanical samples and notebooks, as well. Sunburned, nude, and shaken, they returned to the ship, but still Henry did not complain.
With care, he observed the gentlemen on board, appraising their behaviors. He imitated their speech. He practiced their diction. He improved his manners. He overheard one officer tell another, “As much of a contrivance as the aristocracy has always been, it still constitutes the best check against mobs of the uneducated and the unreflecting.” He watched how the officers repeatedly bestowed honor upon any native who resembled a nobleman (or, at least, who resembled some English idea of a nobleman). On every island they visited, the Resolution’s officers would single out any brown-skinned man who had a finer headpiece than the others, or who wore more tattoos, or who carried a bigger spear, or who had more wives, or who was borne upon a litter by other men, or who—in the absence of any of these luxuries—was simply taller than the other men. The Englishmen would treat that person with respect. This would be the man with whom they would negotiate, and upon whom they would bestow gifts, and who, sometimes, they would pronounce “the king.” He concluded that wherever English gentlemen went in the world, they were always looking for a king.
Henry went turtling, and ate dolphins. He was eaten by black ants. He sailed on. He saw tiny Indians with giant shells in their ears. He saw a storm in the tropics turn the skies a sickly green color—the only thing that had ever visibly frightened the older sailors. He saw the burning mountains called volcanoes. They sailed farther north. It got cold again. He ate rats again. They landed on the west coast of the continent of North America. He ate reindeer. He saw people who dressed in furs and who traded in beaver pelts. He saw a sailor tangle his leg in the anchor chain and be pulled overboard to die.