The Zoo

There was the question of Tupaia, the priest and expert navigator [Tahitian]. Should he be taken on the “Endeavour” or not? The Captain thought not, the Captain was not a romantic, he knew something of official dom; “1 therefore,” announced Banks, in his “Journal”, “have resolved to take him. Thank heaven I have a sufficiency and I do not know why I may not keep him as a curiosity, as well as some of my neighbours do lions and tigyrs at a larger ex pense than he will ever prob ably put me to; the amusement 1 shall have in his future conversa tion and the benefit he will be of to this ship, as well as what he may be if another should be sent to these seas, will 1 think fully repay me”

It was an age of private zoos; but Tupaia would be better than a zoo. If Banks had but known it, a Tahitian was already the rage of Paris, with abbes writing poetry to him and fashionable ladies gazing at him desperately at the opera. —From Dr. J. C. Beaglehole’s intro duction to “The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks”.