The day the Endeavour sailed close to home by Debra Daley

It’s the morning of the second day of November and I’ve sat down at the kitchen table to finish writing this post. Every so often, as always, my gaze strays to the big view framed in the window. The shellfish season is passing and the garden is throwing out new spring shoots and blossoms. The pōhutukawa in the gully below is already coming into crimson bloom. Tui are feasting on the flax flowers and I can hear blackbirds and thrushes too and a rasping call as a pair of rainbow lorikeets pass by, Australian invaders that have turned up looking ridiculously overwrought, among our more restrained native birds, in their green and scarlet and blue feathers.

Flax blooming in my garden, 2 November 2016

In the distance Mauao, an extinct volcano, rises up on the southern tip of the entrance to Tauranga Harbour, where I live on the Ōtūmoetai peninsula in the Bay of Plenty – a wide scoop of sandy beaches that stretches for 250 kilometres on the northeastern coast of New Zealand’s North Island. Over Mauao’s shoulder lies the purple-grey outline of Mayor Island, once a source of valuable obsidian, which the local tangata whenua (people of the land) obtained for use as cutting and scraping tools in centuries past.

View of Mauao from Ōtūmoetai, 2 November 2016. 

Ōtūmoetai means ‘the tide standing still as if asleep’.

View of Mt Maunganui (Mauao) from Ōtūmoetai. Undated sketch by S.L. Clarke, possibly 1880s. Tauranga Library.

On the morning of 2 November, two hundred and forty seven years ago, HMS Endeavour, the Royal Navy research vessel commanded by Lieutenant James Cook on his first voyage of discovery to Australia and New Zealand, was passing Maketu just south of Tauranga. (Later, one of my ancestors, Elizabeth Kelly, would run the one-room school at Maketu and her brother Richard would leave the family farm in 1916 to fight in the First World War. He was killed in France.) As the Endeavour approached the sweeping bay known as Te Moana-a-Toi (the sea of Toi), the master's mate, Richard Pickersgill, drew Cook’s attention to the large pallisaded settlements on the hilltops and the hundreds of canoes drawn up on the beaches. It was the most densely populated stretch of coast that the Endeavour had yet encountered in New Zealand – and it occurred to Cook to name the great curving coastline the Bay of Plenty.

Model of a Māori pā (fortified village) on a headland. Auckland War Memorial Museum. WikiMedia Commons.

By the late afternoon of 2 November, the Endeavour had reached Mayor Island with Mauao in sight. Twenty-six-year-old Joseph Banks, botanist and patron of natural sciences, was among the 90 men and boys on board. Banks, who had supplied £10,000 of his own money to equip the expedition, was accompanied by Linnaeus’s protegé, the Swedish botanist Dr Daniel Solander, a former watchmaker turned naturalist named Herman Spöring and the botanical draughtsman Sydney Parkinson. Samuel Johnson might have been aboard as well, remarkably enough, had Banks succeeded in persuading him to join the Endeavour’s expedition, but Dr Johnson had declared himself no enthusiast for ‘savage life’ and held fast to his spot in the snug at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese off Fleet Street. 

Sydney Parkinson. Engraving of pōhutukawa blossom (Metrosideros Excelsa) 1788, after a 1769 drawing.

I am beguiled by the thought of those Georgian urbanites lingering in proximity to my distant home in the South Pacific. How extraordinary that Banks, of whom I have read so much, was ever here. I can imagine him stooping his six-feet-five-inch frame in his ‘hutch’ – as he referred to his accommodation – to try on, for effect, the cloak he had obtained a week or two earlier from a Māori chief – he later commissioned a portrait of himself wearing it. Banks was impressed by the textile uses of harakeke (New Zealand flax). ‘Of the leaves of these plants,’ he wrote, ‘with very little preparation all [Māori] common wearing apparel are made, and all strings, lines and cordage for every purpose, and of a strength so much superior to hemp as scarce bear a comparison with it. The Finest cloaths are made with the extracted fibres, snow white and shining almost as silk and likewise surprisingly strong.’

Benjamin West. Joseph Banks, 1773. Usher Art Gallery, Lincoln. Sir Joseph Banks in a Māori cloak with Pacific trophies. 

Thomas Pringle. A woman weaving a flax cloak, photographed probably in the Rotorua district, 1905.

Cook was always on the lookout for a useful anchorage as a base for finding supplies of fresh food and water, but he was denied the opportunity to discover the excellent harbour at Tauranga and the large pā that overlooked its calm inner waters. While the Endeavour was sheltering at Mayor Island on the evening of 2 November, two large canoes packed with warriors sailed out to challenge the alien entity in their waters. The Endeavour’s men had experienced a number of similar encounters as they had made their way along the east coast of the North Island, mapmaking and gathering botanical specimens. Only that morning at Maketu, warriors had harassed the ship. The local people were in no mood to be welcoming. During the mid-18th century, most of the Bay of Plenty was engaged in tribal skirmishes between war parties or plunderers demanding satisfaction for various offences. The approach of warm weather in November traditionally marked the start of the fighting season and strangers, let alone an apparition of pale ‘goblins’, were regarded with suspicion. In a repeat of the repulse at Maketu, the Tauranga warriors performed a haka in their canoes, hurled stones and spears and chased the Endeavour away.

A sketch by Herman Spöring of the Endeavour chased off the Bay of Plenty coast, 2 November 1769. The Māori crew performed a haka and pelted the ship with stones.

It’s no great effort, I think, for enthusiasts of the 18th century to come into contact with its manifestations in other parts of the world, but here in New Zealand material evidence of that age is much more fugitive. You have to find it in covert human-made contours of the land or in terribly fragile remnants of organic materials or in the threads of memorised genealogies passed down through the generations. I am always looking for traces of that pre-European history though. I want to know what it was like to live here then.

A few months ago, a roadworks crew arrived one morning near my house and embarked on excavations to widen the street. Not long afterwards, the work came to a halt, and un-roadworks types turned up with cameras and clipboards. Archaeologists! The digging had exposed the remains of at least twenty five pre-European food storage structures - a find that confirmed existing evidence that a large Māori population had been living at Ōtūmoetai during the late 18th century. There were three pā on the peninsula at that time, the largest being its namesake. From the size and number of the storage pits, archaeologists estimated that the gardens belonging to this settlement could have fed as many as two thousand people. I was already greatly interested in Ōtūmoetai pā. Its footprint is preserved in a local historic reserve, which I sometimes pass through when I walk down to the waterfront.

Ōtūmoetai pā. Image by Philip Perry.

The body of the pā was situated on an escarpment with panoramic views of the harbour and of Mauao, before dropping some twenty metres in a series of steep, terraced embankments to a sandy foreshore that offered a safe refuge for canoes. Its location could hardly be more beneficial. A frost-free climate eased the cultivation of crops and there was an abundance of fish and seafood. When I first began digging terraces on our steep garden, I kept unearthing scatterings of seashells and learned that there are many middens in this area, produced when those long-ago inhabitants scooped out the contents of shellfish to dry in the sun. I often thought of those gardeners past, working loamy soil that offered every advantage to the staple root crop of kūmara as well as yams, taro and gourds.

Gottfried Lindauer. Digging with the Kō, 1907. Auckland Art Gallery. The kō was a long-handled digging tool.

The Cornish printer and missionary William Colenso, who arrived in New Zealand in 1834, remarked of Māori cultivation practices, ‘… all worked alike: the chief, the lady and the slave; and all were under a rigid law of minute ceremonial restrictions, or tapu, which were invariably observed…. It was a pretty sight to see a chief and his followers at work in preparing the ground … They worked together, naked, save a small mat or fragment of one about their loins, in a regular line or band, each armed with a long handled narrow wooden spade (ko), and like ourselves in performing spade labour, worked backwards, keeping rank and time in all their movements, often enlivening their labour with a suitable chant, or song, in the chorus of which all joined.’

A Māori communal garden in the Auckland region before the arrival of Europeans. The two large plots contain kūmara (sweet potatoes) and uwhi (yams), with taro in the lower right and hue (bottle gourds) in the small plots in front. Image: Nancy Tichborne in Helen Leach, 1,000 years of gardening in New Zealand. Reed, 1984 

Ever since the kūmara storage pits were unearthed near my house, I have been ferreting around in the New Zealand Room at the Tauranga Library trying to discover more about everyday life in the Ōtūmoetai pā – and I have found a surprising amount. Too much to add here, but I will use my December post to describe as well as I can what I have learned of my neighbourhood in the late 18th century.

    

How to read as a writer, by Gillian Polack

There are so many articles these days – on the web and off- that give a guide to how life was lived or how something was experienced in times other than our own. We can fly through London in the seventeenth century, or boat down the Thames. We can hear about the theatre or read how someone cuddled up by the fire to a good book. What all these articles have in common is that they’re articles about something: they’re modern thoughts. 

For many writers, these articles are entertaining and fun, but not where we get the grit for our fiction. We delve into scholarly studies and we check primary sources. Primary sources are the best. Books, articles, pamphlets, ephemera, pictures, objets d’art, everyday items – any primary source. I use them so much that I keep forgetting to explain that the way I read them in order to write fiction isn’t at all the way I read them as a historian.

Today, then, I’m going to address two issues with the same example. I’m going to show you how I (as a writer) read a single primary source for my fiction. At the same time, I’m going to say honestly that this is not even close to the technique I use as a historian. 

History and fiction serve different functions. We research both, but the research can be quite different in style and always leads to different outcomes. This is one of the many reasons there is a difference between historically based fiction and scholarly monographs, after all. I look into this in detail in History and Fiction, but I don’t actually pull apart a primary source to use in a novel. If you want more of the theoretical stuff, and to know what other writers do, History and Fiction is the place to go. Here I’m going to take a source that I think might be of use for the novel I’m writing (slowly at the moment, for the universe keeps intervening) that’s set in the seventeenth century.

Samuel Pepys is very well known for his diary. He wrote it for himself, which makes it even more interesting, for he writes about his place and time in a very personal way. We’re often looking through his eyes when we see the Great Fire of London, for so many modern novels that tell of the Great Fire or that have it as an incident, use his account as their basis. 

As a historian, I regard him as a tremendous primary source for his place and time. I also have to balance his very articulate views with those of others, because Pepys’ importance (both at the time and in our eyes) means that it’s all too easy to use him alone. To get an understanding of how people actually lived, therefore, Pepys only provides one small story.

Novels share that with Pepys. They, too, focus on one small story. It’s what we write. Accounts of places and of times that focus quite sharply on particular people or events. So many novels, therefore, rely heavily on Pepys. This is why he’s not one of my major sources for my novel, in fact. Pepys is the wrong gender for me, in an England where the life experiences of men and women were wildly different. I’ve read him through and taken the information I think I need from him, and then moved on to other sources that more closely meet the way my own characters would have seen their place and time.

When I read Pepys, I always remember that London was different before to after the fire. I took this picture in 2014 to remind me - this is definitely an 'after the fire' view.

This makes him a very good source to use as an example, for you can see how he’s useful and how he isn’t useful for my novel. 

Let’s start with what I’m looking for. I’m depicting the world of women. I’m looking, therefore, for experiences they might have had, for places they might have seen, for anything that’s shared between men and women, for hints of how my characters might see the streets of London when they visit. Unlike Pepys, they were not Londoners, so what he sees as an insider, my women would see as outsiders.

Let me use an online edition (although I used a print edition for the most part). I’ll paste it here and annotate it, with notes on how I would use it to help shape my novel. You might want to check the annotations of others, as well. They help show how modern readers look at Pepys and what they think need explaining for the wider public. You can find the diary entry and its reader-annotations here

 

Again, London in 2014. Even if the buildings change, the streets may be the same. Pepys may well have walked this.

Up, and to White Hall to the Committee of Tangier (1), but it did not meet. But here I do hear first that my Lady Paulina Montagu did die yesterday; at which I went to my Lord’s lodgings (2), but he is shut up with sorrow, and so not to be spoken with: and therefore I returned, and to Westminster Hall, where I have not been, I think, in some months. And here the Hall was very full, the King having, by Commission to some Lords this day, prorogued the Parliament till the 19th of October next (3): at which I am glad, hoping to have time to go over to France this year. But I was most of all surprised this morning by my Lord Bellassis, who, by appointment, met me at Auditor Wood’s, at the Temple, and tells me of a duell designed between the Duke of Buckingham and my Lord Halifax, or Sir W. Coventry; the challenge being carried by Harry Saville, but prevented by my Lord Arlington, and the King told of it; and this was all the discourse at Court this day (4). But I, meeting Sir W. Coventry in the Duke of York’s chamber, he would not own it to me, but told me that he was a man of too much peace to meddle with fighting, and so it rested: but the talk is full in the town of the business. Thence, having walked some turns with my cozen Pepys, and most people, by their discourse, believing that this Parliament will never sit more, I away to several places to look after things against to-morrow’s feast (5), and so home to dinner; and thence, after noon, my wife and I out by hackneycoach 6), and spent the afternoon in several places, doing several things at the ‘Change and elsewhere against to-morrow; and, among others, I did also bring home a piece of my face cast in plaister, for to make a vizard upon, for my eyes (7). And so home, where W. Batelier come, and sat with us; and there, after many doubts, did resolve to go on with our feast and dancing to- morrow; and so, after supper, left the maids to make clean the house, and to lay the cloth, and other things against to-morrow, and we to bed (8).

1. Places are handy. I can locate them on a map and decide if my characters need to pass them or visit them.

2. Individuals are less handy. Unless they’re likely to appear in the novel, their main use for me is to decide if my characters belong to their class or circle and how any reference will be made to them. In this case, I can’t see any reason for mentioning the death of Paulina Montagu, so I just keep on reading.

3. Pepys was a public servant and his life was ruled by Parliamentary sittings. My characters are anything but. I need to know when Parliament is sitting, however, for it will influence the visit to London. Also, it would be a great matter of interest to my characters. Politics in the late seventeenth century were an obsession and a matter of great import and terribly emotional. I will need a timeline of all the Great Events (including who betrayed whom and when) and I will need to know my characters’ views on these things. This mention by Pepys helps remind me that I need to do this. The wonderful thing about doing this as a novelist is that I’m allowed to be far more partisan than I can be as a historian. My characters will have Opinions. This means I develop quite a different timeline and overview to the one that I would develop as a historian, where I’d look more into causes and outcomes of events than into the feelings of women from a given region. To simplify, I can decide who someone would like to throw mud at and why.

4. Duels are terrific fodder. If there’s a duel in London when my characters visit and if there’s a reasonable likelihood that they’d hear about it, then it will be of interest. No more than that for me for this novel, however, for it’s not the stuff of my women’s lives. Pepys is much closer to the aristocracy and the doings of government than my women are. 

Place in society matters at least as much as place in time. The story Pepys tells would be a good one. A duel! How it happened! was stopped! But it can’t happen in that way in a novel with women from a country town as the main characters. The most they could do is gossip about it, or maybe know someone who knows someone. 

The drama has to come from something other than duelling, then, which is a shame, given how much we associate the seventeenth century with duels. I could force a duel in (as many authors do) but forcing the historically unlikely is not my style. In my notes I’ll probably write that I have to find something of equal interest, but that I can’t use a duel. It’s OK, though, for there’s at least one duel in a novel of mine that will be out next year – it’s entirely appropriate in that novel.

5. Food! I know what Pepys was likely to have eaten. Better, I know what my characters would enjoy. I’ve still got to test a bunch of recipes, but I have the tastes of the time and place all sorted. This means that Pepys isn’t giving me anything new, but he does remind me I still have to test recipes. This is one of the reasons the novel’s been put off for a bit – the one I’m writing currently has no recipes to test, so I can do it immediately.

6. Another thing I can check off. I have my transport to London sorted and my transport within London. I know how long it takes to get to a place and even how long it takes to get letters to and fro, in order to plan a trip. These were easy to research as there are books of timetables in the later seventeenth century. Some eras are much easier to research than others!

7. I do not want to know this. I really, really hate the thought of having a plaster cast of my face. It’s a suffocating scary squicky thought. I do know how it was done, however, should I ever need to write about it. 

Oddly, I was interested in this when I was a child and collected gypsum to make plaster of Paris. My mother forbade me to use the oven and my plaster of Paris remained unmade. This is the sort of information that helps with fiction. It’s much easier to check up the specifics of a technique than it is to find out about something of which one has no knowledge at all. I think this is why so many fiction writers are magpies in the way we collect an understanding of this or of that. Which reminds me that I’d make a note at this point about the ‘Change. This is something that will have to appear in my novel, in one way or another.

8. This sentence is the most important in the whole extract for my novel. It tells the normal order of life. This is something that men and women shared. It tells me the role of a maid (and that it’s a single maid and not three maids and a footman) and how she fits in with the house as a whole. I’ve done my homework on this – I know the shape of London households of this level of prosperity. This means I can safely use this sentence to help bring a household to life.

Looking for Mona Lisa by Mary Hoffman

As I wrote in my Cabinet of Curiosities post a few days ago, I have been reading all I can find about the subject of the world's most famous painting, known as Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda. Who was the sitter? A real woman or an idealised composite of all that Leonardo da Vinci found admirable in a woman?

The most common identification of her is as Lisa Gherardini, the Florentine wife of a silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo, hence La Gioconda. Francesco got his surname from a great grandfather who was always jolly - or "jocund." The idea caught on because of Lisa's husband's surname and the implied reference to her smile.

But she is not the only candidate - other who have been put forward include Isabella d'Este, who was desperate for Leonardo to paint her portrait, Pacifica Brandino, who was the mistress of Lorenzo the Magnificent's youngest son Giuliano, Isabella Gualanda, who is the cousin of Ceclia Gallerani, better known as the Lady with an ermine in another portrait by Leonardo.

(I have incidentally always liked this painting best of all Leonardo's work and was thrilled to see it "in the flesh" at the National Gallery exhibition a few years ago.)

It was the rather unreliable Giorgo Vasari who gave the identification of the subject as Lisa del Giocondo in 1550. Lisa had died only eight years earlier and three of her children were certainly still alive then and living in Florence so he could have checked but perhaps that was not Vasari's way. He certainly didn't change his description of the portrait when he revised the book we now know as Lives of the Artists. But then he had never seen the painting and praised the depiction of the eyebrows, which we know are not present.

I thought this was the beginning and end of what we knew about Lisa Gherardini until I saw a television programme about the painting on BBC2 last December. It was mainly about a new high-tech way of scanning the painting, used by Pascal Cotte, with the permission of the Louvre, which institution - interestingly - did not put up a spokesperson to comment on his findings.

But what really caught my attention was Andrew Graham-Dixon interviewing an Italian specialist in a Florence in an area clearly recognisable as being in the Santa Croce district, where I have often stayed. This turned out to be Giuseppe Pallanti and I found he had also written a book, called in English Mona Lisa Revealed (Skira 2006).

Pallanti is the kind of meticulous researcher who spends his life looking at historic documents of the driest kind: deeds of sale of properties, the equivalent of tax returns, records of baptisms - that sort of thing. And from that he has found out plenty about Lisa Gherardini, where she was born, the houses she lived in, her marriage, her husband's life, her children and her probable burial place.

He continued his searches after publishing the book and they were passed on to an American journalist called Dianne Hales, whose own book, Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered (Simon & Schuster 2014) has publicised his further findings and added some of her own.

Mark Rylance as Leonardo in the 2003 TV mini-series

Leonardo of course looked exactly like this when he was painting his most famous portrait. If we follow Vasari, the picture was started in 1503. It certainly is the case that the young Raphael, in Florence the following year, sketched a female model in a remarkably similar pose. And in 2005, half a millennium after Leonardo was at work on the painting, a marginal note was found, dated October 1503, in a volume of Cicero, stating that Leonardo was at work on a painting of Lisa del Giocondo.

And, whether the painting was commissioned by Francesco del Giocondo or Giuliano de' Medici or someone else, they never possessed it. Leonardo took it with him when he left Italy for France in 1516, never to return.

I wrote about Leonardo's portrait of Lisa Gherardini in my novel David: the Unauthorised Autobiography. I showed Gabriele del Lauro, the fictional model for the giant statue, watching the artist at work in Francesco del Giocondo's house in the Via della Stufa:

' It was glorious. He had captured a quality in the sitter that would have been easy to overlook. Truthfully, she wasn't as lovely as Gandini the baker's wife, but she ha a restful presence - I can't explain it any other way - that had nothing to do with any of her features, nor yet her figure.

She was past her first youth and had borne several children but was not yet quite matronly. Yet she radiated tranquility.'

And now here I am writing about her again for a novel for Barrington Stoke, a short fiction for teenagers called simply, Smile.

This portrait of John the Baptist is thought to be modelled on Leonardo's apprentice and probably lover, Gian Giacomo Caprotti, known as "Salai" or "little devil." There is a marked resemblance between his features and those of Mona Lisa. Was this true in real life? I like to think so.

For all that they lived together for some thirty years, Salai was everything that Lisa Gherardini was not - gluttonous, amoral, promiscuous and not above stealing from his master and friend. Is it too fanciful to think that Leonardo saw in his Mona Lisa the model of a loyal and loving wife, who unaccountably looked like the venal young man he was so drawn to? That he saw in her an alternative life he might have lived, had he been a different man?

One of the many things we will never know and why writers are continually drawn back to the story of the painter, the mdel and the 500-year-old smile.