Tupaia sailed with Captain Cook from Tahiti, piloted the Endeavour about the South Pacific, and was the ship's translator. Lauded by Europeans as an "extraordinary genius," Tupaia was a star navigator, a brilliant orator, and a most devious politician. Being highly skilled in astronomy, navigation and meteorology, and an expert in the geography of the Pacific, he was able to name directional stars and predict landfalls and weather throughout the voyage from Tahiti to Java.
Though, like all Polynesians, he had no previous knowledge of writing or map-making, Tupaia drew a chart of the Pacific that encompassed every major group in Polynesia and extended more than 2500 miles from the Marquesas to Rotuma and Fiji.
Tupaia also became one of the ship's most important artists, drawing lively pictures to illustrate what he described, and he could justly be called the Pacific's first anthropologist. Despite all these amazing accomplishments, however, Tupaia has never been part of the popular Captain Cook legend. In Tupaia, Captain Cook's Polynesian Navigator, Joan Druett restores this extraordinary genius to his rightful place in history.
WINNER OF THE NEW ZEALAND POST GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD
Author Biography:
Joan Druett is an independent maritime historian and writer, married to Ron Druett, a highly regarded maritime artist. In 1986 she travelled to museums in the United States on a Fulbright Cultural Fellowship, to research the lives of women at sea. This led to three ground-breaking books, Petticoat Whalers, She Was a Sister Sailor, and Hen Frigates, all prize-winners. She Was a Sister Sailor received the John Lyman Award for Best Book of Maritime History; Petticoat Whalers (with a later book, She Captains) won the L. Byrne Waterman Award, and Hen Frigates received a New York Public Library Best Book to Remember Award. In 1992, with the aid of a Creative New Zealand grant, Joan returned to the United States, where she was a consultant for a museum exhibit, "The Sailing Circle," which received the Albert Corey Award, which is infrequently granted by the American Association for State and Local History for works "that best display the qualities of vigor, scholarship, and imagination." Returning to New Zealand in 1996, another Creative New Zealand grant enabled her to research castaway depots and wrecks in the sealing islands of the sub-Antarctic. This led to a Stout Fellowship at Victoria University, which she took up in 2001, and a best-selling book about a double wreck on Auckland Island in 1865, Island of the Lost, which has become a classic in the castaway genre, and is used as a text in universities in the United States and Australia. In 2009, a major Creative New Zealand grant enabled her to research the life of Tupaia, the extraordinary priest, orator and navigator, who guided Captain Cook on the Endeavour voyage, both at sea and through tricky intercultural situations on land, particularly in New Zealand, where Tupaia's actions undoubtedly saved lives, both Maori and European.
