1777 Tupaia Indigenous Map of Tahiti and the Society Islands (in Russian)

A significant discovery of considerable rarity, this is a c. 1777 Russian language version of the Tupaia Chart or map of the Society Islands and Tahiti. The map is based upon the indigenous cartography of Tupaia, a Tahitian navigator who drew this map in 1770 while onboard Captain Cook's ship, the H.M.S. Endeavour. Tupaia's Chart, as it is commonly known, is significant as both an illustration of traditional Polynesian hydrographic thinking and as indicative that Tahitian geographical knowledge was far greater than initially assumed.

Tupaia, Tahitian Navigator and Priest of the War God

Tupaia (c. 1725 - December, 26 1770) was a Tahitian navigator and war priest originally from the island of Ra'iatea in the Society Islands. Tupaia joined the crew of the Endeavour in July of 1769 on the insistence of the expedition's botanist, the English nobleman Sir Joseph Banks. Banks was astounded by the breadth and accuracy of Tupaia's hydrographic knowledge. During his life, Tupaia had navigated from Ra'iatea in short voyages to just 13 of neighboring islands. Nonetheless, through wisdom passed down from his grandfather, from a time when Ra'iateans sailed throughout Polynesia, he was able to provide sailing directions to some 70 distant islands. Tragically, Tupaia sickened and perished after less than a year on the Endeavour, but before he died, Banks convinced him to draw a map.

How the Map Was Made

The construction of the map probably proceeded as follows. Banks, or one of the ship's draftsman, would have drawn a cross centered on Tahiti, the largest geographical island in the region, then marked out the cardinal directions: North, South, East, and West. To this, the draftsman would have added the islands already known and mapped by both Cook and other Europeans. Afterwards, Banks asked Tupaia to add any additional information he was aware of. Thus, the present map, in which islands mapped by Cook are underlined twice, by other Europeans once, and the remainder of which were illustrated and identified by Tupaia.

Traditional Polynesian Cartography

It has recently been argued by scholars Anne di Piazza and Erik Pearthree that this map is in fact trying to be two things at once. A traditional European map built upon mathematical principals of scale and distance, and a traditional Polynesian representation of sailing directions. Polynesian navigation was based upon the idea that wherever one started form was the 'center' and to navigate to another islands, one simply identified and followed the correct trajectory. Traditionally distance was not clearly identified in Polynesian sailing instructions, rather it was described as how many days it would take to reach destination A or B, factors that varied according to currents and prevailing winds.

According to Piazza and Pearthree,

Cook, in his own words, believed Tupaia was drawing a map. Tupaia seems indeed to have tried to include distance in his plotting diagrams, thereby going beyond the traditional system of representation. Cook clearly remained fixed in his Cartesian world, adding cardinal points to Tupaia’s Chart. But both could look at the manuscript and see their own system represented: Cook reading islands on a grid and Tupaia reading islands radiating out from different centres.

Versions of Tupaia's Map

All in all, Tupaia mapped some 78 islands for Cook and Banks, some known, some not. Cook made no attempt to visit or map the additional islands placed by Tupaia and the map was never included in the official narrative of the voyage. Nonetheless, Tupaia's chart was preserved in two versions. One, the original manuscript, was kept by Jospeh Banks and rediscovered in 1955, relatively recently. Another better-known version, of which the present map is a variant, was engraved by William Faden and issued by John Reinold Forster, the ship's naturalist, in his 1778 account of the voyage.

Today Forster's account is extremely rare and in most examples this map has been expunged. That the present map is from a previously unknown Russian edition of Forster's account only adds to its extraordinary rarity. Although examples of the Forster English language narrative Observations made during a voyage round the World do appear in instructional collections, we have identified no known examples of the Russian edition, and no separate original print examples of the map, in any language, either in institutional collections or in the market history of the last 30 years.