A Polynesian in England, 1775

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 38-39:

PEOPLE WHO ENCOUNTERED Mai grew to love his playful and curious manner of speech. He freely invented his own words and expressions. A bull was a “man-cow.” Snow was “white rain.” At a country estate where he stayed, he referred to the butler as “king of the bottles.” He called ice “stone water.”

One morning he was stung by a wasp. When asked what had bitten him and caused his hand to swell, he replied that it was a “soldier bird.” Later, a member of the local gentry pinched him a bit of snuff to snort. “No thank you,” he replied. “The nose not hungry.”

His hosts were pleased to learn that he was an excellent cook. Banks asked Mai to roast an assortment of fowl in a traditional Polynesian style. Mai constructed an umu, an earth oven. He dug a hole, built a fire there, then partially filled it with stones. He laid the birds in the pit, wrapping them in butter-smeared paper, for want of his usual plantain leaves. He covered it all with dirt and let the mess of fowl smolder for hours. The result was scrumptious. “Nothing could be better dressed, or more savory,” gushed a critic. “The smoldering pebble-stones and embers…had given a certain flavor to the fowls, a soupçon of smokiness, which made them taste as if a ham accompanied them.”

And so it could be said that barbecue—or at least a South Seas strain of it—had arrived in Great Britain.

At the estates he visited, Mai liked to practice his marksmanship and became a devoted hunter, especially during grouse season. Much to the chagrin of the local groundskeepers, the trigger-happy Mai “popped at all the feathered creation which came in his way”—not only grouse but chickens, geese, even ducks haplessly playing in a pond. “His slaughter of domestic birds,” the observer lamented, “was by no means inconsiderable.”

Guns lay at the heart of why Mai had volunteered to travel to England in the first place. He knew he had to master firearms, to collect them, to understand their inner workings and the ammunition that made them lethal. “He had a sense of mission,” wrote historian Michael Alexander in his book Omai: Noble Savage, and he knew that “these people he had come amongst held the key to his intrinsic purpose, the avenging of his father.”

Other times, Mai would set aside his fowling piece and revert to the hunting techniques he’d learned as a boy. A friend later recalled how Mai crouched in a stubble field and crept up on his prey. “His eye sparkled,” the friend reminisced, when “on a sudden, he darted forward like a cat, and sprang upon a covey of partridges, one of which he caught and took home alive, in great triumph.”