When the Capsule Broke

THE FATAL IMPACT by Alan Moorehead. 230 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

Out of the history of man's ventures and adventures into the lives of the peoples of the Pacific Ocean, Alan Moorehead (The White Nile, The Blue Nile, Cooper's Creek) has constructed a coherent parable that is an irony in time a version of the fall of man--a chronicle of inevitable disasters. The "impact" of which he writes in this unobtrusively expert narrative is the effect of the European Enlightenment upon the primitive, "the fateful moment when a social capsule is broken open, when primitive creatures, beasts as well as men, are confronted for the first time with civilization."

Moorehead's hero is Captain James Cook, and his story deals chiefly with Cook's investigation of three very different places: Tahiti (a geographical designation that includes what are now the islands of Hawaii), Australia, about which Moorehead, himself an Australian, writes with wounding perception and Antarctica, which the 19th century almost stripped of life and in which man now lives in catacombs of perpetual ice, sustained by machines. It is with the first two regions that Moorehead deals most expertly.

A Quick One with Darwin. Tahiti existed m the imagination of Europe before the Europeans sighted its shores Ever since the decline of the notion of original sin, philosophers of the Enlightenment had tried to account for man's lamentable condition. The state of nature remained an abstraction until Tahiti was discovered; it seemed to be just what the doctors of philosophy had ordered. Here was proof that the Noble Savage did exist.

The anti-Christian philosophers were ready to defend this paradise. The Encyclopedist Diderot warned that Europeans would despoil the Tahitians' Eden with "dagger and crucifix." The Rousseauian enthusiasts overlooked a few things: the Tahitians waged war and practiced human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism; they even had priests, an unamiable group who killed all their own offspring, apparently on trade-union principles.

One thing they lacked was a sense of guilt, which, much to Moorehead's evident regret, was imported by missionaries along with a new taboo--against strong drink. It is nice to know, however, that when a latecomer called Charles Darwin offered a consolatory dram of booze to the muted inhabitants of what he called "the fallen paradise," they rose to the occasion with noble savagery. Gravely they put their fingers before their lips. Solemnly they uttered the word "missionary." But then they drank.

Bush Belsen. To the first impact of Europe upon Australia, Moorehead gives a poignancy lacking in other accounts. If Cook embodied the best virtues--manly and intellectual--of the 18th century, and the Polynesians of the Central Pacific composed the most gracious of primitive societies, New Holland (as Australia was then called) presented a contrary confrontation: primitive man at his lowest, civilized man at his worst.

Moorehead leaves the contemporary reader aghast at the obtuseness of the British, who followed Cook's discovery with the decision to make a penal settlement of New Holland. Reason has its crimes: since the American dumping ground for Puritan and Catholic dissidents had been lost by the Revolution, it was quite sensible in London to decide that the new continent should be used for a gaol. In 1788, the year of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, civilization in the form of white slavery arrived at Cook's Botany Bay. So came about a bush Belsen, with men in iron shackles under the bemused eyes of the natives trying to grow food in a land innocent of agriculture.

The first settlement of Captain Ar thur Phillip--redcoats and canary-yellow clad convicts--nearly starved to death. A relief ship came with food and news of the French Revolution Says Moorehead: "What did they make of the terror? Were the convicts delighted that the underdog was having its day? Did any of them pause to reflect that in France, the most sophisticated country on earth, one could watch the guillotine at work in the public streets with sadistic indifference, while here in New Holland the aborigine, the most primitive of all human beings, burst into tears when he watched a warder flogging a prisoner?"

The aborigines had invented neither the wheel nor the plow, nor had they imagined the whip. The same reproach had been felt before. The Tahitians had burst into tears when Cook had a thief flogged on the rigging of his ship. All these things have been written of before --Australia's natural history, Pacific exploration, and colonization. It is Moorehead's peculiar talent to keep the land, the natives and the newcomers in mind at the same time, so that what may have been regarded as mere event takes on the aspect of a moral drama. Historical journalism here justifies itself.

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