Books: When the Capsule Broke

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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.