Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania ... - Wiley Online Library

History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x

Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania: Captain Cook and Indigenous People Bronwen Douglas* Australian National University

Abstract

Beginning with a brief historiographic survey of the prolific literature on European voyages of exploration in Oceania, in particular those of James Cook, this article considers how embodied encounters helped shape the written and visual representations of indigenous Oceanian people by Cook and his naturalists and artists in New Holland (Australia), the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). I treat encounters as situated and permeable: not as a generalised clash of incommensurate cultures but as ambiguous intersections of multiple personal agencies, both indigenous and foreign. This approach suggests an indirect liaison between particular local actors and the expanding stock of empirical information provided by travellers and drawn on by metropolitan natural historians to illustrate their deductions about mankind. I suggest that voyagers’ representations of Oceanian people should be read not merely as reflections of received knowledge derived from dominant metropolitan discourses or literary and artistic conventions but also as personal productions generated in the flux, stress, high emotion and uncertainty of meetings with actual people in the vulnerable settings of voyages under sail. Such representations were often significantly, if obliquely affected by local agency.

The Historiography of Captain Cook The great European voyages of exploration from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries arguably constitute Oceania’s greatest and most enduring claim to global historical fame, both academic and popular. A steadily expanding literature attracted a vast and varied audience to the romance or the science of maritime exploration in the South Seas: the early influential works of Quirós and Dampier;1 the widely read compilations of Brosses, his English plagiariser Callander, Dalrymple and Hawkesworth;2 the narratives of scientific voyagers from Bougainville to Dumont d’Urville;3 the participant history of Burney;4 and the prolific, ongoing historical industry of his professional successors.5 Of all the voyages, those of the Englishman James Cook remain the best known. The narratives of his three expeditions of 1768–71, 1772–75 and 1776–80 inspired lasting metropolitan fascination with Oceanic places, people, plants and fauna, as well as with © 2008 The Author Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania

713

Fig. 1. P.-J. de Loutherberg and J. Webber, ‘The Apotheosis of Captain Cook’, engraving (London: J. Thane, 1794), National Library of Australia, Canberra, pic-an7678295-1.

the navigator himself.6 Cook was apotheosised as hero or founder by many Europeans then and since (Fig. 1), especially in the antipodes, in ironic counterpoint to his fatal identification and sacrifice as a Polynesian god by Hawaiians in 1779, his denunciation as a ‘transgressor’ by nineteenthcentury Christian Hawaiians, and his demonisation as a violent proto-coloniser by many indigenous people, especially in Hawaii, Australia and Canada.7 Most Anglophone historians of Oceania of any international repute have written on Cook, his naturalists or his artists and the production rate has recently surged.8 Cook’s voyages were also the major theme in numerous exhibitions and several important recent initiatives in digital history.9 © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

714 Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania

Much Cook scholarship has been imperial in theme and biographical in intent.10 From an indigenous perspective, such works typically lack ethnographic sensibility and position ‘natives’ as exotic backdrop to a Eurocentric, often hagiographic agenda which renders indigenous people irrelevant or peripheral. They are either universalised as less advanced versions of ‘us’ or stereotyped as passive objects or victims of European initiatives and influences whose only agency was a reflex savagery. J. C. Beaglehole’s biography of Cook fits this pattern but his monumental Cook project leavens imperial with some Oceanic history, combining meticulous transcription of voyage journals with detailed textual, historical, and ethnological commentary.11 From the 1960s, historians of ideas and art historians began to widen their metropolitan focus to encompass European efforts ‘to make sense of a world outside Europe’ while always privileging European ‘images and conceptions’.12 With one significant exception, a further shift in emphasis from European imaging of the exotic to exotic impact on European imaging did little to dislodge the hermetic centrality of European cognition, aesthetics, discourses, and actions or to challenge the trope ‘image’ which reduces local inhabitants to the static objects of a dominant imperial gaze.13 The exception was Bernard Smith, whose pioneering work on the impact of Oceania on European art and ideas conveys the core message that antipodean experience could unsettle and help reconfigure metropolitan conventions, techniques and knowledge.14 His key trope ‘vision’ – implying dynamic engagement rather than the objectified reflection of ‘image’ – allows tacit conceptual space for local input to European perceptions and representations of Oceanian people, though he tapped the potential only fleetingly in explaining increasingly negative attitudes towards ‘savages’ at the end of the eighteenth century as a response to attacks on voyagers. Reflecting on a piece of contemporary doggerel about the death of Cook, Smith mused that in this poem ‘the noble savage, we might say, by the very act of killing the hero of empire has transformed himself into “the inglorious native”’.15 Though Smith’s primary focus was always European, this passing insight hints at what I term indigenous presence in European imagining and representations. Furthermore, his core theme of ‘European reactions to the Pacific’ logically implies indigenous actions.16 If Smith no more than hinted at the possibility of local stimulus to European knowledge and behaviour, later historians have used various strategies to bring an indigenous factor squarely into their equation: both as reified culture and in the context of encounters, either homogenised as cross-cultural or differentiated as personal. Marshall Sahlins traced the appropriation, sacrifice and apotheosis of Cook by Hawaiian culture which was itself transformed in the conjuncture of system and event. John Gascoigne positioned Cook at the interface of radically different cultural and cosmological systems which determined each world’s interpretation of the other. Anne Salmond charted the ‘impact of Polynesia’ on Cook © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


715

in the course of ‘cross-cultural encounters, in which Europeans and Pacific Islanders alike were historical agents’. Nicholas Thomas challenged the stereotype that encounters involved the opposition of ‘coherent’ cultures and instead addressed the ‘messy actualities’ of ambiguous meetings between voyagers and indigenous people in which Cook ‘was the single most important European protagonist, in Oceania in the eighteenth century’.17 This article owes distant inspiration to Smith and its strategic vision is akin to that of Thomas but its agenda and intentions are different. It investigates ways in which indigenous agency in personal encounters on the ground helped shape the representations of Oceanian people by Cook’s predecessor Dampier and by Cook and several of his companions: the naturalists Joseph Banks, Johann Reinhold and Georg Forster, and William Anderson; the astronomer William Wales; and the artists Sydney Parkinson, William Hodges, and John Webber. I treat encounters as situated but fluid: not as a generalised clash of incommensurate cultures but as ambiguous intersections of multiple personal agencies, both indigenous and foreign. I see an indirect link between local protagonists and the expanding stock of empirical knowledge provided by travellers and eagerly deployed by metropolitan natural historians to illustrate their deductions about mankind. Moreover, I refer not to the well-known sites in Polynesia that loom largest in the Cook literature but to New Holland (mainland Australia) and other places Cook visited during his two final voyages – in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), Kanaky New Caledonia, and Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). This choice of sites is pertinent to the theme of indigenous presence since ethnocentric or racialist Europeans more readily discerned personal agency in Polynesians, especially male chiefs, whom they found relatively appealing and apt to be civilised, than in Aboriginal Australians or Melanesians whom they relentlessly collectivised, rarely named, and consistently relegated to the lowest rungs of universal hierarchies of civility or race. Logically, then, to be able to identify traces of Aboriginal or Melanesian agency in voyagers’ descriptions of encounters must reinforce my theoretical case for indigenous presence. Indigenous Presence and the Semantic History of Race The corollary of this approach is that voyagers’ representations of local people, whether written or drawn, were not motivated purely by preconceived European stereotypes and literary or artistic conventions. Rather, such representations were also products of travellers’ personal experience of actual encounters with indigenous people and the confusion, stress and exaggerated emotions such meetings entailed. By this reasoning, indigenous appearance, behaviour or life style – their agency – attracted, intimidated or repelled observers; affected their perceptions; challenged or confirmed their preconceptions; and left distorted but identifiable traces in what they wrote and drew. This use of the term ‘agency’ assumes that all human © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


beings have the potential to desire, to choose and to act strategically – if always within limits affected by circumstances, cultures and personal capacities. Taking local agency seriously challenges the common assumption, then and now, that Europeans were always central to and in control of encounters with indigenous people.18 I do not of course suggest that we merely invert the hoary opposition of European action to indigenous reaction and turn voyagers into passive receptors of local agency. Rather, we need to pay careful attention to the particular entanglements of prevailing ideologies, audience expectations, author’s personality, and located experience of people and their actions that stimulated particular representations – in other words, take account of both European and indigenous worlds and actions. Traces of indigenous agency litter voyagers’ representations but are never transparent – they were pre-processed by the observers’ perceptions and expressed in available vocabularies which took their meanings from contemporary discourses and ideologies about what constituted human difference and civilised or savage behaviour. Eighteenth-century European scholarly discourses on man universalised a highly ethnocentric, class bound aesthetic and were often obnoxious about non-Christians and so-called ‘Negroes’, ‘savages’ or ‘primitives’. However, until the very end of the eighteenth century, the word ‘race’ did not have what has since become its dominant sense: ‘One of the great divisions of mankind, having certain physical peculiarities in common’, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary. Race originally signified a common family or ancestry and was extended to humanity as a whole (‘the human race’). By the eighteenth century, race was synonymous with ‘tribe’, ‘nation’, ‘people’, ‘variety’, ‘kind’ or ‘species’ and was increasingly used to label extensive populations occupying broad regions of the earth. But the idea of classifying human beings into a few discrete races, supposedly defined and determined by inherited physical, mental and moral qualities, was scarcely thinkable. Most Europeans still took for granted the Biblical or humanist narratives that all humanity shared a single origin, was subsequently differentiated through migrations into altered climates and environments, but had a common potential for progress towards the civilised state or for salvation.19 Both cosmology and prognosis would be widely disputed in the nineteenth century as race acquired its modernist meaning of an innate, hereditary biological attribute and the science of man became a science of race.20 In this novel usage, human difference was seen as embodied in the typical characters ascribed to different races and taken to justify their classification into rigid hierarchies – such as the ranking of the ‘Polynesians’ of Tahiti, Hawaii, Tonga, Samoa and Aotearoa New Zealand as racially superior to the ‘Melanesians’ of Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and the Solomon Islands or the ‘Papuans’ of New Guinea, and the positioning of them all well above indigenous Australians or Tasmanians and well below Europeans or ‘Caucasians’ (Fig. 2). From about 1800, certain Oceanian people, especially © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


717

Fig. 2. Dumont d’Urville’s map of Oceania. A. Tardieu, ‘Carte pour l’intelligence du mémoire de M. le capitaine d’Urville sur les îles du grand océan (Océanie)’, in J.-S.-C. Dumont d’Urville, Voyage de la corvette l’Astrolabe exécuté pendant les années 1826–1827–1828–1829 . . . Atlas historique (Paris: J. Tastu, 1833), [Carte 1].

Aboriginal Australians, were consistently positioned closest to ‘the brute’ as allegedly the most inferior of all human races or species, uncivilisable, and doomed to imminent extinction.21 Banks – ‘By No Means Negroes’ In 1770, in the shipboard journals of Cook’s first voyage (1768–71), he and the naturalist Banks invoked their own experience in eastern New Holland to refute the representations of indigenous physical appearance published seventy years previously by William Dampier whose vivid descriptions of the ‘great variety of Savages’ he had encountered across the globe greatly influenced the expectations of later scientific voyagers.22 According to Dampier’s published narrative, the inhabitants of King Sound in northwestern New Holland (Fig. 3), whom he had seen in 1688, were ‘the miserablest People in the world’ who differed ‘but little from Brutes’ and were ‘of a very unpleasing Aspect’. In hair and skin colour, he identified them with the conventional negative physical analogy of ‘the Negroes of Guinea’.23 Cook, in contrast, thought the features of the people he had seen along the eastern seaboard were ‘far from being disagreeable’ while Banks said they were ‘by no means negroes’.24 © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


Fig. 3. New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land, 1688–1777.

Dampier’s writings show that he was especially disconcerted and discommoded by the New Hollanders’ indifference to objects of European manufacture – a marker of local agency that challenged his ethnocentric correlation of trade with civil society and led him to question their capacity to become civilised. On a second visit to the northwest coast of New Holland, to La Grange Bay in 1699 (Fig. 3), Dampier planned ‘to try to win them over to somewhat of Traffick and useful Intercourse’. But ‘the Experience I had had of their Neighbours formerly’ gave him no great expectation of success.25 Yet, unlike Dampier, Cook took no offence at indigenous refusal to trade or to place ‘Value upon any thing we gave them’ – presumably because they were too few to prevent the British from helping themselves to the relatively abundant supplies of wood, water and provisions available along the east coast (compared with the northwest). Instead, he joined Banks in an outburst of primitivist enthusiasm for the apparent ‘Tranquillity’, equality, and freedom from ‘superfluities’ of indigenous existence: ‘in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniencies so much sought after in Europe’. This passage did not simply parrot the contemporary intellectual fad for idealising the primitive as ammunition against the ‘excess’ and ‘Luxuries’ of the civilised – indeed, under the stress © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


719

of imminent shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef, Banks had lamented his likely ‘fate’ of never again ‘conversing with any but the most uncivilizd savages perhaps in the world’.26 Rather, Cook was also influenced by the conduct of the people he encountered – their lack of interest in European commodities and the specific behaviour of two men who opposed the initial landing at Botany Bay (Fig. 3) in April 1770 and kept ‘two boats full of men’ from landing for ‘near a quarter of an hour’ until eventually repelled by small shot.27 This episode is memorialised in the artist Parkinson’s published journal in an engraving by Thomas Chambers who, Smith commented, ennobled the two men ‘as classical heroes’ (Fig. 4). Parkinson might not have drawn

Fig. 4. T. Chambers possibly after S. Parkinson, ‘Two of the Natives of New Holland, Advancing to Combat’, engraving, in S. Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas in his Majesty’s Ship, the Endeavour . . . , ed. S. Parkinson (London: Stanfield Parkinson, 1773), plate 27. © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


the original of this composition but his rough sketch of an armed New Holland man survives. Moreover, he had clearly been moved by the men’s actions – one of the spears, he wrote, ‘fell between my feet’.28 Though in no way naturalistic, the engraving visualises the relatively favourable British response to the inhabitants of New Holland at this time and demeans neither the men’s conduct nor their appearance. Despite this celebrated confrontation and an assault on the English with fire in July 1770 at the Endeavour River (Fig. 3), Cook generalised that the New Hollanders were not ‘a warlike People’ but ‘a timorous and inoffensive race’. His opinion was prompted by their habitual aloofness which in turn inspired his relief that they posed ‘no danger’ while the ship was being repaired after the near disaster on the Great Barrier Reef. Moreover, he added, they were ‘no ways inclinable to cruelty, as appear’d from their behavour to one of our people’ – this reference to the kindly treatment of a sailor met by several local men when alone in the bush is an acknowledged imprint of local agency on a European moral judgement.29 With respect to New Holland, Cook’s and Banks’s journals exemplify a rhetorical sequence recurrent in first-hand Oceanic voyage texts: namely, travellers’ relief at approved or unthreatening indigenous conduct not only inspired positive assessments of the character and morality of local people but often preceded relatively flattering representations of their physical appearance and the distancing of favoured people from a standard adverse catalogue of so-called ‘Negro’ attributes. Disapproved actions often provoked a similar but reverse rhetorical trajectory, as in the case of Dampier’s negative depictions of the people he saw in New Holland. In just such ways, indigenous behaviour impinged on voyagers’ perceptions, was processed by them in the light both of received views and the profound insecurity of sailing in unfamiliar waters amongst so-called ‘savages’, and ultimately infiltrated their representations. Cook – ‘This Apish Nation’ The word race is used very rarely in the journals of Cook’s first voyage and always in the loose eighteenth-century genealogical sense of nation or people – as in his remark that the New Hollanders were ‘a timorous and inoffensive race’. The term occurs more often in the journals of his second voyage (1772–75), particularly with reference to darker-skinned people encountered in the western Pacific, but its meaning is unchanged. Moreover, there is no trace in any of these journals of the blanket dual classification of South Sea Islanders into ‘more fair’ and ‘blacker’ varieties – the first formal taxonomy of Oceanian people – that the naturalist Reinhold Forster later proposed in his post-voyage treatise Observations made during a Voyage Round the World.30 Forster himself used race in the older conventional sense, as in his shipboard journal when he compared the Malakulans and the Tannese encountered in July and August 1774 in © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


721

the New Hebrides, now Vanuatu: ‘They [the Tannese] are a stout well limbed race of people, better & stronger than those at Mallicollo, have black hair, some are woolly, some not’.31 Yet both Tannese and Malakulans would be classified together in Forster’s ‘blacker’ variety and ultimately racialised as ‘Oceanic Negroes’ or ‘Melanesians’.32 Cook, however, reserved his most bitter remarks for the Malakulans whose actions, demeanour, appearance and unfamiliarity provoked him to unusual acerbity: They set no sort of Value upon Nails [the Europeans’ main trading commodity] nor did they seem much to esteem any thing we had, . . . we understood not a word they said, . . . they are almost black or rather a dark Chocolate Colour, Slenderly made, not tall, have Monkey faces and Woolly hair. . . . [T]his Apish Nation . . . are the most ugly and ill proportioned people I ever saw and in every respect different from any we had yet seen in this sea. They are rather a Diminutive Race and almost as dark as Negros, which they in some degree resemble in thier countenances, but they have not such fine features.33

Indigenous agency is pivotal in this passage: it disturbed or reinforced the author’s prejudices, contributed to his experience, and left traces in what he wrote. I suggest that the unprecedented appearance of Malakulans, their lack of interest in European goods, their unwillingness to trade for much needed provisions, their selective bargaining, and their shrewd wariness goaded Cook into what the young naturalist Georg Forster called ‘an ill-natured comparison between them and monkies’.34 Alone amongst Oceanian people, Malakulans were denigrated by Cook as similar or inferior to ‘Negros’ and at times replaced them as his negative standard for comparing human groups. He described the Erromangans of the southern New Hebrides as ‘a different race’ from the Malakulans; they ‘seem’d to speake a quite different language’ and had ‘a good Shape and tolerable features’. The people he saw in Espiritu Santo, also in the north of the archipelago, had ‘some resemblance to those of Mallicollo but seemed to be stouter and better shaped’; they ‘spoke a different language which made us believe they were of a nother Nation’, probably similar to Tongans (who are Polynesians and belong to Reinhold Forster’s ‘more fair’ variety).35 The meeting with Malakulans inspired Georg Forster’s subsequent identification of a ‘black race’ in the western Pacific ‘totally distinct’ from eastern Pacific Islanders (that is, from modern Polynesians). However, he also drew the teeth of Cook’s unkind African analogy by arguing that, although the Malakulans were in some respects ‘very similar’ to ‘Negroes’, their lips and lower faces were ‘entirely different’. They were, moreover, the ‘most intelligent people’ he had yet met in the South Seas, ‘of a very chearful disposition’, while their ‘irregular and ugly’ features showed ‘great sprightliness and express a quick comprehension’.36 The astronomer William Wales likewise qualified Cook’s unflattering physical portrayal of Malakulans: they were ‘a small and ordinary race of People, © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


not quite but very near as dark as the Negros, and do something resemble them in their Countenances, although neither their Noses are remarkably flat or their Lips Thick’; ‘their limbs are well shaped & Clean made enough’.37 Cook’s ugly imagery also differs sharply in tone from the portraits of Malakulans drawn by the expedition’s artist Hodges:38 specifically, from the even features and dignified air Hodges gave to his ‘Man of the Island of Mallicolo’ (Fig. 5). Yet Cook’s vilification of Malakulans, with its simian imagery and negative Negro stereotyping, was a specific reaction to a particular situation mobilising conventional rhetoric rather than a symptom of an already coherent racialist system. Indeed, his consistent genealogical use of race as a synonym for nation or kind is clear in his comparisons of Malakulans

Fig. 5. W. Hodges, ‘[Man of the Island of Mallicolo]’ [July 1774], chalk drawing, British Museum, 1868-12-12-340. © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


723

with people seen elsewhere in what would later be called Melanesia. I have already quoted his conjectures on the affinities of the people of Erromango or Santo. With respect to the Tannese, he wrote that the British initially thought that they and the neighbouring Erromangans: were a race between the . . . [Tongans] and those of Mallicollo, but a little acquaintance with them convinced us that they had little or no affinity to either except it be in their hair . . . hence it should seem that the people of these islands are a distinct Nation of themselves.

The Tannese had ‘good features, and agreeable countinances, are, like all the Tropical Race, active and nimble’; they were ‘of a Very dark Colour but not black, nor have they the least characterstic of the Negro abot them’.39 In this case, there is no tension between words and pictures since Cook’s friendly description is borne out by Hodges’s sensitive drawing of a ‘[Man of ] Tanna’ (Fig. 6). Cook – ‘Not in the Least Addicted to Pelfering’ Both my proposed rhetorical trajectory and the fluid eighteenth-century usage of the term race are again very evident in the journals of the Resolution’s visit to northeastern New Caledonia in September 1774.40 From the outset, the visitors wrote more favourably of the behaviour of New Caledonians (now self-styled Kanak) than of any people previously encountered anywhere in Oceania. Cook, always paranoid about theft, found them ‘courteous and friendly and not in the least addicted to pelfering, which is more than can be said of any other nation in this Sea’. Reinhold Forster thought that ‘their coming off ’ to the ship in canoes as it approached the land ‘either shows the people to be very friendly & goodnatured, or very bold & warlike, or perhaps both’. Subsequent indigenous conduct convinced him that they were ‘very peaceable & goodnatured, absolutely harmless’. These anodyne evaluations survived the serious bout of poisoning which he, his son, and Cook suffered from eating a ‘fine large Fish’ purchased from ‘an Indian’. Even the ‘evident Signs of aversion’ later expressed towards it by several local inhabitants, ‘which proved they knew the Fish to be poisonous & noxious’, did not shake Forster’s confidence in the good will of these people, though Cook himself remarked that ‘no one was observed to do this when it was to be sold or even after it was bought’.41 Such unqualified praise of New Caledonian actions prefaced statements of approval of their appearance and further indecisive (but non-racialised) ruminations by Cook about likely origins: They are nearly of the same colour as the people of Tanna, but these have better features, more agreeable countenances and are a much stouter race . . . Was I to judge of the Origin of this Nation, I should take them to be a race © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


Fig. 6. W. Hodges, ‘[Man of] Tanna’, [August 1774], chalk and pencil drawing, National Library of Australia, Canberra, nla.pic-an2720570.

between the people of Tanna and of the Friendly Isles [Tonga, in Polynesia] or between Tanna and the New Zealanders [the Polynesian Maori] or all three . . . In their desposition they are like the Natives of the friendly isles, in affability and honesty they rather exceed them [high praise given that he had attached the label ‘friendly’ to Tonga].42

Reinhold Forster reported seeing one ‘well limbed’, very tall man and concluded: ‘Upon the whole, tho’ the Natives are black, & have woolly hair, there are however the greater part, well shaped & featured by far better than those at Mallicollo’.43 Hodges’ dry but sympathetic ethnographic drawings of New Caledonians – like those of Tannese – bore out his shipmates’ complimentary prose and earned Georg Forster’s commendation © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


725

Fig. 7. W. Hodges, ‘[Woman of] New Caledonia’ [September 1774], chalk drawing, National Library of Australia, Canberra, nla.pic-an2720551.

as ‘accurate portraits’ that captured ‘the peculiar character of their faces’ (Figs 7 and 8).44 A passage about these people by Wales the astronomer epitomised the rhetorical sequence from admired behaviour to positive physical description to deliberate distancing from likely negative analogies – notably, the supposedly characteristic Negro skin colour and hair type that preoccupied the emergent science of man: They appeared perfectly good natured, friendly & honest which is more than can be said of any others in these seas on our first Acquaintance with them. . . . They are an hansome well-made People enough, and like all other naked people very Active and nimble. Their Complexion is a very © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


Fig. 8. W. Hodges, ‘[Man of] New Caledonia’ [September 1774], crayon drawing, National Library of Australia, Canberra, nla.pic-an2720585.

dark Copper, with Jet-black Hair & Beards. Their hair is very much frizzled, and . . . at first sight it looks very much like that of Negros, but on examination I found it as strong & coarse, if not more so than ours. I think the Hair of the Mallicola People is not so strong & hard as that of those.45

Anderson – ‘Their Features Are Not at All Disagreeable’ The same sequence and the same stereotyped physical analogy recur yet again in the journals of Cook’s third voyage (1776–80) during his brief stopover in January 1777 at Adventure Bay in southeastern Van Diemen’s © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


727

Land (Fig. 3). Cook reported that the English ‘were agreeably surprised’ by a visit of nine males who approached ‘without shewing the least mark of fear and with the greatest confidence immaginable, for none of them had any weapons’. Then follows a relatively flattering physical description with denial of the usual negative Negro analogy. Cook reapplied his first voyage phrase ‘far from being disagreeable’ to their facial features and stressed that, though their hair ‘was as woolly as any Native of Guinea’, ‘they were not distinguished by remarkable thick lips nor flat noses’. He noted their differences from the people he had seen along the east coast in 1770 but again refused identity with ‘that miserable people Dampier mentions to have seen on the western coast’.46 The surgeon-naturalist Anderson saw their colour as ‘not quite so deep as that of the African Negroes’ and their hair as ‘perfectly wooly though something harsher than that of the last mentioned people’. He too found their features ‘not at all disagreeable’: ‘their noses though broad or full are not flat and their lips of an ordinary thickness’; their eyes ‘give a frank chearfull cast to the whole countenance’; and their bodies were generally ‘well proportion’d’. He concluded that ‘these indians have little of that fierce or wild appearance common to many people in their situation, but on the contrary seem mild and chearfull, without reserve or jealousy of strangers’ – and supposed that this peaceable disposition arose ‘from their having little to loss or care for’.47 These favourable written impressions were enhanced in the artist Webber’s fine portraits which blended ethnographic precision with a sympathetic naturalism sensitive to idiosyncrasies of appearance and even personality (Fig. 9). Conclusion This article has related the representation of indigenous Oceanian people in the journals and art of the Cook voyages to the shifting interplay of discourse and experience: that is, to the entanglement of contemporary European vocabularies of human difference with voyagers’ exposure to local agency in particular encounters. With respect to discourse, it is important not to read the negative British reports on Malakulans in 1774 as antecedents of the later hierarchical racial classification of eastern and western Pacific Islanders into Polynesians and Melanesians respectively. Whatever the gossip on board the ship, all the journals finely discriminate the people encountered on other islands in the New Hebrides and in New Caledonia as different races, tribes, nations or varieties of the human species, rather than run them together as the less favoured of ‘two distinct races’ in Oceania, as would become the norm in the nineteenth century.48 With respect to experience, I have shown how indigenous behaviour or tactics could affect voyagers’ perceptions and permeate their representations. © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


Fig. 9. J. Webber, ‘A Native of Van Diemen’s Land. New Holland’ [January 1777], sepia wash drawing over pencil, State Library of Tasmania, AUTAS001124067927.

Dampier’s ill-humoured phrase ‘the miserablest People in the world’, like Cook’s ‘Apish Nation’, registered the frustration that might be induced in commanders by indigenous contempt for their trade goods – no light matter given mariners’ normal dependence on local cooperation and exchange to obtain vital supplies. Several of Cook’s judgements – that New Hollanders were ‘timorous and inoffensive’, that Van Diemen’s Landers had shown ‘the greatest confidence immaginable, for none of them had any weapons’, and that New Caledonians were ‘not in the least addicted to pelfering’ – registered his relief or pleasure at unthreatening or approved indigenous behaviour. Such conduct evidently excused their lack of either © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


729

the desire or the wherewithal to trade. Indeed, Reinhold Forster specifically excused the New Caledonians from engagement in commerce: The Natives are the most harmless & goodnatured Set of people, that we have as yet met with. They are poor on account of the barrenness of their Soil, which does not afford them many cultivated plants, this makes, that they cannot give any away to us.49

I don’t know why Kanak chose to be ‘courteous and friendly’ or Tasmanians to be ‘mild and chearfull’ on these occasions. But I have no doubt their demeanour was both motivated and strategic – like much human behaviour generally. At other times, other Kanak and other Tasmanians acted differently towards other Europeans, adopting violence or withdrawal as their strategy instead of amiability. Similarly, in 1767, Tahitians had greeted HMS Dolphin with violence and endured extreme violence in retaliation. Their subsequent, much celebrated cordiality was an alternative strategy adopted in the wake of this disaster. However, Europeans rarely acknowledged much agency or calculation in indigenous actions: aloofness or indifference to ‘traffick’ were reflexes of lack of civility; hostility was impelled by savagery; while friendliness was gratefully received as their due by those who knew themselves to be civilised. Aboriginal Australians and Tasmanians were represented positively or even idealised by several eighteenth-century voyagers, including Cook and his companions. However, such accounts did not dislodge pejorative impressions such as Dampier’s from popular imaginings, especially in the nascent colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land where fear and the desire to appropriate Aboriginal places, resources and persons would form a lethal union. In one respect, Cook’s obliviousness or wilful ignorance of the physical evidence of Aboriginal agency – their practice of firestick farming50 – was crucial. His erroneous impression that he had seen a ‘Country in the pure state of Nature’, bereft of any trace of ‘the Industry of Man’ but ‘in a flourishing state’ for the introduction of farming and grazing, underwrote his acts of possession along the east coast of New Holland, in the face of his orders to seek ‘the Consent of the Natives’ to enact such protocols.51 Arguably, then, Cook paved the way for the disastrous colonial fiction of a land unused by its savage inhabitants and ripe for the taking.52 But symbolic anticipation is not action and there his responsibility ends. Short Biography Bronwen Douglas is a Senior Fellow in the Division of Pacific and Asian History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, at the Australian National University. Her current research locates the history of the scientific idea of race in relation to the intersections of metropolitan biology or anthropology and field encounters with indigenous people in Oceania. © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


A collection of essays entitled Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940, co-edited with Chris Ballard, is forthcoming. She has also worked extensively on the intersections of Christianity and gender in Melanesia and on the colonial history of New Caledonia. Her crossdisciplinary approach brings together concepts and methods derived from history, anthropology, the history of science, art history, subaltern studies and gender studies. She is the author of Across the Great Divide: Journeys in History and Anthropology (Amsterdam, 1998) and has edited or co-edited several collections, including Tattoo: Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and the West (London, 2005). She has published numerous book chapters and scholarly articles in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Current Anthropology, Journal of Pacific History, History and Anthropology, Oceania and Contemporary Pacific. She has held fellowships at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and Marseille, at the Australian National University’s Humanities Research Centre, and at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK. Before accepting a research-only position at the Australian National University, she taught Pacific history and anthropology at La Trobe University in Melbourne. She received a B.A. from Adelaide University and a Ph.D. from the Australian National University. Notes * Correspondence address: Division of Pacific and Asian History, RSPAS, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. Email: [email protected]. 1 The Spanish navigator Pedro Fernández de Quirós undertook two voyages to the Mar del Zur (South Sea) in 1595 and 1605–06, the second as commander. William Dampier was an English trader, buccaneer and naval commander who travelled widely in Oceania between 1683 and 1711 and published hugely popular accounts of his voyages. See C. Markham (trans. and ed.), The Voyages of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, 1595–1606, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1904); J. Masefield (ed.), Dampier’s Voyages, 2 vols. (London: E. Grant Richards, 1906); C. Sanz, Australia su descubrimiento y denominación: con la reproducción facsimil del memorial número 8 de Quirós en español original, y en las diversas traducciones contemporáneas (Madrid: Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales, Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1973). 2 Charles de Brosses was a French littérateur whose seminal text on the Terres australes, ‘Austral lands’, was plagiarised into English by John Callander. Alexander Dalrymple was a Scottish geographer, hydrographer and author. John Hawkesworth was an English writer and editor whose compilation of English voyagers’ journals, including those of Cook’s first voyage, was widely read and translated. [C. de Brosses], Histoire des navigations aux terres australes . . . , 2 vols. (Paris: Durand, 1756); J. Callander, Terra Australis Cognita: Or Voyages to the Terra Australis, or Southern Hemisphere, During the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries . . . , 3 vols. (Edinburgh: A. Donaldson, 1766–8); A. Dalrymple, An Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean, 2 vols. (London: J. Nourse, T. Payne and P. Elmsley, 1770–71); J. Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere . . . , 3 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773). 3 The classic era of scientific maritime exploration began with the voyage around the world of the Frenchman Louis-Antoine de Bougainville in 1766–69 and concluded with the final circumnavigation of the globe by his compatriot Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville in 1837–40. See [L.-A. de Bougainville], Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi la Boudeuse et

© 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


731

la flûte l’Etoile en 1766, 1767, 1768 & 1769 (Paris: Saillant & Nyon, 1771); J.-S.-C. Dumont d’Urville, Voyage au pôle sud et dans l’Océanie sur les corvettes l’Astrolabe et la Zélée . . . pendant les années 1837–1838–1839–1840 . . . Histoire du voyage, 10 vols. (Paris: Gide, 1842–46). 4 James Burney served on Cook’s second and third voyages and wrote a multi-volume history of South Seas voyages. J. Burney, A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Seas or Pacific Ocean, 5 vols. (London: Luke Hansard, 1803–17). 5 See, for example, the following general works: J. C. Beaglehole, The Exploration of the Pacific (London: A. and C. Black, 1934); J. Brosse, Les tours du monde des explorateurs: Les grands voyages maritimes, 1764–1843 (Paris: Bordas, 1983); J. Dunmore, French Explorers in the Pacific, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–9); M. Lincoln (ed.), Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press in association with the National Maritime Museum, 1998); P. J. Marshall and G. Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1982), 258–98; B. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969 [1960]); O. H. K. Spate, The Pacific Since Magellan, 3 vols. (Canberra/Rushcutters Bay, NSW: Australian National University Press, 1979–88). 6 J. Cook, A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World . . . in the Years 1772, 1773, 1774, and 1775 . . . , 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777); Cook and J. King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean . . . in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780, 3 vols. (London: G. Nicol and T. Cadell, 1784); Hawkesworth, Account, vols. 2 and 3. 7 J. Huggins, ‘Cook and the New Anthropology’, in Lincoln (ed.), Science and Exploration, 199–206; S. M. Kamakau, Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii (Honolulu, HI: Kamehameha Schools Press, 1961 [1867]), 104; G. Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); T. O’Regan, ‘Old Myths and New Politics: Some Contemporary Uses of Traditional History’, New Zealand Journal of History, 26/1 (1992): 5–27; M. Sahlins, ‘Captain James Cook: Or, the Dying God’, in Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 104–35; Sahlins, How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996); B. Smith, ‘Cook’s Posthumous Reputation’, in Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of Cook’s Voyages (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press at the Miegunyah Press, 1992), 225–40. 8 J. C. Beaglehole (ed.), The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, 4 vols. (Cambridge/London: Hakluyt Society, 1955–74); P. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989 [1987]), 1–42; J. Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Gascoigne, Captain Cook: Voyager Between Worlds (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007); H. Guest, Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges and the Return to the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); M. Jolly, ‘ “Ill-Natured Comparisons”: Racism and Relativism in European Representations of Ni-Vanuatu from Cook’s Second Voyage’, History and Anthropology, 5/3–4 (1992): 331–64; R. Joppien and B. Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, 3 vols. (Melbourne: Oxford University Press in association with the Australian Academy of Humanities, 1985–87); Obeyesekere, Apotheosis; M. Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1981); Sahlins, How ‘Natives’ Think; A. Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (London: Allen Lane, 2003); Smith, European Vision, 8–95; Spate, Pacific Since Magellan, Vol. 3, Paradise Found and Lost (Rushcutters Bay, NSW: Australian National University Press, 1988), 98–149; N. Thomas, Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (London: Allen Lane, 2003); G. Williams (ed.), Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2004). 9 Museum of Sydney, Cook’s Sites, exhibition, 20 August–4 December 2005; National Library of Australia, Endeavour: The Voyage, http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/endeavour/maps/voyage.html, accessed on 20 October 2007; National Library of Australia, Cook & Omai: The Cult of the South Seas, exhibition, 15 February–27 May 2001, http://www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/omai/ index.html, accessed on 27 October 2007; National Library of Australia and Australian National Maritime Museum, Endeavour: Captain Cook’s Journal 1768–71, interactive CD-ROM (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1999); National Library of Australia and Centre for Cross-Cultural © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

732 Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania Research, the Australian National University, South Seas: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific (1760–1800), www.southseas.nla.gov.au, accessed on 20 October 2007; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, William Hodges 1744 –1797: The Art of Exploration, exhibition, 5 July–21 November 2005, http://www.nmm.ac.uk/upload/package/30/home.php, accessed on 27 October 2007; State Library of New South Wales, The Papers of Sir Joseph Banks at the State Library of New South Wales, http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/banks, accessed on 27 October 2007. 10 See, for example, G. M. Badger (ed.), Captain Cook: Navigator and Scientist: Papers Presented at the Cook Bicentenary Symposium, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, 1 May 1969 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970); Beaglehole, Journals, Vol. 4, The Life of Captain James Cook (London: Hakluyt Society, 1974); H. Carrington, Life of Captain Cook (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1967 [1939]); A. Frost, Voyage of the Endeavour: Captain Cook and the Discovery of the Pacific (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998); R. Hough, Captain James Cook: A Biography (London/Sydney: Hodder & Stoughton, 1994); A. Kippis, The Life of Captain James Cook (London: G. Nicol and G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1788). 11 Beaglehole, Journals. 12 Marshall and Williams, Great Map, 1, 299; see also R. Fisher and H. Johnston (eds.), Captain James Cook and his Times (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979). 13 See, for example, A. Frost, ‘The Pacific Ocean: The Eighteenth Century’s “New World” ’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 151–5 (1976): 779–822; H. Guest, ‘The Great Distinction: Figures of the Exotic in the Work of William Hodges’, Oxford Art Journal, 12/2 (1989): 36–58; Guest, ‘Curiously Marked: Tattooing, Masculinity, and Nationality in EighteenthCentury British Perceptions of the South Pacific’, in J. Barrell (ed.), Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 101–34; J. Hoorn, ‘Captivity and Humanist Art History: The Case of Poedua’, Third Text, 42 (1998): 47–56; R. Porter, ‘The Exotic as Erotic: Captain Cook at Tahiti’, in G. S. Rousseau and R. Porter (eds.), Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 117–44; W. Veit (ed.), Captain Cook: Image and Impact: South Seas Discoveries and the World of Letters, 2 vols. (Melbourne: Hawthorn Press, 1972–79). Hoorns paper is a partial exception to this point: while uncritically imposing the trope of captivity narrative on an episode of hostagetaking during Cooks final voyage and collapsing voyage art and evidence as mere artefacts of Europes project of possessing Pacific lands and people, she nonetheless discerned a story of local female agency in those same materials. 14 Smith, European Vision; Smith, Imagining the Pacific. 15 Smith, European Vision, 85–7. 16 Ibid., v, my emphasis. 17 Gascoigne, Captain Cook; Sahlins, Historical Metaphors; Salmond, Trial, xx–xxi; Salmond, ‘Tute: The Impact of Polynesia on Captain Cook’, in Williams (ed.), Captain Cook, 77–93; Thomas, Discoveries, xxxiii–xxxv. 18 See B. Douglas, ‘Art as Ethno-Historical Text: Science, Representation and Indigenous Presence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Oceanic Voyage Literature’, in N. Thomas and D. Losche (eds.), Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 65–99; Douglas, ‘Science and the Art of Representing “Savages”: Reading “Race” in Text and Image in South Seas Voyage Literature’, History and Anthropology, 11/2–3 (1999): 157–201; Douglas, ‘Seaborne Ethnography and the Natural History of Man’, Journal of Pacific History, 38/1 (2003): 3–27; Douglas, ‘Slippery Word, Ambiguous Praxis: “Race” and Late 18th-Century Voyagers in Oceania’, Journal of Pacific History, 41/1 (2006): 1–27; Douglas, ‘The Lure of Texts and the Discipline of Praxis: Cross-Cultural History in a Post-Empirical World’, Humanities Research, 14/1 (2007): 11–30, http://epress.anu.edu.au/hrj/ 2007_01/pdf/ch02.pdf. 19 B. Douglas, ‘Notes on “Race” and the Biologisation of Human Difference’, Journal of Pacific History, 40/3 (2005): 331–8. 20 B. Douglas, ‘Climate to Crania: Science and the Racialization of Human Difference’, in Douglas and C. Ballard (eds.), Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940 (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008). 21 J.-S.-C. Dumont d’Urville, ‘Sur les îles du Grand Océan’, Bulletin de la Société de géographie, 17/105 (1832): 1–21. © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


733

22 W. Dampier, Dampier’s Voyages, Vol. 2, A Voyage to New-Holland, &c. in the Year 1699 [1703], ed. J. Masefield (London: E. Grant Richards, 1906), 440. 23 W. Dampier, Dampier’s Voyages, Vol. 1, A New Voyage Round the World [1697], ed. Masefield, 453. 24 J. Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks 1768–1771, ed. J. C. Beaglehole, 2 vols. (Sydney: Public Library of N.S.W. with Angus and Robertson, 1962), 1:257, 400; 2:50, 55, 92, 111–12, 124; J. Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, Vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771, ed. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1955), 312, 358, 395. 25 W. Dampier, Dampier’s Voyages, Vol. 2, A Continuation of a Voyage to New-Holland, &c. in the Year 1699 [1709], Masefield (ed.), 458. 26 Banks, Endeavour Journal, 2:79, 130; Cook, Voyage of the Endeavour, 399; Smith, European Vision, 125–7. 27 Banks, Endeavour Journal, 2:54–5, 134; Cook, Voyage of the Endeavour, 305. 28 For the sketch, see S. Parkinson, [Two Aborigines and Canoes], [April 1770], pencil sketch, in Sketches Made in Captain Cooks First Voyage, 1768–1771 (London: British Library, Add. MS 9345, f. 14v), http://www.imagesonline.bl.uk/results.asp?image=060741&imagex=1&searchnum=6, accessed on 21 February 2008. See also Joppien and Smith, Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, 1:48; S. Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas in his Majesty’s Ship, the Endeavour . . . , ed. S. Parkinson (London: Stanfield Parkinson, 1773), 134; Smith, European Vision, 127. 29 Cook, Voyage of the Endeavour, 354, 361, 363, 396, my emphasis. 30 J. R. Forster, Observations made during a Voyage Round the World, on Physical Geography, Natural History, and Ethic Philosophy (London: G. Robinson, 1778), 228. 31 J. R. Forster, The Resolution Journal of Johann Reinhold Forster 1772-1775, ed. M. E. Hoare, 4 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1982), 4:586. For a map of Vanuatu, see Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, ‘Vanuatu’ (Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin, 2007), http:// www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/cia07/vanuatu_sm_2007.gif, accessed on 28 October 2007. 32 Forster, Observations, 240–4; E. Mentelle and C. Malte Brun, Géographie mathématique, physique et politique de toutes les parties du monde . . . , Vol. 12, Contenant la suite de l’Asie et les Terres Océaniques ou la cinquième partie du monde (Paris: Henry Tardieu and Laporte, 1804), 474, 573; Dumont d’Urville, ‘Sur les îles du Grand Océan’, 12. 33 J. Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, Vol. 2, The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure 1772–1775, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1961), 462, 466. 34 G. Forster, A Voyage Round the World in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution . . . , 2 vols. (London: B. White, J. Robson, P. Elmsly and G. Robinson, 1777), 2:207. 35 Cook, Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure, 480, 513–15. 36 Forster, Voyage Round the World, 2:206, 208, 227–9, 236. 37 W. Wales, ‘Journal’, in Cook, Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure, 849. 38 See Jolly, ‘Ill-Natured Comparisons’. 39 Cook, Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure, 503–5. 40 For a map of New Caledonia, see Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, ‘New Caledonia’ (Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin, 2007), http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/cia07/ new_caledonia_sm_2007.gif, accessed on 28 October 2007. 41 Cook, Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure, 535; Forster, Resolution Journal, 4:642, 646, 648–9, 650. 42 Cook, Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure, 539, 541. 43 Forster, Resolution Journal, 4:646. 44 Forster, Voyage Round the World, 2:426. 45 Wales, ‘Journal’, 864. 46 J. Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, Vol. 3, The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776 –1780, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1967), 52. 47 W. Anderson, ‘A Journal of a Voyage Made in His Majesty’s Sloop Resolution’, in Cook, Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery, 784–6. 48 Dumont d’Urville, ‘Sur les îles du Grand Océan’, 3.


734 Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania 49

Forster, Resolution Journal, 4:651. A. Salleh, ‘Aboriginal Fire-Farming has Deep Roots’, News in Science: ABC Science Online, 22 June 2005 (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 2005), http://www.abc.net.au/ science/news/stories/s1398157.htm, accessed on 26 March 2006. 51 Cook, Voyage of the Endeavour, 397; E. Hawke, P. Brett, and C. Spencer, ‘The Instructions [30 July 1768]’, in Cook, Voyage of the Endeavour, cclxxxiii. 52 See Bruce Buchan’s recent argument that ‘a doctrine of terra nullius was not applied in Australia prior to 1889, but . . . other, more deeply entrenched European concepts, ideas and assumptions were applied in the colonial dispossession of Indigenous Australians’, most notably ‘traffick’ as a gauge of savagery and a not-very-successful strategy of control. B. Buchan, ‘Traffick of Empire: Trade, Treaty and Terra Nullius in Australia and North America, 1750–1800’, History Compass 5/2 (2007): 387–8, 391, 397. 50

Bibliography Anderson, W., ‘A Journal of a Voyage Made in His Majesty’s Sloop Resolution’, in J. Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, Vol. 3, The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776 –1780, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1967), 721–986. Badger, G. M. (ed.), Captain Cook: Navigator and Scientist: Papers Presented at the Cook Bicentenary Symposium, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, 1 May 1969 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970). Banks, J., The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks 1768–1771, ed. J. C. beaglehole, 2 vols. (Sydney: Public Library of N.S.W. with Angus and Robertson, 1962). Beaglehole, J. C., The Exploration of the Pacific (London: A. and C. Black, 1934). Beaglehole J. C. (ed.), The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, 4 vols. (Cambridge/London: Hakluyt Society, 1955–74). [de Bougainville, L.-A.], Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi la Boudeuse et la flûte l’Etoile en 1766, 1767, 1768 & 1769 (Paris: Saillant & Nyon, 1771). Brosse, J., Les tours du monde des explorateurs: les grands voyages maritimes, 1764–1843 (Paris: Bordas, 1983). [de Brosses, C.], Histoire des navigations aux terres australes . . . , 2 vols. (Paris: Durand, 1756). Buchan, B., ‘Traffick of Empire: Trade, Treaty and Terra Nullius in Australia and North America, 1750–1800’, History Compass, 5/2 (2007): 386–405. Burney, J., A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Seas or Pacific Ocean, 5 vols. (London: Luke Hansard, 1803–17). Callander, J., Terra Australis Cognita: Or Voyages to the Terra Australis, or Southern Hemisphere, During the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries . . . , 3 vols. (Edinburgh: A. Donaldson, 1766–68). Carrington, H., Life of Captain Cook (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1967 [1939]). Carter, P., The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989 [1987]). Cook, J., A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World . . . in the Years 1772, 1773, 1774, and 1775 . . . , 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777). Cook, J., The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, Vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1955). Cook, J., The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, Vol. 2, The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure 1772–1775, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1961). Cook, J., The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, Vol. 3, The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776–1780, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1967). Cook, J., and King, J., A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean . . . in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780, 3 vols. (London: G. Nicol and T. Cadell, 1784). Dalrymple, A., An Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean, 2 vols. (London: J. Nourse, T. Payne and P. Elmsley, 1770–71). © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


735

Dampier, W., Dampier’s Voyages, Vol. 1, A New Voyage Round the World [1697], ed. J. Masefield (London: E. Grant Richards, 1906). Dampier, W., Dampier’s Voyages, Vol. 2, A Voyage to New-Holland, &c. in the Year 1699 [1703], ed. J. Masefield (London: E. Grant Richards, 1906). Dampier, W., Dampier’s Voyages, Vol. 2, A Continuation of a Voyage to New-Holland, &c. in the Year 1699 [1709], ed. J. Masefield (London: E. Grant Richards, 1906). Douglas, B., ‘Art as Ethno-Historical Text: Science, Representation and Indigenous Presence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Oceanic Voyage Literature’, in N. Thomas and D. Losche (eds.), Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 65–99. Douglas, B., ‘Science and the Art of Representing “Savages”: Reading “Race” in Text and Image in South Seas Voyage Literature’, History and Anthropology, 11/2–3 (1999): 157–201. Douglas, B., ‘Seaborne Ethnography and the Natural History of Man’, Journal of Pacific History, 38/1 (2003): 3–27. Douglas, B., ‘Notes on “Race” and the Biologisation of Human Difference’, Journal of Pacific History, 40/3 (2005): 331–8. Douglas, B., ‘Slippery Word, Ambiguous Praxis: “Race” and Late 18th-Century Voyagers in Oceania’, Journal of Pacific History, 41/1 (2006): 1–27. Douglas, B., ‘The Lure of Texts and the Discipline of Praxis: Cross-Cultural History in a Post-Empirical World’, Humanities Research, 14/1 (2007): 11–30, http://epress.anu.edu.au/ hrj/2007_01/pdf/ch02.pdf. Douglas, B., ‘Climate to Crania: Science and the Racialization of Human Difference’, in B. Douglas and C. Ballard (eds.), Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940 (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008). Dumont d’Urville, J.-S.-C., ‘Sur les îles du Grand Océan’, Bulletin de la Société de géographie, 17/105 (1832): 1–21. Dumont d’Urville, J.-S.-C., Voyage au pôle sud et dans l’Océanie sur les corvettes l’Astrolabe et la Zélée . . . pendant les années 1837–1838–1839–1840 . . . Histoire du voyage, 10 vols. (Paris: Gide, 1842–46). Dunmore, J., French Explorers in the Pacific, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–69). Fisher, R., and Johnston, H. (eds.), Captain James Cook and his Times (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979). Forster, G., A Voyage Round the World in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution . . . , 2 vols. (London: B. White, J. Robson, P. Elmsly and G. Robinson, 1777). Forster, J. R., Observations made during a Voyage Round the World, on Physical Geography, Natural History, and Ethic Philosophy (London: G. Robinson, 1778). Forster, J. R., The Resolution Journal of Johann Reinhold Forster 1772–1775, ed. M. E. Hoare, 4 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1982). Frost, A., ‘The Pacific Ocean: The Eighteenth Century’s “New World” ’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 151/5 (1976): 779–822. Frost, A., Voyage of the Endeavour: Captain Cook and the Discovery of the Pacific (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998). Gascoigne, J., Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Gascoigne, J., Captain Cook: Voyager between Worlds (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007). Guest, H., ‘The Great Distinction: Figures of the Exotic in the Work of William Hodges’, Oxford Art Journal, 12/2 (1989): 36–58. Guest, H., ‘Curiously Marked: Tattooing, Masculinity, and Nationality in Eighteenth-Century British Perceptions of the South Pacific’, in J. Barrell (ed.), Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 101–34. Guest, H., Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges and the Return to the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Hawke, E., Brett, P., and Spencer, C., ‘The Instructions [30 July 1768]’, in J. Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, Vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1955), cclxxix–cclxxxiv. Hawkesworth, J., An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere . . . , 3 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773). © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

736 Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania Hoorn, J., ‘Captivity and Humanist Art History: The Case of Poedua’, Third Text, 42 (1998): 47–56. Hough, R., Captain James Cook: A Biography (London/Sydney: Hodder & Stoughton, 1994). Huggins, J., ‘Cook and the New Anthropology’, in M. Lincoln (ed.), Science and Exploration: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press in association with the National Maritime Museum, 1998), 199–206. Jolly, M., ‘ “Ill-Natured Comparisons”: Racism and Relativism in European Representations of Ni-Vanuatu from Cook’s Second Voyage’, History and Anthropology, 5/3–4 (1992): 331–64. Joppien, R., and Smith, B., The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, 3 vols. (Melbourne: Oxford University Press in association with the Australian Academy of Humanities, 1985–87). Kamakau, S. M., Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii (Honolulu, HI: Kamehameha Schools Press, 1961). Kippis, A., The Life of Captain James Cook (London: G. Nicol and G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1788). Lincoln, M. (ed.), Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press in association with the National Maritime Museum, 1998). Markham, C. (trans. and ed.), The Voyages of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, 1595–1606, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1904). Marshall, P. J., and Williams, G., The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1982). Masefield, J. (ed.), Dampier’s Voyages, 2 vols. (London: E. Grant Richards, 1906). Mentelle, E., and Malte Brun, C., Géographie mathématique, physique et politique de toutes les parties du monde . . . , Vol. 12, Contenant la suite de l’Asie et les Terres Océaniques ou la cinquième partie du monde (Paris: Henry Tardieu and Laporte, 1804). Museum of Sydney, Cook’s Sites, exhibition, 20 August–4 December 2005. National Library of Australia, Canberra, Endeavour: The Voyage, http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/ endeavour/maps/voyage.html, accessed on 20 October 2007. National Library of Australia, Canberra, Cook & Omai: The Cult of the South Seas, exhibition, 15 February–27 May 2001, http://www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/omai/index.html, accessed on 27 October 2007. National Library of Australia, Canberra, and Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney, Endeavour: Captain Cook’s Journal 1768–71, interactive CD-ROM (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1999). National Library of Australia, Canberra, and Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, the Australian National University, South Seas: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific (1760–1800), http://www.southseas.nla.gov.au, accessed on 20 October 2007. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, William Hodges 1744–1797: The Art of Exploration, exhibition, 5 July–21 November 2005, http://www.nmm.ac.uk/upload/package/30/home.php, accessed on 27 October 2007. Obeyesekere, G., The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). O’Regan, T., ‘Old Myths and New Politics: Some Contemporary Uses of Traditional History’, New Zealand Journal of History, 26/1 (1992): 5–27. Parkinson, S., A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas in his Majesty’s Ship, the Endeavour . . . , ed. S. Parkinson (London: Stanfield Parkinson, 1773). Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, ‘New Caledonia’ (Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin, 2007), http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/cia07/new_caledonia_sm_2007.gif, accessed on 28 October 2007. Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, ‘Vanuatu’ (Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin, 2007), http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/cia07/vanuatu_sm_2007.gif, accessed on 28 October 2007. Porter, R., ‘The Exotic as Erotic: Captain Cook at Tahiti’, in G. S. Rousseau and R. Porter (eds.), Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 117–44. Sahlins, M., Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1981). Sahlins, M., Islands of History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Sahlins, M., How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). © 2008 The Author History Compass 6/3 (2008): 712–737, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00529.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


737

Salleh, A., ‘Aboriginal Fire-farming has Deep Roots’, News in Science: ABC Science Online, 22 June 2005 (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 2005), http://www.abc.net.au/ science/news/stories/s1398157.htm, accessed on 26 March 2006. Salmond, A., The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (London: Allen Lane, 2003). Salmond, A., ‘Tute: The Impact of Polynesia on Captain Cook’, in G. Williams (ed.), Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2004), 77–93. Sanz, C., Australia su descubrimiento y denominación: con la reproducción facsimil del memorial número 8 de Quirós en español original, y en las diversas traducciones contemporáneas (Madrid: Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales, Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1973). Smith, B., European Vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969 [1960]). Smith, B., Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of Cook’s Voyages (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press at the Miegunyah Press, 1992). Spate, O. H. K., The Pacific Since Magellan, 3 vols. (Canberra/Rushcutters Bay, NSW: Australian National University Press, 1979–88). State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, The Papers of Sir Joseph Banks at the State Library of New South Wales, http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/banks, accessed on 27 October 2007. Thomas, N., Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (London: Allen Lane, 2003). Veit, W. (ed.), Captain Cook: Image and Impact: South Seas Discoveries and the World of Letters, 2 vols. (Melbourne: Hawthorn Press, 1972–79). Wales, W., ‘Journal’, in J. Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, Vol. 2, The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure 1772–1775, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1961), 776–869. Williams, G. (ed.), Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2004).
