Abstract
This essay engages the colonial knowledge of the Pacific at what was arguably its foundational stage. Though navigators passed through the ocean from the sixteenth century onwards, contacts were for the most part fleeting and observations cursory. While an analysis can be made of the accounts of early Spanish and Dutch voyagers, the European interest in, and understanding, of the Pacific and Pacific peoples, gained particular momentum from the 1760s onward. Here, I do not survey the discourses of the period, or track the representations and misrepresentations that surfaced and resurfaced in the accounts of the various British, French, Spanish and Russian explorers, who between them made contact, and gained some familiarity with, peoples across Polynesia, as well as, to a more limited degree, those of Melanesia and Micronesia. This is a micro-historical ethnography of colonial knowledge, focussed on James Cook’s second voyage, and a particular set of visual representations by the voyage artist, William Hodges.
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Notes
This is a slightly revised version of an essay previously published in William Hodges 1744–1797: The Art of Exploration, ed. Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
James Cook, A Voyage toward the South Pole (London, 1777), I, xxxvi.
In this essay I keep citation to a minimum, but the reader should be aware that Cook’s second voyage has been extensively discussed, notably in the introduction and annotations to The Journals of Captain James Cook, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge and London: for Hakluyt Society by the University Press, 1955–67), vol. 2,
Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (2nd ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) and Imagining the Pacific (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985–87), vol. 2. is particularly relevant for Hodges’ work;
for the Forsters see J. R. Forster, Observations Made during a Voyage Round the World, ed. N.Thomas, H. Guest and M. Dettelbach (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996) and George Forster, a Voyage Round the World, ed. N. Thomas and O. Berghof (Honolulu: : University of Hawaii Press, 2000).
For recent commentary see also: Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003)
Nicholas Thomas, Discoveries: the Voyages of Captain Cook (London: Penguin, 2003);
and on Hodges specifically, Quilley and Bonehill (eds) William Hodges, and Harriet Guest, Empire, Barbarism and Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). In the text and notes, ‘Forster’ means Johann Reinhold unless otherwise indicated.
Cook, Journals, ed. Beaglehole, I, p. 380.
See Thomas, Discoveries, pp. 202–03, 217–19.
Cook, Journals, ed. Beaglehole, III, pp. 462, 468.
The whole group is located at Add. Ms. 15743 in the British Library. These include views of Sandwich Island (Efate), a Tongan canoe, and the port of Fayal, that I do not discuss here. Unfortunately for cost reasons images of these works cannot be published here (and they anyway need to be seen ‘in the flesh’ because of their size and the importance of their detail), but the interested reader may refer to Quilley and Bonehill, William Hodges; Joppien and Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages for reproductions.
A third, also consisting of two sheets and showing the massing of a fleet of Tahitian war canoes, is not as wide.
Joppien and Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, II, p. 78.
The Tahitian view of the war canoe fleet certainly relates to the 1774 visit, and it is likely that the other does also. It is of course difficult to argue that these drawings were not prepared later, though in most cases they precisely record topographic and other local information, and thus are likely to have been drawn at the time or soon afterwards, with the help of field sketches.
Cook, Journals, ed. Beaglehole, II, p. 435.
Forster, Voyage, p. 480., cf. p. 492.
Cook, Journals, ed. Beaglehole, II, p. 464.
Cook, Journals, ed. Beaglehole, II, p. 540.
For further discussion, see Bronwen Douglas, ‘Art as ethno-historical text’, in N. Thomas and D. Losche (eds), Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 65–99.
Joppien and Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, II, p. 71.
Cook, Journals, ed. Beaglehole, II, p. 493.
Ibid., fn. 3.
Forster, Observations, ed. Thomas, Guest and Dettelbach, p. 153.
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© 2012 Nicholas Thomas
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Thomas, N. (2012). William Hodges As Anthropologist and Historian. In: Roque, R., Wagner, K.A. (eds) Engaging Colonial Knowledge. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230360075_10
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