Pacific Exploration

1699-1701:  The sometime buccaneer William Dampier takes the Roebuck on a scientific and exploratory mission to the Pacific and touches the north west coast of Australia.  He had hoped to go all the way round the Australia (known as Terra Australis), but ended up heading towards New Guinea.  His published account A Voyage to New Holland (1703), along with his earlier A New Voyage Round the World (1697), were seen as models of natural historical and ethnographic detail, and influenced Defoe in his writing of Robinson Crusoe.

1720: South Sea Bubble financial disaster curtails interest in the region.

1740:  Commodore George Anson’s wartime sailing round Cape Horn and on to the Pacific coast of South America, published as A Voyage to the South Seas, and to many other Parts of the World (1744).

1764-6:  John Byron’s epic circumnavigation of the world.  He anchors in Matavai Bay, Tahiti, but makes no dramatic new discoveries.  His voyage fuels the belief that there is a great, undiscovered southern continent.

1767-8:  Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret both make expeditions to the Pacific, and Wallis officially sights Tahiti.

1766-9:  Louis-Antoine de Bougainville conducts a Pacific exploration and global circumnavigation, taking in Tahiti, Samoa and the Solomon Islands.  His Voyage Autour du Monde (1771) famously painted an idealised portrait of the South Sea islanders as noble savages in a state of innocence in their earthly paradises.  It was supplemented by the French Enlightenment thinker Diderot in his Supplément (1773-4) to Bougainville’s account of his voyage was circulated in a French journal the Correspondence littéraire.

1768-1771:   Lieutenant James Cook’s first voyage on the Endeavour, funded by the Admiralty and the Royal Society, to observe the transit of Venus from the South Pacific.  Cook was accompanied by the botanist Joseph Banks and astronomers and scientists.  They first anchored at Tahiti and then sailed round the two islands of New Zealand (he claimed possession of Queen Charlotte Sound in 1770s after a brief explanation to the Maoris there), the eastern shore of Australia (Cook disembarked and claimed the east coast of Australia for the Crown), and the Torres Strait.  Cook and Banks’ journals were fused and adapted by John Hawkesworth as An Account of the Voyages undertaken by….Captain Byron, Captain Carteret and Captain Cook (1773).  This work was a bestseller despite enormous controversy about the information Hawkesworth supplied about the sexual freedoms of the South Sea islanders and concerns about his alterations to the original journals.

1772-75:  Captain Cook’s most important voyage on the  Resolution and the Adventure with the help of a chronometer based on John Harrison’s prototype (see Dava Sobel, Longitude), and accompanied by the naturalists Johann Reinhold Forster and his son George, as well as the painter William Hodges.  This voyage established the basis for the modern map of the South Pacific, disposing of the myth of a giant southern continent, sailing close to the South Pole, touching New Zealand, and Easter Island, Tonga, New Caledonia, Vanatu and South Georgia.  One of Cook’s boat crews was massacred in New Zealand in 1773. Cook’s account was published, with Dr John Douglas, as A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World (1777).  Also there was Georg Forster’s A Voyage Round the World (1778) , now available eds. N. Thomas and Oliver Berghof (2000).

1776-80:  Cook’s third voyage to the North Pacific on the Resolution and the Discovery in a failed search for the Northwest Passage (ie. a northern route to the Pacific).  Cook discovered the Sandwich (Hawaiian) islands, and voyaged up to Vancouver, Alaska and the Bering Strait.  En route home, he was killed on Hawaii in 1779.  There were reports that he had allowed himself to be treated as the god Lono in Hawaii, although this is disputed.  On the on-going controversy about his death, see the books by Sahlins and Obeyesekere listed below.  Cook’s journals were edited by John Douglas as A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean  (1784).

1789 The Mutiny on the Bounty:  the mutiny was lead by Fletcher Christian against Captain William Bligh.  Bligh had served with Cook, and the Bounty was on a mission to Tahiti to obtain breadfruit for planting in the Caribbean colonies.

1780s:  Whalers, traders and missionaries travel to the South Seas.  In 1788, the first penal settlement, in Botany Bay in New South Wales, Australia, takes delivery of its first shipload of convicts.   Free settlers follow in the 1790s.

 Quotations

A crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither, at length a boy discovers land from the topmast, they go on shore to rob and plunder;  they see an harmless people, are entertained with kindness, they give the country a new name, they take formal possession of it for the King, they set up a rotten plank or stone for a memorial, they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more by force for a sample, return home, and get their parson.  Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right.  [Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 1726]

The President of the Royal Society, Lord Morton, asked Cook and Joseph Banks before for `the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the Natives of the several Lands where the Ship may touch…. They are human creatures, the work of the same omnipotent Author, equally under his care with the most polished European;  perhaps being less offensive more entitled to his favour.  They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit.   No European Nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent’.

Say first, what Power inspir’d his dauntless breast

With scorn of danger and inglorious rest,

To quit imperial London’s gorgeous domes

[…]

It was BENEVOLENCE! – on coasts unknown,

The shriv’ring natives of the frozen zone,

And the swart Indian, as he faintly strays

“Where Cancer reddens in the solar blaze,”

She bade him seek;  on each inclement shore

Plant the rich seeds of her exhaustless store;

Unite the savage hearts, and hostile hands,

In the firm compact of her gentle bands..

[Anna Seward, `Elegy on Captain Cook’, 1780 (1810 version]

 Further reading

The Journals of Captain Cook, ed, J. C. Beaglehole (3 vols;  Cambridge, 1955-67)

Glyndwr Williams, `The Pacific: Exploration and Exploitation’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, volume II, ed. Peter Marshall (1998)

Harriet Guest, `Ornament and Use:  Mai and Cook in London’ in A New Imperial History, ed. Kathleen Wilson (2004)

Peter Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind:  British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (1982)

Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think:  About Captain Cook, For Example (1995)

Gannanath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook:  European Mythmaking in the Pacific (1992)

Bernard Smith, European Visions of the South Pacific (1985)

Kathleen Wilson, `Thinking Back:  Gender Misrecognition and Polynesian Subervsions aboard the Cook Voyages’ in her A New Imperial History (2004)