Depicting Pacific peoples

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 21, Issue 1, 1 May 1988, Page 29

Depicting Pacific peoples

BERNARD SMITH

First, may I thank the Committee of the Friends of the Turnbull Library for inviting me to give the first of the Founder’s Lectures. This is a great honour and one that I shall treasure. I owe much to scholars born in this country: Professor A. D. Trendall, who taught me the little I know about classical archaeology; the late Professor J. W. Davidson, Foundation Professor of Pacific History at the Australian National University, who made it possible for me to deepen my interest in the European perception of the Pacific; and the late Professor J. C. Beaglehole who first suggested that I should make a catalogue of the work of the artists and others who travelled with Cook. I did not realise that his almost casual suggestion in 1949 would involve me in a lifetime’s work.

It is generally agreed that Cook’s three voyages greatly enhanced the economic and political power of Europe in the Pacific. But before such power could be fully exercised certain basic sciences and technologies, the efficient maidservants of power, had themselves to be enhanced. Cook’s voyages advanced astronomy, navigation and cartography or, as he might have put it, geographical science. But there were other sciences of less direct concern to the Admiralty enhanced by his voyages and these also contributed in their time to European domination in the Pacific, namely natural history, meteorology and the emergent science of ethnography.

Important advances were made in all these sciences continuously throughout the three voyages, but there were differences in emphasis. The first voyage is the botantical voyage, par excellence, the second voyage is the meteorological voyage, and the third, the ethnographic voyage. These changing emphases were due largely, though not entirely to contingent factors. On the Endeavour voyage, Banks, Solander and Parkinson with their interests centred on botany made a powerful team. On the second voyage, Cook himself, his astronomers Wales and Bayly, the two Forsters, and William Hodges, the artist, were all deeply interested in the changing conditions of wind and weather, light and atmosphere, as they traversed vast sections of the southern oceans. By the third voyage Cook had come to realise that both scientific and

popular interest had shifted to the native peoples of the Pacific, to the nascent science of ethnography. All these sciences were descriptive sciences and depended greatly upon the production of visual records. Historians, dazzled by the abilities of men like Cook and Banks have not done full justice to the abilities of their supporting artists. Yet it was their work, in engraved reproduction, that fashioned the images of the Pacific that etched themselves deeply into the European mind. Words are often forgotten but the images remain.

Yet none of the three professionals, Parkinson, Hodges, and Webber, who travelled with Cook were trained for the enormous task that confronted them. To have found and enlisted the versatility that the portrayal of the Pacific and its peoples required would have been impossible. Eighteenth-century art students were trained to fulfil special requirements; to draw plants and animals for natural historians, to draw maps and charts and topographic views, for the army and the navy, or higher up the social ladder, to paint landscapes and portraits or even history paintings of memorable deeds from scripture or the classics for Royal Academy audiences. But no one was trained to do all these things.

So the demands the voyages placed on their artists was quite unprecedented. It’s surprising they coped as well as they did. The young Sydney Parkinson was probably as good a botanical draughtsman as anyone practising in England at that time. But with the death of the unfortunate Alexander Buchan he had to cope with figure drawings as well; something that he had obviously no training in. Hodges, on the second voyage, had been trained superbly by Richard Wilson as a landscape painter, but on the voyage he had to train himself to produce portraits.

Hodges has not been given his due. He is one of the finest of all the English eighteenth-century landscape painters. A greater, more varied painter than his master Richard Wilson, only Thomas Gainsborough, among his contemporaries, excels him. The quality of his work unfortunately has been largely ignored because of the abiding ethnocentricity of European taste that draws a firm distinction between the aesthetic and the exotic. So much of Hodges’s life was spent outside of Europe, first in the Pacific, then in India, that the exotic character of his work has largely precluded an approach in terms of aesthetic assessment at least among Europeans. Exotic content inhibits aesthetic judgement. Yet in the work of Hodges and Gainsborough English landscape first released itself from its provincial domination by those classical Italianate models in which British artists were trained, and it is in the work of Hodges and the work of Joseph Wright of Derby that eighteenth-century landscape painting begins to confront the central interest of nineteenth-century landscape the portrayal of light.

John Webber, Cook’s artist on the third voyage, never succeeded in reaching the kinds of aesthetic quality that we find in the best of Hodges’s work, but he was better trained for the job ahead of him than any of the others. He could put his hand to anything. Navigational views, plants and animals, portraits, landscapes, and something rather new, a sequence of drawings depicting historical events of the voyage. ‘We should be nowhere without Webber’, John Beaglehole rightly observed, yet managed to do him less than justice. 1 They were all quite young when they enlisted with Cook: Parkinson, twenty-three; Hodges, twenty-eight; Webber, twenty-four, and all in poor circumstances. Whoever else would want to risk their lives in uncharted seas? What parents would risk their sons’ lives, unless little else was offering? Thomas Jones, a fellow art-student of Hodges in Richard Wilson’s studio and one who came of the Welsh landed gentry, was offered the post on Cook’s second voyage some weeks before Hodges was. Thomas had been trying to get his parents to provide him with funds for a tour of Italy. When they heard that he’d received an offer to go with Cook they willingly gave him the money to go to Italy. 2

Webber was not in that class. His father, an orphan of Bern had been assisted by the Corporation of Merchants of that city to train as a sculptor. In his thirties he had gone to England in search of work and there married Mary Quant an English girl who endowed him with six children. Life was difficult for the young family and John, who was the second son, was sent back to Bern where he grew up under the care and protection of his maiden aunt. The Corporation assisted John as it had assisted his father and at the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to Johann Aberli, the most famous Swiss landscape painter of his day, the man who first made views of the Swiss mountains high fashion. No drawings by Webber from his time with Aberli are known to have survived but he must have learned from him to give his landscapes that sense of breadth and height and that feeling for atmosphere which served him in such good stead when he came to paint the icy landscapes of the north Pacific. 3

After three years with Aberli, Webber proceeded to Paris, assisted by an annual stipend from the Bernese Corporation. There he studied under Johann Wille, a German artist and engraver long resident in Paris, a respected teacher and authority on art. Wille was something of a bon viveur, entertained dealers and connoisseurs, and possessed the attractive habit of taking his students into the rural hinterland of Paris in search of peasant life. They were living through the autumnal days of the ancien regime when peasant life was a la mode , both in the sentimental rococo manner that Marie Antionette so loved, and the more realistic style of the Dutch. Under Wille’s influence Webber made drawings of French rural life. The

training came in handy when he had to fill his Pacific landscapes with the peoples of Tonga, Tahiti or Nootka Sound. In Paris, Webber also attended classes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, learned to paint in oils and probably took lessons in the life class. The ‘Portrait of a Sculptor’ (Kunstmuseum, Bern) possibly Friedrich Funk, his cousin, was probably painted during his student days in Paris. After four years in Paris he returned to his family in London and was admitted as a student at the Royal Academy classes. He also did some work for a London architect, mythological scenes for interiors. They were probably similar to those overdoor panels one sees in Adam houses. He may also have painted the religious painting ‘Abraham and the Three Angels’ (Landesmuseum, Munster) after his return to London. It is the only attempt, we know of, of a major figure composition completed before he embarked with Cook.

Webber exhibited a portrait of an artist and two Parisian views at the 1776 Royal Academy exhibition. Attracted by the quality of the portrait, which has never come to light, Solander recommended to Cook that Webber should accompany him on his third voyage. It seems to have been all somewhat last minute. Indeed one gains the impression that the Admiralty was not greatly interested in the appointment of professional artists to its ships. Had it not been for the continuing influence of men like Banks and Solander, professionals like Hodges and Webber might never have been appointed. Webber’s appointment was expressed in words identical to those used in the appointment of Hodges:

Whereas we have engaged Mr John Webber Draughtsman and Landskip painter to proceed in His Majesty’s Sloop under your Command on her present intended Voyage, in order to make Drawings and Paintings of such places in the Countries you may touch at in the course of the said Voyage as may be proper to give a more perfect Idea thereof than can be formed by written descriptions only; You are hereby required and directed to receive the said Mr John Webber on board giving him all proper assistance, Victualling him as the Sloop’s company, and taking care that he does diligently employ himself in making Drawings and Paintings of such places as you may touch at, that may be worthy of notice, in the course of your Voyage, as also of such other objects and things as may fall within the compass of His abilities. 4

There is some uncertainty as to the length of time Webber had to prepare for the voyage. The Academy exhibition opened on 24 April 1776 and Solander is said to have gone to Webber’s rooms with the invitation to join the voyage two days later. But Webber in a letter to his cousin states that the decision for him to go was not made until ‘eight days before my departure’. Doubtless he did not get the official Admiralty letter until eight days prior to leaving. He also told his cousin why he had decided to go. This idea my dear Cousin, no doubt will seem rather strange to you, but to me it was enough to see that the offer was advantageous and besides, contained the matter

which I had always desired to do most (to know, to sail and to see far away and unknown countries). The Admiralty appointed me for 100 Guineas per year and above that paid all the expenses of my work. This, together with the means which I hoped to receive on my return, in order to distinguish myself with images of novelties, gave me hope that my lot would be happier in the end, if God spared my life. All this was decided eight days before my departure, and I was in quite a hurry to pursue all matters that were necessary. 5

It is pleasing to be able to record that in the end Webber succeeded in distinguishing himself with images of novelties he had seen and drawn in the Pacific, but it occurred only years after the voyage and only by his carefully cultivating the market for Pacific exotica that developed in Britain following the publication of the official account of the third voyage in 1784. 6 Webber’s Views in the South Seas, were the first of those etched or aquatinted series of prints put out independently by travelling artists to cater for the demand for scenes of the exotic picturesque that became so fashionable during the first half of the nineteenth century. In our catalogue of the artwork of the third voyage Rudiger Joppien and I have itemised and described over four hundred drawings made by Webber that relate to the third voyage. What I should like to do now is consider that body of work as a whole. What kinds of drawings were made? Is there a consistent programme of work being followed? Were there constraints on Webber, and how did they operate?

As to Webber himself there was the hope, innocent enough, as we have seen, that he would eventually be able to distinguish himself with ‘images of novelties’. But he was in Cook’s service and it is to Cook’s perception of the uses that he could make of Webber’s skills that we must turn if we are to understand the visual programme of work undertaken. Cook was above all a navigator and coastal views were the most valuable drawings an artist could make for the purposes of navigation. So Cook asked Webber to make the coastal views that were used to embellish the charts made on the voyage, largely by the young William Bligh. The late R.A. Skelton attributed these views to Bligh himself but a comparison with the original coastal views by Webber now in the British Library indicates clearly enough that they are by Webber not Bligh. That is what one would expect. Cook was a man who made the best use of the talent available. There is in Webber’s coastal views that feeling for atmospheric perspective that he probably gained from working with Aberli as a student in Bern.

Webber’s coastal views have never been fully published, but they will be when the Hakluyt Society completes the three volumes of the Charts and Views of Cook’s Voyages which has been designed to complement The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages. Then, when the historians of science eventually get around to publishing all the original drawings relating to natural history, we shall have the full corpus of visual

material, to complement the comprehensive verbal record compiled by John Beaglehole. Cook’s instructions certainly required him to make natural history drawings. ‘You are . . . carefully to observe the nature of the Soil’, they read, ‘& the produce thereof; the Animals and Fowls that inhabit or frequent it; the Fishes that are to be found in the rivers or upon the Coast, and in what plenty; and, in case there are any, peculiar to such places, to described them as minutely, and to make accurate drawings of them, as you can’. 7 Cook carried out these instructions with the assistance of his surgeons on the Resolution, William Anderson and David Samwell, and William Ellis, surgeon’s second mate on the Discovery. The Print Room of the British Museum holds sixty-five drawings by Webber, mostly of birds and fishes. The British Museum of Natural History holds an album of drawings mosdy of fish by William Ellis, and the Alexander Turnbull includes eight folios of natural history drawings by Ellis.

What is of more than passing interest is that neither on the second or third voyage was Cook required by his instructions to make drawings of plants. Instead he was told to collect specimens of the seeds of‘Trees, Shrubs, Plants, Fruits and Grains peculiar to those Places’ visited. 8 Nevertheless, the Forsters who to some extent were a law unto themselves carried on Banks’s excellent botanical work, George Forster making over 300 plant drawings now in the British Museum (National Flistory). But on the third voyage few drawings of plants were made. Perhaps the Admiralty felt that it would be quicker to bring home specimens than spend an inordinate amount of time on the voyage producing drawings of plants. Not that they were entirely neglected; Webber made a fine drawing of the Kerguelan cabbage (British Library, London) but his general practice was to incorporate curious plants within landscape settings. For on the third voyage the emphasis had moved firmly from drawing plants and animals towards drawing peoples and places. This was not because Cook’s instructions had changed. As to people they had remained constant for all three voyages:

You are likewise to observe the Genius, Temper, Disposition, and Number of the Natives and Inhabitants, where you find any; and to endeavour, by all proper means to cultivate a friendship with them; making them Presents of such Trinkets as you may have on board, and they may like best; inviting them to Traffick; and shewing them every Civility and Regard; but taking care nevertheless not to suffer yourself to be surprised by them ... , 9 There is no requirement here or anywhere else that the native peoples should be drawn, and if the instructions are taken literally Genius, Temper and Disposition would have been difficult to render graphically, except by the most talented of artists and in conditions different from

those that obtained on the voyages. Nevertheless the depiction of indigenous peoples became an increasingly important concern with each voyage. Cook followed his instructions but, as John Beaglehole observed, never felt himself limited by them. ‘A man would never accomplish much in discovery who only stuck to his orders’ Cook had advised his young French correspondent Latouche-Treville. 10 Cook was forty-eight when he embarked on his third voyage in 1776. He had just completed preparing the text of his second voyage for John Douglas his editor. His portait had been painted by Nathanial Dance. He was already the most famous navigator in the world and he must have been aware of it, knew that he had already made history, that on the present voyage he would be making more history and had in John Webber an artist capable of recording it.

It would seem also that he had developed a fairly clear idea how that history, the history of the third voyage, should be presented in publication. While at the Cape in returning to England on the second voyage he had been mortified and distressed by the many inaccuracies in Hawkesworth’s account of his first voyage and by the attitudes attributed to him that were not his. 11 Nor did he appreciate the controversies that had arisen from Hawkesworth’s discussion of the sexual practices and freedoms of Tahitian society. On that issue he had written to John Douglas in quite unequivocal terms, concerning the second voyage: ‘ln short my desire is that nothing indecent may appear in the whole book, and you cannot oblige me more than by pointing out whatever may appear to you as such’. 12 That mean surely that Webber would not be spending much time drawing naked savages in the Pacific even though he may have spent time drawing nude men and women in the life class of the Ecole des Beaux Arts.

The test came early. From 24 to 30 January 1777 the Resolution and Discovery havened in Adventure Bay, Van Diemen’s Land, to wood and water. Twice a party of Tasmanians came out of the woods to greet the woodcutters, ‘without’, Cook recorded, ‘shewing the least mark of fear and with the greatest confidence imaginable, for none of them had any weapons, except one who had in his hand a stick about 2 feet long and pointed at one end. They were quite naked & wore no ornaments, except the large punctures or ridges raised on the skin . . ,’ 13 Webber appears to have made this drawing (Plate 1) to record the second meeting on 29 January:

We had not be[en] long landed before about twenty of them men and boys joined us without expressing the least fear or distrust, some of them were the same as had been with us the day before, but the greater part were strangers. There was one who was much deformed, being humpbacked, he was no less distinguishable by his wit and humour, which he shewed on all occasions and we regretted much that we could not understand him for their language was wholly unintelligible to us . . . Some of these men wore loose round the neck 3 or 4 folds of small Cord which was made

of the fur of some animal, and others wore a narrow slip of the Kanguroo skin tied around the ankle. I gave them a string of Beads and a Medal, which I thought they received with some satisfaction. 14

This was the first occasion on which native peoples had been encountered on the third voyage, and this little known drawing, now in the Naval Library of the Ministry of Defence, London, provides an insight into the subsequent visual programme that was closely followed during the whole third voyage. It is quite an ambitious composition for Webber to have begun so early in the voyage, but is obviously unfinished, and I suspect that it is unfinished because Cook felt that it would not be a suitable subject to be engraved in the official account of his third voyage. There seems to be little doubt that it was drawn on the voyage because Webber included a drawing, under the heading ‘New Holland Van Diemans Land’, in his catalogue of works submitted to the Admiralty on his return, entitled ‘An Interview between Captain Cook and the Natives’. What it would seem Cook did approve of was a drawing of a man and another of a woman of Van Diemen’s Land which would indicate complete nudity without actually representing it. (‘A Man of New Holland’, ‘A Woman of New Holland’, British Library.)

Although the ‘lnterview’ was never completed or engraved, it does foreshadow what might be described as the official Cook/Webber visual art programme for the voyage. Cook is shown meeting the local people in an atmosphere of peace and potential understanding, offering them gifts and the hope of friendship. And as he began so he continued. All of Webber’s developed compositions constructed on the voyage and for the official publication seem to be saying the same thing: the people of the Pacific are indeed Pacific people. They had not always been depicted so peacefully. In Hawkesworth’s Voyages , for example, the first engraving ever to depict Tahitians, though it renders them looking like orientals, shows them engaged in a violent conflict with Captain Wallis’s ships and his guns reducing them to submission (v.l, pi. 21). In Parkinson’s Journal two Australian aborigines are depicted ‘Advancing to Combat’ as Cook landed in Botany Bay, 16 and in the official account of Cook’s second voyage, Hodges had published his painting depicting the violent reception Cook received when he attempted to land at Eromanga in Vanuatu in 1774 (PI. LXII, facing page 46).

Illustrations of this kind were bound to, and did, create controversy. On the second voyage the Forsters, father and son had both been critical of the way in which native peoples were frequently treated by the members of Cook’s crews. They saw themselves as independent, scientific witnesses who, though they greatly respected Cook’s abilities, were not prepared to turn a blind eye to everything that happened.

This itself caused resentment. Some of the tensions that developed on the second voyage are implicitly revealed in George Forster’s A Voyage round the World (1777). After providing a detailed account of Cook’s attempted landing at Eromanga, he wrote:

From his [i.e. Cook’s] account of this unhappy dispute, Mr. Hodges has invented a drawing, which is meant as a representation of his interview with the natives. For my own part, I cannot entirely persuade myself that these people had any hostile intentions in detaining our boat. The levelling of a musket at them, or rather at their chief, provoked them to attack our crew. On our part this manoeuvre was equally necessary; but it is much to be lamented that the voyages of Europeans cannot be performed without being fatal to the nations whom they visit. 17

Comments of this kind aroused the anger of William Wales, the meteorologist on the voyage, a man who felt deeply loyal to Cook whatever the circumstance and was also a good friend on the voyage of William Hodges. In his Remarks on Mr. Forster’s Account of Captain Cook’s last Voyage round the World (1778) he described Forster’s description of the affair at Eromanga as ‘one of the most singular pieces of misrepresentation and detraction that ever dropped from a pen’. 18 This was characteristic of the vitriolic attack which Wales launched on the book as a whole. It caused George Forster in turn to publish his Reply to Mr Wales’s Remarks (1778). Concerning Eromanga he wrote in defence:

I had my information of this transaction from the mouth of Captain Cook and those who accompanied him, within an hour or two after the affair had happened. Suppose it disagreed with Captain Cook’s written journal, and printed narrative, and contained some particulars not advantageous to seamen;—what then? What reasonable man will not believe that Captain Cook would exactly relate the matter in the same order as he meant to write it afterwards; or that he would not, upon cool reflection, suppress in writing the mention of such facts as were unfavourable to his own character, even tho’ they could at most be construed into effects of unguarded heat . . . The officer’s orders [i.e. to shoot] appeared to me unjust and cruel. Let every man judge for himself. So much I know, that the matter was discussed in my hearing, with much warmth, between the officers and Captain Cook, who by no means approved of their conduct at that time. 19

Cook had sailed on the third voyage before Forster’s Voyage and the resulting controversy was in print. But the heat that had arisen on his own ship over the affair at Eromanga may well have discouraged him from permitting Webber to portray violent confrontations with native peoples on the third voyage. Cook had good practical reasons to suppress such images of conflict. Not only did his instructions require him to cultivate friendship with native people, the representation of conflict with natives could have had at that time the most unpredictable results. For the contemporary political situation in England was volatile. A week before Cook sailed out of Plymouth 20 the American colonies had declared their independence. Radical opinion seized upon Cook’s voyages as yet another attempt by England to dominate weaker societies. Cook had been instructed to return Omai to the Society Islands; the social lion had become something of an embarrassment. Satirists had seized upon his presence to satirise the condition of English society. It would be surprising if Cook had not seen and read the most virulent of these satirical broadsides, entitled An Historical Epistle, from Omiah to the Queen of Otaheite; being his Remarks on the English Nation, which appeared in 1775 while he was resident in London between his second and third voyage. Omai is presented in the satire as a critic of European culture and criticises trenchantly those nations who:

... in cool blood premeditately go To murder wretches whom they cannot know. Urg’d by no injury, prompted by no ill In forms they butcher, and by systems kill; Cross o’er the seas, to ravage distant realms, And ruin thousands worthier than themselves.

As a man of Empire, the representative of George 111 and the Admiralty in the South Seas, Cook it may be assumed, was reluctant to allow anything to occur in the visual record of the voyage that could give credence to those kinds of sentiments.

Let us turn to Webber’s second major set piece of the voyage ‘Captain Cook in Ship Cove, Queen Charlotte Sound’ (Plate 2). Cook is presented shaking a Maori chief by the hand, a European mode of greeting that it is unlikely that he would have preferred since he knew well enough that nose rubbing was the traditional Maori greeting. Nor does the scene confirm the written evidence of any of the journals. For, on entering Ship Cove on this occasion Cook found the Maori afraid to come aboard, though many of them knew him well from his previous visits. They were afraid he had come to avenge the massacre of Furneaux’s men, eight of whom had been killed and eaten at Grass Cove nearby, on the previous voyage. With Omai as interpreter however, friendly relations were quickly established with the parties visiting the ships.

Yet there is no evidence that the obvious reading of this composition records an actual event. That is to say Cook did not on this occasion come off his landing boat and go up and shake a Maori chief by the hand. To all accounts the portion of the beach they landed on was unoccupied —a natural precaution in any case —and it was not until a little later that a party of the Maori came and set up some temporary habitations nearby. It is indeed true that friendly relations were established on this occasion quickly enough and this may be credited to Cook’s practical good sense, true too that all we should expect from a record of an historical event rendered in the mode of a history painting is the general spirit of the occasion, not evidence as to what actually occurred. But my point is that in staging the event in this way Webber

is addressing a British, indeed a European audience. Ethnographical information of great interest is being conveyed about the nature of the temporary habitations, the dress and adornment of the Maori, but it is conveyed within the framework of a potentially political message: Cook the friendly voyager meeting his old friends the Maori.

A few months later in Lifuka, Tonga, Webber began another large history set-piece. Cook and his men now intermingle freely with a great crowd of Tongans as they mutually enjoy the boxing and other entertainments prepared for them (Plate 3). The painting may be identified with the work in Webber’s catalogue entitled ‘The manner of receiving, entertaining and making Captain Cook a present of the productions of the Island, on his Arrival at the Happi’.

So it continued throughout the voyage. Everywhere Cook goes in the Pacific his arrival is celebrated by Webber in scenes of joyful reception, in dancing, boxing entertainments, gifting, trading. Nothing must disturb this sense of peacefulness. Even Cook’s own death, the great trauma of the voyage, is not drawn nor will it be included in the official publication. Webber got better at it as the voyage progressed. One of the finest of all John Webber’s drawings surely must be his record of Cook’s meeting with the Chuckchi people of northern Siberia. They were only on that icy peninsula for between two and three hours, yet Webber managed to make a number of delightful drawings on the spot. 22 Naturally suspicious of the newcomers the Chuckchi refused to put down their arms the journals tell us. Except upon one occasion when

a few of them laid them down and danced for Cook and his men. It was that moment of friendship that Webber chose to record in a beautifully balanced composition (Plate 4).

This then is the implicit message of the Cook/Webber programme. Cook is the peacemaker, the philanthropist who is bringing the gifts of civilisation and the values of an exchange economy to the savage peoples of the Pacific. Later, after Cook’s death, the same message is spelt out to all Europe, in the sixty-odd plates, upon which enormous care and attention was spent, that was included in the Atlas to the Official Account.

True, these grand peaceful ceremonies and occasions did occur, they were high points in a long voyage, and we might agree deserved to be recorded for posterity. They were moreover the kinds of events that suited John Webber’s medium. Watercolour drawing and painting with its broad washes of transparent colour, its feeling of amplitude for the breadth and depth of space is an art surely suited to rendering peaceful scenes. So that in this instance we might want to conclude with Marshall McLuhan that the medium is indeed the message. 23 Webber portrayed the truth, but it was a highly selective truth, from which all sense of violence and tension had been removed.

Consider for a moment what a modern television camera crew, with the right to him whatever they chose, might have selected, to send by satellite back to Europe. They might have selected different events than

the boxing and dancing receptions at Tonga for Europeans to remember the visit by. Consider, for example, these incidents recorded by the young midshipman on the Resolution , George Gilbert, concerning the stay at Tonga.

These Indians are very dexterous at thieving and as they were permitted to come on board the ships in great numbers, they stole several things from us. This vice which is very pervilent [prevalent] here, Capt Cook punished in a manner rather unbecoming of an European viz: by cutting off their ears; fireing at them with small shot, or ball, as they were swimming or paddling to the shore and suffering the people (as he rowed after them) to beat them with the oars, and stick the boat hook into them where ever they could hit them; one in particular he punished by ordering one of our people to make two cuts upon his arm to the bone one across the other close below his shoulder; which was an act that I cannot account for otherways than to have proceeded from a momentary fit of anger as it certainly was not in the least premeditated. 24

It was Cook himself who on the previous voyage had named Tonga, the Friendly Islands.

Nothing delights a camera crew so much as a conflagration; so they would have been very busy on Moorea on 9 and 10 October 1777. When the Resolution had left the Cape it must have seemed like, as David Samwell, described it, a ‘second Noah’s ark’. Cook had on board ‘two Horses, two Mares, three Bulls, four Cows, two Calves, fifteen Goats, 30 Sheep, a peacock and a hen, Turkeys, Rabbits, Geese, Ducks and Fowls in great plenty . . . for the purpose of distributing them among the Islands visited.’ 26 This was Cook in the role of philanthropist of the Enlightenment bringing the blessings of civilisation to the Pacific. The livestock was to be distributed to the natives, either as gifts to appropriate chieftains or in the process of trade.

Not every Pacific person understood the conventions of hierarchical gifting or of a market economy. So when one of the Resolution' s fifteen goats was stolen in Moorea, Cook went on a violent punitive mission for two days burning the native houses and destroying all the native canoes his party came in contact with, and did not cease until the goat was returned. ‘The Losses these poor People must have suffer’d would affect them for years to come’ wrote Thomas Edgar, the master of the Discovery. 21 ‘I can’t well account for Capt Cooks proceedings on this occasion; as they were so very different from his conduct in like cases in his former voyages’, 28 wrote young George Gilbert.

Others since Gilbert have attempted to explain Cook’s markedly changed behaviour on the third voyage. The best is that given by Sir James Watt in his masterly essay on the ‘Medical Aspects and Consequences of Cook’s Voyages’. 29 Sir James brings strong evidence to show that Cook on the third voyage was a sick man and suggests that it may well have had the effect of changing his normal pattern of behaviour. I would not question this but it must be said that his

sickness did not curb his aggression when his authority was threatened. It is not my intention here to address the whole question of Cook’s changed behaviour on the third voyage. I do not feel adequately equipped as an historian to attempt it. But I would suggest that those historians who feel they are might address themselves, without wishing to minimise the significance of Sir James Watt’s findings (since historical causation is notoriously multiple rather than singular) to wider, more general, more countervailing forces acting upon Cook’s behaviour and personality during the later months of his life. What I am getting at might be summarised in such phrases as ‘the loss of hope’, ‘an increased cynicism’, ‘familiarity breeds contempt’, ‘power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. By comparison with his contemporaries there need be no doubt that Cook was a wise, extraordinarily gifted and humane commander. But his first duty was to the survival of his crew and the success of his expeditions. That meant, as he saw it, that his word must not be questioned even when it could not be properly understood. When words were not understood only brute action remained.

On setting out on his first voyage in the Endeavour Cook had been given written advice by Lord Morton, the President of the Royal Society. The Society, you will recall, had sponsored the voyage and Cook gave to Morton’s ‘Hints’ a respect second only to his Admiralty instructions. They contained the most detailed set of instructions he ever received on how to treat the native peoples encountered. Morton’s ‘Hints’ enshrined the high hopes of the philosophers of the Enlightenment for an eventual universal brotherhood of mankind under the leadership, it need hardly be said, of European man. Allow me to quote:

Have it still in view that sheding the blood of those people is a crime of the highest nature: 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. Conquest over such people can give no just title; because they could never be the Agressors.

They may naturally and justly attempt to repell intruders, whom they may apprehend are come to disturb them in the quiet possession of their country, whether that apprehension be well or ill founded. Therefore should they in a hostile manner oppose a landing, and kill some men in the attempt, even this would hardly justify firing among them, ’till every other gentle method had been tried. There are many ways to convince them of the Superiority of Europeans . . . 30 That indeed was an Enlightenment vision of hope. But by 1777 Cook was an old Pacific hand who seems to have grown tired in the use of

the many subtle ways in which indigenous people could be convinced of the superiority of Europeans. By 1777 he could cut corners brutally if the occasion arose. There is a sense of disillusion, of a loss of hope. On the first voyage, rather in the spirit of Morton’s ‘Hints’ he had expressed an admiration for the simple life of the Australian aborigines, ‘far . . . happier than we Europeans’. 31 And on the second, in Queen Charlotte Sound, he expressed a fear that his very contact with the Maori, since his first voyage, had degraded them: ‘Such are the consequences of a commerce with Europeans and what is still more to our Shame civilised Christians, we debauch their Morals already too prone to vice and we interduce among them wants and perhaps diseases which they never before knew and which serves only to disturb that happy tranquillity they and their fore Fathers had in joy’d’. 32 Yet on the third voyage, with his horses, cows, bulls and goats, etc. he was still playing the role of an official philanthropist of the Enlightenment seeking to raise Pacific people from their savage state to a higher level of civilisation. Did the growing realisation of the contradiction between the philanthropist role he was required to play and his actual experience make him increasingly cynical and brutalise his behaviour? By the third voyage he had become convinced that he and other European voyagers were bringing venereal and other diseases to the Pacific. In such cases of guilt it is not unusual to blame the victims. In Queen Charlotte Sound he wrote into his journal, ‘A connection with Women I allow because I cannot prevent it . . . more men are betrayed than saved by having connection with their women, and how can it be otherwise sence all their View are selfish without the least mixture of regard or attachment whatever . . .’ 33

The point I wish to make is this. Cook, in his lifetime had absorbed enough of the hopes and expectancies of the Enlightenment to become aware by his third voyage that his mission to the Pacific involved him in a profound and unresolvable contradiction. In order to treat native peoples in the enlightened way that Morton had exhorted and to survive he had to establish markets among people who possessed little if any notions of a market economy. The alternative was to use force from the beginning as the Spaniards and Portuguese had done, and eighteenth-century Englishmen prided themselves that they could behave more humanely than Spaniards. There was nothing new about the working methods used for establishing more or less humane contact with primitive people, even when they were, as the ancient Greeks said, stubborn. You began by gifting. The Greeks had borne gifts all the way down the Red Sea Coast to the fish-eaters and others of the Arabian seas. 34 It was the acknowledged way of expanding a commercial empire. And if you wanted wood, water and fresh food at each new landfall on a long voyage, without immediately resorting to violence, there was no other

way. So you had to establish markets, at the side of the ship, or on the beaches, as in Webber’s fine painting of the market Cook established at Nomuka, in Tonga (‘The Harbour at Annamooka’, British Library). To establish one’s peaceful intentions one began by gifting. The nature of gifting was more deeply embedded in primitive survival economies than the nature of property or the nature of a free market. So Cook took with him on his third voyage thousands of articles from Matthew Boulton’s factory Soho in Birmingham; axes, chisels, saws, metal buttons, beads, mirrors etc., as presents, and for trading. 35 The year Cook sailed (1776) was the year in which the principles of free trade, of the universal benefits of an international market economy was given its classic expression in Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and it is of passing interest to note that the same publishers, Strahan and Cadell, published the official account of Cook’s Second Voyage a year later. As I mentioned in another context Cook was Adam Smith’s first and perhaps greatest global agent. 36 He opened a new third of the world to free enterprise.

Smith, the theorist of perfect competition, argued that market prices established themselves by the natural laws of supply and demand; if there was any control at all exercised by this beautifully delicate mechanism it was best described as wrought by ‘an invisible hand’. 37 But Smith drew his conclusions primarily from a study of developed market economies that had been in existence in Europe from ancient times. Cook, the practical man, had the grave problem of insisting upon the rules and conventions where they did not exist or existed at the fringe rather than the centre of the primitive polity. There were of course markets in the Pacific before Cook, but at various stages of development, from the complete non-existence of the concept among the natives of Van Diemen’s Land 38 to the astute Indians of Nootka Sound, of whom Cook wrote in chagrin on one occasion that it seemed that ‘there was not a blade of grass that did not possess a separate owner’. 39

So in the Pacific Cook had to play at being, as best he could, Adam Smith’s God. If the laws of property essential to a free market economy were transgressed and a goat stolen an act of the god must descend upon the whole community. If a law is not understood as a natural law the best thing to do, if you possess the power of a god, is to make it seem like one. What I would suggest then is that Cook on his third voyage became increasingly aware in his grand role as Enlightenment Man that he was involved in contradictions that he could not resolve. He had come to the Pacific to spread the blessings and advantages of civilised Europe. What the locals most wanted was the ironware that for so many centuries had made Europe powerful, what Cook’s young sailors wanted even more than they wanted fresh food was the bodies of the native

women, and it was the one universal product most often offered, most readily available. So Cook became increasingly aware that wherever he went he was spreading the curses much more liberally than the benefits of European civilisation. The third voyage records not only his death but before that his loss of hope. For what Adam Smith’s free market economy offered the South Seas was not really the difference between civilisation and savagery but the difference between exploitation and extermination. Those peoples who were sufficiently advanced to grasp the potential advantages of a market economy survived to become the colonial servants of their European masters, those who could not, because of the primitive nature of their societies, like the natives of Tierra del Fuego and Van Diemen’s Land, in the fullness of time of Adam Smith’s invisible god were exterminated; though in a few cases their part-European descendants lived on to cherish the sad tale.

The art of John Webber cannot of course speak to us of such things except by its very silences. And for what he does give us we should be grateful. It is an Arcadian Pacific and for the most part, a pacific Pacific; a new region of the world to be desired by Europeans, sought out, converted to the true religion, rendered subservient, exploited. It is epitomised in Webber’s portrait of Poedua, the daughter of Orio, chief of Raiatea (Plate 5). Here Webber builds upon that image of the Pacific that the preceding voyages had so rapidly and so successfully fashioned. The Pacific as young, feminine, desirable and vulnerable, an ocean of desire. To her, during the next century, all the nations of Europe will come.

Now in all probability, though it cannot be established entirely beyond doubt, Webber painted Poedua’s portrait during the five days during which she was held hostage in the Discovery. Raiatea was Cook’s last port of call in the Society Islands before he sailed for the cold waters of the north Pacific. Two of the crew, enchanted by the island life, decided to desert. Cook, by now well versed in the art of taking hostages, had Orio, his daughter Poedua and his son-in-law lured into Captain Clerke’s cabin and a guard mounted, holding them prisoner. They should not be released but taken to Europe, old Orio was informed,

unless he activated himself in getting the deserters back to Cook. It took five days.

Captain Clerke, who like William Anderson, also secretely longed to stay in the Society Islands instead of going to their deaths from tuberculosis in the cold northern seas, 40 describes what occurred:

I order’d some Centinels at the Cabin Door, and the Windows to be strongly barred, then told them, we would certainly all go to England together, if their friends did not procure their release by bringing back the 2 Deserters. My poor friends at first were a good deal struck with surprise and fear, but they soon recollected themselves, got the better of their apprehensions & were perfectly reconciled to their Situation

.. . The News of their Confinement of course was blaz’d instantaneously throughout the Isle; old Oreo was half mad, and within an hour afterwards we had a most numerous congregation of Women under the Stern, cutting their Heads with Sharks Teeth and lamenting the Fate of the Prisoners, in so melancholy a howl, as render’d the Ship while it lasted, which was 2 or 3 Hours, a most wretched Habitation; nobody cou’d help in some measure being affected by it; it destroyed the spirits of the Prisoners altogether, who lost all their Chearfulness and joined in this cursed dismal Howl, I made use of every method I cou’d suggest to get them away, but all to no purpose,

there they wou’d stand and bleed and cry, till their Strength was exhausted and they cou’d act the farce no longer. When we got rid of these Tragedians, I soon recover’d my Friends and we set down to Dinner together very chearfully. 41 Whether you view the affair as a Pacific farce or as a Greek tragedy it is not difficult to imagine how the camera crew of say a not particularly friendly nation might have recorded the scene. Everything points to the fact that so far as the visual events of the voyage were concerned Webber was setting out quite deliberately to construct a peaceful image of the Pacific, and of the peaceable relations of its peoples with the voyagers. Even when he drew portraits; for example, just as they left the Society Islands Webber drew a portrait of a Chief of Bora Bora, with his lance, but when he made the finished drawing he removed the lance. (British Library).

After Cook’s death the apparent desire for a suppression of all scenes of violence and conflict continues in the engraving of scenes of the voyages published in the Atlas of the official account. Even a face that could recall a scene of great violence is not included. We know that Webber painted a portrait in oils of Kahura, 42 the Maori chieftain who was responsible for the killing and eating of Captain Furneaux’s men at Grass Cove on the second voyage. Cook established beyond any reasonable doubt that Kahura was responsible for the massacre but instead of taking revenge, he developed a respect for his courage and the confidence Kahura placed in him. 43 Dr. Joppien has succeeded in identifying one of the portraits now in the Dixson Library, Sydney as a portrait of Kahura. 44 It is of interest that a portrait of Kahura was among those omitted in the list selected for publication in the Atlas. Perhaps the portrait of a notorious cannibal, however much admired by Cook, was not considered suitable for the official account of the voyage.

Nor was a representation of Cook’s own death. And when Webber made his famous drawing (Plate 6) which was later engraved by Bartolozzi and published separately in 1784, Webber presented the great navigator in the role of a peacemaker holding out a hand gesturing to his men in the Resolution's pinnace to stop firing at the enraged Hawaiians. If my analysis is correct Cook on his third voyage, at least so far as the visual record was concerned, was constructing an image of himself as a man of peace in the Pacific, a man universally welcomed there by peaceable people. Representations of violent encounters were suppressed or ignored. He could not have known as he left the island of Bora Bora that he would discover another great Polynesian society in the north Pacific unknown to Europeans and that there he would be received as the very incarnation of a god of peace, as the returning god Lono, the god of carnival, of the Makahiki festival. 45 So it was that Cook was received, as few men have been, into an alien culture

in a fashion that accorded with his own personal and most innermost desire; and the myth of Cook as the hero of peace and the harbinger of civilisation in the Pacific was sustained in Europe and the Pacific long after his death. But it was myth not reality. The reality lay in the hidden contradictions latent in establishing a free market economy in the Pacific. To do that Cook had taken with him iron from Matthew Boulton’s Birmingham factory that when fashioned into daggers was used to cut him down on Kealakekua beach. For when Cook, this man of peace attempted for the last time to take a Pacific chieftain hostage dealing once again in the coercive market in which captives are exchanged for stolen goods —the hidden hand of Kukailimoku, the Hawaiian god of war struck him and four of his marines down. Cook had committed the fatal error of returning to the island when peace no longer reigned there, not even in myth. The course of history is littered with such ironies.

The present lecture has drawn heavily upon the combined research of Dr Rudiger Joppien and of mine from volume three of The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987), for many of the facts presented. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Joppien for his recent research on the early life and training of John Webber. In other cases where I have drawn directly on Dr. Joppien’s personal research this is mentioned in the notes. Apart from that the opinions expressed are my own.

The text of the inaugural Founder’s Lecture delivered in the National Library’s auditorium on 15 September 1987.

REFERENCES 1 For he also wrote ‘he did his best, but he had a sort of modern fashion-artist’s devotion to length of body and leg, a manner rather than a style, and that, in a producer of documentary drawings, is rather dismaying’. On the issues thus raised see B. Smith, Style, Information and Image (Christchurch, 1988), in the press. 2 Memoirs of Thomas Jones, Walpole Society, 32 (1951), 37. 3 For a detailed account of Webber’s early life and training see R. Joppien, in R. Joppien and B. Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, 111 (Melbourne, 1987). 4 Admiralty to Cook, 24 June 1777, quoted in The Journals of Captain James Cook, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (London, 1967), 111, 1507. 5 Joppien and Smith, 111, 223. 6 For a more detailed discussion of this point see Joppien, in Joppien and Smith, 111, 189-96. 7 Cook, Journals, 111, ccxxiii. 8 ibid. 9 ibid. cf. Cook’s Instructions for the first voyage, Journals, I, cclxxx, and for the second, Journals, 11, clxviii. 10 ‘Car je soutiens que celui ne fait qu’executer des ordres ne fera jamais grandes figures dans les decouvertes’, quoted in Cook , Journals, 11, 695. 11 SeeJ. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook ( London, 1974), pp. 439-40. 12 British Library, Egerton MSS 2180, fol. 3, quoted by Beaglehole in Cook , Journals, 11, cxlvi.

13 Cook, Journals, 111, 52. 14 Cook, Journals, 111, 54. 15 See R. Joppien in Joppien and Smith, 111, p. 193 et al. The remainder of this lecture developes the implications of this initial insight of Dr. Joppien. 16 S. Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (London, 1773), PL xxvii (fp 134). 17 G. Forster, A Voyage Round the World (London, 1777), 11, 257-58. 18 W. Wales, Remarks, p. 71. 19 G. Forster, Reply to Mr. Wales’s Remarks, p. 34. 20 On 12 July 1776. 21 On Omai in general see E. H. McCormick, Omai Pacific Envoy (Auckland, 1977). 22 See Joppien and Smith, 111, catalogue 3.272, 3.273, 3.274. 23 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London, Sphere Books, 1967), pp. 15-30. 24 Captain Cook’s Final Voyage: The Journal of Midshipman George Gilbert, ed. Christine Holmes (London, 1982), pp. 33-34. 25 Cook, Journals, 111, 995. 26 Gilbert, p. 20. 27 Edgar in Cook’s Journals, 111, 232 sn. 28 Gilbert, p. 47. 29 In Captain James Cook and His Times, ed. Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston (Vancouver, 1979). 30 Quoted in Cook, Journals, I, 514. 31 Cook , Journals, I, 399. 32 Cook , Journals, 11, 174-75. 33 Cook, Journals, 111, 61-62. 34 See The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, ed. G.W.B. Huntingford (London, 1980). 35 Cook , Journals, 111, 1492. 36 B. Smith, ‘Cook’s Posthumous Reputation’ in Captain James Cook and his Times, p. 179. 37 ‘He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by

an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention,’ Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, eds. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd (Oxford, 1976), I, 456. 38 ‘They received everything we gave them without the least appearance of satisfaction . . . they either retrieved it or threw it away without so much as tasting it’. Cook in Adventure Bay, Journals, 111, 52. 39 Cook , Journals, 111, 306. 40 The story is told by James Burney first lieutenant on the Discovery who had it from Anderson. It is recounted in Burney’s Chronological History of North-Eastern Voyages of Discovery (London, 1819), p. 233-34 and quoted in J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (London, 1974), p. 568-69. 41 Clerke in Cook, Journals, 111, 1317-18. 42 See his manuscript ‘Catalogue of Drawings and Painting in Oyl by Mr Webber’ under‘Portraits in Oyl Colour. New Zealand. Kahowre a Chief. National Library of Australia, Canberra. 43 Cook, Journals, 111, 69. 44 Joppien and Smith, 111, 19, 285. 45 On these dark and profound matters of ethnohistory see Marshal Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Reality (Ann Arbor, 1980) and Greg Dening, ‘Sharks that walk on the Land: the Death of Captain Cook’, Meanjin, 4 (1982), 427-37.