Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Introduction: Articulating Empire's Unstable Zones
- I Fantasy, Wonder and Mimicry: Proto-Ethnography from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
- II Distance in Question: Translating the Other in the Eighteenth Century
- 5 Domestication and Recognition of the Other in John Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina (1709)
- 6 The (He)art of First Encounter at Tahiti: Samuel Wallis's Conflicts of Interest (1767)
- 7 Distance and Proximity in James Cook's First Voyage around the World (1768–1771)
- 8 Walking in the Contact Zone: Georg Forster and the Peripatetic Mode of Exploration (1768–1777)
- 9 The Disorder of Things: Empiricism and the Cartographic Enterprise, or, the Observations of Samuel Hearne (1795) and Alexander Mackenzie (1801)
- III Stereotypes Undermined: Shifting the Self in the Nineteenth Century
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
7 - Distance and Proximity in James Cook's First Voyage around the World (1768–1771)
from II - Distance in Question: Translating the Other in the Eighteenth Century
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Introduction: Articulating Empire's Unstable Zones
- I Fantasy, Wonder and Mimicry: Proto-Ethnography from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
- II Distance in Question: Translating the Other in the Eighteenth Century
- 5 Domestication and Recognition of the Other in John Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina (1709)
- 6 The (He)art of First Encounter at Tahiti: Samuel Wallis's Conflicts of Interest (1767)
- 7 Distance and Proximity in James Cook's First Voyage around the World (1768–1771)
- 8 Walking in the Contact Zone: Georg Forster and the Peripatetic Mode of Exploration (1768–1777)
- 9 The Disorder of Things: Empiricism and the Cartographic Enterprise, or, the Observations of Samuel Hearne (1795) and Alexander Mackenzie (1801)
- III Stereotypes Undermined: Shifting the Self in the Nineteenth Century
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In 1766 the Admiralty and the Royal Society jointly planned an expedition to the South Seas. If the Admiralty had territorial ambitions, and hoped to establish the existence of the mythical terra australis incognita, the continent that many Europeans thought existed as a counterweight to the Northern hemisphere's continental masses, what came across as the apparent aim of the exploration was the Royal Society's scientific mission to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, due on 3 June 1769.
Captain James Cook was appointed to command Her Majesty's Bark the Endeavour, and the expedition left Plymouth on 26 August 1768, with official instructions, both from the Admiralty and the Royal Society, underlining the importance of astronomical measurements and geographical exploration, as well as the necessity of establishing contact with the indigenous peoples. The island of Tahiti was both the place where the scientific calculation of the distance from the earth to the sun was to be carried out, and an opportunity for supposedly easy commerce with distant populations who had already been in contact with Europeans. The ship was then to sail further west and south, in search of the hoped-for continent, taking this opportunity to draw maps of New Zealand, at the risk of entering into contact with native tribes as yet unknown to European explorers.
Cook himself did not write the narrative through which his exploits came to be known in 1773. John Hawkesworth, a writer of miscellaneous essays, plays, stories and journalism, and a one-time friend of Dr Johnson, was commissioned by the Admiralty to edit the explorer's papers, a work for which Hawkesworth is said to have received the huge sum of £6,000. Hawkesworth's text was therefore the authorized edition of Cook's logbook. In this paper, references to Hawkes-worth's text will be made through dates of entry, as they appear on the ‘South Seas’ online edition of the 1773 official record held by the National Library of Australia and references to Cook's own logbook will be to Beaglehole's 1968 edition.
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- Information
- British Narratives of ExplorationCase Studies on the Self and Other, pp. 83 - 96Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014