5. Brushed with fame
Museological investments in the Cook voyage collections
LISSANT BOLTON
Some time ago, I typed ‘Captain Cook’ into the Google search bar and hit enter. Google responded by locating ‘about’ 16 million sites in 0.18 seconds. I am not sure that fame can be accurately measured by internet mentions, but the number of sites is impressive. Perhaps some of the sites refer to what the art historian Joan Kerr used to describe as ‘imaginary Cooks’ — the references, images and ideas about Cook which people have but which don't accord with what we know about his life and achievements.1 He has come to stand for a number of related things — the discovery of Australia and the Pacific, the ‘cure’ for scurvy, the Enlightenment ideal of a man of science — but by no means all the ideas people have about him are accurate. Perhaps especially in Australia and New Zealand, Cook stands for a great deal more than the events of his own life.
Cook's popular importance can be measured by another slightly bizarre criterion, the number of objects purportedly associated with his death. The Australian Museum in Sydney has for many years held an arrow said to be made of Cook's leg bone. In response to pressure from the Captain Cook Society, the museum had the bone tested, and concluded in 2004 that the arrow was from the north-west coast of America, and the bone in question was most probably antler. The research process was written up in New Scientist, and the final conclusion discussed in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph, and on the BBC news website. Similarly, in 2003, an early nineteenth-century gold-mounted walking stick sold at auction in Edinburgh for £153,000 sterling. As Steven Hooper discusses, in 2003 the normal price for such an object would have been £500-800: this high sale price was achieved because an engraved collar around the top of the stick read ‘Made of the spear which killed Captain Cook’.2 The Bishop Museum holds a swordfish dagger which, Adrienne Kaeppler comments, has ‘a good claim to having been used in Cook's death’.3 Several other objects have such claims attached to them, some of which involve a significant degree of improbability.4
Hooper's observation is that objects associated with Cook ‘appear to possess the quality of holy relics’5 and that, as with other holy relics, the absence of any real evidence of connection to Cook's death doesn't much diminish that status. This adds an odd angle to the infamous anthropological debate between Gananath Obeyesekere and Marshall Sahlins about Cook's death, which turns on the question of whether the Hawaiians who killed Cook did so because they saw him as being an incarnation of the god Lono.6 Divinity seems in this sense to dog Cook. One has only to think of the 1794 Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg engraving depicting his apotheosis — taken straight to heaven in clouds of glory — to see that this kind of thinking has also been attached to Cook in the European imagination almost from the beginning (see page 81). In Polynesian thought, as Nicholas Thomas puts it, ‘divinity and humanity [were] always shaded together’.7 High-ranking Polynesians were sometimes considered to be descended from the gods and could, at times, embody them. Contemporary Western popular opinion today does not deify Cook, but he towers above the other people who took part in the voyages — like Johann Reinhold and Georg Forster — and his popular reputation accords him a remarkable perfection of character. This is not the personification of a god but, as Thomas also comments, ‘the personification of British imperial charity’.8
The last century or so has seen the rise and rise of what might be described as global celebrity culture. Fame has become a kind of capital which people and institutions use to achieve social and financial objectives. Celebrities endorse products and support causes; even US presidents are not immune to making use of (or being) celebrities to build their public legitimacy. The practices of celebrity endorsement are becoming so habitual that historical figures are beginning to be treated the same way. Even the British Museum — which, with some 5 million visitors annually, hardly needs to tout for business — has taken this approach. In 2002, for example, the museum used the Queen of Sheba as a hook for an exhibition about ancient Yemen: the glamour of her name lending appeal to an otherwise abstruse topic.9 In the cut and thrust of contemporary media, known names attract attention.
For museums with Pacific and Australian collections, Cook's fame has a particular resonance and a particular utility. His name is often used to endorse exhibitions about the Pacific. It seems to me that this is not a straightforward or simple usage. Rather, the relationship between Cook, ‘his’ collections and his reputation has some complex interdependencies. In this paper I discuss these relationships in the specific context of museums. This is not in any real sense a paper about Cook at all. His achievements, and the marvellous collections and records made on his voyages, all largely pass this paper by: those ‘imaginary Cooks’ that interested Kerr are more the subject of this paper than the real man and the collections.
Fame and Captain Cook
The proliferation of objects purportedly connected to Cook's death reflects on the significance of that event in popular imagination. Had he not died, but sailed home to England, his fame might have been diminished by the ordinariness of age and infirmity. His death at the hands of Hawaiians made him a martyr in the cause of European scientific exploration. As Bernard Smith observes, his death ‘propelled his memory far beyond the level of mere fame to those exalted realms of the human imagination where only saints, heroes and martyrs dwell’.10 It was also propelled there by what Smith describes as a ‘conscious heroising process by academicians, poets and artists whose imaginations had been gripped by the magnitude of his achievement’.11 This involved a focus on Cook as a hero of the Enlightenment, as a plain man of science whose explorations ‘respected the rights of humanity’.12 Smith points out that ‘despite the religious implications,’ apotheosis, the transformation of heroes into gods, was ‘a popular visual trope by which the Enlightenment sought to venerate famous men’.13 De Loutherbourg's Apotheosis of Captain Cook is thus part of a wider tradition, but Cook's apotheosis seems to have been more sustained than that of other Enlightenment heroes.
The popular understanding of historical figures changes over time, as public values change: Cook's status today is somewhat different. For nearly two centuries the ceremonies he performed to take possession of new lands in the name of the British sovereign constituted him as a kind of founding father of British colonies, a British empire hero.14 His actions made him the the subject of many a classroom history; in the last several decades they have also made him the object of criticism from Indigenous groups reclaiming their rights to land and identity. His fame is perhaps particularly a British Commonwealth matter.
Fame tends to have a simplifying effect. Specifically, it tends to attach to individuals rather than groups. The machinery of the media focuses less on groups than on single individuals, even where, in fact, they are part of a team (of footballers) or a family (like the British royal family). One of the notable features of Cook's public fame has always been the focus on him as an individual. Undoubtedly a leader and a man of striking personal qualities, his voyages were nevertheless team efforts, in which many individuals collaborated on a single project. The products of the voyages, the written records, paintings and drawings, the collections, were all made by a group of people, not by Cook himself alone. Very commonly, however, Cook is made to stand for the group, and the others, the officers, seamen and men of science, are far less well known. The collections made on his voyages are commonly described as ‘Cook collections’ while, in fact, the objects were acquired by a whole range of expedition members, for a whole range of diverse reasons. Indeed, not many objects can be definitively associated with Cook himself.
This process of simplification also means that Cook is very commonly made to stand for all early European exploration in the Pacific. It is widely believed that he was the first European to sail the Pacific (leaving the achievements of Magellan and others to obscurity). It is also widely believed that he was the European discoverer of most of the island groups in the ocean, and the discoverer of the continent of Australia as well. These mythologies about Cook occur in the Pacific too. In Melanesia, perhaps as a result of United Kingdom and Australian primary school curricula used there, he is widely regarded as the first white man who visited the islands. He is more trope than history, a way of talking about the coming of white people rather than as a matter of specific events. I have several times heard people from diverse islands in the Vanuatu archipelago speak about ’taem Kapten Kuk i bin kam soa (when Captain Cook came ashore), whether or not, in fact, Cook ever landed on the island in question. In the 1990s, the Papua New Guinean artist Matthias Kauage painted a number of pictures of Cook in a ship visiting Papua New Guinea although, again, the Endeavour made only one brief visit to the coast of what is now West Papua.
One of the functions attributed to contemporary celebrities is that of the ‘familiar stranger’, a figure not physically to hand who yet seems somehow present.15 People have what Graeme Turner describes as ‘para-social relations’ with celebrities: ‘that is interactions which occur across a significant social distance — with people “we don't know”’.16 It strikes me that this status, this identification as a ‘familiar stranger’, is a crucial aspect of the way in which people, in thinking about the Pacific, often reach for the idea of Cook. A known figure, he, in his travels across the ocean, can act as a kind of intermediary with the far-different societies he encountered there. His reputed steady reasonableness mediates the strangeness of those societies for the ‘Western’ public. This is all the more the case because the voyages were so comprehensive in their reach — visiting the great majority of island groups across the region. Cook is the familiar stranger who can introduce us to the whole Pacific. For Melanesians like Kauage, he is perhaps the ‘familiar stranger’ who heralds the transformations of the European incursion.
Museums
Cook's popular fame today is partly constructed through and by museums, and through the collections made on his voyages. Museums can and do influence public life and understanding as they present information, ideas and perspectives to the visitor. They both reflect the preoccupations of society and, on occasion, influence public opinion. Certain exhibitions, such as Te Maori, (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1984 — Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, 1987) have significantly altered public understandings.17 At the same time, the construction of museum exhibitions is a function of the essentially hybrid nature of museums themselves. Museums stand at an intersection between many different professions and perspectives. Public institutions that draw on additional commercial funding, contemporary museums employ academics, Indigenous representatives, educators, conservators, designers and administrators, and ask them to jointly deliver accessible accounts of interesting subjects. These accounts are usually presented as if they have a single author, the institution itself.
The underlying hybridity of museums creates a fertile environment, but not necessarily an easy one. As anyone who has ever worked in a museum knows, museums are quite often a ferment of personalities, convictions, disputes and politics. An exhibition is often a compromise: a negotiated settlement of deeply felt and opposing convictions held by people with diverse specialisations and priorities. This is all the more the case because the role and purpose of museums has changed, especially in the last 50 years. If, in the 1950s and 60s, museums offered an educational opportunity to their visitors and expected them to measure the value of the experience by what they learnt, museums are now called upon to compete with many other forms of entertainment and to measure their overall success by the number of their visitors.
The increasing pressure to measure success in visitor numbers adds a new complexity to this hybridity. Marketing, audience evaluation and commercial considerations are more and more influential in determining what an exhibition covers. Front-end evaluation — which seeks to assess before the event what its likely impact will be — poses a particular problem to curators. It is hard to get a good response from a prospective public to an exhibition on an unfamiliar topic — like ancient Yemen, perhaps. Museums frequently use something familiar to draw people in, hoping then to lead them on to enjoy a less well-known subject. Dinosaurs, mummies and celebrities (the Queen of Sheba), are all used by museums to attract public interest.
In fact, this is a process of establishing value. Collecting has been succinctly defined as ‘the selecting, gathering, and keeping of objects of subjective value’.18 Exhibiting collections is the process of obtaining wider agreement to that attribution of subjective value. Making a collection is usually the responsibility of curators. Their decisions often rest on academic understandings of the collection subject area — of Australian history, say, or of ornithology. ‘Subjective value’ in museum collection-making is generally constituted by the agreed principles of the relevant discipline. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, exhibiting a collection requires a quite different construction of value, which is to say, enough members of the public have to agree that the objects displayed are worth seeing in order to make the exhibition feasible.
For art galleries, the value of a collection is created, at least in part, by institutional inclusion. The very fact that an art gallery chooses to display a painting attributes value to it, and the public often assents to that. Other museums need to persuade visitors of the value of the objects they exhibit. To do that, there must first be agreement within the institution about the nature of the objects’ value, and then the terms on which the public is enjoined to value them have to be developed and agreed. This is sometimes achieved merely by assertion, by using exhibition titles like ‘masterpieces’ or ‘treasures’, and by writing marketing copy that uses words like ‘unique’ and ‘unparalleled’. Similarly, a museum may trade on the idea that something has never been displayed before (and may never be again). A 2005 exhibition about Persia at the British Museum was titled Forgotten Empire both to signal this kind of rarity, but also to give permission to the public to feel ignorant about the subject matter of the display. Celebrity endorsement is yet another such strategy, what might be termed the ‘Queen of Sheba effect’. It is certainly the case that Cook's fame is the hook that managers, educators and publicists tend to reach for when Pacific collections are mentioned.
This use of celebrity status is one way in which I can understand the frequent reference to Cook in any exhibition about the Pacific. In 2006, I curated a temporary exhibition about eastern Polynesia for the British Museum. This exhibition, called Power and Taboo, was not about European voyages or encounters with the Pacific, but about Polynesian cosmology. Specifically it was about the way in which Polynesians managed the powerful presence of many gods in their daily environment through practices and concepts summed up in the word tapu (or kapu), a word rendered in English as ‘taboo’. The exhibition exhibited objects that had been collected and images made between 1760 and 1860, including resources from Cook's voyages, but including far more material collected by other early voyagers and settlers, like the London Missionary Society. During the planning process for this exhibition, staff working in interpretation, editing, marketing, management and elsewhere suggested that the exhibition be framed in terms of Cook. In particular, many proposed that Cook be mentioned in the introductory panel.
The proposal to name Cook in the opening panels of the exhibition results from a sense that Pacific cultures are unfamiliar territory for many people. The Queen of Sheba phenomenon can in this sense be understood as a quite reasonable attempt to find a known point of entry into material which might otherwise seem strange and alien. This is the familiar stranger who provides a point of entry into an unknown context. Cook ‘stands for’ eighteenth-century Pacific culture in the same way that Livingstone ‘stands for’ the dark heart of Africa — whatever that might actually mean. Cook is a drawcard in and of himself.
The British Museum did name Cook in a 1998 temporary exhibition about Maori culture that was developed in consultation with Maori advisers. The exhibition included a number of objects collected on Cook's voyages, and the introductory panel to the exhibition referred both to Cook's collections and to items donated by an early governor of New Zealand, Sir George Grey.19 John Bevan Ford, a Maori artist who advised the museum on the exhibition, wrote to the curator:
Captain Cook was an English and European navigator of great renown, but he is not a Maori of high standing. To highlight him or his collection in an exhibition of Maori works is to subtly change the emphasis away from a Maori event, toward a European perspective.20
Bevan Ford made his own gesture of appropriation — and blessing — when, as artist in residence at the British Museum in connection with this exhibition, he produced an image of a Maori cloak floating protectively over the former Museum of Mankind and the British Museum. In the Thames, as an answer to Cook's voyages in the Pacific, he placed the canoe of the legendary Maori voyager Kupe.
The fame of objects
Not many museum objects are internationally famous — the Mona Lisa is perhaps the most globally well-known — but many museums operate with the concept of ‘iconic objects’, that is, items granted an individual identity and considered worthy of special display techniques which surround them with a halo of importance. The most famous objects often have personal names which are unique to the object and widely known. The British Museum treats its Rapa Nui (Easter Island) stone statue as an iconic object, and displays it in a key location. The statue has a personal name given to it by islanders when it was collected: Hoa Hakananai‘a. The name is engraved on the plinth on which it has stood since it entered the museum in the late 1860s. It is by this name that the statue is known both within and without the museum: books published about it have that name as their title.21
If some objects have personal names, others have collective titles. Sometimes these names identify them to the holding institution — the Göttingen mourner's costume — referring to object types of which there may be other examples in other institutions. Then there are names which are generic, in that they are applied to a group of objects — the Lewis chessmen, the Cook collections. Last of all there are the many many objects that have no personal name but only an identifying number, remembered by no one. Without a personal name, objects are rarely identified in public consciousness. Naming facilitates fame: it grants objects individuality and, as I have suggested earlier, individuality is a critical aspect of the simplifying construction of fame and celebrity.
Individually naming objects facilitates an interest in them that enables them to be known about in depth. An object with an individual name can be more easily researched and more successfully published. More generic names can have a limiting effect. Especially where the generic name relates to the collector, there is a danger that the object can become more famous for who collected it than for its longer history. This is a case of being ‘brushed with fame’ — of being more famous for an association than for a whole identity. The interesting thing about the Cook voyage collections is that I cannot think of a single object from within them that has achieved the highest ranking of individual named status. They may have particular status within the holding institution's own ranking system, but it is their generic name — Cook collection — that grants them distinction.
Cook's collections
The original search for Cook voyage material was initiated by Kaeppler who, in 1969, searching for Tongan material collected at point of first contact with Europeans, found that ‘there was simply no corpus of material documented as of undoubted Cook provenance that I could use’.22 For example, a series of donations of Cook voyage material were made to the British Museum. These included presentations by the Lords of the Admiralty in 1771 and 1775, by Joseph Banks in 1778 and 1780, and by sundry other members of the voyages’ crews in 1780. These donations were not set out in itemised lists, and the museum did not individually number objects in those far-off days. Now, it is difficult to identify which of the objects that were acquired in the eighteenth century came from those voyages.
If we now attribute fame to the objects collected on Cook's voyages, this has a great deal to do with the extent to which these objects reflect to us those moments of first encounter, the beaches that Greg Dening discusses.23 But, as has often been observed, the members of those expeditions did not initially hold these items in high value. Cook himself wrote about ‘the prevailing passion for curiosities’ on the Resolution, but at the same time commented,
the reader will think the ship must be full of such articles by this time, [but] he will be misstaken, for nothing is more Common than to give away what has been collected at one Island for any thing new at a Nother, even if it is less curious, this together with what is distroyed on board after the owners are tired with looking at them, prevents any considerable increase.24
There was, in fact, a trade of curiosities for curiosities, and certain kinds of objects proved to have particular value across the Pacific. Members of Cook's expeditions found red feathers were particularly useful as trade goods. Red is widely regarded as a sacred or special colour across the Pacific, and feathers are highly valued in Polynesia for their association with the gods. Bands of red feathers collected on the visits to Tonga acquired a ‘money-like’ character in transactions on other islands, and islanders in other places, like the Marquesas, were willing to trade things that they themselves considered valuable for them. In his account of the second voyage, Georg Forster observed that the people of the Marquesas islands were not interested in trading for nails or beads, although ribbons, cloth and other trifles ‘were more agreeable’. However, he says ‘some large hogs were purchased for pieces of the mulberry-bark, covered with red feathers, which we had obtained at the island of Amsterdam or Tonga-taboo’.25
This trade of Pacific objects within the Pacific had effects, although it is not now possible to track many of them. One such possible effect can be seen in a small female figure from the Society Islands now held in the British Museum. The original collection records for the figure are lost but it is known to date from the eighteenth century. The cap and skirt the figure wears are made from Tongan feathered basketry, something like the feathered barkcloth traded for pigs in the Marquesas. Hooper suggests this basketry may have been brought to the Society Islands by Cook's ships. At the time, it was the feathers and the basketry, not the ship on which it travelled, which was important to the figure's maker. Now, the suggestion that the figure may have this indirect association with Cook (whether or not this can be proved), greatly enhances its interest and value. The brush with fame adds importance.
Once they reached London at the end of each voyage, the voyage collections were received with tremendous interest. Indeed, the Cook voyage collections are credited with establishing public interest in ethnographic collections in London, and as doing so precisely because they could be personalised to the expeditions, and to Cook's death. The South Seas Room at the British Museum, first planned in 1775, became a major public draw. John Mack comments that ‘it is perhaps strange that the last part of the globe to become known to the Western world should have been the first in the British Museum to be set up with a specific geographic and cultural reference,’ and attributes the installation of that room to the influence of Banks, who was a long-time British Museum trustee.26 Ironically, I have made strategic reference to the tremendous popularity of the South Seas Room — which was sustained well into the nineteenth century — in proposals for the installation of a Pacific Gallery at the British Museum.
If an association with Cook adds to an object's value or status in museum terms, the deployment of those objects in exhibitions both contributes to and also alters Cook's fame. Joe Moran argues for literary celebrities that ‘the literary texts themselves play a part in this system of celebrity production because of the way they address, mediate and complement already existing meanings. The literary celebrity is at least partly produced by their own writing — and each new piece of writing adds to and interacts with those that have gone before’.27 The analogy with exhibitions is not exact, but nevertheless, each new deployment of Cook collection material in an exhibition modifies popular understandings of Cook. Exhibitions have a shorter-term impact than books, but they can bring about changes in popular perception. Exhibition catalogues can have lasting significance.
Most notable among Cook catalogues is Kaeppler's own catalogue of her 1978 Bishop Museum exhibition of Cook voyage material, ’Artificial Curiosities’.28 Specifically, it potentially shifts the association between Cook and the discovery of the east coast of Australia, by contextualising that in terms of his wider engagement with the Pacific. Kaeppler's long labours in tracking down Cook voyage material in museums around the world have contributed a significant new dimension to Cook's celebrity. The objects provide material evidence of those actual encounters. They facilitate exhibitions and yet further research. They lend substance to Cook's story, and provide a means to retell it, over and over. The 2006 exhibition of the Göttingen collection at the National Museum of Australia celebrates and, partly through its own catalogue, potentially alters Cook's popular profile in Australia.
Detractors and admirers
Celebrity almost always carries with it a negative dimension — the detractors, the diminishers, the bringers-down of tall poppies. Cook has always had such antagonists, as well as those with considered criticisms of the enterprise of exploration. Georg Forster, indeed, was one of the first to express a genuine concern at the outcome of Cook's voyages — doubting the value for the Islanders of the contact, and suggesting that they would have been off better remaining unknown to ‘Europe and its restless inhabitants’.29 A negative version of Cook's encounter with Hawaiians, written up by the American missionary Sheldon Dibble in the 1830s, is generally seen to have produced a strong anti-Cook sentiment in Hawai‘i at that time, which has continued to have effects to the present. Smith observed that ‘it will always be difficult for native historians of the Pacific … to draw a fine line between Cook the individual and the culture their ancestors inherited in the wake of his vessels’.30
There are also those who point to Cook's failings and omissions. Not all his decisions were wise and just, especially on the third voyage, when he seems to have become increasingly irascible and inconsistent. Those who point to these intimations of his humanity are themselves sometimes criticised for unjustly tarnishing his burnished image. These debates roll on and on. In July 2006, the English newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, published an article about how difficult it is now to visit the site of Cook's death in which the lasting effects of Dibble's intervention in Hawai‘i were discussed. The Telegraph quoted the Honolulu Star-Bulletin as saying that Dibble's book was a ‘transparent attempt to poison the generally warm relationship between Hawaiians and Britons’.31
Several discussions of the phenomenon of celebrity argue that the celebrity has a role as a location for the interrogation and elaboration of cultural identity.32 Celebrities often act as models for cultural ideals (both negative and positive), and are valorised as such by the media. Cook acts as a key location for such interrogation and elaboration. If he stood in the past for the valour of British Enlightenment achievement, he now often stands for the massive shift which European incursion brought to the Pacific. In Australia, perhaps, he stands for an Englishness that a new national consciousness is quick to reject. His voyage collections remind us, by contrast, of the specificity of these encounters, the particularities of interaction and exchange that were sometimes limited to a matter of only a few days. At the same time, as with the small Society Islands figure in the Tongan dress, objects can remind us of the ramifications and offshoots of those specific encounters. Cook can thus stand for the multiple effects, the multiple possibilities, which we cling to as a characteristic of contemporary cultural identity.
Both detractors and admirers make use of Cook to understand the present as well as the past, and the collections, manipulated into exhibitions, enable them/us to explore and present those understandings. Kerr always wanted to curate an exhibition about the ‘imaginary Cooks,’ but it may be that all exhibitions about Cook, even the most factually accurate, are in some sense imaginary constructions. The Samoan/New Zealand artist Michael Tuffery has recently made a number of images of Cook wearing moko, facial tattoos. The images appropriate Cook as a Maori ‘of high standing’. They make him a familiar stranger of another kind. If he began as an Englishman, a plain and modest man, and became, in several senses, a god, this most recent metamorphosis is unlikely to be the last, and museums, in manipulating his voyage collections and thus his image, will contribute to the construction and reconstruction of that further identity.
Notes
I would like to thank Julie Adams, Jenny Newell, Jill Hasell, Liz Bonshek, Leanne Brass and Sam Morehead for pointing me to references and other information incorporated into this paper.
1 Joan Kerr, pers. com., 1999.
2 The full inscription on the collar reads ‘From Adml. C.B.H. Ross, C.B. To Admiral Sir David Milne, G.CB. Made of the spear which killed Captn. Cook, R.N.’ See Steven Hooper, ‘Making a killing?: Of sticks and stones and James Cook's “bones”’, Anthropology Today, vol. 19, no. 3, 2003, 6.
3 Adrienne Kaeppler, ’Artificial Curiosities’: Being an Exposition of Native Manufactures Collected on the Three Pacific Voyages of Captain James Cook, R.N. at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, January 18,1978–August 31,1978: On the Occasion of the Bicentennial of the European Discovery of the Hawaiian Islands by Captain Cook, January 18,1778, Bishop Museum, Honolulu, 1978, p. 25.
4 Hooper, ‘Making a killing’, 8.
5 ibid.
6 Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1992; Marshall Sahlins, How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, for Example, University of Chicago Press, 1995.
7 Nicholas Thomas, Discoveries: the Voyages of Captain Cook, Allen Lane, London, 2004, p. 384.
8 ibid., p. 411.
9 The media release for this exhibition begins, ‘The myth and mystery of the Queen of Sheba provides an introduction to the magnificent ancient civilisation of Yemen, where she is believed to have originated. The exhibition … focuses on the importance and splendour of the kingdoms of Southern Arabia that prospered through a lucrative trade in incense and other precious commodities to the Near East and Roman Empire.’ http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/newsroom/archive2002/sheba.html [viewed 2007].
10 Bernard Smith, ‘Cook's posthumous reputation’ in Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston (eds), Captain James Cook and His Times, Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, and Croom Helm, London, 1979, p. 159.
11 ibid., p. 161.
12 ibid., p. 166.
13 ibid., p. 173.
14 ibid., p. 182; Thomas, Discoveries, p. xxxii.
15 T Gitlin, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms our Lives, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2001, p. 22.
16 Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity, Sage Publications, London, 2004, p. 6.
17 The Te Maori exhibition significantly altered attitudes to and practices around Maori culture in New Zealand, as has been discussed in many contexts, for example by Paul Tapsell (‘Taonga, marae, whenua — negotiating custodianship: A Maori tribal response to the Museum of Auckland’, National Museums: Negotiating Histories: Conference Proceedings, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2001, pp. 112-21).
18 Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1994.
19 Julie Adams, ‘Echoes of empire: Relationships between Indigenous groups and ethnographic museums in the 21st century’, BA thesis, University of Wales, 2001.
20 ibid., p. 24.
21 Jo Anne Van Tilberg, Hoa Hakananai‘a: British Museum Objects in Focus, British Museum Press London, 2004; Van Tilberg, Remote Possibilities: Hoa Hakananai‘a and HMS ‘Topaze’ on Rapa Nui, British Museum Research Publication No. 158, British Museum Press, London, 2006.
22 Kaeppler, ‘Artificial Curiosities’, p. xiii.
23 Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures, and Self, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2004.
24 Quoted in Thomas, Discoveries, p. 244.
25 Georg Forster, A Voyage round the World, 2 vols, Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof (eds), assisted by Jenny Newell, University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2000, vol. ii (v), p. 363.
26 John Mack, ‘“Ethnography” in the Enlightenment’, in Robert Anderson, Marjorie Caygill, Neil MacGregor and Luke Syson (eds), Enlightening the British, British Museum Press, London, 2003, p. 118.
27 Joe Moran, 2000, pp. 3-4, discussed in Turner, Understanding Celebrity, p. 18.
28 Kaeppler, ‘Artificial Curiosities’.
29 Cited in Smith, ‘Cook's posthumous reputation’, p. 183.
30 Smith, p. 185.
31 Daily Telegraph, 22 July 2006, p. 16.
32 Turner, Understanding Celebrity, p. 24.