Introduction
Encountering Cook's collections
HOWARD MORPHY AND MICHELLE HETHERINGTON
Material culture is one of the ways in which the past can be brought into the present in an immediate way.1 And the better conserved that past is, the more it appears to be part of the present. The Hawaiian feathered helmet or mahiole, with its feathers remarkably well preserved, seems to have been made a mere generation ago.2 The tapa cloth or woven basket has the appearance of something made in recent times that is still being used in the present — passed on as family heirlooms.
And, in some respects, those past times signified by the tapa cloth and baskets were indeed not so long ago. Cook's voyages of discovery in the Pacific are only four average lifetimes away. Each of us in the journey through life can reflect on how short a distance in time we have travelled. And yet that time, as history, is continually changing the nature of the world and creating distance between lives that were once lived contemporaneously with one another and for a while occupied the same place. The objects collected on Cook's voyages and transported a long way from their home became, for a time, someone else's heirlooms, separated by distance from their cultures of production.
Cook and his company were contemporaries of the Pacific Islanders that they met. They may have felt a sense of superiority in some areas of life and certainly had a superior force of arms and they, at times, were shocked by the customs that they observed; but they also admired much in the lives of the people they met and saw many parallels with their own. The Islanders, in turn, observed the voyagers and also saw things that they admired and things of which they disapproved, including forms of punishment that they found barbaric. The Islanders and the voyagers developed close relationships and entered into intensive trade relations, which taught them much about each other's systems of value. The Ra‘iatean, Tupaia, guided Cook across the Pacific on his first voyage — greatly facilitating his navigation and mediating his relationships with the Maori in particular. On the second voyage Mai, who would be known in England as Omai, joined Cook's consort ship, Adventure, as a guide and returned with Captain Tobias Furneaux to England.
Cook's ostensible purpose in taking the voyage was not to conquer but to observe, although there was a degree of ambiguity in his instructions from the Admiralty. As his voyages progressed, however, he took formal possession of the lands he visited for the British Crown. The consequence of his and his companions’ observations and the reports that they wrote was the colonisation of Australia and most of the island Pacific. It was that process of colonisation that changed the temporal relationships between Cook and the Indigenous societies of Australasia. When they first met, they were both in the same time-world and they may have imagined futures in which they would continue to interact with each other in such a space, but the colonial process created a breach in time that is only now beginning to be healed.
Cook's contact became the moment in which the present day was constituted, in particular in the colonial settler societies of the Pacific Rim. In that respect Cook is the ancestor who replaced the autochthonous ancestors — the founding father, once removed, of the nation states of Australia and New Zealand. Cook thus becomes associated with modern, contemporary Australia and New Zealand, and the Pacific Islanders and the Indigenous Australians with what was there before. That is why the collections made during Cook's voyages exist in two different temporal spaces — a moment in real time when they were produced as part of the continuing Indigenous history of the region, and a moment in colonial time when they became assigned to a past that is disconnected from the present. The excitement of the present is that recent research has brought those periods of time together once more, enabling us to review the interactions in the past and perhaps to gain a more accurate and complex picture of what took place at the time those objects were collected, while simultaneously connecting them to the present of the Indigenous populations of the region and their interactions with the colonial societies who now share their land and sea.
The historiography of Cook
The historiography of Cook is a discontinuous history. The initial impact of Cook's voyages and those of the other Enlightenment voyagers was indeed considerable — on their own societies. They had a sense of achievement as discoverers and as mappers of unknown lands and seas. Although Cook's journals seldom describe his subjective state of mind or reflect on his achievements, there are occasional passages that reveal how much discovery was part of his motivation. Soon after the near disaster of the stranding of the Endeavour on the Great Barrier Reef, Cook reflected in his journal of 17 August 1770:
Was it not from the pleasure which naturly results to a Man from being the first discoverer, even was it nothing more than Sands and Shoals, this service would be insuportable especialy in far distant parts, like this, short of Provisions and almost every other necessary.
On their return, the voyagers competed with each other through authorised and unauthorised publication of their accounts of what they had achieved, creating enduring records that became part of the memory of the voyages passed down the generations. Those whose records were never published or were poorly distributed in their own time often had to wait for much later recognition. Nigel Erskine (Chapter 2) explores the tensions that developed over the publication of accounts of Cook's second voyage — the dynamic struggle over truth, style and reputation that involved the competing claims of Cook, Johann Reinhold Forster and Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty.
The accounts and other writings about Cook's voyages had an enormous impact on the cultural politics of the Enlightenment in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and in popular culture. The time in-between has been the time when myths were created to explain the changing present that made the voyagers into heroes or villains. But that impact was gradually reduced over the succeeding century. In the more caustic language of Jonathan Lamb, Cook ‘became a figure encrusted with myths’.3
When, in the twentieth century, Cook again became the subject of intensive interest and new writings began to appear, the context had shifted from Europe back to the Pacific. As Tom Ryan notes, ‘The production of scholarly texts about Captain Cook dates back half a century to 1955, when the first volume of historian JC Beaglehole's celebrated edition of the Journals of Captain James Cook was published’.4 At the same time, Bernard Smith was turning to the visual record and discovering the European vision in the South Pacific, using the art of Cook's voyages to illustrate the dialogue between art and science that lay at the heart of the Enlightenment.5
The repositioning of Cook in the Pacific rapidly led to attempts to reconnect the early accounts of the voyagers back to the Pacific Islanders and the other Indigenous peoples encountered on his voyages. Perspectives switched and multiplied as researchers tried to capture the true complexity of the events that had occurred. The realisation grew that the documents themselves, though largely written from one side of the encounter, contained the information that enabled them to be reinterpreted from the other. Greg Dening places himself on the beaches of the Marquesas to view the encounter between Europeans and Islanders from both perspectives and to provide a deeper understanding of the local tragedies that unfolded.6 In his chapter in this book he continues this balancing, interpretative project. He finds a museum of curiosities in the temple at Morai Point at Matavai in Tahiti, a collection of relics the Europeans left behind as a result of gift and misadventure. And he sees in the Polynesian tradition of voyaging a knowledge of navigation and of cross-cultural diplomacy in many respects equivalent to, and just as pioneering as, that of the European ‘discoverers’. He sees in the person of Tupaia, who accompanied Cook for much of the remainder of the Endeavour's voyage until his death in Batavia, an explorer of heroic proportions and an exceptional intellect. Dening's analysis reduces the difference between Tupaia and Banks, making them, as Paul Turnbull suggests in Chapter 3, the co-founders of Pacific anthropology, at least in as much as anthropology involves engaging in cross-cultural discourse to learn about the lives and values of others.
These new interpretations have been made possible by bringing together dispersed historical resources and by combining diaries with charts and illustrations, and with published accounts and the artefactual record brought back from the voyages. The original accounts, combined with the encrusting myths of history, tended to paint a simplified and retrospective view of the past that cut out alternative pathways of interpretation. Editors like Beaglehole, concerned with the veracity of the text and determined to clarify ambiguities, reach out to other sources to check and confirm and, in so doing (sometimes inadvertently) open up new directions of enquiry. The sources of information have multiplied as researchers have accessed the archives and found additional journals of voyages that were written by scientists, officers or sailors and that cover the published events from different perspectives. Researchers have mined the correspondence files of the Admiralty, the record of the discords of the voyages and their aftermath, and have gone over in detail the account books and inventories that provide another kind of record of the passage of time. And now, digital technology has allowed the records to be placed side by side. It is possible to access the National Library of Australia's South Seas website to read alternative accounts of the events of the day as recorded by Banks, Sydney Parkinson or Cook, and to locate them on a moving map of Cook's first Pacific voyage of 1768-71.7
The history of Cook's collections of ‘artificial curiosities’
The artefacts, the ‘artificial curiosities’ that were collected on Cook's voyages and brought back to Europe, have followed a similar trajectory to the writings about the voyages. These artefacts were collected in their own right as evidence of the ways of life of the people who were encountered and of the resources of the environments in which they lived. They also came as a by-product of the exchanges and transactions that occurred as the ships sailed from place to place. Cook needed to trade to provision his boat but, on such a long voyage, there was an inevitable need to build up a supply of trade goods. This they did as the voyage progressed, either through making additional goods from iron or wood or by entering — knowingly — into a regional system of trade and value exchange. Goods from one Pacific island were not collected only, nor in many cases even primarily, with a view to an eventual journey to Europe but to be traded from one island to the next one.
Turnbull's chapter places the objects at their moment of collection by bringing all the written sources together to provide a perspective on those initial exchanges in the encounter between European and Pacific civilisations. He shows how Cook's crew gained insights into the relative value of material items across the Pacific by being active in the process of trade and exchange.8 On the second voyage, for example, the ships collected large quantities of red feathers from Tonga, presumably attracted by their spectacular display, and found, on their arrival in Tahiti, that they were in possession of a trade item of enormous value. The feathers placed them in a strong position in bargaining for provisions. More surprisingly, they also enabled the crew to trade for a number of chief mourner's dresses or heva. This costume had fascinated Banks on the first voyage but had been unobtainable at any price. Between the first and second visit to Tahiti by Cook's ships, a shift in values had occurred, with one religious cult replacing another. The heva continued to be an object of great desire for Europeans on the second voyage and now examples were available for sale.
Collectors on the wharfs in England eagerly awaited the objects that the ships brought back. Their appreciation of the values of particular objects had developed in the periods between the voyages and certain objects became highly desirable. The voyagers were aware that there would be a market for objects on their return, and some certainly invested in that acquisition of prize items. Turnbull records that a sailor was able to sell a complete heva for the huge sum of 25 guineas. While the heva presents an exceptional case, Adrienne Kaeppler (Chapter 4) hypothesises that the Forsters, scientists on Cook's second voyage, collected duplicates of certain objects with the intention of selling them or presenting them to benefactors on their return. The consequence of such strong demand was that, in most cases, the collections were dispersed widely in the years following the return of the ships. In a number of cases where objects, such as the heva, could be divided, they were dismembered and the parts sold or gifted separately.
Some objects became part of larger collections that were opened for commercial display, such as the Leverian Museum (Holophusikon). Dealers, of whom George Humphrey is the best known, acquired others. As a result of the process of sale and dispersal, many objects became disassociated from any documentary records of their history and the sets to which they might have belonged. The competition for these scarce goods — the art and artefacts brought back from the South Pacific — which was largely responsible for this disassociation did not last. Interest in them soon faded.
Cook continued to have a place in the European imagination as the heroic Enlightenment explorer of the Pacific but the collections brought back from his voyages were no longer valued for their associations with him and, almost literally, were lost in museum collections. The objects were often classified with others from the same region as types of artefacts that signified stages in the development of human society. The spectacular beauty of the Pacific artefacts that were used as stage decorations for the near contemporaneous (to their collection) pantomime Omai: or, A Trip around the World by de Loutherbourg and other ‘reenactments’ became a faded memory. The reasons why the objects fell out of fashion are complex but are connected to the history of European colonisation and the devaluation of the material culture of non-European societies. The objects belonged to a past that was of interest to ethnologists but even the ethnologists left them behind in their increasing emphasis on social relations. The Forster collection in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford was for a long time unrecognised, and another Cook voyage hoard in Oxford has come to light again only recently, in the collections of Christ Church College.9
However, when historians again became interested in the details of Cook's voyages and began to challenge the ‘encrusted myths’, so too did interest in the Cook collections begin to revive in the market and in the academy. Nineteenth-century evolutionary theory had separated the cultural achievements of Indigenous societies from those of Europe. With the advent of modernism in European art at the turn of the twentieth century, interest in the art of the Pacific revived; so-called ‘primitive art’ became one of the inspirations for contemporary Western art. The separation of the past from the present was maintained by the value accorded to pre-European contact. A premium price was placed on those ‘authentic’ works that had been produced before the civilisations of the Pacific became ‘contaminated’ by European colonisation.
Some anthropologists also developed a renewed interest in the history of Pacific collections, seeing them as an important resource both for understanding the early relationships between European voyagers and Indigenous societies, and also as providing a baseline for studying the art and material culture of Pacific Islanders at the moment of European contact and colonisation. Research on collections from the Cook voyages was pioneered by Kaeppler who began, in the late 1960s, to identify and locate the objects and reconnect them to their history in as much as it is possible to do so. In her chapter in this book she brings together the Forster collection as a whole so that it is possible to see it as it developed during the voyage and to understand the history of its dispersal.
The revival of interest in the Cook voyage collections is dramatic and many research possibilities have opened up. But this renewal of interest has also created problems, as Lissant Bolton demonstrates in her chapter. The bringing together of the collections has unleashed their potential to reframe past encounters and place the material culture of the Pacific in a chronological sequence. However, the emphasis on the Cook voyage collections can recreate the imbalances of the past in a new context. Bolton, while acknowledging the importance of the collections, argues that Cook's fame casts a shadow over the history of the reception of Pacific Island cultures and reflects on how his fame needs to be countered in order to see the richness and diversity of the history of the region.
Reconnecting to the present
Recent research has begun to recreate the Cook collections as a whole, countering the historical process of their dispersal and their disconnection from the past. The task has been to connect them as much as possible to the moment of their collecting. In this way, they can again be seen as part of the sequence of events that unfolded during the eighteenth-century voyages of Cook and other navigators who opened up the Pacific to European colonisation. The objects in context can also be indices of relationships between people — relationships that had a significant impact on the success of those voyages and the subsequent relationships between Europeans and Islanders.
While the Cook voyage collections are often seen as providing a baseline of the material culture of the Pacific Islands as it was before European colonisation, enabling the documenting of changes that have occurred subsequently, the concept of a baseline is somewhat problematic. It implies the beginning of a process rather than seeing the evidence as being connected to already existing processes that were ongoing, dynamic and highly differentiated. It is necessary to view the collections as potential evidence of processes that existed prior to the voyages and it is only by adopting this perspective, of an encounter between societies with different histories, that we will begin to understand the processes that occurred after their entanglement. The material culture collected by Cook cannot be seen as representative of an idealised unchanging Pacific Island material culture. Rather it comprises objects that were the product of dynamic technological systems and which reflect internal processes of formal and stylistic change. This perspective enables a quite different set of questions to be asked about the process of collecting as well as about the significance of the objects themselves.
In this book, the perspectives of different authors allow for competing though often complementary interpretations. Some of the icons of the history of the voyages are mentioned in a number of different essays and they are interpreted in different ways according to the position of the author. Turnbull and Paul Tapsell both discuss Benjamin West's painting of Banks dressed in a kuri purepure, a woven flaxen cloak fringed with dog's hair. Turnbull follows Banks's gaze out from the canvas. He focuses his interpretation on the image that Banks was trying to convey and speculates on a vision of global trade and exchange of value and status.
Tapsell looks in the opposite direction. His own research and knowledge of contemporary Maori culture enables him to question the process whereby Banks came by the magnificent kuri purepure. The tightly woven cloak is a sign of chiefly status and is itself a taonga, an object of tribal heritage. Tapsell argues that such a cloak was a gift between people of status and speculates that it may reflect the close relationships that the Tahitian Tupaia helped establish between Maori leaders and the officers and scientists of the Endeavour. Turnbull and Tapsell's perspectives come together in agreeing that Banks appreciated the aesthetic values of the finely made cloak and its connection to the status of the wearer, and both acknowledge the fineness of the painting itself. And both are able to use the collections to provide insights into complex historical processes.
Reflecting on Cook and the ‘artificial curiosities’ brought back from his voyages is almost inevitably going to generate mixed emotions from Indigenous Australians and Pacific Islanders. While Maori people appreciate the great beauty of the objects preserved from the past, their appreciation is not that of the disinterested viewer seeing them as art objects removed from the context of everyday life, but as active forces in the world with which they wish to maintain relationships in the present. While the objects may initially have been given in trade and exchange in expectation of long-term and equal relationships, history severed the connection and, for a long time, the objects disappeared from Pacific view. Indeed, by the time of Cook's third voyage, Pacific Islanders must have been increasingly aware of dangers to them consequent on their entanglement with the outsiders, and the difficulty of disengagement.
In the case of Indigenous Australians, as Doreen Mellor argues, the gap created over time between Aboriginal peoples and European colonisers of their land has continually been reinforced since Cook first visited these shores. Cook was not impressed by the material culture of the Aboriginal people, probably because the more spectacular aesthetic forms are produced in ceremonial contexts and seldom in easily portable forms. And, as Mellor shows, Cook saw no need to enter into exchange relationships with Aboriginal people since he could not conceive of the kind of rights they themselves recognise in land and environment. When Cook and his companions feasted on turtle when repairing the Endeavour in North Queensland, they had no idea that anyone other than themselves could have rights in the animal, and denied the local people the share that they had asked for.
To Mellor, the legacy of Cook for most Indigenous Australians was a process of enforced separation. Aboriginal people were separated from Europeans by the developing evolutionary theories of the nineteenth century. People were separated from the land through its alienation in the expansion of European settlement. And finally she notes that children were separated from their mothers and their Country and distributed around Australia. The possibility remains of repairing the breach in time caused by the severing of relations and removal from place and, in that context, an honest appraisal of Cook's voyages and their consequences is part of the process.
The positive thing about the return of collections from Cook's voyages to their Pacific homelands is the fact that today they are reconnecting with descendants of the original makers who continue to produce objects of aesthetic power and who have themselves remained in continuity with their memories of times past. As Tapsell shows, Tupaia may be fixed in the past in the European history of the Pacific, but his name has continued to be passed on down the Maori generations. It is this continuity in place that enables Maori to reconnect with their taonga once they return again to visit their relatives either on a permanent or temporary basis. In the case of Aboriginal Australia, Cook has become encrusted with home-grown balancing myths — often quirky and surprisingly generous — which, communicated to non-Indigenous Australians, keep alive memories of aspects of the colonial encounter that many would rather forget.
Notes
1 On 28 July 2006, a public symposium, Discovering Cook's Collections, was held at the National Museum of Australia. The symposium, a collaboration between the Australian National University's Centre for Cross-Cultural Research and the National Museum, was planned in conjunction with Cook's Pacific Encounters, an exhibition of rare eighteenth-century cultural artefacts collected during Captain James Cook's three Pacific voyages. Some of the papers given at the symposium have formed the basis for this book.
2 See for example Stephen Little and Peter Ruthenberg (eds), Life in the Pacific of the 1700s: The Cook Forster Collection of the Georg-Augustus University of Göttingen, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Hawai‘i, 2006.
3 Jonathan Lamb, ‘Cook and the question of naval history’, Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 30, no. 2, 2006, 98-115.
4 Tom Ryan, review article, The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 17, no. 1, 2005, 224.
5 Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1960.
6 Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774-1880, University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 1980.
7 National Library of Australia, South Seas: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific (1760-1800), http://southseas.nla.gov.au/.
8 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991.
9 Jeremy Coote, Curiosities from the Endeavour: A Forgotten Collection — Pacific Artefacts Given by Joseph Banks to Christ Church, Oxford after the First Voyage, Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby, 2004.