Background to Discovery: Pacific Exploration from Dampier to Cook (1990)

This collection on European exploration in the Pacific from the late 17th century throughout the 18th century was edited by Derek Howse (1919-1998) in dedication to Harvard Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, John Horace Parry (1914-1982).

As Howse explained in the "Preface", Horace, then invited as the Clark Library Professor for the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for the academic year 1983-1984, orchestrated the original series of seminar about the exploration in the Pacific during the 18th century. However, his sudden decease in 1982 brought the plan to a halt.

Howse accepted the invitation from UCLA and succeeded as the next Clark Library Professor. To remember Horace's lifelong work on maritime history, Howse decided to continue with the original plan and published six of the original eight seminar lectures in this collection via University of California (1990).

Though the book is already out of print, a digital version from cover to cover is made available by UC Press E-Book Collection 1982-2004, starting here with the "Preface".

The six published lectures are:

I. Seapower and Science: The Motives for Pacific Exploration, where Daniel A. Baugh argues for the differentiation between "an explorer's motives [that] were purely scientific and professional" and "the motives underlying the decision to finance his [the explorer's] voyages" (p. 4) as well as for the acknowledgement of traditional motives such as national seapower and prosperity as working along side with a relatively new motive like science in every exploratory venture in the Pacific.

II. The Achievement of the English Voyages 1650 -1800, where Glyndwr Williams offers a  picture of the British venture into the Mar del Zur from Richard Hawkins in 1594 until the three voyages by James Cook (1728-1779), first from 1768-1771, second from 1772-1775 and third from 1776-1779 when he made "the major, and for himself fatal, discovery of the Hawaiian Islands" (p. 73).  William Dampier (1651-1715) was one of the buccaneers operating along the Pacific shores of South America, who reached the western shores of Australia in 1688 and 1699 and left the first English descriptions of Australian aborigines.

III. The Men from Across La Manche: French Voyages 1660-1790, where Seymour Chapin explains the French technological contribution to the advancement of navigation, namely "the creation of scientific cartography...of the late 1660s and 1670s" (p. 88), "the solutions of the longitude problem" (p. 103), and "that technique to determine the size of the solar system and the shape of the earth as well as...methods for determining longitude" (p. 114).

 IV. Literary Responses to the Eighteenth-Century Voyages, where Professor of English Literature Charles L. Batten contends that travel literature of the 18th century is neither Bildungsroman nor picaresque novels; instead, "the primary subject matter is the countries visited--not the experiences of the traveler" (p. 133)

V. Navigation and Astronomy in the Voyages, where Howse himself talks about "the state of the art in navigation and the physical sciences" (p. xiii), particularly the finding of longitude, the nautical almanac, the marine chronometer and the voyager's observation largely based on the example of the best documented James Cook.

VI. The Sailor's Perspective: British Naval Topographic Artists, where John O. Sands focuses on the training of sailors and individuals such as William Webley whose meticulous observations brought the Pacific vividly to the mind of European readers.

While these lectures explain - as usual in western historiography- more of the European or  the English side of the exploration, I, however, am  collecting the descriptions of the different peoples of the Pacific, and "the encounters between voyagers and islanders" (p. 67).

1688 and 1699: Willam Dampier visited the western shores of Australia and left the first descriptions of  Australian Aborigines. He brought back a Prince Giolo to London from his first voyage to make money by showcasing this tattooed Pacific islander.

1736: Pierre Maupertuis returned from his expedition to Lapland and brought back two Lapp (Sami) girls.

June 1767: Samuel Wallis (1728-1795) and his crew first landed at Tahiti, the first meetings between sailors and Polynesian women which made the island "a symbol of romance of the Pacific islands" (p. 64). French voyager Bougainville visited Tahiti an year later and brought back a Tahitian to Paris.

1769-1773: French voyager Marc-Joseph Marion-Dufresne brought Bougainville's Tahitian back to his homeland, but ended in providing the Maoris of New Zealand a human dinner.

After 1775: Omai came to England on Captain Furneaux's ship and London fell in love with this "genteel, polite, likable" 'Nobel Savage' (p. 152) from the Pacific.

Obviously, these descriptions didn't tell me much about the perspective of Pacific islanders as they saw waves of European sailors nearing their shore. Instead, they did tell even with the most scientific instruction in which the voyager was told to learn about the nature, plants, animals and peoples of the Pacific, he was doing it for himself and for his country alone. They brought back Pacific islanders purely for their personal gain.

As Batten puts it, "the Englishman ultimately was not concerned primarily with people who lived either in the South Pacific or the Orient. Rather, his main scientific interest lay in discovering something about himself--his own religion, society, sciences" (p. 151)

It is in fact very natural that such collection should speak more about the English and the French than the Pacific islanders. It says already in the title. What I care further, without accusing these lecturers as being Eurocentric, is rather to find or even write a similar story from the Pacific side.  That is much more constructive. Revisit Europe following the footsteps of these early Pacific islanders can be the first step.

So, here I come.