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Encountering Oceania: Bodies, Health and Disease, 1768-1846

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Encountering Oceania: Bodies, Health and Disease, 1768-1846 Encountering Oceania: Bodies, Health and Disease, 1768-1846. Duncan James Robertson PhD University of York English July 2017 Duncan Robertson Encountering Oceania Abstract This thesis offers a critical re-evaluation of representations of bodies, health and disease across almost a century of European and North American colonial encounters in Oceania, from the late eighteenth-century voyages of James Cook and William Bligh, to the settlement of Australia, to the largely fictional prose of Herman Melville’s Typee. Guided by a contemporary and cross-disciplinary analytical framework, it assesses a variety of media including exploratory journals, print culture, and imaginative prose to trace a narrative trajectory of Oceania from a site which offered salvation to sickly sailors to one which threatened prospective settlers with disease. This research offers new contributions to Pacific studies and medical history by examining how late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century concepts of health and disease challenged, shaped and undermined colonial expansion in Oceania from 1768-1846. In particular, it aims to reassess the relationship between contemporary thinking on bodies, health and disease, and the process of colonial exploration and settlement in the period studied. It argues that this relationship was less schematic than some earlier scholarship has allowed, and adopts narrative medical humanities approaches to consider how disease and ill-health was perceived from individual as well as institutional perspectives. Finally, this thesis analyses representations of bodies, health and disease in the period from 1768-1846 in two ways. First, by tracing the passage of disease from ship to shore and second, by assessing the legacy of James Cook’s three Pacific voyages on subsequent phases of exploration and settlement in Oceania. 2 Duncan Robertson Encountering Oceania Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................. 2 Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... 3 List of Figures ........................................................................................................................ 5 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ 6 Author’s Declaration .............................................................................................................. 7 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 8 Subject Matter: Oceanic Encounters from Cook to Melville ........................................... 11 Pacific Studies and the Body: A Critical Survey ............................................................. 17 Methods and Approaches ................................................................................................. 29 Chapter One: Scurvy Within and Beyond Pacific Exploration ..................................... 42 Introduction: Scurvy and British Exploration from George Anson to James Cook ........ 42 The Empire at Home: Quacks and Physicians – Francis Spilsbury, James Lind and Others ............................................................................................................................... 50 Scurvy and British Exploration from 1768 ...................................................................... 66 Cook, Science and the Endeavour expedition.................................................................. 75 William Bligh, Food and the Mutiny on HMS Bounty .................................................... 85 Scurvy Prevention and Pacific Encounters ...................................................................... 94 Chapter Two: Australia Revisited .................................................................................. 104 Introduction: Encountering Australians, from James Cook at Botany Bay to Smallpox at Port Jackson ................................................................................................................... 104 3 Duncan Robertson Encountering Oceania Proposals and motivations for an Australian settlement ................................................ 118 The First Fleet and the Health of its Crews in England ................................................. 124 The passage of the First Fleet to Australia ..................................................................... 129 Europeans in Australia ................................................................................................... 140 Smallpox in Australia ..................................................................................................... 151 Chapter Three: Typee: Melville in the Marquesas........................................................ 171 Textual introduction – The Making and Reception of Melville’s Pacific Narrative ..... 172 Historical introduction – The Emergence of an American Literary Maritime Empire, and Historical Influence in Typee ......................................................................................... 183 Cannibalism and Pacific Travel Narratives.................................................................... 189 ‘Unnatural gourmands’: Hunger in Typee ..................................................................... 199 ‘Mysterious disease’: The Exploring Body in Typee ..................................................... 219 ‘Pricking in straight marks’: Tattooing in Typee ........................................................... 230 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 240 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 247 4 Duncan Robertson Encountering Oceania List of Figures Figure 1 – Sketch of two Australian Men and artefacts. Sydney Parkinson (1770). BL Add. MS 9345, f. 14. ................................................................................................................... 104 5 Duncan Robertson Encountering Oceania Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the generous support of the Wolfson Foundation, who funded my research through a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities from 2013 to 2016. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my supervisors at York. I would like to thank Harriet Guest for her knowledge, guidance and patience throughout the duration of this project, and Mary Fairclough for her conscientious and diligent readings of various chapter drafts. I was lucky to spend many days working in the Caird Library of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, where the staff were always helpful and obliging. During a research trip to Sydney in 2015, Vanessa Smith kindly agreed to meet me and shared her unrivalled knowledge of Pacific encounters. Her generous advice on publishing an article based on my early research was clearly excellent. Finally, I would like to thank a former mentor, Stuart Murray at the University of Leeds, for helping with the inception of this project. 6 Duncan Robertson Encountering Oceania Author’s Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own original work, and has not previously been presented for an award at this, or any other, University. Some material from Chapter One has been published as “Metropolitan Scurvy in the Shadow of the Cook Voyages,” in The Journal of Pacific History 52, no. 1 (2017): 15-33. 7 Duncan Robertson Encountering Oceania Introduction This thesis examines representations of bodies, health and disease across three discrete phases in Anglophone contact with Oceania1: the Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook (1768-1779) and the first breadfruit voyage of William Bligh (1787-1790); the establishment and early years of the convict colony in New South Wales, Australia (1788- 1790); and Herman Melville’s representation of his experiences at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, which culminated in the publication of his first novel, Typee (1846). Although my analysis focuses specifically on these events, the narrative trajectory of the work that follows considers the historical and literary influences that shaped these phases of encounter, and their retrospective literary representations. In conclusion, I consider the lasting impact of these voyages and their material productions on the subsequent literature of contact between Oceania and the West. The decision to begin with the voyages of James Cook reflects my understanding of the Endeavour voyage as a crucial turning point in the history of Western encounters with Oceania, and the subsequent impact of the Cook voyages on knowledge about bodies and disease in European and Oceanic contexts. The ability to conduct an expedition of Endeavour’s size without any loss of life to scurvy attracted much attention at the time and continues to do so now, while the Endeavour’s landing on the east coast of Australia in 1 I use the term ‘Oceania’ in the broadest sense here, as a sea region which extends from Southeast Asia to the coast of the Americas, to include Australia. I have also adopted Polynesia where appropriate. As Bronwen Douglas explains, ‘Polynesia’ was initially used by naturalists in the 1780s to describe everything within the vast Pacific Ocean, but this space was separated into
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