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Historicity and the Route

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Historicity and the Route SOPHIE ANNETTE KRANEN Historicity and the Route Remarks on the Relations between Art and Anthropology in the Illustrations of the Travel Account of James Cook’s Third Expedition Yet it is highly to be wished, that, after the commencements we have, the accurate and natural-historic manner of delineating the human species may be extended uninter- ruptedly to all the regions of the Globe. … Cook’s last Voyage, if we may trust what fame says of its engravings, commences a new and higher period, the continuation of which in other parts of the world I ardently desire, and that they may be rendered of more general utility and more extensively known.1 This remark from Johann Gottfried Herder’s Outlines of a philosophy of the history of man (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784) reveals the close connections between anthropology, art, and travel in the late eighteenth century. In expressing a wish for more reliable depictions of humans around the globe, Herder refers to the illustrations from the account of the third expedition to the Pacific conducted by James Cook (1776–1780).2 This lavish publication was part of a broader literary and graphic processing of the European exploration of the world3, one that is revealed by the coalescence of travel and travelogue in Herder’s words.4 Cook’s Voyage was published in 1784––the same year as Herder’s Outlines––and focussed on information about people living in different parts of the Pacific.5 This article will examine the engravings from this publication in order to shed light on the relationship between anthropology, travel, and the production of im- ages. The main aim here is to analyse the temporal patterns constituted by images and text, above all in the developmental models of the history of humankind that were current at the time and were closely connected with the emerging sciences of man. For this I will refer to Johannes Fabian’s study, Time and the Other, which provides an analysis of the temporal systems and attributions that formed the basis of Western anthropological discourse.6 After describing the volume of engravings, I will focus on some exemplary plates and analyse aspects of their relationship to anthropological models. In doing this I do not aim to establish a one-to-one anal- ogy between anthropological theories and travel images, but rather to compile a tableau of the different issues raised by the illustrations, which relate to the discur- sive field of anthropology and history but do not necessarily form one coherent whole. 134 Sophie Annette KRANEN 1. The volume, its composition and contexts Rich and elaborate travel accounts were common and popular in the eighteenth century, and they formed an important branch of the expanding market for printed media.7 The exploration of the Pacific, promoted by France and Great Britain, reached a broader public through the travel accounts of Louis-Antoine de Bougain- ville (1771), Wallis, Carteret and Cook (edited in three volumes by John Hawkes- worth, 1773), and Georg Forster (1777), amongst others.8 The competitive desire to make the world accessible both geographically and economically was also pur- sued in the publication of the European discoveries during these voyages.9 By the time the third expedition to the Pacific led by James Cook departed in 1776, the discourse of discovery was already fully established. The information provided by travel accounts about distant parts of the world were highly valuable for natural historians as well as for anthropologists who were establishing a new discipline.10 Indeed, the latter proposed guidelines for the documentation of travels that would guarantee its scientific usability.11 As a result, when the travellers of the third Cook expedition returned to Ply- mouth in 1780, they brought with them a variety of collected objects, specimens, impressions, written and drawn records, journals, log-books, maps, and coastal profiles that were to be utilised and published. The British-Swiss artist John Web- ber was among these travellers. He had been assigned to sketch places, people, and remarkable incidents during the journey and returned to England with about 200 drawings.12 Four years later, in 1784, the Royal Admiralty published an offi - cial travel account in three volumes of text, and one separately bound volume com- prising sixty-one engravings based on Webber’s drawings.13 A committee made up of members of the Royal Admiralty, scientists, the editors, Captain James King, and John Webber, were responsible for the selection of drawings for publica- tion.14 The graphic material of this so-called Atlas was organised according to the chro- nology of the journey. A huge map of the world at the beginning of the volume established this spatio-temporal structure by presenting the routes of all three Pa- cific voyages that were undertaken by Cook (fig. 1). Their course and duration was indicated by small-inscribed dates and, because Cook died during the third expe- dition, this opening lent the volume the character of a memorial. The series of engravings that follow the map, details the third and last voyage with concrete visual information. Comprising all the images of the journey into one large, comprehensive volume and thereby establishing a coherent sequence of images, is unique to this account; former travel accounts had always included the plates in the text volumes. Thus, the Atlas of the third of Cook’s voyages can be seen as an atlas presenting the “varieties of man”15 on the basis of a geographic structure, and as a (partial) concretion of the famous idea of a “Great map of mankind” that Edmund Burke had expressed seven years before in a letter written to the historian William Robertson:.
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