DOCSLIB.ORG

Object Journal 19

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Object Journal 19 HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.14324/111.2396-9008.024 THE COST OF SYMPATHY: TOWARDS A VISUAL ECONOMICS OF JOHN WEBBER’S ‘ATLAS’ Ben Pollitt arlo Ginzburg’s essay ‘To Kill a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance’ explores eighteenth-century concerns Csurrounding natural law.1 In Diderot’s ‘A Conversation of a Father with His Children’ as Ginzburg relates, a hatmaker confesses to having taken his wife’s dowry, despite the fact that it should have gone to her relatives. The hatmaker resolves to ‘go away to Genova’ and departs. A conversation then ensues between the father and his children who heard the confession in which it is agreed that distance in place and time ‘weaken[s] feelings and awareness of all kinds, even the consciousness of crime.’2 David Hume comes to a similar conclusion to Diderot, ‘sympathy . is much fainter than our concern for ourselves, and sympathy with persons remote from us much fainter than that with persons near and contiguous.’3 For Hume, man’s solipsistic preoccupation with his immediate concerns means that he has as little thought to the future as to what is happening far away. Adam Smith too explores this problem with sympathy, hypothesising that if an earthquake swallowed up everyone in China it might provoke some ‘humane sentiments’ from ‘a man of humanity in Europe,’ but after these were expressed, ‘he would pursue his business or his pleasure . with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened.’4 How to manage the selfshness of our sentiments forms the central theme in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1790). For Smith, it is our own sense of equity and justice that is capable of correcting our selfsh passions; this moral awareness he terms ‘the impartial spectator.’5 A problem Smith wrestled with throughout the writing and revising of this book was how the ‘impartial spectator’ can ever truly know what is equitable and just. If we learn what is morally justifable through sympathetic engagement with others, how can we form judgements independent of our own social conditioning? As Fonna 56 OBJECT Forman-Barzilai argues, in his many revisions of the text, Smith moves from ‘describing conscience in sociological terms to establishing the independence of conscience’ imagining the ‘impartial spectator’ as a quasi-theological, transcendent entity that exists in each of us.6 This ‘man within’ is the only way we have of ‘correcting the natural misrepresentations of self-love,’ of learning ‘the real littleness of ourselves.’7 In modern times, both Hume’s and Smith’s concepts of sympathy have been placed under enormous strain. After such events as World War Two and Vietnam, Ginzburg fnds little evidence for the existence of Smith’s ‘impartial spectator,’ ending his essay with the doleful thought that our ‘capacity to pollute and destroy the present, the past, and the future’ is far greater than our ‘feeble moral imagination.’8 Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others argues that, rather than weakening with distance, as Hume maintains, along with Smith, sympathy is better understood as a rehearsed response designed to maintain our distance from the pain of others. While, in terms of our reactions to images of foreign confict, sympathy acts as a sort of alibi, that removes any guilt the privileged may feel in having caused this sufering or equally in having failed to do anything about it. With no other function than to assert our innocence and our impotence, it is, for Sontag, ‘an impertinent – if not an inappropriate – response.’9 Whilst acknowledging such modern critiques of sympathy, it is largely eighteenth-century philosophical concerns I address here, my focus being to explore the visual potentialities of sympathy in the work of John Webber, the artist who accompanied Captain Cook on his third voyage (1776–1780). I will take as my object Webber’s fnal state watercolours, which were engraved between 1781 and 1783 and published as a separate ‘Atlas,’ the fourth of the four volumes that made up the ofcial account, A Voyage to the Pacifc Ocean (London, 1784). This visual record of the voyage forms its own coherent narrative cycle, one that employs many techniques to engage the sympathies of its eighteenth-century consumer. Taking Smith’s notion that we can only relate to others sympathetically through the mediation of the ‘impartial spectator’, this two-way mirror within the self, which observes and regulates it, how, one may ask, does Webber’s own sympathetic practice as an artist intersect with Smith’s understanding of sympathy? Does his work serve to visually construct the existence of this self-regulating self, efectively externalising what is essentially an internal process? If so, how is this achieved, THE C OST OF SYMPATHY 57 and if it is not, what pressures do Webber’s works place on Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’ and other eighteenth-century notions of sympathy? A Morai in Atooi A Morai in Atooi, (1781, fgure 1), a depiction of a temple or marai in the Hawai’ian Island of Kaua’i, is unusual in Webber’s works from the Pacifc and indeed the works of any of Cook’s onboard artists, being the only published landscape view in which there are no human fgures present. Instead, as the text makes clear, we are presented with an empty burial site: . near the middle of the morai . were the graves of three Chiefs; and before them, was an oblong, inclosed space, to which our conductor also gave the name Tangata-taboo; telling us, so explicitly, that we could not mistake his meaning, that three human sacrifces had been buried there; that is, one at the funeral of each Chief.10 Webber’s image prioritises the formal relations between objects in space, which though strange and foreign appear uncannily familiar in their arrangement. The imposition of this geometric authority when set against the carved forms within the marai might suggest symmetrical relations between acts of inscribing and perhaps points of intellectual contact between Europeans and Polynesians. Much work has been done in exploring cross- cultural transactions between Cook and his crewmembers and the peoples they encountered. David Turnbull’s comparative study of the chart produced by the Tahitian Tupaia and Cook’s own maps is a case in point.11 Simon Schafer has argued that European and Polynesian forms of inscription can be usefully examined in relation to the act of tattooing practised on and by western eighteenth-century visitors.12 Like Schafer, Nicholas Thomas has sought to explore analogies and misunderstandings between Europeans and Pacifc Islanders and their cultural and symbolic capital.13 However as Thomas also asserts, the material culture of Polynesia does not lend itself to European discourses on art, nor can it be ftted into what Bruno Latour describes as Cook’s ‘cartography of [a] unifed world.’14 The ‘cartographic méconnaissance’ that Turnbull identifes in Cook’s failure to read Tupaia’s chart highlights the fact that, far from communicating so explicitly that meanings could not be mistaken, to paraphrase Cook, such encounters largely involved 58 OBJECT Figure 1 John Webber, A Morai, in Atooi, 1781.en, wash and watercolour, 22.3 × 37.6 cm. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Dixson Library, DL PXX2. miscommunication and misrecognition. To present the argument, however, that Webber’s images merely serve to perpetuate these misunderstandings would be to exclude the opportunities his work ofers, not least in terms of reevaluating those European discourses on art to which Thomas alludes. Within the ‘Atlas’, the empty meeting ground of A Morai at Atooi takes on a dramatic character distinct from that of the text. In contrast to the frst two voyage accounts, where the engravings intersect with the text, this separate bound volume of prints allowed the viewer to move from one image to the next as a visual narrative unfolded. As Lord Hardwicke wrote in a letter to the book’s editor, John Douglas, ‘The Drawings will explain some Things better than Description.’15 Certainly, the drawings tell a diferent story to that presented in the written account, as is evidenced by the fact that the images, in their numbered sequence, do not correspond with the chronological order of the text. Matching the push and pull on the viewer’s emotions, the way in which the images follow and depart from the text lends them an oneiric quality, a sense of being adrift. Furthermore, the more they connect to one another, the less they seem to connect to what they describe, not simply the text itself, but beyond that, the reality of each discrete encounter. This sense of detachment from reality, Jonathan Lamb argues, is a feature that characterises THE C OST OF SYMPATHY 59 all South Sea voyage narratives of the eighteenth century. Lamb draws a link with this phenomenon to contemporary accounts on scurvy, a disease that brings about in the suferer a state of mind which Thomas Trotter, writing in 1792, described as ‘scorbutic Nostalgia,’ a pathological longing for the sight, smell, taste and touch of frm land.16 This phantasmagorical aspect of the engravings puts signifcant pressures on Smith’s concept of the ‘impartial spectator.’17 As the images unfold, oscillating between spectacles of death and assurances of pleasurable commerce, the sympathies of eighteenth-century viewers would be strained to such a point as to undermine whatever rationale was deployed to channel them. Broadly speaking, systems of law and notions of government were being challenged from many quarters at this time. Cook departed on his last voyage eight days after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence (4 July 1776).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Death of Captain Cook in Theatre 224
    The Many Deaths of Captain Cook A Study in Metropolitan Mass Culture, 1780-1810 Ruth Scobie PhD University of York Department of English April 2013 i Ruth Scobie The Many Deaths of Captain Cook Abstract This thesis traces metropolitan representations, between 1780 and 1810, of the violent death of Captain James Cook at Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to these representations, in order to show how the interlinked texts of a nascent commercial culture initiated the creation of a colonial character, identified by Epeli Hau’ofa as the looming “ghost of Captain Cook.” The introduction sets out the circumstances of Cook’s death and existing metropolitan reputation in 1779. It situates the figure of Cook within contemporary mechanisms of ‘celebrity,’ related to notions of mass metropolitan culture. It argues that previous accounts of Cook’s fame have tended to overemphasise the immediacy and unanimity with which the dead Cook was adopted as an imperialist hero; with the result that the role of the scene within colonialist histories can appear inevitable, even natural. In response, I show that a contested mythology around Cook’s death was gradually constructed over the three decades after the incident took place, and was the contingent product of a range of texts, places, events, and individuals. The first section examines responses to the news of Cook’s death in January 1780, focusing on the way that the story was mediated by, first, its status as ‘news,’ created by newspapers; and second, the effects on Londoners of the Gordon riots in June of the same year.
    [Show full text]
  • In Polynesia: the Samoan Case
    Illustrations SAMOA Early European views… In relation to the encounters with Samoans, no drawing was made (or survived) from the Bougainville expedition or from the Lapérouse expedition. For the official and posthumous publication of the Lapérouse expedition narrative (1797), only the `Massacre' was drawn and engraved by Parisian artists (in a style which departed from the 1770-1790s' `noble' representations of Tahitians; see pictures in the section on Tahiti). This view went right through into the German colonial period: the 1797 French engraving was reproduced or redrawn many times, as in this case (pl. 2) for a German account of Samoa. The author, formerly Supreme Judge of `German Samoa', has compared on two adjacent pages what he called in his captions the `Samoan raid on the French' (pl. 2) and the `Hawaiian murder of Captain Cook' (pl. 4). 211 ‘First Contacts’ in Polynesia … and colonial times In 1883, the French had elevated on the site a monument stating that their marines gave their life `for science and for their country'. It is in another German colonial book of 1902 that the picture of this French statement found a place (pl. 3). The same German literature gives us an example of the dominating European male gaze at Samoan girls (pl. 5)--captionned just: `Stilleben' (`Quiet Life')! 212 Illustrations From the Dumont d'Urville expedition, we have only sketches of houses and of Apia, with a few drawings of Samoan faces so conventional that they have no historical value, and one magnificent drawing of the inside of a house fale
    [Show full text]
  • Disciplinary Culture
    Disciplinary Culture: Artillery, Sound, and Science in Woolwich, 1800–1850 Simon Werrett This article explores connections between science, music, and the military in London in the first decades of the nineteenth century.1 Rather than look for applications of music or sound in war, it considers some techniques common to these fields, exemplified in practices involving the pendulum as an instrument of regulation. The article begins by exploring the rise of military music in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and then compares elements of this musical culture to scientific transformations during 1 For broad relations between music and science in this period, see: Myles Jackson, Harmonious Triads: Physicians, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Alexandra Hui, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Emily I. Dolan and John Tresch, “‘A Sublime Invasion’: Meyerbeer, Balzac, and the Opera Machine,” Opera Quarterly 27 (2011), 4–31; Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). On science and war in the Napoleonic period, see for example: Simon Werrett, “William Congreve’s Rational Rockets,” Notes & Records of the Royal Society 63 (2009), 35–56; on sound as a weapon, Roland Wittje, “The Electrical Imagination: Sound Analogies, Equivalent Circuits, and the Rise of Electroacoustics, 1863–1939,” Osiris 28 (2013), 40–63, here 55; Cyrus C. M. Mody, “Conversions: Sound and Sight, Military and Civilian,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, eds. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp.
    [Show full text]
  • Bon Voyage? 250 Years Exploring the Natural World SHNH Summer
    Bon Voyage? 250 Years Exploring the Natural World SHNH summer meeting and AGM in association with the BOC World Museum Liverpool Thursday 14th and Friday 15th June 2018 Abstracts Thursday 14th June Jordan Goodman, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London In the Wake of Cook? Joseph Banks and His ‘Favorite Projects’ James Cook’s three Pacific voyages spanned the years from 1768 to 1780. These were the first British voyages of exploration in which natural history collecting formed an integral part. Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander were responsible for the collection on the first voyage, HMS Endeavour, between 1768 and 1771; Johann and Georg Forster, collected on the second voyage, HMS Resolution, between 1772 and 1775; and David Nelson continued the tradition on the third voyage, HMS Resolution, from 1776 to 1780. Though Cook’s first voyage brought Banks immense fame, it was the third voyage that initiated a new kind of botanical collecting which he practised for the rest of his life. He called it his ‘Favorite Project’, and it consisted of supplying the royal garden at Kew with living plants from across the globe, to make it the finest botanical collection in the world. Banks appointed David Nelson, a Kew gardener, to collect on Cook’s third voyage. Not only would the King’s garden benefit from a supply of exotic living plants, but the gardeners Banks sent out to collect them would also learn how best to keep the plants alive at sea, for long periods of time and through many different climatic conditions.
    [Show full text]
  • “A Valuable Monument of Mathematical Genius”\Thanksmark T1: the Ladies' Diary (1704–1840)
    Historia Mathematica 36 (2009) 10–47 www.elsevier.com/locate/yhmat “A valuable monument of mathematical genius” ✩: The Ladies’ Diary (1704–1840) Joe Albree ∗, Scott H. Brown Auburn University, Montgomery, USA Available online 24 December 2008 Abstract Our purpose is to view the mathematical contribution of The Ladies’ Diary as a whole. We shall range from the state of mathe- matics in England at the beginning of the 18th century to the transformations of the mathematics that was published in The Diary over 134 years, including the leading role The Ladies’ Diary played in the early development of British mathematics periodicals, to finally an account of how progress in mathematics and its journals began to overtake The Diary in Victorian Britain. © 2008 Published by Elsevier Inc. Résumé Notre but est de voir la contribution mathématique du Journal de Lady en masse. Nous varierons de l’état de mathématiques en Angleterre au début du dix-huitième siècle aux transformations des mathématiques qui a été publié dans le Journal plus de 134 ans, en incluant le principal rôle le Journal de Lady joué dans le premier développement de périodiques de mathématiques britanniques, à finalement un compte de comment le progrès dans les mathématiques et ses journaux a commencé à dépasser le Journal dans l’Homme de l’époque victorienne la Grande-Bretagne. © 2008 Published by Elsevier Inc. Keywords: 18th century; 19th century; Other institutions and academies; Bibliographic studies 1. Introduction Arithmetical Questions are as entertaining and delightful as any other Subject whatever, they are no other than Enigmas, to be solved by Numbers; .
    [Show full text]
  • In the Lands of the Romanovs: an Annotated Bibliography of First-Hand English-Language Accounts of the Russian Empire
    ANTHONY CROSS In the Lands of the Romanovs An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand English-language Accounts of The Russian Empire (1613-1917) OpenBook Publishers To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/268 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. In the Lands of the Romanovs An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand English-language Accounts of the Russian Empire (1613-1917) Anthony Cross http://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2014 Anthony Cross The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt it and to make commercial use of it providing that attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that he endorses you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Cross, Anthony, In the Land of the Romanovs: An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand English-language Accounts of the Russian Empire (1613-1917), Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/ OBP.0042 Please see the list of illustrations for attribution relating to individual images. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omissions or errors will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. As for the rights of the images from Wikimedia Commons, please refer to the Wikimedia website (for each image, the link to the relevant page can be found in the list of illustrations).
    [Show full text]
  • Kayaking to Resolution Cove SILT 10, 2014
    Context: Captain Cook, Resolution Cove, April 1778. Citation: Doe, N.A., Kayaking to Resolution Cove SILT 10, 2014. <www.nickdoe.ca/pdfs/Webp311c.pdf>. Accessed 2014 Jun 13. NOTE: Adjust the accessed date as needed. Copyright restrictions: Copyright © 2014. No reproduction without permission. Date posted: June 13, 2014. Author: Nick Doe, 1787 El Verano Drive, Gabriola, BC, Canada V0R 1X6 Phone: 250-247-7858 E-mail: [email protected] Kayaking to Resolution Cove …the tale of a visit by two Gabriolans to Resolution Cove in Nootka Sound on August 15–17, 1995, and their discovery of the exact location of Captain Cook’s observatories, and of several of the viewpoints of the artists on the 1778 expedition. Nick Doe with Jenni Gehlbach In the last days of March 1778, the British Spain (Alejandro Malaspina), the French naval ships Resolution and Discovery under Revolution, Malaspina’s political troubles, the overall command of Captain James and the subsequent Napoleonic wars of the Cook, anchored in a small cove on the west early-19th century detracted attention from coast of Vancouver Island.1 They were not the work of the continental Europeans. the first ocean-going vessels to have visited Even today, the part played by the Spanish Canada’s Pacific coast. A Spanish vessel, scientists on the coast is not widely known.3 the Santiago, had anchored off the entrance Cook’s visit, unlike the later one of Captain to Nootka Sound in 1774, and another, the Vancouver, was still within the European Sonora had made a fleeting passage in 1775, Age of Enlightenment, and it is not difficult, but on neither of the previous occasions had more than two-hundred years later, to sense the visitors made even a brief landing, far the enthusiasm and the curiosity with which less had an opportunity for making, as artists and scientists took out their notebooks Captain Vancouver was later to put it, and began their sketches and observations, “…miscellaneous observations as would be “…free from the notion that ancient very acceptable to the curious…”.
    [Show full text]
  • Liminal Encounters and the Missionary Position: New England's Sexual Colonization of the Hawaiian Islands, 1778-1840
    University of Southern Maine USM Digital Commons All Theses & Dissertations Student Scholarship 2014 Liminal Encounters and the Missionary Position: New England's Sexual Colonization of the Hawaiian Islands, 1778-1840 Anatole Brown MA University of Southern Maine Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/etd Part of the Other American Studies Commons Recommended Citation Brown, Anatole MA, "Liminal Encounters and the Missionary Position: New England's Sexual Colonization of the Hawaiian Islands, 1778-1840" (2014). All Theses & Dissertations. 62. https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/etd/62 This Open Access Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at USM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of USM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. LIMINAL ENCOUNTERS AND THE MISSIONARY POSITION: NEW ENGLAND’S SEXUAL COLONIZATION OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS, 1778–1840 ________________________ A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS OF THE ARTS THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE AMERICAN AND NEW ENGLAND STUDIES BY ANATOLE BROWN _____________ 2014 FINAL APPROVAL FORM THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE AMERICAN AND NEW ENGLAND STUDIES June 20, 2014 We hereby recommend the thesis of Anatole Brown entitled “Liminal Encounters and the Missionary Position: New England’s Sexual Colonization of the Hawaiian Islands, 1778 – 1840” Be accepted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Professor Ardis Cameron (Advisor) Professor Kent Ryden (Reader) Accepted Dean, College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis has been churning in my head in various forms since I started the American and New England Studies Masters program at The University of Southern Maine.
    [Show full text]
  • Cook and the Pacific EXHIBITION CHECKLIST
    Cook and the Pacific 22 September 2018 – 10 February 2019, Exhibition Gallery, National Library of Australia EXHIBITION CHECKLIST Who is Cook? John Webber (1752–1793) Portrait of Captain James Cook RN 1782 oil on canvas; frame: 140.4 x 115.8 x 9.5 cm, support: 114.3 x 89.7 cm National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Acc. No. 2000.25. Purchased in 2000 by the Commonwealth Government with the generous assistance of Robert Oatley AO and John Schaeffer AO Michael Cook (b. 1968) Undiscovered #4 2010 inkjet print; 102.4 x 100 cm National Library of Australia, Pictures Collection, nla.cat–vn7794191 Percy Trompf (1902–1964) The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay 1770 1929–30 chromolithograph; 101.5 x 63.5 cm and 101.5 x 65.0 cm Melbourne: Australian National Travel Association National Library of Australia, Pictures Collection, nla.cat–vn2072778 Michel Tuffery (b. 1966) Cookie in Te Wai Pounamu Meets Cook Strait 2011 acrylic on canvas; 40.0 x 40.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane Arthur Horner (1916–1997) ‘This is the place of a cottage’ 1980 pen and ink; 24.0 x 30.0 cm National Library of Australia, Arthur Horner archive of cartoons (Pictures), nla.cat–vn4942077 Tapuvae (Stilt), Marquesas Islands (French Polynesia) 1770s wood; 40.0 x 12.0 cm Australian Museum, Sydney, H000370 Cook’s Box of Instruments c. 1750 wood, engraved brass, glass, letterpress; 44.2 x 21.0 cm (closed) National Library of Australia, Rex Nan Kivell Collection (Pictures), nla.cat–vn2640976 Thomas Luny (1759–1837) The Bark, Earl of Pembroke, later Endeavour, Leaving Whitby harbour in 1768 c.
    [Show full text]
  • Joseph Dalton Hooker
    OS E P H DA LTO N OO KE F R , S j H R, . P I O N E E R S O F P R O G R E SS M E N O F SC I E N C E 801 0 11 81! S . CHAP MAN M.A D . , . S C., F . R .S . JO S E P H D A L T O N H O O K E R 0 M S C B F. M D ET . R. , . , . , C. P F B W c D F R O O ER S S. ROF. , . , . RB OIUB P RO FES SO R 0? m m In THE UNIVERS ITY O F GLASGOW L O N D O N S O C I E T Y F O R P R O M O T I N G C H R I S T I A N K N O W L E D G E NEW YORK : TH E MA CMILLAN COMPANY TE N T CON S . HIS T O RICAL IN T Riov-UCTJON k‘ B IRTH AND EDUCATION FO REI G N TRA V E L A u T HOR smE ' ' H o oRl S P DSI fl’ IO N A s A MA N O R S clE Nc E DA TES RE LATI NG TO THE O FRI EIA-L A N D S CIE N TI FI C; O I! S I R JO SEP H H OOKER P ORTRAI TS BJB LlO GRAPHY CHAPTER I . H I STO R I CAL I NTRO DUCTI O N .
    [Show full text]
  • Bernard Smith
    7 Constructing “Pacific” Peoples1 Bernard Smith It is generally agreed that Cook’s three voyages greatly enhanced the economic and political power of Europe in the Pacific. But before such power could be fully exercised, certain basic sciences and tech- nologies, the efficient maidservants of power, had themselves to be enhanced. Cook’s voyages advanced astronomy, navigation, and car- tography or, as he might have put it, geographical science. But there were other sciences of less direct concern to the Admiralty enhanced by his voyages, and these contributed also in their time to European domination in the Pacific—namely natural history, meteorology, and the emergent science of ethnography. Important advances were made in all these sciences continually throughout the three voyages, but there were differences in emphasis. The first voyage is the botanical voyage, par excellence, the second is the meteorological voyage, and the third is the ethnographic voyage. These changing emphases were owing largely, though not entirely, to contingent factors. On the Endeavour voyage, Banks, Solander, and Parkinson, with their interests centered on botany, made a powerful team. On the second voyage, Cook himself, his astronomers Wales and Bayly, the two Forsters, and William Hodges were all deeply inter- ested in the changing conditions of wind and weather, light, and atmo- sphere as they traversed vast sections of the southern oceans. By the third voyage Cook had come to realize that both scientific and popular A longer version of this chapter was published in Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages, by Bernard Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 193–221.
    [Show full text]
  • List of Freemasons from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia Jump To: Navigation , Search
    List of Freemasons From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation , search Part of a series on Masonic youth organizations Freemasonry DeMolay • A.J.E.F. • Job's Daughters International Order of the Rainbow for Girls Core articles Views of Masonry Freemasonry • Grand Lodge • Masonic • Lodge • Anti-Masonry • Anti-Masonic Party • Masonic Lodge Officers • Grand Master • Prince Hall Anti-Freemason Exhibition • Freemasonry • Regular Masonic jurisdictions • Opposition to Freemasonry within • Christianity • Continental Freemasonry Suppression of Freemasonry • History Masonic conspiracy theories • History of Freemasonry • Liberté chérie • Papal ban of Freemasonry • Taxil hoax • Masonic manuscripts • People and places Masonic bodies Masonic Temple • James Anderson • Masonic Albert Mackey • Albert Pike • Prince Hall • Masonic bodies • York Rite • Order of Mark Master John the Evangelist • John the Baptist • Masons • Holy Royal Arch • Royal Arch Masonry • William Schaw • Elizabeth Aldworth • List of Cryptic Masonry • Knights Templar • Red Cross of Freemasons • Lodge Mother Kilwinning • Constantine • Freemasons' Hall, London • House of the Temple • Scottish Rite • Knight Kadosh • The Shrine • Royal Solomon's Temple • Detroit Masonic Temple • List of Order of Jesters • Tall Cedars of Lebanon • The Grotto • Masonic buildings Societas Rosicruciana • Grand College of Rites • Other related articles Swedish Rite • Order of St. Thomas of Acon • Royal Great Architect of the Universe • Square and Compasses Order of Scotland • Order of Knight Masons • Research • Pigpen cipher • Lodge • Corks Eye of Providence • Hiram Abiff • Masonic groups for women Sprig of Acacia • Masonic Landmarks • Women and Freemasonry • Order of the Amaranth • Pike's Morals and Dogma • Propaganda Due • Dermott's Order of the Eastern Star • Co-Freemasonry • DeMolay • Ahiman Rezon • A.J.E.F.
    [Show full text]