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).