Objects of Encounter:
Displaying first encounters between Europeans
and Pacific Islanders on the voyages of Captain
Cook, in contemporary British museums
Emma Yandle
Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam Supervisor: prof. dr. R. (Rob) van der Laarse Second reader: dhr. dr. D.A. (David) Duindam Word count: 22,988
Figure 1. Māori trading a crayfish with Joseph Banks. By Tupaia,
1769.
Figure 2. Joseph Banks trading with a Māori. Detail from In Pursuit of Venus [infected], by Lisa Reihana, 2015-2017. © Lisa Reihana.
Abstract
This paper explores the presentation in contemporary British museums of the cross-cultural encounters that took place between Europeans and Indigenous Pacific Islanders, on the eighteenth-century voyages of Captain James Cook to the Pacific region. It takes as its central case studies four exhibitions that opened in London in 2018, in response to the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage. It focuses on visualizations of encounters, ranging
from British depictions created on the voyages, to the deployment of encounter iconography by contemporary Indigenous Pacific artists. Both are brought into relation with current anthropological conceptions of cross-cultural encounters: as contingent, tied to specific social locations, and with agency and complex motivations shared by both Indigenous and European actors. It analyses the extent to which the interpretative framing of these works reflects such dynamics of early Pacific encounters. It takes the view that eighteenth-century depictions of encounters are routinely deployed as documentary evidence within exhibitions, overlooking their imaginative construction. By comparison, the use of the same encounter iconography by contemporary
Indigenous artists is subject to visual analysis and frequently brought into relation with anthropological ideas of encounters. However, it concludes that the interpretative framing of both eighteenth-century and contemporary visualizations of encounter still tends towards simplicity, introducing encounters as emblematic of contact within the wide Pacific region, rather than exploring encounters as specific, singular moments, within distinct temporal and spatial environments.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks are due to the staff of the University of Amsterdam, in particular Dr. Robert van der Laarse for his advice and overall supervision of this work. Early conversations with Dr. David Duindam, offered valuable ideas on the structuring and scope of my research and Diederick Wildeman, Curator of Navigation and Library Collections at Het Scheepvaartmuseum (The National Maritime Museum) in Amsterdam, provided much fruitful context and widened my bibliography. I am particular grateful for the willingness of the curatorial teams of the case studies discussed here to contribute to my research: Dr. Adrian Locke and Rebecca Bray of the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Laura Walker of the British Library; Sophie Richards of the National Maritime Museum, Royal Museums Greenwich; and Dr. Julie Adams of the British Museum. All generously gave their time to discuss this research and provided valuable insights into the scope, curatorial aims and specific choices within their exhibitions. Finally, thanks are due to Miranda Reilly for her encouragement and editing advice; Kate Yandle for her pastoral support; and Peter and Jo Yandle for always being there.
Table of Contents
Abstract ... 2
Acknowledgments ... 3
Terminology ... 6
List of Figures ... 7
Preface: Displaying encounters, exhibiting Tupaia ... 9
Introduction ... 13
i.) Talking about Captain Cook in the 21st century ... 13
ii.) Cook exhibitions in 2018: searching for the encounters ... 16
iii.) Methodology and theoretical underpinnings ... 20
iv.) Structure of the work ... 22
I.
The rise of encounters in contemporary museum practice ... 24
i.) The material legacy of Cook’s voyages and their entry into museum collections ... 24
ii.) From discovery to encounter, shifts in anthropology ... 27
iii.) Museums and the contact zone ... 29
iv.) The Gweagal shield, a mobile artefact of encounter ... 33
vi.) An encounter perspective and the limitations of the contact zone ... 37
II. Exhibiting Visualizations of Cook’s Encounters ... 39
i.) Visualizations of first contact: the paintings of William Hodges ... 39
ii.) Visualizations of encounter: as documentary records ... 42
iii.) Painting first meetings: encounters as emblematic events ... 46
iv.) Embracing encounters’ specificity ... 50
III. Encounter iconography in contemporary Pacific art ... 54
i.) The appeal of encounters for contemporary Pacific artists ... 54
ii.) Unexplored relationships: contemporary & eighteenth-century encounters in exhibitions 57
Conclusion ... 61
Appendices ... 63
Appendix A: Excerpt from the press release for James Cook: The Voyages ... 63
Appendix B: Excerpts from press release from the National Maritime Museum, announcing Pacific Encounters ... 66
Appendix C: Press release for Oceania ... 68 Appendix D: Press release Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives ... 72 Appendix E: Label text for in Pursuit of Venus [infected] in Oceania, the Royal Academy of Arts ... 74
Terminology
This work uses the broad terms ‘Indigenous’ and ‘European’, to respectively refer to cultural and social groups who are the original settlers of a land, and the countries or inhabitants of Western Europe. It does so with an awareness that both terms, useful in a comparative analysis such as this work, present an imagined collective of peoples that is not reflected by lived reality. The term ‘Indigenous’ has been used when discussing concepts or artworks ranging across the Pacific region. In individual instances, the preferred terminology of the community in question is used. Where required for clarity, countries will be named by both their European and traditional names. Any subsequent feedback on the terms employed is gratefully received.
List of Figures
Figure 1. Maori trading a crayfish with Joseph Banks, Tupaia, 1769, British Library, Add MS 15508, f.12 Figure 2. Joseph Banks trading with a Māori. Detail from In Pursuit of Venus [infected], by Lisa Reihana,
2015-2017. © Lisa Reihana.
Figure 3. Thomas Herbert trading with a Khoi person on the beach in Table Bay. From Zee- en lant-reyse na verscheyde deelen van Asia en Africa…, by Thomas Herbert, 1665.
Figure 4. Poster for James Cook: The Voyages displayed in the courtyard of the British Library, 2018. Photo by
Emma Yandle.
Figure 5. Representing Tupaia from Pacific Encounters, 2018. Photo by Emma Yandle.
Figure 6. Joseph Banks trading with a Māori. Detail from Entanglements, by John Pule,1997. © John Pule. Figure 7. Entranceway of James Cook: The Voyages, 2018. Courtesy of the British Library. Photo by Emma
Yandle.
Figure 8. Entranceway of Pacific Encounters, 2018. Photo by Emma Yandle. Figure 9. Entranceway to Oceania, 2018. Photo by Emma Yandle
Figure 10. Entranceway of Reimaging Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives © The Trustees of the British
Museum
Figure 11. Installation view of Indigenous Australia. The Gweagal shield is shown on the left; Vincent
Namatjira’s ‘James Cook - With the Declaration’, 2014, on the right © Rachael Murphy
Figure 12. Object label for the Gweagal Shield, in the Enlightenment Gallery of the British Museum, 2017.
Photo courtesy of To BP or Not BP.
Figure 13. The Gweagal shield and gararra (fishing spears) collected by Joseph Banks in April 1770, as
displayed in Encounters, 2015-2016. © Jason McCarthy. National Museum of Australia.
Figure 14. Object label for the Gweagal Shield in Encounters, 2015-2016. Photo by Mark Burgess.
Figure 15. The Landing at Erramanga [Eromanga], one of the New Hebrides, by William Hodges, 1776. One
of four paintings by Hodges showing Cook’s landings in the Vanuatu archipelago during his second voyage. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
Figure 17. Globe with voyage route marked, and factsheet introducing Cook’s first voyage in James Cook: The Voyages. Courtesy of the British Library. Photo by Emma Yandle.
Figure 18. The Landing at Tanna [Tana], one of the New Hebrides, by William Hodges, 1775-1776. © National
Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
Figure 19. Display of William Hodges’ paintings in Pacific Encounters. The four Encounter paintings’ are
displayed in the bottom right. Photo by Emma Yandle.
Figure 20. The Landing at Mallicolo [Malakula], one of the New Hebrides. By William Hodges, c. 1776. ©
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
Figure 21. Contemporary artworks are displayed on the walls, with quotations from the artists above. The
costume of the Chief Mourner is displayed centrally. Installation view of Reimaging Captain Cook: Pacific
Perspectives Photo by Emma Yandle, 2018.
Figure 22. Vanuatu Archipelago case, sub-section entitled ‘A Brief Encounter’, including print of The Landing at Mallicolo shown against a blue backdrop on the right. Photo by Emma Yandle.
Figure 23. Blown-up graphic of William Hodges’ ‘A View taken in the bay of Oaite Peha [Vaitepiha] Otaheite
[Tahiti]’ (‘Tahiti Revisited’) in Reimaging Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives © The Trustees of the British Museum
Figure 24. Detail from in Pursuit of Venus [infected], by Lisa Reihana, 2015–17. Courtesy of the artist and New
Zealand at Venice. With support of Creative New Zealand and NZ at Venice Patrons and Partners. Image provided courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Figure 25. Detail from Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, showing the scenes 1. (Native hut), 2. (3 dancers), 3. (Sailing boat) & 4. (Natives & goat). By Joseph Dufour (manufacturer) Jean-Gabriel Charvet (artist),
1804-1805. Image courtesy of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia.
Figure 26. ‘The Splendid Land’, by John Pule, 2009. © John Pule. Image Courtesy of Gow Langsford Gallery,
Aotearoa New Zealand.
Figure 27. Captn Cook in Australia by Simon Gende, 2018. Reproduced by permission of the artist Image: ©
The Trustees of the British Museum.
Figure 28. Installation view showing scenes of in Pursuit Venus [infected] at the Royal Academy of Arts,
London, 2018. Artwork by Lisa Reihana, 2015-2017. Photo by Emma Yandle.
Figure 29. First meeting between Tupaia, Cook and Māori chief. Tupaia is the figure in the left, wearing a white
cloak. Detail from in Pursuit of Venus [infected], by Lisa Reihana, 2015–17. Courtesy of the artist and New Zealand at Venice. Image provided courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Preface: Displaying encounters, exhibiting Tupaia
This thesis was inspired by research I conducted as Assistant Curator of an exhibition on cartography and Dutch voyaging in the seventeenth century. Entitled Maps & Marvels (Dutch title Cartografie & Curiosa), it opened at Het Scheepvaartmuseum (The National Maritime Museum) in Amsterdam on 9th May 2019. When
conducting research into Dutch travel accounts, I became fascinated by engravings published for a European audience, that purported to visualize these early encounters and moments of first contact between two drastically different cultures. With no common language and differing attitudes towards central concepts such as property and the role of ceremony, travel accounts revealed the complications, variation, confusion and ongoing negotiations that early encounters involved. I was struck by the disparity between such a reality, as mediated through contemporary and subsequent European publications, and the order, stability and symbolic visual presentation in the engravings showing encounters that accompanied these works. A specific example comes from Thomas Herbert’s travel account (1627/1665) (See Figure 3), in which he discusses his time in South
Africa. As my research continued, I came to recognise here a distinct iconography in the depiction of first meeting and early trading between Europeans and Indigenous peoples. I was surprised to find that this subset of European visualizations of Indigenous societies, which as a wider topic has received much scholarship,1 had been
little discussed in detail, specifically for the ways in which it brings together two distinct social groups into one image. With post-colonial theory challenging dominant accounts of European history, they appeared to me particularly useful objects for reintroducing Indigenous narratives into history exhibitions. However, the tension between acting as an historical record, and an artistic work that embeds ideas about cultural contact, made the specific engraving above difficult to adequately frame within our exhibition. How could a depiction of historic contact be utilised by a museum display, without repeating or endorsing the inequities of the symbolic iconography it contains? I wondered, what has current museological practice made of such drawings that overlap documentary and artistic disciplines?
With 2018 marking the 250th anniversary of the first voyage to the Pacific of one of Britain’s most famous
naval explorers, Captain James Cook, a number of cultural institutions programmed exhibitions to open for varying durations throughout the year.2 In London alone, four exhibitions from major institutions specifically
1 See Smith, 1992; Moser, 1998; Sloan, 2007; Gaudio, 2008; Pratt, 2009.
2 In 2018, the Director of Royal Museums Greenwich Dr. Kevin Fewster referred to the opening of the Pacific Encounters exhibition at the
National Maritime Museum in Greenwich as “usher[ing] in more than a decade of commemorations in Britain and overseas. Among them are Cook’s landings in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, to be commemorated in 2019 and 2020 respectively; in Hawai’i and the north-west coast of America in 2028; and, of course, his death in 2029.” (Fewster, 2018, p.7). In Australia, following the Australian Museum & Galleries National Conference in 2019, initial plans for ‘Project 2020’ commemorations include: a First-Nations led response to the 250th
anniversary in an exhibition at the Australian Museum in Sydney; a re-enactment of Cook’s contact with the Eastern coast of Australia on his first voyage on a replica of the Endeavour; The Newcastle Weaponry Museum will collaborate with local Indigenous Elders to fire
Figure 3. Thomas Herbert and a Khoi person trading a piece of copper for a
sheep, on the beach in Table Bay. From Zee- en lant-reyse na verscheyde
tied themselves to the Cook anniversary in their marketing materials3.This offered an unusual opportunity to
compare museological practice on a similar topic and with similar collection items. The first to open was James
Cook: The Voyages at the British Library. One of its lead press images, displayed as a poster outside the
building (see Figure 4), bore clear similarities to the engraving of Herbert and the Khoi in South Africa. The exhibition revealed this to be a depiction of contact drawn around 100 years later, in 1769, of British botanist and collector Joseph Banks, who travelled on Cook’s first voyage, bartering with a Māori (for a detailed view see Figure 1). It was drawn and painted by Tupaia, an Islander from Ra'iātea, who also joined Cook’s first voyage.4 The
similarities between the two works are stark, from the flat presentation of the figures in profile, to the moment of exchange suspended just before its completion, objects held in outstretched hands, the trade left visually unfulfilled.5 Tupaia is believed to be
the first Pacific Islander to draw using European techniques with paper and water colour and it is striking how similar his figuration is to an established European tradition of which he almost certainly was not familiar. The differences between how the trade is shown in his drawing and its description in a letter written by Banks that displayed alongside it in the exhibition6, offered further evidence of the unclear role played by
visualizations of encounter, as documentation or as artwork. Developed centuries apart, these two examples of early contact bolstered my idea that the iconography of encounter contained encoded assumptions and biases, but also representations of agency and parity. Both were available to be highlighted by museum interpretation. Tupaia’s drawing led me to assess the wider role afforded to him, as an Indigenous Pacific Islander, within this exhibition, that took James Cook as its eponymous subject. Recent scholarship has highlighted the crucial role played by Tupaia in the peaceful unfolding of Cook’s landing, 127 years after a violent first encounter with the Dutch, and the development of friendly relations between the British and Māori (Salmond, 1991). Tupaia joined Cook’s crew when they visited his homeland in what is today known as Society Islands, where he was a navigator and ‘aroi (a high-ranking religious figure). Tupaia’s role as a go-between was highlighted by an audio-visual intervention in the exhibition: alongside Tupaia’s drawing, excerpts from Māori television series
Tupaia’s Endeavour played (Rolls, 2017), in which activists and scholars from the Pacific describe how he was
cannons at the replica Endeavour when it reaches Newcastle. The National Museum of Australia have elected not to put their Cook collection on display. (H. Joscelyne, personal communication, 17th May 2019).
3 The terminology employed by promotional materials for each exhibition is recounted in footnote no.10 of this work.
4 Tupaia was only identified as the artist of this work – previously described only as ‘The Artist of the Chief Mourner – when Harold Carter
presented a newly-discovered letter written by Joseph Banks, discussing this moment of barter, at the Science and Exploration in the Pacific conference held at the National Maritime Museum in 1997. It has been described as “a moment that has had a profound effect on subsequent studies of Pacific encounters.” (Rigby, 2017, pp.236-7) Tupaia’s drawing appears to show a crayfish being traded by the Māori for a piece of white tapa (Tahitian bark cloth), held in Banks’ hand (Salmond, 2017, p.8).
5 As Nicholas Thomas has described it is this strange fixity of a dynamic act that is the notable feature of depictions of trade, for “what is
most telling about the image of barter is that it does not speak…We have no sense of what is said or thought.” (1991, p.11).
6 The exhibition displays a letter in which Banks describes this trades, with details that differ to Tupaia’s drawing. Writing in 1812, Banks
claims that Tupaia: “drew me with a nail in my hand delivering it to an Indian [sic] who sold me a Lobster but with my other hand I had a firm grasp on the Lobster determined not to Quit the nail till I had Livery and Seizure of the article purchased” (The British Library, 2018)
Figure 4. Poster for James Cook: The Voyages
displayed in the courtyard of the British Library, 2018. Photo by Emma Yandle.
able to communicate with the people of New Zealand, and recount the respect with which he is remembered in their oral history.As I visited more exhibitions, I saw Tupaia again and again being afforded a central or influential position within the narrative of the voyages, contributing to the knowledge, art and material culture that they brought back to Europe. In the National Maritime Museum’s
Pacific Encounters, he is profiled alongside other significant voyage
participants ranging across Indigenous and European. The inequities of material evidence, resulting in two portraits within the collection of Cook and none of Tupaia, were responded to by a newly-created portrait entitled Representing Tupaia (See Figure 5).7 In the Royal Academy of
Arts’ Oceania, which includes the original of Tupaia’s ‘Drawing of a Tahitian scene’8, the interpretation highlights how eighteenth-century
European records of Cook’s voyages reference Tupaia, but purposefully do not give him his due credit.9 In the British Museum’s Reimagining the Pacific, Tupaia is introduced to challenge ideas of how objects changed
hands in New Zealand and to highlight the role in general of Indigenous go-betweens in the collection of material culture.10 Tupaia’s trade makes another appearance in Oceania, within a panoramic video work by Lisa
Reihana. One of its 70 dramatic vignettes, depicts Banks and Māori in an exchange, here playing out in real time as a dynamic negotiation11 (see Figure 2). Beyond using
Tupaia to disrupt a Eurocentric account of the history of contact in the Pacific, within these exhibitions he is shown to have significance and imaginative lure for Indigenous artists working across the vast region. One such example is found in the British Museum’s
Reimagining Captain Cook. Niuean artist John Pule’s Entanglements, 1997 (See Figure 6), reproduces Tupaia’s
drawing, flipping the orientation, and placing within a wider composition of scenes that depict different ‘entanglements’ of his country with Europe that occurred
7 The full label text reads: “Representing Tupaia. There are no existing portraits of Tupaia. This representation aims to give Tupaia a
presence in this gallery and acknowledges his importance to the Endeavour voyage. It uses a painting and map drawn by Tupaia when he was on board the Endeavour, and a silhouette of Lyall Hakaraia, artist, performer and gallery contributor.” (National Maritime Museum, 2018)
8 This drawing is used as the background for Representing Tupaia.
9 The label states: “Tupaia was instrumental in helping the HMS Endeavour to navigate and communicate in the southern Pacific, but his
role was diminished from Captain Cook’s official record of the voyage.” (Royal Academy of Arts, 2018).
10 A facsimile of his trade drawing from the British Library (Figure 1) is displayed alongside a dog-hair cloak. The interpretation suggests
that much of the material culture collected on the voyages may in fact have been given to Tupaia, as a highly respected individual. A flax and dog-hair cloak from Joseph Banks’ collection is now held by the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Tapsell (2009/2010, p.103) has suggested that this cloak may actually have been gifted by Māori to Tupaia, and only later made its way into Banks’ collection, after his death. In the exhibition, the label on Tupaia’s death, on the voyage’s arrival in Batavia (present-day Jakarta), suggests that “[a]fter his death, the many treasures he had been given probably passed to Joseph Banks”. Banks’ bequest to the British Museum makes up a large part of their Cook collection, some of which is exhibited here.
11 Reihana describes two dramatic scenes within her work as relating to Tupaia’s drawing: ‘Banks bartering with a Māori Chief for a
crayfish’ and ‘Tupaia drawing the Chief Mourner Costume and Bartering Scene’ (Reihana, 2012, p.45) Figure 6. Joseph Banks trading with a Māori. Detail from
Entanglements, by John Pule,1997. © John Pule. Figure 5. Representing Tupaia from
Pacific Encounters, 2018. Photo by
during and after contact.12Tupaia’s treatment across the exhibitions shows curators drawing from scholarship
by anthropologists.13 However, I was interested to see if the approach taken towards Tupaia and the encounters
he was a part of was an outlier, or if it extended to other depictions of early and first contact found within these exhibitions: a line of research that is pursued in this work.
12 The call for museological practice to reflect the research of related disciplines has been characterised as a central aim within what has
been termed a ‘second wave’ of the so-called new museology in the 21st century (Macdonald, 2011; Boast, 2011, p.58)
13 The figure of Tupaia and the artworks he created, are employed across these exhibitions to make points that show a range of influences: of
current thinking within anthropology; calls for inclusivity in museum representation; and Indigenous challenges to European institutions to decolonize their spaces and displays. In the realm of anthropology, his inclusion and treatment particularly seem to draw on the work of Anne Salmond (1991, 1997, 2003) and Nicholas Thomas (1991, 1997, 2012).
Introduction
i.) Talking about Captain Cook in the 21st century
In August 1768, Captain James Cook set sail from Plymouth onboard the Endeavour on the first of what would comprise three voyages: the first spanning 1768-1771; the second 1772-1775; and the third 1776-1780. Collectively they constituted over a decade of travel and marked the beginning of sustained contact between Europeans and the island nations of the vast Pacific Ocean, including but not limited to Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand and Hawai’i, and the north-west coast of North America (Banner, 2007, p.7). In a lecture given in 2016 at the Tairāwhiti Museum in Gisborne, New Zealand, Dr. Julie Adams, curator of Oceanic collections at the British Museum, spoke of the uncertainty with which British museums approached the upcoming anniversary of Cook’s first voyage. She remarked that few major museums had exhibitions planned, reflecting personally on the interest and value of such exhibitions and whose need they would be meeting. Of planned exhibitions at the National Maritime Museum and Royal Academy of Arts in London, she stated only, “It remains to be seen how these new interpretations will grapple with the legacies of the Cook voyages.” (Adams, 2016). That Cook’s voyages are to be “grappled with” responds to changes in thinking from the past decades across historical, anthropological and museological disciplines. Post-colonial reassessment has shifted focus from the ways in which Cook’s voyages represented European achievements, to the perspectives of Pacific Islanders and the afterlives of contact with Europeans for Indigenous communities (Clifford, 1988; Hallam & Street, 2013). Within museum studies, an understanding of museums as mediators of cultural history, has highlighted the political nature of collections and displays, whose interpretative strategies can confer authority, and as such become sites that can either represent or exclude social groups (Trofanenko, 2006, pp. 95-109; Dubin, 2011, pp.477-494; Bennett, 2013, pp. 49-69). To be reflective of current academic thinking, exhibitions concerning Cook’s voyages in the 21st century must to engage with both of these areas.
The role that Cook has been afforded within narratives of history, over time and by different cultural groups, is notable for the heights of heroizing and the depths of demonizing that he has been successfully used to embody. Swiftly positioned as a martyr following his death on the beach of Kealakekua Bay in Hawai’i during the third voyage in 1779 (Sivasundaram, 2004, pp 201-229), the symbolic role afforded to Cook in eighteenth-century British accounts transformed the man into a metonym for a European endeavour to make the world knowable, presenting the pursuit of knowledge, rather than enabling trade or expanding an empire, as his primary motivation.This depiction of Cook continued with authority well into the twentieth century. Propagated through books, prints, artworks and works of popular culture (Smith, 1992, pp. 225-240), the creation of his reputation has been discussed in detail (See Smith, 1992, pp. 225-231; Williams, 2004, pp. 230-232; pp. McAleer & Rigby, 2018, pp. 201-203). It was enabled and supported by the unprecedented breadth of new data and information that was brought back from Cook’s voyages. From the outset, description of the voyages moved beyond accounts of specific historical events, to frame them in terms of the ‘firsts’ they offered to European knowledge: of land masses, of societies and their cultures, of flora and fauna. In cartographic terms, Cook’s voyages led to the first accurate map of the breadth of the Pacific region, the last area of the world at the time that remained largely unknown in Europe. Cook’s extensive surveying and charting completed the shape of
Australia on world maps, by mapping its Eastern coast for the first time. By circumnavigating New Zealand, he produced the first comprehensive survey of its coastlines. Numerous South Sea islands were placed on the world map with a degree of accuracy for the first time. Of particular significance for eighteenth-century Western geography, his voyages definitively dispelled its most persistent myth: that there was a large southern land to be found at the base of the earth. In so-doing, Cook led the first ships in recorded history to enter the Antarctic circle.
Cook’s voyages also brought specific Europeans into contact for the first time with individuals from social groups of specific Pacific islands, whether through making first contact, such as with Hawai’i, or through lengthier contact with the inhabitants of islands where Europeans had previously landed, such as Tahiti. This cross-cultural interaction led to unprecedented movements of individual Pacific islanders, such as the Ra’aitean’s (known in Europe as one of the Society Islands) Tupaia and Mai who joined Cook’s ships on the first and second voyages. Mai became the first Pacific Islander to visit Britain in 1774. Alongside such firsts, Cook’s voyages also heralded the end of the centuries long European project to explore and map the world. When his ships made contact with Hawaii in 1778, it represented a meeting with the last ancient civilization to have developed in isolation from the rest of the world (Thomas, 2003). The breadth of his scientific
achievements and hardships endured on such long voyages remain impressive to this day. At the time they were presented in Britain as a distinct source of national pride. With the stirrings of global expansion amongst European nations and accounts of Cook’s persistent and fearless personality, he “provided the material from which a new kind of hero…was fashioned.” (Smith, 1992, p. 225), one who could be called upon to embody the collective achievement of the voyages he commanded, and the country he hailed from14.
Few figures have been more thoroughly reassessed by post-colonial thinking than Cook. With the rise of identity politics in 1970s, with its focus on the self-determination of marginalised groups and their need for cultural representation; to post-colonial theory’s proposition that Western achievements must be understood in relation to their concurrent colonial rule; alongside the activism of Indigenous Pacific communities both outside and inside the museum space15, Cook’s well-documented metonymic usefulness was harnessed for a different
purpose. Particularly within the Pacific regions that were subsequently colonized by the British, Cook’s first contact or landings had been used as markers of a foundational, imperial national narrative, and frequently visibly memorialised in public heritage from statues to street names (Williams, 2004, pp. 236-237). As a response in part to this visibility and prevalence, Cook has been harnessed by Indigenous activists as an exemplification of European imperialism16. He has been used to symbolise the devastating impact of
14 Bolton highlights that “One of the notable features of Cook's public fame has always been the focus on him as an
individual...Undoubtedly a leader and a man of many striking qualities, his voyages were team efforts in which many individuals
collaborated on a single project. The products of the voyages, the written records, paintings and drawings, the collections, were all made by a group of people, not by Cook himself alone...Very commonly, however, Cook is made to stand for the group and the others - the officers, seamen, men of science - are far less well known. The collections made on his voyages are commonly described as Cook Collections, while in fact the objects were acquired by a whole range of expedition members for a whole range of diverse reasons. Indeed, not many objects can be definitively associated with Cook himself. This process of simplification also means that Cook is very commonly made to stand in for all early European exploration in the Pacific.” (Bolton, 2009/2010, p.122)
15 For a general overview of worldwide Indigenous perspectives on engagement and self-representation in current museological practice see
(Onciul, 2015). For a detailed Pacific case study, see (McCarthy, 2018) on the reopening of the Aotearoa New Zealand’s national museum in 1998 as the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand (its Māori title translating to ‘Container of Treasures’). As mandated by a 1992 Act of Parliament, the museum was re-organized to acknowledge and represent Aotearoa New Zealand as a state with two national cultures, placing Indigenous Māori culture on equal footing alongside settler-colonial New Zealand society.
16 The specific appeal of Cook is shown by how he has been deployed by the colonial governments of countries where he did not in fact
colonisation on many of the Indigenous Pacific groups that he encountered, ranging from both acts of violence that occurred during his voyages, to the population decimation and settling of Indigenous land that followed them. The consolidation of these legacies into a ‘concept’ of Cook as a shorthand for oppression however blurs the “fine line between Cook the individual and the culture their ancestors inherited in the wake of his vessels” (Smith, 1992, p.240; See also Bolton, 2009/2010). Such critiques of Cook entered mainstream European publications in the latter half of the 20th century (Williams, 2004, pp. 238-243), yet British museums have been
slower to reassess how they narrativize Cook17. In contrast to museums in the Pacific region, where settler
colonisation has made negotiating their relationship to imperial history more urgent and a part of wider political struggles, there has been less of a sense of urgency within Britain for museums to reconsider the presentation of Cook through their collections. For British museums, he has remained the ‘familiar stranger’ through which Pacific history can be accessed and mediated for a European public (Bolton, 2010, p.123) and surprisingly “[t]he level of interest has not diminished in recent years, despite the discredited status of the imperial ideologies with which Cook was for so long associated.” (Thomas, 2003, p.xx). How Cook’s voyages are displayed in British museums, in comparison to within Pacific institutions, has particular political significance, revealing the extent to which (primarily state-owned) spaces, are able to balance an acknowledgement of Cook’s achievements, with critical scrutiny.
17 The British Museum loaned objects to two exhibitions in the early 2000s that demonstrate the co-existence of both traditional and dialogic
approaches to discussing Cook’s voyages. Pacific Encounters. Art & Divinity in Polynesia 1760-1860, ran from 21st May – 13th August
2006 at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, England, presenting Cook’s voyages as elements of a wider Pacific narrative and, as its title suggests, highlighting contact and meeting of cultures and ideas within the region (see Hooper, 2006). By contrast, James Cook
and the Exploration of the Pacific, displayed in the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn from 28th August
2009 - 28th February 2010, describes itself as “a major exhibition dedicated to the great navigator and to the Pacific”, described elsewhere as “the exotic world of the South Seas”, and thus implying a distinctly Eurocentric and romanticized approach to this period in history. (See “Media Release”, 2010).
ii.) Cook exhibitions in 2018: searching for the encounters
Contrary to Adams’ prediction of limited museological responses to the 250th anniversary of his first
voyage, as already introduced four exhibitions opened in Britain in 2018, that directly linked themselves to Cook’s voyages. All specifically claimed to be ‘marking’ the anniversary in their marketing materials.18 Despite
the similarity of their topic, these exhibitions varied hugely in all other concerns. Although all organised by large institutions located in the capital, with considerable status and renown in both the domestic and
international museum field, they ranged across state and private institutions19. Beyond this they differed in the
genre of their collection on display; whether as displays of the museum’s permanent collection or temporary exhibitions of primarily loaned material; the size and design of their exhibition spaces; and the role given to Cook’s voyages within their narratives. For clarity, the titles, institutions, dates and curatorial teams of the exhibition are recounted below, in chronological order of their opening:
James Cook: The Voyages
British Library, London20
18 “The exhibition marks the 250th anniversary of the Royal Academy, founded in 1768, the same year Captain James Cook set sail on his
first expedition to the Pacific on the Endeavour.” (“Oceania Press Release”, 2018); “New major exhibition marks 250 years since James Cook’s ship Endeavour set sail from Plymouth” (“James Cook: The Voyages Press Release”, 2018); “To mark the 250th anniversary of
Captain Cook’s first voyage, the British Museum today presents a new exhibition which re-examines the explorer’s relationship with the people of the Pacific.” (“Reimagining Captain Cook Press Release”, 2018); Whilst the press release for Pacific Encounters does not repeat this terminology, in the foreword to a National Maritime Museum publication to coincide with the opening of this new gallery, Director of Royal Museums Greenwich Dr. Kevin Fewster describes the opening of Pacific Encounters as “Marking the 250th anniversary in 2018 of
the departure of this momentous voyage.” (Fewster, 2017, p.7)
19 The British Museum, British Library and National Maritime Museum (as part of Royal Museums Greenwich) are state owned institutions
with a permanent collection that is free to enter, and an offering of both free and charged exhibitions. The Royal Academy of Arts is an independent charity, with some free displays of its permanent collection, but a core focus on its temporary exhibitions with a charged entry.
20 Temporary exhibition: 27th April – 28th August 2018 Curators: William Frame (Head of Modern Archives and Manuscripts) and Laura
Walker (Archivist and Curator). Charged admission. For press release, see Appendix A. It should be noted that a much smaller photography exhibition was programmed from 6th July – 23rd September 2018, to crossover with the main exhibition’s run. Entitled Tūhuratanga – Voyages of Discovery: Photographs by Crystal Te Moananui-Squares, and curated by the artist herself, Crystal Te Moananui-Squares, in
collaboration with Māori producer Jo Walsh. Twenty photographic portraits were displayed, to “document[s] people of Te-Moananui-a-Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean) living in the United Kingdom today” and positioned as “ a response to the historical context and interpretation of images, objects and text currently on display in James Cook: The Voyages (Tūhuratanga – Voyage of Discovery Press Release, 2018). Laura Walker, curator of James Cook: The Voyages explained that the exhibition developed out of a consultation with Jo Walsh, and that the space was fully curated by the external community group. She described it as “a really important part of the exhibition to do that, but it was limited by its location”, in a small space on the second floor. The exhibition, however, isn’t referenced within James Cook: The Voyages and is physically positioned quite far away from the main exhibition space. It is consequently likely that many visitors were not aware of its existence.
Figure 7. Entranceway of James Cook: The Voyages, 2018.
Pacific Encounters
National Maritime Museum, Royal Museums Greenwich, London21
Oceania
Royal Academy of Arts, London22
Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives
The British Museum23
21 Permanent collection: opened 22nd September 2018. Curators: Sophie Richards (Exhibitions Interpretation Curator), Dr. Katy Barrett
(formerly Curator of Art), Dr. Nigel Rigby (formerly Curator of Exploration). Free entrance. For press release, see Appendix B.
22 Temporary exhibition: 29th September – 10th December 2018. Curators: Professor Nicholas Thomas (external: Director of the Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge), Dr. Peter Brunt (external: Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington) and Dr. Adrian Locke (Senior Curator). Charged entrance. Subsequently travelling to Museé du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac, Paris, 12th
March – 7th July 2019. For press release, see Appendix C
23 Temporary exhibition: 29th November 2018 – 4th August 2019. Curators: Dr. Lissant Bolton, (Keeper of Africa, Oceania and the
Americas); Dr. Julie Adams (Curator of Oceania), Dr. Gaye Sculthorpe (Senior Curator, Oceania collections), Mary McMahon (PhD student) and Theano Guillaume-Jaillet (Former Director of the Tahiti Museum, visiting research fellow in early 2018). For press release see Appendix D
Figure 8. Entranceway of Pacific Encounters, 2018. Photo by
Emma Yandle.
Figure 9. Entranceway to Oceania, 2018. Photo by Emma
Yandle
Figure 10. Entranceway of Reimaging Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives © The Trustees of the British Museum
The exhibitions’ titles alone provide clues to their different narrative approaches to Cook’s voyages. James
Cook: The Voyages at the British Library is a detailed chronological account of the events during Cook’s travels
in the Pacific, primarily exhibiting documentation and visual records created on board and on the return to England. In Pacific Encounters, a new permanent gallery at the National Maritime Museum, Cook is displaced as the central subject for the Pacific region itself: its islands, peoples and cultural traditions. The exhibition switches between thematic and chronological presentations of objects, to narrate specific events and moments of encounter between Europeans and Indigenous peoples, across a history of contact of which Cook is a part, but as part of a wider framework of Pacific culture that extends before and after these decisive moments in its history. In Oceania at the Royal Academy of Arts, as its title implies, it is the region that is on display. Cook is
introduced at the outset but then entirely de-centralized, as thematic groupings of objects from across the Pacific are displayed, interrupted by works of contemporary art from the Pacific today. Stating its aims in its title, the much smaller Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives pairs an historical account of events from Cook’s voyages, with the ways in which they have been questioned, criticized or extended by contemporary Pacific artists. Their artworks are displayed in cases alongside historic objects that were collected or created during the voyages.
However, alongside these differences in content, focus, and curatorial approach, there are noticeable
consistencies in the choice of language the exhibitions use to discuss the meetings of Europeans and Indigenous peoples on Cook’s voyages. Interactions between Europeans and Indigenous groups are primarily referred to as ‘encounters’. The term is both a linguistic choice and a thematic element in the exhibitions. It is observable to varying degrees across the exhibitions, from structuring the whole exhibition around encounters (Pacific
Encounters); to a thematic room (Oceania) or thematic cases (Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific
Perspectives); to its discussion within audiovisual interventions and text (James Cook: The Voyages). Language
that reflects this point of view is also included across object labels and in accompanying catalogues and publications. What might at first appear to be merely transparent, politically neutral choice of language for discussing contested periods of history, the word and the idea of an encounter itself, has a far from neutral meaning in the fields of anthropology and history.
To allow for the complexity of cultural interactions, new terms have gained traction across academic disciplines for describing the meetings that occurred between European explorers and Indigenous peoples during voyages of exploration. This is tied to a wider movement within anthropology that gained traction in 1970s and 80s, to “decolonize the discipline by recognizing the colonial politics that underpin our theoretical categories and ethnographic practice” (Faier & Rofel, 2014, p.364). From the impact of early racial science on the conception of ethnic groups,24 to the presentation of Indigenous cultures as a-temporal and static,25
24 This is particularly evidenced in the Pacific through the division of the islands into geographic and ethnic regions in 1831, by French
explorer Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville. His proposal of island groupings termed Polynesia, Micronesia, Malaysia and Melanesia, was devised based on an hypothesis of shared ethnicity within groups of islands, in which the darkness of Islanders’ skin was a primary differentiator. Despite originating out of discredited racial science, such geographical divisions are still commonly used today.
25 The late 20th century saw criticism of anthropology’s use of what has been termed the ‘ethnographic present’. This term was used to refer
to anthropological writings that adopt the viewpoint of “the present which existed in the traditional past and not the period when the ethnographer was in the field” (McKnight 1990, p. 58). As Sanjek elaborates, “[s]uch writing conveys none of the independence of rule and action experienced in the ethnographer's own world, nor does it present behaviour as contingent, situational or deliberate…The ethnographic present…functions to take the society so described out of the timestream of history in which ethnographers and their own societies exist.” (Sanjek, 2013, p. 86). Broadly speaking, it refers to a trend of earlier anthropology to focus on the perceived traditional life of Indigenous groups, at the expense of their present-day reality.
assumptions within anthropology have impacted the ways in which these moments of contact were perceived. In the arena of cultural interaction, first contact was initially defined primarily as a ‘fatal impact’ whereby the force of European culture would inevitably cause the destruction of Indigenous ways of life. Within the Pacific region this idea achieved mainstream attention through Alan Moorhead’s work on Australia (1966). Whilst the devastating effects of contact in many instances is undeniable and an important aspect of this history, recent anthropologists have strongly criticised the fatal impact theory. They argue it continues the same one-sided view of agency that was present in European exploration writings from the outset, with their persistent talk of
‘discovering’ lands and peoples. Contemporary anthropology has sought to replace this with a two-sided notion – of ‘encounters’ or ‘contact’ and ‘entanglement’ - between European and Indigenous groups. In works that return to the primary sources from Cook’s voyages to reassess the moments of encounter, the idea of the encounter has been used to reframe historical events, creating a history “in which Europeans and Pacific Islanders alike were historical agents”. (Salmond, 1991, p. 12) Within Pacific scholarship, the work of Marshall Sahlins’ (1985) was an influential example of how returning to encounters can alter a mainstream account of history. Sahlins proposed a radical reassessment of the circumstances of Cook’s death, which occurred at the hands of Indigenous Hawaiians on the third voyage in 1779, on the beach of Kealakekua Bay. Traditionally positioned as an example of Indigenous violence and aggression (albeit it in response to Cook’s attempts to kidnap their ruling chief Kalaniʻōpuʻu to force the return of a small cutter vessel the Islanders had stolen), Sahlins’ argues it was in fact due to the ways in which Cook’s arrival accidentally coincided with an Hawaiian religious cycle, the festival of Lono. Although this argument has in turn been subject to criticism26, it was a
seismic demonstration of the new perspective required of anthropology, in which Indigenous world views must be centrally placed to move it away from being fundamentally “a discourse of alterity” (Thomas, 1991, p.3), defined by Europeans. Sahlins’ reassessment of Cook was an early move towards allowing Indigenous cultures to inhabit the subject position of history. In a ground-breaking research project published in 1991 as Two
Worlds: First Meetings Between Māori and Europeans, 1642-1772, Anne Salmond brought together for the first
time British and Māori accounts of early encounters in New Zealand. In the preface to her work she directly addressed the surprising lack of collaborative scholarship27. Written almost thirty years ago, the anniversary of
Cook’s first voyage offers an apt occasion to reflect upon the extent to which Salmond’s approach has been embraced by museums, through their exhibitions.
26 Gananath Obeyesekere strenuously contested Sahlins’ claims in his publication The Apotheosis Of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking In The Pacific (1992), initiating a long-standing debate between the two academics and their respective camps. For a summary of the key
areas of debate see Borofsky, 1997.
27 “After two hundred years or more of shared history in New Zealand, one might have thought that scholars would have considered each of
iii.) Methodology and theoretical underpinnings
I will rely on two core theoretical concepts for this analysis: that objects have situationally-contingent meanings, and that exhibitions can be usefully understood as texts and their interpretative strategies elucidated through the tools of narrative theory. Objects have been termed ‘mutable mobiles’ by Bruno Latour, to reflect their ability to have a fixed material form, whilst also being mobile and portable. On a semantic level, theorists have argued for objects to be seen as animate and mobile, rather than “pure tools of representation” (Appadurai, 2016). His landmark collection The Social Life of Things calls for a focus on this mobility and mutability of possible meanings, by analysing objects’ – used here to refer to the breadth of material culture and artworks - entanglement in wider social and economic systems, showing that they can usefully be viewed as having a ‘social life’ and a ‘cultural biography’ (Kopytoff, 1986, pp.64-94). Appadurai argues that, although from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context (2016). These tenets will be appropriate for studying how objects can reflect the encounters – moments of transition – that they were often a part of on Cook’s voyages. Equally they are useful for understanding the change in an object’s use value and generic category when it moves from Indigenous to European worlds, and further to become a part of a museum collection. A focus on the instability of objects’ meanings, alongside their constant material properties, led Tony Bennett to adapt Latour’s definition to look at museum objects as ‘mutable immobiles’ (2012, p.148) or
‘mutable immutable mobiles’ (2016). A key issue of the ‘new museology’ is the “situated and contextual rather than inherent” (Macdonald, 2011, p.3) meaning of museum objects. The ordering and shaping force of an exhibition can thus highlight or confer new meanings upon an object through inclusion in its structure (Vergo, 1989, p.46). Bennett’s conception of ‘mutable immutable mobiles’, acts as a framework within which one can analyse and compare the constant material properties of an object and the changing, functions and effects afforded it through inscription in a museum setting28. This setting can range from the interpretation directly
framing the object, to the layers of meaning inscribed by its location in a specific institution, as well as the wider discursive environment of museology, “the circulation of concepts across museums and affiliated disciplinary networks of the wider forms of political agency that are brought to bear upon them.” (Bennett, 2016). Nicholas Thomas describes this re-inscription as “[c]reative recontextualization and indeed reauthorship” through which objects “become and are becoming different” (Thomas, 1991, p.5), as they are moved, reframed or drawn into new discourses.
A focus on the social transformations of an object enables the disruption of an essentialist idea that the identity of an object is held within its material form, rather than its conceptual configuration (Thomas, 1991, p.28). Rather, “[a]s socially and culturally salient entities, objects change in defiance of their material stability. The category to which a thing belongs, the emotion and judgment it prompts, and the narrative it recalls, are all historically reconfigured.” (Thomas, 1991, p.125). It is the tension between the signification of the object and the museological techniques and frameworks brought to bear upon it through an exhibitionary structure; and the
28 Both Bennett’s case studies and Latour’s original example of a mutable mobile interestingly relate to the Pacific region: Latour uses the
example of explorers’ desire to bring back a physical record of their new knowledge of the Pacific, as the motivation for a mutable mobile – a map – to be created. (see Latour, 1981, pp.5-6)
tension between museological discourse and the affiliated disciplinary networks of anthropology and history, that make this a fruitful mode of analysis for my study of encounters.
The situational meanings of objects are thus brought to the fore by the structure or context within which they are placed in an exhibition. The exhibitionary structure, rather than any “pure representation” inherent in an object itself, is the crucial element in controlling how visitors respond to and perceive them, for “[t]he same material can be made to tell quite different stories not just by means of captions or information panels or explanatory texts but by the sequence in which works are displayed, the very way the material itself is divided up, above all the physical and associative context.” (Vergo, 1989, p.54). The implications of multiple objects brought together that is occasioned by exhibitions, has led to them being described through the language of literary theory as “elements of a narrative” (Vergo, 1989, p.46). History museums conventionally offer a narrative directly to visitors, however from this theoretical standpoint, narratives are present regardless,
precisely when objects are placed within an interpretative structure. This has led to a focus on the ways in which an exhibition’s framework can “construct and convey meaning” through its ability to “feature and focus” objects and ideas, whether aiming for synthesis or for rupture (Greenberg, Ferguson, Nairne, 1996, p.1, p.2).
Exhibitions can consequently be viewed as texts – another system in which elements are arranged in relation to a whole structure. Mieke Bal has expanded on how the terminology of literary theory can be useful for
analysing museums. She describes the syntax of exhibitions as their “orderly or systematic arrangement of parts or elements” in which the placement of objects in relation to each other creates meaning as do lines of a text: “[c]onnections between things are syntactical; they produce, so to speak, sentences conveying propositions” (Bal, 1996, p.87). Bal describes works as ‘collocating’ when they are thoughtfully placed together on a wall, which “breaks the autonomy of each and states their connections for the viewer” (1996, p.87). Within museum spaces, the role played by the visitor in bringing narratives to life, combines the temporal nature of reading a text, with the spatial element of moving through the physical location of the exhibition, which Bal terms the ‘walking tour’, arguing that it “must be taken seriously as a meaning-making event” (1996, p.96). This highlights the tension between the “reading attitude” (1996, p.95) that an exhibition seeks to promote to its visitors, and the degree to which this is or isn’t engaged with by them: visitors are understood to play an active role in the meaning-making process. In lieu of an ‘ideal visitor’, the design and layout of an exhibition can be used to exert influence and guide how the exhibition is read by a visitor, or in turn purposefully use these techniques to undermine a specific route through its narrative, and space.
iv.) Structure of the work
My analysis will go on to explore the ways in which specific objects with strong links to encounters in the four exhibitions in question are narrativized. This will explore the extent to which the encounter is
highlighted as a salient feature of the object, the techniques used to do so and how these engage with or
overlook anthropological thinking around encounters. Together I will analyze how the overall effect contributes to or diminishes the extent to which the exhibitions and museums act as contact zones. It will question the extent of the gap between anthropological scholarship, curatorial thinking and museological practice. The discourse of ‘encounters’ - “engagements across [emphasis added] difference” (Faier & Rofel, 2014, p.364) allows for agency, motivations and influence from both European and Indigenous groups, and fragments authoritative narratives of history into multiple, interacting viewpoints, where outcomes are relational. Approaching Cook’s voyages through the idea of ‘encounter’ is thus both a theoretical approach, and one that places a renewed focus on material evidence, seeking to supplement it where it is lacking. The rise in reference to ‘encounter’ in museum interpretation, implies a symbiotic relationship between anthropological thinking and museological practice29. This work will explore the extent to which the linguistic deployment of ‘encounter’ is
borne out as a perspective in these exhibitions, towards a specific subset of objects related to Cook’s voyages: artworks both historic and contemporary that purport to visualize first contact and early meetings between the European crew and different Indigenous Pacific Islanders. It will analyse how these objects are used to narrativize encounters on Cook’s voyages, and the role that encounters are afforded within the exhibitions’ wider narratives, by comparing their material content and interpretative strategies. Is the linguistic trend of ‘encounter’ also used as a structuring principle or discursive strategy for looking at Cook’s voyages? Is it borne out in the interpretation, the exhibition’s structure and the point of view it present? This work will begin by establishing the stake and influence that museums have in the public representation of Cook’s voyages, by establishing the organic link between the voyages, the collections they brought forth, and museum collections. From here it will expand on the link between anthropological and museological thinking, showing how the idea of encounters has been borne out by recent museum practice relating to Cook (Chapter One). It will then analyse the visual representations of European-Indigenous encounters during Cook’s voyages, comparing the narrative use of eighteenth-century depictions of these events (Chapter Two), followed by the exhibitions’ response to the redeployment of European iconography of encounter by contemporary Indigenous artists (Chapter Three). The role of contemporary art within these exhibitions will be compared, to reflect on its inclusion as an interpretative technique to compensate for a lack of material evidence, by representing historic encounters from Indigenous points of view. Together, this will allow for conclusions to be drawn on the extent to which exhibitions on Cook’s voyages in 2018 afford a role to the specific encounters between European and Pacific Islanders; and the ways in which encounters are used by British museums as part of a wider perspective for framing Pacific history.
At the outset, it is interesting to note the words of Nicholas Thomas, co-organizer of the three year-long
Artefacts of Encounter project, in which the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of
29 The word ‘encounter’ is now commonly used in the titles of exhibition that discuss European voyaging and the early cultural meetings.
The V&A’s 2004 exhibition entitled Encounters: the Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500-1800, displayed in London from 23rd September –
Cambridge sought to thoroughly research and establish the provenance of its ‘Cook collection’ (Thomas eds., 2016, pp.17-28). In the subsequent publication, that revealed the results of this provenance and historical research, Thomas turns to considering the ways in which the details of the encounters that surround these artefacts, could be represented by their interpretation in exhibitions. Thomas describes in detail what could be termed an ‘encounter perspective’, setting the precepts of uncertainty, multiplicity, history and presence for exhibiting cross-cultural encounters (full quotation included in the footnote).30 The opinions of Thomas, an
eminent figure within both Pacific anthropology and museology, are of particular note for the role he played within the exhibitions I will go on to discuss. Himself at the forefront of both anthropological and museological theory, are his precepts for exhibiting encounters borne out both in the practice with which he is involved and wider curatorial treatments of this period in history?
30 “One precept might therefore be that we should exhibit uncertainty. We should also always make it clear that the great and singular things
we display have meant different things to different people. So a second precept might be that we exhibit multiplicity. A third should reflect the vital and formative character of the encounters through which these objects passed into the hands of mariners, scientists and other Europeans: they are representative, not of cultures, but of emerging, evolving, chronically contested relationships. In other words, we exhibit
history. Finally, these are things that remain potent and alive, in different ways, for people today. Above all, they remain alive for the
Islanders, from whom we have learned so much through our intersecting interests and varied collaborations – some short-term in nature, others considerably more sustained. Most vitally, we exhibit presence.” (Thomas, 2016, p.261)
I.
The rise of encounters in contemporary museum practice
i.) The material legacy of Cook’s voyages and their entry into museum collections
Cook’s voyages are specific a concern for museums because of the sheer quantity of material heritage collected during them that has made its way into public collections. These objects, and museums in turn are thus influential sites for the public representation of Pacific history.31 This encompasses both objects that originated
from Pacific countries that were collected during the voyages, and European artworks and written accounts produced during or after the voyages. The extraordinary nature of Cook’s travels within the field of so-called voyages of discovery, is due to the wealth of information and knowledge that they brought back to Europe. From the outset the voyages and their reception have been intimately linked to – and accessed through – objects. The extent of the output in material culture is in part a result of the overlapping interests of the stakeholders of the voyages, which included the British Admiralty, Royal Geographic Society, accompanying naturalists, scientists and artists. Charts, surveys, geographic and astronomical observations were recorded in journals, logs, maps and later in printed publications. With the inclusion of the wealthy amateur naturalist Joseph Banks on the first voyage, a precedent was set of meticulously documenting all forms of natural life encountered in the Pacific, that was continued through all three. The first voyage alone returned with over a thousand zoological specimens and 30,000 botanical specimens, including 1,400 species that had never been previously recorded (Chambers, 2016, pp.6-7). Alongside these were detailed landscape scenes; drawings of animals and plants; anthropological drawings, paintings of social groups and specific Indigenous people encountered; objects gained through trade, as gifts or purposefully collected; and documentary records, both textual and visual, of moments deemed important during the voyages including landings and meetings. Objects created during the voyage were subject to repurposing back in Britain for wider public presentation. The paintings of William Hodges, artist for the second voyage, were sent back to Britain to be exhibited at the Free Society of Artists Exhibition in 1774, over a year before Cook’s second voyage returned. Both Hodges and the third voyage artist John Webber, had paintings they created during the voyages exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, which was itself established the same year that Cook first departed onboard the Endeavour (McAleer, 2018, pp.153). From the return of the first voyage, drawings and paintings were engraved as illustrations for both official and unofficial publications about Cook’s voyages; these depictions became the over-riding visuals of the Pacific in Britain, due to their wide dispersal and ease of access by the general public.32 The variety, wide generic mix and scale of the objects
collected from Cook’s first voyage onwards, created a new template for expeditions to return with material evidence and detailed accounts of everything they encountered (Chambers etc., 2016, p.6). Objects resulting from Cook’s voyages range across many different ‘genres’ of collection and institutions today - natural history, artistic, archival and the previously termed ‘ethnographic’, now more frequently as ‘world culture’ collection. Their dispersal into national collections across Europe was in many cases a contemporary process, and organically linked with the development of national museums in Britain.
31 See Thomas, 1991; Hetherington & Morphy, 2010; Chambers, 2016; Thomas, Adams, Lythberg, Nuku & Salmond, 2016; McAleer &
Rigby, 2018)
