Katrina Schlunke
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
Captain Cook Chased a Chook
2011, Cultural Studies Review
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Abstract
How can we write the contemporary 'histories' of Captain Cook when they include such textual and material diversity? When that diversity ranges from children's rhymes to convenience stores as well as journals now claimed as iconic documents of the enlightenment? How might the insights of Bruno Latour into how the 'experimental' is produced in the laboratory be helpful in showing how Cook is produced in a settler culture? How does revealing the 'experimental' (the material and textual ethnography) of history show us new ways of 'doing' history that engages with its textual as well as its material diversity.
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The Time of Captain Cook: A Conversation
Journal18, 2020
Captain James Cook and his times
1979
Banks in 1962: a rich lode which other scholars immediately began to mine. He started drafting the life of Cook in 1967, the year in which he retired from Victoria University of Wellington, and, at this point, one can sympathize with his regret at any interruption. J.C. Beaglehole died on 26 March 1971, and his masterly and almost universally acclaimed Life of Captain James Cook appeared in 1974.4 Beaglehole's Cook offers as complete a study as one could expect a single scholar to produce. It is to be admired not just for its thorough ness but also for its erudition, style, and scholarly integrity. Having read Beaglehole, one might ask if there is anything else to say. The answer, as these papers show, is that Beaglehole's editions of the journals make possible a reassessment not only of Cook but, to some extent, of Beagle hole. He has paved the way, not closed it off. It is a measure of the power of his contribution that in the past few years much valuable scholarship has come to maturity. Like any biographer, Beaglehole focussed on his subject. The lens of his scholarship threw an intense light on Cook, but sometimes cast a shadow on those who surrounded him. In his paper on "Cook's Post humous Reputation," Bernard Smith has pointed out how the eulogists of the late eighteenth century excluded other individuals from their orations lest mention of their achievements diminish those of the hero. To some extent, perhaps, Beaglehole shared this tendency. Cook was his hero, and other men were sometimes judged harshly. David Mackay, Howard T. Fry, and to some extent Michael E. Hoare all assert the im portance of men who were Cook's contemporaries. Joseph Banks, Alex ander Dalrymple, and the two Forsters5 made fundamental contribu tions to Cook's voyages. Clearly their careers were profoundly influ enced by their association with Cook. But it is also true that Cook's stature was enhanced, not diminished, by the men that surrounded him. As the old Maori saying, which Beaglehole uses to sum up Cook, has it, "a veritable man is not hid among many."6 Perhaps surprisingly, given Beaglehole's exhaustive work, there are even some new perspectives emerging on Cook the man. Research prompted by bicentennial celebrations is producing new insights into Cook's early life in Yorkshire and the extent to which local connections explain his otherwise curious decision to join the Royal Navy in 1755. The last few years of Cook's life also bear re-examination, and Sir James Watt provides intriguing new evidence on the state of Cook's health on ROBIN FISHER & HUGH JOHNSTON Williams shows how he contributed to the emergence of a definite coast line out of the clouds and fogs of cartographers' imaginings. As in the south, Cook's influence did not end with his departure, and Christon I. Archer explains how the appearance of his account of the third voyage taught the Spanish the importance of publicizing their own efforts to ex plore the northwest coast of America. By then, however, it was too late, for Cook's presence on the coast resulted in the development of the seaotter trade and the influx of British and American traders. Another aspect of Cook's explorations that demands attention, in both the north and south Pacific, is their consequences for the indigenous people. Here, in the tradition of Beaglehole's "Note on Polynesian History," 10 the methods of historians and anthropologists need to be brought together in an effort to achieve some understanding of both sides of the relationship that developed between Cook's men and the people of the Pacific. Hitherto, European writing has been dominated to a considerable extent by the "fatal impact" view, 11 which tends to obscure any reciprocity that may have existed in the contact situation. The extension of this line of thought, sometimes expressed at the con ference, is the notion that there are two points of view on Cook's pres ence in the Pacific-that of the European and that of the Pacific people-and that these views are necessarily distinct and different. In his paper, Robin Fisher tries to show that a reciprocal relationship, which neither group dominated and both benefitted from, developed between Cook's men and the Indians of Nootka Sound. If nothing else, both cul tures also have in common the subsequent manipulation of Cook's memory to suit current social and political concerns. As the prefaces and footnotes of his volumes indicate, J.C. Beaglehole, like all scholars, drew on the knowledge of others. Yet he dominated the field of Cook studies in a way that no individual now can or, perhaps, ought to do. To carry the task further, to better understand the full scope of Cook's explorations and their impact, it is necessary to bring together people from many disciplines, individuals with different ex pertise but with a common interest. Those who participated in Simon Fraser's Cook conference demonstrated that, like the voyages them selves, Cook studies are now very much a cooperative enterprise.
Text commentary on extract from James Cook's journal
This is a pedagogical document illustrating how to write a historical text commentary on an extract from James cook's journal. It was originally prepared in connection with the national examination here in France, the agrégation.
2015 Artefacts of Encounter: The Cook-Voyage Collections in Cambridge
Cook-Voyage Collections of ‘Artificial Curiosities’ in Britain and Ireland, 1771–2015 (MEG Occasional Paper, No. 5), 2015
The University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (hereafter, MAA) houses more than 250 objects that have been authoritatively traced to the three Pacific voyages led by James Cook. These include the largest documented collection of first-voyage artefacts anywhere in the world and many objects known to have been acquired during the second and third voyages, a number of which were once in the Leverian Museum. Some objects can be linked to specific encounters between local people and members of the expeditions that are described in detail in the voyage accounts.The collections have been the focus of considerable scholarly attention over the past half-century, and firm provenances have been established both for specific objects and component assemblages. At the same time, growing interest in these collections amongst Pacific peoples and the affordances of new information technologies suggest novel ways in which our understanding of these singular artefacts of encounter might be enhanced in the future.
Captain Cook upon Changing Seas: Indigenous Voices and Reimagining at the British Museum
Journal of Pacific History, 2019
This paper reviews the British Museum exhibition, Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives, 29 November 2018-4 August 2019. It situates the exhibition within a global context of exhibitions held around the 250th anniversary of Cook's first voyage, and critically considers its attempt to reframe dominant narratives surrounding Cook, his voyages and more broadly the colonization of the Pacific through a focus on Pacific Islander perspectives within a changing museum sector.
Pacific Images: Views from Captain Cook’s Third Voyage. Eleanor C. Nordyke and James A. Mattison, Jr.
As is pointed out in the introductory section of this book, the 61 engravings made from the drawings of the artist John Webber on James Cook's third voyage, first published as an Atlas accompanying the three volumes of Cook's journals in 1784, " were the first visual records of the Pacific for the Western world " (p. xi). It is unsurprising that both words and images have been mined by countless scholars ever since, providing as they do a record of some of the earliest contacts between the peoples of Europe and Oceania, and documenting customs and a material world whose trajectory of change was forever skewed in different directions by that contact, and was never to appear quite the same again. Given that amount of attention, perhaps most notably in Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith's seminal four-volume magnum opus published in 1987 (twelve years before the first edition of the present work), we might be forgiven for having misgivings about whether yet another book on the topic had much fresh information to offer to us. We need not have worried. For a start, a work like Joppien and Smith (1987) is unashamedly aimed at scholars. Its very completeness and dense analysis (not to mention its cost) all militate against its use by the general readers to whom Eleanor C. Nordyke directs her book (p. xvii). Further, by limiting the imagery surveyed to that made on the third voyage (though drawing on the journals of all three voyages to provide commentary and contextualization), Nordyke reduces the extraordinary volume of information to a more " bite-sized " amount. The originality of the scholarship displayed here lies in the meticulous matching of each image with, on the facing page, original text that relates exactly to the event, scene, person or place depicted. The engraved images are presented in the sequence in which the original drawings and paintings were made, so that the book becomes in one sense a travelogue, and allows us to take a " virtual journey " along with the voyagers. The drawings and the journals are filled with the immediacy and urgency of the experiences as they were being lived and responded to by those intrepid men in their cockleshell vessels. The result, though certainly painstaking scholarship, avoids the voice
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2009
The debt that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s romantic ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) owes to George Shelvocke’s A Voyage Around the World By Way of the Great South Sea (1726) was first claimed by William Wordsworth and has been well documented by Fruman,1 Holmes,2 Hill,3 Lamb4 and others. Further, the influence of Cook’s Voyage towards the South Pole and round the world performed in His Majesty’s ships the Resolution and Adventure in the years 1772, 1773, 1774 & 1775 has been suggested by Moorehead5 and Smith.6 This article posits that the familiar four-step account of the ballad’s creation – that the idea arose through a suggestion to Coleridge from William Wordsworth following the relation to Coleridge of an unusual dream of his friend, John Cruikshank, and was inspired by Coleridge’s reading of the journal of George Shelvocke and the conversational influence of William Wales (an astronomer and meteorologist on board Cook’s Resolution in 1772) upon Coleridge as a schoolb...
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In 1622, Francis Bacon published his Historia naturalis et experimentalis. Many of the features of Bacon's natural and experimental histories were entirely new. This paper studies this literary form as a new epistemic genre. In particular, it analyzes its origin and evolution in Bacon's work, focusing on how its basic template and features were influenced by his specific epistemic requirements. It shows that Bacon devised these features in the process of developing a Historia mechanica, or a history of the mechanical arts, drawing on the particular case of the technical recipe. Since antiquity, the recipe had been the dominant epistemic genre for recording and communicating technical knowledge. However, this paper suggests that the recipe format did not meet Francis Bacon's epistemic needs. In particular, the format was incompatible with the goal of keeping experimentation and its reporting open-ended and flexible. More generally, the acknowledgment of the provisional, historical character of knowledge was a tenet of what Bacon called an "initiative" method of knowledge transmission, or a method of "probation." According to this approach, knowledge "ought to be delivered and intimated, if it were possible, in the same method wherein it was invented" and discovered. Only the display of its tentative features would encourage and stimulate others to improve and advance it. The format of the new genre of natural and experimental
THREE MEMOIRS OF THE FORSTERS – THE POLISH-BORN PARTICIPANTS OF COOK’S SECOND VOYAGE, in: Polish-AngloSaxon Studies, V. 14-15(2011), pp.7-47
Polish-AngloSaxon Studies, Poznan, Poland, v.14/15, 2011
The rationale behind this work is to present research on the humanistic heritage of Johann Forster and his son George. The Forsters were born near Gdańsk in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (First Commonwealth – “Rzeczpospolita”). They were of Scottish ancestry. The Forsters took part in the Second Circumnavigation commanded by James Cook. They wrote numerous works, the most important of them in English, based on their experiences on Cook’s Second Expedition. The Forsters made their own particular contributions to the genres of the travelogue and the scholarly treatise. The Forsters did not adhere to any prevailing philosophical or literary tradition. In fact, they invented their own method of literary and scientific expression. Both academics and critics of English literature the world over, for various reasons, have to date almost completely neglected the Forsters’ works. For example, the awareness of the Forsters’ heritage in England has always been peripheral. In all likelihood only a few fragments of only one of the Forsters’ many works have been translated into Polish. The lack of awareness of the Forsters in Poland and Lithuania has been even less understandable bearing in mind that they were the only citizens of the First Commonwealth ever to leave a lasting mark on worldwide maritime culture, as a result of their Polish origins and their following of the English seafaring tradition. In addition, the Forsters were the first ever to compile a critical summary of the achievements of all Cook’s Voyages. It has remained remarkably fresh and objective. In contrast, the works of English-language writers on Cook are now outdated and some of them are opinionated in their idealisation of Cook’s accomplishments. The fact is that publications on the Forsters present a vivid example of the existence of neglected areas in the history of Polish-British relations and later relations between Poland and the United Kingdom, especially in the field of maritime culture. The geopolitical situation of Europe has changed favourably for linguistic research on the Forsters. Since the accession of Central and Eastern European countries to the European Union, cultural relations between England, Scotland, and generally the UK, and Poland and the other countries, which formed part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, have required a fresh approach to many hitherto secret, politicised cultural matters. Besides, since devolution, the Scottish government has become more interested in the country’s cultural heritage. It is therefore high time to attempt to rehabilitate the Forsters in England. It is also worthwhile re-introducing them to readers in Scotland, Poland, Lithuania, as well as in New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, and other English-speaking countries and territories. Research carried out for this work provided evidence to the effect that, contrary to assertions of certain critics, the Forsters’ publications were innovative and outstanding in every respect. They also provided a notable example of the interaction between the Polish, Lithuanian, Scottish, Anglo-Saxon, German, and French cultures. This study attempts to prove that, contrary to popular belief, the written heritage left by the Forsters is enormous. Most of it concerns Cook’s Expeditions, especially the Second Voyage. Therefore, any research dealing with the Forsters, which aims at a presentation of its results in a single article, has to be rather selective. From the point of view of an exposition written by a linguist in the field of the history of English literature and the history of the relations between the First Commonwealth and Britain, it is worthwhile concentrating on the Forsters’ three memoirs based on Cooks’ Second Voyage.
“Historians Should Explore Rather Than Sticking with What They Know”: Interview with Professor Harold Cook, Brown University
Itinerario, 2019
is a scholar of the history of science and medicine based at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Readers of Itinerario probably know him best as the author of the monograph Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, published in 2007. The book investigates, among other things, the global dimension of scientific and medical knowledge-production in the seventeenth century. His most recent study, on the early life of Descartes, was published only a couple of weeks before we conducted this interview. It shifts the focus back to the history of Europe, with travel central to Descartes' development. We met with Professor Cook on an unseasonably warm day in June at Museum Boerhaave, the Dutch national museum for the history of science and medicine in Leiden, where we discovered that his work had also been consulted in the context of the redesign of the museum's permanent exhibition about science and medicine in the Dutch Golden Age. We looked at some of the objects and books that were a source of inspiration when he wrote Matters of Exchange, and learned that part of his fascination for medicine in the Dutch Republic started in the museum library as he was leafing through the pamphlets about medicine kept there. But our conversation also brought us to the American Civil War, Mensheviks in Ann Arbor, Rhode Island traders in a painting from Surinam, and American accounting methods. Why and how did you decide to become a historian? When I was coming into my teenage years in the 1960s, there was an anniversary of the American Civil War, and my father gave me a birthday gift of a book on the war from
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For how long can history, as it is conceived in ‘the West’, continue to attach itself to an exhausted humanism, where ‘man’ is central and all the natural and inanimate objects surrounding humans (and linked intimately to human activity) are relegated to the function of support act?This essay argues from anthropological theory that there are fundamentally different sorts of relationships that humans can entertain with non-humans, and that these relationships can have a magical force. When a monument is placed at the spot where an explorer first touched the land, does this impart a contiguous magic? On the other hand, where the stuff of history seems animated, and spreading out without clear connection to impart some small part of the aura to a doll representing the historical figure, are we not dealing with a sympathetic, contagious magic? This essay will experiment with these nonrepresentational forms of energy as they are transferred in domains associated with the figure of Lt. Ja...
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Halfway around the world from where Capt. James Cook recorded some of his greatest achievements, and where he met his death, sits a relic of his voyages "round the world." Deep in the Pocumtuc Valley, in rural Massachusetts, lies Historic Deerfield, a living history museum that commemorates early America with a sweeping array of material culture. Here, one can find a remarkable collection of powder horns, relics of the colonial wars. One of these tools is inscribed "John Parker His Horn 1775." It is a peculiar testament to the ways in which early Americans perceived the wider world. Etched into the horn is an image of a canoe. It carries eight Native American warriors. One stands in the bow, holding a telescope, the others paddle a vessel that is festooned with decorative art, war clubs, and severed heads, symbols drawn from Native Americana. Yet, the symbols distill another set of themes, drawn from Cook's voyages among Polynesian cultures! Intriguing, too t...
Creating Place out of Space: James Cook's Travel Writing
izlazi u samo elektroničkom izdanju: NE
National identity" claims Richard White "is an invention," it is an "intellectual construct" (Inventing Australia), and brennan adds that its component elements are race, geography, tradition, history, language, size, and place ("The National Longing for From"); and place, explains Ashcroft in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader "in post-colonial societies is a complex interaction of language, history and environment." It is precisely place that Cook formulates in his journals as he considers the vast, mystical space of the globe, seeing it, as he does all the lands he visited, in terms of Western European rhetoric, thus enabling them to enter history (worlding, Spivak). Therefore, his journals are an important building block in the architecture of both, Australian and North American identity. Namely, before the lands were even settled, Cook's writings contributed to the formulation of what it meant to be Australian or North American. This paper is an attempt to analyse Cook's discourse in the context of the Western European civilising mission resulting from the Enlightenment, a project which erased earlier knowledges of those lands and overlaid them with those of eighteenth-century Europe.
Biofiction and History: A Comparative Reading of the Lives of Captain Cook, Sultan Selim III, and Kuchuk Huseyin Pasha
Critical Inquiry in Comparative Literature [Working Title]
Biofiction is a hybrid literary genre that appropriates historical lives and molds them into the subject of fiction; it uses historical characters rather than representing them. This literary genre, which has stimulated a vast array of reactions over the past few decades, is not a branch of history or biography. Anna Enquist’s 2005 novel The Homecoming is a successful example of biofiction that revolves around the illustrious life of Thomas Cook but tells the story from the perspective of his wife Elizabeth Cook. Through the reconstructed voices of these historical figures, the reader is offered alternative perspectives into their lives as well as into the British Empire in the eighteenth century. Stanford Shaw’s critically acclaimed Between Old and New (1971), on the other hand, is a history book that aims to offer a factual representation of the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire, particularly the reign of Sultan Selim III. This chapter aims to examine the interesting parallels and...
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Jean-Nicolas Démeunier and his translation of Cook’s A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean
Astrolabe, 2020
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La cartographie de Terre-Neuve effectuée par James Cook de 1762 à 1767 a été indispensable à ses futures expéditions dans le Pacifique. Ses efforts lui ont valu la réputation de maître navigateur et arpenteur fort qualifié pour le commandement. Certains historiens ont examiné si le commandement de l'exploration du Pacifique aurait pu être confié à quelqu'un d'autre. Bien que cette conclusion soit acceptée par ceux qui ont méticuleusement étudié le capitaine Cook, il s'agit d'une conclusion qui est difficilement reconnue publiquement à l'extérieur du Canada atlantique. In introducing his book, Captain Cook's War and Peace: The Royal Navy Years, 1755-1768, John Robson remarked that "Some writers have asked the question, 'Why was James Cook chosen to lead the Endeavour expedition [into the Pacific in 1768]?'" Robson then suggested that, with a better understanding of Cook's career between 1755 and 1768, the more reasonable questions to ask would be "'Why would the Admiralty have chosen anyone else to lead the expedition?' and 'Who else could they have chosen?'" 1 Robson's point is that Cook's career in the Pacific (which for much of the rest of the world is the only James Cook there is) cannot be understood without reference to his accomplishments during the years that he served in the Royal Navy in North America. Those years were absolutely critical to his training as a navigator, a hydrographer, and as a commander. 2 Indeed, in his biography of Cook, Frank McLynn declares quite unambiguously that "Even
Exploration and Travel—Generating Captain Cook and Paul Kane into Published Authors
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In: Tales from Academia. History of Anthropology in the Netherlands. part 2, ed. Han Vermeulen and Jean Kommers, saarbrücken, 2002., 2002
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and Anthropology, discovered a curious book in London. Small and unassuming, its neatly bound covers contained eight pages of printed catalogue followed by 43 specimens of 18th-century Polynesian barkcloth, richly colored and textured. With funds from the George Leib Harrison Foundation, the Penn Museum purchased the book in 1920.
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References (12)
- Personal communication, 25 November 2003.
- As quoted by Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, 'Counterhistory and the Anecdote', in Practicing New Historicism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000, p. 54. Although direct quotes are duly noted, this entire volume is owed a much greater debt for educating me in what can be done within that wandering heading 'New Historicism'. There are some wonderful essays in this book that challenge us to think again and again about the past.
- Gallagher and Greenblatt, p. 51.
- Lionel Grossman, 'Anecdote and History' in History and Theory 42 (May 2003), p. 168.
- Meaghan Morris, Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture, Sage Publications, London, 2006, p. 5.
- Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1982 [1928].
- Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, Random House, New York, 1973, p. xv. Gallagher and Greenblatt also use this anecdote for their discussion, p. 71. 11. Gallagher and Greenblatt, pp. 72-3.
- Jean Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984.
- Captain Cook Bicentenary Commemorative Booklet. V.C.N. Blight, Government Printer, NSW, 1970. This booklet was 'Presented by the Government of New South Wales on the occasion of the Bi- Centenary Celebrations of Captain James Cook' s first landing on the east coast of Australia'. This is one of two booklets widely distributed in 1970 aimed, it would appear, at children; this one at primary school age and the other at upper primary or high school.
- An Aboriginal Children's History of Australia, written and illustrated by Australia' s Aboriginal children, Rigby, Adelaide, 1977, p. 7.
- Des Hastings and Jill Carpenter, Voyage with Captain Cook, The Book I'm In, Lindfield, 1985, p. 18.
- Greg Dening, Performances, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996.