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  • Constructing Colonial Discourse: Captain Cook at Nootka Sound
  • Jan Purnis (bio)
Noel Elizabeth Currie. Constructing Colonial Discourse: Captain Cook at Nootka Sound McGill-Queen’s University Press. xvi, 212. $75.00

In Constructing Colonial Discourse: Captain Cook at Nootka Sound, Noel Elizabeth Currie examines, in the context of postcolonial theory, textual and visual representations of Captain James Cook's 'often-overlooked' month at Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island during his third and final Pacific voyage. In particular, she compares the portrayal of this month in the 1784 official published version of his journals edited by John Douglas to the 1967 scholarly edition published by the Hakluyt Society and edited by J.C. Beaglehole to demonstrate the extent to which the narrative of Cook's voyage, like other travel writing, ought not to be read as unproblematic non-fiction, but rather as 'mediated, consciously shaped, and literary.' Currie focuses on the projection of specific eighteenth-century British cultural values onto the Pacific Northwest (and Cook) through editorial alterations made by Douglas, and emphasizes class and gender nuances within those values.

In the first chapter, 'Travel and Exploration Literature: Constructing the New World,' Currie situates the narrative of the third voyage within eighteenth-century generic conventions of travel and exploration literature, emphasizing that the multiple stages involved in the transformation from log book to journal to published account, in consideration of an audience, encourage the reworking of narrative events around a desired result. [End Page 427] Currie argues that in his task of editing Cook's text to suit eighteenth-century notions of decorum and propriety, 'so as to present and confirm Cook's status first as a gentleman and then as a national hero' and representative of the Enlightenment, Douglas made stylistic and other changes to elevate Cook from self-made man to gentleman-traveller. In 'Approaching Sublimity: Aesthetics, Exploration, and the Northwest Coast,' Currie demonstrates how Douglas employed the vocabulary of the sublime and the picturesque as well as the 'assumptions of universality, disinterest, and autonomy' central to eighteenth-century aesthetics when editing Cook's account to make him appear 'a gentleman-scientist engaged in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.' In contrast, John Webber's anti-heroic landing-paintings positioned the voyage itself as history-making and highlighted the commercial considerations underlying the expedition. In 'Science and Ethnography: The Field of Vision,' Currie illustrates the influence of the discourse of Linnaean natural history on the narrative of the third voyage and traces the translation of the traditional Western gendering of culture and nature (with nature being feminized) into racial terms.

Chapter 4, 'Cook and the Cannibals: The Limits of Understanding,' is perhaps the most important chapter in Constructing Colonial Discourse. In it, Currie engages in the current debate about whether cannibalism as a cultural practice has ever existed, or whether its attribution has rather served to legitimate dispossession and enslavement, and to sell books. Convincingly arguing that the depiction of the inhabitants of Nootka Sound as cannibals in the narrative of Cook's voyage is entirely the work of Douglas and was never even hinted at by Cook, Currie suggests instead that cannibalism might be read as a metaphor for the 'voracious appetite' of empire; the 'transculturation' that threatens to dissolve boundaries between parties in what Mary Louise Pratt has designated 'the contact zone'; and the act of reading in the context of sensationalism and marketing. In her final chapter, 'Reconstructing Cook,' Currie explores various histories of Cook, both those constructions that have served the ideological purposes of British imperial culture and the settler cultures that followed from his voyages, as well as deconstructions, histories that tell versions of the negative effects of the encounter.

Constructing Colonial Discourse is a thoroughly researched, multi-disciplinary, and highly readable study of how various aspects of eighteenth-century British culture are intertwined in the 1784 publication of Cook's exploratory voyage. Currie's study is valuable as a reminder of the need to continue to challenge racist assumptions embedded in, and perpetuated by, textual accounts of the New World because the impact of expeditions like Cook's, and their published versions, continues to have very real consequences...

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