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In this chapter, I explore James Cook’s representation of the natural landscape of the South Pacific. I focus on the writing Cook produced on the second voyage and afterward in London as he revised his journals from the voyage into a book manuscript. Of the three Admiraltysanctioned books that recorded Cook’s three different circumnavigations, A Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World () was the one that Cook was most actively engaged in producing. Driven into authorship by frustration and anger over the publication of John Hawkesworth’s disastrous collage of various accounts of Pacific voyages, Cook took up the challenge of transforming his journals into a published account of his voyage. Anxious about his abilities as a writer, Cook worked long and hard revising his journals and happily collaborated with the Admiralty-appointed editor , Dr. John Douglas, canon of Windsor, to whom Cook deferred on issues of taste and style. Reworking the journals’ plain and direct style, Cook made revisions with an eye toward the reading expectations of an educated Chapter  Seeing, Writing, and Revision: Natural History Discourse and Captain Cook’s A Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World These Marine Gentlemen’s narratives must have been better told by themselves, than by those uninterested in their scenes of pleasure and distress. —Morning Chronicle, January ,  better flavoured than I have any where tasted —James Cook, ship’s journal1 general audience as well as a particular audience of naturalists, geographers, and other men of science. I argue here that the kinds of changes that Cook made were a product of his efforts to make his journal entries conform to the polite discourse of natural history. Though lacking a gentleman’s education, Cook sought to legitimate his observations by adopting literary, natural history, and aestheticizing practices that would transform his “mere” record into a learned and culturally sophisticated product, one that would be recognized as adding to England’s fund of knowledge. In adopting the high style associated with gentlemanly travel and polite science, Cook, and to a much lesser extent his editor, produced a text that lacked the immediacy and the energy of his journal entries. Specifically, Cook removed the processes by which he apprehended the unknown, and in particular he excised references to his body and its engagement with the process of knowing. What is fascinating about Cook’s revisions, particularly those that adopt the polite discourse of natural history, is that they reveal an anxiety about his own cultural competencies . Played out in Cook’s bid to elevate his prose are larger societal, class-based struggles for status and authority. In Cook’s adoption of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “aesthetic disposition” and “transposable disposition ”—bourgeois representational strategies that enable distancing from the object contemplated—Cook engaged in a kind of ventriloquism that resulted in a hollow mimicry of those gentlemanly travel narratives he was striving to imitate. It may be helpful here to recall Hodges’s efforts to produce a travel narrative replete with pastoral and georgic tropes and antiquarian and connoisseurial discourses to elevate his style and lend it an air of authority appropriate to a gentleman scholar. Cook shares much in common with Hodges, not only in that they spent three years together on board the Resolution, but in that they produced travel narratives that were serious attempts to win approval from Britain’s educated elites. The writing and illustrations produced during Captain Cook’s second voyage provide us with the opportunity to examine the processes by which the pressures of publication (which included but were not limited to editors, engravers, and printers) transformed journal entries and sketches into standardized and codified illustrated travel narratives. The modifications that William Hodges’s sketches underwent as they were readied for publication mirror the alterations of Cook’s journal as it was transformed into a book. I begin my analysis of Cook’s style with a brief discussion of the illustrations that William Hodges produced for the published account of the second voyage. Natural History and Cook  .213.128] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 19:16 GMT) Hodges’s Illustrations On his second circumnavigation around the globe, Captain James Cook was accompanied by a scientific team consisting of William Wales, an astronomer; Johann Reinhold Forster, a natural historian; his son George Forster; and the landscape artist William Hodges, who was charged with drawing coast lines, weather patterns, land and seascapes, and indigenous peoples and their surroundings. These men, or “the gentlemen,” as...

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