Preface . The University of Hawai‘i at Ma -noa is situated on ceded lands, meaning Hawaiian lands confiscated by the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by a band of American sugar planters with the aid of the U.S. marines. As Hawai‘i is a colony, the postcolonial era has yet to arrive. Introduction . Michel Foucault, “The Discourse of Language,” The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, ), . . As Suvir Kaul convincingly argues, the poem declaims “the coming to global power of a puissant Britain, divinely ordained inheritor of the imperial and civilizational traditions of classical Europe.” Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ), . . Thomson, “Rule, Britannia!” in The Complete Poetical Works of Jameson Thomson, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, ), . . Kaul, Poems of Nation, . . James Boswell, Boswell: The Ominous Years, –, ed. C. Ryskamp and F. A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, ), . For Cook’s powers of observation, see Roy Porter, “The Exotic as Erotic: Captain Cook in Tahiti,” in Exoticism in the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester Universtiy Press, ), –. . William Dawson’s copy of Cook’s Resolution journal, entitled “Captn Cook’s Voyage from the year to July Given me by Himself, Bristol,” ff. –. Housed at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, this manuscript will be referred to as the Greenwich copy in the following citations. . My reading of the descriptions of tropical nature produced by naturalists and travelers was developed in conversation with William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, ). Very influential for me was his suggestion that fantasy played an important role in early colonists’ perception of Native Americans’ relation to the land. The New World had been represented as a place of “‘small labour but great pleasure,’” and, as Cronon argues, “the willingness of colonists to believe such arguments, and hazard Notes their lives upon them, was testimony to how little they understood both the New England environment and the ways Indians actually lived in it” (). Cronon’s analysis of the colonists’ perceptions of the New World reveals that pastoral tropes dominated their imaginations, and once they realized the environment was not a perpetual summer, they employed georgic tropes to dispossess Native Americans, who, in their eyes, did not labor, for the colonists did not see that the New England landscape and its productive powers had been managed and tended by Native Americans. “In short, Indians who hunted game animals were not just taking the ‘unplanted bounties of nature’; in an important sense, they were harvesting a foodstuff which they had consciously been instrumental in creating” (). This cognitive failure to recognize the effectiveness of agricultural practices that were different from Europe’s was, as I argue, prevalent in British descriptions of the tropics. . Greenwich copy, f. . . J. C. Beaglehole, ed., The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, –, vols. and (Sydney: Angus and Robertson and The Public Library of New South Wales, ), :–. . Beaglehole, ed., Endeavour Journal :. . In arguing that Cook saw that tropical bounty was produced by the labor and skill of Pacific Islanders, I am suggesting that Cook could, unlike Banks, acknowledge that Pacific Islanders possessed valuable horticultural techniques and botanical knowledge. However, Cook’s ability to recognize native knowledge traditions did not necessarily extend to other branches of local knowledge, such as navigation . For a complex analysis of why Cook failed to investigate the methods by which Pacific Islanders navigated, see David Turnbull’s essay “Cook and Tupaia, a Tale of Cartographic Meconnaissance?” in Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Margarette Lincoln (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, ), –. Turnbull notes also that Banks valued Tupaia’s navigational skills more highly than Cook. . George Forster, A Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof, vols. (; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, ), :. Subsequent references to this text will be placed in parentheses following the quotation. . See Forster’s discussion of the relation between agriculture and the progress of civilization, :–. George Forster was indebted to his father’s thinking on the relationship between climate and civilization; in fact, as Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof contend, “this book was, to some extent, a co-authored work and . . . many broader perceptions expressed here are also enunciated in Forster senior’s diary and his Observations” (xlvii). For Johann...