Voyages of Discovery. Captain Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific, and: Imagining the Pacific. In the Wake of the Cook Voyages, and: The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (review)

REVIEWS 285 Apart from the correspondence of Harold and Vita Sackville-West, Herrmann appears to have uncovered little new information about AML. Most of the picturesque imagery she attempts to build of her subject is revealed in the passages of AML's published diaries from which Herrmann has profusely extracted. Although Herrmann has cited her references at the close of her book, there is no reference numbering within the text, thereby making it more difficult than need be to find the source of a particular quoted passage. It remains puzzling to this reviewer why Herrmann has omitted so many of the comments and criticisms (though few) on AML's writings. Trude Würz has collected the references to this commentary in Anne Morrow Lindbergh: The Literary Reputation. A Primary and Annotated Secondary Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1988), and although not cited by Herrmann, this remains an invaluable source book for discussions of AML's literary reputation. Perhaps the explicitly detailed openness of AML's autobiographical diaries diminishes the need of biographically reconstructing her life from the outside. Anne's daughter, Reeve Lindbergh, has recently published The Names of the Mountains (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). This work provides more insight, though ambiguously fictionalized, into AML from the viewpoint of Lindbergh family life. Indeed, not until a thorough assessment of all the Lindbergh papers in the Yale University archive has been made can we expect a more thorough and accurate biographical account. Herrmann mentions that AML has granted Scott Berg open access to these papers in attempts to see her husband vindicated in a book that will, according to AML, "tell the whole story and the truth." Perhaps a more complete account of the motivations and tensions in AML's life will come out of this future work as well. Until then, Herrmann's work, despite the above-mentioned insufficiencies, provides a working image of one of America's most significant and insightful women writers of this century. Philip K. Wilson University of Hawaii at Manoa Lynne Withey, Voyages of Discovery. Captain Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific. University of California Press, 1989. 512 pp. Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific. In the Wake of the Cook Voyages. Yale University Press, 1992. 262 pp. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook. Princeton University Press, 1992. 251pp. Last January, to the near total neglect or even willful oblivion on the part of the American mainland press, a significant centennial was observed on lands that purport to be part of the United States. Few Americans are aware that in Hawai'i the forceful overthrow of the indigenous monarchy by American arms took place in mid-January 1893. Following Captain James Cook's initial landing on Kaua'i in 1778, it was only with great difficulty that the successors of King Kamehameha retained their throne for 115 years in the face of repeated foreign intrusions, introduced diseases that decimated the native population, and the barely veiled encroachment of the haole, many of them descendants of the first missionaries. As I recently surveyed the obelisk erected to the memory of Cook in Kealakekua Bay, near the site where the great explorer met his 286 biography Vol. 16, No. 2 death, many questions as to his legacy came to mind. Three recent books on Cook, while not dispelling the problems raised, have each provided ample material for reevaluating his key contribution to Hawai'i's history. Professor Withey's volume is the most general in approach and consequently the least controversial. Her stated purpose is outlined in the Preface to her book: "... I consider 'discovery' as a mutual process of exploration between Europeans and Pacific peoples," and on the following page she poses the dilemma that faced all explorers of some sensitivity: "Does the value of knowledge for its own sake justify the uses to which it is put, regardless of the consequences?" Cook, a member of the Royal Society , was a trained navigator/scientist, as such a product of the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a humane captain by the standards of his day, and a man keenly aware of the judgment of posterity. Already during his second voyage Cook was critical of the baleful European...