The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas, and: Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook (review)

The production of scholarly texts about Captain Cook dates back a half century to 1955, when the first volume of historian J C Beaglehole's celebrated edition of The Journals of Captain James Cook was published. Overthe next twenty years Beaglehole completed companion pieces for the second and third voyages, a masterly two-volume Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks (1962), a widely acclaimed Life of Captain James Cook (1974), and numerous related essays. Immaculately researched and beautifully written, Beaglehole's works marked a decisive advance beyond the hackneyed hagiography that had characterized Cook literature up to this time.

However, it is clear that Beaglehole, while focused on the Pacific, brought an Anglocentric perspective to his work. Note, for example, the concluding words of his pathbreaking 1964 essay, "The Death of Captain Cook" (in Historical Studies 11 [43 ], 305): "In England also . . . there was a sense of shock. . . . I can think of nothing in our history of quite the same order until the news came through in 1913 of Scott's death in the Antarctic." Though very much a New Zealander, Beaglehole's claiming of English history as his own, and his comparison of his boyhood hero Robert Falcon Scott with Cook, show that he, like many white Antipodeans of his generation, never stopped thinking of Britain as "home" and heartland of the world's greatest empire.

Meanwhile, in Australia, art historian Bernard Smith was pursuing an equally humanist but ambitiously postcolonial engagement with Cook. His primary focus then, as for the next half century, was early European representations of Pacific lands and peoples. This was evidenced most dramatically in Smith's 1960 classic, European Vision and the South Pacific 1768-1850, and in his 1992 collection of essays, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages. In recent years, too, Smith has coproduced three-volume collations of both the art and the charts and coastal views from Cook's voyages.

By the time of the Cook bicentenary celebrations in the decade 1969-1979, a number of other Antipodean, Canadian, and British scholars were making themselves heard on Cook-related issues. Most, however, were historians who preferred to rework well-trodden themes like imperial expansionism and scientific discovery. Few ventured far into the murky zone of Cook's relations with indigenous peoples. The last point is best illustrated by the 1979 publication Captain James Cook and His Times, edited by Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston, which emerged from a 1978 conference of the same title held in Vancouver, in which only one of eleven essays directly addressed this thorny topic.

A few researchers, however, were pursuing "ethnohistorical" studies of Pacific topics. One of them, Greg Dening, an Australian trained in both history and anthropology, published in 1980 his tragic but poetic work, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas 1774-1880, in which he sought "to know the culture of Enata [The Men (Marquesan term for themselves)], to know the cultures of Anoe [Outsiders (Marquesan term for Europeans)], to know them in their meeting"(1980, 6). In a subsequent series of studies set around Tahiti and Hawai'i (Performances [1996]), Dening further explored his interpretive style of historical ethnographic writing by focusing on the "theatre" enacted on beaches and in similar liminal spaces during visits by Cook and other early Europeans (1996, xv). Recently, in a book called The Wonders of History-Making(2003),he recalledthe genesis of his quest for such "two-sided history": "Fifty years ago I made a discovery that changed my life. . . . I could read...