The Challenges of Representing Islands

In the field of visual representations crafted for an eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British and British colonial public, both of these richly illustrated books address a question that Peter Hulme and Mary Pratt had placed at the center of studies of travel literature and colonial narrative by the early 1990s. ¹ How do the cultural products emerging from what Pratt called the contact zone seek to compensate, via an array of strategies, for the violence of encounter and colonialism?

One way of responding to this question is to tease apart the contradictory strands of colonial discourses that reaffirm British and European cultural superiority. This is Harriet Guest’s project in Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges, and the Return of the Pacific: to reveal how dominant explanations of the differences between societies came under pressure during the voyages to the Pacific led by Captain Cook. As Guest shows in her articulate and comprehensive study, the visual representations of the second voyage, in particular, are divided by the competing demands of Enlightenment theories of culture, on the one hand, and the historical moments of encounter, exchange, and violence between the British and European voyagers and the peoples of the South Pacific, on the other. Another way of responding to the question is to approach images as performances that evoke and inhabit, sometimes haunt, and, most importantly, instantiate cultural identity. This is the tack taken by Kay Dian Kriz in Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840, a virtuosic exploration of how a range of visual media transformed a culture of violence and slavery in sugar production into a British West Indian culture, complete with displacement of traumatic cultural memory.

Guest examines the rich archive of work produced by the teams assembled to accompany Cook on his voyages to the Pacific between 1768 and 1780, focusing chiefly on the second voyage, 1772–1775, and on the drawings and paintings of William Hodges. The second voyage, free from the wonder of first encounter, offered the opportunity for a consideration of South Pacific societies informed by contemporary political philosophy (7). Employed by the Admiralty, the artist William Hodges prepared paintings and sketches that were transformed into the engravings accompanying Cook’s published account of the voyage, as well as into large, formal paintings for the Royal Academy. His work is of particular interest to Guest because it reveals the tension between “the elaborately theorised conventions of high art, . . . the conflicting demands of natural history for the accurate representation of climate, topography, flora and fauna” and “the challenge which the cultures of the South Pacific posed” to the voyagers’ preconceptions (13). The principal artists and naturalists on the second voyage struggled to provide a consistent account of the cultural variations occurring on the path from Tahiti and the other Society Islands, to Tonga and Vanuatu (the Friendly Islands), to New Zealand. Guest argues that they charted the progression of sociability and civility almost by latitude and longitude. Gender served as the primary term in the voyagers’ classification of the societies and forms of labor they encountered. In images from the second voyage, Tahitian men, for example, have rounded, feminized, and lazy bodies, while Tahitian women, painted by Hodges in Edenic bathing scenes, enjoy their leisure. In New Zealand, the brutal treatment of Maori women by Maori men functions as an index of barbarism; in Tahiti, by contrast, the prominence of women in social life and the good treatment they receive denotes a high degree of civility. At the same time, perception of the degree to which Tahitians are feminized “gives the Europeans a kind of right to exploit them as though that were a...