ABSTRACT
Breasts, sodomy and the lash are not the triad usually invoked to talk about the justly celebrated and preeminently civilizing voyages of discovery undertaken by Captain James Cook and his crews between 1768 and 1780. Rejecting the notion of a unitary Enlightenment which it is the job here to 'unmask', and accepting the importance of the voyages as one of many sites of enlightened processes and ideas, this chapter will nevertheless be concerned with indeterminacies rather than radical departures. The mapping and colonizing of the South Seas, with all their potential promise and glory, had become a competitive and nationalist obsession with European statesmen and intellectuals by the middle of the eighteenth century. Maori cannibalism was later theorized by Forster senior as the result of the excess militarism of Maori society; but it was the less severe Hawaiians who would prove to be most in need of the lesson of British superiority secured by physical force.
