ABSTRACT
Introduction: Atlantic History, Atlantic Geography-Atlantic Enlightenment?
In thus discussing ‘The Explorer’ as an Enlightenment figure, Bourguet captures a sense of the Enlightenment not as static, something fixed in space by national boundaries, but as something dynamic, a matter of enlarging knowledge about the world in ways that involved the production, reception and mobility of ideas and artefacts over land and sea. It is a view of the Enlightenment upon which this essay will elaborate. It is, moreover, a conception of the Enlightenment in which the Pacific figures prominently. For the British, the French and, to a lesser extent, the Spanish and the Russians, the Pacific Ocean was from the 1760s Enlightenment Europe’s principal testing ground. Islands in the ‘Southern Seas’ were the source of new flora and fauna that intrigued and intoxicated European naturalists, the home of peoples whose existence and social structures raised profound questions to do with humanity’s origins and differences and whose classification and depiction helped to usher in new ‘modern’ methods of understanding in art and in science. In short, the Enlightenment was in large measure ‘made in the Pacific’—the result of sea-borne navigation, of new forms of ‘ethnographic navigation’ across the ‘Great Map of Mankind’ and the return of new world data to the metropolitan calculating centres of Enlightenment Europe.2
