ABSTRACT

James Cook’s first Pacific voyage of 1769 and 1770 undertaken in the ship Endeavour opened up the people and places of Australasia to the rest of the world. The British encountered both Aboriginal people and Māori during this voyage, writing the first significant ethnographic description of Māori and revising and extending William Dampier’s initial account of Aboriginal people. The discoveries of Cook’s voyage and the crew’s encounters with the varied peoples of the region were documented in An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere. 1 John Hawkesworth edited the shipboard journals of James Cook and his botanist Joseph Banks for this official publication, endorsed by the joint sponsors of the voyage, the British Admiralty and the Royal Society. Hawkesworth merged the journals of Cook and Banks into one narrative voice, blurring the distinction between navigator and scientist but speaking from the perspective of the navigator. The narrative of Cook’s voyage was included alongside those of the voyages of John Byron, Samuel Wallis and Phillip Carteret. While contemporary scholars now turn to the separate texts of the Cook and Banks journals edited from the original manuscripts by J. C. Beaglehole, 2 Hawkesworth was the voice of Cook until Cook’s journal was published separately in 1893. 3 There were eight English-language editions of Hawkesworth in the sixteen years following the Endeavour voyage, as well as four translations. In addition the text was ‘incorporated in part or in full in uncounted lives of Cook, collections of voyages and editions of Cook’s voyages’. 4