ABSTRACT
As the taste for wilder surroundings grew stronger, so curiosity about their inhabitants increased. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's claim could be accepted by his admirers without difficulty, since there was no practical way of proving him right or wrong. Then, by chance, in the 1760s, the opportunity to satisfy this curiosity about the 'noble savage' arose, when a series of navigators sailed round the world, exploring regions in the Pacific previously untouched by Europeans. In the 1760s, the voyages of exploration made by John Byron, Carteret, Wallis and James Cook were, in a different respect, still governed by an early eighteenth-century principle, which, though it went far back to the earliest classical geographers, was given additional strength by post-Newtonian views of the universe. Cook himself, devoted to his task of exploration and a brilliant navigator, was and it was a part of his genius to be this so consistently eminently practical.
