ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to take a different tack, and address some of the confusions engendered by James Cook’s encounters with South Pacific peoples, focusing on the disruptions and silences produced by the arts and accounts of ‘discovery.’ Focusing on the eighteenth century as against Ann Laura Stoler’s 19th and 20th centuries, Kathleen Wilson’s work has also cast new light on ideas about sex, gender and the body in colonial encounters. Cook’s mission of mapping and discovering the South Pacific took place in a period of growing political, intellectual, and cultural ferment in Britain, the global dimensions of which would become clear as the three South pacific voyages unfolded. Cook’s celebrated explorations were thus stridently gendered as well as intensely nationalistic. They were also powerfully imbued with a historicist mission to turn their work and its subjects into ‘History,’ providing the ‘facts’ about new peoples that would help establish ‘permanent truths in the history of Man’.
