ABSTRACT
Two contact events mark key developments in the evolution of truly global history. The first involved the European entry into the Americas in the decades around the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries, led by Scandinavian voyagers and colonizers. The second contact event was the British entry into New Zealand and eastern Australia from the late eighteenth century under Captain James Cook’s command, which heralded the integration of all inhabited continents into a global schema of interlinked economies and maritime empires. Maritime encounters become conduits for the examination of historical emotion, but emotion needs to be considered as a distinct element in the history of encounter. The indigenous Americans, by the European account, show signs of curiosity and astonishment, but their full emotional response is clearly masked by the one-sided nature of the report. Such emotional contact offers sites for emotional introspection on a wider cultural scale.
