ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses how objects from Cook's voyages were collected, circulated, and displayed, and more specifically, on how certain objects from Cook's voyages came to be invested with special significance derived from a variety of considerations. The viewer's imaginative projection of the scene of acquisition a scene made vivid by numerous other cultural sources and the imaginative interpellation of other "scenes" proper to those voyages, not least of all the scene of Cook's death. While many of the collections arising from Cook's voyages were dispersed to locations well beyond England's shores, a great number were divided in some manner between the British Museum and the Leverian. Arjun Appadurai's attention to the cultural biography of objects in The Social Life of Things is useful here: objects do indeed have "social" lives, even if their meanings are functions of, and constructed by, a variety of human agents and institutional spaces.
