ABSTRACT
Derived from the Latin expeditio, a voyage of war, the word expedition had roughly parallel usages in French and English from the fifteenth century. Indigenous agency in Easter Island, the expeditions first Pacific landfall, confirmed comte de La Prouses unsentimental rejection of primitivist enthusiasm for the bon sauvage. La Prouses consistent use of the substantives Indian and Islander, rather than sauvage, was perhaps a protest at the pastoral implications of the philosophers use of the latter term, with its etymology in the Latin silva. Louis de Saulces de Freycinet ambiguous experience of encounters with Aboriginal people in southeast Van Diemens Land set a potent precedent for his future engagements with Indigenous Australians. In contemporary terms, this seaborne ethnography constituted an important body of anthropological knowledge about unfamiliar populations and their productions. Intellectually, seaborne ethnography generated rich veins of written and visual materials that have been mined ever since by historians and ethnohistorians.
