7 - Colonists, Convicts, Settlers and Natives: La Perouse, Pitcairn's Island and Van Diemen's Land!

Summary

If everything suggests that de Loutherbourg and O'Keefe were happily following their conjunction of personal interests in producing Omai, subsequent Pacific dramas following The Death of Captain Cook were largely noticeable by their absence from the London stage; the ones which were produced illustrate the transition of the region from a site of exploratory voyaging to the destination of penal and emigrant settlement. In less than fifty years, audiences were transferred from the compromised ethnography of Omai to Moncrieff's Surrey Theatre Van Diemen's Land! Or, Settlers and Natives (1830), a burletta complete with moving panorama of Hobart and intransigent aboriginal leader. In the interim, Kotzebue's Pacific-located La Perouse (1799) was probably subject to self-censorship at the two London royal theatres (who ultimately declined even to attempt to stage it) while a prospective production at Norwich Theatre Royal – even with Norwich's censored conclusion – was refused a license. As with Omai, once again pantomime became the preferred route to circumvent such state regulation as the censor suppressed any representation of Kotzebue's ideal Pacific colony with its remodeled social family. Nevertheless, the prospect of colonization and emigration quickly gave rise to misgivings about the region's suitability exclusively as a destination for penal transportation. Thomas John Dibdin's Drury Lane ‘Ballet of Action’, Pitcairn's Island (1816), with its resuscitated and mellowed figure of Fletcher Christian, was an important transitional drama, at once rehabilitating a mutineer but also making it clear that the Pacific contained viable sites for settlement.