4 - ‘Notwithstanding our signs to the contrary’: textuality and authority at the Endeavour River, June to August 1771

Summary

Gananath Obeyesekere's 1992 study The Apotheosis of Captain Cook marked the high point of a critical postcolonial approach to the dynamics of Pacific exploration. Obeyesekere's ferocious attack on the methodology of those non-Pacific/non-indigenous scholars, here with special reference to Marshall Sahlins, who seek to read the processes of culture contact and exchange in the region, ultimately offered not so much another way of reading events, as a completely different idea of rationality at the heart of the construction of history. In a similar vein, Dennis Foley's insistence that only Aboriginal commentators can interpret the full meaning of Cook's contacts in Australia in 1770 promotes a forceful sense of Cook as the instigator of the colonial period that would follow the arrival of the First Fleet. Such readings invoke the language of cultural primacy, of the rights of interpretation associated with this position.

We make a mistake if we try to see through the prose of the ships’ journals to the events of Cook's Endeavour voyage as if the writing were some form of clear glass. This is not a point about language so much as a consequence of textual exchange, the problems that writing carries as it tries to express both the modernity of its own approach and the nature of the contact involved. It is clear that the scholarship focused upon the investigation of the journal writing of the period needs to improve. To understand the complexities of such production we need to know what writing a journal meant in the late eighteenth century, why it was so popular, the forms it could take, the generic codes such writing had already established by the 1760s, and the demands these contexts and codes placed upon anyone who sought to write down experiences.

The two points above are intertwined. Obeyesekere and Foley, while making crucial and valid points about the frequently blinkered nature of European scholarship regarding culture contact, are nevertheless themselves overdeterministic in their categorisation of Cook as simply an exemplar of empire. There is disingenuousness in such thinking. Equally, the method of reading Cook's prose that allows for an idea of an unmediated originality, a clear route from the events of the Endeavour voyage to the character of the figure commanding the ship, makes a great error.