South Seas Trade and the Character of Captains

Abstract

In a scene from Lewis Milestone’s 1962 film, Mutiny on the Bounty, William Bligh is reprimanded by members of the Admiralty for having dispensed unusually cruel punishments on board his ship. Justice, they remind him, is carried not in the articles of war, but in ‘the heart of a captain’.1 Although this wholly fictitious scene takes considerable liberties with the facts of eighteenth-century naval discipline, it nonetheless offers quite an accurate depiction of the moral economy operating in later eighteenth-century voyages to the islands of the South Seas. The imperial ambitions of these lengthy journeys were, in many ways, inseparable from the principles of moral sympathy since, for the later eighteenth century, sympathy offered a theory of social order (the sublimation of aggressive and dangerous passions) that privileged commercial growth. In the journal records from Cook’s three voyages into the Pacific and from Bligh’s breadfruit expedition to Tahiti a decade later, passions are everywhere: in tensions among the crew and between sailors and their indigenous hosts, both on board the ship and on shore. Both Cook and Bligh encounter South Seas ‘savagery’ in the tempers and appetites of sailors as much as in the barbaric or licentious customs of Pacific peoples.KeywordsMoral JudgementNative PeopleCrew MemberMoral SentimentMoral EconomyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.