The Death of William Gooch: A History's Anthropology (review)

Abstract

Reviews Greg Dening, The Death of William Gooch: A History's Anthropology. Honolulu: U of Hawai'i P, 1995. χ +191 pp. Maps, photos, illustrations, notes, index. $20.00, ISBN 0-8248-1754-0. The volume under review is a reissue of Greg Dening's History's Anthropology: The Death of William Gooch, published in 1988 by the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania. Earlier critics gave this book a very warm reception; it still deserves one and so I will give it one, too. The story Dening has to tell us about the making and writing of history may not be as striking or as fresh as it was almost a decade ago, but readers unfamiliar with the earlier edition will still welcome his reflections on ethnographic history and his tale of selfconscious encounter with the life of William Gooch, an astronomer on the supply ship Daedalus who was fated to be murdered in Hawai'i near the beach at Waimea, O'ahu, in 1792, at the age of 21. Dening's key points—that we are always making history through our crafted stories and that we have different crafted stories for different occasions—endure as practical reminders about the character of social life and about the historian's relationship to the past. At the same time, his cultural history of entangled Hawaiian and English lives is personal, absorbing, and vastly revealing of histories made and histories in the making. Dening shares with anthropologist Marshall Sahlins an interest in the historical conjuncture of Stranger and Native on Hawaiian shores in the 18th and 19th centuries. In their respective works, Sahlins is inclined to bold theoretical arguments about structure and practice, Dening to constructivist aphorisms and admonitions, fine-grained portraiture, and lyrical reflections on history. While both attend to cultural, and thus positioned, understandings of fatal events—for Sahlins, the deaths of Cook and the Hawaiian god Lono; for Dening, the death of Gooch—Dening evinces a desire to get at the dramas of experience, and to know what may have led Gooch to be killed at Waimea. Because of his self-conscious pursuit of Gooch's social milieu and tragic fate, Dening's work reminds me of Young Men and Fire, Norman MacLean's very moving book about the 1947 Montana wildfire that took the lives of thirteen smokejumpers. Both are wonderful works about our engagement with the past and about the limits to our knowing history and the moment of another's death. 210 Biography 20.2 (Spring 1997) In turning the title around for this reissue, Dening and the University of Hawai'i Press may have wanted to beckon a wider, more general audience for the book. I hope that happens. Yet placed to the fore in the title, Gooch still does not serve as the focus of the book's reflections, but rather, as their anchor to time, place, and cultural encounter. Dening is alert to the different stories about Gooch that are recollected or preserved in letters, ships' logs, and oral histories, and wants to instruct us on the dilemmas and insights they offer for the general project of writing history. But conjured to occasion a lesson in history writing and history making, the figure of Gooch remains strangely elusive in these pages. Dening should not be faulted for the scant record on Gooch; in fact, the historian's detective work was superb and turned up a small bundle of Gooch's letters dating from the young man's years at Cambridge University. The letters, however, don't give readers enough for a broad and sure sense of Gooch, and so Dening instead treats us to a fascinating portrait of Cambridge student life in the late 18th century. Readers are then called upon to imagine what might have shaped Gooch's life before he signed on to become astronomer aboard the Daedalus. I nevertheless came away from the book with little feel for Gooch, save for his months aboard the supply ship, where a drama of command, memory, glory-seeking, intrigue, frustration, and misunderstanding takes place between captain, officers, and crew. It is not biographical portraiture but instead a cultural history of Cambridge that succeeds so...