The Ends of the World

Abstract

The Ends of the World Roxanne Lynn Doty Brian Richardson, Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook’s Voyage Changed the World (University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 256 pp. ($85.00; $32.95 pb.) Brian W. Richardson’s Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook’s Voyage Changed the World is an intricately researched, incredibly detailed account of the voyages of Captain James Cook and the ways in which these voyages shaped how Europeans could know the world. Cook’s voyages were recorded and disseminated in books that generated an enormous amount of popular interest, and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were unrivaled as exemplars of Enlightenment exploration. Through an examination of Cook’s writings as well as the works of artists who traveled with him, Richardson shows how his three voyages to the Pacific Ocean created a mathematical and scientific view of the world’s places that marked a significant shift from the guesswork of his predecessors. Cook’s method of charting and mapping provided detail and precision regarding the existence and location of places. Lines became areas and coastal points were replaced by inland spaces, enabling explorers to comprehend much larger spaces than was possible from “coasting.” This appeal to areas and shapes framed the world in broader terms than was previously the case. The turn toward interiors inaugurated by Cook served as a model for other explorers of other places. The sea became a unifying metaphor, applied to deserts and jungles. The world was divided into “chunks” that could be arranged not only in terms of geographical coordinates, but also in terms of other attributes that functioned to create seemingly natural borders between peoples and the physical territories they inhabited. This, of course, had important implications for nations, national identity, and empire. Richardson argues that the resulting representations speak to a question raised implicitly in Edward Said’s Orientalism, but not explicitly answered, i.e., “How was the division between Europe and the Orient reworked into a global system of distinct nations?” Richardson suggests that the reorganization of space that appeared in Cook’s writings facilitated such a reworking. Cook’s narratives of the South Pacific became the model for a new way of giving an account of peoples and places. While the same general dichotomy present in Orientalism was applied to the South Pacific, Cook offered details that would seemingly undermine such simple oppositions as civilized vs. non-civilized. Indeed, one of the more significant issues highlighted in Richardson’s study is how Cook’s voyages (and his writings about them) illustrate an unstable co-existence of simple dichotomies alongside a more sophisticated recognition of diversity within the binary poles. This is due to the enormous amount of detail recorded by Cook pertaining to the places and peoples he encountered during his explorations. Such details were not wanted by those who, like James Boswell, believed that “one set of savages is like another.” Cook complicated this type of representation through his carefully detailed and systematic descriptions that did not fit neatly into a representation of the world characterized by strict binary oppositions, whether geographically, socially, or morally. Cook’s world was one in which the South Pacific islands and their inhabitants were internally distinct from one another, thus complicating representations that were prevalent among seventeenth-century Orientalists and eighteenth-century primitivists. For example, in contrast to Locke’s world, in which places were located along a single line and formed of a single narrative, Cook’s was one of intermixed variety located in an immense ocean. Readers were thus freed to pursue their own interpretations. However, even though dichotomies were not enough for Cook, and while his representations of the world were fuller and more diverse than those of his predecessors, dichotomies of sameness and difference persisted. Despite the recognition of internal diversity, the external distinction between Europe and the South Pacific continued as an extremely powerful underlying intellectual structure. Cook may not have agreed with Boswell on the essential sameness of all “savages,” but they remained “savages” nonetheless. Cook’s nations were “uncivilized” and his attitude was one of paternalism, thus making his representations complicit in the empire-building of his time and after. His...