The Textual Construction of North American Indigenous Peoples in the Account of Cook's Third Voyage

Abstract

AbstractBy foregrounding the stratification of cultural agencies underlying the text, this article analyses the conceptualization of human otherness in the official account of James Cook's third voyage, published in 1784. The close reading focuses on the case study of indigenous people encountered during Cook's journey up the west coast of North America. A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean is an excellent vantage point from which to examine the intimate connections between time, power, and knowledge, which characterized eighteenth‐century European culture. Drawing on existing scholarship, this study takes a closer look at John Douglas's hitherto neglected introduction to the first edition of the account, treating it as a conceptual threshold to the text and addressing the relationship between it and the main body of the account.