The Warrior, The Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire by Kate Fullagar

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Warrior, The Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire by Kate Fullagar Laura M. Stevens Kate Fullagar, The Warrior, The Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 306; 33 b/w illus. $40.00 cloth. In The Warrior, The Voyager, and the Artist, Kate Fullagar tells the stories of three lives that left evidence of their intersection in two eighteenth-century portraits. These individuals are the painter Joshua Reynolds, the Cherokee leader Ostenaco, and Mai, a young man of Ra’iatea, one of the Society Islands in the South Pacific. Ostenaco and Mai never met each other, but they both had their portraits painted by Reynolds while they visited London. The portraits are Syacust Ukah, painted in 1762, and Omai, for which Mai sat in 1775. Fullagar positions her project within “two resurgent cultural concerns: the possibilities of life writing and the moral legacy of empire” (5). In addressing the first concern, she aligns her work with “[t]he so-called New Biography, with at least an eye out for the constructed nature of selves” (5), and in relation to the second, she cites ongoing debates between “apologists” for the British Empire and scholars advancing “The New Imperial History” (254, n. 6). These two sets of concerns, methodologies, and debate inflect each other, with, for example, a foregrounding of questions about the degree to which notions of selves are shaped by culture and by asymmetrical dynamics of power. These lives are worth telling, even as they pose oppositional challenges. Reynolds left a large footprint in archives, print, and painting, and he has been the subject of previous biographies, even as he remains a somewhat elusive figure because of the great care he clearly took to avoid controversies and thus maintain interpersonal relationships along with power. Fullagar positions herself in a somewhat crowded tradition of scholarship on Reynolds by considering him as “an imperial subject” with “mixed views on empire” (8, 7). If the main task for the book’s sections on Reynolds is to sift through a dense array of primary and secondary texts, the sections on Ostenaco and Mai entail a challenge familiar to scholars of Indigenous studies: to find and describe fully resolved human beings, with their own thoughts, agendas, and feelings, in an archive shaped by imperialist biases and erasures. Ostenaco (also known as Usteneka) was a prominent warrior and diplomat among the Overhill Cherokees of the 1750s and 1760s, who resided in present-day eastern Tennessee. The archival traces of Ostenaco’s life are fairly substantial but scattered, for he shows up with some frequency in colonial government records and in publications such as the memoirs of Henry Timberlake, a Virginia-born soldier who became acquainted with Ostenaco while on an expedition to the Overhill towns and then accompanied him on his transatlantic journey. A “chief prosecutor of the deadly Anglo-Cherokee War of 1760–61,” Ostenaco visited London along with two other Cherokees for ten weeks in 1762 “to secure the war’s termination with King George III of Britain” (3). There is also a dearth of documentation around the portrait that links these two subjects of the book. As Fullagar notes, the painter’s “pocketbooks merely state that the ‘King of the Cherokees’ came to his studio on 1 July.’” Why and how Reynolds came to paint Ostenaco is not clear; also mysterious is the fact that Reynolds kept the painting, titled it (erroneously) “Scyacust Ukah,” but “ever afterward hid it from view” (88). Mai is less visible than Ostenaco in colonial records before his visit to Britain, but there is more documentation of his two-year stay there. A young man [End Page 261] who fled his birthplace of Ra’iatea for the island of Tahiti, because of an invasion from neighboring Bora Bora, he boarded the Adventure, which accompanied the Resolution on Cook’s second voyage in 1774, ostensibly preparing it for its return voyage, and then quietly stayed on the ship when it departed. Mai’s efforts to befriend the ship’s captain, Tobias Furneaux, paid off when Furneaux persuaded Cook to allow...