‘Very curious and romantick Views’: Captain Cook’s Antarctic explorations and aesthetic education

Abstract

In all three of James Cook’s expeditions to the Pacific, visual artists were hired by the Royal Society and the Admiralty to communicate scientific information that relied on visual evidence, while conveying the embodied experience of travel. The present article focuses on the representational challenges raised by the encounter with the Antarctic during the polar explorations of the second voyage (1772–75), with an emphasis on Cook’s textual accounts and William Hodges’s sketches and illustrations, which are shown to provide an interesting angle on the contemporary debates about the respective abilities of words and images, both as paths to knowledge and as sources of aesthetic experience. After a brief discussion of the complementary epistemological function of words and images in Cook’s Pacific voyages, this article argues that the specific representational issues raised by the encounter with the Antarctic not only encouraged Cook to reflect about the value of images for the publication of his discoveries, but also partook of his own aesthetic education, with significant and long-lasting implications for the subsequent construction of polar regions in the British imagination.