“Destruction of poor naked savages”: Samuel Wallis in the Pacific

After the Dampier voyages and a lull in Admiralty initiatives, further and more concerted British exploration of the Pacific, was to gain momentum in the mid-eighteenth century. Tom Ryan suggests that “European understanding” of the South Seas was profoundly reworked after the publication in 1756 of a French collection of travel accounts, namely Charles de Brosses’s Histoire des navigations aux terres australes. Histoire, which was a two-volume compilation of accounts of travel to the south seas spanning a period of 250 years “contenant ce que l’on sait des moeurs & des production des contrées découvertes jusqu’à ce jour.” De Brosses, like his English counterparts since Hakluyt, was also interested in examining “l’utilité d’y faire de plus amples découvertes, & des moyens d’y former un établissement.” The only translation into English of de Brosses’s two-volume founding document was John Callander’s later Terra Australis Cognita published in 1766–1768, which appropriated the work of Charles de Brosses and turned propaganda for French exploration of the Southern Ocean into propaganda for British initiatives “to promote the Commercial Interests of Great Britain, and extend her Naval Power.” Contemporaneously, others, like Alexander Dalrymple, were also actively interested in further exploration of the Pacific. Dalrymple had documented and recognized links with navigation and exploration and his 144-page Account of the Discoveries made in the South Pacifick Ocean which two years later became An historical collection of the several voyages and discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean. By Alexander Dalrymple, Esq. Dalrymple was no amateur armchair traveller, like Callander, and he showed honed interest in the search for the southern continent. His status, as recognized geographer and navigator, gave credit to his theory which was based on sightings of land by seafarers over the centuries. He argued that there was an extensive landmass awaiting discovery in the Pacific and that “we have traces from antient times, warranted by latter experience, of rich and valuable countries in it; no subject can be more interesting, to a commercial state, than the discovery of new countries and people, to invigorate the hand of industry, by opening new vents for manufactures.” These types of texts, along with others, appeared in print prior to and during Britain’s ground-breaking exploratory forays into the South Pacific.