“To treat them with all imaginable humanity”: Violence and James Cook’s Endeavour Voyage

The Cook voyages covered a span of only 12 years, between 1768 and 1780 but they brought cartographical precision and clarity to European thinking about the south and north Pacific Ocean, which the Wallis voyage had not. The first two voyages laid to rest the centuries-old myth of an undiscovered continent in the high southern latitudes (Terra Australis Incognita). The third voyage was an exploration of the north Pacific in search of Northern passage by sea from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. Though Cook did not discover the Northwest Passage, his voyage was to initiate long-term British and European commercial and colonial interest in the area. Cook’s expeditions may be understood not only as voyages of discovery, but also of scientific enquiry and artistic endeavour, with George III showing interest in Enlightenment epistemological advances, as well as in pursuing colonial projects. Both meant filling in cartographical gaps with, as the Admiralty instructions to Cook stipulate, the hope of bringing honour, glory and commercial gain to Britain as a result. Obviously, from the view of the Pacific peoples whom James Cook encountered, as Michael Pearson argues “the idea of ‘discovery’ is meaningless […] if the term ‘discovery’ is used at all, it is in the context of the discovery of geographical or scientific facts for European science and commerce, not in the sense of the discovery of previously unknown land (though ‘discovery’ is appropriate for Antarctica…).” These overlapping objectives were broader in scope as compared to Wallis’s remit and would perhaps allow accrued compacting of the violence that occurred, as described with relation to Dampier’s circumnavigation in the Roebuck where geographical, nautical and natural historical particulars perform an attenuant and camouflage function, less apparent in the source Wallis texts.