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Reviews
LONGITUDE AND EMPIRE: HOW CAPTAIN COOK'S VOYAGES CHANGED THE WORLD
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by Brian W. Richardson
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| University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2005. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 256 pages. $85.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. |
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| Although it is smoothly written, this book is not a straight narrative of explorations or a companionable bedside book for readers of C.S. Forester or Patrick O'Brian. Instead, it develops the sweeping intellectual argument indicated in the subtitle. |
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By mapping the Pacific Ocean with good instruments for determining both longitude and latitude, James Cook introduced new and widely influential concepts of space, territory, cultural identities, and political power. Earlier explorers had traced continental coastlines that were separated by vacant seas; Cook crossed vast oceans with confidence and produced accurate maps of particular islands and their places in a fully explored world. He also focused on islands as confined territories that sustained varied and distinct cultures. He thus opened a more complex way of thinking about Native peoples — not as savages or barbarians contrasted with civilized Europeans, but as societies shaped by local geographies. Cook's narratives, maps, and plates made it possible for readers to hold the complex modern world in their hands as they took up his volumes and to reconsider their ideas of sovereignty, nationalism, and empire. |
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This argument retains some telltale blemishes from its origins as a political science dissertation. It is repetitive and overemphatic on some points, allusive and sketchy on others. Readers are expected to recognize the basic ideas in Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Bentham and have fresh acquaintance with works by Paul Carter, Michel Foucault, Marshall Sahlins, Edward Said, and Elizabeth Eisenstein. There is also some slippery handling of the term "Cook's voyages." At various points it seems to mean: the practices of James Cook as a brilliant navigator and explorer; the explorations Cook and others achieved in three long journeys in the Pacific; subsequent publications in which Cook's work was edited, rewritten, amplified, and illustrated by others; new nautical and print technologies, which Cook's works embodied and exemplified; some of the above; or all of the above. In order to build his central points about political concepts and persuasions, Richardson has to slight some of these many layers. Nevertheless, his work exposes a vital nerve in modern history, especially for students of the Pacific Northwest. |
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As late as the 1720s, writers such as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift could freely spin fables about far-flung islands and describe a land of gross but rational giants north of Cape Blanco. After 1778, Cook had named Cape Foulweather and Cape Flattery, provided exact coordinates for them, and placed them in a world map that embraced all the continents and oceans. Moreover, Cook's elaborate, government-sponsored, well-staffed expeditions had set a new standard. "The printed accounts of his voyages also became the ideal representation of scientific expedition literature. More than with any other voyage, Cook's travels and writings represented how an explorer ought to give an account of the world — while the voyages contain descriptions of distant places, they also discuss the practical and epistemological conditions under which certain kinds of descriptions are considered accurate and complete" (p. 7). George Vancouver came to the North Pacific in the 1790s, trained by Cook and specifically charged to further his work. And Meriwether Lewis came overland from Fort Mandan in 1805 with Cook's example firmly in mind. |
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There is a danger in American historical writing that far western exploration can be traced back to a single Founding Father in Monticello, and no further. Thomas Jefferson, it can be argued, knew all that was known about America and all that needed to be known before sending his famous scouts westward beyond the Mississippi. It was thus the polymath Jefferson who masterminded both American political ideals and American geographical realities. Richardson's study opens ampler perspectives by insisting that Cook was just as revolutionary and farsighted, that Cook took in not only a continent but a world, and that as early as the 1770s Cook had set the terms for a new understanding of geography, politics, and their interrelations. Richardson also sketches the broad background of European science and philosophy that produced Cook's work, demanded it, and built upon it. He does not mention Jefferson or Lewis, and he notices the Pacific Northwest only incidentally, but his book carries an implication worth pondering — that this region's exploration and development were already being determined by cartographers, curio collectors, and clockmakers before Jefferson was out of his teens. |
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| ALBERT FURTWANGLER
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| Salem, Oregon |
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