The universal topics of all companies’: Exhibiting exploration and the voyages of James Cook

 The pocket globe published by John and William Cary in April 1791 was not intended to be a serious scientific instrument.^[1] Constructed from papier mâché and plaster, and measuring just seventy-seven millimetres in diameter, it was unsuitable for any practical navigational calculations. But its existence allows us to measure something else: the impact of European voyages of exploration on eighteenth-century British culture and society. As objects that acted as status symbols for gentlemen rather than precision instruments for savants, pocket globes such as this one give us an insight into the concerns and preoccupations of those buying and displaying them. In this case, the globe bears an inscription assuring the bearer that its geographical details were “agreeable to the latest Discoveries”. It incorporates the track of Constantine Phipps’s voyage towards the North Pole in 1773 while Alexander Mackenzie’s recent explorations (1788–1789) in North America are also recorded. But it is the expeditions of James Cook that occupy the most textual space on the tiny sphere. The routes of all three voyages are carefully delineated, while the date and location of Cook’s death (“Owyhee where Cook was killed 1779”) are also carefully recorded. This object, one that could be displayed in the palm of one’s hand, reinforced the idea of exploration as a distinctly British activity and one connected to rising imperial ambitions. As Kathleen Wilson has powerfully demonstrated, Cook’s voyages initiated a “Pacific craze” in Britain.^[2] This article attempts to show how physical artefacts – books and images, as well as three-dimensional material culture – contributed to that phenomenon by exhibiting exploration. The great voyages of scientific exploration – or more precisely their various results in the form of objects, images and even people brought back from the Pacific, as well as the cultural products they inspired – provided crucial conduits for presenting this global engagement to late-eighteenth-century Britons. This relationship with the wider world, as this article seeks to demonstrate, was mediated through cultures of display and exhibition that linked travel, exploration and empire.

As a result of the collecting activities of various voyages, and the subsequent exhibition of the fruits of their endeavours, the British public had the opportunity to see, at first hand, the material cultures of various Pacific Island, American and Australasian societies. These “numerous specimens of the ingenuity of our newly discovered friends”, as John Douglas (the editor of one of Cook’s voyage accounts) termed them, were accompanied by a variety of other media that exhibited exploration to the public. And all of these offered “real matter for important reflection” on the nature of Britain’s place in the world, the status of the societies encountered on these voyages, and the relative merits of each.^[3] The paintings of voyage artists, such as William Hodges and John Webber, adorned the walls of influential art exhibitions. Lavishly illustrated official travel narratives and cheaper, more popular accounts were eagerly anticipated by the reading public, at the same time as audiences were exposed to narratives of exploration in theatres, panoramas and music halls. And with objects such as the hand-held terrestrial globes that were so fashionable, it was even possible to carry the story of exploration and Britain’s maritime engagement with the wider world in one’s pocket.

Text, image and the exhibition of exploration

In 1772, the year in which Cook set off on his second voyage to the South Seas, Johann Reinhold Forster commented that “circumnavigations of the globe have been of late the universal topics of all companies”.^[4] One of the foremost ways in which these endeavours were brought to the attention of the British public (or rather “publics”) was through the publication of travel accounts, which displayed the expanding boundaries of Britain’s global endeavours to an increasingly literate community. Thomas Bankes, in the preface to his Universal Geography (1784), remarked that the “latest discoveries appear to engross conversation from the politest circles and throughout every class of the Kingdom”.^[5] An indication of this may be found by considering the information about the South Pacific available in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This swelled from a meagre seven lines in the first edition to an impressive forty double-column pages by the third edition of 1788/89.^[6]

Publication, and subsequent distribution and consumption, offered a forum for exploration endeavours to enter public consciousness. James Cook’s expeditions were particularly important in bringing exploration to a wider audience, and the published accounts derived from them offer strong evidence of the interest in exploration at all levels of society. Within three years of Cook’s return from his first expedition, western Europe was “intoxicated” by illustrated accounts of the voyage.^[7] Official and unofficial editions proliferated: more than one hundred editions and impressions of these voyages were published between 1770 and 1800.^[8] John Hawkesworth was selected to chronicle this expedition (as well as those of Wallis and Byron undertaken in the previous decade). He was given exclusive access to the voyage journals by the Admiralty and given free rein to strike a deal with a publisher. Hawkesworth proved to be as much a sleek businessman as a literary talent. Recognising the huge public appetite for such accounts, Strahan and Cadell gave him the enormous sum of £6000 for his text, which was lavishly illustrated with plates from the work of the late Sydney Parkinson, or otherwise concocted (as no artists accompanied the Byron or Wallis expeditions).^[9] Written in the first person, Hawkesworth’s narrative appeared in 1773 and was rapidly reprinted; a second edition appeared the same year. Although expensive, and aimed at an educated and élite audience, Hawkesworth’s Voyages quickly aroused widespread interest in the Pacific and its contents reached a wide section of the British public.^[10] It was the most popular title in the Bristol Library from 1773 to 1784, being borrowed 115 times between 1773 and 1775, and 201 times over the whole period.^[11] By the end of 1773, a second English edition and a New York edition had appeared; it was translated into French, German, Spanish and Italian, and excerpts were widely published in the periodical press.^[12] And it also came out in shilling parts entitled Genuine Voyages to the South Seas, published in sixty weekly numbers.^[13]

Cook’s second voyage produced three accounts. With the full support of the Admiralty, Cook published a two-volume work in May 1777. Voyage to the South Pole included twelve charts and fifty-one monochrome engravings of places, people, and artefacts mainly based on originals produced by the official voyage artist, William Hodges. When he returned to Britain, Hodges was employed by the Admiralty at £250 per annum to complete the paintings and drawings he had brought home with him in preparation for the publication of the voyage.^[14] The first edition sold out in just one day. A second edition appeared the same year and, by 1784, the book was in its fourth edition. The success of the publication was even more remarkable, given the competition it faced. Six weeks before the official account appeared, George Forster had published a two-volume account. His father, Johann Reinhold Forster, who had also accompanied the expedition, published his single-volume observations on “Physical Geography, Natural History and Ethnic Philosophy” in 1778. And, although neither this nor George’s contained illustrations, the fact that they appeared at all gives a sense of the public’s appetite for such material.^[15]

The book describing Cook’s last voyage to the Pacific – Cook and King’s Voyage to the Pacific Ocean – appeared in June 1784 and sold at 4½ guineas. Although it was more the work of its editor, John Douglas, than that of Cook or King, in terms of presenting a view of Britain’s exploration activities for widespread public consumption, it was an even more impressive operation. The voyage artist, John Webber, was engaged to illustrate the official account, again at a salary of £250. The project eventually incorporated sixty-three drawings as copper plates, which necessitated the help of twenty-five assistants. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it took two and a half years to complete, rather than the eighteen months originally estimated by Webber.^[16] The Admiralty assumed the production costs for the prints, including Webber’s salary and the engravers’ fees of about £1000, thereby effectively subsidising the Voyage’s publication by about £2 per copy.^[17] Despite the book’s delayed appearance, and its relative costliness, results were impressive: it sold out within three days.^[18] One London periodical noted:

We remember not a circumstance like what has happened on this occasion. On the third day after publication, a copy was not to be met with in the hands of the bookseller; and to our certain knowledge, six, seven, eight and even ten guineas, have since been offered for a sett [sic].^[19]

The runaway success of Cook’s voyages illustrates not only a “Pacific craze” but the fact that media like published travel accounts could bring people closer to exploration and engagement with the wider world.

If published descriptions brought exploration to people in Britain, then visual images also contributed to this expanding universe of knowledge. William Hodges, the official voyage artist on the second of Cook’s expeditions, sent oil paintings of Funchal, Port Praya and the Cape of Good Hope back to Britain for public display within months of setting out. Seven paintings by him were exhibited at the Free Society of Artists Exhibition of 1774, more than a year before the Resolution returned.^[20] The critic of the London Packet, while generally unfavourable to the work of William Hodges that he saw on display in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1777, recognised the impact of the work of Hodges and his colleagues. The critic acknowledged that “the public are indebted to this artist for giving them some idea of scenes which before they knew little of”.^[21] The artist on Cook’s third voyage, John Webber, was particularly prolific. Over the course of his career, Webber exhibited some twenty-nine paintings based on his Cook voyage.^[22]

Many images circulated more widely in the form of prints. The production of prints was a key means by which visual information about exploration endeavours reached a wider public. Over the course of his career, John Webber utilised the storehouse of images he had amassed on the third Cook voyage. In 1788, he issued a series of plates of Pacific views, based on drawings and studies not included in the official account. By 1792, sixteen views were for sale by subscription.^[23] In 1808, Boydell published a folio volume of Views in the South Seas based on Webber’s drawings.^[24] The impact of such prints in creating visual and cultural expectations can be gauged by the words of George Mortimer, a lieutenant on a later voyage to the Pacific Northwest. In 1789, he described how “in this and in every other particular [the natives of Oonalashka] exactly resemble the prints of them in Captain Cook’s last voyage, taken from the elegant drawings of Mr Webber”.^[25] So widespread and instantly recognisable had these products of exploration become that they themselves became a benchmark for assessing the people and places encountered by future expeditions.

Prints could sustain their own exhibitionary impulse, inspiring a range of different display contexts. For example, Thomas Pennant received a gift of the prints from Cook’s third voyage and immediately hastened to have “half a room hung with them”.^[26] William Hodges’s landscapes were so popular that they encouraged Matthew Boulton to buy depictions of Tahitian landscapes and have them reproduced using the new mechanical, copperplate method that imitated oil paintings.^[27] Illustrations of Cook’s voyages, based predominantly on Webber’s drawings, provided basic information about the Pacific that was published in the great Italian and French costume books that appeared during the first third of the nineteenth century.^[28] A series of wallpapers entitled “Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique”, designed in 1804–1805 by Jean-Gabriel Charvet and printed by Josef Dufour, provides striking evidence of the ways in which such images of exploration were redeployed for European consumers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The wallpaper series included a four-page prospectus which offers an insight into why these various visual outputs proved enduringly popular:

We hoped that viewers would be pleased to see assembled in a convenient and vivid manner this multitude of peoples who are separated from us by vast oceans, arranged in such a way that, without leaving his apartment, a studious man reading the history of the voyages or the specific accounts of the explorers used in these decorations, might think himself, by casting his eyes around him, in the presence of the depicted peoples.^[29]

The twenty panels – each two by ten metres – were arranged as a serried display of colourful panoramas which were sold as a set so that, without leaving home, “the reader of the histories of travel can imagine himself among those nations [...] and will become familiar with their costumes and the diversity of nature”.^[30]

One of the most striking ways in which exploration could be exhibited was through the display of people and personal experiences. The most famous example of this was Mai, a native of Raiatea in the Society Islands (or, as the British press described him, a “wild Indian, that was taken on an island in the South Seas”) who returned with Cook’s expedition in late 1774.^[31] However, this element of personal interaction could be vicariously achieved by putting “exploration” on the stage. Theatre played a vital role in recycling, modifying and circulating the texts, images and objects derived from British voyages of exploration. In 1785, a theatrical production of “Omai, or; a trip around the world”, by John O’Keefe, incorporated some of the best-known themes and images from the Cook voyages. First performed on 20 December that year, “Omai” was the Christmas pantomime show for the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden. One contemporary described it as “the stage edition of Captain Cook’s voyage”.^[32] John Webber painted background landscape scenes and provided first-hand information on dress and accoutrements, as well as advising Philip Jacques de Loutherbourg, who was in charge of costume and decor.^[33] Many of the objects that were used as theatrical props were based on material culture that had been collected on various voyages. Like the images and travel narratives from which it was partially derived, the production proved to be a great success: it was repeated fifty times during the season, once by Royal Command. In autumn 1786, it was revived for another eight performances, and for yet another eight in the spring of 1788.^[34] It effectively displayed, according to a critic writing in The Times, “all the productions of nature in the animal and vegetable worlds” that European explorers were likely to encounter on expeditions. The same critic went on to make a direct comparison with the published account of such voyages, highlighting the visual nature of public engagement with exploration:

It may be considered a beautiful illustration of Cook’s Voyages – an illustration of importance to the mature mind of an adult, and delightful to the tender capacity of an infant. The scenery is infinitely beyond any design or paintings the stage has ever displayed. To the rational mind what can be more entertaining than to contemplate prospects of countries in their natural colours and tints – to bring into living action, the customs and manners of distant nations! To see exact representations of their buildings, marine vessels, arms, manufactures, sacrifices and dresses?^[35]

As the success and popularity of “Omai” proved, the texts and images derived from Cook’s voyages of exploration found a ready and varied audience in Britain. From those in a social and financial position to pay for luxury publications and to view art exhibitions, to those who saw prints of the voyages in printsellers’ shops in St Paul’s Churchyard or on stage in Covent Garden, these expeditions percolated widely into the cultural consciousness of people in eighteenth-century Britain.

Objects, museums and exhibitions

If texts and images formed a key part of exhibiting exploration, then tangible objects and material culture were equally important in presenting the voyages of Cook to audiences in Britain. Such artefacts were collected as part of the process of exchange and transaction that occurred as European ships sailed around the Pacific, offering material proof of the ways of life of the people encountered by European travellers, and of the resources and the environments in which they lived.^[36]

The collecting of “curiosities” was a pastime as popular among those who sailed with Cook as with connoisseurs back in Europe. George Forster makes repeated reference to the eagerness with which all members of the ship’s company acquired specimens as “targets without number were bought by almost every sailor”. He noted that “not less than ten” of the elaborate mourning dresses of Tahiti “were purchased by different persons on board and brought back to England”. Officers and sailors built up huge collections of material on their travels, partially because of their desirability in Europe. These objects found a willing market among museums and collectors: one mourning dress brought back to England by a seaman on Cook’s second voyage was sold for the sum of “five and twenty guineas”.^[37] Similarly, David Samwell, the assistant surgeon on the third voyage, auctioned off his collection in 248 lots in 1781. Over 2000 items related to the voyages were known at the end of the nineteenth century.^[38] And these objects could be distributed far and wide. When Cook’s ships arrived back in Europe, the London-based merchant and collector George Humphrey obtained shells that he subsequently sold to purchasers such as the Duchess of Portland and the Literary and Philosophical Society of Danzig.^[39] Perhaps the most notable collector on Cook’s voyages was Joseph Banks, who accompanied the first voyage. On his return to London, his home at 14 Burlington Street became “an early ‘Museum of the South Seas’”.^[40] It provided a focus for those seeking information about Cook’s voyages, much of which was gleaned from the arrangement and interpretation of objects.

Ethnographic objects also satisfied an appetite for display and exhibition. Cook himself recognised the “prevailing passion for curiosities”.^[41] Such material was initially most in demand from educated and scientifically curious audiences, or those with a direct connection with the voyages. As early as 1773, William Falconer wrote to Joseph Banks expressing genuine interest and curiosity in the indigenous arts of the Pacific: “I was highly entertained at Oxford with a sight of some curiosities you sent from Otahieta and new Zealand [sic].”^[42] In 1780, George Humphrey auctioned his museum, which included 182 “artificial curiosities” from the South Seas. The items for sale from Humphrey’s collection represented the types of objects that could convey the ways of life of these newly explored Pacific spaces: “the best and most extensive collection of cloths, garments, ornaments, weapons of war, fishing tackle and other singular inventions of the natives of Otaheite, New Zealand and other new discovered islands in the South Seas”.^[43] John Webber returned from the third voyage with over 100 items, many of which he bequeathed to the museum in Berne, the town of his birth. When Fanny Burney visited Webber’s house “to see his south Sea drawings” in March 1781, she instead spent the morning inspecting the “curiosities” with which he had returned. The author had a personal connection with Cook’s voyages as her brother, James Burney, had accompanied the second and third voyages. When Webber and Captain King explained the objects and their significance to her, Burney proclaimed them “extremely well worth seeing”.^[44]

But the interest in such material – and the impulse to put it on public display for general audiences – went beyond those directly connected with the voyages. Cook’s first biographer, Andrew Kippis, acknowledged that:

The curiosities which have been brought from the discovered islands, and which enrich the British Museum and the late Sir Ashton Lever’s (now Mr Parkinson’s) repository, may be considered as a valuable acquisition to this country, as supplying no small fund of information and entertainment.^[45]

Several donations of Cook voyage material were made to the British Museum at regular intervals. In February 1770, Philip Stephen, Secretary to the Admiralty, wrote to the trustees of the British Museum with the “offer of several Curiosities from the late discovered Islands” in the Pacific.^[46] On 3 February 1775, the Lords of the Admiralty wrote to the British Museum to consign “a collection from New Zealand and Amsterdam in the South Seas, consisting of 18 articles, Domestic and Military, brought by Captain Furneaux”. Meanwhile on 24 November 1780, the museum’s “Book of Presents” records a gift of “several artificial curiosities from the South Sea from Captain Williamson, Mr John Webber, Mr Cleveley, Mr William Collett, and Mr Alexander Hogg”.^[47]

Joseph Banks, who made donations in 1778 and 1780, described the “several cart loads” of “arms and curiosities from the South Sea” that he had sent to the museum, which had “engaged to fit up a room for the sole purpose of receiving such things”.^[48] A “South Seas Room” was planned at the British Museum as early as 1775. In April 1776, the carpenter was reprimanded for his tardiness and instructed to complete the arrangements as a matter of urgency. By March 1778, the room was being papered in a “neat mosaic pattern”.^[49] The display subsequently became a major public attraction. It was the first occasion on which the museum had organised a display with specific geographical and cultural references.^[50] Daniel Solander, together with some assistants, arranged and labelled everything.^[51] In doing so, they had to “intirely renew the arrangement”. On 10 August 1781, Solander reported that the display was opened to visitors.^[52] When Sophie von la Roche visited the museum in the summer of 1786, she was intrigued by the objects (“all the pots, weapons and clothes from the South Sea islands just recently discovered”), which were “just as they are shown in the prints illustrating the description of [Cook’s] voyage: crowns, helmets and war-masks, state uniforms and mourning”. And, even at this stage, the material was inextricably linked to the personal story of Cook: Sophie described the room as being “devoted to Captain Cook, that luckless, excellent man”.^[53] In the early nineteenth century, the “Otaheite and South Sea Rooms” of the British Museum were described as among the great sights of London for visitors. James Malcolm described the sight in London Redivivum:

The researches of Captain Cook are well known to the publick; and perhaps no age or country were ever more happy in the choice of a Navigator, and his companions in science and perseverance. The visitor will find in this room the result of years of labour and danger: a fund of information, supported by undoubted authenticity; and a source for poignant regret, that our possession of these treasures led to the unhappy end of this illustrious seaman.^[54]

Sir Ashton Lever’s Holophusicon was one of the most remarkable public display phenomena of the period. Initially opened in Lever’s home, Alkrington Hall near Manchester, it was subsequently moved to Leicester House (which dominated the north side of what became Leicester Square) in London.^[55] Objects collected on Cook’s second voyage were on public display in the Otaheite Room and Club Room. By 1784, when Lever was in the process of disposing of his collection, he had 1859 Pacific objects, the majority of which must have been derived from Cook’s voyages.^[56] On 16 July 1778, Susan Burney wrote to her sister, the author Fanny, about a visit to the Holophusicon, where there “were a great many things from Otaheite” already on display.^[57] The Sandwich Room, named for the First Lord of the Admiralty, later opened to accommodate material from the third voyage.^[58] In a public announcement dated 31 January 1781, Lever acknowledged “the patronage and liberality of Lord Sandwich, the particular friendship of Mrs Cook, and the generosity of the officers of the voyage, particularly Captain King and Captain Williamson” in endowing his establishment. He hastened to add that he had made “many considerable purchases himself”, and that he was “now in possession of the most capital part of the curiosities brought over by the Resolution and Discovery in the last voyage”. Lever’s collection was “displayed for public inspection: one room, particularly, contains magnificent dresses, helmets, idols, ornaments, instruments, utensils, etc. etc. of those islands never before discovered, which proved so fatal to that able navigator, Captain Cook, whose loss can never be too much regretted”.^[59]

The display of this material culture was undertaken for a variety of reasons, and with a number of motives in mind. Sir Ashton Lever clearly considered that objects demonstrated the ingenuity of the individuals who made them. The Companion to the Museum (1790) was published to highlight and explain “those curious works of art, which display the inventive genius as well as of the untutored Indian, as of the more polished European or Asiatic”.^[60] Lever’s collection achieved a modicum of success in shaping public opinion and increasing public knowledge. In the preface to the official account of the third voyage, John Douglas contended:

If the curiosities of Sir Ashton’s Sandwich-room alone, were the only acquisition gained by our visits to the Pacific Ocean, who that has the taste to admire, or even the eyes to behold, could hesitate to pronounce, that Captain Cook had not sailed in vain?^[61]

Conclusion

Objects associated with exploration continued to be of interest into the nineteenth century. In his Treatise on the Art of Preserving Objects of Natural History (1818), William Bullock used associations with, and narratives of, Britain’s exploration history in order to advertise and promote his activities. His collections embraced the “most interesting articles brought from the South Seas during the Voyages of Discovery of Captain Cook. They include the identical idols, weapons and other domestic and military implements engraved in the History of these Voyages.”^[62] But objects from the Pacific were also increasingly displayed with a specific view to commemorating James Cook who died on the third voyage. By the time it became Parkinson’s Museum, or the “Leverian Museum” at the Rotunda on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge, the “Sandwich Room” was “dedicated to the immortal memory of Captain Cook”, and contained “the admirable and curious articles he collected in his third, and unhappily last, voyage”.^[63] John Feltham’s description here owed a lot to the official “Companion” to the museum which reminded visitors that “on entering this apartment, the first thing that meets the eye is the following inscription: ‘To the immortal memory of Captain Cook.’”^[64]

After James Cook’s death on the third voyage, the presentation of voyage material became increasingly refracted through his commemoration. As Lissant Bolton argues, Cook’s “popular fame today is partly constructed through and by museums, and through the collections made on his voyages”.^[65] Kathleen Wilson has demonstrated how late eighteenth-century thinking about national identity was articulated and refined through representations of Cook and the South Pacific.^[66] Monuments erected by Sir Hugh Palliser near Chalfont St Giles and the Earl Temple at Stowe illustrate the widespread impact of Cook, and his developing mythic status. And later, as Jillian Robertson has shown, monuments, memorials and markers that commemorated Cook were employed by a range of interested groups for a variety of political ends.^[67]

The contemporary collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting of information and objects derived from eighteenth-century voyages of exploration occurred at a time when British responses to the rest of the world were being rapidly forged and reshaped. The enduring appeal of objects, exhibitions, and displays relating to Cook – up to and including the present day – demonstrates the long-lasting impact of these voyages.^[68] By the early nineteenth century, the British Museum’s collection formed “one of the most conspicuous parts” of that museum.^[69] And the history of these voyages, narratives published to accompany them, the objects associated with them, and their public display continue to play a crucial role in exhibiting the history of exploration, reflecting the altered political circumstances and agendas of today’s postcolonial world.