Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages.

AuthorTillotson, G.H.R.

At first glance, this volume - a collection of essays already published elsewhere as articles - nevertheless has a measure of unity, and allows the articles to explore in greater detail aspects of the subject not fully covered in the author's earlier books, which include the celebrated European Vision and the South Pacific (2nd ed., 1985) and the three volumes of The Art of Captain Cook's Voyage (edited with Rudiger Joppien).

Repeatedly, Smith returns to a central theoretical concern of much of his writing. This is set out in the preface here as the claim that there are continuities between "imaging," or the construction of an image in the presence of an object, and "imagining," or constructing one away from it. Later (p. 53), he draws distinctions between inventive, illustrative, and documentary drawing - based respectively on imagination, text and observation - only to insist that the distinctions are not clear-cut. Smith shows how the artists associated with Cook's voyages worked within established modes of representation, or (one might less fashionably express it) were subject to style.

This point might have been brought out more strongly in chapter 7, which treads a somewhat cautious path around the ideas of Edward Said. The question, "to what extent was the imagery [of the Pacific] truthful, to what extent false?" (p. 173) is practically meaningless where it has been shown that any imagery - whatever its documentary claims - is unavoidably substantially imaginative.

The chapter on Hodges adds much new material on his...

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