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In imagining any region of the world today we often start with cartography- with a map.1 Yet the maps we draw are never reflections of the world as it is, but always partial representations of it-representations powerfully shaped by who we are, where and when we are, and what motivates our interests in that place.2 Maps of Japan appropriate to tourist sojourning, to seismic charting, to military conquest, or to developmentalist economics would differ radically.3 In this article I look at several maps of the Pacific, generated in different places and times and for different purposes. But let me start with two maps that derive from the late eighteenth century.
The first is the map of Tupaia, a man from Ra'iatea, priest of the 'Oro religion, member of the arioi cult, and adviser to the chiefs of Tahiti.4 (See figure 1). Tupaia joined the Endeavour when Captain Cook left Tahiti in the Society Islands in July 1769. Cook thought him immensely intelligent and knowledgeable both about the geography of the islands and the varied customs of its peoples. Joseph Banks sought his assistance as an interpreter and desired to take him back to England as a "curiosity." Unlike Omai (see Hetherington 2001; Jolly nd b), Tupaia never made it to England; he died en route, in Batavia in December 1770. But some of his extensive knowledge of his island world was passed on as a map. The original drawing was lost, but several copies were made, including the version published in Johann Reinhold Forster's magnum opus, Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World (Forster 1778; 1996, 304-305). Forster and his son Georg were the naturalists on the second of Cook's voyages-voyages that generated another cartography of the Pacific, as reflected in a map of the tracks of the sailing ships on Cook's three voyages. (See figure 2).
I juxtapose these two maps to ponder the relationship between indigenous and foreign representations of Oceania and to situate such representations in the changing histories of relations between Pacific peoples and strangers, between Islanders and those who are called (tongue-in-cheek, in an important volume [Borofsky 2000]), "Outlanders." Indigenous and foreign representations of the place and its peoples are now not so much separate visions as they...