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The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas, by Anne Salmond. London: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2003. ISBN 0-713-99661-7; xxii + 506 pages, figures, maps, appendixes, notes, selected bibliography, index. Cloth, £25.00.
Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook, by Nicholas Thomas. New York: Walker & Company, 2003. ISBN 0-8027-1412-9; xxxvii + 486 pages, tables, figures, maps, photograph, glossary, bibliography and further reading, index. Cloth, US $28.00.
The production of scholarly texts about Captain Cook dates back a half century to 1955, when the first volume of historian J C Beaglehole's celebrated edition of The Journals of Captain James Cook was published. Over the next twenty years Beaglehole completed companion pieces for the second and third voyages, a masterly two-volume Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks (1962), a widely acclaimed Life of Captain James Cook (1974), and numerous related essays. Immaculately researched and beautifully written, Beaglehole's works marked a decisive advance beyond the hackneyed hagiography that had characterized Cook literature up to this time.
However, it is clear that Beaglehole, while focused on the Pacific, brought an Anglocentric perspective to his work. Note, for example, the concluding words of his pathbreaking 1964 essay, "The Death of Captain Cook" (in Historical Studies 11 [43], 305): "In England also . . . there was a sense of shock. . . . I can think of nothing in our history of quite the same order until the news came through in 1913 of Scott's death in the Antarctic." Though very much a New Zealander, Beaglehole's claiming of English history as his own, and his comparison of his boyhood hero Robert Falcon Scott with Cook, show that he, like many white Antipodeans of his generation, never stopped thinking of Britain as "home" and heartland of the world's greatest empire.
Meanwhile, in Australia, art historian Bernard Smith was pursuing an equally humanist but ambitiously postcolonial engagement with Cook. His primary focus then, as for the next half century, was early European representations of Pacific lands and peoples. This was evidenced most dramatically in Smith's 1960 classic, European Vision and the South Pacific 1768-1850, and in his 1992 collection of essays, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages. In recent years,...