Abstract:
The scholarship that maps the long eighteenth century’s rich period of global maritime history is dominated by the British explorer Captain James Cook, not only because of his repeat visits to the Pacific and the publications that followed them but also because of his extensive, well-documented, and now widely dispersed collections. For many of the Pacific islands, the earliest extant examples of material culture are associated with the voyages of scientific exploration made by Cook and his crews in 1768–71 with HMS Endeavour; in 1772–75 with HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure; and in 1776–79 with HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery. For example, save a single barkcloth collected in Tahiti by Bougainville in 1768, Cook’s are the first European voyages from which a corpus of Pacific barkcloths survive and can be identified. 2 This essay considers a series of sampler books made from Tahitian, Tongan, and Hawaiian barkcloths collected on Cook’s voyages, which were first published in 1787 by a British bookseller named Alexander Shaw.