The Conversation

Mapping, the driving force of Cook’s voyages, embraces an enormous body of knowledge or discourse circulating around the sciences and philosophy. Cook’s project, then, was already mediated epistemologically. All mapping is in part constructed by cultural motivations and values systems—as is immediately apparent when a map of the world is oriented with the southern hemisphere in the upper half of the map. Smith posits that

both classical antiquity and the traditions of Christian thought provided a stock of attitudes and preconceptions which Europeans brought to bear upon their experience of the Pacific. European attitudes towards Pacific peoples provide an illuminating example. The first European visitors to Polynesia tended to view the natives as noble savages, an attitude with its roots deep in the thought of classical antiquity (6, 243).

Indeed, “so well known did the islands of the South Seas become following the publicity given to Cook’s voyages that the natural productions and native peoples of the Pacific became better known to European scientists than the natural productions and peoples of many less distant regions”[5]—that is, less distant from Europe. This is an example of what I shall delve into in more depth in the pages to come: cultural mapping.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, states: “Every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the country-side in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie, or a river is” (ix). Although the river itself precedes knowledge about the river, Merleau-Ponty’s implication is that we come to experience the river through a field of knowledge already circulating about the river—a geography.[6] If geography is not only an “abstract” and “derivative” “schematization,” but a “sign-language,” is it not a language, “constructed” and “formed” through signs­ and symbols—a map even? Forty-some years after Merleau-Ponty’s insight, a cartographical historian comes to a similar conclusion. J. B. Harley states that “maps are texts in the same senses that other nonverbal sign systems—paintings, prints, theatre, films, television, music—are texts. . . .  Like all other texts, maps use signs to represent the world.”[7]

If geography is a sign-language and if that language is itself a carrier of ideology and culture, might not the deployment of the map itself bear the cultural motivations of colonial domination? What does the mapping of the world under colonialism have to tell us about the world then and the world now? We have simply to look “behind” the map to approach the discourses that produce it. My point is that the map, aside from its practical functions of locating and delineating objects in space, itself bears the cultural motivations of colonial domination.

In this article, I examine colonial-era cartography and travelogues in the South Pacific and the ways in which the mapping of islands implicitly suggests a cartography of the Other, or a mapping out of the islands’ constituent populations by the occupying powers. If the “material” of colonial geography underwrites the ideological justifications for colonization and vice versa, the racism and ethnocentrism inherent in said project acts metaleptically as it is both the cause and effect of colonial geography—whence cultural domination through mapping. In the following section, I consider four related texts: The Marquesas Islands by Reverend Robert Thomson, a nineteenth-century British missionary, as a case study of colonial geography; the maritime journals from the voyages of Captain Cook, which Thomson had read and to which he refers and which must be considered inextricable from the actual mapping accomplished; a letter from Vincent Van Gogh, which comments on Thomson’s book; and excerpts from Voyage of the Beagle. From 1833 to 1838, Charles Darwin sailed as a naturalist with H.M.S. Beagle and made his own observations about the indigenous peoples he encountered, including Polynesians.

II

Ever since Polynesia was discovered, it has excited considerable interest throughout the civilized world; it opened a field [my emphasis] where many intrepid navigators have won immortal fame and extended the commerce of their country; over which science has soared with unwearied wings and where Christian benevolence . . . reaps in joy.

—Reverend Robert Thomson

My epigraph is taken from the first paragraph of Reverend Robert Thomson’s description of his three-year mission in the Marquesas Islands, an example of colonial geography produced and sustained par excellence. Here, Polynesia, as well as the rest of the uncivilized or, as in the case of India and China, the less scientifically advanced world—the non-West—becomes a field in three ways: (1) materially, as in a landscape; (2) as an abstract and ideological schematic field, as in Merleau-Ponty’s sense (that is, there arose a body of knowledge or discourse producing the Marquesas Islands);[8] and (3) as a discipline, career or field for those intrepid European explorers, cartographers, missionaries and merchants. Polynesia is a field of commerce, under merchant capitalism, primarily for three rival global players—Britain, France and an arriviste United States. Correlatively, Polynesia also becomes a field for sowing “Christian benevolence” and harvesting new souls. The civilizing mission becomes both a reflection and a proof of the superior civilization achieved by the West and the economic system(s) under which it operates.[9] Paramount themes for Thomson, and for the rest of the West, then, are commerce, careers and Christianity.

Thomson was aware of, and of course complicit with, the commercial forces driving international interest in Polynesia. Although the islands were first “discovered” by Spain in 1595 and subsequently declared “Las Islas del Marquesa de Mendosa,” Thomson tells the story of the histrionic flag plantings on the islands by Britain, France and the United States beginning 200 years later upon the second “discovery” of the islands. Particularly interesting is the processes of naming.

[The] discovery [of the Marquesas Islands], however, is disputed and claimed by America as the discovery of Captain Ingraham who named them Washington Islands; by France as the discovery of Captain Marchard who called them Revolution Islands; and by the British as the discovery of Lieutenant Hergest in honour of whom Vancouver called them Hergest’s islands. (2)

Naming ignores and abrogates the names the indigenous people gave the islands and even the names they gave themselves. Instead, their differences are overlooked and they are culturally colonized as “Marquesans.” Although these islands continue to be administered by France as a part of French Polynesia, the original names of individual islands, and even of the north and south archipelagoes, have been restored; nevertheless, they are still collectively known as the Marquesas (or, in French, as les îles Marquises or l’archipel des Marquises or, simply, les Marquises).

This narrative of “discovery” is now a trope of exploration and conquest. One can almost imagine a scuffle on the beach in which each explorer, flag in hand, argues that he “was, in point of fact, there first.” Let not the levity of this imaginary row belie the gravity of the very real philosophical sublation of the native islanders and their displacement therein.[10] But Thomson’s description of the international rivalry for dominance in the South Pacific is by no means hyperbolic. The exploration and mapping of the Marquesas by Britain, France and the United States, and subsequent claims to the territory, fifty years before Thomson and Darwin’s arrivals, are quickly followed by a military presence and annexation of the islands. Cartography and colonization, then, dialectically underwrite each other.

When Thomson refers to those “intrepid navigators,” he was almost certainly referring to Captain James Cook, for whom mapping the world was a career. It is interesting, then, that a portion of Captain Cook’s journals, as well the journals and materials of the members of the crew (including naturalist J. R. Forster, who replaced Joseph Banks, the naturalist on Cook’s first voyage who later became the president of the Royal Society), dealt not only with the world itself but also with the populations of the places he “discovers” as well.[11] A significant part of mapping was the mapping of human beings.

For example, upon “discovering” in 1774 what are still called the Cook Islands, just west of French Polynesia, Cook gave this description of the indigenous people: “The conduct and aspect of these islanders occasioned the Captain’s naming it Savage Island [upon receiving open hostility from the indigenous people]. They seemed to be stout, well made men, were naked, except round the waists, and some of them had their faces, breast, and thighs, painted black.”[12] They were described and named without, apparently, any attempt to study “ethic philosophy.”

Another striking example of mapping the Other appears in Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle some fifty years later. Darwin describes the “Natural History and Geology” of the world he encounters during the Beagle’s circumnavigation of the globe, yet embedded in his narrative is also, like Captain Cook’s writings, a cultural mapping of the populations as a measure of their deviation from the standard of European civilization. During his sojourn in Tahiti, Darwin compared the tropics with the temperate regions of Europe and reflected that “I felt the force of the remark, that man, at least savage man, with his reasoning powers only partly developed, is a child of the tropics.”[13] He imagines a scale of civilized behavior, with the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego at the bottom. Of the Australian aborigines, for example, he writes: “On the whole, they appear to me to stand some few degrees higher in the scale of civilization than the Fuegians” (438). Similarly, he ranks Maoris below Tahitians:

Looking at the New Zealander, one naturally compares him with the Tahitian; both belonging to the same family of mankind. The comparison, however, tells heavily against the New Zealander. He may, perhaps be superior in energy, but in every other respect his character is of a much lower order. One glance at their respective expressions, brings conviction to the mind that one is a savage, the other a civilized man. (424)

There can be no question, however, which people are at the pinnacle of civilization. “To hoist the British flag,” he writes in his conclusion, “seems to draw with it as a certain consequence, wealth, prosperity, and civilization” (508).

What this amounts to is an example of a description of the Other ensconced within growing European discourses and fields of knowledge on the Other, including such wide-ranging disciplines as anthropology and Egyptology.[14] Cultural mapping is indeed predicated upon markers of difference from European civilization—tattoos, body paint, clothing, and pathologically “childlike” minds—and this difference is inscribed in the very processes of mapping. The indigenous population remains philosophically sublated within the discourse of “discovery” and becomes discernable or mediated through a schematic or continuum of civilization.

Walter Mignolo notes that “putting the Americas on the map from the European perspective was not necessarily a task devoted to finding the true shape of the earth; it was also related to controlling territories, diminishing non-European conceptualization of space and spreading European cartographic literacy; thus colonizing the imagination of the people on both sides of the Atlantic” (309). I make a similar claim regarding the South Pacific. Like Said’s concept of “imaginative geography,” Mignolo’s theory allows us to see the ways in which European conquest was a double-movement: it was the territorialization of both the materiality of the globe as well as the global imagination and epistemology of the world. That cartography hinges upon both processes suggests its importance.

The geography inscribed in Reverend Robert Thomson’s description of the Marquesas is but one instance of these processes, yet embedded within it is also a critique of what he sees as the deleterious effects on the Marquesans of “intercourse with civilized Europe and America” (56). Thomson of course operates within the discourse of the Christian missionary disseminating the word of God and civilization in remote areas of the globe, yet he also models his writing on Captain Cook’s journals, to which he refers throughout his text, which ranges from geography to meteorological observations to customs of the inhabitants to musings on missionary efforts.

This broad range of topics is, in fact, similar to Darwin’s in Voyage of the Beagle, and Thomson, like Darwin and Cook, remains racist and ethnocentric throughout the text; yet he laments some European contacts with these islands and the violent encounters they engender. While the Marquesas islander always remains “savage,” “depraved” and “uncivilized” (both in the Romantic sense of the noble savage and in racist pseudo-scientific terms), s/he is undeserving of the violence exacted by colonial deracination. “Humanity must weep,” Thomson declares, “to know that in so many of the early visits of civilized men to these savage shores, the painful anticipations of Cook have been so often realized, and thousands have regretted that ever their Islands have been discovered” (4). What arises out of this tension between Thomson’s lament and his unconscious racism, paired with the discourse of commercial humanism, is the repression of colonization itself within the discourse of exploration and missionary work. Although, for Thomson, some effects of colonization and territorial annexation are regrettable, neither these processes themselves nor the racism of Europe are held accountable or are ever the subject of his critique.

Two contending landscapes emerge (and I use the term “landscape” as pertaining both to the material land and to the culturally produced or mapped Other population; both landscapes come into being through representation) within the discourse surrounding the islands: first, that of pre-European contact, in which a Romantic trope of the noble yet primitive savage is foregrounded; and second, that of post-European contact, which, for Thomson, finds the indigenous population ever more depraved.[15]

Notice that the in-between of the “pre” and “post”—colonization itself—remains tellingly effaced. Still, Thomson’s biting vituperation remains important:

The inhabitants of this group of islands are probably now in a worse condition both moral and physical than they were when they were first discovered. . . . The gentle and innocent beings seen by the Spaniards nearly three centuries ago; and the kind good-hearted natives spoken of by Captain Wilson in the end of the last century, have perished from these islands, and the savage in his unrestrained barbarity has supplied their place. (56)

A truly monumental and valiant leap of logic takes us from the noble savage of sixteenth-century Marquesas to that of the unrestrained barbarian of the nineteenth. One might believe that one is reading a Jekyll-and-Hyde story. In a way, though, we can read the “unrestrained barbarian” as a metonym for the degraded non-Christian European. Indeed, “Many of the [European] seamen upon these islands differ only little in colour from their fellow savages,” and thus Thomson, by way of strategic metalepsis, excoriates the West—the Self—through the proxy of the Other—the Marquesas islander.[16] In a round-about way that will seem obvious to us now, Thomson indeed gets away with severely criticizing the “barbarity” of the West, its violence and its spreading of disease—both physically and mentally (as in the rampant profligacy of the seamen)—yet that critique is so saturated in racism and ethnocentrism (as well as the rhetoric of the benevolence of Christianity), that the nineteenth-century reader (or twenty-first century reader) may have missed its implications.

One nineteenth-century reader who did not miss Thomson’s implications was Vincent van Gogh. In recently published letters to friend and fellow painter Émile Bernard, Van Gogh delves into a strange version of postcolonial literary criticism, which I quote at length:

I’ve just read a book—not beautiful and not well written, by the way—on the Marquesas Islands, but very heartrending in its description of the extermination of an entire tribe of natives—cannibals in the sense that let’s say an individual was eaten once a month, and what of that? The whites (very Christian, etc., to put an end to this barbarity? really not very savage. . . .), could think of nothing better than to exterminate both the tribe of cannibal natives and the tribe with which the former was at war (in order to obtain the requisite edible prisoners of war on both sides). Then the two islands were annexed, and did they become dismal!!! Those tattooed races, those negroes, those Indians, everything, everything, everything disappears or is corrupted. And the frightful white man, with his bottle of alcohol, his wallet and his pox, when will we have seen enough of him! The frightful white man, with his hypocrisy, his greed and his sterility! And those savages were so gentle and so loving. Ah, you do darned well to think of Gauguin [Paul Gauguin, who also spent a fair amount of time in the Marquesas]—they’re high poetry, his negresses—and everything his hand makes has a sweet, heartrending, astonishing character. . . . (156)

There are two discourses to which Van Gogh, like Thomson, appears to adhere. The first reveals a racist ethnocentrism within the Romantic trope of pre-contact Marquesans constructed as infantilized noble savages. This is apparent in Van Gogh’s terminology as “those savages were [before conquest] so gentle and so loving,” yet they are still barbarous “cannibals.” “[B]ut what of that?” Van Gogh asks. A similar stance on cannibalism is taken by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Instead of following through with his plot to exterminate the cannibals on “his island,” he states, “it occurred to me that albeit the usage they thus gave one another was thus brutish and inhuman, yet it was really nothing to me. These people had done me no injury.”[17] And for Van Gogh, although they were primitive, and maybe “an individual was eaten once a month,” Thomson’s censure of the enormity of deracination is echoed by Van Gogh.[18]

 The second discourse guiding Van Gogh’s thought is that of an enlightened European humanism, paternally tolerant of non-Western primitives or “civilization’s children,” concomitantly incensed at the violence perpetrated upon them. This liberal idealism was prevalent in the abolition movement earlier that century, yet it failed to take into account the complicity of colonization, slavery and territorial conquest with the economic systems under which the mercantile powers operated.

Thus, for Thomson and Van Gogh, neither European exploration nor colonization itself presented a problem but, rather, the particular ways in which they were carried out. Thomson objects to the lack of a Christian ethos at all levels of contact with the non-Western world. For example, in calling for the removal of non-state-sanctioned contact, he advocates the removal of the dissolute sailors running amok on the islands (57–8). Still necessary, of course, within Thomson’s representation of post-contact indigenous society, is the civilizing mission and colonization as a form of commercial humanism: enlightenment as an exchange for the extraction of resources.

What both of these landscapes emerging out of colonial representations of the islands of the South Pacific share is that the inhabitants, the “discovered” population, the indigenous, are, in both representations of pre- and post-contact, “savage,” “primitive” and childlike. The processes of colonial cartography and the economic territorialization, as well as the territorialization of the imagination, go unchallenged, or are “repressed” in what Chinua Achebe calls the “psychology of the West.”[19] The intertwined processes of material and cultural mapping, I argue, works towards the construction of the Other in the minds of Westerners—one effect being the justification of colonization and, I would argue, neo-colonization in the present day. These cultural maps are still used, for example, in the tourism industry. Take Paul Gauguin, for example, whose legacy persists not solely in exoticized portraits of Marquesan women but also in the cruise ship named for him, which re-traces imperial routes.

Interesting here is the way in which colonial cartography and trade routes are mimicked in contemporary tourism. Inderpal Grewal writes about the ways in which colonial cultures of travel are “still visible in contemporary cultural productions of travel, mediated in various parts of the world through specific agendas inflected by the geopolitics of the tourist industry” (1). Contemporary tourism also recapitulates colonial cultural production. The Other is still constituted as “exotic,” “languid,” “mysterious,” and, therefore, as Other. The website offering a cruise to Tahiti aboard the M/S Paul Gauguin provides sufficient proof:

In 1891, when Paul Gauguin arrived in Tahiti, he captured the charm, culture and languid grace of the natives in his oil paintings. You won’t find his paintings here, but the original models still call this corner of French Polynesia home. This 11–day itinerary is perfect for those who want to experience what’s at the core of Polynesian essence. . . . What better way to discover the mysterious and exotic French Polynesia than on a South Pacific cruise.[20] [My italics.]

The definition of “languid” is of course “lacking vitality” and “slow.” One is automatically reminded of Cook’s and Darwin’s racism here, and of the corresponding European discourse constituting the Other as such. In this context, “the subaltern” cannot speak.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Massachusetts Review. 18 (1977): pages.

Cook, James. Captain Cook’s Voyages of Discovery. Ed. John Barrow. New York: 1906.

———. The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery: Vol. II, The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure 1772-1775. Ed. J.C. Beaglehole. Cambridge: U P, 1969.

Darwin, Charles. Voyage of the Beagle. Ed. Charles W. Eliot. Danbury, Connecticut: Grolier, 1980.

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. New York: Random House, 1948.

Grewal, Inderpal. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

Harley, J. B. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Ed. Paul Laxton. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Hunter, Michael. Establishing the New Science: The Experience of Early Royal Society. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989.

Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I, A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Vintage, 1976.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul Press, 1962.

Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Smith, Bernard. European Vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.

Stoddart, D. R. On Geography and its History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986.

Thomson, Rev. Robert. The Marquesas Islands.

Van Gogh, Vincent. Painted with Words: The Letters to Émile Bernard. Eds. Leo Jansen et al. Trans. Imogen Forster. New York: Rizzoli, 2007.

Vantage Travel. http://www.vantagetravel.com/Trip/Trips_561, 2008.

Tags: Charles Darwin, Christopher Ian Foster, James Cook, mapping, Robert Thomson, Vincent Van Gogh