Region and period

Explorers of the Pacific in the 18th Century

In the eighteenth century, the Pacific was first of all a problem of navigation. The ocean covers a third of the globe, ports of call were few, and no one could yet determine longitude: ships missed islands and wandered for weeks. Scurvy ravaged crews, and only in 1753 did the Scottish physician James Lind show the effect of citrus fruit, a lesson navies took decades to apply. Since 1565 only the Manila galleon crossed the ocean each year, between Asia and Mexico, along an unchanging route. Exploration became systematic only after the Seven Years' War: in 1764-1766 John Byron completed in under two years a voyage around the world that opened the series.

The following decade was decisive. Philip Carteret discovered Pitcairn in 1767; Jean-François de Surville coasted New Zealand in 1769. On June 3 of that year, astronomers stationed in Tahiti and at many other points around the globe observed the transit of Venus across the Sun in order to calculate the distance between the Earth and the Sun. In 1772 Marion Dufresne was killed in New Zealand, while the viceroy of Peru sent ships and missionaries to Tahiti to assert Spain's claims.

These voyages were also encounters, and the islanders played their part. The Tahitian Ahutoru followed the French to Paris in 1769 and became a regular at the Opéra; he died on the way home. European accounts, learned or naive, describe double canoes, tattoos, ceremonies, exchanges of gifts and the violence that marked almost every landfall. Without knowing it, they bear witness to the skill of Polynesian navigators, who had settled this same ocean centuries earlier with neither compass nor written chart.

By the end of the century, Europeans had come to stay. In January 1788 the First Fleet landed at Botany Bay the convicts who would found Sydney. In 1789 the crew of the Bounty, sent to carry breadfruit trees from Tahiti to the Caribbean, mutinied: William Bligh and eighteen men covered more than six thousand kilometers in an open launch, while the mutineers hid on Pitcairn. D'Entrecasteaux set out in 1791 in search of La Pérouse, without finding him, and charted the coasts of Tasmania and New Caledonia along the way. From 1789 to 1794 the Italian Alessandro Malaspina led a scientific expedition for Spain from one end of the Pacific to the other.

This collection brings together our editions and a directory of related texts, to follow the century in which the Pacific entered Europe's map of the world and its debates.

Our titles on this subject

A Cruising Voyage Round the World

Woodes Rogers, 1708-1711

The corsair who rescued from a desert island the sailor who became the model for Robinson Crusoe.

Published in 1712, the journal of Woodes Rogers is one of the great English privateering narratives of the South Sea, written in the time of the War of the Spanish Succession. It tells of the rescue of Alexander Selkirk at Juan Fernández, the source of Defoe's *Robinson Crusoe*, the capture of Guayaquil and of a Manila galleon, then the return by Guam, Batavia and the Cape. Its descriptions of the Spanish coasts of the Pacific fed the English expeditions of the eighteenth century.

The Journal of the Endeavour

James Cook, 1768-1771

Summer 1768: Cook sets sail aboard the Endeavour to observe the transit of Venus and search for the southern continent. Cape Horn, Tahiti, the violent shores of New Zealand: the first volume of the authentic journal.

In 1768 the Admiralty and the Royal Society sent a mere lieutenant to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti, with secret orders to look for the southern continent. The first part of Cook's day-by-day journal shows Enlightenment science entering the South Pacific, two years after Wallis and one after Bougainville reached Tahiti, and then the first sustained European contact with the Maori since Tasman's brief encounter in 1642.

Volumes I II III

Cook Towards the South Pole

James Cook, 1772-1775

July 1772: Cook sets sail to settle the question of the southern continent. The first to cross the Antarctic Circle, he discovers Dusky Bay and Tahiti. A period account rewritten in modern English, with maps and illustrations.

Cook's second voyage was meant to settle a question geographers had debated since antiquity: was there a great southern land? Its first year shows him crossing the Antarctic Circle in January 1773, something no one had done before, then spending the southern winter between New Zealand and Tahiti. It was also the first long expedition to carry a copy of Harrison's chronometer, the instrument that would transform how longitude was found at sea.

Volumes I II III

Cook's Last Voyage

James Cook, James King, 1776-1780

February 1776: Cook sets out again for the Pacific. Tenerife, the Cape of Good Hope, Kerguelen, then New Zealand, where a chief accused of murder faces the crew. Account rewritten in modern English, maps and illustrations.

Cook's third voyage reversed the question: no longer a land to find in the south, but a northern passage between the Pacific and the Atlantic. Its first year, even so, was spent in southern waters. Cook charted the Kerguelen Islands, found by a Frenchman four years earlier, put in at Tasmania, then returned to New Zealand to inquire into the Grass Cove massacre. The narrative gains a second voice, the surgeon William Anderson, a careful observer of the peoples met.

Volumes I II III IV V VI

Log of the Proceedings of His Majesty's Ship Providence

William Bligh, 1791-1793

Two years after the Bounty, he dares to return to Tahiti for the breadfruit.

The log of the Providence is the day-by-day account of the second breadfruit expedition, led by Bligh two years after the mutiny on the Bounty. It links Tahiti, Torres Strait and the West Indies, and gives a long testimony on Tahitian society under the chiefs of Matavai and Oparre on the eve of the missionaries' arrival. It is also a major document on imperial botany and British navigation in the Pacific.

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

Richard Walter, A Voyage Round the World by George Anson (1748)

Thirty years later, Commodore Anson's squadron almost retraces the route of the Duke. Setting out in 1740 and decimated by scurvy off Cape Horn, it recovers at Juan Fernández, where the sailors find goats with slit ears that they link to Selkirk. It plunders Paita, watches in vain for the galleon off Mexico, then in 1743 seizes the Covadonga near the Philippines. The narrative, published in 1748 under the name of the chaplain Richard Walter, becomes a great publishing success. It shows what naval war made of Rogers's privateering model. See A Voyage Round the World by George Anson.
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Jean de Surville, Journal du voyage du Saint-Jean-Baptiste (1769-1770)

In December 1769, a French merchant ship was likewise searching for land in the Pacific and sailing along the north coast of New Zealand. Cook and de Surville passed within a few dozen leagues of one another, in the same storm, without ever sighting each other. The Frenchman's journal, long forgotten, tells the other face of that moment: a crew ravaged by scurvy, a tense landfall among the Maori, a hostage taken by force. To read these pages alongside Cook's journal is to grasp how much discovery depended on the chance of routes and winds.
Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L'Étoile (1771)

Setting out in 1766 to hand the French settlement on the Falklands over to the Spanish, Bougainville passes through the Strait of Magellan, crosses the Pacific by way of Tahiti, Samoa, the New Hebrides and the Solomons, then reaches the Moluccas and Batavia before returning across the Indian Ocean. It is the first official French naval voyage round the world. His account, published in 1771, feeds the philosophers' debate on the noble savage. The comparison with Rogers is telling: the same seas, the same Dutch ports of call, but a voyage of state, of scholars and observation, where Rogers led an enterprise of prizes. The book is Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L'Étoile.
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Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde (1771)

A year before the Endeavour, a French frigate rounds Cape Horn and reaches Tahiti, which Bougainville names New Cythera. His account, published in 1771, offers the exact counterpoint to Cook's journal: the same atolls, the same happy island, the same astonishment before a society without iron or money, but the gaze of an Enlightenment philosopher where the Englishman remains a sailor and surveyor. Reading both is to watch two Europes lean over the same shore at the same moment, and come away with different Tahitis. Here one already glimpses the shadow of the noble savage that would haunt the whole century.
Pierre Sonnerat, Voyage à la Nouvelle-Guinée (1771-1772)

A naturalist and draughtsman, Sonnerat travels in 1771 and 1772 through the islands of the Indian Ocean and the coasts of New Guinea, gathering plants, sketching birds and customs, and mixing into his observations his own share of fables. An exact contemporary of Cook's Friendly Islands, he shows another Pacific, further west, where Europe is only just beginning to sort truth from marvel. Reading him, one measures what Anderson's sober, verified method brings that is new to the view of these seas.
Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne, Relation du voyage (1772)

Two years after Cook, another French navigator dropped anchor in the Bay of Islands, those very shores the Endeavour had just sailed past. The stop, cordial at first, ended in blood: Marion du Fresne and some of his men were killed by the Maori they believed to be their friends. The account of this voyage casts a harsh light on what Cook's journal only lets the reader glimpse: the fragility of first contact, where a single misunderstanding was enough to turn hospitality into war.
John Hawkesworth, Relation des voyages entrepris pour faire des découvertes dans l'hémisphère méridional (1773)

Two years before the Endeavour, another English ship, the Dolphin, had touched at Tahiti and brought back the news that decided Cook's call there. Hawkesworth's great compilation, published in 1773, gathers these expeditions of Byron, Wallis, and Carteret in the Pacific. In it one reads the discovery of Tahiti as the Royal Navy first knew it, that same Dolphin whose memory Cook's journal keeps everywhere. It is the opening act of the South Seas, just before the Endeavour made its round of them.
Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (1773)

Draughtsman on Cook's first voyage, who died at sea before the return, Parkinson left a journal published in 1773 by his family. In it we follow the Endeavour along the same New Zealand and Australian coasts that Cook had just revealed. The tone is that of a young man, wonderstruck and scrupulous, who notes down the words of the languages he encounters and sketches plants and faces. It is the first sustained European gaze upon these shores, the one that prepared the ground for the second voyage recounted here.
John Ledyard, A Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage (1776-1780)

An American corporal of marines was at Kealakekua that morning. Once home, Ledyard published in Hartford, in 1783, an account of the voyage that came out more than a year ahead of the official edition and told of Cook's death without going through the Admiralty. The tone is free, at times borrowed from others, and the judgment on the officers' conduct severe. It is the first counterpoint to the text just read: two men, the same beach, the same quarter hour, and two versions whose comparison has occupied historians ever since.
Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World (1777)

Embarked at seventeen on the Resolution alongside his father, the young Forster lived through exactly the scenes that Cook recounts, but he gives a wholly different version of them: sensitive, colorful, attentive to people rather than to bearings. Published in 1777, the same year as the official account, his book is the intimate counter-shot to ours. In it we find again the Friendly Islands, the Maori cannibalism, Easter Island, but seen by a cultivated adolescent who would become one of the great German prose writers. The double gaze, that of the captain and that of the passenger, sheds light on the whole voyage.
Julien Crozet, Nouveau voyage à la mer du Sud (1783)

Shortly after Cook, the French navigator Marion du Fresne touched at New Zealand, where he was killed along with some of his men by the Maori in 1772. His second-in-command, Crozet, recounted the expedition in an account published in 1783. In it, as a tragic mirror of the cannibalism Cook observed, we read of the violence born of misunderstanding between Europeans and Maori. The two texts, almost contemporary with each other, together sketch the first century of contact, made up of exchange, fascination, and blood, upon these shores at the end of the world.
Jean-François de La Pérouse, Voyage autour du monde (1785-1788)

Ten years after Cook, La Pérouse crosses the same waters, calls at the neighbouring Navigator Islands, and loses his second-in-command there in an ambush that answers, like a sinister echo, all the lavish friendships of this volume. His account, saved from the final wreck by copies sent home in time, shows the other side of the Polynesian coin: the same sea, the same magnificent chiefs, and the violence that Cook brushed against without always seeing it coming.
William Bligh, A Voyage to the South Sea (1788-1789)

The Master of the Resolution, the man who sounds the bays of Kerguelen's Land in this volume, returns to Adventure Bay twelve years later aboard the Bounty, plants apple trees on the very same spot, then sets a course for Otaheite, where the mutiny awaits him. To read his account of Van Diemen's Land alongside Cook's is to measure what a pupil retains from a master: the same method, the same gestures, and a temperament that will make all the difference.
James Morrison, The Journal of James Morrison, Boatswain's Mate of the Bounty, and Memorandum on Tahiti (1789-1792)

The boatswain's mate of the Bounty, left at Tahiti after the mutiny of 1789, lives there nearly two years before being captured, sentenced, then pardoned. His memoir, written in prison, is the most detailed description we have of Tahitian society before its conversion: the arioi, the morai, the royal maro, the district wars, everything Cook only glimpsed as a visitor. It lights up from the inside the chapters Anderson wrote, twelve years earlier, on the same islands.
William Bligh, A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty (1790)

Eighteen years after the Endeavour, driven from his ship by mutiny, Lieutenant Bligh accomplished, in a mere open boat, one of the most extraordinary voyages in the history of the sea. His route crosses almost exactly that of Cook: the strait separating New Holland from New Guinea, then Timor, where he too arrived exhausted and starving. A former pupil of Cook, whose master he had been on the last voyage, Bligh applied his master's lessons to survive. Two accounts of the same reef-strewn sea, a few years apart.
James Wilson, A Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean, Performed in the Years 1796, 1797, 1798, in the Ship Duff (1796-1798)

Five years after the Providence, the Duff, chartered by the London Missionary Society and commanded by James Wilson, drops anchor at Matavai on 5 March 1797. She lands the first Protestant missionaries in Tahiti, welcomed by the very family Bligh had known: Tynah, now Pomare, and his son Otoo. The account, published in 1799, describes the marae, the ceremonies and the life of Matavai through the eyes of pastors. The places and people of Bligh's journal reappear, on the threshold of an upheaval he could not foresee: the conversion of the island.
Jean-François de Lapérouse, Voyage autour du monde (1797)

Fifteen years after Cook, France in turn sends two ships to survey the Pacific. Lapérouse follows part of the Endeavour's routes, everywhere paying tribute to the memory of the great English seaman, then vanishes without a trace at Vanikoro. His journal, salvaged and published in 1797, closes the heroic age of Oceanic discovery just as Cook's journal had opened it. The reader finds here the same islands, already changed by the passage of Europeans, and that Enlightenment obsession with mapping everything before dying.

Explorers of the Pacific in the 18th Century