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BREASTS, SODOMY AND THE LASH: MASCULINITY AND ENLIGHTENMENT ABOARD THE

COOK VOYAGES

Punish'd [ohn Marra with one dozen lashes for behaving Insolent to his Superior Officer.

Resolution Log, [uly 2, 1772

The breasts of the women of Ov'Taheitee, the Society Isles, Marquesas and Friendlv-Isles, are not so flaccid and pendulous as is commonly observed in Negro-women, and as we likewise noticed them in all the Western islands, in New Zeeland, and some of the females of the lower sorr at the Society Isles.

[ohann Forster, Observations on a Voyage RouM the World (1778)

From the shelter of the Roman empire, it extends over the length and breadth of the earth; at the destruction of the empire, it takes refuge near the papacy, it follows the arts into Italy, it reaches us when we civilize our selves. If we discover a hemisphere, we find sodomy there, Cook drops anchor in a new world: there it reigns ... lt is to be a villain, a monster, to want to play the role of a sex that is not one's own!

Marquis de Sade, La Philosophie clans le boudair, 17951

Breasts, sodorny and the lash are not the triad usually invoked to talk about the justly celebrated and preerninently civilizing voyages of discovery undertaken by Captain James Cook and his crews between 1768 and 1780. While gender and sexuality have always been central to academic and popular representations of the South Pacific, the sex is usually straight and the possibilities for transgression represented as a function of abundance rather than object choice.? Yet breasts, sodomy and the lash became crucial signs in the cultural system through which particular versions of rnasculinity, national identity and racial difference were constituted, transmitted and destabilized on the voyages. In this final chapter, their examination as objects and subjects ofBritish explorers' discourse about the South Pacific will allow us to appreciate the intriguing roles of gender misrecognition and

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Wilson, Kathleen. <i>The Island Race : Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century</i>. Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. Accessed May 20, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from ecsu-ebooks on 2024-05-20 01:47:16.

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the entanglements of desire in the production of Enlightenment typologies of difference. Recent scholarship has variously, if not entirely incompatibly, characterized the Cook voyages as being a "diagnostic" of modem geography and Enlightenment mentalit€, and an incamation of the local, fragmented and dispersed character of Enlightenment cultural production.' Weshall begin by embracing both assertions, and add a third: the Cook voyages were groundbreaking, even revolutionary, in their aims (the substitution of the benevolent goals of"discovery" for the bloody annihilations of conquest) and discursive results (the inauguration of "modern" anthropologv). Rejecting the notion of a unitary Enlightenment which it is the job here to "unmask," and accepting the importance of the voyages as one of many sites of enlightened processes and ideas, this chapter will never theless be concemed with indeterminacies rather than radical departures. In particular, we will take seriously the mutual confusions that abounded as Cook and his men attempted to use gender and sexual practice as guides to Pacific social systems, and Pacific islanders in turn tried to map their cosmogonies onto European bodies. Far from exhibiting some simple or unilateral process of"othering" at work in the art of discovery, our exploration of breasts, sodomy and the lash suggests how much the categories of Enlightenment social science depended upon the familiarity ofbodies, and highlights the multiple (mis) recognitions and ambiguous identifications at play in the crucible offirst contact - even, or perhaps especially, in the eyes of their beholders.

Enlightened Explorers

The mapping and colonizing of the South Seas, with all their potential promise and glory, had become a competitive and nationalist obsession with European statesmen and intellectuals by the middle of the eighteenth century. In the wake of the Seven Years War, the Scottish hvdrographer Alexander Dalrymple and projector lohn Callander issued urgent treatises on the centrality ofBritish control of the region to the maintenance and extension of national power. Callander, in particular, simply stole French parlementaire Charles de Brosse's plan and rhetoric when he claimed the project to be part of a uniquely British mission. "United among ourselves, respected by foreigners, with our marine force entire, and (humanly speaking) invincible, aided by a set ofNaval officers superior in every respect to those of the nations around us," Callander hubristically asserted in his Terra Australis Cognita (1766), "[and] with a sovereign on the throne who is filled with the most ardent and laudable desire of seeing his native country great and flourishing," the settlement of the South Pacific seemed to be the gold ring within Britain's grasp." Once in the sights of the Royal Society, the Admiralry and George III, the southem Pacific voyages became the most ambitious and well-funded mission of scientific and imperial discovery ever undertaken by Europeans. According to the British social theory of the day, the vessels for navigation displayed the genius of a country: "bv the formation of them the ingenuity of a people may be estimated."! Accordinglv, no effort was spared in making these

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vessels exhibit the superiority of British technology and invention. Cook's ships were outfitred with the most advanced instruments of navigation and astronomy and boasted naturalists, artists and astronomers on board, whose speciallv designed rooms could house their accumulating collections of plant, animal and mineral specimens, Each specialist aimed at setting new standards of data collection and empirieal observation that promised to demonstrate once and for all British superiority in the arts of discovery, and to vindicate the nation, as one journalist put it, "to future ages, as the most powerful people upon this globe/" The official directive for the voyagers to boldly go where no man had gone before and claim all new and old discoveries for Britain also required that they adopt the new techniques of record keeping, recommended by the Royal Society, that were best suited to organize and transmit the fruits of discovery. As James Hevia has argued, these required that

Global phenomena ... be collected and placed into a meaningful set of hierarchized units, whieh could then be comparatively evaluated through exact description. Charting the world in this form had a corollary in writing, a writing whieh assumed a subject and author who captured the objective world in disinterested prose.

The resulting naturalist reportage, as we have seen in Chapter 2, modeled its methodology on the systems of classification initiated in the natural sciences in order to describe and rank human societies according to stage of subsistence, morality and culture.?

Cook's voyages, occurring in the midst of an escalating colonial and national crisis, were crucial to reconstituting the imperial project as an essentially scientific and philanthropie enterprise, designed to benefit all of humankind.f Within this context, the enlightened explorer emerged as a new kind of national hero, combining expertise with the taste for adventure, manly action with the sensibility and restraint capable of fostering the "brotherhood among men" that would facilitate British possession. The secret instructions of Cook and his crew sketched in this ideal character: he would "observe the Genius, Temper, Disposition and number of the Natives or Inhabitants" of each land, treat them with "every kind of Civility and Regard" and thereby proeure "the consent of the Natives to take possession of convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain." The enlightened man of exploration would use civility, tolerance and political arts rather than force to persuade indigenous peoples at once ofBritish benevolence and British proprietary rights to their lands. Simultaneously, he would collect data to formulate general laws discerning the "truth" behind human differences, their causes and consequences. Hence his keen skill for dispassionate, empirieal observation and fact-gathering would provide the foundations for "a new Science of Man." Cook himself of course was the primary exemplar of this alternative masculinity, exhibiting the requisite curiosity dissociated from sexual interest, and a self-control crystallized bydecisive action. "No man could be better

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calculated to gain the confidence ofSavages than Cap. Cook, "one ofhis officers recalled. "He was brave, uncommonly Cool, Humane and Patient. He would land alone unarmed, or lay aside his Arms, and sit down when they threatened with theirs, throwing them Beads, Knives, and other little presents, then bv degrees advancing nearer, till by patience and forbearance, he gained their friendship."" But this mantle of expectation also fell on the shoulders of his officers and crew, all of whom were intensely conscious of the imperative to embrace the goals of masculine, unbiased but compassionate observation and reporting that would vindicate British superiority in the arts of discovery.

The ideal of the enlightened explorer did present certain epistemological and material problems for eighteenth-centurv theorists and practitioners alike, Royal Society intellectuals had come to question the reliability of sense experience alone in the accumulation of empirical data, yet they nonetheless found themselves forced to depend upon the eyewitness observation of men positioned far from the structures of civil society (and thus liable to degeneration themselves). Such problems could be allayed, ifnot vitiated, by the adoption of the "naturalist's gaze" by officer and seaman alike, a gentlernanly ideal that would allow the explorer to observe, not with an eye to commerce or conquest, but "vacant to every object of curiosity, and at leisure for the most minute remarks.l'l'' That the journals and logs of the senior and petty officers would be collected bv Cook and later used as the basis for the Admiralry accounts of the voyages gave credibility to crew members' rather inflated sense of their own roles in turning the voyages into History.

Secondly, and perhaps more irreducibly, dass disrupted the masculinity and perspicacity attributed to the enlightened explorer. The gentleman naturalist of the first voyage, Joseph Banks, returned to England with eight thousand new botanical specimen only to be lampooned in prints and squibs as a "butterfly catcher" and sensualist whose excessively refined tastes exemplified aristocratic effeminacy. Cook hirns elf resented Banks's preciousness and pretensions, and frustrated his efforts to smuggle women aboard ship at various ports.11 Conversely, the officers and gentlemen on board also worried that the common seamen and marines lacked the sensibility and restraint to do the work of humanizing imperialism. George Forster, son and assistant to the senior naturalist on board the Resolution, complained constantly about the crew's excesses: their swearing, drinking, violence and apparently unquenchable sexual lusts; their cruelty; their "inhuman propensity to destroy the poor harmless people of the South Seas." Although he attributed such behavior to the hardships of a seafaring life, which, in the fashion of eighteenth-centurv environmentalism, he believed made "their musdes rigid and their nerves obtuse, ... [and] communicated insensibility to the mind," Forster ultimately hazarded this judgment: "Subjected to a very strict command, they also exercise a tyrannical sway over those whom fortune places in their power ... Though they are members of a civilized society, theyare in some measure to be looked upon as a body of uncivilized men, rough, passionate, revengeful, but likewise brave, sincere and true to one another."12 Yet despite such doubts, the common seamen were ostentatious in their embrace of the empirical

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values of the voyage, even as they combined with it the sailor's historieally sharp eye for commercial gain. Indeed, the merging of curiosity, science and profit was a distinctive aspect of the voyages as a whole, whieh marked a tuming point in the emphasis on empirieal accuracy and collecting.P The crew's mania for acquiring "curiosities" - from Tahitian feathers and cloths to severed Maori heads - was important in helping to turn the ship into a kind of floating museum or curiosity cabinet. Their enthusiasm also lubrieated the wheels of exchange across the Pacific, as local people became increasingly interested in the artifacts of their near or distant neighbors. The seamen's interest in observation (and its potential profitability) was also, perhaps, revealed in the energy devoted to ethnographic inquiry. Hence the Resolution's gunner's mate, irascible lrishmanJames Marra, who had first come aboard on the Endeavour at Batavia, used his unauthorized account of the second voyage to justify his two attempts to desert the ship at Tahiti as part of a secret mission to do detailed anthropological research. A "pity it was that he happened to be discovered," Marra recalled, "as from him a more copious and accurate account of the religion and civil govemment of these people might have been expected/'l"

The investigative mission of the voyages intersected with, and reinforced, another normative masculinity legislated aboard ship, namely that of the British explorers' vessel itself A number of writers have stressed the symbolic, tropic and politieal significance of the ship in the age of revolution. For Michel Foucault, the ship was the "heterotopia parexcellence," a chronotope that moved through space, compressing, inventing and inverting terrestrial social relations and re-shaping the human imaginary. For Paul Gilroy, the linguistie and politieal hybridity of the ship constituted a "counter-culture of modemity" that enabled men and women to cross and transgress social, geographieal and national boundaries. For Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, the ship, with its dangers, monotonies and tyrannies, its paradoxieal imperatives of cooperation and coercion, was the engine of radieal proletarian consciousness. And for Greg Dening, the ship was both a floating island and a "beach" where cultures were made to reveal themselves to each other.P But none of these striking characterizations alone captures the distinctiveness of the explorer's sloop. Its imperative to chart and claim "undiscovered" regions of the globe required, first, that the commanders and crews had the toughness to face down the terrors of terra incognita in the human, climactic and ecologieal realms. The arts of discovery also necessitated weathering the psychologieal tedium of seemingly endless months at sea (most other navy vessels spent as much as half their time in port), and accommodating the contending goals and disparate abilities of the peculiar mix of mostly volunteer seamen, marines, warrant and Commissioned officers, and supemumerary gentlemen, naturalists and artists on board. The clash of personalities, purposes and pretensions that ensued exacerbated the more customary divisions of social dass, ethnicity and nationality with which most navy vessels were familiar.l"

Indeed, the diversity of Cook's seamen matched and may have exceeded that of other naval vessels, underlining both the difficulties of attributing some

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undifferentiated "Englishness" or "European-ness" to men sharply divided by national and class background and interest, and incorporating all equally into a coherent mission. On the first voyage, Cook's crew and supemumeraries included twenry-nine provincial Englishmen, nine Londoners, seven Scots, three Irishmen, three Americans, two Welshmen, two Brazilians, two Swedes, two black Britons and a Eurasian, as well as five Tahitians taken on the strength temporarily to help navigate the South Pacific waters. On the second voyage, the crew hailed from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, America, India, the Dutch East Indies, Holland, Germany, Sweden and the Azores as well as Polynesia. The company of the third voyage was only slightly less colorful, coming from America, Guernsey, Germany and India as well as the British Isles. Of the black Britons among the ships' com panies on the voyages, at least three gave their lives in the cause of national glory: [oseph Banks's servants Thomas Richmond and George Dorlton of the Endeavour froze to death during an unlucky inland expedition to Tierra del Fuego in January of 1769, and able-bodied seamanJames Swiley ofthe Adventure was killed byMaoris at Grass Cove in 1773.17Butwhatever the provenance ofthe individual men, and despite their often blustery shows ofbravado, all present felt, and were, vulnerable, at sea in exotic locales that offered them so little, and so much, that was familiar.

In this context, authoritv was maintained by everyone knowing their place, and that survival was possible only ifeveryone did their duty. Discipline was legislated through the prohibitory system enacted though the Articles ofWar - the British "rule oflaw" at sea, passed byParliament - and the navy's own, and more frequently adjusted, Regulations and Instructions. Both were used to order and legitimate what since the early eighteenth century had become the primary instrument of corporeal navy punishment, the lash or, more precisely, the cat 0' nine tails. 18

The lash served as the remedy for an array of behavioral offenses - drunkenness, insubordination, incivility, neglect of duty, waste offood, uncleanness, theft, and threats or implementation of assault on others, including indigenous peoples - and, although the number oflashes was limited to twelve by the Articles ofWar (any more requiring the order of a court martial), this rule was frequently transgressed by captains, including Cook himself. Indeed, violence, or the threat of violence, was at the heart of the system of maritime authority, and Cook's sloops in this respect were no exception.l? Given seamen's notorious love of liberty and intol erance of arbitrary power, officers had to run a tight ship capable ofmaking visible the absolute authority and sole right to corporal remedy that they wielded over their crew. The cat was central to the system. Cook flogged 20,26 and 37 percent ofhis sailors on his three voyages respectively, and also used irons as a way to placate habitually bad tempers.i? Admittedly, this may have been a fairly low percentage by military standards (although estimates of this statistic differ), and the number of lashes fairly light, especially compared to that inflicted on West Indian and American plantation slaves (who could be flogged with six hundred lashes or more for behavioral offences).21And certainly background and training played a role in the likelihood of corporal punishment: marines were more likely, it seems, to get in trouble than seamen; Irishmen and Welshmen were twice as likely to get flogged

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as Englishmen and ScotS.22 Flogging was always intended to disgrace, and, given the goals of the voyages to set new standards in virtually all areas, from discovery to seamen's health, it seems likely that the lash took on an even greater symbolic authority as drastic remedy. ABLieutenant Charles Clerke noted in his journal of the second voyage with regard to a typical troublemaker, Charles Logge, the command felt "Ye Common Safety of the Shipj's] Company render'd it necessary to disgrace him with Corporal punishrnent.Y'

The way a man responded to the lash spoke, in his crewmembers' eyes, to his masculine toughness and resolve. [ust as the flogging, done coolly and deliberately, "directed the gaze from the man in power to the power itself and its necessity," as Greg Dening has remarked.i" so the response of the victim determined the respect shown him byhis fellows. Executed with the arms and legs tied to the grating, back bared and legs spread, the crews arrayed on one side of the mainmast and the officers on the other, the spectacle of the flogging was intended to impress through the power of example (Fig. 19). This it did, though not always in the ways intended. Witnesses spoke ofthe way the first flogging "made the man," transforming the lad into the seaman.P ABsuch, the lash was also a badge and guarantee of manly spirit and hierarchy necessary to the ship. Further, it bonded the men in a common fellowship in opposition to that of the officers: however the individual reacted during the punishment, in the eyes of the lower deck he was turned into a man's man and welcome shipmate. Significantly, the lash was also a terrorist weapon in the "civilizing process," used not only to tame recalcitrant seamen but also to educate native peoples in the sanctities of private property and British authority. In these cases there were no Admiralty-set limits on the number of lashes inflicted, and severe punishments of six dozen lashes were imposed on indigenous peoples chiefs included - who had the temerity to steal equipment or even glasses and eating utensils from the ships. "The [Tahitian] Natives cannot withstand thieving," Clerke reported on the second voyage: "great numbers of them constantly coming on board & going about the Ship & rigjgjing they frequently steal things, & whenever catched ... we immediately seize them up to the Shrouds & give them a dozen or two according to the nature of the Theft, without any respect to rank or distinction." Others could be shot and killed - an outeome statistically more likely on the first and third voyages, but oeeurring in all three. As Cook reeorded with reference to his first encounter with the Maori (labeled by the British press in the aftermath of the first voyage as "cannibals," despite the fact that only Maori had been killed),

They are a brave, war-like people, with sentiments void of treaehery ... We had frequent skirmishes with them, always where we were not known, but firearms gave us the superiority. At first some of them were killed, but we at last learned how to manage thern without taking away their lives; and onee peaee was settled, they ever after were our very good friends.

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Maori cannibalism was later theorized by Forster senior as the result of the excess militarism ofMaori societv; but it was the less severe Hawaiians who would prove to be most in need of the lesson ofBritish superiority secured by physical force. 26

Needless to say, not only women but all things "effeminate" were considered to be antithetica] to the homosociality of the ship, and sexuality was particularly disruptive: there were no European women passengers allowed on these voyages (although some Oceanic women were given passage on the sloops to neighboring islands),27 and women were officially prohibited from coming on board. Obviously when in port this rule was more honered in the breach than in the practice, but the first sign of the commanders' intention to re-irnpose normative shipboard discipline was to order all the women off the ships.28More seriously, in the homo social space of the ship sodomy was one of the eight crimes for which the death sentence was mandatory - indeed, it was allegedly considered by seamen to be a worse offense than murder - although in practice the less draconian remedies of "running the gauntlet" or the lash were also used to punish or discourage this otherwise lethal vice. 29 There is no unambiguous evidence that any member of Cook's crews was flogged for sodomy, but two were flogged for "uncleanliness", and the Articles ofWar, which ostentatiously listed "the unnatural and detestable sin of buggery and sodomy with man or beast" as a capital offense, were read aboard ship and on shore on a number of occasions in the course of the voyages.l'' As we shall see, the homophobia as well as the violence of the ship also extended to encompass the semiotics of colonial encounter. At the same time, however, where sexual customs seemed part of a larger social alterity, the intimation or implication ofsame-sex desire could serve as an entree into exotic culture and so itselfbecome an instrument of colonization.

In sum, the discipline, power and masculinity aboard the explorer's sloop were visual and corporeal; once engaged in the arts ofdiscovery, the visual and corporeal equally became "evidence'' in the effort to classifyhuman difference in evolutionary stages from the primitive to the civilized, The masculinities of the ship thus were bound to a "national identity continuous with that of the universal connoisseur" as Harriet Guest has remarked.I' These values and expectations profoundly influenced the voyagers' assessments of and interactions with the indigenous peoples of the South Pacific, when British officers and seamen alike confronted political, gender and religious systems beyond European knowledge and experience. In this melange of Pacific otherness, the shape of women's breasts, and rumors of sodomitical practices among men, were used as metonyms of aesthetic, moral and cultural difference, revealing in the process the unstable and fictive nature of the essentialized identities they were mobilized to express.

The Traffic in Wornen

"The breasts of the women of OvTaheltee, the Society Isles, Marquesas and Friendlv-Isles, are not so flaccid and pendulous as is commonly observed in Negro wornen," Johann Reinhold Forster, naturalist aboard the Resolution scientificallv

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recorded, "and as we likewise notieed them in all the Western islands [Mallieollo, Tanna, New Caledonia], in New Zeeland, and some of the females of the lower sort at the Society Isles."32 This observation on the size and shape of indigenous women's breasts was offered in a chapter of Forster's Observations on a Voyage Round the World (1778), a work widely renowned to provide the most complete eighteenth-century record of South Pacific natural and human history. Part of a chapter entitled "On the Causes of the Difference in the Races ofMen in the South Seas, their Origin and Migrations," Forster's mammary assessment contributed to a larger theory that made women the central signifiers and engines of Pacific societies' potential progress. Forster classified the various "nations" of the South Pacific into two "races," distinguished according to "Custom, Colour, Size, Form, Habit and natural Turn of Mind" and ranked according to manners, morals, cultivation and the "progress towards Civilization", a rubric under whieh treatment of women loomed large. How did breasts work as signs wirhin this classificatory schemel

Metonyms of female beauty and sexuality in European culture, women's breasts were something that voyagers of all ranks felt qualified to [udge. [oseph Banks thoughr that Tahitian women's beautiful breasts were the result ofbeing allowed to develop "undistorted bv bandages": "Nature has fullliberty lofl the growing form in whatever direction she pleases and amply does she repay this indulgence." [ohn Marra and William Wales, both of the Resolution, also ventured considered opinions on the subject in remarks that suggest shared aesthetie tastes and perhaps a frequent topie of conversation. "The breasts of the women of Tahiti are round and beautifully shaped," Marra exulted, while the more sober Wales added that although "the Breasts of the young ones are very round and beautiful ... those of the old ones hang down to their navals."33 In England, of course, breasts had recently become politicized objects in the debates, inspired by Rousseau, over women's proper role in the polity. The breast-feeding tirelessly promoted by male moralists and adopted with alacrity by some elite and bourgeois women reflected a new emphasis on matemity that, although contested, was swiftly becoming hegemonie. Women's breasts had long served to signify female defenselessness or threat; the pendulous breasts of the witch or the savage both conveyed in early modem visual images a deformed or stunted femininity. In the later eighteenth century, however, as matemity became eroticized, the size and shape ofEuropean women's breasts took on additional aesthetie and practieal importance: both were believed to determine the quality of the milk, the best coming from round and moderately sizedbreasts with well-formed nipples.l" In these and other ways,breasts became integral to the debate on women's place and their role in public life. As moralists emphasized, albeit ineffectually, the need for women to disengage from "public" affairs, the matemal bosom becomes prominently displayed in the portraits and fashions of the period."

In the South Seas, in the equally politicized project of human ethnology, women's position and treatment, their sexual traits and their breasts also became the objects of scrutiny. Linnaeus's "fixation on the fernale mammae" has been

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colorfully and convincinglv described by Londa Schiebinger as a basis for his c1assificatory schemes. Other feminine characteristies - skin color, lip pigment, fertility, hair texture, and pelvic and c1itoris shape - also provided grounds for scientists' comparisons across cultures and, increasingly, across classes.l'' joharm and George Forster were c1early influenced by Linnaeus, seeing, like him, breast shape as a sign of a broader debasement or inversion ofEuropean prototypes among primitive peoples, The remarks quoted above on breast shape thus accorded well with the theories of social progress they advanced about South Pacific peoples. "It is the practice of all uncivilized nations to deny their women the common privileges of human beings, and to treat them as creatures inferior to thernselves," George Forster asserted, and his father concurred that "the more women are esteemed in a nation, and enjoy an equality of rights with the men," the more likely the society is to advance towards civilization.F Indeed, in the senior Forster's work, this long established trope of Enlightenment thought is given new resonance by what Nicholas Thomas has called an "aesthetic evolutionism" that ranked the various islanders from the most beautiful (Tahitian and Society Islanders) to the least (Australian Aborigines and Melanesians). In this semiotie system, physiognomv could signify national character: c1imate and the material bases of subsistence are linked to phvsical beauty, cultural progress and the prospects or actuality of degeneration, and breasts became a sign of the levels of "savagery" of island societies and their degree of movement towards civilization. Hence, those societies where the women's breasts were "round and beautiful'' were among those where women were esteemed and well treated, and held to be advancing out of savagery; conversely, in the cultures where women's breasts were "flaccid and pendulous," women were wretchedly used as beasts of burden or punching bags by their own offspring.

These attitudes found expression in graphic representations of the voyage. As noted above, Europeans from Pliny the EIder to Edward Long, had used women's breasts, to signal the monstrosity or sexual excess of marginalized groups and indigenous peoples. Saartje Baartman or the "Hottentot Venus," who was brought from Cape Colony to London and exhibited to show Khoikhoi women's allegedly protruding buttocks and overdeveloped c1itoris, would soon 100m large as an example of the ways in which colonized women's bodies were used to mark a deviant sexuality.38 But on the South Pacific voyages the effort is to show indigenous people in their "native habitats," closely and "objectively" observed a "naturalist" visual idiom that nonetheless conveyed its own cultural polities, and that sometimes confirmed, sometimes contrasted srrangely with the descriptions in the voyagers' journals.l? In the official art of the voyages, although laden with neoclassieal allusion, native women were associated with the relative fecundity or barrenness of the landscape, and their bodies made to bear the signs of their societies' primitiveness or transmutation to a higher stage. Tahitian women, with their "beautifully proportioned shape, . . . irresistible smile, and eyes full of sweetness and sparkling with fire" as Forster senior rhapsodized, of course, were appropriately depieted in sensual, luminous images (which, importantly, were as

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avidly consumed bv women as by men within Britain). And given that physical adomments, including tattoos, were also used to rank and characterize local women, Tahitian women also eamed high marks from the explorers for tattooing only their buttocks and hands rather than their upper bodies or lips, asNew Zealand and Hawaiian women did. Hence Hodges's Tahiti Revisited (1776) (Fig. 7 above) memorializes all of these commendable features ofTahitian culture by representing the women's tattooed buttocks as part of the island's lush tropical fertiliry and exoticism. His painting, indeed, offered the perfect visual illustration of George Forster's remark that "[tjhe View of several of these nymphs swimming nimbly all around the sloop, such as nature had formed them was perhaps more than sufficient entirely to subvert the little reason which a mariner might have left to govem his passions.P'? At the same time, the painting's attention to the buttocks, like the "idol" or tii and draped corpse in the distance, hints at the alterity and danger of South Sea social and sexual systems that were elaborated upon in the journals.f Yet Hodges also produced atttactive depictions of ni-Vanuatu and New Caledonian women, whose large sparkling eyes, round cheeks and high breasts contrast strikingly with Cook's and the Forsters' verbal description ofthem as "disagreeable" and "ill-favoured" in beauty, customs and hospitality. Malekulan women were apparently too "ugly and ill-proportioned" - having "Monkey faces and Woolly hair" - to warrant visual representation, despite their high intelligence and facility with sign language, which far exceeded that of the T ahitians.42 More conven tionallv, [ohn Webber's painting of Poedooa, (Poedua [Poetua], Daughter of Oree,ChiefofUlietea,One of the Sociery Islands (1777) (Fig. 20), displays the high and well-rounded breasts of an advancing society, albeit one with an uncanny resemblance to classical statuarv.f

Conversely, the visual and literary depictions of the Aboriginals ofNew Holland - held by all the voyagers to be among the lowest on the scale ofcivilization - were much less allusive, if equally embedded in alandscape described by[oseph Banks as "in every respect the most barren" in the Pacific. Tobe sure, the Quaker Sydney Parkinson, artist on the Endeavour, drew portraits of Aboriginal men as noble savages, and Cook offered one ofhis more famous reflections when he mused that they were probably "far more happier than we Europeans" because of their austere and simple life.44 But it is the more deprecatory assessments ofNew Holland's native inhabitants, first offered by Dampier, confirmed by later commentators, and alluded to in Forster senior's description, which inaugurate a tradition that becomes instantiated in visual representations.f Hence [ohn Webber's A Woman ofNew Holland (1777) (Fig. 21) set the tone for subsequent depictions, such as those bv Scots convict Thomas Watling's Group on theNorth Share of Port ]ackson, New SouthWales (1794) and Frenchman Nicolas Martin-Petit's A Young Australian Aboriginal Woman (c, 1800), which also use the pendulous breasts and stark

Figure 20 lohn Webber, Poedua [Poetua] (1777). Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum.

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Figure 21 lohn Webber, A Woman of New Holland (1777). Courtesy of the British Library, Department of Manuscripts.

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topographical setting described in voyagers' accounts to convey the allegedly more technologicallyand aesthetically "primitive" nature of Aboriginal culture. Even William Blake, whose sympathetic drawings of African and Amerindian women depicted them with high, firm breasts, portrayed the Iora with pendulous breasts in an otherwise admiring engraving, A Family ofNew South Wales (l792) (Fig. 22). Through "naturalism" in visual and textual accounts, the conflation of the cultural and the physical gets presented as a social fact, and pendulous breasts come to signify, and legitimate, the ethnological notion of the savage.

Figure 22 William Blake, A Family of New SouthWales (1792). Courtesy of the Henry E. Huntington Library.

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The use of breast as metonym of cultural progress or degeneration seems to suggest a successful incorporation of Pacific women by the enlightened explorers into the "history of Man." But these representations simultaneously attempt to mask the chaos attendant on the sexual commerce under way in the South Pacific. Indeed, the journals of the Forsters and other officers and crew reveal patterns of misrecognition and confusion that was not amenable to the imposition ofEuropean order. These local representatives of the Royal Society proved unable to cope effectively with the desires and identifications provoked by the radically different sexual and gender systems of the Pacific that neither mirrored nor inverted European models, to the point that the confrontation could interfere with the successful provisioning of the ship, preservation of the crew and survival of the mission. The genital symbolism of temples and monuments, the overt erotic content of dances, poetry and songs, and the polvgamy, polyandrv and even occasional incest in eastern Polynesia all convinced British seamen that these were sex-rnad peoples. "No people in the world ... indulge their sexual appetites as much as these," the surgeon William Ellis reflected ofthe Hawaiians. But what the British crews were empirically observing was not the "free love" of Polynesian culture but its sanctification of sexuality. This isnot to treat our eighteenth-century explorers with condescension: the complexity of Polynesian social systems has continued to elude well-intentioned Western observers.t'' Although the cultural diversity of Polynesian, as other Pacific island, culture makes it difficult to generalize, in the pre-Christian period gender seemed to function as a complex realm of social relations vested with maintaining the separation and balance of the sacred (tapu) and the everyday, in each of which men and women played indispensable rolesY Certainly British tars were delighted that nails, bits of mirror and red feathers, could win the favors of the local beauties and they eagerly projected their own desires onto the women. According to David Samwell, Welshman, poet and surgeon on the Discovery, Tahitian women had complained of the "unmanly behavior" of the Spanish crews who had recently visited the Society Islands and had refused their embraces: "This appeared very strange to these blooming Girls, who had always been so eagerly courted by us, and who could have no Idea of any defect that would render young Women undesirable Objects except the Want of Personal Charms ... We gave them every consolation in our power," Samwell concluded.i'' The sailors, however, refined the gift into an exchange, by rewarding the women with goods in return for sex.49 What to the British were sexual encounters exchanging sex for goods - a traffic in women that vindicated British Protestant masculinity and marked the women in British eyes as lower-class, akin to English prostitutes in the port towns - was to Polynesians a traffic in European men: first for supernatural access; second, as that illusion faded, to get highly desirable manufactured goods that allowed locals to raise their own status or wage war on their rivals.

For it seems likely that Polynesian cosmogony linked sexual intercourse with access to divine power and social advancement, explicating "the creation of the world from a primordial act of sexual intercourse or from the separation of merged

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conjugal bodies.,,50 Women's offering themselves to British sailors may have been influenced by their beliefs that as foreigners they had close links to this sacred power and the offspring sired by them would give the women access to supernatural benefits in the form of ancestral mana (supernatural power). As Marshall Sahlins has famously argued, for Polynesians "sex was everything: rank, power, wealth, land and the security of all these." Sexual acts engaged men and women in a cornmon opposition to the divine: "For men, the Promethean task of wresting the substance ofhumanity from its divine overseers in the form of food. For the women to attract and transform the divine generative forces in the form of children.P! These beliefs underlay, for example, the proscription against intersexual dining and certain foods for women: men ate in the company of ancestral gods, and women's spiritual potency was believed to be so strong (the Tahitian word for vagina was "pathway to the gods") that it could interfere with the divinity of the men. Their cosmology also contributed to pagan Polynesian disregard of premarital sex, a moderate amount ofwhieh was held to bring on the much-anticipated onset of adulthood at an sociallevels, and the lack of any Christian notion of a "wife.,,52 Because women were active in political and religious realms in much the same way as men, at high and low levels - for example, as chiefs and goddesses as well as in making of sacred barkcloth - differences in rank affected the politieal and economie power they wielded and the impact of tapu regulations on their lives.53

These social features of eastem Polynesia were of course not statie, and were reshaped by local regional and politieal conflicts and further complieated by cross cultural encounter. In the Society Islands, for example, as in Hawaii subsequently, local dynastie rivalries were intensified by the waves ofEuropean visitors. Wallis's bloody encounter with the Maohi on Tahiti 1767 was followed by Frenchman Comte Louis-Antoine de Bougainville's more peaceful visitation in 1768 and Cook's eventful stay a year after that; in between Cook's second and third sojourns on Tahiti, Spanish ships had come and gone, after unsuccessfully attempting to set up a mission. This backdrop ofEuropean rivalry and intervention exacerbated local tensions still fermenting over the relatively recent spread of the cult of Oro, god of war, through the Society Islands, the conquest of Raiaitea and Tahaa by Hau Fa'naui ofBorabora in the early 1760s and the continuing dynastie ambitions among and wars between the asi'i, or ruling dass, of the various islands in the archipelago. Members of the manahune, or land-owning dass, who had lost land and power in these battles also attempted to use the European presence and arms to their advantage. Hence Cook was inveigled bv chiefs and commoners alike to wage war on their behalf.54

In these and other ways, then, the Maohi or Society Islanders clearly sought to engage with the British through their own cosmological traditions, political requirements and complex perceptions and motives. In the context of the unsettled social hierarchies described above, it seems clear that the appearance offoreigners provided unparalleled avenues for self-promotion. Hence the women as well as the men were determined to seize the opportunity offered them by the arrival of shiploads of strangers. This was often executed against the will of their objects, the

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British tars. "[We] found all the Women of these Island but little influenced by interested motives in their intercourse with us, as they would almost use violence to force you into their Embrace regardless whether we gave them any thing or not," Samwell complained at one point. (He seems to have got used to it: some months later he boasted that he and his mates lived on Hawaii "in the greatest Luxury, and as to the Choice and number of fine women there is hardly one among us that may not vie with the grand T urk hirnself" - an allusion that had some theoretical standing in the work ofLord Kames, among others, who linked sexual aggressiveness in women with the torrid climates and degenerate cultures ofTurkey and Asia.)55

As Polynesian women mapped their culture onto the European male body, they made that body the object in the process of their own spiritual and social aggrandizement. The apparently boundless appetite of lewer-rank women for sex with British tars also mirrored the performative nature of Polynesian culture, "continuously making relationships out of practice" - that is, inventing social relationships out of performances, rather than using performances to guarantee the relationships: which is to say that European contact did remold indigenous sexuality.P'' This cultural traffic flowed both ways. After the seamen had been demoted, in Polynesian eyes, from strangers to locals, women would then offer themselves in return for "curiosities" - therebv displaying an admirable regard for ethnographie investigation themselvee.F Maohi women quickly worked out the semiotics ofEuropean rank, and made their most energetic addresses to officers in uniform, which led inventive ABs in search of amorous encounters to don fuH dress.58The sailors in turn attempted to map their own notions of domesticity as weH as sexuality onto the women, inviting them to dinner aboard ship (and thus de-sacralizing themselves as foreigners through intersexual dining), or taking them as "wives." At the very least, through these encounters Oceanic and European History become inextricably entangled. Significantly, a large part of Cook's authority as commander rested upon his resolve to stand outside this history by refusing to participate in the traffic as object or subject. His crews admired him immensely for his self-restraint with native women as weH as the men: "Great was the indifference with which he submitted to every kind ofself-denial," Lieutenant King would later recall, "The qualities ofhis mind were of the same hardy, vigorous kind with those of his body."59 His romantic aloofness and sexual self-control, however, elicited contempt from the women themselves. Hence at Tonga in june 1774 when Cook declined a beautiful young girl offered by her mother for his "personal use," he was roundly abused: "I understood very little of what she said, but her actions were expressive enough and shew'd that her words were to this effect, Sneering in my face and saying, what sort ofa man are you thus to refuse the embraces of so fine a young Woman.,,60

Two other consequences of the confusion attendant upon heterosexual com merce in the Pacific stand out. First, although the importance ofsex in Polynesian culture could never be reconciled with Christian or European mores, the enlight ened voyagers nonetheless struggled valiantly to turn the exchanges under way

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into facts that could be used in social theories of progress and degeneration. Both Cook and the Forsters suggested that it was European contact that had corrupted Oceanic morals and led to the "promiscuous trade." Reflecting on the Maoris' apparently learned propensity, by the second voyage, to prostitute their wives and daughters for European goods, Cook reflected that "we debauch their Morals already too prone to vice and we interduce among them wants and perhaps diseases which they never before knew and which serves only to disturb the happy tran quility they and their fore Fathers had injoy'd."61 That in some cases island men were clearly forcing women into sexual commerce was also decried by the gentle men as evidence of the corruption enjoined by contact with British culture. In Queen Charlotte's Sound, some Maori men came on board the Resolution and "went through the whole vessell, offering their daughters and sisters promiscuously to every person's embraces," as Forster junior wrote in his account, "in exchange for our iron tools, which they knew could not be purchased at an easier rate."62 Here British crews' sexuallusts made them an easy mark for the locals, while also increasing the exploitation of the women. These remarks draw attention to the way in which European contact not only exacerbated divisions within Polynesian island societies, but also altered local sexual customs, spread venereal disease and begat children, with long-lasting consequences for Pacific peoples and European colo nization. But they also laid bare the performative nature of Enlightenment social science, which also invented social relationships out of performances, and codified them through stadial theory.63 Hence Cook himself ventured a universallaw on female chastity when, on the third voyage, the women ofVan Diemen's Land (Tasmania) refused the tars' advances: "I believe it has generally been found amongst uncivilized people that where the Women are easy ofaccess, the Men are the first who offer them to strangers, and where this is not the case they are not easily come at, neither large presents nor privacy will induce them to violate the laws of chastity or custom.Y"

Secondly, just as the complex transactions under way would set commoners at odds with rulers on the islands, so it exacerbated the divisions among the British crews. From the officers' point ofview, the sexual commerce between islanders and seamen was inevitable but regrettable, for it undermined good discipline and encouraged the degenerative tendency among the common men far from civilized society to "go native." Indeed, miscegenation with Pacific islanders played a large role in fomenting desertions, and so "rendered visible a collusion between uncivilized natives and subaltern seamen that could have dangerous results for British authority," as Bridget Orr has argued.65Moreover, the apparently uncon trollable sexual "instincts" ofthe crews were on a par, in the eyes ofthe gentlemen and officers, with those of the barbarous nations. When Mahine, the native of Borabora who accompanied the Resolution to Antarctica, "did not hesitate to gratify his appetites in New Zeeland, though he was too clear-sighted at the same time not to perceive the vast falling off from his own country-women," his behavior was explained as "the force of instinct triumphing over his delicacy, - and can we wonder at it, when our civilized Europeans set the example?"66 Here Forster

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articulates a notion of sexual desire as a "natural urge" that civil society needed to regulate, but that civil society was striated by class as wen as national divisionsP The failure of such regulation was most dramatically and poignantly marked by the encounters that crossed the line into outright rape. Forster senior wrote in his journal oftwo Maori women who "I believe served with reluctancy to the pleasures of the young Men, and cried bitterlv, who were hardhearted enough to use them in the Spite of their tears." Such "brutal lust," which "breaks through all social ties, extinguishes all principles of true honor, virtue and humanity in every being ... only eyes sensualiry and lewdness, as the only things which ought to be satisfied," Forster concluded.P'' But although the gentleman naturalist recorded his disgust, significantlv he did not intervene. At the very least, such assaults should have thwarted any attempt to ascribe universal proclivities for amorous activity to Pacific women as a whole, but they had that effect only in part.

The relations between territorial and sexual exploration were harder to read than the British had been led to believe. The frustration of expectation could lead to resentment. When the anticipation of sex for goods was confounded, the British became indignant. On the second voyage, a young Maori woman who came aboard the Resolution with an old man was besieged with gifts from the sailors, for she was the first woman they had seen in several months. Yet Clerke remarked with some annoyance "the Young Gypsey did not seem at all inclin'd to repay them in the Kind Indian Women in general trade in, and indeed the Kind that's most esteem'd I believe by all men after so long an absence from the Sex."69Polynesian women's supposedly wanton behavior made Johann Forster compare them in his journal unfavorably to British women, whose white and pink complexions, "inno cence and chastity" and "improved minds" were so far superior to the superficial phvsical attraetions ofPacific women. Here a corrupted femininity becomes a sign of racial otherness, as Forster upbraids the Polynesians not only for their lack of chastity, but also for their refusal to engage straightforwardly in sexual commerce: "The women coquet in the most impudent manner, and shew uncommon fondness for Foreigners, but are all Jilts and coax the Foreigners out of anything they can get: and will not comply to sleep with them, unless they be common prostitutes, or the bribe very great and tempting.V? As with the native men's alleged propensity for "theft," which was probably undertaken as a form of compensation for an unwelcome visit, and for which, as already noted, they could be lashed or even shot and killed, local women's refusal to conform to the British rules of"fair trade," and even more, to insist upon their own rights to be subjects in sexual exchange, was read as a sign of their "deceitful" natures, one that frustrated Forster's scientific aim to know and understand them, to possess their cultures' "curiosities.t'"

Clearly, the female gaze that made the women into connoisseurs and the men into objects was very desrabilizmg. In this context, the classification of female bodies could allay the anxieties arising from the arts of discovery, while also displacing the immense shame felt bv Cook and his officers for British tars' "brutishness" towards and venereal infection of unsuspecting islanders. Breasts, a site of sexual commerce that did not betray that commerce's potentially lethal

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effects, were thus a sign that could impose order on chaos and anchor the process ofclassifying humanity into discrete categories or stages. Breasts also helped recu perate British masculinity threatened by the perceived excesses and irrationality ofOceanic sexualities and confirm the British officer, gentlemen and crews' status alike as insightful enlightened explorers and connoisseurs of female beauty. In these, and in other ways, white English masculinity was actively produced through the observation and ordering of the indigenous woman's body.

The Traffic in Men

Male sexuality was another area where misrecognition confounded the voyagers' encounters with Pacific islanders. Let us listen to William Wales, astronomer aboard the Resolution, talk about his attempts to put to rest among his own men the fear that the "natives" were "sodomites." Recording the details of his explo ration of the island ofTana in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) - one of the islands of the western Pacific that was universally regarded by Cook and his crew to be lagging far behind the Tahitians in civilization and physical beauty - Wales reported that some ofhis men had been followed into the bushes by ni-Vanuatu males "for a purpose I need not mention," He then remarked,

there are People who ... are not capable ofdefending the Whims they Adopt otherwise than by It is so - I know it ... and some of this Cast have asserted, and I make no doubt written down . . . that most of the People we have lately been among are Sodomites, or Canibals, or both ... [ver]no person had been attempted who had not either a softness in his features, or whose employment it was to Carry bundles of one kind or other which is the Office of their own Women.

Here Wales, like Cook a bluff and self-made Yorkshireman, tries to use his well trained powers of observation to combat the prejudices ofhis crew and resolve the crisis brought on bythe perception of sexual difference by chalking up the miscues of the T annese to gender confusion.P The visual and corporeal cues upon which European order depended were insufficient, it seems, in antipodean encounters, where British tars projected their own fears of sodomitical desire onto the ni Vanuatu, and the ni- Vanuatu mapped their own culture on the European male body. From the latter perspective, in a culture where women did most (though certainly not all) the carrying, and were in George Forster's view obliged "to perform all sorts oflaborious, and humiliating operations," European men who did women's work looked like, or could be used as, women, in a telling demonstration of the performativity of gender in ni-Vanuatu societv. Equally possible is that the ni-Vanuatu could not conceive that shiploads of men could appear without women in tow to do their carrying for them. Wales hirnself put the burden of proof of masculinity back on the British tars themselves, admitting that the "softness" offeatures of some contributed to their misrecognition by the natives. In doing so

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he reflects a widely held view in Britain that "the prevalency of this passion [for sodomy] has for its object effeminate delicate beings only."73

Perhaps, as Gannath Obeyesekere has argued about Pacific cannibalism, the British sailors' suspicions about sodomy, arising after several months' incarceration in the cramped and homosocial holds of two sloops, revealed more about the practices aboard ship than they would like to think. Altematively, to follow this line of inquiry may be to treat these texts to what Lee Edelman has called, following Foucault, a "hermeneutics of suspicion," through which any sexual practice and all forms ofhomosociality become doubled, permeable and suspect, and homosexuality is called into being through the forensie investigation for "subtexts.t'I" Yet I would contend, contrary to both positions, that a (non-homophobic) hermeneutics of suspicion may be precisely what is needed in order to illuminate what is at issue in these accounts: the dense sites of signification that nationalized bodies were made to bear, the failure (from the enlightened explorers' perspective) of native bodies to speak for themselves, and the murkiness created when cultures of identity circulate between nations at the point of contact. From this perspective, Wales's entry speaks to an array of issues surrounding sodomy and masculinity, both in English culture and in the art ofdiscovery, when for a variety ofhistorical reasons the homophobic hermeneutics of suspicion that entangled the ship was projected onto indigenous societies."

For British seamen's prejudices were consistent with the growing antipathy to "effeminates" that was a marked feature of the social and politicallandscape of England in the 1770s. Within England, sodomy was increasingly identified with aristocratic debauchery and excess or, still worse, with the perception of a depraved and degenerate character. Randolph Trumbach's recent argument that sodomy was becoming the touchstone of a gender revolution that legislated heterosexuality as the norm receives solid empirical support by the evidence of a rise in the expression of English hostility to sodomy in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a hostility that exceeded perhaps anywhere else in Europe. In this period, bi- or homosexual men were banished to the Continent bv their families, and the numbers of pardons für the capital crime of sodomy steadilv diminished" There was also an upsurge in formal charges of sodomy that began in the 1770s and reached a peak in the early 1800s, reflecting a backlash in England over non procreative forms of sex in general. However, on the Continent, too, sodomy carried with it a host of associations that underlined its social status as an "unnatural" act. Its French euphemisms, "le peche anti-naturel," or "le peche philosophique," signaled that sodomy, as a sexual practice that did not bother to hide its status as a purely non-reproductive pleasure, was both an act and a trope that signaled a crossing over into disorder. The Marquis de Sade, whose quotation at the beginning of the chapter may also testify to the rapidity and breadth of the gossip networks that sustained the celebrity of the Cook voyages, was well aware of the social trangressiveness of sodomitical desire. Sade was fond of documenting the naturalness, or ubiquity, of supposed "unnatural" practices, and made no secret ofhis own pleasure at being penetrated; but it is still clear that sodomy functioned

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in his writing, as well as in eighteenth-century European civil and martiallaw, theologyand social jeremiad, as the sign of a social, cultural and sexual alterity that could otherwise not be named. Hence a sex manual of the period that trum peted its usefulness in providing the "forty positions of fucking" added on sodomy as number forty-one, the dangerous supplement, in all senses of the term, that threatened to engulf conventional pleasures."

Characteristically, in Britain such "effeminacy" was coming under scientific scrutinyas a symptom of a moral weakness that "pervertled] those appetites which nature has bestowed for the most beneficial purposes." Social theorists such as Lord Kames, William Robertson and lohn Millar were at pains to explain sarne-sex desire as a feature of the degeneracy that is produced by luxury and excess in advanced societies, when the "free indulgence of appetites" is unrestrained, and the passions debased; yet they also hinted at its existence among "primitive" cultures, where emotionallanguor and lack of sensibility could fail to spark "that passion which was destined to perpetuate life, to be the bond of social union, and the source of tendemess and joy."78 The problematics of "effeminacy" and its complex rela tions to the "man offeeling" in this period rested, as discussed in the Introduction, on the status of gender difference as innate or acquired and on the dynamic relations existing between sexual practice and gender in late eighteenth-centurv British culture. For now it is important to note that the apprehension of and anxiety about "effeminacy" - which I would describe in this context as the attribution of a damaged or failed gender to certain kinds of men, which may or may not be evinced in sodomitical desire - influenced our explorers' views of South Pacific peoples.I? Marra's assessment of Sodety Islanders was clearly colored by these concems of Enlightenment social and politica] theory. "The women, in particular, are without modesty," he recorded, "and the men without courage; they have neither the manlv boldness of the Ohoteroans, nor the savage fierceness of the New-Zealanders; but are in general an effeminate race, intoxicated with pleasure, and enfeebled bv indulgence."8o The sensual overindulgence and promiscuity of the Tahitians, and especially the asioi, who combined their sexual omnivorousness with abortion and infanticide, were also interpreted by the British as a sign of effeminacy and corruption attendant upon tropical plenrv" In this context, the perception of sodomitical desires or practices among indigenous peoples of the Pacific mobilized the fears of difference and social exile involved with the signification of sodomy in England. British tars' concems certainly seemed to express a terror over losing proper gender through the intimation of inappropriate desire in the antipodes of the world. 82

Such anxieties were clearly exacerbated in the art of discovery, when the explo ration of foreign territories and bodies invoked the concomitant fear of being explored.P On the first voyage, [oseph Banks noted that one of the "gentlemen" of the Endeavour had come back to the ship after aland excursion on the New Zealand coast, "abusing the natives most heartily whom he said he had found to be given to the detestable Vice ofSodomy." Apparently he had made his addresses to a Maori family for the favors of"any one young woman" they chose for him, and

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was dismayed to find they had attempted to foist a boy off on him - not once, but twice. Banks recorded his own skepticism of the accuracy of the charge, but others among the ship' s company subscribed to it nonetheless.f" Contact in the brave, and strange, new world of the South Pacific, where the regulatory apparatus of civilization (which seemed here to be read, by Banks's companion, as hetero sexuality) was suspended, the homophobic hermeneutics of the ship had to be made to stand in the breach. When the gender misrecognition worked the other way, as it did at different points on all three voyages, the psychic trauma produced bv erotic entanglement seemed less pronounced. Again in New Zealand, where the problem was caused, in Wales's eyes, bv the fact that men and women dressed alike, a young Maori woman who was, like many of her nation according to the explorers, "rather masculine" in personal appearance, mistook a young seaman for a member of her own sex, offering him gifts and rubbing his hair with oil. But she was apprised ofher error when, according to one account, the boy tried to seduce her, or, according to another, she saw him urinating.F' The imperative to close observation - coupled with British guilt and anxiety over the spread of venereal disease in the South Pacific - could lead to some uncomfortable identi fications for the British. Cook's own identificatory projections, for example, are suggested through his squeamish fascination with Malekulan men's use of the penis sheath: "This Apish Nation," he recorded not once but twice in a single journal entry, barely "cover their Natural parts, the testicles are quite exposed, but they wrap a piece of cloth or leafe round the yard which they tye up to the belly to a cord, and so tight that it is a wonder to us how they could endure it."86 In these scenarios, gender, sexual practice and "national" difference seemed easily confused, under lining the degree to which the familiarity of bodies was the foundation for more complex and elaborate forms of classification and distinction; at the same time, bodies both exceeded and failed normative European and Oceanic categories of gender. Certainly, as a number of scholars have observed, the projection of the desires and fears ofthe explorer onto the explored results in an image of the othered as licentious and unrepressed.f" But what is much less remarked upon is the circu lation of subjectivity in such scenarios: as in these examples, who is the explorer and who the explored?

The Polynesians certainly had their own doubts about the virility of their visitors. Given their deep investment in the sexual and procreative avenues to spiritual and material advance, it was clear that Polynesians regarded the homosociality of European culture, as manifested in the British explorers' sloop, as suspect, even derisive. Lieutenant King reported that the Hawaiian chiefs were very curious about the provenance and intentions of their guests, but one circumstance "puzzled them exceedingly, our having no women with USj together with our quiet conduct, and unwarlike appearance" - the act of war being one of the few events neces sitating travel without women in Polynesia.f' In several islands, as we have seen, the manhood of sailors and officersalike who refused the embraces of island women became the object of taunts bv the locals: and following Cook's prohibition of intercourse with Hawaiian women for fear of introducing the "venereals," the

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women in question were said to have ridiculed the Europeans for their lack of virility. In some other cases, investigations were undertaken to determine whether the Europeans were "whole men."89 These Oceanic men and women, mutually interdependent in their everyday and sacred relationships, seemed not to conceive of sexual segregation, except for specific sacred or bellicose purposes, as a viable social arrangement. Even after conversion to Christianity, Polynesians remained intensely suspicous of men who remained unmarried into their mature years.90

Hence the explorers' sloops seemed to raise questions in the eyes of their hosts as to the explorers' inclinations and civility that the British themselves could never quite satisfactorily answer.

Wales's journal entry invites us further into this tangled circuitry of colonial identification, alterity, exchange and transformation. He goes on to elaborate his theory about the gender confusion that gave rise to the unfortunate misappre hension that the ni- Vanuatu were sodomites, while also making clear that the purpose he "need not mention" was universally recognized, and could be signed without difficulty in the gestural economy of encounter:

The Man who carried Mr. Forster's Plant Bag had, I was told, been two or three times atternpjtjed, and he happening to go into the Bushes on some occastion or other whilst we were set down drinking our Cocoa nuts etc, I pointed it out to the Natives who sat round us, with a sort of sly look and significant action at the same time, on which two of them [ump'd up and were following him with great glee, but some of our Party bursting out into a laugh, those who were bv ... called out Erramange! Erramange! (it's a Man! It's a Man!) on which the others returned, very much abashed on the Occasion.

The "sly look and significant action" were both conveyed through gestural signs common in encounters in which neither party spoke the other's language: yet the acceptance of gesturallanguage as a reliable indicator of sexual intention is, and was, clearly problematical. The Forsters would also hypothesize, entirely on the basis of such gestural signs, that the ni- Vanuatu were also eaters of human flesh. Wales, however, had initially refused to believe that Maori were "cannibals" despite mounting "evidence" (the pantomime of cannibalism put on bv the Maori) and the conviction to the contrary of all the rest of the company. He protested "how far we are liable to be misled bySigns, report and prejudice,"?! In the passage above, however, Wales indicates both that gestural sign (of sodomy? or heterosexual intercourse? Ir is unclear which sign was being made, or indeed if they were different) could convey the truth both to and of the ni-Vanuatu, and that the suspicious traffic flowed both ways. What should we make of this exchange?

European prejudices were both inverted and confirmed in this social perfor mance. As previously noted, while sodomy and same-sex desire were bv no means seen as unitary in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, both were, to varying degrees, coming to be attached to the same object of suspicion: the "effeminate"

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man.92 In Britain, this (usually elite-identified) individual was the product of spending too much time around women, or, as Millar theorized, of societies where women had too much civil or political power; in either case, he was beginning to be thought to be the most likely to harbor same-sex desires.I" There was an increasing, although not invariable, convergence, in other words, between gender and sexual practice, and a demand for men that the outward performance of gender be matched bv inner desire. Hence the great surprise and alarm among the British public at the sodomy prosecution and subsequent exile of the manly Isaac Bickerstaffe, playwright and collaborator of GarrickP" In the encounter above, however, same-sex or sodomitical desire is feared as a function of primitive, rather than advanced and corrupted, sensibilities, which would require, according to late eighteenth-century stadial models ofsocial development, that it had been there all along, apart ofhumanity in its "original" as in its "advanced" state (a view which anticipated missionaries' condemnation of sodomy as a "heathenish" practice at all levelal." That the ni-Vanuatu were in a "primitive" state was not in doubt, although the Forsters theorized that their nation might have degenerated from the happiness of the Tahitians owing to their less advantageous climate. And certainly gestural sign was associated by some with cultural primitiveness. The case had been made very eloquently by Rousseau, who argued that "if the only needs we ever experience were physical, we should most likely never have been able to speak, we would fully express our meanings by the language of gestures alone." Conversely, on the basis of evidence culled from the voyages ofBougainville and Cook, as well as European communities of the deaf, some Enlightenment thinkers had elevated gestural sign to the level of a philosophical artifact, as a "natural" and possibly even universallanguage. From that perspective, sign language provided a theatrical, if provisional, "mode of exchange, a physical and symbolic space inscribed with meaning," as Paul Carter has argued of contact performances in general.96 Yet what that meaning was to the different parties remains elusive. In other words, the indeterminacy ofboth sign and sodomy isglossed in Wales's account ofencounter: in the state of nature being enacted for the British in western Polynesia through a gestural economy, even the most stalwart empirieist was led to believe the "unnatural crime" was not only recognized but could be made intelligible through a sort of kinesthetic lingua franca, the wink and the nod. Communication is achieved as meaning isdeferred, and sodomy becomes the place where civilized and savage meet - a predilection of those with too much luxury and too much contact with women (as the British had long believed of Islamic nations), as well as, apparently, those who neither spent time with nor appreciated women.i" Clearly, the enlightened explorers identified themselves with neither camp.

Of course, just as there was some ritual cannibalism practiced in certain South Pacific societies, so there were people who engaged in sodomy. The expectations of sexual exchange that the British fostered did not necessarily translate into the "natural" sex roles ordained by European culture. But what is most striking here is that Pacific social codes continued to elude European categories of identity. Among the ni- Vanuatu, male-to-male sexual contact may have been part of the complex

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rituals involved in the invocation and transmission of male and especially chiefly power, although the British had no way of knowing this.98 Probably more trans gressive from the European point of view (and perhaps more accessible to our vovagers) were the mahu of Tahiti and the Marquesas, young boys who were deliberately brought up to dress and behave as women and as grown men openly practiced transvestism, fellatio and - perhaps - sodomy. Within the gender com plementarity of eastern Polynesian culture, the mahu were seen possibly as a third gender, or as women; men having sexual relations with them did not think of themselves as "sodomites," nor did mahu have sex with each other.99 The mahu may have been "discovered" by the British on the second voyage as they prepared for final departure in 1774: Wales described some men "who are forbid the use of Women" and Forster senior may have been alluding to them when he decried that "appetite for sensual pleasure" accompanying opulence in a society, which, "if no restraint is laid on its gratification, it grows stronger and stronger, so as at last to extinguish all the notions ofpropriety and decency."lOO Transvestism was certainly not unknown in England, as the public campaigns to stamp out mollv houses attested, and some of the more sensational trials for sodomy confirmed.l'" But what is noteworthy is that the explorers, if they noticed the mahu, did not condemn them. Ten years later, Captain Bligh (hirnself suspected of being "a bit peculiar" by his own men) was less restrained by Enlightenment relativism in his denun ciation of the mahu. Bligh's close and manual examination of a mahu led hirn to express his revulsion at this example of Tahitian "effeminacy" privately, but in lurid tones: "it is strange that in so prolific a country as this, men should be led to such sensual and beastly acts of gratification," he wrote in his journaL Significantly, he goes on to note "those connected with [the mahu] have their beastly pleasures gratified between his thighs, but are no farther sodomites as they all positively deny the crime." The LMS missionaries who arrived in TheDufften years later were more public in their condemnations, recording in their writings the similarity between "these heathens" and "the heathens of old," both groups being "given up to vile affections; the men leaving the natural use of woman, burn in their lusts towards one another." British audiences thus learned of the

unnatural crimes which we dare not name, committed daily without the idea of shame or guilt, In various districts of the island there are men who dress as women; work with them at the cloth; are confined to the same provisions and rule of eating and dressing; may not eat with the men, or of their food, but have separate plantations for their peculiar use.

Worse yet, the chiefs had their favorites among them.lOZBy the 1790s, then, when the enlightened ethnography ofTahitian culture was giving way to the evangelical, both explorers and missionaries interpellated the mahu as "unnatural" (whether as fellaters or sodomites), and so confirm the threat that such transvestite practices posed to normative social morality in the counter-revolutionary fervor of the day.

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As such, these descriptions and valuations of Polynesian culture fed back into metropolitan categories not only of civilized and savage but also of respectability and depravity.

Nevertheless, despite the irony of explorer and evangelical alike castigating the practice of men living as women as degradation (given their simultaneous British belief that high esteem for women was a measure of progress in a society), both rather missed the point.103 The social acceptance of the mahu in eastern Polynesian societies may have actually expressed the associations of women's reproductive functions with the divine - and hence the association of the feminine with positive, rather than negative, hierarchies and characteristics.P" Indeed, the mahu had their female counterpart in the "female headmen" who took on a role usually fulfilled by male members of chiefly families. Aggressive, masculine in appearance, and large in size, female headmen were known for their skill in warfare, sometimes took youths as husbands or surrounded thernselves with mahu for their court.l'" Only slightly less transgressive, from the British perspective, was the pekio of the Marquesas: men who became secondary husbands to women of high status and provided them with both sexual and domestic service - a role which had its opposite number in Hawaii äikane.106

The Hawaiian äikane was indeed less hidden from the History made on the Cook voyages than the mahu, and so they will complete this reading of the circuitrv of colonial encounter, misrecognition and transformation. In Hawaii the äikane were a distinctive social and cultural presence: young male warriors who served as inter mediaries, agents and male sexual companions to the chiefs of the islands. Unlike the mahu, they otherwise fulfilled typical male roles, including having wives and children.107 The British were openly fascinated by them, as both Robert Morris and Lee Wallace have recentlv discussed. The journals of the voyage record several instances in which Hawaiian chiefs or äikane expressed interest in British officers and crew, offering hogs in exchange for the younger and better-looking men. Samwell typically records their interest, and British investigation, in lively fashion:

Another Sett of Servants [of the chief, Kalani'opu'u] ... are called Ikanyand are of superior Rank their business is to commit the Sin of Onan upon the old King. This we learnt from frequent Enquiries about this curious Custom, and it is an office that is esteemed honourable among them and they have frequently asked us on seeing a handsome young fellow ifhe was not an Ikany to some of us.108

Samwell's description of the äikane, moving from wonder to knowing and coy detachment, suggests the explorers' propensity to view same-sex desire not as a "sin," but as a cultural practice that needed to be analvzed. At the same time, his remarks speak volumes in their silences about his own predilections as the straight man in the comic scene he constructs. A few days later he reported, "we have great reason to think that that Unnatural Crime which ought never to be mentioned is not unknown amongst them" (1184). "[S]uch is the strange depravity of these

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Indians," he coneluded, after Captain Clerke had been offered severallarge Hogs to let one of his crew stand as äikane to a elose relative of the King of Kaua' L109

Samwell's gallantry and archness about the sexual proelivities of South Sea islanders thus extended from the women to the men; yet he still managed to suggest, in the latter case, that if he was intrigued intellectually he was not personally attracted by such proposals.

The interest in the äikane among some of the other crewmembers was tempered more by anxiety and ambivalence. Given the increasing importance of the belief, later codified through historieal examples by Millar, Robertson and Malthus, that civil society's restraints were necessary to inflame the passion and refine the desires for, and good treatment of, the opposite sex, the Hawaiians' base appetites signaled an obstaele to social and spiritual progress.U? This play between same-sex practiees as both an object of ethnographie analysis and a religious abomination was evident in New Englander john Ledyard's assessment. Ledyard used Biblieallanguage to condemn a practiee he nonetheless felt it his duty to describe, through the "historian's" obligation to tell the truth:

Ir is however very manifest among the chiefs, that not only marriage, but a commerce with the women in any other respect is in very indifferent estimation, and it is a disagreeable circumstance to the historian that truth obliges him to inform the world of a custom among them contrary to nature ... it would be to omit the most material and useful part of historieal narration to omit it; the custom alluded to is that of sodomy, which is very prevalent if not universal among the chiefs. AB this was the first instance we had ever seen of it in our travels, we were cautious how we credited the first indieations of it, and waited until the opportunity gave full proof of the circumstance. The cohab itation is between the chiefs and the most beautiful males they can proeure about 17 years old, these they call Kikuana, which in their language signifies a relation. These youths follow them wherever they go, and are as narrowly looked after as the women in those countries where jealousy is so predominant a passion; they are extremely fond of them, and by a shocking inversion of the laws of nature, they bestow all those affections upon them that were intended for the other sex ... though we had no right to attack or ever to disapprove ofcustoms in general that differed from our own, yet this one so apparently infringed and insulted the first and strongest dictate of nature, and we had from education and a diffusive observation of the world, so strong a prejudiee against it, that the first instance we saw of it we condemned a man fully reprobated. Our officers indeed did not insult the chiefs bv any means, but our soldiers and tars to vindieate their own wonderful modesty, and at the same time oblige the insulted women ... became severe arbitrators, and the most valourous defenders and supporters of their own tenets.U!

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The enlightened explorer had to record the facts, and verify the accuracy of the record, but in doing so was roused to condemn a custom "contrary to nature," and to condone the British tars' manly and seeminglv compulsory heterosexual response. Indeed, heterosexuality itself is produced and asserted by this reading of the äikane as sodomites. There are also many assumptions in this passage - about male beauty, sexual jealousy and romantic love, for example - that also suggest the complicated and ambiguous nature ofLedyard's response to the alter sexual customs and same-sex desire expressed by the Hawaiians.

The journal entries and accounts by Lieutenant james King, handsome and respected young officer aboard the Resolution, allow us to track these ambivalences with some care. On leaving the island of Hawaii, following Cook's death, King recorded his overall impressions of the Hawaiian people, and determined that they "will fall very short of the Society and Friendly Isles in that very good test of Civilization, the rank and consequence ofWomen" for not only were the women forced to eat separately and but were also "depriv'd of the natural affections oftheir Husbands ... [since] the foulest polutions disgrace the Men."1l2 King perhaps had reason to be worried: Hawaiians mistook hirn repeatedly not only as Cook's son but also as his äikane. Yet his later rather phlegmatic report that one Hawaiian chief had negotiated with Cook "to leave me behind; I had proposals by our friends to elope, and they promised to hide me in the hills till the Ships were gone, and to make me a great man"113 attempted to make light of the concern, expressed elsewhere by hirnself and some of the other men, at the effort to make hirn an object in an "unnatural" and "foul" sexual exchange. King's more fulsome published account of this encounter is even more striking in its apparent indifference to the desire being openly expressed by a Hawaiian chief and one ofhis warriors. "It was ridiculous enough to see them [the Hawaiians] stroking the sides, and patting the bellies of the sailors (who were certainly much improved in the sleekness of their looks), during our short stay in the island," he wrote.

On my part, I spared no endeavours to conciliate their affections, and gain their esteern; and I had the good fortune to succeed so far, that, when the time of our departure was made known, I was strongly solicited to remain behind, not without offers of the most flattering kind. When I excused myself, by saying, that Captain Cook would not give his consent, they proposed, that I should retire into the mountains; where, they said, they would conceal me, till after the departure of the ships; and on my farther assuring them, that the Captain would not leave the bay without me, T erreeoboo and Koa [Kalani'opu'u, the chief and Koa, his äikane] waited upon Captain Cook, whose son they supposed I was, with a formal request, that I might be left behind. The Captain, to avoid giving a positive refusal, to an offer so kindly intended, told them, that he could not part with me, at that time, but that he should return to the island next year, and would then endeavour to settle the matter to their satisfaction.U"

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As Wallace has suggested, perhaps "despite themselves ... the Europeans kept signaling this particular sexual availability to [Hawaiian] men."115

Wallace's insight also points us to another intriguing aspect ofthese encounters: the allure of the homoeroticism ofPolynesian culture to British explorers. Certainly we have no way of knowing whether same-sex des ire between British and Polynesian islanders of the different nations was common or ignored. But it is clear in a number of ways - not least through the abundant descriptions of the genital symbolism of eastem Polynesia (which the British compared to "the Priapus of the Romans"), the "frequent Enquiries" made about the äikane, the bond-friendships made between the officers and chiefs (which involved "kissing" or nose-rubbing}, and the apparent ease with which King recorded the effort to traffic in male bodies - that the homoerotic aspects of native culture were not rejected by some of the explorers, and could even provide a kind of entree into local life.U'' King himself may have used his own physical attractiveness (described by Beaglehole as "too small-bodied, too well-bred, too genteel, for a young man who ... may have considered himself a tar") to "conciliate" the islanders and "gain their esteem/'l'? The politics of identity within Britain may also help illuminate those at work in these encounters. As Bickerstaffe's case eloquently proved, even bythe last quarter of the century sexual identity was not solely determined by object choice, nor was gender an automatic outcome of sexual practice, and the efforts to make them meld (through reformation of manners campaigns, executions for sodomy, and other aspects of the "gender revolution") were not invariably successful. For the seaman, oceans away from the soothing commonplaces and coercive social pressures of "home," homoeroticism or the expression of same-sex desire may have offered a "liminal" space, as Victor Tumer has defined it, "a realm ofpure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise," that allowed him to cross over to a multiply determined "other side." Tattooing constituted another such act and symbol of transgressiveness, through which the sailor expressed his identification with Oceanic mores and gained the islanders' acceptance. Significantly, tattoos were also associated in British accounts with Oceanic sexual excess.P'' As Peter Heywood, mutineer of the infamous Bounty, explained: "I was tattooed, not to gratify my own desire, but theirs; for it was my constant endeavour to acquiesce in any little custom which 1thought agreeable to them ... provided 1gained byit their friendship and esteem."119 The intimation of same-sex desire may have similarly eased some of the anxiety generated through the arts of discovery by allowing the stranger to cross over into the native culture - and perhaps even to become a different kind ofnational and sexual subject. At the very least, given that, within the terms of eighteenth-centurv social science, desire was not extinguished but inflamed by restraint, the homophobia of the ship could produce its own rebel lion. 120 Ideologies of identity, then, sexual and national, circulated between the two cultures at their points of meeting, and their nature or outcomes were neither predictable nor codifiable.

Hence, the traffic in men transformed the enlightened explorers into the objects of Polynesian knowledge, who thereby read their own culture on the European

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male body. But this exchange is of much broader historical significance. The tensions between notions of gender and national difference as innate or learned, the shifting dynamics of relations between sexual practice and gender, and the "crime that can never be mentioned" but was everywhere suspected aIl point to the circuitry of identity, alterity, exchange and transformation that was both charged and recuperated by the systems of observation and empirical recording. Who is the object and who the subject of these exchanges? Who is ethnographer and who the "primitive"? The rape, flogging and killing of natives on the voyages as part of the "civilizing" process established one kind of masculinity and power but did little to impress upon indigenous peoples that the British were representatives of a superior, masculine and civilized race. Indeed, the attempted imposition of British "order" could only temporarily divert attention from what Michael Taussig has caIled in another context the "unstable interplay of truth and illusion."121 The differential and contested accounts of Pacific peoples laid bare in the journals and published voyage accounts revealed the insufficiencies of the social typologies that Britain's enlightened explorers were so keen to formulate and applv. These misrecognitions, articulated through the axes of sexuality and gender, produced ideas about racial difference that staked out the grounds of similarity as weIl as alterity, and possibilities for identification on both sides that were not fixed or predetermined. Significantly, they also suggest that it was religious, rather than secular, valuations of difference that produced the more absolutist definitions that begin to take hold in the late Georgian period.

Cook and his men aimed to discover and record empirical facts about an unknown world, and their cultural as weIl as topographical mappings changed the world in the process. The psychic impact of these processes on the colonizers and their forms of knowledge has received, perhaps, too little direct attention. The empirical "facts" of territorial and sexual conquest clearly summoned up the fantasy ofbeing taken, as well as taking; and as desire, identification and dis-identification worked to naturalize conquest and aIlay its anxieties, the "unnatural" nature of the act of conquest comes back to haunt in the figure of the sodomite - the absent presence (or present absence) on all the voyages. Perhaps these examples suggest that through the arts of discovery the emergence of the "modem" sexual regime was indeed being felt and fabricated across the world. But it is also clear that suspect practices could not produce and certainly could not prove the essentialized identities that such a regime required. The multiple images of Oceanic and British bodies reveal the fietive nature and irresolvable tensions within those categories of difference invented in the crucible of first contact. The same accounts that inaugurate the labor of colonial discourse in the South Pacific thus raise the central question, who was looking at whom? What was seen in the act of looking and who was the discoverer? Looking at natives looking back at them, could the enlightened explorers ofCook's voyages be so sure they were not looking at themselves? From this perspective, breasts, sodomy and lash become markers of the instabilities of nationality, race and gender and the indeterminacies of sexual practices - in the time of the great Captain Cook, as well as in our own.

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