Article ID: CBB539711921

Tangled compositions: Botany, agency, and authorship aboard HMS Endeavour (2022)

unapi

By all accounts, James Cook’s HMS Endeavour sojourn in Tahiti was a pivotal moment in Enlightenment engagements between Indigenous and European cultures. Among the voyage records that survive, the Endeavour draftsman Sydney Parkinson’s Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (1773) is widely viewed as anomalous for the depth and breadth of its interests in Indigenous Tahitian culture and plant knowledge. This essay complicates that view, with emphasis on the contingencies peculiar to the Journal’s publication and to Parkinson’s own authorial biography. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, I analyze Parkinson’s account alongside the botanist Daniel Solander’s historiographically underutilized “Plantae Otaheitenses” manuscript. In so doing, I offer an alternative reading of the Journal as archetypal rather than exceptional in its attention to Indigenous cultures and knowledges. At stake, I suggest, is an enhanced appreciation for Indigenous–European botanical engagements and for Enlightenment print culture more broadly, as well as for the nebulously adisciplinary and collaborative nature of Enlightenment natural history field practices.

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Authors & Contributors
Irving-Stonebraker, Sarah
Orchiston, Wayne
Rose, Edwin
Loring, Lorna M.
Buchan, Bruce
Combe, Thomas
Concepts
Natural history
Botany
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Indigenous peoples; indigeneity
Travel; exploration
Colonialism
Time Periods
18th century
Enlightenment
19th century
17th century
Edo period (Japan, 1603-1868)
Modern
Places
Tahiti
Great Britain
Pacific Ocean
Netherlands
New Zealand
Japan
Institutions
British Museum
Uppsala Universitet
Royal Society of London
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