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Article ID: CBB539711921

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

Bil, Geoff (Author)

History of Science
Volume: 60
Issue: 2
Pages: 183-210

DOI: 10.1177/0073275320971109

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320971109

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Botany Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence Indigenous peoples; indigeneity Natural history Enlightenment 18th century Tahiti Solander, Daniel Charles Cook, James

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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