Write a 250-300 word response response to the assigned readings and media on ?the role of ethnography and anthropology in the construction of racial ?categories. Be sure that you use specif

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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, th

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