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Voyaging in the Pacific

Coleman, D ; Morrison, R (Oxford University Press, 2024)

This chapter examines three major works published over a span of almost five decades: John Hawkesworth’s An Account of the voyages . . . for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere (1773), George Keate’s Account of the Pelew Islands (1788), and Dr John Martin’s Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean (1817). The ‘authors’ named here were not authors but editors, professional literary men who edited, rearranged, compiled, and often embellished the journals, logbooks, and charts of the original travellers. My aim is to see how each of these editors produced the experience of travel textually for Romantic metropolitan audiences. Hawkesworth, the best known, edited the first of James Cook’s three voyages, drawing principally on the journals of Cook and the naturalist Joseph Banks. Keate, a friend of Voltaire, shaped the thirteen- week encounter between a shipwrecked British crew and the people of Palau, and Martin took charge of William Mariner’s tale of his four years on Tonga.