John Ledyard

IT IS not much to our credit if, as students of the eighteenth century, we seldom accord more than a footnote, if indeed that much, to the field of eighteenth-century accomplishment that is represented by names like Anson and Commodore Byron, Bligh and Carteret and Wallis, Bougainville and La Perouse, Kerguelen and Marion du Fresne. There are signs that a generation which has learned to concern itself, however superficially, with ecology may redress this balance and teach us that we cannot know the European Enlightenment unless we know its navigators and hydrographers, who are necessarily also its first experimental ethnologists and zoologists. It is high time. And the consequences may be extraordinary and astonishing. What happens, for instance, to our image of the age of sensibility, if we try to accommodate, as a massive and defining enterprise of that age, the most momentous and heroically sustained navigations of all, the three voyages of Captain James Cook? What does Cook amount to, in the image that we make for ourselves of that Europe of the 1760s and 1770s which Cook departed from, and returned to? So far as I am aware, the question has been asked, and a tentative answer to it has been ventured, by only one scholar-by J. C. Beaglehole, whose magnificent erudition on everything that concerns the great hydrographer is monumentally summed up in his great editions of Cook's journals. Beaglehole, more than any one else, has the right to ask the questions

Political science · Maritime and Coastal Archaeology · Travel Writing and Literature

• How Navigators Think

  Ashley, Stanley W Ashley et al.•Past & Present•2007

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