Although the title of this book might suggest that it is a new overview of the exploration history of Oceania, it is something else altogether. While the book does cover almost three-and-a-half centuries of Oceanian-European interaction, it addresses two very specific things.

First, it is a lexico-semantic history of the terminology that visitors to Oceania (as well as metropolitan authors) used to make sense of the variety of people they encountered in Oceania. Douglas writes it with the aim of showing how racial thinking, so often anachronistically read back into sources going as far back as the sixteenth century, only arrived late onto the Oceanic scene. She argues that metropolitan savants only developed a racial understanding of humanity around the turn of the nineteenth century and only in its wake did racial thinking slowly filter through to the perceptions and writings of visitors to Oceania. The book takes an approach toward racial thinking similar by Roxann Wheeler but applies it to the specific context of Oceania.Footnote ¹

Second, the book looks for signs of “indigenous presence” in the writings of European visitors to Oceania. Douglas makes use of an extensive methodology that draws on Subaltern Studies and works from the assumption that indigenous presence/agency surfaces in these European writings by looking for what she calls “indigenous countersigns”. She complicates her picture of Oceania by suggesting that, until much of the region was fully under the influence of European imperialism (which, for the most part, did not happen until after her period of study), Europeans did not necessarily have the upper hand in these encounters. Indigenous peoples were not helpless victims (i.e., not necessarily “subaltern” at all) and certainly not already on a way to their inevitable subjugation or destruction by Europeans. Douglas’ book not only includes the imagery that was the product of these voyages (e.g., drawings and prints) but also plaster casts of people in her analysis. This leads to a richly illustrated book in which the illustrations form parts of the author’s arguments.

Douglas’ book is roughly chronological and divided into two parts. The first part broadly looks at the first European voyages in Oceania by the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch (chapter one), those by the English and French up to 1794 (chapter two) and French Revolutionary period voyages via the activities of the British explorer Matthew Flinders on the Australian Coast and those by Nicolas Baudin (chapter three). Throughout the first part, Douglas’ analysis of various journals shows how their content was not shaped by systematic racial conceptions but by the nature of the encounters themselves. For example, Schouten’s journal from the Schouten and Le Maire expedition of 1615-1616 uses a bewildering plethora of terms for indigenous peoples until an attack off the coast of New Guinea makes him anxious and suspicious of indigenous people. From this point on, regardless of any observed physical characteristics, he predominantly refers to indigenous people as “swarten” (i.e., blacks). This term had negative connotations but, as Douglas convincingly argues, was not a racial category in the modern sense. The labels that Schouten used were the result of indigenous conduct (i.e., an attack in this case) and, in itself, were a countersign of indigenous agency. Notably, the contemporary English version of Schouten’s journal translated “swarten” as “Indians” and thus points to how fixed racial terminology did not yet exist in Oceania. Douglas interweaves her analysis of various journals and their terminology with sections on metropolitan savants (e.g., Blumenbach, Cuvier, Buffon and Leibniz) and their theories. Focused on how to understand and classify the human species, she examines the influence that these ideas had on the perceptions and writings of visitors to Oceania (and vice versa).

Part II begins after a lull in voyages of exploration during of the Napoleonic Period, which roughly coincided with a “discursive shift” in metropolitan thinking towards “racial differentiation and ranking” (33) that Douglas identifies around the turn of the nineteenth century. From this point in the text, Douglas takes a more in-depth looks at particular expeditions undertaken by the French navy: the 1822-1825 voyage of Duperrey (chapter four) and the voyages of Freycinet from 1817 to 1820 and Dumont d’Urville between 1826-1829 (chapter five). Douglas slightly departs from her otherwise chronological order in these second two voyages since her main sources for them came from the same people: the surgeons and naturalists Jean René Constant Quoy and Joseph Paul Gaimard. A final chapter addresses a later expedition by Dumont d’Urville (1837-1840), by which time racial thinking had become entrenched and phrenology had become a fashionable field of study. Douglas gives specific attention to the craniometry, collection of human remains and the making of plaster casts that took place during this expedition.

The second part of Douglas’ book has less emphasis on lexico-semantic analysis and instead focuses more on the metropolitan savants and how they influenced the perceptions and behaviours of visitors to Oceania. Douglas describes how, particularly in France, stadial theory and theories about distinct human races develop and slowly filter through European explores’ modes of thought and perceptions. Particularly pivotal is chapter five, in which Douglas analyses the writings of Quoy and Gaimard to show how by their second expedition they started seeing the indigenous people in racial terms and how such thinking was absent in their first expedition. Douglas’ stated intention of finding indigenous presence and agency in journals by Europeans (which, in the first part of the book, often remains limited to the naming of instances where indigenous people apparently successfully used violence and/or coercion) also makes its presence in the book’s second part. She writes about the surprise and hilarity of the crew of the Duperrey expedition at the guards of the Tahitian king who were “grotesquely decked out in old European costumes” (174) and at the “perfectly civilized” table manners of Tahitians that had converted to Christianity, which seemed extremely incongruous with their near-naked appearance. Douglas then recasts such remarks in the travel journals as countersigns of indigenous innovation, choice and general agency.

Douglas has earlier written extensively on the topics of race and indigenous agency. In this book, she interweaves both and it results in a rich albeit slightly convoluted book. In some cases, the themes of race and indigenous presence productively cross-fertilize but often they read as distinct themes within a single book. Treating the two topics separately might have made both themes more accessible. All the same, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of the history of racial thought in Oceania and the nature of encounters between European explorers and the region’s inhabitants.