Eighteenth-century European commentators had no difficulty construing the Pacific as a whole. In composer William Shield's and playwright John O'Keeffe's pantomime Omai, Or, A Trip Round the World (1785), the eponymous journey took in the English capital and seaside towns like Plymouth and Margate but also the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, the Kamchatka Peninsula, Tahiti, Tonga, New Zealand, Vanuatu, Easter Island (Rapa Nui), Hawaii and the Polar seas. Against the backdrop of British, French and Spanish rivalries over territorial possessions, the empire on which the sun never set was imagined to be the Pacific itself.

It was this world that London audiences were keen to experience during the Christmas season of 1785. Opening at Covent Garden, the pantomime by Shield (1748–1829) and O'Keeffe (1747–1833) centred on the adventures of Omai, based on Mai, a Raiatean Islander, who had been taken by Captain James Cook to England a decade earlier. There he was presented to George III and the Royal Society and lionized by the British aristocracy, before being returned to the Society Islands a few years later (see Harriet Guest, ‘Omai's Things’, in Cook and Omai: The Cult of the South Seas (Canberra: The National Library of Australia in association with the Humanities Research Centre, The Australian National University, 2001), 31–36). For London audiences, the theatrical production promised a spectacle of rare ethnographic verisimilitude and special effects that included the recently invented hot-air balloon (for details of the production see Greg Dening, Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 156–161, and Iain McCalman, ‘Spectacles of Knowledge: OMAI as Ethnographic Travelogue’, Cook and Omai: The Cult of the South Seas, 9–16). Capitalizing on widespread public interest in the South Seas, the costumes and set by renowned designer Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812) drew directly on ethnographic material, eyewitness accounts and the pictorial record from the three Cook voyages. John Webber, one of Cook's official artists, was a scene painter for the production, lending it the further imprimatur of first-hand observation. The music, too, aimed to capture more than just a general flavour of the South Seas. Shield received input from two of Cook's officers, James Burney, son of the music historian, who made the first transcriptions of Maori and Tongan part-singing, and Molesworth Phillips, James's brother-in-law, who likewise proffered observations about Polynesian music (see Vanessa Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 113 and 193, note 60).

As Greg Dening has observed, the incorporation of Polynesian instruments collected by the voyagers, along with fantastic elements, enhanced the ‘reality effect’ of the production as a whole (Mr Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the ‘Bounty’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 269–271). This sense of authenticity was reinforced by Shield's use of music from closer to home – Irish reels, folk tunes and the first transcribed sea shanty (Linda Troost, ‘Shield, William’, in Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (4 April 2016)) – which reflected Shield's early familiarity with seafaring and a later enthusiasm for travel writing and the exotic. A number of Shield's other compositions explored similar themes: Robinson Crusoe, or Harlequin Friday (1780), Lord Mayor's Day, or A Flight from Lapland (1782), Aladdin (1788), Highland Reel (1788), inspired by James Boswell's recently published account of the Hebrides, and The Crusade (1790), inspired by the Ottoman ambassador's visit to London (see Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 91; Troost, ‘Shield’). Among other reviews an anonymous ‘Short Account of the new Pantomime called OMAI’ printed in the Monthly Review (volume 3 (1786), 621) noted that the pantomime ‘happily adapted’ accounts of Cook's voyages and introduced metropolitan audiences to ‘instruments never before heard in this country’; the ‘vernacular airs of Otaheite’ were further praised as being ‘characteristic’ of Polynesian music. Whether the music was indeed ‘characteristic’ is another question: a song like ‘In de big Canoe’, for example, is an Irish tune sung in minstrel style by a character called the ‘Otaheitian Traveller’. In the end the work is a pastiche of musical idioms, notwithstanding its composer's interest in ethnomusicological fidelity and his familiarity with the kinds of cross-cultural musical exchange typical of late eighteenth-century voyaging.

Shield did not, in other words, confine himself to the elements then considered typical of Polynesian music – homophony, a narrow tonal range, vocal portamento, and repetitive melodic and rhythmic patterns. Instead, the musical pastiche used conventional Western tonality and depended on exotic instrumentation and extramusical elements (for example, words like mahi or breadfruit, yam and hog) to invoke the South Seas. In contradistinction to Chinese and Turkish musical idioms, which were readily borrowed from in the eighteenth century, far less was known about Polynesian music (see Agnew, ‘Encounter Music in Oceania: Cross-Cultural Musical Exchange in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Voyage Accounts’, in The Cambridge History of World Music, ed. Philip V. Bohlman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 194). The music to Omai thus has a predominantly domestic character. It is, however, a domesticity that drew in England's own social margins – sailors, swindlers, barrow-pushers, street hawkers, a Jewish usurer – and its colonial periphery – Ireland, North America and the Pacific (Agnew, ‘Omai, or A Trip Round the World’, Forster Collection: Pacific Pathways (Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 2003), available at <http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/forster>; Enlightenment Orpheus, 130–132). It is a mishmash of domestic and exotic alterity that collapsed space and time, and inverted class and racial positions to form a commedia dell'arte commentary of sorts – at once celebration and satire – on European imperial ambitions in the Pacific.

Ode to Captain Cook, From Omai, Or, A Trip Round the World, edited by Robert Hoskins, orchestrated by David Vine, makes available a new score adapted from the pantomime. Intended for concert or semi-staged performance, the work is scored for seven characters – three Tahitian notables (Oberea, Otoo, Oddiday) based on historical figures, a Tahitian Girl, Britannia, an English Captain and a British Sailor, along with SATB chorus of Islanders and Sailors, strings, woodwind, trumpet, keyboard (harpsichord or pianoforte doubling celeste) and percussion. The editors suggest possible alternative instrumentation for the Polynesian instruments: conch shell or muted trumpet, triangle or castanets (tete), cymbal or bamboo stamping tubes (kofe), bass drum (pahu), slit-gong drums (nafa) and paddle clubs (paki). The edition draws on O'Keeffe's manuscript libretto (annotated by Shield), the wordbook (published in 1786 by Cadell and available to contemporary audiences) and Shield's printed piano-vocal score (published in 1786 by Longman and Broderip). Shield's overture to The Travellers in Switzerland (1794) has been adopted to replace the missing overture.

Hoskins's and Vine's editorial selections seem to have been motivated by a principle of intelligibility. The original profusion of pantomime characters has been winnowed to a handful: gone, for example, are Omai's servant Harlequin, his intended, Londina, and her maid, Columbine, along with Don Strattolando, whose machinations propel the action from the South Seas to the metropolis and back. The setting is confined to Tahiti and the convoluted plot subsumed into a pageant that culminates in a dirge sung by a chorus of Pacific Islanders, ‘Mourn, Hawaii's Fatal Shore’, and, finally, Cook's apotheosis in ‘Ode in Honor of Captain Cook’, grandly orchestrated by Vine. Moreover, the editors have chosen elements with the greatest musical appeal. Elided from their edition is, for example, the plain street hawker's song, ‘In the Character of an Old Water Cress Woman’, with its compound metre and typical use of the falling third. Likewise cut is ‘In de big Canoe’, sung by an ‘Otaheitean Traveller’, a song interesting for its early superimposition of minstrelsy onto the Pacific. While such elisions are justifiable in light of the editors’ aims and do not detract from the appeal of their eminently performable edition, we do lose something of the multivocality and historical specificity of the original.

Vine's orchestration generally follows the orchestral cues in Shield's piano-vocal score, though at times he provides a fuller realization. ‘Chorus of the Villagers of the Friendly Islands’, for example, augments Shield's spare drone and percussion (slit-gong, paddle club and stamping tube) with characteristic fifths and thirds in the orchestra. ‘Ode to Captain Cook’ similarly includes a very singable extended chorus. Imagined against the backdrop of de Loutherbourg's and Webber's painting The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (1794), one can only think that this is how Shield might have wanted it.

Hoskins's Introduction provides an informative contextualization of Ode to Captain Cook, including references to primary sources and historical and ethnomusicological scholarship. Black-and-white plates illustrate the edition, providing the reader with background information and establishing the historical significance of the work to Enlightenment audiences. Among the illustrations are, for example, reproductions of Joshua Reynolds's magisterial portrait Omai (1775–1776), second-voyage artist William Hodges's 1777 depiction of the much-admired Tahitian war fleet and John Webber's painting of Cook's death (1784). These illustrations demonstrate the faithfulness of some of de Loutherbourg's sets, costumes and props to the originals (for example, the mourning costume worn by one of the characters) and Shield's adoption of artefacts like the large Tahitian drum (pahu). The Introduction does not delve into questions of musical exoticism, suggesting instead that Shield's Polynesian appropriations are significant for their proto-ethnomusicological character and because of his efforts to ‘recreate’ the tonal quality of Polynesian instruments – either through muting or the use of authentic instruments (iv).

By the editors’ own account, the edition ‘focus[es] attention on the work's status as what may perhaps be called the first South Seas score’ and aims to preserve the ‘essence of O'Keeffe's drama [as] a colonial fantasy played out in terms of Omai's chivalry and Cook's godlikeness’ (v). Ode to Captain Cook is thus reduced to two poles – Tahiti and London – and two main protagonists – Omai and Cook – concluding with a kind of ballet des nations. Reduced is the complexity that gave the pantomime some of its political frisson (the goings-on of Strattolando as a metonym for Spanish imperial designs, for example) and an audience-recognition factor à la Hogarth. If the original exoticized Polynesian music, the effect of this paring down is, arguably, to make more exotic a work whose exoticization was modulated by a proximate Other – its domestic, marginal characters.

At the same time, Hoskins and Vine make accessible parts of a work that has been little performed owing to the unavailability of the score and, one assumes, to audiences’ lack of familiarity with the form and subject matter. Happily, the editors have rectified this. Given the historical and musical interest of the pantomime, however, one would wish for them to embark on a further project that reconstructed Omai, or A Trip Round the World in all its difficult entirety.