In recent years, a more balanced anthropological approach toward the controversial Pacific explorer Captain James Cook has begun to replace the critical interpretations in vogue since the 1960s. In Captain Cook: Voyager between Two Worlds, the Australian historian John Gascoigne represents Cook more as an agent of cultural interaction and change than a genocidal conqueror. Gascoigne maintains that Cook did not attempt to change a primitive Pacific world in the “likeness of Britain” (xiii–xiv). For Gascoigne, Cook was an empiricist, a rational man who sought to use scientific method to understand the strange, new world he encountered. Despite his Enlightenment mind-set, however, Cook could only see the Pacific world through British eyes (xiv).

Recent accounts of Cook's momentous voyages have addressed the process of cultural conflict, interaction, and accommodation between British and Pacific peoples through the perspective of anthropological-historical analysis. In Captain Cook: Voyager between Two Worlds, Gascoigne examines how both cultures struggled to comprehend each other by comparing how they integrated concepts of war, politics, and religion, as well as the realities of sex and death, into their worldview. Eschewing polemics, Gascoigne refrains from castigating Cook's voyages as simply the leading edge of British imperialism in the Pacific, preferring instead to build a textured reconstruction of the cultural encounter between Cook and the Pacific peoples. Informed by his own cultural preconceptions, Cook's first impressions of the Pacific peoples established the groundwork for subsequent encounters.

In a perceptive first chapter entitled “Worlds,” Gascoigne portrays Cook as the product of a traditional, preindustrial society in the throes of revolutionary economic and social change (1). Although divided by significant cultural differences, the British and the Pacific Islanders differed less in terms of technology at first meeting than they later would when steel and steam had replaced wood and wind (62). “Cook's ships,” Gascoigne concludes, “were to be both one of the last emissaries of preindustrial Europe and heralds of a new era of European industrially-based dominance over much of the globe” (77).

The heart of the book explores the development of trading relationships between British interlopers and Pacific Islanders and how trade was understood and integrated into their respective worldviews. As overseas trade grew in importance over the course of the eighteenth century, Britain became more market oriented and less self-sufficient (81). The ritualistic component of trade evident in preindustrial British commerce remained important in the Pacific well into the eighteenth century but was lost in Britain by midcentury as “getting and spending had become … ends in themselves” (85). In the Pacific, trade involved more than a simple exchange of goods. The societies Cook encountered were largely self-sufficient in food and raw materials and traded only for highly valued items in limited supply. Unlike market-oriented British society, Gascoigne maintains that when goods were exchanged in the Pacific, “it often reflected not so much the needs of everyday life but, rather, the outward and manifest expression of a social bond” (85–86). For Pacific Islanders, gift giving was a reciprocal social gesture, “an indication of status and the tribute that status demanded” (86). Ultimately, Gascoigne concludes, trade with Europeans destroyed the Pacific Islanders’ traditional way of life as they exchanged agricultural self-sufficiency for a reliance on imported goods (86).

In the last two chapters of Captain Cook: Voyager between Two Worlds, Gascoigne turns from religion, politics, and war to the more common concerns of sex and death. In two intriguing chapters, Gascoigne notes that a slowly evolving reality of a common humanity shared by Europeans and Pacific Islanders “was enveloped in cultural forms which rendered the basic biological imperatives diverse, multifarious and sometimes difficult for foreigners to fathom” (177). Cook and his crew tried to understand Pacific attitudes toward sexuality and death by making cultural assumptions based upon their own traditions. While this is not a particularly novel observation, Gascoigne provides vivid examples of how the process of cultural conflict and accommodation worked in the Pacific in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Cook's men assumed that they could acquire sexual gratification in return for an appropriate payment of some kind and that sexual practice in the Pacific differed little from Europe (177). However, Cook's men encountered cultures in which sex brought membership in society and, hence, social obligations (177). Sex-deprived British seamen failed to comprehend that in the Pacific sex was not a marketable commodity in the same way it was in Britain.

Gascoigne's discussion of death in the concluding chapter serves to sum up his arguments regarding cultural similarity and difference. In both Britain and the Pacific, funeral rituals provided the means “of reaffirming the permanence of society in the face of the manifest impermanence of the individual” (205). However, Gascoigne draws a sharp contrast between the communal funerary practices of the Pacific peoples and the increasingly private practices of the British. In Britain, funerals were less “all-embracing of the community as a whole” and more private family commemorations of loss (205). Gascoigne observes that in the closely knit societies of the Pacific, death was much more likely to be a public event than it had become in Britain.

After his tragic death on the big island of Hawaii in 1779, the Hawaiians invested Cook's remains with deep spiritual significance. To the men who killed Cook, death did not “sunder all ties and the spiritual force that had animated a person's life could still be attached to the physical remains” (217). Gascoigne concludes that this belief was “part and parcel” of a Pacific worldview that did not distinguish between matter and spirit or the natural and supernatural (211). Integrated by the Hawaiians into their world, Gascoigne concludes that the strength of Cook's spirit, or mana, became “part of their spiritual armory” (217). Ironically, Cook became in death a powerful part of an alien spiritual world that he little understood in life.