Studies of the Pacific have long been in the shadow of Bernard Smith's seminal European Vision and the South Pacific (1960). This work takes further his dexterous melding of pictorial and textual sources to uncover the mentality of those late eighteenth-century Europeans who first encountered what was for them the new world of the Pacific. It does so by focusing on Cook's second voyage and particularly the paintings of William Hodges who accompanied Cook on this voyage. The book includes a generous serving of color plates of his vivid and dramatic works that, like the book as a whole, accords with the high standards of production we have come to expect from Cambridge University Press.

The concentration on the second voyage provides a foundation for drawing together both its artistic representation and the texts that also derive it—not only from Cook himself but also others on board including, notably, that formidable Germanic father-and-son duo, Johann Reinhold and George Forster. These two did much to make life more difficult for Cook, but their intellectual depth and range led to their producing some of the greatest and most reflective travel accounts of all time. This has prompted considerable scholarly attention that is not fully reflected in this work's bibliography (H. West, “The Limits of Enlightenment Anthropology: George Forster and the Tahitian,” History of European Ideas 10 [1989]: 147–60, is, e.g., highly pertinent to the themes of the book). More attention to George Forster's later career, which included an enthusiastic tract in support of British settlement at Botany Bay, would also have widened the discussion about his views about such issues as European colonization on the second voyage.

In drawing on the work of the Forsters and other second voyage journalists along with the art of Hodges, Guest widens our understanding of these diverse forms of representation by relating them to the dominant genres, whether intellectual or artistic, of the period. In particular, in considering the written texts Guest helps to explain the way in which they were shaped by the discourse of stadial development with its emphasis on stages of development of human society, generally with European man at its acme—a form of the “Science of Man” that the Scottish Enlightenment did so much to cultivate. An important dimension of her analysis is the way in which theory and observation did not always match. One of the most original perspectives of the work is its attention to gender issues and the way in which the Pacific journalists endeavored to incorporate what they saw in Pacific societies into a model in which the treatment of women was an index of progress. And yet the far from ground-down women of the Pacific whom they encountered and who were portrayed in Hodges's paintings could not be so neatly secured within such a tight European corset. Nonetheless, the connection between an increasingly dominant masculine West and a Pacific often portrayed in feminine form is given substance here through a careful reading of both visual and textual sources, thus drawing the Pacific within some of the forms of Orientalizing discourses so influentially analyzed by Edward Said.

Theory and observation also did not neatly match when discoursing on the connection between industry and progress in Pacific societies such as Tahiti, where, as Joseph Banks wrote on the first voyage, the population seemed to be spared the curse of Adam and the need to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. Such a comment—along with Cook's description of the Australian Aborigines as being “far more happier than we Europeans” (Cook's Endeavour Journal, ed. J. C. Beaglehole [Cambridge, 1955], 2:399)—is a reminder that on the first voyage, at least, the paradigm of evolutionary progress was not always entirely dominant. Indeed the impact of Scottish stadial theorizing tends in this work to be too readily assumed, and a more focussed discussion of its major tenets and the way it can be demonstrated that they influenced the journalists discussed would have helped to provide a securer basis for this approach.

Such a strong statement of theme is particularly necessary in a book such as this, which roams refreshingly far. For its diverse subject matter goes beyond the actual voyage to encompass the return of the Tahitian Mai to London and an epilogue with a detailed and original analysis of Hodges's last great work, Peace and War (1794). Holding together such diverse elements takes a clear thematic focus that is not always evident, even though each of the studies in different ways adds to our understanding of the character and impact of Cook's epoch-making second voyage. For this is a work that demonstrates how the encounter with the Pacific was a distant mirror that did more to reflect the European observers than the island people they were depicting. With an usually broad interdisciplinary range, Guest sheds light on the way in which Pacific voyaging can also be a path to a better understanding the Europe from which these voyagers set out and to which they often returned with a changed view of the world.