This lucid book is critically and historically illuminating, and immensely pleasurable. Sanborn brings his careful historical, biographical and ethnographical study of the nineteenth-century Maori, who by the 1830s were being described as “the most impressive people that Europeans had ever encountered” (6) to his dense familiarity with the works of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville. While he concentrates on two novels and two Maoris, Te Ara and Te Pehi Kupe, his analysis resonates with early nineteenth-century cultural and literary studies more broadly, and suggests new approaches to a range of topic in that period – masculinity, settler colonization, race relations and the interrelation of literature and politics.

Sanborn maps an early nineteenth-century Western fascination with Maori manhood and reexamines two key early novels in that light. He argues that what guided Maori-mania in the West was less “colonialist self-interest” than

Sanborn argues that Cooper's and Melville's important novelistic conceptions were influenced in particular by accounts of two different Maori chiefs – for Cooper, it was Te Ara; for Melville, Te Pehi Kupe. So in four elegant chapters, Sanborn offers (for the first time) biographies of those two chiefs, both extraordinary men, in which he aims not only to trace out what Melville and Cooper could know but also to “give an accurate imaginative shape” to the entire trajectory of their lives, in order not to subordinate them in his account to paheka (white) art; and he counterposes those biographies with startlingly new readings of those critically canonical novels.

Sanborn uses his analysis of Cooper's familiarity with Te Ara and his fascination with the Maori more generally to make two “counterintuitive” claims about Last of the Mohicans: first, that Magua is not the villain of the novel; and second, that Cooper's evident admiration for and sympathy with Magua evidences “a more general sympathy with the spirit of patriotic liberation movements” across the world, “a spirit that he thought every right-thinking American should support, wherever it appeared” (45–46). Cooper's sympathy, Sanborn insists, was not pie-eyed, but rather tempered by personal tragedies and a “haunting” awareness of forces that “limit both chiefs and nations” (46–47).

In Melville's case, the trail is a bit more elusive. Sanborn's counterintuition here is to look away from the places Melville actually visited and toward the imaginative presence of the Maori and New Zealand in his novels after Omoo. Sanborn attends to biographical and textual traces to make the case that Te Pehi Kupe impacts on the way Melville thinks about later works, and specifically on his “attraction to ‘ancient dignity,’ the grand, primal quality that he associated with ‘certain phenomenal men’” and republican struggles. Sanborn urges his readers to see Melville not just as a “celebrant of the ‘common dignity of manhood,’” but also as a man deeply attracted to “the heroic tone peculiar to ancient life” (96). In this way, Queequeg emerges, contrary to a long critical tradition, as the embodiment not so much of “love,” evidencing Melville's democratic humanism, but rather of a revolutionary manhood that resists “the proud gods and commodores of this earth” (106, 112). Similarly, Melville's growing awareness of the Maori influences his post-Typee understanding of tattooing, which in Moby-Dick, Sanborn argues, becomes a “special category of signs” that manifests “the presence of great power and worth.” The “antithesis of whipscars,” tattooing in Moby-Dick functions like Maori conceptions of mana – the reputation of forceful manliness, of the law, nature, god, or power (123). His reading of tattooing in the novel leads him to pose yet another counterintuitive claim about the novel, that the whale itself is not an abstract symbolic entity “but a formidable champion … a fellow-traveller” to the harpoonists and Ahab (127).

Sketching Sanborn's intriguing claims does not begin to capture the charm of his project, which is so readable, even captivating, such a startling and rewarding engagement with both men and literature.