Amid the recent flurry of books on Captain Cook and the voyages undertaken in his command (1768–80), these two very readable books stand out. Glyndwr Williams's collection, Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments and Anne Salmond's Trial of the Cannibal Dog offer a sound course amid the ever-changing political winds of Cook scholarship. Each volume contributes to the expanding initiative to render both sides of the colonial encounter comprehensible and to reveal the shifting balances of power and indigenous agency that made contact such an extraordinary and unpredictable event. Striving to keep our sense of inevitability at bay, and shunning both Cook idolatry and Cook vilification, each book confirms that these voyages continue to provide scholars with the most remarkable accounts extant for studying Pacific and European peoples alike in the later eighteenth century.

Captain Cook brings a diverse range of specialists to the task at hand, from British, Russian, French, American northwest, and Polynesian historians to anthropologists and cultural critics. Williams provides a concise introduction and, later in the book, an incisive summary of the trends in Cook scholarship since the eighteenth century. Early chapters on Cook's English connections, by Rosalin Barker, Richard C. Allen, and Andrew S. Cook address Cook's relationships with Whitby shipbuilders, Quakers, and the Royal Society, respectively. The next four chapters offer original perspectives on Pacific-European encounter, focusing on Cook's account of Aboriginals at Endeavor River (Stuart Murray), his intercultural conversions at the hands of Polynesians (Anne Salmond), the permanent insufficiencies of Cook's and subsequent Europeans’ understandings of native Hawaiian culture (Pauline Nawahineokala’i King), and the multidirectional nature of power in the voyagers’ contacts with the peoples of Nootka Sound (Daniel Clayton). As Clayton sagely remarks, Cook's voyages remain important to us “because they open up much wider questions about the impossibility of producing a true or authentic knowledge about the other” (113), and he and other authors in this section convincingly demonstrate how unsettled, and unsettling, the truth effects of the journal accounts continue to be. In the next section, John Robson compares the very different backgrounds and hence marine cartography of Cook and Louis de Antoine Bougainville, Robin English considers other of Cook's French well as Spanish rivals, and Simon Werret locates Russian adulation of Cook in the late eighteenth-century Baltic nobles’ propensity to follow court dictates and mimic the lifestyles and habits of western Europeans. The three final chapters consider Cook's legacies, where Williams's essay is joined by Sujit Sivasundaram's insightful comparison of the images of the martyrdoms of Cook and Rev. John Williams created by nineteenth-century British missionaries, and Andrew Lambert's thoroughly enjoyable account of his experience of “extreme History” as a member of the Endeavour replica's crew in the voyage of 2001. Throughout the book, memory, storytelling, personal anecdote and theatrical metaphors are woven into the weft of historical narrative, demonstrating how far Cook studies have come from the days of J. C. Beaglehole's authoritative but decidedly imperial history.

Anne Salmond's Trial of the Cannibal Dog continues this reorientation of our understanding of the Cook voyages and their ethical implications through a richly textured ethnographic account of cross-class and cross-cultural relations—an account that suggests both the impossibility of a redemptive imperialism, and also the considerable successes, despite all odds, that made it seem provisionally within reach of Polynesians and voyagers alike. Across the gulf between societies where ancestral mana (sacred power) and genealogy structured and gave meaning to the quotidian as well as the great event, and those where private property, commerce, and a distant Providence shaped webs of identity and debt, South Pacific peoples and the Cook voyagers met, communicated, made love and war, and were individually and collectively altered by the experience. It is the mutuality of cultural exchange, and particularly the transculturation of Cook and his officers and crew, that is the most original aspect of Salmond's wide-ranging interpretation, and it sheds new light on two important episodes in Polynesian and western history: the Maori “massacre” of seamen at Grass Cove, and the death of Captain Cook at the hands of Hawaiians.

By the second voyage, Cook and his men could be said to have begun to cross over at least partially into Polynesian culture, exchanging gifts, clothing, and names (the latter part of taio, or ritual friendship, which also involved “kissing” or nose rubbing), being tattooed, appreciating or tolerating alter sexual customs. Grass Cove, where a boatload of seamen from the Adventure, the consort vessel, were killed, dismembered, and partially eaten by Maori, complicated the voyages’ engagement with indigenous culture. Lieutenant James Burney and the Raiatean Mai were among the armed party who discovered the body parts of their comrades strewn around the beach, roasting on fires or chewed up by dogs. The incident greatly traumatized the men, upset the discipline of shipboard life, and ultimately fascinated the British public with this seemingly irrefutable evidence of South Sea cannibalism. It also raised serious questions about their commander's previous positive assessments of the Maori and their “stage” of civilization. Cook had given admiring accounts of the “manly” and “honorable” nature of the Maori in his journal of the first voyage, and even after he caught wind of the massacre, he suspected that the stimulus for the violence had lain with the British crew. Salmond argues that it was in fact a prior incident, taking place on the Resolution about three weeks before (after the two ships had lost each other in a thunderstorm), that had turned local Maori against the voyagers. Cook's party had also come ashore near Grass Cove in search of vittles and greens. In the course of their various tasks, the head of a slain young Maori had been bartered for from the victorious warrior (who also displayed the fallen man's heart on the prow of his canoe) and brought back to the Resolution. Lieutenant Charles Clerke used it to conduct a mock “experiment,” cutting a piece of flesh from the cheek, grilling it, and then offering it to a Maori on board, who ate the meat with an exaggerated show of pleasure. This mutual parody—of European science and expectations and of cannibalism—however, horrified Cook's crew, led to an outpouring of journal entries about the meaning of such behavior, and most importantly cruelly affronted the family of the young man who had been slain, whose mana had thereby been sacrificed to illegitimate ends. As Salmond explains,

But the consequences of Grass Cove did not end there. When Cook returned to the area during the third voyage, with Mai and several of the same seamen and officers on board, he met up with the man who had initiated the attack on the Adventure’s crew. Local people clearly expected him to take revenge; so did Mai, who pointed to the man and shouted, “Kill him!” (316); and so, too, did his sailors, who felt that their commander must punish the “savages” who had shown such brutality to their comrades. Cook, however, in conformity with his code of practice established on the first voyage, refused to take action, promising the Maori man in question he would not be harmed, and leaving the Sound rather than precipitate further conflict. The principles of enlightened exploration clashed with the imperatives of class and local culture: from a Maori point of view, Cook behaved like a man without mana, and his own crew agreed. Reputation and the performance of rank and honor were equally crucial to both social hierarchies, Maori and European, and Cook had failed the test. This was the context for the mock “trial” of the title, when some seamen, humiliated at the shows of disrespect shown their commander by unrepentant Maori, court-martialed a New Zealand dog, and then executed, cooked, and ate it. This prank, as Salmond notes (in the spirit of Robert Darnton's famous analysis of French apprentices’ practical joke of slaughtering their mistress's cats), “showed their captains how cannibals ought to be handled” (317). But the trial of the cannibal dog also signaled a greater crisis of authority, the consequences of which Cook would have to deal for the rest of the voyage (which is to say for the rest of his life).

Cook's death at the hands of angry Hawaiians at Kealakekua Bay in February 1779 confirmed his crossing over into another culture and his consequent loss of face to his own men. As Salmond rather lyrically puts it, after years of material and ritual exchanges with Polynesians, “according to Pacific understandings, something of the life force of those people had entered his being. Such relationships, especially between ariki [chiefs, living representatives of the gods], were often turbulent and dangerous” (393). Cook could satisfy neither constituency: his men thought he valued the lives of “savages” over their own; the islanders thought him weak for refusing to engage in sexual commerce or use maximum force to avenge insults; he had to resort to increasingly violent mutilations and floggings to maintain his authority. Hence “Toote,” as his men now derisively called him (the Tahitian transliteration of his name), or “Lono Lahi” as the Hawaiian high chiefs honorifically named him, could be said to have been undone by the very arts of discovery at which he excelled, which had enabled him to cross over into Polynesian culture while also (he thought) keeping a foot in the “civilizers” camp. For this, and for much more, the Cook voyages, their ethical implications, and their multiple readings will continue to fascinate and compel.