Fathoming the Primitive: Australian Aborigines in Four Explorers' Journals

Fathoming the Primitive: Australian Aborigines in Four Explorers' Journals, 1697-1845Author(s): Pauline Turner StrongSource: Ethnohistory, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Spring, 1986), pp. 175-194Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/481773Accessed: 23/11/2008 16:02

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ETHNOHISTORY 33(2):175-194

FATHOMING THE PRIMITIVE: AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES IN FOUR EXPLORERS' JOURNALS, 1697-1845

Pauline Turner Strong University of Chicago

Abstract

Prior to the work of Lewis Henry Morgan, social theorists relied primarily upon explorers' journals for accounts of Australian Aborigines, who were presumed to be among the most primitive of human beings. The journals of explorers Dampier (1697), Cook (1773), Grey (1841), and Eyre (1845) were especially significant, affecting as well as reflecting current theories regarding the primitive.

The Europeans went to the Pacific in search of a physical Antipodes. They found an intellectual and moral antipodes.

Wilcomb Washburn

Before the emergence of the classic ethnography as a distinct genre in the late nineteenth century, a primary source of ethnographic detail for comparative social theorists was accounts of the "manners and customs" of native peoples included in the literature of exploration. These proto-ethnographies were products of explorers' attempts, we might say, to fathom the primitive. The figurative use of this mariners' term is both appropriate and suggestive, for it not only implies an attempt to penetrate to the depths of the dark unknown, but also characterizes this activity as one of taking measure. Indeed, fathoming is measuring of a particular sort: when one ascertains the depth of water by throwing a fathom line overboard, one relies explicitly on one's own position with respect to that which is being measured. In attempting to fathom the primitive, then, explorers were charting the contours of a human unknown by measuring it against the presumably well-known coordinates of their own existence.

For knowledge of Aboriginal Australia, which gradually came to exemplify the primitive Other against which Europeans measured themselves, social theorists relied largely on the soundings of explorers for the two centuries between 1697, when an immensely popular journal by the British pirate William Dampier was published,' and the 1870s, when a productive correspondence was launched between Lewis Henry Morgan and the colonial team of Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt. Four journals of Australian exploration were particularly significant during this period for British scholars seeking to measure and account for the distance between European social life and what they considered the furthest reaches of the primitive. In addition to the buccaneer Dampier's journal, these include James Cook's journal of his 1768-1771 travels, as well as the journals that overlanders George Grey and Edward John Eyre published in the 1840s.2 The latter two journals, based upon administrative experience in addition to exploration, were by far the most extensive and well-informed, and they are notable as early attempts to counter the prevailing typification of native Australians as among the lowest, the most bestial, of human beings.3 This persistent typification had obstructed a more profound fathoming since Dampier described the inhabitants of Australia's western coast as "the miserablest people in the world," confirming predictions that the unknown southern lands were peopled by antipodal beings.4

A complex, reciprocal relationship obtained between what explorers, on the one

STRONG

PAULINE TURNER STRONG

hand, and scholars, on the other, were able to fathom of the Aboriginal Australians. Here we explore this relationship between the literature of exploration and social theory-between the use and the construction of fathom lines-focusing on how the descriptions of Aborigines offered by Dampier, Cook, Grey, and Eyre both reflected and transformed the prevailing scholarly modes of fathoming the primitive.

All Things Contrary

Prior to Cook's expeditions to the South Pacific beginning in 1768, it was unclear whether New Holland, which the Dutch had claimed since the early seventeenth century, stood alone or, rather, was a protruberance of Terra Australis Incognita, a huge "unknown southern land" thought to enclose the southern margins of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. This hypothetical continent was an artifact of classical Greek geography: called the antipodes, it was thought to lie on the opposite side of a spherical earth, providing a necessary balance to the oikoumene, or known habitable world of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The antipodal theory, formalized by Crates of Melos in the second century B.C., was challenged by Ptolemy in the second century A.D. due to his generation's knowledge of the tropics; however, it was revived in the fifth century and passed on to the medieval West in the works of Martianus Capella and Macrobius. These two scholars combined the notion of the Antipodes with the prevalent ancient belief in climatic zones, involving a temperate southern zone cut off from the known world by a lethally hot equator. While Macrobius denied that the Antipodes were actually inhabited, Capella left the question open, describing the Antipodes as a world that has winter when we have summer, night when we have day. Extending this belief, illustrators of medieval maps based on the zonal theory often portrayed vague southern lands inhabited by beings with inversely human characteristics (notably, contraries who walked upside-down, or the classical monsters with backward-turning feet, also called Antipodes, or those with a single huge foot used as a sun-shade for the head, known as Skiapodes.)6

Depictions of an inhabited southern Antipodes persisted into the fifteenth century, although banned as heretical by the Church from the eighth century onward due to the difficulties that a habitable but inaccessible southern continent posed for the doctrines of universal descent from Adam and universal opportunity for salvation.7 In place of classical zonal maps, the Church favored "ecclesiastical" diagrams, such as that of the sixth century Alexandrian monk Cosmas, which mapped Biblical history and cosmology onto the flat, ocean-surrounded world of Homer's time.8 With the rediscovery of Ptolemaic spherical projection in the fifteenth century, the antipodal theory was strengthened, and in 1522 it was reinforced-with the proviso that the Antipodes were, in fact, accessible by sea- through Magellan's sighting of Tierra del Fuego to the south of Brazil. On the influential Mercator World Map of 1569, Tierra del Fuego appears as the tip of a vast hypothetical southern landmass that also edges northward in the vicinity of New Guinea. Though there was skepticism even in the sixteenth century, the classical tradition was tenacious, and the search for Terra Australis Incognita ranked with the search for a Northwest Passage to India as a major motivation force of exploration during the next two centuries.9

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Fathoming the Primitive

Brute Misery

Given the long-standing interest in the mysterious Antipodes, as well as a nas- cent commercial interest aroused by the Dutch East India Company's forays in the early seventeenth century, William Dampier's New Voyage round the World was received with great enthusiasm upon its publication in 1697. The earlier Dutch expeditions had done little to dispel the mystery surrounding the southern continent: the few accounts that were published hardly went beyond characterizing the region as unpromising, peopled by poor, hostile, presumably cannibalistic barbarians.'? Therefore, along with much derring-do, the buccaneer's lively journal provided the British public with its first somewhat detailed account of the South Seas, including New Holland-which Dampier enticingly described as "a part of Terra Australis Incognita" while admitting uncertainty as to whether the latter was an island or a large continent." So eagerly was A New Voyage read that it went through four editions by early 1699, reviving the vogue for travel literature that had faded since the publication of Purchas His Pilgrimes in the first quarter of the century. The most popular and influential of all travel accounts for three- quarters of a century, Dampier's New Voyage was eagerly perused by scholars and the public alike for information about the southern Pacific.'2

Like the Dutch, whose route he followed, Dampier skirted the arid northwestern coast of Australia on his voyage of 1688, but unlike his predecessors Dampier initiated contact with the inhabitants. 3 The pirate tried unsuccessfully to interest them in trade and in serving his crew as water carriers; more successful, due to the use of firearms, were his party's attempts to kidnap natives and to approach campsites, both for the avowed purpose of observation.

Dampier began his description of the inhabitants with a characterization that corroborated, in the main, the published Dutch accounts as well as the persistent fantasies about the contrary people who would be found in the Antipodes. A brutish people even more impoverished than the Hottentots-that seventeenth century ex- emplar of humanity at its lowest-Dampier's "New Hollanders" lacked the goods and skills essential to the European concept of human, as opposed to animal, existence:

The Inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the world. The Hod- madods of Monomatapa, though a nasty People, yet for Wealth are Gentlemen to these; who have no Houses and skin Garments, Sheep, Poultry, and Fruits of the Earth, Ostrich Eggs, etc. as the Hodmadods have: and setting aside their Humane Shape, they differ but little from Brutes.14

Although the New Hollanders' "humane shape" saved them from being classified as brutes, their visage remained "very unpleasing" to Dampier, who highlighted in his extensive physical description their black color and their constant blinking to keep flies out of their eyes. From this, Dampier turned to a description of material culture, subsistence, and social organization-providing details that in some cases belied his opening characterization. He noted, seemingly without cen- sure, that the people had "no sort of Cloaths" but a girdle of grass or tree boughs "to cover their Nakedness," and no houses, "the Earth being their Bed, and the Heaven their Canopy." Rather than inferring that the New Hollanders were can- nibals as had certain explorers before him,15 Dampier reported with apparent admiration, an egalitarian sharing of scanty resources: "Sometimes

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they get as many Fish as makes them a plentiful Banquet; and at other times they scarce get every one a taste: But be it little or much that they get, every one has his part, as well the young and tender, the old and feeble, who are not able to go abroad, as the strong and lusty."

Other aspects of social organization eluded Dampier, except that the people lived in "companies" of twenty or thirty persons. Given this, it would not have been unusual for an explorer to reinforce the charge of brutishness with speculation concerning indiscriminate sexual relations, but Dampier admitted ignorance as to "whether they cohabit one Man to one Woman, or promiscuously." Similarly restrained was his comment regarding religion: rather than presenting the New Hollanders as heathens or pagans, he simply noted that he "did not perceive that they did worship any thing." Dampier's naive but engaging linguistic observation was that "these People speak somewhat thro' the Throat; but we could not understand one word they said."

For Dampier as for the Dutch, the New Hollanders had nothing to offer com- mercially: neither raw materials, produce, manufactures, nor even interest in ex- changing their labor for European goods.16 Dampier noted his astonishment when the men-newly clothed in "an old pair of Breeches," "a ragged shirt," and "a jacket that was scarce worth owning"-failed to work heartily at carrying barrels of water; instead, they "grinn'd like so many Monkeys" and discarded the clothes without regret. Indeed, "neither did they seem to admire any thing that we had"-a generalization illustrated rather weakly (to modern ears, at least) by an anecdote concerning four men who were captured and taken aboard ship, where they ate what was offered them but took no notice of either the ship or its contents, hurry- ing away at the earliest opportunity.

The wealth of detail in Dampier's journal contributed greatly to its popularity, and perhaps also to his success in securing a commission from the Royal Society to lead the first official British expedition to Australia-this time aimed at scholarship as well as profit. Dampier's journal of that 1699 voyage along the western coastline added little to knowledge about the continent and, indeed, reinforced antipathy toward the inhabitants by stating that "all of them have the most unpleas- ant Looks and the worst Features of any People that ever I saw, tho' I have seen a great variety of Savages."17 In the end, the well-tempered empirical observations of Dampier's New Voyage proved to be far less influential than his typification of the New Hollanders as the most miserable and distasteful people in the world. The explorer's Hobbesian characterization of the poor and brutish people who inhabited the southern lands was often reproduced in the voyage literature of the eighteenth century, most notably, in the first major collection of Pacific voyages, which appeared in French in 1756 and in English a decade later (the latter version under the premature title Terra Australis Cognita).'8 Dampier's journal also inspired imitations-including Defoe's A New Voyage Round the World By A Course never sailed before (1724)-and even satire. The most significant of the satires was none other than Gulliver's Travels (1726), which mimicked Dam- pier's style, established kinship between Lemuel and "Cousin Dampier," and located Lilliput and Houyhnhnm-land off the Australian coast.19

Swift, at least, saw that generalizations concerning extreme misery and brutishness such as Dampier's could be understood only as dehumanizing caricatures. Far more commonly, Dampier's denigration of the New Hollanders

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was accepted and used to rank them together with Hottentots, Patagonians, Fuegians, and Eskimos on the "lowest link of mankind." Barely higher on the "Great Chain of Being" than the orangutan, these human types were thought to share the sentience of the animal world but to possess only a minute portion of humanity's reason and spirituality. Such transitional peoples as the New Hollanders retained their debased position in early racial classifications and evolutionary theories, the latter of which transformed a static hierarchy of life forms into a progressive one.20 In 1749, for example, the Comte de Buffon's classification of humanity echoed Dampier on the New Hollanders, calling them "peut-etre les gens du monde les plus miserables, et ceux de tous les humaines qui approchent les plus des brutes"; the New Hollanders were grouped alongside other "nearly marginal humans" living in harsh environments.2

Natural Tranquility

Dampier's journal was not superceded as the most popular account of exploration and the only major source on Aboriginal Australians until 1773, when an account of James Cook's first voyage to the South Pacific was published. This expedition, commissioned by the Royal Society and the Admiralty primarily for the purpose of observing the transit of Venus across the sun in Tahiti, embarked in 1768 amidst much public enthusiasm for the discovery of a "Great South Land." Cook returned in 1771 with evidence that New Holland was not part of a larger, unknown continent, a discovery strengthened by his subsequent voyages, which dispensed with the age-old belief in an immense Antipodes.22

Cook and Joseph Banks, the expedition's naturalist, were pleasantly surprised by their voyage along New Holland's eastern coastline, for their expectations had been colored by Dampier's gloomy appraisal. In fact, as Banks wrote, so "prej- udiced" were the explorers by the pirate's account that, in first glimpsing animate beings as they approached land, "we fancied we could see their Colour when we could scarce distinguish whether or not they were men." Cook and Banks were eager for independent observation and made the most of their opportunities, but they failed to establish much more contact with the peoples on shore than had Dampier. The inhabitants of the vicinity around Botany Bay attempted to prevent the ship from landing, and kept their distance after the crew fired small shot at two armed men. Later, when the ship was being repaired at the mouth of the Endeavour River, friendlier relations were marred by the voyagers' determina- tion to prevent their visitors from taking turtle meat off the ship's deck. The resent- ful Aborigines set fires near the ship, after which Cook resorted to his musket- both parties demonstrating in the common language of violence their mutual in- comprehension concerning the other's notion of value and property.23

This cultural disparity was underscored by the Aborigines' complete lack of interest in European goods: in sharp contrast to the Tahitians whom the explorers had encountered earlier, the Australians left untouched the gifts they found in their huts, and discarded European garments in a heap after a brief wearing. In this instance, however, Cook and Banks demonstrated some insight into the values associated with a hunting and gathering lifestyle, the latter suggesting that the clothes appeared "doubtless as lumber not worth carriage" to these "Indians."

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Even so, the nakedness of both men and women (unmitigated for the explorers by ornaments and body paint) provided a singular conceptual conundrum. Banks'

journal entry is revealing: "Of Cloths they had not the least part but naked as ever our general father was before his fall, they seemed no more conscious of their nakedness than if they had not been the children of Parents who eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge."24

What kind of beings were these, who by virtue of their unabashed nakedness seemed to stand outside the fallen family of man? Cook and Banks did not go so far as to speculate with the seventeenth century Dutch polygenist Issac de la Peyrere that the New Hollanders were not descendants of Adam; instead, they understood their problem in ethnological terms, looking for physical, linguistic, and material signs of Aboriginal relationships to the peoples of New Guinea and other Pacific islands.25 Nor did Cook and Banks join in the common typification of the people as near brutes. Physically, they were "far from being disagreeable," according to Cook, and rather than ferocious, "a timorous and inoffensive race, no ways inclinable to cruelty." Cook's only recourse to the rhetoric of bestiality occurred as an analogy: "they seem to have no fix'd habitation but move about from place to place like wild Beasts in search of food." Banks avoided even this, likening these to a more familiar nomadic people, the Arabs.26

If neither polygenesis nor hierarchical classification guided Cook and Banks in their attempts to fathom the Aborigines, the influence of primitivism is evident in their perception of a contented, uncorrupted people living in the abundance of "the pure state of Nature." Both journals feature a paean to the natural life, Cook's entry on New Holland closing in sharp contrast to Dampier's influential typification.

From what I have said of the Natives of New-Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb'd by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Houshold-stuff etc., they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholesome Air, so that they have very little need of Clothing and this they seem to be fully sencible of, for many to whome we gave Cloth etc. to, left it carlessly upon the Sea beach and in the woods as a thing they had no manner of use for. In short they seem'd to set no Value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one ar- ticle we could offer them; this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities.27

Here, like Dampier, Cook measured the natives of New Holland against Euro- peans primarily by what they lacked, but he turned the former's perception of miserable poverty on its head, seeing instead the virtue of a tranquil and egalitarian simplicity. Seeking to understand Aboriginal disregard for European goods, Cook resorted to two contemporary forms of explanation. First, environmental deter- minism accounted for the Aborigines' limited needs while, in addition, a stoical or "hard" form of primitivism accounted for their proportional wants. The latter was a subjective, relativistic explanation involving Aboriginal satisfaction with a condition that Europeans would consider wretched. Cook's passage acknowledges a disparity between Aboriginal and European values, and explicitly criticizes the

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social conflict engendered in Europe by inequality and the pursuit of luxuries.28 The line Cook used to fathom the Aborigines was as conventional as Dampier's

and remained largely unsubstantiated in the journal. Nevertheless, through acknowledging the possibility of a difference in values, Cook was able to arrive at an explanation for two apparent features of Aboriginal life-egalitarianism and indifference to European commerce-that remained astonishing to Dampier given his perception of pervasive misery. The Tranquil New Hollander, however, was not destined to replace the Wretched New Hollander in public discourse. Banks, who had vacillated during the journey regarding Aboriginal character, gave official testimony in 1779 that characterized the New Hollanders as treacherous, though cowardly. More significantly, Cook's typification was not even available in print for over a century because his editor, John Hawkesworth, emphasized the romantic or "soft" primitivism of the Tahitians, meanwhile transporting Cook's primitivist reflections on the natives of New Holland to the people inhabiting a harsher southern region, Tierra del Fuego (whom Cook had actually described as "in a word ... miserable"). Rather than praise Aboriginal happiness, Cook was made to close his remarks with the vapid disclaimer: "I have faithfully related facts, the reader must judge of the people for himself."29

Rude Barbarity

The judgment that prevailed into the nineteenth century was more akin to Dam- pier's than to Cook's. The privateer's assessment continued to be widely quoted, even after 1788, when descriptions of Aboriginal Australians by the English col- onists became available. A few sympathetic appraisals of Aborigines appeared in journals of exploration and colonization, especially after 1830, but these foundered in a sea of general disdain.30 The scholarly consensus, dependent on first-hand accounts, was no less negative than public opinion. Scholars working within the two dominant theoretical paradigms of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries-the social evolutionism of the French and Scottish Enlighten- ment, and the Biblical paradigm of the ethnological tradition-continued to rank Aboriginal Australians on the bottom of a human hierarchy.

In the evolutionism of the Enlightenment, hunting peoples-particularly the American Indians-represented the lowest (or "rudest") of four developmental stages based upon modes of subsistence. Unlike the static Chain of Being, the Enlightenment hierarchy stressed a common human nature and "perfectibility": the possibility of "advancement," given a conducive environment, from hunting through the more socially-differentiated stages of pastoralism, agriculture, and commerce. But when the model was applied to Aboriginal Australians, the presumed bestiality of the lowest stage was often stressed over perfectibility. Particularly notable are the descriptions of Lord Monboddo, Thomas Malthus, and James Cowles Prichard, each of whom utilized the four-stage hierarchy even while disputing other aspects of the Enlightenment theory. For instance, the first volume of Monboddo's Origin and Progress of Language (1773) presented Dampier's New Hollanders as illustrative of the link between humans and the orangutan; here, in the "lowest stage of barbarity," humans had advanced only slightly beyond the "brutish insensibility" of the animal world through developing language.3

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For Malthus, too, Aboriginal Australians exemplified "the lowest stage of human society": the second and subsequent editions of his Essay on the Principles of Population, which buttressed his influential theory of 1798 with comparative material, featured Aborigines in considering the checks to population in that "lowest" stage. Posing a question taken from Hawkesworth's edition of Cook- how is the population maintained at the sparse level that the subsistence base re- quires?-Malthus found an answer in the description of "marriage by capture" featured in the 1798 journal of David Collins, the early governor at Botany Bay. Asserting that "the prelude to love in this country is violence, and of the most brutal nature," Malthus presented the Australians' "barbarous mode of court- ship" as a cruel but effective form of population control.32

A similar conception of the Aborigines' lowly status appeared in the writings of ethnologist James Cowles Prichard, although his commitment to the Biblical version of human origins led him to insist on a clear break between beasts and man. The first and second editions of Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (1813, 1826), the major work of the ethnological tradition, characterized the natives of New Holland as among "the rudest and most destitute savages found on the face of the globe." Prichard took the egalitarianism that both Dampier and Cook had reported with admiration as evidence of a "rude unimproved state," and considered the physical condition of the Aborigines to be no less rude. Emphasizing the New Hollanders' "considerable resemblance to the negroes of Africa," Prichard included two passages that indicated a special proximity to brutes: Dampier's typification and a more recent description by Gover- nor Collins. The latter description, which Prichard pronounced indisputable, closes:

Many had very prominent jaws; and there was one man, who, but for the gift of speech, might well have passed for an orang-outang. He was remarkably hairy; his arms appeared of an uncommon length; in his gait he was not perfectly upright; and in his whole manner seemed to have more of the brute and less of the human species about him than any of his countrymen.33

Within Prichard's version of ethnology, a resemblance to Africans or brutes did not signify a transitional stage between apes and humans. Nor did Prichard believe that this resemblance indicated degeneration from the original human condition of perfection, like his fellow comparative anatomist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who followed the Biblical frame of reference more closely. Rather, Prichard considered "rudeness" to indicate an early developmental stage of the human species, which was unitary and distinct in origin. By the time of Prichard's Researches, both assumptions had already been challenged: the distinction between humans and apes by Monboddo, and the unity of humanity by Lord Kames, whose Sketches of the History of Man (1774) suggested a "polygenetic" alter- native. As the century progressed, comparative anatomists increasingly departed from the monogenetic orthodoxy, portraying human differentiation as primor- dial rather than as a historical development, and employing a static hierarchy of races inherited from the Chain of Being. Scholarship in this emerging tradition followed the earlier hierarchy in ranking Aboriginal Australians among the most inferior of several human types. An early example is the research of Francois Peron, who, at the turn of the century, concluded that physical strength and moral development were directly proportional, both increasing as one ascended the scale from Tasmanians and Australians to Malayans and, eventually, to Europeans.34

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Primitive Complexity

Whatever their theoretical differences, scholars inclined toward social evolutionism, ethnology, and polygenism alike continued to consider Australian Aborigines as a measure of humanity at its physical and mental nadir. So pervasive was this typification and so devastating were its practical consequences in the nineteenth century that the overland explorers George Grey and Edward John Eyre both offered the ethnographic accounts appended to their journals as cor- rectives to the prevailing misrepresentation. Eyre's opening to his "Manners and Customs of the Aborigines of Australia" (1845) is representative: his purpose, he announced, was to arouse an interest in behalf of "the Australian native," who "by the world at large" is erroneously "looked upon as the lowest and most degraded of the human species, and is generally considered as ranking but little above the members of the brute creation."35

Grey's and Eyre's acquaintance with Aborigines began on various officially- sponsored expeditions into the interior of southwestern Australia between 1837 and 1841. Although their separate expeditions were disappointing in their geographical findings, each explorer gained fame for surviving in an unexpectedly severe environment. Eyre, in particular, returned a hero from his journey across the forbidding Great Bight. In large part, the overlanders' survival was due to their reliance upon native guides-a circumstance that also led to an unprecedented familiarity with Aboriginal culture. Grey's guides, for example, taught him native place names and other key terms (well enough to enable him to publish the most detailed area vocabulary of his day), as well as customs of introduction and gift exchange; over the campfire Grey and his guides traded Aboriginal tales for adventure stories.36

The explorers' accounts also reflect the experience in colonial administration each attained as a result of his expeditions-Grey as Governor of South Australia from 1841 to 1845, and Eyre, his protege, as Resident Magistrate and Protector of Aborigines on the Murray River from 1841 to 1844. The two administrators- each of whom had been raised in a clerical family and came to Australia with liberal ideas-were committed to acculturating Aborigines and integrating them within Christian society. In order to reach this goal, each considered it necessary to break the vicious cycle which connected the negative typification of Aboriginals with official policy towards them. Thus, Grey's and Eyre's ethnographic accounts were intended to combat the ignorance and prejudice regarding Aboriginal character, which, they believed, were largely responsible for the hostility of relations between Aborigines and the British.37

The chronological section of each journal documents the author's growing understanding of Aborigines during the course of exploration. Through recount- ing fairly intimate relations with the native guides as well as poignant encounters with Aboriginal expressions of emotion-notably, Grey's overhearing the mourn- ing for a warrior he had killed and Eyre's witnessing the joyous reunion of his guide with his loved ones-each journal presents Aborigines not as alien, abstract types, but as individuals approachable in their humanness, regardless of the un- familiar natural and social conditions in which they lived. For the most part, familiarity lessened contempt: knowledge gained during exploration coupled with administrative experience facilitated significant new insights into the nature of Aboriginal life. Where others had perceived a nearly cultureless people, Grey demonstrated the complexity and moral force of Aboriginal social institutions;

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where others had portrayed an inherent bestiality, Eyre conveyed the brutalizing nature of European aggression and usurpation of the land.38

The basic insights developed during exploration are expanded in Eyre's "Man- ners and Customs" and Grey's "Observations on the Moral and Physical Condi- tion of the Aboriginal Inhabitants" (1841), the ethnographic accounts that follow each author's chronology of exploration. The comprehensiveness of these descriptions of Aboriginal life, as well as their relation to the burgeoning ethnological tradition, is indicated by their topical organization.39 Grey, for instance, begins with a chapter on "native language," which, in true ethnological fashion, seeks to establish linguistic relationships as proof of common racial origins. Of greatest theoretical import is the subsequent chapter on "laws of relationship, marriage, and inheritance," which was among the earliest descriptions of exogamous clans in Australia. These chapters are followed by more descriptive accounts of "crimes and punishments," "social condition and domestic habits," "food and hunting," "songs and poetry," "funeral ceremonies, superstitions, and remarkable customs," "characteristic anecdotes," and "the influence of Europeans on the natives." Eyre's categories are similar, although he was less theoretically inclined, and his observations are particularly strong in the domains of daily and ceremonial life, as well as the degrading effects of European intrusion.

The most significant portion of these two ethnographic accounts-Grey's discussion of "traditional laws"-opened with an attack on "deistical writers, and philosophers of great note but small experience" who idealized the freedom and equality of natural man, thus overturning "ancient faiths and wholesome laws." Neither liberty nor equality was evident in Aboriginal Australia, wrote Grey; rather, a complex system of exogamous clans bound the Aborigines to "barbarism" by allowing the monopolization of advantages by strong male elders. Extending his argument against primitivism to progressivism, Grey presented these laws as or- dained by Providence (thus their sacredness in the eyes of Aborigines) and so well adapted to Aboriginal needs that progress was possible only through contact with a more civilized society. Aborigines, proclaimed a key passage, are

as apt and intelligent as any other race of men I am acquainted with; they are subject to the same affections, appetites and passions as other men, yet in many points of character they are totally dissimilar to them; and from the peculiar code of laws of this people, it would appear not only impossible that any nation subject to them could ever emerge from a savage state, but that no race, however highly endowed, however civilized, could in other respects remain long in a state of civilization, if they were submitted to the operation of such barbarous customs.40

Grey, then, retained a belief in the inferiority of Aborigines to Europeans, but he located the cause in codes of sacred law rather than in natural endowments or environmental conditions. He believed that it was the will of God and the duty of Christian society to enable the Aborigines to progress by destroying the traditional system, instructing them in liberal, Christian morality, and integrating them within European institutions. Eyre's understanding of Aboriginal inferiority and European responsibility was less systematic, but he, too, advocated acculturation and assimilation-albeit through an initial period of enforced separation from and dependence upon European society.4'

For both Grey and Eyre, the crucial measures of Aboriginal inferiority were religion and the status of women. Both explorers treated Aboriginal religion as

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only an assemblage of superstitions, despite Grey's rudimentary awareness of what he called "a certain mysterious connection" between an animal or vegetable and matrilineal "families" (i.e., totemism), and despite the interest of both, especially Eyre, in the outward aspects of ritual. The status of women received considerably more comment: Grey and Eyre alike were appalled by the deprivations and violence to which Aboriginal women were subjected. Their commentary on this subject is heartfelt but difficult to analyze since, unlike many of their other generalizations, those on the treatment of women are not substantiated by specific incidents that occurred during the expeditions. An influential passage in Grey's account reported that:

The early life of a young woman at all celebrated for beauty is generally one continued series of captivity to different masters, of ghastly wounds, of wanderings in strange families, of rapid flights, of bad treatment from other females amongst whom she is brought a stranger by her captor; and rarely do you see a form of unusual grace and elegance, but it is marked and scarred by the furrows of old wounds.42

While earlier observers had provided graphic descriptions of "marriage by capture" (such as that cited by Malthus), Grey's account would become particularly significant for social theory because it accompanied his discovery of highly regulated betrothals between exogamous matrilineal groups. The coexistence of practices coded as "lawful" on the one hand and "natural" on the other allowed John McLennan's Primitive Marriage (1865) to portray Aboriginal Australian societies as a crucial transitional stage between marriage by capture and a more advanced system of betrothal.43

Grey's "Observations" were significant for the ethnological tradition as well: the third edition of Prichard's standard reference work (1836-47), which earlier had reflected the prevailing typification, features a greatly expanded section on Australian language and "ethnographical traits," primarily drawn from Grey. The ethnographic section opens much like its predecessors: "The Australians are generally considered to be one of the most degraded and savage races in the world, and some writers have represented them as scarcely endowed with reason." The representative opinion quoted here implicitly likens the Australians to the mythical "wild men" of Renaissance thought:

Les plus bruts des hommes, les derniers sortis des mains de la nature, sans religion, sans lois, sans arts, vivans miserablement par couples, totalement etrangers a l'etat social, les Australasiens n'ont pas la moindre idee de leur nudite.

Disavowing this typification, Prichard contended that Grey's emphasis upon the force of law in Australia was far more accurate, endorsing the latter's theory that "the brutalised state in which they are found to exist is not the permanent result of naturally defective reason, but the incidental effect of a complex and artfully contrived system of customs and institutions, which, though injurious in their tendency, clearly evince the possession and exercise of intellectual faculties."44

Grey's insights into Aboriginal social institutions, although coupled with cen- sure, broke one of the paths through which the complexity of these presumably primitive peoples would eventually be appreciated. In contrast, Eyre's primary insight-that the brutality and degradation considered part of Aboriginal character were, in truth, a result of their subordination within an oppressive colonial situation-had little effect upon either theory or practice. Indeed, Eyre's suggested

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remedy of acculturation through separation and enforced dependency would hardly have served to lessen Aboriginal degradation if it had been adopted as official policy.45

Despite the significant strides Grey and Eyre took in understanding the social and cultural conditions of Aboriginal life, the explorers were only marginally successful in their attempts to counter the contemptuous typification of Aboriginal Australians as among the lowest of human beings. In fact, in subsequent decades the typification was strengthened by the "comparative method" of Victorian social evolutionism. Like the Enlightenment theorists, nineteenth century social evolu- tionists took the "lowest" of existing societies as the baseline-the "primitive"-for investigations into the origin and development of civilization. For these post- Darwinian scholars, however, the scale of civilization was transformed from a purely social patina upon a uniform human nature to a correlate of a racial hierarchy. Herbert Spencer's Descriptive Sociology (1874) systematized the correlation between organic and social evolution; here, Aboriginal Australians were grouped along with Fuegians, Andamans, and Veddahs as "Uncivilized Societies: Types of Lowest Races." Most significantly, Australians took a privileged position in Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) due to this assumption that their race represented an early stage of mental evolution:

The Australians rank below the Polynesians, and far below the American aborigines. They stand below the African negro and near the bottom of the scale. Their social institutions, therefore, must approach the primitive type as nearly as those of any existing people.46

To summarize a long tale, significant in its own right: research proceeding according to the evolutionary assumption that Aboriginal Australians typified the primitive state would lead to the accumulation of ethnographic data that ultimately broke down the notion of primitive simplicity altogether. Grey and Eyre anticipated this realization due to their moral and political concerns. Neither doubted the superiority of European over Aboriginal culture, but each perceived that Aborigines could be incorporated within colonial society only if the complexity of their social institutions were understood (and, Eyre added, if their legitimate political grievances were addressed). More than the explorers who preceded them or the social evolu- tionists who followed them, Grey and Eyre were able to abandon the degrading typification they inherited and to begin the process-in which we are still engaged- of fathoming the complex peoples of Australia as they fathomed themselves. That it was an assimilationist program that fostered a deeper fathoming illustrates how the relationship between theory and exploration-more generally, between culture and practice-may itself be unexpectedly, even ironically, complex.47

Acknowledgments

For perceptive readings of this or related work, the author is grateful to Mark Francillon, Nancy D. Munn, David M. Schneider, and George W. Stocking, Jr. A shorter version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of The American Anthropological Association, November 20, 1983.

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Notes

Note to Epigraph: "The Intellectual Assumptions and Consequences of Geographical Ex- ploration in the Pacific," in The Pacific Basin: A History of its Geographical Ex- ploration, ed. Herman R. Friis (New York, 1967), 329.

1. William Dampier, A New Voyage round the World, rpt. in Dampier's Voyages, ed. John Masefield, 2 vols. (London, 1906).

2. James Cook, An Account of a Voyage Round the World, in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, and 1771, ed. John Hawkesworth (London, 1773); modem edition: The Journals of Captain Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour, 1768-1771, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (London, 1955). George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in Northwest and Western Australia, 2 vols. (London, 1841). Edward John Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, 2 vols. (London, 1845). With the publication of Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), which included information on Kamilaroi marriage classes solicited from Fison, the "incidental anthropology" of travel literature gave way to a new era of collabora- tion between "fieldworkers" and social theorists; A. P. Elkin, "The Development of Scientific Knowledge of the Aborigines," Australian Aboriginal Studies, ed. W. E. H. Stanner and Helen Sheils (Melbourne, 1963), 3-28.

3. Typification is used here rather than the more common stereotype or image in order to indicate precisely the kind of fathoming employed in explorers' descriptions of Australian Aborigines. That is, the native peoples of Australia came to represent the "primitive" Other as a common-sense, taken-for-granted ideal type, defined in opposition to a similar typification of the "civilized" Self. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, vol. 1, The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague, 1973), 355-56; vol. 2, Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague, 1964), 248-73; see also Keith Basso, Portraits of "the Whiteman" (Cambridge, 1979), 3-6, passim.

4. Quotations from Dampier's New Voyage are taken from Masefield, Dampier's Voyages, i, 450-58.

5. This analysis considers an earlier time period and differs in outlook from Kenelm Burridge, Encountering Aborigines, A Case Study: Anthropology and the Australian Aboriginal (New York, 1973), the most extensive discussion of the reciprocal influence between concepts of the primitive and ethnographic accounts of Australian Aborigines. Burridge, in emphasizing the benign effect of the Christian belief in human unity, downplays the placement of Australians at the bottom of various racialist and evolutionary hierarchies as well as the European destruction of Australian societies and cultures. See, for documentation of the latter, C. D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, 4 vols. (Canberra, 1970). Much more akin to my approach, though differing in focus, are D. J. Mulvaney, "The Australian Aborigines, 1609-1929: Opinion and Fieldwork," Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand 8 (1958), 131-51, 297-314; Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston, 1963); and Walter Veit, "On the European Imagining of the Non-European World," Australia and the European Imagination, ed. lan Donaldson (Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, monograph 1, 1982), 123-56. The development of the concept "primitive" is discussed more generally in M. F. Ashley- Montague, ed., The Concept of the Primitive (New York, 1968); George W. Stock- ing, Jr., "The Dark-Skinned Savage: The Image of Primitive Man in Evolutionary Anthropology," Race, Culture, and Evolution (New York, 1968), 110-32; Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization (New Brunswick, N.J., 1974).

6. Peter Martyr's Decades of the New World (1555) described the inverse nature attributed to inhabitants of the Antipodes: "Antipodes are they, whyche walke wyth theyr fete dyrectelye contrarye agaynste oures, and have the heaven dyrectlye over theyr heades as we have. Yet have we nothinge in common wyth them, but all thinges contrarye"; in Robert R. Cawley, Unpathed Waters: Studies in the Influence of the Voyagers on Elizabethan Literature (New York, 1940), 49; see also 47-49, 79-81. The explicit portrayal of the inhabitants of the Antipodes as inversely human sug-

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gests that this is an example of delimiting the moral universe through "symbolic inversion"; see The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. Barbara Babcock (Ithaca, 1978). As Hayden White has demonstrated for the concept "savage" more generally, the inverse nature of these antipodal beings was ambiguous, involving utopian as well as pejorative senses; "The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish," First Images of America, ed. Fredi Chiapelli, Michael J. B. Allen, and Robert L. Benson, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1976), i, 121-35. The utopian senses are discussed in articles by J. W. Johnson and W. T. James in Australia and the European Imagination, ed. Donaldson, 41-85. Marcel Destombes, ed., Monumenta cartographica vestustioris aeri, A.D. 1200-1500, vol. 1, Mappemondes, supplement 4, Imago Mundi (Amsterdam, 1964), 12, 43, 85; Hildegard Binder Johnson, "New Geographical Horizons: Concepts," First Images, ed. Chiapelli, ii, 625; Raleigh A. Skelton, The History of Cartography, rev. ed., ed. Leo Bagrow (Cambridge, 1964), 44-45; Raleigh A. Skelton, "Map Compilation, Production, and Research in Relation to Geographical Exploration," Pacific Basin, ed. Friis, 41-42; Norman J. W. Thrower, "The Art and Science of Navigation in Relation to Geographical Exploration before 1900," ibid., 19-20; John Kirtland Wright, Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades: A Study in the History of Medieval Science and Tradition in Western Europe (New York, 1925), 15, 18, 32, 55, 156, 160, 258, 385n; Lawrence C. Wroth, "Early Cartography of the Pacific," Bibliographical Society of America, Papers 38, no. 2 (1944), 163-64.

7. Early in the fifth century, Augustine outlined the theological difficulties in his City of God (xvi, 9), questioning how the postulated inhabitants of the Antipodes could have been descended from Adam, how Christ could have died for them, and how the Gospel could be preached in the four corners of the earth if parts of it were cut off by tropical fires. Despite the orthodox opinion, maps dating from the ninth through the thirteenth centuries which accompanied the commentary on the Apocalypse by the eighth century Spanish Benedictine monk Beatus retained a fourth southern continent, inhabited by Skiapodes, upon the authority of the following passage in Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, a scientific encyclopedia of the preceding century: "Moreover beyond these three parts of the world, on the other side of the ocean is a fourth inland part in the south, which is unknown to us because of the heat of the sun, within the bounds of which the Antipodes are fabulously said to dwell" (Wroth, "Early Cartography," 167). It was the inaccessibility, not the presumably monstrous nature of the inhabitants of the Antipodes that posed doc- trinal difficulties, for monsters were considered degenerate but redeemable descendants of Adam by Augustine, Isidore, and other ecclesiastical authorities. Antonello Gerbi, "The Earliest Accounts of the New World" and Johnson, "Geographical Horizons," First Images, ed. Chiapelli, i, 37-44; ii, 615-34; Skelton, History, 42-43; Norman J. W. Thrower, Maps and Man: An Examination of Cartography in Rela- tion to Culture and Civilization (Englewood Cliffs, 1972), 31, 33; Thrower, "Art and Science of Navigation," 24; Rudolf Wittkower, "Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942), 159-97; Wright, Geographical Lore, 67-68, 154, 157, 248, 259, 264, 386; Wroth, "Early Cartography," 91, 104-7, 109, 164-67.

8. While the map appearing in Cosmas's Christian Topography had narrow parallelograms representing inaccessible lands framing all four sides of a rectangular earth (representing God's tabernacle), Cosmas declared that these lands were inhabited only before they were cut off by the Flood (Johnson, "Geographical Horizons," 622; Wright, "Geographical Lore," 248). For an analysis of the kind of thinking that motivated the ecclesiastical diagrams, albeit in the context of nineteenth century ethnology, see George W. Stocking, Jr., "From Chronology to Ethnology: James Cowles Prichard and British Anthropology, 1800-1850," in James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man, (Chicago, 1973), ix-cx.

9. New World exploration had begun to modify traditional expectations, but before traditions were discarded they were richly elaborated (John H. Elliott," Renaissance Europe and America: A Blunted Impact?," First Images, ed. Chiapelli, i, 11-28). Doubts concerning the existence of Terra Australis Incognita began to arise after

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Francis Drake's voyage of 1577-80, for he saw no sign of lands to the south of Tierra del Fuego when he was driven there by a storm. Cawley, Unpathed Waters, 78; G. R. Crone, Maps and their Makers: An Introduction to the History of Cartography, 5th ed. (Hamden, Conn., 1978), 35, 77-79, 82; G. R. Crone and R. A. Skelton, "English Collections of Voyages and Travels, 1625-1846," Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., 93 (1967), 71-72; Skelton, "Map Compilation," 47, 55.

10. The Dutch East India Company was reluctant to publicize accounts of its expeditions to New Holland lest competitors find some means to exploit the region and its inhabitants-both of which had been disappointing from the commercial perspective. The few accounts emerging from the Dutch expeditions portrayed humans who, if not the physically inverse beings of classical lore, were antipodal in their behavior, lacking the goods and social restraints associated with civilized existence. For the bulk of the century, the most accessible account in English concerning the vicinity of New Holland was by Willem Jansz, who in 1606 discovered the Torres Straits while sailing eastward from the Cape of Good Hope on the way to the Company's base in Java. On the basis of a violent encounter, Jansz described the inhabitants of the islands adjoining the Straits as "savage, cruel, black barbarians." An English version included in Samuel Purchas's collection of travel literature (1613) escalated Jansz's typification, presuming that these barbarians were "man-eaters" as well.

Purchas also published the contrasting account of Pedro Fernandez de Quir6s, the idealistic commander of a Spanish expedition, also in 1606, to "Austrial Del Espiritu Santo." Reflecting his experience with the Melanesians of the New Hebrides, Quir6s described the inhabitants of the southern continent as "simple heathens" inhabiting an earthly paradise, peacefully awaiting conversion. As D. J. Mulvaney has pointed out, the two descriptions in Purchas-the one motivated by material interests, the other by spiritual concerns-were abstractions reflecting contrasting modes of primitivism. It was the "ignoble" variety that subsequent Dutch explorers of New Holland proper would reinforce, beginning with Jan Carstenz, who in 1623 lambasted the mainland as "the most arid and barren region that could be found anywhere on earth; the inhabitants, too, are the most wretched and poorest creatures that I have ever seen in my age or time." Although the kidnapping of a native engendered such hostility that Carstenz was unable to go inland, he did not hesitate to concur in the attribution of cannibalism to these "utter barbarians." Mulvaney, "Australian Aborigines," 131-33; Donald D. Brand, "Geographical Exploration by the Spaniards," Pacific Basin, ed. Friis, 135-37; Jan 0. M. Brock, "Geographical Exploration by the Dutch," ibid, 159. For bibliography on noble vs. ignoble primitivism, see Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York, 1979), 205, n. 62.

11. The journal of the great Dutch explorer Tasman's travels of 1642, which suggested that New Holland was an island, became available in English in 1682. Nevertheless, the belief in Terra Australis Incognita remained strong: the travel collection edited by the Secretary of the Royal Society, Sir Tancred Robinson, speculated that the Dutch had found the sought-after southern continent. Herman Moll, the foremost geographer of the day, eschewed such speculation in the map accompanying Dam- pier's New Voyages, showing only the known western coastline of New Holland (Crone and Skelton, "English Collections," 71-73; Crone, Maps and their Makers, 82).

12. The Purchas collection was first published in 1613, and was reprinted in 1625. The incorporation of the Royal Society in 1662 was another factor in the efflorescence of travel literature in the eighteenth century. Under the Society's auspices, explorers' accounts were published in English for the first time since Purchas (Crone and Skelton, "English Collections," 68). Dampier's journal was the best and the most popular of several journals by buccaneers in the South Seas; Glyndwr Williams, " 'The In- exhaustible Fountain of Gold': English Projects and Ventures in the South Seas, 1670-1750," Perspectives of Empire, ed. John E. Flint and G. Williams (New York, 1973), 27-53.

13. Official Dutch instructions repeatedly urged the use of heavy weaponry and extreme caution when approaching the "South-lands." As Abel Janszoon Tasman was reminded

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in 1644, "barbarians are nowise to be trusted" (Mulvaney, "Australian Aborigines," 133). This policy acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy, ensuring that throughout the century the Dutch would generally remain aboard ship, learning little that might challenge their preconceptions.

14. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Hottentots were commonly cited as the lowest link of mankind, next to beasts, on the "Great Chain of Being" (cf. n. 20, below); Ray W. Frantz, English Travellers and the Movement of Ideas, 1660-1732 (New York, 1967), 53-56; Maximillian E. Novak, "The Wild Man Comes to Tea," The Wild Man Within, ed. Edward Dudley and M. E. Novak (Pittsburgh, 1972), 183-221. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Dampier's phrase as an example of an obsolete usage of miserable to mean "needy, poverty stricken," and stresses that in contemporary usage "nasty" was a very strong word, meaning "disgustingly dirty or foul."

15. Both the translator of Jansz's account and Carstenz attributed cannibalism to the New Hollanders without any evidence apart from their status as barbarians (cf. n. 11). In the supplementary volume to his first journal, Dampier explicitly noted that in all his travels he had never met Anthropophagi: "all nations," he wrote, "have food enough to live on, even the people of New Holland" (Masefield, Dampier's Voyages, ii, 471-72). The qualification embodies Dampier's belief that the New Hollanders lived under the most unfortunate circumstances of all people. For a provocative treatment of the role of cannibalism and other tabooed activities in European descriptions of New World "savages," see White, "Noble Savage Theme."

16. The Dutch, hoping to expand their trade network, found New Holland and its inhabitants extremely disappointing. A keynote of their dismal assessment was the absence of cultivation, as illustrated by an overview of Tasman's second voyage written by the Company in 1644: "Nor did they make any profit by bartering transactions, having only met with naked, beach-roving wretches, destitute of rice, and not possessed of any fruits" (Mulvaney, "Australian Aborigines," 133). A hunting and gathering economy stymied the Dutch pursuit of profit and was central to the typification of the inhabitants as poor and wretched. Here is foreshadowed more theoretical assessments of the following century, in which the primary diagnostic for ranking the Aboriginal peoples of New Holland on the lowest of four stages of human evolution was their mode of subsistence.

17. Dampier, A Voyage to New Holland, ed. J. A. Williamson (London, 1939), 102-3. 18. There is a striking similarity between Dampier's summary description of the New

Hollanders and Hobbes's generalization regarding the natural condition of humanity in the Leviathan (1651): "And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short"; Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976), 16-17; Mulvaney, "Australian Aborigines," 134. The French collection, Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes, was edited by Charles de Brosses. John Callender's three volumes, appearing in 1766 through 1768, was highly derivative. Each editor urged his nation to promote commerce and settlement in the South Seas, proclaiming the potential benefit for the Aborigines in words reminiscent of Dam- pier: "In short, those nations would become men, who have just now nothing human but their figure"; Glyndwr Williams, "Seamen and Philosophers in the South Seas in the Age of Captain Cook," Mariner's Mirror 65 (1979), 5. Dampier's journal was also included in collections edited by James Knapton in 1729 and John Camp- bell in 1744-48. Crone and Skelton, "English Collections," 119-21; P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind (Cambridge, 1982), 38, 260.

19. Frantz, English Travellers, 50-52; Percy G. Adams, Travellers and Travel Liars, 1660-1880 (Berkeley, 1961), 105; Christopher Lloyd, William Dampier (Hamden, Conn., 1966), 69-70; William Hallam Bonner, Captain William Dampier, Buccaneer-Author (Stanford, 1934). Swift's condemnation of colonialism closes Book IV, "A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms," in which he describes the Yahoos (beasts in human form) and the Houyhnhnms (rational beings in the form of horses). Defoe's commercial interests in the South Seas are discussed in Williams, "Inexhaustible Fountain."

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20. Arthur O. Lovejoy, in a classic work of intellectual history, describes the Chain of Being as, prior to evolutionary theory, "perhaps the most widely familiar conception of the general scheme of things, of the constitutive pattern of the universe." On the Chain, "difference of kind was treated as necessarily equivalent to difference of excellence, to diversity of rank in a hierarchy." The hierarchical dimension remained in evolutionary theory, which Lovejoy characterized as the "temporaliza- tion of the Chain of Being." The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), vii, 64.

21. "Perhaps the most miserable people in the world and, of all humans, those who are nearest to brutes" (translation mine); quoted in Glyndwr Williams, " 'Far more happier than we Europeans': reactions to the Australian Aborigines on Cook's voyage," Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand 19 (1981), 509, rpt. in See- ing the First Australians, ed. Ian Donaldson and Tamsin Donaldson (Sydney, 1985), 35-50. George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon's two volumes on human classification, Varietes dans l'espece humaine, were included in his comprehensive Histoire naturelle. Dampier's influence is likewise discernable in the racial classification in the first edition of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's De generis humani varietate nativa (1755), which cited "winking eyelids" as characteristic of the Asian race (one of four) in which Australians were included. James Slotkin, ed., Readings in Early An- thropology (Chicago, 1965), 190; Alan Frost, "The Pacific Ocean: the eighteenth century's 'new world', " Studies on Voltaire 152 (1976), 813; Mulvaney, "Australian Aborigines," 140.

22. The foremost advocate of the search for the southern continent was hydrographer Alexander Dalrymple, who was hoping to lead the expedition to Tahiti himself. Thereafter an opponent of Cook, Dalrymple had to content himself with advocating his theory in his popular collection of southern voyages, published in 1770-71. See n. 2 for editions of Cook's journal; the Hawkesworth edition was among the most widely read works of its century. Frost, "Pacific Ocean," 784-85, 792; Preston E. James, All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas (Indianapolis, 1972), 111; Wroth, "Early Cartography," 176-78; Crone and Skelton, "English Collections," 121-22.

23. Banks quoted throughout from Williams, "Far more happier," 501-4. 24. "Lumber," in contemporary usage, signified useless odds and ends (Williams, "Far

more happier," 503-4). Although in his journal Cook did not set Aboriginal nakedness within what Stocking, in "Chronology to Ethnology," has called the Biblical paradigm, he did so in a letter to his former master, John Walker: "Men women & children go wholy naked, it is said of our first Parents that after they had eat of the forbidden fruit they saw themselves naked and were ashamed: these people are Naked and are not ashame'd" (quoted in Mulvaney, "Australian Aborigines," 136).

25. Peyrere, Prae-Adamitae, or A Theological Systeme Upon that Presupposition that Men were before Adam, quoted in Mulvaney, "Australian Aborigines," 134-45, and Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution, 39; cf. Frost, "Pacific Ocean," 800-801. For polygenist and ethnological approaches see Stocking, "Chronology to Ethnology" and "What's in a Name? The Origins of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1837-1871," Man 6 (1971), 369-90.

26. Cook quoted throughout from Endeavor, ed. Beaglehole, 395-99. Cook's and, especially, Bank's characterization of the New Hollanders as nomadic was significant in later British denials of Aboriginal land rights; Williams, "Far more happier," 511-12.

27. Williams, the first commentator to take this passage seriously, defends it as "assessing an indigenous people against its own background, not against the standards of contemporary Europe" ("Far more happier," 508; "Seamen and Philosophers," 12-13, is more critical of Cook). While at the time of Cook's voyage such sentiments were articulated most fully by Rousseau, Williams finds similar passages in early to mid- eighteenth century descriptions of American Indians with which Cook would have been familiar. Banks's own primitivist passage is more a general disquisition, less tied to the specifics of Aboriginal life. Significantly, Cook's praise of New Holland in its natural state was preceded by an enthusiastic assessment of its potential for

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cultivation by "the hand of industry." Veit, "European Imagining," notes that these passages by Banks and Cook mesh primitivism and progressivism (which he calls, respectively, the "Arcadia" and "superiority" topoi).

28. For the role of the environment in eighteenth century theories of human evolution, see Meek, Social Science, and Stocking, "Chronology to Ethnology," xlix-1. For "hard" primitivism, which celebrates the virtues of moderation, equality, and self- sufficiency in contrast to the "soft" or sensual primitivism characteristic of contemporary portrayals of Polynesians, see Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935); Bernard Smith, Euro- pean Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850 (Oxford, 1960).

29. Quoted in Williams, "Far more happier," 500, 510; see also Smith, European Vi- sion, 22. Banks had written earlier regarding the Fuegians that "with this small share or rather none at all of what we call the necessaries and conveniences of life liv'd about 50 men women and children ... to all appearance contented with what they had nor wishing for any thing we could give them except beads." Hawkesworth, whose edition (see n. 2) was a composite of Cook's and Bank's journals, here expanded upon the sentiments of Banks rather than upon those of Cook. The similarity of Banks's Fuegians to Cook's New Hollanders, and Cook's Fuegians to Dampier's New Hollanders underscores the conventionality of each of these assessments.

30. Mulvaney, "Australian Aborigines," 138-45, summarizes the accounts of Australian Aborigines that appeared between Cook's and Grey's. Among the more sympathetic were those of Governors Phillip and Collins, and explorers Flinders, Sturt, Mitchell, and Strzelecki.

31. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, quoted in Williams, "Far more happier," 511; Frost, "Pacific Ocean," 811; Meek, Social Science, 203-7, 223, passim; Smith, Euro- pean Vision, 70-72; Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1945). The Enlightenment paradigm is expressed memorably in Degerando's instructions to the anthropologist on the Baudin expedition of 1800 to Australia: "The voyageur-philosophe who sails toward the extremities of the earth traverses in effect the sequence of the ages; he travels in the past; each step he makes is a century over which he leaps." Degerando also elaborated the moral potential of such travel: "What more touching purpose than to reestablish the holy knots of universal society, than to meet again these ancient parents separated by a long exile from the rest of the common family, than to extend the hand by which they will raise themselves to a more happy state!" (quoted in George W. Stocking, Jr., "French Anthropology in 1800," Race, Culture, and Evolution, 26-27). Ironically, the anthropologist on the Baudin expedition was Francois Peron, whose research took on more of a racial than a philanthropic orientation (see below).

32. Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principles of Population (Georgetown, 1809), 34-35; Frost, "Pacific Ocean," 815; Mulvaney, "Australian Aborigines," 140-41.

33. Prichard relied on Hawkesworth's edition of Cook and some skeletal evidence in his physical description of the New Hollanders. David Collins, Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (1798), quoted in Prichard, Researches, 1st ed., ed. Stocking, 266; other quotations from 248-72. The second edition was entitled Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (2 vols., London, 1826).

34. Blumenbach did not fully incorporate New Hollanders into his racial classifications until his third edition (De l'unite du genre humain, 1795), which traced two lines of degeneration from an original Caucasian stock. The New Hollanders were seen as the most degenerate of the Malayan race, which was intermediate between the Caucasian and Ethiopian races (Frost, "Pacific Ocean," 814-15; Stocking, "Chronology to Ethnology," xxxviii-xxxix, cxxii). Stocking's introduction to Prichard ("Chronology to Ethnology," xliv-lxi) discusses early polygenism, Prichard's monogenism, his progressivist assumptions (which excluded religion, presented as divinely revealed), and his belief that the original human pair were black. See also Stocking, "The Persistence of Polygenist Thought in Post-Darwinian Anthropology," Race, Culture, Evolution, 42-68. For Peron, see Stocking, "French Anthropology," 29-34; cf. n. 31.

35. Eyre, ii, 153.

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36. George Grey, Vocabulary of the Dialects of Southwestern Australia (London, 1841). Mulvaney, "Australian Aborigines," points out the importance of Grey's and Eyre's accounts. Biographical information is from Geoffrey Dutton, The Hero as Murderer: The Life of Edward John Eyre (London, 1967), and J. Rutherford, Sir George Grey: A Study in Colonial Government (London, 1961).

37. Each explorer's policy recommendation is found in the last chapter of his ethnographic account. Grey's chapter includes his report of 1840 to Lord John Russell, Secretary of State for the Colonies, which earned him the Governorship of South Australia. The later administrative careers of both Grey and Eyre were controversial: Grey was dismissed from the governorship of both South Africa and New Zealand, and Eyre became the center of a major controversy concerning colonial policy after suppres- sing an uprising among black freeholders during his tenure as Governor of Jamaica. See, for the latter case, Bernard Semmel, Jamaican Blood and Victorian Conscience: The Governor Eyre Controversy (Boston, 1963), and Pauline Turner Strong, "Of Pumpkins and Planters: Conflict over Land, Labor, and Race in Jamaica and England, 1831-1868" (M.A. thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1980).

38. Eyre used his guide's reception to chastise "those heartless calumniators, who, brand- ing the savage as the creature of unbridled passions, deny to him any of those better feelings and affections which are implanted in the breast of all mankind" (Jour- nals, ii, 109-10); Grey, Journals, i, 152-59.

39. Eyre, Journals, ii, 147ff; Grey, Journals, ii, 207ff. Stocking discusses the emergence of ethnology as a collective scientific effort in "What's in a Name?" and "Chronology to Ethnology," lxxv-lxxvi.

40. Grey, Journals, ii, 217, 222-23, 374-75. Grey's opposition to progressivism in the realm of religion resembles Prichard's (see n. 34), and likely reflects the views of his childhood mentor and benefactor, Richard Whately, a leading degenerationist. In his lecture "On the Origins of Civilization," Whately argued against Tylorean social evolutionism that savages had degenerated from a higher state conferred upon them through divine revelation, and could not raise themselves from that condition without aid; Whately, Miscellaneous Lectures and Reviews (London, 1861). See Stock- ing, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 75, 98, and 69-109, passim, for the disagree- ment between Whately and Tylor.

41. There is a striking similarity between Grey's position and the assumptions of nineteenth century Protestant missionaries to American Indians as analyzed by Robert F. Berkhofer, Salvation and the Savage (Lexington, Ky., 1965), 6-14 passim. Like Grey, missionaries saw the "functional interrelationships of the various institutions in a society," and thought it necessary to instill simultaneously a superior religion and a superior state of civilization. Similarly, Eyre's policy recommendations resemble those of contemporary American advocates of "removal."

42. Grey, Journals, ii, 226-28, 249. For Eyre, at least, the Aborigines had no religion whatsoever, because they did not have a rationalized belief in a monotheistic Creator (Journals, ii, 355). The development of the Christian religion and the European family would become the two dominant concerns of Victorian social evolutionism; see J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cam- bridge, 1966), 93-102; Peter Cominos, "Late Victorian Sexual Respectability and the Social System," International Review of Social History 8 (1963), 18-48, 216-50; Elizabeth Fee, "The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology," Feminist Studies 1 (1973), 23-39; George W. Stocking, Jr., "Some Problems in the Understand- ing of Nineteenth Century Cultural Evolutionism," Readings in the History of An- thropology, ed. Regna Darnell (New York, 1974).

43. John McLennan, Primitive Marriage: An Inquiry into the Origin of the Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies, ed. Peter Riviere (Chicago, 1970), 31-32. Addi- tionally, Grey's work suggested the link between totemism and exogamy which McLennan developed in his influential paper, "The Worship of Animals and Plants," Fortnightly Review, vols. 6-7 (1869-70). In contrast to McLennan, John Lubbock, the popularizer of Victorian social evolutionism, minimized the existence of law among Australians, one of the "lowest races of men," highlighting instead the violence of

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marriage by capture, brutal subjugation of women, and "communal marriage," the latter inferred from certain ambiguous descriptions Eyre gave in Latin of sexual hospitality to visitors and adolescent sexual freedom; Origin of Civilization (1870), ed. Peter Reviere (Chicago, 1978), 52, 68-74, 363-64.

44. "The most brutish of men, the last species from the hands of nature, without religion, without law, without art, living in poverty as couples, totally estranged from the social state, the Australasians have not the least idea of their nudity" (translation mine); M. Bory de St. Vincent, quoted in James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man, 3rd ed., 5 vols. (London, 1836-1847), v (1847), 267. Cf. Hayden White, "The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea," The Wild Man Within, ed. Dudley and Novak. Prichard quoted from Researches, 3rd ed., 266-67. Eyre's work apparently appeared too late to affect this edition of Prichard, although he did note that two Aboriginal boys recently exhibited at a meeting of the London Ethnological Society supported this assessment; these had been brought to England for schooling by Eyre.

45. Eyre's policy recommendations were based on the course he followed on the Mur- ray River, where he supplied food allotments both for humanitarian motives and to instigate dependency. He was remarkably successful at that post, showing the same skill in defusing hostility by addressing underlying causes that marked him as an explorer (Eyre, Journals, i, 166-74; ii, 148-49, 154-64, 204; Rowley, Destruc- tion, 79-0; Dutton, Hero, 40, 44, 156). Eyre's linking of the perception of degraded character to colonial domination is a line of thought that was not to be explored systematically in anthropology for over a century, e.g., in Dell Hymes, ed., Reinvent- ing Anthropology (New York, 1969).

46. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society, ed. Leslie White (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 50-51. Herbert Spencer, Descriptive Sociology (London, 1874), iii, 20. Spencer cited Eyre selectively in support of his classification. Darwin himself accepted the customary hierarchy of humanity inherited from the Chain of Being and polygenist thought, predicting, for instance, that sometime in the future the savage races and the an- thropoid apes would be exterminated, so that the break between species "will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between men in some more civilised state ... than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla" (quoted in Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 113). For discussions of nineteenth century evolutionism, see Stock- ing, "Dark-Skinned Savage," "Some Problems," and Race, Culture, and Evolu- tion, 69-109, passim; for the place of Aboriginal culture in evolutionary theory, see Mulvaney, "Australian Aborigines," 297-314, and "The Darwinian Perspective," Seeing the First Australians, ed. Donaldson and Donaldson, 68-75.

47. The "long tale" is the subject of ongoing research by the author; cf. Burridge, En- countering Aborigines; Levi -Strauss, Totemism; Mulvaney and Stocking as cited in n. 46. The complex relationship between culture and practice in intercultural encounters in Hawaii, Fiji, and New Zealand is explored in Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, 1985) and Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Struc- ture in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor, 1981).

Submitted 26 October 1984 Accepted 17 May 1985 Final revisions received 1 January 1986

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Fathoming the Primitive: Australian Aborigines in Four Explorers' Journals

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