How Was Captain Cook a Symbol of His Age? How

Question

Examlex · Accepted Answer

The Answer is Captain Cook was a symbol of his age in two ways. He represented the European wish to colonize and control other parts of the world, and he represented the wish to observe, experiment, and contribute to the assembly of universal knowledge that characterized the Enlightenment. His voyages of exploration served both of these objectives. The first voyage had an advertised, scientific goal and included several scientists sent to observe and describe the plants, animals, and natural phenomena of the Pacific, but also had a secret mission to claim the unknown Southern Continent for Great Britain before the French or Dutch could do so. His third voyage, more explicitly combining the two elements, carried a cargo of European domestic plants and animals with which to seed the Pacific. In particular, Australia was deeply affected by this type of expansionism. After the British officially took possession of eastern Australia, they planned to make it a source of needed raw materials as well as a strategic outpost. They introduced sheep for wool and intended to harvest timber and flax. They also introduced people, including a colony of British convicts as well as free migrants, who increased in numbers to over 1 million in less than a century. The remaining indigenous Aborigines, a group already decimated by Afro-Eurasian diseases to which they had no immunity, were forced from their land by a colonization that was, compared to that of the Americas, faster and more decisive. Cook and other Pacific explorers also provided written accounts that introduced Europeans to the Australian Aborigines, Hawaiians, and other indigenous peoples of Oceania. This information, like their botanical and zoological discoveries, was incorporated into the universal knowledge-gathering project of Enlightenment-era scientists and social scientists. Thinkers like Bernier, Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and the Comte de Buffon used Cook's discoveries to fit Pacific peoples into their project of classifying all the world's peoples according to a combination of physical characteristics such as skin color and hair texture, and social characteristics like their type of government. In this system of racial classification and hierarchy, Pacific peoples fit somewhere in the middle, between Europeans top) and Africans bottom). In some cases, their homes on isolated tropical islands led European observers to consider them as "noble savages," people who had not been corrupted by culture and society. However, Captain Cook made a final contribution to the attitudes of Europeans with his violent death at the hands of the Hawaiians in 1779; afterward, Pacific cultures were viewed as "darker" by European colonizers and seekers of universal knowledge.

How Was Captain Cook a Symbol of His Age? How

Definitions: