The final problematic term in the title is “cross-cultural”, which I overuse because it is a handy shorthand for encounters, interactions and mutual (mis)conceptions between indigenous people and foreigners. Yet “cultural” is among the least transparent of words and has at least three strikes against it in this context. First, it is abstract: “culture” is a concept, not a thing; and cultures don't meet or encounter each other, people do. To reify such interactions as cross-cultural assumes that dramatic differences in language, thinking, history and way of life between two seemingly homogeneous communities are what matters when their members come together. This distanced binary perspective has its points, especially politically, but in principle it essentializes each side as permanent and monolithic and in practice privileges élite male perspectives, taken as opposed. By contrast, a close look at particular past situations may also reveal multiple alliances between local inhabitants and foreigners whose respective unstable groupings intersected ambiguously and fractured internally along lines of gender, age, vocation, place, and rank, class or status. I still use “culture” strategically, but pluralized to imply flux and diversity rather than fixity or uniformity.^[7]

Second, cultural is ethnocentric: in the social sciences and increasingly in popular usage, culture has the naturalized anthropological connotation of a bounded, collective pattern of belief, thought and behaviour. Yet, so far as we can tell, Oceanian people did not usually objectify their total way of life in this fashion, even in confrontation with Europeans, though indigenous people these days often appropriate the term in oppositional political rhetoric.

The third problem with cultural is anachronism: in English, culture only acquired its naturalized modern anthropological meaning (Edward Burnett Tylor’s “complex whole”^[8]) from the mid-to-late nineteenth century. This usage emerged out of an ambiguous raft of earlier senses, literal and metaphoric, substantive and abstract, as traced in Raymond Williams’s outline of the convoluted history of the word and its cognate term “civilization”.^[9] Already multivocal at the end of the eighteenth century, culture denoted the process of “cultivation”, both literally in animal or crop husbandry and metaphorically in development of the human intellect: “The mind is strengthened by the cultivation of the arts and sciences”, pronounced the English translator of La Pérouse’s narrative in 1798.^[10] However, a detailed search turned up few uses of culture or its derivatives by Oceanic voyagers before the 1830s and those always in the primary physical sense of husbandry. It is entirely absent from the Endeavour journals of the Englishmen James Cook (1728–79) and Joseph Banks (1743–1820) and from the Investigator and other journals by Matthew Flinders (1774–1814).^[11] In the published narrative of the Endeavour voyage, though, Cook’s editor John Hawkesworth (1715?–73) replaced Cook’s wording “rais'd with very little labour”, said of the “produce” of Tahiti, with the phrase “with so little culture”. Culture also occurs in passing in the published narratives of the French voyagers Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse (1741–88) and Antoine-Raymond-Joseph de Bruni d'Entrecasteaux (1737–93), with the same incorrect and demeaning implication that the people in question — the Samoans and the Kanak of New Caledonia, respectively — had no or little familiarity with “the art of culture”.^[12]

Embedded in these casual assertions that Pacific Islanders ignored agriculture is a tacit shift from purportedly empirical fact to loaded judgement. This verbal slippage betokens a universalist but profoundly ethnocentric developmentalism which was given detailed expression with respect to Oceania by Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–98), the German naturalist who sailed on Cook’s second voyage of 1772–75 and in 1778 published a treatise on natural philosophy. For Forster, the “cultivation” — or its synonym “culture” — of crops and animals was a prerequisite for “progress” in “civilization”:

The presumption of a critical causal nexus between agriculture and civilization was a standard trope in developmentalist or social evolutionary theories from the Enlightenment onwards.^[14] Forster’s version drew on the idea of a common stadial or graded development of civil society from savagery to civilization proposed by Scottish philosophers such as Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), whose treatise on the “progress towards maturity of knowledge and civilization…in different nations” included an equally loaded allegation about “Negroes”: “[T]hey live upon fruits and roots, which grow without culture.”^[15]

By the late-eighteenth century, the abstract noun “civilization” denoted both the Enlightenment idea of a general secular process of human development from a primordial state of savagery and the ultimate outcome of that trajectory: a condition of refinement or social order, of being “cultivated” or “civilized” — “civil society” in English — which was supposedly realized in (European) modernity and was set in binary opposition to “savagery” or “barbarism”. In German, Zivilisation and Kultur were synonymous whereas by the early-nineteenth century the English term culture was increasingly reserved for intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic advance, in opposition to the perceived materialism of civilization. However, the anthropological application of culture to mean a particular way of life came via the German conflation of civilization and culture as a general human process: indeed, Tylor's celebrated definition referred to “culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense”.^[16]

Men of their time, European travellers undoubtedly regarded Oceanian people, as Roy Porter put it, “through eyes already trained in seeing stereotypes about the savage and the civilised”.^[17] Yet the term “civilization” was not often used by British voyagers before 1830,^[18] though from time to time they mentioned “civil” behaviour or “civility”, often connoting relief that nothing nasty had happened. Thus Sydney Parkinson (1745?–71), Banks’s artist, commented that some Maori men “behaved very civil to us” in New Zealand (Aotearoa) in 1769.^[19] Banks, the well-bred naturalist, often used the word “civil” and showed his concern for refinement of manners and social rank in frequent references to the exchange of “civilities”, usually with “the Better sort of people”.^[20] On the other hand, a familiar ambivalence about the civilized state — “we Europeans” — was implicit in Banks’s well-known primitivist description of the inhabitants of eastern New Holland in 1770 as “these I had almost said happy people, content with little nay almost nothing, Far enough removd from the anxieties attending upon riches, or even the possession of what we Europeans call common necessaries”.^[21] Cook, the farm labourer’s son, endorsed the sentiment but added feelingly: “They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb'd by the Inequality of Condition”, a reminder of the entanglement of the ideas of civility and class. In the journal of his second voyage, Cook explicitly referred to “our Shame [as] civilized Christians” in venting an elegiac outburst against the negative impact on the Maori, especially on their sexual morality, of “the commerce they had with Europeans”.^[22]

In contrast to the British, French voyagers made far greater use of civilisation, in both its abstract senses.^[23] They explicitly located particular Oceanian groups along a universal trajectory bridging the opposed poles of savagery and civilization — but always towards the savage end. However, the moral implications of that opposition were fiercely contested, ranging between triumphalist acclaim for civilization as unequivocal progress and nostalgic disgust for aspects seen as degenerate and contrary to nature. Experience of Oceanian people provided grist to both rumour mills; indeed, both extremes were enunciated at different stages in the course of a single narrative, that of Bruni d'Entrecasteaux's voyage in search of La Pérouse in 1791–93.

I have argued elsewhere that the rhetorical somersaults in d'Entrecasteaux's evaluations of particular indigenous people were at least in part a product of their perceived behaviour towards the French — that the content and wording of his narrative were infused with indigenous countersigns, that referents could impinge on signifiers.^[24] Thus, in Van Diemen’s Land, the inhabitants’ “peaceable dispositions” showed him that “these men so close to nature…are good and trusting” and provided “the most perfect image of the first state of society, when men are not yet troubled by the passions or corrupted by the vices which civilization sometimes brings in its wake”. These infantilized people were at once “less advanced in civilization” than the Maori of New Zealand (Aotearoa) but also less “fierce”.^[25] In contrast, though Tongans were not “naturally ferocious”, the seemingly arbitrary brutality of chiefs towards ordinary Islanders horrified d'Entrecasteaux and produced the global assertions that “sentiments of humanity are unknown to them” and they “attach no value to human life”.^[26] For their part, the Kanak of New Caledonia so appalled him with a single “act of ferocity” — cannibalism — that he denied them “the least degree of civilization” and deemed the Tongans “much more advanced”.^[27] Yet, in Tonga, advance was an equivocal blessing which had produced a “feudal”-style government with “weak”, “effeminate” chiefs whose “voluptuous” lifestyle and arbitrary “abuses” led to a “state of anarchy” and forced the ordinary people into dissimulation, theft and “acts of cruelty”.^[28] Finally, his colleagues’ accounts of vivid insults exchanged between two warring parties in the Louisiade Archipelago (Papua New Guinea) saw d'Entrecasteaux damn entire groups as “cannibals” and deplore “the excesses in which the human species can indulge when customs are not moderated and softened by civilization”. Rhetorically, this was a long way from the natural charms of the “simple and good” inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land.^[29]

These fluid, late-eighteenth-century representations of particular Oceanian people were moulded by cumulative experiences of indigenous reception of foreigners — local actions and demeanour — which the author tried to square with his general values, preconceptions and desires, and with place-specific precedents derived from reading voyage literature. The moral universalism of d'Entrecasteaux's developmentalist discourse remained intact across the spectrum of his representations but the specific moral valence of his words shifted dramatically in response to particular indigenous actions. However, his vocabulary did not yet signify the racialization of observed human differences and is inappropriately read in terms of the now familiar named racial phenotypes into which the people of the region were shortly to be classified. In principle at least, eighteenth-century humanism, both neoclassical and Christian, allowed the potential for progress or salvation to all human beings while construing both in thoroughly ethnocentric ways.