These particular histories of interactions between shipborne strangers and Aboriginal people in Van Diemen’s Land or New Holland at the end of the eighteenth century both mirror and illuminate the problematics of my title. My artificial and partial separation of stories from exegesis is a metonym for the tension between narrative and texts that plagues anti-objectivist history. Narrative is necessary because small histories speak to large issues. So too is textual analysis but it must be contextualized. In this paper, historicizing authors, their ideas and their experiences highlights the ambiguity of the concept “cross-cultural” with reference to periods and contexts in which it was clearly anachronistic or inappropriate. Close attention to the words voyagers used to describe their experiences and the indigenous people they saw makes it clear that whatever they thought were doing, it was normally not engaging in cross-cultural encounters. Their key trope was not culture but civilisation (in the French case) and civility or civil society (in the British case).

That said, civilization is no more transparent than culture. Its discursive instability, in conjunction with that of the idea of “race”, was nicely captured by George Stocking: “in the later eighteenth century, the idea of ‘civilization’ was seen as the destined goal of all mankind, and was in fact often used to account for apparent racial differences. But in the 19th century more and more men saw civilization as the peculiar achievement of certain ‘races’”.^[61] I have written elsewhere about broad discursive transitions at the end of the eighteenth century with particular reference to race.^[62] The texts considered here are on the cusp of this shift in the meaning of civilization which is exemplified in the similarity and contrast between d'Entrecasteaux's and Péron's narrativized responses to volatile indigenous behaviour in Oceania. It was the spectre of cannibalism — an offence against humanity — which led d'Entrecasteaux (writing in 1793 but edited for posthumous publication in 1808) to deplore “the excesses in which the human species can indulge when customs are not moderated and softened by civilization”; it was particular insult at the “violent aggression” directed against his colleagues that saw Péron (publishing in 1807 about events in 1802) use the same trope: “[O]ne cannot sufficiently mistrust men whose character has not yet been softened by civilization.” Both envisaged the need to respond with force but for d'Entrecasteaux it was a council of despair rather than a prescription: compare his lament that “we must renounce visiting [Pacific Islanders]…, or we must inspire respect in them by very great severity” with Péron's dogma that “one must only approach these peoples armed with sufficient means to curb their ill will or repel their attacks”.^[63] “Curb” is a key term which spoke to a paradox at the heart of Enlightenment humanism: that its moral universalism was at once inclusive, philanthropic, and optimistic about all human beings, including so-called savages, but also ethnocentric, hierarchical, paternalist, prescriptive and acquisitive. These latter strands, which would not accommodate other people’s assessments and exercise of their rights, desires and autonomy, came steadily to dominate the discourse of civilization. Colonization was in the air and in September 1803, 18 months after Baudin’s visit, it became a grim fact in Van Diemen’s Land.

The particular wording of these passages also signals a semantic instability in the word “civilization”, noted by Williams: a slippage from the idea of civilization as “refinement of manners and behaviour” to its preferred modern connotation of “social order”.^[64] D'Entrecasteaux used the term in the earlier sense, lyrically celebrating indigenous sociality in Van Diemen’s Land as “evidence” of the “first natural affection” and a “school of nature”.^[65] Péron did so in the later sense: these same people — “so close to the zero point of civilization”,^[66] the “children of nature par excellence” — epitomized “non-social man” who must be “curbed”. There is, moreover, overt racialization in his assertion that they “differ essentially [and perhaps originally?] from all other known peoples” and in his conclusion that they were “the most savage [people] of all”, consigned by physical deficiencies to the bottom of a hierarchy of races whose relative “physical strength” he claimed to have established “by direct experiments”. A passionate advocate for “the progress of civilization” and the superiority of “civilized” over “savage man”, Péron argued for a close causal nexus between “physical constitution” and “social organization” or its purported “absence” — between race and civilization: the “peculiar conformation” and the alleged physical “weakness” he discerned in the inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land were products of inadequate diet and lifestyle which were in turn “an immediate and necessary result of the savage state in which these unhappy peoples vegetate”.^[67]

Williams, furthermore, suggested a national difference in the usage of “civilization”: “From e[arly] C19 the development of civilization towards its modern meaning…is on the whole earlier in French than in English.”^[68] The shift in French was presumably fuelled by the experience of revolution, whereas its later English manifestation related more to colonialism. My sample of voyage texts, though too small to be conclusive, partly bears out Williams’s observation. Civilization is only implicit in most of the British texts but for Bass it meant relative “convenience” and “happiness”, in Forster's sense, which were corollaries of refinement. Flinders's primary concern was to explain “a characteristic difference between the manners, and perhaps the dispositions” of the Port Jackson and the Moreton Bay people — “manners” came first — and he did so in terms of a simple environmentalist developmentalism which also reads like a distillation of Forster: it was ultimately “the form of the bay” which produced “more…society” at Moreton Bay.^[69]

Yet the distinction between refinement and social order was not simply linear but was also one of emphasis, degree and pragmatic context: if manners mattered more aesthetically and in the abstract, “superior power” — Flinders's phrase — came to the fore when the always-lurking spectre of savagery materialized into real or threatened action. In an ironic passage, Flinders acknowledged the intimate linkage of power and refinement: having failed to impress the Moreton Bay people with “the effect and certainty of his fire-arms” when he shot at a hawk and only broke its leg, he recalled wryly how:

I approached these texts with the working hypothesis that they would disclose a broad contrast between English pragmatism and French abstraction. It was partly confirmed in the distinction between explicit French and implied English usages. However, again the question is more complex and ambiguous. Class and occupational differences were at least as salient as national ones. In many respects, sailors like Cook and Baudin — an officier bleu, of non-noble birth, he had no real career in the French Marine until after the Revolution — had far more in common with each other, as their pragmatic, empirical language showed, than either did with their more sophisticated naturalists Banks and Péron. Furthermore, if French sailors fulminated more about civilisation, they also fired less often on indigenous people than did the British. Unlike Flinders at Moreton Bay, Baudin was “not obliged to fire” on his stone-throwing assailants in Van Diemen’s Land because when he aimed his firearm at one man, they all scattered — they had prior experience of muskets whereas the Moreton Bay people seemingly did not. But for Baudin, it was also a matter of principle: “experience” had taught him that “superior force” was not always the only guarantee against “the traps of the man of nature” and that “prudence” could avert endless alarms.^[71]

As they made their way around the New Holland coast, voyagers of both nations evinced a keen predatory interest in the resources offered by the land and its potential for pasture and agriculture but the British, already ensconced, did so more systematically, persistently and, in the end, effectively.^[72] The initial British settlement in Van Diemen’s Land was placed at Risdon Cove on Bass’s recommendation and the definitive settlement at Hobart Town that followed in February 1804 was led by Collins, the amanuensis of Bass and Flinders. I conclude by suggesting that whereas “cross-cultural” is in principle an egalitarian, relativist concept which acknowledges the specificity and validity of particular ways of life, the idea of civilization, in all its manifestations, is hierarchical, universalist and assimilationist. From this perspective, the only named cross-cultural actor in my histories was Bungaree.