6. In the Event: Indigenous Countersigns and the Ethnohistory of Voyaging

This chapter combines an ethnohistory of French voyagers’ representations of indigenous people in Oceania^[1] with an ethnohistory of cross-cultural encounters in which those representations were generated and about which they speak. It does so for both epistemological and pragmatic reasons: to illustrate the entanglement of discourse, text and event that underpins historical writing; and to construct a comparative history of specific cross-cultural interactions in the Pacific Islands and Van Diemen’s Land during one exemplary voyage in the classic era of European scientific voyaging (1766–1840) – the expedition of La Recherche and L’Espérance (1791–94) led by Antoine-Raymond-Joseph de Bruni d’Entrecasteaux (1737–93) (see figure 6.1). The chapter foregrounds embodied ethnohistorical moments and moves inductively from them to anticipate aspects of the wider intellectual context of an emerging science of race, which is merely outlined in the introduction. I not only problematise the assumed centrality of European actors in actual cross-cultural encounters but argue for an ongoing, mobile dialectic of discourse and expériences ^[2] – that the presence and agency of indigenous people infiltrated the writings and pictures produced by sailors, naturalists and artists in the course of scientific voyages and left ambiguous countersigns in the very language, tone and content of their representations. Indigenous countersigns permeate voyagers’ representations but are often camouflaged in the ignorance, prejudices and ethnocentric perceptual processes of European observers. They can be identified through critical attention to disparities and correspondences between particular representations and their different genres or media (see also Douglas 1999a, 1999b, 2003, 2006, 2007). Such countersigns are a key resource for ethnohistorians.

The political backdrop to d’Entrecasteaux’s voyage was revolution in France; the intellectual context of the voyage comprised the unstable scientific discourses or artistic conventions which programmed European modes of seeing and representing exotic people. Violent political ferment at the end of the eighteenth century paralleled dramatic flux in anthropological ideas and vocabularies. This intellectual and semantic volatility registered an analogous series of discursive shifts which in some respects were embodied or prefigured in the written and pictorial legacy of d’Entrecasteaux’s voyage. In art, empirical naturalism supplanted neoclassicism. In literature, Romanticism displaced classical Enlightenment values including idealisation of the primitive. In the natural history of man, holistic humanism gave way to the rigid physical differentiations of the science of race and in the process the modern biological conception of race was distilled out of the term’s older, ambiguous, environmentally-determined connotations of “variety,” “nation,” “tribe,” “kind,” “class” or, sometimes, “species.”

Eighteenth-century discourses on human similarity and differences were always ethnocentric and often racially obnoxious with respect to “Negroes” and other non-white people. Yet racial discriminations were rarely categorical while most savants in principle attributed a common origin and the possibility of development toward “civilisation” to all human beings. Nineteenth-century discourses varied widely but moved steadily toward a consensus that racial differences were permanent, hereditary, formative and, possibly, primordial. This transition was epitomised with respect to Oceania in the writings of d’Entrecasteaux’s celebrated successor, the multiple circumnavigator Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville (1790–1842), whose hierarchical division of the indigenous people of Oceania into “two distinct races” used race in its modern biologised sense and reviled the “black race” of “Melanesia” (1832, 3, 19).