This chapter refers to cross-cultural encounters during the visits of d’Entrecasteaux to the Admiralty Islands (in what is now Papua New Guinea), Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania), Tongatapu and New Caledonia. I draw on a range of texts both published and unpublished at the time: the Voyage (1808) of d’Entrecasteaux; the Relation du voyage (1800a) of the naturalist Jacques-Julien Houtou de La Billardière (1755–1834); the shipboard journal of one of the officers (Richard 1986b); original drawings by the artist Piron; and the forty-six plates engraved by Jacques-Louis Copia (1764–99) for the Atlas to La Billardière’s Relation (1800a; 1800b).^[3] Like its French and English precursors and successors, this expedition combined patriotic and scientific goals “in the name of humanity, the arts and the sciences.” Its “double mission” was to search for the missing French navigator Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse (1741–88), whose ships had vanished in 1788 after leaving Botany Bay, and “simultaneously to undertake research relative to the sciences and to commerce.”^[4] The quest for La Pérouse was unsuccessful, but the voyage made significant contributions to the sciences, including the natural history of man.

Map courtesy ANU Cartographic Services, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra.

The narrative trajectory of d’Entrecasteaux’s Voyage is one of dissolution – literally so in its conclusion with the death of the commander but also metaphorically, in Anthony Pagden’s sense: “The spaces that separated the European from those ‘others’ he was eventually to encounter were spaces of dissolution, menacing areas where civility could so easily dissolve into barbarism” (1993, 3). This Voyage is a synecdoche for the era’s dawning disenchantment with primitivist idealisation of the noble savage (le bon sauvage) and its supplanting by negative, ultimately racialised attitudes better aligned with a new age of intensifying European imperialism. In his seminal work on the impact of Oceania in European art and science, the Australian art historian Bernard Smith argued that the transformation in the weight of European opinion about “savages” from sentimental approval to disgust owed much to “the death of famous navigators” at indigenous hands in Oceania (1960, 86–7, 99–105). In France, a specific trigger was the disappearance of La Pérouse and the publication of his Voyage in 1797 with its shocking climax in the apparently unprovoked killing of twelve crew members by Samoans. These people had seemed to La Pérouse to be “the most fortunate inhabitants of the globe,” but their inexplicable actions forced him to the bleak conclusion that “man living in anarchy in a nearly savage state is a more vicious being than the most ferocious animals” (1798 [1797], 3: 223–63, 238).

However, neither le bon sauvage nor le mauvais sauvage (“the ignoble savage”) was sui generis in European art and literature or merely a matter of imaging. Both positive and negative representations of indigenous people took initial shape on the ground, in particular equations of discourse, authorship and located encounter which saw voyagers’ words and pictures colonised by countersigns of indigenous agency – their demeanour, actions and desires. Indigenous countersigns were filtered through distorting screens of European preconception, precedent, perception, fantasy and phobia, and cloaked in loaded epithets, such as welcome, friendship, indifference, hypocrisy, treachery, rejection, or hostility. The narrative transition in d’Entrecasteaux’s Voyage from initially rapturous approval of “natural man” to eventual bitter disillusionment with “ferocious savages” is thus a signifiant “signifier” of this author’s unsettling experience of a variety of unpredictable indigenous behaviours (1808, 1: 230, 359). Yet d’Entrecasteaux’s descriptive shifts do not denote the logical unfolding of a deductive racial scheme that was yet to be conceived. In this chapter, I juxtapose samples of the emotive idealism of d’Entrecasteaux’s Voyage with the more pragmatic, republican optimism evinced in La Billardière’s Relation and the unsentimental “hard” primitivism of Piron’s neoclassical portraits.^[5] This interior contrast between varied narrativisations of d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition foreshadows an inductive comparison of shifting discourses in the science of man, epitomised in Dumont d’Urville’s theory of “two distinct races.”