Sparked by scientists' desire to record a fleeting moment-the transit of Venus at Tahiti in 1769-Captain Cook's three Pacific voyages left an enduring legacy. Not only did they reveal one-third of the globe to European eyes, but in following Admiralty instructions to observe the "Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number" of Pacific peoples encountered on the way, the voyagers amassed a rich store of art and writing. For this we can thank the Enlightenment, and its mania for cataloging and categorizing all of Creation.
The latest Cook curio to come into focus is among the most unusual: a Tahitian warrior known as Omai, who arrived in London in 1774 aboard the support vessel Adventure, a living souvenir of Cook's second voyage. As documented by a colorful hothouse of prints, paintings and papers in "Cook & Omai: The Cult of the South Seas," at the National Library of Australia, this mild-mannered man from Raiatea gave Britain its first live glimpse of the Pacific-and carte blanche for its wildest fantasies. Paraded as an embodiment of the noble savage, and lionized by royalty, scientists and artists during his three-year stay, Omai inspired a four-volume theological treatise in French, Narrations d'Omai; even a Covent Garden musical. In OMAI: Or, A Trip Round the World, a 1785 pantomime version of Cook's voyages, our Tahitian hero arrives in London to woo a British maiden and returns home a king.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. In 1777 Omai (who had traveled to England willingly) was returned by Cook to the Tahitian island of Huahine-not Raiatea, where there was tribal unrest. He was fleeced of many of his European belongings and died, 13 months later, of an undiagnosed disease. He was not yet 30. "Cook & Omai" artfully navigates the gulf between myth and reality, in the process drawing a portrait more revealing of 18th century Europe than of the Pacific. "Although the Europeans were sailing to discover the New World, what they made of what they found there actually discovers them to us," says curator Michelle Hetherington.
The exhibition opens with a 1756 French map of the largely uncharted South Seas: "a vast space into which Europeans could project their wishes," says Hetherington. At first glance, explorers like Samuel Wallis, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and Cook saw in the Pacific echoes of classical Arcadia and biblical Eden. "These people may almost be said to be exempt from the curse of our fore fathers," wrote Cook in his journal upon arriving in Tahiti in 1769. For the published version of Cook's journals, Florentine artist Cipriani transformed the islands into a rococo wonderland of warriors and nymphs.
Of course, the reality was quite different. Seeking to discover a passage through North America to the Atlantic, Cook was eventually unhinged by the Pacific and killed on a Hawaiian beach in 1779. Voyage artist John Webber's posthumous portrait of Cook-recently purchased by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra and included in the show-reveals a stern, beak-nosed man starting to come apart at his unbuttoned seams. And Pacific culture, already infected with European diseases, would soon be changed forever by the arrival of the London Missionary Society in 1795.
Lost in the process was an understanding of Omai-who spoke little English-or the illiterate society that spawned him. "It's impossible to get much closer to Omai," says Hetherington. Even the highly romanticized European portraits, which depict him as a kind of Polynesian boulevardier, are suspect: "dark, ugly and a downright blackguard," was the usually reliable Cook's first impression of Omai. Only in Sir Joshua Reynolds' c. 1774 pencil sketch do we begin to see a man unembellished by exotica. It's a fleeting but poignant moment in "Cook & Omai," an exhibition which cleverly charts paradise-found and lost.