By Robin Fisher
Through the summers of 1792-94, George Vancouver and the group of the British naval send "Discovery" mapped the northwest coast of North the United States from Alaska to northern California. regardless of the estbalished presence of Spanish and Russian investors, they have been the 1st Europeans to survey this colossal area. Their paintings used to be so meticulous that the maps have been nonetheless in use by way of sailors 100 years later. To map a space is, after all, to suitable it. Vancouver's charts have been a part of a technique of financial exploitation and cultural disruption. local humans were making this aspect for years, yet a distinct standpoint at the ecu "discovery" of the Americas has began to take form considering that non-Natives have unearthed the problem and it truly is now not attainable to have a good time the arriving of Vancouver with no combined emotions. compared to the talk approximately Columbus' arrival in 1492, Vancouver's voyage in 1792 looked like a minor sideshow. stuck up in significant generalizations concerning the uniformly disastrous impression of eu touch, whilst he was once remembered in any respect, Vancouver's maps have been changed into new metaphors. Historians from all over the world accumulated on the Vancouver convention on Exploration and Discovery within the urban of an analogous identify to monitor the two hundredth anniversary of his arrival at the Pacific northwest coast. They met to debate the ecu and local event of this pivotal occasion. a gaggle of the main enticing papers offered at that convention make up this quantity. with no denying the oppression and pain of the local humans of the Pacific zone from the time in their first come upon with Europeans, the authors current a variety of views on Vancouver and his social gathering. They expand from the know-how Vancouver hired to the advanced political and tool relationships among eu explorers and the local management, and one of the British, Spanish and Russians themselves.
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Additional resources for From Maps to Metaphors: The Pacific World of George Vancouver
Example text
The term Polynesia was in the geographical literature of the time. 28 Not till a half century had passed after Cook's last voyage was the term delimited in its current sense by the 32 Ben Finney French navigator Jules-Sebastian-Cesar Dumont-d'Urville. 29 However geographically tidy this tripartite division might have been, it has been more of an impediment than an aid to understanding the prehistory of the Pacific and its cultural diversity. Where Polynesia is remarkably homogeneous, having been populated in recent millennia by people of one origin, Micronesia is demonstrably more diverse, and Melanesia exemplifies human diversity itself.
Exploration of the strait soon followed. In August 1788 the Princess Royal, commanded by Charles Duncan, anchored just inside the MYTH AND REALITY 39 entrance off the Indian village of Claaset. Duncan's sketch of the opening was published early in 1790, with Pinnacle Rock shown near Cape Claaset (Cape Flattery), a reminder of that 'exceeding high Pinacle' which de Fuca had reported in the entrance of his strait, though on its northern side. '16 The following March the American trading vessel Washington, commanded by Robert Gray, sailed into the strait for twenty-five miles before bad weather forced it back.
Largely on the basis of linguistic comparisons, Banks and Cook hypothesized that the ancestors of the 'South Sea Islanders' had migrated eastward into the Pacific from the 'East Indias,' that is, from the islands which roughly comprise modern Indonesia, island Malaysia, and the Philippines. Cook realized, however, that this hypothesis, which is still basic to thinking about Polynesian migration, raised a critical issue of seamanship: how could people sailing in canoes without keels or centreboards push thousands of miles from Southeast Asia to the eastern Pacific against the southeast trade winds?