Volume XIII, Number 1 (June 2001)
Review by Jane Samson, University of Alberta
Reprinted by kind permission of the International Journal of Maritime History.
The recent death of W. Kaye Lambe underlined the passing of a generation of editors of whom John Cawte Beaglehole is probably the best known. For historians of exploration, Beaglehole's editions of Cook's journals represented a turning point in the discipline. Before 1955, when the first volume was published, scholars were faced with assorted printed versions, many of which featured considerable editorial meddling. Research travel was often required before first editions could be consulted. Beaglehole's great achievement was the production of a meticulously edited version at a price that libraries (and private individuals) could afford. They quickly went out of print, and now command upwards of £1000 per set.
Beaglehole's volumes were extensively reviewed at the time of their original publication, and the Boydell Press reprints are duplicates in every respect. Rather than write a conventional review, therefore, it might be more profitable to reflect on Beaglehole's place in the changing world of Cook scholarship. The general preface to the original series, written in 1954 by the President of the Hakluyt Society, mentioned ‘the piety which a New Zealander owes to the virtual discoverer of his islands', and Beaglehole himself wrote that ‘Cook's competence changed the face of the world.' There is no doubt that Beaglehole saw Cook as an heroic figure. Today's academics are just as likely to see him as the herald of destructive changes: epidemics, guns, and colonialism. Literary specialists scour the journals for evidence of racism and imperial power, and anthropologists point out the many ways in which Cook misunderstood the words and actions of Native peoples. Heroism is mentioned only for the purposes of deconstruction. A comparison of the 1978 ‘Captain Cook and his Times' conference with the 1992 ‘Vancouver Conference on Exploration and Discovery' reveals how much the field of exploration history and multi-disciplinary research. And in the wake of postmodernism, with its allergy to empirical research and argument, the lot of editors has itself become controversial. What is the point of archival research, and of careful annotation and presentation, if there is no such thing as historical evidence? The reprinting of Beaglehole's editions might seem a quixotic exercise in such a climate.
To me, much of the current criticism of ‘conventional' historians like Beaglehole seems hypocritical. A glance at the bibliographies of works on Cook published in recent years reveals a plethora of references to Beaglehole's work. His empirical skills were what made his volumes so reliable. There is no doubt that Beaglehole's own interpretation of the material is under debate; one of the 1997 Journal of Pacific History International Essay Prizes was won by a paper exploring Beaglehole's neglect of Cook's colleagues and supporters. The publication of a host of journals and correspondence by Cook's contemporaries has made such revision much easier than it would have been in Beaglehole's day. But there should be no doubt about the value of Beaglehole's editions of the texts. In other words, current analysis relies on Beaglehole's editions of the texts. In other words, current analysis relies on Beaglehole and his generation even as it derides them for their ‘old-fashioned' scholarship. The Wordsworth Classics choice of the 1906 Everyman edition of Cook simply underlines the superiority of Beaglehole's version; the antiquated language and bowdlerisation of the Everyman text makes it unsuitable for either general or scholarly readers. Because copies of the original Beaglehole editions are so expensive, and the abridged version by Glyndwr Williams is available only through the Folio Society, there was a clear case for a reprint. It will now be easier for scholars to benefit from the labours of one of maritime history's most indefatigable editors.