The chapter explores the influence of William Wales on the young Coleridge when he was a student at Christ’s Hospital, London, Wales, the scientist-navigator who travelled with Cook on the Resolution, was appointed Master of Mathematics at Christ’s Hospital in 1775 and Smith, in this engaging essay, argues that the young Coleridge would have heard the stories of their momentous journey in search of the great South Land. For not only was Wales a teacher of mathematics but his job also included drumming up midshipmen recruits from the Lower School for the Royal Navy. He was ideally suited for this – a man of great stature and intellect who could deliver an exhilarating first-hand account of what it was like to be pushing to the very frontiers of knowledge through maritime exploration.

The essay makes out the case that the presence of William Wales and what he brought with him as a teacher – the library, the interests in meteorology, the commitment to the documentation of experience and to exploration – were all qualities that would have impressed Coleridge. It should come as no surprise therefore that twenty years later a number of the maritime phenomena which had been so ably documented on the Resolution’s journey and subsequently reported in Cook’s Voyage towards the South Pole (1777), George Forster’s Voyage around the World (1777), and Wales’s Astronomical Observations (1777) (which were all in the Christ’s Hospital Library) would find their way into the Ancient Mariner – the imaged replaced by the imagined.

The essay appeared first as a largely self-contained piece of writing in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes in 1956 and challenged the Livingstone Lowes thesis which, as Smith writes, relied upon the investigation of the verbal sources of the poem and was overly intellectual in approach. Smith offers a compelling argument which suggests that ‘the course of the voyage itself traced a pattern in his mind never to be en­tirely forgotten’, and that the events of the voyage ‘established centres of interest in Coleridge’s mind which directed much of his later reading’.

Reprinted now for the third time (and largely unchanged) it remains a remarkably fresh and apposite piece of writing and its conclusion, first asserted more than thirty years ago, encapsulates one of the great achievements of the book, namely the articulation of the complex interrelationship that exists between imaging and imagining and the impact that this would have in the domain of culture in Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century.

The structure of the book is very interesting and, I think, extremely satisfying. Professor Smith comments towards the end of the preface that the ten different chapters address ten different but related aspects. While there is a loose chronology, with discussion centering on the first and second voyages in the early chapters and second and third voyages in the later chapters, the book is issue-based rather than a narrative.

So, for instance, William Hodges’s great legacy of paintings and drawings from the voyage of the Resolution between 1772­–5 is discussed at considerable length over several chapters and with a variety of conclusions being offered. First it is considered as ‘information’ in ‘Art as Information’ where Smith makes the point that working under a geographic imperative in the Pacific, Hodges made the significant early move to an optically inspired and empirical naturalism.

In ‘Portraying Pacific People’ Smith poses the question: ‘How were the artists expected to draw a man from a scientific viewpoint? Like Gainsborough working on a commission at Bath? Or as though portraying some fascinating, exotic animal? Here he compares the ‘objective and somewhat patronising anthropology’ of Banks on the first voyage to the much more humane attitude to, say, the Maoris, that occurred on the second voyage. Sidney Parkinson was not employed by Banks in the first instance as a portraitist but, following Buchan’s untimely death, he would produce a large number of figure drawings. Here Professor Smith stresses that Parkinson’s job was made very much easier because of his (and his colleagues’) courtesy and discretion when dealing with the peoples of the South Pacific. It would be true to say, however, that Parkinson’s portraiture tended to be conventionalised and to be dominated by ethnographic concerns. In the case of Hodges, however, Bernard Smith argues that the ethnographic conventions begin to give way to a desire to evoke a presence. The point is a fundamental one to the thesis being advanced m this collection for as Professor Smith says:

Like all artists, [Hodges] structured his work on a schematic model, but here the model is only a point of departure in search of a feeling rather than for the raw facts. The imagination, we might say, has entered scientific draughtsmanship.

While we might celebrate this as an advance, Professor Smith offers a timely caveat that this kind of portraiture best suited European concepts of individualism and was, in fact, antithetical to the political and social structures encountered by artists like Hodges. At the same time it marks a point where, say, the Pacific Islander is seen not so much as a type (human, it’s true, although a specimen nonetheless) but a person of psychological and social complexity. We nevertheless do well to remember that Hodges’s perceptual shift occurs at a historical moment when the cult of individualism begins to arrive in those island societies.

In ‘William Hodges and English Plein-Air Painting’, Bernard Smith makes out a convincing case that Hodges was practising a proto-plein­airism several decades before Corot and Constable. Plein-air oil sketching had been around for thirty years or so before Hodges joined the company of the Resolution but what proves to be really interesting about his oeuvre is that he produced many scaled-up landscape paintings which relied upon the artist’s immediate response to the scenes depicted. So not only were there the many wash drawings and watercolour sketches painted on the voyage but a substantial number of the finished oil paintings (until his oil paints ran out while the Resolution was visiting the Marquesas).

Professor Smith argues that two key factors seem to have prompted Hodges to experiment with plein-air painting. First, he was expected to make accurate records as they travelled South. It wasn’t just that Cook was a hard task-master in this regard but, as Smith comments elsewhere, with Wales and the Forsters there too, the Resolution was a sophisticated laboratory with an extensive library and, for the small but intense community of scientists, artists and technicians, the job was to record and interpret to the very best of their ability what they saw on their voyage of exploration.

Second, just as the Resolution was a laboratory, so too was it a studio, and Hodges produced a remarkable series of oil paintings from the security of the great cabin which, with its wrap-round windows, afforded a splendid vantage point from which to paint. Clearly Hodges was predisposed to paint in this manner (and he suffered considerable criticism back in England for his ‘ragged mode’ of colouring) but the practical demands of the voyage were influential in establishing his plein-airism as a practice.

The point is not just a historical nicety, for what is so compelling about this book is Smith’s passionate belief that Cook’s voyages to the Pacific were not only enormously influential in the development of the natural sciences but also had a much-underestimated impact on the nature of seeing and on the changing forms of representation in the late eighteenth century. In the case of the shift from classical naturalism to empirical naturalism, for instance, it was precisely the Cook voyages that mark the beginning of the ascendancy of the empirical point of view that would lead eventually to the emphatic achievements of the Impressionists. As Smith writes:

During the twelve years from 1768 to 1780 something in the order of three thousand original drawings were made of things, mostly from the Pacific, not seen before by Europeans: plants, fish, molluscs, birds, coastlines, landscapes, unknown peoples, their arts and crafts, religious practices and styles of life. And Cook’s voyages were not only fact­gathering phenomena, they deeply affected conceptual thought, and their influence penetrated deeply into the aesthetic realm. That need not surprise us. It would be much more surprising if the unveiling to European eyes of more than one third of the world within fifteen or so years had a lesser effect.

Although much of the book is devoted to exploring the way in which this shift to empirical naturalism occurred (exemplified in ‘Art as Information’ and ‘Portraying Pacific People’), Bernard Smith also considers the utilitarian implications of the art of the voyages in the light of Edward Said’s thesis in his book Orientalism (1978). While it is true that the util­ity of the art had been a significant consideration in the early chapters of Smith’s European Vision in the South Pacific (1960), here it is argued much more assertively and one might reason that this is very much due to the impact of Said’s thesis.

Smith makes the convincing point that the models or types of imagery used as sources for the depiction of Pacific peoples were extremely varied and, to a considerable extent, the view espoused here runs counter to Said’s opinion that visual representations of the ‘East’ were relatively unchanging. Indeed, the book as a whole explores the fascinating variety of the models used by the artists and illustrators to convey what they saw and in this Smith offers a conflicting view to Said. On the other hand, the exploration of the South Pacific did deliver two highly consistent and mutually supporting images of the South, even if they are antithetical: the images of the South as paradise or purgatory.

Smith argues that these two imagined states proved to be emotional spurs of great power and magnetism for countless European explorers. It depended, of course, on whether one set out to savour paradise or act as ‘saviour’ (and both types went in their droves in the nineteenth century) but the imagery brought back from Captain Cook’s voyages served as an extraordinarily important image bank to sustain both points of view.

One of the persistent themes which is explored in this excellent book, therefore, is the enormous impact that the art of the voyages had in the domain of European culture. Cook may well have had a fairly practical view of his artists’ role but Bernard Smith shows just how very much more significant that far-sighted employment of artists would be. This has been at the very centre of Professor Smith’s research for over four decades now but is nowhere more emphatically stated than here.

Imagining the Pacific is beautifully produced and comes with a host of colour images not readily available other than in The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages (1985–7) which Bernard Smith and Rudiger Joppien edited. It also has a fresh and searching bibliography which identifies a number of interesting recent publications which the author has assessed and on occasion challenged. The book is, indeed, an indispensable and major contribution to and ideas in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.