From the Publisher

A 'Solander slip'

A 'Solander slip' was a sheet of paper on which the description of a specimen was recorded, an innovation of Banks’s botanist, Daniel Solander, and a reflection of the advanced and systematic nature of the voyage’s efforts to document natural history.

Contents from The Voyages of Captain James Cook

Chapter 4 Tahiti

Tahiti would become renowned, even notorious among Europeans, for the opulence of its climate, the civility of its people, and the supposed licentiousness of their customs. A description of an extraordinary scene of apparently 'customary' public sexual intercourse led to Hawkesworth’s Account being censured for indecency; the occasion was probably rather a parody of the sailors’ eagerness to seek sexual favors in exchange for iron and other trade goods. But the visitors also made serious efforts to describe and interpret intriguing practices, such as the funeral ceremony involving the spectacularly costumed 'chief mourner.'

Chapter 6 New Zealand

Cook and his companions were impressed by the Maori but astonished and troubled to discover a 'horrid custom' among them: they consumed the bodies of slain enemies. Cook struggled to make sense of what seemed their positive and negative characteristics, as well as of his geographical discoveries up to this stage of the voyage.

Chapter 7 Rapanui

Cook’s next landfall in Polynesia would be Easter Island. Though struck by what he considered the poverty of the island’s provisions and resources, he was intrigued to realize that the inhabitants were related to Maori—that is, they were another branch of the Polynesian peoples who, despite their lack of iron tools and western-style navigational knowledge, had the capacity to cross thousands of miles of open ocean to settle these widely dispersed islands.