An account of the voyages undertaken by the order of His present Majesty for making discoveries in the Southern hemisphere, and successfully performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Carteret, and Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, the Swallow, and the Endeavour / drawn up from the journals which were kept by the several commanders, and from the papers of Joseph Banks, esq; by John Hawkesworth. (London : Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773) 3 v.

Hawkesworth’s edition of Voyages is best known as the first appearance of Captain Cook’s account of the discovery of the east coast of Australia, but it also includes the narratives of Byron, Wallis and Carteret. The frontispiece map to volume 1 shows the tracks of all of the voyages.

Byron’s circumnavigation took place in 1764-66, in the Dolphin and the Tamar. After discovering and taking possession of the Falkland Islands, he rounded the Horn and crossed the Pacific from east to west. Wallis went in the same direction (1766-68) in the Dolphin. On 18^th June 1767 he sighted Tahiti, being the first European to do so. He sailed onwards through the Society Islands, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, the Marshall Islands, and the Marianas. The illustration shows Wallis and his party being greeted on Tahiti by the Queen and her attendants.

Volumes two and three are devoted to Captain Cook’s first voyage (1768-1771), in the Endeavour. He came via Cape Horn and reached Tahiti on 11^th April 1769, where he observed the transit of Venus on 3rd June. He then sailed for the Society Islands. The illustration shows a troupe of dancers performing on the island of Bora Bora. The figures are depicted in the classic style of ancient Greece or Rome, for this was the period of idealisation in the image of the “noble savage”.

After leaving the islands Cook steered south to try to discover the “Great South Land”. He reached the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand on 7^th October 1769, and spent six months charting the country’s coastline. Volume three is open at an illustration of a New Zealander showing his tattoos.

The bodies of both sexes are marked with the black stains called Amoco, by the same method that is used at Otaheite, and called Tattowing; but the men are more marked and the women less. The women in general stain no part of their bodies but the lips, though sometimes they are marked with small black patches on other parts: the men, on the contrary, seem to add something every year to the ornaments of the last, so that some of them, who appeared to be of an advanced age, were almost covered from head to foot. Besides the Amoco, they have marks impressed by a method unknown to us, of a very extraordinary kind: they are furrows of about a line deep, and a line broad, such as appear on the bark of a tree which has been cut through, after a year’s growth: the edges of these furrows are afterwards indented by the same method, and being perfectly black they make the most frightful appearance. The faces of the old men are almost covered with these marks: those who are very young, black only their lips like the women; when they are somewhat older, they have generally a black patch upon one cheek, and over one eye, and so proceed gradually, that they may grow old and honourable together; but though we could not but be disgusted with the horrid deformity which these stains and furrows produced in the “human face divine,” we could not but admire the dexterity and art with which they were impressed. The marks upon the face in general are spirals, which are drawn with great nicety, and even elegance, those on one side exactly corresponding with those on the other: the marks on the body somewhat resemble the foliage in old chased ornaments, and the convolutions of filigree work; but in these they have such a luxuriance of fancy, that of an hundred, which at first sight appeared to be exactly the same, no two were different in different parts of the coast, and that as the principal seat of them at Otaheite was the breech, in New Zealand it was sometimes the only part which was free, and in general was less distinguished than any other.

The skins of these people, however, are not only dyed, but painted, for as I have before observed, they smear their bodies with red oker, some rubbing it on dry, and some applying it in large patches mixed with oil, which is always wet, and which the least touch will rub off, so that the transgressions of such of our people as were guilty of ravishing a kiss from these blooming beauties, were most legibly written on their faces. (p. 452-3)

Outside the Rare Books office, there is a model of Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, constructed by Sir Robert Blackwood, the first Chancellor of Monash University, and presented to the Library in 1968. Above it is an engraved portrait of Captain Cook.

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