![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article deals with the treatment by imperial European powers and private publishers of cartographic and cultural intelligence about New Zealand from Abel Tasman’s discovery of the country in 1642 to James Cook’s arrival there in 1769. It introduces the notion of a proto-intelligence stage in imperial intelligence-gathering as a precursor to Christopher Bayly’s construct of an ‘information order’. This proto-intelligence phase is marked by an emphasis on physical, scientific data rather than cultural details about newly encountered territories; the consequent tendency to European agency and indigenous passivity in intelligence-gathering; and a lack of systematic or state-governed control of the flow of intelligence between imperial nations.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See, for example, Martin Thomas, “Colonial States as Intelligence States: Security Policing and the Limits of Colonial Rule in France’s Muslim Territories, 1920–40,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 6 (2005): 1033–1060; Kapil Raj, “Colonial Encounters and the Forging of New Knowledge and National Identities: Great Britain and India, 1760–1850,” Osiris 15 (2000): 119–134; David Killingray, “The Maintenance of Law and Order in British Colonial Africa,” African Affairs 85 (1986): 411–437; Philip Murphy, “Creating a Commonwealth Intelligence Culture: The View from Central Africa 1945–1965,” Intelligence and National Security 17, no. 3 (2002): 131–162.
2 John H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration and Settlement, 1450–1650 (London: Phoenix Press, 1962). i.
3 See, for example, Andrew Fitzmaurice, “The Genealogy of Terra Nullius,” Australian Historical Studies 38, no. 129 (2007): 1–15.
4 Christopher Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
5 Ibid., 2–3. Bayly’s concept of ‘information order’ is derived from Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information, Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
6 This metaphor is used in the sense of describing ‘complex agglomerations of individuals and interest groups’, in Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2015), 15.
7 Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 319.
8 Geoffrey V. Scammell, The First Imperial Age: European Overseas Expansion 1500–1715 (London: Routledge, 2003), 27.
9 Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), chap. 1.
10 Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012), 25.
11 This is detailed in Paul Moon, “Entering the Periphery: Reassessing British Involvement in New Zealand in the 1820s in the Context of Wallerstein’s Theory of a World-System,” New Zealand Journal of History 49, no. 2 (2015): 81–109.
12 Ballantyne, Webs of Empire, 26.
13 A form of immanent development, of the type described in Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton, Doctrines of Development (London: Routledge, 1996), 87; and Brian Hooker, “James Cook’s Secret Search in 1769,” The Mariner’s Mirror: The International Quarterly Journal of the Society for Nautical Research 89, no. 3 (2001): 299.
14 Christopher Bayly, “Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India,” Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 1 (1993): 5.
15 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (Oxford: Routledge, 1989), 146–149.
16 Bayly, Empire and Information, 2–3.
17 Brian Hooker, “Two Sets of Tasman Longitudes in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Maps,” Geographical Journal 156, no. 1 (1990): 24.
18 Report of the Directors of the Dutch East India Company, 1644, in Abel Janszoon Tasman’s Journal, ed. Jan E. Heeres (Amsterdam: Muller 1898), 115n; Oskar H. K. Spate, Monopolists and Freebooters: The Pacific Since Magellan, vol. 2 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1983), 51; and Michael Bennett, “Van Diemen, Tasman and the Dutch Reconnaissance” (Papers and Proceedings: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, June 1992), 74.
19 Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans 1642–1772 (Auckland: Viking Penguin, 1991), 72.
20 Brian Hooker, “New Light on the Origin of the Tasman-Bonaparte Map,” The Globe 78 (2015): 4; and Gunther Schilder, “Organization and Evolution of the Dutch East India Company’s Hydrographic Office in the Seventeenth Century,” Imago Mundi 28, no. 1 (1976): 72.
21 William Foster, “An Early Chart of Tasmania,” The Geographical Journal 37, no. 5 (1911): 550–551.
22 Gunther Schilder, Australia Unveiled: The Share of the Dutch Navigators in the Discovery of Australia, trans. Olaf Richter (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., 1976), 189.
23 Joan Blaeu, Nova et Accuratissima Terrarum Orbis Tabula, RLIN/OCLC: 7727216, New York Public Library; and Eric H. McCormick, Tasman and New Zealand: A Bibliographical Study (Wellington: R. E. Owen, Government Printer, 1959), 10.
24 Another possible appearance of New Zealand in a published work around this time is in the so-called ‘Bonaparte Map’. However, there is uncertainty of its original provenance and publication date, with estimates of it originating as early as 1644 (which would make it the earliest known copy of Tasman’s map), or as late as 1695. For details on this debate, see Andrew Sharp, The Voyages of Abel Janszoon Tasman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 318–9; Schilder, Australia Unveiled, 354; and Hooker, “New Light,” 1–7.
25 Dirk Van Miert, Humanism in an Age of Science: The Amsterdam Athenaeum in the Golden Age, 1632–1704, trans. Michiel Wielema (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 72; Soli Britannico Reduci Carolo Secundo regum augustissimo hoc Orbis Terrae Compendium humill. off. I. Klencke. [A collection of forty-two maps of all parts of the world, published by J. and W. Blaeu, H. Allard, N.J. Visscher and others, made up into a volume by J. Klencke and other merchants of Amsterdam and presented by them to King Charles II of England at his accession in 1660, British Library, System number 004959010, UIN: BLL01004959010.
26 Melchisédech Thévenot, Relations de divers voyages curieux: qui n’ont point este’ publie’es, et qu’on a traduit ou tiré Des originaux Des voyageurs fran-çois, espagnols, allemands, portugais, anglois, hollandois, persans, arabes & autres orientaux, Pt. 2 (Paris, 1664). The publication date is wrongly stated as 1666 in Thomas M. Knight, “From Terra Incognita to New Holland,” Cartography 6, no. 2 (1967): 87.
27 David McKitterick, “‘Ovid with a Littleton’: The Cost of English Books in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 11, no. 2 (1997): 190; and Books in Cambridge Inventories; Book-Lists from Vice-Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, vol. 1, ed. Elisabeth Leedham-Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 540–75.
28 Eltjo Buringh, and Jan Luiten Van Zanden, “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, a long-term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries,” The Journal of Economic History 69, no. 2 (2009): 409–445.
29 Mary Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1.
30 Ibid.
31 Robert Hooke, “A Short Relation out of the Journal of Captain Abel Jansen Tasman, upon the Discovery of the South Terra Incognita: not long since Published in the Low Dutch by Dirk Rembrantse,” Philosophical Collections (London: R. Chiswell, 1682): 179–186.
32 Evelyn Stokes, “European Discovery of New Zealand before 1642,” New Zealand Journal of History 4, no. 1 (1970): 18.
33 Charles R. Weld, A History of the Royal Society: With Memoirs of the Presidents, vol. 1 (London: John W. Parker, 1848), 378–9, 405; James Burney, A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea Or Pacific Ocean; Illustrated with Charts: 1620–1688, vol. 3 (London: Luke Hansard, 1813), 316; and David P. Miller, “Between Hostile Camps: Sir Humphry Davy’s Presidency of the Royal Society of London, 1820–1827,” The British Journal for the History of Science 16, no. 1 (1983): 1–47.
34 John Gascoigne, “The Royal Society and the Emergence of Science as an Instrument of State Policy,” The British Journal for the History of Science 32, no. 2 (1999): 171.
35 Hooker, “New Light,” 3.
36 Dirck Rembrantsz van Nierop, Eenige Oefeningen, in God-lijcke, Wis-konstige, en Natuerlijcke Dingen (Amsterdam: G. Van Goedesbergh, 1674); and Gerard R. Crone, “The Discovery of Tasmania and New Zealand,” The Geographical Journal 111, nos. 4/6 (1948): 258.
37 Hooke, Philosophical Collections.
38 McCormick, Tasman and New Zealand, 17.
39 Nicolaes Witsen, Noord en Oost Tartarye, Ofte Bondig Ontwerp van eenig dier Landen en Volken Welke voormaels bekent zijn geweest (Amsterdam: Halma, 1692).
40 John Harris, Navigantium Atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca, or, A compleat collection of voyages and travels: consisting of above four hundred of the most authentick writers, beginning with Hackluit…and continued with others of note…relating to any part of Asia, Africa, America, Europe or the islands thereof, to this present time…also an appendix of the remarkable accidents at sea…together with the invention and use of the magnet, and its variation, &c. (London: Thomas Bennet, 1705), 608ff.
41 John Narborough, An Account of Several Late Voyages and Discoveries to the South-Sea (London: S. Smith and B. Walford, 1711), 129–140.
42 John Campbell, Navigantium atque itinerantium bibliotheca, or, A complete collection of voyages and travels: consisting of above six hundred of the most authentic writers, vol. 1 (London: T. Woodward, 1744), 399.
43 Lucile H. Brockway, “Science and colonial expansion: the role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens,” American Ethnologist 6, no. 3 (1979): 451–2.
44 The final significant volume published prior to Cook’s departure to the South Pacific was by the Scotitish antiquarian and sometimes plagiarist John Callander. His 1768 Terra Australis Cognita was a flawed and unattriuted translation of Charles de Brosses’ 1756 work Histoire des Navigations Aux Terres Australes. See John Callander, Terra Australis Cognita; or, Voyages to the Terra Australis (Edinburgh: A. Donaldson, 1768); Charles de Brosses, Histoire Des Navigations Aux Terres Australes (Paris: Durand, 1756); and Tom Ryan, “‘Le President des Terres Australes’: Charles de Brosses and the French Enlightenment Beginnings of Oceanic Anthropology,” Journal of Pacific History 37, no. 2 (2002): 180–1.
45 John Harley, “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe,” Imago Mundi 40, no. 1 (1988): 60.
46 Bayly, Empire and Information, 1.
47 William Roy, “An Account of the Measurement of a Base on Hounslow-Heath. By Major-General William Roy, FRS and AS,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 75 (1785): 385.
48 Thomas Stamford Raffles to Colonel Addenbrooke, Singapore, 10 June 1819, in Thomas Stamford Raffles “The Founding of Singapore,” Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 2 (1878): 175.
49 Harley, “Silences and Secrecy,” 59, 72, n.25.
50 Glyn Williams, “‘To make discoveries of countries hitherto unknown’: The Admiralty and Pacific Exploration in the Eighteenth Century,” Mariner’s Mirror 82, no.1 (1996): 19; and William T. Stearn, “A Royal Society Appointment with Venus in 1769: The Voyage of Cook and Banks in the Endeavour in 1768–1771 and its Botanical Results,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 24, no. 1 (1969): 64.
51 Thomas Hornsby, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 55 (London: Royal Society, 1765), 344.
52 Andrew Dalrymple, Account of the Discoveries made in the South Pacific Ocean (London, 1767), iii-iv, vi-vii.
53 Details of this arrangement are in Stearn, “A Royal Society Appointment with Venus in 1769,” 64–90.
54 Bayly, Empire and Information, 2–3, 15, 110, 133, 328.
55 Which could extend to territorial claims. See Carteret’s Voyage Round the World, vol. 2, ed. Helen Wallis, (Cambridge: Hakluyt, 1965), 304.
56 Kapil Raj, “18th-Century Pacific Voyages of Discovery, “Big Science”, and the Shaping of an European Scientific and Technological Culture,” History and Technology, an International Journal 17, no. 2 (2000): 81; and Lorraine Daston, “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment,” Science in Contea 4, no. 2 (1991): 367–86.
57 Joseph Banks described this distinction respectively as being between ‘pure’ and ‘ornamental’ sciences. See John Gascoigne, “The Royal Society and the Emergence of Science as an Instrument of State Policy,” The British Journal for the History of Science 32, no. 2 (1999): 173–5; and David Mackay, “A Presiding Genius of Exploration,” Captain James Cook and His Times, ed. Robin Fisher and Hugh J. M. Johnston (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), 37.
58 Salmond, Two Worlds, 99.
59 The Explorations of Captain James Cook in the Pacific, As Told by a Selection of His Own Journals, ed. Grenfell Price (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 17–18.
60 Additional Instructions to Captain Cool for his First Voyage, July 1768, in The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery. Vol 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour, 1768–1771, ed. John C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1955), cclxxiii.
61 James Cook, “Cook’s Journals, Daily Entries”, 31 January 1770, transcription of National Library of Australia, Manuscript 1 (Canberra, 2004), 181.
62 Hooker, “Two Sets of Tasman Longitudes,” 23.
63 The Public Advertiser, 23 July 1768, in Glyndwr Williams, “The Endeavour Voyages: A Coincidence of Motives,” in Science and Exploration in the Pacific, ed. Margarette Lincoln (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1998), 13.
64 Crone, “The Discovery of Tasmania and New Zealand,” 260.
65 Benjamin Schmidt, “Mapping an Empire: Cartographic and Colonial Rivalry in Seventeenth-Century Dutch and English North America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 3 (1997): 549–578; and Alessandro Scafi, “Mapping the End: The Apocalypse in Medieval Cartography,” Literature and Theology 26, no. 4 (2012): 400–416.
66 John Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 26, no. 2 (1989): 10.
67 Christopher, Tomlins, “The Legal Cartography of Colonization, the Legal Polyphony of Settlement: English Intrusions on the American Mainland in the Seventeenth Century,” in Law & Social Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2001): 324.
68 Benjamin Schmidt, “Mapping an Empire,” 551.
69 Tomlins, “The Legal Cartography of Colonization,” 326.
70 Ibid., 327.
71 David Turnbull, “Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces,” Imago Mundi 48, no. 1 (1996): 5–24.
72 Harley, “Silences and Secrecy,” 57–76.
73 John B. Harley and Kees Zandvliet, “Art, Science, and Power in Sixteenth-Century Dutch Cartography,” Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 29, no. 2 (1992): 10–19.
74 The Book of Duarte Barbosa (1518), ed. Mansel L. Dames (London: Hakluyt Society, 1918), 66; and Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation: Made by Sea or Ouer-Land to the Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth, at Any Time Within the Compasse of These 1600 Years: Diuided into Three Seuerall Volumes, According to the Positions of the Regions, vol. 1 (London: George Bishop, 1599), 608.
75 Edward Terry, A Voyage to East India: Wherein Some Things are Taken Notice Of (London: J. Wilkie, 1665), 171.
76 George Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World by the Way of the Great South Sea (London: J. Senex, 1726), 347.
77 John Lock, “The Second Voyage to Guinea [1554]”, in Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, vol. 2, 476.
78 Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents (London: E. Cotes, 1658), 9.
79 Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism (London: Psychology Press, 1996), 20; Mary Terrall, “Heroic Narratives of Quest and Discovery”, Configurations 6, no. 2 (1998): 223–242; and Michael Householder, Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery: Narratives of Encounter (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 5–15.
80 As examples during the century and a half preceding Cook’s mapping of New Zealand, see David Fausett, “Historical and Literary Parallels in the Early Mapping of Australia,” in Terrae Incognitae 26, no. 1 (1994): 27–35; Jeffrey C. Stone, “A Newly Discovered Map of Ettrick Forest, Scotland by Robert Gordon of Straloch: Implications for Sources Consulted by Joan Blaeu,” Imago Mundi 31 no. 1 (1979): 85–87; Lisa Davis-Allen and Dennis Reinhartz, “A Sanson-Jaillot Copperplate of 1674 of the Eastern Half of South America for the Atlas Nouveau: What Might Have Been,” Imago Mundi 42, no. 1 (1990): 94–98; and Paul E. H. Hair, “A Note on Thevet’s Unpublished Maps of Overseas Islands,” Terrae Incognitae 14, no. 1 (1982): 105–116.
81 James Cook, “Cook’s Journals, Daily Entries,” 25 December 1769, transcription of National Library of Australia, Manuscript 1 (Canberra, 2004): 167.
82 Abel Tasman, 5 January 1643, in Abel Tasman’s Journal of his Voyage of Discovery 1642–1643, ed. Brian Hooker (Auckland, DelZur Research 2002), n.p.
83 One of the exceptions to Cook’s dependence solely on Tasman’s cartographical intelligence was in his references to Tasman’s observation of a gum tree in Australia. James Cook, “Cook’s Journals, Daily Entries,” 1 May 1770, 229.
84 Ibid., 30 December 1769, p. 168.
85 Abel Tasman, 18 December 1642, in Abel Tasman’s Journal of his Voyage of Discovery 1642–1643, ed. Hooker, n.p.
86 Tony Ballantyne, “Christianity, Colonialism, and Cross-Cultural Communication,” in Christianity, Modernity, and Culture: New Perspectives on New Zealand History, eds. John Stenhouse and Gilbert A. Wood (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2005), 23–57.
87 Abel Tasman, 18 and 19 December 1642, in Abel Tasman’s Journal of his Voyage of Discovery 1642–1643, ed. Hooker, n.p.
88 Ian Barber, “Gardens of Rongo: Applying Cross-Field Anthropology to Explain Contact Violence in New Zealand,” Current Anthropology 53, no. 6 (2012), 799–800; Grahame Anderson, (Wellington, Te Papa Press, 2001), 89–92; and Andrew Sharp, The Voyages of Abel Janszoon Tasman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 121–130.
89 Abel Tasman, 19 December 1642, in Abel Tasman’s Journal of his Voyage of Discovery 1642–1643, ed. Hooker, n.p.
90 James Cook, “Cook’s Journals, Daily Entries,” 16 January 1770, 175.
91 Ibid., 18 and 19 April 1770, p. 223.
92 Ibid., 19 April 1770, p. 223.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Paul Moon
Dr Paul Moon is Professor of History at the School of History, Auckland University of Technology, in Auckland, New Zealand