Voyages
We are working with six separate voyage accounts, documenting English voyages in the Pacific between 1766 and 1780.
- John Hawkesworth's account of Captain Wallis's voyage (part of a compiled and heavily edited account of several Pacific voyages from the 1760s, up to and including an account of Cook's first Pacific voyage.) The Wallis segment as summarized by Hawkesworth describes English first contact with Tahiti. Wallis's circumnavigatory expedition identified Tahiti as an ideal place to observe the astronomical phenomenon of the Transit of Venus.
- John Hawkesworth's account of Captain Cook's first voyage to the Pacific, in its entirety. This voyage circumnavigated the earth on a primarily scientific expedition to the Pacific, with a main goal to observe and document the Transit of Venus from Tahiti in June 1769. This multi-volume account describes the experiences of Captain Cook, Joseph Banks of the Royal Society, Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander, and artist Sydney Parkinson, and contains much description of Tahitians and other Pacific island cultures, as well as documentation of flora and fauna. Hawkesworth's account infuriated Captain Cook for appropriating his logs, retelling the expedition in the first person (as if Hawkesworth were the voice of Cook), and in Cook's opinion, giving disproportionate space to Joseph Banks. A group of our students in Fall 2013 prepared the TEI version of "Cook Voyage 1" by autotagging from an ECCO TCP base text, and they prepared a graphical analysis of cultural interactions in Book I: Chapters X - XV, describing experiences on Tahiti.
- James Cook's Voyage Towards the South Pole, the account of his second voyage, a major resource for writers and poets of the Pacific, especially in documenting cultural exchanges and newly mapping the Pacific and its continents and islands. Cook's second voyage explored the far south (Antarctic regions) of the South Pacific, and brought the Tahitian Omai to England.
- Georg Forster's and his father Johann Forster's separate accounts of Cook's second voyage, distinctive for their detailed cultural reflection as an alternative commentary on cultural contact.
- John Rickman's Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage. This third and last voyage returned Omai to Tahiti, tracked north to Nootka Sound and Vancouver. Rickman's journal documents the violent ending of Cook's life on Hawaii (to be posted).
We have extracted matched pairs of latitude and longitude coordinates from two of these voyage files, and have successfully converted these to KML files to view in Google Earth, together with the surrounding paragraph of text for each pair of coordinates. Please see our Maps page to view the Google Earth visualizations. As we continue our work, more voyage files will be posted here. For now the three voyage files available also form our database set from which we compile our geographical coordinate data as well as data on people and contexts for study with the poetry files.
In the early phase of this project, during the winter months of 2013, we spent much time preparing good XML files from a range of distinct base texts, from Project Gutenberg, from the ECCO Text Creation Partnership, and finally from early Microsoft Word documents generously sent to us by Nicholas Thomas, Professor of Historical Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, who published editions of Johann and Georg Forster's narratives in the 1990s and early 2000s. At this point, our files of Hawkesworth and of Cook's Second Voyage have undergone the most intensive markup, and these along with the XML file of Georg Forster's narrative of Cook's second voyage are all fully TEI P5 conformant. In preparing these files, we experimented with identity transformations from XML to XML (as exemplified by the Early Stage Identity Transformation of the Cook file), and we soon developed XSLT stylesheets to transform XML to HTML. We experimented with both the Hawkesworth HTML transformation and the Cook HTML Transformation with applying color coding with CSS to spans of our markup. Much of this color coding will likely change or disappear as we rethink how we are coding cultural contact episodes. For now the bright colors help us to take stock of what we've marked, why it's significant, and how we might code differently as we think about intersections across multiple files. We will most likely be keeping the blue color-coded spans indicating the geo elements, or latitude and longitude coordinates we have marked during our careful sifting of these files and intensive labors with regular expressions.