Paradise found

‘Madam’, Dr Johnson rebuked Boswell's wife, who had objected to the two men's Scottish tour, ‘we do not go there as to a paradise. We go to see something different from what we are accustomed to see’ (Johnson 1775, p. 19). His remark summarizes the empirical spirit idealized by eighteenthcentury travellers, but the denial it offers highlights the interpretive temptations beguiling travellers faced with unaccustomed scenes. Inevitably they resorted to descriptive strategies derived from pre-existing ideas, and so it was that when Joseph Banks stepped ashore at Tahiti he hailed it as an ‘Arcadia of which we were to be kings’ (Banks 1962, I, p. 252). The notion of terrestrial paradise was never far from the ocean-weary sailor's imagination, and even in the scientifically-minded ‘season for observing’ (Dening 1996, p. 109) following Captain Wallis's 1767 ‘discovery’ of Tahiti, the discourse of paradise, Eden, Elysium punctuated accounts of South Sea landfalls. Within a few years Wallis was followed by the French gentleman-explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville and then Captain Cook's Endeavour voyage, which served both as England's prototype of a new sort of scientific exploration and as the Grand Tour of a wealthy and imaginative young gentleman, Joseph Banks. Banks and Bougainville had been educated, as the sea captains who traditionally undertook voyages of discovery had not, in the classics and in the primitivist philosophy of Rousseau, and they thus brought to the South Seas a set of cultural assumptions that reinflected sailors’ age-old preoccupation with the paradisal qualities of landfalls.