World order | 6 |
Fig. 1. | If we are to believe this picture from 1777, Captain James Cook was received by toga-clad natives on his arrival at Middleburgh, Tonga, during one of his famous South Sea expeditions. The Landing at Middleburgh, one of the Friendly Isles. W. Hodges, 1777.
natural, too passionate. The view of the people who were colonised as cannibals, murderers and “brutal savages�, barely to be considered human, was shared not least by the sailors and emigrants who travelled and settled in the New World. Bestiality not only caused offence, it also fascinated. This duplicity explains why sailors, merchants and explorers enthusiastically collected and took home so-called cannibal forks from Fiji, tattooed heads from New Zealand and scalps from North America. There was a market for these kinds of souvenir at home in Europe, where being a learned gentleman involved not just owning a library but also the building of private collections of curiosities from the worlds of nature and culture. Depiction of the savage as a cannibal was not exclusively based on a desire to show reality in a realistic way, it was also done with the intention of demonising the colonised. This
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