Intimate Strangers
Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters

A fascinating study of the importance of ideas of friendship in late eighteenth-century explorations of the Pacific.

Vanessa Smith (Author)

9780521437516, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 October 2010

336 pages, 18 b/w illus.
23.4 x 16 x 1.9 cm, 0.65 kg

'… inspiring in the range of its insight, and has the potential to reconfigure the way we approach the history of encounters …' International Journal of Maritime History

When Louis Antoine de Bougainville reached Tahiti in 1768, he was struck by the way in which 'All these people came crying out tayo, which means friend, and gave a thousand signs of friendship; they all asked nails and ear-rings of us.' Reading the archive of early contact in Oceania against European traditions of thinking about intimacy and exchange, Vanessa Smith illuminates the traditions and desires that led Bougainville and other European voyagers to believe that the first word they heard in the Pacific was the word for friend. Her book encompasses forty years of encounters from the arrival of the Dolphin in Tahiti in June 1767, through Cook's and Bligh's voyages, to early missionary and beachcomber settlement in the Marquesas. It unpacks both the political and emotional significances of ideas of friendship for late eighteenth-century European, and particularly British, explorations of Oceania.

Introduction: amicable signs
Part I. Making Contact: 1. Crowd scenes
2. Receiving strangers
3. Calculated affection
4. Performance anxieties
Part II. Particular Friendships: 5. Fellow traveling
6. Ruinous friendships
7. Prizeable companions.

Subject Areas: Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], General & world history [HBG]