The purpose of this article is to compare two instances of European expansion during the second part of the eighteenth century, while highlighting certain elements of violence that characterised the arrival of the explorers in territories which they considered they had a legal and moral right to control. His journal describes the Endeavour’s infamous arrival in Poverty Bay, New Zealand, during which several Maori were killed. As for Cook, he was accompanied during his first trip by William Monkhouse, of whom little is known other than that he was the ship’s surgeon on the first trip to the South Seas. In the case of Bougainville, I’ll be dealing with the only published report of his first trip to the Malvinas, conducted in the early 1760s, written by the ship’s naturalist and chaplain, Antoine-Joseph Pernety. There were also less glamorous but equally necessary members on board, including doctors, cooks and chaplains, and it is on such lesser-known testimonies that this article focuses. As was then becoming the norm, their expeditions included a variety of objectives, meaning that a number of specialists, scientists and even artists accompanied them, with the task of collecting useful information that the ship captain could not be expected to obtain on his own. The following article deals with two accounts of state-sponsored voyages undertaken in the early careers of renown navigators Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and James Cook in the 1760s.

Europa universalis 5 maori