Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters

by Vanessa Smith

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521437516
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/28/2010
Series:	Critical Perspectives on Empire
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Vanessa Smith teaches in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (1998) and co-editor of Exploration and Exchange: A South Seas Anthology 1680–1900 (2000) and Islands in History and Representation (2003).

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"...inspirational, recalling just how much has been forgotten or missed in previous readings of that archive."
—International Journal of Maritime History

From the Publisher