Fine Women

Neil Rennie

• The Pacific since Magellan. Volume III: Paradise Found and Lost by O.H. K. Spate
  Routledge, 410 pp, £40.00, January 1989, ISBN 0 415 02565 6
• Captain Bligh: The Man and his Mutinies by Gavin Kennedy
  Duckworth, 321 pp, £14.95, April 1989, ISBN 0 7156 2231 5
• The Sublime Savage: James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian by Fiona Stafford
  Edinburgh, 208 pp, £22.50, November 1988, ISBN 0 85224 569 6

In the 1760s the greatest gap in Western knowledge of the world – the Pacific – was plugged, in theory, by the great southern continent of Terra Australis, awaiting its Columbus. Within a few decades this continent had been exploded, mostly by its anti-Columbus, James Cook, and crumbled into a multitude of islands in a vast ocean, mapped, measured and ready for invasion by beachcombers, traders, whalers, missionaries, colonial administrators and, in their wake, historians. The voyagers, equipped with scientists and artists, had replaced a fictional continent with factual islands – a triumph of empiricism in preparation for a triumph of empire, apparently, but then the voyagers who had demolished Terra Australis had discovered Tahiti, an idea as well as an island, a ‘paradise’ found and then lost.