Gordon Browne
Death of Captain Cook
London: George Routledge & Sons, 1892
1892.7.875 (frontispiece)

The nineteenth century and its advances in commerce and technology made the ‘noble savage’s’ way of life seem inferior and doomed to extinction. The peoples of the Pacific, regarded as exotic and captivating in the eighteenth century, were increasingly imagined to be in need of civilisation in the century that followed, as growing European empires sought to assume racial and cultural superiority over them. Cook, with his ambitions of global expansion, soon became the ideal hero for a country that was in the midst of a full-blown imperial conquest. As the century progressed, the bestiality of Cook’s assailants became emphasised, portrayed to look increasingly like animals, as can be seen for instance in this 1892 illustration of C. R. Low’s edition of Cook’s voyages.