1774 Captain Wallis Attacked in Le Dauphin by the Tahitians
DESCRIPTION
The Tahitian attack on Captain Samuel Wallis's ship at Matavai Bay appears in this excerpted plate from the French edition of John Hawkesworth's account of the voyages of Byron, Wallis, Carteret, and Cook.
In it, a three-masted ship fires its guns in clouds of smoke as canoes crowd the water around it beneath wooded hills. A large canoe hung with pennants and a canopied platform presses toward the ship at lower right accompanied by several smaller canoes to its left. Manning these vessels are native Tahitians setting upon Captain Wallis' ship Le Dauphin. The caption reads "Le Capitaine Wallis est attaqué dans le Dauphin par les Otahitiens," or "Captain Wallis is attacked in Le Dauphin by the Tahitians."
Hawkesworth's Voyages
In 1773 John Hawkesworth published, at the Admiralty's commission, a compiled account of the British voyages of John Byron, Samuel Wallis, Philip Carteret, and James Cook's first voyage, which together opened the South Pacific to European readers. It was translated into French the following year as Relation des voyages entrepris par ordre de Sa Majesté britannique (Paris: Saillant et Nyon and Panckoucke, 1774), with its plates re-engraved under the direction of Robert Bénard and others. Wallis's Dolphin reached Tahiti in 1767, the first European ship known to have done so, and Cook's Endeavour followed in 1769.
CONDITION
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