Review of Jonathan R Wynn’s 2011 The Tour guide. Walking and talking New York

BOOK REVIEWS Indigenous Agency and European Science: Exploring the Emergence of “Race” Across Seas and Centuries Bronwen Douglas, Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania, 1511– 1850 (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave, 2014), 384 pp., 41 illustrations, £70 In Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania, 1511–1850, Bronwen Doug- las brings together twenty years of research in an ambitious, stimulating, and engaging history. Th e book highlights the simultaneous and competing infl u- ences of indigenous agency, experiences in the fi eld, and metropolitan theories about human diversity on the representations of Oceanic peoples produced by European voyagers. It also traces how European understandings of humanity were constructed via the circulation of knowledge between imperial centers and peripheries and the accumulation of knowledge from one encounter or voyage to another. Th e gradual emergence of the “science of race,” Douglas reveals, was aff ected by the regular movement of people and the constant ex- change, accrual, and testing of their knowledge over space and time. Th is history is told chronologically and in two parts. Beginning in the six- teenth century with so-called Indians, Negroes, and Savages in Terra Aus- tralis, the fi rst part takes the reader through three stages—“Before Races,” “Towards Races,” and “Seeing Races”—from Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch exploration to British and French scientifi c expeditions, concluding at th e turn of the nineteenth century. In Douglas’s own terms, this fi rst part consti- tutes a “lexico-semantic history and an ethnohistory of ‘not race’” (33). In the second part, the scope narrows as Douglas concentrates on a series of French maritime expeditions that, unlike their predecessors, involved only naval staff —no civilian naturalists. Th ey experienced Oceanic encounters and pro- duced textual and visual representations of humanity in a climate of “harden- ing racial values and imperial rivalry in the metropole” and amid an array of “confl icting imperatives”—personal, offi cial, and experiential (34). Despite its breadth, this history is thorough and scholarly. Douglas smoothly combines ethnohistory and the history of science, acknowledges the complexities of the historical record by considering, for example, the diff erences between textual and visual genres, and traces the shifting moods of her subjects by noting, for instance, the patterns and connotations of their language. Th e book’s vibrant cover image provides an engaging and appropriate entry to this complex history. Truly a “graphic narrative” (33), it depicts the meeting between a boatload of voyagers from the Astrolabe and several men Transfers 5(2), Summer 2015: 143–164 doi: 10.3167/TRANS.2015.050212 ISSN 2045-4813 (Print) ISSN 2045-4821 (Online)

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