Cook and His Contemporaries 2

As the 18th century progressed, fictional works based on real exploration turned their focus on the characters of the explorers themselves as well as on the inhabitants of foreign lands. Published accounts of journeys such as that of La Billardière focused on romanticised Enlightenment ethnographic notions of the ‘noble savage’ and ‘native beauty’ rather than on adventures on the high seas. Writers now explored the possibilities of what might have happened to lost explorers such as La Pérouse or imagined the purported romantic relationship of Joseph Banks with the Queen of Tahiti.