18 Conclusion
This Open Education Resource (OER) draws on the traces left by European explorers, and examines what they can tell us about the past. These documents are not simple records of facts, they are rich interpretations of extraordinary events. The exploration of Australia and the Pacific was not a simple matter of investigating unknown regions and recording them for the future; rather, the explorers entered peopled places and their records contain glimpses of the societies they encountered. Explorers’ records also illuminate their own preconceptions and those of the societies they represented.
When explorers entered the Pacific, the region was not a blank expanse. The ideas explorers carried with them shaped their vision. Those ideas, and their hopes, had led to their very presence in the region. Explorers were not disinterested observers, even those who made scientific records. Most came expecting to find what they were looking for. The rigours of their journeys meant they were often sick, desperate for supplies, anxious, and fearful. Their vision was already clouded by expectation and distress, and the records of their experiences and actions are further distorted by their need to please their patrons and funders.
Explorers did not just shape the records that would inform history, they also shaped the futures of the regions they visited. They acted as probes for interested states and organisations; they were forerunners of empire throughout the Pacific, and of settler colonialism in Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Hawai’i. The definition of explorer used in this OER (explicated in the introduction) reflects the strength of connection between explorers and Europe.
Determining quite what makes an explorer an explorer (and not simply a traveller) is difficult. Attempts to identify explorers by their connections with written records and publications are partly successful but gather in many travellers and exclude some people recognised as explorers. Such a definition risks excluding Sir Francis Drake, whose journal was lost by Queen Elizabeth I (an account was later written by his nephew and published nearly half a century after his return). And such a definition excludes the explorers who first located Aotearoa (the stories of Maui and Kupe were not committed to writing, and were published only much later as myths). Rather than being identified by their relationship with publishers, explorers can be identified by their strong links to their home societies which supported their endeavours, and which they in turn informed of new places and opportunities.
That connection to their home societies means that European explorers are problematic figures in the present. They are tarred by their association with colonial expansion, by their willingness to resort to violence against local people, and by the cartographic problems they left in their wake as they assigned new names to geographical features. These issues may disrupt previous interpr