Nigel Rigby

Profile

Head of Research

I look after the Museum’s academic programme of conferences, lectures, seminars and fellowships. I also manage the curatorial group and do a bit of research myself, mainly on 18th-century exploration, particularly in the Pacific Ocean.

The question I'm asked most often

Was Captain Cook cannibalized?

James Cook was killed at Keleakekua Bay, Hawaii, on Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1779. Fourteen Hawaiians were also killed but Cook’s body was not recovered. Some parts of it were given back, including one of his hands, which was identifiable by an old powder burn, and some bones which had deep scores in them and showed the marks of fire.

It was popularly believed that Cook’s body had been divided up between the Hawaiian chiefs and eaten. A long poem, Elegy on the Death of Captain Cook, was written by Anna Seward shortly after Cook’s death and it colourfully describes ‘human fiends’ feeding on his limbs. In Herman Melville’s semi-autobiographical novel, Omoo, the main character, a sailor called Tommo, claimed to have met a chief who had eaten Cook’s big toe.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, these are some way from the truth, which was that the flesh from Cook’s body was cut off and burned and the bones then distributed to chiefs around the island in line with Hawaiian funerary practices.

My recommended books and links

Books

• Discoveries: the Voyages of Captain Cook
• The Life of Captain James Cook
• The Life of Matthew Flinders
• Pioneers of the Pacific: voyages of exploration 1787-1810

Online

If it’s Matthew Flinders you are interested in, I can recommend the National Maritime Museum’s web pages which have transcriptions of his letters to his wife, written during his voyage of exploration around Australia in 1801–03. These are very well written, engrossing and often extremely moving.

Academic profile

Head of Research

Biography

• BA (I) African and Caribbean Studies and English, University of Kent, 1991
• PhD ‘A Sea of Islands: Tropes of Travel and Adventure in the Pacific, 1800-1900’, University of Kent, 1995
• Lecturer in English Literature, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1995-96
• Joined NMM in 1996 as a research fellow on the Trade and Empire gallery.

Areas of research and interest

• Exploration, particularly Pacific exploration, 1700–1830
• Literature and the sea

Current NMM projects

I am the Museum supervisor of Philip Rich, a doctoral student at the University of Sheffield, who is writing a thesis on our collection of films about cruising in the immediate post-war years.

I’m also supervising Anyaa Anim-Addoo, who is registered for a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London and is working on the papers of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. She’s particularly interested in their operations in the post-Abolition Caribbean.

Previous NMM projects

Research for the Trade and Empire gallery, which opened in 1999.

External fellowships/honorary positions/membership of professional bodies

• Vice-president, Hakluyt Society
• Council member, British Commission for Maritime History

Selected publications

Edited and co-written scholarly publications:

• Modernism and Empire, ed. with H. Booth (Manchester University Press, 2000)
• The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. and introduced with H. Bowen and M. Lincoln (Boydell and Brewer, 2002)
• Maritime Empires, ed. with D. Killingray and M. Lincoln (Boydell and Brewer, 2004)
• Editor, Journal for Maritime Research, 1999-2008

Refereed articles and chapters in scholarly books:

• ‘Introduction’ (with H. Booth) and ‘“Not a Good Place for Deacons”: the South Seas, Sexuality and Modernism in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s "Mr Fortune’s Maggot"’, Modernism and Empire, (Manchester University Press, 2000) pp. 1-12, 224-248
• ‘The Politics and Pragmatics of Seaborne Plant Transportation, 1769-1805’, in M. Lincoln ed., Science and Exploration: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century (Boydell & Brewer, 1998, new edition 2001), pp. 81-102
• ‘Die Darstellung kriegerischer Auseinandersetzungen im National Maritime Museum’, Michael Epkenhans and Gerhard Gross eds, Das Militär und der Aufbruch in die Moderne, 1860-1890 (Oldenbourg, 2003), pp. 299-312
• "'Not at all a Particular Ship": adapting vessels for British voyages of exploration, 1768-1801’, in A. George, J. Wege et al, eds, Matthew Flinders and his Scientific Gentlemen: the Expedition of HMS Investigator to Australia, 1801 to 1805 (Western Australia Museum, 2005), pp. 13-23
• ‘“The Whole of the Surveying Department Rested on Me”: Matthew Flinders, Hydrography and the Navy’, S. Rivière, ed., Encounters 200 (University of Mauritius, forthcoming, 2006)