This engraving, after a drawing by William Hodges, comes from the official account of Cook's second voyage, 'A Voyage towards the South Pole', published by Strahan and Cadell in 1777 (vol. II, pl. xxxix, f.p. 119).

Captain James Cook (1728-79) made three separate voyages to the Pacific (first in the 'Endeavour', second with 'Resolution' and 'Adventure', and finally with 'Resolution and 'Discovery'). He did more than any other voyager to explore it and the Southern Ocean, not only encountering Pacific cultures for the first time but also assembling the first large-scale collections of Pacific objectsbrought back to Europe. He was killed on Hawaii in 1779. Hodges (1744-97) was the draughtsman and painter on Cook's second expedition,1772-75, and was subsequently employed by the Admiralty to work up drawings for engraving and produce finished oil paintings from it.

Cook located New Caledonia in September 1774 and was there in the 'Resolution' between 3 and 13 September. Before he left Hodges completed, as he had at Tana, a portrait of a typical man and a typical woman of the island. They are highly competent works but wholly impersonal. Melanesians, it seems, made no imaginative impression upon him and these images are more in the older tradition of ethnographic topography rather than personal portraiture. It is particularly obvious in the drawing of the man of New Caledonia, seen in frontal and profile view on the one sheet, repesenting the physiognomic interests of the scientists rather than the personal reactions of the artist. As Joppien and Smith note (citing Record) in reproducing the original red chalk drawing from which this plate was made, now with its pair of the NewCaledonian woman in the National Library of Australia in Canberra, the attachment on the hat is 'A becket, or piece of cord made of cocoa-nut bark, used in thowing their lances' (i.e a sling). See 'The Art of Captain Cook's Voyages' (vol. II, p. 237- 39 for both the drawings of man and woman and the related prints, and p. 240 or Record's print which separately shows the type of hat, with other New Caledonia items. J&S also give Cook's note on hats in relation to another of the Canberra drawings by Hodges showing a man wearing one improvised from European paper: ' Some have a kind of Concave cylindrical stiff black caps [as shown in this print], these seemed to be a great ornament among them, and we thought only worn by men of note or Warriors, a large sheet of our strong paper, when ever they got one, was generally applied to this use.' (See 'Journals' [ed. Beaglehole], II, p.540, 2 Sept. 1774). For the print of the woman of New Caledonia, see PAI2115.

Mounted in album with PAI4078-PAI4098, PAI4100-PAI4214.; Page 145.