The Landing at Mallicolo, one of the New Hebrides.

Title

The Landing at Mallicolo, one of the New Hebrides.

Description

View showing Captain Cook's landing on Mallicolo, an island in the New Hebrides. Drawn after William Hodges, engraved by J. Bafire.

c. 1777

Artist

Hodges (1744-1797)

William Hodges (1744- 1797 ) was an English painter. Hodges accompanied Captain James Cook aboard the Resolution on his second voyage to the South Seas, including Tahiti, the Tonga Islands, New Zealand, Easter Island and Antarctica. During his stay on board Hodges mainly made landscape sketches, but also some portraits of expedition members as well as special personalities of the visited islands. His landscape paintings usually also include elements showing the way of life of the people visited. His sketches were further worked on after his return to London, Hodges obtained employment for some time with the Admiralty, which allowed him to produce oil paintings from the sketches and to supervise the production of engravings of the same. Hodges' pictures illustrate as engravings in large quantity the later published travel descriptions of James Cook.

Historical Description

New Hebrides was the colonial name for the group of islands in the South Pacific now Vanuatu. Native people had inhabited the islands for three thousand years before the first Europeans arrived in 1606 from a Spanish expedition led by the Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queirós. The islands were colonized by both the British and the French in the 18th century shortly after Captain James Cook's visit, and the two countries eventually signed an agreement that turned the islands into an Anglo-French housing estate that would include the New Hebrides in divided into two separate communities: one Anglophone and one Francophone. This gap continued after independence, with schools teaching in either one language or the other and with different political parties.