Gothic and the Pacific voyage: Patriotism, romance and savagery in South Seas travels and the Utopia of the Terra Australis

'Gothic and the Pacific Voyage' is an examination of what the emblematic northern European Goth was doing in the Pacific South Seas in the latter part of the eighteenth century. By way of literary analysis, historical contextualisation, and the application of ethnographic and anthropological insights, I argue that Gothic tales, ideals, iconography and states of mind are not marginal but integral to eighteenth-century Pacific travel narratives: real voyages, fantastic voyages, and narrative fictions set in both the actual and the mythic lands of the South Seas.;In part one, I survey Gothic in its diverse incarnations, in order to explore a trajectory of influence from Tacitus's barbarians to the indigenous inhabitants of the Pacific South Seas. I establish Gothic as a product of the Western mind and a significant imaginative export--part of a plexus of cultural expectations, habits, discourses and fantasies attendant upon the early British and European far-traveller embarking on voyages to the Pacific.;Part two explores the narratives of some of the first European voyagers to make extended contact with the island populations of the South Seas: Wallis, Bougainville, Commerson, Cook, Sparrman, Johann and George Forster. I show how Golden Age, Utopian and Noble Savage expectations helped to shape the narratives of European-Polynesian contact, before giving way to speculation on the similarities between Europe's own ancient, gothic barbarians and the newly encountered 'savages' and 'savage lands' of the Pacific. In these narratives of contact and exploration, I demonstrate how persistent were gothic habits of mind and description.;Finally, I examine the early romance of the South Seas. Before the era of missionaries and settlement, before the erotic and exotic imaginary of Stevenson and Gauguin, there were the fantasies and wild expectations of South Seas utopias and the Terra Australis Incognita. I show how travellers to these fantastic regions of the British and European map and mind were often styled as Gothic chivalric knights and the lands they sought as the last possible places on earth to find paradise.