Intermediaries, Servants, or Captives : Disentangling Indigenous labour in D. W. Carnegie’s exploration of the Western Australian desert

In the late fifteenth century, Christopher Columbus kidnapped Caribbean people to train and use them as translators who could inform him about potential dangers and desirable commodities. The Dutch East India Company in the early seventeenth century instructed their captains to capture Indigenous peoples whenever possible for the same purpose.
Then, in the late eighteenth century maritime explorers like James Cook and Matthew Flinders, on occasion, kidnapped Islander and Aboriginal people in the Pacific and Australia as punishment for perceived thefts, and as a means of asserting their authority over seemingly recalcitrant native peoples. Thus, for centuries European explorers felt at liberty to capture Indigenous individuals as a strategy for discovering information about local environments and polities, as well as for enforcing discipline and control.

This edition © 2019 ANU Press and Aboriginal History Inc.

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