Return of the Traveler

The final chapter traces Mai’s voyage back from Britain to the Pacific. This voyage was arranged by the British government and led, again, by James Cook. Mai experiences various adventures during the voyage, including some altercations with different indigenous groups. In New Zealand, Mai secures two Maori boys to join him as servants. His arrival on Tahiti proves moving for Islanders and British alike. Here Mai reunites with a sister and an aunt, wrangles with a chief, and acquires a large canoe. Mai expects to be deposited back on Ra‘iatea, but Cook at the last minute decides against it, fearing Islander conflagration, and takes him to Huahine instead. Disappointed, Mai is at least gratified to have Cook’s men build him a house. In many ways, Mai’s plotline is the most tragic of the three characters: he begins as a refugee from his own society and never fulfils his dream of restitution. Even so, Mai offers at least one small twist to the old tale—European empire never steals the limelight in his story; instead, Mai turns the tables by employing European empire, almost entirely on his own terms, to seek his ultimate end.

The Artist-Philosopher

Chapter 2, much like Chapter 1, traces the first several decades of an eighteenth-century life, dwelling on what childhood can reveal about a whole society; when lives might be said to begin in a given culture; and how the protagonist moved within his world to reach mid-life. Its focus is the artist--philosopher Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds’s life embodies a deep conflict in British society of the time—the conflict over empire. We see Reynolds’s character develop gradually as both conservatively sceptical about Britain’s recent expansionist thrust into the world and keenly eager to make the most of all that imperial commerce was now bringing into his native country. Reynolds’s ambivalence is also reflected in his art theories, local politics, and even domestic life. While narrating his rise to artistic pre-eminence (and a philosophical devotion to neoclassical aesthetics), the chapter also shows how Reynolds built increasingly close friendships to key male literary figures of the time—especially Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke. Through his connection to the Tory Johnson and the Whiggish Burke, we get a glimpse into Reynolds’s otherwise elusive, hard-to-read political views—especially during Britain’s greatest imperial push to date, the Seven Years War.

Home to a New World

In late 1762, Ostenaco returns to a changing Appalachia. The chapter narrates the second half of his life, detailing his adventures with home life, war, land cession, and much else. The year 1763 brings the momentous news of Britain’s final victory over France. With European rivalry now removed, British settlers seem more rather than less intrusive upon Native Americans. Such a reaction prompts both an Indian backlash in the shape of Pontiac’s War and a British administrative scramble to legislate some measures of protection against settler encroachment. Ostenaco is caught up in the consequent maelstrom. Although he maintains his diplomat’s demeanour through the 1760s and the early 1770s, something snaps for Ostenaco in 1775. That year, he witnesses the Cherokee young-blood, Dragging Canoe, stamp his feet and refuse to negotiate with any whites any longer. By 1777 Ostenaco has joined Dragging Canoe’s Chickamauga secessionists. The plot twist in Ostenaco’s story, then, is in how he manages to remain, in his own mind at least, loyally Cherokee while bucking the prevailing Cherokee trend towards surrender. Through a novel turn to non-cooperation, Ostenaco maintains a sense of autonomy from empire till the very end.

A Cherokee Envoy and the Portrait That Failed

The focus of this chapter alternates throughout from Ostenaco and his travels to the centre of London, to Reynolds’s endeavour to paint his portrait, back to Ostenaco, back to Reynolds, and then finally ends with Ostenaco’s voyage home in October 1762. The chapter covers only six months, but this period turned out to be portentous for both Cherokee and British fortunes. The Cherokees looked set to enjoy some assured independence herein and the British teetered on the verge of wiping out all imperial rivalry. Amid the narrative flipping, we follow Ostenaco’s adventures through the seamier regions of London’s lowlife—including taverns, spas, and drunken escapades in pleasure gardens—to his diplomatic meeting with King George III. We witness Reynolds’s meeting with Ostenaco and his attempt to capture the Cherokee’s image on canvas according to his neoclassical philosophy of art. Reynolds afterwards reckoned the work a failure—an intriguingly rare moment of defeat for the painter—but it nonetheless distils much about attitudes to empire in Britain at the time.

The Warrior-Diplomat

A narrative of the first half of Ostenaco’s life, it tells the story of the Cherokees from their first encounters with Europeans to the deadly Anglo-Cherokee War of 1760-61. Ostenaco’s life illuminates the Cherokees’ changing sense of themselves, from a town-based identity, to a region-based identity, to a nation-based identity. It also reveals an Indigenous face to the history of empire. We learn that, in Cherokee terms, the story of Ostenaco’s life started with his mother rather than with the actual fleshy entrance of his body into the world. From the description of Ostenaco’s childhood, we also learn about the peculiar gender dynamics of Cherokee society as well as its clan system, economic values, and overall embeddedness in the place of the Appalachians Mountains. By the 1740s, Ostenaco had gained the high-ranking military title of Mankiller; by the 1750s, he was allying with British officers like George Washington. In early 1760, deteriorating relations with multiple colonial centres lead Ostenaco abruptly to reject all colonial alliance.

Prologue

The evening of 10 December 1776 was exceptionally cold. It had been a trying winter for Londoners in more ways than one. News from across the Atlantic was getting worse every day, and no one seemed to agree on the best path forward. Some thought the American colonists were justified in their break for independence. Others believed that hanging was now not punishment enough. The weather didn’t help. Yet, undeterred by it all, that night the members and students of the Royal Academy of the Arts scurried up the steps into Somerset House on The Strand for their annual prize-giving ceremony. Perhaps they were eager for some distraction from the splintering of their empire. Perhaps they wanted simply to find out who were the medal winners for that year and to listen to their president’s seventh formal address....