By the late eighteenth century, many naturalists and philosophers were uncomfortable with the biblical credo of human descent from a single couple even if they avowed, with Buffon (1749b, III:530), that 'there was originally only a single species of men'. A few eminent savants like the Frenchman Voltaire (1694-1778) and the Scot David Hume (1711-1776) flirted with the notion of multiple origins.^[107] Kant proclaimed an end to the 'hitherto obligatory accepted interpretation of world history as mystical salvation history' and duly proposed a rational, scientific justification for human unity. Prichard, too, insisted that 'all mankind constitute but one race or proceed from a single family' but denied 'religious predilections' and claimed to rest his case on 'distinct and independent grounds', including the supposition, attributed to Linnaeus, that every species was created 'in a single stock; probably a single pair'.^[108] Among voyage naturalists, Philibert Commerson (1727-1773), who sailed with Bougainville in the 1760s, asserted that 'only a mythologist' could explain how the 'very distinct races of men' could be the issue of 'a common stock' and speculated that 'our good Tahitians', whom he idealized, might be autochthonous. Georg Forster also mocked the 'hypothesis of one single couple' as 'mythology', 'unknowable', and no less problematic than the 'assumption' of human descent from 'several original stocks' emergent in 'different parts of the world'.^[109]

The writings of nineteenth-century naturalists on Oceanian people are punctuated by signs of both the growing scientific and demotic appeal of polygeny and the countervailing moral and political inertia exerted by the established doctrine, especially over conventional genres. In a popular work, Dumont d'Urville's protagonist flirts with the notion of 'the Australian' as 'half-man, half-brute', condemned to 'perish entirely' because he lacked 'the conditions of amalgamation which might create, like elsewhere, a class of half-breeds'. In his racial taxonomy, directed to a scientific audience, Dumont d'Urville was noncommittal as to whether the three major human races might belong to 'different or successive creations or formations'. Yet, in reprinting this memoir in his official voyage narrative — a very conventional genre — he added a footnote endorsing the orthodox 'opinion' that all races derived from the 'same primitive stock'.^[110] Lesson's memoir on the races of Oceania (1829:156) likewise acknowledged in passing the 'fundamental premise, that man constitutes only a single species'. But in a later general work on natural history (1847:14-15), he at once maintained that 'the human species is one and indivisible'; insisted that the existence of 'numerous and very diversified' permanent races was 'palpable' and that 'we cannot mistake the real and profound characters of race'; but refused to speculate whether racial diversity was originally created or a product of externally induced 'degeneration'.

Quoy's strategic vacillations on the issue of human unity pepper his texts. His manuscript journal of the Uranie voyage (1817‑20:[ii]) is prefaced by this highminded but evidently sincere statement of intent, indicating his belief at the time in the common humanity of 'the natives' he expected to meet: 'I swear here that I prefer to lose my life than to keep it by killing unfortunates who are barbarians only for want of judgment or civilization'. In keeping with this avowal, his and Gaimard's chapter 'On Man' in the Zoologie of the voyage (1824c) shows traces of an environmentalist, albeit ambivalent humanism. Yet Quoy's equivalent chapter in their Zoologie of the Astrolabe voyage (1830) is much altered in tone. Here, he refused to 'engage in conjecture' on the 'origin' of 'the species [espèce] which inhabits New Holland' though the term espèce was loaded in the context. He admitted as much in a handwritten marginal comment on a personal copy of the volume: 'here I am not too clear. I apparently had in mind the unity of the human species, in which I do not believe'. At the time, however, either he, Gaimard, or their editors were evidently unprepared to dispute the doctrine openly: the published text sticks consistently to the term race whereas Quoy's manuscript draft interchanges espèce and race, suggesting conflation of the concepts in principle but conscious editorial avoidance of controversial terminology. In a much later manuscript, Quoy took the plurality of human species as given, significantly with reference to the New Hollanders who were always among the populations most likely to be relegated to other or less than fully human status: the handful of 'naked savages' seen 'wandering like animals in search of their food' at Shark Bay in 1818 were 'truly the most degraded species in the world, occupying the last echelon of humanity' — a notably less generous estimation than in his 1824 text.^[111] Taken together, such equivocations and about-turns register both a widening acceptance by French naval naturalists of the radical notion of multiple human species, if not separate origins, and their anxious efforts to accommodate the frequently incommensurate demands of intellectual fashion and moral conformity, epitomized respectively in their scientific and naval vocations.

By the mid-nineteenth century, polygenist thinking was pervasive in anthropology in France. Restoration-era constraints on its expression in officially sanctioned literature had receded and professed monogenists were often ambiguously complicit in the by now dominant racial agenda.^[112] These patterns were already evident in the voluminous body of scientific material on the people of Oceania generated by Dumont d'Urville's final voyage of 1837-40. The works in question were produced by the phrenologist Dumoutier, who believed in a single human species, and the variously polygenist naturalists Hombron, Jacquinot, and Emile Blanchard (1819-1900), who did not.^[113]

Dumoutier promoted the key phrenological principles of individuality and the equal mental potential of all human beings while his novel method of casting moulages, plaster busts, from living indigenous subjects demanded personal intimacy with likely models and patient negotiation to obtain cooperation from them or their governors (Figures 10 and 11).^[114] Yet his mostly unpublished writings on the voyage (1837‑40) show a striking disjunction between theory and unsettling experience: expressed humanist values jar with conventional racial essentialism and deeply ambivalent reactions to Oceanian people, especially when they acted in independent or threatening fashion or reminded him of Negroes. Though his phrenological investigations suggested significant differences in the cerebral development of various Oceanian populations, he clearly did not see such variation as innately organic since 'the organization of the brain is the same in all men'. Instead, like the later Buffon, he represented organic differences as the indirect product of external influences — climate, 'the social state', 'the mode of existence', and ancient histories of migration by 'conquering strangers' who successively displaced and dispersed the 'two primitive black races' which, he thought, were probably 'original to the torrid zone' and doomed to 'nonexistence'. One was 'a particular race' which inhabited most of New Holland, was positioned 'at the lowest degree of civilization', and spoke many different languages that 'resemble no dialect of any other human race'.^[115] Here, too, an insinuation of autochthony prefigured a whiff of polygeny and the spectre of racial extinction.

Dumoutier's theoretical commitment to ideals of human unity and general improvability jostled in his writings with complacent conviction of European superiority and deep ambivalence about 'primitive black races'. However, few such uncertainties troubled the volumes produced by his surrogate Blanchard or his fellow voyager Hombron. Blanchard asserted that the human genus 'comprises several species'; that they were necessarily 'created in the very countries where we observe them today'; and that there must therefore have been 'a considerable number of original stocks'. Races were permanent while their 'physical' characters were primary, 'rigorously determined', and coincident with their 'moral and intellectual' characters.^[116] There was direct correlation between European physical characters and the greatest 'volume of intelligence' but no 'equality' between men since those whose heads were 'contracted on top and in front and elongated behind' and whose jaw bones 'projected' — such as the 'Papous', 'the Australians and Tasmanians', and 'the Negroes of Africa' — were bereft of 'genius or even talent, in the European sense'.^[117] On the basis of Dumoutier's skull collection, Blanchard distinguished six 'very distinct types' in Oceania, arranged in a hierarchy of relative physical and moral 'superiority' and 'inferiority'. The 'Malay type', though 'very imperfect' compared to the European, ranked highest and was 'greatly superior' to the Micronesian who in turn had 'the advantage' over the Polynesian. The skulls of the Papous closely resembled the Polynesian type but were 'more degraded'. Dismissing Quoy and Gaimard's portrayal of Papous as 'Negro-Malay metis' and citing Prichard in support, Blanchard made them the 'true natives' of the lands they occupied from New Guinea to Fiji, a discrete race positioned at 'one of the last degrees of human civilization'. The Australians and Tasmanians were anthropologically 'at the last rank among men', along with the Negroes of Africa, and lacked any 'trace of civilization' or capacity to achieve it.^[118]

Hombron's treatise 'On Man' is a prolix, idiosyncratic effort to reconcile polygeny with divine creation. It is profoundly racialized: the 'several species of men' had separate local creations, were distinguished by 'intelligence', and were grouped into 'three natural families'. The 'family of blacks' belonged 'to the primitive human creations' and continued to occupy 'the most arid and inaccessible' places where their 'conquerors' had not bothered to follow them; the 'copper-coloured' family, which included the eastern Oceanians or Polynesians, emerged subsequently; the 'great white family' was created last as the 'logical consequence of the union of matter and intelligence' to form the link between 'man occupying the last echelons of the human series, and the supreme intelligence'.^[119] However, the rival treatise by Hombron's young medical colleague Jacquinot (1846:36, 375‑6) — on 'anthropology' and 'the human races of south America and Oceania' — is a useful reminder that extreme racialism was not a necessary corollary of polygeny and that personal impressions could flout racial preconceptions. An avowed believer that the human genus comprised 'three distinct species', he nonetheless denied the standard representation of 'the black races of Oceania as brutish nomadic tribes, lacking industry and intelligence'. The stereotype hardly applied even to the 'most brutish tribes' of New Holland, whose 'miserable state' resulted largely from the 'sterility of the soil', while in other parts of the country they had shown themselves to be 'intelligent' and as educable as the children of English settlers. The 'Melanians' (Melanesians), he claimed, 'cede nothing to the Polynesians and even surpass them sometimes', especially in 'industry'; conversely, in 'ferocity and perfidy', the Polynesians yielded nothing to the Melanians, as the first navigators had found to their cost.

Figure 10: [J.-B.?] Léveillé after photograph by [Louis-Auguste?] Bisson of Pierre-Marie Alexandre Dumoutier, 'Ma-Pou-Ma-Hanga. Native de l'Ile de Manga-Réva, Archipel Gambier (Polynésie)' (1846).^[120]

Lithographed photograph of plaster bust. Photograph B. Douglas.

 Figure 11: [J.-B.?] Léveillé after photograph by [Louis-Auguste?] Bisson of Pierre-Marie Alexandre Dumoutier, 'Guenney. Natif de Port-Sorelle, (Comté de Dévon), Côte-Nord de la terre de Van Diemen (Mélanésie)' (1846).^[121]

Lithographed photograph of plaster bust. Photograph B. Douglas.