Many debts are necessarily incurred in the course of such a long project. The editors particularly thank the contributors for the uniformly high quality of their chapters, their cheerful, tolerant responses to our editorial obsessions, and their patience over a much longer gestation period than planned. We thank Stephanie Anderson and Vicki Luker for outstanding research and editorial assistance respectively. We thank Noel Wendtham for her superb cover design.

We are grateful to the knowledgeable and helpful staff of the following libraries, museums, and archives: in Australia, The Australian National University Library, the Baillieu and Brownless Libraries at the University of Melbourne, the Matheson Library at Monash University, the Mitchell Library at the State Library of New South Wales, the National Library of Australia, and the State Library of Victoria; in France, the Archives nationales, the Bibliothèque du Musée de l'Homme, the Bibliothèque du Musée de la Marine, the Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, and the Bibliothèque nationale, all in Paris, the Ancienne Ecole de Médecine navale in La Rochelle, the Médiathèques in La Rochelle and Rochefort, the Musée des Beaux Arts in Chartres, the Muséums d'Histoire naturelle in Le Havre and La Rochelle, and the Service historique de la Défense, département Marine, in Vincennes, Rochefort, and Toulon; in the UK, the British Library, the British Museum, Cambridge University Library, the Library of the Linnean Society, and the National Maritime Museum. Particular thanks to Gabrielle Baglione, in Le Havre; to Yvonne Bouvier-Graux, Claude Stéfani, and Arnaud Thillier in Rochefort; and to Chantal de Gaye, Elise Patole-Edoumba, and Jean-Louis Mahe in La Rochelle. Paul Turnbull thanks the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons in London for permission to cite from manuscript material held in their Library.

We thank the following repositories for permission to reproduce images held in their collections: the David Rumsey Map Collection <http://www.davidrumsey.com> (Figure 1); the Service historique de la Défense, département Marine, Vincennes (Figures 8, 9, 12); the National Library of Australia, Canberra (Figures 3, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24). We thank Bob Connolly and the Penguin Group for permission to reproduce a photograph to which they hold copyright (Figure 20).

Both editors enjoyed valuable opportunities to undertake research in Europe through the award of fellowships, visitorships, and research grants. Bronwen Douglas thanks the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK, for a Caird Visiting Fellowship in 2001 and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) for an appointment as maître de conférence associé at the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l'Océanie (CREDO) in Marseille in 2007. Her research in France in 2004 was funded by a Getty Grant Program grant for a project on 'Tatau/Tattoo: Embodied Art and Cultural Exchange, c. 1760-c. 2000', and in 2006-7 by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant for a project on 'European Naturalists and the Constitution of Human Difference in Oceania: Crosscultural Encounters and the Science of Race, 1768-1888'. Chris Ballard thanks the International Institute for Asian Studies, Amsterdam, for the award of an Exchange Fellowship in 1999; the Centre national de Recherche scientifique (France) for an appointment as directeur de recherche in CREDO in 1999-2000; and the EHESS for an appointment as professeur invité in 2001. His research in the UK in 2007 was funded by the ARC Discovery grant.

The editors thank the following colleagues for generous and incisive contributions to their particular chapters and during the course of the whole project: Alban Bensa, Claude Blanckaert, Peter Brown, Diana Carroll, John Cashmere, Elena Govor, Margaret Jolly, Gareth Knapman, Campbell Macknight, Andrew Pawley, Anton Ploeg, Anne Salmond, Martin Staum, Serge Tcherkézoff, and Nicholas Thomas. We are especially grateful to the lively critical stimulus provided by the participants in a postgraduate reading group on 'Encounters, Race, and the Construction of Human Difference in Oceania' held at The Australian National University in 2007, including Karen Fox, Hilary Howes, Sandra Manickam, Ashwin Raj, and Tiffany Shellam. Our greatest debts are to our families who have shared both the highs and the lows inseparable from a protracted project of research and writing while providing unswerving intellectual and emotional support. To Charles, Kirsty, Allie, and Andrew; and to Mem, Tessa, and Sebastian, this book is dedicated with much love and gratitude.