# THE AFRICAN DIASPORA IN OCEANIA (1700-1800)  
Cassandra Pybus  
The earliest record of a person of the African diaspora in Oceania was an unnamed 'black servant' on Captain James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific. He was among a party of ten men from HMS Adventure sent ashore in a cutter to collect greens at Queen Charlotte Sound (in present day New Zealand) on 17 December 1773 (Beaglehole, 1969, pp. 749-52). All of these men were killed by Māori warriors, led by the chief Kahura and subsequently eaten in a whāngai hau ceremony, in which the participants consumed the spirit of an enemy and his ancestors (Salmond, 2003, p. 229). It is clear from the evidence that the Māori made no distinction between this African man and the other nine European men in the cutter with him. It is safe to assume that there were other men from the African diaspora on Cook's ships in his various voyages into the Pacific, but they remain even more anonymous than that unfortunate 'servant'.  
Historians know much more about the African men who were aboard a fleet of eleven British ships under Captain Arthur Phillip that sailed into the Pacific late in 1797. This was the First Fleet sent to create a penal colony on the east coast of Australia that Captain Cook had named New South Wales. The ships carried 759 British felons sentenced to 'transportation beyond the Seas' and a few hundred marines to guard them. A decade earlier, these convicted felons would have been shipped to the American colonies, but since the American War of Independence, 1775-1782, the British Government had been desperate  
to find a new dumping ground for Britain's unwanted felons. Several proposals for convict settlements on the west coast of Africa - near the slave factory of Cape Coast Castle, on the coast of Sierra Leone, or on an island miles up the Gambia River - were considered and rejected before the Home Secretary, Lord Sydney, chose the very distant and utterly unfamiliar place Captain Cook had found on the other side of the world (Christopher, 2011).