The writing of travel and its publication has served various ideological ends over the centuries. Prominent among those is the production of a newly discovered Other, both place and person, but also of a rediscovered Self, that of the traveller himself. In 1598, Richard Hakluyt initiated a compilatory trend – ‘pioneering in its scope’ in Bohls and Duncan's words – which contributed to the undertaking of empire and importantly paved the way for a national archival memory-making and for the invention of a national identity rooted in maritime exploits, articulated not in poetry but in prose narratives, in the language of the common man: ‘What the old epics were to the royally or nobly born, this modern epic is to the common people’.

In his conceptualization of the narrative of exploration, MacLaren identifies four stages, the first of which is the logbook entry made en route. The journal then gives body to the log entry, ‘informing it with continuity and purpose’: whereas the log entry may display tentativeness, in the journal, the use of the past tense and retrospection generates orderliness and consistency. This production is central in the emergence of an author, as the narrative is also shaped by the potential audience's exigencies. The third and fourth stages, the draft manuscript and the publication itself, are similarly subject to the demands of the audience. The nature of the texts I will be examining here draws attention to the log entry itself as a site of ambivalence – which the navigator explores and fully exploits.

Commander Samuel Wallis was the first Englishman to have more than a fleeting encounter with the inhabitants of what is known today as the Tuamotu archipelago. Furthermore, his discovery of the Society Isles in the South Pacific, specifically Tahiti, is the earliest documentary record of the encounter between Europeans and Polynesians. Unlike his successors, though, Wallis did not write a journal onboard ship; his log may nevertheless be interpreted as a key text in elucidating relationships between Self and Other, in that it attests to first encounter in an account which has not been reworked to suit the tastes of a reading public.