DESPITE all the anxiety about the fragility of James Cook's fame in the eighteenth century, decades of colonial activity in Oceania ensured that, by the 1820s, he had reached something approaching the status of imperial founding father promised by Anna Seward's Elegy. In his 1821 A Vision of Judgement, the Poet Laureate Robert Southey enlisted Cook among his ‘Worthies of the Georgian Age’. Still a silent ‘shade’, Southey's Cook is eligible to join the kind of national pantheon from which the Stowe monuments and early odes had excluded him:

Southey's underworld of immortals has an explicitly monarchist and imperialist function. As Timothy Fulford argues, the invocation by George Gordon, Lord Byron, of native ‘shades / from Otaheite's Isle’ in his counterblast The Vision of Judgment, represents in part a refusal of Southey's authority to allocate national fame in this way and for these purposes. Intensified by forty years during which British colonialism had caused cultural repression, environmental degradation, and widespread suffering and depopulation in Oceania, Byron's response recalls the handful of anti-colonial newspaper writers who had responded to the news of Cook's death by citing the ‘misery and destruction’ visited by explorers on indigenous people. A year later, for a more subtle dismantling of Southey's authoritarian politics of fame, Byron would turn to the Bounty mutiny. As a disillusioned, even parodic, sequel to the Cook voyages, the story of the Bounty generated forms of Oceanic celebrity and notoriety that highlighted an existing sense of fame's power to alienate the individual from his own publicity. This sense is perceptible under the surface even of heroic representations of Cook.