Omai | |
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Written by | John O'Keeffe |
Date premiered | 20 December 1785 |
Place premiered | Covent Garden Theatre |
Original language | English |
Genre | Comedy |
Omai is a 1785 pantomime written by John O'Keeffe with music by William Shield. It depicts the voyage of Omai, a Tahitian royal, to marry Londina the fictional daughter of Britannia. It was loosely inspired by the real visit of Omai to Europe in the 1770s and the final voyage of the explorer Captain James Cook leading up to his dramatic death in 1779. Its full name is Omai: or, a trip round the world
The sets were designed by Philip James de Loutherbourg who took great care to try to make his depictions as authentic as possible by studying sketches made on all three of Cook's voyages and consulting with John Webber an artist who had sailed with Cook. [1]
The play was produced a year and a half after official Admiralty records of Cook’s final voyage were released and played a major part in the hero-isation of Cook. [2] Although much of its material was intentionally whimsical and inaccurate, it helped shape Western views of the Pacific Ocean and its inhabitants. It was first performed at Covent Garden Theatre in December 1785 an afterpiece to Nicholas Rowe's Jane Shore .
Omai, the heir to the throne of Tahiti, is due to marry Londina, the daughter of Britannia, which will symbolically join the two countries together. However Omai has a number of rivals, who wish to prevent the marriage and the union of the two countries. To escape them he and Londina embark on a voyage that takes them through various destinations visited by Cook including Kamchatka, Antarctica, New Zealand, Tonga and Hawaii.
Captain James Cook was a British explorer, cartographer and naval officer famous for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean and to New Zealand and Australia in particular. He made detailed maps of Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific, during which he achieved the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand.
James V was King of Scotland from 9 September 1513 until his death in 1542. He was crowned on 21 September 1513 at the age of seventeen months. James was the son of King James IV and Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII of England. During his childhood Scotland was governed by regents, firstly by his mother until she remarried, and then by his second cousin, John Stewart, Duke of Albany. James's personal rule began in 1528 when he finally escaped the custody of his stepfather, Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus. His first action was to exile Angus and confiscate the lands of the Douglases.
The mutiny on the Royal Navy vessel HMS Bounty occurred in the South Pacific Ocean on 28 April 1789. Disaffected crewmen, led by acting-Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, seized control of the ship from their captain, Lieutenant William Bligh, and set him and eighteen loyalists adrift in the ship's open launch. The mutineers variously settled on Tahiti or on Pitcairn Island. Bligh navigated more than 3,500 nautical miles in the launch to reach safety and began the process of bringing the mutineers to justice.
The Onedin Line is a BBC television drama series that ran from 1971 to 1980. The series was created by Cyril Abraham.
Sydney Parkinson was a Scottish botanical illustrator and natural history artist. He was the first European artist to visit Australia, New Zealand and Tahiti. Parkinson was the first Quaker to visit New Zealand. The standard author abbreviation Parkinson is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
HMS Adventure was a barque that the Royal Navy purchased in 1771. She had been the merchant vessel Marquis of Rockingham, launched in 1770 at Whitby. In naval service she sailed with Resolution on James Cook's second expedition to the Pacific in 1772–1775. She was the first ship to circumnavigate the globe from west to east. After her return she served as a store ship until 1779. The navy sold her in 1783 and she resumed a civilian career, but retaining the name Adventure. She was lost in May 1811.
William Hodges RA was an English painter. He was a member of James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific Ocean and is best known for the sketches and paintings of locations he visited on that voyage, including Table Bay, Tahiti, Easter Island, New Zealand, Dusky Sound and the Antarctic.
Mai, known as Omai in Britain, was a young Ra'iatean man who became the second Pacific Islander to visit Europe, after Ahutoru who was brought to Paris by Bougainville in 1768.
The first voyage of James Cook was a combined Royal Navy and Royal Society expedition to the south Pacific Ocean aboard HMS Endeavour, from 1768 to 1771. It was the first of three Pacific voyages of which James Cook was the commander. The aims of this first expedition were to observe the 1769 transit of Venus across the Sun, and to seek evidence of the postulated Terra Australis Incognita or "undiscovered southern land".
Joseph Dufour et Cie, founded in 1797 by Joseph and Pierre Dufour, was a French painted wallpaper and fabrics manufacturer located in Mâcon, France.
Captain John Hatley, RN was an officer of the British Royal Navy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hatley is most noted for being one of the junior officers on board Captain James Cook's third voyage in HMS Resolution, aged approximately 14. He later went on to serve in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, receiving promotion after helping to thwart a mutiny in 1797 and later commanding frigates in several campaigns.
The first humans are thought to have arrived in New Zealand from Polynesia some time around 1300 AD. The people, who later became known as Māori, eventually travelled to almost every part of the country. Their arrival had a significant impact on the local fauna, particularly the flightless birds such as moa.
James Hanna was the first European to sail to the Pacific northwest to trade in furs. This maritime fur trade was an important factor in the early history of the Pacific Northwest and the westward expansion of the United States and Canada.
The second voyage of James Cook, from 1772 to 1775, commissioned by the British government with advice from the Royal Society, was designed to circumnavigate the globe as far south as possible to finally determine whether there was any great southern landmass, or Terra Australis. On his first voyage, Cook had demonstrated by circumnavigating New Zealand that it was not attached to a larger landmass to the south, and he charted almost the entire eastern coastline of Australia, yet Terra Australis was believed to lie further south. Alexander Dalrymple and others of the Royal Society still believed that this massive southern continent should exist. After a delay brought about by the botanist Joseph Banks' unreasonable demands, the ships Resolution and Adventure were fitted for the voyage and set sail for the Antarctic in July 1772.
James Cook's third and final voyage took the route from Plymouth via Tenerife and Cape Town to New Zealand and the Hawaiian Islands, and along the North American coast to the Bering Strait.
Portrait of Mai (Omai) (also known as Portrait of Omai, Omai of the Friendly Isles or simply Omai) is an oil-on-canvas portrait of Omai, a Polynesian visitor to England, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, completed about 1776.
On 14 February 1779, English explorer Captain James Cook attempted to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu, the ruling chief of the island of Hawaii. The decision to hold him in exchange for a stolen longboat was the fatal error of Cook's final voyage, and led to his death at Kealakekua Bay.
James Charles Stuart Strange was a British officer of the East India Company, one of the first maritime fur traders, a banker, and a Member of Parliament.
A Voyage Round the World is Georg Forster's report on the second voyage of the British explorer James Cook. During the preparations for Cook's voyage, the expedition's naturalist Joseph Banks had withdrawn his participation, and Georg's father, Johann Reinhold Forster, had taken his place at very short notice, with his seventeen-year-old son as his assistant. They sailed on HMS Resolution with Cook, accompanied by HMS Adventure under Tobias Furneaux. On the voyage, they circumnavigated the world, crossed the Antarctic Circle and sailed as far south as 71° 10′, discovered several Pacific islands, encountered diverse cultures and described many species of plants and animals.
Resolution is a 2016 historical novel by English writer A. N. Wilson. It is a fictionalised account of the life of the 18th century German naturalist, writer and revolutionary George Forster. Main aspects of Forster's life covered by the novel include his participation in the second voyage of James Cook, his marriage to Therese Heyne and his experiences in the French Revolution as a protagonist of the Republic of Mainz. The book is based on historical sources including the journals of Cook and of Forster's father Reinhold as well as Forster's works, but includes also some invented figures and deliberately deviates from some historical facts.
Claydon, Tony & McBride, Ian. Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland 1650-1850. Cambridge University Press, 1998.