Beginning with a brief historiographic survey of the prolific literature on European voyages of exploration in Oceania, in particular those of James Cook, this article considers how embodied encounters helped shape the written and visual representations of indigenous Oceanian people by Cook and his naturalists and artists in New Holland (Australia), the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). I treat encounters as situated and permeable: not as a generalised clash of incommensurate cultures but as ambiguous intersections of multiple personal agencies, both indigenous and foreign. This approach suggests an indirect liaison between particular local actors and the expanding stock of empirical information provided by travellers and drawn on by metropolitan natural historians to illustrate their deductions about mankind. I suggest that voyagers’ representations of Oceanian people should be read not merely as reflections of received knowledge derived from dominant metropolitan discourses or literary and artistic conventions but also as personal productions generated in the flux, stress, high emotion and uncertainty of meetings with actual people in the vulnerable settings of voyages under sail. Such representations were often significantly, if obliquely affected by local agency.