Painted plein air. The inscription scraped into the paint surface might refer to the location where the picture was painted. The grey wash on the reverse of the board may have been applied in order to prevent the board from warping for stark differences in temperature and humidity.

Edvard Hodges was the official artist appointed on Captain James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific Ocean between 1772-1775 on the 'Resolution' and 'Adventure'. The expedition also counted Carl von Linne’s pupil the botanist Daniel Solander amongst its scientific members. On the journey Hodges made sketches and oil studies which ranks amongst the first images of this region of the world by a European, including Table Bay, Tahiti, Easter Island, New Zealand, Dusky Sound and the Antartic, Hodges made a study of an iceberg, the first ever recorded depiction of an iceberg. Hodges also produced many valuable portrait sketches of Pacific islanders and scenes from the voyage involving members of the expedition. His arresting portrait of Captain James Cook, only discovered in 1986, is in the National Maritime Museum, London. Many of Hodges sketches and wash paintings were adapted as engraving in the original published edition of Cook's journals from the voyage. In 1778, Hodges travelled to India, one of the first British professional landscape painters to visit India, where he remained there for six years.