Captain James Cook
By Richard Hough
Norton, 432 pages, $29.95
It may be difficult for many of us to grasp, but only two centuries ago educated people believed that a Northwest Passage must exist, uniting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and that at the South Pole there was a rich and habitable Great Southern Continent.
It was James Cook (1728-1779) who was responsible for disposing of these fanciful notions. His three epic voyages were to take him south of the Antarctic Circle and north of the Arctic Circle, making him the first or at least the second European to discover and map, among many other places, New Zealand, the Friendly and Society Islands, Fiji, Tahiti, Easter Island, Hawaii and the Pacific coasts of America and Alaska. He was the first navigator to undertake a systematic survey of the east coast of Australia, from Tasmania and the Great Barrier Reef as far as New Guinea. These great voyages would keep him almost continuously at sea from age 39 to age 50.
This new one-volume biography by Richard Hough, a noted British naval historian and author of a previous short study of Cook, is an incomparable introduction to Cook’s extraordinary career. Lively and scholarly, it benefits from the fact that Hough, over the years, has personally followed Cook’s routes around the world and has seen for himself most of those lonely shores originally glimpsed by Cook and his men aboard the Endeavour and the Resolution, the Adventure and the Discovery.
Hough emphasizes the solid apprenticeship acquired by Cook, of tough Scots and Yorkshire stock, before he was promoted to lieutenant in the Royal Navy and appointed to lead his first long voyage. At age 18-old for the period-he took to the sea in the rugged little barques that plied their trade up and down the eastern coasts of England. The grim waters of the North Sea were an excellent training ground for the future argonaut of the Atlantic and Pacific. Transferring at 26 to the Royal Navy, he was engaged in several critical actions against the French in the Seven Years War and so greatly distinguished himself that at 28 he was promoted to full Master and on his 29th birthday was given command of a 60-gun ship-of-the-line. More important, from the point of view of his subsequent activities, was his appointment at age 34 as official surveyor of Newfoundland, an exacting duty that established him as one of the foremost surveyors and cartographers of his day.
When the Board of Admiralty began a search for an officer to head an expedition to the Pacific to set up a station to observe the transit of Venus, Cook’s name headed the list. In May 1768, still not yet 40, he sailed out of Plymouth and headed for Cape Horn on the first of his great journeys.
In many ways that first voyage was to be the most remarkable of the three. Aboard his small ship, the Endeavour, was a group of scientists, led by the brilliant young botanists Joseph Banks and Sweden’s Daniel Carl Solander, together with their numerous assistants: artists, draftsmen, astronomers and instrument-makers. The expedition, which lasted almost three years, took them to Tahiti, to New Zealand and to Botany Bay and was considered a triumph. On their return to England, its participants found that they were already famous.
Cook was no mean scientist himself. His ethnographical observations were in advance of his day, his journals were couched in a superlative prose and the maps upon which he expended so much labor were regarded as things of beauty. In addition to the power of his mind and his genius as a navigator, he also possessed exceptional qualities of courage, audacity, decisiveness and staying power. From his Scottish father and his Yorkshire mother he had inherited a double dose of practicality. It was this that made him pre-eminent in the three principal requirements of his profession: the selection of his ships, his officers and his men.
Hough reminds us that we must not picture Cook cruising around in a stately and commodious man-of-war. His choice fell upon the sturdy and unpretentious little vessels in which he had learned his skills in the North Sea trade. There were few passages, inlets or harbors into which he could not maneuver them.
He was equally painstaking when it came to picking his officers. They were the best that the British Navy had to offer, and many of them were glad to accompany him on one grueling expedition after the other, with practically no break between. His first lieutenant on his first and third voyages was the New Yorker John Gore, who had joined the Royal Navy in 1755 as a midshipman and ultimately rose to the rank of captain. The journals that Gore kept are equal in style and value to those of his superior. It was he who, on the death of Cook in the middle of the third voyage, brought the Resolution and the Discovery home.
As for the hands on the lower deck, they too were seasoned professionals, although from time to time their captain had trouble with them. Among other things, he was fanatical about their health and cleanliness. He made them choke down unfamiliar foods and liquids, such as sauerkraut, boiled cabbage, wine instead of beer and rum and a horrible concoction of herbs and vegetables and compelled them to wash themselves, their clothes and their quarters with dismaying frequency. But by means of such vigorous methods, enforced if necessary by the lash, their captain preserved them from most of the worst scourges of shipboard existence: yaws, jaundice, tuberculosis and, above all, scurvy.
His men knew that a quarter to a third of their number would never make the voyage home. They faced not only the brute struggle with the elements-storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, fogs, icebergs, waterspouts, calms, the constant danger of being driven onto a lee shore-but human perils too. Cook had to contend with the unpredictability of the native peoples on whom he depended for fresh supplies of meat, fruit, vegetables and water. Eleven men of the Adventure were murdered and eaten by the New Zealand Maoris. When Cook himself was clubbed and stabbed to death, during an affray caused by an attempt by Hawaiians to steal one of the Resolution’s cutters, his body was dismembered and the burned and salted remains were returned to his shipmates in a pair of bloody parcels.
That third and final voyage was ill-starred from the beginning. Cook’s ships were badly prepared and poorly provisioned, and he was compelled to enlist a number of problematic officers and men. As third officer, he had to cope with the gifted but erratic William Bligh, of Bounty fame.
Worse, Cook himself began to manifest uncharacteristic lapses of judgment. He courted unnecessary risks and fell into fearful rages, ordering frequent floggings and treating the native peoples with unprecedented harshness. After a nightmare circuit of the Arctic he had a near mutiny on his hands.
He was, in fact, a very sick man, suffering from a parasitic infection of the bowels that caused fatigue, irritability, loss of concentration and disabling fits of depression. After a voyage that already had lasted for more than two years and that was marked throughout by frustrations and setbacks, none of his men was surprised by the series of accidents that culminated in his murder among the rocks and shoals of Kealakekua Bay.
Hough, by condensing Cook’s life into a single volume, has brought his achievements into a sharper and stronger focus. The British, a seafaring breed, have produced many great sea captains, but James Cook is truly their Master Mariner.
