Captain James Cook was the quintessential English hero, a
brilliant navigator and explorer who filled in the blanks on the
European maps of the Pacific Ocean and delivered the land masses
of Australia and New Zealand to the colonial attentions of the
British Empire. His martyr's death at the hands of Hawaiians
in 1779 further embellished his legend, so it was no surprise that
a replica of his first ship, the Endeavour, was made for the
bicentennial celebration of the founding of the British penal
colony in Australia. The latter-day Endeavour plied the
world's oceans, taking on local crews for short hops between
ports. Travel writer Tony Horwitz sailed on this ship from
Seattle to Vancouver, and set himself a daunting task - to visit
all the places first explored by Captain Cook and write about how
they had changed over the last two centuries.
Armed with his "bible," the definitive biography of Cook by Kiwi
historian J. C. Beaglehole, Horwitz visited Tahiti, New Zealand,
the eastern coast of Australia, Tonga, Hawaii, Alaska, and the
north country of England's Yorkshire where Cook grew up and from
where he first shipped out. Accompanied by a pal, a
hard-drinking Aussie yachtsman who could be counted upon to
provide comic relief and unremitting cynicism, Horwitz weaves
together two narrative strands - the epic journeys of Cook and his
crew, and the more farcical adventures experienced by those who
would follow in Cook's wake. This may not be the most
detailed account of Cook's tours, but it is without doubt the most
amusing.
When Cook visited the South Pacific ports of call, he was
oftentimes the first European to encounter the native
cultures. His perspective is frequently that of an amateur
anthropologist, noting the friendliness and open sexualtiy of the
Tahitians, the fierce posturings of the Maori, and the Stone Age
indifference of the Australian aborigines. By the time
Horwitz arrives, colonial and missionary settlement have
transformed these landscapes, usually to the detriment of the
original inhabitants. Tahiti has become a tourist trap for
Paradise-seekers, with every other establishment invoking the
legends of Cook, Gaughin, or Robert Louis Stevenson for commercial
gain. New Zealand has become the Southern Hemisphere mirror
image of the British Isles, and Maori-pakeha intermarriage has
blurred the original Polynesian culture to the point where Maori
elders now sport Orders of the British Empire citations. The
waves of convict transport! ation to New South Wales has decimated
the aborigines and pushed the few remaining survivors into the
harsh interior outback. Horwitz notes all this with tongue
firmly in cheek and lager in hand.
When he visits Yorkshire, Horwitz sheds some light on a central
paradox about Captain Cook - for a man of such bold
accomplishment, Cook in his personality and his writings seems
almost colorless, matter of fact, stoic. This contrast is
especially apparent on his first voyage, where he is accompanied
by the flamboyant aristocrat Joseph Banks, botanist
extraordinaire, a younger man who has no trouble "going native,"
an unimaginable pursuit for Cook himself. Horwitz points out
that Cook was schooled and apprenticed by Quakers during his teen
years in the north country, and was most likely influenced by the
humility and aversion to ostentaciousness or self-aggrandizement
that Quakers exhibit. This essential decency and
self-effacement is unique among British colonial adventurers, and
explains why Cook never succumbed to the blandishments of sexual
freedom that made the rest of his crew think they had found Eden
in the South Pacific.
There is ample evidence to conclude that Cook, once the most
enlightened of rational men, sank into a kind of megalomaniacal
madness during his third and final voyage. Years of rough
living with inadequate food on unforgiving seas, attempting to
control crews that more resembled the inmates at de Sade's asylum
in Charenton than trim, precise naval professionals, took their
toll on the great explorer. Cook was more likely to flog
crewmen for petty offenses and more likely to use rifles on
thieving Polynesians than he had been in the past, and the growing
swells of mutiny can be detected in crew journals of this last
voyage. So Cook's ultimate fate in Hawaii comes as no great
surprise. The Hawaiians welcomed this first European visitor
as an incarnation of the god Lono, and Cook no longer possessed
the wisdom to separate myth from reality. He welcomed the
deification, and used his privileged status to re-provision his
ships without regar! d to how this impacted the native Hawaiian
economy. Resentment smoldered, and one fateful day, after a
Hawaiian had stolen a small shore boat, Cok retaliated with
wholesale slaughter that triggered a riot in which he was clubbed
to death. Lono was mortal after all.
When Horwitz visits the scene of Cook's death, Kealakekua Bay, he
asks many modern-day Hawaiians what they think of Captain
Cook. He finds that Cook is not held in the same esteem by
islanders as he is by the imperial British, and finds proof of
this in the persistent desecration of the Cook memorial statue
that was erected on that spot during the 19th Century. The
legacy of discovery has turned into a legacy of venereal disease,
exploitation, and expropriation, an attitude that Horwitz
discovers not only in Hawaii, but in other Pacific islands as
well. The apotheosis of Captain Cook is a strictly cultural
phenomenon, rooted in 18th Century British imperial mythology, not
the universal truth that Eurocentric commentators have often
attributed to it.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard Seltzerseltzer@seltzerbooks.com privacy statement