by Barry Lopez
What keeps Cook from immediately accepting command of the Third Voyage is his recollections of the physical demands of such voyaging, and his awareness of how tiresome he has come to find members of his crews, with their lack of self-discipline, lack of ambition, coarse appetites, and penchant for creating problems ashore. Weren’t these the same fellows of middling mind he had grown up with, whose company he wanted to escape?
But he agrees to go. His exasperation with his crew grows, as does his impatience with the voyage and also, perhaps, a sense that he has thrown his life into this effort for no sufficiently good reason. He doesn’t know who his wife is, really. He hardly knows his children, having been away so many years. What will even greater fame now mean? And what will be the cost? And what is he to do with his vague misgivings about the rise of empire? He can share these misgivings with no one. The Navy, he knows because of how they edited his journals for publication, has made him the bearer of their belief in British exceptionalism. They will make him an avatar of empire, as will his foremost biographer, Beaglehole, two centuries later, fashioning of Cook a man steeped in Beaglehole’s own prejudices.
Cook will be used for ends for which he had no sympathy and this, too, seems to be on his mind on the Third Voyage.
At the start of that voyage (1776–1780) Cook was financially secure and had the respect of his peers. What he did not have was control over the meaning of his own life. Before he accepted command of the Third Voyage, during which he would lose his grip, both as a man and as a commander, and be stabbed to death by angry Hawaiians, did Cook imagine a retirement that would allow him to write up the story of his life in his own way? Did it concern him that for all his apparent freedom of expression, he was still in service to a national vision, not really free to say what he thought or believed? And if he chose to, would he, the son of a Scots farmer, be ostracized socially, along with his family? Did it irritate him that he had built the floor upon which Sir Joseph Banks and others now pranced, people with more latitude to speak their minds than he? If he did find a western entrance to the Northwest Passage on the Third Voyage, would that make these concerns irrelevant? And finally, did he worry whether anyone was really interested in hearing his mature insights into any deeper meaning his voyages might have had? Or was he so thoroughly exasperated by the public’s appetite for tales of South Seas cannibals and sexual adventure with Polynesian women that he could not muster the will to plumb his soul?
For MacDonald, the question of ambition and his own meaning in history was perhaps more tortured. He grew up unsure of his social status and not seeing any clear path to personal success. At different times and in different circumstances, he tried to imagine himself quite apart from the world of Indians, to imagine he had erased what he regarded as a social stigma by becoming an educated and cultured man, traveling easily in the world his father lived on the fringes of. At other times, during his months in Japan, for example, he identifies strongly with his Chinook heritage.
MacDonald regarded his father as a person of consequence, but knew that his filial connection offered him no certain social standing outside the HBC trade network, especially in eastern Canada, because he was a mestizo. It was important to him to know that his maternal grandfather, Concomly, was a member of Chinook royalty in that socially stratified, slave-holding society; but this was of no real help to him. Chinook society was unraveling, and the HBC’s reorganization of traditional trade networks had taken from the Chinook their power to control regional trade. His grandfather was a transitional figure in Pacific Northwest history. Fifty years earlier, the grandson of Concomly would have commanded respect among the Chinook and other Lower Columbia tribes, and he would have inherited material wealth. In the 1830s and ’40s, his lineage gave him no advantage.
MacDonald’s father treated him like a favored nephew. His stepmother, Jane Klyne, with whom Archibald had thirteen children, treated him like a son, but she herself, it is thought, was the daughter of a Swiss voyageur and a Cree mother. She could provide him with no entrée except among the Cree and members of the Métis nation, a mixed-blood people of south central Canada. MacDonald, in short, saw no sure or promising opening for himself in North American society. He would, as it turned out, never marry or have children. He would die an unheralded isolate on an Indian reservation, where he was regarded as quaint and eccentric; and he would be buried in no place of honor. He would have no plot commensurate with the way he saw the meaning of his own life.
In the end, there is about MacDonald a certain false note. The educated locutions of his correspondence, his cultivated mannerisms, and the way he presented himself in public all seem affected, suggesting he never found out who he actually was. In his later years he was viewed by visitors to the Colville Indian Reservation as little more than a well-traveled raconteur, not as someone deserving of serious attention. The condescension he sensed was driven home for him in a parochial article in the July 18, 1891, issue of Harper’s Weekly, written by Elizabeth Custer, wife of the foppish American brevet general, George Armstrong Custer. She belittles the courtesy MacDonald showed her when she visited him and treated his life experiences as an amusement. In a vulnerable letter written in 1892 to Eva Emery Dye, a California woman who turned out to be his first biographer, and who would later characterize him as “the strangest, most romantic and picturesque character of Northwest annals,” MacDonald implores her not to be “so hard on me as Mrs. General Custer.”
If they were to sit down together on that Pacific lanai I imagine them meeting on together—Cook the more reserved, MacDonald the more loquacious; Cook the nattier dresser, MacDonald the one more at ease with the waitstaff; both of them sons of Scots fathers—I believe Cook would have been amused by, but appreciative of, MacDonald’s harmless bravado, and that MacDonald might have understood Cook’s dilemma as a famous person. I infer from their biographies that both died without having anyone really to talk to: one a sailor with all the trappings of conventional success, eventually honored with life-size statues of himself in half a dozen Pacific ports; the other a sailor without a medal, no letter of gratitude or commendation from anyone to show to Mrs. Custer, and all but forgotten—except in Japan, where he remains widely known and celebrated.
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IN DECEMBER 1845 at Sag Harbor, Long Island, MacDonald signs on to the American whaler Plymouth. He’s twenty-one years old. For the next two years he hunts mostly sperm whales from her boats, visiting several mid-Pacific ports along the way, including Floreana Island (Isla Santa Maria) in the Galápagos, where the crew deposits and retrieves mail at Post Office Bay. In June 1848, in the Sea of Japan, the ship’s captain honors a pledge he made to MacDonald in Sag Harbor and which he renewed with him at Lahaina. He allows MacDonald to be lowered over the side in one of the ship’s boats with a cache of supplies. (The Plymouth is homeward bound, its hold full of barrels of sperm whale oil.) This is somewhere south of the island of Yagashiri, in the sea’s eastern waters. From there, MacDonald makes his way north to Rishiri, an island off the western shore of Hokkaido, where he poses as a shipwrecked sailor among the Ainu.
The indigenous Ainu, fearful of being accused by the local daimyo’s representatives of socializing with this gaikokujin, turn him over to Japanese authorities at the military post at Sōya, on the mainland. A series of land and sea journeys, interrupted by brief periods of house arrest, brings him three months later to the shogun’s court in Nagasaki. Here, for the next seven months, MacDonald instructs fourteen men in the English language, believing they will need to master it in order to deal successfully with the British and American merchants and military personnel he’s certain are coming.
MacDonald makes a good impression on his pupils, especially his favorite, a man close to his own age named Einosuke Moriyama. MacDonald makes a favorable impression on almost everyone he meets. He has the right demeanor, the right attitude for a visitor, in the eyes of the Jap
anese.
On April 27, 1849, MacDonald leaves Nagasaki for Hong Kong in the company of a contingent of legitimately shipwrecked American whalemen who are being expelled from the country. By 1851 he is prospecting in the Australian goldfields near Ballarat, in south central Victoria. There is no dependable record of MacDonald’s whereabouts before he arrives in Australia or afterward, until he turns up again in the Cariboo region of east central British Columbia, during the 1858 gold rush. He finds work here as a chandler and horse wrangler, ferrying supplies into the Fraser River backcountry. By then, knowledge of his singular achievement seems to have evaporated completely, to have disappeared from the historical record, perhaps in part due to MacDonald’s reluctance—or inability—to impress anyone.
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AT A DISTANCE of some 170 years, it’s difficult to appreciate the degree to which Japan was closed to the outside world during the forty-three weeks MacDonald was traveling there and teaching. Foreign ships that approached any Japanese port except the one at Nagasaki immediately drew cannon fire from shore batteries. Survivors of shipwrecks were quickly rounded up, transported to Nagasaki, and put aboard homeward-bound Dutch trading vessels. The civil treatment MacDonald met with in Japan stands out as anomalous, until one remembers his respectful temperament and the seriousness with which he undertook his mission. He struck the Japanese as amiable and deferential, in contrast to other shipwrecked American whalers, who were frequently confrontational, rowdy, disrespectful, and condescending. The oriental cast of MacDonald’s facial features seemed to diffuse his hosts’ own racial prejudice, and the ease with which MacDonald adapted to local customs and a Japanese diet surprised them.
In July 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry strode ostentatiously into the emperor’s court at Edo, his proposal and orders were translated for the court by MacDonald’s former students. Perry’s disingenuous courtesy, his preemptory demands, and his thinly disguised military threats contrasted sharply, for some of those present, with the way MacDonald had conducted himself, a man steeped in what it means to be of mixed race and culture, no believer in the immutability of economic, social, or racial hierarchies, and conciliatory by nature.
Perry would have thought MacDonald’s approach to negotiation in these circumstances uninformed and weak. Moriyama, who was present, must have seen in Perry the reification of what MacDonald had warned them about.
For me, MacDonald represents a man who passed away oddly unfinished or sidetracked, a person in whose history one finds too many doors automatically closed simply because he had the wrong physical appearance, the wrong work history, the wrong ideas.
I often recall, in thinking about MacDonald, the many exemplary people I’ve met all over the world who, for reasons of race, religious conviction, lack of formal education, or nationality, are not likely ever to be invited to the table to discuss the fate of humanity.
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AS FAR BACK as I can remember I’ve had a deep fear of being caught in hurricane weather or heavy seas out of sight of land, even though I’ve found the sea seen from shore, in almost any weather, mesmerizing and soothing. Perhaps its primary attraction has been its breadth, like a stage’s, or the unbroken line of its meeting with the sky, or its inconstancy. Or the transparency of its colors, from the dark purple of prunes through tropical blues to the green of the verdigris that forms on oxidized copper. Once in Camden, Maine, walking its waterfront with a friend, the painter Alan Magee, I saw in a shop window a perfectly crafted scale model of a whaleboat, the type of longboat with a step mast that MacDonald would have worked from, though I didn’t know of him at the time. I bought the model because it was beautiful, and because it had been built with near-microscopic attention to detail—the coiled lines, the oarlocks, the rigged harpoons. It was fashioned out of someone’s love and perfect knowledge. I wanted it in the room where I worked, next to the model of the Martin M-130.
Today the boat resides in my workroom in a glass box, to keep dust from settling in its many small cavities. It’s an image for me of courage, even of security. For a long while after I purchased it, I was not able to imagine the boat in the sort of seas I knew whalers had encountered or to regard it as anything but unsafe. One day this perception changed in the Drake Passage, that corridor of notoriously wild water that separates the tip of South America from the Antarctic Peninsula. On that day I learned about a kind of beauty I had not until then been able to grasp. I was aboard a large ecotourism vessel with 130 others, trying to reach the leeward shore of South Georgia, 750 nautical miles southeast of Port Stanley, our point of departure in the Falkland Islands the day before. The ship, the Hanseatic, was weathering a Beaufort force 11 storm—sustained winds over 55 knots, chaotic seas of forty-foot waves with some fifty-footers breaking over the upper decks. Hardly a spot on the surface of the water was not blanketed with sea-foam. Sometimes the bow of the Hanseatic was entirely buried in a wall of water. It geysered through the anchor chains’ hawseholes and crashed against the windows of the bridge. For some reason I decided this was the time for me to address my old fear. I stepped outside on a lee deck, just below the bridge, with a trusted friend, the polar explorer Will Steger. Dressed in storm gear, we stood together in the caldron of soaking air, listening to the shrieking wind tear through the superstructure.
We quickly hunkered in the shelter of a companionway with our feet spread and with death grips on the railing. We watched in astonishment as albatrosses forty feet away navigated the chaotic wind like Olympic snowboarders, glancing over to make eye contact with us as they did. I turned at one point to see the stern of the 403-foot ship rise from the water and swing thirty feet to port. The only stillness here was the steel deck directly under our feet, which carried the shuddering of the ship, as it crested, into our thighs.
Some time into this spectacle I realized I was relaxed, that thoughts were unfurling in my head in a normal way, without panic or anxiety. What had for so long been an image of terror for me was now an image of something else, a kind of perfection. Here was Earth’s fundamental wildness, here was William Blake’s sense of the Divine in chaos. A well-traveled friend of mine, when I told him of my fear of encountering big seas offshore, had said to me, of just such a storm he’d been through in the Drake Passage, “I saw the face of God.”
When I got home from that trip, I looked differently at the whaleboat in its glass case. Its oars are shipped, its sails are raised. No human figure is aboard. I now sensed the daring in its architecture, imagined the seamanship that would keep it from capsizing in heavy weather. I could appreciate more deeply its integrity, which is chiefly what made it attractive.
The subtlest memory of that hour I spent watching the storm from one of the Hanseatic’s upper decks is that by standing that close to a force that might easily have killed me if I became inattentive, I’d fed both a sense of gratitude for still having, at the age of fifty-seven, a life I could lead and a sense of forgiveness for the harm any random person might do to another. In those minutes of gazing at the boiling cistern of waves and watching the albatrosses addressing the storm with great seriousness, I could fix only on what I admired most often in other human beings, their enduring grace and poise.
As I look back on Cook’s experiences in the Pacific and on MacDonald’s, and look at the model of the M-130 sitting in my studio, and consider my fascination with the nautical details of Cook’s Resolution, I can see that I have spent much of a lifetime thinking about such conveyances. When the time comes, what sort of person will be at the helm for us? And how will we know whether we can trust this navigator?
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THE EVENING OF the day before the storm was supposed to arrive at the cape I lay sleepless in my tent, wondering why I returned to this place so regularly, as though one day I expected to find a letter here from God. What tugged at me was how well history, biology, geography, q
uietude, and space came together in this place—at least as I understood those things. I anticipated, I suppose, that an illuminating convergence of some sort might reveal itself here one day. But I’d break camp, unenlightened, and return home; and then, as often as not, leave the country for somewhere else—the Galápagos Islands, South Africa, Afghanistan, Prague, the Tanami Desert. Many months—sometimes a few years—later, I would return, having found some piece of insight elsewhere; and with a cup of black tea in the evening I’d watch the ancient ocean, watch the infinite variety of its surface, the nap of tweed or sheen of satin or wrinkle of crepe there, losing definition as the evening’s darkening atmosphere settled over it.
I felt a peculiar intimacy at Cape Foulweather with events that were local—the history of the Alseans, the Tillamooks, the Chinook. The differing ecologies of disturbed and undisturbed lands. The summer and winter regimes of light, the neap and spring tides of the lunar months. In some ways I envied Cook the precision and order of his grid of latitude and longitude, the certainty of it, in all weathers and lights, his way to connect one thing directly to another, a dependable matrix upon which to lay out a dependable route. But his grid lacked the measure of time. And lacking a third geometrical dimension, it gave the navigator a false or incomplete sense of security.
We no longer seem to be sailing in a time of fixed stars, of accurate chronometers, and of reliable routes. I met a photographer near the cape one day, close to Otter Rock. He’d been making images of Oregon’s beaches during the spring tides. He believed that the seascape exposed twice a month during extreme low tides will disappear in his lifetime, as the Pacific slowly rises. North and south of Cape Foulweather, to one way of thinking, the ocean is in fact dying. For prolonged periods of time now, the amount of oxygen available to organisms in the water here is not enough to sustain anything but marginally anaerobic life. And the pH of the water is dropping, as it is in all the world’s oceans. As they become more acidic, they become more hostile to life. Some ocean ecologists believe that in fifty years pelagic food fish might mostly be gone from Earth, their loss representing a major part of the ongoing Sixth Extinction, the first worldwide extinction since the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago.
