Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  Yet the day laborer’s son and the landed gentleman would forge one of the great partnerships in the history of exploration, akin to that between Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Like the two Americans, Cook and Banks possessed complementary talents, and their voluminous day-to-day journals tell the same story through very different eyes. Cook titles his journal Remarkable Occurences on Board His Majestys Bark Endeavour, and he leaves out many details of ship life that to him seemed routine. An unsentimental man, accustomed to drawing charts, he surveys even the most exotic scenes with cool objectivity and factual precision.

  Banks is chalk to Cook’s cheese: opinionated, anecdotal, Romantic, self-revealing. “A genteel young man,” Boswell called him, “of an agreeable countenance, easy and communicative, without any affectation.” In his journal, Banks writes about his nausea, his bowel pains—even about banging his head while “foolishly” doing exercises in his cabin. He also conveys the awe and terror of launching into the deep in a way that Cook, the middle-aged salt, cannot. Several weeks out from Plymouth, after sailing past Spain, the Endeavour swung west across the Atlantic. Cook calmly noted the wind speed and weather. Banks, battling butterflies as well as seasickness, confided in his journal: “Took our leave of Europe for heaven alone knows how long, perhaps for Ever.”

  On the evening of my second day aboard the replica, I pulled the “last dog” watch, from 1800 to 2000 hours. This was a pleasant time to be on deck, with the sun setting and my belly warmed by the corn chowder I’d bolted at dinner. It was refreshing to feel genuine appetite bred of hard labor rather than habit. And, for the first time all day, there seemed little to do. Only six sailors were needed to work the helm and keep watch from the bow, leaving the rest of us to idle by the rail. Even the roll of the ship seemed soothing, like a cradle. As the light faded, I closed my eyes.

  Todd nudged me awake, his dark features curled in a mischievous grin. “I’ve got something to perk you up,” he said.

  “Coffee?”

  “Better. Topgallant needs putting to bed.” In other words, the sails draped from the topmost yard had to be furled. Todd handed me over to a young Australian deckhand named Jess, my guide to the top of the mast. She started scampering up the shrouds and I followed, climbing beside Charlie the fireman and Chris the professor. This seemed reassuring. Charlie had told me the night before about rescuing a man from a burning building. Chris was a neuroscientist who studied conditioned response and the power of suggestion. Two men with a professional perspective on fear and how to confront it.

  Then I noticed that Charlie had stopped midway up the mast, paralyzed by the ship’s sudden sway. “At least a fire ladder’s solid,” he said. The topmost yard lurched far above us, like a drunken pencil. A dizzying glimpse of deck and sea swam below. “I don’t know what’s worse,” Charlie said, “looking up or down.”

  “Just focus on your hands and concentrate on what you’re doing!” Chris shouted, climbing behind us. “If you don’t think about falling you won’t get dizzy.” This sounded like good advice. Except that Chris was clinging to the shrouds so tightly that his hands had gone as white as his face. I parroted a line that Chris had handed us the night before: “Irrational fears go away if you confront them.” My voice came out strangled, high-pitched.

  “It’s a little different when those fears are entirely rational,” Chris replied, peering between his legs.

  Jess, climbing high above, shot us a withering look. “Come on, you wankers!” she shouted. “You want to do this job in the dark?”

  We resumed climbing to the crosstrees, three narrow ribs of wood perched beneath the top yard. Earlier in the day, in full light and calm seas, the much lower and larger fighting top had seemed a relatively secure haven. Now, at dusk, in a brisk wind, this tiny way station felt horribly precarious. Height radically amplifies a ship’s motion; a roll that tilts the deck a foot will move the top of the mast five times as much. “Funny, when you’re on the deck the ship seems really wide,” Chris said, foolishly glancing down again. “Not anymore.”

  We hooked our safety harnesses, crept along a foot line, and belly flopped over the yard. Furling a sail was much more awkward and tiring than letting it down. Following Jess’s lead, we grabbed fistfuls of flapping fabric, bunched the sail against the yard, and reached down for more. I was just getting the hang of it when the ship pitched forward, teetering us over the bow, before swinging back. Then it pitched again. As we raised the sail we had to tie it to the yard. When we practiced this maneuver on deck, it had seemed simple enough: looping a rope under the sail, cinching it tight, then throwing the spare line over one shoulder before edging along the yard to tie up another clot of sail. Now, a hundred feet up, as the ship pitched, the job felt about as easy as roping a steer. The rope became tangled around my neck and under my arm and each time I crept down the foot line the sail I’d just tied up began to sag. “I feel like a stroke victim,” Chris said. “My hands can’t seem to follow simple mental commands.”

  He fled to the crosstrees. Jess skipped out along the foot line and deftly corrected our sloppy work. I was well past feeling any shame. “Could you carry me down while you’re at it?” I asked, only half in jest.

  “No worries, mate.” She tied off the last bit of rope. “By the end of the week you’ll have done this so many times it’ll seem dead easy.”

  When we reached the deck, my hands were black from the tarred shrouds and bleeding from clutching the ropes too hard. My legs shook. Mostly, though, what I felt was incredulity. Cook’s men had performed this harrowing job not simply as a matter of course, without safety gear, but in conditions that made our scamper up the mast seem like a child’s pirate game.

  “Sleet and Snow froze to the Rigging as it fell and decorated the whole with icicles,” Cook wrote of a gale off Antarctica. “Our ropes were like wires, Sails like board or plates of Metal…. It required our utmost effort to get a Top-sail down and up; the cold so intense as hardly to be endured.” Cook didn’t bother to mention that he and much of the crew were laboring against sickness, including severe joint pains from incipient scurvy. Many of Cook’s men also suffered from hernias—bursted bellies, as sailors called them.

  My only affliction was bone-crushing fatigue. I’d been on my feet for most of the past eighteen hours. When our watch ended, I went straight to my hammock, too tired to wash. Climbing in, I decided the sling wasn’t so bad after all. A cocoon almost. Samson hoisted into his, thumping against me. The allergic woman began coughing and sneezing again. Only four more nights and days of this, I thought, drifting straight to sleep.

  If I’d been aboard the original Endeavour, the journey ahead would have loomed rather larger: 1,052 days, to be exact, assuming I was among the 60 percent who survived. This was a notion I struggled to wrap my mind around. I’d often felt sorry for myself when flying to and from Australia. Twenty hours in the air! A forced march through movies, meals, and mystery novels. Almost the limit of the modern traveler’s endurance. Yet it had taken Cook and his men a year and a half to reach Australia, and almost as long to get home again. The ship crawled at seven or eight knots in ideal conditions, much slower in light wind. And each day on the water unfolded much like the one before, a metronomic routine of watches, scrubbing, furling and unfurling sails. “The sea,” landsman Joseph Banks observed, “is certainly an excellent school for patience.”

  Reading the thousand or so entries in Cook’s Endeavour journal also brought home Winston Churchill’s famous quip about naval tradition: “It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.” At the start of the voyage, Cook read his crew the Articles of War, which listed punishable offenses, including drunkenness, “profane Oaths,” the “unnatural and detestable sin of buggery or sodomy with man or beast” (in Canada, Cook had twice lashed seamen for attempting this offense), and “stirring up disturbances on account of the Unwholesomness of Victual.” It was this last crime that occasioned the first flogging on the Endeavour, just three weeks out to sea
: twelve lashes each for two sailors who complained about their allowance of beef.

  On our first-day tour of the replica, Todd had showed us a canvas bag; inside it was a heavy knotted rope—the cat-o’-nine-tails, so named for the number of its cords and the catlike scratches it left on a man’s back. This was also the origin of the phrases “let the cat out of the bag” and “not enough room to swing a cat.” The cat came out of the bag with depressing regularity during the Endeavour’s long passage to the Pacific. On one day alone, three men were lashed, the last for “not doing his duty in punishing the above two.” Before the trip was over, Cook would flog one in four of his crew, about average for eighteenth-century voyages.

  If Cook didn’t spare the lash, he also didn’t stint sailors their most treasured salve: alcohol. The Endeavour sailed with a staggering quantity of booze: 1,200 gallons of beer, 1,600 gallons of spirits (brandy, arrack, rum), and 3,032 gallons of wine that Cook collected at Madeira. The customary ration for a sailor was a gallon of beer a day, or a pint of spirits, diluted with water to make a twice-daily dose of “grog.” Sailors also mixed beer with rum or brandy to create the debilitating drink known as flip. Cook’s notes on individual crewmen include frequent asides such as “more or less drunk every day.”

  Midway across the Atlantic, the Endeavour crossed the equator, an occasion marked with ancient, rum-soaked ritual. From here on, the skies and seasons would reverse, an experience known only to the handful on board who had “crossed the Line” before. For one day, the ship’s hierarchy also turned upside down. Veterans of the South Seas conducted a fraternitylike initiation of other crewmen, regardless of their rank. The salts tied novices to a makeshift stool, hoisted them up the main yard, and then plunged them into the sea three times. Any sailor who refused to undergo this dunking had to forfeit four days’ allowance of drink.

  “This ceremony was performed on about 20 or 30 to the no small deversion of the rest,” wrote Cook, who ransomed himself with rum. Those being ducked didn’t enjoy themselves quite so much. Some “were almost suffocated,” wrote Banks, who paid extra brandy to spare his servants and dogs. That evening, he added, “was spent merrily.”

  Christmas afforded another occasion for excess. “All good Christians that is to say all hands got abominably drunk so that at night there was scarce a sober man in the ship,” Banks wrote. “Wind thank god very moderate or the lord knows what would have become of us.” Considering the quantity of booze that sailors consumed on a normal day, it staggers the mind to imagine how much grog the men downed that Christmas.

  At Tierra del Fuego, at the bottom of South America, Banks went ashore with a small party to gather plants. The weather turned suddenly frigid and snow began to fall. Banks’s two black servants “stupefied themselves” with rum, and stayed behind while the others struggled ahead. By the time a rescue party returned, the two men had died from exposure or alcohol poisoning. Later in the voyage, a man entered the ship’s log as having “died at sea of an excess of rum.” Some who fell from the ship and drowned undoubtedly did so while drunk.

  There wasn’t any risk of that happening on the replica Endeavour. The ship was alcohol-free, a concession to modern sensitivities about sailing under the influence. “People get a little more upset these days if you lose someone overboard,” Captain Blake dryly explained. In three years at sea, only one man had fallen off the replica: a safety officer who slipped while stowing a sail. He was pulled out ten minutes later, frightened but unhurt. Another crewman had fallen from the rigging. Though saved by his harness, he suffered bruises and shock. Rough seas also threw crew around the lower deck, resulting in broken ribs and gashed heads.

  Even in calm weather, minor injuries were common: sprains, twists, rope burns. On our second day out, Chris slipped from a rail, tearing a ligament in his knee. Another man badly wrenched his ankle. This meant more work for the rest of us. In theory, the watch system divided the ship’s labor into four-hour shifts, with no more than twelve hours a day of work for any sailor. In practice, this clearly defined schedule was subject to change at any moment: if the wind died or gusted, if we had to tack, or if some problem arose that required more than twelve hands on deck. Meals and sleep were prone to similar interruptions. Before long, I stopped watching the clock and stumbled from task to task in a plodding daze.

  At some point I found myself winding up the anchor with the capstan, a revolving wood cylinder that eight of us moved by pushing chest-high spokes, around and around, like blindfolded camels grinding grain. It was brute work, set to brute commands: “Heave away!” “Avast!” “Heave and pawl!” Todd interspersed these orders with an off-color chantey, set to the tune of an Australian rugby song: “I wish all the ladies were waves in the ocean, and I was a surfer. / I’d ride them all in motion. / I wish all the ladies were bricks in a pile, and I was a builder. / I’d lay them all in style.”

  As Todd sang, a Californian named Karen shook her head. “Onshore you’d get fired for sexual harassment singing that,” she said, pushing the capstan beside me. “Not that I care out here. I don’t care about anything anymore.”

  “It’s like a cult,” added a Canadian named John, who was pushing in front of us. “They get you on this ship and use fear and sleep deprivation and lead-based paint fumes until you become a complete automaton.”

  One task offered relief from this ceaseless toil. At sunset, Todd ordered me to keep watch from the bow. This meant shimmying to the end of the twenty-foot bowsprit and looking for logs, buoys, or small boats. If I saw anything I called out its position to a “runner” at the rail. Lying with my elbows on the bowsprit, the wind gusting past, I felt rather like a figurehead—albeit a ludicrous one, bundled in layers of filthy clothes and a wool cap pulled down around my ears. The original Endeavour was so prosaic a ship that it sailed without a figurehead, or even its name painted on the transom.

  Settling in, I realized that bow watch suited my temperament much better than tugging ropes, shoving the capstan, or scurrying up the mast as a cog in a mechanism I didn’t comprehend. Here, all I had to do was observe, and report on what I saw—not so different from my normal occupation as a journalist. “Buoy, two points to port!” I shouted to the runner, conveying the only breaking news during the contented hour I spent astride the bowsprit.

  For several days I’d barely had a moment to gaze out to sea, except in terror from the top of the mast. Now, I watched a porpoise surface and a family of eiders paddle past. Seagulls perched atop seaweed. The water seemed wondrously varied and textured, in one spot dark green and glass-smooth, in another indigo and ruffled, as if pattered by tiny raindrops. At other points, the sea eddied and frothed into whitecaps: miniatures of the snow-covered Cascade Mountains looming off to starboard, slowly turning pink in the setting sun.

  Cook hadn’t been quite so awed by the majesty of the Pacific Northwest. By the time he arrived off the west coast of America, midway through his third voyage, he’d become a bit jaded by all the scenery he’d passed during the previous nine years: Antarctic icebergs, Krakatoa’s volcano, the fjords of New Zealand. Sighting the coast of present-day Oregon, he wrote of the view: “There was nothing remarkable about it.” Nor was Cook impressed by the climate. “The land formed a point, which I called Cape Foul Weather from the very bad weather we soon after met with.”

  Coasting north through squalls, hail, sleet, and snow, Cook searched for a port or even a clear sight of land. Close to where we now sailed, he spotted an opening “which flatered us with hopes of finding a harbour.” It proved an illusion, and Cook left behind another disappointed name: Cape Flattery. Later, he neared the Strait of Juan de Fuca, named for a navigator who claimed to have come this way in 1592, and who returned with tales of beautiful islands “rich of gold, Silver, Pearle, and other things.” Cook, once again, was foiled by darkness and weather. “We saw nothing like it, nor is there the least probability that iver any such thing exhisted,” he wrote of the strait, before departing the present-day Uni
ted States.

  We were much more fortunate. At dawn on our third day out, the ship approached a wide passage between the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island. “There it is, mates,” Todd announced. “The Strait of Wanna Puka.” The last time the replica had sailed past the Juan de Fuca Strait, half the crew had spent the day hugging “chunder buckets”—plastic pails with smiley faces at the bottom beside the words “You will get better.”

  The wind quickly picked up and I struggled to keep my balance on deck. But the scenery was lovely, not a sign of humanity, the lonely San Juan Islands just ahead. By now, the first mate’s commands had also taken on the pleasantly repetitive rhythm of a caller at a square dance.

  “Hold your starboard reef!

  “Hold your starboard bunt!

  “Belay starboard!”

  I still wasn’t sure what much of this meant, but I knew what to do: tug and hold weight until someone tied off the line. Only a few people had to flex their minds. The rest of us were just muscle. Even scaling the mast had lost some of its terror. Or rather, the terror made me feel safe; I was so focused on keeping a tight grip and getting the job done that I felt preternaturally alert, like a soldier in combat.

  A deep apathy about personal hygiene had also set in. At one point I caught my reflection while polishing brass: three days’ scruff on my cheeks, lank hair, red eyes, tar-speckled chin. I looked like a street person, and behaved like one, too. Discovering a Vegemite-smeared crust in my pocket, stashed the day before while dashing from the galley to the deck, I bolted it without shame. During a rare slack moment between watches, I wrapped a rank shirt around my head and sprawled on the nearest patch of deck. At night it was all I could do to peel off two layers of socks.