by Tony Horwitz
Eighteenth-century sailors were far more slovenly. They often slept fully clothed, in case they were called on deck during the night. Soap didn’t become a Navy provision until 1796. Lice were endemic; maggots, cockroaches, and rats also swarmed the ship. For napkins, sailors used bits of frayed rope, which became so greasy that the men recycled them as candles. Makeshift urinals added to the squalor. Some sailors didn’t bother to use them, pissing from the deck through grates to the hold below. On Cook’s second voyage, a marine was punished for defecating between decks, and when a ship’s cook died from disease, his mates attributed it to his filth: as one put it, “he being so very indolent & dirtily inclined there was no possability of making him keep himself clean, or even to come on Deck to breath the fresh air.” Not surprisingly, given this level of hygiene—even among cooks—sailors also suffered from dysentery, a horrible thought given that the only toilets were the dreaded “seats of ease.”
Cook fought hard to change sailors’ habits. He encouraged them to take cold seawater baths, as he did, and enforced regular cleaning of hammocks, bedding, and clothes, sometimes towing laundry behind the ship. He also used sailcloth to channel fresh air into the lower deck, as well as scrubbing the floors with vinegar and lighting fires of brimstone to clear out the fug. But it was in the realm of diet that Cook made his greatest mark. The Endeavour was not only on a voyage of scientific discovery; it was also a laboratory for testing the latest theories and technology, rather as spaceships are today. In particular, Cook and his men became guinea pigs in the Navy’s long fight against “the scourge of the sea,” otherwise known as scurvy.
The human body can store only about six weeks of vitamin C, and as the supply runs out the hideous symptoms of scurvy appear: lassitude; loose teeth; rotted gums; putrid belching; joint pain; ulcerated skin; the reopening of old wounds and healed fractures; hemorrhaging from the mouth, nose, and lungs; and, ultimately, death. Some eighteenth-century ships lost half their men to scurvy. Also, because of the disease’s time cycle, it would often strike much of the crew at once, filling the ship with sick men. This made scurvy as significant an impediment to exploration as sailors’ inexact means of calculating longitude.
The Navy suspected that scurvy sprang from a lack of fresh food at sea. But it had failed to adopt the findings of James Lind, a Scottish physician who, fifteen years before the Endeavour’s sail, wrote a treatise on scurvy that recommended citrus fruit as a prophylactic. Instead, the Navy’s “Sick and Hurt Board” loaded the Endeavour with experimental antiscorbutics such as malt wort (a drink), sauerkraut, and “portable soup,” a decoction of “vegetables mixed with liver, kidney, heart and other offal boiled to a pulp.” Hardened into slabs, it was dissolved into oatmeal or “pease,” a pudding of boiled peas.
Cook enforced this diet with fanatical zeal, and with a keen grasp of sailors’ psychology. “Such are the Tempers and disposissions of Seamen in general that whatever you give them out of the Common way,” he wrote, “it will not go down with them and you will hear nothing but murmurings.” At first, the sailors wouldn’t touch sauerkraut. Then Cook made it known that the dish was being served each day to the gentlemen and officers, and left the People to decide if they wanted to eat it or not. Before long, every man did. “The Moment they see their Superiors set a Value upon it, it becomes the finest stuff in the World,” Cook wrote. He also forbade sailors one of their favorite dishes—biscuits smeared with “slush,” or fat skimmings—because he believed it obstructed digestion and blocked “putrid air” in the body.
Cook succeeded in quelling scurvy, though not for the reasons he or the Navy supposed. The antiscorbutics on board were of little or no value. Instead, it appears that Cook’s equally dedicated pursuit of fresh food at every port he reached protected his men. “It was the Custom of our Crews to Eat almost every Herb plant Root and kinds of Fruit they Could Possibly Light upon,” a sailor wrote, adding that crewmen “knew it was A great Recommendation to be seen Coming on board from A pleasure Jaunt with A Handkerchif full of greens.”
Ironically, Cook’s later endorsement of malt wort retarded the fight against scurvy. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that scientists conclusively determined that a daily dose of a mere ten milligrams of vitamin C was enough to prevent a disease that had killed tens of thousands of sailors.
On our fourth night at sea, I was shaken awake for what I assumed was the four A.M. watch. Struggling out of my hammock, I fell to the sharply tilted floor. I glanced at my watch: it was only two o’clock. The ship righted, then rolled again. The thought of getting back in my hammock made me queasy. I went to the galley and found six others, nervously clutching tables. A woman named Sharon was distracting herself by compiling a list of nautical terms that had entered modern slang: “all washed up,” “around the horn,” “clear the decks,” “catch someone’s drift,” “taken aback” (when sails drive a ship to stern), “scuttlebutt” (a water cask around which sailors gossiped). The rest of us pitched in words we’d learned during the course of the week, such as “three sheets to the wind” (if a ship’s sheets, or ropes, are hanging loose, the sails flap and the ship is unsteady; hence, drunk), and “bitter end” (the last piece of an anchor cable, attached to a bitt, or post).
“Pooped,” someone said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s in rough seas, when the water comes over the stern and onto the poop deck.”
The galley went silent. We listened to water slosh in the bilge. Dishes rattled in latched cupboards. “Batten down the hatches,” Sharon said, adding the phrase to her list.
For once, I was grateful when my shift on deck began. In rough seas, the open air seemed far preferable to the stifling mess deck. Then again, as soon as I climbed the companionway, the wind bounced me from mast to rail and pierced my long johns, jeans, and four layers of shirts and jackets. “Crisp morning,” the captain said, giving Todd the course and ducking below.
As luck would have it, my turn at the helm had arrived. This job required two people. One crewman, called “brains,” shouted changes in direction, while another, called “muscle,” turned the heavy ten-spoked wheel. Working first as muscle, I struggled to keep track of where I was on the wheel while the brains called out, “two spokes to port,” or “four spokes to starboard,” or “midships,” the wheel’s original position.
“Brains” was much trickier. I had to keep a simultaneous eye on the faint, bobbing horizon and on a gyrating compass. When the ship strayed more than 5 degrees off course—which it did constantly, in gusts of up to thirty-five knots—I had to judge how much to adjust, at the same time recalling how many spokes we’d already moved to port or starboard.
A 370-ton wooden tub doesn’t shift so nimbly as a fiberglass yacht. The ship took half a minute to respond each time I moved the rudder; when it did, I invariably found I’d corrected too much. Then I’d correct the correction, fishtailing too far the other way. I felt as though I was steering a poorly aligned truck on an icy highway. And each time I’d finally got things under control, the captain would pop his head up from below to order a new course, starting the mad skid all over again.
At least the work kept my mind off the rolling seas. At six A.M., handing over the helm, I tripped on a heavy bundle by the rail. A muffled groan came from inside the blanket. A little way on, I passed several hunched figures retching into buckets. Struggling to the bow, I arrived just as the ship pitched into a wave, tossing cold spray in my face. A moment later, Todd lifted my wool cap and shouted in my ear to come back and help brace a spritsail spar. There were no other able bodies available.
Grasping a rope and pulling down with all my weight, I lifted off the deck, swinging like a pirate, until Michael fastened the line. “Do it fast and don’t let go,” Todd told him, “or else Errol Flynn there will fall back on the deck, crack his head, and die a terrible death.”
“Shit happens,” Michael said, calmly belaying the rope.
At breakfast, half the m
embers of mainmast stared greenly into their swaying porridge. The rest of us bantered with the obnoxious merriment of the spared. “Eat up,” Chris said to one of the stricken. “It’ll give you something to do back on deck. Two-six heave.”
Todd pitched in with tales of epic vomiting from voyages past. “Someone spewed while aloft and the wind was blowing so hard it went horizontally,” he said. Another sailor, dangling from the topmost yard, daintily puked in her hat rather than shower those below. “Unfortunately, she dropped her hat on the way down.”
I was surprised to learn that Todd, who had been at sea for three years, sometimes became sick, as did others among the permanent crew. During a gale shortly before our voyage, the Endeavour had heeled so sharply that the cannons dipped in the sea and water sloshed over the rails. “Sea legs aren’t much good,” Todd said, “when your legs are almost in the sea.” The most sickening motion, though, was when the ship “corkscrewed,” rolling and pitching at the same time. Todd added what was meant to be a consoling footnote. “I’ve never known anyone to spew for more than three days and three nights.”
Midmorning, the wind settled down, and I was ordered below to clean the quarters of the officers and gentlemen. This meant collecting seawater in canvas bags slung over the ship’s side, then struggling down a steep ladder to scrub the uneven wood floors. Compared to our quarters, the aft deck felt decadent. The only natural light in the mess deck shafted narrowly down the companionway. Here, sun filtered through a transom and latticed windows. The table in the officers’ mess was laid with pewter, china, and cloth napkins. There was more than enough room to swing a cat.
The cabins, though, were six-foot-square hutches, crowded with gimballed beds, sea chests, and chamber pots. Even Cook’s cabin felt tiny, with barely enough space for a foldout desk and a chair with shortened legs. Banks, at six foot four, stood several inches longer than his room; he usually left his quarters to his books and dogs, preferring to sling a hammock in the “great cabin.” This was where the captain and gentlemen dined and worked. Here, light and air poured through wide sashes opening out both sides of the ship, and to stern. A large table, with chairs lashed to its base, stood at the room’s center, surrounded by cupboards, a fireplace, a shelf of nautical and botanical books, and a birdcage with a fake parakeet.
Captain Blake sat at the table, writing in the ship’s log. His rendition of the last twelve hours sounded disappointingly tame. The wind had reached “force six,” he wrote, referring to the Beaufort Scale, “bringing with it a short sharp sea chop that had some effect on the crew.” When we’d finished cleaning, he invited several of us to join him at the table. This wouldn’t have happened in Cook’s day. Officers and gentlemen kept to the quarterdeck when above, an area off limits to ordinary sailors. Below, they remained separated from the sailors by a party of marines, whose quarters formed a firewall against mutiny. The marines were a sort of seaborne middle class, dining and dwelling apart from both the officers and the People. The Endeavour was England in miniature: a hundred men on a hundred-foot ship, decorously maintaining the same divisions at sea that prevailed on land.
“You couldn’t be that formal now, even if you wanted to,” Blake said. “Not with a crew of Australians. They’d tell you to get stuffed.”
Blake, an Englishman born in Nigeria, had gone to sea at fifteen and spent the next three decades working on everything from cargo boats to luxury cruise ships. He possessed the unflappable air of a mariner who had seen all that the sea could throw at him. Even so, the captain confessed that he’d been startled by the experience of piloting the Endeavour. “I’m not a romantic,” he said, “but you do start to appreciate what they did, and how soft we’ve become by comparison.”
In Cook’s day, sailors still relied on much the same tools they’d used for centuries. They calculated the ship’s speed with an hourglass and a knotted line draped in the water (hence the term “knots”). They dropped lead lines with tallow at the end to determine the water depth and test the sea’s bottom. A relatively new and improved system of sextant, almanac, and lunar tables helped sailors figure out where they were on the globe. All these tasks—performed in an instant today by sonar, radar, and global positioning systems—were not only tricky and time-consuming; they also left little or no margin for error on a ship that was unwieldy, even for its day.
“The Endeavour was the Mack truck of the eighteenth century,” Blake said. “A beast to maneuver.” The replica, like the original, sailed poorly into the wind and slipped steadily sideways in a heavy current or cross breeze. If the replica found itself close to shore in shifty winds or water, Blake could hit the emergency engines, and motor out of trouble. “Cook had to sail out of it or be crushed against rocks,” he said. Added to that was the constant anxiety of keeping the ship provisioned with fresh water, firewood, and food.
But what awed Blake most was the Endeavour’s mission. For much of the voyage, Cook sailed blind: into uncharted waters, toward unknown lands, through hurricane belts with nothing but clouds to warn of the weather ahead. The only modern experience that seemed remotely analogous was hurtling into space; one NASA shuttle had been named, appropriately, the Endeavour. But even this comparison didn’t capture the utter vulnerability of Cook’s ship. Astronauts have satellite images, contact with Mission Control, and high-tech instruments to bail them out. Cook traveled far beyond the range of any help, without so much as a life raft.
“We throw around words like ‘courage’ and ‘stress’ very carelessly today,” Blake said. “Anyone who does anything out of the ordinary is a ‘hero,’ a ‘survivor.’” He shook his head. “I don’t think many of us could endure a week of what Cook and his men confronted, physically and psychologically, day in and day out, for years at a time.”
In one respect, though, Blake envied Cook. The replica Endeavour had to keep to a schedule, forcing Blake to spend much of his day watching the clock and calling in his coordinates to the Coast Guard. Cook had a schedule, too, but it was generally measured in seasons. Could he reach the Arctic before winter closed in? Would breadfruit and other foodstuffs still be in season when he reached the tropics?
“We’ve lost that patience, that sense of chance,” Blake said. “I think that’s why a lot of people come out on this ship. They feel confined, coddled, time-sick.” He laughed. “Either that or they’ve read too many Patrick O’Brian novels.”
The replica’s professional sailors were different. Many came from maritime backgrounds and hoped to spend their careers at sea. One was a shipwright’s son from the Sydney docks. Others had labored in the merchant marine. Todd, a truckdriver’s son who’d spent his teenage years as a lifeguard on Australia’s rough Pacific beaches, planned to get a maritime pilot’s license. One sailor had decided to stick to historic vessels: his next posting was aboard a replica of an Irish famine ship.
Like Cook’s men, the replica’s sailors also played as hard as they worked. “There may not be any booze on this ship, but everyone makes up for it on shore,” Blake said. “The world’s a different place than it was in Cook’s time, but sailors’ characters haven’t changed all that much.”
The next day, Vancouver’s skyline hove into view, set against a spectacular backdrop of jagged, snowcapped mountains. Cook had missed this, too. The closest he came was Nootka Sound, off Vancouver Island, where he spent a month provisioning and repairing his gale-battered ship. For “the People,” who had previously enjoyed the beauty and liberality of Polynesian women, Nootka proved a disappointment. “The women here are quite out of the question,” a surgeon’s mate, William Ellis, wrote of the lice-ridden, ocher-painted natives. Not all the crewmen agreed: some scrubbed the women on deck before bartering for their company.
Our own arrival in Canada was considerably less exotic. On the morning of our last day at sea, we were assigned an additional job: turning the lower deck from a working ship into a museum exhibit for the Endeavour’s stay in port. We laid out bowls of plastic sauerkraut, piles
of hardtack, dominoes, and wooden mugs and pitchers. Stringing a sample hammock, I felt like climbing in and staying in the sling as part of the exhibit: dead sailor. Among other things, I’d learned that hammocks doubled as shrouds for those who perished at sea. My hands were so swollen and raw that I couldn’t make a fist or do the buttons on my shirt. Every limb throbbed. My eyes twitched and blurred from fatigue.
We went aloft one last time to furl the sails and we stayed on the yard to enjoy the view as the ship eased into harbor. A replica longboat pulled alongside, rowed by men in horned helmets, the kind that mock Vikings drink from. “Ahoy!” they shouted, raising their oars. The dock was crowded with schoolchildren waving Union Jacks, red-uniformed Mounties, city officials, and television camera crews. After just a week on board, I felt unexpectedly proprietorial and proud.
“Fire in the hole!” the gunner yelled, delivering a broadside of shredded newspaper in the direction of downtown. Then he soberly approached the helm. “Minimal collateral damage, Captain. We can still use the pub.”
And we did, toting our duffel bags through a seedy district to Fred’s Uptown Tavern. I found myself walking bowlegged and leaning into an imagined swell. I didn’t register much else; after two beers, the bar began to sway like the quarterdeck. I blearily exchanged hugs and phone numbers with my watch mates, then found a room on the top floor of a cheap hotel. Falling into the shower, I tried to scrub off the tar stuck in my hair and the grime embedded in every inch of exposed skin—a fraction of the filth the Endeavour’s sailors must have acquired in three years at sea. As soon as I closed my eyes, the bed began to pitch and roll, a mattress pinned atop a fifteen-story mast. I’d only been at sea a week, in relatively calm seas. Cook and his men once sailed extreme latitudes for 117 days without touching land. It’s a wonder they could still walk when they reached shore.
