Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  It was much easier for officials to take symbolic steps—not just toward the victims, but also toward the alleged perpetrators. Which brought Cook back into the picture: or rather, screened him out of it. Already half forgotten, the captain now had to be completely expunged for the original sin of raising the British flag. Even the south Sydney district encompassing Cook’s landing site had joined in the purge. Councilors suggested removing the captain from the shire’s logo, which they declared “outdated” and a “symbol of the invasion of our country.” The proposed new emblem, a dancing dolphin, would, in the words of one councilor, give the district a fresh image as “friendly, approachable, progressive and environmentally sensitive.”

  This gesture, like the rewriting of the national anthem, was a minor masterpiece of Orwellian doublethink. A metropolis that had virtually exterminated or expelled its original population, and polluted a place Cook described as a botanical paradise, could now proclaim itself a champion of Aborigines and the environment. The council had also fingered a culprit for its wrongs: Cook, the invader, yesterday’s man, to be airbrushed from public record like a disgraced Soviet commissar.

  The final irony in all this lay in Cook’s own journal. After leaving Botany Bay and following the continent’s coast north, he finally had a chance to meet Aborigines, and to understand a little about their culture. The words Cook wrote while off the Great Barrier Reef, my next stop in the Endeavour’s wake, would prove far more sensitive and friendly to Aborigines than anything that white Australians had conceived in the two centuries following the captain’s now reviled visit.

  Chapter 6

  The Great Barrier Reef:

  Wrecked

  A seaman in general would as soon part with his life, as his Grog.

  —JOHN WILLIAMSON, LIEUTENANT TO COOK

  Cook originally intended a different name for Botany Bay. He planned to call it Stingray Harbour, due to “the great quantity of these sort of fish found in this place.” During the two days before leaving the bay, crewmen pulled aboard half a ton of stingray. “AM: Served 5 lb of fish to all hands,” Lieutenant Charles Clerke wrote on May 5. “PM: Served 6 lb of fish per man.” The next day, yet another dose of stingray prompted a crewman to complain: “It was very strong and made a great many of the Ships Company sick which eat of it.”

  This in itself might be enough to make an Englishman “sigh for roast beef,” as Banks had put it. Sugar, salt, tea, and tobacco were also running low. Even Cook seemed impatient to reach home. Propelled by a brisk wind, he sailed north from Botany Bay for several weeks, barely pausing to explore the coast. When he did, the English stayed just long enough for Banks to catalogue the notorious miseries of the Australian bush: stifling heat, stinging grass, a “wrathful militia” of prickly caterpillars, ants “biting sharper than any I have felt in Europe,” and “Musketos” so dense they “made walking almost intolerable.”

  Back at sea, the crew also grew nettlesome. One night, several men assaulted Cook’s clerk as he lay drunk in his bed, cutting off his clothes and severing parts of both ears. Cook regarded this “very extraordinary affair” as “the greatest insult that could be offer’d to my authority.” He promised a rich reward of fifteen guineas and fifteen gallons of arrack to any crewman who exposed the perpetrators. No one did, though a midshipman suspected of the crime later indicted himself by jumping ship in the East Indies.

  Cook’s talent for geographical names also seemed to desert him as the Endeavour made its way north. Instead of evocative place-names such as the Society Isles or New Zealand’s Dusky Bay, the reader plods past bluffs and harbors named for a roll call of earls, admirals, dukes, and second viscounts, as if Cook were cribbing from Royal Navy lists or a copy of Burke’s Peerage. Nor were all these namesakes deserving of honor. Cook’s biographer, J. C. Beaglehole, notes that one was a “disastrous First Lord,” known for his ugly face, while another was “a man so foolish that even George III deplored his lack of judgment.”

  This pattern reversed abruptly a month out from Botany Bay, when the Endeavour rounded a point that Cook named Cape Tribulation, “because here begun all our troubles.” At sunset on June 11, shoals appeared off the ship’s port bow. Cook steered away, toward what he thought was the safety of open sea, “having the advantage of a fine breeze of wind and a clear moonlight night.”

  Leadsmen hurled heavily weighted lines to determine how much water lay beneath the ship. “All at once,” Cook wrote, “we fell into 12, 10 and 8 fathoms.” Then the water abruptly deepened; just before eleven o’clock, a leadsman called out a comfortable seventeen fathoms (102 feet). “Before the Man at the lead could heave another cast,” Cook wrote, “the Ship Struck and stuck fast.”

  Running aground was an occupational hazard that eighteenth-century sailors feared but felt confident of surviving. The Endeavour, however, hadn’t run aground on coastal sand or rocks. It had pinned itself, thirteen miles offshore, on an outcrop of the world’s largest coral shelf, the Great Barrier Reef. Banks, shaken from his bed, described an alarming sound “very plainly to be heard”: the grate of wood against coral, its “sharp points and grinding quality which cut through a ship’s bottom almost immediately.” Surf pounded the ship against the reef, rocking the Endeavour so violently that “we could hardly keep our legs upon the Quarter deck.” The men working aloft, quickly reefing sails in the dark, must have felt as though someone were trying to shake them from a treetop.

  Cook seems to have retired just before impact, because Banks later described the commander as managing the crisis in his drawers. First, Cook hoisted out boats to sound for deep water. Then he tried to wrench the ship off the coral by dropping anchors from the boats and winding them up with the capstan and windlass. Despite this “very great strean,” the ship didn’t budge. Cook took a more desperate measure: lightening the ship in hopes it would lift off the coral. All night, men hauled massive weights up and over the rail and into the sea: six cannons, fifty-six-pound pigs of iron ballast, firewood, even water casks and food stores—fifty tons in all. Still the ship stuck fast.

  In the morning, the Endeavour began to leak. Every man, including Banks, labored at suction pumps made of bored elm trees, relieving one another at fifteen-minute intervals. As night fell again, water in the hold rose to almost four feet. A third pump was deployed, but the fourth and last failed to work. “The leak gained upon the Pumps considerably,” Cook wrote. “This was an alarming and I may say terrible Circumstance and threatened immidiate destruction to us as soon as the Ship was afloat.”

  This was unusually strong language for Cook. High tide approached, his best chance for heaving the ship off the coral. If he tried to do this, water might flood through the ship’s gashed bottom. But he couldn’t stay, either. “I resolved to resk all,” he wrote. Men toiled at the capstan and windlass, tugging cables and anchor lines until the ship finally sprang free. Cook’s worst fear instantly materialized. Water poured into the hold—or so the man measuring it reported. This news, Cook wrote, “for the first time caused fear to operate upon every man in the Ship.”

  It seems hard to believe that every man wasn’t already terrified. But up to that point, Banks wrote, the crew had worked nonstop, for twenty-four hours, with “inimitable” calm and “surprising chearfullness and alacrity; no grumbling or growling was to be heard throughout the ship.” Banks credited this to Cook’s “wonted coolness and precision,” and to that of his officers. Perhaps, too, exertion and exhaustion kept the crewmen from fully apprehending the peril they were in.

  But there was no denying the danger once water flooded into the ship. “Fear of death now stard us in the face,” Banks wrote. “I intirely gave up the ship and packing up what I thought I might save prepard myself for the worst.” Ships’ boats in the eighteenth century were small craft designed for labor, not lifesaving. “We well knew,” Banks wrote, “that some, probably the most of us, must be drownd: a better fate maybe than those who should get ashore without arms to defend themse
lves from the Indians or provide themselves with food, on a countrey where we had not the least reason to hope for subsistance.”

  Nor was there any reasonable hope of rescue. In fact, no European ship would visit this shore again for fifty years. Even Cook abandoned his customary calm, later confiding in his journal that his “utmost wish” at this moment had been to somehow beach his wrecked ship and salvage enough timber to “build a vessel to carry us to the East Indies.”

  Then, just as suddenly, deliverance arrived. The crewman who had earlier reported a frightening rise in water was found to have measured incorrectly. “This mistake was no sooner clear’d up than it acted upon every man like a charm,” Cook wrote. “They redoubled their Vigour” at the pumps. Cook also took counsel from a midshipman, Jonathan Monkhouse, who had once helped save a sinking ship with a technique known as fothering. As Cook described it, men covered a sail with a sticky mix of oakum, wool, and “sheeps dung or other filth.” Then they maneuvered the sail under the ship with ropes until water pressed the gluey canvas into the largest gash. Monkhouse, who directed this operation, “exicuted it very much to my satisfaction,” Cook wrote, bestowing one of the highest plaudits in his vocabulary. The rest of the crew also came in for rare praise. “No men ever behaved better than they have done on this occasion.”

  But the Endeavour wasn’t out of danger. The Barrier Reef angles toward shore and is farthest from land at its southern edge, which the ship had passed two weeks before. In other words, the Endeavour had sailed into a virtual cul-de-sac. And the leaking ship had to somehow maneuver through coral-studded seas with “nothing but a lock of Wool between us and destruction,” Banks wrote.

  Cook set his sights on two barren sandbars, naming them Hope “because we were always in hopes of being able to reach these Islands.” Unable to do so, he pinned his hopes instead on a harbor he named Weary Bay. But the bay was too shallow. At sunset, men in the pinnace found a river mouth deep enough to bring the ship in. But as the Endeavour approached, the weather turned so wet and blowy that the badly damaged ship “would not work,” Cook wrote. For two days the vessel lingered offshore, “intangled among shoals.” Finally, on June 18, a full week after striking the reef, Cook sailed into the narrow river, twice running aground before finally mooring beside a steep bank.

  Whatever relief the English must have felt wasn’t recorded in their journals. Perhaps they were too exhausted, or alarmed by their situation. When Cook finally had a chance to examine the ship’s bottom, he found the damage “hardly credable.” The reef had shorn off much of the keel and sheathing, and torn planks so cleanly that “the whole was cut away as if it had been done by the hands of a man with a blunt edge tool.” Most astonishing of all was “a large piece of Coral rock that was sticking in one hole.” The coral had snapped off and plugged the gap it had created. This was literally a lucky break. Without it the ship might well have sunk.

  The repairs would obviously take weeks. Cook climbed a hill by the river to survey the countryside. He found a “very indifferent prospect” of mangrove swamps skirted by “barren and stoney” ground. A fierce wind blew constantly. This unpromising venue was to be the crew’s home for almost two months, its longest stay on land since the ship’s departure from Matavai Bay a year before.

  One of the small ironies of Cook’s voyages is that a man who charted and named more of the world than any navigator in history has few places of consequence called after him. Magellan and Bering were honored with famous straits and seas; Hudson merited a major river and bay. Columbus garnered ten American cities, including the U.S. capital (“Columbia” is a feminized version of “Columbus”), as well as a national holiday. Cook came away with two glaciers, several remote passages, inlets, and peaks, a tiny island group he barely visited, and a crater on the moon.

  One reason for this slight is that Cook narrowly missed several harbors that later became major cities: not just Sydney, but also Auckland, Wellington, Vancouver, and Honolulu. Still, Cook seems ill rewarded, particularly on the map of Australia. Tasman never set foot on the island state that bears his name, nor did Darwin visit the modern capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. Yet Cook, who traced the continent’s entire east coast, has little to show for it except a south Sydney electoral district and a weird town in far north Queensland, beside the river where the Endeavour found refuge after hitting the reef.

  Cooktown has seventeen hundred inhabitants and a reputation in the rest of Australia as a beer-swilling, cyclone-racked, crocodile-infested outpost—in other words, a fairly typical bush settlement. Cooktown also hosts a “Discovery Festival” each year to mark the anniversary of the Endeavour’s landing. Judging from a festival brochure I received from Cooktown’s tourist office, this event wasn’t quite so earnest as the one I’d attended at Kurnell. The three-day bash included a wet T-shirt contest, a race down the main street by revelers pulling beer coolers mounted on wheels, and a reenactment of Cook’s landing by “local residents in authentic costumes.”

  “It’ll be a shocking piss-up,” Roger predicted a week before the festival. “We better start drinking now to lay down a foundation so we don’t disgrace ourselves.” Instead, I headed to Cooktown for a few days of sober reconnaissance before Roger joined me at the weekend. Just getting to Cooktown, which is closer to New Guinea than to the Queensland capital of Brisbane, presents a challenge. The sea approach remains almost as treacherous as in Cook’s day; large ships traveling the north Queensland coast carry specially trained “reef pilots” to navigate the shoals. The schedules of the small planes flying into town are subject to frequent disruption by high winds and other hazards. Driving to Cooktown from Cairns, the nearest town of any size, isn’t easy, either. The coastal road through the Daintree rain forest is impassable during the six-month-long wet season; during dry months, it is a slippery, spine-shuddering track, so filled with craters and fallen trees that traveling it resembles a land version of navigating the nearby reef.

  Having endured many such drives during my earlier travels in Australia—including one that left me bleeding in a ditch after I triple-flipped my car off a road near Alice Springs—I opted for the much longer inland road from Cairns to Cooktown. This route, at least, offered the luxury of occasional paved stretches and a reasonable hope of rescue if I broke an axle or my tires became bogged. “In an hour or so you’ll want to go into high-four and lock down the wheel hubs,” the car rental agent at Cairns informed me, handing over a Land Cruiser with a shorn-off aerial, gravel-dug acne, and an inch-deep skin of dust and mud from its last trip to Cooktown. “Otherwise,” he added dryly, “you’ll run into a bit of drama.”

  Drama of any kind might have proved a relief during the daylong drive. Australians have a colorful vocabulary to describe their country’s vast interior: outback, bush, scrub, woop-woop, never-never, back of beyond. Whatever the term, the view remains much the same: mile upon mile of desiccated soil and stunted shrubs. At times, even this ground cover vanishes. One early explorer of Australia’s central desert called it the Ghastly Blank.

  Since most of the continent’s exotic fauna is sensibly nocturnal, there’s little to look at, except signs warning of the many ways that a motorist can come to grief on outback roads. First, kangaroos, bounding out of the scrub at dawn and dusk (my Land Cruiser, like all outback vehicles, came equipped with a massive “roo bar” to repel marsupials). Then, unfenced cattle roaming all along the route, a danger advertised with pictograms of cars crushed against cows. And finally, extreme weather patterns, prompting the curiously unhelpful sign: “Drive According to Prevailing Conditions.” If the prevailing condition was a dust storm or flash flood, how should one drive? Should one drive at all?

  Compounding these hazards is the Australian institution misleadingly named a roadhouse. To American ears, this conjures a diner or truck stop offering bottomless cups of coffee. In the outback, it usually signifies a single gas pump and a corrugated-metal shed in which drivers wash away dust and boredom with
staggering amounts of beer.

  The Lion’s Den, an hour short of Cooktown, typified this outback vernacular. “Keep your Dog Outa the Bar and I’ll Keep My Bullets Outa Your Dog,” announced a sign in front of the lean-to, which was unadorned except for the “XXXX” painted on its side—the label of Queensland’s favorite beer—and a notice saying, “Current Opening Time 10 A.M.” The bar had been open since eight A.M., and several flea-bitten mutts lounged on the plank floor, offering confirmation that dogs resemble their owners: in this case, unshaven men with stringy beards and work clothes worn to an even dun color.

  I ordered a “pot” of XXXX and studied the pub’s décor, which included a display of pickled spiders and snakes, crocodile skins, and a calendar titled “Roadkill Collection.” January featured a photo of a squashed bird named “Sleeping Beauty,” February “The Battered Bat,” March “The Flatted Calf,” April “Roll over Rover,” and so on through the year and the animal kingdom. Each month’s pinup also bore a caption announcing where and when the creature had expired.

  Equally eye-catching was a small sign advertising “Safe Riverside Camping” behind the pub. Safe from what, I wondered?

  “Crocs,” the barmaid said. “Usually.”