by Tony Horwitz
You’d think, then, that Cook’s memory and legacy would be stamped all over London, a city with more monuments and museums and historic plaques than almost any other. But the opposite appeared true. At Trafalgar Square, Roger and I joined hundreds of tourists craning their necks at Horatio Nelson, perched heroically atop his towering column. A hundred yards away, hidden behind Admiralty Arch, we found London’s only monument to Cook: a modest 1914 statue of the captain in an oversized tricorn, gazing across a busy street at a memorial to marines who fought in China and South Africa in 1899–1900. The casual tourist passing this way could easily mistake Britain’s greatest navigator for one among a legion of now obscure figures cluttering pedestals all across London.
The British Museum, at the time of our visit, had not a single Cook-related exhibit on display, and the Natural History Museum only one: a small sample of plant specimens that Banks and Solander collected in Australia. Even Greenwich’s National Maritime Museum gave Cook short rations. While Nelson memorabilia occupied an entire wing, the Cook collection, which once merited a room of its own, had been scattered across theme exhibits such as Explorers, Trade and Empire, and Global Garden.
In a stairwell of the museum hung two of the three surviving paintings of Cook. The most famous, painted in 1776 by a renowned portrait artist, Nathaniel Dance, depicted Cook in imperial mode, wearing a gray wig and formal captain’s uniform, his finger planted on a chart. The depiction of Cook’s body, broad and imposing, didn’t match the rawboned figure described by the captain’s shipmates. Cook had sat only briefly for the portrait, forcing Dance to use a model to finish his work.
Much more compelling, to me at least, was the museum’s lesser-known portrait by William Hodges, an artist on Cook’s second voyage. Hodges had the advantage of spending three years at sea with the captain. His unheroic portrait of Cook—wigless and weather-beaten, with brown curls, deep-set eyes, prominent nose, jutting chin, and sloping shoulders—seemed as close to an image of the real man as we were likely to find. (The third surviving portrait, by John Webber, an artist on the third voyage, isn’t so striking, though it has the historical virtue of showing Cook wearing a black glove, as he often did, to conceal the ugly wound on his right hand.)
We lingered in front of the Hodges portrait for some time, staring into Cook’s rather weary and melancholic face. “The inner man,” Roger declared. “It’s all there. I see it for the first time.”
“What?”
“Cook was an alcho, a total pisspot. Look at those eyes. Yellow and small, like peeholes in snow. He had a terrible hangover the day he sat for this painting, he can barely see out. And that big nose, shiny and crinkly, like crepe paper? A classic drinker’s bugle.”
“You’re projecting yourself on Cook.”
“No I’m not. Remember those three thousand gallons of Madeira he picked up on his first voyage? It was for Cook, not the crew. He wasn’t a staggering, lurching drunk. But the grog explains some of his strange behavior, and why he fell apart in the end. He was down to one percent liver function, like me.”
We continued to debate this the next day, during another torturous Underground trip to London’s East End, where Cook spent most of his time in the city. Rather than try to navigate the tangled, Blitz-damaged streets (where even Cook might lose his way today), I’d arranged for a pilot: Clifford Thornton, president of the Captain Cook Society. Formed in 1975 by philatelists interested in Cook-related stamps, the society had since grown into a global network of Cook enthusiasts and historians who swapped opinions and arcane research queries about the captain. I’d joined the society and found its publications and online forum a tremendously useful resource.
But I knew nothing about Clifford Thornton, except that he’d once been a museum curator and now wrote an elegant “President’s Message” in the society’s quarterly newsletter, Cook’s Log. From this, and from our e-mails (we’d never spoken), I’d conjured an elderly and eccentric Oxonian with long, swept-back gray hair, tweed jacket, public-school tie, and an unlit pipe hovering a few inches from his lips. So I was a little startled when we emerged from the Tube near the Tower of London to find a middle-aged man with close-cropped hair who wore corduroys, a windbreaker, and a student-style knapsack, and spoke with a northern England accent as strong as any I’d heard in Cook country.
Cliff, as he introduced himself, came from Stockton-on-Tees, an industrial town close to Middlesbrough, and now lived in suburban Essex, just outside London, where he worked supervising welfare services for the local council. “I’m a bit of a browser, nibbling here and there,” Cliff said, checking his street map and striding briskly down Pepys Street and Seething Lane to our first stop: a church called St. Olave’s, with a graveyard alongside that held the bodies of Samuel Pepys, 365 victims of the Great Plague, and a sixteenth-century woman identified as Mother Goose. “Cook’s lieutenant, Pickersgill, probably worshipped here,” Cliff said. “Just thought you might want to have a squint at it.”
From there, he led us down a road called Crutched Friars and headed into Wapping, the Thames-side district that had once been the heart of maritime London. German bombs and urban renewal had transformed most of it since Cook’s day. We passed new apartments and moorings for pleasure craft. Then the road turned from pavement to cobble, and condominiums gave way to old brick warehouses and pubs.
Cliff led us down moss-slicked steps that dropped to the river near Execution Dock, so named because pirates were once hanged there and left dangling until three tides washed over them. “I would put my money on it that Cook walked ashore right here from Whitby colliers,” Cliff said, kneeling to pluck bits of old glass, crockery, and clay pipe from the dirty sand. He pointed at a riverside pub, one of thirty that had lined the Wapping waterfront in its eighteenth-century heyday. The owners of these pubs doubled as “undertakers,” who undertook the business of unloading and selling coal. “It was thirsty work,” Cliff explained. A coal heaver received a pint of beer during each hour he spent toting baskets of the grimy cargo up the steep stairs.
One of these riverside publican-undertakers had been John Batts, the father of Elizabeth Cook. Batts owned an alehouse called the Bell and leased Execution Dock. Cliff believed that Cook had become acquainted with the family while unloading coal here. He may also have lodged at the Bell, which stood just across the road from the dock.
The site of the Bell was now a parking lot. Cliff led us down the road to a church the Cooks attended, St. Paul’s Shadwell, where their first child, James, was baptized nine months after their marriage. The church had been rebuilt in the nineteenth century and now bore almost no resemblance to the structure the Cooks had known. When I mentioned to Cliff that we’d been frustrated by the same pattern in Yorkshire, he nodded and said, “The best you can do is catch an echo of the man. You can almost never reach out and touch him.”
The same was true of the houses that the Cooks inhabited, first in Shadwell—on a site that now lay in the middle of a road—and later in the nearby district of Mile End. Cliff led us from Wapping to Mile End through a maze of condominiums and housing estates that gave little hint of the area’s maritime heritage, except for streets named Vinegar and Cinnamon, and buildings called after explorers: Franklin, Frobisher, Vancouver, Shackleton.
Mile End had changed even more since Cook’s day. In 1763, when Cook purchased a sixty-one-year lease there, for a property bordered by a bakery, a wine vault, and stables, Mile End was an up-and-coming neighborhood at London’s eastern edge, still fringed by fields and orchards. It didn’t stay bucolic for long. By the time William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, began his work there in 1868, much of the neighborhood had become a crowded, impoverished slum known as Mile End Waste. Later came heavy bombing by the Germans in World War II. Once a magnet for Jews and other European refugees, Mile End now teemed with immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, and the Asian subcontinent.
Cliff led us past halal shops and ethnic restaurants to number 88 Mile E
nd Road—or, rather, a plaque on the brick wall between 86 and 90 that read: “On this site stood a house occupied for some years by Captain James Cook R.N. F.R.S. 1728–1779 Circumnavigator and Explorer.” Mrs. Cook stayed in the narrow brick terrace until 1788 before moving to Clapham, on the other side of the Thames. The building later became a kosher butcher’s shop and survived the Blitz, only to be demolished in 1959 to expand a nearby brewery. The Australians were approached about buying the house, but feeling they’d been gulled once before, in the affair of “Cook’s Cottage” in Great Ayton, they resisted. So the house was gone, and the garden behind it had become a parking lot.
We stood and stared at the wall, littered with windblown trash. Sitar music wafted from a textile workshop behind the house site. Muslim women in full-face veils hurried down the block while men in robes and skullcaps argued in Arabic before a coffee shop. “Cook didn’t really need to sail around the globe, did he?” Cliff said. “If he’d stayed here long enough, the world would have come to him.”
We returned to Wapping for lunch at an ancient riverside pub called the Prospect of Whitby. Dark and low-beamed, with stone-flagged floors, the pub was named for a ship that had once moored behind it. As we sat outside, in the wan autumn sun, gazing at the Isle of Dogs, I asked Cliff the question that had nagged at me since our arrival in London: Why was Cook’s memory so neglected in the city?
Cliff pondered this for a moment. “Britain loves its warriors,” he said. “Cook wasn’t blood and thunder like Nelson. He’s a quieter, more peaceful figure, not your traditional hero.” To some degree, he added, the American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars initially overshadowed Cook’s voyages, so that the full impact of his discoveries didn’t become apparent until the nineteenth century. Also, Cook’s biographers never met the navigator; in popular imagination, he remained an opaque and stolid figure. This was in sharp contrast to the romantic Nelson, who carried on his adulterous affair with Lady Hamilton and perished triumphantly at Trafalgar with those immortal last words to his officer, “Kiss me, Hardy.”
Cliff, however, felt that Cook was “starting to get his due.” In his quiet way, Cliff had done a great deal to make this happen. He’d over-seen the establishment of the Cook Birthplace Museum in Marton, written booklets and scholarly articles about the captain, and disseminated research around the globe through his presidency of the Captain Cook Society. I was surprised, then, to learn that Cliff hadn’t really discovered Cook until midlife, even though the two men’s birthplaces lay just miles apart.
“I’m a seaweed man by training,” Cliff said. He’d begun his career as a marine biologist, dreamed of going into forensic science, then drifted into museum work instead, in part to support his growing family. This had led him to Cook. Though Cliff had since changed careers, he continued to immerse himself in the navigator as almost a second, unpaid occupation, and as an outlet for his detective instincts. “I love mysteries and investigation,” he said.
Cliff opened his knapsack and spread bits and bobs of his latest research across the tavern table. This ranged from the fate of an obscure crewman on one of Cook’s ships (“I’ve spent a lot of time at the India Office going through ships’ rosters,” Cliff said), to the design of the Resolution’s prow (“Been corresponding with a figurehead historian in New Zealand”), to the provenance of a painting of Whitby (“That story’s still rumbling on, another bit of unfinished business”). For a skilled historical gumshoe like Cliff, Cook’s story was the perfect fixation: global in reach, with a large cast of characters and a narrative so vast and intricate that you could spend years sleuthing each small part of the puzzle.
“This is my real obsession,” he said, reaching into his knapsack again. “Finding Cook’s bones.” He brought out a spiral notebook filled with notes and copies of archival documents relating to the mysterious fate of the captain’s remains. Cliff had unearthed an astonishing body of evidence, unknown to Beaglehole or other Cook scholars, suggesting that a piece of the captain had come back to England and may have survived to the present day. The labyrinthine paper trail led through Hawaii, London, and Sydney, though Cliff was still trying to fill several gaps in the historical record. “Don’t know where this will end,” he said. “In a way, I hope it doesn’t.”
Listening to Cliff, I quickly became infected by his passionate, quirky quest. “Why don’t you come with us to Hawaii?” I said. “We’ll go in February, on the anniversary of Cook’s death.”
Cliff, who had never left the U.K. except to attend a Cook conference in Canada in the 1970s, allowed himself a small smile. “I’ll think on it,” he said.
We parted beside the Tube stop at the Tower of London. When Roger and I reached the platform, a voice droned over the loudspeaker. “I regret to say,” it began, before vanishing in feedback.
“All these Cook-mad Englishmen we’ve met are the same,” Roger said, as we waited, and waited, for a train to appear. “They’re isolatos. Trainspotters. A secret society, exchanging Cook trivia like a Masonic handshake.” He peered down the empty track. “Actually, a trainspotter would come in handy right now.”
Our flight to Sydney was scheduled to leave in a few hours. Roger reached in his pocket and fondled his plane ticket. “Blue sky, cold beer, happy people who don’t lie under trains,” he said. “I’m like Cook. Can’t wait to get back to the Pacific.”
Twenty years after joining the Royal Navy in London, at the age of forty-six, Cook reached another crossroads in his career. In August 1775, within weeks of his return from the second Pacific voyage, he asked for and was granted a sinecure as captain of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich, a medical facility and home for aging sailors. The post offered a comfortable salary of £230 a year, plus living quarters, firewood, and a food stipend.
Elizabeth Cook may well have encouraged her husband to seek the hospital post. Since their wedding thirteen years before, the couple had spent less than four years together. When Cook returned from his second Pacific voyage, having been away six of the previous seven years, his two surviving sons, about to turn twelve and eleven, must have seemed virtual strangers to him.
But settling down for a life of professional and domestic quiet also felt strange to Cook. “My fate drives me from one extream to a nother,” he fretted, soon after his return, in a letter to his Whitby friend, John Walker. “A few Months ago the whole Southern hemisphere was hardly big enough for me and now I am going to be confined within the limits of Greenwich Hospital, which are far too small for an active mind like mine. I must however confess it is a fine retreat and a pretty income, but whether I can bring my self to like ease and retirement, time will shew.”
Time would show very quickly. A few months after the Resolution reached England, the Navy began preparing the ship for a return trip to the Pacific. The Earl of Sandwich and Sir Hugh Palliser, Cook’s longtime Admiralty patrons, invited him to dinner and laid out their vision for the Resolution’s next voyage. Whom, they wondered, would the great captain recommend as its commander? Cook, according to his first biographer, Andrew Kippis, was so “fired” with excitement that he “declared that he himself would undertake the direction of the enterprise.” One wonders if claret and port played some part in this declaration.
In any event, Cook’s decision was undoubtedly what Sandwich and Palliser had hoped for all along. In February 1776, Cook sent another letter to John Walker. “It is certain that I have quited an easy retirement, for an Active, and perhaps Dangerous Voyage,” he wrote. “My present disposition is more favourable to the latter than the former, and I imbark on as fair a prospect as I can wish. If I am fortunate enough to get safe home, theres no doubt but it will be greatly to my advantage.”
Cook had accepted yet another mission impossible. His destination this time would be the top of the world, rather than its bottom, in quest of a channel instead of a continent. Cook was to search for the Northwest Passage, the much-dreamed-of shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific that would enable British ships to
reach the Orient without rounding the Capes. Surely, like a vast and temperate southern continent, a passage across the top of Canada must exist. Open ocean couldn’t freeze, or so armchair geographers of the day believed. Parliament had even offered prize money of £20,000 to the crew of the ship that made the passage’s eventual discovery. It awaited only an explorer of Cook’s skill and fortitude to succeed where Baffin, Hudson, Frobisher, and so many others had turned back or frozen to death.
Cook’s orders carried an added wrinkle. While other explorers had searched for the passage from the Atlantic side, Cook would approach from the far north Pacific. Only a few Europeans had ventured this way before, most notably Vitus Bering, who perished after his ship wrecked near the frigid sea named for him. And Bering, at least, had had the advantage of setting off from Russia’s northeastern flank, in Kamchatka. Cook would have to sail halfway around the globe, entering the Pacific near New Zealand, then cross more than a hundred degrees of latitude to the largely uncharted waters of the north Pacific. For all he knew, there might be no land at all between Polynesia and the vaguely known territory that the Russians called Alaschka.
Cook had another, smaller mission to perform en route: taking home a Tahitian named Omai, whom Tobias Furneaux of the Adventure had carried to England on Cook’s second voyage. By all accounts, Omai had been charmed by the British, and they by him. Joseph Banks squired him around London in a suit of Manchester velvet and white satin, and introduced him to King George, to whom the Tahitian blurted, “How do, King Tosh!” Omai attended the opera and sat for a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He skated on ice and swam in the freezing North Sea, novelties for a native of the tropics. According to the London Chronicle, Omai also became engaged “to a young Lady of about 22 years of age, who will go with him to his own country.” The historical record makes no further mention of the engagement, or of the young lady.
