Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

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  ———. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1982.

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  ———. “Palagi Views of Niue.” Auckland: Auckland University Bindery, 1984.

  Sahlins, Marshall. How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

  ———. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

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  ———. Captain Cook and Hawaii. London: Francis Edwards, 1957.

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  ———. Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of Cook Voyages. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992.

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  ———. “Origin of the Condemnation of Captain Cook in Hawaii,” published in the Annual Report of the Hawaiian Historical Society, 1930.

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  Withey, Lynne. Voyages of Discovery: Captain Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

  Wood-Ellem, Elizabeth. Queen Salote of Tonga: The Story of an Era, 1900–65 Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999.

  Young, Rev. George. The Life and Voyages of Captain James Cook. London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1836.

  Zimmermann, Heinrich. Zimmerman’s Account of the Third Voyage of Captain Cook. Wellington: W.A.G. Skinner, 1926.

  Also by Tony Horwitz

  Confederates in the Attic

  Baghdad Without a Map

  One for the Road

  Acknowledgments

  My travels, like Cook’s, introduced me to a world of wondrously hospitable strangers. Apart from Sydney, all the places I visited were new to me. I knew no one at any of my destinations before arriving. The following people were especially welcoming and helpful: James Pouant, a great teacher in Tahiti; Sheila Robinson and Anne Iranui McGuire, my warm and inspiring guides in New Zealand; Ian Stubbs, Reg Firth, and Doug Worton, fellow Cookaholics in North Yorkshire; Herb Kawainui Kane, the Renaissance man of Hawaii; and four sailors who kept me afloat and amused on the replica Endeavour: Todd Vidgen, Karen Angel, Mike Randolph, and Steve Featherstone.

  I owe a special debt to Clifford Thornton, president of the Captain Cook Society. Cliff accompanied me in person during part of this journey, and in spirit for all of it; he is one of the world’s true explorers, circumnavigating the globe every day from his computer in Essex. I’d also like to thank the other members of the society, who entertained and informed me with their online dispatches. I’m proud to belong to your fraternity and hope, like Charles Clerke, that my Cook-mates “will have no occasion
to blush in owning themselves such.”

  I’d also like to express special gratitude to Rick and Melia Knecht of Unalaska, Alaska, the most intrepid couple I’ve ever met: great company, great readers, great adventurers. I’ll never forget the Elbow Room, the Bering Sea, and Dutch Harbor’s airport—and hope never to see them again. Please come visit me in Virginia.

  While new and distant friends assisted me every step of the way, it was two New Yorkers who made this journey possible. Kristine Dahl urged me to undertake it, and helped launch my endeavor with the largesse of Joseph Banks. John Sterling navigated the book into print with Cook-like calm, vision, and courage. You two are my Lords of the Admiralty; I look forward to future voyages together. Thanks, too, to Jolanta Benal, for an eagle-eyed copy edit that saved me from countless errors and embarrassments.

  I also owe an immeasurable debt, yet again, to family and friends who kept me on course with their editing and encouragement. Most of all my wife, Geraldine Brooks, who patiently endured my long absences, and my even more taxing presences, during which she lived through and edited every chapter, several times; my mother and line editor without peer, Elinor Horwitz; my big-picture brother, Josh Horwitz; and inspiring fellow writers Joel Achenbach, Brian Hall, Jack Hitt, Rich Ivry, Michael Lewis, Lisa Michaels, William Powers, Martha Sherrill, and Ken Wells. Love and thanks to you all.

  Finally, and fulsomely, I want to thank my co-traveler, Roger Williamson, an intoxicating companion who helped me keep my sense of humor and nautical direction throughout. I’m sorry (though not very) that I skipped Antarctica; you did better without me. I’m honored to be your Beaglehole, and hope that these pages are the tribute you merit. Cheers, mate.

  Notes on Sources

  As I hope I’ve made clear throughout this book, any study of Cook depends to an extraordinary degree on the encyclopedic work of John Cawte Beaglehole. The New Zealand historian, who died in 1971, published the first accurate and comprehensive edition of Cook’s journals, including scholarly introductions, long excerpts from crewmen’s diaries, and scores of official documents. Before Beaglehole, entire continents of Cook material remained unexplored, embroidered, or inaccessible to the general public. His four-volume edition of the journals is a masterpiece of thorough and judicious scholarship.

  For this reason, I’ve relied on Beaglehole’s edition rather than on the many earlier versions of Cook’s travels, such as John Hawkesworth’s three-volume work in 1773, An Account of Voyages undertaken…for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, which adapted Cook’s words and blended the captain’s writing with that of Joseph Banks and earlier Pacific explorers. In almost all cases, I’ve also used Beaglehole as my guide in navigating the shoals of eighteenth-century names, titles, and spellings.

  Also invaluable to me were Beaglehole’s essays, his annotated edition of Banks’s journal, and his last work, The Life of Captain James Cook. In Beaglehole, Cook found the biographer he deserved: a fair, factual, tenacious, and humane man of astonishing breadth. Beaglehole isn’t infallible or completely without prejudice; he’s occasionally too forgiving of Cook, and overly harsh in his assessments of the naturalists Banks and Johann Forster. But his biography of Cook, published posthumously in 1974, remains the gold standard for books about the captain.

  In the thirty years since Beaglehole’s death, new sources have come to light. Also, the past three decades have seen a flowering of scholarship by and about Pacific peoples. So while any study of Cook must begin with Beaglehole, it shouldn’t end with him. Two recent works that I found indispensable were Ray Parkin’s H.M. Bark Endeavour, a very accessible, beautifully illustrated look at Cook’s first ship, crew, and voyage, and John Robson’s Captain Cook’s World, which provides clear maps and concise exposition of Cook’s circuitous travels, in Britain and Canada as well as the Pacific.

  In a more analytic vein, Bernard Smith combines brilliant art criticism with literary and historical insight, particularly regarding Cook’s legacy. Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific and Imagining the Pacific also include some of the best reproductions of art from Cook’s journeys. Another Australian scholar, Greg Dening, skillfully dissects eighteenth-century seafaring and the encounters between Europeans and Pacific Islanders. In Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language, Dening makes frequent reference to Cook and ranges across disciplines to craft one of the most original books I read in the course of my research. Typical of Dening’s contrarian approach is his examination of the number of lashes doled out by every British captain in the Pacific during the eighteenth century; this tally reveals that Bligh, despite his reputation, was a mild commander compared to Cook and others.

  Gananath Obeyesekere, a Sri Lankan–born anthropologist at Princeton, offers a harsh, postcolonial critique of the navigator and of the mythmaking that occurred in his wake. Obeyesekere’s The Apotheosis of Captain Cook is a polemic, often wrongheaded (in my view), but always provocative. As with Smith and Dening, I found that reading Obeyesekere sharpened my own thinking about Cook and provided an antidote to the hagiographic, Anglocentric tone of much that’s been written about the captain. Other, excellent interpretations of Cook and his legacy can be found in several books of essays, most notably Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston’s Captain James Cook and His Times, Margaret Lincoln’s Science and Exploration in the Pacific, and Walter Veit’s two-volume Captain James Cook: Image and Impact.

  Though no biography comes close to Beaglehole’s in depth, several offer lively introductions to Cook for readers who don’t want to brave the New Zealander’s 750-page tome. Alistair MacLean, the author of best-sellers such as The Guns of Navarone, knows how to tell a good story, and he does so in Captain Cook. One of the most recent biographies, Richard Hough’s Captain James Cook, is very traditional in its approach, but it also provides a readable summary. Lynne Withey takes a broader, more anthropological approach in Voyages of Discovery, integrating the perspective of Pacific peoples in a way that most others have not.

  For readers interested in Joseph Banks, Harold Carter’s Sir Joseph Banks is the most comprehensive biography. Patrick O’Brian, the famed sea novelist, brings his lively style and eye for color to his shorter, more readable biography, Joseph Banks. The botanist’s Endeavour journal is available online at http://slnsw.gov.au/.

  For primary sources, apart from Cook’s and Banks’s journals, I relied for the most part on the Mitchell and Dixson Libraries at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, which houses the best collection of Cook-related manuscripts in the world. Also very useful to me were the libraries and exhibits at Sydney’s National Maritime Museum, the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., the Natural History Museum in London, and other repositories in Tahiti, New Zealand, Alaska, and Niue. I’m indebted to the curators and librarians who assisted me in each of these places. I also drew a great deal of information from the Captain Cook Society, which publishes a quarterly “log” and provides the best clearing-house for contemporary research at www.CaptainCookSociety.com.

  For readers interested in works about travel in the modern Pacific, there are countless paeans to swaying palms and twitching hips. A few works stand out from this tired genre. Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania is an acerbic, amusing, and insightful travelogue that covers an astounding amount of the Pacific, including many of the places I visited. Theroux can be brutal, but he’s never dull. And it’s a mark of Cook’s appeal that a writer as skeptical as Theroux observes: “It is impossible to travel in the Pacific, even for a short time, and not develop an admiration for this hero of navigation and discovery, who was—amazingly, for a great captain—a thoroughly good man.”

  Simon Winchester’s Pacific Rising offers an informative overview of the ocean and its history. And while Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau isn’t, strictly speaking, about the Pacific, it’s the most probing book I read about travel in the vast territory Cook covered. Raban sails the northwest coast of America in the path of Cook�
��s disciple, George Vancouver, and casts an original and illuminating eye on both shipboard life in the eighteenth century and the legacy of European encounters with natives. Like Theroux, Raban also appreciates Cook’s accomplishments. “Cook’s rise in the world was a fabulous occurrence—a phoenix, born in smoke and ashes,” Raban writes. “Cook proved that there was room for wild untutored genius in the upper echelons of eighteenth-century England.”

  The Lonely Planet and Rough Guide for each of the countries I visited provided lively and generally accurate introductions to Pacific history and culture, as did the South Pacific Handbook. For a more academic treatment of the region, I often turned to The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders.

  For readers interested in additional sources, here are a few comments on individual chapters. Details on the mentioned works are in the bibliography.

  Prologue: The Distance Traveled

  In describing the aftermath of Cook’s death, I’ve relied on the journals of his men, particularly Charles Clerke, James King, and David Samwell. For Hawaiians’ treatment of the dead, I found the writings of Marshall Sahlins and Roger Rose particularly useful. My overview of Cook’s career and legacy is informed by many sources, especially the writings of J. C. Beaglehole and Bernard Smith.

  1 Pacific Northwest: One Week Before the Mast

  For details relating to Cook’s ship, Ray Parkin’s H.M. Bark Endeavour is essential, both for Parkin’s detailed drawings and for the background he provides on eighteenth-century seafaring. Also useful are the publications of the H.M. Bark Endeavour Foundation and its historian, Antonia Macarthur; the foundation’s Web site is www.barkendeavour.com.au. Sydney’s National Maritime Museum, in conjunction with the National Library of Australia, has produced an excellent CD-ROM, Endeavour, which combines journal extracts with graphics of the ship and the lands it visited.

  There are dozens of books on the exploration and mapping of the Pacific. Among the most useful to me were J. C. Beaglehole’s The Exploration of the Pacific and Peter Whitfield’s New Found Lands. I’ve dealt only briefly with the complex subject of cartography and navigation. For those interested in further reading, John Noble Wilford’s The Mapmakers is the best place to start.