by Tony Horwitz
Joan Druett’s Rough Medicine provides many grisly details about shipboard health and diet. The most exhaustive study of this subject in relation to Cook is an essay by Sir James Watt, a British naval surgeon, titled “Medical Aspects and Consequences of Cook’s Voyages,” published in Fisher and Johnston’s Captain James Cook and His Times.
The aphorism quoted at the start of the chapter is from Marcus Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.
2 Tahiti: Sic Transit Venus and 3 To Bora-Bora: Sold a Pup
I don’t read French well enough to comment on the extensive writings about Tahiti and neighboring islands in that language. Translated works or ones written in English that I found useful include Teuira Henry’s Ancient Tahiti, Etienne Taillémite’s Bougainville in Tahiti, Jose Garanger’s Sacred Stones and Rites, and John Dunmore’s French Explorers in the Pacific. David Howarth’s Tahiti: A Paradise Lost provides an excellent overview of European contact and its dire results. I also profited from my interviews with two academics at the Université de la Polynesie Française in Tahiti, Sandhya Patel and Serge Dunis, as well as with government adviser Alexandre Ata and journalist Al Prince.
4 New Zealand: Warriors, Still
For such a small country, New Zealand seems to produce a striking number of great historians. In addition to Beaglehole, there is James Belich, whose Making Peoples is a lucid, engaging, and balanced history of New Zealand to the late nineteenth century. Anne Salmond’s Two Worlds is a gem of a different sort: a richly detailed, almost microscopic look at early contact between Maori and Pakeha, much of it focused on Cook’s voyages.
For the recollections of Te Horeta, the Maori boy who witnessed Cook’s arrival, I’ve drawn on several nineteenth-century versions of his story, particularly the one published in John White’s The Ancient History of the Maori. I gathered added details from my interviews with Maori still living in Mercury Bay, and am indebted to Peter Johnson of the Ngaati Hei.
5 Botany Bay: In the Pure State of Nature and 6 The Great Barrier Reef: Wrecked
Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore doesn’t dwell for long on Cook’s visit to Botany Bay, but it brilliantly and exhaustively details the Endeavour’s legacy: the creation of the world’s largest prison and the devastation of Aboriginal society. He also paints a grim, vivid portrait of the working-class world from which convicts—and many of Cook’s sailors—came. While some Australian scholars have challenged Hughes’s analysis as overly dark, dramatic, and polemical, The Fatal Shore is indispensable for anyone interested in the early history of white Australia.
Also controversial, and invaluable, is the work of Henry Reynolds, who has written several books detailing the dispossession and devastation of Aborigines. Reynolds is a campaigner as well as a scholar, and some of his research has recently come under fire. But he attempts to document, in a way that few other Australians have been willing to do until recently, the horror and extent of white-on-black violence. Other works on Aborigines that I found useful include Lyndall Ryan’s The Aboriginal Tasmanians, John Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga’s Prehistory of Australia, and a book of essays printed by the University of Sydney’s history department, Maps, Dreams, History.
Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country is a fun and informative overview of Australia and its history. Also lively are Tim Flannery’s well-edited anthologies about Australia’s settlement and exploration: The Birth of Sydney and The Explorers. For information on Botany Bay, Daphne Salt’s Kurnell provides the best overview.
As I’ve mentioned already, Sydney is blessed with the Mitchell and Dixson Libraries. The Mitchell’s exhibit in 2000 on maps of terra australis, and a lecture there by the library’s curator of manuscripts, Paul Brunton, were also very useful to me. Brunton dismisses claims, based on the so-called Dieppe maps, that the Portuguese “discovered” Australia before the Dutch, so I haven’t covered this issue in my book. But a new work, published in Britain too late for me to include it in my research, treats this subject at length: Victoria Collingridge’s Captain Cook: Obsession and Betrayal in the New World (Ebury Press, 2002). Other works dealing with early voyages to, and maps of, Australia, include J. P. Sigmond and L. H. Zuiderbaan’s Dutch Discoveries of Australia, and Robert Clancy’s The Mapping of Terra Australis.
Finally, I am indebted to the very helpful librarians at my onetime employer, The Sydney Morning Herald, who helped me find news stories on Cook, Aboriginal affairs, and contemporary Australia.
8 Savage Island: The Hunt for Red Banana and 9 Tonga: Where Time Begins, and Goes Back
Not surprisingly, there isn’t a great deal of literature on Niue. For overviews of the island’s history and culture, I mostly relied on Percy Smith’s Niue: The Island and Its People and Edwin Loeb’s History and Traditions of Niue. Two excellent monographs at the Niue Archives detail Cook’s visit: Thomas Felix Ryan’s “Narratives of Encounter” and “Palagi Views of Niue.”
Any historical study of Tonga should begin with the extraordinary story of William Mariner, a young clerk who survived the massacre of his shipmates in 1806, lived on the islands for four years, and later told his tale to Dr. John Martin, who published it as Tonga Islands, William Mariner’s Account. The book provides rich detail of Tongan life and culture in the early-contact period. For twentieth-century Tongan history, the most useful book to me was Elizabeth Wood-Ellem’s Queen Salote of Tonga. I also profited from dozens of issues of Matangi Tonga, an excellent newsmagazine published in Nuku’alofa.
10 North Yorkshire: A Plain, Zealous Man and 11 London: Shipping Out, Again
No part of Cook’s life is more shrouded in mystery and myth than his early years in the north of England. In my efforts to distinguish fact from folklore, I’m indebted to Captain Cook in Cleveland, a booklet by Clifford Thornton, formerly head of the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum in Marton. In Great Ayton, I found two other useful booklets: Joyce Dixon’s History Under the Hammer, about the history and sale of “Cook’s Cottage,” and Dan O’Sullivan’s The Education of Captain Cook. In Staithes, as I’ve mentioned in the text, the Captain Cook and Staithes Heritage Center contains an astonishing trove of artifacts and documents relating to Cook’s life. Also useful to me were the exhibits at the Captain Cook Memorial Museum and Whitby Museum.
In London, I turned to two experts at the Natural History Museum. Roy Vickery, a curator in the botany department, showed me around the herbarium and its collection of specimens gathered by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander. Neil Chambers, research curator of the museum’s Banks Archival Project, gave me access to some of the botanist’s vast correspondence, which he has since edited and published (The Letters of Sir Joseph Banks [London: Imperial College Press, 2000]). The letters, many of them never transcribed before, make for astonishing reading, including one from a Lincolnshire magistrate who sent Banks a statement about local people vomiting live frogs. The best source for scarce information about Cook’s time in East London is Captain James Cook Endeavours, by Julia Rae.
12 Alaska: Outside Men
Steve Langdon’s The Native People of Alaska is an excellent introduction to Aleuts and other indigenous residents of the state. Historians Stephen Haycox at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, and Lydia Black, professor emerita at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, helped me with research relating to Russians in Alaska. The state is also blessed with first-rate museums, including the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository in Kodiak, and Unalaska’s Museum of the Aleutians. I can also recommend two beautifully illustrated publications by Alaska Geographic, The Bering Sea and Russian America. Two other works gave me a feel for contemporary Unalaska: Ray Hudson’s affecting memoir, Moments Rightly Placed, and Jerah Chadwick’s beautiful poetry in Story Hunger.
13 Hawaii: The Last Island and 14 Kealakekua Bay: A Bad Day on Black Rock
It is impossible to research Cook in Hawaii without becoming mesmerized by the duel between the anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Ganana
th Obeyesekere—and also, at times, bewildered by their contretemps. (Sahlins rebuts Obeyesekere at one point by writing: “The notion that a substantive statement can be ignored on the presumption that its author was directly or indirectly influenced by a priori missionary belief involves the fallacies of ignoratio elenchi and petitio principii.”) I’ve given a very abbreviated version of their views in the text. But as the title of Sahlins’s main work on the subject—How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example—makes clear, this debate isn’t simply about whether or not Hawaiians viewed Cook as a god. Sahlins and Obeyesekere are really arguing over the fundamental and bedeviling question of how best to understand cultures very remote from our own, whose beliefs have been heavily filtered by Western sailors, scholars, and missionaries. For that reason, I found the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate relevant to the whole enterprise of understanding Cook’s contact with people across the Pacific. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz offers a probing, noncombatant’s view of their face-off in his November 30, 1995, essay for The New York Review of Books, titled “Culture War.”
While scholars argue over the meaning of Cook’s death, untangling the many versions of what transpired at Kealakekua Bay on February 14, 1779, is like interviewing ten witnesses to a car wreck. Molesworth Phillips’s report on the skirmish, given to Charles Clerke soon after it occurred, is probably the most reliable record we have. To a lesser degree, I’ve also drawn on the journals of other crewmen, particularly David Samwell, who gathered the testimonies of others and wrote a short book about Cook’s death (to which, rather bizarrely, he appended an essay “respecting the introduction of the venereal disease into the Sandwich Islands”).
There is ongoing debate about whether the Spanish visited Hawaii in the sixteenth century. Captain Rick Rogers deals with this at length in his well-illustrated Shipwrecks of Hawaii, and he was kind enough to share additional research with me in Honolulu. The Hawaiian proverb quoted as the epigraph of Chapter 13 is from Greg Dening’s Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language.
Epilogue: A Period to His Labours
My information about the fate of the Endeavour and Resolution comes from a visit to Newport, where I met with Dr. A. K. Abbass, the director of the Rhode Island Archaeology Project. I also consulted researchers involved with the hunt for the Endeavour at the National Maritime Museum in Sydney. Updates on the continuing search can be found online at www.rimap.org/.
For the story of Cook’s bone, I turned to the Australian Museum and the State Library of New South Wales, the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Clifford Thornton of the Captain Cook Society, and Estelle Lazer, a forensic archaeologist at Sydney University.
Index
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Aborigines
contemporary
Cook’s contact with
culture of
history of Europeans and
rights movement of
Adams, John
“Advance Australia Fair” (Australian national anthem)
Adventure, H.M.S.
message in bottle
’Aho, ’Eleni
aikane (male retainers)
akua (ancestral spirits)
Alaska
contemporary, ferry to Dutch
Harbor
contemporary, in Unalaska
Cook in
Cook travels to
Russians in
U.S. purchase of
alcohol
Cook and
Cook’s sailors and
native people and
Alenuihaha Channel
Aleutian Islands
American effect on
in WW II
Aleuts
abandoned villages of
contemporary
Cook and
culture of
Ledyard’s trip with
Russians and
WW II and
All Saints Church (Great Ayton, Yorkshire)
Alofi, Niue
Alpha Farm (Australia)
American civil rights movement
American Indian Movement
American missionaries
American Revolutionary War
America. See also United States
European discovery of
northwest shore
Amnesty International
Amundsen, Roald
Anderson, William (surgeon)
animals
Aleutian islands and
Australian outback
bandicoot
Cook gives, to Tonga
crocodiles
dingoes
fishing industry
flying fox or fruit bat
jerboa
kangaroo
king crab
koalas
native, in Australia, extinct
penguins
pigs, in New Zealand
sea lions
on ship
Steller’s sea cow
third voyage burdened by
wallaby
walruses
whales
Antarctica
Apotheosis of Captain Cook, The (painting)
Arctic
Ariori
“artificial curiosities,”
Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa
’Atenesi School (Tonga)
Atkins, John
Attu Island
Auckland
Australia. See also Botany Bay; Cooktown, Australia; Great Barrier Reef
Aboriginal rights and
Banks and
contemporary, Cook’s Botany Bay landing site
contemporary, view of Cook in
contemporary, whites and
Aborigines in
Cook declares British possession of
Cook first visits
Cook first visits Botany Bay
Cook leaves
Cook’s cottage moved to
Cook’s ship damaged on Great Barrier reef
Cook’s ship repair site in Queensland
gold rush
named
Australia Day
yacht race
Australian Museum, arrow made of shinbone of Cook found in
Baffin, William
Baffin Bay
Balboa, Vasco Núñez de
Banks, Joseph
Aborigines and
Australian animals and plants and
Batavia and
birth of
boards Endeavour with entourage
botany collection of
Clerke’s final letter to
Cook’s legacy and
Cook’s sailors and
Cooktown reenactment and
on crossing equator
death of
declines Resolution trip
England homecoming of
friendship of, with Cook
Great Barrier Reef and
Huahine and
life of, after Endeavour
New Zealand and
Omai and, in London
on patience
personality of
Polynesian politics and
southern continent and
Tahiti and
takes Tahitian priest on voyage
Tierra del Fuego and
“Banks Garden” (New Zealand)
Barnum, P. T.
Batavia
Batts, John
Bayly, William
Beagle (Darwin’s ship)
Beaglehole, J. C.
work of, on journals of Cook’s travels
Beaufort Sea
Bering, Vitus
Bering Sea
Bessborough, Earl of
Biddle, George
Biorka, Alaska
Bishop Museu
m (Honolulu)
“Black Line” (Tasmania)
Blake, Captain Chris
Bligh, William
Blosset, Harriet
Bolckow, Henry
Boorstin, Daniel
Booth, William
Bora-Bora
Cook’s visit to
environmental problems of
Boswell, James
Botany Bay
Aborigines and First Fleet at
Cook and Aborigines at
Cook names
contemporary, from sea
contemporary, landing site museum in
environmental effect of Europeans on
