Left Turn at Paradise

by Thomas Shawver

  I used a magnifying glass to help decipher his handwriting:

  Sunday, 28 Aug. 1768. It’s been a fortnight since our Marine complement of 9 privates and 1 drummer led by Serj’ Edgecumbe came aboard. I am still no friend of the Sea, or it to me, but at least my Guts have settled. Methinks it good to write of this Globe trot should I not return….

  I thought of the young man, probably no more than twenty, sailing for the first time to the other side of the world. His fears must have been offset by eager anticipation as to the adventures ahead, particularly the delights awaiting him in Tahiti. The island had been first visited the year before by the HMS Dolphin, captained by Samuel Wallis, and reports of the amorous beauties in that tropical paradise were surely enough to excite any young man’s wanderlust.

  This night I guard the captain’s door and am sore afraid because while they say he is a kindly man he has a most fearsome look. I’d rather be in the cargo deck where I can pen my words in peace. He ordered 12 lashes for Pvt Tom Dunster who would not eat those vinegary weeds and catted a tar for not washing his hands after cleaning the goat stall. A Captain setting off on a long Voyage must set rules from the start. He tells us the kraut will keep the Scurvy away, but I doubt this.

  Skipping ahead, I noticed Private Gibson usually chose Sunday to write. Was that because he pulled guard duty in the hold those days, scribbling his recollections as he sat atop a keg of gunpowder? There would have been few other places on that ship with sufficient privacy. Wherever he did it, the handwriting—full of capital letters in all the wrong places—was uneven, sliding down the page sometimes as if the hand was jerked by a crashing wave or the sudden appearance of a nosy shipmate.

  After half an hour, my eyestrain was leading to a migraine. I went to get coffee next door.

  It was just past nine A.M. and, despite the previous night’s blizzard, Café Provence was bustling with neighborhood regulars and students from the nearby college.

  Professor Charles Walsh, the former curator for incunabula at the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology, sat in the front, looking like an envelope without an address on it. Elbows on table and palms on forehead, he slumped over an untouched plate of sausage and eggs sunny-side up.

  When I pulled up a chair across from him he slowly raised his melancholy face. “Never again, Mike,” he began in a voice that sounded like an eagle being goosed. “Never again will I succumb to Agnes’s insatiable physical entreaties.”

  Agnes was his wife of sixty-plus years.

  “Been overdoing the fandango, have we?”

  “A January tradition, I’m afraid. It seemed like a good idea several decades ago.”

  Deirdre Lescalle approached our table and gave me a concerned smile while placing her hand lightly on my shoulder. She was a local girl who, with her French husband as chef, had opened the bistro six months earlier, replacing the bakery.

  “Ça va, Michael?”

  “Oui, ça va bien, Deirdre.”

  “Jean Paul and I were worried about you when you didn’t show for dinner last night.”

  “Sorry. With the snow and all…”

  “No problem. You want the usual?”

  “Please.”

  “When does Josie get back?”

  “Tomorrow, if she doesn’t fall off the Grand Teton.”

  Her eyes were filled with concern.

  “Are you guys okay?”

  “One hundred percent,” I lied.

  “How’s your flute-player friend?”

  Sandra Epstein, the musician in question, performed in the wind section of the Kansas City Symphony. She also played a mean tin whistle at Fitzpatrick’s Galway Pub, where I occasionally joined in the seisúns. The previous weekend, while Josie was scampering among the Tetons, I had sung to Sandra’s accompaniment until final call.

  Hiding one’s infidelity in the Brookside area of Kansas City is like trying to cover an elephant with a dish towel. Given the number of friends the three of us had in the community, it didn’t take long for one of them to text Josie that I’d left the pub clinging to Sandra. No matter that I was too drunk to drive or do anything else. Good Samaritan that the flautist was, Sandra drove me home without so much as tucking me into bed.

  Having already explained the situation to Josie, I didn’t feel like protesting my innocence to every woman in the neighborhood.

  When I told Deirdre this, she smiled sweetly and sashayed off to get my double espresso.

  I turned back to Walsh.

  “What do you know about the British Navy during the eighteenth century?”

  “Their magnificent ships of the line ruled the world,” he said, relieved he didn’t have to listen to any more of my ongoing soap opera.

  “Ever hear of the HMS Endor?”

  He shook his head. Then he reconsidered. “There’s The Witch of Endor, but it’s a fictional cutter portrayed in Flying Colours by C. S. Forester. Why do you ask?”

  “I have a journal written by a Royal Marine who claimed to serve aboard the Endor. The first entry is dated 28 August 1768.”

  Charlie put down his fork.

  “That doesn’t make sense. I know the name of any English warship of that era large enough to warrant Marines on board. Perhaps your man was a would-be novelist creating a below-deck version of Horatio Hornblower? Where can I find this masterpiece?”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later he finished his breakfast and joined me at my counter, watching with amused interest as I handed him the journal. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d asked Charlie to confirm what I thought to be an important find only to have him declare it of scant monetary or historical value.

  Upon reading the first paragraph, however, his dubious demeanor suddenly transformed into that of a bird dog on point. Charlie adjusted his glasses, slid his tongue slowly across his upper lip, and, like a sluice miner who had detected a speck of gold dust, thumbed greedily through the stiff browned pages.

  After five minutes of this I asked his opinion.

  Instead of answering, he moved to my computer to type “Samuel Gibson, Royal Marines” on the search engine.

  The first heading to come up stated CCSU—the Royal Marines on Cook’s Voyages. Listed under the heading was Gibson, Samuel, Pvt, followed by Dunster, Thomas, and ten others, including Molesworth Phillips, the last surviving member of the illustrious…

  “En’dor is an abbreviation of Endeavor,” Walsh proclaimed in a voice an octave higher than usual. “THE Endeavor. Captain James Cook’s ship on the first of his three historic voyages.”

  I pretended to look impressed, but the scribbled diary of an eighteenth-century lobsterback didn’t seem to rate up there with Marco Polo.

  “Don’t you get it, Bevan? Only a select number of officers and gentlemen passengers were allowed to keep journals. And anything that might prove embarrassing to the Navy was edited by the admiralty before it could be published. If caught, the man would have been lashed for penning this. Or even hung.”

  The professor returned to the computer and, after studying the screen for a minute or two, looked up.

  “It says here that Gibson served on all three of the expeditions, advancing in rank from private to sergeant. As a Marine, he would likely have been at Cook’s side on that fateful February in 1779 when the Hawaiians attacked them. This being his first journal, he might well have kept records of the other two voyages. Imagine finding them, too! It could provide what all the other journals, Cook’s included, never have done.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Reveal something of the great man himself, of course! While we have intricate detail of where he went, what he saw, and whom he met, we still know very little about Cook the inner person. His official reports were bought and read by thousands of an adoring public, but there is nothing in his writings or that of his officers to suggest his weaknesses and idiosyncrasies until that fatal third voyage. How delightful it would be to read, unencumbered by official admiralty
oversight, the secrets of that elusive personality!”

  Walsh took off his glasses to rub his eyes. “You have something that is not only unique, Michael, but perhaps extremely significant. What do you intend to do with it?”

  “I’m going to the California Book Fair in a few weeks to get a feel for the market.”

  “Excellent idea. I suggest you put Holt House first on your list of exhibitors to show it to. It’s the premier merchant for all matter relating to Pacific exploration. How much do you know about Cook’s accomplishments?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid. It’s not something American schools bother to teach.”

  “And more’s the pity. We aren’t a people prone to celebrate history’s great men and women if they weren’t born here. But there are still those in Great Britain and its former colonies who would literally kill to defend the honor of Captain Cook.”

  “You must be joking.”

  “Not at all. Last year a Royal Navy veteran bashed in the head of a publican in Portsmouth. The barkeeper’s only crime was to insist Cook was a despot worse than Bligh and no better a navigator. Only slightly less bloody has been the interminable feud between a pair of cultural anthropologists named Middleditch and Oyestebek as to whether the Hawaiians actually believed Cook to be divine. Care to hear more?”

  For the next hour, interrupted only by a few of Café Provence’s customers poking their heads in to inquire if Riverrun was open, Charlie provided a fascinating primer on the Yorkshire farmer’s son who out-discovered Columbus, Magellan, and da Gama combined. The gist of it was this:

  In 1745, James Cook, age seventeen, began his maritime life as a lowly apprentice seaman on a merchant collier in the North Sea coal trade. In the following decade, he rapidly rose in the ranks to first mate, becoming an expert at navigating the treacherous English coastal and stormy Baltic waters. But James Cook felt destined for greater things. With the onset of the Seven Years’ War in 1755, he transferred to the Royal Navy to fight the French off Canada’s shores. Following the peace he spent years charting coasts on both sides of the North Atlantic while fine-tuning his knowledge of mathematics and astronomy—skills that would prove essential for his future success. But for all practical purposes, his career had stalled.

  Then, in a most unlikely conjunction of politics and rare common sense by the admiralty, Cook, a noncommissioned officer with no social connections, was chosen to lead three expeditions to the Pacific Ocean.

  The first, in the Endeavor, lasted from 1768 to 1771; the second, from 1772 to 1775, in which he commanded the Resolution, with its sister ship the Adventure; and the last, from 1776 until his death in 1779, as captain of the Resolution accompanied by the Discovery.

  In that eleven-year period, with no more than brief breaks between voyages, Cook’s obsessive work ethic, curious nature, and determination led him to lands as foreign to Europeans as planets outside our galaxy would be to us today. By the time of his sudden death on February 14, 1779, he had explored one third of the unknown world, circumnavigating and charting New Zealand, surveying the east coast of Australia, touching the fringes of Antarctica and the Arctic, and chronicling exotic Polynesian customs.

  The mission of the third voyage was to sail up the north coast of America in search of a northwest passage linking the Pacific to the Atlantic. Stymied by impenetrable ice in the Bering Sea, he returned in late 1778 to the Hawaiian Islands, which he had discovered earlier that year. It was an opportunity to repair disintegrating ships, and replenish supplies as well as sea-worn bodies. But for reasons known only to Cook, he decided to circumnavigate the Big Island for seven weeks before dropping anchor at Kealakekua Bay on January 17.

  But by then James Cook had been at sea too long. Fifty years old, worn out by a decade of unceasing stress that would have destroyed a lesser man long ago, he was fighting time, weather, and an increasingly unsettled mind.

  Physically, he remained impressive. In an age when the average height of a British male was five feet five inches, the captain stood six feet two. He dressed the part, too.

  “The Hawaiians had never seen a white man before,” Charlie told me. “Just imagine what they must have thought as he gazed down upon their canoes from the forecastle of his ship—a craft in size and design like something in a dream. Bedecked in a wide bicorne hat, brilliant blue coat with gold-laced buttons, and Wilkinson cutlass, Captain Cook had all the earmarks of a superior being.”

  Fittingly, Kealakekua meant “pathway to the gods.” Ancient Hawaiian prophecies had long predicted the return there of a pale god on floating islands during the annual New Year/Harvest festival called Makahiki. This period traditionally began in late November—the very time that the Resolution and the Discovery first appeared over the horizon. Given these remarkable coincidences, it’s no wonder that the natives believed this impressive creature was Lono, their white god of fertility and peace, who had come to greet them in the flesh.

  The ships were overhauled, pork and vegetables provided for the galley, and, thanks to the comely and accommodating women, crew morale improved. But after a few days, the obsequious veneration directed at Cook by the Hawaiian priests went to his head, so much so that his officers feared their leader suffered from dementia.

  The local chiefs weren’t particularly pleased, either. There was only so much food to be taken and these strange voyagers were voracious. Who would have thought gods and demigods could be so hungry?

  According to the legend, the reign of Lono stopped with the end of the Makahiki festival in early February. The deity was then obliged to sail his canoe back to his mystical island over the horizon. Although unaware of the significance of the timing, the British ships happened to depart Kealakekua Bay with Cook at the helm on February 4, 1779.

  Then, tragically, things changed. The ships were caught in a violent storm off Maui and were forced to return to the bay six days later to repair a broken foremast. From the Hawaiian standpoint, this was blasphemous. Now it was the time of Ku, the god of war and human sacrifice, as represented by its human avatar, King Kalani’opu’u.

  Cook and his men were oblivious to the Hawaiians’ resentment. On the last day of his life, the captain made foolish and provocative decisions that led to his death at the hands of the very people who had worshipped him.

  Back in Europe, the news of Cook’s tragic demise elevated him from being merely famous to becoming the martyred saint of the Enlightenment.

  “Smallpox, syphilis, missionaries, and imperial exploitation followed in the wake of Cook’s ships,” Charlie told me grimly as he concluded his lesson. “Justifiably or not, Cook is the symbol of everything that destroyed the native way of life throughout the Pacific.”

  Chapter Four

  Three weeks later, I stepped out of a cab at the corner of Eighth and Brannon in rain-drenched San Francisco to join a line that stretched in front of the Concourse Exhibition Center.

  It was a half hour before the doors of the Center were to open, but there must have been five hundred people ahead of me shivering like stragglers on a retreat from Moscow. Not having brought an umbrella, I pulled the wool cap farther down my brow, flipped up the collar of my barn coat, and sat on a low brick wall to wait. I passed the time listening to a goateed gent describe the Siege of Mafeking to a stylish, silver-haired matron who looked as if she longed to drop a hand grenade down his throat.

  Finally, unable to stand any more of the logorrheic assault, she said, “I understand this was during the Second Anglo-Boer War. Am I correct?”

  “Why, yes, it was,” the man said. “If Baden-Powell hadn’t—”

  “Are you familiar with what Arthur Conan Doyle had to say about the siege?” she interrupted.

  “No, but—”

  “Jannie Geldenhuys?”

  Silence.

  “Or Major Dennis? Fransjohan Pretorius, perhaps?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Then I suggest you go to a library and brush up on your ignorance.”

  A
t last the doors opened and the alligator line began shuffling into a building that resembled an airplane hangar circa 1960 East Berlin.

  It doesn’t matter if you’re at an estate sale in Fargo or the Olympia Book Fair in London. When the bell rings, the idle chatter stops and the race is on. Then you’d best be ready to find the tables specializing in your subject matter and decide whether or not to buy. Once you walk away, odds are if you have second thoughts and go back for it, it will be gone.

  I shook the rain off my coat at the entrance, gave the attendant my ticket, and walked into a vast hall already bustling with dealers, buyers, and assorted bibliophiles. Most of the latter weren’t there to buy, but to merely see and touch beautiful books, like fans who wait for hours to catch a glimpse of a famous actor or athlete.

  I ambled down the aisles, gazing left and right at the fabulous wares being offered, picking up catalogs (some, like Phillip J. Pirages’s Catalogue 56, can be works of art and bibliographical masterpieces) and stopping to touch with an almost sensual rush the feathery softness of Moroccan leather and vellum.

  It was all there, everything that I loved about my adopted trade. In an atmosphere redolent with the aroma of old paper and leather were the most beautiful and desirable books, maps, and manuscripts to be found anywhere.

  Within the buzzing hive of the conference center I felt alive and free from all the cares of the outside world. If ever I needed confirmation as to what my niche in life should be, this was it.

  Still, I noticed that many hopeful sellers, particularly those who had shepherded their treasures across oceans, seemed anxious. This may have been due mostly to the rain pounding against the green Plexiglas roof thirty feet above their stalls, threatening inventories worth millions. But there was also an atmosphere of dread relating to a change in the paradigm of bookselling itself.