The Pacific

by Meaghan Wilson Anastasios

  GEMMA CRONIN

  So much of our history is hidden. I remember sitting in a class one day and having a teacher talking about Aboriginal people and how we were dirty and lazy and how you could never get us to work ’cause we went on walkabout. I don’t think I even really realised it was me she was talking about.

  From the hill on Possession Island on 22 August 1770, Cook went through the motions and claimed Australia’s east coast for the British Crown.

  WARWICK THORNTON, Kaytej Nation, Filmmaker/Director

  Do I see you as a colonist? No . . . God no! Indigenous people grew out of that a long time ago. But we still need someone to blame. It could have been anybody. We could have been here going, ‘That dickhead Columbus.’ Different continent, but same shit really. It’s about empires and the Mother Country. It’s much bigger than Cook.

  To the British, the Aboriginal connection to the continent amounted to nothing – despite their tens of thousands of years of occupation and songlines that documented and traced the geographic features of the land.

  SAM NEILL

  I can’t fathom it – but mine are the eyes of a modern man. What possessed Cook, you might ask? Well, the Admiralty’s instructions for one. But, their advice also said ‘with the consent of the natives’. I don’t know how Pacific peoples could agree to a mystifying act in a foreign language made in the name of a king and country they didn’t know. But we do know one thing: they weren’t asked.

  In the eighteenth century, only marks on paper counted.

  AARON LEGGETT, Dena’ina Tribe, Historian

  In the Western sense, it’s not enough to talk about a place. To write it down – to draw maps – that’s how the power of the written word overshadows the oral tradition.

  In the four months Cook had spent travelling along the Australian shore, he had executed thirteen landings. Just one of these was in the territory now bounded by the modern state of New South Wales. The rest fell in Queensland. Cook renamed 120 landmarks, none of which he named for himself. And the coast he mapped today supports over 80 per cent of Australia’s population. When all was said and done, Cook should have regarded it as a successful expedition.

  But Cook was a man who liked to be in control. Perhaps that’s why he struggled with Australia’s ambiguity. He didn’t really know what to do with it. After he left Possession Island he never set foot on mainland Australia again despite two more voyages to the Pacific and a passing flirtation with the island that would one day be called Tasmania. It’s not that he left the continent with a negative assessment of the locals and their circumstances – quite the opposite, actually. He described Aboriginal people as ‘timorous and inoffensive . . . no ways inclinable to cruelty’.

  And Cook directly contradicted William Dampier’s scathing assessment of Indigenous Australians.

  CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

  [T]he natives of New Holland . . . may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a tranquillity which is not disturbed by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life; they covet not magnificent houses, household stuff etc. They live in a warm and fine climate and enjoy a very wholesome air, so that they have very little need of clothing and this they seem to be fully sensible of, for many to whom we gave cloth etc. to, left it carelessly upon the sea beach . . . as a thing they had no manner of use for . . . they seemed to set no value upon anything we gave them, nor would they ever part with anything of their own for any one article we could offer them; this, in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessaries of life and that they have no superfluities.

  *

  As Cook approached the Dutch colony of Batavia, he had many reasons to be fairly pleased with himself.

  DAVID PRYCE

  There are plenty of people who can sail a ship. But to be able to sail a ship well, and exhibit the leadership skills required to keep everyone together on board for several years in really trying conditions, never knowing whether you’re going to survive till the next day or what sort of hazards are going to present themselves . . . it’s pretty impressive.

  By the measure of the day, Cook had achieved most of what was expected of him when he set out in the Endeavour. He had charted the entirety of New Zealand – almost four thousand kilometres of coastline – and was the first Westerner to give shape to Australia’s east coast on a European navigational chart. The conditions under which he’d worked were far from ideal. More often than not he had made his measurements and surveyed the coastlines from the dipping and swaying deck of the Endeavour. The speed with which Cook had drawn his charts and the accuracy of his work was, in retrospect, remarkable.

  When he arrived in Java, the thing that pleased Cook the most was the fact that he had managed to get there without losing a single man to scurvy during the voyage.

  His men docked in good health, so much so that despite the fact they had been at sea for over two years, thanks to their captain’s strict regime of good hygiene, warm cabins and fresh food the crew of the Endeavour arrived in a much better physical state than most of the people who lived permanently in Batavia.

  But Cook’s delight was short-lived. Once they made it off the ship, the Endeavour’s crew succumbed to the grim conditions in the Dutch outpost. One-third of the men who arrived there hale and hearty died between the Dutch East Indies and England. They had circumnavigated the world, only to be felled by disease. Artist Sydney Parkinson, aged just twenty-six. Surgeon William Monkhouse, who had bared his bum at the Māori in New Zealand. The ship’s master, Robert Molyneux. The astronomer, Charles Green.

  Joseph Banks made it home, of course, although in Batavia he too suffered terribly from the dysentery that carried away so many of his shipmates, writing on 27 October 1770, ‘me so weak as scarcely to be able to crawl downstairs’. But apparently not so weak that he couldn’t find time to write in his journal.

  After his recovery, Banks returned to England on the Endeavour carrying a remarkable companion. In Botany Bay, Tupaia had saved a young lorikeet from the pot. He’d kept it with him as he travelled up the Australian coastline. When Tupaia, like so many of his shipmates, died of dysentery in Batavia and was buried in an unmarked grave, Banks adopted the orphaned bird.

  On Cook’s second voyage, as his ship approached New Zealand, the Māori hailed Tupaia. They assumed he was on board the ship they had believed was his. When the Māori in Tolaga Bay learnt of his death, they wrote a mourning lament: a koe mate auē Tupaia. ‘You have died, alas, Tupaia.’

  Tupaia’s parrot would outlive him by many years. In England, it became the first Australian bird to be depicted by a European artist. It was painted twice – once by Moses Griffith in 1772 and again by Peter Brown in 1794, when the lorikeet had reached the ripe old age of twenty-four. This means that the bird outlived most of the men who sailed on Cook’s first voyage, including its captain.

  As for James Cook, after that first voyage he returned to his home in Mile End. An embarrassment of professional recognition followed. He was presented to King George III and promoted to commander. Despite this, in a letter to the Admiralty and demonstrating characteristic modesty, Cook declared that ‘the discoveries made in this voyage are not great’.

  Alexander Dalrymple – fellow of the Royal Society, Great Southern Continent cheerleader and confounded would-be commander of the expedition to the South Pacific – agreed with Cook’s choleric assessment. When Cook announced that he had cast about and found no evidence of an unknown continent, Dalrymple was scathing. He decided to write to John Hawkesworth, who had written the account of the first voyage. In a letter unambiguously titled ‘Letter from Mr Dalrymple to Dr Hawkesworth occasioned by some groundless and illiberal imputations in his a
ccount of the late voyage to the South’, Dalrymple aired his grievances. He was not a man to pull any punches.

  ‘The point is not yet determined whether there is or is not a SOUTHERN CONTINENT? although four voyages have been made . . . at the same time I dare appeal . . . that I would not have come back in ignorance,’ he wrote. Yes, SHOUTY CAPS were a thing even in the eighteenth century.

  Sounds like a challenge, doesn’t it? And Cook, as we now know all too well, was never one to walk away from one of those.

  PART FOUR

  TEN

  ENDS OF THE EARTH

  It’s becoming clear to me that Cook found the perils of the sea far less daunting than those on land. Out here amidst an immense ocean, most of the time he was in full control. But, still . . . what greater adventure would there be than being on one of Cook’s voyages?

  SAM NEILL

  You’ve just sailed into port after years at sea. You’ve cheated death, seen things no Westerner before you has ever seen, circumnavigated the globe and changed the course of history. You’d be forgiven for taking some time out. But you’re not James Cook, are you?

  As he dropped anchor, he was already planning his next voyage.

  It’s occasionally been suggested that Cook’s eagerness to avoid home may have been caused by a less-than-stellar domestic situation. But given that Cook and his wife, Elizabeth, were on opposite sides of the world for thirteen of their seventeen years of married life and they still managed to chalk up six offspring, this does hint at what might politely be described as an affectionate relationship. Cook’s commitment to amorous pursuits with Elizabeth and his demonstrated fecundity may also have been assisted by the fact that he – reputedly – never indulged in the sexual exploits pursued by his men. His abstinence in the face of temptation is evidence of the deep love and sense of loyalty Cook felt for his wife. After years at sea, it must have been with considerable relief that he found comfort in her arms.

  What seems a more likely explanation for Cook’s itchy feet than marital discord is that he knew he still had a fair bit to do in the Pacific. He had barely dipped his big toe into its vast waters and, as far as he was concerned, his work there had only just begun. His prolific record of procreation leaves not a skerrick of doubt – Cook was not a man who liked to leave a job unfinished. Not to mention, his profession was a calling and one he relished, although he was not blind to the hardships of life at sea, writing, ‘Were it not for the thrill of discovering even so much as a sand bar, this service would be insupportable.’

  Before Cook headed south again, he had to get official backing. Not surprisingly, it was the floral and faunal treasures and anthropological curiosities that Banks had brought back that captured the public imagination – a mighty-tailed, bounding creature the size of a greyhound outshone a painstakingly drafted chart. Whether consciously or not, Banks trumped Cook.

  If the men and women on the streets of London were more impressed by Banks’ cabinet of curiosities than Cook’s prodigious gifts, the same could not be said of Cook’s masters at the Admiralty. They appreciated the scale of his achievements and had no qualms about sponsoring another voyage to the Pacific. He must have been relieved. The successful observation of the Transit of Venus and his detailed charting of New Zealand and the east coast of Australia were achievements to crow about. But it rankled that he’d failed to discover the elusive Great Southern Continent – or, for that matter, blow belief in its existence out of the water.

  Although he had successfully shown there was no mega-continent lurking in the tropical waters of the Pacific, Cook had yet to venture into the daunting waters of the Southern Ocean where there was still much virgin sea to explore.

  After Cook added the east coast to what the Dutch had already recorded of western, southern and northern Australia, he knew the continent wasn’t ‘Great’ enough to qualify as the Great Southern Continent – he was looking for something much more impressive, geographically speaking.

  To prove, or disprove, the theory, Cook had to venture into the forbidding waters of the Antarctic Circle. He had the Royal Society’s full support. If the Crown was truly to ‘Rule Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves’, then an Englishman would have to be the one to put the myth of the Great Southern Continent to rest.

  CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

  Whether the unexplored part of the Southern Hemisphere be only an immense mass of water, or contain another continent, as speculative geography seemed to suggest, was a question which had long engaged the attention, not only of learned men, but of most of the maritime powers of Europe. To put an end to all diversity of opinion about a matter so curious and important, was His Majesty’s principal motive in directing this voyage to be undertaken . . . to go beyond former discoverers; and continue to Britain the reputation of taking the lead of nations, in exploring the globe.

  But it wouldn’t be easy. His experience of the terrifying seas off the tip of Cape Horn as Cook had passed the tip of South America on the first voyage left him in no doubt about the dangers of the undertaking and the brutal conditions he would encounter in the southernmost reaches of the Pacific.

  Cook had barely escaped catastrophe on the first voyage and this time round he intended to take a different approach. If the Endeavour’s near-disaster on the Great Barrier Reef had taught him one thing, it was that when blithely sailing into unknown waters, it was unwise for him to put all his maritime eggs in just one floating basket. So as he planned the second voyage, Cook outfitted a companion ship, the Adventure, to accompany his own, the Resolution.

  As it happened, the Adventure was to live up to its name and chalk up an extensive rollcall of exploits under the oversight of Lieutenant Tobias Furneaux. Furneaux was no stranger to the Pacific. He had accompanied Captain Samuel Wallis on his 1767 journey to Tahiti aboard the Dolphin, and had won plaudits when he assumed command during Wallis’s protracted bouts of illness on that voyage. With the commander confined to his cabin, Furneaux was the first Englishman to set foot on Tahiti. However, his mission to pilot the ‘lifeboat’ for Cook and his crew on the Resolution was to end rather less successfully.

  The two ships sailed from Plymouth in July 1772, heading for the tip of South Africa via the island of Madeira.

  The day before he sailed from Cape Town, Cook wrote to his former master, the Quaker sea captain John Walker of Whitby. ‘I should hardly have troubled you with a letter was it not customary for men to take leave of their friends before they go out of the world.’ For Cook, this was uncharacteristically fatalistic. It was also a fairly pragmatic – and realistic – perspective.

  *

  As the Resolution and the Adventure steered south, things got very cold very quickly. This made difficult manoeuvres at sea all the more challenging. Cook described the fast-deteriorating conditions on board, writing: ‘Our ropes were like wires, sails like board or plates of metal and shivers froze fast in the blocks so that it required our utmost effort to get a top-sail down and up.’ He couldn’t do much to alleviate the conditions, but he could help the crew a little. And what better way to keep a frosty company of sailors happy than to ply them with grog? Ignoring the naval regulations that strictly controlled the frequency and volume permitted, Cook gave orders to issue a tot of spirits at any time of the day.

  The British Navy – and military forces the world over – recognised the importance of serving up alcohol to its troops, not only in order to boost morale and provide a good dose of Dutch courage, but also as a way of overcoming the soul-destroying boredom and monotony that went hand in hand with long sea voyages. In Cook’s time, the daily ration was half a pint of spirits. The sailors were allowed to down half their allocation at noon and were given the rest at six in the evening. Give or take, that amounts to a quarter of a litre of rum a day. To fully appreciate the impact that this might have had on the crew’s sobriety, you need to understand that it was 94 per cent proof alcohol. That’s right: a quarter of a litre of grog strong enough to topple an elephant, each d
ay. And that doesn’t count the lashings of wine and ale. No wonder Cook’s journal frequently included the observation, ‘More or less drunk all day.’ It wasn’t until 1970 that the Royal Navy ended the tradition. As the English privateer Woodes Rogers observed in 1712, ‘good liquor to sailors is preferable to clothing’.

  The Resolution and Adventure Taking in Ice for Water, William Hodges, 1773–4 (watercolour). William Hodges, official landscape artist on the Resolution, was the first professional painter to depict the icy seas of the Antarctic. SLNSW, Mitchell Library, SAFE / PXD 11, IE1006576

  Rogers had been more accustomed to sailing in the Bahamas than the conditions Cook’s men were confronting. In the frigid polar climes where clothing was significantly more important than in the tropics, Cook’s sailors might well have disagreed with Rogers’ assessment. But the extra tots of rum did calm the anxieties of those on board the Resolution and Adventure. It’s unlikely they did anything to alleviate Cook’s concerns, though, as massive floating mountains of ice loomed out of the fog, threatening to smash his two timber boats into rafts of matchsticks.

  RICHARD PICKERSGILL (1749?–1779?), Lieutenant, Cook’s first and voyages

  [T]he masts sails and ropes were all caked with ice and it constantly snowed which froze as fast as it fell . . . Towards the evening we saw a prodigious number of ice islands and before morning the sea was so thick with them that it was with the utmost difficulty we could steer clear of them – good God!

  But icebergs did come in handy for one thing. They provided a way for the men to harvest fresh water, an absolute necessity as they pushed further into the Southern Ocean.