Mrs. Cook

by Marele Day

  Mrs Elizabeth Cook and Rear Admiral Isaac Smith were piped aboard a sloop bound for the East India Station, with all the pomp and ceremony that Elizabeth had heard of years earlier through the excited voices of her sons. She was not interested in the carry-on, but Isaac had said that the widow of the celebrated Captain Cook could hardly come on board unnoticed. So Elizabeth steeled herself. She proceeded up the gangway, black mourning garment billowing about her. The officers waiting at the top of the gangway bowed as if she were the queen.

  Elizabeth stood still amid the flurry of departure, the thwack of ropes, the flap of canvas, squawking of seagulls, and the bark of commands—‘Jib the mizzens!’, ‘Up the foresheet!’, ‘Port the helm!’

  The pilot guided the sloop past Limehouse and Greenwich, the marshy edges of Bugby’s Hole, Purfleet, Gravesend and Tilbury. How well the sailors harnessed the wind, adjusting the sails to suit its moods, working always with it, as James had done, never against it. The further they went the more the brown river widened. By the time they reached Sheerness, the place of James’s terrible storm that last season in Newfoundland, night had fallen.

  Elizabeth did not see the point at which the brown turned to blue. Though she rose early the next morning, she found herself already surrounded by it. ‘That’s Dover,’ Isaac said, indicating the chalky white cliffs. But Elizabeth was not interested in the land with its affairs and preoccupations. She wanted only to be in the emptiness of blue.

  She stood at the bow in her billowing black, and watched the sloop slice through the water beneath her, giving the vessel a lacy white edge, and blue ripples that fanned out and away. Behind her was a wake of white water, then the waters came together again, leaving no trace of the ship’s passing. She closed her eyes and felt the sea wind on her face, the wind that moved the waters around the globe. Elizabeth imagined the wind to be like the water, closing up behind her, so that her passing, too, left no trace. How exhilarating to be away from the refuse and garbage that sullied the waters of the Thames. She imagined its pure source, a gurgling baby spring that fed a bubbling brook and became the immense slow river on which she had grown up and passed her life. She saw the flow of water find its way around rocks and other hindrances in its path, watched it fill the deep dark cracks that grief had worn into her, move on and finally dissolve into the ocean.

  Standing at the bow of the ship, with harlequins of light sweeping across the water, Elizabeth felt the clenched fist of her heart relax and open out. Blood flowed freely through it, pulsing life into the rivers of her veins. It would continue to pulse in the darkness of winter, the season in which Elizabeth prayed for her dead. Her time of remembrance beginning in October with Nathaniel, then the day of longest darkness, the winter solstice devoted to Hugh. January was the time for Jamie, and finally, on 14 February, the day on which birds chose their mate, James.

  PORTRAIT OF ELIZABETH COOK

  BY AN UNKNOWN ARTIST

  When Elizabeth was somewhere in her eighties, Charles and Isaac persuaded her to have her portrait painted. ‘Then we can put the portrait in the window to satisfy the curious,’ said Charles, ‘and you can go about the house in peace.’

  They employed a young artist known to the sculptor William Wyatt, who was distantly related by marriage to Isaac’s great-niece, Caroline Cragg. Elizabeth no longer remembered the name of the artist but she recalled very well dressing in her best goffered hat, wearing it even though she was at home in her own house in Clapham. She sat very still, something she did well, for long periods at a time, while the young man circled around her, looking at her this way and that. Her steady immobility made quite a contrast to the way James flew off in a carriage to Nathaniel Dance’s studio to have his famous portrait painted.

  The young man made a couple of visits; Gates served him tea, and while drinking it, he asked Elizabeth about the old days. Elizabeth loved telling young people the stories and showing them the curiosities James had brought back from his voyages—the fish hooks and tapa cloths, feathered helmets and capes, carved wooden figures. A favourite story, especially when the man himself was present, was ‘Isaac, you shall go first’, and the young ones—Elizabeth’s goddaughter, or John Leach Bennet from Merton, would imagine themselves there and the captain saying it to them. Elizabeth had endless patience for those who wanted to hear the stories, but found her temper growing short with people who stood outside her house trying to look in the windows to catch a glimpse of her, as if she herself were a monument, a living relic.

  ‘This is my husband’s dress sword,’ she said, pointing out the silver handle and silver trim on the scabbard. ‘And these are the shoe buckles he wore to court.’

  ‘What of yourself, Mrs Cook?’

  ‘Myself?’

  ‘Do you have stories of yourself? Your rings, for example,’ the young man searched for a way in. ‘This one on your right hand.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That is the memorial ring for my husband. The vase motif on it is made of his hair. All that came back from Hawaii.’ Elizabeth was silent for a moment, travelling back to that place.

  The artist then switched to her left hand, to happier memories.

  ‘My wedding ring,’ she smiled. ‘We walked across the fields to St Margaret’s. I wore a cream silk dress,’ she said, looking down at her widow’s dress of black satin, ‘with matching hat.’

  Elizabeth showed him the oriental box. ‘This was Mr Cook’s first present to me. It didn’t have embroidery tools in it then.’ But she didn’t tell him what the box first contained, it seemed too . . . personal.

  The tea and the stories finished, the artist went to his easel, and Elizabeth to the high-backed chair. It was a pleasant drowsy experience being painted, like having her hair combed.

  When the portrait was finally completed Elizabeth was so surprised. She looked exactly like the old woman she had seen in her dream, the one who reminded her of a walnut, grown erect and tall. She saw an old woman’s face, the softly wrinkled skin, lips thinned by the absence of teeth, a hint of crepeyness at the neck. The hands were quietly folded one on top of the other, and revealed Elizabeth’s rings. Best of all were the eyes. In that old-age face the eyes were still the deep limpid blue eyes she had had when a child, a girl, a young wife and mother. Elizabeth considered the artist’s work a gift, that he portrayed her as a venerable old lady yet brought into the eyes the whole span of her life.

  ‘Wait one moment,’ she said to him. She knew that Charles and Isaac had commissioned the work, but Elizabeth was so pleased she wanted to give the artist something herself. ‘It is a page from my husband’s log,’ she said, handing him the sheet. Elizabeth often gave such pages as gifts. People collected Cook memorabilia, and Mrs Elizabeth Cook had the best collection of all, which was obvious to anyone who came to the house and had to thread their way through it. Once she gave her servant, Charles Doswell, a gilt button from James’s dress uniform. He seemed to treasure it much more than the book she’d given him as a birthday present—William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious Systems of Professed Christians, in the higher and middle classes in this country, contrasted with real Christianity.

  How could she recall the lengthy title of Mr Wilberforce’s book but not the name of the young man who’d painted her portrait? After he’d gone Elizabeth opened up the fan of time. How odd to have found it amongst James’s papers when she went to get the log page. She couldn’t remember placing it there, one of the servants must have. The fan was almost as old as Elizabeth herself. She could see signs of wear in the silk, the embroidered numbers beginning to fade. She remembered how the half-circle of the outstretched fan looked like the sun rising up from the horizon. Now she saw that it was the same shape as the setting sun.

  How excited she’d been when she made the fan, at all its possibilities, how she could open and close it, could find her birthday in the fan of time, make it show years yet to come. She swept her hand across the fan, feeling the soft smoothness of the silk
, the ridges of the bone struts. Eighteen hundred had been so far in the future then, but it was now more than twenty years ago. She manipulated the fan and found the happy times of her life—1762 when she married James, 1763 when Jamie was born, the birth dates of Nat, Eliza, Joseph, George, and darling Hugh, the dates of James’s returns from Newfoundland and the voyages. She smiled looking back on those happy times, the years of grief hidden in the folds.

  A LETTER FROM ISAAC SMITH TO EDWARD HAWKE LOCKER

  Merton Abbey 8 Oct 1830

  My dear Sir,

  I am sorry Mrs Cook had not returned to Clapham when you favoured her with a call on Wednesday last but she intends to do so next week & desires me say that she has not in her possession any letter or even a paper of any sort of her husband’s writing nor do I believe that there is now left a single paper with his signature in the house, so many applications having been made for it and as to any communication she could make was much better made when Dr Keppis wrote the Life as then Mr Banks, & Hugh Palliser & other of his friends did their utmost to select information & had several conferences with her on the subject but she feels herself hurt by the idea that the Captain was severe & says he was a most affectionate husband & a good father to his children whom he dearly loved & she always found fault with the picture for that stern look which it has otherwise a good likeness. As for myself that was with him the first two voyages as a petty officer & youngster, I never thought him severe & he was both loved & properly feared by the ship’s company &when he was very ill on the second voyage the first question ask’d both by the officers & men on the relief of the watch at night was how does the Captain do, is he better, but Capt. Clerke &King, who have given their opinion of him is of much more consequence & later than mine, not having seen him after the year 1775. The publication you mention I hope will equal your most sanguin wishes & Mrs Cook thanks you for preference you have given to her deceased husband & hopes you & your family are well, and I propose returning to Clapham with Mrs Cook for the winter, a great invalid from a severe illness

  and am Dear Sir with respect

  yours most faithfully

  I.S.

  It was a most mellow autumn in that year of 1830 and Elizabeth had stayed on in Merton. Isaac was ill, and Elizabeth did not want to take the journey till he was improved. Nevertheless, it would be better for him to spend the winter in Clapham, where Dr Elliotson could administer to him.

  As for the visit from Mr Locker . . . He was writing a book, or setting up a gallery at Greenwich Hospital, something or other. Elizabeth was sure he was a man of good intention but she no longer cared. She disapproved of the portrait he’d made mention of by William Hodges. It made James look stern, ill even, with sunken eyes. It was not the way history should remember Captain James Cook.

  Elizabeth had dictated the letter to Isaac, with her cousin adding his own opinion.

  ‘Read it back to me,’ she instructed. Though her mind remained sharp, her eyesight had softened and blurred, laying a permanent veil over everything. Elizabeth could no longer thread a needle, and certainly could not have written a letter.

  She remained silent during Isaac’s reading, and for a long time after.

  ‘Is everything all right, Cousin?’

  ‘Why do you say that Clerke’s and King’s opinion of James is of much more consequence than your own?’

  ‘Well, because I can only speak of the first two voyages. I was in America on the Weazle by the time of the third.’

  ‘Would your opinion be different had you sailed with James on his final voyage?’

  Isaac started fiddling with the gold braid on his sleeve.

  ‘Isaac, I asked you a question. Was he “loved and properly feared” on the third voyage?’ she asked more directly.

  ‘I wasn’t there,’ he mumbled into his kerchief.

  ‘But you know, don’t you?’ Though King, Burney, even Isaac, put a shield around their captain’s widow, the odd rumour got through. ‘Did his temper get the better of him?’

  Isaac sighed. ‘That, among other things. A common saying amongst both officers and the people was: “The old boy has been tipping a heiva to me”. Or, “I had a heiva of the old boy”.’

  ‘And what, pray, is a heiva?’

  ‘A South Seas dance.’

  ‘A dance? Surely a dance does not denote temper.’

  Isaac cleared his throat. ‘A war dance. A lot of stamping on the ground. Yelling, and fearsome facial expressions.’

  ‘I see.’ Elizabeth fingered her mourning ring. ‘They called him the old boy?’

  Isaac shifted in his chair. ‘I believe so.’

  Elizabeth was silent for a moment, the portrait of which she disapproved fixing itself into her mind. She saw the severe lines around his mouth, the almost demented look in his eyes. ‘Did he turn into a monster?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he tried to laugh it off. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘What would you say?’

  ‘He was erratic. There were incidents.’

  ‘What kind of incidents?’ Elizabeth set sail on her husband’s final voyage.

  ‘Well, for example,’ Isaac began, adjusting himself once again, as if he couldn’t find a comfortable position, ‘in the Arctic they came across a colony of walruses, and the captain ordered them to be butchered, thinking that the fresh meat would preserve the people’s health. Despite being hung to let the oil drain off, boiled for four hours then fried, the meat was disgusting. Midshipman Trevenen said it tasted like train oil. The people couldn’t keep it down and refused to eat any more of it. The captain flew into a rage and called them “damn’d mutinous scoundrels who will not face novelty”. If they’d not eat walrus then they’d eat nothing but ship’s biscuits. He came close to mutiny. The men started collapsing at their work stations through malnourishment, and the captain had to lift the ban.

  ‘He made navigational errors, changed course suddenly, and several times in the ice put the ship in imminent danger. This was not the man we revered as our great captain and father. He lost his patience with the South Seas thievery, on one occasion threatening to burn canoes if a stolen goat wasn’t returned. A Tahitian they were transporting from one island to another stole something and the captain ordered not only that his head be shaved but his ears cut off as well. The barber had completed the first part and was beginning on the ears when an officer, King, I believe, sent him to the captain to have the order verified. The rage had passed, and the islander swam ashore with only one ear lobe missing.’

  Elizabeth could not believe her husband capable of such cruelty.

  It was a blighted voyage from the beginning, before the Resolution even left Deptford yards, workers’ negligence bringing the ship undone time and time again. Clerke had succumbed to tuberculosis, as had Surgeon Anderson. At one stage, even Mr Kendall’s clock stopped—dirt in the mechanism.

  Dirt had somehow found its way into James’s mechanism. He had gone not only as far as it was possible to go, but too far. Elizabeth remembered the captain of the second voyage, who, in The Antarctic Muse, ‘conducted the ship from all eminent danger’, whom the ‘brave boys’ held in high esteem, and would ‘toast with a loud song all around’, the captain ‘who had proved so good’.

  Then she thought of the other poem inspired by the second voyage, the one in which Elizabeth and Isaac and Banks had found correspondences and made a game of it. ‘A grey-beard loon with glittering eyes, and skinny hand so brown.’ Had the Pacific Ocean become for James a ‘rotting sea’ on which he wandered aimlessly? Had Captain James Cook become the Ancient Mariner?

  Was it the illness Isaac referred to in the letter that transmogrified him? Elizabeth recalled those final days before the third voyage, James wincing and putting his hand to his stomach.

  The next time Dr Elliotson came, which was fairly frequently with Isaac being so poorly, she asked him about it. He told her that bilious colic was perhaps caused by a parasitic infection of the intestine, which could produce digest
ive disturbances, irritability, and even change of personality. James had exhibited all of these.

  Elizabeth needed to know the man of the third voyage, but knowledge is one thing, memory another. Not just Elizabeth’s memories but those of others, including the South Seas people. From subsequent travellers Elizabeth heard the memories of Te Horeta, who had been a small boy when the Endeavour came to New Zealand. The Maoris assumed the English were creatures from another world, had eyes in the back of their heads because they rowed their boats facing the opposite direction to where they were heading. Te Horeta recollected that ‘there was one supreme being in that ship. We knew that he was lord of the whole by his perfect gentlemanly and noble demeanour. This man did not utter many words; all that he did was to handle our mats and hold our spears, and touch the hair of our heads. He was a very good man, and came to us—the children—and patted our cheeks, and gently touched our heads.’

  Elizabeth recalled how James had held their first-born, lifted little Eliza into the air when she took her first steps, how tender he was with Elizabeth herself. She could not reconcile the husband of her memories with the mariner of the third voyage.

  ‘Isaac, was James faithful to me in the South Seas?’ It was a question she’d hardly dared ask herself, let alone her husband, even when he performed the Tahitian flesh brushing on her.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Isaac without the slightest hesitation or shock that Elizabeth should ask such a thing.