by Lay, Graeme
Dedication
For Georgia and Josh
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Map
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Acknowledgements
The Secret Life of James Cook by Graeme Lay
About the Author
Other Books by Graeme Lay
Copyright
Introduction
The year is 1771.
James Cook RN (43), recently returned from an epic world voyage, is promoted by his sovereign, George III, to captain’s rank and instructed to embark on a search for Earth’s last undiscovered landmass, the Great Unknown Southern Continent.
This voyage proves to be one of the longest and most perilous ever undertaken. In command of HMS Resolution and with its consort HMS Adventure, Cook and his crews venture further south than any other previous voyagers, sailing well beyond the Antarctic Circle. Like an 18th-century Ulysses, Cook drives himself and his men onward, traversing the entire South Pacific in both the high and low latitudes, discovering no landmass but re-charting islands formerly found, as well as making discoveries of his own.
Although his second three-year world circumnavigation represents a personal triumph for Cook, his prolonged absence from his wife Elizabeth and their surviving children is marked by domestic tragedy and heartbreak. For Elizabeth Cook, James’s success at sea counts for nothing when tragic losses occur at home.
James Cook’s New World continues in fictional form the story of the great explorer’s triumphs and disappointments as this dutiful, driven man puts into place the last pieces of Earth’s great jigsaw puzzle. It also continues to portray the relationship of James and Elizabeth, mainly through the intimate journal he writes for her during his protracted voyage.
As James frequently wonders: where does duty to King and Country end, and loyalty to wife and family begin?
Map
One
18 AUGUST 1771
‘WHAT DO YOU THINK?’
Elizabeth came down the steep staircase very carefully, trailing her gown. Now she stood at the foot of the stairs, arms open wide, awaiting his response. For some moments James was unable to reply. Then, getting up from his chair by the parlour window, he said, ‘Elizabeth, you look wonderful.’
He was aware that she had been sewing the gown for weeks, ever since he received his invitation to Court, where he was to meet the King and receive his promotion to naval captain. The invitation, delivered to their house in Assembly Row and written on a gold-embossed card, was extended to ‘Lieutenant James Cook, Royal Navy, and Mistress Cook’. Elizabeth immediately took a coach into the city and bought a pattern for the gown in a seamstress’s shop near Charing Cross. Characteristically, she declined the proprietor’s offer to have the gown made for her. ‘I shall sew it myself, at half the cost,’ she announced. From a local draper she bought six yards of dove-grey silk, then set to the cutting and sewing, assisted by their maid, the ever-diligent Susan. And now, here was the result.
The gown was hooded and in the Brunswick pattern, with a full-sized hooped skirt. Tied around her arms and neck were pink-and-white striped ribbons, with another matching ribbon around her hair, which she had looped into a coil on top of her head. James had never seen her looking so grand. But her expression was anxious.
‘Do you think perhaps the ribbons are a trifle too much?’ She plucked the one around her left arm.
‘No, no. A dash of colour suits you.’
She shot him a cross look. ‘Is the gown too drab, do you mean?’
‘Not at all.’ He gave a little bow. ‘It is definitely a gown fit for an audience with the King.’
Nodding but frowning still, she drew back the skirt’s hem a little, exposing one silver shoe. It had a buckle and a curved heel. She gave an embarrassed half-smile. ‘These were costly, James, but I couldn’t resist them. After all, the money I saved by sewing the gown myself I could afford to spend on the shoes.’
James laughed. His wife had never been one for elaborate dressing. Her tastes were plain and straightforward—one of the reasons, he sometimes thought, why she had married him—but this occasion was exceptional. An audience with the King. Never had either of them dreamt of such an honour. It was barely a month since he had returned to London after his three-year circumnavigation of the world in HMB Endeavour. He had been told that there was a rumour going around the docks that a promotion was in the wind, but he had not taken a great deal of notice. Until a letter was delivered to the house from the naturalist Joseph Banks:
My Dear Cook,
I am reliably informed that you are to be promoted to Naval Commander. As you are aware, my good friend John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, is once again First Lord of the Admiralty, and he wishes to meet you in order to convey the good news to you in person. Furthermore, when I met the King last week in order to report on aspects of our voyage on Endeavour, His Majesty also expressed a strong desire to meet you. It seemed thus a logical progression for me to suggest to the First Lord that he should accompany you when you meet the King, and that the monarch should on the same occasion present you with your warrant as Commander.
My heartiest congratulations on your impending promotion. I believe it augurs well for your already distinguished naval career.
I am yours truly,
Joseph Banks
The letter took James by surprise, and brought with it mixed emotions. Naturally he was deeply gratified to learn of his imminent promotion. After three long years at sea, often in adverse circumstances, he had become accustomed to the authority and responsibility which the command of Endeavour had carried. He was also aware that Sandwich had begun his third term as First Lord of the Admiralty earlier in the year, succeeding the distinguished Lord Hawke. Since his return James had met Sandwich three times in Whitehall, when he had verbally presented his reports on the voyage to the Lords of the Admiralty. Several South Sea islands discovered and claimed for His Majesty; the islands of New Zealand circumnavigated and charted; the east coast of New Holland charted from south to north. Sandwich and the other Sea Lords had expressed their satisfaction at these achievements, and let him know how much they anticipated his written accounts of the voyage. So in the subsequent weeks James had subsided into the role of a shore-based lieutenant, living at the family home in Assembly Row and there preoccupied with polishing his reports and charts and drawing up his recommendations for promotion of those among his crew who had served with particular distinction on Endeavour.
Although these post-voyage duties gave James satisfaction, and he was delighted to be reunited with his family and friends, already he was missing the sea, with its manifold challenges and satisfactions. His promis
ed promotion added impetus to this yearning, as it suggested the possibility of the command of another extended expedition. Although he had already come a long way from his boyhood in a farm biggin in Great Ayton, Yorkshire, he had a strong desire to go further still, much further than the silver-spoon naval commanders who had preceded him, such as John Byron and Samuel Wallis. Banks’s letter led James to suspect that the naturalist and his crony, Lord Sandwich, were planning an expedition that included a role for himself. For what other reason had the news of his impending promotion been first communicated to him by Banks?
Properly, the information ought to have come from the Secretary of the Admiralty, Philip Stephens. Stephens had been a strong supporter of James’s naval promotion. He had been greatly admiring of his work surveying the St Lawrence River and the coasts of Newfoundland, and had been instrumental in his appointment to lead the Endeavour expedition. Banks was not a naval officer: he was a civilian naturalist, albeit a well-connected one. He was ambitious for further discoveries, particularly of the fabled Terra Australis Incognita, the Great Unknown Southern Continent. They had searched in vain for it during the voyage of 1768–71. James doubted the continent existed, but Banks was still convinced it lay in the high southern latitudes. Now, in Lord Sandwich, Banks had a powerful ally within the Admiralty. Reading the letter again, James felt certain that Banks and Lord Sandwich were laying plans. I am reliably informed …
In some ways Banks’s usurping of the announcement of James’s promotion did not surprise him. After sharing a ship for three years, James knew only too well of the naturalist’s presumptions and innate sense of entitlement. He loved to control events, believing that it was his destiny to do so. These tendencies had been further inflated by the stories which Banks had fed the London newspapers upon his return, retailing his heroic deeds during the long voyage. For their part, the news writers had seized upon his stories like foraging skuas. In a short time Banks had become, in the public’s perception of him, the great botanist, the great adventurer, the great collector, the great seducer of native women. As a result of these sensational reports, King George had been quick to grant Banks an audience. James was well aware of how important Banks’s contribution had been to the voyage. Independently wealthy, his private fortune had largely financed the expedition. But as commander of Endeavour it was James who had successfully navigated the ship across three of the world’s greatest oceans, the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian. Were it not for his sailing prowess, charting and choice of anchorages, Banks would not have been able to boast to the Royal Society of his collection of exotic plants, creatures and native curios, including the smoked head of a New Zealand Maori. So if there was to be another voyage involving the two of them, could James cope with Banks’s sometimes insufferable arrogance?
And there was another as-yet-unanswerable question: how would he cope with Elizabeth’s distress if he was again called to sea for a prolonged and potentially perilous voyage?
‘James? Did you hear me? What time is the carriage coming?’ Elizabeth was retying the ribbon at her throat.
‘At two o’clock. We are to meet Lord Sandwich outside St James’s Palace at a quarter to three, and be presented to His Majesty on the hour.’
Licking her middle finger, Elizabeth reached up, touched a place on his neck and rubbed it. ‘A spot of blood. From your shaving.’ Then she drew back, sighing impatiently. ‘Men are so lucky. They have no need to spend days over choosing and sewing gowns.’ She peered at his sleeve then plucked some lint from his cuff.
James smiled. ‘True. All I need is my uniform. And the new wig.’ He patted it. ‘And clean boots.’ He pointed down at the boots that Susan had polished until they shone like lacquer. Susan, along with James and Elizabeth’s two boys, James and Nathaniel, had been sent to Elizabeth’s mother’s and stepfather’s house for the night, since following the meeting with the King, James and Elizabeth would be taking tea in Piccadilly with James’s patron and friend, Sir Hugh Palliser and his wife.
From the street outside the house came the sound of stomping hooves, the clatter of wheels on cobbles and the cry of a coachman. James went to the window. ‘Our carriage,’ he announced. He picked up his tricorn from the hatstand in the corner, bowed extravagantly to Elizabeth and said, ‘Mistress Cook, your coach awaits.’
Although it was now a warm, dry London afternoon, there had been heavy rain earlier and the coach sloshed through the pools which had formed in the Strand. To their left the Thames was the colour of mulligatawny. A barge filled with sawn timber was making its way down the river, borne along by the ebbing tide, and a schooner crammed with barrels was on a reach towards the south bank. Giving a little shiver, Elizabeth slipped her arm through his. ‘James, I’m so nervous,’ she murmured. ‘Going to the palace, meeting the King.’ She made a sibilant sound. ‘And me just a girl from Wapping.’
Patting her arm, he drew her closer to him. Sternly he said, ‘You are not “just a girl from Wapping”. You are my wife, and a splendid example of English womanhood. Just the type of woman our King admires. He will be aware of the wifely sacrifices you have made. Separated from your husband for nigh-on three years, hearing no word from him.’ His voice faded, unable to speak the unutterable, knowing what both of them were thinking: and losing two infants to illness while he was away. Elizabeth said nothing. Instead she sat up and stared unseeing out the coach window, towards the row of half-timbered buildings on the far bank of the Thames. As she did so she twisted the wedding ring on her left hand, hard.
The two graves in the St Dunstan’s Church cemetery were side-by-side. Two grassed mounds, one slightly longer than the other. At the head of each grave was a white cross, with black lettering on their horizontal arms. Joseph Cook d. 1768 at two months of age; Elizabeth Cook, 1766–1771. James and Elizabeth stood in silence, he with his arm around her. Tears coursed down their faces. On each mound Elizabeth had placed a posy of bluebells she had gathered earlier in the day from a copse on Stepney Green. Staring at the small humps of ground, James felt a sense of bereftness more hollowing than any he had felt before, made worse by the guilt which had afflicted him ever since he had been informed of the little ones’ deaths. Elizabeth held a handkerchief to her face. For a time neither of them spoke. Instead there was a silent merging of their thoughts and feelings, a sense of shared loss, as if both had had the ground cut from under them and they had plunged together into a black pit. Then James said quietly, ‘Little Joseph, who did he resemble?’ Elizabeth, her eyes still closed, said, ‘He had my hair and eyes. Fair, blue—’ She couldn’t go on. James brought her closer, held her tighter. His voice just a murmur, he said, ‘Little Elizabeth. She was such a sweet child. I adored her.’ Elizabeth nodded. ‘The love between a father and daughter. I so well remember my own father, and how he loved me. His illness, his passing, was a terrible time.’ James nodded, but he thought, at least your father lived long enough to be able to show his love, to watch you grow to womanhood. His own little girl had known him for only a few months. But the times they had been together were unforgettable for him. He had read her bedtime stories and told her his own, ones she listened to silent and wide-eyed. That look in her eyes, that loving gaze, he would never forget. Gently he drew Elizabeth away from the graves. ‘It was proper that we came here, Elizabeth, but I think we should go now. We can walk on the common, then take lunch at the Bell.’ Nodding, she turned away. And as they walked in silence through the necropolis of gravestones and towards the lych-gate of the church, James thought: there will be more children. There had to be.
The coach turned into the Mall and passed around St James’s Park—its oaks and elms in full, darkening, late summer leaf—then into Pall Mall. They passed a troop of mounted horse guards, resplendent in armour and scarlet, then minutes later the carriage drew up outside the palace. James opened the door and stepped down, then held out his hand. Elizabeth took it and followed carefully, holding up her gown with one hand. Then, standing beside the coach, the
couple paused to stare up at the frontage of St James’s Palace.
The arched entranceway of the four-storeyed, red-brick building was flanked by two octagonal, crenellated towers. A clock and wind vane stood atop the entrance between the towers and the Royal Standard hung from a pole above it. Two guards in fusiliers’ red-jacketed uniform stood on either side of the entrance, muskets shouldered. As arranged, Lord Sandwich was waiting for them there, along with two young men in midshipmen’s uniforms.
‘Lieutenant Cook, Mistress Cook, good afternoon to you.’
The two men shook hands and Lord Sandwich bowed to Elizabeth, his gaze lingering on her bosom. Like James, the tall, imposing former John Montagu was wearing the dress uniform of a Royal Navy officer: blue, brocade-edged jacket and waistcoat, white, high-collared undershirt, cream breeches and boots. The one item of his attire that distinguished him from James was his admiral’s plumed hat. Sandwich had a prominent nose, ruby cheeks and piercing green eyes. A known philanderer, he was the organising force behind the Hellfire Club, whose members were regularly entertained by the cream of London’s prostitutes. Another of the club’s devoted members was Joseph Banks.
‘Lieutenant James Cook and Mistress Cook,’ Lord Sandwich announced severely to one of the palace guards, ‘to meet with His Majesty.’ The guardsman half-turned, then nodded respectfully in the direction of the courtyard which they could see through the entrance. ‘That way, my lord,’ he said. Sandwich instructed the two midshipmen to return with a coach at four o’clock, then dismissed them.
‘You have been keeping well, Cook?’ Sandwich asked as the trio walked across the cobbled courtyard, Elizabeth with her arm through James’s.
‘I have, thank you.’
‘Not missing the sea too much?’
Glancing at Elizabeth, James laughed, drily. ‘Somewhat, my lord.’
Elizabeth looked down, her expression thoughtful. Sandwich’s question had sounded to her suspiciously like a leading one.
