Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  The two ships made a sweep of the Friendly Islands, where they once again became separated, and the Resolution returned to Queen Charlotte Sound at the beginning of November to await the Adventure’s return. After three weeks, when Furneaux had not appeared, Cook departed for the Antarctic. He left a note for his second-in-command, informing him that he would investigate the ice below New Zealand and then, if he failed to find the Great Southern Continent, would sail north-east for Easter Island, the easternmost outpost of Polynesia, which had been visited only once by a European and whose precise position was a matter of guesswork.

  Furneaux arrived a week after Cook had departed, and was relieved to find that Cook’s letter mentioned nothing about any specific rendezvous; nor did it contain any instructions as to what the Adventure should do. He decided, therefore, that he was free to go home. By 17 December the ship was ready for its journey, and Furneaux sent Midshipman John Rowe with ten men to gather anti-scorbutic vegetables. The following morning they had yet to return, so Furneaux despatched a second boat, this time with a contingent of marines, to find them. Patrolling the coast, they at last came across evidence of Rowe’s party. It consisted of a few shoes, a hand, some pieces of their boat, and 20 baskets of roast flesh. Continuing to the next bay, they met a large number of Maoris gathered round a fire. Dispersing them with musket volleys, they examined the beach. Burney, the officer in charge,* recorded the scene: ‘On the beach were two bundles of celery, which had been gathered for loading into the cutter. A broken oar was stuck upright in the ground, to which the natives had tied their canoes; a proof that the attack had been made here. I then searched all along at the back of the beach to see if the cutter was there. We found no boat, but instead of her such a shocking scene of carnage and barbarity as can never be mentioned or thought of but with horror; for the heads, hearts and lungs of several of our people were seen lying on the beach, and, at a little distance, the dogs gnawing their intrails.’

  The men’s immediate instinct was to launch a retributive attack. But rain had begun to fall, dampening the powder in their muskets’ firing pans. It was also the end of the day. Burney, therefore, thought it best to retreat to the ship. His decision was a wise one for, as they drew away, they could hear what sounded like thousands of Maoris cheering from the forests that lined the shore. Outnumbered, their weapons misfiring and darkness upon them, it would have been madness to make any aggressive move. Moreover, as Burney reasoned, it would not bring back the dead: ‘we could expect to reap no other advantage than the poor satisfaction of killing some more of the savages’. Logic, however, did nothing to quell their rage as they watched sparks rise into the night sky from a celebratory bonfire the Maoris had lit on a nearby hill. The next morning the Adventure’s crew was all for bombarding every settlement in Queen Charlotte Sound. But Furneaux, like Burney, realized that wanton destruction was no solution. Why so many Maoris should have descended on the area, and why they should have attacked Rowe’s men, were questions to which Furneaux had no answers. Nor did he seek them. Having lost more people in one day than on the whole of the voyage, he was not going to risk the lives of the others in an inquiry that would be dangerous and probably futile, and that, if more deaths occurred, might jeopardize his chances of getting home.

  A man like Cook might have exercised his authority more forcibly and demanded retribution. But Furneaux was not Cook: he was a second-in-command, unused to dealing with the natives and unsuited to the responsibilities of exploration. He was alone in the South Pacific, almost as far from Britain as it was possible to be; he had no clear orders and had lost at one stroke such a large percentage of his crew that the ship was seriously undermanned. One can sympathize with his decision to abandon the quest. The Adventure left immediately for Cape Horn, from where it crossed to Cape Town and thence to England.

  Cook, meanwhile, was proceeding south towards Antarctica, dodging icebergs and enduring such cold that his rigging became nigh unworkable from the weight of frozen spray. Towards the end of January he was halted by a massive sheet of pack ice. Here, at 71° 10’ S, he decided his search for the Great Southern Continent was at an end. ‘I will not say it was impossible anywhere to get farther to the south,’ he wrote, ‘but the attempting it would have been a dangerous and rash exercise, and what I believe no man in my situation would have thought of.’ It was his opinion that the ice extended unbroken to the South Pole or ‘to some land to which it has been fixed from the creation’. Apart from the occasional penguin, there were ‘but few other birds or any other thing that could induce us to think any land was near’. In a telling passage, Cook described his conflicting frustration and relief: ‘I who had ambitions not only to go farther than anyone had done before, but as far as it was possible for man to go, was not sorry at meeting with this interruption as it in some measure ... shortened the dangers and hardships inseparable with the navigation of the south polar regions.’

  Retreating from the ice, Cook sailed first to Easter Island – despite its whereabouts being so doubtful that ‘I have little hopes of finding it’ – then to Tahiti, where Odiddy was returned to his people, and finally to Queen Charlotte Sound, where he learned of the calamity that had befallen Furneaux’s men and of its cause: a typical combination of drunkenness on the part of the shore party and acquisitiveness on the part of the Maoris. Leaving New Zealand, he headed for Cape Horn and, as Christmas approached, was able to write: ‘I have now done with the SOUTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN, and flatter myself that no one will think I have left it unexplored, or that more could have been done in one voyage towards obtaining that end than has been done in this.’ He had not given up on the Antarctic: in February 1774 he discovered South Georgia, an island (or collection of islands) of such inhospitable and icy aspect that he did nothing more than name it and claim it, before turning north. He reached London in the first week of August 1775, to universal acclaim. He had charted almost every island in the Pacific, not to mention a few more off the Atlantic coast of South America while en route to Cape Town, and he had returned with not a single death from scurvy. His greatest achievement, however, was making the first circumnavigation of Antarctica and probing further south than any human had yet been.

  Cook’s assessment of the Antarctic dispelled every romantic notion that adhered to it and was so accurate that, long after the event, one cannot but admire his intuitive feel for the environment. He wrote: ‘The greatest part of this Southern Continent (supposing there is one) must lie within the Polar Circle where the sea is so pestered with ice that the land is thereby inaccessible ... Thick fogs, snowstorms, intense cold and every other thing that can render navigation dangerous one has to encounter, and these difficulties are greatly heightened by the inexpressibly horrible aspect of the country, a country doomed by nature never once to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays, but to lie for ever buried under everlasting snow and ice.’ He was careful, however, not to deny the possibility of reaching Antarctica: he might, he said, have had a go himself had he not been carrying so much valuable information.

  Cook’s was the crispest, clearest analysis of the region to date, and one that would be confirmed by subsequent expeditions. In 1820 Fabien Gottlieb von Bellingshausen replicated Cook’s journey. An American sealer, John Davis, landed on the Antarctic Peninsula, south of Cape Horn, in 1821. James Weddell, a Dutch-born English navigator, reached 74° 15’S in 1822–4. In 1831 a ship belonging to Enderby Brothers (a British whaling firm) sighted land. James Ross in 1839, and then men like Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen followed. Everything they found supported Cook’s conclusion: Antarctica was, as he had predicted, a land of perpetual snow and ice.

  For this, Cook was honoured less with medals and promotion than with a job that suited him perfectly. The Board of Longitude, who had commissioned the chronometer he had taken on his last journey – which, by the by, performed so well that he never sailed without it again – had set a bounty on the North-West Passage. It was understood that the passage, linking the Pacifi
c and Atlantic Oceans, ran through the Arctic seas north of Canada. Many navigators had sought it in the past, but they had approached mostly from the east. Cook was therefore invited to try from the west, through Bering Strait.* If he succeeded – and everybody was certain that he would, for he was now the most outstanding explorer of the age – he and his crew could claim £20,000, more than £1 million today, of which the lion’s share would fall to the captain. This, and the chance of once again going further than anyone before him, was Cook’s reward.

  He left on 12 July 1776 aboard his old ship, the Resolution, accompanied by Lieutenant Charles Clerke in the Discovery. The two ships sailed south to Cape Town and then headed east to the Pacific to reprovision for the journey north. They stopped, naturally, at Tahiti, where Cook repatriated a man named Omai, whom Furneaux had brought home on the Adventure, before proceeding north.** Along the way he made a new discovery: an archipelago whose inhabitants spoke a language similar to that of Tahiti, and whose islands were as bounteous as those to the south. He had stumbled on the northernmost outpost of Polynesian culture, now known as the Hawaiian Islands but which he named the Sandwich Islands after the 4th Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty (and inventor of the snack which bears his name). Unfortunately, he lacked the time to explore them fully: if he was to complete the North-West Passage he needed to reach Bering Strait before the brief Arctic summer closed. Five weeks was all he allowed himself, by the end of which he had charted three islands and still had not collected as much water as he would have liked. He sailed up the west coast of America – cautiously, lest he offend the Spaniards who laid claim to it – and reached the Aleutian Islands in June 1777. Two months later he was moving from side to side of the Bering Strait, fraternizing now with the natives of America and now with those of Asia. When in harbour he sent boats on 30-mile rowing trips to explore neighbouring bays. One midshipman described these outings as hard work but a welcome diversion, because they were allowed to eat and drink as much as they liked.

  This last was odd because, although Cook had always been a stickler for diet, he had never kept his men on short rations. Now rationing seemed to weigh heavily on his mind. Perhaps he was conserving food for the forth-coming voyage through the Passage. But many people noted that he was not the same leader to whom they had entrusted their lives in past years. At times he was querulous, hesitating at opportunities he would have seized before. At others he was rash, raising full sail in a fog and stopping only when the ship was 100 yards from the shore, having passed a nightmare of rocks that he admitted he must have navigated in a dream. He was brusque, impatient and applied shipboard rules more strictly than ever before. One officer, on returning from a 30-mile trip, wrote: ‘Captain Cook ... on these occasions would sometimes relax from his almost constant severity of disposition and condescended now and then to converse familiarly with us. But it was only for a time: as soon as on board the ship he became again a despot.’

  Cook’s strange behaviour has been attributed to a parasitical disease contracted on his second voyage. It might also have been the result of nerves and an understandable fear of the North-West Passage, whose traverse, as he must have known, would be harder than anything he had faced to date. Or it could simply have been age and exhaustion – he had been exploring, almost without interruption, for a decade. Whatever the cause, he was definitely more quarrelsome and capricious than before. When he reached 70° 44’ N above the Bering Strait and found his way blocked by a solid mass of ice, he informed the men that he was going west to find the North-East Passage above Siberia. Then after a few days he changed his mind and said they were going south to reprovision for a second try at the North-West Passage. His goal was the Hawaiian Islands, which were the nearest, most comfortable source of provender and also offered the chance of further discovery. Sure enough, on 30 November he met a volcanic island, larger than any other he had discovered in the Pacific. Its inhabitants called it Owhyhe (Hawaii). As Cook sailed round the island he found the natives to be astonishingly friendly, waving white banners when the ship approached and trading with gusto. Priests welcomed him ashore and gave him all the food and water he needed. He was invited to rituals on a stone platform similar to the one he had seen in Tahiti, and was greeted at every step by people who called him Orono. When they left on 4 February they were presented with a remarkable quantity of food, including a small herd of pigs. Never, in anyone’s recollection, had they met with such generosity in the Pacific.

  The paradise was marred only by Cook, whose behaviour grew stranger and stranger. At one point he abolished the rum ration and told the crew they would have to drink beer instead. However ardently he advocated beer as an anti-scorbutic – which current thinking held it to be – the crew were not having it. Nor were they willing to accept another of their captain’s peculiar orders: that no women were to be allowed on ship. In the face of mutiny Cook had, humiliatingly, to rescind both edicts. Matters improved once they left the island and resumed standard shipboard routine. But they had been at sea for only four days when a storm split the Resolution’s foremast. A safe anchorage was needed for the lengthy process of repairing it, and the nearest such place was the one they had just left – Kealakekua Bay on Hawaii. So back they went. This time their reception was noticeably cooler.

  Cook had been aware that the Hawaiians considered him some kind of god, but paid little attention to it. Unfortunately, he did not appreciate the ramifications of his visit. In Hawaiian mythology, the island’s prosperity depended upon the regular arrival and departure of a white-skinned god Lono, or Orono, who presided over the rainy season. His coming was celebrated by a four-month festival, Makihiki, during which his image was carried clockwise around the island, its progress punctuated by ceremonies and sacrifices. When the rains ended Lono was ritually killed in battle with Ku, the god of the dry season, and left for his home over the waves, to reappear the following year. The authority of Hawaii’s rulers and priests rested on this routine, and the placatory rituals had been conducted for centuries without major incident. Lono came, he went; and this was how it was.

  Cook’s arrival in November had coincided with the festival of Makihiki. As he was white (a pale skin was associated throughout Polynesia with divinity), and as he had, by coincidence, sailed clockwise round the island, the islanders assumed that this year Lono had decided to join the celebrations in person rather than effigy. The assumption was reinforced when Cook accepted the offerings they gave him and participated in the rituals to ensure his departure. Moreover, his ships had anchored at, and then left, Kealakekua Bay, by chance the very place where Lono had for hundreds of years met his ritual demise. Normally, it would have been clear from the white men’s drunkenness and womanizing that they were by no means gods. But Cook’s uncharacteristic strictness had given them a gloss of respectability. And if he was very obviously human, this did not seem to bother the priests at all. After generations as an effigy, Lono had become a symbol, and so long as Cook obeyed the rules of Makihiki – which he did – then it did not really matter what he was, as long as he served his symbolic purpose. Cook’s return so soon after his departure, however, disrupted the age-old routine. If Lono was not dead, Hawaii’s hierarchy was in jeopardy and the island’s crops might fail.

  Oblivious to his mythical status, Cook sent his carpenters ashore and had them erect a workshop for repairing the foremast. The first sign he had of the islanders’ discontent was their refusal to trade for anything but knives, and their inquiries as to how many warriors he had aboard. Then they began to steal, on an unprecedented scale. On Saturday 13 November the thieving became so blatant that Clerke ordered his men to open fire; they missed their target. Later, an unarmed shore party narrowly escaped annihilation when they were pelted with rocks. These incidents severely dented the foreigners’ reputation for invincibility and drove Cook into one of his sudden rages. ‘The behaviour of these Indians must at last oblige me to use force,’ he told an officer. ‘They must not imagine they
have gained an advantage over us by what has occurred today.’ But the ‘Indians’ very obviously did have the advantage: that night they swam alongside Clerke’s Discovery and stole its cutter.

  The theft of tools and small metal items was a tiresome but expected adjunct to any stay in Polynesia. To steal a boat, however, struck at the heart of Royal Naval pride. When Cook heard of the loss he demanded retribution. In a conference with Clerke, he outlined their plan of action. Boats from both ships would block the mouth of Kealakekua Bay and drive the Hawaiian canoes ashore; nobody was to escape, and the gunnery officers were ordered to fire their cannon if need be. The aim of the exercise, he stressed, was not to kill innocent people but to apprehend and punish the culprits who had stolen the cutter.

  On Sunday 14 November the bay was full of canoes, and Cook put his plan to the test. At first it went well, the Hawaiians fleeing before the power of the Westerners’ guns. But they did not flee in as much disarray as he would have liked: an ominous humming sound came from the forests, interspersed with the blare of conch shells. Ignoring the hidden presence of an army that must have been several thousand strong, Cook announced that he would advance on the village of Kealakekua and take the local ruler hostage. Why he thought this gambit would work, when it had failed so miserably in New Zealand, is a mystery. Nevertheless, with the ships’ four-pounders lobbing shells into the canoes, and his boat parties firing musket volleys, he was in a strong position. When he landed with three boats and marched up the beach to the village, accompanied by one of the Resolution’s officers and nine marines, including a corporal and a sergeant – all fully armed – he was confident of success. Then everything went wrong.