A
library for the price of a book.
Captain James Cook was the quintessential English hero, a brilliant
navigator and explorer who filled in the blanks on the European maps of
the Pacific Ocean and delivered the land masses of Australia and New Zealand
to the colonial attentions of the British Empire. His martyr's death
at the hands of Hawaiians in 1779 further embellished his legend, so it
was no surprise that a replica of his first ship, the Endeavour, was made
for the bicentennial celebration of the founding of the British penal colony
in Australia. The latter-day Endeavour plied the world's oceans,
taking on local crews for short hops between ports. Travel writer
Tony Horwitz sailed on this ship from Seattle to Vancouver, and set himself
a daunting task - to visit all the places first explored by Captain Cook
and write about how they had changed over the last two centuries.
Armed with his "bible," the definitive biography of Cook by Kiwi historian
J. C. Beaglehole, Horwitz visited Tahiti, New Zealand, the eastern coast
of Australia, Tonga, Hawaii, Alaska, and the north country of England's
Yorkshire where Cook grew up and from where he first shipped out.
Accompanied by a pal, a hard-drinking Aussie yachtsman who could be counted
upon to provide comic relief and unremitting cynicism, Horwitz weaves together
two narrative strands - the epic journeys of Cook and his crew, and the
more farcical adventures experienced by those who would follow in Cook's
wake. This may not be the most detailed account of Cook's tours,
but it is without doubt the most amusing.
When Cook visited the South Pacific ports of call, he was oftentimes
the first European to encounter the native cultures. His perspective
is frequently that of an amateur anthropologist, noting the friendliness
and open sexualtiy of the Tahitians, the fierce posturings of the Maori,
and the Stone Age indifference of the Australian aborigines. By the
time Horwitz arrives, colonial and missionary settlement have transformed
these landscapes, usually to the detriment of the original inhabitants.
Tahiti has become a tourist trap for Paradise-seekers, with every other
establishment invoking the legends of Cook, Gaughin, or Robert Louis Stevenson
for commercial gain. New Zealand has become the Southern Hemisphere
mirror image of the British Isles, and Maori-pakeha intermarriage has blurred
the original Polynesian culture to the point where Maori elders now sport
Orders of the British Empire citations. The waves of convict transport!
ation to New South Wales has decimated the aborigines and pushed the few
remaining survivors into the harsh interior outback. Horwitz notes
all this with tongue firmly in cheek and lager in hand.
When he visits Yorkshire, Horwitz sheds some light on a central paradox
about Captain Cook - for a man of such bold accomplishment, Cook in his
personality and his writings seems almost colorless, matter of fact, stoic.
This contrast is especially apparent on his first voyage, where he is accompanied
by the flamboyant aristocrat Joseph Banks, botanist extraordinaire, a younger
man who has no trouble "going native," an unimaginable pursuit for Cook
himself. Horwitz points out that Cook was schooled and apprenticed
by Quakers during his teen years in the north country, and was most likely
influenced by the humility and aversion to ostentaciousness or self-aggrandizement
that Quakers exhibit. This essential decency and self-effacement
is unique among British colonial adventurers, and explains why Cook never
succumbed to the blandishments of sexual freedom that made the rest of
his crew think they had found Eden in the South Pacific.
There is ample evidence to conclude that Cook, once the most enlightened
of rational men, sank into a kind of megalomaniacal madness during his
third and final voyage. Years of rough living with inadequate food
on unforgiving seas, attempting to control crews that more resembled the
inmates at de Sade's asylum in Charenton than trim, precise naval professionals,
took their toll on the great explorer. Cook was more likely to flog
crewmen for petty offenses and more likely to use rifles on thieving Polynesians
than he had been in the past, and the growing swells of mutiny can be detected
in crew journals of this last voyage. So Cook's ultimate fate in
Hawaii comes as no great surprise. The Hawaiians welcomed this first
European visitor as an incarnation of the god Lono, and Cook no longer
possessed the wisdom to separate myth from reality. He welcomed the
deification, and used his privileged status to re-provision his ships without
regar! d to how this impacted the native Hawaiian economy. Resentment
smoldered, and one fateful day, after a Hawaiian had stolen a small shore
boat, Cok retaliated with wholesale slaughter that triggered a riot in
which he was clubbed to death. Lono was mortal after all.
When Horwitz visits the scene of Cook's death, Kealakekua Bay, he asks
many modern-day Hawaiians what they think of Captain Cook. He finds
that Cook is not held in the same esteem by islanders as he is by the imperial
British, and finds proof of this in the persistent desecration of the Cook
memorial statue that was erected on that spot during the 19th Century.
The legacy of discovery has turned into a legacy of venereal disease, exploitation,
and expropriation, an attitude that Horwitz discovers not only in Hawaii,
but in other Pacific islands as well. The apotheosis of Captain Cook
is a strictly cultural phenomenon, rooted in 18th Century British imperial
mythology, not the universal truth that Eurocentric commentators have often
attributed to it.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard SeltzerA
library for the price of a book.
What do Plutarch, Gibbon, Proudhon, Malthus, Houdini, Frazier, Jefferson,
Darwin, Veblen, Dewey, and Plato have in common? Their works are
all on the same Non-Fiction
CD, with over 700 books, one of which, 2002 CIA World Factbook,
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Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
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