by Barry Lopez
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THE PHENOMENON OF James Cook—a determined explorer in a transitional era toward the end of the Enlightenment, master of a complex “platform” for exploration, as we might term it today, a square-rigged barque—has occupied my imagination for a long while. Cook embodies both questing as an idea, a mental pursuit, and the indispensable skills of a professional mariner. His eighteenth-century search for a commercially viable Northwest Passage, of which his landfall at Cape Foulweather was an early part, is what originally brought me to this part of the Oregon coast. My thought was to become acquainted with the physical geography here, with the plants, animals, and creeks that today represent only a shadow of the place Cook saw more than two hundred years ago. The wolves and grizzly bears of his time are no longer here. Nor are the original Alsea people, their culture and traditions having been diluted and then almost entirely stripped from these hills. A cellphone tower stands today atop the 1,096-foot peak of Cape Foulweather. Invasive plants of many sorts—Scotch broom, Russian thistle, Himalayan blackberry—have moved in, along with exotic grasses. The forest soil is saturated with the residues of herbicides and other poisons once used in the wake of industrial logging to ensure the health of the artificial woodlands that replaced the original forests. At the time Cook was being tossed about offshore, a greater number of native trees flourished here, trace elements in the bloodstream of this temperate-zone rain forest—red alder, black cottonwood, golden chinquapin, Pacific yew, Pacific silver fir, lodgepole pine, bigleaf maple, Pacific madrone, western red cedar. Today, a crazy quilt of plat claims blankets the replanted acres, claims of possession many of the owners hope one day to profit from, by selling off, yet again, what once belonged to no one.
The cape is a strangely ghosted landscape now. I no longer complain, though. This is where we find ourselves today. Here, then, is a place from which to explore further, though perhaps with different ideas than those that drove Cook.
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FOR DECADES I’ve been drawn to biographies of Cook and to revisionist thinking about his accomplishments. He made three epic voyages of reconnaissance in the later part of the eighteenth century, each one circling the planet. Early in his career he made remarkably accurate coastal surveys of Newfoundland and a defining circumnavigation of Antarctica, which produced what was then considered Earth’s final continent. (Some geographers today consider New Zealand to be the high ground of a submerged eighth continental mass, Zealandia.) He deployed new meridians of longitude over the Earth’s already established parallels of latitude, so that a place once found could be found again more easily. He also, to my mind, prefigured on his final voyage a type of modern-day colonial derangement not unlike that of Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, who lost his bearings in the jungles of the colonial Congo Basin. Cook does not take well to being solved, though. In my reading of his journals, he was conflicted about, and also perplexed by, the consequences of Europe’s imperial reach, and by the search for material wealth that began with Prince Henry’s navigators setting their sails for Vasco da Gama’s South African cape, and with other Europeans embarking on the Silk Road, eastward from Anatolia in modern-day Asian Turkey.
The case for Cook as a paragon of the Enlightenment, as a representative of Progress, of precision in mapmaking, of ennobling virtue, and of the pursuit, in general, of practical improvements, has been made often in the past, most ably by his New Zealand biographer, J. C. Beaglehole. In recent decades, however, some biographers have made a case against Cook. He’s been described as an “unreasoning, irrational, and violent” man, the prototype of the Old World’s imperial questers—Columbus, Bougainville, Cortés—a person intent on conquest, and restricted in his thinking by a narrow frame of reference. Among the better known of these revisionist histories is The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, by Gananath Obeyesekere, a writer more sympathetic than most of Cook’s biographers to the fate of those cultures across the Pacific that felt the brunt of Cook’s determination “to know,” to mathematically corral the planet’s last unknown reaches. Some recent works, examining the aftereffects of Cook’s various unbidden visits, have been brutally straightforward in their description and assessment of the costs to non-Western peoples. Among the most chilling is Before the Horror: The Population of Hawai‘i on the Eve of Western Contact, by David Stannard. Stannard’s primary focus is on the impact of those diseases Cook’s party brought to the Hawaiian Islands, among them smallpox, venereal disease, tuberculosis, and an influenza virus.
Collateral damage, a military locution, is a term often used today to describe the unintentional harm done to innocent people as a result of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century “exploration,” the aggressive economic strategies of exploitation that followed, and the international struggle afterward for political leverage and control in Europe’s colonies. People in power today generally don’t like to reconsider such damage; and by and large, ordinary people fear the consequences of confronting modern tyrants who still stand behind such schemes, in quasi democracies as well as in dictatorships and police states.
Inarguably, Cook was the great nautical chart maker of his time and a relentless prober of the Pacific Ocean, the last great unexplored geographic space on the surface of Earth in the eighteenth century. In my mind, though, he was also a person quietly but profoundly conflicted about the consequences of his work. Like many other readers of books about him, I find myself stepping back from hagiographies like Beaglehole’s The Life of Captain James Cook; and while glad for the necessary correctives that books like Obeyesekere’s provide, I remain reluctant to demonize the man. It is ever helpful, it seems to me, to view someone like him as an unwitting collaborator with historians arguing for their own interpretation of a particular sequence of historical events.
If on some occasions Cook was gruff, insensitive, petty, obstreperous, or tyrannical, an exceedingly strict officer with a hasty temper, he was also at other times selfless, moral, and gracious. The thing worth considering in our time is what he bequeathed us: the fruit of his keen desire to know Earth’s oceans and shores. Besides the east coast of Australia, which had never been visited by a European, and continental Antarctica, he gave us the Hawaiian Islands (which might have first been seen by sailors in Spanish galleons), New Caledonia, and the Cook Islands; also the empirical education of Sir Joseph Banks, who went on to become the iconic longtime president of the Royal Society; and his official no to the existence of a western entrance to the Northwest Passage. He gave us, I believe, the first three-dimensional sense of Earthly order, something no one in the world before him had ever provided. In a time long before the modern era’s forced rearrangements of political geography, his was a stupendous accomplishment.
After Cook, we were able to picture the entire planet, the whole of it at once, a sense of open space that, in the centuries of Western exploration before him, had eluded us. After Cook, the old cartographer’s admission of ignorance, Here Be Dragons, disappeared from the perimeter of world maps. Like his contemporary Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who revolutionized field biology by assigning a scientific binomial—a genus and species—to every known organism, and then placed each genus within a matrix of families, orders, and classes, Cook gave us a system that effectively organized what had once been geographic speculation.
After Linnaeus established his categories of scientific description, human beings were, specifically, Homo sapiens. Our very distant mammalian arctic relative the narwhal was no longer a type of unicorn but Monodon monoceros. The delicate deer’s-head orchid of the Pacific Northwest, Calypso bulbosa, was no longer to be confused with its relative the phantom orchid, Cephalanthera austinae. And the African hunting dog, Lycaon pictus, was a remote, not close, relative of the wolf, Canis lupus.
Once terrestrial geographic order was established, plans to further explore, explain, and speculate about all the geographic lacunae that were still l
eft could be made with greater confidence. After Cook, we had a better sense of where the last blank spots on the map might be.
Cook provided an empirical reference for the perennial figurative question, Where are we going?
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MISSING FROM MUCH of the scholarly and popular exegesis about Cook, strangely, is any reference to the many places he visited that goes much beyond what Cook and his companions themselves reported. The assumption, I assume, has been that the physical place, the actual place, is of no more consequence than the scenery behind a group of actors, something to keep the narrative going while imported ideas unfold against a backdrop. But physical places, it is my belief, do shape the attitudes of visitors arriving from distant homelands with an outlander’s mindset. The nature of the visited place affects the very tone of a journal entry. It influences the selection of the facts one chooses to jot down about that place. In short, the historian who visits a place writes a different history than the historian who stays home, satisfied to read about a place someone else once visited. I’m no historian, nor any biographer of Cook, but over time I unconsciously came into the habit of trying to see the places where Cook had disembarked. I felt to do so might prevent some kind of presumption in me about what had actually happened there or about how it might have happened.
If I could actually see what he saw and linger there, whatever the weather or the season might be, I knew I would know more. Each place on Earth goes deep. Some vestige of the old, now seemingly eclipsed place is always there to be had. The immensity of the mutable sea before me at Cape Foulweather, the faint barking of sea lions in the air, the nearly impenetrable (surviving) groves of stout Sitka spruce behind me, the moss-bound creeks, the flocks of mew gulls circling schools of anchovies just offshore, the pummeling winds and crashing surf of late-winter storms—it’s all still there.
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ONE BALMY, SUMMER AFTERNOON at Botany Bay, on the southeastern periphery of greater Sydney, Cook’s first landfall on the east coast of Australia, I pondered the sense of compassion I’d developed for Cook. I was prompted to do this by the bright riot of afternoon sunbeams ricocheting from the calm surface of the bay, by the distant clatter of dry eucalypt leaves roiled by the wind, and by the towering, fair-weather cumulus clouds above, with their convoluted cauliflower heads. Together, these framed for me a prelapsarian scene. I sensed in all this an absence of violence, and of malicious intent.
As I strolled through a public park on the southeast shore of the bay he entered in 1770, I probed my sympathy for Cook. He did, of course, lay the groundwork for the colossal abuses of colonial exploration, but this was indeliberate and it was preceded by centuries of French, Spanish, English, Dutch, and Portuguese barbarism. Cook was no King Leopold, with ten million dead in the Congo, a Lord Kitchener belligerent and imperious at Omdurman, near Khartoum. Yet Cook was murdered for his own unholy transgressions (as they were perceived on February 14, 1779, by native Hawaiians at Kealakekua Bay, on the island of Hawai‘i). There is no grave to visit because the Hawaiians took his corpse away immediately and cut it up into pieces. What few parts of Cook’s body his men were able to retrieve were buried at sea shortly after his death. Later, perhaps because of Cook’s “martyrdom,” his achievements were praised by colonizers and missionaries eager to advance enterprises he might very well have wanted no part of.
I spent that day at Botany Bay mostly wandering around Cape Solander in the shadow of Sydney’s major desalinization plant, another sightseer, an amateur untutored, among other things, in the psychology that informed Cook’s personal quests and private needs, but wondering as well what he might have meant by his life. In the end, there being no obvious answer in front of me at Botany Bay, I tried to imagine the new world that arrived for him on his voyages nearly every day, the spectacular primacy of his time at sea, which he so enjoyed. In my late forties at the time, I was no longer able to summon the indignation needed to vilify such a man. He had led a dedicated life and, like so many, caused others pain he did not mean to inflict. As the years closed in, however, I believe he found anger growing in himself. And greater self-doubt.
I enjoyed the salutary weather that afternoon at Botany Bay, the pink galahs flying in flocks across the face of white clouds and then into a patch of blue sky, where suddenly they winked dark. I experienced from this ambience a generosity of spirit in myself I cannot always find. An uncomplicated love of the world.
On another “Cook occasion,” in Tahiti, I hired a car in Pape’ete and drove east a few miles to Point Venus, where I walked the public beach at Matavai Bay past topless sunbathers. A small contingent of eighteenth-century scientists, in service to His Majesty George III and sailing aboard HMS Endeavour on Cook’s First Voyage, made their observations of Venus transiting the face of the sun here, on June 3, 1769. (This was Britain’s part in a worldwide European effort to determine the distance of Earth from the sun and from the other planets.)
Long before my visit to Point Venus and that afternoon at Botany Bay, I was able to travel some hundreds of miles of Cook’s sea route along the northwestern coast of Alaska aboard a NOAA research vessel, finally sailing through Bering Strait from the Chukchi Sea into the Bering Sea. Twenty years after that, I rode out a storm in the Southern Ocean’s Drake Passage aboard another ship, pitching and rolling on all three axes in forty-foot seas and screaming winds—the kind of seas Cook saw in the very same place on his Second Voyage. On yet another occasion, I stood ashore, trying to compose a silent eulogy to Cook below the cliffs at Kealakekua Bay, trying to choose phrases neither insipidly deferential nor disdainfully sophisticated to express my gratitude for the example of his determination.
I wanted in all this, however obsessive it might have been, to feel contemporaneous with him. To feel empathetic.
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AS I UNDERSTAND THEM, Cook’s journals reveal a man in a private perpetual state of wonderment, despite his vigorous efforts to remain objective in approaching other civilizations and in examining geographies other than Britain’s. I read with admiration his assessments of the indifferent and gnomic character of the seas on which he sailed. His voyages were not like Parsifal’s, a quest for the Grail, though some historians want them to be; nor were his merely the dispassionate, disciplined ambulations of a curious, rational, and self-made Englishman. Like Meriwether Lewis, I believe, he was also exploring things so fragile and tenuous he would never write explicitly about them, because he found the task intimidating, and describing the experience itself too tenuous, too indefinite an exercise. Here were suggestions of his thoughts about the deeper consequences of his excursions, the ramifications of his trespass.
Toward the end of his Third Voyage—his consort, Charles Clerke, would finish it after Cook was killed—Cook started to show signs of unraveling. He made uncharacteristically rash decisions. He was strangely inattentive to the need for careful navigation in unknown near-shore waters off the coast of southern Alaska, in June 1778. He seemed, too, oddly attracted to the idea of giving up entirely on the Third Voyage. Maturing in him, as I read his journal entries from the final months, was a realization of what he might actually have wrought by toppling the last icons of classical geography, and by having imposed as an explorer on other cultures—cultures profoundly, even eerily, different from his own. By this time, in my mind, he could not free himself from the driving force of his own fame, nor from the responsibility that he believed came with it. One had to consider, too, not incidentally, that although he had made major revisions in the geography of the world that had come down to him from Strabo, Ptolemy, and Eratosthenes, he spent his days in the company of sailors for whom such ideas were inconsequential. Lionized at home, feared at sea, a stranger to his wife and children, he had become over the course of the three voyages a person hardly known to anyone.
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&n
bsp; JOSEPH BANKS, the supernumerary of note aboard Cook’s Endeavour on the First Voyage, was an aristocrat. He assumed the privileges of his social class during the voyage and expected deference be shown to the elevated position he held in London society. He has long served historians as an emblem of the person who feels superior to all he encounters, immensely and genuinely curious though Banks was. When I read Banks’s journal of the voyage alongside Cook’s journal, I found their temperaments strikingly different. Banks’s formal education, together with his lack of interest in navigation or the character of the sea, his peerage and his gregariousness, immediately set the two men apart. And of course, by journey’s end, each had come to a different conclusion about what was to be valued about the experience.
Comparing the journals makes clear the nature of each man’s ethnocentrism and makes apparent, too, how differently they evaluated issues of race and social rank. The journals share an unconscious deference toward Western logic and the metaphysical assumptions of Western philosophy, but a prominent contrast between the two is the way each one regarded the physical world through which they moved. Banks was primarily interested in the cultures and terrestrial geography of the islands they visited. He could not make much sense of the seas between his landfalls. Cook was equally curious about the elements of each island—their botany, anthropology, and topography—but his attention to the ocean was just as intense. For him there was no “emptiness” between one island and the next. He thought it actually possible to define this apparent void. Even though he could navigate through it with a certain precision, he appreciated the fact that it was—and perhaps would ever remain—unmarked. Its only boundary was the horizon, the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine.