Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  Crocodiles are rife in estuaries and streams like the one running behind the pub. “How can you be sure it’s safe?” I asked.

  The barmaid shrugged. “No one’s ever been taken there,” she said, “at least not that anyone can remember.” Being “taken” was characteristic Aussie understatement. Crocodile attacks typically result in sheared limbs, massive hemorrhaging, and, if the croc takes its prey into a “death roll,” drowning.

  Driving on, past Boggy Creek, Scrubby Creek, and Forgotten Road, I reached the outskirts of Cooktown, announced by a bullet-riddled sign that read: “Check Your Pulse.” I crossed a muddy stream and reached Cooktown’s main drag: a wide avenue lined with wooden buildings, their verandahs overhanging the sidewalk. At first glance, the town looked quaint and deserted, like a Wild West set just before the climactic shoot-out.

  Stepping from the Land Cruiser, I realized why there were so few people about. The street was a wind tunnel. Struggling to stay on my feet, I walked bowlegged past secondhand stores and a souvenir joint named the Croc Shop before taking refuge in a pub called the Cooktown Hotel. A rugby league match blared on the television. Though I’ve resided for a decade in rugby-playing countries, the sport, to me, remains a bewildering cross between American football and the combat scenes from Braveheart. A mirror image of the game was under way in the pub. Dangerous-looking men in sweat-stained singlets and shorts formed a scrum beneath the TV, sloshing beer on one another as they jeered at the screen.

  “Ya wankers!”

  “Fuckwits!”

  “Mongrels!”

  I took a XXXX to a vacant tree stump at the far end of the bar and settled beside a barefoot, ponytailed man about my own age. Shouting over the TV and the imprecations, I tried to make conversation about the weather. “Is the wind always like this in Cooktown?”

  “No, mate,” he replied. “Come July and August it’ll blow to buggery.”

  “Is it always, uh, this rowdy in here?”

  “Bloody oath. This is nothing. Usually it’s a drunken riot.”

  Laurie Downs told me that he worked at the bar. This was his day off, so he was drinking beer instead of serving it. “They say Cooktown’s the largest unfenced asylum in Australia,” he said.

  “Is it?”

  “Not really. I reckon it’s the largest unfenced asylum in the world.”

  The way Laurie described it, the asylum had four wings. The crowd at the other end of the bar represented a sort of middle class, “your basic upstanding Cooktowners: laborers, drunks, blokes on the run from the law or their wives in the lower states.” Aborigines, many of them poor and jobless, gathered at a pub down the street called the West Coast. The town’s third tavern, the Sovereign, attracted the “snobs,” mostly newcomers who ran businesses or held professional jobs. Finally, there were “ferals,” a fringe-dwelling population of hippies and desperadoes who worked, if they worked at all, in the “horticulture industry”—i.e., growing dope.

  “You’ll see ferals come in here who haven’t had a bath or shower or been near water for six months,” Laurie said. “One bloke ordered a beer and I handed him a bar of soap instead.”

  Laurie studied my dusty khakis, stubbly cheeks, and relatively clean T-shirt. “Not a snob, are ya?” he asked.

  “Hope not. Just passing through.” I told him about my travels and asked if I could hire someone to take me out to the reef where the Endeavour came to grief.

  “There’s your fleet, mate,” he said, pointing at three grizzled men hunched at the bar. One, a florid fisherman with flaming red hair, went by the name of Blue. Laurie identified the other two as “real nutcases. They’ll die at sea if they don’t die here first.”

  This wasn’t too encouraging. Nor was Blue’s response when I asked if I could hire a boat to see the reef. He said no one risked going out that far until the wind died down in September. Blue also warned against touring the inland waterways. A few days before, the Coast Guard had been called out to rescue a seaplane attacked in the night. “A croc tried to root the plane, then decided to bite it instead and do the death roll thing.” Blue laughed. “I’d like to see the insurance claim on that one.”

  I returned to my tree stump and shared this tale with Laurie. “You’ve got some real Crocodile Dundees in here,” I said. “Great bullshit artists.” Laurie responded by going behind the bar and bringing back a beer-stained local newspaper. Under the headline “Love at First Bite,” I read a news item corroborating Blue’s story in every particular. Other police news, which consumed half the paper, told of a woman whose ear had been bitten off by her husband, a man who paid for groceries with “a very badly photocopied fake $100 bill,” a pub brawl, a window smashed with a beer bottle, several drug busts, and innumerable arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct.

  “Quiet week,” Laurie said. “Most people are lying low till the Cook festival.” Laurie, it turned out, was responsible for buying the Cooktown Hotel’s supplies for the weekend: one hundred cartons each of Jim Beam whiskey and Bundaberg rum, a thousand cartons of beer, plus smaller quantities of vodka, gin, and wine. Seventy thousand dollars of alcohol in all.

  “I know, it doesn’t sound like much,” Laurie said. “But we had a lot in stock already.” He drained his beer and went to the bar for another. “Stop back this weekend. There may be a bit of drama.”

  To mend the Endeavour, Cook had to unload the ship, float it ashore with the tide, then raise the vessel on its side so carpenters and caulkers could patch the bottom. “The rest of the people I gave leave to go in the country,” Cook wrote. Elsewhere, this would likely have meant searching for women, or bartering for “artificial curiosities.” But the natives in north Queensland were as shy as those the English had encountered farther south. So the men’s interest turned instead to tracking a strange and elusive creature they’d glimpsed at Botany Bay.

  The first sightings in Queensland, Banks wrote, were of “an animal as large as a grey hound, of a mouse colour and very swift.” A few days later, the botanist glimpsed one himself. While resembling a greyhound in size, it had a very long tail and jumped not on four legs but on two, “making vast bounds” like those of an African rodent called the jerboa. But this didn’t quite capture the creature, either. “What to liken him to I could not tell,” Banks wrote, “nothing certainly that I have seen at all resembles him.” Bereft of analogies, the English began referring to the creature as “the wild animal” or “the beast so much talkd of.”

  Nor was this the only strange wildlife. One sailor told Banks that he’d been frightened by a creature the size of a small beer keg; it was “as black as the Devil and had 2 horns on its head.” This was probably a flying fox or fruit bat, its ears mistaken for horns. The men also saw wild dogs, or dingoes, which they took for wolves, and seven-foot-long “alligators,” actually crocodiles. Banks, meanwhile, marveled at man-high termite hills, and debated with Solander whether they more closely resembled “English Druidical monuments” or “Rune Stones on the Plains of Upsal in Sweden.” Less exotic were the “musquetos,” so rife that at night “they followd us into the very smoak, nay almost into the fire, which hot as the Climate was we could better bear the heat than their intolerable stings.”

  Finally, a month after the Endeavour’s arrival, the sharpshooting American, Lieutenant John Gore, bagged “one of the Animals before spoke of.” It weighed thirty-eight pounds, and had disproportionately tiny forelegs and shoulders and short, ash-colored fur. “Excepting the head and ears which I thought was something like a Hare’s,” Cook wrote, “it bears no sort of resemblance to any European Animal I ever saw.” This didn’t deter the English from sampling its meat, which Cook termed “excellent food” and Parkinson likened to rabbit. Gore later shot what he called “another of them beasts,” this one weighing eighty-four pounds. Parkinson sketched one of the animals mid-hop, with remarkable accuracy, and Banks kept a skin and skull. The English drawings, descriptions, and specimens would give Europe its first detailed image of the Au
stralian marsupial. Banks, still struggling to classify it, later referred to the creature as an eighty-pound “mouse.”

  Eventually, the English also made contact with Aborigines, who had been as tantalizing and elusive as the still-unnamed beasts. One day, four native men appeared on the opposite bank of the river and called across to the crew. Cook decided it was the English who should play hard to get, and instructed his men to ignore the visitors. This stratagem worked. Eventually, the men paddled alongside the ship. The crew gave them cloth, nails, and paper, but they showed as little interest in trinkets as had the inhabitants of Botany Bay.

  “At last a small fish was by accident thrown to them,” Banks wrote, “on which they expressd the greatest joy imaginable.” Tupaia prevailed upon the visitors to lay down their weapons and come sit on shore. They stayed only briefly, but returned the next day with more men, all of them naked except for the ocher smeared on their skin and the long fish bones stuck through their septums. They were short, and so lean and small-boned that Parkinson found he could wrap his hand around their ankles and upper arms. The artist also recorded more than 150 words of the native tongue, including kangooroo, the local term for the “leaping quadruped” that so intrigued the English.

  But communication remained very tentative and prone to sudden breakdown. Curiously, the Aborigines seemed disturbed by the sight of caged birds on deck and attempted to throw them overboard. They also asked for some of the enormous turtles the English had caught near the river. When the crewmen refused (turtle had replaced stingray as their dietary mainstay), the Aborigines tried to drag two of the creatures off the ship.

  “Being disapointed in this they grew a little troublesome and were for throwing every thing over board,” Cook wrote. The Aborigines then lit some dried grass and encircled the shore camp in flames. As they attempted to also ignite English nets and clothes, laid out to dry, Cook fired small shot, slightly injuring one of the men. The Aborigines fled, but returned soon after and resumed relations “in a very friendly manner.”

  This confusing courtship continued for the rest of the English stay. One day while botanizing, Banks found the many clothes the crew had given the Aborigines, “left all in a heap together, doubtless as lumber not worth carriage.” He suspected that other trinkets the English had given them had been discarded, too. “These people seemd to have no Idea of traffick nor could we teach them.” Banks was also frustrated in his attempts to make contact with women, once going so far as to follow several Aborigines into the bush in hopes of glimpsing females.

  Thwarted, and tormented by mosquitoes, Banks found little to recommend northern Queensland. As for Aborigines, he viewed them as “but one degree removd from Brutes.” Like kangaroos, they seemed to Banks almost unclassifiable creatures. “What their absolute colour is is difficult to say, they were so completely covered with dirt, which seemed to have stuck to their hides from the day of their birth,” he wrote. “I tryd indeed by spitting upon my finger and rubbing but alterd the colour very little.” The large fish bones in their noses struck Banks as “ludicrous,” their voices as “shrill and effeminate” or, because of the nose bone, “scarce intelligible.” As for their shy nature, he thought it “pusillanimous,” even calling Aborigines “rank cowards.”

  Banks’s unkind assessment may have reflected the influence of Tupaia. The Tahitian priest, like Banks, hailed from the upper tier of a hierarchical society and shared the botanist’s preference for well-bred, mannerly people. Tupaia had regarded the Maori as degenerate cousins to Tahitians, and Aborigines struck him as even worse: what he called ta‘ata ‘ino, degraded people who in his homeland would be doomed to human sacrifice.

  By contrast, Cook’s own summary remarks on “New Hollanders” are strikingly sympathetic. “Their features are far from being disagreeable and their Voices are soft and tunable,” he wrote. “I think them a timorous and inoffensive race.” Like Banks, he was struck by their lack of agriculture, iron, or tools more sophisticated than fish gigs. But he seemed intent on dispelling William Dampier’s dismal image of New Holland and its “miserablest” inhabitants. Cook’s concluding passage on Aborigines is among the most extraordinary he ever penned:

  They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans: being wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquility which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life…. They seem’d to setno Value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them; this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life.

  Many scholars regard this passage as some sort of momentary lapse, inspired by an excess of brandy or by a Banks soliloquy on noble savages. Even the admiring Beaglehole dismisses this “panegyric” as “nonsense,” and expresses relief when Cook’s journal quickly returns to “the clear head, the hydrographer, with ‘a few observations on the Currents and Tides upon the Coast.’”

  Cook’s words do partly echo those of Banks, who contrasted Aborigines, “content with little nay almost nothing,” to insatiable Europeans, for whom “Luxuries degenerate into necessaries.” But the rest of Banks’s journal makes it obvious how little the botanist admired or envied Aborigines. Banks was a man of large appetites, accustomed to opulence, who would never live rough again. When his grand tour was complete, he became a corpulent and gout-ridden socialite for whom luxury was very much a necessity.

  Cook was a man of much simpler tastes. As one of his midshipmen memorably observed, Cook’s palate “was, surely, the coarsest that ever mortal was endued with.” Kangaroo, dog, penguin, albatross, walrus, monkey—all to him were “most excellent food,” as fine as English lamb. (Banks, who followed Cook’s lead, though not always with equal relish, later observed: “I believe I have eaten my way into the Animal Kingdom farther than any other man.”) Cook displayed the same intrepidness toward the vegetables he so obsessively gathered. “The tops we found made good greens and eat exceedingly well when boiled,” he wrote in a typical passage, on Queensland yams. “The roots were so Acrid that few besides myself could eat them.”

  This culinary stoicism wasn’t simply a reflection of an undiscriminating tongue, bred on Yorkshire farm food and the sailor’s diet of salt pork and biscuits. Cook, when extolling found foods, invariably observed that others would concur in his opinion if only they trusted their taste buds rather than their prejudice. “Few men have introduced more novelties in the way of victuals and drink than I have done,” he later wrote, complaining, “every innovation…is sure to meet with the highest disapprobation from Seamen.”

  This stubborn Enlightenment faith in firsthand observation, rather than in received opinion, extended to everything Cook did. As a navigator, he remained unswayed by “expert” theories about the existence of a southern continent. So, too, as an observer of strange lands, he suspended judgment about cannibalistic Maori or naked Aborigines whom men of superior education and social standing regarded as “brutes.” Also, having experienced class prejudice, Cook may have seen value in a life undisturbed “by the Inequality of Condition” in a way that Banks could not.

  “They sleep as sound in a small hovel or even in the open as the King in His Pallace on a Bed of down,” Cook later wrote of Aborigines in a letter to a Yorkshire friend. To a degree, these words also described Cook, a man who uncomplainingly endured—even enjoyed—whatever sustenance and shelter the world afforded him.

  Courage, Winston Churchill once observed, is “the greatest of all human virtues because it makes all the other ones possible.” Cook’s uncommon bravery amid spears, reefs, and icebergs has been amply documented. Less recognized is the rare courage he showed in his own convictions, a trust that made possible s
o much of what he did.

  When the wind died down, from gale force to intermittent gusts, I ventured beyond Cooktown’s pubs to tour the rest of the settlement. I found the Endeavour’s landing site along a muddy, mangrove-tentacled stretch of riverbank, beside a red sign warning: “Estuarine crocodiles inhabit this river system.” In a nearby park stood a late-nineteenth-century monument to Cook and his men, inscribed “Post Cineres Gloria Venit” (After ashes, glory comes). Town fathers had originally planned to flank the monument with the cannons Cook dumped on the reef. But a large reward and a weeklong search failed to uncover any of the guns (which weren’t retrieved until 1969, by an archaeological team from America). Instead, a single weapon now stood by the monument with a plaque that read: “On April 10th, 1885, the Cooktown Council carried the following motion, ‘a wire be sent to the premier in Brisbane requesting him to supply arms and ammunition & a competent officer to take charge of same, as the town is entirely unprotected against the threat of Russian invasion.’”

  Queensland authorities didn’t take the threat too seriously. They sent the 1803 smoothbore cannon that now stood beside the Cook column, as well as two rifles, three cannonballs, and an officer. A sign beside a nearby stone well reported: “In the 1940s the well was cleaned. At the bottom, three cannon balls and a skull were found.”

  The rest of the town’s history was equally curious. For a full century after Cook’s visit, not a single European settled along the river that the navigator had named after his ship. Then, in 1872, gold was discovered a short way inland. Almost overnight, a town named for Cook sprang up. By 1874, the settlement had forty-seven licensed pubs, plus countless illegal “grog shops.” The gold rush also drew three thousand Chinese, who ran their own newspaper and shipyard. Before long, Cooktown boasted a botanical garden, cricket pitch, and roller-skating rink.

  Then, just as abruptly, the boomtown went bust. A planned rail line was never completed, the gold played out, and cyclones, floods, and fire almost finished off the town. Within a few decades of the gold rush, the population dwindled from more than thirty thousand to four hundred. Cooktown had staged a modest recovery in the latter half of the twentieth century, thanks to tourism and the “horticulture industry” Laurie Downs had told me about at the pub. But little evidence of the town’s onetime glory remained, apart from the elegant granite curbing on the main street. The overgrown botanical gardens had historic plaques bearing Victorian photographs of men in straw boaters and women in linen dresses, gathered by the cricket oval for “dignified recreation.” Given the contemporary scene at Cooktown’s pubs, this image seemed almost surreal.