by Tony Horwitz
We began rowing, badly out of sync, and made poor headway against the breeze and current. “Bloody oath, we’re going backwards!” the tiller man shouted. We finally coordinated our rowing long enough to reach the beach, ten minutes after the marines. A thousand or so spectators looked on as we pulled the boat ashore.
“The sailors are happy at being on land after many perilous days at sea,” announced an emcee. “Look at them work! Men were made of sterner stuff in those days.” I cut my bare feet on a rock and fell into some brambles. Another man refused to carry the officers over the muddy water because he was scared of crocodiles. “You’re expendable,” Rob said, shoving him over the rail.
We straggled onto the grass as the emcee continued to narrate the Endeavour’s story. “One of the blokes with Cook was a Swede named Solander,” he told the crowd. “He was born in Sweden, I think, and went to England nine years earlier.”
Nine years before his birth? “Who is this clown?” one of the sailors asked Rob.
“Town historian. He’s drunker than us.”
“Tupaia was a Tahitian boy that Cook liked,” the emcee went on. “The crew took him back to England, I’m not sure what happened to him after that.” In fact, Tupaia was about forty and never reached England. But the dirty-faced teenager playing the Tahitian looked in Rob’s direction and slapped his rear, much to the crowd’s delight.
We set up tables for the artist and surgeon and milled around, waiting for cues from the emcee, who had lost his place in the script. “Lieutenant Cook scans the surroundings with a telescope,” he finally announced. Rob dutifully peered through his spyglass. His lines, scribbled on a piece of paper stuffed up his sleeve, fell to the ground. “Lieutenant, have your men be on the alert!” he commanded. Then he whispered to Hicks, “Fuck, what’s next?” Hicks shrugged. Rob went on, “I hereby name this stream the Endeavour River.”
The emcee drew the crowd’s attention to the marines’ boat, now lying offshore. Roger and two other men stood flailing away at something in the bottom of the craft. “Those boys have caught some tucker!” the emcee cried as one of the men held up a battered fish. Then they rowed ashore and presented the catch to the cook. Roger was covered in fish guts. I asked him what they’d caught. “Two fish and two crabs a marine brought down in an esky,” he said. “Predeceased and very frozen.”
We milled around some more as the cook pretended to cook, the surgeon rummaged through his briefcase for laudanum, and Banks and Solander kneeled to study grass, cigarette butts, beer tabs. Then the Aborigines burst from the mangroves, brandishing spears. “These local boys look a bit vicious!” the emcee exclaimed.
The marines raised their muskets. “Hold men, there will be no violence here!” Rob shouted. He flung some plastic beads on the grass. One of the Aborigines grabbed a fish instead and ran off with the others. We raised a flagpole, rather unsteadily, as the marines fired a volley of wadded paper. The Union Jack had a patch where a marine had accidentally blown a hole in it the previous year.
“What a lovely erection!” the emcee shouted. Then Rob read a proclamation claiming the land for His Majesty, signaling the end of the reenactment. “Three cheers for these local boys who have trained all year for this!” the emcee concluded. The crowd gave us a lackluster round of applause and hurried from the park for a second round of the Great Esky Race. The cook took off his hook. “I’ve done thirty-six of these,” he said, “and this was the best yet.”
We returned to the garage behind the police station to empty the rest of the sea chest. At some point it dawned on me that I’d consumed little except beer for the better part of forty-eight hours. Even Roger looked wrecked. He leaned against a tree, staring numbly at his watch. “It’s stained with vomit not my own.” He wiped the face with his gut-smeared smock. “Three P.M. I’ve never retired from the field this early.”
“We started early. Beer o’clock.”
“That’s true. I haven’t completely disgraced myself.”
Several “officers” and “wenches” lay unconscious on the grass all around us. Raucous cries erupted from down the street; the wet T-shirt contest was under way again. Roger closed his eyes. “I’m glad Cook didn’t live to see this,” he said.
Chapter 7
Homeward Bound:
The Hospital Ship
Fear of Death is Bitter.
—JOURNAL OF JOSEPH BANKS (AUGUST 16, 1770)
On August 4, 1770, Cook hauled his ship out of the Endeavour River and back into the treacherous waters he’d survived in June. If anything, his situation appeared even more daunting than before. His patched ship was barely seaworthy, stores ran dangerously low, and the sea afforded no obvious escape route. If Cook retraced his path south, he’d have to beat straight into the prevailing wind. But the waters to the north and east appeared barricaded by shoals and reef. “I was quite at a loss which way to steer,” Cook confessed.
He sailed east, then north, then east again, taking constant soundings and dodging shoals so tortuous that Cook wrote “LABYRINTH” in capital letters across his chart. (Few ships have since risked these waters; some areas are still labeled “Unexamined” or “Numerous Coral Patches Reported.”) Going ashore on a small island, Cook climbed a hill and glimpsed distant sea breaking high against the outermost wall of the reef. He also saw several channels through the barrier, and soon after managed to thread one of them.
“In a short time got safe out,” he wrote, after escaping into open sea for the first time in months. Banks, as usual, wrote more fulsomely. “That very ocean that had formerly been looked upon with terror by (maybe) all of us was now the Asylum we had long wished for and at last found,” he observed. “Satisfaction was clearly painted in every mans face.”
This satisfaction lasted one day. The wind, blowing hard from the east, pushed the damaged ship back toward the reef it had just escaped. Then the wind died, leaving the ship unable to maneuver through mountainous waves that washed it ever closer to the coral. “Now our case was truly desperate,” Banks wrote. “A speedy death was all we had to hope for.” This wasn’t hyperbolic. When the ship had run aground in June, it did so in relatively calm water, against a coral outcrop detached from the main reef. Two months later, the ship lay in rough seas much too deep for dropping anchor, and it was rapidly approaching a semi-submerged cliff.
“A Reef such as is here spoke of is scarcely known in Europe, it is a wall of Coral Rock rising almost perpendicular out of the unfathomable ocean,” Cook wrote. “All the dangers we had escaped were little in comparison of being thrown upon this Reef where the Ship must be dashed to peices in a Moment.”
The surf brought the ship within forty yards of the reef, “so that between us and distruction was only a dismal Vally the breadth of one wave,” Cook added. A puff of wind enabled the ship to veer away from the reef, though only for a few minutes. Men in boats tried to tow the Endeavour through the heavy surf while sailors desperately tossed paper over the side to judge whether the becalmed ship was moving forward at all. It wasn’t. But another breath of air—“our friendly breeze,” Cook called it—carried the ship within reach of a narrow break in the reef.
Cook determined to shoot through it. He failed, but “the Tide of Ebb gushing out like a Mill stream” pushed the ship several hundred yards from the coral. Cook spotted another slim passage. When the tide shifted, he used it to flood through the gap, sweeping instantly from the raging sea to the calm though shoal-strewn waters enclosed by the reef.
“This is the narrowest Escape we ever had,” wrote the master’s mate, Richard Pickersgill. “Thir would have been no hopes of saveing one Single Life in so Great a Surf.” Even Cook’s nerves had been frayed by the eighteen-hour ordeal. With a rare glance heavenward, he named the passage through the reef Providential Channel. He also penned an unusually personal entry that exposes the extraordinary pressure he labored under.
“Was it not for the pleasure which naturly results to a Man from being the first discoverer, even
was it nothing more than sand and Shoals, this service would be insuportable,” he wrote, “especialy in far distant parts, like this, short of Provisions and almost every other necessary.” Danger and deprivation weren’t the only source of strain; there was also the weight of expectation riding on an explorer’s shoulders.
“The world will hardly admit of an excuse for a man leaving a Coast unexplored,” Cook went on. “If dangers are his excuse he is than charged with Timorousness and want of Perseverance and at once pronounced the unfitest man in the world to be employ’d as a discoverer; if on the other hand he boldly incounters all the dangers and obstacles he meets and is unfortunate enough not to succeed he is than charged with Temerity and want of conduct.”
If this was the only such passage in Cook’s journals, it wouldn’t merit much analysis. Exhausted by two years of sailing, several months of exceptional stress, and one day of sheer terror, Cook succumbed to a moment of doubt and self-pity. But there would be other entries that echoed this one, usually written when things went wrong. Taken together, they hint at a brittle and unhappy side to Cook’s personality.
Throughout his troubles on the reef, he’d displayed cool nerves, keen nautical judgment, and absolute command over men he’d trained expertly. Yet his principal thought on saving his ship—for a second time—was that his narrow escape might loom as evidence “the world” could use to judge him “unfit.” Cook wasn’t paranoid. Most Pacific explorers before him had failed in their assigned missions, and none in the eighteenth century was given a second chance to prove his mettle. Still, that such a consummate overachiever could imagine he might be viewed as an underachiever suggests how hard the man was on himself.
Cook’s angst off the reef also carried echoes of his fury over Tahitian thievery and the attack on his drunken clerk—incidents that struck him as personal insults against his authority. At these and other moments, Cook’s extraordinary drive and self-reliance can seem corrosive: the marks of a compulsively driven loner, obsessed with control and prone to gnawing fears of persecution.
Cook’s background could explain some of this. Having navigated his way from the bottom of English society, he may have seen the world as one vast reef arrayed against him. Perhaps, too, Cook’s extreme independence and ambition were prerequisites for great exploration. Few “normal” men, particularly family men in their forties, would endure the risks and wretchedness that Cook abided in the Pacific—not once, but three times. After the Endeavour’s voyage, Banks would spend the rest of his long life reaping the rewards of his youthful adventures, and dining out on them. Cook, lacking Banks’s fortune and status, had more to prove. Even after his second voyage, which sealed his fame and brought him the offer of a comfortable retirement, Cook chose to set off again, ultimately at the cost of his life.
As for the “pleasure” of discovery that Cook mentioned off the reef, he never alluded to it again in his journals. The farther he went, the less pleasure exploration seemed to give him. Toward the end, he would rail against everything: his indefatigable sailors, his superiors, even the wind.
Cook’s escape through the Providential Channel saved his ship from destruction, but he still had to wend his way north between shoals, sandbars, and tiny islands. Eighteen days from the Endeavour River, Cook finally ran out of coastline and reef to follow. He went ashore at a small island and climbed a hill to confirm that he’d reached the end of the continent. “Confident” that the eastern coast he’d surveyed over the prior four months “was never seen or visitd by any European before,” he hoisted a flag and took possession of the entire shore in the name of King George III. He also claimed “all the Bays, Harbours Rivers and Islands situate upon the said coast.” Three times, the men fired their guns and cheered—more out of relief, one suspects, than reverence for His Majesty.
This would prove the most consequential of all Cook’s acts of possession, effectively laying the foundation for white settlement in the Pacific. But it was also the most confusing of Cook’s many land claims. He obviously hadn’t acquired the consent of the natives, as he’d been instructed to do; the few Aborigines whom Cook encountered on this northernmost bit of land, which he named Possession Island, appeared intent on opposing the English before suddenly retreating. Cook’s claim was also oddly imprecise: “a vague assertion of authority over a quite vague area,” Beaglehole writes. How far inland, for instance, did his claim to the coast extend? Cook didn’t help matters by naming this nebulous possession New South Wales. No one knows why. The east coast of Australia doesn’t bear any discernible resemblance to the Welsh shore. And why South Wales? Also, Cook’s cumbersome name already existed on the world’s map, attached to a bit of land in northern Ontario.
It was left to the explorer Matthew Flinders, who circumnavigated the continent thirty years after Cook, to popularize the name “Australia” (which had been used previously, in a loose way, for various parts of the southern hemisphere). This gradually supplanted New South Wales—providing irreverent Aussies with yet another opportunity for mockery. Their country’s name, poets and songwriters often complain, rhymes with little except “failure” and “genitalia.” “New South Wales,” meanwhile, survives as the unsuitable tag for a state encompassing vast stretches of outback that receive less rain in a year than south Wales does in a week.
Cook, in any event, was almost done with naming. Having established that open sea separated New Holland from New Guinea, a subject that had been much debated by mapmakers, he was ready to sail home through previously charted waters—a circumstance that delighted his exhausted men. The People, Banks wrote, “were now pretty far gone with the longing for home which the Physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia; indeed I can find hardly any body in the ship clear of its effects but the Captn Dr Solander & myself, indeed we three have pretty constant employment for our minds which I beleive to be the best if not the only remedy for it.”
Desperate for provisions and repairs, Cook stopped only briefly at New Guinea and the island of Savu before heading to Batavia, the principal port of the Dutch East Indies and site of today’s Indonesian capital, Jakarta. The Endeavour arrived on October 5, 1770, in horrid shape, unable, having jettisoned its large guns off the reef, to provide the customary cannon salute upon entering harbor. Once in Batavia’s dock, the Endeavour’s carpenter gave a report to Cook that made the vessel sound like the survivor of a great sea battle: “The Ship very Leakey…Main Keel being wounded in many places…The False Keel gone beyond the Midships…Wounded on her Larboard side…One Pump on the Larboard side useless the others decay’d.” After surveying the ship’s shattered, worm-eaten underside, Cook wrote, “it was a Matter of Surprise to every one who saw her bottom how we had kept her above water.” He had no choice but to settle in for a long stay to make the ship seaworthy for its onward passage.
Cook’s men, on the other hand, were as fit as the ship was foul. On the Endeavour’s approach to Batavia, a Dutch officer and several crewmen came out from shore. “Both himself & his people were almost as Spectres, no good omen of the healthyness [of the port] we were arrived at,” Banks observed. “Our people however who truly might be called rosy & plump, for we had not a sick man among us, Jeerd & flouted much at their brother sea mens white faces.”
Cook couldn’t resist gloating, either. In a letter he quickly dispatched to the Admiralty by a Europe-bound Dutch ship, he wrote, “I have the satisfaction to say that I have not lost one man by sickness during the whole Voyage.” By “sickness” Cook evidently meant scurvy, as one man had died of tuberculosis and one of epilepsy, diseases they’d carried with them from England. Cook had ample reason to crow; it was unprecedented for a ship to survive such a long ocean passage without losing anyone to scurvy. All told, eight of the ship’s original complement of ninety-four men had died from disease and accidents, a remarkable record given the hazards the Endeavour had encountered.
The high spirits of Cook and his crew weren’t due solely
to their comparative good health. After more than two years at sea, much of it in waters and on shores unvisited by Westerners, the English now found themselves in a “civilized” outpost peopled by a rich curry of Dutchmen and other Europeans, as well as by Indians, Chinese, Malays, native Javanese, and slaves from Bali and Sumatra. Batavia, principally a dockyard and trading post, also bore the grand stamp of its Dutch engineers: broad paved streets, tree-lined canals, and fortified bastions named Diamond, Ruby, Pearl and Sapphire. Merchants, exchanging a babel of tongues and currencies, trafficked in ducks, geese, pineapples, tamarinds, incense, opium, nutmeg, and flowers. The English even found months-old London newspapers, which informed them, among other things, that the American colonists were on the verge of revolt over taxes.
None among the Endeavour’s company were more exhilarated by Batavia than the Tahitians. Tupaia’s young servant, Taiata, “was all-most ready to run mad,” Banks wrote. “Houses, Carriages, streets, in short every thing were to him sights which he had often heard described but never well understood, so he lookd upon them all with more than wonder.” While Taiata “danc’d about the streets,” Tupaia admired the fine and varied dress of the Batavians, which included silk, velvet, and taffeta. “On his being told that every different nation wore their own countrey dress,” Banks wrote, Tupaia decided to promenade around town in his “South Sea cloth.”
Banks found lodging for his party at an inn where the amenities included fifteen-course dinners, as well as “Tea, Coffee, Punch and Pipes and tobacco as much as we could destroy.” He also hired two carriages, “drove by a man setting on a Coachbox,” and a servant he described as “a mongrel between a Dutch man and a Javan woman.” While Cook busied himself at the dockyard, Banks visited country houses “built upon the Plan of Blenheim,” and admired the “inexpressibly elegant” women with jasmine-wreathed hair piled high atop their heads.