by Tony Horwitz
This idyll came to an abrupt halt just two weeks after the Endeavour’s arrival. The Tahitians fell ill, and so did many of the rosy, plump sailors. Before long, Cook wrote that he and every other man had become sick, “except the Sail Maker an old Man about 70 or 80 Years of age, and what was still more extraordinary in this man [is] his being generally more or less drunk every day.” The others had apparently contracted malaria or an ailment they called “putrid dysentery,” probably typhoid fever or cholera. Cook, who had initially admired the Dutch port and the skill of its shipwrights, now damned the “unwholsome air of Batavia which I firmly believe is the death of more Europeans than any other place upon the Globe.”
He wasn’t far wrong. Batavia’s ubiquitous canals, which doubled as sewers and dumping grounds for dead animals, formed stagnant breeding grounds for mosquitoes and disease. Ships arriving from all over the world brought illnesses of their own. Beaglehole estimates that eighteenth-century Batavia had an annual mortality of fifty thousand. When Cook lamented to other visiting captains that the Endeavour had become a “Hospital Ship,” they told him “we had been very lucky and wondered that we had not lost half our people.”
On November 5, a month after the Endeavour’s arrival, the ship’s surgeon died. He was an able man, though medicine of the day could offer little to combat the illnesses afflicting the crew. Eighteenth-century medicine still hewed to the ancient notion of balancing the body’s four “humours”—yellow and black bile, blood, and phlegm—with drastic measures such as bloodletting and purgation to induce vomiting and diarrhea. When Daniel Solander became gravely ill, Banks wrote that a Dutch physician put mustard plasters on his feet and blistering agents on his legs, to draw out bad humors. Banks, so sick he was “scarcely able to crawl,” submitted to bleedings and purges, but had the good fortune to dose himself with quinine-bearing bark. He also retreated with several others to a country house, accompanied by a number of “Slaves,” including female nurses, “hoping that the tenderness of the sex would prevail even here.”
Tupaia, however, grew sicker and asked to be moved to a tent by the water where he could feel the sea breeze. On December 17, his servant, Taiata, announced, “Tyau mate oee,” “My friends, I am dying,” and soon after perished. Tupaia became inconsolable, refused all medicine, “and gave himself up to grief,” Parkinson wrote, “regretting, in the highest degree, that he had left his own country.” He died three days later. One can only imagine what Tupaia, a skilled linguist and keenly intelligent man, might have one day told of his adventures, and contributed to Cook’s later voyages.
With so many of his men sick, Cook could do little to hasten the repairs to his ship and the provisioning needed for the voyage’s next leg, across the Indian Ocean to Cape Town. The Endeavour finally left Batavia on the day after Christmas, carrying the fevers and dysentery, or “bloody flux,” with it. During ten weeks in port, seven men had died and another had deserted—a loss equal to that suffered during the prior twenty-seven months of sailing.
A week out to sea, the dying resumed in earnest. Cook’s and Banks’s journals became little more than obituary pages. The botanist, afflicted with dysentery that caused “the pains of the Damnd almost,” barely wrote at all. On one day, his entire journal entry reads: “Self still Bad: three more of the people died this day.” On another day he managed six words: “One more of the people died.” Followed the next day by “Another died,” and then, “Lost another man.”
The losses included the one-handed cook, John Thompson, the astronomer Charles Green, the naturalist Herman Spöring, and the twenty-five-year-old Sydney Parkinson, who had done almost a thousand drawings. The aged, drunken sailmaker, who had remained miraculously healthy in Batavia, also died. On January 31, four men perished, and in February, a hot and sultry month, sailors died almost daily, including Jonathan Monkhouse, the midshipman who had helped save the ship by fothering its bottom off the Great Barrier Reef.
On February 7, the carpenter, without whose skill the ship might never have left the Endeavour River, dictated his will in the presence of Cook and two other shipmates. “My Body I commit to the Earth or Sea as it shall please God to Order,” the document began. Five days later, Cook wrote in his journal: “At 7 in the AM died of the flux after a long and painfull illness Mr. John Satterly, Carpenter, a man much Esteem’d by me and every Gentleman on board.” It is excruciating to imagine how painful and wretched it was to perish of dysentery, on a ship full of sick men, with the surgeon already gone and only the “seats of ease” for relief.
The survivors, most of whom were ill themselves, had to cope not only with the dying all around them, but also with sailing the undermanned ship. Before long, an anarchic despair took hold among the crew. Cook wrote of punishing the marine drummer with twelve lashes “for getting Drunk, grossly Asaulting the Officer of the Watch and beating some of the Sick.” Another man felt the first stirrings of dysentery and started shrieking, “I have got the Gripes, I have got the Gripes, I shall die, I shall die!” He soon recovered.
However dire Cook’s situation had been off the Barrier Reef, he’d at least been able to bring his nautical expertise to bear on the crisis. Now, he could do little except witness wills and try to keep his ship afloat with a diminished and sickly crew. In one twenty-four-hour period, four men died while a squall battered the ship. “Melancholy proff of the Calamitous Situation we are at present in,” Cook wrote, “having hardly well men enough to tend the Sails and look after the Sick.”
When mountaineering expeditions go bad, surviving climbers often believe that those dying beside them have made mistakes, as if to say, “It won’t happen to me,” or “It’s not my fault.” War correspondents resort to the same defense mechanism. Cook, struggling to make sense of his ship’s epidemic death rate, cast blame on the “extravecancy and intemperance” of some of the deceased. Upon the death of the astronomer Green, on whose skills he had so often relied, Cook wrote that he “lived in such a manner as greatly promoted the disorders he had had long upon him, this brought on the Flux which put a period to his life.”
In his despair, Cook’s tone also became wallowing, as it had off the reef. He obviously feared not only for the health of his crew but also for his own reputation, doubtless regretting the letter he’d sent to the Admiralty from Batavia boasting of his crew’s exceptional health. Reaching Cape Town, having lost twenty-four men since leaving Batavia eleven weeks before, Cook encountered several other ships that had lost even more men, in a shorter time, and observed: “Their sufferings will hardly if atall be mentioned or known in England when on the other hand those of the Endeavour, because the Voyage is uncommon, will very probable be mentioned in every News paper.”
Cape Town proved a much healthier port than Batavia. Only a few men died between there and England, including two valued young officers: the ship’s master, Robert Molyneux, and Lieutenant Zachary Hicks, who had first sighted the east coast of Australia. “He died of a Consumption which he was not free from when we sailed from England,” Cook wrote of Hicks, “so that it may be truly said that he hath been dieing ever sence.” Ultimately, thirty-eight of the Endeavour’s original company of ninety-four failed to make it home (including the deserter, and a man who died as soon as the ship reached England). Eight others who had joined the ship in the course of the voyage also perished.
Still, this was better than many in London had anticipated. In late 1770, a fanciful dispatch appeared in an English gazette claiming that the Endeavour had sunk with all hands. Previous Pacific journeys had generally taken two years, and the Endeavour stayed away for almost three. “Wagers were held that we were lost,” Cook learned from a passing vessel as he approached England. Cook, characteristically, resisted the urge to dramatize. A week later, on July 13, 1771, after more than a thousand days and forty thousand miles at sea, he wrote a one-line entry: “At 3 oClock in the PM Anchor’d in the Downs, & soon after I landed in order to repair to London.” So ends the journal of one of th
e most extraordinary expeditions in history.
The response onshore was rather more ecstatic, though it was Banks rather than Cook who garnered most of the public attention. The dashing young gentleman had lofty connections and an ego to match. Early press reports, based on anonymous letters from “ingenious gentlemen” who sailed on the Endeavour, failed even to mention Cook, dwelling instead on the triumphs of “the immortal Banks” and his assistants, who “have made more curious discoveries in the way of Astronomy, and Natural History, than at any one Time have been presented to the learned World.”
Once in London, Cook busied himself writing dry dispatches to the Admiralty. Banks swanned around town: “frequently waiting on his Majesty,” regaling aristocratic dinner parties with tales of his adventures, and paying £5,000 to extract himself from an engagement, made before the voyage, to a young woman named Harriet Blosset. He also displayed and distributed the many “curiosities” he’d gathered. The kangaroo skin Banks brought from the Endeavour River was inflated and stuffed to serve as a model for a famous oil painting by George Stubbs. The image proved so popular that it was reproduced in engravings and on Staffordshire drinking mugs. But several decades passed before naturalists agreed on how to classify the anomalous creature. One suggestion was that it be named for the Endeavour’s botanist: Yerbua banksii gigantea.
If Cook felt slighted by the hero’s welcome accorded Banks, he left no record of it. Ever deferential and diplomatic toward his social betters, Cook modestly accepted his own share of laurels, including a captain’s commission and an audience with the king (eleven days after Banks’s first visit to the palace). Others aboard the Endeavour enjoyed modest fame, too—even the ship’s goat, which had survived its second circumnavigation. Samuel Johnson composed a bit of Latin doggerel for the animal to wear on its silver collar. The verse translates as “The globe twice encircled, this the Goat, the second to the nurse of Jove, is thus rewarded for her never-failing milk.” The hardy goat was also given the privileges of a naval pensioner at the Greenwich Hospital and retired to a field near London, where she perished a month after Johnson bestowed his poetry on her.
Cook, meanwhile, returned to his home in Mile End, a middle-class neighborhood at London’s eastern edge where he’d moved a few years after marrying Elizabeth Batts in December 1762. On their marriage license, Cook, then thirty-four, is listed as “Mariner and John Doe,” while Elizabeth appears as a “Spinster” of twenty-one. She was the daughter of a pub owner at Execution Dock in Wapping, the waterside district that was the hub of London shipping. Not much is known of the Cooks’ life together—in part because they had so little of it. Cook was almost constantly at sea from the time of their marriage, sailing on surveying trips to Newfoundland four times before setting off on the Endeavour.
During his brief pauses between sails, however, he’d fathered four children by Elizabeth, three of them born while he was at sea. Cook had listed his two young boys, James and Nathaniel, as a servant and a sailor aboard the Endeavour, though they were aged only five and four at the time. This was a sanctioned fiction that earned the boys several years’ time toward taking an officer’s exam, should they one day join the Navy.
The two other children had died while Cook was circling the globe: a four-year-old daughter and a three-week-old son, born a day after the ship’s departure. Upon Cook’s return, Elizabeth quickly became pregnant again and accompanied her husband on a long winter road trip to visit his family and friends in northern England. We know nothing else of Elizabeth during this time, except for a brief mention in a letter Cook wrote to a friend, apologizing that he was unable to visit Hull as planned: “Mrs Cook being but a bad traveler I was prevailed upon to lay that rout aside on account of the reported badness of the roads.” The son Elizabeth was carrying arrived in July 1772, as Cook set off on his second voyage, and died just four months later.
Cook had begun mulling a return trip to the Pacific during the Endeavour’s long sail home and composed an addendum to his journal, which he submitted on his arrival in London. “I hope it will not be taken a Miss if I give as my opinion,” he wrote, “the most feasible Method of making further discoveries in the South Seas.” The fundamental question of the first voyage remained: Was there a southern continent? Cook had narrowed the continent’s parameters (if it existed) and located bases in New Zealand and Tahiti from which to probe the southernmost latitudes. In winter, when it was too cold to search for terra australis, he could explore vast stretches of the Pacific that remained unknown or vaguely charted. “Thus the discoveries in the South Sea would be compleat,” he wrote at the end of his postscript.
This bold scheme found a willing audience at the Admiralty. Within two months of Cook’s landing in London, plans were under way for a return trip along the lines he’d laid out. There would be notable differences from the first voyage. Cook would reach the Pacific by sailing around Africa rather than South America, to take advantage of the westerly winds prevailing in high southern latitudes. He would also have a consort vessel, as defense against the near-stranding he’d endured off the Barrier Reef.
The Admiralty purchased two new colliers from Whitby “for service in remote parts.” (The Endeavour was put out to pasture as a transport ship to the Falklands.) Cook became commander of the lead ship, the Resolution (at 462 tons, a quarter larger than the Endeavour), while a veteran of Samuel Wallis’s Pacific voyage, Tobias Furneaux, took charge of the smaller Adventure. Seventeen men from the Endeavour, including Charles Clerke, promoted to second lieutenant, signed on for the second voyage. So did several urbane and well-connected young men, a testament to Cook’s growing fame. “It would be quite a great feather in a young man’s Cap,” wrote a midshipman, John Elliott, “to go with Captn Cook, and it required much Intrest to get out with him.”
Banks, meanwhile, had begun approaching some of the best scientific minds of the day, including the chemist Joseph Priestley, to accompany him on the Resolution. “O! How glorious to set my heel upon the Pole!” the botanist exclaimed in a letter to a French count. “And turn myself round three hundred and sixty degrees in a second.” Banks also asked the Admiralty to modify the Resolution to accommodate an entourage of seventeen, including six servants and two horn players. Cook at first consented, even ceding Banks the captain’s quarters. But refitting the Resolution to meet Banks’s demands made the ship so “crank,” or prone to capsize, that it flunked a trial sail. “By God I’ll go to Sea in a Grog tub if desir’d,” Charles Clerke wrote to Banks, “but must say, I do think her by far the most unsafe Ship, I ever saw or heard of.”
When the Resolution returned to dock to have the renovations torn out, Banks “swore and stamp’d upon the Warfe, like a Mad Man,” one midshipman wrote, “and instantly order’d his servants, and all his things out of the Ship.” Banks’s appeals to the Admiralty for a larger ship failed, and in a fit of pique he withdrew from the expedition, later taking his party (as well as a French cook) on a consolation voyage to Iceland. The Resolution was made right and readied for its departure.
Left stranded by Banks’s withdrawal was a would-be passenger named Burnett, who had planned to board the Resolution in Madeira. Burnett claimed to be a botanist, one of Banks’s retinue, but left Madeira just before the Resolution’s arrival, apparently having learned that Banks wasn’t on board. Islanders who had met this mysterious person informed Cook that “every part of Mr. Burnetts behavior and every action tended to prove that he was a Woman.” No more was ever heard of Banks’s mistress.
The dispute over the Resolution’s refit temporarily strained the friendship between Banks and Cook, and deprived the captain—and history—of the botanist’s supple intellect and social deftness, which had served Cook so well on his first voyage. Banks’s last-second replacement on the Resolution, a prickly, Prussian-born naturalist named Johann Reinhold Forster, would prove an irritant to Cook and almost everyone else aboard. “He was an incubus,” writes Beaglehole. “Dogmatic, humourless, suspicio
us, pretentious, contentious, censorious, demanding, rheumatic.” On a more positive note, the proto-Marxist views of Forster and his son George, who accompanied him, provide an illuminating counterpoint to the journals of the mercantile English.
Cook also carried new cargo, including a carrot marmalade concocted by a Berliner named Baron von Storsch and believed to have value as an antiscorbutic. But the most significant freight for maritime history was a newfangled timepiece. As Dava Sobel relates in her book Longitude, an inventor named John Harrison had spent four decades perfecting a “clock machine” that promised to keep accurate time at sea, freeing sailors from the painstaking and often faulty astronomical calculations used to determine a ship’s position. But the obstinacy and elitism of the scientific establishment had denied the inventor his due. In Cook, Harrison—like the captain, a Yorkshire-born man of humble background—finally found the fair, fine judge he deserved. Cook’s later endorsement of Harrison’s clocks (four copies of which the Resolution and Adventure carried) proved crucial to the invention’s eventual adoption by the Royal Navy.
On July 13, 1772, a year to the day after Cook’s return from his first voyage, he sailed from Plymouth again, making no more note of the occasion in his journal than to mention the direction of the wind.
Chapter 8
Savage Island:
The Hunt for Red Banana
The Pacific is a strange place.
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Cook spent a year sailing home from the Great Barrier Reef, and another year preparing for his second voyage. It took me a day to travel from Cooktown to Sydney, and by the next I was plotting my onward journey.
The sandstone cottage where I worked had become an ersatz Admiralty office. A standing globe filled one corner, an atlas compressed my desk, antique charts carpeted the floor. The plywood bookshelf sagged beneath almanacs, nautical tomes, and the ballast weight of Beaglehole’s blue-bound edition of Cook’s journals. I hoisted Volume I, Remarkable Occurences on Board His Majestys Bark Endeavour, back onto the shelf, and brought down Volume II, Journal on Board His Majesty’s Bark Resolution. Opening it, I paced from globe to atlas to chart, cross-checking Cook’s coordinates like a pilot scanning instruments on the bridge of a ship.