Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  Even so, I found myself completely fogged in as soon as I embarked on the Resolution’s voyage. Tracking the Endeavour’s route had proved relatively easy. The ship rarely strayed from its westerly course and lingered at only three Pacific ports: French Polynesia, New Zealand, Australia. The path of Cook’s second voyage, by contrast, looped and backtracked across the map like the doodles of a drunken skywriter. Cook explored scores of islands and sailed some seventy thousand miles, almost twice the distance he traveled in the Endeavour. And that was just the Resolution; Cook’s companion vessel, the Adventure, quickly became separated from the Resolution and followed its own tangled trail across the Pacific.

  I glanced at the bookshelf; Cook’s third voyage looked even more daunting. Beaglehole’s edition of that ran to two volumes and 1,650 pages—more than double the length of the Endeavour’s story. On the first voyage, only a handful of men had kept journals; I’d been able to follow the journey mainly through the words of Cook and Banks. On the second and third voyages, the cast of characters was twice as large, and many more men wrote about their travels, conscious that they were making history—and that they could peddle their tales of South Sea adventure.

  At the archives in downtown Sydney, I’d photocopied dozens of these manuscripts, which now formed an unsteady ziggurat in another corner of my office. Beaglehole spent the better part of four decades unearthing and sifting all the writings about Cook and his voyages: smudged letters, badly copied logs, dry dispatches from the Navy Board, diaries penned in German decades after Cook’s travels. The historian died while revising Chapter 19 of his magnum opus on the captain. It was left to Beaglehole junior to complete and publish the old man’s work.

  I doubted my four-year-old son would do the same for me, though a quick calculation revealed that he’d be in college by the time I finished, if I hewed to my original plan: following the second and third voyage as I had the first, island-hopping in Cook’s wake. Several days of reading put an end to this scheme. The problem wasn’t just the immense distances Cook covered; it was also the bleak-sounding places he went. On the second voyage, when not dodging icebergs off Antarctica, Cook busied himself charting uninhabited outposts like Cape Circumcision and Freezeland. One of the old maps on my floor labeled the entire region that Cook sailed through while searching for a southern continent as “Frigida.” Much of the third voyage appeared just as inhospitable; it carried Cook inside the Arctic Circle until frozen sea stopped him between Alaska’s “Icy Cape” and the far northeast coast of Siberia.

  Some people thrill to visions of pack ice and sled dogs. I’m not one of them. It wasn’t just the polar climate that left me cold. I like adventures where I encounter people, not penguins. There seemed little chance of that in Antarctica, unless I hitched a ride on an icebreaker, or traveled to a science station in Frigida. Anyway, it was winter in the southern hemisphere. Even Cook acknowledged that this was “a Season by no means favourable for discoveries” in the southernmost latitudes.

  Stuffing logs in the cottage’s potbelly stove, I turned instead to the territory Cook traversed between his summertime probes of Antarctica. He spent many months repairing and resupplying the Resolution in New Zealand and Tahiti, or struggling to rendezvous with the Adventure, at one point even leaving a bottled message for the ship’s captain, Tobias Furneaux, buried at the foot of a tree on which was carved “Look underneath.” Furneaux found it but was too late to catch up with the Resolution at Cook’s next proposed meeting point.

  Cook also sailed across a vast swath of the South Pacific he hadn’t toured on his first voyage, stretching from Easter Island to the New Hebrides, with dozens of isles and atolls between. Somewhere in this vastness, I decided, lay unknown territory for me to explore. I’d save the cold travel for Cook’s third voyage, which at least brought the captain into contact with Aleuts and offered the added consolation—for me, at least—of ending in Hawaii.

  As for Antarctica and the other places I skipped over, well, I would read everything I could about them. Settling in by the stove, I opened Volume II and rejoined Cook as he left Cape Town in November 1772 and dipped south in search, once again, of terra australis.

  The Resolution’s first southern sweep carried Cook and his men out of sight of land for 117 days. Clad in the thick woollen fabric called fearnought, and warmed by an extra shot of brandy at breakfast, the crew climbed “Rigging and Sails hung with Icikles,” Cook wrote. Snow and sleet fell ceaselessly, men suffered from “froze bit,” and in the fog the Resolution lost contact with the Adventure. Cook also maneuvered between enormous bergs, or “ice islands,” some twice the height of the mainmast. To the naturalist George Forster, “The whole scene looked like the wrecks of a shattered world.”

  With little experience of sailing through ice, and charts that were more hindrance than help, Cook plunged on through the “pinching cold,” becoming the first navigator to cross the Antarctic Circle. Pack ice finally forced him back, just seventy-five miles from the Antarctic continent. The only diversions during these chill four months were Christmas Day, celebrated with drunkenness and boxing, and the periodic amusement provided by penguins. The creatures’ “very Whimsical appearance” put Lieutenant Richard Pickersgill in mind of soldiers on drill: “They Seemd to perform their Evolutions so well that they only wanted the use of Arms to cut a figure on Whimbleton Common.”

  Cook resumed his polar probe during the next southern summer, after wintering in Polynesia. The second approach to Antarctica proved even more wretched than the first. Livestock perished, tropical provisions ran out, and the men—eating little except weevil-ridden biscuits and salt rations—began to show signs of scurvy and depression.

  “Salt Beef & pork, without vegetables for 14 weeks running, would probably cure a Glutton, even in England,” wrote William Wales, the ship’s astronomer. According to George Forster, even the resilient Cook became “pale and lean, entirely lost his appetite, and laboured under a perpetual costiveness [constipation].”

  Undaunted, Cook pushed deep inside the Antarctic Circle, crossing the 71st Parallel before he stalled in pack ice. “We could not,” he realized, “proceed one Inch farther South.” Cook, once again, had narrowly missed his mark. Although he’d probed far enough south to sight land several times, he’d repeatedly done so at the wrong spots. Instead of hitting one of Antarctica’s peninsulas, Cook kept sailing into the continent’s recesses.

  Cook’s breaching of the 71st Parallel nonetheless marked an astonishing moment in the history of exploration. Sailing blind, in a lone wooden ship, Cook had added ten degrees of latitude to the map. Almost fifty years passed before another vessel so much as crossed the Antarctic Circle. In 1821, American sealers finally stepped ashore on one of the continent’s peninsulas—7 degrees north of Cook’s 71st Parallel. Of the Resolution’s path, Beaglehole observes: “No ship in or near that longitude would ever sail so far south again.”

  Yet Cook felt it necessary to apologize for turning back. He carefully described the prospect that lay before him at 71 degrees south: an “immence Ice field” rising to “Ninety Seven Ice Hills or Mountains.” Lest anyone suppose he lacked fortitude, Cook added what would become the most famous line in his journals: “Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go.”

  Three weeks later, Cook collapsed. He doesn’t reveal much about this in his journal, except to note that he was confined to his cot for a week because of a gastric affliction he called “Billious colick.” George Forster makes it clear that the captain’s condition was much graver than Cook suggests. The captain suffered from “violent pains” and “violent vomiting,” Forster wrote. “His life was entirely despaired of.”

  The treatment given Cook—opiates, clysters (suppositories), plasters on his stomach, “purges” and emetics to induce vomiting—probably didn’t help. When Cook finally recovered, his first meal in a week was the only fresh meat on the ship: the Forsters’
dog. “Thus I received nourishment and strength from food which would have made most people in Europe sick,” Cook wrote.

  The captain’s catholic tastes made him desperately ill again, six months later, when he and several others dined on a tropical fish “with a large ugly head” off the coast of New Caledonia. “We were siezed with an extraordinary weakness in all our limbs attended with a numness or Sensation like that caused by exposeing ones hands or feet to a fire after having been pinched much by frost,” Cook later wrote. “Nor could I distinguish between light and heavy bodies, a quart pot full of Water and a feather was the same in my hand.” After “each of us took a Vomet,” he added, the men recovered, though a pig that dined on the fish died. Scholars have since concluded that Cook ate a poisonous toadfish filled with neurotoxins.

  Soon after, as summer approached, Cook embarked on his third “Southern Cruse” in search of terra australis, completing his tour of the Pacific’s highest latitudes and then sailing the entirety of the far south Atlantic. With stores running low, the men consumed sea lions and cubs, “sea bear” (a South Atlantic fur seal), albatross, and penguins, of which even Cook admitted, “I cannot say they are good eating.” This diet also seems to have deranged his crewmen, three of whom were confined in irons after “going into the Galley with drawn knives and threatening to stab the Cook.”

  By the late southern summer of 1775, even the captain had reached the limit of his endurance. “I was now tired of these high Southern Latitudes,” Cook confessed, on a day so foggy that “we could not see a Ships length.” With his provisions so meager that they were “just enough to keep life and Soul together,” Cook finally turned north and headed home, having covered twenty thousand leagues, or three times the circumference of the globe—“a distance I will be bold to say, was never sailed by any Ship in the same space of time before.”

  Cook devoted the final line of his journal to another point of pride: “Been absent from England Three Years and Eighteen Days,” he wrote on July 29, 1775, when the Resolution reached Plymouth, “in which time I lost but four men and one only of them by sickness.” (The ill man had tuberculosis; two others drowned and one suffered a fatal fall down a hatchway.) By contrast, the Adventure, which carried forty fewer men and returned home a year ahead of the Resolution, lost thirteen out of eighty-three crew (including ten killed and eaten by Maori). At one point, a third of Furneaux’s passengers suffered from scurvy. A paper that Cook wrote soon after his return to London, about the measures he took to keep seamen healthy, earned him the Royal Society’s highest prize, the Copley Medal, an honor bestowed in other years on luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.

  While Cook had failed to find the fabled southern continent, his circling of the globe, near its southernmost latitude, demolished forever the fantasy that a land of plenty girdled the bottom of the world. If a southern continent existed, Cook wrote, with his usual acuity, it was “a Country doomed by Nature never once to feel the warmth of the Suns rays, but to lie for ever buried under everlasting snow and ice.”

  Sydney in winter was a joke by comparison, about as rugged as Los Angeles in January. The only thing that made it uncomfortable was that houses were drafty and uninsulated, designed for Australia’s long summers rather than the fleeting cool months. Still, reading Cook’s account of his Antarctic probes was the literary equivalent of chewing on ice cubes. So it came as a relief when I turned to his writings about the Pacific islands he visited between his frigid southern sweeps.

  I’d always wanted to see Easter Island, having marveled as a child at one of its astonishing stone figures in the Smithsonian Museum. But Cook was so sick during his brief stay at Easter Island that he barely went ashore, leaving it to his men to measure “those Colossean Statues” and to wonder how they’d been erected. Cook also made the island sound almost as bleak as the Antarctic seas he’d just departed. “No Nation will ever contend for the honour of the discovery of Easter Island as there is hardly an Island in this sea which affords less refreshments and conveniences.”

  Idly tracing the Resolution’s path westward across the Pacific on an old chart, my finger brushed against a flyspeck labeled “Savage Island.” I checked the index of Cook’s journal. A brief entry from June 1774 explained the atoll’s intriguing name. When the English attempted to land, islanders burst from dense woods “with the ferocity of wild Boars,” Cook wrote, hurling rocks and spears. Cook and his men fired at their attackers, “stout well made men and naked except their Natural parts.” A footnote said that the warriors’ mouths were smeared red, as if with blood. “Seeing no good was to be got of these people,” Cook wrote, he withdrew to the boats, gave the island its unflattering name, and sailed off.

  I consulted my atlas. No mention of Savage Island. Nothing on my globe, either. Beaglehole, as so often, came to my rescue. He identified the island as present-day Niue. An almanac on my shelf described Niue as “the world’s smallest self-governing state.” A country I’d never heard of!

  Then again, a lot of Pacific islets hadn’t crossed my radar before I’d begun tracking Cook’s voyages. I rang Roger on his cell phone. He was on a business trip, peddling books to librarians in Canberra, a much colder city than Sydney. “I’m driving through a bloody snowstorm,” he said.

  “Have you ever heard of Niue?”

  “What?”

  “Knee-ooo,” I repeated, guessing at the pronunciation. “N-I-U-E.”

  “Is that a disease? In Africa? Or is it something I’ve got?”

  “It’s a country. Cook went there. He called it Savage Island. The natives had red teeth.”

  “Is it warm?” Roger asked.

  “Must be. It’s in the middle of the South Pacific.”

  “Let’s go, then. Right now. I’m freezing here.” The line crackled and dropped out.

  The notion of just setting off appealed to me. Following in the Endeavour’s wake had filled me with a certain wistfulness. I’d gone where Cook went, but I couldn’t share his experience. The problem wasn’t simply that I traveled by jet, rather than by wooden ship, to lands that had changed utterly since Cook’s day. It was also that I carried an image of every place I went before I got there. This was the curse of modern travel: it was like reading a book after you’ve already seen the movie adaptation.

  Niue seemed different. All I knew was its name and vague coordinates, plus the few paragraphs I’d scanned in Cook’s journal. I decided to keep it that way. Traveling virtually blind to a land I hadn’t known existed, and whose name I couldn’t even pronounce, seemed as close as I could get to the freshness of discovery I so envied in Cook’s voyages.

  Still, I had to get there. I called a travel agent. She hadn’t heard of Niue, couldn’t even find it in her computer. I rang Qantas, Air New Zealand, Polynesian Airlines. No Niue. But a saleswoman suggested I try Royal Tongan.

  “You mean NEW-ay,” a reservation agent said, correcting my pronunciation. Royal Tongan Airlines flew there once a week, from New Zealand. “But we don’t fly back,” she said.

  “You mean I’m there forever?”

  “Not exactly. If you stay a week, there’s a flight from Niue to Tonga. You can come back from there.”

  That was fine. I wanted to see Tonga, too. Cook spent several months touring Tonga’s many islands and liked the place so much he named it the Friendly Archipelago. Still, a week in Niue sounded like a lot. Given the paucity of flights, there probably wasn’t much to do on the island, perhaps not even a place to stay. I called Roger again to make sure he wanted to blow off his job for a few weeks to see both Tonga and Niue. He was staring out his hotel window at the swimming pool.

  “It looks like an iceberg,” he said, “or an ‘ice island,’ as Cook would call it. Count me in.”

  “What will we do in Niue for a week?”

  “Drink.”

  “What if there’s no booze?”

  “We’ll chew betel nuts. That’s probably what turned their teeth red. Either that or th
ey were cannibals.” He laughed. “Maybe they still are. There’s probably not much food. We’ll be scratching around in the sand and drinking from coconuts.” We made a pact to learn nothing more about Niue, and booked tickets on the next available flight.

  It was oddly relaxing to set off on a trip for which you couldn’t prepare. What do you take to a desert island? Cook carried nails and beads; I packed lots of cash, in several different currencies. During our stopover at the Auckland airport, Roger added bottles of gin, rum, and chardonnay. “That’s a fraction of what Cook carried,” he said defensively. “He had barrels of Madeira, and we’re not taking a drop of that.” Then, at the departure gate, Roger spied a man toting aboard a case of lager. “Oh no, maybe they don’t sell beer in Niue.”

  I was struck by something else: the size of our fellow passengers. Some were so big they could barely squeeze down the aisle of the small jet. The man seated next to me oozed over the armrest and almost into my lap before falling asleep.

  Midway through the flight, a steward handed out customs forms for Niue. The list of prohibited goods included “handguns, flick knives, swordsticks, etc.” Swordsticks? Also banned were “indecent goods,” such as adult videotapes and magazines. Roger groaned. “You can be sure they’ll be mad Christians, every crackpot cult.” Making matters worse, our flight left early on a Monday morning and crossed the international dateline. “So we’ll have to do Sunday all over again,” Roger said. “Our Sunday and their Sunday. Not my favorite day and I get two on the trot.”