Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  A guard escorted me across the grass to the towering bronze. The statue made the king appear strikingly Mao-like, with Asiatic eyes, a martial uniform, and a military cap tucked under his arm. I could see why the statue pleased the king. He looked like a wise and imposing commander, an oriental Bismarck.

  Once outside the palace gate, I stripped off my coat and tie and found a shade tree to slump under. I flipped through my notes, trying to make sense of my audience. The king seemed a gentler, more modern figure than I’d expected from the medieval cast of his domain. Also, despite all the trappings, he wasn’t particularly regal. If anything, he appeared miscast for monarchy: a man who would probably have been happier teaching at a war college in the West. He’d answered my questions about affairs of state with detachment, becoming much more animated each time we talked about something other than Tonga.

  Perhaps this explained the neglected state of his kingdom, and also why he’d agreed to see me, an American writing about naval history (or so I’d described myself in my letter to his secretary). I felt a little bad that I’d asked him about other things, rather than spending a pleasant hour chatting about Confederate submarines.

  Later in the week, I went to see one of the few outspoken mavericks in Tonga. Futa Helu ran a high school and university called ’Atenesi (Tongan for Athens), and had modeled its curriculum on Oxford’s. Not that ’Atenesi’s campus bore any resemblance to its English counterpart. A taxi deposited me at the end of a dirt road in what seemed another of Nuku’alofa’s flooded shantytowns. The school’s main building was an ugly concrete edifice with broken windows. Futa Helu kept office at home, a ramshackle wood house with pigs rooting in puddles outside.

  “Welcome to Athens, the capital of critical thought,” he said with a faint smile, showing me into the simple but immaculate interior. Futa was a man of about sixty, with flyaway Einstein hair. He wore a matted Tongan skirt. On Fridays, Futa explained, faculty and students donned traditional garb. On other days they wore Western dress. Classes were conducted in English and emphasized liberal arts.

  “Western Europe had the seed of the Greeks,” he said, “while in Polynesia criticism has never been encouraged. We are trying to change that. There are enough automatons already in Tonga.” Futa clearly wasn’t one of them. “We are what anthropologists call a shame culture. People spend their time polishing their personal and family image, they don’t want to lose face or security. The church and nobility exploit this.”

  Futa had started ’Atenesi in 1966 as an alternative to other schools in Tonga, over 80 percent of which were church run. A school emphasizing Western classics might seem old-fashioned, even reactionary, elsewhere in the Pacific, where the emphasis was on reclaiming indigenous culture and language. Tonga was different. “We don’t have the mentality of former colonial places,” Futa said. “We believe Europeans are clever and rich, but we never had the deep inferiority complex you see in some countries.” He laughed. “If anything, we look down on other people, we’re proud and assertive, which is why many Polynesians hate us.”

  At the same time, Tongans had been spared the deep resentment of the West common in many colonized societies. “So we are open to learn from European sources,” he said. This included Cook. The captain’s journals were a primary source for classes on Tongan history and culture at ’Atenesi. Futa felt that Cook’s journals cast light not only on Tonga’s culture but also on its character. “He wrote that commoners built towers of yams for the chiefs. We still see that today: the size of an offering is a mirror of your heart, how much you value a person. People express loyalty to nobles and the church by giving more than they can afford. Otherwise, they will feel shamed.” This deference was built into the language, too. Futa said there were different ways to ask “How are you?” depending on whether a Tongan was speaking to a commoner, a nobleman, or the king. “All three phrases mean the same thing,” he said, “but it’s a linguistic way of acknowledging class and rank.”

  Cook’s description of island plenty also offered insight into Tonga’s current economic plight. A surgeon aboard the Resolution wrote that islanders led “a very easy and indolent Kind of Life,” a judgment Futa concurred with. “Tonga enjoyed a kind of Stone Age affluence,” he said. “Now we have a cash economy but the old habits remain. Tongans are still laid-back and lazy, they don’t have staying power. So everything becomes run-down, neglected.”

  Futa was an excellent teacher; in an hour, he managed to explain much of what I’d seen in Tonga. I asked if I could sit in on the university class he was about to teach, on political philosophy. “Absolutely!” he said, gathering up a few books. Then he led me to his classroom: a wooden building perched on concrete stilts above a flooded field. Inside, a dozen students sat on benches. There were holes in the floor, and Futa left the doors open to offer some relief from the stifling humidity. Standing at the front, with a dog curled at his feet, Futa began, “I was talking in our last class about Hegel. Today I will cover Marx and dialectical materialism.”

  The lecture that followed resembled many I’d heard in college, except that Futa illustrated each point with reference to Tonga. “Marx believed in the inevitability of class conflict, but in Tonga it hasn’t happened that way. Here, the landed nobility has moved into business, they have become the owners of capital. It is a depressing thought, really. We’d like to see the aristocracy to be weakened, but instead it is strengthening.”

  Futa returned to Marx, to class conflict, but only for a moment. “We have been conditioned to fawn. Parents beat their kids to bow down in the presence of their social superiors. Perhaps market forces will erode these traditional honors and work for a kind of egalitarianism. But only if we think critically, for ourselves.”

  The students took copious notes, asked a few questions, and after an hour they rose to attend the next class. ’Atenesi had no bells. “I urge you to read Das Kapital, it is in the library,” Futa concluded. “Also the Communist Manifesto. Next week we’ll talk about American legal theory.”

  I spoke with Futa for a few more minutes outside the classroom. In the Tongan context, his lecture seemed frankly subversive and I wondered if the authorities took notice. “At the beginning the government was pretty hostile,” he said. “But they’ve learned to live with us. And many people secretly believe this is the only way to move forward, by educating the young like this.”

  I asked him if he thought his efforts would change Tonga. He smiled wearily. “Not in my lifetime, perhaps. But it is a bit of leaven that will work slowly through the flour.” Followed by his dog, Futa hiked up his skirt and headed through the mud to teach his next class.

  The Christian Sabbath in Tonga was so sacrosanct that it began on Saturday. At Nuku’alofa’s central market, men in shirts and ties shouted through loudspeakers, urging people to attend church the next day. Most businesses closed at noon. By Sunday morning, the capital was so quiet you could hear a coconut drop. Movie houses and bars closed for the day, fishing and swimming were prohibited, planes didn’t fly, and any contract signed on the Sabbath was considered void. “I never looked forward to Monday until I came here,” a Fijian doctor told me, settling in for a long day at the hotel snack bar, about the only place in town serving food and drink.

  At ten A.M., bells started pealing and the streets filled with families headed for church. (Most congregations held three services on Sunday.) In hopes of glimpsing the monarch in public, I decided to visit a Methodist church he often attended, a huge concrete edifice near the palace that was big enough to seat several thousand people. Its interior was utterly plain, except for the king’s box: a high-backed chair with a coat-of-arms, a plush red pillow, and a fan perched on the rail.

  The king didn’t show, but I lingered by an open door listening to the choir. Everyone seemed to glow. As people came into the church they made eye contact with me and smiled broadly. I thought back to Futa’s lecture on Marx. Religion might be the opiate of the masses, but in dour Tonga it seemed a welcome d
rug.

  One man paused to chat before going in. He’d just visited America, and we talked for several minutes: about baseball, about fast food, about the weather in California. It was the first small talk I’d made during my entire stay in Tonga—the first idle chat of any kind with a complete stranger. I asked his name.

  “Vaea,” he said.

  “Baron Vaea?” I’d heard this name many times over the past week. In hierarchical Tonga, he ranked very close to the top.

  “Yes, that’s me.” He shook my hand and went inside. I’d just met the only baron in the realm and he seemed a regular, unassuming guy. Not for the first time, I realized that Tonga confused me as much as it had Cook.

  One mystery in particular still lingered. Several times during the week, I’d gone back to the bar where Roger and I had met Macy Cook, the captain’s alleged descendant. We’d failed to find her, much to Roger’s satisfaction. Now it was Sunday, the bar was closed, and my flight to Sydney left the next morning. But there wasn’t much to do, except lie by the hotel pool. So I went in search of Macy’s house, which the barman had said lay somewhere behind the pub. I found her washing clothes in a tub before a shack not much bigger than a chicken coop.

  Macy said her mother hadn’t been able to find the family history she’d mentioned to us. But Macy had an uncle, Albert Cook, who lived on the outskirts of Nuku’alofa. Maybe he could help me. Macy declined my invitation to come along, but gave me vague directions. I hailed one of the few taxis operating on Sunday and spent an hour circling through the rural fringe of Nuku’alofa, the driver pausing every few minutes to ask passersby if they knew where we could find “Albert Cookie.”

  At sunset, when we were about to give up, a man directed us to a field where four women sat on the ground, peeling and bundling long brown leaves for weaving. One of them was Albert Cook’s wife. She said Albert had gone to dig taro for dinner, but she invited us to their home across the road, a modest, four-room structure that housed eight family members. Following her lead, I took off my shoes and sat cross-legged on a black-and-white tapa mat. A few minutes later, Albert appeared at the door carrying a pitchfork. A gray-haired, barefoot man of about sixty, he spoke little English, but the taxi driver interpreted my questions.

  “Captain Cook had a wife in New Zealand,” Albert said. “Their child came here as a whaler and married a Tongan, and their son was my grandfather.” The plot had thickened. Unfortunately, Albert didn’t know any more of it. He recommended I go see his cousin, Tom Cook, who lived in Nuku’alofa. “He speaks much better English than me and is very interested in history.”

  This sounded promising. Except that it was dark out and Albert’s directions were even vaguer than Macy’s had been. It was nine o’clock before the driver finally found Tom Cook’s house, a wooden bungalow just a few blocks from the Dateline. I’d stopped by the hotel to pick up the last of Roger’s liquor supply, a bottle of Australian wine, to bring as a gift. As soon as Tom invited me inside, I sensed the wine was a mistake. The living room was dominated by an enormous, 1950s radio blaring a religious program. “I am a Mormon,” Tom said, when I handed him the bottle.

  A big man with a coronal of white hair, Tom wore a striped business shirt over his Tongan skirt. As Albert had promised, he spoke perfect English, and his face lit up when I said I was interested in Tongan history. Like the king, Tom was particularly intrigued by the Stonehenge-like trilithon I’d visited, and the massive backrest beside it. Tom said a skeleton had been found at the site that was believed to be that of the King-Strikes-the-Knee. “His skeleton measured ten feet two inches, and that was just the bones,” Tom said. “So you see, Tongans are not eating as well as we used to.”

  This was an arresting thought: Tongans could be bigger. “When I was a child,” Tom went on, “we cooked outside in an umu, on hot stones. Now everyone goes to the store and buys fatty mutton flaps or food filled with sugar. People used to die with their own teeth. Not now.” He also believed that the size of the thirteenth-century king explained how the trilithon had been built. “If people were ten feet tall, enough of them together could have lifted the stones.”

  I nodded politely and asked Tom if he’d also studied Captain Cook. His face brightened again and he gave me an excellent summary of Cook’s voyages, with details and exact dates for each of the captain’s visits to Tonga. This was encouraging. So was Tom’s precise knowledge of his own family’s history. Tongans, like Maori, are renowned for being able to recite their genealogy going back thirty or more generations.

  “That is how I know I am related to Captain Cook,” Tom said, working his way back through the generations, very slowly. “Albert Edward Cook, my grandfather, ran away from a prison in New Zealand on April 25, 1863, and stowed away on a ship to Tonga. He’d been put in prison for drunkenness. My grandmother was his fourth wife. They married on May 10, 1911.”

  Tom said he’d used this information to apply for permanent residency in New Zealand. The request had been granted, another encouraging sign. Tom continued back through the generations. His grandfather’s father, George Cook, was one of twelve children born to an English father and a Maori mother. Tom told me about each of George’s siblings, again with precise dates. It had taken us two hours to reach the early nineteenth century.

  “And before that?” I asked.

  “Captain Cook,” Tom said. “He was George’s father.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely. There is a book in New Zealand showing the lines of descent.”

  “So Captain Cook had a Maori wife?”

  “Yes. A princess named Tiraha. As I said, they had twelve children.”

  I studied the tangle of names and dates Tom had given me, and sketched a family tree, with James Cook and Tiraha at the top. “Have I got it right?” I asked, passing the tree to Tom.

  He corrected the spelling of a few names, then scratched out “Captain James Cook” and wrote in “Captain William Cook” instead.

  “Who’s he?”

  “James Cook’s son, William,” Tom said. “He came to New Zealand in 1780 and became a sea captain. He’s the one who married Tiraha.”

  “I see. And what about James Cook? Didn’t he have a Maori wife?”

  “Oh no. He was a very faithful man, we know that from the history. A Christian man, like me. He had six children by his wife, Elizabeth.”

  This was true. Unfortunately, none was named William. Nor had any visited New Zealand. A rare onset of tact forbore me from mentioning this to Tom.

  “It makes me so proud to be related to Captain Cook,” he said. “As Cooks, the sea is in our blood. All my family has been fishermen or boatbuilders. I have a boat in Auckland. And my uncle’s grandson has a degree in fishing and sailed a boat here from Tasmania.” He smiled proudly. “Cook sailed with a hundred men, but that boy sailed alone. So you see, the blood is getting better.”

  It was almost midnight. I thanked Tom for his time, sprinted back to the Dateline, and phoned Roger in Sydney. I told him I’d tracked down Cook’s descendants.

  “You did not.”

  “Did so. A man named Tom Cook told me the whole story, with exact dates. Captain Cook had twelve children by a Maori princess.”

  Roger went uncharacteristically silent. “Oh, God. Give me the bloody details.” Which I did, saving Captain William Cook for last.

  Roger sighed audibly with relief. “For a minute there I thought you’d nailed Cook—a root rat, like me,” he said. “Now we know. Percy slept quietly at night.”

  Chapter 10

  North Yorkshire:

  A Plain, Zealous Man

  We know all about Cook and we know nothing about him.

  —ALISTAIR MACLEAN, CAPTAIN COOK

  The autumn sky lowered so gloomily that it hardly qualified as daylight. After a year in the radiant Pacific, I’d lost the vocabulary to describe this flat an atmosphere.

  “Leaden,” Roger said. “That’s the only word for it.”

  “Pewt
er?”

  “Too poetic. Anyway, pewter’s made of lead.” He switched on the headlights. “You can’t even say it’s ‘pregnant with rain.’ Just leaden. Like the lid of a lead coffin.”

  The scenery had also lost its luster since we’d left the walled city of York an hour before. At first, we’d driven through meadows filled with sheep and piled with turnips for winter forage. We passed Castle Howard, the setting for Brideshead Revisited. A hare sprang from a hedgerow, followed by a fox. I waited for a hunting party to appear, in pinks and blowing trumpets.

  Instead, a short way on, the fall foliage and stone farmsteads and cozy pubs suddenly vanished. We’d reached the North Yorkshire moors, barren except for a veil of heather and bracken. Purple in high summer, the moors now looked coarse and khaki, as drab as the leaden sky. The only landmark for miles was a brutalist military pyramid; Roger said it was Fylindales, an early-warning station for ballistic missiles, erected during the Cold War.

  Oddly, family-filled cars and caravans crowded the narrow road ribboning through the desolate moors. “School break starts today,” Roger explained. “They’re all headed to the coast. For a beach holiday!” He lit a cigarette and eased down the window, admitting a blast of cold, damp air. “It’s great to be home.”

  When Roger had told me a month before that he planned to visit his native Yorkshire, for the first time in ten years, I’d jumped at the chance to tag along. His childhood haunts in and around the coastal town of Whitby lay near the heart of “Cook Country,” where the navigator was born, reared, and initiated as a sailor. Better still, Roger’s homecoming would coincide with Cook’s birthday, October 27, an event marked each year by a week of local festivities. After the strange and ambivalent Cook ceremonies we’d attended in the southern hemisphere, I was curious to see how the captain was honored on his home ground.