Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  I also hoped to get a better fix on Cook’s character. Whenever I’d tried to conjure him on the beach in Tahiti, or Tonga, or New Zealand, his presence had seemed fleeting and faint. Cook visited all these places, but he wasn’t of them. Yorkshire was different; it had been Cook’s home for twenty-six of his fifty years. I could tread the same ground he had as a child, linger in his homes and churches, and perhaps gather a few clues to his personality that had so far eluded me.

  I’d also have a chance to see Roger in his native surroundings—though in his case, the “inner man” wasn’t quite so inscrutable. “Just so you know,” he warned, as we wound down toward the sea, past Sneaton Thorpe and Ugglebarnby, “the crumpet here is appalling. Percy doesn’t just sleep quietly in Yorkshire. He’s deceased.”

  Nostalgia breeds strange rituals. Roger’s dictated that our first stop in Whitby should be the same as during his childhood visits: at a building marked “Public Conveniences,” where we paid fifteen pence to use the urinal. “Whitby’s famous for its clean lavatories,” Roger said proudly. From there we walked to a small take-away restaurant, or “caf,” so Roger could revel in his native cuisine. As we stood in line, listening to the strongly accented chat, I felt as though I needed subtitles.

  “Cheese and tom in a bap.”

  “There you go, loov.”

  “Mug of Oxo and a chip buttie, ta.”

  “Tom” was tomato, “bap” a roll, Oxo a brand of beef bouillon. “Chip buttie” was a heavily buttered bap stuffed with french fries. Roger ordered a cold pork pie and “scratchings,” local slang for crackling. “Ahh, the taste and smell of fried pig fat,” he sighed, gobbling the greasy snack. I dreaded to think what ritual came next.

  “We have to walk to the end of the pier and gaze out to sea,” Roger said.

  “You sure? That sounds too normal and nice.”

  “Not in Whitby it’s not.”

  We descended a steep street to the River Esk, which ran through the middle of Whitby. (“‘Esk. North Sea feeder,’” my wife, Geraldine, had told me. “Very popular in crosswords.”) As soon as we stepped from the shelter of a riverside building, the wind hit me so hard that I thought Roger had clapped my back. Vacationing families, clad in hooded anoraks, stumbled around us like drunks. A girl, weepy from the wind, or from fright, clutched her father with one hand and a stick of cotton candy with the other. The pink floss flew from the stick like seeds from a dandelion.

  Hunched over almost double, we struggled as far as a wind-chewed sandstone lighthouse. “You go ahead without me!” I shouted, feeling like a climber at Hillary’s Step on Everest. Roger persevered to the end of the pier, clutching lampposts bent by the wind and crashing surf. Herring boats bobbed in the North Sea whitecaps, the waves washing over their sides. Roger returned, red-faced and runny-nosed, and slumped beside me in the lee of the lighthouse.

  “Cook’s first sail was in that,” he yelled, nodding at the mountainous waves. “No wonder he was never fazed at sea, even off Antarctica.” Then Roger pointed at children frolicking beneath a cliff at the water’s edge, their pants rolled above their knees as they raced the frigid surf. “Cook insight number two. Yorkshire makes for tough people. Farming the moors is tough. The fishermen are very tough. Even the kids are tough. It makes sense that Cook started here.”

  Cook hadn’t started exactly here; he was in his late teens by the time he reached Whitby. I wanted, as much as possible, to retrace his early life in chronological order. So after warming ourselves over a mug of Oxo, Roger and I left the rest of Whitby for later, and drove toward Cook’s birthplace. The village of Marton lay only twenty-five miles away, over the Cleveland Hills west of Whitby. But getting there required some navigation. One of our maps didn’t show Marton at all. The other marked it in microscopic print that was almost obscured by a highway cloverleaf and large block letters: MIDDLESBROUGH.

  Middlesbrough was a map-eating sprawl that hadn’t existed in Cook’s day. The city arose during the Industrial Revolution, becoming one of the largest iron and steel centers in the world, and gradually smelting the once rural villages around it. Middlesbrough, in turn, belonged to an industrial expanse called Teesside, after the River Tees, the banks of which teemed with refineries, a nuclear power station, blast furnaces, and chemical plants.

  Approaching from the coast, we saw steam and smoke billowing above the green Cleveland Hills before we could see actual industry. It was eerie, like driving toward a distant battlefield. Then, cresting a sheep-studded rise, we descended into a plain of smokestacks, stump-like cooling towers, cranes, and high-rise public housing. The sky, mingling noxious fumes with the natural gloom, was now truly leaden. Teesside harbored three of the ten most toxic factories in Britain; asthma and cancer rates were four times the national average, and a smog alert shortly before our visit had forced residents with respiratory problems to stay indoors.

  Lost in a maze of roundabouts, we finally spotted a sign adorned with a sailing ship, pointing the way to Cook’s birthplace. This led us to a park sealed off from its congested surroundings by a perimeter of trees. As we got out of the car, gulping the relatively fresh air, I reflected on one of Cook’s minor legacies. Here, as at Gisborne and Botany Bay, memory of the navigator provided an excuse for a green and tranquil refuge, however small.

  Musket fire crackled from inside the park. Cook’s weeklong birthday party was already under way. Hiking toward the noise, we met a periwigged man with a painted-on mustache and asked him what was going on. “Plains of Abraham,” he replied, pointing at a five-foot-high wall of plywood, topped with castlelike crenellations. “That’s Quebec City.” He rushed off to join the fray.

  In 1759, as a young officer, Cook charted and buoyed the St. Lawrence River, helping British forces land troops near Quebec and defeat their French and Indian foes on the Plains of Abraham. I didn’t know many details from this period of Cook’s career. Unfortunately, I wasn’t about to learn much more.

  “Bloody Frogs!” shouted a Highlander in a kilt, his legs blue from the cold as he charged the walls of “Quebec.” Our mustachioed friend popped up from behind the plywood fortress and shouted back, “Cochons d’Angleterre!” English pigs! A few “Indians” burst from the woods, wielding wood tomahawks. After some clumsy wrestling with the British, the Indians held aloft mock scalps and whooped at the small crowd that had gathered to watch.

  “This is almost as lamentable as Cooktown,” Roger said, “and without a drop of grog in sight.” We spotted a commander in a tricorn and tight naval uniform that resembled Cook’s. “Do you notice how breeches always draw attention to the gonads?” Roger observed, as we walked over to meet him. “It’s hard to look these people in the face.”

  The officer turned out to be Ian Stubbs, a curator at the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum, which lay at the center of the park. “I’m about six inches too short to play Cook,” he confessed, pronouncing the captain’s name with a strong Yorkshire accent, as “Koook.” It dawned on me that this was probably how Cook said his name. This might explain why Tahitians, who had no hard “C” or “K” sound in their vocabulary, and ended all words in vowels, had rendered his name as “Toote” or “Tute.”

  When the battle ended, Ian invited us to join a tour of the park, beginning at Cook’s birth site, in what was now a soggy field. Cook’s father, James, was born in Scotland, the son of a tailor, and had migrated across the border to northern England, where he married Grace Pace. Their mud-and-thatch biggin in Marton had been torn down in 1786, to make room for a stable yard behind a newly built mansion. But the owner of the estate marked the outline of the Cooks’ cottage with a quadrangle of flint. Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, a prosperous German-born ironmaster named Henry Bolckow bought the estate. In his eagerness to anglicize, Bolckow built a grand hall and erected a plinth topped by a pink granite urn to mark the site of the cottage.

  Ian said that the name Marton, a settlement first mentioned in the eleventh-century Domesday Book, was pro
bably short for “Marsh Town.” I gazed at the urn and tried to conjure the site as it might have appeared in October 1728. The ground felt spongy, the chill air moist and penetrating. Traffic roared in the distance. An Indian reenactor wandered past in buckskins, gnawing on a candy bar.

  Ian led us through a garden Bolckow had planted with exotic species from lands Cook visited, and across a busy road to St. Cuthbert’s, the twelfth-century church where Cook had been baptized. St. Cuthbert’s was low and dun-colored and ringed by crooked headstones so ancient that the inscriptions had worn away. The interior was even more evocative: cold stone floor, timber ceiling, columns carved with leering griffins. “We think this grave belongs to a Crusader, possibly a Knight Templar,” Ian said, casually peeling away a carpet to expose a rectangle etched with a cross and sword.

  Then he showed us the church register, listing centuries of births, deaths, and marriages. The yellowed page for November 3, 1728, contained the first recorded mention of the Great Navigator: “James ye son of James Cook day labourer baptised.” Fifteen years after Cook’s baptism, news of Joseph Banks’s birth appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine, alongside notices for the arrival of other newborns of exalted parentage. Cook’s merited only the terse entry in St. Cuthbert’s registry, his status etched beside his name, like that of neighboring infants: a bricklayer’s son, a mariner’s daughter.

  Studying the page, I felt the cold draft of eighteenth-century class, and was reminded, yet again, of the extraordinariness of Cook’s rise. It was a feat that still resonated today. As we strolled back to the birthplace park, I asked Ian what had drawn him to Cook. “He had nothing at all to start with, yet through hard work and a few coincidences, he became a great man,” he said. “I guess you could say he gives hope to others.”

  “Oh, aye,” said an old woman walking beside us. “Cook wasn’t to the manor born, was ’e?” She paused, staring at her stout shoes. “But what I like most is his grit and stickability and stubbornness. That’s very Yorkshire.”

  The leaden sky opened up, pelting us with cold rain. This was very Yorkshire, too. We fled inside the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum, which offered a lively and informative tour of Cook’s life and voyages. But it contained little on his boyhood in Marton, for the simple reason that almost no hard information existed, apart from the church registry.

  “Did you feel his presence?” Roger asked, as we hiked through the rain to the car.

  “I felt cold and damp. That’s about it. And you?”

  “No. Nothing. Just an urn. The church made me panicky and depressed, the way I always feel in church.” He slipped in the mud. “I need a drink.”

  Just across from the park stood an ugly brick pub called the Ladle. Inside, the smoke was so thick that we could barely see our way to the bar. Most of the patrons had hand-rolled cigarettes hanging from their lips, like extras in an Andy Capp cartoon. “Good God,” Roger whispered, “the entire tobacco industry of Great Britain is supported out of this single pub.”

  The bar menu listed two items: “turkey curry” and “mince and dumpling.” I opted for the turkey. The substance that appeared some minutes later was a color I’d never seen on a plate, a radioactive yellow-orange. Poking from this vivid curry sauce was a mound of gray and stringy turkey. Roger looked at it in horror. “They wouldn’t even serve that in the Army.”

  We fled, coughing, into the rain, and headed for another Cook site in Middlesbrough: a striking metal sculpture by Claes Oldenburg titled Bottle of Notes. The late-twentieth-century work was a tribute to Cook, with the steel cut into ribbons of script and molded in the shape of a tilted jug. “It’s meant to suggest a message in a bottle,” I said, reading from a tourist brochure, “left on the sand by a receding wave.”

  We studied the steel script to see what the message said. It was indecipherable, except for the sentiment spray-painted onto the sculpture: ALL POLICE ARE DICKS. The rest of downtown Middlesbrough was also dispiriting. On the main shopping street, we passed tanning parlors, heavily pierced youths in enormous black boots, and a newsstand displaying a poster of the day’s local headline: MORE JOBS MISERY.

  Stopping at a coffee shop, I asked the young man behind the counter if locals took pride in their most famous native son.

  “Cook? Learned about him in school. Didn’t learn much.” He paused. “But I admire the man a lot.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He got out of this place, didn’t he? I plan to do the same as soon as I can.”

  In 1736, when Cook was eight, his day-laboring father moved up a notch. He became a “hind,” or overseer, on a farm owned by the lord of the manor in the village of Great Ayton, and moved there with his family. Ayton lay just five miles from Marton, but it felt like a different universe. While the surrounds of Marton had become a William Blake nightmare of “dark Satanic mills,” Ayton represented the poet’s opposing dream, of “England’s green and pleasant land.” We drove through verdant pastures arranged beneath a peak called Roseberry Topping, and entered a village of rose-covered cottages lining a duck-filled stream.

  In the village green stood a statue of Cook as a shoeless and bare-chested lad, a shirt slung over his shoulder. “Must have been a mild day,” Roger quipped, standing in the chill rain. “At least forty degrees.” More realistic was a bas-relief on the wall of an old stone building. It depicted Cook as a teenager, clutching his hat and holding a staff, the trees around him bent by the wind. “In this building,” stated a plaque on another wall of the same structure, “James Cook, the son of a day labourer, attended school.”

  The building now housed the Captain Cook Schoolroom Museum, which offered an excellent précis of education in eighteenth-century England. Public education in the modern sense didn’t yet exist. The gentry generally hired tutors for their children, while middle-class parents sent their offspring to private grammar schools. Children of low status received no formal schooling. Roughly half of Britain’s populace remained illiterate, including, most likely, Cook’s parents.

  But young James was gifted—and lucky. Thomas Scottowe, the lord of the manor who employed Cook’s father, was the first in a long line of Cook’s “social betters” to recognize the future navigator’s potential. Scottowe paid for the boy to attend Ayton’s charity school. This institution was a new phenomenon in Cook’s day, and one that not everyone approved of. “The more a shepherd or ploughman know of the world, the less fitted he’ll be to go through the fatigue and hardship of it with cheerfulness and equanimity,” the writer Bernard Mandeville observed, five years before Cook’s birth.

  The school museum included a reconstruction of Cook’s classroom: hard benches, muddy boots set in one corner, a weekly “Table of Faults” that listed misdemeanors such as lying, swearing, and “playing at church.” Corporal punishment was the norm. As for the education Cook received, it was rudimentary and rote: basically, the three Rs and the catechism.

  A display on penmanship revealed how meager life had been for charity-school youths. “Children had to be taught how to hold a pen because unlike modern children, they had never played or drawn with crayons or pencils.” Also, quill pens made from goose feathers were delicate and easily broken. Ink was manufactured by the teacher in a laborious, twelve-hour process involving galls, gum arabic, and vitriol. “Paper was expensive, and so it was a serious offense for a child to spill ink on, or blot, his copybook.”

  Reading this, I wondered if Cook’s devotion to detail, and his meticulousness as a mapmaker, had their origins here, as he sat terrified that he might spoil a sheet of paper or spill a drop of ink. The exhibit’s concluding statement also gave insight into Cook’s adult writing style. “Accuracy was highly valued, but not originality. There was no such thing as creative writing in the 18th century.”

  Cook attended this school for only three or four years; he was most likely taught by a local weaver who moonlighted as an instructor. During this period, the young boy also worked on the Scottowe farm, several miles out
side the village. From here on, Cook would teach himself. But his brief time in this schoolroom was nonetheless a life-altering break. Without the basic literacy and numeracy he acquired at Ayton’s small school he could never have become so expert at navigation, surveying, and astronomy.

  In the schoolhouse, much more than at Marton, I felt able to conjure the young James: seated in the cold room on a hard bench, hunched over his quill, learning the workmanlike hand in which he would later pen more than a million words in his ships’ logs and journals. But this pleasing apparition evaporated a moment later. On the way out, I noticed a small wall panel that said the school had been torn down in 1785, “due to the increase of Poverty in the growing village.” A poorhouse went up in its place. In other words, the Captain Cook Schoolroom Museum wasn’t Cook’s schoolhouse at all, despite the plaque we’d seen outside. It was a building erected six years after his death, and since refurbished to attract unsuspecting tourists like me.

  Ayton, it turned out, had a history of hyping its Cook-related sites. Near the “schoolroom” stood a monument to “Cook’s Cottage.” This referred to the modest dwelling that Cook’s aging parents built in 1755, on a parcel of “waste ground” in the village. In 1933, the cottage, by then derelict, was put up for auction with an advertisement that read: “Renowned as the home of Captain Cook’s early days.” The Australian state of Victoria bought the house at an inflated price and moved it to Melbourne, even transplanting the ivy that grew on its walls. And so it stands today, a popular tourist attraction and the oldest building in Australia, having been constructed fifteen years before Cook first sighted the Australian continent at what is now the east coast of Victoria.