Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  There was one problem. The young Cook never lived in the cottage. By the time his parents built it, Cook was a Navy man and had been gone from Ayton for a decade; there’s no evidence he ever spent a single night there. Also, drawings of the original cottage showed that it didn’t much resemble the one taken to Melbourne; in the intervening two centuries, the building had undergone considerable change.

  We walked across the road to the last of the Cook sites in Ayton: All Saints Church, which James attended as a child and where much of his family lay buried. This, at least, was the actual building Cook had known: a low, twelfth-century church with a heavy wooden door and a dark nave, illuminated—barely—by a Norman slit window. The church still had no heat or electric lights.

  As we entered, an old man stepped from the shadows and introduced himself as Jack Greathead, a church guide. He showed us stones etched with eighth-century Celtic symbols, survivals from an Anglo-Saxon church that once stood on the same site. He also pointed at the dark wood pews, apologetically noting, “They’re only from the eighteenth century.”

  “So Cook would have sat in them?” I asked. After our other stops, I was eager to inhabit some bit of authentic Cook space.

  Jack shook his head. “Sorry, no.” He explained that the Cook family would have sat in the back, in a portion of the church that had been torn down in 1880 to expand the graveyard outside. By then, Ayton had become a bustling village, and the church needed more room to bury all the dead. Jack led us to a space in the stonework by the door. “That’s the charnel pit,” he said. The ancient churchyard held so many bodies that gravediggers often struck earlier corpses. “So they’d throw the old bones in this hole,” Jack said, retreating into the dark church.

  Following Jack’s directions, we wandered the crowded, lumpy graveyard until we found the Cook family plot: a single stone topped by a spooky, lightbulb-shaped angel’s head, similar to those adorning old graves in New England. The inscription listed the five Cook children who had died young: Mary, Mary, Jane, William, and John. The recycling of Mary seemed especially poignant; Cook’s mother had a sister named Mary, and it seems likely Grace meant to honor her.

  Studying the dates on this cluttered stone, I calculated that James had been eight when the first of his siblings died. He lost two young sisters a few years later, and both his brothers when he was in his late teens and early twenties. Perhaps this helped explain the seeming coolness with which Cook later recorded the deaths of his shipmates. Well acquainted with death from an early age, he may have learned to armor his emotions. The headstone also spoke to Cook’s hardy constitution. In the Darwinian world to which he was born, only the toughest made it to adulthood.

  Two of his sisters also survived, although we know very little about them. Christiana Cook married a man named Cocker and vanished from the historical record. Margaret wed a fisherman, James Fleck, and moved to Redcar, nine miles from Ayton. One sad glimpse of the Flecks’ connection to Cook survives. On England’s northeast coast in the eighteenth century, smuggling brandy, silk, and other heavily taxed luxuries from the Continent was an extremely common occupation. James Fleck was charged with “running goods” in 1776, and wrote to his famous brother-in-law, claiming he was innocent and asking the captain for help.

  But Cook was straitlaced. He wrote to an attorney about the matter, making it clear that he doubted Fleck’s innocence and adding that he had neither the “time nor inclination” to intercede on his relative’s behalf. No more is known of Fleck’s fate, except that some of his and Margaret’s descendants ended up in Australia. Cook left each of his sisters ten pounds sterling in his will.

  Cook’s mother and father left similarly faint traces on the historical record. Their names are etched on the gravestone in the All Saints churchyard, as “parents of the celebrated circumnavigator.” But the church guide had told us this was a misleading nineteenth-century addition. Grace didn’t lie beneath the stone; indeed, no one knew where in the churchyard she’d been buried. Her husband, who outlived her by fourteen years, moved to Redcar, where his daughter Margaret lived, and was buried near there. He was eighty-five at the time of his death: among eighteenth-century farm laborers, a Methuselah.

  We know that Cook visited his aged father in 1771, between voyages, and that his will provided the old man an annuity of ten guineas. His father never received it; the elder James died just six weeks after his only surviving son, before news arrived in England that the captain had perished in “Owhyhee.” This, at least, seemed a small blessing for a man who had endured so much hardship and family tragedy in the course of his long life.

  I wanted to make one other stop near Ayton: the property outside the village where the Cooks lived and worked when James was a boy. It was still a working farm, a picturesque expanse of sloping pasture overlooked by Roseberry Topping. The land was private, so we leaned against a roadside fence, gazing at the sheep and cattle.

  “Cook insight number three,” Roger said, picking up where we’d left off on the pier in Whitby. “Cook always wrote about the livestock and seeds he left at every island. We think of him as a mariner, but he was a farm boy first, and he never lost that.” I sensed something else. Growing up on a farm, working a plow and herding stock beneath Yorkshire’s inclement skies, he would have developed an instinct for reading the weather, which served him well at sea.

  A short way on, we saw a sign for a trail up Easby Moor, the highest point for miles around; James would probably have scaled it as a youth. Like farm work, climbing moors was excellent training for the future mapmaker. Almost everywhere Cook landed, he hurried up the nearest hill for a good look around.

  Then again, Easby Moor didn’t much resemble the hills that Cook scaled in Tahiti or New Zealand or Australia. Hiking up a steep path through a thinning cover of trees, we emerged on a bald summit swept by a howling wind off the North Sea, ten miles or so to the east. Easby Moor may well have been the spot from which Cook first looked out to sea—or at the “German Ocean,” as the North Sea was then known. We couldn’t see it now: the view was socked in by fog.

  Instead, we studied a towering obelisk perched at the crest. It was the first monument in Britain erected in the navigator’s honor, and easily the most colossal Cook memorial I’d yet seen. Curiously, it was also among the least heralded; I’d never read mention of it in any of my books on Cook. The monument’s lengthy inscription perhaps explained why.

  “Regardless of danger, he [Cook] opened an intercourse with the Friendly Isles and other parts of the Southern Hemisphere,” it read in part. “While the spirit of enterprise, commerce and philanthropy shall animate the sons of Britain, while it shall be deemed the honour of a Christian nation to spread civilization and the blessing of Christian faith among pagan and savage tribes, so long will the name of Captain Cook stand out among the most celebrated and most admired benefactors of the human race.” This Kiplingesque monument had been erected by one “Robert Campion Esquire” of Whitby, in 1827.

  “I think that’s the most unfortunate use of the word ‘intercourse’ I’ve ever seen,” Roger said. “And I’m surprised all those ‘pagan and savage tribes’ haven’t come over here and blown the thing up.” He slouched off to pee in the heather, shouting over his shoulder, “Still, it’s almost refreshing to see something so politically incorrect.”

  In the southern hemisphere, I’d learned to tiptoe around my admiration for Cook and had become used to hearing his name indelibly stained with the disease and dispossession that followed in his wake. In North Yorkshire, there was no such shame attached to his memory. Cook was a hero, plain and simple. Like Roger, I found this a bit liberating.

  But I also felt wearied by the pendulum swing of historical memory. Cook, to me, wasn’t the wicked imperialist that modern-day Maori and others imagined him to be. Nor was he the godlike figure that Robert Campion Esquire extolled, bestowing Christianity, commerce, and civilization on benighted savages. In remembering the man, the world had lost the balance and
nuance I so admired in Cook’s own writing about those he encountered.

  But then, what was he? Everyone had an opinion—except Cook himself. His journals and charts allow us to follow every step and sail he took, down to the minutest degree of latitude. But Cook left us no map to his soul. Very rarely does he tell us why he did what he did, not just in the Pacific but throughout his life.

  Descending Easby Moor, we found a plaque describing the surrounding landscape as “countryside which young James Cook knew and loved.” If he “loved” it, why had he fled rural life as soon as he was able? After joining the Navy in 1755, Cook traveled home to Ayton only once that we know of. Nor did he ever express a sentimental attachment to his childhood terrain, at least not in his journals or surviving letters.

  Even more enigmatic was this: Cook spent most of his career charting new territory and probably named more places than any person in history. Yet there’s no evidence that he ever once called a river, shore, island, or promontory after any of the places he’d known during his childhood. And while he named countless landmarks after Admiralty bureaucrats, second-rate aristocrats, and sailors on his ships, he never gave this honor to any member of his own family.

  As a chill twilight blanketed the moors, we left the Yorkshire countryside behind, as Cook had done, and followed his path to the sea.

  James Cook was about seventeen when he departed Great Ayton for Staithes, a small town on the North Sea coast north of Whitby, thirteen miles from his family’s home. He’d secured work as a shop assistant to William Sanderson, a haberdasher and grocer. This seems, at first glance, an unlikely occupation for a farm boy and future navigator. But at the schoolroom museum, we’d learned that the teaching of arithmetic in Cook’s day was “aimed particularly at preparing pupils for the shop-counter or merchant’s warehouse.” Also, Cook’s later life revealed that he had a gift for mathematics. So it seems probable that his Ayton patron, Thomas Scottowe, recommended the quick-counting lad to William Sanderson, a friend and business associate in Staithes, just a day’s walk away.

  Staithes lay in a seaside crevasse so sheer that Roger and I couldn’t see the small town until we’d plunged down a steep road from the cliff above. The road turned to cobble, slithering between close-packed houses and ending beside a seaside pub called the Cod and Lobster. The pub stood so close to the North Sea surf that a ship’s bowsprit had once pierced its wall. Over beer and crisps, we scanned Beaglehole and other sources for the little that was known about Cook’s time in Staithes.

  During his eight months working at Sanderson’s store, Cook slept under the counter, as was then the custom for shop assistants. Staithes was a small but busy seaport, and Sanderson’s shop faced the water, just a few yards from the Cod and Lobster. According to local lore, the ships coming and going outside the shop’s window entranced the young Cook, as did the tales told to him by visiting mariners. One day, a customer paid for an item with a shilling issued by the South Sea Company. Bewitched by the exotic coin, Cook plucked it from the shop till, putting another shilling in its place. One version of this tale (which made its way into every early biography of Cook) held that Sanderson accused his assistant of stealing the money, and as a result Cook ran off to sea.

  “Calumny,” Roger declared, when I read this aloud. “Locals just made up that story because Cook had the sense to leave. Can you imagine him spending his life as a grocer and haberdasher?”

  Across from the pub we found a small home with a sign labeling it “Captain Cook’s Cottage.” This turned out to be as dubious as “Cook’s Cottage” in Ayton. Long after Cook left Staithes, Sanderson’s seafront shop succumbed to surf and storms. In the early nineteenth century, locals salvaged timbers from the wave-battered relic and erected a new store on the site of this cottage. Slight as this connection was, it remained the only physical remnant of Cook’s time in Staithes.

  It didn’t take us long to tour the rest of town. Penned on three sides by high cliffs called nabs, Staithes was a picturesque tangle of alleys so narrow and precipitous that cottages piled almost on top of one another. Smoke coiled from every chimney. The ambience was cozy but claustrophobic, especially when set against the wide-open sea lapping at Staithes’s feet. It was easy to imagine a restless and ambitious youth gazing out the window of Sanderson’s shop and aching for escape.

  Near the top of the High Street we noticed a gray stone building labeled “Primitive Methodist Chapel 1880,” with a small sign beneath its stained-glass window: “Capt. Cook & Staithes Heritage Centre.” Model boats floated in the window and wicker lobster pots perched by the door. It looked like another Cook tease.

  The museum’s first few rooms, stuffed with bric-a-brac, confirmed this impression. We studied a jumble of seashells, crab pots, old bonnets worn by local fisherwomen, and an intriguing notice for a 1797 fair in Staithes, which included a three-legged race (“maidens running in pairs” with their ankles tied together) and a man-and-wife race (“ye wife to be hugged either on the backe, in arms or by any other device. Husbands with light wives to be put back. No wheelbarrows allowed”). The notice suggested that life in eighteenth-century Yorkshire wasn’t quite so pinched and prudish as I’d supposed.

  “Is there anything in here to do with Cook?” Roger wondered aloud, as he studied a gag toy called “Big Mouth Billy Bass,” which flapped its plastic tail and croaked the song “Take Me to the River.” At the mention of Cook, a man suddenly materialized at Roger’s side. “Oh, aye,” he said. “You haven’t even started yet.”

  Reg Firth was a large man with a gray mustache, gray hair tufted atop his head, prominent front teeth, and blue eyes that darted behind thick glasses. He looked like the March Hare. Reg led us from the warren of Staithes history into the nave of the former church, which now housed a two-story replica of Sanderson’s shop: bay windows, a tiled roof, and candles, brooms, bolts of cloth, and other goods set out front. There was also a counter, fashioned from what had been the church pulpit, modeled on the one Cook slept under. The floor in front of the shop had been cobbled to resemble the street on which the store stood.

  “The only thing wrong is the windows,” Reg said. “They’re four feet high and they should be five, but I was restricted for space.” He wrung his hands, obviously vexed by this minute variance from the original. The window’s wooden shutters also troubled him. “I believe these were salvaged from Sanderson’s shop. But without carbon-dating, I can’t be sure.”

  Reg bounded up a narrow flight of stairs to a vast room crammed from wall to wall, and floor to ceiling, with Cook memorabilia. This part of the onetime church still felt like a place of worship. The exhibits were arranged around the cycles of Cook’s life, beginning with his birth in the mangerlike biggin in Marton and ending with his martyrdom at Hawaii. There were saintlike relics, such as a bottle of black sand from Point Venus, where Cook had trod, and a South Sea shilling “similar to the one Cook exchanged from the till of William Sanderson.” The Word was carefully preserved on shelves filled with bound volumes, many of them ancient and rare. Framed quotes from Cook and his disciples adorned the walls. A few graven images lay mixed among this reverential display: a jigsaw puzzle of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay, a toby jug of his head, a bottle of rum bearing his name.

  After twenty minutes my head spun. There was no place for the eye to rest, and no way to uncover every treasure in less than a week. Reg hovered beside us, like a fussy shopkeeper, making sure each item was returned to its precise position the moment we moved to the next. Occasionally, he’d recommend a particularly valued object to our attention, such as blue bottle shards discovered by an English visitor to a beach in Cooktown. The Victoria and Albert Museum had confirmed that the glass was “free blown” and of eighteenth-century origin, possibly a gin bottle. The man who found the glass had given it to Reg because he liked the museum so much.

  Other items reflected Reg’s own scavenging, some of which broke new ground. Across one table spread William Sanderson’s will, an exten
sive document. “Solicitors write out these wills, and every word has to be paid for,” Reg said, “so of course it’s very long.” The will revealed that Sanderson, depicted in history books as a simple shopkeeper, had actually been a prominent merchant, banker, and landowner who left a considerable estate. “His wife and son ran it all into the ground,” Reg noted, showing us the bankruptcy documents he’d also unearthed and put on display.

  After years of foraging, Reg had amassed a collection so vast that he’d run out of space, cramming the overflow in drawers and beneath tables. “Makes for an exhibition, doesn’t it?” he said, allowing himself an understated smile before bounding down the stairs to greet a new arrival.

  During our hour-long tour, Reg had frequently called out to someone we couldn’t see, working downstairs. “Which drawer are the Tonga stamps in?” he’d yell, or “What year did Sanderson’s son go bankrupt?” A meek female voice answered each time, invariably with a prompt and correct reply. This disembodied person seemed to play Cook’s role, as dutiful shop assistant to the rather imperious Sanderson.

  I went in search of this phantom and found Reg’s wife, Ann, behind the counter of Sanderson’s rebuilt store, which doubled as the museum gift shop. Dark-haired and slight, she was about as easy to draw out as a church mouse. But after twenty minutes of answering my queries with nods and “Oh, ayes,” she mentioned something Reg hadn’t. The couple had sold everything they owned to buy this derelict church fifteen years ago, even living in a trailer park for seven years while they’d turned the chapel into a museum.

  When I asked why, Ann shrugged and said, “It’s what he wanted to do.” She blushed and began fiddling with a display of Cook mugs. When Reg reappeared, I teased out a few more details. He said he’d worked previously as the captain of a fishing boat in Whitby, and served a term as Whitby’s mayor. Then, at the age of forty-nine, he gave it all away to start this museum. “Cost me me boat, me house—everything—and years of hard work building this brick by board,” he said. “Put me money where me mouth is, and me muscle too, didn’t I?” He rubbed his fingers together as if counting coins. “If you haven’t got the brass, you can’t do nowt but what you do yourself.”