by Tony Horwitz
For a man so careful with his brass, Reg struck me as having undertaken a midlife makeover more reckless than most. At two pounds sterling per visitor, the museum obviously wasn’t a money-spinner. If anything, the couple seemed to have taken a virtual vow of Poverty to sustain it. Reg offered me use of a creaking copy machine to reproduce documents in the museum, but he switched it off between copies, to save electricity. When Roger asked to use the toilet, Reg showed him to an outside building with a bucket nearby to collect rainwater for flushing.
When I asked why he’d given over his life to Cook, Reg looked a bit puzzled, as if he’d never really posed this question himself. “Maybe it began with the fishing,” he said. “I spent years going out of the same harbor as him, traveling the same water, seeing the same sights.” He’d always taken note of the Cook statue on a cliff above Whitby’s harbor. “I’d go past it twice a day. It was like he was looking after me.”
If so, Cook had cared for Reg well. In twelve years on the water, Reg had never once fallen in—a good thing, given that he couldn’t swim. Nor had he ever broken down or called for help. “I try to do everything right, by meself, and if I can’t, I don’t do it.” He looked around the museum. “If you get hold of something, you have to see it through to the end. Cook was like that, wasn’t he?”
Reg led us to a glass case holding one of his most prized possessions: an eighteenth-century edition of Cook’s third voyage, based on the captain’s journal. Reg opened the volume to an introductory note, drawn from an entry Cook penned on July 7, 1776, as he prepared to set off for the Pacific one last time. Reg asked me to read Cook’s preface aloud.
“‘It is the production of a man, who has not had the advantage of much school education, but who has been constantly at sea from his youth; and though, with the assistance of a few good friends, he has passed through all the stations belonging to a seaman, from an apprentice boy in the coal trade, to a Post Captain in the Royal Navy, he has had no opportunity of cultivating letters. After this account of myself, the Public must not expect from me the elegance of a fine writer, or the plausibility of a professed bookmaker; but will, I hope, consider me as a plain man, zealously exerting himself in the service of his Country, and determined to give the best account he is able of his proceedings.’”
I looked up. Reg’s eyes brimmed. “That’s all Cook,” he said. “Joseph Banks would have said, ‘I’m the greatest,’ but not Cook. He’s humble.”
Roger was wet-eyed, too. “He could have put on airs, but he didn’t,” he said to Reg. “He was what he was, a simple Yorkshireman, to the end of his days.”
Reg nodded. “Most places, they go for aristocracy, or people who seek it. When you go down to London, the museums are all Horatio Nelson. They’ve no time for Cook, who taught himself and didn’t have money to buy into his job.” Reg opened a drawer and produced a sheaf of insurance records for Cook’s house in London. The building was only fifteen feet wide. The household goods Cook insured were just as modest, including plates, apparel, and a timber shed valued at ten pounds. “He wasn’t looking for a grand home or a Lady Hamilton,” Reg said. “He married a publican’s daughter and lived simply. We have to stick up for him, don’t we?”
By now, Reg and Roger looked as if they might start bawling. I felt awkward. Cook’s humility and plainness were admirable qualities, but they didn’t move me to tears. There was obviously a Yorkshire thing going on that I couldn’t understand. Feeling left out, and a bit contrary, I raised the question that had come to me on Easby Moor. If Cook was such a homeboy, why hadn’t he named any place after Marton or Ayton or Staithes—or spared a word in his voluminous journals for his beloved Yorkshire?
“He was working all his life. He died at his work, didn’t he?” Reg said. “No time to write about himself or his boyhood, or even think about it. And he was too humble to name places after his own. Cook wasn’t a vain man. Not like Banks, who took all the glory when he came home.”
This seemed accurate. I’d been struck in Yorkshire by the fact that people didn’t draw attention to themselves. Reg, in his gray pants and gray sweater and thick-soled gray shoes, was a case in point. Still, I was curious about why Cook seemed so intent on fleeing home: first the farm, then Staithes, and later the coal trade in Whitby. Reg had a theory about this, too.
“Farming’s like religion, isn’t it?” he said. “You roll it over, the same thing every year. Then he came here and looked at the North Sea, which was like a big road heading out, the M1 of his day. He was thinking, ‘I don’t want to be in a shop all me life.’ So he goes to sea, but it’s a coal ship. That’s a monkey’s job, you’d be black bright from working that coal every day. He wanted more.”
It was an hour past closing time. We’d been in the museum all afternoon. At the door, I asked Reg one last question: Did he ever have the urge to pack up and travel as Cook had?
“No. Haven’t got the brass. It cost Banks ten thousand pounds to go, didn’t it?” He smiled. “But there’s an offer on now to Hawaii that’s cheap, even for a Yorkshireman. Might just go.”
His offhand tone suggested this would never happen. Reg’s attraction to Cook was entirely different from my own. While I was drawn to Cook’s restless adventuring and plunge into the unknown, Reg worshipped the man’s modesty, sense of duty, loyalty to home and country. Maybe it was good that we knew so little of Cook’s inner life. As it was, each of us could fill him up with our own longings and imagination.
On our fourth morning in Yorkshire, waking at a guest house we’d found near Staithes, Roger refused to get out of bed. Or rather, he got out of bed just long enough to devour a crippling repast of porridge, kippers, sausage, and eggs, then got back in. “Bed and breakfast, breakfast and bed,” he said. “I feel a terrible ennui.”
I flung open the curtains in a feeble attempt at reveille. The sky was gray and drizzly, as it had been every day. “Still leaden,” Roger said. “Like my stomach. All the forces of the universe are focused on my gut.” He burped. “I’m not homesick anymore. Can we pack up and go now? Head to the Costa del Sol for a week? Cook probably sailed near there.”
I flipped open a pamphlet on the Cook birthday festival, and read the list of events still on offer. Happy hour at a brewery offering “Captain Cook Ale.” Reenactors of eighteenth-century marine life, “drinking grog and cooking leftover rations.” A shanty festival and other “fun for the kids.”
Roger groaned. “I loathe the word ‘fun.’ It always means you’re not going to have any. English code for ‘utter misery.’” With that, he rolled over and soon began to snore.
I sprawled on my bed with a pile of books and read about the next stage of Cook’s life. When he left Sanderson’s shop in Staithes for the Whitby docks in 1746, he was about to turn eighteen, in those days a late age at which to begin life at sea. But Cook, once again, found a fine patron: John Walker, a Quaker shipowner and coal merchant who took James on as a three-year apprentice, perhaps because he knew Cook’s earlier benefactors. Quakers, renowned for their thrift, integrity, and work ethic, prospered as shipowners the world over, as readers of Moby-Dick will recall.
Cook’s stay in Whitby is much better documented than his earlier life, thanks in large part to a fortuitously timed act of Parliament. A new law, enacted just a year before Cook’s arrival in Whitby, required that merchant seamen pay sixpence a month to support a fund for disabled sailors and the families of those who died at sea. To collect the levy, the government made copies of muster rolls from every merchant ship, including details of mariners’ position and age, and the date and port of their entry and discharge.
From these records, it appears that Cook sailed for the first time as a “servant” aboard a coal ship called Freelove. The ship’s name was richly ironic, given the terms of indenture common in that day. Apprentices agreed not to “haunt taverns or playhouses, play at dice, cards or bowls or other unlawful games, commit fornication or contract matrimony.” In exchange, the master agreed to teac
h apprentices “the trade, mystery and occupation of the mariner,” and to provide them with “Meat and Drink, washing and Lodging.”
John Walker’s ships traveled north from Whitby to load coal near Newcastle, then carried the cargo south to London. Cook also served on ships bringing timber from the Baltic and transporting troops to Ireland. But for nine years, as he worked his way up the ranks, Cook mostly performed the dirty, heavy business of toting coal, in waters and along coasts that are among the most storm-lashed and treacherous in Europe. Also, the mid-eighteenth century witnessed a climatic chill known as the Little Ice Age, when rivers and ports froze. It was easy to see why the coal trade was regarded in Britain as the “nursery of seamen,” one that taught young men to handle tricky channels, shoals, currents, and tides—all skills that would serve Cook well in later years.
When Roger finally stirred from his kipper-induced slumber, we returned to Whitby. Since our earlier visit, the wind had slowed to mere storm strength, allowing us to lift our heads and take in the town’s theatrical profile. Whitby spread across steep hills on either side of the Esk. The buildings, roofed with rust-colored pantiles modeled on a Dutch design, cascaded in pastel waves down to the river. This made Whitby appear, at first glance, more continental than English. The spooky ruin of a seventh-century abbey perched on a crag looming over the town. Sacked by Vikings, rebuilt by one of William the Conqueror’s knights, and dissolved by Henry VIII, the abbey and its graveyard also feature in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Crossing the iron swing bridge that spans the Esk, we turned down Grape Lane, a cobbled thoroughfare so dark and narrow that it was originally known as “Grope.” At the end of the lane stood a handsome redbrick building with a plaque by the door: “James Cook Lodged Here.” This was the former home of Cook’s employer, John Walker, and now a museum furnished as it had been in the eighteenth century.
The family rooms appeared modest and utilitarian, befitting a Quaker household, with bare walls and straight-backed cane chairs that looked about as comfortable as pews. Even the house’s single looking glass wasn’t there for vanity; mirrors reflected and thus amplified candlelight. The apprentices’ quarters, in the attic, were about as airy as the mess deck of a coal ship. Sixteen young men crowded into a single, slope-roofed room, stringing hammocks between oak rafters made from ships’ timbers.
In a corner of the attic, a wax manikin of the teenage Cook sat before a desk spread with trigonometric drawings. The Walkers’ housekeeper, Mary Prowd, took a liking to the serious-minded James and made sure he had candles to study by at night, she later said, “whilst the other apprentices were engaged in idle talk or trifle amusements.” When Cook returned to Whitby after his first Pacific voyage, the Walkers instructed Mary Prowd to treat the now famous man with due deference and reserve. But the housekeeper couldn’t contain herself. At the sight of Cook, she embraced the former apprentice, exclaiming, with un-Quaker exuberance, “Oh honey James! How glad I is to see thee!” This anecdote was about as warm and fuzzy as Cook’s story ever got.
Even without the wax effigy, it was easy to visualize the young apprentice pacing the attic’s creaky floorboards, or gazing out a small back window at the river, so close that he could almost have stepped through the glass and straight onto one of Walker’s ships. The house’s austerity and gloom—some casements had been bricked in to avoid an eighteenth-century tax on windows—also threw into bold relief the museum’s small display of exotica from Cook’s voyages: a watercolor of Krakatoa, a drawing of bare-breasted Pacific islanders, a fly whisk from Tonga, tattooing needles from Tahiti. In this plain Quaker dwelling, they looked like artifacts from another planet.
We picked up a bunch of booklets about Whitby and Cook in the museum shop and headed for a nearby tearoom. By my second scone, the time-travel reverie I’d enjoyed in the Walkers’ attic had been badly punctured. It turned out there wasn’t hard evidence that Cook had ever lodged in the house. I consulted my bible—Beaglehole’s biography—and found a footnote I’d previously missed. “Walker’s house and its attic in Grape Lane are popularly regarded as the premises where Cook lived and slept,” the historian wrote, “but the dates make this impossible.” John Walker didn’t occupy the house until 1752, after Cook’s apprenticeship had finished. Before then, the Walkers lived in a house on the other side of the Esk that had since been torn down.
Our entire tour of “Cook Country” seemed doomed to this vexing pattern. In a landscape filled with centuries-old structures, some dating back a millennium, almost every building space associated with Cook had vanished: the biggin in Marton, the Ayton schoolhouse, the section of the church he’d sat in as a child, the Staithes store, and now the Walkers’ one-time home in Whitby. “Funny, isn’t it,” Roger said, finishing off my scone, “that a man who traveled everywhere left so few footprints.”
In a way, this seemed fitting. While every town and village associated with Cook wanted to claim him as a native son, Cook didn’t truly belong to any of them. He was a wanderer for most of his life: a rebel against the rootedness and narrow horizons of his Yorkshire childhood. His real home, if he had one, was the sea.
However, one of the books we’d picked up at the Walker house hinted at a powerful local influence on Cook that I hadn’t considered before. Titled, simply, The Life of Captain Cook, it was a slim volume written by a couple named Tom and Cordelia Stamp, who came at Cook from a very different perspective than other authors: as Whitby dwellers, as lifelong Quakers, and, in Cordelia’s case, as a woman. I was especially struck by the book’s list of “Quaker Advices” current in northern England during Cook’s youth, which stated in part:
“Keep to that which is modest, decent, plain and useful…. Be prudent in all manner of behaviour, both in public and private; avoiding all intemperance in eating and drinking…. Walk wisely and circumspectly towards all men, in a peaceable spirit…. Let our moderation and prudence, as well as truth and justice, appear to all men, and in all things, in trading and commerce, in speech and communication.”
To me, this read like a blueprint of Cook’s adult character. The Stamps also pointed out that Cook lived with the Walkers at a very impressionable age, in his late teens and early twenties, and may have attended Quaker meeting with the family. On the walls of the Grape Lane house, we’d seen several letters Cook wrote to John Walker between Pacific voyages. While the letters were mostly reports on his Pacific travels, they also gave glimpses of the navigator’s ambition and anxiety, and included rare mention in Cook’s writing of “Providence.” The fact that Cook wrote the letters at all, to a man whose employ he’d left twenty years before, suggested that the farm boy had formed a close bond with his Quaker mentor.
I found the Stamps listed in the local phone book. Cordelia answered my call. “Oh yes, please!” she replied, when I asked if we could stop by. “My husband’s dead, but I’m still here. I’ve broken my leg and can’t do anything. I’d love someone to talk to!” Whitby Quakers, it seemed, weren’t quite so reserved as in Cook’s day.
Cordelia’s house, however, was appropriately plain: a modest brick cottage on the edge of Whitby. Cordelia also seemed without pretense, a woman of seventy-eight wearing a wool cap, loose blouse, long skirt, and one sensible shoe. A cast covered her other leg. She sat by an ancient electric heater, surrounded by the clutter of the small publishing company she ran from her house. The only decorations were a portrait of Cook and a photograph of a deceased dog named Buttercup. The pet’s replacement, a Jack Russell terrier, tugged at Cordelia’s shoelace as I asked her to expand on the book’s thesis that Cook’s character bore many “marks of the true Quaker.”
“You see it first in his quietism,” she said. “Quakers are quiet people, though you wouldn’t know it listening to me. When you read the journals of Cook’s men, they almost never quote him directly. He didn’t waste words. When he talked, it was to get something done.”
She reached for a pile of bubble wrap and gave it to the dog, which began e
cstatically popping. “Then there’s his modesty and plainness,” Cordelia went on. “That’s very Quaker. I don’t wear a wedding ring, even though I was married forever. Quakers back then carried this to extremes. Men’s jackets had no collars. Cook wasn’t an extremist, but he was a no-frills fellow. Also, he had no room for religious ritual, at least not external ritual. He couldn’t bear reverends on his ships and he almost never referred to the Deity in his writing. Belief is within oneself.”
I’d been struck by this, too. Cook often used the word “superstition” when referring to Pacific beliefs, and implied that he felt the same way about Western religion. I’d put this down to Cook’s Enlightenment faith in scientific inquiry. Closely related to this was a quality that, being a journalist, I much admired: Cook’s clear-eyed objectivity and “just the facts, ma’am” style. To Cordelia, this also bespoke Quaker influence. “I went to a Quaker school in Great Ayton,” she said. “Its motto was ‘Magna est veritas’—‘The truth is great.’ I’m a believer in that, and so was Cook.”
I’d attended a Quaker school, too, for eight years, though I’d fidgeted during the required weekly meeting and the moments of silence before each class. I also disliked the fact that we couldn’t skip school on military holidays, a recollection that raised another question about Cook. He wasn’t, strictly speaking, a pacifist.
Cordelia disagreed. “He fired guns, but only as a last resort,” she said. “And whenever he did, he expressed regret over it.” She herself had served in the Signal Corps during World War II, scrubbing floors and operating telephones. “Quakers are peaceful, but they’re not barmy. You do what you have to do.”