by Tony Horwitz
Cordelia clumped out of the room to get more bubble wrap for her dog. While she was gone, I checked the list of “Quaker Advices” in her book, searching for holes in her argument. But rereading them, I felt the same eerie concordance with Cook’s character that I’d noticed before. Quakers couldn’t abide idleness, and nor could Cook, who always kept himself and his crew busy. Even the quality in Cook that least appealed to me, his customary humorlessness, was in the Advices; they warned against “foolish jesting” and “long and frequent conversation on temporal matters” because “there is leaven therein, which, being suffered to prevail, indisposes and benumbs the soul.” Reading this, I realized how often, and usually in vain, I’d searched Cook’s journals for some leaven therein.
Cordelia thumped back in, critiquing her thesis for me. “Of course, as a believer in truth, I have to acknowledge that the qualities I’ve described could reflect his father’s Scottish background, too,” she said. “Scots are dour, quiet, never daft. Or that’s how they were in Cook’s day. Now a lot of them are silly asses.”
Her language reminded me of one Quaker dictate that didn’t fit. What about the admonition to “swear not”? The journals of Cook’s men include a number of references to his temper and profanity. A prissy Swede on the second voyage complained that Cook “stamped about the deck and grew hoarse with shouting” oaths, including repeated “Goddamns.”
Cordelia laughed. “Oh, yes, Cook knew his language, I’m sure he cursed like a true Navy man. But when Quakers say they don’t swear, what they really mean is that they won’t take an oath. We’ll affirm the truth but we won’t swear to it.”
Roger, by this point, was fed up with talk of religion, and he burst in with a question of his own: “If you’d lived in Cook’s day, would you have found him attractive?”
“Oh, yes!” Cordelia cried. “I find the weather-beaten face in his portraits very handsome. And I adore tall men. No use for little chaps.” This pleased Roger, who at six foot three regarded me, five inches shorter, as a virtual dwarf. “What about Mrs. Cook?” he asked. “Do you think she was crumpet?”
“Must have been, or she wouldn’t have caught the attention of a man as observant as Cook,” Cordelia said. “Of course, she may have chosen him. We often do. I think he was too busy to have much of an eye for the ladies. Still, I bet Elizabeth was a bonny lass.”
Unfortunately, the only surviving image of Elizabeth Cook was a portrait painted of her as a very elderly woman. Her oversized bonnet and tight-lipped expression, which suggested she’d lost her teeth, made her looked pinched and severe. Cordelia had sold postcards of the painting at a gift shop she once ran in Whitby. “Gawpers would look at that picture and say, ‘No wonder Cook went to sea. To get away from her!’” Cordelia shook her head. “Well, I used to be younger, too, but I’m not now.”
Cordelia also took a sympathetic view of Elizabeth’s character, a subject most male historians ignored or touched on very lightly. Beaglehole, for instance, wrote little about Elizabeth, except to lament the fact that she destroyed Cook’s letters.
“I love her for that!” Cordelia exclaimed. “Long may she be revered for burning them all! When my husband died, I destroyed all our letters. I hate gawpers. She was his wife, it was her right. It was him and her. Good lass!”
However, this left us with virtually no record of their relationship. Elizabeth once revealed that she was always nervous on stormy nights, thinking of “Mr. Cook,” as she invariably called him. We know nothing of Cook’s longings. But Cordelia thought she sensed them in his journals. “You notice how tender Cook and his men are towards the animals on board, they’re always going on about the goats and dogs and livestock,” she said. “Part of that was practical, of course. But I think it was an expression of how much they missed their women, the presence of someone to care for.”
This put her in mind of her own pet, whom she’d banished to the garage when the bubble wrap gave out. As we got up to go, I asked Cordelia to sign my copy of her book. “It’s a good seller,” she said. “Not because it’s good, mind you, but because it’s cheap. This is Yorkshire, remember. I’m the sole distributor and I keep the price at five pounds.” With that she clumped off to free her dog.
Roger sighed. “Vibrant face, twinkling eyes, enormously good-humored, a real iconoclast. If she wasn’t married to that dog, I could really go for her.”
Although we’d skipped most of the week’s Cook festivities, I was determined to catch the last: a “Captain Cook Commemorative Service” at St. Mary’s Church, beside the ruined abbey in Whitby. It was at St. Mary’s that coal ship apprentices were required to worship when ashore. Perhaps I’d have one last chance in Yorkshire to stand in some space that Cook had actually occupied.
Roger, church-averse as always, begged off and went to visit his mother instead. So on Sunday morning, I hiked up the 199 stone steps leading to the abbey. Bram Stoker, who visited Whitby in 1893 and used it as a model for the seaside town in Dracula, wrote of a black dog leaping from a wrecked ship and bounding up these steps to the churchyard, where it metamorphosed into a vampire. Stoker chose his spot well. The steep steps had wide landings designed for pallbearers to rest. In the clifftop cemetery, where Dracula took refuge in the tomb of a suicide, a sundial bore the eerie inscription “Our Days Pass Like a Shadow.”
St. Mary’s was low and Norman, like so many other churches in Cook Country. But the interior resembled no church I’d ever encountered, except in the pages of Moby-Dick. Like the whaling church that Ishmael visited in New Bedford, St. Mary’s was an extension of the sea, fitted out by maritime carpenters with box pews hewn from ships’ timbers, and recycled masts supporting the gallery. The three-decker pulpit, topped by a preaching box, towered above the pews like a crow’s nest. Above it loomed a ceiling cut with transom windows similar to those in the great room of the Endeavour.
St. Mary’s had no electric lighting, and no heat apart from a single coke stove. Each pew’s distance from this fire reflected its occupants’ place in Whitby’s social hierarchy. When I asked a churchwarden where apprentices would have sat, he pointed me to a drafty alcove that was now unused and curtained off to save heat. “You might want to have a look at the seats,” he said, pulling aside the curtain.
Crouched in the alcove’s chill gloom, I studied the dark pews and found that almost every inch of the wood had been hacked and carved by generations of apprentices. The pews were a Rosetta stone of church boredom: initials and dates (the oldest being 1665), crude etchings of flags and ships, and other cuts too worn to decipher. I searched in vain for the letters “J.C.” or a carving of the Freelove. Still, it wasn’t hard to imagine the young Cook and his shipmates, numb with cold and tedium, discreetly wielding penknives as a preacher droned and the coke stove sputtered in the distance.
When the church bells began pealing, I took my seat in a pew marked “Strangers.” Two nuns joined me in the box. Most of the other pews were filled with men in suits and women in huge hats, though one group in the upper gallery stood out: a small band of Dracula fans, “Goths,” who favored black lace, frock coats, purple hair, and exposed, pierced navels.
Near them sat a local “fishermen’s choir,” which inaugurated the service with a song about herring.
“Our market will not wait for God,
And neither will it wait for men,
It’s get your fish upon the quay,
Then turn and put to sea again.”
A hymn followed as the minister strode down the aisle, followed by the Right Reverend Bishop of Whitby, who wore an enormous, teardrop-shaped miter and carried a crosier as tall as he was. I thought back to Cordelia’s observation about Cook’s dislike of religious pomp, and wondered what he would have made of this ceremony in his honor.
Ten minutes into the service, my nose and feet began to go numb with cold. The pew was so uncomfortably high and straight-backed that each time I tried to relax my posture I almost pitched onto the chill stone floor. Listen
ing to hymns, psalms, lessons, and more herring fishermen’s songs, I gazed dully at a clock and wished I’d brought a penknife to add some graffiti of my own.
The bishop stirred me from my torpor, climbing into the preaching box and reciting the beautiful lines of Psalm 107: “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters,” he called out in a booming voice. “These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.”
Then the bishop launched into a sermon about Cook that seemed to draw a long spiritual bow. Cook, he claimed, “set science and technology in the context of Christian faith.” For the captain, the wonders of discovery and mathematics “spoke to the glory of God.” Cook also had “a deeply held Christian understanding of life.” The bishop concluded by bringing the message home to his listeners. “We of the church in our own age must similarly seek new ways of understanding. The same voyage of discovery is ours.”
The choir sang another tune about fish, and then the congregants filed out of the church for a wreath-laying at the Cook statue topping Whitby’s West Cliff. This was the figure that had so inspired the Staithes museum keeper, Reg Firth. The statue depicted Cook in his resolute navigator mode: legs spread wide, hands clutching the dividers used to measure distance on charts, the captain’s commanding gaze aimed straight out to sea. The base bore two inscriptions: “Circa Orbem” (“Around the Globe”) and “Nil Intentatum Reliquit” (“Nothing Left Unattempted”). It was the most striking monument to Cook I’d yet seen.
The day had turned frigid and threatening, and the wind whipped so hard across the exposed cliff that it carried away most of the prayers and tributes. “A son of this country and nation…” “His quality of courage, humanity, and diligence of service…” “As Nelson said, ‘Only those associated with the sea can appreciate Cook….’”
Whitby’s mayor and other officials laid wreaths at Cook’s feet and stood stiffly at attention. A vicar bowed his head and said, “Let us praise those who have charted new territory that others may safely follow, and may the memory of his life encourage us to greater things in ours.” A cold, hard rain pelted down, but the ceremony continued with a prayer for the queen and a last song from the fishermen’s choir, “Beacon Light.”
I found myself unexpectedly moved, less by the memory of Cook than by the people gathered to honor him. The British were brilliant at this sort of ceremony: sincere, stoic, and understated—nothing like cynical Australians or syrupy Americans. Watching these few dozen faces lashed by freezing rain, their breath clouding as they uttered “God Save the Queen,” I caught a glimpse of the grit and pride that had sustained Cook and his men, and that had once enabled this small, damp country to rule so much of the globe.
“Hold fast to that which is good,” the bishop intoned in a final prayer. Then the crowd dispersed, popping umbrellas and retreating to their cars. I was about to do the same when the rain abruptly halted and a rainbow appeared, arching over Cook’s statue and framing the navigator against the sea and sky. The moment was so unexpected and spectacular that I felt a sudden urge to pay my respects. But the only words that came into my head were “Happy birthday, Captain Koook. Happy two hundred and seventy-two.”
Chapter 11
London:
Shipping Out, Again
I have had a good dinner, for I have had a good Cook.
—JAMES BOSWELL, PUNNING AFTER A MEAL WITH THE CAPTAIN IN 1776
“I regret to say,” a voice intoned over the Tube’s loudspeaker, “there is no service between South Kensington and Embankment, due to a person lying under the train.”
Roger greeted this news by muttering, “Whenever I’m in London I feel like doing the same.” He studied the sallow-faced commuters packed in the stalled train. “Everyone looks stupefied, as though they’ve swallowed a misery tablet.” Newspapers shot up around us like shields, each one bearing a variation on the same headline: “Britain’s Rail System Grinds to a Halt.” “Taking the Train Today? Forget It.” “Disaster Strikes Tube.”
Great Britain, the nation that invented train travel and dispatched Cook around the globe three times, still couldn’t manage to move people into and around its capital city. Our train ride from York had slowed to horse speed near London and taken twice as long as scheduled, owing (a disembodied voice told us) to “wet leaves on the track.” Now, we inched and jolted beneath central London as the gratingly civil voice crackled over the loudspeaker again: “Sorry for the slow progress. Defective train at Aldgate.”
The young Cook had been spared this. He traveled to London by sea, aboard Whitby colliers. Then, in the summer of 1755, he disembarked in East London and joined the Royal Navy. This marked yet another enigmatic departure in Cook’s early career. His Whitby employer and friend, John Walker, had recently offered him command of a coal ship. At the age of only twenty-six, Cook appeared set for a relatively comfortable and secure career as a merchant captain. Instead, he enlisted in the Navy as an able seaman, just one notch up from the bottom of the maritime hierarchy. This job earned Cook a pittance and subjected him to the horrifying cruelties, privations, and dangers of life aboard the lower deck of eighteenth-century Navy ships. On his first vessel, the Eagle, scores of men perished from disease, and almost a quarter of the crew was killed or injured by a broadside from a French ship. British warships of the day set off with twice the number of sailors needed, in expectation of appalling casualties.
In 1755, when Cook enlisted, Britain was on the brink of war with France. He may have volunteered out of patriotism and a sense of duty—or to avoid being press-ganged, a fate that had befallen some of his Whitby shipmates. More likely, given what we know of Cook’s tremendous confidence and ambition, he regarded the Navy as the route to far greater renown than he could ever achieve as a coal ship commander. In the event, Cook didn’t remain a lowly seaman for long. Soon after he volunteered, his talents caught the eye of Hugh Palliser, a fellow Yorkshireman and fast-rising captain who would reach the pinnacle of the naval establishment, and look after Cook each step of the way.
Cook’s skill at managing the men under him is well documented; much less heralded is his talent at managing those above him. From Thomas Scottowe, Ayton’s lord of the manor, to Hugh Palliser, who became a Lord of the Admiralty, Cook showed a knack for attracting powerful patrons and maintaining their loyalty and support. These men were no doubt eager to take such a promising novice under their wing. But Cook, having grown up poor in a deferential and hierarchical society, also seems to have developed an instinct for flattering his superiors and enlisting them in the furtherance of his own aims.
This skill is evident in Cook’s surviving letters, many of which are obsequious in tone. He also stroked his superiors with his choice of place-names. Cook honored Palliser with a bay, cape, and island group, and named one of his sons, Hugh, after his Admiralty benefactor. The captain also named so many Pacific sites for another exalted patron, the Earl of Sandwich, that the Admiralty later changed some of them.
“Sandwich Islands, Sandwich Sound, Sandwich Cape,” Roger read out, as we killed time in the stalled Tube by tallying all the places named for the earl (who is best known for once having asked, while gambling, for a piece of meat between two pieces of bread—thereby bestowing his title on this combination, too). “Cook could at least have included some other foods. Scone Mountain. Pudding Island. Biscuit Hill.” Roger shook his head. “He was the complete employee, the opposite of me.”
Then again, Roger closely identified with Cook’s decision to flee Yorkshire, which Roger had done at precisely the same age. The son of a World War II tank commander, Roger left school at seventeen, volunteered for the Leeds Rifles, his father’s regiment, then went to work in construction. He’d done well at this and repeatedly been offered a top job by his employer. “When I was twenty-six, I had a glittering career ahead of me in the Yorkshire cement industry,” he said. But Roger decided to take off and travel the world instead, and ended up in Australia. “Cement’s like co
al, a grubby unglamorous business. So I threw it all away for adventure. Why wouldn’t Cook have done the same?”
In the end, as with so much of Cook’s life, we could only speculate about his motives. But we could retrace his movements with some precision. Between 1755 and 1768, when Cook took command of the Endeavour, he rose steadily through the ranks, becoming a ship’s master at twenty-eight. During this period, Britain was busily wresting Canada from France; Cook’s principal duty was charting the St. Lawrence River and the coasts of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. He quickly established himself as a brilliant surveyor and chart maker, jobs that combined his nautical, mathematical, and astronomical skills. “Very expert in his business,” one of his superiors observed in a typical dispatch.
It was between voyages to Canada that Cook married Elizabeth Batts in 1762. Nothing is known of their courtship, except that it appears to have been brief: Cook returned to London from a voyage to Canada in mid-November 1762, married Elizabeth on December 21, and went back to sea the following April. This pattern continued for the next five years, with Cook spending only the winters in London between sails to and from Newfoundland (including his 1764 visit to a place called Unfortunate Cove, where, his ship’s log reported, “a Large Powder Horn blown up & Burst in his hand which shatter’d it in a Terrible manner,” leaving a scar that ran up to his wrist). In 1763, Cook bought a lease on a brick house in East London. There his children grew up, and there his wife would remain for twenty-five years.
London was as close to a home as the adult Cook ever had: his domestic base for the latter half of his life, and the place where he readied his ships and plotted his voyages with the Admiralty and Royal Society. It was also in London that the impact of his discoveries was most keenly felt: in science, commerce, and the arts. Cook’s achievements contributed, in no small way, to London’s becoming the headquarters of an empire that would ultimately span eleven thousand miles of the globe and rule over 400 million subjects.