Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  Omai, like Banks before him, wasn’t one to travel light. He took as baggage on the Resolution the many gifts he’d been given, including a suit of armor, a barrel organ, a jack-in-the-box, toy soldiers, and pewter dishes. Nor was this the only curious cargo that Cook carried as he set off from Plymouth on July 12, 1776, just under a year since his return from the second voyage. Cook’s newfangled gear included a cork life preserver and “an Apparatus for recovering Drowned persons.” Much more cumbersome was the menagerie he toted: a bull, two cows, and several calves, intended as gifts to the Tahitians from King George, and a peacock and peahen, donated for the same purpose by the Earl of Bessborough. In Cape Town, Cook collected four horses, sheep, and other stock, as added presents. “Nothing is wanting but a few females of our own species to make the Resolution a compleate ark,” Cook wrote. The next year, when he’d unburdened his ship at Tahiti, the captain confessed: “The trouble and vexation that attended the bringing of these Animals thus far is hardly to be conceived.”

  Trouble and vexation, of all sorts, would plague the third voyage from its start. The Resolution, battered by its Antarctic travels on the second voyage, hadn’t been properly refitted in dry dock—in part because the fastidious Cook, believing he was headed for the Greenwich Hospital, didn’t oversee the initial work. The ship began leaking almost as soon as it left Plymouth, and rain poured straight in, soaking the Resolution’s stores and sleeping quarters. Problems with the ship’s caulking, masts, and rigging would delay and divert Cook repeatedly over the next several years.

  The Resolution’s companion ship, the Discovery, was in better shape, except for its captain, Charles Clerke, the good-humored, wench-loving officer who had served Cook so well on his two previous voyages. Shortly before setting off from London, Clerke landed in prison, having agreed to answer for his brother’s unpaid debts. Cook, already behind schedule, sailed off without him. Clerke extracted himself three weeks later—“Huzzah my Boys heave away,” he exulted in a departing letter—and the Discovery caught up with the Resolution at Cape Town. But the thirty-five-year-old Clerke had contracted tuberculosis in prison and would gradually weaken during the course of the long voyage.

  As the ships sailed on from Cape Town to the Pacific, it also became clear that Cook was ill—if not in body, then in spirit. He had turned forty-eight in Cape Town, a ripe age for an eighteenth-century mariner. William Watman, a gunner listed as forty-four years old at the start of the voyage, was termed “an old man” by his shipmates when he died three years later. Cook had been at sea for three decades and already served a full and taxing naval career, as evidenced by the Admiralty’s initial willingness to put him comfortably out to pasture at the Greenwich Hospital.

  All eighteenth-century seafarers endured conditions that today seem insupportable. But even by the standards of that era, Cook labored under exceptional strain. He’d already sailed twice into the unknown, for three years at a stretch, traveling far beyond the range of reliable charts, mail contact, the prospect of passing ships, or the hope of any rescue if he got into trouble. Cook’s status as commander, and his reticence, compounded this stress and isolation. By all accounts, he’d remained a solitary rock amid life-threatening crises: the Barrier Reef, Antarctic icebergs, attacks by islanders, and the diseases that carried off a third of the Endeavour’s crew. It seems fair to say that Cook didn’t have a true day off during the six years he spent at sea commanding his first two Pacific expeditions.

  Nor did he have much time off between voyages. Cook had already plotted a return journey to the Pacific by the time he finished his first, and he spent the intervening months preparing his ships, recruiting crewmen, and reporting on his travels aboard the Endeavour. The year’s interval between his second and third voyages was even more hectic. Having initially planned to go to Greenwich, Cook had to play catch-up, rushing to prepare his ships and men for a departure originally scheduled for April, just eight months after his return.

  Cook also had to fulfill the flattering but time-consuming obligations attending his growing celebrity. He set down the long account of his second voyage, sat for the portrait by Nathaniel Dance, and corresponded with admirers (including a French naval officer, to whom Cook wrote: “A man would never accomplish much in discovery who only stuck to his orders”). He also met other Fellows of the Royal Society at the Mitre tavern on Fleet Street, and dined with luminaries such as James Boswell, who wrote: “It was curious to see Cook, a grave steady man, and his wife, a decent plump Englishwoman, and think that he was preparing to sail round the world.”

  It seems doubtful that Cook found much time in this schedule to sleep in, enjoy his wife and children, or sit quietly by the fire at his home in Mile End. If he had, he might have reconsidered his impulsive decision to set off on a third Pacific voyage just months after returning from his second. Cook’s letters to John Walker suggest another possibility; the captain may have been chronically ill-suited to a desk job and a staid domestic life.

  Cook’s mood showed clear signs of curdling in early 1777, when the Resolution and Discovery reached the Pacific. “We were persecuted with a Wind in our teeth,” he wrote of his slow progress north, in what seems a revealing choice of words. Already behind schedule—the Resolution had left late, and the Discovery later still—Cook reluctantly abandoned his original plan to head north in time for the brief Arctic summer. Instead, he had to wait out the long northern winter by trolling between now familiar islands, and enduring all-too-familiar problems: theft, lecherous and drunken crewmen, warring chiefs, and the endless search for fresh provisions. He also had to deal with the nagging irritation of his poorly fitted ship. At one point, the normally respectful captain railed against the Navy Board in language so angry and accusatory that his superiors deleted it before publication of the voyage’s official version.

  On his two earlier journeys, Cook had generally confronted such challenges with equanimity, and shown a firm but fair hand in dealing with both crewmen and islanders. On his third voyage, he became, at times, an entirely different commander. Off the coast of New Zealand, someone on the Resolution started stealing food. Unable to find the culprit, Cook cut the crew’s rations by a third. When his men complained, he accused them of “very mutinous proceedings.” Such eruptions would become more frequent as the voyage proceeded north. Cook ultimately ordered lashings of forty-four men aboard the Resolution, more than twice the number he’d had flogged during each of his previous voyages.

  As the third voyage proceeded to the island of Moorea, off Tahiti, natives stole a goat, and then another. In earlier such instances, Cook had taken a chief hostage, itself a harsh reprisal. This time, he ordered his men to burn houses and smash canoes. Even his admiring officers were stunned. Later, enraged at another Polynesian thief, Cook ordered his ship’s barber to shave the man’s head and cut off his ears. “I punished him with greater severity than I had ever done any one before,” Cook acknowledged in his journal, though he expressed no regret. Instances of sudden fury toward natives would recur, ultimately at the cost of Cook’s life.

  At other times, the captain’s instability manifested itself not with rage, but inaction. On his leisurely months-long revisit to Tonga, Cook heard frequent reports of a “very fruitful island” called “Fidgee,” only a short sail away. He also learned of “the largest of all the islands” in the region, known as “Hammoah.” Yet Cook failed to set off in search of either Fiji or Samoa—strangely passive behavior for a man whose hunger for new discoveries had once seemed limitless. Even more aberrant were Cook’s occasional navigational lapses. In the Bering Sea, he became so confused by the location of one island that he repeatedly mistook it for a new site, and gave it three different names.

  If the change in Cook’s character seems clear, the causes for it are not. Cook gave no hint of distress in his journal, at least not directly. And his men tended to find excuses for their captain’s erratic behavior, or wrote about it obliquely. One journal keeper, for instance, re
ferred to Cook’s escalating temper tantrums as “heivas,” the foot-stomping Polynesian war dances.

  Cook’s deterioration may have reflected a physical breakdown. The first signs of declining health had surfaced during the second voyage, when Cook suffered from a rheumatic fever and later from the “Billious colick” that confined him to his bunk for a week. Stress seems to have contributed to his stomach trouble. In 1773, after almost wrecking against a reef off Tahiti—and bellowing at his men during the tense escape that followed—Cook went below in the company of Anders Sparrman, the Swedish naturalist. “Although he had from beginning to end of the incident appeared perfectly alert and able,” Sparrman wrote, the captain was now “suffering so greatly from his stomach that he was in a great sweat and could scarcely stand.” Sparrman dosed Cook with brandy, which seems to have given the captain at least temporary relief.

  Sir James Watt, a surgeon-admiral in the British Navy who has made an exhaustive study of health aboard Cook’s ships, believes that the captain’s ailments represent “a classical picture of intestinal obstruction.” Watt suspects the blockage was caused by a roundworm infection. This, in turn, caused a vitamin B deficiency, which produces fatigue, constipation, irritability, depression, and loss of interest and initiative—in other words, chronic, personality-changing symptoms that seem to match those exhibited by Cook.

  Ulcers and a gallbladder infection are other possible culprits. On the third voyage, Cook also complained of sciatica, or what he called “a sort of Rheumatick pain in one side from hip to the foot” (at one point he described Tahitians giving him a bone-cracking massage that provided “immediate relief”). We also know that Cook was treated on the second voyage with opiates, the only effective painkiller in the medicine chests of ships’ surgeons. Given the intensely addictive nature of opiates, and the stomach problems they often produce, it seems conceivable that Cook struggled with drug dependency as well.

  Alternatively, or on top of these problems, Cook may have been simply exhausted, psychologically as well as physically. At times on the third voyage, he showed signs of disillusion with the whole business of exploration, and with the ills his own discoveries had brought to native peoples: disease, greed, thievery, prostitution. “Cook,” the historian Bernard Smith speculates, “increasingly realised that wherever he went he was spreading the curses much more liberally than the benefits of European civilization.”

  Nor did Cook have anyone to lean on or confide in, even if he’d been so inclined. Charles Clerke was sick with consumption and captain of a separate ship. By Cook’s side on the quarterdeck of the Resolution were the stolid American, John Gore, and the young William Bligh, who was already exhibiting the petulance that would land him, a decade later, on a longboat cast adrift from the Bounty.

  There were several sensitive and literary men on the voyage who might have provided Cook with the sort of broadening company that Joseph Banks had offered on the Endeavour. Lieutenant James King, for instance, was a parson’s son, educated at Oxford and in Paris, who corresponded with Edmund Burke. He and others on the third voyage wrote so prolifically that they collated a weekly paper at sea. (Sadly, it is lost to history.) But most of these men were much younger than Cook and far inferior in rank. They no doubt felt intimidated by their captain, a reserved man who was already a celebrity.

  Finally, there was the frustration of the mission itself. As Cook headed north through cold and fog, with no sign of a route to the Atlantic, he came to suspect that the Northwest Passage was a chimera, like the fabled terra australis. Given all these pressures—his illness or fatigue, the exasperating condition of his ship, the hardship and frigid futility of the third voyage—it seems unsurprising that Cook showed signs of falling apart. The real mystery may be how he managed to hold on to his sanity and health as long as he did.

  Chapter 12

  Alaska:

  Outside Men

  This region is the empire of the winds.

  —IOANN VENIAMINOV, A NINETEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIAN PRIEST IN THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS

  After my ride on the replica Endeavour, and several queasy sails with Roger in Tahiti and Australia, I’d hoped to avoid anymore travel by sea. But plotting Cook’s path to the Arctic, I couldn’t see a self-respecting way to avoid the Tustumena, an Alaskan ferry that closely followed the route Cook sailed in the summer of 1778. The state-run ferry traveled along Alaska’s southwestern peninsula and into the Aleutian Islands, which form a twelve-hundred-mile tail arcing toward Kamchatka. The ship’s last stop, a Bering Sea port called Dutch Harbor, lies beside Unalaska Island, the only place in the far north where Cook had prolonged contact with people rather than with walruses.

  Unfortunately, to reach Dutch Harbor, the Tustumena—named, aptly, for a glacier—churned through some of the roughest seas on the planet. When I phoned the ferry office in Alaska for a schedule, I learned that the Tustumena’s most recent voyage, in June, had run into eighty-knot winds and twenty-five-foot waves, forcing the ship to stand off Dutch Harbor for half a day, tossing and pitching until the wind slowed enough for it to land without wrecking the dock.

  “Sounds abysmal,” Roger said, when I asked if we should book tickets for the ferry’s July run. “You’ll puke yourself to death. I wouldn’t miss that for the world.”

  We decided to trim a few days off the weeklong ferry trip by flying from Anchorage to Kodiak Island, the Tustumena’s first stop. At a bed-and-breakfast, I told the owner we’d be checking out the next day to catch the ferry. She burst out laughing.

  “Is it that bad?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t worry,” she said. “The captain’s very seasoned.” Meaning, I guess, we wouldn’t drown. However, her beds were the last we’d see for the rest of the week. The few cabins aboard the ferry, which made the Aleutian run only once a month, from May through October, had been booked long ago. At a store in Kodiak, we bought thin foam mats. I’d also brought a sleeping bag, unlike Roger. “I’m Australian, I’m tough, I’m an idiot,” he said, unfurling his meager pad on the ferry’s cold steel deck, beside a massive smokestack. The hundred-odd passengers who had boarded before us had already staked out the indoor flop space.

  As the ship pulled away from Kodiak, a horn bellowed and the smokestack roared to life. If the cold and swell and midnight summer light didn’t keep us awake, the noise surely would. “At least we’ll be the first ones into the life raft,” Roger said, studying an alarming-looking vessel mounted near the rail. Labeled “Totally Enclosed Lifeboat,” it was a submarinelike pod that deployed by shooting down a ramp and then making a twenty-foot freefall into the sea. Anything less robust wouldn’t have stood a chance in Alaska’s roiling, frigid waters.

  We left the deck to explore the rest of the 296-foot-long Tustumena, a no-frills vessel built in 1964. The only entertainment on offer was a claustrophobic game room with three vertigo-inducing video machines—the last place I wanted to be in heavy seas. The ship’s tiny bar was vacant, except for a man buying a packet of “Motion Ease.” In the adjoining dining room, a lone couple tucked into gravy-choked Salisbury steak. This also seemed the wrong place to settle in for the rough ride ahead.

  In theory, we could stand on the deck and gaze at the magnificent scenery—if the fog ever cleared. I’d packed field glasses, as well as half my library, including an article on motion sickness. Scanning it, I learned that the two worst things to do in rough seas were reading and peering through binoculars. Our fellow passengers didn’t promise much distraction, either. Almost all of them had sacked out by six P.M., exhausted by the trip so far.

  Then, a few hours out of Kodiak, an announcement crackled over the ferry’s PA system. A documentary on Arctic wildlife was about to air in the forward lounge. Eager for diversion, I quickly lost myself in footage of adorable sea otters, whose fur, the narrator said, was the densest of any mammal on earth. Then another announcement came over the loudspeaker. “There is a gale warning for tonight. Please stow your gear carefully and use the h
andrails at all times. There may be some motion.”

  Roger laughed. “‘Some motion.’ In a gale! That’s like when the doctor says, ‘You may feel some discomfort’ as he snaps on a glove and asks you to bend over for a prostate exam.”

  We tottered up to the deck. The ship was already swaying. I climbed into my sleeping bag while Roger slumped on his mat and covered himself with every scrap of clothing he could muster. Then I washed down several Dramamine with a can of tomato juice.

  “You’ll look like you’re bleeding to death when you throw that up,” Roger said, reaching for a rum bottle instead. “I may die out here, but at least I’ll be numb.”

  After sailing across the Pacific, Cook encountered North America at present-day Oregon and coasted north to British Columbia, paralleling the route I’d traveled in the replica Endeavour. He anchored in Nootka Sound, west of today’s Vancouver, to provision his ships and replace a rotted mast on the Resolution. Then, in the spring of 1778, he crawled north toward the 65th Parallel, the latitude at which he’d been instructed by the Admiralty to start searching for inlets and rivers that might lead to a “Northern Passage.” Cook’s ship leaked constantly; his charts were hopeless, and so was the weather: constant rain and mist interspersed with hail, sleet, and snow. “A thick fog and a foul Wind,” Charles Clerke dryly observed, “are rather disagreeable intruders to people engaged in surveying and tracing a Coast.”

  Cook duly named whatever land he glimpsed through the fog, though some of his choices seem to reflect his gloomy view of the coast. He named Cape Suckling for a captain whom Beaglehole describes as “weak” and “unimportant.” Kaye Island honored a toadyish rector who had curried favor with Cook’s family; the island’s name has since been changed to Kayak. Probing what seemed a wide, promising inlet, Cook dubbed it Sandwich Sound, after his Admiralty patron. But when he explored an arm of the passage and discovered that it led nowhere, Cook left a name that echoed his disappointment: Turnagain. A statue of the captain, gazing out at glacial silt, now stands near the site, at the edge of present-day Anchorage.