Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  With sunset approaching, we motored on to the site of Biorka, a village abandoned after World War II. All that remained were a few collapsed roofs. While the installation artists positioned microphones by the beach grass and driftwood, Rick pointed to a nearby island, where Russians had slaughtered Aleuts in reprisal for an attack on fur traders. Rick had surveyed the site and found dozens of skeletons, including one with a Russian knife still embedded in its rear.

  “All these ghost villages make you feel sometimes like you’re part of a toxic culture,” Rick said. This was an uneasy sentiment I’d often shared while following Cook’s travels and surveying the damage done in the captain’s wake. When I said so to Rick, he added: “A lot of people want to blame Cook and others like him, because they were the first to get in and start nibbling. The sad truth is that we’re the real locusts. Some of the worst destruction is taking place right now, by us, even though we know the consequences.”

  Aleuts had lived and fished in settlements like Deep Bay for thousands of years. Now, except for a few depressions in the earth, invisible to the untrained eye, nothing remained. Americans from the Lower Forty-eight had occupied Unalaska in large numbers for only the past sixty years. Yet the mark we’d already left on the landscape—gouged hills, pillboxes, rusted cars, rotting crab pots, oil-polluted soil—would probably linger for a millennium.

  It was also very recent contact that had done the most damage to the abundant marine life that sustained the thrifty Aleuts for centuries. As we turned back to Dutch Harbor, a few otters frolicked in our wake, poking their whiskered noses just above the water. We also caught glimpses of porpoises and harbor seals, and passed a sea lion “haul-out,” where a dozen of the blubbery giants sprawled like misshapen tires on the beach.

  “Twenty years ago, you would have seen four times that number,” Rick said. No one was sure what had caused this precipitous decline, but sea lions became caught in fishing nets and other debris, and competed for the same bottom fish that boats hauled out by the ton. With their numbers down by 80 percent since 1970, the sea lion had recently been put on the endangered species list. Several types of otter, seal, and whale had narrowly avoided extinction.

  “The whole history of Western contact in Alaska is extractive,” Rick said. First fur, then whales, then gold, then oil, and now mining of the sea for crab, halibut, and pollock. Once the water was fished out, there wouldn’t be much left, except ice. “And global warming’s taking care of that,” Rick said. The polar icecap was retreating so rapidly that scientists predicted the Northwest Passage would soon be navigable for much of the summer.

  This brought us around to Cook again, and to another of Rick’s notions about the captain’s character. Rick had read that accountants, and others whose work demanded extreme precision and control, often came from chaotic or troubled backgrounds, such as a home with an alcoholic parent. He imagined that Cook’s boyhood might have led him along the same path. “Here’s this child prodigy—almost a Mozart or a chess master—growing up in a crowded hovel filled with animals and death and maybe lots of drinking. He’s got little in common with his peers. Math becomes his refuge.”

  Cook runs away to sea and turns his math skills to surveying and navigation. “Making charts, studying stars, plotting voyages—it’s a way to control his environment,” Rick hypothesized. This monomania proved both a strength and a weakness. It accounted for Cook’s factual exactness and objectivity. But it also contributed to his impatience and periodic tantrums. “He’s like Mr. Spock in Star Trek,” Rick said. “He can’t stand it when others are being imprecise or illogical.” As a commander, accustomed to total control, he also resented any challenge to his authority. Hence the face-off with his crew over walrus in the Arctic, and other incidents that seemed to unhinge him.

  Rick’s theory was intriguing, if not wholly convincing. Cook clearly had an exceptional flair for mathematics, and he often behaved in ways that today would earn him the label “control freak.” If Rick was right in imagining that Cook came from a troubled family, this might also explain his seeming lack of sentiment about the world he’d left behind. But while the captain may have been a loner, he obviously possessed a human touch; without it, he never could have bent both sailors and islanders to his will. He also took risks: calculated risks, but very dangerous ones nonetheless. In mathematical terms, the man was much bigger than the sum of his parts.

  I shared this with Rick as we motored into Dutch Harbor at midnight. He smiled and said, “That’s what’s fun about Cook. You can read almost anything into him you want. It’s like predicting the weather here. Take your pick—sun, rain, wind, storms—and some part of it is sure to fit.”

  As our departure from Unalaska approached, I realized that flying out of the Aleutians was as wretched as ferrying into them. The tiny, mountain-enclosed airport had one of the shortest runways in America, only 3,900 feet long. Departing planes carried half the normal pay-load and positioned passengers toward the back, so aircraft could make a rapid ascent and swerve to avoid slamming into the volcano near the end of the runway. The wreckage of a DC-3 that hadn’t made it remained distressingly visible on the mountain’s face.

  The airport also lacked radar guidance. Fog, storms, and high winds were so frequent that roughly a third of scheduled flights were canceled due to weather: reputedly the highest rate at any airport in the world. Since Unalaskans relied on the daily flights to and from Anchorage for their mail, newspapers, and periodic escape, they made a sport of watching the sky and guessing whether “Alaskaflot” would risk landing. According to the local rule of thumb, if fog reached as low as a World War II bunker that stood midway down a mountain behind the airport, no plane would land. The bunker had remained shrouded for almost the entirety of our week’s stay, and conditions didn’t look much better on the day of our scheduled departure.

  “Have a good trip, guys,” said a woman at the drive-through espresso shack that we visited each morning. “And if you don’t, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Roger groaned. “It’s like Devil’s Island here. You never get off this place.” We drove on to the airport. A sign near the entrance said: “Caution: Road Crosses Runway.” We joined other passengers gazing into the fog for evidence of incoming aircraft. Rain sheeted onto the tarmac. “At least there’s not much wind today,” I said to the man standing next to us.

  “Actually, that’s a problem,” he replied. “If there’s no wind, the plane can’t get enough lift to clear the mountains.” The man worked as the city’s engineer and evidently knew what he was talking about. I asked him about the DC-3 pancaked against the volcano, and another plane that had recently burned after its engines sucked up slush during takeoff. “They were both pilot error,” he said, as though this would be somehow reassuring.

  Half an hour after the plane’s scheduled arrival, we heard a rumble overhead. Seconds later, a small jet materialized out of the fog and bounced down the runway. The other passengers applauded and headed for the gate. Roger popped a Valium. Rick Knecht had told us that takeoffs were often so hair-raising that even local fishermen, who braved death every day in the Bering Sea, became weeping wrecks. Rick referred to these flights as “pukers and screamers.”

  Roger gazed at the still, dismal sky. “Look, even that crow can’t get any lift,” he said, pointing. “I can’t see the volcano, but I bet it’s got my name scrawled across it.” On board the plane, he gazed out the window at a slate-colored wash of rain and fog. The plane roared down the runway and jumped like a jackrabbit, wings barely off the tarmac before the jet banked sharply right, bumping along a carpet of cloud. After a few horrible minutes, the plane reached smooth subarctic air and rode it all the way to Anchorage.

  I opened Cook’s journal and read about his own departure from Unalaska on October 26, 1778, one day shy of his fiftieth birthday. “We put to sea,” he calmly wrote, barely bothering to mention the rain, hail, and snow, which pelted his ships so ferociously that part of the rigging gave way,
killing a seaman and injuring several others. “My intention,” the captain added, was to proceed to the tropics “and spend a few of the Winter Months.” Then he would return to the Arctic to continue searching for a northwest passage.

  A week before, Cook had also completed his report to the Admiralty, which he hoped the Russians would deliver. Despite the captain’s doubts about finding a passage to the Atlantic, he pledged every effort toward “the improvement of Geography and Navigation,” and signed himself, “Your most obedient humble servant.” The letter, dated October 20, 1778, made its way by Russian ship from Unalaska to Kamchatka, and by dogsled and horse-drawn sleigh across the steppes to the British mission in St. Petersburg, finally reaching London on March 6, 1780, more than a year after Cook’s death. It was the last dispatch the captain’s superiors would ever receive from his hand.

  Chapter 13

  Hawaii:

  The Last Island

  Chiefs are sharks that walk on the land.

  —HAWAIIAN PROVERB

  Ten months before leaving Unalaska, on his way north from Polynesia to America, Cook had stumbled on an island cluster unknown to the West. Sprinkled across the watery vastness of the central Pacific, thousands of miles from America or Asia, the isles lay farther from continental land than any archipelago on earth.

  Cook and his men had just sailed six weeks and more than 2,700 miles from Bora-Bora without seeing a soul. Yet the islanders who came out in canoes to greet the English, Cook wrote, were “of the same Nation as the people of Otaheite and the other islands we had lately visited.” His lieutenant, James King, thought the men in the canoes—tawny-skinned, tattooed, and muscular—most closely resembled Maori, who dwelled five thousand miles to the south.

  Cook consulted his charts and calculated that he had now met islanders of similar ethnicity and language sprinkled across a third of the earth’s latitude and longitude. “How shall we account for this Nation spreading it self so far over this Vast Ocean?” he wrote.

  Historians and anthropologists are still trying to answer Cook’s question. Most scholars believe that voyagers in sailing canoes set off from Tahiti between A.D. 100 and A.D. 300, navigating by the stars to what are now the Hawaiian Islands. A millennium or so later, more migrants arrived from the islands of Raiatea and Bora-Bora. Although Spanish ships passed near Hawaii in the sixteenth century, the islanders had remained sealed off from the outside world for centuries, and had never encountered Europeans until Cook and his men arrived one January day in 1778.

  “I never saw Indians so much astonished at the entering [of] a ship before,” Cook wrote, “their eyes were continually flying from object to object.” Offered beads, the natives asked if they were edible. The Hawaiians also marveled at china cups, which seemed to them a wondrous form of wood. In exchange for a single sixpenny nail, they gave the English several pigs. But it was the vessel’s commander that awed islanders most of all.

  “The very instant I leaped ashore, they all fell flat on their faces, and remained in that humble posture till I made signs to them to rise,” Cook wrote. As he walked inland, “attended by a tolerable train,” a guide “proclaimed” his approach, causing natives to prostrate themselves until Cook passed. “In all their conduct, islanders seemed to regard us as superior beings,” Lieutenant James King wrote; their regard for Cook, he added, “seemd to approach to Adoration.”

  The English spent only three days ashore, but they filled their journals with superlatives equal to any they’d composed about Tahiti. Island flowers “sent forth the most fragrant smell I had any where met with,” Cook wrote. He judged island sweet potatoes the largest he’d ever seen, taro root “the best I ever tasted,” and native canoes “shaped and fited with more judgement than any I had before seen.” Best of all were the islanders themselves, “an open, candid, active people” who traded on the most favorable terms of any in the Pacific. “We again found our selves,” Cook wrote, “in the land of plenty.”

  This bounty included island women. They were bare-breasted, wearing short cloth wraps, shell bracelets, and feathered “ruffs,” the crewmen’s phrase for leis. “As fine Girls as any we had seen in the south Sea Islands,” enthused David Samwell, the lustful young Welshman. “They seem to have no more Sense of Modesty than the Otaheite women, who cannot be said to have any.”

  There was only one catch, so to speak. Cook forbade his men from having relations with women, lest they bring “the venereal” to these untouched islands. He dispensed twenty-four lashes to an infected sailor who disobeyed, but this proved an inadequate deterrent. Sailors dressed island women as men to sneak them aboard. One night, a party of twenty crewmen had to stay ashore because the surf was too heavy for boats to pick them up. Island women, one crewman coyly wrote of that evening, “were determined to see wether our people were men or not.”

  Charles Clerke had no better luck enforcing abstinence on the Discovery. “Seamen are in these matters so infernal and dissolute a Crew,” he observed, “that for the gratification of the present passion that affects them they would entail universal destruction upon the whole of the Human Species.”

  Cook was nonetheless delighted by his brief island stay—and by the three months’ worth of provisions he’d acquired at minimal cost. As a mark of his esteem, he gave to the islands his favorite name: Sandwich. It was to this paradisiacal outpost that Cook steered once again after leaving Unalaska, anticipating a pleasant winter’s sojourn that would afford his men all “the necessary refreshments.”

  The Aloha Air jet from Honolulu to the Big Island of Hawaii swooped toward a runway that was hard to pick out from its volcanic surrounds. “It’s one big Pompeii down there,” Roger said, as the plane banked over a bed of black rock. “They could have skipped all the bitumen and just painted lines on the lava.”

  Roger had passed the short flight reading Samwell’s rhapsodies about island women. “‘They absolutely will take no denial,’” he read aloud. “‘They would almost use violence to force you into their Embrace.’ I love that! Maybe even I’ll have a chance here. Can’t wait to land.”

  I was eager to arrive, too. Apart from jet-lagged stopovers at Honolulu airport, en route to and from Australia, I’d never visited the state of Hawaii or the island that gave it its name. Like most Americans, I had a soft-focus image of the place: bronzed surfers, grass-skirted hula dancers, honeymooners sipping rum from coconut shells.

  Not that our trip was shaping up as a romantic getaway. In Honolulu, we’d been joined by Cliff Thornton, the Captain Cook Society president, who had shown us around London’s East End. Much to my surprise, Cliff had accepted our invitation to commemorate the February 14 anniversary of Cook’s death. “I feel a loss that there is nowhere I can go and honor Cook,” he said in a late-night phone call, telling me of his decision to undertake only his second trip abroad, and his first in more than twenty years.

  I was glad to have Cliff along, though we made for an odd three-some. Among other things, I’d learned that he was a teetotaler and former Mormon who had done missionary work in England. He and Roger seemed to enjoy each other, swapping laddish tidbits about British TV serials, rugby and cricket, and Yorkshire jokes told in slang I couldn’t comprehend. But as we crowded into a compact sedan at the airport, I couldn’t help wondering how our crew would hold up over the week ahead.

  We sped between fields of lava from the Kona airport to Kalaoa to Kailua to the King Kamehameha Hotel. (The Hawaiian language has only twelve letters, half of which seem to be “k.”) When Mark Twain visited Kailua in 1866, he found “a little collection of native grass houses reposing under tall coconut trees—the sleepiest, quietest, Sundayest looking place you can imagine.” One hundred and thirty-five years later, it was clogged with hotels, souvenir shops, superstores, and gridlocked traffic.

  Our budget suite at the King Kamehameha offered a view of the hotel’s heating and cooling system. Wandering downstairs for the evening luau, we joined a crowd of rotund Americans decked in leis
, eagerly trying to learn the hula from a Hawaiian dancer. “Right foot out, hands on hips, slow and sensual,” she shouted, rotating in her orange wrap. A hundred tourists mimicked her motions, rather less sensually. Then the crowd swarmed around an all-you-can-eat Polynesian buffet.

  “How does a nation become so great when its population is such a dirge?” Roger asked, watching diners stack pyramids of food on their plates. “It must be a few individuals who do the great things. The rest are just consumers.” He sipped his tropical punch and gasped. “It’s nonalcoholic!”

  During the feast, Cliff snapped pictures of an enormous woman in a mu‘umu‘u crooning to the plink of ukuleles. But he, too, seemed dispirited by the luau’s parody of traditional Hawaiian culture. “I wonder what Cook and his men would think if they landed today,” he said. Roger shook his head. “Samwell would take one look at the crumpet and climb back in his bunk.”

  A few minutes later, Roger did just that. As he sprawled on his bed with an ashtray and a tumbler of rum balanced on his chest, idly perusing the adult offerings on the in-house movie channel, Cliff took the Gideon Bible from its bedside drawer and began searching for passages to read on the anniversary of Cook’s death. That was still five days away. It was beginning to look like an interesting week.

  After a hard month’s sail from Unalaska, the Resolution and Discovery reached the Sandwich Islands again in late November 1778. On his earlier visit, Cook had touched at the archipelago’s northern tip. This time, he arrived at the chain’s southeastern end, off the island of Maui. His exhausted men, who had warmed themselves in the Arctic with memories of the archipelago and its fleshly delights, were desperate to go ashore. But Cook resolved to coast the islands without landing, so he could control trade, meting out his dwindling store of barter items and avoiding a quick depletion of the local food supply at any one place. He was also determined, as before, to keep the islanders free of the “Venereal distemper.”