Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  The narrow road leading to Waipi’o ended at a precipice overlooking the mile-wide valley, which opened onto the sea. Only horseback riders, hikers, and four-wheel-drive vehicles were allowed on the rugged switchback winding down to the valley floor. The few walkers we saw straggling up were breathless and drenched in sweat. “Oh God, ironman stuff again,” Roger said. “I’ll take in the view from up here.” He glanced over the edge and retreated to the car, easing back the seat and closing his eyes.

  I headed down the switchback, grateful for the quiet and solitude. I’d spent just a week in the constant company of Roger and Cliff. Little wonder that Cook, sequestered for months aboard his cramped, overcrowded ships, often headed off for a solitary hike as soon as he reached land.

  After a half-dozen turns, the view from the trail opened up. I could hear waves crashing on the beach. Birds swooped back and forth across the valley, wafting on air currents. From here, Waipi’o resembled a lush version of the Grand Canyon: an immense trench, more than a thousand feet deep, with a river snaking along the valley floor. It took me half an hour of scuffling in a backward-leaning trot to reach the bottom, which was marked with an alarming road sign.

  WARNING! WARNING!

  DO NOT STOP—STOPPING MAY BE HAZARDOUS.

  ROAD FLOODS. SLIPPERY WHEN WET.

  ENGAGE FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.

  Not surprisingly, there wasn’t a vehicle in sight. Except for the cawing birds and crashing surf, the scene was silent. A steady rain pelted down. The valley before me looked jungly, the way I imagined the Mekong Delta or an Amazonian rain forest: swamped paddies, huge-fronded palms, trees dripping with rain and fruit, the whole scene so green it seemed to vibrate. More than at any moment in my Pacific travels, I suddenly felt very far away, alone in a landscape utterly foreign to me. Funny that this should happen in my own country, an hour’s drive from a cookie-cut sprawl of fast-food joints and tourist hotels.

  I plunged on, my normally nature-impaired senses alert to every sound and smell. I tasted a berry, red and tart, and picked pink flowers and other plants I couldn’t identify. Closing my eyes, I listened to the thrum of insects. Where a stream ran across the road, I took off my sandals and left them in some bushes, along with my soaked shirt and knapsack.

  Herb Kane had told me that during his childhood, the six-mile-long valley supported hundreds of farmers, as well as a general store, churches, and a Chinese temple. The valley had also been rife with illegal stills, brewing the ti plant into a potent liquor called okolehao, which translated as “iron ass.” Now, very few people remained, and the handful of farmsteads I passed appeared ramshackle.

  After walking a mile or so, I spotted a man with his head under the hood of a pickup. He seemed a bit startled to see a barefoot, shirtless stranger wandering into his yard, soaked with rain and clutching a bunch of leaves and berries. I asked him how much farther it was to the base of a waterfall I’d seen cascading down the mountain on the distant side of the valley.

  “You won’t get there, not today,” he said, wiping a wrench on his trousers. “Road’s flooded.” The man was heavily tattooed and looked, like so many other people on the island, to be a mix of Hawaiian and Asian. He studied me for a moment and asked, “You a plant collector?”

  “Oh. No. Just picking a few things. Wondered what they were.”

  I held my small bouquet out to him and asked what grew in the valley. “Taro mostly, and ferns, red ginger, monkey paw, mango, guava, orange, coconut, apple, banana, breadfruit, lotus, candlenut. Few other things.” He paused. “You can throw a seed out the window of your truck and it takes root here. It’s about the most fertile place on earth.”

  “Lono-land,” I said. He looked at me strangely, as if I was on drugs. I’d seen a lot of hippies in Hawaii; many of them probably chose the valley for hallucinogenic hikes. “Lono, the god of fertility,” I went on. “He rode down from the heavens on a rainbow to woo his bride by the waterfall here.” This was one of the stories I’d read about Waipi’o.

  “Oh yeah, I heard that one, lots of rainbows here,” he said. “Then Captain Cook came and they thought he was Lono and killed him. They say he’s buried up in the cliffs beside the waterfall.”

  I’d heard that one, too. In the many Hawaiian stories about Cook’s bones, several mentioned that his remains had been secreted in a cave in Waipi’o, where island royalty had been buried for centuries. In precontact Hawaii, Waipi’o was the Valley of the Kings, a religious and political center, and home to a place of refuge like the one I’d visited near Kealakekua.

  “What do you think, is he up there?” I asked.

  The man shrugged. “Dunno, brah. You’d need a rainbow to check it out.” He chuckled, shook his head, and stuck it back under the hood of his pickup.

  I walked on until I reached water running waist-high across the road: as far as a man could go. The rain sluiced down, and the cliff tops were lost in mist. I could just make out a few caves in the rock face, far above. I waited awhile, hoping for a rainbow, then turned to begin the long trip home.

  Epilogue:

  A Period to His Labours

  Ah! Those were the glorious days; but we are all going now.

  —ALEXANDER HOME, MASTER’S MATE, RECALLING COOK’S VOYAGES

  In June 1779, four months after leaving Hawaii, the Resolution and Discovery reached the Kamchatkan harbor of St. Peter and St. Paul. Charles Clerke dispatched a letter to the Admiralty, informing his superiors of Cook’s death. He also pledged to push on with the search for a northern passage: “Whatever can be done, shall be done.”

  The Resolution “leaked confoundedly,” Clerke wrote, its trusty chronometer had stopped, and the captain’s health was failing fast. But he pushed his ships to 70 degrees north, just a few miles short of the latitude Cook had reached the previous summer. Then the sea, once again, became “Choak’d with Ice.”

  Retreating south toward Kamchatka, Clerke grew too weak to write. He dictated a final letter to Joseph Banks. “My ever honoured friend. The disorder I was attacked with in the King’s bench prison has proved consumptive,” Clerke began. “It has now so far got the better of me that I am not able to turn myself in my bed, so that my stay in this world must be of very short duration. However, I hope my friends will have no occasion to blush in owning themselves such.”

  Clerke recommended several of his men for “a share in your friendship” and promised Banks the plants and artificial curiosities collected on the voyage. “Now, my dear and honoured friend, I must bid you a final adieu. May you enjoy many happy years in this world, & in the end attain that fame your indefatigable industry so richly deserves. These are most sincerely the warmest and sincerest wishes of your devoted, affectionate, departing servant.”

  Clerke departed four days later, at the age of thirty-eight, and was buried in Kamchatka beneath willows planted by his crew. Clerke, remembered by one sailor as a “wag and lusty extrovert,” would have appreciated the leisure his men enjoyed in Kamchatka, courtesy of their Russian hosts: bear hunting, fiddle playing, and country dancing. Catherine the Great was a great admirer of Cook and his men, and a monument to Clerke still stands near his burial site in Petropavlovsk.

  John Gore, the stolid American survivor of his fourth Pacific voyage, took command of the Resolution for the long homeward journey, unaware that his native land had declared its independence from Britain more than two years before. James King commanded the Discovery. In Macao, on the Chinese coast, sailors sold the pelts they’d collected in Canada and Alaska. News of the astronomical prices they received—as well as Cook’s writing about the commercial potential of the Pacific Northwest—would ignite the fur trade and spark the trail-blazing of American “mountain men.”

  The stop at Macao proved the crew’s last bit of good fortune. Reaching the coast of Britain in the summer of 1780, after four years at sea, the ships couldn’t land because of contrary winds, and lingered for an agonizing month off the Orkneys. Samuel Gibson,
the marine who had deserted in Tahiti on the first voyage, only to sail with Cook twice more and survive the fight at Kealakekua Bay, made his way ashore and married. He died of disease just a few days before the ships finally reached the Thames on October 4, 1780.

  Clerke’s letter from Kamchatka had preceded the ships to England by nine months. When Elizabeth Cook received the news, she was embroidering a waistcoat of Tahitian cloth for her husband to wear at court. With no body or grave to mourn over, she took to wearing a ring containing Cook’s hair. Widowed at thirty-eight, with three sons, she also felt the loss of the “easy retirement” at Greenwich Hospital once promised to her husband. In 1781, she wrote to Lord Sandwich, pleading for proceeds from the published history of Cook’s third voyage. “Consider us for such compensation as you may deem us deserving of by his merit,” Elizabeth wrote, in a fine, clear hand, “untill his unfortunate Death put a period to his Labours whereby we became great sufferers from his not returning safe home.”

  Elizabeth eventually received half the profits from the history, which sold out within three days of its publication. She also garnered a generous pension and other gratuities that afforded her a comfortable lifestyle, attended by a footman. Elizabeth may have drawn consolation, too, from the praise lavished on her husband’s memory. Medals were struck, panegyrics written, a coat of arms posthumously conferred. The Theatre Royal in Covent Garden staged a show called Omai: Or, a Trip Round the World, which ended with a tapestry of Cook’s apotheosis lowered onto the stage as a chorus of “Indians” sang: “Mourn, Owhyee’s fatal shore/For Cook, our great Orono, is no more.”

  Elizabeth also took comfort from her three surviving children, whom she described in a letter as “my greatest pleasure now remaining.” Two had gone to sea very young and had risen much more quickly than their father had done a generation before. By listing Nathaniel and James on the Endeavour’s muster roll when they were only four and five, Cook had hastened their naval careers.

  This proved, however, no blessing. Nathaniel Cook was a fifteen-year-old midshipman when his ship went down in a hurricane off Jamaica. His older brother, James, began his naval education at the age of eleven and made commander at thirty. On a winter’s night in 1794, he boarded a longboat on the south coast of England to take command of his first ship—and was later found stripped of his clothes and possessions, with a wound to his head, dead on the shore of the Isle of Wight. The longboat’s crew was never discovered.

  A few months before James washed ashore, his brother Hugh, the last of the Cooks’ six children—he was born just prior to his father’s departure on the third voyage—went to study for the clergy at Cambridge. Described as a “fine tall youth,” Hugh was the only Cook child of whom a portrait survives. He appears in the painting as a handsome scholar of seventeen, with his father’s long straight nose but none of the captain’s austerity. Soon after arriving at Cambridge, Hugh contracted scarlet fever; he died on his parents’ wedding anniversary. James Cook’s line had ended.

  Elizabeth Cook retired to her bed for two years, and then lived for another thirty-nine, donning black on the anniversary of each of her children’s deaths. She survived to the age of ninety-three and was buried beside two of her sons in Cambridge. Elizabeth left part of her considerable estate to “six poor widows” in the parish of Clapham, where she’d dwelled for the latter half of her life. The only monument to her memory is a small fountain in Australia.

  The soft job that Elizabeth had wished for her husband, as captain at the Greenwich Hospital, went instead to John Gore. The next ranking survivor of the third voyage, James King, was also promoted to captain, and took several veterans of Cook’s journeys along on his first command. They were at King’s bedside in Nice when he died at the age of thirty-four from tuberculosis, as had so many of Cook’s officers. The men may well have contracted the disease from one another in the close quarters of Cook’s ships.

  Many other young men who served under Cook went on to distinguished naval careers—posthumous testimony to the captain’s skills as a mentor. More than twenty of them became commanders; Isaac Manley, just twelve when he joined the Endeavour as Cook’s servant, and Isaac Smith, a sixteen-year-old midshipman on the same ship, both rose to the rank of admiral, outstripping Cook. George Vancouver, who sailed on the second and third voyages and was almost beaten to death at Kealakekua Bay, later commanded his own great voyage of exploration to the Pacific, during which he completed and corrected Cook’s survey of the North American coast.

  Others became freelance adventurers, most notably John Ledyard, the Connecticut-born marine. Dispatched to fight the Americans in the closing days of the Revolutionary War, he deserted, sold his story of the third voyage, and concocted his own grand scheme for exploring the north Pacific. With the encouragement of Thomas Jefferson, Ledyard set off on a solo walk across Russia, with the intention of sailing from Siberia to Alaska and then crossing the uncharted interior of the North American continent from west to east. Ledyard’s circumambulation of the globe was aborted at Irkutsk, where he was arrested as a suspected spy and escorted back west to the Polish frontier.

  Undaunted, Ledyard went to London and, with Joseph Banks’s help, won sponsorship from the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, to lead an expedition in search of Timbuktu and the source of the Niger. Ledyard got as far as Cairo, where he died of food poisoning at the age of thirty-seven. Jefferson’s dream of one day dispatching Ledyard from Kentucky to the west coast of America would have to wait for two men by the names of Lewis and Clark.

  Others who served under Cook also went on to colorful, if not always illustrious, ends. Lieutenant James Burney abandoned his wife, eloped with his half sister, and wrote “An Essay by Way of Lecture, on the Game of Whist.” The talented artist William Hodges gave up painting for banking, at which he quickly failed, and soon after died of a laudanum overdose. Then there was William Bligh, whose story needs no repeating, except to note that several veterans of Cook’s voyages were set adrift with the captain following the mutiny on the Bounty. The irascible Bligh also nursed a lifelong grudge toward his shipmates on the Resolution, accusing them of failing to recognize his navigational achievements. “I must take another opportunity, to declare,” he groused in a letter to Burney in 1791, “that the Sandwich Islands published with Cook’s Voyages are entirely my survey—the Friendly Islands the same.” Bligh would go on to survive two more mutinies and die old and bitter in 1817.

  The hundreds of men who served on Cook’s lower decks left much fainter tracks on the historical record. Some fought in the American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, or ferried convicts to Botany Bay. One sailor wrote a song about his voyage with Cook. Others fell on hard times and wrote to Joseph Banks in hopes the wealthy botanist would remember them. “I am one of the Men that went round the world with you and Captain Cook,” began a letter from a crippled seaman in 1808, a full forty years after the Endeavour’s voyage. Banks kept a careful record of such correspondence. “Gave him a guinea” was a typical reply.

  Banks also became, in effect, the executor of Cook’s legacy. As president of the Royal Society for forty-one years, he promoted the colonization of Australia and the many voyages—by Bligh, Vancouver, the London Missionary Society, and others—that expanded on Cook’s discoveries and helped build the empire. Banks turned Kew Gardens into an experimental plot for plants from around the world. He also dispatched sheep and cattle to Australia and dispensed human skulls and other curiosities to collectors and anatomists across Europe. (Australian Aborigines are now seeking the return of shields and spears the English took from Botany Bay, as well as skeletons spirited away by later visitors.)

  With time, the rakishly handsome young botanist of the Endeavour voyage became fat, jowly, and gout-ridden. Banks died in 1820 at the age of seventy-seven, with no known offspring, just eighteen days after resigning as president of the Royal Society. His great botany collection now resides in the herbarium of London
’s Natural History Museum, in polished wood cabinets from Banks’s Soho house. But Banks never completed the multivolumed work he’d planned on the Endeavour’s botanical discoveries; not until the 1980s were the hundreds of copper plates made from Sydney Parkinson’s drawings finally published.

  Cook’s ships met with similar neglect. The Navy sold the Endeavour in 1775, then leased it back to transport Hessian mercenaries to fight against the Americans. The Resolution was sold into the whaling trade. In a believe-it-or-not twist, marine archaeologists have recently discovered that the two ships came to rest in the same waters, at the bottom of Newport Harbor in Rhode Island. When a French fleet threatened the harbor in 1778, the English formed a blockade by sinking a convoy that included the Endeavour (which had been renamed the Lord Sandwich). Divers are still trying to determine which of the scuttled ships matches the size and build of Cook’s vessel. The Resolution, meanwhile, ran aground at Newport in 1794, and now lies buried beneath landfill.

  One piece of the puzzle still lingered: the fate of Cook’s remains. Cliff Thornton, back in England, regaled me with e-mails about his ongoing search for the arrow allegedly made from Cook’s shinbone. He’d managed to track the relic from an exposition in London in 1886 to its transfer, soon after, to the government of New South Wales in Australia. From there the trail went cold.

  I delved into the archives, following Cliff’s leads, and found a card catalogue at the state library in Sydney devoted to “Realia,” or relics. A librarian escorted me to a back room to inspect the Cook-related items, including a tiny lacquered box in the shape of a coffin, inscribed with the words “Lono and the Seaman’s Idol.” The coffin’s lid slid open to reveal a watercolor of Cook’s death, a lock of the captain’s brown hair, and a carving that read: “Made of Resolution Oak for Mrs. Cook by Crew.”