Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  But I couldn’t find the arrow, even though it was listed as belonging to the library’s collection. Further digging led me to the nearby Australian Museum, where I met with the head anthropologist, a professorial English emigrant named Jim Specht. He seemed amused by my tale and insisted that there was no such artifact in the museum’s possession. But he agreed to have a look in the museum’s vast “Pacific storeroom.”

  I followed Jim through aisles lined with trays until he located a box marked “H68 Arrow.” Taking it to a brightly lit table, Jim donned white gloves and opened the box. Inside lay an arrow of about two and a half feet in length, with a metal point, feathered fletching, and a shaft made from a bamboolike stem affixed to a pale, mottled substance, five inches long and roughly the diameter of a pencil. An old card inside the box said: “Arrow stated to be partly made from the small leg bone of Captain Cook.”

  Jim turned the artifact in his hands. “It’s definitely bone, perhaps the tibia,” he said. “But this arrow is not Hawaiian. There are no fletched arrows in the tropical Pacific.” He showed me other arrows from the region, most of them dartlike and, indeed, unfletched. “It just doesn’t ring true,” he said. “The Hawaiians thought Cook was a demigod. Why would they turn his leg bone into an arrow? It seems disrespectful.”

  In the museum’s library, we found two “authenticating documents,” attesting to the arrow’s provenance. One, from a prominent English surgeon in 1828, stated: “This Arrow was given by the King of the Sandwich Islands, when in England, to one of his Attendants, with the assurance that the bone attached to it was a part of the leg-bone of Captain Cook.”

  Jim also unearthed pictures of arrows from the west coast of Canada, which closely resembled the one in the box. “These jokers were all over the north Pacific,” he said of Cook and his men. “Maybe they brought the arrow to Hawaii from someplace else.” The seventy years during which the arrow apparently resided in England also raised questions. Museums were filled with Cook relics of dubious or unknown origin.

  I might have left it at that, but not Cliff. He kept up a steady stream of correspondence with the museum, sharing each new shred of evidence. Among other things, he’d learned at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu that the bones of enemy chiefs were often fashioned into fishhooks and arrows; possessing mana, the bones were believed to give fishermen and hunters a better chance of success. Turning bones into tools could also be a way of spitting on one’s enemies. It seemed plausible, given the ill repute into which Cook fell in Hawaii, that his shinbone had been made into an arrow as a mark of disrespect. As for the fletching, Cliff speculated that someone had added it in England, to make the arrow resemble prevailing images of “Indian” weapons.

  Eventually, officials at the Australian Museum became as intrigued as Cliff, and they agreed to study and test the arrow. When I went back a second time, Jim Specht and his colleagues began a long and technical discussion of DNA testing, and how the bone would have to be matched with mitochondria from Cook’s maternal line. Cliff had thought of this, too, and contacted Australian descendants of Cook’s sister Margaret. They had agreed to give DNA samples.

  Jim took me down to the museum’s photo lab, where a technician X-rayed the bone. While we waited for the prints to emerge, Jim and another anthropologist speculated about the result.

  “Marine mammal,” Jim predicted.

  “I’ll say bird,” his colleague replied.

  “There’s another question,” Jim said, smiling. “If it is Captain Cook’s bone, should we clone him?”

  When the X ray was done, it showed nothing but a dense white mass, providing no clue as to its origin. Months later, the museum sent the arrow to a Sydney hospital for a bone scan. This, too, proved inconclusive. A forensic archaeologist studied the arrow and test results. “The bone density falls well within the human range,” she told me. However, marine mammal couldn’t be ruled out. If the bone was human, she added, it belonged to the tibia or femur of “a robust, active, large male.” But only a DNA test could take the investigation further. The museum, concerned that extracting a DNA sample might damage the arrow, balked at conducting the test; months more have passed without a decision.

  I felt frustrated by these tantalizing clues, and by the glacial pace of museum and laboratory work. But Cliff was philosophical. “This is one legend that refuses to lie down quietly,” he punned. “Long may the search go on.” In a way, this seemed fitting. Cook spent a decade seeking a fabled continent and passage, and died without finding them. More than two centuries later, the truth about his remains still eluded discovery. He’d left one very personal riddle for the rest of us to solve.

  On my last night in Sydney, I went for a parting “piss-up” with Roger on his yacht, Aquadisiac. The next day I’d be flying home with my family to the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia, a landlocked domain that was about as far as you could go from the Pacific. “Swallowing the anchor” was what mariners called it when they finally gave up the sea. I’m a landsman, so this suited me. But Roger still felt restless. For all his moaning during our many trips together, he’d become as hooked on Cook as I had, and couldn’t bear to settle down again in Sydney.

  “I finally understand the man,” he said, uncorking a third bottle of chardonnay. “Cook traveled because he liked to run away. It solves all life’s problems.”

  Roger had hatched a scheme to continue traveling in Cook’s wake. He’d sold his car—even sold the contents of his wine cellar—so he could muster the funds to buy a proper seagoing yacht. “I’m going to quit my job and just set off after Cook, for the sheer hell of it,” he said. “I won’t take a goat, but I’ll sail as far as I can go, which might only be five miles.”

  As I write, nine months later, Roger is moving out of his apartment and onto the forty-one-foot yacht he recently bought for his oceangoing adventure. In the meantime, he’d also managed to ride a Russian ship to Antarctica, a destination I’d dodged. Reaching the continent, Roger set up camp with other passengers on an ice shelf, then wandered off to toast Cook with a bottle of rum. He passed out on the ice and might have frozen to death, like Banks’s drunken servants in Tierra del Fuego, were it not for a young doctor from Texas who dragged him into her tent. She’d since followed Roger home to Sydney.

  “For once I didn’t have you along as deadweight,” he said, explaining his Antarctic success during a late-night phone call. “Then again, maybe she took me into her tent only because she wanted to keep warm.”

  In Virginia, I often put my five-year-old son, Nathaniel, to bed with tales of Captain Cook, while tracing his adventures across the inflatable globe hanging above Natty’s bed. One night, after Natty fell asleep listening to the story of Cook’s death and dismemberment—his favorite episode—I lay awake, drowsily recalling the distance traveled, then got up and placed a toy arrow alongside Natty’s globe. If I poked it through the plastic, starting at our home, it would emerge in the blue latitudes off Australia, close to where Cook sailed on the Endeavour.

  In the early nineteenth century, wealthy families in Europe and America adorned their homes with wallpaper depicting scenes from Cook’s voyages, including Tahitian dancers, Tongan wrestlers, and Cook’s final struggle on the beach in Hawaii. Dufour, the French company that manufactured these “scenic papers,” advertised its product as not only decorative but didactic—useful in teaching children about geography, botany, and exotic peoples, as well as inspiring them to great things.

  The notion seems quaint today. Natty enjoys my stories of Cook’s adventures, though he prefers to hear about wizards and hobbits. He has spent a third of his life in Australia; his room in Virginia is filled with stuffed koalas and kangaroos, and books about Aborigines. The antipodes doesn’t seem strange or unimaginable to him.

  If a company like Dufour were to design wallpaper today, it would probably craft images of men on the moon, or weightless astronauts on space stations. This, too, was part of Cook’s legacy. He was one of the world’s great explore
rs, but also among its last. In his wake, other discoverers filled in the few remaining blanks on the map. Eventually, there wasn’t anyplace left on earth where no man had gone before.

  Tucking Natty in, I liked to think that he might become an explorer of a different sort. As Rick Knecht, the Alaskan archaeologist, had told me during our boat ride to Cook’s landing site, there was evidence of a “novelty-seeking” gene in humans’ makeup. Cook, because of the early deaths of his own children, wasn’t able to pass this trait along. But maybe I could, if not genetically then with my stories about the navigator.

  When adults ask Natty what he wants to be when he grows up, he always smiles mysteriously and says, “An adventurer.” Making lists of supplies and companions for his future exploration fills much of his playtime. Natty’s mission, like Cook’s, isn’t always clear: the destination is often secret or imaginary, and it tends to change from day to day. But I rejoice in the endeavor.

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  Mulvaney, D. J. Encounters in Place: Outsiders and Aboriginal Australians, 1606–1985. University of Queensland Press, 1989.