George Hewitt, the surgeon’s mate on Discovery, tartly remarked that in 1777 Vancouver had been “a Young Man but that not being now the Case the Ladies of course were not so attractive.” Vancouver’s conviction that syphilis was rife was based on a mistake made by Cook, who confused the symptoms of syphilis with those of yaws—which was endemic in the South Pacific, and not venereally transmitted. Whether because he’d lost his own libido, or because he feared the spread of infection aboard his ships, Vancouver made the hugely unpopular decision to deny shore leave to anyone below the rank of lieutenant.
This was a violent break with naval custom. The rest-and-recreation facilities of Tahiti and Hawaii were the chief attraction of voyages to the Pacific. English sailors would cruise the native villages in search of girlfriends, and at nightfall, women would swim out to the anchored ships, selling sex for a handful of nails. Iron, in any form, was the usual pay for a prostitute. Tender tropical nights in the arms of an obliging girl were an expected perk on any South Sea expedition.
Vancouver ordered shore parties on ship’s business to avoid fraternization with natives. Almost everyone aboard the two ships thought the ban cruel in the extreme, and many sought sex on the sly.
While on an official shore party, Captain Van spotted Midshipman Pitt talking with a woman and put him under immediate arrest. He was found to be in possession of a piece of iron, part of an old cask-hoop bent into a zigzag shape and used in the midshipmen’s quarters as a griddle.
The twisted scrap of metal gave Vancouver the excuse he needed. The iron hoop was technically part of the ship’s stores; ergo, Pitt had committed theft. Vancouver sentenced the midshipman to two dozen lashes for “purloining.”
As Joseph Whidbey, master of Discovery, later wrote, “If such a construction as Purloining is applicable to the cutting up of an Iron hoop I am afraid that there are few Officers in the Navy, that are not guilty of Purloining.”
The usual punishment for an errant midshipman was to be “mast-headed”—sent aloft for a few hours with an improving book. None of the lieutenants backed Vancouver’s judgment; and in the main cabin, the sentence was thought the outrageous revenge of a mad captain on his unfortunate bête noire.
Vancouver, feeling goaded by Pitt beyond forbearance, was too unimaginative to look ahead into the likely consequences of what he was now doing. He knew he had to assert the power of rank over the insidious power of class; had to humiliate Pitt for the sake of his own captaincy; had to show the ship’s company that his rightful authority, as per His Majesty’s commission, was not to be undermined by an insufferable young lordling.
Of all the officers on board Discovery, the first lieutenant, Zachary Mudge, was the most upset by the sentence. Mudge owed his own position to the patronage of the Pitts; and Lady Camelford had made a point of entrusting her son to Mudge’s personal care for the duration of the voyage, an unenviable assignment. Subsequently, Sir Joseph Banks would describe Mudge as a man “who appears to have born but a moderate Character”; he was certainly an ineffectual go-between. Whenever he tried to approach Vancouver on Pitt’s behalf, he exposed himself to the captain’s impatient fury; and when he tried to approach Pitt, he met only with the midshipman’s inflated sense of his name and social station.
At six bells in the forenoon watch (eleven o’clock), all officers and midshipmen were ordered to present themselves, in uniform and wearing swords, in the main cabin. The fifteen marines aboard were mustered on the quarterdeck under their lieutenant, standing at attention with muskets shouldered. The bosun’s mate carried the cat-o’-nine-tails in his ceremonial red-plush bag. (Hence “to let the cat out of the bag.”)
Archibald Menzies, as ship’s naturalist, claimed the privilege of a civilian and kept to his private cabin, where he still could hear the intolerably long-drawn-out administration of the punishment. The drumlike construction of the ship’s hull made the sounds of John Noot’s footsteps, and each crack of the lash, reverberate between decks.
After the first dozen lashes was an interval. Blood trickled from the welts on Pitt’s narrow back; his body looked like a carcass hanging in a butcher’s shop. Mudge detached himself from the line of officers and went up to the boy, saying that if Pitt would vow to behave better in the future, he would plead with the captain to remit the final dozen lashes.
With what was left of his voice, the midshipman said something about “honour,” and then that he “would not be begd off by Mr. Mudge.”
Noot laid on twelve more strokes of the cat.
When news of the flogging filtered back to London, brought there by fur traders who had stopped in at Nootka Sound and Hawaii, some of the papers reported that a mutiny had taken place on Discovery. That wasn’t true. Discovery wasn’t Bounty, and naval discipline held, both during and after the punishment of Thomas Pitt. Yet after Matavai Bay, the ship’s command structure came to rest on rank and regulations alone. Captain Van could no longer count on the affectionate respect of any of his officers. They obeyed his orders. They trusted his expertise as a navigator and surveyor. They acknowledged his professional experience. But that was as far as they went. Even Joseph Whidbey, Vancouver’s favorite, couldn’t respond to him with any warmth. An atmosphere of stiff correctitude reigned on the quarterdeck as Discovery, a tiny, crowded wooden world, rolled uncomfortably across the North Pacific.
Every so often, the Matavai Bay skeleton would rattle the door of its closet.
On the King’s birthday, 4 June 1792, Captain Van proclaimed a twofold celebration: the survey of the Puget Sound region was complete, and next day the expedition would sail north into the Gulf of Georgia (now Georgia Strait). The loyal toast would be observed with a double issue of grog for the men, and a vinous feast in the main cabin. Tom Pitt’s closest friend aboard the ship, the Honorable Charles Stuart, son of Lord Bute, got himself boisterously drunk. In a moment of weird alcoholic theater, he pulled a razor from the pocket of his waistcoat and made a vainglorious speech to Vancouver. “If, Sir, you ever flog me, I will not survive this disgrace: I have this ready to cut my throat with.”
In Sir Joseph Banks’s account, based on Menzies’s firsthand report, “Mr. Stuart experienced much inconvenience from the Captains Revenge from the beginning of the Quarrell he was often sent to the masthead as a punishment for trifling or supposed offenses & kept there an unreasonable time but his Spirit never gave way he did his duty to the utmost of his Ability & bore the injustice he received patiently.”
Like puffs of dust, the reek of ancient class snobbery still rises from these pages. The “disgrace” feared by Stuart was clearly the disgrace of being sentenced to be flogged by someone he regarded as a common little man—and most of the people who left some written record of the voyage shared the young Honorables’ opinion of Vancouver as a coarse-grained parvenu. Another young gentleman, Robert Barrie, referred to Vancouver as “a mere sailor not an educated man” (he was comparing him with La Pérouse). That the Grand Tour aspect of the voyage should have attracted such a bevy of disdainful young swells—boys born to expose his every solecism and insecurity—was Captain Van’s bad luck. Trying to resolve his social difficulties, he only made them worse.
Writing to a friend in 1793, from Monterey, California, Midshipman Thomas Manby described the nasty mood on the quarterdeck:
We are my good fellow spinning about the Globe like a Worligig, seldom in a place, and as seldom like true Seamen contented with our situation. Good health continues in our little squadron, though I am sorry to add not that good fellowship which ought to subsist with adventurers traveling these distant Seas, owing to the conduct of our Commander in Chief who is grown Haughty Proud Mean and Insolent, which has kept himself and Officers in a continual state of wrangling during the whole of the Voyage.
Following the undercurrents of Vancouver’s voyage, through the lavish footnotes and appendices of W. Kaye Lamb’s Hakluyt Society edition, I felt a growing kinship with the m
an. I was annoyed to overhear his midshipmen talking of him as their natural inferior. The lords of the Admiralty thought well enough of Vancouver to entrust him with one of the great expeditions of the age. They saw him as the logical heir to Captain Cook; he knew the Pacific, he had studied astronavigation under a leading astronomer and mathematician, he had an unblotted record as a midshipman and lieutenant. Yet his failure to win the respect of a scornful band of teenage patricians wrecked his captaincy.
His ship was a little floating England, in a period of great class upheaval. Vancouver, rising on his own merits, was a new man, and a lonely one. He possessed every necessary technical skill, though without any leavening of charm or humor. His very existence aboard Discovery was a threat to the old aristocratic order—people brutally expert at cutting outsiders down to size. The customs collector’s son, with his mangled Dutch name (originally van Coeverden) and root-vegetable features, was forced to endure the supercilious mockery of his juniors.
He tried to rise above his unpopularity, keeping himself increasingly aloof. Or a-luff. When a ship “keeps aloof,” it sails as close to the wind as possible, trying to avoid being driven onto a lee shore. He withdrew into his superior rank like an injured hermit crab into its shell. Coming out of his private quarters, he aimed to present to the world a façade of inscrutable gravity, but it kept on crumbling before the force of his ungovernable temper.
He “behaved like a Madman raged and swore,” wrote George Hewitt after one of Vancouver’s outbursts. “His salutation I can never forget, and his language I will never forgive,” wrote Thomas Manby after another. “It was no unusual thing with him to be passionate and illiberal in his abuse,” wrote Menzies.
Dignity eluded Captain Van. His meltdowns were triggered by the slightest affront to his authority. An unpunctual rendezvous, smoke from a bonfire set by natives, a flicker of insubordination from a midshipman, a mention of Menzies’s accursed quarterdeck greenhouse—and Vancouver would explode, scalding everyone around him with the lava flow of his rage. Yet when it came to the tedious and frustrating business of nautical astronomy, an eerie calm came over him: setting up the observatory tent, waiting patiently for the low clouds to disclose Antares or Polaris, taking sights by the score, then working them out on paper and transferring them to the evergrowing chart, Vancouver was alone among his officers in his methodical placidity. So quick to blaze up at any man-made impediment to his will, George Vancouver was benignly tolerant of the vagaries of the weather and the stars.
There was no dawn for me, only a slow dwindling of the darkness into oatmeal-gray. I struggled out of bed into the nimbus cloud that had taken possession of the cabin and draped itself around the unwashed dishes and half-emptied glass of wine. Vancouver, in four volumes, sprawled untidily over the settee, the table, and the floor. On the VHF marine weather channel, shore stations on the mainland coast of Georgia Strait were reporting visibility in miles, which was promising. As the morning wore on, I fretted through the hours, making repeated visits to the cockpit, trying to shift the fog by mind-power. The top of the mainmast was lost in fog, the bow-pulpit an indefinite shadow of its former self. My bronchial cough sounded mildly alarming as it came rattling back to me from the invisible shore.
Past two o’clock the fog suddenly evaporated, revealing a world of misty unexpected distances. Sidney showed as a substantial city, many miles off; the rocks and islands to the north looked limitless as they trailed away into the haze. I got the engine started, winched up the anchor, and clawed into the archipelago against a smooth, fast river of tide.
Meringue-like gobbets of fog were caught in shady, northward-facing hollows, but otherwise the coast was clear. It was a slow, sunlit wriggle through the islands, ticking off the marks as they crept by on the beam. In Satellite Channel I was overhauled by an elderly wooden purse-seiner, Seattle-registered and painted up to the nines, as if off to Ketchikan on a blind date. Her hull was a brilliant moss-green, with red and white trim. The final touches were still being put on; much of the deckhouse was clad in gray primer, and on the afterdeck, in the lee of the house and just out of sight of the skipper at the wheel, a man stood smoking, paint-bucket at his feet. He lifted his cigarette in salute as he was carried past, and for a moment I thought I’d met him before—the pale hair tied back in a ponytail, the childish stare, the greasy, flyblown tartan jacket.
Rounding Musgrave Point, at the entrance to Sansum Narrows, I slowed and let the boat drift in neutral past the tiny cove at the foot of a steep overgrown meadow on Saltspring Island. A ramshackle jetty ran out from the beach. This was where the ketch Tzu Hang was moored in the 1950s, when it wasn’t being pitchpoled and dismasted off Cape Horn, or visiting Japan, the Hebrides, or any of the other spots around the globe to which Brigadier Miles Smeeton and his wife, Beryl, used to sail on the flimsiest of pretexts. They gave themselves rational destinations—Melbourne, to see the 1955 Olympics; Tokyo, to return a ceremonial sword to a Japanese general—but these were just excuses for them to indulge their addiction to big waves, nautical emergencies, and huge doses of undiluted solitude on the ocean. I had some of Miles Smeeton’s books on board—Once Is Enough, Sunrise to Windward, The Sea Was Our Village—and I’d hoped to catch a glimpse, at least, of Musgrave, the Smeetons’ farmhouse. If the house still stood, it was securely hidden by the trees above the meadow.
The Smeetons had been a famously daunting couple: crusty, Spartan, quarrelsome, tough as a pair of old boots, and resolutely happy. Leaving India and the army in 1947, the year of Indian independence, they had shrunk from the prospect of a life of tame restriction in Clement Attlee’s postcolonial socialist Britain. Sight unseen, they’d bought Musgrave—a ruin, half-smothered in blackberries and salal—out here in the western wilderness. Then, like many other ex-officers at the end of the war, temperamentally at odds with peacetime life, the Smeetons had gone poking around the muddy ports of England in search of a mothballed boat in which they could escape to sea. Tzu Hang, found in Dover, became their 46-foot ark, in which the Smeetons’ unfashionable code of values was enshrined. The central character in Miles’s books, it becomes an emblem of personal liberty, self-sufficiency, thrift (Beryl, at a pinch, would serve her guests curried cat-food for a grandly presented dinner), and the romantic quest for hazardous adventure.
Tzu Hang was a counter-world, sailing on the reciprocal course to that taken by postwar Britain. As a child of that time, I quailed at the idea of the Smeetons and what they stood for. I knew very well that if the brigadier and I had ever come face to face, he immediately would have nailed me as a ninny and a wet—a typical product of the welfare state he so despised. In turn, I’d have thought him a ferocious dodo. But I read his books with pleasure, and traveled as a vicarious stowaway aboard Tzu Hang, admiring the hardihood and bravery of the Smeetons from a safe distance, without having the least desire or ability to emulate them.
In 1968, the aging Smeetons sold Tzu Hang to a friend. Several owners later, she was carrying large cargoes of marijuana on the Colombia–Chesapeake Bay run, and in 1988 she was impounded by U.S. Customs agents. In 1990, a Puerto Rican ship-breaker bulldozed her to bits.
The sun, blocked by the mountains on Vancouver Island, had already left the cove, and the water on which Tzu Hang used to swing was turning fast to pitch. The Smeetons were gone—Beryl died in 1979, Miles in 1988—and the remains of their beloved boat were now interred in a San Juan landfill. Miles’s godson, Miles Clark, whom I came to know when he was working on their biography, had very recently killed himself, aged 32. The last I’d heard from him had been a cheerful fax describing his plans to sail into the heart of Russia via the Black Sea and the Volga; it was an expedition that I envied, though I hadn’t bothered to send Clark a letter in return. His suicide happened soon after he came home from his Russian expedition. It was a horrible end to a bright young career. Passing Musgrave now, its dock fallen in, its fence in need of repair, I was taken aback by how powerfully it gave
off the too-intimate stink of the Reaper.
Twilight perhaps made Sansum Narrows seem more sepulchral than it really was: the black cliffs on either side of the passage interlocking with each other like pieces of a loose-fitting jigsaw puzzle; the name Burial Islet attached to a low grassy hummock in midstream; the priestly cormorants on a line of pilings by the shore. In the narrows between Sansum Point and Bold Bluff, the broken water burbled like a pebbly brook, though the chart showed it to be three hundred feet deep. A fishing boat, southward-bound, riding the tide, came rocketing out of the pass as I went in, to labor hard against the current, the shallow-sounding water tinkling and spitting around the hull.
Six miles on, wreaths of pale steam from the tall chimneys of the pulp mill at Crofton drifted across the dark sky. It was just possible to make out the low-floating islands of logs in the booming grounds, a fair-sized forest stripped and peeled, ready to be ground up and cooked in the mill. Moving slowly, watching out for the dangerous silhouettes of escaped logs in the water ahead, I eased into the cluster of fishing boats at the government dock, where an amiable pyknic type took my lines and tied me up. The fenders of my boat had barely kissed the dock before Mr. Pyknic was talking my ear off.
He was a self-appointed one-man chamber of commerce for Crofton and its glories. A shift-worker at the mill, he commuted from his home on an island a few miles away, in a new white 21-foot motorboat, his own marine sport-utility vehicle. With a family across the water and a little Filipino darling in Crofton—who even now was fetching him a bowl of hot noodles—he was, he said, as happily placed as anyone in the province.
Mr. Pyknic, like many outgoing innocents I’d met, valued cunning above all other virtues. He was proud of his own, and generously appreciative of other people’s. He drew my attention—as if it needed to be drawn—to the steepling mill chimneys that rose more than 300 feet above our heads.
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