by A. N. Wilson
Next day, everyone on board heard that land had been sighted, but it was an illusion. Huge icebergs loomed. Two jolly boats were sent out to collect ice, for the bergs were fresh water, which could be brought back and stowed on the quarter-deck and in the sheep-pens. Everywhere they looked there were whales surfacing and ice-islands towering. A gale blew for a couple of days. Snow and sleet pelted upon them. Cook tacked south and north of the Antarctic Circle, but his conscience would not much longer allow him to take risks with the lives of the men. By 24th February they had sailed past over a hundred icebergs, and found themselves, after some squally weather and heavy sleet, surrounded by vast floating islands, green and white, which towered over them, many times taller than the mainmast. The waves dashed and foamed against their icy walls creating glories of light, colour and movement no less stupendous than the Southern Lights in the heavens. Hodges and George were busy with their pencils and brushes.
—We shall return! Captain Cook told the men at prayers the next morning. We shall find our Southern Continent. No one knows more than I do what valour you have all shown, what hardships you have endured. You need your rest and our good ship needs an overhaul – so does the Adventure, I dare say. So we’re turning round now and we’re New Zealand bound! If you think I haven’t noticed how cold it is – our breeding sow farrowed nine pigs. This afternoon every one of which, poor little blighters, perished o’ cold. I’ve seen your chilblains and your blue noses!
As he announced an additional measure of grog in appreciation of their hardships the men all cheered.
He did not veer north, he edged north, sailing east for ten days, covering a hundred and fifty-five miles, moving slowly. They saw the Southern Lights again, and then began their progress, north by north-east towards New Zealand. They sailed through torrential rain and gales. The ram, stowed with two ewes, had not been idle and when the time came for the lambs to be delivered extra care was taken to keep the animals warm. A makeshift byre was wedged between the master’s cabin and Reinhold’s.
—You will, of course, not expect me, Mr Gilbert, to stay—
—I don’t know where else you want to sleep unless you can sling yer hammock below with the crew – and even there there’s little room enough.
—You joke . . .
—Of course I joke, you silly bugger.
—And you think the Kapitän will not have something to say when he knows that on one side of my bedroom there are sheep bleating and pissing and on the other there are goats butting and shitting and my cabin is soaking wet and—
—You’d win a contest at belly-aching, Forster, wouldn’t you?
—On the contrary, my stomach is in order. I keep nearly all my woes to myself. Quocirca vivite fortes fortiaque adversis opponite pectora rebus.
—Very likely.
—That is my motto and that of my son. Live, therefore, as brave men and turn a brave front to adversity.
—So that’s your motto.
—So that’s my motto. But to sleep in a shit hole with sheep and goats. Did the King of England expect this of a philosopher when he asked him on board? I could by now be the Director of your British Museum – instead I chose – and my son chose – to come on board the Resolution – but to sleep as a man sleeps, not in a midden, not in goat shit. Mr Gilbert? Mr Master? I asked you a question and could, I hope, be accorded the courtesy of a reply.
One morning, George counted the days and realized a week had passed since he had seen a penguin. The gales, too, subsided. There were seals, skuas. The sea winked with bright sunlight. On Lady Day a voice came from the crow’s nest —Land ahoy! It was New Zealand. There was a great swell, and rain pelted down, as the Captain, allowing himself a smile, applied a telescope to his eye and recognized the prodigious cliffs, the sheer slopes, the wooded hills, broken by the white gush of cataracts, the abundant, fertile welcome of Dusky Bay. Two leagues up the bay, he let go his anchor for the first time in four months. The pinnace was lowered. Mr Gilbert and four hands rowed out with their nets to ensure a fresh fish supper for all hands.
II
1785
NEITHER OF THEM WANTED THE QUARRELS. SINCE THEY WERE both intelligent people, they learnt various tricks of avoiding these, though sometimes involuntary irritation led them to slip. Desperate to keep together some semblance of conversation – if only to avoid embarrassing Marie, who stared, puzzled, at them as she served their silent meals – he began, cautiously, to show her his Cook the Discoverer book – even, after dinner, to read passages aloud to her as she breast-fed Rosechen. (Marie had tried to persuade Therese to find a wet nurse, had even impertinently suggested in broken German that the sight of her feeding the child would lessen George’s ardour – poor goose – did she really suppose that since the child’s conception there had been much of that?)
—What sailor would have eaten walrus, sea lion, polar bear, penguin, petrel or albatross without the good example of their Captain . . .
This made her jolt with laughter . . . and Rosechen momentarily lost the pink rubberiness of the nipple. George stared at his wife’s swollen veiny breast as it happened, feeling interest but no lust.
But some of the time her comments irritated him.
—Truth – that was the mission of all the great men with something to teach the human race. Truth, the relation of things to one another and to us . . .
—Don’t make it preachy. The best bits are the narratives – that passage about the New Zealanders, and Captain Cook visiting their huts, his courtesy. That was good. Let his passion for truth be clear in the story . . .
—Well, perhaps we have read enough for a day.
Instantly, though a quarrel was (just) avoided, a cloud of wretchedness returned, like the acrid coal smoke which billowed down the chimney and into the parlour when the wind changed direction.
—My God, I hate feeding this baby!
—Why do it?
And the veins on the wet breast and the little hand which clawed it, having seemed fascinating, became instantaneously disgusting to him. He knew that pretending not to hear what she called after him, as he left the parlour, would make her angry. Equally he felt himself too angry to stay in the room. So their days went on.
And then, one day, when he was out at the University – lecturing to the ladies of Vilnius on botany, a course he conducted in French – and Marie was cleaning his study and the baby was asleep, Therese looked out of their window and saw a Russian naval officer dismounting from his horse. Within twenty minutes of his having rung the doorbell, been admitted and given tea while a boy was sent to the University to bring George home, Therese knew that the officer was their saviour. He was a sea-captain named Grigorii Ivanovich Mulovskii. The news he brought was that the Empress Catherine wished to finance another great voyage of discovery. Five ships were to set sail to the South Seas and to take up where Cook, on his third, fatal voyage, had been cut short.
—He won’t speak of the Captain’s death – even though he has almost finished his book on the Discoverer, he has not written . . . how he died.
Mulovskii, who was about her age, smiled politely at Therese’s need to involve him in a marital tension.
—Captain Cook’s last voyage, as you know, took him down the west coast of America. He sailed the Bering Straits. He visited the westernmost tip of Alaska, which he named Cape Prince of Wales. He came to Siberia, and then down the west coast of America and into the Pacific. Then of course—
The Russian was a handsome man. George could see Therese’s squinty eyes taking in his muscular thighs in his nankeen, the blue coat, the braiding. The firm wrists emerging from his gilded cuffs. He saw the Slav’s brow and the smile which played over thick, sensual lips. Already, only a few years into marriage he noted his wife’s devouring coquettishness, but in this case, the fact of his noticing it had no more emotional effect on George than if he’d observed the colour of her dress. For his mind was racing ahead. Mulovskii was spelling out the details of the Imperial Russia
n voyage. They would go to London together, George and he, to purchase no fewer than five vessels – perhaps going to the north to buy merchant ships from Cook’s old haunts in Yorkshire. George would be engaged as chief scientist and chronicler of the voyages. The terms were to be absurdly generous and he could have as large a team of researchers, draughtsmen, botanists, astronomers, bag-carriers and servants as he required.
—And, he stammered, Hawaii. We would – we would visit Hawaii.
It was in Hawaii that the disaster had occurred. Therese knew that George found it quite literally too painful to contemplate. The dear old Resolution, accompanied by a ship called the Discovery, had sailed into the Hawaiian archipelago – Cook called them the Sandwich Islands – after they had explored the west coast of America. (The Resolution had a new young master, one William Bligh, much admired by Cook for his seamanship but hated by the men for his abrasiveness.) The islands’ first European visitors had been sent by the Spanish conquistador Juan Gaetano, in 1555, but they had remained a Spanish secret, so well kept that the world knew nothing of them until Cook’s arrival. The English ships first took in the island of Murci in November ’78, though they did not land. A chief had come alongside in a canoe, his skin encrusted with scabs, his eyes inflamed with drinking kava, and presented the Captain with a fine yellow feathered headdress which he had worn proudly. Cook had not, at first, wanted to stay, however, and the Resolution and the Discovery had sailed southwards until it became clear to him he had made a mistake. Both ships were leaky and needed repairs; both crews were ill: he himself was exhausted and the outbursts of bad temper which were legendary even in the days when George had sailed with him were now a frequent feature of life. They were all drinking too much, when, after stormy weather – and it took nineteen days of blowy seas before they could put in at the easternmost part of Hawaii – Cook bought sugar from the natives and eagerly began the manufacture of a rather deadly beer – ‘which was’, he told his Journal, ‘esteemed by every man on board.’ It was not true – the men complained the beer was making them ill. He ordered the men aft and roared at them that no sugar cane could make them ill. Next day the cooper, William Griffiths, started drinking from one of the barrels and pronounced it ‘sour’ – which produced such rumbles of dismay among the crew that Cook believed them to be on the edge of mutiny. Griffiths was given twelve lashes.
The bad atmosphere aboard the British ships was matched by a sense that the islanders were not their friends. Cook lowered the anchors on 6th January and was welcomed with some ceremony. Accompanied by priests to their heiau or village temple, he had taken part in a ritual meal, and allowed himself to be wrapped in a red robe. He had found it difficult to swallow the lump of putrid hog which he was given to eat on this occasion. The scabby old man who had come aboard the Resolution in the previous visit turned out to be a king, and he returned to the ship with Cook for dinner.
There was trouble, however. The natives who followed the British sailors were pilferers. One of them, caught in the act of stealing clothes, was brought on board the Discovery and flogged. The sailors in their turn were stealing sacred images from the islanders on Maui – acts considered blasphemous. They even torched the temple. Cook’s officers believed, in spite of these actions, that the people of Maui regarded him with reverence, even with worship.
At the beginning of February there were gales and the short voyages round the islands had shown the necessity of mending both ships before they put out once more to sea. There was a month’s work here for the carpenters. The foremast of the Resolution needed replacement. The main topmast of the Discovery with that of the Resolution were requisitioned to be used as sheers. So, a little humiliatingly, they staggered into Kealakekua Bay, establishing the carpenters and sail-makers in huts to replace the masts and make the ships seaworthy. The Hawaiians, however, showed little respect. One ‘rascal’ got aboard the Discovery and stole the armourer’s tongs. He escaped in a canoe, pursued, unsuccessfully, by two midshipmen in a cutter, firing muskets. Next day, the sailors found the owner of the escape-vessel, the canoe, and beat him with their oars. The next disaster was that the Discovery’s cutter was itself stolen, leaving much of the crew marooned in the ship. Cook, loading his double-barrelled firing piece, decided to act. He had always in all his voyages insisted on his peaceful intentions. He had never wished to ‘conquer’ the indigenous populations of the lands he discovered. On the other hand, nor could he brook the humiliation of their stealing with impunity, nor of their treating Englishmen with disrespect, nor of their mockery. He had always believed that the use of firearms was a last resort, but that if they were used, they would subdue the savage instantly. In Hawaii this proved not to be the case.
Some of the officers who had been ashore were attacked by the Hawaiians. The crews of two boats were pelted with stones.
—Mr Cooper, Cook said to his First Lieutenant on the Resolution, the behaviour of the Indians obliges us to use force. They must not imagine they have gained an advantage over us.
—And if they resist us, sir? asked the young master.
—There will be no resistance, Mr Bligh. I am very positive of that. The Indians will not stand the fire of a single musket.
With a party of armed mariners, commanded by Lieutenant Molesworth Phillips, Cook made the decision to go aboard, to make their way to the king’s house. They found Kalaniopu’u asleep, and at gunpoint he agreed to accompany them back to their boat. Cook had meant to tell the villagers that if they restored his stolen boats and the other items, he would release the royal hostage. By the time they reached the shoreline, however, a huge crowd – thousands of angry people – were waiting. Some of them threatened Cook with stones and sticks. The mariners fired into the crowd, killing one or two people. Then Cook fired his loaded musket at a man. He was instantly set upon, stabbed from behind.
—Get back to the boats! he was able to call out before he was hit again.
His officers and men obeyed him, crowding into the pinnace and rowing at speed back to the Resolution. The cutter from the Resolution rowed back to give the men cover, continuing to fire into the crowd.
Cook was dead; so were four mariners. The islanders took his body. It was impossible, in after time, to be quite sure what the islanders had done next, nor was it apparent why they had acted as they did. Some of the sailors believed that the islanders, aware that they had slain a great man, had identified him with one of their gods – Lono. There seems some evidence that in his visits to the heiau, Cook, when arrayed in a priestly cloak by Kalaniopu’u, had been addressed as Lono. In Hawaiian mythology, Ku is the God of War who enacts a ritual battle each year with Lono, a fertility god. Evidence for the identification of Cook and the Gods seemed scant enough. Clearly, however, they had recognized his high status. When the next day Commander Clerke – who succeeded Cook and took charge of the expedition – went back to the islands to beg for his remains, he was treated with respect. There were to be no more killings.
Some days later, the carpenters finished work on the new mast, and as it was carried to the boat to be transported to the Resolution, the men were met by a long procession of natives, carrying green boughs, hogs, fruit, roots and beating drums. The chief, who led a gang of wailing natives, presented Commander Clerke with a bundle, which he gently carried back to the ship. The body had been burnt – roasted rather than utterly cremated. The bundle contained the scalp and all the long bones, the thighs, legs, arms and the skull, missing the jaw. The hands were wrapped separately. No flesh remained on any of the bones, except upon the hands – the right hand was instantly recognizable, bearing the scar between thumb and forefinger which he had borne since, as a young sailor, he had suffered an exploded powder-horn off the coast of Newfoundland.
The next day, the chief was rowed out to the Resolution in a canoe, bringing another bundle: the Captain’s jaw-bone, his feet, and the twisted broken musket. The remains were put in a coffin and late in the afternoon of 21st February, they were lowe
red into the waters of the bay. The mast was fixed. The Resolution sailed for home.
George could not write these things, though he knew them, and had determined with great concentration to find out all that could be known. He discerned very soon, not the obvious things he had already surmised – that the scene of the Hawaiian tragedy was a muddle, a riot, whose exact details would be impossible to recapture – but other, more troubling truths. What had his own Voyage book been, written with the deliberate intention of attracting a public sale in advance of the publication of the Captain’s own Journals, but a form of disembodiment, a scalping, a severing of limbs? Yet he too, like the islanders who had taken Cook to pieces, worshipped the man he had dissected, worshipped in a way he could never revere another person. The journeys of discovery which Reinhold had initiated when he first opened Linnaeus or took the boy down the Volga was a voyage of fits and starts: an unsatisfactory chaos of explorations. True, Cook had not found the Southern Continent. True, he was murdered before he had completed his explorations of the American western seaboard or established the existence or otherwise of the Northwest Passage, but nonetheless there was a purity of purpose, a simplicity of aim, an integrity of intellect, a majesty, a stature about this man which made him, indeed, possess qualities which in certain human usages could be termed divine. George finished his book by ignoring the fact that Cook had been buried at sea.
In my passionate Enthusiasm I now think of him at this moment, as one of the beneficent heroes of antiquity borne aloft on eagles’ wings to the assembly of the blessed gods. Were he, from the heights of Olympus, to cast a glance earthwards, he would see the academies of science who crowned his endeavours with honour in his life time bestowing upon him an immortal garland; he would see the tears of abject sorrow flowing, throughout Europe, for a noble man too early cut short; he would see the History of his Voyages, a more lasting monument than bronze or marble. He would also see the blossoms of Friendship strewn upon his grave.