The Pacific

by Meaghan Wilson Anastasios

  Although he didn’t manage to persuade the Chukchi to trade with him and his men – or even to lower their weapons – for the three hours the ships were there, Cook did encourage some exchanges of trinkets for artefacts. Word of Cook’s visit would eventually find its way back to the ear of Catherine the Great, who assumed the interlopers were American. Furious, and determined to assert her claim over the area, she demanded that her coat of arms be nailed to tree trunks along the coast . . . being unaware that there are no trees in the region.

  Today, the Chukchi remain fiercely independent. The Chukotka Autonomous Region is populated by 55,000 people spread out over more than 700,000 square kilometres, which is traversed by only 600 kilometres or so in roads and has no other overland means of transport. As recently as the 1970s, it was reported that the Chukchi still refused to speak Russian.

  For Cook’s men, the Chukchi greeting didn’t alter the fact that, having endured horrendous conditions in the Bering Sea, the brief change of scenery was appreciated.

  CHARLES CLERKE (1743–1779), Naval Officer, crew member on Cook’s first, second and third voyages

  [F]ine cheery day . . . gave even this wretched, barren country a more pleasing appearance; we all feel this morning as though we were risen in a new world.

  If there is any doubt about just how terrible their experience in that body of water must have been, consider how it was that two shiploads of men who had recently spent months wallowing in the tropical climate of Polynesia could wax lyrical about Siberia – a place that is, by any measure, bleak, barren and rather uninviting to the uninitiated.

  It would have been with considerable dismay, then, that the crew heard the order to head out to sea again.

  *

  Having found no indication yet that a passage through the sea ice existed, Cook was determined to continue his search. But it was August and summer was on the wane. And as winter approached, so did the ice sheet. Despite the danger, Cook forged his way through terrifying seas as he pushed north.

  CAPTAIN PHIL PRYZMONT, Arctic Fisherman

  Sledge Island is about twenty miles east of us right now, and after Cook clears that, he’s going to turn north and go around the end of the Bering Strait. Out there it gets bumpy. You’ve got a prevailing northerly wind with a prevailing south to north current, so you get some pretty steep waves.

  Approaching the ice sheet on 17 August 1778, Cook recognised an atmospheric phenomenon he knew from his time in Antarctica: ice blink – a peculiar glow in the sky near the horizon that’s caused by the reflection of the sun off an icefield.

  CAPTAIN PHIL PRYZMONT

  When you get close to the ice, even within about twenty miles, you can see the sky above it is white. It’s reflecting the sunlight off it, so you have a pretty good advance notice that it’s coming. When you get to the ice you’re going to get to the pancake ice where pieces of them are banging into each other in the swells. It’s round enough and the edges are usually pretty thin. But then as you get further into the ice pack, you lose the swell first and start noticing that the water gets calmer and calmer. Then the pancake ice pieces get bigger and bigger and pretty soon you start to meet up with the icebergs.

  Cook knew what that meant, and it wasn’t good news. Large chunks of frozen water slamming and grinding together did not bode well for two timber ships whose seaworthiness had been giving Cook headaches ever since they had departed England.

  It was the Great Barrier Reef all over again, but in sub-zero conditions and with terminally dangerous chunks of ice that moved. At least coral stays in the one spot.

  Still Cook pressed on. On 18 August 1778, he reached as far north as Icy Cape. He was just beyond seventy degrees in latitude and at a point so far north that it was as far from Icy Cape to Unalaska as Unalaska was from Hawai‘i. It was almost exactly the same latitude Cook had reached in the southern hemisphere when he crossed the Antarctic Circle. But as the seasons turned and the ice sheet began its inexorable march south at a rate of up to a mile an hour, the ice pressed in on him – ‘as compact as a wall and seemed to be ten or twelve feet high’, as Cook put it – at times threatening to crush the two ships.

  For a time, Cook tacked back and forth along the wall, probing to find any gaps that might hint at a passage beyond. The chart that shows Cook’s zigzagging about the Bering Sea and the northern Asian and American shorelines bears witness to his determination to probe every corner of the northern Pacific until he found evidence of – or disproved – the existence of a passage through the ice. But conditions worsened, and he realised he could push his men no further.

  CHARLES CLERKE

  A thick fog and a foul wind are rather disagreeable intruders to people engaged in surveying and tracing a coast . . . We have now a very staggering gale. This seems upon the whole a damned unhappy part of the world.

  JOHN RICKMAN (1737–1818), Lieutenant, Cook’s third voyage

  Ice was seen hanging at our hair, our noses and even at the men’s finger ends. Hot victuals froze while we were at table.

  Cook knew it was the end of the line.

  CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

  The season was so far advanced . . . I didn’t think it consistent with prudence to make any further attempts to find a passage this year in any direction so little was the chance of succeeding.

  On 29 August, he decided to retreat from the frozen north.

  It surely came at no small cost to Cook’s pride for him to turn back without resolving the question he had travelled so far, and endured so much, to answer.

  JAMES TREVENEN (1760–1790), Midshipman, Cook’s third voyage

  Indefatigability was a leading feature of his character. If he failed in, or could no longer pursue, his first great object, he immediately began to consider how he might be most useful in prosecuting some inferior one.

  Did Cook consider the voyage a failure? There’s no doubt he would have preferred to find a way through the ice to the other side on his first attempt. But he had every intention of returning the following summer – the next time travelling with fresh eyes and his own charts after having been led on a wild goose chase in 1778 by the substandard Russian maps.

  CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

  It was with me a matter of some consequence to clear up this point this season, that I might have but one object in view the next.

  He certainly didn’t plan to give up – though as he sailed south, he had begun to question the plausibility of there being a North-West Passage, writing that he had observed ‘the polar part is far from being an open sea’.

  Cook’s scepticism was based on observations he had made while journeying around the Antarctic on his second voyage. Along with the naturalist Johann Forster, Cook had questioned the prevailing wisdom as put forward by the leading lights of the Royal Society that ice was a freshwater phenomenon and that seawater did not freeze. The explanation they had for sea ice was that it was formed in rivers before entering the ocean. All of which was complete bunkum, of course.

  It would take nearly two hundred and fifty years and the helping hand of global warming for the North-West Passage to become a reality – and only then in summer with the assistance of icebreakers.

  *

  Cook’s decision to abandon the search must have come as a relief to the men on board the ships. Not that the return to Unalaska was without its challenges. As they retreated south, they had to fight through heavy snow flurries and bitterly cold temperatures. To top it all off, on 25 September the Resolution again defied its name and sprang a new leak.

  Visibility was appalling, which meant that Cook was often sailing blind. He found a surprising – and unwitting – ally when navigating the icefloes through sea fog. The mournful bellow of walruses lolling about on the ice warned Cook when he was getting too close for comfort.

  Before turning south again, the other thing Cook had thought walruses might be useful for was as a source of protein. Given they looked for all the world like legless marine cows – or ‘sea hor
ses’ as the men on the British boats called them – it wasn’t an unreasonable assumption to make. For the people who inhabited these desolate outer reaches of the globe, walruses were a crucial natural resource.

  RAYMOND KOWELUT, Inupiat/Eskimo

  My people have lived on walrus for thousands of years. When I was sixteen years old, I went walrus hunting and they wanted me to harpoon without using the rifle, but we couldn’t find a walrus. I’m glad we didn’t because if I had gotten it with just a harpoon at sixteen, it would have been my time to get married – it was tradition back then. When you’re hunting, your adrenalin is really high – some people get nervous because a walrus is a big animal. Once you harpoon it, it’s like catching a big fish. If you’re going too fast it can almost rip your arm off – the bearded seal can get to about maybe eight hundred pounds, and a walrus can be half a tonne maybe. Sometimes the young bulls will come up to your boat and try to flip it over. I like hunting – you get that natural high.

  It’s unlikely Cook’s crewmen experienced the raw thrill of the hunt as described by traditional hunters.

  Judging by the illustration that the ship’s artist, Webber, made of the ‘sea horse’ hunt, where sailors in a low-keeled rowboat unload shot into walruses with tusks the length of a man’s arm, it must have got their hearts racing nonetheless. They brought down nine walruses – some as large as nine feet in length.

  Cook sampled the walrus meat and deemed it quite delicious, declaring its fat as ‘sweet as marrow’.

  CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

  The fat at first is sweet as marrow but in a few days it grows rancid unless it is salted, then it will keep good much longer, the lean is course, black and rather a strong taste, the heart is nearly as well tasted as that of a bullock. The fat when melted yields a good deal of oil which burns very well in lamps, and their hides, which are very thick, were very useful about our rigging.

  The crew disagreed. To their taste, the fat resembled ‘train oil instead of marrow’, and was ‘disgustful’ and ‘too rank both in smell and taste as to make use of except with plenty of pepper and salt’.

  SAM NEILL

  It kind of has a blubbery look about it. So if I’m careful, I can avoid the blubber, and just go for the meat . . . Urgh . . . it’s got a slight gag reflex thing about it . . . That’s decidedly one of the worst things I’ve ever eaten in my life . . . it’s kind of rancid – fishy tasting – really an instant stomach churn. Having said that, if I was cold and hungry, and I was nearing the Arctic Circle, I’m not entirely sure if I’d go on hunger strike . . . No, come to think of it, I probably would.

  Cook, they decided, may have been a commander and navigator without peer, but a gourmand he was not.

  JAMES TREVENEN

  Captain Cook here speaks entirely from his own taste which was, surely, the coarsest that ever mortal was endured with.

  ‘Disgustful’ or not, Cook wasn’t about to give in. He halved regular rations and left them with one choice. Eat the walrus, or starve. Many amongst the crew voted with their spoons – it was an Alaskan stand-off as the men refused to eat. Many of those who did eat the walrus were violently ill.

  RAYMOND KOWELUT

  You got to get used to it. When I was growing up we had to eat it at a young age because that’s all we can eat sometimes – just walrus or seal. But the taste of walrus is . . . well, you have to get used to the taste.

  Within days, Cook’s malnourished men were ready to collapse and next to useless. He had no other choice but to give in and reinstate salt beef in the rations, though he did so begrudgingly, describing his men as ‘[d]amned mutinous scoundrels’.

  There’s no doubt this incident caused another rift between Cook and his crew. In a sense, it was a point of critical mass – the culmination of all the ill will that had been building up during the voyage.

  In the past, Cook’s men had the highest regard for their captain.

  ALEXANDER HOME, (c.1739–1823), crew member, Cook’s third voyage

  In the midst of the greatest jeopardy, [Cook] could judge and reflect calmly and always had the skill and good fortune to extricate himself and his people . . . By degrees a habit grew upon us of placing such confidence in him, that although surrounded by dangers in shallow seas, fogs and storms we could go calmly to rest placing our safety in the skill and fortune of our leader.

  But although there had been glimpses on this third journey of the composed leader they knew from previous voyages, Cook’s reputation as a commander who was fair-minded and even-handed had suffered a mortal blow.

  JAMES TREVENEN

  [Cook] would sometimes relax from his almost constant severity of disposition and condescended now and then to converse familiarly with us. But it was only for a time; as soon as on board the ship he became again the despot.

  Although many factors contributed to his end, this rupture between Cook and his crew would play an important part in the tragic events that led to his death.

  *

  Other than their very brief sojourn in St Lawrence Bay, by the time they arrived in the (relatively) safe harbour in Unalaska at the beginning of October, the men on board the Resolution and the Discovery had endured three months worth of ice, gales, fog and sub-zero conditions.

  On 2 October, the Resolution and Discovery dropped anchor in Unalaska, and Cook ordered the men to set about refitting, repairing and replenishing the ships, and recaulking their leaking timbers.

  They would spend almost one month in Unalaska, during which Cook allowed his men to take shore leave while he indulged in long walks in the hills ringing English Bay, cataloguing the many berries that grew on the exposed hillsides. While he directed some of the crew to harvest the berries with a view to fending off scurvy in months to come, Cook also instructed the blacksmith to rework a damaged anchor from the Discovery into knives and adze blades to use as trade goods when they returned to Hawai‘i. If he’d known what was to come, Cook might have chosen to do something else with the waste metal.

  While on shore, Cook also found time to cast an anthropological eye over the Unangan people who lived in what were to him surprisingly heavily populated settlements, given the apparent paucity of natural resources on the island.

  DR RICK KNECHT, Archaeologist, University of Aberdeen: There would have been five or six hundred people in these settlements. That contrasts to the Eastern Arctic, where you could have had no more than five hundred people in total on the entire Ellesmere Island. Because they had so many marine resources here, they were able to have a fairly complex and sophisticated culture even though they were non-agrarian because you had all that food out there in the ocean in big packages . . . all you had to do was harvest it and process it. So rather than put in all the labour cultivating, planting . . .

  SAM NEILL: . . . and weeding.

  RICK KNECHT: Yeah . . . weeding.

  SAM NEILL: No weeding. This is a dream.

  Cook marvelled at their ingenuity and ability to thrive in what he knew from firsthand experience was a harsh and forbidding environment. The Unangan wasted nothing. Take a sea lion, for example: yes, it yielded the obvious – food and blubber oil – but it went a whole lot further than that. Its bones were used to craft tools, teeth became fishhooks, and sinews were dried and used as fishing lines. Flippers were shoe soles and, most extraordinarily, intestines and gut lining were used to make water-resistant parkas and skylights for the subterranean houses the Unangan carved into the earth.

  SAM NEILL

  In Unalaska, Cook encountered people who had adapted brilliantly to their harsh environment. And the Unangans had thrived for some nine and a half thousand years when the English ships showed up. They lived in homes built about a metre underground – where a wooden post was both a ladder and structural support for the building. Cook was impressed by Unangan genius in surviving in these adverse conditions. And, frankly, so am I. There’s a parka in the Museum of the Aleutians which is made of seal gut. It’s not only an exquisite piece of clothing
, it’s also completely practical. Before the invention of Gore-Tex, it was the most waterproof and breathable thing you could wear on the planet.

  Cook made note of the rye grass baskets carefully crafted by the Unangan women, and he recorded how they warmed themselves using blubber-oil lamps by placing them between their legs and under their clothing.

  As has occurred with depressing regularity across the Pacific, in Unalaska the accounts written by Cook and the other men on board would ultimately prove to be valuable resources for present-day Unangans seeking to re-establish ancient cultural traditions that had previously been transmitted from generation to generation through oral means.

  Their houses were also quite remarkable and perfectly suited for the environment. For thousands of years, the Unangan occupied subterranean huts accessible via a ladder that popped out of a hole in the hut’s roof.