Mrs. Cook

by Marele Day

  It was Sir Joseph who’d advocated the establishment of a colony in New South Wales. Elizabeth wondered whether James would have approved. He came and went, but the colonists stayed, exposing the natives to convicts. James had found the natives of New South Wales ‘an inoffensive race. All they seemed to want was for us to go.’ Of the South Seas people in general he wrote: ‘We introduce among them wants and perhaps diseases which they never before knew and which serves only to disturb that happy tranquillity they and their forefathers enjoyed . . . If anyone denies the truth of this assertion let him tell me what the natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.’

  Over the years, Sir Joseph, Sophia and Dorothea had all grown enormously fat. When Sir Joseph wasn’t troubled with the gout, he enjoyed his food and wine with the same enthusiasm he had for botany, or any of his other pursuits. As Elizabeth watched Gates setting out the new pearl-ware Wedgwood, she couldn’t help but recall once again Banks’s boast that he had ‘eaten his way further into the animal kingdom than any man’.

  Nothing so challenging as penguin or armadillo would be served this Thursday. Elizabeth’s few remaining teeth had a hard time chewing great lumps of meat, and for the dinner with the Banks she had organised an onion soup, followed by a fricando of veal garnished with lemon and barberries. A syllabub for dessert and, when the Banks arrived, to whet their appetites, anchovy toasts. This was a dish Elizabeth was fond of, and often had by itself for supper. Gates would cut slices of bread, fry them in butter then place half an anchovy on each piece. A good sprinkle of grated cheese mixed with parsley from the garden, and the dish was ready to place under the salamander to brown. It had to be browned in the dish which would come to the table, to keep it nice and hot.

  ‘The Banks, marm,’ announced Gates.

  They entered the room like three round tumblers. Despite his obesity, Sir Joseph still had a great deal of flourish. ‘I trust you are keeping well, Mrs Cook,’ he said.

  ‘Very well, thank you,’ she replied. It was a politeness to answer in this way. Elizabeth often was not very well; the fits which had attacked her when Hugh and Jamie died threatened to return, she became feverish and could not sleep without the assistance of powders, especially on nights of high wind when she tossed and turned, and no amount of prayers could settle her.

  The Banks were not frequent visitors but Elizabeth was always glad to see them. Sophia, who still continued collecting things, noticed any new relics and curiosities Elizabeth had, and Mr Banks always brought news of London and the world, of the men, like Bligh and Vancouver, who had sailed with James. What officers they were! ‘You men of Captain Cook,’ Sir Joseph repeated the words of politician William Windham, ‘you rise upon us in every trial.’

  The last time the Banks had come to dinner the talk was of the then recently published Lyrical Tales, by Mr Samuel Taylor Coleridge, now secretary to the governor of Malta. The poem which had most caught the public’s imagination was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which told a dreadful tale. In that first 1798 edition, the precis read thus: ‘How a ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold country towards the South Pole, and how from thence she made her course to the tropical latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own country.’

  ‘Why, it’s James’s voyage on the Resolution!’ Elizabeth had exclaimed to Isaac when it first came to their attention. The matter elicited quite a bit of discussion, Elizabeth remembering exact words from the Voyage which had found their way into the poem, and Isaac remembering incidents aboard.

  The matter had been taken up again at dinner with the Banks. Sir Joseph listened to what Elizabeth and Isaac had to say.

  ‘Isaac, let’s not forget Mr Wales, may he rest in peace. Do you remember him, Mrs Cook? Astronomer aboard the Resolution, a Fellow of the Royal Society, elected 1776.’ Elizabeth admired the way the man could refer so smoothly to that second voyage, the preparations for which had caused him to become a laughing stock. It all seemed so long ago. ‘On his return, Mr Wales was appointed Master of the Mathematical School at Christ’s Hospital, where Coleridge was a pupil.’ Sir Joseph explained. ‘It was the most dreadful school till Wales took command, the boys a terror to all around them. He reined them in, with strict discipline as well as a kind heart and a sense of humour. My guess is that a little storytelling wouldn’t have gone astray. Nothing boys like so much as a good story of adventuring, Wales no doubt blending a little science in with the wonders of the sea and the ice, the strange phenomena of our world.’ Banks laughed. ‘Perhaps Mr Coleridge saw Wales as the ancient mariner. He was forty-odd when he commenced teaching, closer to fifty by the time he had Coleridge in his charge.’

  Then began a kind of a game, with Elizabeth, Isaac and Sir Joseph looking for all the correspondences between the poem and the voyage, using James’s account and Isaac’s memories. ‘And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald.’ In James’s journal they found: ‘The weather became hazy . . . the haze increased so much, that we did not see an island of ice, which we were steering directly for, till we were less than a mile from it. I judged it to be about fifty feet high.’ As high as a mast.

  The poem made mention of a phenomenon Elizabeth had heard of—the eerie sound of cracking ice, as if the whole earth was being rent asunder. All who had been to the high latitudes spoke of it. Mr Coleridge described how the ice ‘cracked and growled, and roared and howled’.

  There were many other correspondences, and though Elizabeth thought it was a very fine poem, the one closer to her heart was The Antarctic Muse, which James had enclosed in one of his letters to her. It had a much more positive ring to it.

  After the dinner, with her head full of the voyage and the poem, Elizabeth had thought of the albatross. They were rather magnificent birds, judging by the paintings. Whether it was bad luck, as the poem suggested, to shoot an albatross, Elizabeth did not know. James noted in his journal the shooting of albatrosses, particularly by Mr Forster. But he would have none of the superstition. Perhaps part of Mr Forster’s peskiness came from this, Elizabeth had mused before she’d drifted off to sleep. That night she had dreamt of white birds on great airborne voyages around the globe, a pair of them dancing their courtship in the sky high above the ice.

  After the syllabub of the present dinner, over port and coffee, Elizabeth took up her embroidery.

  ‘What a splendid idea, Mrs Cook,’ said Sophia. ‘All the ladies are embroidering maps, but no-one is more suited to it than you.’

  ‘Where are you up to?’ asked Dorothea.

  ‘Approaching Botany Bay.’

  Dorothea leant over for a closer look, careful not to spill anything on Mrs Cook’s precious work.

  ‘Ah, Botany Bay,’ sighed Sir Joseph. ‘So long ago yet my picture of it is still vivid. It was May when we were there, the creeks full of water from the autumn rains and the grass green. Flocks of lorikeets and cockatoos. Curious kookaburras giving out great guffaws of laughter that echoed through the trees. Stingrays in the bay weighing nearly four hundred pounds—without the guts. So much botanising to be done! You know,’ he said, shifting in his chair, ‘when we arrived your husband said: “Isaac, you shall go first”. What a thrill for a boy of his age, the first European to step onto that pristine shore.’ Sir Joseph paused, thinking perhaps of the shore no longer pristine, of the struggles the fledgling New South Wales colony had endured.

  When Captain Arthur Phillip had arrived on that January day in 1788, the middle of the antipodean summer, the creeks had been but a trickle and the grass brown. They had all nearly starved. Yet the natives had been living there for some considerable time and had not starved, thought Elizabeth. She smiled at the memory of young Isaac. It was a well-loved family story, Isaac being the first to step ashore. And now he was a post-captain, commander of
the Perseverance under Commander Cornwallis of the East India Station.

  Elizabeth spent the winters in Clapham and summers at Cousin Charles’s estate at Merton Abbey, also known as the Gatehouse, further south in the county of Surrey. In 1807 she was joined by Isaac, who had become ill with the yellow jaundice and had to retire, having obtained the rank of rear admiral.

  In both houses Elizabeth embroidered and the work elicited interest whenever anyone saw it. Even little Horatia, product of the union between Charles’s neighbours, Nelson and Lady Hamilton, was curious, mesmerised by the shiny thread Elizabeth was pulling in and out of the cloth. Elizabeth gave the child a piece of silk to play with, as she had once done with her own dear little Eliza.

  Elizabeth stitched her way across the world and chequered it with the firm dark lines of longitude and latitude. James had told her that the Polynesian navigators of the South Seas made ‘maps’ of their ocean that resembled skewed lines of longitude and latitude, maps made of string with shells knotted into them, which were used to teach their apprentices, the lines representing the direction of currents, and the shells islands. Now Elizabeth was nearing Hawaii, about to stitch her way into Kealekekua Bay, where James’s voyage, and his precious life, ended.

  Kealekekua Bay. Elizabeth looked again at the watercolour of it in the ditty box and imagined James there. A turquoise bay with coral and brightly coloured fish, the water so clear the white sand could be seen on the bottom. Behind the bay ran a rocky cliff. Further away still was a massive snow-capped mountain. All around the bay was black volcanic rock, and at one end, a stream of fresh water.

  Elizabeth will stitch only once into Kealekekua Bay but James went twice. The first time he was revered as a god. Over eight hundred canoes came to greet him, as well as a multitude of swimming natives. James’s diary entry for 17 January 1779 read: ‘I have no where in this Sea seen such a number of people assembled in one place, besides those in the Canoes all the Shore of the bay was covered with people and hundreds were swimming about the Ships like shoals of fish.’

  An old priest came on board and presented James with coconuts and a pig. When James went ashore that afternoon the natives prostrated themselves before him. Echoing from the cliffs was their chant of ‘Lono, Lono’. He was escorted to a sacred place which was bedecked in skulls and carved images. The priests wrapped a red ceremonial cloth around James and bade him prostrate himself in front of one of the images, then the islanders lined up and made offerings to him, all the while chanting ‘Lono, Lono’. In return, James distributed trinkets and pieces of iron.

  James King, second lieutenant, described the proceedings as a ‘long, and rather tiresome ceremony, of which we can only guess at its Object and Meaning, only that it was highly respectful’. Later they would learn that the appearance of the Resolution on the horizon, a floating island with white banners secured by crossbars, matched exactly the predicted return of Lono, the Hawaiian god of abundance and peace. As well, the ships happened to arrive in the middle of makahiki, the season celebrating the god, in which warfare was suspended, and sport and entertainments took its place.

  So began days of mutual friendship, reverence and gift-giving, including daggers and more pieces of the iron which the islanders so prized. As the days turned to weeks, Kalei’opu’u and the chiefs ‘became inquisitive as to the time of our departure and seem’d well-pleas’d that it was to be soon’, wrote King. Even in this season of abundance there were only so many offerings the people could make to their god. They had already provided all they could spare.

  The Resolution and Discovery departed on 4 February. But on the night of the seventh strong gales blew up and damaged Resolution’s foremast. A sheltered harbour in which to make repairs was needed.

  They returned to Kealekekua Bay, to a very different reception. As Jem Burney noted, the islanders ‘appeared much dissatisfied’. The mood darkened even further, and thievery, which had been in abeyance during the first visit, now became rife. The blacksmith’s tongs, tools which helped fashion the daggers, were stolen, not once but twice. Vancouver and others who tried to apprehend the thief had stones thrown at them. Reverence had turned to contempt.

  That night, James called a meeting of his officers. ‘The Capt expressed his sorrow,’ wrote Lieutenant King, ‘that the behaviour of the Indians would at last oblige him to use force, for that they must not he said, imagine they have gained an advantage over us.’

  In the early hours of the morning, Sunday 14 February, Jem Burney noticed, on his rounds, that the Discovery’s cutter was missing, the boat having been stolen from under the very noses of the men on night watch.

  On hearing of the theft James immediately ordered a blockade of the bay. Any canoe attempting to leave was to be driven back to shore. He gave an order for the marines to load their muskets with ball, which would kill, rather than shot, which merely caused superficial damage. James loaded his own gun, one barrel with shot, the other with ball. He went ashore in the pinnace with Lieutenant Molesworth Phillips and nine armed marines.

  They landed on the black volcanic rockshelf and made their way towards the village, James intending to invite King Kalei’opu’u to visit the Resolution, and keep him there till the cutter was returned, this ‘kidnapping’ having worked on other occasions. The king had just woken up but was happy to go, as were his two sons, one of whom ran ahead and climbed into the pinnace.

  Then came the sound of musket fire from the south end of the beach, and soon a ripple spread through the gathering crowd that a chief trying to leave the bay had been shot. More islanders gathered, some wearing protective war mats, others carrying clubs. And the iron daggers. A great humming arose and the trumpet of conch shells. One of the king’s wives rushed forward and tried to persuade her husband not to go. The king sat down, confused. With the crowd teetering on the edge of war James could not compel the king to accompany him without bloodshed.

  Several of the islanders threw rocks at the marines, knocking one of them to the ground. Another islander came from behind, aiming a spear at James. James turned and fired shot but it did not penetrate the thick war mat. When a marine told James he’d fired shot at the wrong man, James ordered him to shoot the right one. Which the marine did. The islanders momentarily fell back, but then began the scene of ‘utmost horror and confusion’.

  The natives showered the shore party with rocks. Four marines were killed. Phillips was knocked down then stabbed in the shoulder. He managed to shoot his assailant before swimming to the pinnace. As James waved for the boats to come closer, an islander armed with a club struck James a blow to the back of the head. James fell to one knee, his musket under him. As he rose again, another islander ran at him, drew an iron dagger from his feathered cloak and plunged it into the back of James’s neck. James staggered into the water, and fell face down. The islanders held him under, snatching daggers out of each other’s hands and plunging them into James’s body long after it had become a corpse, swept along in the surge of destruction, just as the Gordon rioters had been, in which all humanity and reason is lost.

  There was shocked silence on both sides. Then began the aftermath. Many on board the two ships, Bligh included, wanted to bombard the village, raze it to the ground. Captain Clerke took command, and ordered restraint.

  It was a week before James’s remains, or parts of them, were returned—his hands, one bearing the signature scar from Newfoundland, the long bones, the scalp. The rest, it was explained, had been divided among the chiefs of the island, as was the custom with the death of a grand personage. The returned remains were buried at sea, ‘committed to the deep’, Clerke wrote, ‘with all the attention and honour we could possibly pay it in this part of the world’. Captain James Cook was in the embrace of his beloved ocean. Before the ceremony, someone was thoughtful enough to cut a lock of hair from his scalp, to be returned to his wife in the ditty box.

  Elizabeth sat for a long time looking at Hawaii, such a small scatter of islands on the blue ocean
that had so seduced her husband. She drew her focus away from Hawaii to see the world as a whole, the embroidered coastlines, the letters marking the Southern Ocean, Great South Sea, the Pacific Ocean and theWestern Atlantic Ocean. Across all the oceans and seas were Elizabeth’s fine antlike stitches, the traces of Captain James Cook’s voyages.

  THE BOOKPLATE

  The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.

  All the rivers run into the sea . . .

  Ecclesiastes 1: 6–7

  ‘Into the blue?’ repeated Isaac. ‘What do you mean?’

  Elizabeth dabbed paste on the inside cover of the Bible and carefully placed the bookplate, smoothing it down with a cloth to make it adhere. The bookplate bore the Cook family coat of arms with the two polar stars and map of the Pacific. ‘I mean I want to depart, on a ship. A supernumerary like Banks, and the others.’

  ‘You want to sail to Botany Bay?’ Surely Elizabeth couldn’t be serious. Never in her entire life had she expressed a wish to sail. Isaac eyed his cousin carefully. Was she finally losing her faculties?

  ‘Of course not to Botany Bay,’ she said impatiently. ‘The blue water must start sooner than that. I want to see the brown river turn ocean blue.’

  ‘But you get seasick,’ Isaac protested lamely.

  ‘I feel queasy on a boat,’ Elizabeth corrected him. ‘Unlike Nelson, who vomited his way to Trafalgar, I have never actually been ill. I’ve survived many things, queasiness is not going to kill me.’ Elizabeth watched her cousin’s mouth, on the verge of saying something, his eyes flickering, searching for more excuses. ‘It’s not a whim,’ she continued. ‘A short passage to Portsmouth should be easy for a rear admiral such as yourself to arrange. A sailing ship that goes with the wind, not one of those new steam-powered things belching smoke into the air. No special arrangements need be made. I’ll not be bringing a suite of servants, horn players and dogs, or any paraphernalia. Just myself, and one small valise.’