VI
JAMES COOK

Once more I am going to ask you to take your seat with me on the ideal equivalent of the Magic Carpet and skim across another time-gulf some half-century wide. This time we alight on the morning of Monday, July 5, 1742, before the door of a double-fronted shop, one side of which is devoted to the sale of groceries and the other to the drapery business. This shop is situated in a little village on the Yorkshire coast a few miles from Whitby, Staithes, or more exactly The Staithes, so called from the local name for a pier or sea-wall of wood jutting out a few feet into the German Ocean, and built partly to protect the little bay from the North Sea rollers and partly to afford accommodation for the fishing-boats and colliers.

The shop belongs to a substantial citizen of Staithes named Saunderson, and this morning Mr. Saunderson is a very angry man. In fact, if we go into the shop, which is not yet open, we shall find him with a cane or some similar weapon in his hand, leaning behind the counter and hitting blindly at a bed there is beneath it, shouting the while sundry excellent maxims on the virtue of early rising, especially modified for the benefit of apprentices.

But no response comes from the bed, and Mr. Saunderson stoops down to make closer investigation. The bed is empty, and the fact dawns on him that his last apprentice has followed the example of all the others and run away to sea. It was a very common event on the Yorkshire coast in those days, but this particular running away was destined to be a very memorable one for the world, for the lad who, instead of being in the bed under the counter, was just then striding rapidly away over the fields to Whitby with one extra shirt and a jack-knife for his sole possessions, was James Cook, a name as dear to the lovers of the romance of travel and adventure as Robinson Crusoe, and one of infinitely more importance in the annals of mankind.

In following his fortunes, so far as the brief limits of such a sketch as this will permit, we shall bid a perhaps welcome adieu for a while to the roar of guns and the shock of battle, to the blaze of burning towns and the fierce cries ringing along the decks of captured treasure-ships, to watch the contest of a clear head and a strong will against those foes which may be overcome without bloodshed, although not always without loss of life—the hidden dangers of unknown oceans strewn with uncharted reefs and shoals lying in wait for unwary keels, the sudden hurricanes of the Tropics, and the storms and fogs and the floating ice-navies of the far North and South. It was these that Captain Cook went out to fight and overcome, and in doing so to prove eloquently that:

“Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war.”

Nevertheless there are certain points of likeness between James Cook, Geographer and Circumnavigator, and that other Circumnavigator, Francis Drake, Pirate and Scourge of Spain. Both began life as ship-boys, and both rose, by sheer ability and strength of purpose, far above their original station in life to positions of command in the service of their country. Both were men of iron will, far-reaching design, unshakeable self-reliance, and passionate temper, and, lastly, both were possessed by that irresistible spirit of roving and adventure which, when it once seizes a man, but seldom lets him rest in peace. In short, though the vocation of one was piracy and war, and that of the other the peaceful, but none the less adventurous service of science, both were stamped with the supreme and essential characteristics of the Empire-Maker.

Naturally, the world had changed a good deal by the time James Cook started out to add so enormously to men’s knowledge of it. Spain had fallen from her high estate and was living in slothful ease on the dregs and lees of that strong wine which she had drunk to intoxication in the golden days of Cortez and Pizarro. But Britain, no longer only England, had become Great Britain, and was fast expanding into Greater Britain. Cowley, Dampier, Clapperton and Anson had circumnavigated the globe more than once, and people were beginning to have something like a definite notion of how very big a place was this world which now seems so small to us. The Imperial Idea was beginning to take hold of men’s minds. They wanted to know, not so much how big the world was, but what other unknown lands might be lying waiting for the discoverer, hidden away among the vast expanses which were still an utter blank upon the map.

The maritime nations of the world, too, and Britain, now foremost among them, had unconsciously taken a very great stride along the pathway of real progress, and they were beginning to grasp the higher ideal of colonisation as distinguished from mere conquest, and to James Cook belongs the high honour, if not of discovering, at least of first definitely locating and in part mapping out the greatest of all the British colonies.

Indeed, it may be said that, in sober fact, he added a whole continent to the British Empire, and that without the striking of a single blow or the loss of a single life in battle.

The first few years of James Cook’s seafaring life were eventless, just as Francis Drake’s were, but for all that he, like Gloriana’s Little Pirate, was doing that minor but no less essential part of his life-work which was the necessary preparation for the greater. He was doing his work first as ship’s boy, then as sailor before the mast, then as second mate, first mate, and so on up the laborious ladder which was to lead him in the end to an unequalled eminence among mariners.

Thus for thirteen years he served what may be called his apprenticeship to his life’s work; learning in the most practical of all schools, a North Sea collier of the eighteenth century, not only the science of seamanship in all its details, but also what was hardly less important—that science of taking things as they came, of looking upon hardship, privation and danger as the commonplaces of a seaman’s life, incidents in his day’s work, as it were, and as such scarcely worth even the mention, and hence much less worth troubling about.

A curiously instructive fact strikes one in contrasting Captain Cook’s own account of his voyages with those of others, such as Anderson and Gilbert, who sailed with him. They expatiate largely on the miseries of heat and cold, ice and mist, the almost uneatable character of the sea-fare of those days, disease among the crew, and so on; but Captain Cook hardly ever mentions them, saving only the scurvy, of which more hereafter.

But there was something else that James Cook had already learnt long ago while he was yet a boy. When he was a lad of six or seven he had been set to work on a farm belonging to a man named William Walker, and this William had a wife named Mary who, taking a fancy to the lad, taught him his letters and encouraged him to read, and so, without knowing it, put into his hands the talisman which was to win his way to future greatness. She not only aroused in him that passion for reading which distinguished him among the sailors of his time, but she gave him what might have been the only means of gratifying it, for not every farm-lad and ship’s-boy of the middle of the eighteenth century had learnt, or ever did learn, to read and write.

It may have been that James Cook’s latent ambition had never looked beyond the possibility of becoming master of one of the vessels of which he had been mate, and it is also possible that he might never in reality have been anything more, but it so happened that his ship, the Friendship, was lying in London river in May, 1756, and that at the same time the war with France, which had been brewing for a year, broke out.

As usual the Press Gang set instantly to work, and now came Cook’s chance. He was mate of a ship, albeit only a collier brig; still he was a thorough seaman, an excellent navigator, and, more than that, he seems to have known something of the theory as well as the practice of his science. These accomplishments, however, did not put him beyond the reach of the Press Gang.

Now, in those days there were two ranks of seamen before the mast in the King’s navy—the pressed man, who might be anything from a raw land-lubber to an escaped convict, and the volunteer, who was probably and usually a good sailor, if not something better, as Cook was, and he, guided either by inspiration or deliberate resolve, eluded the Press Gang by offering himself as a volunteer, and so in due course took his rating as able-seaman before the mast on board his Majesty’s frigate Eagle, of sixty guns, of which shortly afterwards the good genius of his life, Sir Hugh Palliser, was appointed captain.

During the next four years there was fighting, but we have no record of any share that Cook took in it. What we do know is that by the time he was thirty he had risen to the rank of master of the Mercury, a King’s ship which went with the fleet to the St. Lawrence at a very critical juncture in British colonial history.

So far it would appear that he had worked himself up by sheer ability and industry, but now his chance was to come. The river St. Lawrence at that time had never been surveyed, and it was absolutely necessary that soundings should be taken and the river correctly charted before the fleet could go in and with its guns cover Wolfe’s attack on Quebec. The all-important work was entrusted to the master of the Mercury, and although the river was swarming with the canoes of hostile Indians in the service of the French, and though he had to do his work at night, he did it so thoroughly that not only did the fleet go in and out again with perfect safety, but the work has needed but little re-doing from that day to this.

Thus did James Cook, not as sailor or fighting-man, but as good mariner and skilful workman play his first part as Empire-Maker, and in an unostentatious fashion contribute his share towards the capture of Quebec and the acquisition of one of the widest and fairest portions of Greater Britain.

He was at this time, as has been said, only thirty. As regards the outer aspect of the man he stood something over six feet, spare, hard, and active. His face was a good one and suited to the man, broad forehead, bright, brown, well-set eyes, yet rather small, a long, well-shaped nose with good nostrils, a firm mouth, and full, strong chin.

In short, his best portraits show you just the kind of man you would expect Captain Cook to be. For the rest he was a man of iron frame, tireless at work, resting only when it was a physical necessity, with few friends and fewer confidants, cool of judgment save during his rare and deplorable fits of passion, self-contained and self-reliant—just such a sea-king, in short, as we may imagine Heaven to have commissioned to carry the British flag three times round the world and to the uttermost parts of the known earth, and to plant it on lands which until then no white man’s eye had seen or foot had trodden.

In the same year Cook was promoted from the Mercury to the Northumberland, the Admiral’s flag-ship, and in her he came back to England, and at St. Margaret’s Church, Barking, married Elizabeth Batts, a young lady of great beauty and of social standing far above that of the grocer’s apprentice and collier’s knockabout boy, but not above that of the Master of a King’s ship. His married life lasted some seventeen years, and of these he spent a little over four in the enjoyment of the delights of home.

For the next four years or so he was regularly employed in surveying and exploring work off the Atlantic coast of America, and this of itself shows that he had already made his mark in his chosen profession. But much greater things were now to be in store for him. It will be remembered how Drake, when he first saw the smooth waters of the Pacific, prayed God that He would give him life and leave to sail an English ship on its waters. That prayer had been granted, and his and many another English ship had crossed the great Sea of the South.

Meanwhile the realised dream of El Dorado had been replaced in men’s minds by another, even more vast, shadowy, and splendid. This was the dream of the Great Southern Continent, and in this imagination revelled and ran riot. Grave scientists, too, demonstrated beyond all doubt that there must be such a land far away to the south since how, without it as a counterpoise to the continents of the north, was the rolling world to be kept in equilibrium?

So they took it for granted, laid it down upon the maps, and wrote glowing descriptions of the varieties of climate, the splendour of scenery, the wealth of treasures and the strange peoples and animals that it must of necessity contain. Above all, it would be a new El Dorado which would not be under the control of Spain.

What more could men want, unless indeed it was the actual discovery of the Terra Incognita Australis? This was the new world of which Cook was to be the Columbus. Others had seen parts of it just as others had seen parts of America before the great Genoese reached the West Indies, but he was the man who was to do the work of putting its existence beyond all doubt.

The Royal Society found that there would be a transit of Venus in the year 1769, and that it would be best observed from some point in the great Southern Ocean, say Amsterdam Island or the Marquesas Group, lately discovered by the Dutch and Portuguese, and as the result of representations made to the King, an expedition was set on foot to carry out suitable persons to observe it. Of this expedition James Cook, raised from the rank of master to that of lieutenant, was placed in command. On his own recommendation the ship chosen for the purpose was the Endeavour, a Whitby-built craft of 370 tons, broad of bow and stern and fairly light of draft, and built for strength and endurance rather than speed.

She sailed, carrying a complement all told of eighty-five men, from Plymouth on August 26, 1768, which as Cook’s latest biographer happily remarks, was a Friday, and the starting-day of what was, all things considered, the most successful voyage of discovery ever made. Just before she sailed Captain Wallace had come back bringing the news of the discovery of Otaheite, otherwise known as Tahiti, and as this island was considered a more favourable position, Captain Cook, as we may now fairly call him, was ordered to proceed there first.

It is of course utterly out of the question to attempt any connected account even of one voyage round the world, let alone three, within such limits as these, therefore I cannot do better than let the great navigator describe his achievements, as he actually did, in three modest paragraphs:

“I endeavoured to make a direct course to Otaheite” (this was after he had crossed the Atlantic and doubled the Horn, which doubling, by the way, took thirty-three days), “and in part succeeded, but I made no discovery till I got within the Tropic, where I fell in with Lagoon Island, The Groups, Verde Island, Chain Island, and on the 13th of April arrived at Otaheite, where I remained three months, during which time the observations on the transit were taken.

“I then left it, discovered and visited the Society Islands and Ohetoroa; thence proceeded to the south till I arrived in latitude 40°22 south, longitude 147°29 east, then on the 6th of October, fell in with the east side of New Zealand.

“I continued exploring the coast of this country till the 31st of March, 1770, when I quitted it and proceeded to New Holland; and having surveyed the eastern coast of that vast country, which part had never before been visited, I passed between its northern extremity and New Guinea, and landed on the latter, touched at the island of Savu, Batavia, Cape of Good Hope, and St. Helena, and arrived in England on the 2nd of July, 1771.”

I have seldom come across such a masterpiece of eloquent simplicity as this, but then, of course, Cook’s voyages were made before the days of the lecture-exploiter and the Age of Booms. There is, however, one remark that may be made on it. What Cook calls New Holland we call Australia, and Botany Bay, the first point he touched at, is hard by Port Jackson, on the flowery shores of which now stands the lovely capital of New South Wales. Terra Incognita Australis was unknown no longer, but the days when it was to prove itself even more golden than El Dorado were yet distant nearly a hundred years.

If you would read the marvellous tale of frozen lands and seas, of the sunlit coral-islands gemming the sparkling waters as thickly as the stars stud the Heavens, of the delights of Paradise and the terrors of Nifflheim told and written by sundry members of this expedition after their return, you must go to your library and find them in the originals, for there is no space to give them here. Suffice it to say that, though somewhat prolix and diffuse, you will, if you are blessed with an intelligent taste for that kind of thing, find them more delightful reading than any of the countless romances whose writers have taken their materials out of them.

But there is one circumstance which for the honour of James Cook ought to be mentioned. The curse of sea-voyaging in those days was scurvy. Out of forty sick, nearly half of the little company, no fewer than twenty-three died, and this terrible fact set the captain thinking, with the result that he, first of all mariners, grappled with and conquered this worst of the dangers of the ocean. If he had never done anything else he would have deserved a niche in the Temple of Fame. In his second voyage round the world, which lasted three years and sixteen days, he only lost four men, three of whom died by accident and the fourth not of scurvy.

The Circumnavigator was now promoted to the rank of Commander, a modest enough reward for the achievement of the greatest work of his generation. He remained ashore just a year, probably the longest period he had ever spent on land since he first went to sea.

During this time the publication of a collection of travels started people talking about the Southern Continent again. Captain Cook had found it, but that didn’t matter. His discovery was not splendid enough by any means, so it was decided to send another expedition, this time of two ships, “to complete the discovery of the southern hemisphere” (!) and Cook sailed again in command aboard the Resolution of 462 tons having for consort the Adventure of 336 tons.

They sailed on July 13, 1772, and on October 30th reached Table Bay—a hundred and nine days, think of that, you who take a run out to the Cape and back again for a winter holiday! Truly the world was somewhat larger in those days.

From Cape Town they steered straight away for the South, and on December 10th they sighted for the first time the ice-fringe of what we know now to be the true Terra Incognita Australis.

The landsmen on board seem to have had a dreadful time during this part of the voyage and Foster, one of the naturalists of the expedition, bewails “the gloomy uniformity with which they had slowly passed dull hours, days and months in this desolate part of the world.” What a change it must have been from the rigours and horrors of Antarctica to the paradisaical delights of Tahiti, which, after surveying the coast of New Zealand and deciding that it consisted of two islands and not one, the expedition reached on the 16th of the following August.

There is perhaps no other spot on earth which so completely fulfils one’s ideas of what Paradise ought to be as this same island of Tahiti even now, but what must it have been in those days, when white men first saw it in all the beauty and simplicity of its primeval innocence. Now, alas, it is very different, cursed by the diseases and vices of civilisation and afflicted by a cast-iron rÉgime which the people seem to think a little worse than death, since they are dying as fast as they can to get away from it.

After this again New Zealand was visited, and once more the two ships plunged into the icy solitudes of Antarctica, only to return again, baffled by the impenetrable ice-wall. From here the ships steered northwards for Easter Island and Crusoe’s Island. It is noteworthy that on the way Captain Cook, the great Medicine Man of the sailors, himself fell sick, and that, for want of anything better, “a dog was killed to make soup for him”—from which it will be seen that voyages of discovery were not exactly picnics in his time.

From Juan Fernandez he steered for the Marquesas again, once more visited New Zealand, and once more his sea-worn crews revelled in the unrestrained delights of Tahiti. Then again to the south, this time not to rest until the whole circle of the Southern hemisphere had been made without the finding of any other southern continent than the unapproachable Antarctica, and so in due course and without mishap came the Sunday morning, July 30, 1775, when the Resolution and the Adventure, having well vindicated their names, dropped their willing anchors into the waters of Spithead.

More honours, though not of the nineteenth-century-boom order, were now most justly bestowed on the Circumnavigator. He was promoted to the rank of Post-Captain in the Navy, and made a Captain of Greenwich Hospital, a post which carried with it a home and honourable retirement for the rest of his life—of which he was the very last man in the world to avail himself. He was also elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and presented with the gold medal for his treatment of scurvy.

Captain Cook as sailor, as scientific navigator, and as explorer was now at the height of his fame. He was forty-eight years old, and had spent thirty-four years at sea, and it is no exaggeration to say that during this time he had added more geographical knowledge to the history of the world than any one had ever done before, and had probably covered a larger portion of its surface. He had at once proved and disproved the dream of the Southern Continent, and, potentially speaking, he had added enormous areas to the ever-growing realms of Greater Britain.

He might well have rested on such laurels as these, but there was more work for him to do, and he went to do it. One of the greatest questions of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, was the possibility of the North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. So far every attempt had ended in failure, and generally in disaster, but now, when men’s minds were full of the wonders Captain Cook had achieved, there arose another question: Might not a North-East passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic be possible, and, if so, who better to try it than the great Circumnavigator? An expedition was promptly decided on. Captain Cook was not offered the command, as the Government probably and rightly thought he had won his laurels. But one fatal evening he dined with Lord Sandwich, the promoter of the expedition, and at table he met his old patron, Sir Hugh Palliser, and his friend, Mr. Stephens, Secretary to the Admiralty. Ostensibly the object of the dinner was to consult him as to the best leader for the new venture, but the moment the subject was broached the unquenchable passion for travel blazed up again, and the great Navigator rose to his feet and said gravely:

“My lord and gentlemen, if you will have me I will go myself.”

So was decided the fatal voyage which was destined to end a glorious and almost blameless career by an ignoble and unworthy death.

The expedition consisted of the old Resolution and the Discovery, a vessel of three hundred tons. The voyage lasted four years and nine months, but the loss of life by sickness was only five men, of whom three were ill when they started. A good deal of the old ground was gone over, more islands were discovered, more unknown coasts surveyed. Fair Tahiti was visited once more, and the expedition, so far as its principal object was concerned, came to an end, as the search for the Southern Continent had done, in a way blocked by impenetrable barriers of ice—this time the ice of the North.

Thus turned back, they steered southward, and on December 1, 1778, they discovered Hawai, which discovery the great Navigator in his last written words somewhat strangely says, “seemed in many respects to be the most important that had hitherto been made by Europeans throughout the extent of the Pacific Ocean.”

It was here, as all the world knows, that he met his death, and the story of it is, unhappily, at sad variance with that of his life.

The one blemish on Captain Cook’s otherwise noble character was a liability to outbursts of ungovernable temper, and during these he seems to have behaved on more occasions than one in a manner almost befitting one of the old buccaneers. For instance, he would punish paltry thefts by cutting off the ears of the islanders, firing small shot at them as they swam to the shore, chasing them in boats, and ordering his men to strike and stab them with boat-hooks as they struggled out of the way. On one occasion he punished a Kanaka who had pilfered some trifle by “making two cuts upon his arm to the bone, one across and the other close below his shoulder.”

Again, at the island of Eimeo, because a goat was stolen, he landed thirty-five armed men, blockaded the island with armed boats, and burnt every house and canoe that he came across, and, as an eye-witness says, “several women and old men still remained by the houses, whose lamentations were very great, but all their tears and entreaties could not move Captain Cook to desist in the smallest degree from those cruel ravages.”

Now it was undoubtedly this anger-madness of his, combined with an equally incomprehensible act of duplicity, which cost him his life. When he returned from his attempt to find the North-East passage and landed at Hawai, he was hailed by the natives as Lono, a god who had disappeared ages before, saying that he would return in huge canoes with cocoa-nut trees for masts. Now unhappily there is no doubt that Captain Cook, for some reason or other, took advantage of this belief. Not only did he not undeceive the natives, but he permitted divine honours to be paid to him.

From personal knowledge of the Pacific Islanders I am able to say that in their pristine state they look upon deception and lying as the gravest of crimes, and usually punish them with death, and Captain Cook, with his vast experience of them, must have known this also, and therefore he must have been fully aware that the moment anything happened to show the natives that he was not a god, his life would not be worth a moment’s purchase.

Shortly after this the ships sailed, and it would have been well for Cook, who had been guilty of some very high-handed acts, if he had never returned. But they came back a week afterwards to find the island under the mysterious tabu—which is the Kanaka equivalent for an interdict, and by far the most sacred institution known to the Polynesians. Some of his marines broke this tabu in the most flagrant fashion. In revenge one of the Discovery’s cutters was stolen. When anything of this sort happened Captain Cook was accustomed to inveigle a chief or two on board his ship and keep them there till the thing stolen was restored. He tried to do this with the King of Hawai, but the people suspected his design, and at the critical moment news came that a canoe had been burnt and a chief killed. The King refused to go another step, and then Captain Cook, who was armed with a hanger and a double-barrelled gun, did a terribly foolish thing for such a man to do.

He began to walk away to his boat, turning his back on the armed and angry natives. To do so was to invite certain death, and one of the warriors attacked him with his spear. He turned and shot at the man, missed him, and killed another man behind him. A shower of stones followed, and the marines fired on the natives.

Cook appears now to have seen the seriousness of the situation, and signalled to those in the boat to stop firing. While he was doing this a chief ran up and drove his spear through his body. Some accounts say that it was an iron dagger, others that he was clubbed on the head simultaneously. At any rate he staggered forward and fell face downwards in the water, on which the natives “immediately leapt in after and kept him under for a few minutes, then hauled him out upon the rocks and beat his head against them several times, so that there is no doubt but that he quickly expired.”

Such was the end of the great Circumnavigator, the greatest seaman of his time, and a man honoured wherever the science of navigation was known. It was a miserable end to such a brilliant career, miserable as was that of the great Magellan, who lost his life and the deathless honour of being the first sea-captain to sail round the world in just such a petty and ignoble squabble on the beach of a lonely islet in the Phillipines.

But though his death was ignoble, it can detract nothing from the splendour of his life’s work. He was not perfect—no great man is—and it is only the mournful truth to say that the meanest and most unlovable trait in his character was the direct and culpable cause of his death. Among sailors this is already forgotten, and they only remember him, as they are well warranted in doing, as the greatest of English mariners, and the man who conquered their most terrible enemy and their deadliest destroyer.