Captain Cook

Copyright

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This eBook edition published 2020

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1972

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1972

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Images: Triumph of the Navigators’ by Robin Brooks / Bridgeman Images (front cover), Granger / Bridgeman Images (map), Shutterstock.com (compasses)

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Source ISBN: 9780007371983

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780008353346

Version: 2020-01-22

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

Prologue

1. The Able Seaman

2. The Vanishing Continent

3. Charting New Zealand

4. Australia and the Great Barrier Reef

5. Antarctica and Polynesia

6. The North-West Passage

Epilogue

Index

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

About the Publisher

Map

PROLOGUE

Shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century, a young gunner in the Royal Navy, a certain Jeremy Blyth, who had yet to sail on his first commission, made his way into an alehouse in Wapping. It was a dock-side tavern typical of its time and place, dirty, smoky, with cracked floor-boards and blackened walls and ceiling, entirely lacking in what, even in that era, passed for the more civilised amenities of life. A planked bar, a few rickety tables and chairs; that was all. Typical, too, were the customers: a mixture of seamen from both naval services, many the victims of press-gangs, many with criminal pasts, hard-drinking, hard-swearing, hard-living men inured to suffering and hardships and death, men tough and enduring and hard-bitten to a degree almost incomprehensible to those who live in a gentler and more effete age.

Atypical, however, was the atmosphere in that ale-house. No one spoke. No one drank. The silence was accentuated by occasional sobs. The landlord, shoulders heaving, had his head buried in his forearms. So did a number of those at the tables. Some of the men were openly weeping and all seemed lost in their own private worlds of grief-stricken desolation. Blyth sat down opposite a grizzled old seaman, a grey-cheeked veteran with tears welling from sightless eyes, an untouched drink before him. Wonderingly, gently, Blyth touched him on the forearm.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

The old man looked up from the table and said angrily ‘Haven’t you heard? Haven’t you heard?’

Blyth shook his head.

‘Nelson is dead.’

Again Blyth looked slowly round the dingy room, at the men for whom the death of Nelson had left an aching void that could never be filled, then he said: ‘Thank God I never knew him.’

It is doubtful whether any such scene occurred, or any remotely comparable, when the news of Cook’s death reached England some twenty-six years earlier. The nation mourned him, as England has always mourned the passing of its great men, its Marlboroughs, its Wellingtons, its Churchills: but it did not weep with a broken heart.

Nelson and Cook are the two most revered names in the annals of the Royal Navy. Reverence is compounded of respect and love. Nelson was widely respected but universally loved. Cook was universally respected but he was incapable of inspiring in the minds and hearts of the public that degree of devotion and adoration that Nelson so effortlessly and inevitably aroused. But that Cook was beloved by his officers and men is beyond dispute.

The reason for the difference lies, of course, in the natures of the two men. To love a person, a public figure, one has to be able to identify one’s self with him: to do that, one has to know him – or, at least, believe that one knows him. In so far as this was concerned, there was no difficulty at all about Nelson, a warm-hearted, outgoing extrovert whose inner thoughts and private life were as open a book as his public ones. But Cook’s inner thoughts and private life were a closed book, one of those old-fashioned books with a brass hasp that he’d locked and then thrown away the key. With the passing of the years it seems increasingly unlikely that the key will ever be found.

We know all about Cook and we know nothing about him. We know that he was courageous, prudent, wise, indefatigable, adventurous, a born leader of men: but what he was like, what kind of individual he was personally, we have but the most remote of conceptions. We know that he took those leaking old coal-boats of his from the tropical Pacific to the bitter and awesome wastes of both the Arctic and the Antarctic in the most stupendous voyages of exploration in the history of mankind. But whether he liked flowers or dandled his children on his knee or gazed enraptured at the sun going down in the ocean beyond Hawaii or Tahiti we shall never know. We know he was the greatest navigator of his age or any age: it would be interesting to know if he ever got lost in the back streets of his home borough of Stepney.

To have maintained so inviolate a privacy is indeed a feat, but to have done so in spite of the fact that he left us over one million words minutely recording his day to day activities over many years amounts to an accomplishment so staggering as to defy rational comprehension. But, in his journals and logs, this is what Cook did indeed do. No famous figure of modern times has ever documented his life so thoroughly and painstakingly. But this massive documentation is detached, impersonal; Cook does not appear: it was about what he did, not what he was. Even in his private correspondence – what little of it has survived – this same iron reticence manifests itself. Only twice does he mention his wife and then only in an incidental fashion: of his two children who died in infancy or his daughter who died at the age of four, there is no authenticated instance of Cook ever having mentioned them.

His contemporaries wrote of him of course, from Walpole to Dr Johnson they all had their say, and when all their writing is over and done with we learn no more about Cook than we learn from Cook himself. Maybe they did not know him as they would have liked to know him: maybe he was reserved to the point of being unapproachable. It may even have been that they were aware that they were dealing with an already living legend who was destined for immortality. If this were the case then their task was impossible: the myth envelops the man, so cocooning its creator in the folds of his fame that it becomes virtually certain that not even the keenest eye can penetrate to the heart of the legend, a legend that will accept only the most grandiose rhetoric, the most broad and sweeping generalisations: one does not customarily discuss an immortal’s taste in cravats or whether he stopped to smell the lilac on an evening late in May.

Biographies of Cook there have been, of course, many of them. But none of them is the good and true and definitive biography of a man about whom we should like to know so much. It is very much to be doubted whether there will ever be such a biography. Most of the biographers who have tried to flesh out the skeleton of his awesome reputation have had to have recourse to varying degrees of invention or imagination while honestly trying to remain within the bounds of probability. Thus, we are told on one occasion that Mrs Cook welcomed her husband home with tearful affection after one of his marathon voyages, affection because he had been so long away, tearful because one of their children had died in his absence. Now, this is very likely: but there is nothing on record to justify such an assertion. She may, for all we know, have hit him over the head with a two-by-four. This, admittedly, is extremely unlikely. The point is that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is not impossible. Extrapolation and uninspired guesses are no substitute for historical accuracy.

It has been said that the definitive biography is only a matter of time. I don’t believe it. It has been said that if Cook’s million words are subjected to the combined scrutinies of a statistician, an analyst and psychiatrist the truth must out. That something would finally emerge one does not doubt but as the liability of statisticians, analysts and psychiatrists to error is established and notorious the mind boggles at the prospect of such error trebly compounded. Requiescat in pace. It is unthinkable that an immortal should be subjected to the processes of computerised butchery.

Far from being intended to be a definitive biography, what follows is no biography at all. A true biography is a fully-rounded portrait but there are colours missing from my palette. I do not know enough about the man: the material just is not there. This is but a brief account of his early apprenticeship to the sea, his development as a navigator and cartographer, and of his three great voyages, and this is perhaps enough to let us have an inkling of the essential Captain Cook for he was a man, as he himself confessed, to whom achievement meant all. In his last letter written to Lord Sandwich from Capetown in 1776 he said: ‘My endeavour shall not be wanting to achieve the great object of this voyage’. It never was. It was not what Cook said or thought that raised him to the ranks of the immortals: it was what he did.

Let the deeds speak for the man.

ONE

THE ABLE SEAMAN

James Cook, who was to become a Post-Captain in the Royal Navy and the greatest combination of seaman, explorer, navigator and cartographer that the world has known, was born in 1728 of obscure parents in an obscure village in Yorkshire. His mother was a local girl, his father a Scot, a farm labourer. There has been considerable speculation as to which parent transmitted the seeds of genius to Cook, a speculation as singularly pointless as it is totally inconclusive as we know nothing of either of them.

After a sporadic education and a few years’ work on his father’s employer’s farm, Cook left home at the age of seventeen for the tiny seaport of Staithes. This move has been cited as the first stirrings of that restless and soaring ambition that was to take Cook to the uttermost ends of the earth. It may equally well have been that he was just fed up with the farm for it seems unlikely that a boy suffused with dreams of glory would have gone to work in a grocer’s and haberdasher’s shop, which is what Cook did.

The prospect of a lifetime behind a counter clearly appealed to Cook no more than the prospect of one behind a plough for in 1746, at the age of eighteen, he left the haberdashery trade, a life to which he was never to return, and betook himself to the sea, which was to be his home, his life and his consuming passion until his death thirty-three years later.

He was apprenticed to John and Henry Walker, shipowners, of Whitby, who specialised in the colliery trade. The ships employed for this purpose were, as one might imagine, singularly unlovely, broad-beamed and bulky, much given to wallowing in a sickening fashion in any condition short of perfect, and notoriously poor and slow and difficult sailors under all conditions. But to the owners of eighteenth-century colliers aesthetics were irrelevant, pragmatism was all: such vessels were designed solely to carry large quantities of coal in bulk and for this task they were superbly equipped.

But they were possessed of other and unlikely qualities. Despite the fact that they were designed and built along the lines of a cross between a Dutch clog and a coffin they had remarkable sea-keeping qualities and could ride out the most violent of gales although, admittedly, to the vast discomfort of their unfortunate crews. Their flat-bottomed design permitted them to be hauled ashore on suitably sandy beaches for careening. And, of course, they were capable of carrying vast quantities of provisions. So perhaps it was not after all so ludicrous that it was to be those lumbering Whitby colliers and not the Navy’s dashing frigates and cruisers that were to take Cook to the furthest ends of the earth.

Cook, then, served aboard such a vessel – the Freelove, a 450-tonner – for the first two seasons of his apprenticeship, plying the coal route between Newcastle and London, before transferring to another Walker vessel, the Three Brothers, which extended the limits of his geographical knowledge and seamanship by taking him to the west coast of England, to Ireland and to Norway.

Little is known of Cook’s professional or social life during this period. Indeed, he doesn’t appear to have had any social life whatsoever for between voyages or when vessels were laid up for the winter Cook devoted himself exclusively to the pursuit not of pleasure but of learning. This is one of the few facts of his early life that can be established without difficulty, for the Walkers – with whom Cook stayed when not at sea – and their friends were moved to record their astonishment at the long hours Cook spent in improving his knowledge of navigation, astronomy and mathematics. This was a habit that Cook was never to lose: he kept learning until he died.

His apprenticeship over, Cook left the Walkers, spent over two years in the East Coast and Baltic trade, then was asked by the Walker brothers to return to them and become mate of their vessel the Friendship. Cook accepted. Three years later, in 1755, he was offered the command of the Friendship. Cook declined. Instead, he joined the Royal Navy as an able seaman.

This extraordinary decision does two things: it points up a fact and raises a question. The fact is that, to have been offered a command at the age of twenty-seven, Cook must have impressed the owners with his qualities as a seaman, a navigator and a leader of men, which is perhaps not surprising when one considers the quite extraordinary lengths to which he was going to develop those already marked abilities – and that of the practice of cartography – in the years to come. But what is surprising is that he passed up the command of a merchant ship for the lowest rank of a naval vessel.

As with so many of his decisions, Cook himself has offered no explanation for this one. (Cook was an intensely secretive man – in his wanderings over the world his officers frequently complained that they never knew where they were going until they got there.) It is generally assumed that it was directly connected with the frantic re-arming taking place in Britain and France in preparation for the inevitable approach of what, the following year, was to be the beginning of the bitter and bloody Seven Years’ War: active fighting was already taking place in overseas territories, especially in North America, where Britain and France had already abandoned all pretence of diplomatic negotiations as a means of settling the question of colonial supremacy: already, although it was still nominally peace-time, the British Navy had instituted a tight blockade of the French coast to prevent further supplies of men and arms from reaching the French in Canada.

Because of a Navy that had been allowed to become rundown and depleted and because of the imminence of war, British shipyards were turning out naval vessels at an unprecedented rate. Ships need crews and the young men of that day and age were markedly reluctant to volunteer for this honour, an unwillingness that is no cause for surprise when one considers the brutal conditions of life in the Royal Navy of the mid-eighteenth century. They had to be persuaded to man those empty vessels and as recruiting posters weren’t very much in vogue at that time persuasion usually took the form of forcible abduction, by heavily-armed naval press-gangs, of any able-bodied man, drunk or sober, who was so unfortunate as to cross their path. It has been suggested that Cook volunteered so as to avoid being press-ganged, but, apart from the fact that it seems totally out of character with the man, it is incredible that a merchant navy officer – and Cook could have been a captain, had he so wished – would have been press-ganged without being released, with apologies, the moment his identity was known.

Perhaps he was a romantic who could hear the far-off sound of drums and bugles. Perhaps his patriotism was of less euphoric nature, a combination of conscience and commonsense that told him it was not only his duty but also prudent to smite the French before they smote him. Perhaps – this is the most commonly suggested explanation and an uncommonly cynical one it is too – Cook figured that with so many ships being built and with the certainty of so many men being killed in the now inevitable war, promotion was bound to be rapid. Perhaps he was just tired of the eternal coal dust. Perhaps anything. We shall never know. All that we know with certainty is that he joined the Navy on 17 June 1755, and eight days later was assigned to the Eagle, a sixty-gun ship of the line lying at Portsmouth.

The Eagle in turn was assigned to the blockade of the French coast. As he was from then on to do faithfully for the rest of his life, Cook kept a day-to-day log, but it makes for rather less than dramatic and inspirational reading. He mentions such things as watch changes, conditions of the food and drink, gives us weather reports, speaks of patrols, sighting and investigating ships, hum-drum details which after two centuries can hold no interest for us because, as ever, they tell us nothing of the man himself.

Only two things of any note occurred in his first few months on the Eagle. Within a month of joining, he had become master’s mate, indication enough of the speed with which his navigational ability, seamanship and reliability had been appreciated. Then, not long afterwards, the Eagle’s captain, an easy-going gentleman who vastly preferred the sheltered calms of Portsmouth harbour to the winter gales of the English Channel, was relieved of his command and replaced by Captain (later Sir) Hugh Palliser.

Palliser, as he was to prove, was no ordinary man. A brilliant seaman and naval tactician, held in the highest regard by his superiors, he was eventually to become Governor of Newfoundland and a Lord of the Admiralty. Even so, he might have been entirely forgotten today, his tiny niche in history obliterated by Cook’s great shadow, were it not for the fact that it was Palliser who first recognised Cook as a man of genius and destiny, who proclaimed this loud and long to all in authority who would listen and who, as his years drew in, long after Cook’s place in history was assured, was still happily proclaiming his belief in Cook’s destiny. Palliser must have been a man of quite extraordinary perception.

Cook remained on the Eagle from the summer of 1755 until the autumn of 1757 – the Seven Years’ War had begun early in 1756, but the declaration of war did no more than regularise an already existing situation. Except for occasional urgent refits – the weather in the Channel and the Bay of Biscay caused far more damage to the English men-o’-war than the French did – the Eagle spent almost all of this time blockading the French coast. It was a rather hum-drum and monotonous existence enlivened only by the first – and last – sea-fight of any importance in which Cook was to engage. In late May, 1757, they engaged a large French vessel, 1500 tons and fifty guns, off Ushant – an East Indiaman by the name of Duc d’Aquitaine. The French vessel, in a running fight lasting forty minutes, was crippled and captured: but the Eagle itself was so badly damaged that it had to return to England for repairs.

For our understanding of Cook, the significance of this period lies not in the occasional skirmishes with the enemy but in the fact that it was then that Cook polished and honed the skills, those very special skills, that were to serve him so well in the years to come. True, he was still no cartographer, his years of surveying and chart-work were yet to come: but that he had fully mastered his knowledge of ships and the sea is shown clearly by the fact that in just over two years he had advanced from able seaman to master’s mate, to boatswain and finally to master, the person in charge of the actual running of the ship and the senior non-commissioned officer on board. At the same time, he pursued his studies in navigation and mathematics (in necessary conjunction with astronomy) and as he had already been fully qualified in those subjects before he had joined the Navy the standards he had now reached must have been quite exceptional.

The mastering of those subjects was, of course, an essential prerequiste for the years in the Pacific that still lay far ahead – without them he could never have gone and the Admiralty would most certainly never have chosen him. But no less essential for the future was his exposure and conditioning to naval life itself, so different from the careless and rather slipshod way of life found aboard the colliers. Here each man was a specialist, a man trained to rely upon himself and to rely upon others, a man into whose mind it was firmly and permanently inculcated that he was a vital link in a chain and that the one unforgiveable sin, under times of stress – and Cook and his men were to undergo a much greater degree of stress in the Pacific than they had ever been subjected to in the Atlantic – was to be the one who broke that chain. Much has rightly been said about the harshness of naval discipline at the time, but overmuch misplaced emphasis has been laid on the contention that only an iron discipline could produce a highly trained crew. Only bad crews, badly officered, require this brutal kind of discipline, while good crews, good officers, all highly trained, need only the discipline that comes from within: it is clear, now and later, that this was the kind of crew Cook had in mind.

On 27 October 1757, Cook joined the Pembroke, a sixty-four gun ship, as master. It was his twenty-ninth birthday. For most of the winter his new ship carried out the blockade in the Bay of Biscay. In February, 1758, they sailed for Canada.

The war was going badly for the British on the North American continent. General Braddock’s army had been savagely handled by the French and Indians and it was considered imperative and of the utmost urgency to take the pressure off the British colonial forces in what is now the eastern seaboard of the United States by launching an attack against the French in the north, the main objective being the centre of their military power, Quebec.

There is no evidence that Cook took any active part in the first part of this operation which consisted in the reduction of the powerful fortress of Louisburg which guarded the gateway to the St Lawrence. This fortress fell to General Wolfe, who was to die the following year in the taking of Quebec, after bitter fighting and a lengthy siege. But Cook had a role to play in the Quebec campaign itself, not a major one, perhaps, but one which was essential for the success of the operation.