Blue Latitudes Read online

  Praise for Blue Latitudes

  “Hilarious, brainy, and balanced…A trip with Horwitz is as good as it gets.”

  —The Charlotte Observer

  “Horwitz’s adventures pay illuminating tribute to the great navigator—to Captain Cook himself and to his intrepid eighteenth-century colleagues, including the improbably attractive Sir Joseph Banks. But most of all Blue Latitudes offers clear-eyed, vivid, and highly entertaining reassurance that there are still outlandish worlds to be discovered.”

  —Caroline Alexander, author of The Endurance:

  Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition

  “Blue Latitudes is a rollicking read that is also a sneaky work of scholarship, providing new and unexpected insights into the man who out-discovered Columbus. A terrific book—I inhaled it in one weekend.”

  —Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea

  “One of the best…full of humor…It is with people that Horwitz excels. As he demonstrated in Confederates in the Attic, he has a gift for getting them to open up. A terrific reporter, Horwitz investigates how the places he visits have changed…. What he also does, and what makes this book so absorbing, is intersperse among all the details of life today in these far-flung places an elegant running account of Cook’s exploits.”

  —The New York Times Book Review (cover)

  “Compelling…Horwitz is particularly convincing when he’s establishing just how harsh a sailor’s life could be in the 1700s, why most of them were drunk so much of the time, and why today’s mariners have it relatively easy…. Remarkable.”

  —The Oregonian (Portland)

  “A rewarding and—trust me on this—witty tale of a remarkable explorer who now occupies a controversial place in history because of disease, greed, thievery, and prostitution that followed in his wake…Perhaps the highest praise of any book is that it takes you somewhere. Horwitz manages to do this on two levels, mingling history with a humorous travelogue.”

  —The Mercury News (San Jose)

  “A swashbuckling history.”

  —Newsday

  “An entertaining and rewarding read. Horwitz remains an intriguing sketcher of characters, and there are plenty of aging hippies, burnt-out colonials, and out-and-out oddballs in his path. He’s still the master of the targeted anecdote or factoid…Charming…Blue Latitudes stretches from Easter Island to Alaska, from Cape Horn to Indonesia. In Mr. Horwitz’s company, it seems all too short a trip.”

  —Sunday Star-News

  “Delightful…[Horwitz] is an observant traveler, with an eye for both the oddball and the salient. He also has the good sense to enlist the services of a madcap Aussie traveling companion, who is determined to make certain that any journey, to be worth its salt, must include plenty of misadventures.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “At once well-researched, gripping, and peppered with humorous passages…The book’s literary magic comes from mixing information from Horwitz’s observations with observations written by Cook himself…. Blue Latitudes ought to appeal to diverse audiences—those who devour travel books, those who care about the mixed legacy of famous dead white males, and those who treasure memorable writing whatever the subject matter.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Thanks to Horwitz’s thorough research—he seems to have read all of Cook’s journals, previous biographies, and anthropological studies of the Pacific—naval life and island life come brilliantly alive…. Paul Theroux travels the world and finds disappointment; Tony Horwitz finds a cast of colorful characters and history embedded in the land.”

  —The Providence Journal

  “A compelling account.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “[Horwitz] weaves his own experiences with those gleaned from Cook’s own writings and those of his crew into a fabric dense with the delicious details that keep readers turning pages long past bedtime.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Filled with history and alive with contrasts.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A staggering blend of historical research, character study, sociological analysis, and intriguing tales of travel.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “This alternately hilarious, poignant, and insightful book is history for people who don’t like history, and a travelogue full of wonder and smart observation, not jaded cynicism…. Horwitz succeeds brilliantly in turning the English from stiff icons to flesh-and-blood human beings. The book’s constant humor, honesty, and judgment recall his own Confederates in the Attic or Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods…. This book will keep you enthralled.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Tony Horwitz has done it again…. [With] keen insight, open-mindedness and laugh-out-loud humor, he…travel[s] across the globe in search of the memory of Capt. James Cook.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Horwitz has a self-deprecating wit that translates well into print, making him an eloquent Everyman in whatever exotic setting he enters. He is a meticulous observer, a preternaturally gifted student of human nature.”

  —The Atlanta-Journal Constitution

  “With prodigious research and a willingness to raise the subject of Captain Cook with anyone, including a drunk, a king, and a girl in a wet T-shirt, Horwitz has managed to muscle a big, sloppy idea into something coherent and fun to read…Horwitz reveals the most about Cook by acting like Cook, exploring each place with the same energy and relentless curiosity as the man himself…. He one-upped Cook and made it home in one piece.”

  —Forbes FYI

  “Horwitz offers an affectionate but convincing defense of the captain as a man driven by a ‘stubborn Enlightenment faith in firsthand observation,’ and conjures the hero’s primal encounters by getting off the beaten path himself.”

  —Outside

  “[An] engaging outing…Horwitz seamlessly weaves humorous anecdotes from Cook’s journals with his own peripatetic observations—and without succumbing to hero worship, he conveys Cook’s lifelong romance with traveling to the far reaches of the then-unknown world.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  For Natty, an adventurer at five

  Contents

  PROLOGUE: The Distance Traveled

  1 PACIFIC NORTHWEST: One Week Before the Mast

  2 TAHITI: Sic Transit Venus

  3 TO BORA-BORA: Sold a Pup

  4 NEW ZEALAND: Warriors, Still

  5 BOTANY BAY: In the Pure State of Nature

  6 THE GREAT BARRIER REEF: Wrecked

  7 HOMEWARD BOUND: The Hospital Ship

  8 SAVAGE ISLAND: The Hunt for Red Banana

  9 TONGA: Where Time Begins, and Goes Back

  10 NORTH YORKSHIRE: A Plain, Zealous Man

  11 LONDON: Shipping Out, Again

  12 ALASKA: Outside Men

  13 HAWAII: The Last Island

  14 KEALAKEKUA BAY: A Bad Day on Black Rock

  EPILOGUE: A Period to His Labours

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  INDEX

  Prologue:

  The Distance Traveled

  Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go.

  —THE JOURNAL OF CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

  Just after dark on February 16, 1779, a kahuna, or holy man, rode a canoe to His Majesty’s Sloop Resolution, anchored off the coast of Hawaii. The kahuna came aboard with a bundle under his arm. Charles Clerke, the ship’s commander, unwrapped the parcel in the presence of his officers. He found “a large piece of Flesh which we soon saw to be Human,” Clerke wrote in his journal. “It was clearly a part
of the Thigh about 6 or 8 pounds without any bone at all.”

  Two days before, islanders had killed five of the ship’s men on the lava shoreline of Kealakekua Bay, and carried off the bodies. Nothing had been seen of the corpses since. Unsure what to make of the kahuna’s grisly offering, Clerke and his men asked whether the rest of the body had been eaten. The Hawaiian seemed appalled by this question. Did Englishmen eat their foes?

  Hawaiians weren’t cannibals, the kahuna said. They cut up and cooked the bodies of high chiefs to extract certain bones that possessed godly power. Islanders distributed these remains among their leaders and discarded the flesh. Hence the kahuna’s return of the deboned thigh, “which,” Clerke wrote, “he gave us to understand was part of our late unfortunate Captain.”

  James Cook, the Resolution’s captain, was one of the five men who had died on shore. There was no way of knowing for certain if this pungent thigh belonged to him. But several days later, the Hawaiians delivered another package, bundled in a feathered cloak. This one contained scorched limbs, a scalp with the ears attached and hair cut short, and two hands that had been scored and salted, apparently to preserve them. Fifteen years earlier, a powder horn had exploded in Cook’s right hand, leaving an ugly gash. This “remarkable Cut,” one of his lieutenants wrote, remained clearly visible on the severed right hand delivered to the ship.

  While the Hawaiians were parceling out Cook’s bones among their leaders, the English performed a parallel ritual aboard the Resolution. Officers and “gentlemen” divided and sold the captain’s clothes and other effects, in accordance with shipboard custom. Two and a half years out from home, in waters no other Europeans had sailed before, the English needed the useful items in the dead captain’s kit.

  On the evening of February 21, the English put their flags at half-mast, crossed the ship’s yards, tolled bells, and fired a ten-gun salute. “I had the remains of Capt Cook committed to the deep,” Charles Clerke wrote, “with all the attention and honour we could possibly pay it in this part of the World.”

  The thirty-seven-year-old Clerke, who had inherited command of the Resolution following Cook’s death, was himself dying, from tuberculosis. As the ship weighed anchor, he retired to his cabin, turning the quarterdeck over to Lieutenant James King and to the ship’s brilliant but testy young master, William Bligh.

  “Thus we left Karacacooa bay,” King wrote, “a place become too remarkably famous for the very unfortunate & Tragical death of one of the greatest Navigators our Nation or any Nation ever had.”

  Half a world away from Kealakekua Bay, in a sodden Yorkshire churchyard, a single headstone honors the family into which James Cook was born. “To Ye Memory of Mary and Mary, Jane and William,” the inscription reads, listing siblings who perished by the age of five. The stone also mentions James’s older brother, John, who died at the age of twenty-three. A second epitaph commemorates the mother and father of this short-lived brood: “James and Grace Cook were the parents of the celebrated circumnavigator Captain James Cook who was born at Marton Oct. 27th, 1728,” the inscription says, “and killed at Owhyhee Dec. 14th, 1779.”

  The latter date is incorrect; Cook died in Hawaii on February 14. But this simple gravestone speaks more eloquently to the distance Cook had traveled than any of the grand monuments erected in his name. Cook was born just a few miles from his family’s grave plot, in a mud-and-thatch hovel: a building type known in the North Riding of Yorkshire as a biggin. Farm animals wandered in and out of the hut’s two small rooms. Sacking and meadowsweet, spread on the dirt floor, kept down the damp and odor.

  Cook’s father worked as a day laborer, close to the bottom of Britain’s stratified society. The prospects for a day laborer’s son were bleak, even if he survived the harsh conditions that killed most of Cook’s siblings in early childhood. Public education didn’t exist. There was very little mobility, social or geographic. The world of the rural poor remained what it had been for generations: a day’s walk in radius, a tight, well-trod loop between home, field, church, and, finally, a crowded family grave plot.

  James Cook didn’t just break this cycle; he exploded it. Escaping to sea as a teenager, he became a coal-ship apprentice and joined the Royal Navy as a lowly “able seaman.” From there, he worked his way to the upper reaches of the naval hierarchy and won election to the Royal Society, the pinnacle of London’s intellectual establishment. Cook’s greatest feat, though, was the three epic voyages of discovery he made in his forties—midlife today, closer to the grave in the eighteenth century.

  In 1768, when Cook embarked on the first, roughly a third of the world’s map remained blank, or filled with fantasies: sea monsters, Patagonian giants, imaginary continents. Cook sailed into this void in a small wooden ship and returned, three years later, with charts so accurate that some of them stayed in use until the 1990s.

  On his two later voyages, Cook explored from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Tasmania to Tierra del Fuego, from the northwest shore of America to the far northeast coast of Siberia. By the time he died, still on the job, Cook had sailed over 200,000 miles in the course of his career—roughly equivalent to circling the equator eight times, or voyaging to the moon. “Owhyhee,” a sun-struck paradise unknown to the West before Cook arrived, was as far as a man could go from the drear Yorkshire churchyard he seemed destined at birth to occupy.

  Cook not only redrew the map of the world, creating a picture of the globe much like the one we know today; he also transformed the West’s image of nature and man. His initial Pacific sail, on a ship called Endeavour, was the first of its kind in Britain—a voyage of scientific discovery, carrying trained observers: artists, astronomers, naturalists. The ship’s botanists collected so much exotic flora that they expanded the number of known plant species in the West by a quarter. This seeded the modern notion of biodiversity and made possible the discoveries of men such as Charles Darwin, who followed in the Endeavour’s path aboard the Beagle.

  Similarly, the art and writing of Cook and his men, and the native objects they collected, called “artificial curiosities,” transfixed the West with images of unfamiliar peoples: erotic Tahitian dancers, Maori cannibals, clay-painted Aborigines. Sailors adopted the Polynesian adornment called tattoo, and words such as “taboo” entered the Western lexicon. A London brothel keeper offered a special night to her clients, featuring “a dozen beautiful Nymphs” performing the ritualized sex Cook had witnessed in Tahiti. Poets and philosophers seized on the South Seas as a liberating counterpoint to Europe. On the other side of the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin issued an extraordinary order, in the midst of the Revolutionary War, commanding American naval officers to treat Cook and his men as friends rather than foes.

  For the lands and peoples Cook encountered, the impact of his voyages was just as profound, and far more destructive. His decade of discovery occurred on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution. The steam engine and spinning jenny emerged as Cook set off on his first Pacific tour; Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, as Cook embarked on his last. His explorations opened vast new territories to the West’s burgeoning economies and empires, and all that came with them: whalers, missionaries, manufactured goods, literacy, rum, guns, syphilis, smallpox.

  Cook, in sum, pioneered the voyage we are still on, for good and ill. “More than any other person,” writes the historian Bernard Smith, “he helped to make the world one.”

  Like most Americans I grew up knowing almost nothing of Captain Cook, except what I learned in fifth-grade geography class. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I also absorbed his adventures through episodes of Star Trek. A suburban kid, growing up in a decade when even the moon had been conquered, I never ceased to feel a thrill at the TV show’s opening words: “These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before!”

  It wasn’t until years later that I realized
how much Star Trek echoed a true story. Captain James Cook; Captain James Kirk. The Endeavour; the Enterprise. Cook, the Yorkshire farm boy, writing in his journal that he’d sailed “farther than any other man has been before.” Kirk, the Iowa farm boy, keeping his own log about boldly going “where no man has gone before!” Cook rowed jolly boats ashore, accompanied by his naturalist, his surgeon, and musket-toting, red-jacketed marines. Kirk “beamed down” to planets with the science officer Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and phaser-wielding, red-jerseyed “expendables.” Both captains also set out—at least in theory—to discover and describe new lands, rather than to conquer or convert.

  In my twenties, I fell in love with an Australian and followed her to Sydney. Geraldine and I found a house just a few miles from the beach where Cook and his men, landing in 1770, became the first Europeans to visit the east coast of Australia. My new surrounds seemed wondrous but disorienting: the sun blazing in the northern sky, scribbly gums that shed bark instead of leaves, fruit bats squeaking at night in the fig trees. One day at an antiquarian bookshop, I found a copy of Cook’s journals and read his own impressions of this strange land over two centuries before me.

  “It was of a light Mouse colour and the full size of a grey hound and shaped in every respect like one,” Cook wrote of a creature he saw fleetingly near shore. “I would have taken it for a wild dog, but for its walking or running in which it jumped like a Hare or a dear.” Unsure what to call this odd beast, Cook referred to it simply as “the animal.” Later, he inserted the native word, which he rendered “kanguru.” The Endeavour carried home a skull and skin, the first kangaroo specimen in the West. It resided in a London museum until destroyed in the Blitz during World War II.