Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
If aliens ever visit earth, they may wonder what to make of the countless obelisks, faded plaques and graffiti-
covered statues of a stiff, wigged figure gazing out to sea from Alaska to Australia, from NZ to North Yorkshire,
from Siberia to the South Pacific. James Cook (1728-79) explored more of the earth's surface than anyone in his-
tory, and it's impossible to travel the Pacific without encountering the captain's image and his controversial leg-
acy in the lands he opened to the West.
For a man who travelled so widely, and rose to such fame, Cook came from an extremely pinched and provin-
cial background. The son of a day labourer in rural Yorkshire, he was born in a mud cottage, had little schooling,
and seemed destined for farm work - and for his family's grave plot in a village churchyard. Instead, Cook went
to sea as a teenager, worked his way up from coal-ship servant to naval officer, and attracted notice for his excep-
tional charts of Canada. But Cook remained a little-known second lieutenant until, in 1768, the Royal Navy chose
him to command a daring voyage to the South Seas.
In a converted coal ship called
Endeavour,
Cook sailed to Tahiti, and then became the first European to land at
NZ and the east coast of Australia. Though the ship almost sank after striking the Great Barrier Reef, and 40% of
the crew died from disease and accidents, the
Endeavour
limped home in 1771. On a return voyage (1772-75),
Cook became the first navigator to pierce the Antarctic Circle and circle the globe near its southernmost latitude,
demolishing the myth that a vast, populous and fertile continent surrounded the South Pole. Cook criss-crossed
the Pacific from Easter Island to Melanesia, charting dozens of islands between. Though Maori killed and cooked
10 sailors, the captain remained sympathetic to islanders. 'Notwithstanding they are cannibals,' he wrote, 'they
are naturally of a good disposition.'
On Cook's final voyage (1776-79), in search of a northwest passage between the Atlantic and Pacific, he be-
came the first European to visit Hawaii, and coasted America from Oregon to Alaska. Forced back by Arctic pack
ice, Cook returned to Hawaii, where he was killed during a skirmish with islanders who had initially greeted him
as a Polynesian god. In a single decade of discovery, Cook had filled in the map of the Pacific and, as one French
navigator put it, 'left his successors with little to do but admire his exploits'.
But Cook's travels also spurred colonisation of the Pacific, and within a few decades of his death, missionaries,
whalers, traders and settlers began transforming (and often devastating) island cultures. As a result, many indi-
genous people now revile Cook as an imperialist villain who introduced disease, dispossession and other ills to
the Pacific (hence the frequent vandalising of Cook monuments). However, as islanders revive traditional crafts
and practices, from tattooing to
tapa
(traditional barkcloth)
,
they have turned to the art and writing of Cook and
his men as a resource for cultural renewal. For good and ill, a Yorkshire farm boy remains the single most signi-
ficant figure in the shaping of the modern Pacific.
Tony Horwitz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and nonfiction author. In researching Blue Latitudes (or Into
the Blue), Tony travelled the Pacific - 'boldly going where Captain Cook has gone before'.
