Books: Ulysses from Yorkshire

CAPTAIN COOK AND THE SOUTH PACIFIC (269 pp.)—John Gwyfher—Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

As the sullen waters spumed in white fury along the Great Barrier Reef, steely, hidden fingers of coral dug into the bottom of the Endeavour and the hearts of every man aboard. Ordinarily, 18th century seamen panicked fast. Most of them were too superstitious to learn how to swim; they felt it would only prolong the agony of drowning. The only rule of shipwreck and death was to loot the liquor supplies and drink oneself insensible in the short time left to live.

Not so the crew of Captain Cook. Under his nerveless, hypnotic brown eyes, the men heaved 50 tons of equipment overboard, worked the pumps until they dropped, and strained mightily at the capstan so that on the second high tide, the Endeavour was pulled free. Even then the ship would have sunk to the bottom if Cook had not been canny—and humble— enough to accept a timid midshipman’s suggestion that he draw a dung-and-oakum-smeared sail under the ship and over a shattered spot in the bottom. Pressure clotted the sail to the hole, and the Endeavour and her men were saved. Though the East Australia coast was only 25 miles away, Cook’s wisdom, the midshipman’s wit, and even the crew’s will were undoubtedly sharpened by the knowledge that another ship was not likely to be coming their way for the rest of the century.

The Transit of Venus. It is the story of the first and greatest of Cook’s tours which John Gwyther, a wartime Royal Navy officer, tells in Captain Cook and the South Pacific. A three-year circumnavigation of the globe (1768-71), Cook’s voyage added Australia, New Zealand and a number of South Pacific isles to the then known world. Narrated by Author Gwyther with seadog relish, authority and profound professional admiration, Cook’s epic journeyings have the fascination of an Odyssey from Yorkshire.

James Cook was a farmer’s son, the sixth or seventh of nine—his mother was never quite sure which. A grocer’s apprentice as a boy, he later manned coal barges, enlisted in the Royal Navy and worked his way up, most notably as a cartographer in Wolfe’s campaign up the St. Lawrence against Quebec. Cook was 40 when he was chosen to skipper the Endeavour. By London’s top scientists, the Fellows of the Royal Society and the Admiralty, he was handed a twofold mission: 1) he was to sail to Tahiti and observe the transit of Venus “over the disk of the sun”; 2) he was to search out “Terra Australis Incognita,” a vast body of land presumed to extend westward from the tip of South America because it was theoretically necessary to counteract the weight of the Northern Hemisphere and so keep the world on an even keel. French explorers like Bougainville were looking for the same territory, and the idea was to claim it for George III first.

Timorodee Patoo-Patoo. The expedition had smooth sailing until it hit Tierra del Fuego. There, an overzealous scientific party of twelve, bent on collecting hundreds of new botanical specimens, got ambushed by a howling snowstorm and lost two men. The survivors staggered back to the ship after a ration of three mouthfuls of fresh vulture, “each man given his share, raw, to cook as he pleased.”

After the icy blasts and terrors of Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn, sundrenched Tahiti, lazing in the trade winds, seemed a double paradise. The island girls proved eager for the transports, if not the transits, of Venus. To Cook’s 18th century mind, it was a matter of their being noble savages “who have not even the idea of indecency” but did have early know-how: “In other countries the girls and unmarried women are supposed to be wholly ignorant of what others upon occasions may appear to know . . . but here it is just contrary. Among other diversions, there is a dance, called Timorodee, which is performed by the young girls . . . consisting of motions and gestures beyond imagination wanton.” With a wife and children waiting in England, Cook did not say in his famous journal whether he resisted the wanton spell of the Tahitian women, although he got close enough to note that “their breath [was] perfectly without taint.”

The next batch of natives, the brave and cannibalistic Maoris of New Zealand, breathed fire. In full fighting regalia, they would yell from their war canoes: “Come to us, come on shore and we will kill you all with our patoo-patoos!” While the Maoris did not brain any of Cook’s men with their patoo-patoos (war clubs), Cook got rattled for a rare moment during a sudden Maori foray and ordered his men to open fire. Four of the tribesmen were killed, to the kindly Cook’s lasting regret.

Tot of Juice. In Australia he made a more amusing error. Spotting a strange new hopping animal, he asked the aborigines about it, was answered with the word “Kanguroo” and never learned that the word meant “I don’t understand you.” After the near shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef, the Endeavour was badly in need of a drydock, and Cook put in at Jakarta (then Batavia). The two-month stay salvaged the ship but wrecked the crew. Seven men died of malaria and dysentery in the fetid port, another two dozen on shipboard as the Endeavour limped her solitary way around South Africa, back to the Thames and into the history books.

Of 94 men who embarked on the expedition, only 56 lived to tell about it. Remarkably, not a man died of scurvy—the first of the achievements which, in Author Gwyther’s view, set Cook apart in the annals of marine history. A devout believer in antiscorbutics (the acids which prevent scurvy), Cook would even flog a man who failed to down his tot of “inspissated juice of wort.” It was about the only time Cook ever did fall back on physical punishment. In an age of Draconian discipline (lashing with the cat-o’-nine-tails, ducking, keelhauling) and brutalitarians like Captain Bligh,* Cook treated his men with humanity and fair play. Nor did his rare talents stop at shipside. His enlightened dealings with the South Pacific natives were a good century and a half ahead of his time. His maps and navigational observations on the South Pacific were so accurate that Author Gwyther found them still useful off the Great Barrier Reef as late as World War II. Cook was to go on two more voyages and be slain and dismembered by Hawaiian natives (in 1779), but not before he explained in a letter the heroic, globe spanning drive behind the modest Yorkshire mien: “[ I ] . . . had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.”

* Who served on Cook’s third expedition as his sailing master, before he went on to captain the Bounty and sail into Nordhoff & Hall fiction.