The Man Who Mapped the Pacific

I was born in Australia. I speak English because Captain Cook sailed there 200 years ago. There was a picture of him in our schoolroom in Melbourne showing him landing at Botany Bay in New South Wales—a tall, fine-looking man in old-style British naval uniform.


He was restraining a couple of his men from firing on a group of Australian aborigines, understandably upset at the invasion of their territory. In the background lay his ship, the famous Endeavour. With his pleasant, open countenance, he looked such a quiet, kindly man to be a great figure of history. No guns belched from his ship, no cutlasses shone in the Australian sunshine, no captured natives lay in bonds at his feet.


'The most moderate, humane, gentle circumnavigator who ever went upon discoveries' … 'the ablest and most renowned Navigator this or any country hath produced'—some of his contemporaries knew the true value of James Cook.


In three great world-circling voyages between 1768 and 1779, this farmhand’s son took possession of Australia's east coast for Britain, circumnavigated Antarctica, discovered the Hawaiian Islands, and charted the dangerous west coast of North America for 3,000 miles, from what is now Oregon to beyond Bering Strait. Through it all, he showed a thorough concern for his men, crowned by his extraordinary victory over scurvy, which until his time was accepted as a necessary evil in ships and destroyer number one of seamen.


Cook's luster is greater today than ever. Queen Elizabeth II traveled to Australia and New Zealand in 1970 to commemorate his opening of those lands to British settlement, and to inaugurate the great bicentenary celebrations which, over the next ten years, will continue in other places that Cook discovered or explored.


At his birth in 1728 James Cook had poor prospects of receiving high tributes from either his contemporaries or posterity. Son of a Scots farmhand settled in a remote village in Yorkshire, he was apprenticed to a grocer and dry-goods merchant at 16. His schooling had begun at 8, ended at 12. He did not begin his sea career until he was 18, in a period when it was customary to go to sea at 11 or 12. He joined the navy late, too, volunteering as an able seaman at the age of 27. He was 40 before he received his first commission as an officer, and he served as a commissioned officer for only ten years. Yet in those ten years he charted more of the Pacific than had been recorded by more than twenty predecessors—Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, English—over the previous 250 years.


The image that shone from that picture in my Melbourne schoolroom—of the great humane sailor—stayed in my mind. It was a mind made up even at the age of 9. When I grew up I would go to sea, in ships like Cook's Endeavour. I read all I could about him. I would be a sailing-ship captain too.


It took me a long time to realize that dream, but in the end I did. I returned to Australia one day in a ship like Cook's, a full-rigged ship named Joseph Conrad, which I commanded and sailed in as much of his track as I dared.


Sometimes in those days I felt very close to Captain Cook—especially once when I got on a reef in the Coral Sea, as he had done on his first voyage. Drifting on a windless day, I was carried off course by currents. My ship touched on the coral, trembled, and stopped. I had to move quickly; the rise and fall of the ground swell would pound the Conrad's bottom on the coral till it holed her.


I was lucky. I got the Conrad off that reef fast, by the grace of God, the brawn of my young seamen, and the calm weather. I didn't have to dump ballast, or water, or stores, as Cook had to do (even six of his cannon went over the side). We got a big anchor away and hove her off to it.


The rasping sound of the coral biting at my ship's keel brought home to me vividly the alarm Cook must have felt when his ship hit the Great Barrier Reef in that same Coral Sea in June 1770. The little bark Endeavour, a former collier only 106 feet long, had been sent on a twofold mission: To make astronomical observations from Tahiti that would help determine the distance between the earth and the sun; and to search for a conjectural continent, the Unknown Southern Land, with which imaginative map makers loved to fill the blank space that extended across the bottom of the globe.


No one had any real idea at that time what proportion of the Pacific might be land and what water. Cook's predecessors, from Magellan onward, had left the chart of the vast ocean much as they had found it. A squiggle that represented Dutchman Abel Tasman's observations of western New Zealand, Spanish and Dutch outlines of New Guinea and the north, west, and south coasts of the 'desert' called New Holland (now Australia), a blob for southern Tasmania—these were almost all that was known of what lay beyond Balboa's wide South Sea.


Until indomitable Captain Cook came.


He had shown great courage to be there among the reefs at all. No man could sail through the shoal-studded maze of the Coral Sea and the Great Barrier Reef and get away with it day and night for weeks on end. The greatest reef system in the world—1,250 miles long by 10 to 90 across, 80,000 square miles of it off Australia's Queensland coast—it waited with ship-ripping fangs just below the surface. Sailing through such waters, still uncharted, was as great a hazard as a seaman could face anywhere.


'A Reef such as is here spoke of is scarcely known in Europe,' Cook wrote in his journal; 'it is a wall of Coral Rock rising all most perpendicular out of the unfathomable Ocean … the large waves of the vast Ocean meeting with so sudden a resistance make a most terrible surf breaking mountains high especially as in our case when the general trade wind blowes directly upon it.'


But Cook was lucky, too, even when he ran aground. His flat-bottomed bark paid off, for she stood up square, even on her pierced hull. She didn't fall over when the tide left her. If she'd done that, she'd have been finished.


When the tide came again and lifted her off, half the crew pumped for their lives while the other half rowed like mad in her boats, towing her. Cook bandaged her —'fathered' is the old term—with a sail bound right around the most damaged area. Then she slowly sailed on to a convenient beach at the mouth of the river now named Endeavour, on the coast of Queensland.


When she dried out, he saw that it wasn't the sail bandage that had saved her, though it had helped. A coral head had broken off right in the worst hole and jammed there like a cork. It took weeks to patch her up.


Cook summed up the incident in a cool understatement: 'Was it not for the pleasure which naturly results to a Man from being the first discoverer … this service would be insuportable … but it is time I should have done with this Subject w[hich] at best is but disagreeable & which I was lead into on reflecting on our late Danger.'


As for those six cannon that he dumped, they stayed right on the reef for almost 200 years. Then, in 1969, they were discovered by an expedition from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, led by Dr. Virgil Kauffman and equipped with underwater metal detectors. Up they came at last, mightily overgrown with coral but still in good condition.


One summer evening last year, in Britain's National Maritime Museum at Greenwich by the Thames, I watched Prime Minister Edward Heath unveil one of those cannon. I sat among the great of Britain and of many other countries, noble lords and ministers, admirals and ambassadors, listening to the tributes and the applause, and I reflected that so distinguished an assemblage had never met to honor Cook while he was alive. I wondered whether the wraith of James Cook, somewhere out there, might have smiled.


Cook, of a family with neither influence nor wealth, began the hard way, in North Sea coasters. These little barks, about as big as modern harbor tugboats, carried coal to London. In the days of sail, coasting was much more dangerous than making long open-sea voyages, for it was land that most threatened the ships. Tides set them upon it, adverse winds blew them upon it, storms drove them upon it. All could be fatal.


In those North Sea ships a sailor had to know his business, and Cook could scarcely have had better training. After three years as an apprentice and three more as able seaman, he was promoted to mate. By the time he was 27, in 1755, he was selected for command. He turned this down and volunteered into the navy as a plain able seaman; why he did so, he never explained.


Even today, a seagoing mate of a merchant ship might be considered almost crazy to make such a choice. In Cook's day, merchant seamen were press-ganged into navy ships as needed—waylaid in seaports, slugged, drugged, or dragged aboard. Most seamen avoided the king's service if they could.


Very rapidly—for the navy—Cook climbed to the rank of master, a warrant officer, not commissioned, who had charge of sailing the ship but not of fighting her; that responsibility belonged to the commissioned officers. At 29 he was named master of Pembroke, a 64-gun ship, for the North American station.


In Canada he distinguished himself by charting the turbulent St. Lawrence River as far as Quebec. This made possible the successful amphibious operation, under Gen. James Wolfe, that dislodged the French from dominant power in Canada. Then, for five years, he made charts of Newfoundland, charts so good that they were still in use a century later. Even in recent years, when I was in those waters with Portuguese dory fishermen in the schooner Argus, I noted that authorities for some of the charts we used included 'James Cook, Master and Surveyor'.…


Just about that time, the savants of the Royal Society, with the Lords of the Admiralty, were planning the Endeavour voyage, which James Cook was to make so triumphantly his own. Why did they give him the command? He was still a warrant officer, a master only. He had never even crossed the Equator. He had never had command of any expedition. It looks simply as if the Lords of the Admiralty for once exercised a considerable degree of intuitive genius in selecting Cook. At any rate, at the age of 40, he was commissioned lieutenant—bottom of the officer ladder then—and put in command of Endeavour.


Navy ships of those days were manned on a scale to allow for heavy casualties to scurvy and to cannon, and the little Endeavour did not provide much in the way of adequate quarters for the 94 officers, scientists, seamen, and marines who crowded aboard her. Among these was an enterprising young botanist named Joseph Banks—later Sir Joseph, president of the Royal Society for 40 years—who went along as chief scientist. Banks was a very rich young man, a great landowner. He came aboard with four personal servants and two big dogs, one a greyhound, but the accommodating Lieutenant Cook took that in stride too.


It was a good thing for science that Banks was aboard. His presence greatly widened the scientific scope of Cook's voyage, and inaugurated the custom of carrying exceptional landsmen on naval expeditions. Had Banks not set the precedent, Charles Darwin might never have sailed aboard the Beagle 60 years later.


After crossing the Atlantic, the little Endeavour sailed down the east coast of South America. She was an object of scorn and disbelief at Rio de Janeiro, where the Portuguese viceroy refused to believe she was a king's ship at all, and kept Cook aboard like a prisoner. But riding the rough wind, stubborn on her stumbling way, Endeavour rounded the Horn and made for Tahiti.…


After the Tahitian visit, Endeavour left the zone of favorable southeast trade winds, thus abandoning the safe beaten track back to Europe around the north of New Guinea. Cook struck south and west into the unknown.


Down there was no vast Unknown Southern Land extending far up into the Pacific, but the two long, lovely fertile main islands of New Zealand and, beyond them across the Tasman Sea, the east coast of the great land that was to become the Commonwealth of Australia.


Cook first charted 2,400 miles of New Zealand's coasts. The Maoris were sure the Britishers were supernatural beings because they rowed ashore facing aft, and so must be able to see through the backs of their heads. Besides, they could remove their skins (their coats) and some (who wore wigs) their scalps as well.


Fifty years later, a Maori chief remembered: 'There was one supreme man in that ship. We knew he was the lord of the whole by his perfect gentlemanly and noble demeanour. He seldom spoke, but some of the 'goblins' spoke much. He came to us and patted our cheeks. My companion said: ‘This is the leader, which is proved by his kindness to us, he is also very fond of children. A nobleman cannot be lost in a crowd.’ ' The Maoris appreciated Cook.


After New Zealand, according to his orders, he could have turned back eastward to reach the Atlantic—and England—by way of Cape Horn. The winds were favorable, the distance to the Horn some 4,700 miles. But James Cook did not do things the easy way. That great blank upon the map, the thousands of miles of the eastern face of 'New Holland'—the future Australia—challenged him.


He headed his little ship west again. Instead of five months, it took more than 15 to reach home by way of the Tasman Sea, the east coast of Australia, the Coral Sea, the Great Barrier Reef, the Torres Strait, across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope—the first part of this a monumental passage that no European had ever made. On his very first Pacific voyage, this Columbus of the South Seas had given men a new view of their world.


When Cook sailed Endeavour home to England, Mr. J. Banks was acclaimed, for he was known among society; Lieutenant Cook was not. Mr. Banks had indeed made great contributions to science and returned with fabulous collections. But Lieutenant Cook's astonishing scientific feat in bringing the ship's company home without a single death from scurvy was not at first fully appreciated.


We know today that scurvy is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C. On long ocean voyages fresh vegetables and fruit—rich in vitamin C—were unavailable. Before Cook's pioneering efforts to prevent it, the disease decimated ships' crews. It was an ugly, frequently fatal affliction, running through debility, depression, loss of teeth, and hemorrhages, to death.


In 1747 James Lind, a Scots naval physician, showed that lemon juice could cure the disease. The Endeavour had a small supply of it aboard, to be used only as a cure, not a preventive, for there was never enough of it.


In his search for more readily available preventives, Cook tried 'portable soups'—thick brown meat broth issued by the Admiralty in concentrated slabs so well preserved that there are specimens of them from the Endeavour at the British National Maritime Museum to this day. Stuff which Cook—no genius at spelling —called 'Sour Krout' he took aboard by the barrelful in quantities sufficient to allow every seaman two pounds a week for at least a year, and this went into the soups too.


At first his sea dogs spat it out, claiming it spoiled the soup. Cook, who knew seamen, simply stopped their kraut for a week, said nothing, and increased the amounts served in the officers' mess, with quiet instructions that all there should eat the stuff with obvious gusto, even if feigned. This 'favoritism' toward officers being duly reported to the seamen by the officers' servants, the idea grew that perhaps the infernal kraut had something after all, and soon the mariners were shouting for it. Hunger and envy are great persuaders. Cook must have smiled.


When Endeavour reached bleak Tierra del Fuego, Cook sent the men in quest of 'scurvy grass' and 'sellery,' and these appalling—but effective—greens went into the soup too. In kindlier climes, Cook bought or gathered onions, fruits, all sorts of fresh vegetables.


His critics claimed that the new places Cook had charted—New Zealand, inhabited by warring cannibals; Australia, its northeastern shore guarded by coral, the abode of primitives who produced nothing—did not sound like the stuff of instant empire far off at the end of the world. What of the Unknown Southern Land? There was still room in the southern ocean for a great continent, particularly in the Pacific between New Zealand and South America, where no ships had yet searched.


So Cook, promoted to the rank of commander (not to captain, as he should have been) was sent off to look again. This time he was given two little ships, both of them former Whitby colliers, because the chances of losing a single ship were considerable. For Cook's orders were to circumnavigate the Antarctic region and to probe down there to find a new continent or dispel the idea forever.


One day in July 1772 Commander Cook sailed again from Plymouth, Devon, in His Majesty's sloop Resolution, about 120 feet long, accompanied by the smaller sloop Adventure, Tobias Furneaux commanding.


Mr. Banks, unfortunately, was not in either, for he had wanted virtual command of the whole expedition and so large a retinue (including scientists, artists, servants, and two musicians) that the Resolution had to have an overbuilt upper deck to accommodate them. With this she was so crank she could not sail. Off came deck, retinue, and Banks—which was a pity.


The idea of two ships being better than one did not work well. In the fogbound sub-Antarctic wastes, Resolution and Adventure became separated, met at a rendezvous in New Zealand, and were separated again. Adventure returned to England a year before Resolution. It was July 1775 before Cook was back, after a voyage of three years and 18 days.


He had done all he set out to do, and a great deal more. He circumnavigated Antarctica, and Resolution became the first ship to cross the Antarctic Circle—three times in all. Cook reached as far south as 71° 10′, in the southern Pacific; while still with the Adventure, he had come within 100 miles of Antarctica in the Indian Ocean, but never glimpsed land. He sailed around the whole area, disproving the myth of a huge, inhabited southern land. If there was such a continent, it was locked behind ice.


Without heat other than an improvised stove or two, Resolution could sail the Antarctic only in the short summer seasons, and perilously then. So Cook had to make his southern voyage in three sections, sailing away each time as fall came. Otherwise he would have been frozen in down there forever.


For more than 12,000 miles he accepted the hazard of ice in the form of floes, bergs, and pack, as well as fog, storms, and calms. He looked after his people, issuing clothes of wool and baize. The intense cold was hard on everyone, and the ship never properly warm. Cook himself was so ill with intestinal trouble that he nearly died.…


When Resolution came home in late July of 1775, James Cook was at last publicly honored. He sent to the Royal Society a report of the means by which he brought back his crews without a single loss to scurvy on two of the longest voyages ever made. Now the society voted him their Copley Gold Medal, Britain's highest honor for intellectual achievement—an extraordinary distinction for the farmhand’s son, graduate of no school, holder of no degree.


In recognition of his feats as indefatigable seaman-discoverer, Cook was promoted to captain at last, and given an appointment to the board of Greenwich Hospital that assured him time to work on his observations, journals, and papers, and to renew his acquaintance with Mrs. Cook and their children.…


Now, in 1776, she was to be parted from her husband for the last time. Resolution was being commissioned once more. Who else could command her?


This was to be the most difficult sea assignment James Cook had ever faced. What about that old problem, a sailing route between Britain and the East Indies via a northern passage? A route wholly in the Northern Hemisphere, even if practicable only in the summers, would shorten voyages, add greatly to trade. Since all seekers had failed, looking from the Atlantic end, let Cook, explorer of the Pacific, find the way, not from the Atlantic but from the Pacific.


Considering that it was then the best part of 300 years since Columbus's first voyage, astonishingly little was known of the North Pacific. Americans had no real idea of the precise size of their great continent. Its northwest coast was less known to them than the west coast of Africa, where their slave traders sailed. Few explorers had ventured far into North Pacific waters.


In Cook's third-voyage orders the Admiralty commanded him to make a running survey of the coast from Oregon northward, probing above 65 degrees for a river or inlet leading toward Hudson Bay or Baffin Bay. If no such passage showed, he was to try to sail back to the Atlantic entirely around the north of Canada, or the other way, around Siberia toward Europe. And more and more: Find sub-Antarctic harbors, revisit New Zealand, and take home the Society Islander, Omai, whom Furneaux had brought to England on the second voyage.…


Cook was not always his former self on this last voyage. His strained digestive system, the constant worry over leaky, badly refitted ships combined to torture his iron will and inclined him to outbursts of shouting, cursing, and sometimes ill-judged actions.


When he reached Tahiti, he found that another affliction had become unbearable. He had developed crippling rheumatism, intensified by wet quarters below leaky decks. 'We'll fix that,' said a friendly chief.


So 12 large, muscular women, four of them the chief's relatives, were paddled out ceremoniously in a great canoe, descended to Cook's cabin, and spread a mattress and blankets on the deck. 'Lie!' said the women.


Cook lay down. The 12 giantesses immediately fell upon him, pummeling and squeezing unmercifully with their plump, lively hands, until his joints cracked and all his flesh felt like misused blubber. After 15 minutes of this, the released victim got up. To his astonishment he felt immediate relief.


'More?' asked the ladies, smiling.


Indeed, agreed the captain. Three more treatments, he recorded, ended his pain.


Leaving Tahiti, Cook made another of his great discoveries, the Hawaiian Islands, which he named the Sandwich Islands in honor of his noble friend at the Admiralty. Cook later chose them as a North Pacific base for his Arctic probes.


These were arduous, navigationally hazardous, and, from the point of view of discovery, quite futile. There was no way through Canada to the Atlantic, nor round Alaska either. Cook groped far up the most promising estuary, now called Cook Inlet, to where the city of Anchorage now stands. From there he sent Mr. Bligh and some crewmen on inland in small boats. The farther they went, the fresher the water—there was no road through.


Next he fought his way along the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands, and up toward Point Barrow to his farthest north of nearly 71°. Beyond was the hopeless ice jam of the Arctic Ocean. There was no slightest sign of a useful sailing passage around either Siberia or North America.


In the strain of it all, Cook began to take chances, which was unlike him. Once, near Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, thick mist clamped down while he sailed. But the wind was moderate, so the ships ran on, Resolution ahead, the smaller Discovery close astern, following a mark that the leading ship towed.


Suddenly the leadsman found the bottom, rapidly shoaling! Seabirds shrieked. The wind had an odd swishing sound, as if among cliffs. To the seamen's alert ears there came the unmistakable sound of sea breaking on rocks. Still they could see nothing; it was time to stop until the fog cleared.


'Down helm! Clew up everything!' roared Cook. The ship spun into the wind. Sails flapped. Well-used cordage sang through blocks.


'Let go anchor!' Down splashed the heavy bower.


The ship shook like a reined-in steed, almost as if she were frightened. A few hours later the fog cleared slightly. Cook looked back the way they had come and saw two huge rock pinnacles, with lesser rocks between. All unknowing, he had sailed not just between the crags, but by the only clear passage.


He took off his hat and wig, mopped his brow. 'I would not have tried that on a clear day,' he said.…


After months amid the ice and fog and rocks, Cook returned to Hawaii and warped the ships close in offshore at Kealakekua Bay. The Polynesians there received the English well. Cook they called Lono, after a benevolent god of that name. There was a tradition that Lono, a deified chief who had departed ages earlier, had promised to return on a 'floating island' with trees, laden with gifts.


Cook could not know this; researchers unearthed this myth years after his time. But his ships were near enough to floating islands and their masts and yards to trees. He brought gifts. He and his veteran officers spoke some Polynesian, learned at Tahiti and Tonga, and knew something of Polynesian ways. So the islanders, led by their chiefs and priests, took Cook for the long-awaited Lono.


Nevertheless, it appeared that these strange men in their floating islands took a lot of feeding. After several weeks, this became a strain; stocks in the local gardens, larders, sweet-potato patches, and pigsties were run down. The islanders were greatly relieved when their guests hove up their anchors and sailed.


Then storms struck and damaged Resolution's foremast. It was split at the head, beyond possibility of shipboard repair. Cook must seek port again. He knew of no good anchorage other than Kealakekua. Aware that the ships had overstayed their welcome there, he was reluctant to return. But it had to be.


At anchor again, 'Lono's' floating islanders found a different attitude. The brown-skinned citizens were soon threatening to throw stones. Petty thieving became major when a boat from the Discovery was stolen and not returned.


As was his custom, Cook landed to take a senior chief hostage against the boat's return—or rather he tried to. Perhaps because the Hawaiians knew the boat had already been ripped to pieces for its metal fastenings, there was noisy opposition that rapidly grew to a fracas.


Cook made for the beach to re-embark. Stones flew fast and viciously.


The boat began to pull off. Muskets banged. Small shot bounced off the Hawaiians' body mats, but at least one warrior fell dead. This was no Lono!


Cook turned seaward at the water's edge and raised his hand to command a cease-fire. As he turned, a warrior clubbed him. He sank to his knees in the water. Others stabbed with knives, and stabbed again.


I made a pilgrimage not long ago to Kealakekua Bay. There in the shadow of the volcano Mauna Loa, a monument and a nearby plaque, underwater at high tide, commemorate Cook at the scene of his assassination. As the liner Kungsholm came abreast of the spot, Capt. Per-Eric Sjölin and I dropped a wreath in the sea.


Today the memory of the great man who died there in his fiftieth year, on February 14, 1779, is green in millions of hearts. His memorials are modern, populous Australia and New Zealand, and islands and island groups of the Pacific, almost beyond reckoning, that he discovered or rediscovered.


The farmhand's son from England indeed changed the Pacific world.
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