In Search of the Raw and the Cooked

On Aug. 26, 1768, Capt. James Cook set sail from England for the vast void of the Pacific. For three years, the plain-spoken British navigator and his men aboard H.M. Bark Endeavor explored the third of the globe that was still unknown to Europeans with orders for “making Discoveries of Countries hitherto unknown.” By the time he returned to London, Cook had literally redrawn the map of the world, preparing charts of Australia, New Zealand and other Pacific islands so accurate that some were still in use in the 1990s. He probably named more places than anyone else in history.

Cook also transformed Western art and science. Led by financier and botanist Joseph Banks, artists, astronomers and naturalists aboard Cook’s first voyage of discovery collected thousands of previously undocumented flora and fauna, vastly expanding the known natural universe. Their dramatic stories and graphic drawings of exotic locales and unfamiliar practices--from orgiastic sex to human sacrifice, from tattoos to taboos--provided the template for generations of legend and myth.

Cook’s two follow-up expeditions were also epic. He explored from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Tasmania to Tierra del Fuego, from the South Seas to the Aleutians. He survived coral reefs, icebergs and attacks by islanders. By the time Cook was killed in 1779 by an angry mob of natives in what he had named the Sandwich Isles (now Hawaii), he had sailed about 200,000 miles. He had opened huge new territories to Europe’s colonial and commercial empires--as well as to Europe’s slavery, syphilis and wars.

In “Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before,” journalist and author Tony Horwitz retraces much of Cook’s remarkable journey and explores the profound legacy of one of history’s greatest explorers. It is a vivid narrative--part history, part travelogue--and mostly just great fun. He brings the same insatiable curiosity and wry wit to this book that he did in his “Confederates in the Attic,” a bestseller on the Civil War. Here too he plays the role of re-enactor--swabbing decks and reefing sails for a week on a replica of Cook’s vessel. And here too, he weaves a meticulously researched historic tale with his own amusing misadventures.

Paul Theroux and Simon Winchester, among other authors, have toured--and largely trashed--the not-so-happy isles of modern Oceania in recent years. Horwitz is far more judicious, if only because he reviews and discards more of the biases and blinders that have shaded our view of “native” Pacific cultures since the days of Rousseau’s noble savage.

The myths are deeply ingrained. Think of Cook’s much-maligned mate, William Bligh, whose sadistic misrule later triggered the mutiny on the Bounty and at least three Hollywood movies. Horwitz reminds us that Bligh flogged his men less often and fed them better than did many British officers of the time. And the Bounty’s mission was hardly noble: The ship was to carry Tahitian breadfruit to the West Indies to provide cheap food for slaves.

Horwitz also finds small treasures as he travels. My favorite: Cook named the kangaroo after gangurru, the term used by Aborigines on the northeast coast for local large, gray marsupials. Cook didn’t realize that Australia’s widely scattered Aborigines had numerous languages and the word was foreign to most of them. But Cook took the word to England, and British settlers soon carried it back to Australia, where it was ultimately accepted. Ironically, Horwitz writes, the Aboriginal clan that Cook first met had 10 different words for kangaroo. As an Aborigine tells him: “If Cook had asked about a small red one, the whole world would be saying nharrgali today.”

Still, Horwitz’s book has its flaws. He has a sophomoric eagerness to describe each time he and Roger, his boozy Australian sidekick, get drunk, throw up, smoke dope, get seasick, get drunk again and so on. Roger is on his own quest here--for “crumpet,” Australian slang for women. Their search for Cook’s trail soon resembles Animal House at sea. Their escapades are entertaining, but wet T-shirts and interviews with barflies get old fast. We get less the enduring insights of Herman Melville than the addled antics of Hunter Thompson.

But this is history on a global scale, and Horwitz tells it surpassingly well. When Cook first embarked in 1768, the known world was surprisingly small. Much of the globe remained blank on European maps, or was filled with sea monsters and imaginary continents. Map makers labeled much of the Pacific “nondum cognita,” not yet known. To help fill the gaps--and to record a rare astronomical event, the transit of Venus across the sun--King George III agreed to send the little-known Cook to the Pacific. Tahiti was the first stop.

Reports from Cook’s men of bare-breasted women apparently eager to engage in public sex helped create the myth of Tahiti as primitive paradise. In reality, the first Western ship to visit Tahiti two years before had brought venereal disease. Smallpox, measles, alcoholism and other ills soon spread with devastating effect. The population plummeted in less than a century from more than 200,000 to about 7,000.

We know little of how Pacific islanders viewed their first contact with the West. Cook’s visit to New Zealand is a rare exception. According to interviews later conducted by British settlers, natives thought his ship was a giant bird or a floating island. Clan elders thought it came from the spirit world, and the men were goblins. Many Maoris today apparently agree. Horwitz lends a sympathetic ear to angry local activists who view Cook as a racist invader who unfairly depicted their ancestors as criminals and savages. “With hindsight, the line between exploration and exploitation, between investigation and imperialism, seems perilously thin,” he concludes.

Cook next sailed west, becoming the first European to reach the east coast of Australia. His ship foundered and nearly sank on the Great Barrier Reef, and he was glad to finally get out alive. Many who followed were not so lucky. His reports on Australia’s timber, fish and other resources led Britain to choose the new colony to replace the rebellious American colonies as a place to dump prisoners. The first prison ships landed in 1787, and 160,000 British convicts ultimately followed. Aborigines were hunted and killed as vermin, and their land taken at will. In Australia, Horwitz writes, the two societies didn’t so much meet as violently collide.

It was a pattern repeated in varying degrees across the Pacific. Many of the lands Cook ultimately claimed for Britain “became wretched colonial outposts,” Horwitz correctly notes. Indeed, he points out, “the notion of ‘discovery’ also rings hollow” since nearly every place Cook visited was already inhabited. “In Polynesia, the true discoverers were pioneers who set off from Asia in sailing canoes several millennia before Cook, eventually settling the vast triangle of ocean bounded by Easter Island, New Zealand and Hawaii,” he tells us.

In the end, Cook’s legacy is a matter of perspective. Was he a savior who brought Western trade and civilization to benighted lands? Or a despot who ravaged native populations and traditional cultures? Horwitz argues that he was both, a humane and just man who grew so accustomed to being treated like a god that he ultimately became petty and cruel.

Sadly, Cook’s lengthy journals rarely explain why he did what he did. But Horwitz cites one entry that perhaps explains his motives most clearly. “Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me,” Cook wrote, “but as far as I think it possible for man to go.”