Captain Cook

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Bo rn in obscuri ty bu tgripped by a boundless passion for new hori zons, James Cook had become at the time of his dea th in 1779 the grea test combina tion of seaman, e xplorer, naviga tor, and cartographer that the world had ever known . He s till is . He had driven himself mercilessly, and his men likewise, and yet the surgeon's mate on the Resolution was able to wri te : 'In every si tuation he s tood unrivalled and alone ; on him all eyes were tu rned ; he was our leading star, which a t i ts se tting left us involved in darkness and despair '. Between 1768 and 1779, Cap tain Cook cir cumnaviga ted the globe three times in voyages of discovery that broke record after record of e xploration, endurance, and personal achievement . He e xplored and char ted the coasts of New Zealand, landed in Bo tany Bay, e xplored the Pacific, mapped i ts islands, and travelled further sou th than any man before him ; he e xplored the Great Barrier Reef and travelled thousands of miles north to tackle the North-West Passage . He e xcell ed in all aspects of his craft and inspired in his men an affection for him and an enthusiasm for his undertakings that provoked constant loyalty and unfailing endeavour in fre quen tly savage conditions . Mr MacLean's achievement in this book is to present a graphic and lively account of this grea t e xplorer, and to describe in e xci ting de tail his three ama zing voyages and the adventures that befell him, his crews, and his ships in lands tha t until he sailed were in many cases unknown . Cook's life was a resounding success and the story of it is a thrilling e xemplifica tion of his own description of himself as a man 'who had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had done before, bu t as far as it was possible for man to go' .

Photo: Godfrey Argent

Alistair MacLean was brought up in the Scot tish Highlands . He joined the Navy in 1941 and served in the Home, Medi terranean, and Eastern Fleets . After the war, he gradua ted in Arts a t Glasgow University and became a teach er . In his spare time he wro te short stories, one of which won a pri ze in a Glasgow Herald competi ti on . He was a t once approached by Collins and shortly after delivered to them the manu ­ script of his firs t novel, H.M.S. Ulysses, a brillian t novel about the war a t sea . Since tha t firs t success, Mr MacLean has writ ten many o ther bes t-sellers, such as The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra ' When Eight Bells Toll, Force Ten from Navarone, Puppet on a Chain, Caravan to Vaccares, and Bear Island. Many of these stories have been made in to immensely successful fil ms . The jacket illustration shows Cook's death in Ha11Jaii painted by john Webber, the artist who accompanied Cook on his final voyage. Reproduced by kind permission of the Dixson Galleries.

Printed in Great Britain

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A medallion por trait of James Cook (1728-79) by Josiah Wedgwood, from a design by John Fla xman, cast in 1784

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

CAPTJ\JN COOK

Doubleday & Company, Inc . Garden City, New York.

.

Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 70-180092 © Alistair MacLean 1972 All Rights Reserved

Printed in Great Britain

Contents PROLOGUE

7

I.

The Able Seaman

I3

2.

The Vanishing Continent

28

3·

Charting New Zealand

so

4· Australia and the Great Barrier Reef

77

5·

Antarctica -and Polynesia

96

6.

The North-West Passage

I49

EPILOGUE

I82

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I88

INDEX

I89

In 1775, on his r ctu m fr om his second voyage, the Royal Socie ty awarded Cook the Copley Gold Medal

Prologue SHoRTLY after the turn of the nineteenth century, a young gunner in the Royal Navy, a certain Jeremy Blyth, who had yet to sail on his first commission, made his way into an ale­ house in Wapping . It was a dock-side tavern typical of its time and place, dirty, smoky, with cracked floor-boards and blackened walls and ceiling, entirely lacking in what, even in that era, passed for the more civilised amenities of life. A planked bar, a few rickety tables and chairs ; that was all. Typical, too, were the customers : a mixture of seamen from both naval services, many the victims of press-gangs, many with criminal pasts, hard-drinking, hard-swearing, hard­ living men inured to suffering and hardships and death, men tough and enduring and hard-bitten to a degree almost incomprehensible to those who live in a gentler and more effete age. Atypical, however, was the atmosphere in that ale-house. No one spoke. No one drank. The silence was accentuated by occasional sobs. The landlord, shoulders heaving, had his head buried in his forearms. So did a number of those at the tables. Some of the men were openly weeping and all seemed lost in their own private worlds of grief-stricken desolation. Blyth sat down opposite a grizzled old seaman, a grey­ cheeked veteran with tears welling from sightless eyes, an untouched drink before him. Wonderingly, gently, Blyth touched him on the forearm. 'What is it ? What's wrong ?' The old man looked up from the table and said angrily ' Haven't you heard ? Haven't you heard ?' 7

P R O L O G UE

Blyth shook his head. 'Nelson is dead . ' Again Blyth looked slowly round the dingy room, at the men for whom the death of Nelson had left an aching void that could never be filled, then he said: 'Thank God I never knew him . ' I t is doubtful whether any such scene occurred, o r any remotely comparable, when thenews ofCook's death reached England some twenty-six years earlier. The nation mourned him , as England has always mourned the passing of its great men, its Marlboroughs, its Wellingtons, its Churchills : but it did not weep with a broken heart. Nelson and Cook are the two most revered names in the annals of the Royal Navy. Reverence is compounded of respect and love. Nelson was widely respected but universally loved. Cook was universally respected but he was incapable of inspiring in the minds and hearts of the public that degree of devotion and adoration that Nelson so effortlessly and inevitably aroused. But that Cook was beloved by his officers and men is beyond dispute. The reason for the difference lies, of course, in the natures of the two men. To love a person, a public figure, one has to be able to identify one's self with him : to do that, one has to know him - or, at least, believe that one knows him . In so far as this was concerned, there was no difficulty at all about Nelson, a warm-hearted, outgoing extrovert whose inner thoughts and private life were as open a book as his public ones. But Cook's inner thoughts and private life were a closed book, one of those old-fashioned books with a brass hasp that he'd locked and then thrown away the key. With the passing of the years it seems increasingly unlikely that the key will ever be found. We know all about Cook and we know nothing about him . We know that he was courageous, p rudent, wise, indefatig� 8

P R O L O G UE

able, adventurous, a born leader of men : but what he was what kind of individual he was personally, we have but the most remote of conceptions. We know that he took those leaking; old coal-boats of his from the tropical Pacific to the bitter and awesome wastes ofboth the Arctic and the Antarc­ tic in the most stupendous voyages of exploration in the history of mankind. But whether he liked flowers or dandled his children on his knee or gazed enraptured at the sun going down in the ocean beyond Hawaii or Tahiti we shall never know . We know he was the greatest navigator of his age or any age : it would be interesting to know ifhe ever got lost in the back streets ofhis home borough of Stepney. To have maintained so inviolate a privacy is indeed a feat, but to have done �o in spite of the fact that he left us over one million words minutely recording his day to day activities over many years amounts to an accomplishment so staggering as to defy rational comprehension. But, in his journals and logs, this is what Cook did indeed do . No famous figure of modern times has ever documented his life so thoroughly and painstakingly. But this massive documentation is de­ tached, impersonal ; Cook does not appear : it was about what he did , not what he was. Even in his private correspondence­ what little of it has survived - this sam e iron reticence manifests itself. Only twice does he mention his wife and then only in an incidental fashion : of his two children who died in infancy or his daughter who died at the age of four, there is no authenticated instance of C ook ever having mentioned them. His contemporaries wrote ofhim of course, from Walpole to Dr Johnson they all had their say, and when all their writing is over and done with we learn no more about Cook than we learn from Cook himself. Maybe they did not know him as they would have liked to know him : maybe he was reserved to the point of being unapproachable. It may even have been that they were aware that they were dealing with like,

9

PROLOGUE

an already living legend who was destined for immortality. If this were the case then their task was impossibl