Captain Cook: Master of the Seas

By Frank McLynn

This “thoroughly researched and sharply opinionated” biography presents a nuanced portrait of the renowned 18th century navigator (The Wall Street Journal).
 
The age of discovery was at its peak in the eighteenth century, with bold adventurers charting the furthest reaches of the globe. Foremost among these explorers was Captain James Cook of the British Royal Navy. Recent writers have viewed Cook through the lens of colonial exploitation, regarding him as a villain. While they raise important issues, many of these critical accounts overlook his major contributions to science, navigation and cartography.
 
In Captain Cook, Frank McLynn re-creates the voyages that took the famous navigator from his native England to the outer reaches of the Pacific Ocean. Although Cook died in a senseless, avoidable conflict with the people of Hawaii, McLynn illustrates that to the men with whom he served, Cook was master of the seas and nothing less than a titan. McLynn reveals Cook's place in history as a brave and brilliant yet tragically flawed man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9780300172201

Book preview

CAPTAIN COOK

CAPTAIN COOK

MASTER OF THE SEAS

CAPTAIN COOK

FRANK MCLYNN

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund

Copyright © 2011 Frank McLynn

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:

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Set in Fournier MT by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd

Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McLynn, Frank.

 Captain Cook/Frank McLynn.

  p. cm.

 ISBN 978–0–300–11421–8 (cl:alk. paper)

1. Cook, James, 1728–1779. 2. Explorers—Great Britain—Biography. 3. Voyages around the

world—History—18th century. 4. Oceania—Discovery and exploration. I. Title.

 G420.C65M35 2011

 910.92—dc22

2010036481

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Daniel and Ellen

Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Charting Cook

CHAPTER 1 A Yorkshire Apprenticeship

CHAPTER 2 The Seven Years War

CHAPTER 3 Charting Newfoundland

CHAPTER 4 The Challenge of the Pacific

CHAPTER 5 First Contacts with Tahiti

CHAPTER 6 The Isle of Cythera

CHAPTER 7 Peril in Australasia

CHAPTER 8 Homeward Bound

CHAPTER 9 Antarctica

CHAPTER 10 Tongans and Maoris

CHAPTER 11 Mastering the Pacific

CHAPTER 12 Lost Horizon: The Great Southern Continent

CHAPTER 13 The Last Voyage

CHAPTER 14 Tahiti: The Final Phase

CHAPTER 15 Quest for Illusion: The Northwest Passage

CHAPTER 16 Hawaiian Nightmare

CHAPTER 17 Tragedy on Kealakekua Beach

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

Index

Illustrations

CAPTAIN COOK

PLATES

(between pp. 172 and 173)

1 Portrait of Cook, 1759, proof by T. Major. Antipodean Books, Maps and Prints, David and Cathy Liburne.

2 Reconstruction drawing of the cottage where Cook was born. The Captain Cook Birthplace Museum/Middlesbrough Council.

3 Roseberry Topping. Photograph by Paul Kent.

4 George Cuit, Captain Cook's Father's House at Great Ayton, c.1788. Courtesy of The Hepworth Walkfield.

5 John Bird, Whitby Harbour, c.1790. Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby.

6 Richard Paton, Capture of Louisburg, Quebec House, Westerham. ©NTPL/John Hammond.

7 Samuel Holland. Photograph by Margaret Mallett of Prince Edward Island, Canada. Public Archives and Records Office of Prince Edward Island.

8 Ship plan of the Endeavour fitted at Deptford dockyard, July 1768, National Maritime Museum. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

9 Benjamin West, Sir Joseph Banks, 1773. Lincolnshire County Council, Usher Gallery, Lincoln, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library.

10 William Hodges, Tahiti Revisited, c.1776. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

11 Endeavour journal, Wednesday 12 April 1769. © The British Library Board (Add. MSS. 27955).

12 HMS Endeavour, Tahiti, 1769, from Captain Cook's Account of a Voyage Round the World in the Years 1768–1771. The Granger Collection, New York.

13 Drawings of the Transit of Venus by Captain James Cook and Charles Green. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Vol. 61, p. 410, 1771.

14 Sydney Parkinson, New Zealand War Canoe bidding defiance to the Ship, 1770. © The British Library Board (Add. MSS. 23920, f.50).

15 A Maori bartering a crayfish with an English naval officer, by the Artist of the Chief Mourner, 1769, from Drawings illustrative of Captain Cook's First Voyage, 1768–1771. © The British Library Board (Add. MSS. 15508, f.11).

16 William Byrne, A view of the Endeavour River, New Holland, with the Endeavour laid on shore, in order to repair the damage which she received on the rocks; June–July 1770, engraving after Sydney Parkinson, 1773. © The British Library Board (Add. MSS. 23920, f.36).

17 The Fly Catching Macaroni, published by M. Darly, 1772. National Library of Australia (an9283268).

18 The Simpling Macaroni, published by M. Darly, 1772. National Library of Australia (an9283270).

19 Marine timekeeper K1 by Larcum Kendall, London, 1769. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

20 James Northcote, Captain Tobias Furneaux, 1776. D. Bayes/Lebrecht Music & Arts.

21 Midshipman Henry Roberts, HMS Resolution, watercolour. The Granger Collection, New York.

22 Jean Francis Rigaud, Portrait of Dr Johann Reinhold Forster and his son George Forster, 1780. National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Purchased with funds provided by the Liangis family, the Ian Potter Foundation and John Schaeffer AO 2009.

(between pp. 300 and 301)

23 George Forster, Ice islands with ice blink, 1773. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

24 William Hodges, Waterfall in Dusky Bay, April 1773, 1775. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

25 William Hodges, Otoo, King of Otaheite, 1773. National Library of Australia (an2720588).

26 William Hodges, Otago, Chief of Amsterdam, October 1773. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

27 J.K. Sherwin, The landing at Tanna, one of the New Hebrides, engraving after drawing by William Hodges, 1777. National Library of Australia (an7691872).

28 J.K. Sherwin, The landing at Erramanga, one of the New Hebrides, engraving after painting by William Hodges, 1777. National Library of Australia (an7691847-1).

29 Omai's visiting card, before 1776. Collection of Mark and Carolyn Blackburn, Honolulu, Hawaii.

30 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Omai, c.1776. Photograph courtesy of Guy Morrison.

31 Thomas Gainsborough, Montagu, 1718–92, 4th Earl of Sandwich, 1st Lord of the Admiralty, 1783. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

32 John Webber, Portrait of Captain James Cook RN, 1782. National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Purchased 2000 by the Commonwealth Government with the generous assistance of Robert Oatley and John Schaeffer.

33 Nathaniel Dance, Captain Charles Clerke, 1776. Photograph by Mark Coote. Permission: Government House New Zealand.

34 Midshipman William Bligh. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach, Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations.

35 William Sharp, Poulaho, King of the Friendly Islands, drinking kava, engraving after John Webber, 1784. National Library of Australia (an10562593).

36 William Sharp, A night dance by women in Hapaee, engraving after John Webber, 1784. National Library of Australia (an10562591).

37 John Webber, A human sacrifice at Otaheite, 1777. © The British Library Board (Add. MSS. 15513, No.16).

38 Cloak made of olona fibre netting, feathers ('i'iwi, ‘o'o, mamo), eighteenth-century. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

39 John Webber, Nootka Sound, watercolour, 1778. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

40 John Webber, A party from His Majesty's ship Resolution shooting sea-horses … 1778, 1784. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

41 Thomas Edgar, Master, Kealakekua Bay, drawn to illustrate the log of HMS Discovery for 5 August 1778 to June 1779. The National Archives.

42 Hawaiian Peoples, Standing Male Figure, New Orleans Museum of Art. Bequest of Victor K. Kiam. 77.149.

43 J. Hall, An offering before Captain Cook, in the Sandwich Islands, engraving after John Webber, 1784. National Library of Australia (an9186267).

44 John Webber, The Death of Cook, 1779. © Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales/The Bridgeman Art Library.

45 W. Henderson, Mrs Elizth Cook. Aged 81 years, 1830. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

MAPS

1 Cook's First Voyage, 1768–71.

2 Cook's Second Voyage, 1772–75.

3 Cook's Third Voyage, 1776–80.

4 Cook's North Pacific Voyage, 1778.

ENDPAPERS

A General Chart: Exhibiting the Discoveries made by Captain James Cook in this and his two preceeding Voyages; with Tracks of the Ships under his Command, 1785. Historic Maps Collection (HMC01.40). Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library.

Charting Cook

Cook was a supremely gifted surveyor and star navigator. His discoveries, and the accurate cartographic depiction of them, were of incomparable benefit to his contemporaries. A selection of those maps and charts accompanies the following chapters.

Chapter 1

Coal first called Cook to the seas. The young merchant mariner cut his teeth in the collier trade from Newcastle to London and mastered the Baltic timber route. Detail from A new and accurate map of Europe … by Emanuel Bowen, 1747. David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com.

Chapter 2

As master of the Pembroke Cook wintered in Halifax during the Seven Years War, compiling charts of the coast of Nova Scotia and evolving new pioneering methods of surveying. A draught of the harbour of Hallifax and the adjacent coast in Nova Scotia: survey'd by order of Commodore Spry, by James Cook, 1766. National Library of Australia (RM430).

Chapter 3

In 1765 Cook surveyed the coast of Newfoundland, including Fortune Bay, aboard the Grenville. His maps, which the Admiralty permitted to be published under his own name, were of great political and commercial value. Part of the south coast of Newfoundland … 1766. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

Chapter 4

The presumed existence of the great Southern Continent lured many men to explore the South Pacific, and was one reason among others that the Admiralty dispatched Cook on his first voyage. Carte des Terres Australes by Phillippe Buache, from Guillaume de L'Isle's Cartes et tables de la géographie physique ou naturelle …, 1757. Historic Maps Collection, Princeton University Library.

Chapter 5

Cook's survey and chart of Tahiti in 1769 (published in 1773) was a masterwork, productively combining inland navigation, triangulation and marine methods. Chart of the Island Otaheite …, 1773. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

Chapter 6

The Tahitian Tupaia deftly piloted the Endeavour through the myriad islands of Polynesia. Cook and his crew had to be just as wary of the social structures of the Society Islands. A Chart representing the Isles of the South Sea … collected from the accounts of Tupaya, from Johann Reinhold Forster's Observations Made during a Voyage Round the World …, 1778. © The British Library Board (984.e.1).

Chapter 7

To prove that New Zealand was an island, and not the famed Terra Australis Incognita, Cook doggedly circuited and surveyed it, even in raging storms. Chart of New Zealand, explored in 1769 and 1770 by Lieut. J. Cook, Commander of His Majesty's Bark Endeavour, 1772. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

Chapter 8

Existing maps of the Dutch East Indies were unclear – sometimes deliberately so, in order to hinder competitors. The Endeavour's voyage homeward, nearing the end of Cook's first expedition, took longer than the maps suggested. A Map of the East-Indies and the Adjacent Countries; with the Settlements, Factories and Territories, explaining what belongs to England, Spain, France, Holland, Denmark, Portugal &c … by Herman Moll, published London, 1719.

Chapter 9

Dusky Bay provided a blissful berth for the men of the Resolution, who had braved four months on hellish Antarctic waters during Cook's second voyage. Sketch of Dusky Bay in New Zealand; 1773, by James Cook, 1777. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

Chapter 10

A chart of the Southern Hemisphere; shewing the tracks of some of the most distinguished navigators accompanied the publication of Cook's 1777 account, A voyage towards the South Pole, and round the World, and detailed many of the latitudes and longitudes of the islands of the South Pacific measured by Cook. David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com.

Chapter 11

Previous explorers had described the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), but Cook meticulously mapped the entire island group – one of his most superb achievements of surveying and cartography. Chart of discoveries made in the South Pacific Ocean in his majesty's ship Resolution under the command of Captain Cook, 1774 by James Cook, 1777. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

Chapter 12

Cook's exploration on his second voyage of the deep southern Antarctic Ocean was beset with difficulties and dangers. The penultimate island before the pack ice was Georgia, which Cook named after his king, christening many of its inlets and features with the names of his sometime truculent crew. From A voyage towards the South Pole, and round the world by James Cook, 1777, no IV.

Chapter 13

Disillusioned with its inhabitants and delayed by contrary winds, Cook did not endeavour to circumnavigate Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) – and therefore assumed it was joined to the mainland. Chart of Van Diemens Land by James Cook, copied by Henry Roberts, 1784. National Library of Australia (Map T 332).

Chapter 14

The Cook of the third voyage was altered from the explorer of old. Misjudging the seasonal winds when trying to reach Tahiti, he found harbour in the Friendly Islands, but his sojourn at Tongatapu was much longer than necessary, and beset by thievery. Sketch of Tongataboo Harbour, 1777. The writing engraved by Mw. Smith, by William Bligh, published 1785. David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com.

Chapter 15

The unsuccessful attempt to find the famed Northwest Passage proved the wild inaccuracy of the existing charts of the Bering Strait and Alaskan and Siberian coastlines, which Cook did much to rectify for posterity. Thomas Conder's chart of 1784–86 shows Cook's sea-tracks (dated August and September 1778) alongside those of Charles Clerke (July 1779) who took command of the Resolution and the Discovery following Cook's death. Chart of Norton Sound …, 1784–84. National Library of Australia (Map RM 550/11).

Chapter 16

Cook returned to the Sandwich Islands in November 1778 but, for unknown reasons, did not make landfall until January. The map – the original of which is attributed to William Bligh, Shipmaster aboard the Resolution – shows how for weeks the Resolution strangely zigzagged around the north coast of Hawaii. Was Cook punishing his crew, protecting the natives, or had he lost his reason? Chart of the Sandwich Islands by Thomas Conder, 1784–86. National Library of Australia (Map RM 550/19).

Chapter 17

Neither crew nor natives relished the prospect of returning to Kealakekua Bay to repair storm damage to the Resolution. It was on these shores that Cook died. Detail from chart by William Bligh, 1779. Geographicus Rare Antique Maps, www.geographicus.com.

Chapter 18

A General Chart: Exhibiting the Discoveries Made by Captn. James Cook in this and his two preceeding Voyages, with the Tracks of the Ships under his Command. The greatest explorer of the age traversed every degree of longitude and remapped the known world with a staggering degree of accuracy. From the atlas volume of Cook's A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean …, 1784. Rare Books Division, Princeton University Library.

CAPTAIN COOKCAPTAIN COOKCAPTAIN COOKCAPTAIN COOKCAPTAIN COOK

CHAPTER ONE

CAPTAIN COOK

A Yorkshire Apprenticeship

EXPLORATION is an activity that calls for extraordinary talents, among them physical courage of an incredible kind and an ability to ‘bracket’ the reality of the physical world in pursuit of impossible dreams. All explorers, we may confidently assert, are psychological oddities, and the jury is out on whether true psychic pathology is involved, or merely a heightened form of normal sensibilities. If we except polar exploration, which in so many ways is a thing in itself and an exception even to the general proposition we can advance the impulse ‘to boldly go’, there are really just two types of exploration, that by land and that by sea. The most impressive feats of discovery on land were carried out by European explorers in Africa – for such as Orellana in South America, Mackenzie in North America and Sturt in Australia are not really in the class of the celebrated African quintet of Livingstone, Burton, Stanley, Speke and Baker. An examination of this quintet also throws up other fascinating propositions: that the great explorers are either upper-class misfits and semi-mystics (Burton, Baker, Speke) or those who have surmounted a background of acute poverty and deprivation (Livingstone, Stanley). ¹ A similar division between high-born naval aristocrats and low-born adventurers is discernible in the case of magnificent voyages into the unknown in defiance of the mighty oceans. James Cook, the finest maritime explorer in the history of the world, was born into indigence, the son of a farm labourer. It is a relevant observation that Henry Morton Stanley, greatest of all land-based explorers, was also a product of penury and hardship, with his early years spent in a Welsh workhouse. In both men the early years and the subsequent trial of surviving the snobbery of their ‘betters’ left a legacy of subterranean rage, more easily visible from an early age with Stanley, but in Cook's case slowly germinating with ultimately fatal results.

James Cook was born in the village of Marton-in-Cleveland, in the north-east corner of the North Riding of Yorkshire. His father, also called James, was a Scotsman, from the village of Ednam in Roxburghshire in the border country. James Cook senior was the only son of John Cook and Jean Duncan, who had married the year before the boy's birth in 1694. James senior experienced the same obscure years of struggle his son would face until the age of 20, possibly working as a shepherd or millhand. In some way lost to us in the mists of history the economy of Roxburghshire was badly affected by the aftermath of the failed Jacobite rising of 1715.² Without talents, qualifications or obvious skills, James senior set out to seek his fortune south of the border, and began eking out a precarious living as a day labourer. Family legend states that when he left the bosom of his family his mother pronounced the words ‘God give you grace’, but the deity must have misheard her, for instead of the divine chrism He provided him with a young woman named Grace Pace, a native of Stainton-in-Cleveland in the North Riding.³ The couple married on 10 October 1725 (James was 31 and Grace 23) and settled first in the village of Moreton in the parish of Ormesby. Here, in January 1727, a son, John, was born to them. Later that year the family moved to Marton, another village just one mile away to the west. They lived in what was known in the North Riding as a ‘biggin’, not dissimilar to the bothies James senior would have known in Scotland. In this two-roomed clay-built thatched cottage, full of smoke from the open fire, where farm animals wandered in and out at will, a second son was born on 27 October 1728 and given the name James. The first sensory impression of the new arrival was doubtless the primitive carpeting of sacking and meadowsweet laid down by the parents to keep down the damp and the smell. James and Grace produced six other children, most of them victims of the eighteenth century's cruel way with infant mortality. The firstborn John survived until his twenties, but four other children died young. Mary, born in 1732, died before her fifth birthday, and Jane, born in 1738, expired in her fifth year. Another Mary, born in 1740, lasted just ten months, while a third son, William, born in 1745, clocked up just three years of age before likewise being carried off. The only true adult survivors apart from the future explorer were his sisters Margaret and Christiana, of whose lives little is known. Christiana married a man with the surname Cocker and at once faded from the historical record. A little more is known about Margaret, who married a fisherman named James Fleck and moved to Redcar. In 1776, when Cook was already rich and famous, Fleck was indicted for smuggling and appealed for help to his celebrated brother-in-law. Convinced of Fleck's guilt, Cook did nothing to help him.⁴

To survive at all James Cook junior had to be an exceptionally tough and wiry baby, and all later evidence regarding Cook as a physical specimen bears out the obvious inference. Life was hard and food scarce, so that the child would quickly have become an omnivore. In the days of his fame he would astonish fellow officers by the coarseness of his palate, as he would devour anything – penguin, walrus, albatross, kangaroo, monkey and even dog; as long as it was meat, Cook would invariably describe it as ‘most excellent food’. As a young boy he was one of the wretched of the earth, and detailed historical records are not kept of those born in humble and obscure circumstances. But there are three obvious pointers to the lad's young life: his heredity, his life chances and his physical environment. Much nonsense has been written about his parentage, with the Scots father standing in for patience, intelligence and industry and the mother supposedly representing Yorkshire independence and self-reliance.⁵ It is not denied that every individual is to an extraordinary extent the product of his or her parents, but such reductive determinism cannot be pushed very far before it lurches into absurdity.⁶ As for life chances, these must realistically be counted close to zero. In an age of limited social mobility and opportunity, the odds were heavily in favour of Cook living out his life like his father and his grandfather before him. The life of a journeyman labourer was severely circumscribed, both financially and geographically. It is unlikely that James Cook senior strayed much beyond the radius of surrounding villages until he moved to Redcar later in life (he would die there, aged 85). The physical environment of the North Riding was also unprepossessing: the monotony of moors, hills and farmland was broken only by a sprinkling of farms and labourers' cottages. In this rural backwater the young James spent his first eight uneventful years. By this time he was already a veteran of sowing seeds, digging ditches, hedging and back-breaking labour in general. His education was rudimentary, though he could read and write by the age of eight, having been taught his alphabet by a Mrs Walker, wife of the farmer of Marton Grange, in exchange for running errands and helping with household chores. Writing in particular was a difficult art to master, for in those days children had to be taught from scratch, as it were, how to hold a pen; unlike today's children, they had not used crayons or pencils from an early age.⁷

In 1736 James Cook senior was promoted to be a ‘hind’, a kind of overseer or farm manager at the village of Great Ayton, five miles from Marton. His prudent stewardship places him perfectly within the paradigm of the sober, thrifty pre-Industrial Revolution worker later recalled with dubious nostalgia.⁸ Cook senior's benefactor was a rich farmer named Thomas Skottowe, of Airyholme farm, who presumably negotiated his release from the Walkers' employment. The increase in family income doubtless lifted young Cook's spirits, but possibly they were also lifted because he was aware of having moved to a superior village. Ayton, much larger than Marton, was close to the market town of Stokesley and was itself a place of some local importance, since it boasted a watermill, a tannery, a brick-kiln and a brewery, and provided work for weavers as well as farm labourers.⁹ It was set on the edge of the Cleveland hills and dominated by Roseberry Topping, the highest summit in the North Riding. It was at Great Ayton that the first puzzle in young Cook's life is recorded.¹⁰ The village school, being fee-paying, was beyond the reach of the Cook family, yet Thomas Skottowe is said to have discerned promise in young James Cook and paid the fees so that he could attend. Since similar largesse was not provided for Cook's elder brother John or indeed for any of the rest of the Cook family, the inevitable suspicion has arisen that Skottowe must have had an ulterior motive. Two things are clear: young James Cook was more talented than his siblings, and he received a better education. Was Skottowe perhaps the young boy's real father?¹¹ It is indeed a wise man who knows his own father and cast-iron certainty is rarely possible in such matters, but there is no compelling circumstantial evidence that would blacken Grace Pace with the taint of infidelity. The prima facie evidence makes the suggestion seem highly unlikely. Skottowe was a true gentleman farmer, an established member of the gentry rather than a yeoman farmer. Dalliance with the wife of a farm labourer would be plausible only in the case of a woman's exceptional beauty, and local oral tradition would certainly have recorded this aspect of Grace if it had been the case.

At the village academy known as Postgate school Cook was taught elementary English and mathematics, drilled in the catechism, and nudged by the pedagogue to improve his skills in basic literacy. Although it was rumoured that the schoolmaster, William Rowland, was a mere part-timer who ‘moonlighted’ as a weaver, he seems to have done a good job of improving on Mrs Walker's inchoate efforts, for he not only turned the boy into an efficient reader but taught him a workmanlike copperplate handwriting. No formal records of young James's schooling were kept, but local tradition says that, though no future academic or intellectual, he showed distinct promise in mathematics, perhaps already foreshadowing the skilful navigator of later years. Other oral testimony stresses that the boy was very much a loner and was habitually left out of the typically boyish excursions of his peers. It was not so much that he was unpopular, rather that he was already exhibiting signs of the ‘control’ syndrome that would afflict him in later life: he insisted on doing things his way, and was obstinate, inflexible and even somewhat unpleasant. Yet it is significant that there are no stories of bullying – an outcome one might expect. There was something ruthless and determined about the boy that made his fellows back off and regard him with cold respect, viewing him as someone not to be trifled with. If ever he was engaged as part of a group discussion, on the best place to go bird's nesting, say, Cook was always adamant that he knew the best spot, and his very vehemence usually resulted in his arriving at the supposed rendezvous alone.¹² Yet the precise mixture in his life of schooling, schoolboy adventures and hard work in the fields – which we can infer was his lot between the ages of eight and sixteen – is lost to the historical record. It was 1745 when the young James Cook emerged into clear light. Because of the detail in the anecdote we can pin down the precise date (November 1745) of the next inconsequential story related about his youth. Always a devotee of hill-climbing, Cook particularly liked to scale Roseberry Topping, and he had an established route to the top where there was a spring and he could take a long drink of fresh water before clambering down again. On this occasion he decided to abandon the tried and tested route and went in search of a more adventurous descent. On his way down he saw a jackdaw flying into a cleft in a rock, and made the correct deduction that there was a nest there.¹³ An avid bird's-nester, the boy scooped up the eggs, put them in his cap, and held the cap between his teeth while making a tentative and vertiginous descent. Suddenly he lost his footing and in panic grasped at a plant, which began to come away at the roots. Unable to find a secure purchase and thus effectively marooned, Cook began crying for help. Fortunately for him sentries had been posted on all the summits of the Cleveland hills to give warning if Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebel army from Scotland decided to make for London by a northeasterly route after crossing the border.¹⁴ The Roseberry Topping sentinel heard the plaintive cries and soon organised a rescue party.

1745 was also the year Cook became a shop assistant in the fishing port of Staithes, fifteen miles from Great Ayton. Staithes was one of the numerous villages and towns south of the Tees – Redcar, Saltburn, Brotton, Sandsend, Whitby, Robin Hood's Bay, Ravenscar, Hayburn Wyke – that depended entirely on fishing. Cook was already in a different world from the farming communities inland which had hitherto been his sole experience of human life, and it was almost as if he had been steadily inching towards his destiny. One would give a lot to have a record of his thoughts and feelings on first sighting the sea. But for eighteen months he was resolutely land-based. His employer was William Sanderson, a grocer and haberdasher, who had been impressed by Skottowe's tales of the mathematical prowess of his protégé and agreed to take him on trial as a trainee shopkeeper; there were no formal indentures as this was not an apprenticeship in the true sense. Sanderson's emporium was on the seafront and was a ‘double shop’, with two front doors leading, respectively, to the grocery and the drapery. Sanderson and his family lived above the shop, and Cook took his meals with them, but he was in no sense ‘one of the family’, since he made a primitive ‘den’ under the shop counter and slept there with his handful of possessions. Dutiful and hard-working, Cook swept out the shop, opened it in the morning, closed it at night, served behind the counter and kept accounts. Yet it was clear very early on that his heart was not in his trade, and that he had already heard the call of the sea. The entire town of Staithes was permeated with talk of fishing and the oceans, and after-hours yarning with the sailors led the 17-year-old to experience vicariously the thrills of venturing outside the bay into the open sea. Many people are put off by their first encounter with this cruel and malevolent mistress but Cook, always endowed with superlative physical courage, brushed aside the Jeremiahs who stressed the dangers of the North Sea. His determination to forge a maritime career must have hardened over eighteen months of ‘fumbling in a greasy till’ (Yeats's phrase), but the story usually told of his ‘career crisis’ is probably apocryphal. The tale goes that Cook one day received as payment a shilling piece minted around 1720 at the time of the South Sea Bubble, bearing the legend of the great South Seas. Besotted by this talisman, he replaced it in the counter drawer with an ordinary shilling piece of his own.¹⁵ Sanderson spotted that the striking coin was missing and accused Cook of stealing it. The misunderstanding was cleared up but, at least on Cook's side, left a sour taste, so he gave in his notice. Sanderson evidently forgave the ‘theft’, for when Cook said that it was his ambition to go to sea the shopkeeper said he would help him. However, many doubt that the incident ever happened and Cook's great biographer John Beaglehole dismisses the anecdote as ‘a trivial affair blown up to dramatic proportions by more than one romancer’.¹⁶

Local tradition is adamant that Sanderson was instrumental in introducing Cook to his next employer, a wealthy Quaker shipowner named John Walker of Whitby, who discerned promise in the lad. This time there was a formal apprenticeship and Cook signed a three-year indenture as a ‘servant’, hoping to learn the craft of a merchant seaman. The indenture was a standard ‘boiler-plate’ contract for the merchant navy, but it has an odd ring to modern ears.The contract with Walker committed Cook ‘not to play at dice, cards, bowls or any other unlawful games … (nor) haunt taverns or playhouses … commit fornication nor contract matrimony’. In return Walker agreed to provide lodging, food and drink, laundry, and instruction and training in ‘the trade, mystery and occupation of a mariner’.¹⁷ For the first six of his nine years in the merchant navy Cook lived with Walker and his family in a large house in Haggersgate on the west bank of the river Esk. (Even though Beaglehole long ago established that Walker did not move to his well-known house in Grape Lane until 1752, successive writers on Cook insist on peddling the myth that that was where the young man did his navigational studies of an evening.)¹⁸ There need be no serious doubt about the studiousness, which especially recommended him to John Walker and his brother and partner Henry. Indeed the Walkers' housekeeper Mary Proud turned young Cook into something of a ‘teacher's pet’ by providing him with a special table and extra candles to aid his studies.¹⁹ Without question Cook absorbed some of the heavy Quaker ethos at Haggersgate, but the extent of the influence of the ideology of the Friends is problematical. The role and status of the great Quaker families – the Walkers, Chapmans, Taylors, Saunders, etc. – in the Whitby shipping industry can hardly be overstated, though they were living on borrowed time, for Quaker austerity proved unable to hold the line against the eighteenth century's ever increasing hedonism, consumerism and permissiveness.²⁰ Nonetheless, during Cook's apprenticeship the Friends were still ‘hegemonic’ in Whitby. Cook certainly imbibed a work ethic from them and the conviction that work should be regarded as good in itself. Other salient influences can be traced in his modesty, plainness, taciturnity, hatred of idleness and gossip, disbelief in a transcendent god, and general humourlessness. As someone who always disliked arguments and confrontation, he learned from the Quakers the skill of arbitration by observing their pacific method of settling disputes.²¹ On the other hand, by ‘flashing forward’ to Cook's later career we can see that there were limits to the legacy of Quakerism. He made a point of addressing people by their titles, as the Friends did not on the grounds of egalitarianism. And he quickly learned the art of flattery and sycophancy to his social superiors – necessary for an ambitious man but alien to Quaker principles. Nor he was a pacifist. Although physical force was never his first port of call, he believed in it as the ultimate deterrent and, as he grewolder, came to believe in it more and more.

Cook's sojourn in Whitby and the apprenticeship with John Walker marked the definitive point where he turned away from the land towards the sea that would ultimately make him famous. Did he, then, derive anything from his early years as a farmer and landsman? Certain influences are detectable. The early death of so many of his siblings hardened him to mortality and helped to make him unafraid of the terrors of the deep. His liking for hill-climbing never left him, and shades of Roseberry Topping can be found in the many scarps, hills and eminences he would climb on his voyages. As a farm boy he took an interest in seeds, livestock and agriculture not discerned in other naval officers; in the Pacific he kept detailed journal entries about which ‘improving’ seedlings and domesticated animals he had left in the islands. But the inference is that his childhood left him cold and detached about North Yorkshire. It has been pointed out that he never named newly discovered geographical features after any place he had known in his childhood and youth, though he was quite prepared to name them after sailors on his ships as well as ‘Admiralty bureucrats and second-ratearistocrats’.²² Once in Whitby, his gaze was always towards the sea, and the very shape and contours of the town almost compelled such concentration. At Whitby the Esk left the somnolent wooded valleys and plunged into the North Sea through beetling cliffs. Two stone piers jutted out into the sea, protecting the harbour from the many storms it had to sustain – so frequent that the Whitby lifeboat was already famous for the number of shipwrecked mariners it had saved from a watery death. Known to history as early as the year 664 for the synod at which Bishop Wilfrid successfully introduced Roman church practices in place of the Ionian rituals and modalities hitherto typical of British Christianity, Whitby in the mid-eighteenth century was a thriving port with a population of 5,000, important enough to spark Daniel Defoe's interest when he passed through on a noteworthy tour through all England.²³ The mouth of the Esk was virtually a gateway to adventure and danger and Whitby would produce many celebrated sons, not just the Arctic explorer Luke Foxe and the whaling captains Scoresby, father and son, but also the guerrilla leader Thomas ‘Bumfoot’ Brown, two years Cook's junior, who would live among Indians in North America and lead a band of mounted loyalists in Georgia against the ‘sons of liberty’ and the Continental Army in the American War of Independence.²⁴

Naturally Cook's apprenticeship did not involve merely navigational mathematics at his desk and midnight lucubration. He had to master the art of handling sailing ships, at which he soon proved a natural. The first thing was to learn the nature and function of every sail: the main topsail and main topsail yard, the mizzenmast, mizzen topgallant and mizzen topsail, the spanker, foremast, foresail, fore topsail, fore topgallant, main top gallant and main topgallant yard. He was taught to reef – to reduce the extent of a sail by taking in or rolling up a part of it and securing it. Words like jib, bend, reef point, hawser, cable, crossjack, jib, fluke, stream anchor, gaff, yard slings, staysail haulyards, gasket, shears and cordage had to become second nature, so that one could almost sleepwalk through one's orders when afloat. He had to learn to tack – to work to windward by changing course alternately from starboard to port tack; to veer – to put a vessel on to the other tack by turning the stern into the wind; to bring to – to stop a ship by bringing her head to the wind; to ply – to beat up against the wind and to bring the ship to windward by putting it about frequently; and to warp – to move a vessel from one mooring in a harbour to another.²⁵ Hardest of all, he had to go aloft, working perhaps 100 feet above the deck, furling and unfurling sails in all weathers. The climb up the ratlines (rope ladders) was bad enough in fair weather but to accomplish this and then cling on to the rigging in storms, high seas, at night and with ice coating every rope pushed even the toughest man to the limits of his endurance. The old cliché ‘firm but fair’ was often applied to John Walker, but he would tolerate no slackers, and without question life was tough for the apprentice mariners. On shore they had to learn about life in the riotous and violent atmosphere of Whitby's tavern, while at night, in Walker's attic, they huddled together in dormitory conditions, sometimes ten apprentices bedding down together. Cook took comfort from the thought that the seafaring life was a passport to a wider world and better things. Perhaps he already knew that the famous navigator William Dampier had had a similar upbringing to his. But he certainly knew that for an ambitious man born into poverty in the eighteenth century, the sea was perhaps the only escape route.²⁶

Cook's apprenticeship must be set in a historical, sociological and even geographical context. John Walker was an owner of colliers, and Cook's training was directed towards the seaborne coal trade, an industry of paramount importance in mid-eighteenth-century Engand. In 1700–1830 between a quarter and a third of the country's consumption of coal was conveyed to customers by coastal navigation. Already by 1700 some 600 ships were carrying coal from Newcastle to London, stimulated by the demand for iron, new industries and an expanding navy.²⁷ Coal arrived in London either by canal or by ship from the east coast. (The west coast coal trade was unimportant, with ships travelling no more than sixty miles.) In Lancashire, Somerset, the East and West Midlands, inland Scotland and South Wales road transport was paramount. Although river and canal navigation were important in some parts of the country, in the north-east their importance was negligible, but collier owners kept a wary eye on their rivals in barges and vehemently opposed any extension of canals that would make inroads on the London–Newcastle seaborne trade.²⁸ Almost all ports on the English east and south coasts were supplied from the coalfields of the north-east, where the utmost ingenuity was exercised to get the mineral from the pits to the Tyneside ports.²⁹ Newcastle, Sunderland and Blyth accounted for over 80 per cent of the coastal shipping, and Newcastle alone shipped out over 60 per cent of the coal from the north-east – between 685,000 and 742,000 tons annually during Cook's period in the merchant marine. Whitby, with twenty colliers operating out of the port, had a small but significant share of this trade. In Cook's time London took about 60 per cent of the coal of the north-east but almost every port on the east and south coasts as far west as Exeter received cargoes from Tyneside and Whitby.³⁰ Apart from London, other significant destinations for seaborne coal were Hull, King's Lynn, Yarmouth, Wells-next-the-Sea, Rochester, Sandwich and Southampton; and it is a fair inference that in nine years Cook visited all of these places at least once.

John Walker was a shrewd businessman who never speculated recklessly but diversified his investments into land and securities. In the coal trade itself he spread the risks by issuing shares in the colliers, with the ship's master always retaining the Grand Bill of Sale which made him de facto manager of the ship. Apart from losses through shipwreck, the owners of coalships had to beware both the profiteering of middlemen and the rapacity and price-fixing agreements of London lightermen.³¹ Even so, in normal years profits were high, with returns of at least 12 per cent and often nearer 20 per cent; recent studies have shown that profit levels were higher than previously thought, largely because of the high degree of vertical integration in the coal trade, but also because of exiguous manning levels.³² Crews of colliers tended to be small, no more than seven or eight men and boys; a typical watch would be a two-man affair, or rather one callow youth and one experienced sailor. The 600 colliers in service in 1703 employed just 4,500 men.³³ A master of diversification, Walker built his colliers in such a way that they were not specialised coal-carriers but could take general cargo if ever the coal trade was slack. A shrewd owner knew that fluctuations in demand for coal in London could lead to heavy losses for them, so had the timber trade of the Baltic as an ‘ace in the hole’. Case studies bear out the general proposition that ships rarely left Newcastle or Whitby without a full cargo. One ship, the Molly and Jenny, built in 1752, made thirteen voyages out of Newcastle in its first year at sea (1752–53), six of them to London with coal, the others to Hamburg, Amsterdam, Norway and the Baltic.³⁴ Henry Taylor, who was born in 1737 and finished his indentures in 1756, is the great source if one wants to work out by inference what Cook's life as a merchant seaman was like. Taylor recorded that a typical collier would load coals for Scandinavia, then proceed through the Baltic to load timber for Hull. The voyage to Riga would normally take a month, ‘often under reefed courses, long nights and cold weather’.³⁵

Sociologically, the North Sea coal trade was a proving ground for the very best seamen, and produced its fair share of characters. One of them was the same Henry Taylor, who after long years in colliers converted to Methodism, but not before undergoing some singular adventures. He recalled that on one trip to Riga the captain, master and mate were all habitually drunk during the month's outward voyage and again on the way back – no wonder there were so many shipwrecks, he remarked ruefully – and that he and the other ordinary seamen had to work out how to steer the ship and set a true course.³⁶ Another larger-than-life figure was William Hutchinson (b. 1716), a jack of all trades: mariner, shipowner, trader, boatbuilder, inventor and hydrographer.³⁷ As Thomas Jefferson later remarked, England's top sailors were always those who had learned their trade carrying coal from Newcastle to London.³⁸ This was because the ability to manage and manoeuvre a cat-built Whitby collier – the so-called ‘cat’ – was the ultimate test of seamanship. The ‘cat’ was a squat and ugly ship, built for strength and endurance rather than speed, with a narrow stern, blunt prow, and a deep ‘waist’ (that is, broad-bottomed). Between 300 and 400 tons, it could carry 400–600 tons of cargo, and was so designed that, although coal was the primary cargo, other freight, such as lumber, could easily be substituted. It required careful and skilled handling, not just in storms and high seas but in the narrow entrances of small river harbours, around bars and sandbanks and in shifting tides. He who could master a ‘cat’ would find manoeuvring a man-o'-war simple by comparison.³⁹

The other reason the collier trade was such a proving ground for young mariners was the violence of the North Sea. The east coast of England from the Humber to the Thames was the worst of all English coasts for outlying dangers. Even today sailors treat it with a wary respect because of its treacherous tides, tidal streams, sandbanks, sand-spits, sunken rocks and rocky shelves; two hundred and fifty years ago such dangers were all the more minatory as there were no lighthouses, buoys or other markers, or even any adequate charts. Worst of all were the frequent storms and high seas. The most dreaded of all maritime phenomena, the 100-foot oceanic wave, is encountered as often off the coast of Norway as in the Agulhas current off the coast of South Africa (where the Indian and Atlantic oceans collide). The pioneer ocean navigator Pytheas of Massilia, a Greek who flourished around the time of Alexander the Great and who made a famous circumnavigation of the British Isles, reported a 100-foot wave in the Pentland Firth and was habitually derided for credulity until unimpeachable scientific data in 1995 established the truth of the phemonenon he had observed.⁴⁰ Even without its ultimate weapon the North Sea is still a fearful place, notorious for its high and unpredictable winds. Four storms along the Dutch and German coasts in the thirteenth century killed at least 100,000 people each, and one of them is believed to have accounted for the death of 400,000 souls. Storms on 11 November 1099, 18 November 1421 and in 1446 are estimated to have carried off 100,000 people each in England and the Netherlands combined.⁴¹ The All Saints' Day flood of 1–6 November 1570 is thought to have killed another 400,000. Famously, the Spanish Armada of 1588 was hit by a five-day running storm off the east coast of Scotland, which generated huge seas and tore the heart out of Philip II's ‘invincible’ fleet.⁴²

Things were no better in the eighteenth century. A hurricane in the English Channel on 26–27 November 1703, with wind speeds of 170 kilometres per hour, sank every ship in the Channel with the loss of 8–10,000 lives. Other severe storms with heavy fatalities occurred in 1634, 1671, 1682, 1686, 1694 and 1717. Colliers were particularly vulnerable when heavy laden and caught by a sudden gale before they could retreat to the shelter of an east coast harbour or the lee of a headland. Sometimes the sea was so dangerous that no ships could sail at all, as in 1782 when all colliers were harbour-bound with adverse winds for six weeks and coal miners had to be put on short time.⁴³ Obviously it is difficult to generalise or quantify the risks. In really bad years the impact of the weather could be utterly disastrous, as in 1800 when 69 out of 71 ships carrying coal from Newcastle to London were wrecked, or in 1824 when a hundred colliers were overwhelmed in an October gale. Statistics compiled for the years 1701–10 reveal that 71 colliers were lost at sea in this period, 46 of them in the terrible North Sea hurricane of November 1703.⁴⁴ Taylor, our best source for the collier trade, tells of being caught in a terrible storm off Yarmouth in 1770,⁴⁵ and also divulges awesome statistics that confirm the general picture regarding the winds off the east coast. Only six of fifteen ‘cats’ that set out from South shields in the winter of 1767 survived the ferocious storms, and in October 1789 calamitous seas destroyed 23 of 42 colliers at sea, with the loss of 300 seamen.⁴⁶ Of course, as Taylor pointed out, the drunken incompetence of some ships' captains, such as his skipper on the run from Riga above, did not help matters. The best Taylor could do was to issue general guidance for mariners. All masters and mates must keep a conscientious watch, particularly at night; a good roadstead is better than a bad harbour in a gale; always strike the topmast but not the foreyard in a storm; a ship will ride better in high seas with a very long scope of cable and one anchor than with less length and two anchors.⁴⁷

It is a notable feature of Cook the mariner that he always remained unfazed by storms and other sea states that terrified even veterans of the ocean. As a very late starter in the merchant navy – he was nearly 18 when he signed the indentures with Walker – he caught up fast and was soon recognised as the most promising of the intake of the late 1740s in Whitby. Whereas the least prepossessing apprentices were given routine tasks such as sweeping the deck or scrubbing out the boats, Cook made it a point of honour to be first up the rigging, to carry out a close reef, to hold a luff, to haul off when faced by a hazard, to use the handspike when heaving on the windlass and in general to perform those tasks memorably described by Taylor as ‘To haul out the weather earing when the topsails were to reef, to ship the first handspike and to cat the anchor.’⁴⁸ There was a multiplicity of tasks to perform: handling the headsails, clearing away the anchors to let go, and catting and fishing them when unmooring. Once aloft he would have begun by serving a mini-apprenticeship at the relatively unskilled work, hauling on sheets, halliards and braces. From this he would have graduated to ‘top’ work, hauling and loosing the most complex sails and, finally, as an upper yardman, working on the highest sails: the topgallants and royal yards. This required exceptional stamina and was young man's work, but Cook was physically well capable of anything that was asked of him. By his late teens he was over six feet tall, with a gaunt, rawboned look, with high cheekbones, deep-set brown eyes, a long, straight nose and thin lips. But life aboard was not all physicality. He was also mastering the arts of navigation, reading the barometer correctly, calculating latitude by noonday fixes and making running surveys of the coastline. Cook had to be an un-Hogarthian apprentice, for Walker would not tolerate slackers. Taylor, his near contemporary, paid him the ultimate compliment by describing him as a ‘natural’: ‘he was a striking instance of the power of emulation, united with sobriety and an ardent application; his example is worthy of the imitation of every seaman’.⁴⁹

Cook's first ship was the Freelove, a square-rigged three-masted vessel, 106 feet long and 341 tons. It was a new ship, built at Great Yarmouth in 1746, and boasted a larger than usual complement: master, mate, carpenter, cook, five seamen and ten apprentices, all from Whitby and with ages ranging from 15 to 19 (so Cook was one of the oldest). Although Walker himself sailed as master on two voyages to London in 1747, the usual skipper was John Jefferson, aged 32, and his mate Robert Watson, 27, who worked peculiarly well in tandem. Cook's earliest voyages were on the run to London. His first trip took nearly two months, whereas the fastest Newcastle–London round trip in the eighteenth century took a month; in theory a ship could complete nine round-trips a year at this rate, but this presumed permanently favourable weather, and in fact a ‘cat’ working steadily on the run over a twelve-month period would average more like four trips.⁵⁰ Walker's practice was to get the apprentices to sail the ship on their own as far as possible, with the master as overall director. Evidently Cook impressed Jefferson for, when Walker launched another new ship and assigned Jefferson to command her, Cook was one of six apprentices he took with him. The new vessel was the Three Brothers, at 600 tons nearly twice as large as the Freelove, and young Cook took part in her rigging and fitting out.⁵¹ Cook served in the Three Brothers continuously from 14 June 1748 to 8 December 1749. At first he continued on the Newcastle–London coal run, but then the ship was switched to a new route, having been chartered by the government as a troop transport, specialising in conveying cavalry from Flanders (at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession) to Dublin and Liverpool. After completing his apprenticeship, Cook signed on as an ordinary seaman for the first time on 20 April 1750, this time on the Mary of Whitby, owned and commanded by relatives of John Walker. On the Mary he got to know the Baltic timber route, and was continuously engaged on this for eight months until 5 October 1750, when he was discharged at London.⁵² This, then, was the year when he mastered the wrinkles of the Baltic, not only Stockholm, Malmö, Danzig (Gdansk) and Königsberg, but also the tricky Danish waters of the Skagerrak and Kattegat.

After a brief spell on a Sunderland vessel, whose name does not survive, Cook returned to the Three Brothers during 1751–52, all the time studying for his mate's examination. This involved a more advanced study of navigation – the use of instruments such as the quadrant, ring-dial, cross-staff, backstaff, azimuth compass and nocturnal dipping-needle – plus a smattering of astronomy and geometry. The key to practical seamanship was supposedly mastery of the three Ls: latitude, lead and lookout. Lookout is self-explanatory, and casting the lead was the time-honoured way of ascertaining depth of water or, in shallow water, the nature of the sea bottom – the only way one could avoid navigating blind in thick fog.⁵³ Fixing latitude was still very much a matter of taking noonday sightings of the sun. Cook demonstrated that he could combine study with hands-on seamanship by giving a good practical account of himself while studying, much to the satisfaction of his captains. The new master of the Three Brothers was Robert Watson, who had been the mate on Cook's first voyage. Evidently the two struck up a notable rapport, for when Watson transferred as skipper at the end of 1752 to another Walker ship, the Friendship, Cook, newly qualified, went with him as mate. He could now regard himself as a true master of the North Sea, which meant perfection in negotiating tideways and difficult narrow channels.⁵⁴ For two and a half years Cook was mate on this vessel, under three different masters: first Watson, then John Swainston, and finally Richard Ellerton, who remained a friend. There was no reason on paper why Cook should have expected accelerated promotion, for there were hundreds of mates in the north-eastern coal trades, all seeking the few openings as master. But Walker was an accomplished talent-spotter and had already seen Cook's great potential. After less than three years as mate and just nine years after he had begun his naval apprenticeship, Cook was offered the post of master of the Friendship. It must have seemed like a dream come true. But to fairly general stupefaction Cook turned down Walker's generous offer and announced his intention of abandoning the merchant marine. He intended to join the Royal Navy as an able seaman.⁵⁵

Cook's decision has puzzled biographers and historians ever since, and has appeared as, at the very least, a mighty risky gamble. It is often considered an eccentric resolution, and some have speculated that Cook must have been convinced of his lucky star, for it was scarcely rational to expect that in the Royal Navy he would encounter patrons to match Skottowe and Walker.⁵⁶ Was he, then, tired of Whitby and bedazzled by the London he had glimpsed on shore leave from the ‘cats’? Was he simply bored with life on a collier, or finding the coastal trade dull? Had he always intended to join the Royal Navy, was he actuated by simple, naïve patriotism in time of imminent war, or did he simply consider that ‘naval service, whatever its drawbacks, offered a lively mind more variety and more excitement’?⁵⁷ Certainly some of the motivations ascribed to him fail to convince. It has been said that he foresaw the coming of war between Britain and France – imminent in 1755 and already raging in North America – and feared that he would be swept up by a press gang.⁵⁸ But this is absurd: as the master of a collier he was exempt from pressing. Others claim that the coming of war would have made his life as master of a collier intolerable, and it is true that from 1757 French privateers swarmed off the Yorkshire coast, disrupting both the coal trade and the inshore fisheries.⁵⁹ Still others argue from sociological data and bring the nascent whaling industry of Whitby into the equation. From the early 1750s Whitby was diversifying into whaling; in 1753 its merchants formed a Whale Fishing Company and to jump-start the new industry brought in Dutch specialists. By 1770 Whitby was the major whaling port in England.⁶⁰ Is it possible that Cook spotted this trend and (wrongly) concluded that the colliery trade was about to go into a decline? On the other hand, if a mere lust for adventure was his motive, whaling offered the prospect of sailing the seven seas in search of the Leviathan. A taste for adventure cannot explain the decision to join the Royal Navy, since Cook could easily have transferred from being master of a collier to a similar position with the East India Company in the Indian Ocean or with the many enterprises focused on the Atlantic.

It is much more likely that, in switching from the merchant marine to His Majesty's fighting ships, Cook was evincing signs of a cold, calculating, long-haul ambition. The circumstantial evidence of a chess player's mind is there, for Cook's most famous biographer, John Beaglehole, stressed the apparent disadvantages of the Royal Navy vis-à-vis the coal trade:

Its physical conditions were worse; its pay was worse; its food was worse, its discipline was harsh, its record of sickness was appalling. To the chance of being drowned could be added the chance of being flogged, hanged or being shot, though it is true that deaths in battle were infinitely fewer than deaths from disease. The enemy might kill in tens, scurvy and typhus killed in tens of hundreds.⁶¹

But against this litany can be set contrary arguments. Not all scholars agree that conditions of service in the merchant navy were superior; some say the wages and food were better, the medical treatment was superior and that, certainly in wartime, life at sea was easier in the Royal Navy. There are other considerations. To a man obsessed with control, as Cook always was, the slack discipline in the merchant service could well have been a trial. The issue of wages has been confused, for some have looked only at the enlistment bounty of £2 or the able seaman's wages of 24 shillings a month, ignoring compensation payments and pensions.⁶² Yet overwhelmingly, two issues seem salient and cardinal. Wartime in the Royal Navy opened up the lucrative possibilities of prize money from the capture of enemy ships. As a historian of the Georgian navy

Reviews for Captain Cook

[pierthinker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Captain James Cook is a key figure in the British story. Renowned for his three great voyages of exploration and discovery in the Pacific, including the Antarctic and Arctic, his technical foundation, laid out in maps, surveys and other navigational activities, allowed the rapid assimilation of this region into the global family. Often falsely named as the discoverer of Australia, he did map its east coast and produced detailed charts of New Zealand that stand up to modern day scrutiny.Cook learned his seafaring trade hauling coal down the east coast of England, gave it all up to move from the Merchant to the Royal Navy, effectively starting at the bottom again, and provided key navigational and mapping support to Wolfe’s campaign against the French Canadians in the Seven Years War and at the fall of Quebec.There is no doubt that Cook was a master mariner, perhaps the master mariner in recorded history. His first two voyages were triumphs of seamanship and delivered beyond Admiralty expectations. It was during the third voyage that Cook unravelled, started making decisions that went against him and ultimately paid for his stubbornness and his poor relationship with his officers and crew with his life. Beaten to death in the shallows off Tahiti his body was quickly dismembered by the natives and there was precious little to include in the burial at sea.Frank McLynn has written a great biography of Cook and pays special attention to the details of the voyages and the great achievements that Cook made. He attacks the social and political structures of the Pacific islands that Cook visited and gives a good picture of the clash of cultures that ensued. A great deal of primary sources exist for the voyages themselves and McLynn uses these, along with key secondary sources - particularly J. C. Beaglehole’s ‘The Life of Captain Cook’ and his edited versions of Cook’s journals - effectively. Little is known of the man himself and his private life. It is as if all his energy went into his naval life with nothing left outside. This leaves Cook as a slightly hollow figure and I found it difficult to agree with McLynn’s views about Cook’s ambition and his personality.McLynn has a firm grasp on the technicalities of sailing, so best to mug up on 18th century rigging and sails to get the full effect here! He also has a tendency to use the widest vocabulary possible, so sometimes understanding the meaning without resort to a dictionary can be aleatory.