Captain Cook

(This column was published in the October 2, 1995 Buffalo News.)

   The reputations of lesser men too often outlive those of heroes.

   We all recall William Bligh, captain of the Bounty, whose British Admiralty 
appointments probably survived three mutinies only because his seniors wished 
to maintain service discipline. Cursed by "thin-skinned vanity," he has yet 
been a central figure in a half dozen novels and three major motion pictures.

   But who remembers James Cook, the truly heroic commander under whom Bligh 
himself served? I certainly knew little about him until this summer when I 
opened the over 700 page "Life of Captain James Cook" by J. C. Beaglehole. I 
was led to this book through my great enjoyment of the sea novels of Patrick 
O'Brian. I had guessed that Cook's adventures provided source material for 
O'Brian and indeed this was the case. What began as a difficult exercise, for 
Beaglehole's paragraphs run to several pages and contain content to which 
others would devote chapters, soon became a thrilling experience.

   Captain Cook was indeed a marvel. An 18th Century Yorkshire farmer's son, 
he apprenticed to a ship owner, sailed on colliers in the Baltic, but when 
offered a command, chose instead to join the British Navy. He served in the 
North Atlantic during our French and Indian Wars, playing a major role in 
charting the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Newfoundland.

   His map-making led to an appointment to command the first of his three 
great circumnavigating expeditions, each to take three years. A prime 
motivation for these voyages was the British belief in a kind of geographical 
fairness principle: With so much land on "our" side of the world, surely the 
vast Pacific must have a balancing continent somewhere. Cook laid this belief 
to rest, in the process discovering or charting scores of land masses 
including Australia, New Zealand and the Hawaiian Islands, where unfortunately 
on his third voyage in 1799 he was killed in a minor skirmish with natives.

   The routes of the three voyages imposes a spider web on the world's seas 
from below the Antarctic Circle to the high Arctic, where he sought a 
Northwest Passage over America. In both south and north ice finally turned 
back his fragile ships.

   This account derives from Cook's journals (which Beaglehole also edited) 
and is rich with breath-taking episodes: terrifying storms, near encounters 
with reefs and shoals, narrow escapes from violence at the hands of indigenous 
peoples. Through it all, the captain's qualities shine. He was a master 
navigator and a gifted seaman -- sailors know that those two are not the same 
-- an exceptional leader of men and a geographer of the highest order, his 
charts not improved upon for over 150 years.

   Above all, Cook was a scientific explorer. Subject to the caprice of wind 
and current, but "no longer dependent exclusively on Halley's three L's, Lead, 
Latitude, and Lookout," he was one of the first seamen to carry an accurate 
clock. This gave him the ability to measure longitude as well as latitude. His 
geographic measurements over the great Pacific distances improved on that of 
his predecessors by orders of magnitude.

   Just as important was his conquest of the sailors' deadly enemy, the 
debilitating scurvy. He overcame his crews' conservatism through example, 
seeking out fresh vegetables and fruit on trips ashore, eating sauerkraut and 
scurvy grass and drinking spruce beer. For his paper on this topic he was 
awarded the Copley Medal and Fellowship in the British Royal Society. Because 
of his high regard for Cook, Benjamin Franklin recommended to our congress 
that his ships be exempt from attack during the Revolutionary War.

   At a time when we need honorable heroes, Captain Cook serves very well.