CAPTAIN COOK – MASTER OF

THE PILOTAGE

1770

THE SECRET OF GENERAL WOLFE’S DARING capture of Quebec in 1759 was navigation – the mastery that the British navy achieved over the shoals of the treacherous St Lawrence River. ‘The enemy has passed 60 ships of war where we hardly dared risk a vessel of 100 tons,’ grumbled the French second-in-command, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, as he watched the British navigate their way upriver that June – and the star of those navigators was a thirty-year-old ship’s master from Yorkshire, James Cook. Following the capture of Quebec, the young officer was awarded a special bonus of £50 (£5690 today) for ‘indefatigable industry’ in making himself the ‘master of the pilotage’.

James Cook came from humble origins. The son of a Yorkshire farm labourer, he started work as a shop assistant before joining the crew of a dirty broad-bottomed colliery ship that transported coal from Tyneside down to London. For eleven years he learned his seamanship by battling the storms and shifting sandbanks of the North Sea, before he enlisted in 1755, aged twenty-six, as an ordinary sailor in the Royal Navy. In just two years, Able Seaman Cook took his Master’s exams, qualifying himself ‘to observe all coasts, shoals, and rocks, taking careful notes of the same’.

Cook had had only a few years of basic schooling at his home village of Whitby, so he spent his spare time at sea educating himself in Greek, mathematics and astronomy. After the conquest of Quebec he helped compile a chart of the Gulf of St Lawrence and spent much of the 1760s surveying the north and west coasts of Newfoundland. Every summer for five years he sailed and measured these chilly North Atlantic waters before returning to England to spend the winter drawing up his meticulous charts. Then, in 1768, came the invitation to participate in the ‘greater Undertaking’ – a scientific mission to measure the sun’s distance from the earth, plus a secret mission from the King.

Venus was due to pass across the sun in June 1769, and the scientists of the Royal Society knew that the sun’s location could be worked out by measuring the planet’s passage from three different points on the globe. Lieutenant Cook, who was by now the navy’s top navigational expert, was allocated the South Pacific leg of the experiment, setting sail on 25 August 1768 in the Endeavour, a sturdy, round-bottomed collier from his native Whitby. On board were eleven scientists, including the Eton-educated botanist Sir Joseph Banks, who was to become Cook’s lifelong friend and supporter.

Only after the astronomical observation of June 1769 did Cook open his sealed orders – to steer onwards and locate, once and for all, the fabled Terra Australis, literally ‘the land of the south’ which Dutch navigators had first logged a century earlier. On 29 April 1770 the Endeavour put down anchor just south of modern Sydney in a cove that Cook named Botany Bay, after the large number of unusual plant species that Joseph Banks located there.

Banks himself was not complimentary. ‘It resembled in my imagination the back of a lean cow,’ he wrote of the weathered landscape, ‘covered in general with long hair, but nevertheless where her scraggy hipbones have stuck out further than they ought, accidental rubbs and knocks have intirely bar’d them of their share of covering.’

Cook claimed this east coast of Terra Australis for George III, naming it New South Wales, before heading for England where he arrived in June 1771, almost three years after his departure. He had measured the passage of Venus accurately and charted some 4400 miles of New Zealand and Australian coastline. But equally remarkable was his feat in getting his crew home without succumbing to the sometimes fatal disease of scurvy, the occupational hazard of long voyages that caused sailors’ limbs to swell and their gums to rot.

Twenty years earlier a Scottish doctor, James Lind, had established that scurvy – essentially vitamin C deficiency – could be prevented by the consumption of fresh lemon and lime juice, but it wasn’t until 1795 that Lind’s rations (which eventually gave British sailors the nickname ‘Limeys’) were officially adopted by the navy. Cook’s preference was for a concentrated vegetable gel known as portable soup, along with carrot marmalade and sauerkraut – pickled, fermented cabbage.

‘Few men have introduced into their ships more novelties in the way of victuals and drink than I have done,’ wrote Cook, describing how he got his crew to gather cabbage palms and wild celery in New Zealand – to their disgust. They condemned this vegetable fare ‘as stuff not fit for human beings to eat’.

One local curiosity in which they did show interest was the Polynesian tradition of tattooing, which they first encountered on the island of Tahiti. With time on their hands, several sailors and the young nature artist, Sydney Parkinson, ‘underwent the operation’ and proudly brought their tattoos home, starting a naval tradition that would later become a fashion statement.

In subsequent voyages Cook crossed the Antarctic Circle three times and discovered the South Sandwich Islands. In Alaska he proved definitively that there was no Northwest Passage, before turning back via Hawaii – where, in a tragic skirmish with islanders over a stolen boat in 1779, he was clubbed to death on the beach. Isolated in an angry crowd, he had ordered his men to ‘Take to the boats’ that were floating off the rocky shore, but why he did not take to the water himself remains a mystery. Perhaps Captain Cook was too brave or too proud to flee. But there is another explanation: like a surprising number of sailors in the old Royal Navy, the great navigator had never learned how to swim.