I could go on in some detail about how we waited patiently, and told each other that the walking party would bring back a rescue vessel. But we were becoming very selective in the stories we chose to tell and not tell.
One story we avoided was that we were only here because of our Captain’s determination to take us into further danger. It was a bitter truth that festered within me as I considered the impossibility of our situation. Yes, I pitied our Captain, but I resented him too. Perhaps I just needed someone to carry the blame. But he could have sailed directly home after New Zealand. He could have just turned around and gone back the way we had come. Yet he didn’t, did he? He wanted to fill in the gaps in the maps. Find every bloody land formation and inlet and island and every bloody rock too. Well, he certainly did that, didn’t he! He found one rock too many and look what became of us.
So many times already we had escaped danger brought about by his poor decisions, but the fact that we always survived it seemed to make him feel he was immune to it. He nearly ran us onto the rocks in New Zealand, and scraped the ship’s bottom several times there. More than once he put us in danger of being overrun by natives. And he ignored the warnings and omens that were put in front of him. After leaving New Zealand and crossing the Tasman Sea we encountered a large waterspout—a rarity of nature—but surely a sign, which he ignored. As was the large storm that tried to turn us about several times, the largest we had encountered to date, and it came close to sending us to the bottom of the sea. He should have heeded those signs. Should have known that no good would come if he remained set on his course.
Even when we sighted this vast land and tried to approach, the breakers prevented us. The very waves tried to turn us away. But he would not heed them either. He kept dragging us further into danger.
Then our attempts to make contact with the natives proved futile. Wherever we saw them and tried to entice them they slipped away before us. That should also have been seen as an indication of the futility of it all.
And if that was not enough to convince us, poor Forby Sutherland, our poulterer, fell dead as soon as we had stepped upon the land here. We buried him there on the edge of Botanists Bay. There were mumblings among the sailors, of course. Some might consider them superstitious, but they knew. Too many signs and omens to put down to mere whims of nature.
Why couldn’t Cook see that?
And here’s something not often told: Cook was not even the first choice to lead the expedition. It was originally going to be Alexander Dalrymple—a rather pompous Scotsman who had put forward the idea that there must be a great southland simply to balance up the land mass in the northern hemisphere. But he wanted to be overall commander of the whole expedition, as well as the chief astronomer, and chief everything else. And the Admiralty weren’t having any of that, were they? The arrogant prick was trying to tell the Admiralty what they should do, and that was only going to happen in his dreams.
The Admiralty insisted a naval man be in overall command. And they chose one Captain John Campbell to lead the voyage. Another Scotsman, and one of the most accomplished navigators of the British Navy. But he was pushing fifty and didn’t much fancy heading off into the unexplored for so little reward.
So, the Admiralty had to scratch around and see who was left on the list of available and competent commanders. They were looking for one who wouldn’t be as arrogant as Dalrymple, and one more subservient than Campbell. Someone who would follow orders and who could navigate well and draw a fair chart. Someone who didn’t realise what a fool’s mission it was to be sent around the globe in an old ship, with no support vessel. Even then, the Admiralty might not have endorsed the voyage had not Mr Joseph Banks offered ten thousand pounds to cover its costs.
Hmm, let me see. What about James Cook? He’s not even got a captain’s rank yet. Joined the Navy late in life. Very ambitious. A fair hand with a map.
He looks like just the chap!
And I couldn’t help but wonder, had Campbell or even Dalrymple been in charge of our expedition, would we have ended up shipwrecked here, our party ever diminishing in number?
Who would ever know the different ways that history might turn out, but we in our imaginings?
So we few starving and pitiful survivors started to dwell more on our pasts, and the lives we had left behind, rather than on our uncertain and likely-to-be-short futures, which now seemed something we would measure in days or weeks. For our prospects were not good. Food was harder to find. The natives were becoming bolder in approaching us. We had practically nothing you could call an effective weapon to defend ourselves. And we were so thin and weak we could not put up much of a fight anyway. I looked at my hands—a little more the hands of a stranger each day—dirty fingers and cracked grime-filled nails, nothing like the clean hands of a Royal Navy midshipman.
I was lying morosely under a tree I had taken to hiding under during the midday heat, staring up at the bright blue sky through the soft green of its leaves, trying to pretend I was looking up at the familiar childhood skies through the green leaves of a tree in America. The day had started out differently, after a night rain, with the land and grass smelling new and alive. We had fresh wind blowing for once from the north—the direction the wind would have to change to if we were ever to sail free of this place out of the maze of reefs that lay to the north. If we’d had a ship.
The day had warmed up quickly since, with the grey clouds blown far away to the south, and the heat filled us all with a heavy torpor. We were all dirty and bearded and looked like the type of riffraff you’d see sitting in their own squalor by the docks of any port city. If a recruitment officer were to look at us, I’m sure he’d turn up his nose and reject every one of us as being suitable for a position in his Majesty’s Navy.
But if I squinted hard enough from where I lay I could pretend that the blue was the softer blue of the northern hemisphere and that the green of the leaves was a softer one as well. And then I could almost imagine that the clouds that now and then drifted past were from the dreams of my childhood, when I lay and wondered how different foreign skies might look.
I tried to ignore any tiny insects that crawled across my legs or hands, or buzzed around my head, and went back to a place far away in time and distance. When I was still young and naïve about the world, but had so much optimism for how my lot in life would turn out. Like my father, I suppose, the eternal optimist in the face of uncertainty.
He forever believed his fortune lay waiting for him somewhere other, if he could only find it. And it is difficult to say if he ultimately found it by dint of destiny or good luck. But either could be fickle. He was convinced, for instance, that he should throw his lot in with the British in the conflicts between the colonists and the King. He told us many times that the colonials seeking independence would never be able to defeat the might of the British Navy and Army. His time in Ireland had been evidence enough of that, and the same would happen in the Americas, he believed. Even if there was a violent uprising, the British would subdue it and those who had been rebellious would lose their lands and those who had remained faithful to the Crown would gain from it.
More so if he had children serving in the British armed forces, he said, and it would not only make our own fortunes to join the British Army or Navy, but would make our family’s fortunes as well.
I wondered if having a sailor son lost at sea would count for anything when it came time for reckoning the spoils of the crushed revolution. Would it wring a tear or two from some flint-hearted administrator charged with dividing up the lands of the rebels, and convince him to offer the best land to my father?
If so, he might benefit from my ill fortune. That might be some consolation for the anguish of not knowing what had become of me, lacking the finality one obtained from a recorded corpse, be it buried far away at sea or brought home again.
He had expected that I would rise rapidly through the ranks in the Navy, progressing from midshipman to a rank of greater influence, and then using that rank and experience to petition for an administrator’s job. Perhaps some consulate to the Crown in a tropical or semi-tropical location, where the British controlled the produce and exports, and the British administrators were treated like minor royalty. Somewhere in the West Indies perhaps.
Did I mention that? It is hard to recall.
It was a fair dream to pursue. I would have a big house with several servants and light responsibilities through the day, leaving time for a nap in the afternoon. I’d lie upon a linen hammock, with natives waving large fans to keep me cool, while I looked up into the sky, through some tree of that land. And I would remember how I had once lain on my back watching the sky through filtered green leaves in America, imagining what foreign skies might look like.
But that was all premised on returning safely to England on the Endeavour.
I did wonder, too, what daydreams or memories the other few survivors clung to when they stared up at the sky. Who held fast to the belief that we would be rescued? And who preferred to conjure up memories of the past, for they could see no clear future? Certainly being shipwrecked played no part in the future I had envisaged.
Perhaps an incident at sea or a battle could be countenanced, in which I was recognised and commended, starting my climb through the ranks. But I now knew that was a fancy. My only mention in the Captain’s journal was the disciplinary actions against me over the cutting of Mr Orton’s ears that night, described as being one of those Gentlemen frequently found on board King’s Ships that can very well be spared.
Yet as long as there was life, there was hope. What else stopped us from walking into the ocean to join our drowned shipmates but a belief that we were still alive due to some reason yet to be revealed?
That made me wonder what the Captain saw in his dreams as he lay there insensible. Did he even know his ship was lost and with it his command and his scientific notes and specimens, and even the precious records of the Transit of Venus? I had to wonder what a Captain in such a predicament had to look forward to.
But if he were to suddenly awaken and proclaim that we would build a ship and escape, we would surely all join him in his efforts. And if he were to order that we would instead build a village and await a ship to find us, we would surely all believe that too. Whatever he asked, we would surely do his bidding.
I believe that each of us who elected to stay behind felt that Cook’s destiny was somehow tied up with our own—in life or death—and that destiny would not be long in revealing itself to us.