PORTRAIT OF SIR HUGH PALLISER BY GEORGE DANCE

Elizabeth, dressed in mourning black, was cleaning out the fire. It was a dirty job, coal dust rising into her nose, but she cared not a jot for her own discomfort. Apart from the interment, Elizabeth had not left the house since Eliza’s death. The curtains were still drawn, though by the noise outside she could tell it was a fine day. Elizabeth did not want to go out into the sunshine, it was too much at odds with the darkness inside her.

It pleased her to be doing the dirty work of cleaning out the fire. She was on her knees, no apron, her black satin dress smudged. She swept and swept at the fireplace, filling the cinder box with ash. Some of it flurried up to her face, settling on her cheeks and stinging her eyes. She did nothing to try to stop it. Her insides felt as if they’d turned to ash anyway, so dry that she had not been able to shed even one tear for Eliza. She had stopped praying, severed her connection to the Lord. Perhaps if she were covered in ash He would think her dead and no longer seek her out.

Elizabeth began applying blacklead to the grate with a soft brush. It had an unpleasant smell that made her feel sick, but she did not waver from the chore. She used a harder brush to rub off the excess, vigorously working her arms into it till they ached. She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, smudging it with ash, as someone knocked at the door.

The knocking persisted. Elizabeth took her time, arranging the brushes and making sure the cinder box did not tip its contents all over the floor. The sound at the door stopped. The person had finally gone away. But no, three final knocks, a light but firm hand.

Elizabeth got up off the floor. She took no care to fix her hair, or even wash her hands. The caller would see her just as she was.

A navy man. He looked familiar to Elizabeth but it was as if she were viewing him through a fog.

‘Is Mrs Cook at home?’ he asked.

She recognised him now his oval face with its kindly expression. Hugh Palliser. The fellow Yorkshireman was a friend of James’s; he had first been his captain, then governor of Newfoundland, and recently, this year of 1771, Comptroller of the Navy Board. He was wearing a long jacket with wide lapels, similar to the one in the portrait James had taken her to see. She recalled Mr Palliser’s casual pose in the portrait, his elbow resting on a column, elegant fingers hanging from a lace cuff, the vague outlines of a ship in the background.

The opened door threw light onto Elizabeth and her darkened house. She saw herself in the mirror of Mr Palliser’s eyes. She looked like a chimneysweep. Be that as it may. For Mr Palliser to coming knocking on her door in person, it must be important. Had the Almighty not finished with her after all? Was Mr Palliser about to announce the news she dreaded most?

‘May I come in, Mrs Cook?’ he said, recognising her now. He showed no surprise at her forlorn state.

He came in and, although she offered him the sofa, waited till she sat before he did so. It made no difference to Elizabeth whether she sat or stood. Eventually she sat on the edge of a chair.

Mr Palliser sharpened the edge of his hat with long elegant fingers. ‘My deepest sympathies for your recent loss,’ he said.

Elizabeth bowed her head, accepting his condolences.

He paused, giving the dead their due. ‘But I come on a happier matter. Intelligence which may lift your spirits. You may have heard reports that the Endeavour was lost—indeed, we feared so ourselves. But,’ he said, placing the hat beside him on the sofa, ‘we recently have advice from the India house that the Endeavour arrived in Batavia on the tenth of October, last. All well on board. We can expect them soon.’

All well, we can expect them soon. The words Elizabeth had so longed for had been spoken in her house. She slumped into the back of the chair, not giving one thought to the possible dirt she was spreading. She felt tears flood into her eyes. Tears of relief for James, and a well of sadness for Eliza. ‘Oh, Mr Palliser, thank you, thank you,’ she said, as if he himself were responsible for the glad tidings. ‘I don’t know . . . I . . .’ She gave herself over completely to the flood of tears.

Though a bachelor, Mr Palliser seemed not the least embarrassed by her display of emotion. Instead, he reached into his pocket and offered her a white lace handkerchief. She buried her face in it, smelling its subtle perfume, drenching it with her tears. She did not realise she had such a flood of them inside her.

When they were finally spent, she lifted her face and saw how besmirched the handkerchief was. ‘I am so sorry, Mr Palliser.’

He waved away her apologies, the handkerchief remaining in her lap, a bond between her and him. She was full of admiration for James’s old friend. A man in his position could simply have sent a message, but he had come in person.

The lightness, the sea breeze that Hugh Palliser had brought into the house stayed, even after he had gone. It was mid-May, and high time for spring-cleaning. When the boys were at school, Elizabeth, Frances and Mrs Pore from down the street cleaned the house, literally from top to bottom.

Rugs were taken outside and beaten, blankets and bed linen washed and hung out in the spring sunshine to dry. All the upstairs furniture was covered with dusting sheets while the rooms were swept. Elizabeth cleaned the wallpapers, first by blowing the dust off with bellows, then with a section of white bread, holding onto the crust and wiping downwards in deft, light strokes. Mirrors were cleaned with a mixture of water and gin.

The three women together took down the curtain poles, and Mrs Pore cleaned them with vinegar, then rubbed them with furniture polish. Frances got down on her knees and cleaned the kitchen floor with sand and hot water. Elizabeth took the heavy velvet bed curtains down and replaced them with the linen ones, having first hung these outside for the breeze to disperse the smell of camphor. The hens in the yard scattered at the flurry of activity, clucking disapproval of the disturbance to their ways. When the wind flapped the curtains hanging on the line, the hens remembered they were birds and even managed, with a few fluttery wing movements, to become airborne. Elizabeth took hold of the bottom corners of one curtain, felt the pull as the wind filled it. ‘Frances, look!’ she cried with delight. ‘I am sailing.’

Daily they waited for the return of the Endeavour and at night Elizabeth listened to the wind, judging its direction and speed, waiting for the wind that would bring her husband home. Batavia was half a world away, but it had been more than six months earlier that they were there.

A fortnight into July, on a day when the breeze was fresh and the weather fine, Elizabeth came inside with an apron full of eggs to find a message. She carefully placed the eggs in a dish, wiped her hands down the apron, picked up the letter and recognised Mr Palliser’s handwriting. She broke open the seal. The Endeavour had been sighted off Dover. Elizabeth told herself to be calm, but she could not be. She was thirty, yet she skipped about with the same gaiety as a five year old.

On the evening of Wednesday 18 July, he came. He stood in the doorway, just as Elizabeth had first seen him when she was thirteen. She saw his beloved features, and the three hard years of waiting dissolved away. She felt waves rippling through her as they embraced, smelled the vestiges of the sea on him. She wanted to press against him like this forever. But forever would have to wait. The boys were here to greet their father. Jamie and Nat looked at him, as tall and strong in the flesh as he was in their memory. Elizabeth noticed a few grey hairs at James’s temples, felt her heart miss a beat as she saw the scar on the hand that he extended to the boys.

She heard a bleating, and beyond him, beyond the trunks and paraphernalia from the voyage, saw a goat. It was so unexpected that she laughed.

‘You have brought a goat?’

‘The goat,’ James stressed, ‘that has now twice circumnavigated the globe. She deserves a well-earned rest. I can think of no better place than our garden.’

‘Best we install her there then,’ said Elizabeth, ‘before she eats your sea chests.’

They brought her through the house and out to the back where they firmly tethered her, the hens clucking like disapproving old ladies at this creature with whom they were to share their domain.

‘I think I need the aid of two strong lads to bring in the chests,’ said James.

A small crowd of neighbours had gathered outside the front door. James nodded a greeting while he and the boys lugged the things inside. Time enough for friends and neighbours when he was once more in the bosom of his family.

That night the boys were allowed to stay up as long as they wanted, and it was after midnight when they finally laid their heads on their pillows.

Before James and Elizabeth followed, to enjoy the long-anticipated intimacy of their bed, James went to one of the sea chests and brought out a package wrapped in cloth with leather binding around it. ‘My dear,’ he said, presenting it to her. Elizabeth undid the deft sailor’s knots and out tumbled letters, hundreds of them, one for each week that he had been away.

Elizabeth left them where they fell. She would savour each and every letter later. Right now there was an urgent need to reacquaint herself with their author, to share her bed with her real husband after so many nights with the imagined one.

She felt the softness of his lips on hers, the play of fingers, the trembling of their bodies as they recharted one another. Elizabeth thought that perhaps after so long the ultimate intimacy might be difficult, as it had been on their wedding night, but instead it was the greatest ecstasy. She felt her skin, her very boundaries, melt and she became the warm South Seas.

Afterwards, as they lay together, she asked, ‘Did you find the Great South Land?’

‘Of riches beyond compare? I have come home to it, Elizabeth.’

It was not till the first morning birds began twittering, after a night in which neither James nor Elizabeth slept, that the subject of the absent children was broached.

‘Hugh told me about Eliza,’ said James softly.

Elizabeth bowed her head, tears pricking her eyes. How quickly the sadness welled up, even in the midst of happiness.

James had never known the baby Joseph, but felt keenly the loss of little Eliza. ‘I want to visit her grave. Will you come with me, Elizabeth?’

Elizabeth picked flowers from the garden and gave them to her husband. Together they walked in the fresh morning, towards St Dunstan’s.

Elizabeth led James to the grave. He placed the flowers in front of the headstone, and stood quietly, his head bowed. Elizabeth took a step back, to allow her husband a moment alone with his daughter, but he reached his arm out and together they stood. ‘Talk to me of her,’ he asked.

Elizabeth took a deep breath, preparing her heart for this difficult task, for the sweet sadness of remembering the dead. As Elizabeth had told Eliza of her father, now she told the father of his daughter, how affectionate she was, kissing everyone and putting her little hands on their cheeks. When neighbours asked after her father, she would say, ‘Papa is in Tahiti’, rising up on her toes as if she couldn’t pronounce the name of the place without doing so. Elizabeth told him how they had all witnessed the transit of Venus, how at Christmas Eliza asked if Papa was playing bullet pudding. Finally, Elizabeth told James that their daughter had died peacefully. She did not mention the racking coughs, the fever that consumed her, the terrible sound of her gurgling breath.

James looked at his wife, into her oceanic eyes, and found the etchings of lines around them that had not been there before. ‘How difficult it must have been for you, both Eliza and the new baby.’

She nodded, but said nothing of the bleakness that had invaded her, how she’d wanted to bury herself in ashes to avoid God’s will. How she now understood the nature of the darkness in which Mama drowned.

Slowly they walked back to Assembly Row, where the boys were already up, despite their late night, as if it were Christmas morning. They couldn’t stop looking at their father, not wanting to miss a single word, a single movement, not even the blink of an eye.

After breakfast, the grand opening of the chests began. There were presents for Elizabeth and the boys, for friends and family, but most of the booty was bound for the Admiralty.

James presented Elizabeth with several pieces of tapa cloth from Tahiti, some with coloured designs and others plain. She felt its papery texture as James told her it was from the bark of a tree, and beaten rather than woven. Nevertheless, the fabric was fine and Elizabeth appreciated the workmanship of it. Also for Elizabeth was a ring made of turtleshell with the tooth of a shark attached. She slipped it onto her finger after the boys had closely examined it. The ring fitted perfectly. Elizabeth was amazed that the Tahitians’ fingers were the same size as her own. ‘When the women dance they move their fingers like this,’ said James, making the motion of waves.

‘The men too?’ asked Nat.

James showed them how the men danced, legs apart, thighs thrust out in a suggestive manner, though fortunately the suggestion was lost on the boys.

The next item appeared to be some sort of mat. ‘A mantle worn in wet weather,’ said James, lifting it out of the chest. ‘A gift from a Tahitian chief.’ It was made of pandanus leaves, James explained, which repelled the rain, and it had a dark brown ornamental border.

‘It rains in Tahiti?’ That was not Elizabeth’s idea of paradise.

‘By the bucketload. Then it is over and done with. The sun comes out again.’

For Jamie there was a hatchet of jade from New Zealand. It was dark green, the colour of yew trees, and had a smooth, polished finish. For Nat, an adze, the head fashioned from dense black volcanic stone, and bound to the handle with coconut fibre. There were fish hooks made of shells, decorated paddles and clubs, cloaks made of feathers, a basket of coconut fibre with shells and beads decorating it. It seemed as though all of the South Seas was spread out in the Cooks’ living room.

The quantity of items brought back by James was nothing compared to the bounty gathered by Dr Solander and, especially, Mr Banks. ‘Is it true that Mr Banks brought back 17 000 plants we’ve never before seen in England?’ Elizabeth asked.

The newspapers were full of the voyage, all of London ablaze with Mr Banks this and Mr Banks that, but little mention of James. Though James did not keep a house in fashionable New Burlington Street, as did the celebrated Mr Banks, with nobility dropping in to visit, he was high in the esteem of everyone at number 8 Assembly Row. To the boys it was as if King George had come to stay. The Admiralty, too, was obviously impressed. The minutes of their meeting for 1 August 1771 read: ‘Resolved that [Lieutenant Cook] be acquainted the Board extremely well approve of the whole of his proceedings, and have great satisfaction in the account he gives of the good behaviour of his officers and men, and of the cheerfulness and alertness which they went through the fatigues and dangers of the Voyage . . . ’

There was talk of a second voyage, hopefully not too soon, Elizabeth thought to herself. It looked as if James would never resume his post in Newfoundland. He was mapping the whole world now. Mr Banks would go again, and on a much larger scale.

While Mr Banks could not help but be puffed up by being the toast of the town, he did not forget his friend and fellow traveller, James Cook. It was Banks who had the pleasure of writing to James to tell him that he had been promoted to captain.

There was a family dinner to celebrate the promotion, with Charles, Isaac and their young sister Ursula present. Isaac must have grown six inches since he’d been away and, while not yet twenty, had developed a confident, smooth manner. ‘Captain Cook,’ he said, striding into the room and shaking James’s hand.

‘Isaac had the honour of being first to step ashore at Botany Bay,’ announced James. ‘He’s master’s mate now.’

James had discovered the east coast of New Holland, which he re-named New South Wales. Elizabeth recalled James’s letter about this ‘capacious safe and commodious’ bay, their first landing place. Mr Banks likened the coastline to a ‘lean cow, covered in general with long hair but nevertheless where her scraggy hip bones have stuck out farther than they ought accidental rubbs and knocks have entirely bard them of their covering’. The natives, who went about naked, were a very dark brown with hair ‘black and lank much like ours’, James wrote. Unlike the South Seas people he had so far come across, the New Holland natives distanced themselves. Even the beads and nails left as gifts for them remained untouched.

‘It was Stingray Harbour when I first stepped ashore,’ Isaac began, ‘on account of the stingrays. Then the captain renamed it Botanist Harbour because of the large number of new plants Banks and Solander collected.’ Isaac’s words almost tumbled over each other in his haste to get them out. Beneath his man-of-the-world veneer Elizabeth saw the excitement of the small boy who had once marvelled over James’s instruments.

‘And eventually,’ added James, ‘long after we’d left the place, it became Botany Bay.’

They had not found the Great South Land. Hopes of finding it had risen when they sighted New Zealand but were dispelled when the Endeavour skirted the coast of that country and discovered it to be two large islands. New Holland was not the fabled continent either. ‘As far as we know,’ said James, ‘it does not produce anything that can become an article of trade to invite Europeans to fix a settlement upon it. However the eastern side is not that barren and miserable country that Dampier and others have described the western side to be. Everything flourishes and the natives think themselves provided with all the necessities of life.’

‘Ahem,’ Cousin Charles cleared his throat, finally finding a gap in the conversation. He unrolled his copy of the Historical Chronicle and proceeded to read:

An express arrived at the Admiralty, with the agreeable news of the arrival in the Downs of the Endeavour, Captain Cook from the East Indies. This ship sailed in August, 1768 with Mr Banks, Dr Solander,Mr Green, and other ingenious gentlemen on board for the South Seas to observe the transit of Venus; they have since made a voyage round the world, and touched at every coast and island, where it was possible to get on shore, to collect every species of plant, and other rare productions of Nature. Their voyage, upon the whole, has been as agreeable and successful as they could have expected, except the death of Mr Green, who died upon his passage from Batavia. Dr Solander has been a good deal indisposed, but it is hoped a few days refreshment will soon establish his health. Captain Cook and Mr Banks are perfectly well.

Although it was old news, dated Saturday 13 July, everyone took great pleasure in hearing it. ‘Ingenious gentlemen,’ repeated Nat. ‘Yes,’ said Jamie, ‘and we have two of them at the table with us.’ They laughed, and every time either of them addressed James or Isaac they called them ‘ingenious gentlemen’ again.

‘How’s the goat faring?’ asked Isaac.

‘Eating her way through the garden,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We’ve had to tether her closer to the house. She’s developed a taste for roses, thorns and all.’ Elizabeth turned to Ursula, who had barely said a word. ‘Perhaps after dinner we can feed her the scraps. Would you like to do that, Ursula?’ The little girl nodded.

‘A true Endeavour voyager is our goat, one who eats whatever is at hand,’ said James. ‘Banks maintains that he has eaten his way further into the animal kingdom than any man, but we were right there with him, eh, Isaac?’

Isaac started listing some of the beasts that had kept the voyagers alive. ‘Penguin, kangaroo, dog. Everything that walks, crawls, hops, swims or flies. Banks has a recipe for albatross, if ever you happen to come across one at Billingsgate Market. “Skin them and soak their carcasses in salt water overnight, then parboil them and throw away the water, then stew them well with very little water. When sufficiently tender, serve them up with a savoury sauce”. But the albatross had its revenge on our botanist. He was sick for days afterwards.’

‘Did you eat a man?’ asked Jamie.

‘Jamie!’ admonished Elizabeth.

‘The fellows at school say that the men of New Zealand are cannibals,’ Jamie defended himself.

‘Aye, that they are,’ said his father. ‘They eat the bodies of their enemies, to take in their strength.’

‘Do they eat everything? The ears and eyes as well?’ asked Nat, eager for gory detail.

‘They preserve the heads for trophies,’ said James. ‘Banks bought a head from the Maoris, or rather, it seems he forced them to sell it to him, because they never showed us another afterwards.’

Ursula looked as if she were about to faint, and pushed her dinner plate away.

‘I think we’ve had enough on that subject.’ Elizabeth drew herself up. ‘There are certain people at this table who are very impressionable.’

Elizabeth was sitting up in bed drinking a cup of tea and reading James’s letters. The Tahitian ring was on the bedside table. To the image of a tropical paradise, with verdant mountains and coral seas, were now added turtles and sharks.

‘There’s much mention in your letters of thievery,’ Elizabeth commented. She watched her husband shave, preparing himself for the day. How she treasured these moments, the everyday intimacies that for other wives were a common occurrence.

‘There was much thievery,’ James said. ‘At one stage a native even made off with the quadrant, which was kept under heavy guard.’

‘But it was retrieved,’ Elizabeth pointed out.

‘Thankfully, yes.’

Elizabeth thought of all the curiosities laid out in the living room downstairs, how the boys could hardly wait to touch and handle everything. She thought of the shops in London, with everything on enticing display. That’s what the Endeavour must have looked like to the natives, a big shop full of curiosities, and so many of them that the sailors wouldn’t miss one or two.

‘I think it was not so much covetousness as a game of skill,’ James said.

‘Or in return for Banks taking so many of their plants,’ Elizabeth suggested.

She went back to the letters. Canoes coming to greet the Endeavour, coconuts, breadfruit and fish in exchange for beads. ‘Apart from the thievery, it sounds as if you had good relations with them.’

‘Would that it was always so in the South Seas,’ said James, putting on his shirt. ‘We enter their ports and attempt to land in a peaceable manner. If we succeed, all is well. If not, we land nevertheless and maintain our footing by the superiority of our firearms. In what other light can they first look upon us but as invaders of their country?’ James continued dressing, getting ready to take the boys to Stepney Green.

‘The Tahitians didn’t mind you cutting down their trees to make a fort on Point Venus?’

‘I asked permission first, and offered gifts as payment. They seemed not to mind the construction at all. On the contrary, they pitched in and helped, digging trenches and carrying water, as if it were all a huge game. One of the chiefs even brought his family along and set up house near the site.’ James buttoned up his waistcoat. He’d not be needing a jacket on this warm day, certainly not to play cricket.

After James and the boys left, Elizabeth continued reading. The fort became a little community, with a kitchen-dining tent, a forge for the blacksmith, and even a tent set up for Sunday service. For Divine Service ‘as many of the principal natives were admitted as we conveniently could’, wrote James, ‘and there was a vast concourse of people without the fort. The whole thing was conducted very quietly, those in the tent doing as we did, kneeling, standing or sitting. They understood perfectly that we were speaking with our God, as they themselves worship an invisible and omnipotent being.’

Elizabeth thought of the Bible, now safely home again, which she’d lovingly prepared for the voyage, with its frontispiece showing the light of God shining down on all the peoples of the world. Eliza’s death had made her want to hide from the Lord. Now she felt ready to stand in His sight, to feel the light which shone on all the peoples of the world also shine on her.