It is a work for information not for amusement, written by a man, who has not the advantage of Education, acquired, nor Natural abilities for writing; but by one who has been constantly at sea from his youth, and who, with the Assistance of a few good friends gone through all the Stations belonging to a Seaman, from a prentice boy in the Coal Trade to a Commander in the Navy. After such a candid confession he hopes the Public will not consider him as an author, but a man Zealously employed in the Service of his Country and obliged to give the best account he is able of proceedings.
James undertook the account of the voyage not because he had any special talents for writing, but to give the public what they did not get with Hawkesworth—a truthful and accurate history, with observations based on fact, not fancy, in the plain-speaking language promoted by the Royal Society’s men of science.
By Guy Fawkes night, 5 November, when effigies of the Catholic traitor were burnt throughout the realm and fireworks set off, and the sky above London was thick with smoke and gunpowder, James was in the South Seas once more, carried along by a feathery quill this time instead of a sail, retracing the route of the second voyage, a task that would occupy him all of the winter and into the summer of 1776.
It was as well the boys were in Portsmouth, because the manuscript, the charts, loose papers, letters received and letters written, blotting paper, pencils, pens and inks spread over the house like lava. Every so often Elizabeth would raise her head from her embroidery and glance at her husband in the middle of it all, see his determined air, the furrowing of the brow, the look of focused concentration that Nathaniel Dance would so aptly capture in his portrait of her husband. She caught sight of the Newfoundland scar, the end of it disappearing into James’s cuff, rolled up to keep it out of the way of ink.
The journals were no longer simply an extended report for the Admiralty but for all of England, for all of the world. When published, in May 1777, nearly a thousand pages and sixty-three plates—charts and drawings—in two volumes, they would sell out immediately and go on to become one of the great accounts of Pacific exploration.
In her Mile End home Elizabeth watched the masterpiece grow, a meshing of threads in James’s sloped handwriting, additions, deletions, insertions between the lines, in the margins, at the foot of the page, wherever its author could find space, till the entire voyage had been caught in the web of narrative.
Elizabeth was in a boat, a tub, and she was surrounded by water. Not on the sea but in her own house, in front of the fire. Unlike her husband’s vessels which were designed to keep the water out, Elizabeth’s vessel kept the water in.
‘A bath, marm, in the middle of winter?’ Gates had protested.
Though James was a stickler for cleanliness, Elizabeth’s ablutions were most frequently done at the washbasin. A bath, in a tub that was big enough to sit in, was more of a luxury than a necessity.
‘Why not?’ Elizabeth countered. She did not allow herself luxuries very often. They had, courtesy of James’s pension, free light and heat. James was dining with Lord Sandwich, Sir Hugh and Mr Stephens, the Admiralty secretary, so it seemed appropriate that the Admiralty should pay for Elizabeth’s little luxury.
‘But the baby, marm.’ Gates was a spinster and had had little to do with birthing, or even assisting a midwife.
Elizabeth judged herself to be three or four months gone. ‘In my belly the little one is surrounded by water,’ explained Elizabeth. ‘A little more will do no harm. In fact, if the water is allowed to get neither too hot nor too cold, it will be beneficial.’
Gates had brought one big kettle then another off the fire and poured steaming water into the tub. Cold water had been added till Elizabeth had felt it with her elbow and deemed it to be just right. Towels were waiting on a stool near the tub, and the heat of the fire ensured that the bath would not cool too rapidly. Elizabeth could always call Gates to top it up with more hot water. She stepped into the tub, first her big toe penetrating the warmth, then the rest of her body following suit, sinking into it.
Perhaps the best thing about a bath, thought Elizabeth, was getting out of her clothes, the corsetry and stays, the stomacher, releasing her body from its confinement. She could breathe. The tightness of clothes, before the Empire style which would arrive from Paris in the next century and shock everyone, was between the breasts and the navel. Below that, between the navel and the stocking tops, no undergarment was worn, which created an airy space between body and clothes. Only when women were in their rags and folded cloth was slung between the legs and attached to the bottom of stays, or to a cord around the waist, was anything worn close to this part of the body. But Elizabeth’s folded cloths would be tucked away in a drawer for a year at least. No blood came while she was pregnant, it being used instead to grow the baby.
James had been gone an hour perhaps. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and already night was falling. Soon Gates would be lighting the candles. As well as the voyage recently completed, James was busy taking a hand in the voyage soon to begin. The Resolution, due to return to the South Seas under Clerke’s command, was currently at Deptford being refitted, and James, at the Admiralty’s request, was on the lookout for a vessel to accompany her. By 4 January 1776, less than a month after James and Elizabeth’s thirteenth wedding anniversary, and the arrival of Jamie and Nat from Portsmouth to spend Christmas at home, James had found yet another Whitby collier to accompany the Resolution. His advice on this South Sea voyage was much sought after, everything from navigational matters to details such as how many barrels of vinegar to take on board. It seemed to Elizabeth that her husband was busier in retirement than he had ever been in active service.
She wriggled her toes and sent a gentle wave of water up over her body, a ripple that soon subsided, to be replaced by the tiny undulations caused by her breath. How soothing water was in the container of this tub, how wild and wilful, turbulent, it could become outside. At night, when James was away and Elizabeth heard a high angry wind she, like every sailor’s wife, tossed and turned, knowing how the wind whipped up water, how the two worked together with a potency capable of destroying whatever small barque they found in their path. Sometimes even without wind, water wreaked its havoc, the sea threw itself upon rocks, upon wild coastlines, again and again. Receding momentarily then returning to renew the assault, unmindful of the ships, the lives, it might take with it.
Elizabeth drew in a deeper breath, smelled the sprig of dried lavender softening in the water, then sighed it out. She would no longer worry on nights of high wind because James would be sleeping safely by her side. Lilliputian waves splashed gently on the sides of the tub. Elizabeth idled the time away, eyes closed, watching thoughts wing their way across her mind like migratory birds.
She felt as if she were on the verge of a new life, a life with James as a landman. She was a young bride and this baby she carried inside her was their first. Elizabeth dreamt of all the things she and James would do together once the voyage preparations were over and the Resolution had sailed. They would go to plays, visit the Pleasure Gardens again, stroll along the green with the new baby. This one he would see grow up. James would be here for each new tooth, the first steps, the first day at school. But even if a boy, the child would not go off to naval college as his brothers had done, Elizabeth would see to that. This new baby would be a landman’s son.
The bath was growing cool. Elizabeth opened her eyes, saw her water-wrinkled fingers and decided against a top-up. Where was Gates at any rate? Why hadn’t she lit the candles? Night had gathered outside and the only thing keeping it from overtaking the room was the dull glow of the fire, and its burnished reflection on the tub.
‘Gates?’ Elizabeth called. Gates appeared so quickly that she must have been just outside the door. She came in, took a twig from the fire and lit the candles. They had sulphur matches, flat, thin things, but as Elizabeth said, there was no point lighting one piece of wood when there were already plenty alight in the fireplace.
‘Sorry, marm, not to have done it earlier,’ Gates apologised. ‘I looked in but you were so peaceful there in your bath I thought it would only disturb you.’
‘We must always keep a candle lit,’ said Elizabeth. ‘To welcome home our sailors.’
Gates looked at her mistress, standing by the fire with the towel cloth around her, like a figure from antiquity. She knew it from her childhood, sailors’ families keeping a candle in the window, a bright flicker of faith for the men at sea. But the master, as far as she knew, had not gone to sea, only to dinner with the sea lords.
It was late, time for bed, and still James was not home. At every carriage approach Elizabeth pricked her ears, but none stopped outside 8 Assembly Row. James would undoubtedly be returned in Sandwich’s vehicle, but what if there had been an accident? There were so many, what with the state of the roads, the slip of winter ice, and the drivers drunk more often than not. Worse was the possibility of highway robbery, and although her husband had survived all kinds of dangers when he had sailed into the unknown, and could no doubt get the better of any highwayman, still Elizabeth worried.
She climbed the stairs. It was not that late, she told herself, it was simply the early fall of winter night that made it appear so. Elizabeth said her prayers, a special one at the end to bring James home safely that night, the prayer she said when he was away at sea. Then she parted the bed curtains and stepped into the cocoon.
Not long after she heard the front door open, then footsteps. But they did not come immediately up the stairs, instead pacing up and down. ‘James?’ Elizabeth called.
‘Yes, my dear,’ she heard his reassuring voice, ‘sorry to wake you.’
‘I was not asleep,’ she replied, the whole exchange carried out in a loud whisper so as not to disturb Gates, despite Gates having said nothing disturbed her, the proof being that she had slept through the earth tremors that had rocked London in the fifties, and only when her mother grabbed her from her bed had she awakened.
Through the gauze of bed curtain, Elizabeth saw the play of candlelight rising up the staircase, the shadows it cast on the wall. It flickered as it entered the room, announcing the looming form of her husband. She propped herself up on her elbows, watched him place the candle on the bedside table. ‘It was a good dinner?’ she asked.
‘Yes, my dear.’
Something was wrong. He had answered her question but the words were merely small bubbles which had risen to the surface. He was almost bursting with intensity, with fire. He made no attempt to disrobe and get ready for bed. If Elizabeth did not know her husband so well, she would have suspected by his behaviour that he had a mistress and that he had been with her. She pulled the bed curtain aside. Light glittered in his eyes.
‘A fruitful discussion?’ she pressed.
‘Yes, my dear.’ His eyes were fever bright.
‘James, what is it?’
He paced around the room, came up to Elizabeth, walked away again.
He took a breath, then expelled the words in one gust. ‘I am to command the voyage.’
Elizabeth caught hold of the words, felt their barbs. ‘Command the voyage?’ she repeated, the words tasting bitter in her mouth. Elizabeth searched for antidotes. ‘But you are retired. How can they order you to do this? Surely Clerke . . .’
‘Clerke will command the second barque.’ James remained where he stood, as if the bed curtain were made of iron.
‘Simply to return Omai to his home, you and Clerke both must go?’
Now James shifted, walked to the window then returned to the exact same spot, as if he were already at sea, already on the quarterdeck, already the captain. ‘That is the public reason for the voyage,’ he said. His voice lowered but retained its passion nevertheless. ‘The true direction of the enterprise is to seek out the north-west passage.’
She understood now. The sea lords had not inveigled her husband into this, he had volunteered. The warm dreamy atmosphere induced by the bath turned to ice, an ice so cold and hard it was cracking her bones. She made an effort to breathe, but the cold was suffocating her. Fifty or so attempts had already been made to find a passage in the high latitudes of the Arctic Circle, a faster route from one ocean to the other, to the riches of China, the East Indies. But so far none had been found.
‘You are prepared to set out on what might be a wild goose chase, to leave your wife, your sons, for something that may not exist, just as the Great South Land did not exist?’
‘There is £20 000 in it,’ said James. ‘For whoever finds the passage. We will be comfortable for life.’
‘We are already comfortable. I can do with less comfort and more of my husband. In the last seven years we have been together little more than a year. In all thirteen years of our marriage, if you add up the months, the weeks, the days, we have spent little more than four years together. When are you going to be a husband to me, a father to your sons?’ Elizabeth demanded. ‘Have you forgotten the words you spoke in St Margaret’s, “till death us do part”? When we are apart, death comes. The children are born and die, and I bear it alone. They die in my arms, not yours. You hear about it, after the event. I know it disturbs you but it’s not the same as watching it happen. I feel so helpless, nothing I do can stop it.’
James came and sat on the bed. ‘It will be my last voyage, Elizabeth, I promise you.’
‘You think you are the only one to voyage? I have made discoveries I didn’t wish to make. Three children dead. Do you know to which bleak shore that takes me? You said your tribulations started on that long reef of New Holland, but the reef of grief is endless and the coral sharp as knives. So many times I have been stranded there, alone, James, without you. I doubt I can survive another voyage,’ she said, her voice barely audible.
James reached out to his wife but she pulled away. So much she wanted to lie in his arms, to dissolve in his embrace, to have the pain soothed. But it would be a barbed embrace by the one who had caused that pain.
‘Elizabeth, you are the only woman I have ever loved. I swear this by Almighty God. And I swear that I am, and have always been your faithful husband. At home and in parts beyond the seas, you are my constant companion, my succour and my desire, you are as much a part of me as my own flesh.’
‘But not enough to keep you by my side,’ Elizabeth threw his loving words back in his face. ‘I’ve had to be mother and father to the children, struggle to learn about your precious instruments, navigation, astronomy, your precious South Seas, so that I can try to explain to Jamie and Nat what it is that keeps their father away from them.’
She saw him flinch, the muscles in his jaw tighten. ‘Be patient, dear Elizabeth, for one more time.’
‘I have been patient! I have waited two years, three. Before we married I waited seven years.’ The waiting years rose out of Elizabeth like a tidal wave and came crashing down.
James looked on, wanting to help her but not knowing how. There was no rope he could throw to reel her in to safety. ‘I must undertake the enterprise, it is my duty to my country.’
‘Duty? It’s more than duty that drives you. Is it not enough to be the celebrated circumnavigator Captain Cook, do you want to be Sir James Cook? Certainly your gentlemen friends love and admire you, but you’re a curiosity to them, a farm boy from Yorkshire, a curiosity like Omai.’
‘And they are a curiosity to me!’ James lashed out. ‘Sandwich, Banks, even the king himself!’
Elizabeth was shocked. ‘You put yourself above the king?’ It was close to blasphemy.
‘Not above. Outside. He is the king of this island, but the world is full of islands. I have touched noses with Maori chiefs, shared their breath. Exchanged clothes, names, with the kings of Tahiti, and become their brother.’
‘King Toot? Is that it? Perhaps you’ve voyaged too far already, James.’
By the time the darkness of night turned to a dirty grey, Elizabeth had exhausted herself. James had remained in the room but an ocean away from the bed, passing the last shreds of night in a chair, fully clothed. Neither slept, each wrapped quietly in their own pain. The vigilant Gates knew better than to knock on the door, to bring master and mistress their morning cup of tea.
Although Elizabeth lay still, James knew perfectly well that she was awake.
‘Can I bring you anything?’ he said quietly, his voice strained from the night.
‘No thank you,’ she replied sharply.
Elizabeth felt the icy breeze as James got out of the chair. ‘I have business in town,’ he said, and left the room, the house. Dressed just as he was, as he had been the night before.
Elizabeth heard a murmured query from Gates downstairs, then the brusque tone of James’s reply. The door opening, the life of the street, vendors’ cries, horses’ hoofs and carriage wheels, all becoming muted as the door shut firmly.
They had argued, said terrible things. Elizabeth had uttered death’s name, and it had all coursed through her blood to the unborn one. She took a deep breath, saw the mound of her stomach rise and fall. The anguish must stop here, she must draw a curtain on it. What had been said must never leave this room. Elizabeth wondered how much the sound sleeper Gates had heard. She had no reason to doubt her servant’s loyalty, yet it had never before been tested in this way.
Elizabeth curved her hands upon her belly, making a net of her fingers. James’s pronouncement was still there, a piece of grit in her heart. She must not let it grow, because then every time she took a breath she would feel the lump of it, black and hard as coal, till it grew so big she would not be able to draw breath at all, and the little one would suffocate.
Her dream of James as a landman would never become reality. She had married a seaman and a seaman’s wife she would remain. With a big heave, Elizabeth pushed away the reminder that Mr Blackburn, also a seaman, had retired well before the age James was now, and had settled to land life. But Mr Blackburn was hardly in the same fish kettle as James.
Elizabeth cradled the unborn child in her interlaced fingers. She would like to hold her husband like this, in her belly, nurturing him, keeping him safe, surrounding him with her warm sea of protection. She carried James’s seed inside her, and she must let the little one be nurtured in calm waters, not the tempest that had erupted last night. Elizabeth imagined her breath as wind, a gentle breeze that floated the clouds away. A sky of uninterrupted blue as far as the eye could see, a great empty sky, the weather at rest. A seabird, white as snow, flew into her imagined sky, bowed its wings then hovered in the uplift of wind before soaring into the blue. James must go, must sail, as surely as this bird must fly.
Elizabeth’s husband did have a mistress—the Pacific Ocean—and he wanted no other man to have her. She had had other lovers before James, but he was her best. None caressed her the way he did, charted and mapped her every feature. None had penetrated her the way he had, found her most secret places. To no other had she yielded them. He loved her in all her moods, when she was calm and pleasant, when she teased, when she was fitful and sultry. He was alert to her every move, to her sighs, to the way she carried him along. He fought against her fury, a match of master and mistress. He rode out her lashings, never retreated from her. He loved her people and they took him into their family. He would sail to the moon for her. She had enchanted him, her juices flowed in his veins. When her sirens called to his blood, he had no choice but to answer, even if he was dashed against the rocks. He must go to her. Elizabeth did not seek out these thoughts, they came uninvited, the moist whisperings of her husband’s mistress. They flooded into her ears and she was powerless to stop them. Against an ocean she could do nothing else but pray.
They were hard days that followed, the weather bitterly cold. The world had turned upside down—the sky the colour of dirt, and the earth covered in clouds of snow. Elizabeth’s heart also was covered in cold hard snow. She had spent her life waiting; how wasted those years seemed now. She had dreams of James lying in the embrace of his ocean, its waves stroking him like the hands of the Tahitian women. After, she lay awake so as not to dream again.
The days grew longer and winter drew to a close. Her heart could not remain frozen forever. As she lay beside the sleeping storm of her husband Elizabeth felt the ice beginning to melt, the flow of love returning. She had only to wait one more time. This would be his last voyage, he had promised.
Elizabeth watched the slow rise of her body, felt the small increments of the days getting longer, and knew that the hibernating creatures of the fields behind her Mile End home, the moles and voles, would soon waken, that snowdrops would push up through the softening earth, their crisp white skirts hemmed in festive green spots, like sprigged muslin, then the daffodils, their yellow trumpets heralding spring, when the new baby would be born.