THE PORTRAIT OF CAPTAIN
COOK BY NATHANIEL DANCE

‘An excellent likeness,’ Elizabeth pronounced after she’d studied Nathaniel Dance’s portrait of her husband.

In the painting James was seated at a table, holding a map, his right hand resting on it, index finger outstretched, pointing. To what, it was difficult to tell. Perhaps to the hoped-for entrance to the north-west passage. In any case James was looking away from it, his gaze fixed on something beyond the picture frame. He was wearing navy dress uniform, appropriate for the rank of post-captain. White breeches, white waistcoat with brass buttons, a few of which were undone, white neck-cloth; a dark blue jacket with gold braid trim around the collar, down the edges and along the length of the cuffs, which finished with a modest display of lace from the shirt beneath. The squaring of the pose, the upright torso, everything about him suggested a man of strength and determination. The concentrated focus of the furrowed brow, the intent look in the eyes, the straight nose over the curve of mouth and the set of the chin. A master of men and, it would appear, of his own destiny.

There were other portraits but Elizabeth deemed Dance’s to be the truest. When her husband passed into history, it would become the definitive one.

It was a wonder James had even found time to sit for the portrait commissioned by Banks. When he sat down at all, which, it appeared to Elizabeth, was not very often these days, it was to put finishing touches on the voyage narrative. But it was the new voyage that sucked everything into its vortex. James was writing letters of requisition to the various boards, other letters to associates and friends, studying the details of his proposed route. He was often out—at the Admiralty, discussing matters with his officers, seeking news of Clerke, who was still in prison, meeting with the supernumeraries—astronomers, botanists, artists. Elizabeth had resigned herself to waiting one more time. In a way the voyage had already started, but at least this leg of it, the preparations, she could share with him.

Omai would be going of course, to be returned to his home. Just as voyagers to the South Seas had brought back curios, so Omai was taking home his—gunpowder, wine, a globe of the world, tin soldiers, a hand organ, crockery, fancy goods and, heavens know why, a complete suit of armour were going on board the Resolution as Omai’s luggage.

With slightly less paraphernalia was John Webber, the young artist whose work in the recent Royal Academy exhibition had been noticed by Solander. Mr Bayly, the astronomer who had sailed on the second voyage, was this time to go aboard the Discovery, and Banks had sent David Nelson, gardener at Kew, to collect botanical specimens. Then there was the crew—ignorant, drunken, blockheaded English tars who had such a bad reputation abroad for fighting and creating a disturbance that ports such as Cape Town would not let them ashore unless accompanied by an officer. The men were distrustful of innovation, but they knew the reputation of the captain, some of them having sailed with him before, and were prepared to eat sauerkraut, wash their clothing, swab the decks, fumigate and do whatever else the captain deemed necessary to keep them alive and healthy.

James was taking marines aboard as well. Elizabeth remembered the name of one of them—Corporal Ledyard, an American, who was so determined to make the voyage that he walked from Portsmouth to London. She would later hear how the former missionary from Groton, Connecticut, had walked across Siberia, and, later, that he died in Africa looking for the source of the Niger. Sailing towards their places in history were midshipman George Vancouver, and ship’s master William Bligh, a talented navigator and surveyor, but known to be an ‘awkward fellow’. Clerke, captain of the Discovery, was to eventually meet up with the Resolution in Cape Town, having either escaped from prison or bribed his way out.

James dined with Banks and Solander, frequented Will’s and other coffee houses to read the newspapers and catch up with the talk when he could. Mostly it was of the war in America.

In the midst of all this came the birth of another son. On that bright day in May, James avowed he was the happiest man alive, and held the wee thing with such tenderness Elizabeth thought she would melt at the sight of it. ‘We shall call you Hugh,’ James whispered over the newborn’s head, ‘and Sir Hugh shall be your godfather.’ Elizabeth smiled and nodded, remembering the morning Mr Palliser, as Sir Hugh was then, had come to the door with news of James, how he had lent her his handkerchief and lifted her spirits out of the ashes.

This new little Hugh lifted her spirits every time she looked at him. He was the most beautiful child of all. At first Elizabeth fretted at his fragility. He had the transparency of an angel. Soft-eyed, cherub-lipped. But there was a light in him that had been lacking in baby Joseph and even baby George. This child would survive. The Almighty had already taken more than His tithe from Elizabeth. God willing, this one would be spared.

The birth of Hugh was a short respite in the bosom of the family, and soon James was once more dashing hither and thither. One piece of business, and a vital one at that, to which he was not giving enough attention was overseeing the work being done at the Deptford yards on the Resolution. The river from Wapping, through Limehouse Reach to Deptford where the city wharves tailed out and the ship-building facilities began, was always crowded, and thick with odours, miasmas, curses, shrieks and cries, but this spring and summer of 1776, it was worse than Bedlam.

First there were the prison hulks, pensioned-off navy vessels no longer fit for service, their wings clipped, their sails dismantled, where prisoners passed the night in fetters, to be awoken at dawn and rowed to labour in the dockyards. If the smell of the river itself wasn’t enough, there was effluent and refuse from the hulks, the stench of rotting ropes, of rotting hulks, rotting lives. A visitor to the yards had to row through all of this, past the hulks festooned with clothing and bedding hung out to air, like a sad parody of fairground pennants. With the American colonies no longer accepting English convicts, the prisoners’ lives were in limbo. The American revolt was also responsible for the sheer volume of work in the dockyards. For thirteen years England had been at peace, the dockyards at an ebb, and now they were suddenly a hive of activity. So much so that often a lick and a polish replaced actual structural work.

At the best of times the dockyard workers had to be watched, and these were not the best of times. The mission of the Resolution and her sister ship, the aptly named Discovery, was above and beyond war and politics, yet was dragged down into it. No ship had priority in the Deptford yards unless someone made it so. James Cook was not shying away from the stench of the hulls, the chaos in the yards, it was simply that he was already stretched to the limit.

James had sailed to the extremes of heat and cold, and Elizabeth imagined that he had no boundaries, that he could perform whatever task was set before him. Several tasks. He was a big strong man but a man nevertheless. He had personally supervised preparations for the first and second voyages, every detail of the refitting and overhauling of his vessels, but then he had not been stretched in so many different directions. Now he was. Visiting the dockyards was but one of many tasks, instead of being the overriding one. He simply did not have time.

Elizabeth remembered when the boys were young, how excitable they were for adventure, for staying up late, for fireworks, for special occasions, and how they would say no, they did not want to go to bed, even though Elizabeth could see their eyelids drooping with fatigue. In those months before departure, James was like that. Eager, wanting to do everything, unaware of his own fatigue. Sometimes he winced and put his hand on his stomach. When Elizabeth asked he would say: ‘Nothing, my dear.’ And in these summer months of 1776 she would remember Cousin Isaac saying that the bilious colic returned in the warmer latitudes. The hottest day of an English summer was nothing compared to the tropical heat of the low latitudes.

Though Elizabeth could not help but be swept along, uplifted in the zephyr that surrounded her husband’s voyage, she was also grounded by the presence of baby Hugh. She would rise in the night, glancing at her sleeping husband, and tend to the baby. Hugh’s eyes were bright with the candlelight, his cherub lips already searching for her nipple. The milk of love poured out of her, and as she fed the newborn, she tried not to think about her husband’s hazardous journey. She was feeding succour, nourishment into baby Hugh, she did not wish to brew anxiety into it.