The Great Explorer
I’ve mentioned Captain Cook before in one of my earliest entries as the man who discovered Australia. And several other places, it turns out. But though I mentioned him in passing, I wanted to take an opportunity now to talk about the man in a bit more detail.
One of the reasons that I wanted to discuss Cook was that I spent some time up in the Coromandel peninsula, and many of the areas there bear names given by Cook, such as Mercury bay. The other reason is that I fear his name is at risk of being lumped in with incompetents like Christopher Columbus, or the morally bankrupt politicians and generals of Confederate America. This is because the past several years have seen an alarming increase in what may be termed “grassroots historical revisionism”. That is, several supposedly liberal societies, bereft of a totalitarian regime to censor them, have decided apparently to take the task upon themselves.
Editing History
In recent years, the United States has experienced a rash of student protests calling for the renaming of buildings, streets, the removal of statues, and so forth, in an effort to…well, it’s not really clear what the effort is for. Supposedly, the idea is that with these statues and building names we are venerating figures of history that deserve ridicule. But whether the students at Yale exalted John C. Calhoun whenever they walked into his former residential college, or whether they now exalt Grace Hopper, the figure for whom it’s currently named, is actually doubtful. Like most things named for people, with the exception perhaps of the bevy of roads named for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., most of the individuals who pass through these areas have no concept of what actions their namesakes performed in their lives. I mean seriously, does anyone really believe that Yale, in 2017, was nefariously promoting the formerly American institution of slavery through its building names?
This process is also problematic from a pragmatic standpoint. Are we to re-examine every building or road or bridge named for any person, judging them from the moral standpoint of the current moment? What would happen if one were to discover that Grace Hopper, in fact, didn’t feel comfortable with homosexual marriage (a detail I just made up, but who knows what could come to light)? Would her memory too be sentenced to historical exile? Who will be safe from our future ethicists? I suppose no one will be worthy to be remembered for a period longer than that which it takes the post-modernists to invent some new category of ethical offense.
But the real reason why this sort of historical avoidance is the wrong approach is that having the painful parts of our history in front of us actually forces us to reckon with them. Statues of slaveowners locked away in museums allows us to live our lives in comfort, walking around our campuses, content that America has only ever been home to the likes of trailblazing female computer engineers. The more we have to search for the darkness of our past, the more likely we are to fall back into darkness in the future.
This is why I encourage the names of slaveowners and confederate generals and all other form of ilk around our society. Keep the statues up. And when children ask (as perhaps they will again, one day, when we recover our culture’s intellectual curiosity) “who was that man?” we can answer them that he was a man who did great and terrible things. He was a man of his times, a man who was actually very similar to us. A man whose moral failings we acknowledge, who was a part, in fact, of a moral stain that we must decide how to handle. Do we delete it, ignore it? Or do we learn from it?
Fortunately, after this long preamble, there is a historical figure that deserves less ridicule than he currently receives, and this, you may have guessed, is Captain Cook. Yet, he is caught up in the criticism leveled against an increasing number of European explorers. When I wrote my post about Australia Day, a statue of him in Melbourne was defaced by protesters who seemed to associate him with genocide. In Sydney the year prior a similar event occurred, along with a scrawling of the words “no pride in genocide” at the statue’s base. This association of the explorer with genocide actually shows the opposite of what the protesters seem to advocate. Rather than demonstrate that we, as a society, are exalting Cook without closely examining his accomplishments, it merely reveals the cursory study which these renegades have applied to the man, and the rush with which they lump him with other figures like Columbus.
An Actually Bad Guy
To be sure, Christopher Columbus is a man who deserves our ridicule (but again, let’s talk about him, not erase him). His journey to the Americas, famously launched in 1492 by Queen Isabella of Spain, was not a matter of exploration, but of profit. Columbus also directly initiated the trans-Atlantic slave trade, when he arrived in the Caribbean and nearly immediately began selling natives into slavery. He also slaughtered natives, reducing the population of one island from nearly 200,000 to less than 2000. Even beyond his immoral behavior (deemed even so by the crown of Spain at the time, who dismissed him as Viceroy and charged him with tyranny) he was also incompetent, miscalculating the circumference of the Earth by thousands of miles. The only reason he left Spain was because he thought the voyage to Japan from Spain was about 2400 miles, a distance which most scholars of the time agreed was far too short. This included those scholars who advised the monarchs of England and Portugal, who roundly rejected his proposal as fanciful.
So Columbus was tyrannical, driven by greed, and incompetent. None of these qualities is shown by anyone to have resided in Captain Cook. Yet some imagine differently. It is as if we can no longer even conceive of a figure in Western European history who can be lauded for his bravery and skill. Swinging like a pendulum, we’ve gone from the extreme worshipping of ourselves during the 19th century to the endless castigation of “white” persons that is all anyone can safely say these days. Forgetting to mention that genocides and conquest are not limited to a single skin color, but are human atrocities, we also forget that some Europeans have been capable of great feats that came at virtually no cost. The story of Cook is one such story. The fact that we lump him in with the likes of Columbus simply shows how little we know of the man, and I’d venture to guess that you, like I, knew very little about him until now.
So, I give you, a brief story of Captain James Cook.
Captain Cook
Cook began his life at sea at a merchant mariner at age 14. There’s little record of his life between then and age 27, when he began his military service aboard the HMS Eagle as an able seaman. That’s right, Cook began in the Royal Navy as a seaman. He would die as a Captain after years of command.
Cook’s military career first brought him to Quebec with the British during the French and Indian war, where he demonstrated his aptitude for navigation and surveying. Surveying was then much more primitive, and Cook made many improvements upon the methods used to chart rivers, bodies of water, and especially coastlines. He had a natural skill for trigonometry, and an attention to detail that placed him far above his contemporary rivals. The maps that Cook made, whether in Canada or New Zealand, were not superseded in accuracy, in some cases, for over a century or more.
As he developed the maps of Quebec and other areas, he taught himself trigonometry and astronomy, and studied prodigiously to make further improvements to his methods of charting and navigation. These forays in the maritime arts, combined with the stoic demeanor he’d developed during his years of rough service in the merchant marine, would later make him the perfect candidate for the exploration of the central Pacific.
Pacific Exploration
The Pacific, or course, had been crossed for hundreds of years by merchant and military vessels by Cook’s time. But these ships followed known paths, mostly a single path originally wound by Magellan, or if not that path, then direct paths to known lands where ready replenishment could be had. So much was unknown, and most weren’t willing to take the risks required to know it. Unlike the dreams of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, there were no lucrative trade routes to find in the Pacific, no shortcuts to vast riches. Just a huge, empty, treacherous ocean that had never been fully explored.
Then, in 1768, an opportunity arose. The Royal Society of London determined that the following year the planet Venus would pass before the Sun, offering a chance to take an astronomical measurement which would more accurately determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun. For this journey, the Admiralty selected Cook for command, based on his reputation. He was commissioned a Lieutenant, a move which we must understand was incredibly rare at the time. These days, there are plenty of enlisted who earn a commission and become officers (to show you how far the standards have slipped, I was one of them), but back then it was nearly unheard of. To commission an enlisted man required nearly an act of god. In this case the direct intervention of the Secretary of the Admiralty (sort of akin to the secretary of the Navy in modern America) was what got Cook his commission.
So Cook was sent. And in addition to his task of taking the measurement of Venus, he was given a more open-ended task: explore this uncharted mess.
The notion of exploration, historian W.J.L. Wharton reminds us, is something we lose sight of the longer that time goes on. He writes, in 1893 no less:
“It is yearly becoming more difficult for us to realise these obstacles. The prevailing winds and currents in each part of the ocean are well known to us: the exact distance and bearing from one point to another are laid down in the chart; steam bridges over calm areas, and in many cases conducts us on our entire journey at a speed but little inferior to that of land travelling by railroad; modern science preserves fresh and palatable food for an indefinite period; and, in a word, all the difficulties and most of the dangers of long voyages have disappeared.”
These days, it is fully impossible to understand the challenge that a man like Cook faced in traveling to the South Pacific in 1768. These days, we have the technology to literally see to the edges of the universe. While we can’t see all this great expanse in much detail, and there is certainly much exploration to do, any future exploration will be done, almost certainly, by robots. Failures in these forays may be expensive, as we’ve seen from some of the failures of NASA, but except for rare instances such as the Challenger mission, do not come with loss of human life. In fact, the last manned exploration was, perhaps, Apollo 17, in 1972, and in that instance the astronauts knew exactly where they were going, how long it would take, the supplies they’d need, and they had continuous, nearly instant communication with a team at the command center in Houston.
As I write this, I sit in a comfortable bed in a hostel in New Zealand. When I choose to travel to Indonesia, I will simply buy a plane ticket, and the greatest inconvenience I will suffer is having my bags checked and having to refill my water bottle after passing through security. Once I land, my struggles will not exceed finding apower adaptor and a spot for good wifi. If I’m extremely unlucky, I may sleep in a bed with bedbugs. At no time will I be more than a few minutes away from some form of communication, with which I can reach family, friends, rescue if need be. There are very few places left on this planet where this is not the case.
Not so with Cook. At the time of James Cook’s first voyage, we barely knew the shapes of the continents. The issue of Longitude had not yet been solved with the invention of the chronometer. Scurvy, the immunodeficiency disease that results from a person not consuming enough vitamin C, plagued nearly all ships, which were also unable to produce their own fresh water, and were at the mercies of the winds. Ships were also slow, traveling at most 50 miles a day, in an ocean with a surface area exceeding 100 million miles.
These were not trifling problems. Nor was it the case that these problems were diminished for the people of the time, as simply something they were accustomed to. In fact, one of the main reasons why the Pacific remained uncharted was because until Cook, no one had been able to overcome these difficulties. Several had tried. Abel Tasman had come much before, in 1642, and had discovered Tasmania and some parts of New Zealand and the Tonga islands. In 1764 Commodore Byron and Captain Mouat made an attempt, but were overcome by scurvy. Shortly after Byron returned in defeat, Captains Wallis and Cartaret set out in 1766. Wallis discovered Tahiti, and made friends with the Tahitian natives, but was still plagued by scurvy and shortage of water, forcing his retreat. Cartaret wasmore persistent, but no more successful, afflicted by scurvy and attacked by natives, and discovered little before beating back to England.
I’m not sure how much the English people of the time knew of these voyages, or their results. But think of it in the modern context. How much patience do we have for government sponsored exploration? Imagine years of failed expeditions, at taxpayer expense, adding little more than a bit of coast here, an island there, to our maps. This is actually one of the main arguments put forth to defund NASA: it just doesn’t have an immediately noticeable effect. If the English kept up with it, the news must have been demoralizing. There were surely many who doubted the wisdom of setting off “out there” at all. There was no money in it. And all that seemed to await an intrepid explorer was a disease that robbed one of his teeth, or killed him straight out, hostile natives who were better left alone, years away from family, hardship at sea, even potential attack by pirates.
Cook set out into this, a man risen through the lowest rank, and accomplished a feat of exploration that was truly astounding. In the course of Cook’s three voyages to the Pacific, he discovered or improved the maps of the East coast of Australia, both islands of New Zealand, New Caledonia, Vanuatu (called New Hebrides by Cook), the Fiji Islands, the Hawaiian Islands, the Pheonix Islands, Kiribati and Tuvalu (called the Gilbert and Ellice Islands by Cook), the Marshall and, of course, Cook Islands, the Tuamotus (formerly Paumotus), and the Western North American coast above 45 degrees North. In the process, the greatest crime he seems to have committed was the blunder of introducing pigs and cattle to many of the various islands. Nowadays we’d recognize the danger of introducing foreign wildlife to an area, but back then it was common practice to leave some pigs in the wild so that future ships that arrived could hunt their offspring and resupply in that way.
Of course, there were misunderstandings in Cook’s time, including the one that led to his death at the hand of native Hawaiians. But to paint a picture of Cook as a privileged white man wantonly conquering helpless natives is to ignore everything the man in fact did. He suffered great hardship, hardship that had cowed an entire generation of explorers before him, as he mapped the pacific, a task which no one in the world had done. We may criticize the idea that Cook “discovered” these islands, they being inhabited, but there is no refuting the fact that he documented them all for the first time. There is no Polynesian man of the Pacific, nor Chinese, nor Aboriginal Australian. Of course, many of these island nations knew of each other, but none had a complete knowledge of the area, and in any case, none had mapped the coastlines as Cook, with his knack for cartography, did. Again, some of these maps were so accurate that satellites were required to improve upon them. And there is no trail of blood.
He also overcame the great scourge of the sea, scurvy, in an innovative way. Sauerkraut, a fermented food, kept longer than typical vegetables, and contained valuable vitamin C. To get his crew to eat it, Cook simply began to have it served, with great ceremony, in the wardroom. Jealous of the fancy food that the officers were eating, the crew soon started clamoring to be given the same fare, a request which Cook obliged (we can imagine him begrudgingly acceding to their demands. What choice did he have?). He was also obsessive about obtaining wild celery and any vegetables or fruits at the islands he visited. Water was also a top priority for him, and his records show that he was almost never short in supply of the vital commodity. Finally, he kept strict discipline on his ship, and forced his sailors to wash consistently and keep their living areas assiduously clean – a rare stepat the time. This attention to cleanliness and the supply of food led to an incredible accomplishment: under Cook’s command, during his three voyages, not a single man was afflicted with scurvy.
Controversy and Death
Much is made of the evils of colonization, and much of the criticism is deserved. But Cook was not a colonizer. In fact, though he named several areas with distinctly European titles, he also strove to use the native names for as many places as possible. In at least one case, with Paumotus, this actually backfired, and gives us a good example of how subjugation is not a trait reserved for Europeans. Attempting to learn the name of the island group, Cook asked the people of Tihiti, who responded that these islands were called “Paumotus”. Cook didn’t realize it, but Paumotus means “subservient islands”, and this name was actually a pejorative exonym. Years later, natives of Paumotus would petition to have the islands recognized as Tuamotus, meaning “distant islands”, the endonym used by the inhabitants themselves.
The most controversial event in Cook’s life, though, seems to be his death. That story is actually barely about Cook, and more about the mythology of the Hawaiian natives. According to their myths, a king named Lono left Hawaii centuries earlier, but vowed to return one day, bearing trees, dogs, and pigs. The arrival of Cook’s party seemed to fulfill that prophecy. The great masts of the ships certainly seemed like trees, and Cook normally carried pigs, and perhaps had dogs as well onboard. Some accounts claim that Cook exploited the excessive hospitality that was shortly offered to him and his crew, but I have some doubts about this. First, his knowledge, if any, of their language would have been rudimentary: these islands had never been seen by Europeans. Second, Cook was an explorer first and foremost. His goal was to refit the ship, resupply, and set out to resume exploring. He had always been fair and honest with natives in the past. Third, the knowledge that the Hawaiians believed him to be a god didn’t come to us until much later, when missionaries visited the islands and asked about the events.
Regardless, Cook and his crew enjoyed a great deal of hospitality from the Hawaiians, until one of his crew died of a stroke on the island, calling into question their god-like status. From this point, tensions mounted, until a group of Hawaiians stole the ship’s cutter while Cook was anchored off shore. Cook, determined to retrieve the cutter, went ashore to take the Hawaiian king hostage until the boat was returned to him. The king went willingly, but other Hawaiians began antagonizing the crew of Cook’s ship. The crew eventually broke discipline, firing at a small boat of Hawaiians, killing a lesser chief aboard. One Hawaiian called out, “the chief is shot!” and chaos broke out ashore. As Cook attempted to escape to the safety of his boat, he was stabbed in the back and killed. So ended James Cook.
The Maps of History
Against the voices that cry out to mar the history of the world, one must ask the simple question: “what would you rather have had them do?” Is the preferred narrative that Europeans should simply have stayed in Europe, never venturing forth? Is any contact, even friendly trade, a form of exploitation? These aren’t serious questions. But one wonders what those who deface the history of Cook would have had him do. His mission had been undertaken before, by several men who failed spectacularly, bringing their crews great suffering and wasting the money of their sponsors. It’s conceivable that if he hadn’t come along, England and other countries would simply have continued sending captains and their crews, until the task was done anyway. Even absent the profit motive, there is a part of being a human being that demands that we know ever more about the world around us. It seems obvious that this trait evolved in us, giving us a tremendous advantage over incurious apes. In a way, and I’m by no means the first to say this, our drive for knowledge is the very thing that separates us from other intelligent creatures on the Earth.
As Tolkien put it, “not all who wander are lost”. Similarly, not all who discover seek to exploit. Cook was a man bound, more than anything else, by a sense of duty: a grim determination to see his task through to the end. This is hardly a trait deserving condemnation. Cook led his men admirably through some of the roughest areas of the planet, from the ice floes of the Antarctic through the balmy, disease-ridden Equatorial region, all the way back to frigid, volatile seas in the far North. His longest journey was over three years at sea, during which time he kept his men free from scurvy, and was a fair and inspiring enough leader that much of his crew continued serving with him voluntarily on subsequent expeditions.
Of course, the man wasn’t perfect, but then neither are any of us. Neither, we should remember, were the natives of these islands, some of whom tried to recruit Cook, with the power of his military ship, to help in local wars against neighboring islands (he refused). What these attempts to deface history reveal is not an insight into the nature of some humans, but a willing blindness to the faults that lie in all humans. We are all capable of incredible levels of ignorance, even at times willing to let others believe, or to think ourselves, that we are gods walking among men. If not gods in ability, then perhaps gods in morality. This seems to be the perspective of the students at Yale and other colleges, or those defacing Cook’s statues in Sydney and Melbourne. The rest of us are moral cretins, unable to process their high ideals. Only they can see the great corruption of history, and only they know the solution.
We shouldn’t listen. The argument is not worthy of us. What is worthy is to debate history, to dig deep and uncover the facts. I myself could dig much deeper than I have, and perhaps if I did I’d uncover more about Cook to condemn him. If I did, I would be even more compelled to let the statues stand. My view on this is the same as my view about Australia day: it is more useful to our intellectual and moral development to confront the parts of history that are uncomfortable and multifaceted. As we pursue truth – a form of exploration in itself – what we find is bound to, unless we are extraordinarily lucky in our initial assumptions about things, surprise us, anger us, even make us ashamed. These are all good things. It is in recognizing the ease with which humans can slip into depravity and evil that we build the barriers to such things in our own mind. Not by censoring the world, like Plato advised, and exposing ourselves to only the most harmonious songs and the most moral speech. If we are to be free agents, charting our own path, then we must know where the shoals lie.