Into The Blue, Review
Into the Blue: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
by Tony Horwitz
481pp, Bloomsbury, £20
Shortly after dark on February 16th, 1779, a local holy man paddled his canoe up to His Majesty’s sloop Resolution, at anchor off the coast of Hawaii. Under his arm was a package, which he unwrapped ceremoniously in the presence of the officers. The ship’s Commander noted in his diary that the parcel contained ‘a large piece of flesh which we soon saw to be human; it was clearly a part of the thigh, about 6 or 8 pounds in weight without any bone at all.’ The officers may have been revolted at the meat, but were all the more appalled when they realised it was part of their skipper, the legendary Captain Cook.
The disconsolate scene in the remote Pacific waters brought to an end one of the most extraordinary yet under-celebrated lives of exploration. Captain James Cook, the son of a Yorkshire farm labourer, became one of the giants of seventeenth century discovery. His three epic journeys — between 1768 and 1779 — charted the Pacific Ocean and Antipodes for the first time. They encompassed Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand, New Guinea and Indonesia, Alaska, Siberia, and even Easter Island. They were voyages beset with blood-curdling danger: on seas more turbulent than any other, and in lands teeming with hostile cannibal tribes.
The first of Cook’s journeys was at the insistence of the Royal Society which, in conjunction with the Admiralty, wished to transport certain learned gentlemen to Tahiti, in an effort to observe the line of the planet Venus in relation to the sun. The expedition’s mandate was then to discover a legendary land, known as ‘Terra Australis’, which philosophers had suggested must exist in order to balance the landmass of the Northern Hemisphere. Cook, who was selected to head the expedition, was already forty years old — an age more likely for retirement in the seventeenth century.
When in 1768 he embarked on his 170,000-mile voyage of exploration, one third of the world’s map was still blank; but by the end of it, there remained relatively little to be discovered. Cook’s crew touched every continent and every ocean. The word ‘epic’ hardly begins to describe the daunting nature of the achievement. In our world of fast danger-free travel it’s impossible to comprehend the astonishing breadth and gravity of these hazardous journeys. We can only perhaps appreciate their significance, by observing their legacy in our own lives: asking how would our world be different had Captain Cook never lived at all? This key point is covered admirably in Tony Horwitz’s book INTO THE BLUE, as are questions of Cook’s legacy in the lives of the Pacific’s peoples.
Horwitz tells the tale of James Cook’s life and his achievements, partly through first hand retracing of his most important expeditions. Immersing oneself in almost five hundred pages on the subject, allows the reader to travel back in time, to a world where what we consider to be basic information just didn’t exist. After two extensive journeys to the southern Pacific, Cook turned his seafaring hands to the great enigma of the time: namely, was there a ‘North-west Passage’ — a shortcut through the Americas, to the Orient? Such a route would permit British ships to avoid rounding the treacherous waters of the Capes. In London, Parliament offered the enormous sum of £20,000 to any man brave enough (or stupid enough) to prove that the hypothesis of a North-west Passage was actually fact.
INTO THE BLUE is the last word on the world and life of Captain Cook. Far from a dry historical narrative, it creates a razor-sharp picture of Georgian exploration. Heaped onto it are many more layers, ranging in scope from current political and cultural issues, to minute observation of Cook’s techniques, theories and thoughts. What Horwitz has created is not for a moment a work of history, so much as a work of travel: and, for that, I think that Captain Cook would have been very pleased indeed.
(C) Tahir Shah
End
by Tony Horwitz
481pp, Bloomsbury, £20
Shortly after dark on February 16th, 1779, a local holy man paddled his canoe up to His Majesty’s sloop Resolution, at anchor off the coast of Hawaii. Under his arm was a package, which he unwrapped ceremoniously in the presence of the officers. The ship’s Commander noted in his diary that the parcel contained ‘a large piece of flesh which we soon saw to be human; it was clearly a part of the thigh, about 6 or 8 pounds in weight without any bone at all.’ The officers may have been revolted at the meat, but were all the more appalled when they realised it was part of their skipper, the legendary Captain Cook.
The disconsolate scene in the remote Pacific waters brought to an end one of the most extraordinary yet under-celebrated lives of exploration. Captain James Cook, the son of a Yorkshire farm labourer, became one of the giants of seventeenth century discovery. His three epic journeys — between 1768 and 1779 — charted the Pacific Ocean and Antipodes for the first time. They encompassed Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand, New Guinea and Indonesia, Alaska, Siberia, and even Easter Island. They were voyages beset with blood-curdling danger: on seas more turbulent than any other, and in lands teeming with hostile cannibal tribes.
The first of Cook’s journeys was at the insistence of the Royal Society which, in conjunction with the Admiralty, wished to transport certain learned gentlemen to Tahiti, in an effort to observe the line of the planet Venus in relation to the sun. The expedition’s mandate was then to discover a legendary land, known as ‘Terra Australis’, which philosophers had suggested must exist in order to balance the landmass of the Northern Hemisphere. Cook, who was selected to head the expedition, was already forty years old — an age more likely for retirement in the seventeenth century.
When in 1768 he embarked on his 170,000-mile voyage of exploration, one third of the world’s map was still blank; but by the end of it, there remained relatively little to be discovered. Cook’s crew touched every continent and every ocean. The word ‘epic’ hardly begins to describe the daunting nature of the achievement. In our world of fast danger-free travel it’s impossible to comprehend the astonishing breadth and gravity of these hazardous journeys. We can only perhaps appreciate their significance, by observing their legacy in our own lives: asking how would our world be different had Captain Cook never lived at all? This key point is covered admirably in Tony Horwitz’s book INTO THE BLUE, as are questions of Cook’s legacy in the lives of the Pacific’s peoples.
Horwitz tells the tale of James Cook’s life and his achievements, partly through first hand retracing of his most important expeditions. Immersing oneself in almost five hundred pages on the subject, allows the reader to travel back in time, to a world where what we consider to be basic information just didn’t exist. After two extensive journeys to the southern Pacific, Cook turned his seafaring hands to the great enigma of the time: namely, was there a ‘North-west Passage’ — a shortcut through the Americas, to the Orient? Such a route would permit British ships to avoid rounding the treacherous waters of the Capes. In London, Parliament offered the enormous sum of £20,000 to any man brave enough (or stupid enough) to prove that the hypothesis of a North-west Passage was actually fact.
INTO THE BLUE is the last word on the world and life of Captain Cook. Far from a dry historical narrative, it creates a razor-sharp picture of Georgian exploration. Heaped onto it are many more layers, ranging in scope from current political and cultural issues, to minute observation of Cook’s techniques, theories and thoughts. What Horwitz has created is not for a moment a work of history, so much as a work of travel: and, for that, I think that Captain Cook would have been very pleased indeed.
(C) Tahir Shah
End
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