"The Wide Wide Sea"

[fiefoe]

Hampton Sides's account of Captain Cook's last voyage is balanced and well-researched, a bracing tonic in the middle of the almost-too-cozy "Wives and Daughters".

• In 2021, in Victoria, British Columbia, protesters toppled a statue of Cook into the city harbor. Cook, in some respects, has become the Columbus of the Pacific.
• one TV show set in outer space. (Captain James Kirk of the USS Enterprise is widely thought to have been inspired by Captain James Cook.)
• What made Cook different from most explorers was that he was also a preternaturally accurate mapmaker, a skill aided by his use of the latest navigational technology and his deep understanding of astronomy. When he came home, the places he visited were forever fixed on maps,
• Polynesians and other Indigenous groups Cook encountered during the voyage held ideas about property and ownership that differed greatly from European ideas. To Polynesians, for whom most possessions were considered communal, swiping objects from Cook’s ships was hardly a crime—especially since Cook and his sailors were already taking (stealing, one might say) so much from their island communities in the way of food, water, fodder, timber, and other finite resources.
• Some anthropologists have speculated that sex was a way for young women to defy, at least for a moment, a stratified, male-ruled society that had boxed them in with draconian taboos. Others have suggested that the true answer might be simpler: Maybe it was about pleasure and little else

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• (Probably the ships’ masts, sprits, and spars.) Another replied, “They are trees moving about on the sea.” <> No, the local priest countered, they were the floating heiaus, or temples, of the gods. “This is not an ordinary thing,” the kāhuna insisted. He said the branches must be steps reaching toward heaven.
• Many scientists at the time posited that there must exist an immense southern landmass, far larger than Australia, to counterbalance the weighty preponderance of terrain in the northern hemisphere. Without a southern supercontinent, the earth would be so top-heavy, it would tumble into space.
• Cook was a hard person—hard to please, hard to fool, hard to reach, hard to know. One writer described his laconic persona this way: “There were depths, but the soundings were few.”
• * It was remarkable that through all his travels, he’d never named a landmark or feature after himself or any members of his family.
• Cook displayed a genius as a surveyor, hydrographer, and mapmaker while serving in Canada. These were skills that played an important role in England’s decisive victory over the French at Quebec City in 1759, during the Seven Years’ War (which Americans know as the French and Indian War). Cook was assigned the herculean task of charting the St. Lawrence River, from its mouth to Quebec City, and during the siege of Quebec, he was responsible for re-marking the navigable channel after the French had removed their marker buoys to impede the British fleet.
• * Comparing it against modern satellite images of Newfoundland, one can see that his chart was a cartographic masterpiece of almost chilling precision.
• Upon his return to England in 1771, Cook’s first voyage was hailed as a triumph, but it was the gentleman-scientist aboard the Endeavour, a young botanist and bon vivant named Joseph Banks, who captured most of the attention
• * But in reading his journals, one senses he was not deeply engaged, on a personal level, with the gambits of the larger colonial chess game; his interest was more inquisitive than acquisitive, more empirical than imperial.
• But amazingly, during his two odysseys, it seemed that Cook had beaten scurvy. On his second voyage, the Resolution was at sea for three years, but not a single one of his men died of the disease... A Scottish surgeon named James Lind had demonstrated as far back as the 1750s that scurvy could be treated by consuming citrus fruit, but it took decades before his ideas were aggressively adopted.
• It has been estimated that nearly two million European sailors perished from scurvy between 1600 and 1800.
• by 1770, a London clockmaker named Larcum Kendall had built a less expensive copy of Harrison’s H4. Kendall’s device, the K1, was a magical thing a little smaller than an abalone shell, with a white clockface and svelte hands that swept across elegant Roman numerals. It weighed just over three pounds.
• the K1’s success was yet another triumph that could be credited to Cook’s second expedition. What was it about this man? Good fortune and impressive results seemed to follow him most everywhere he went. Not only had he smashed a colossally wrong theory about a supercontinent; not only had he gone far in conquering a disease that had killed millions; he had also helped to solve one of navigation’s longest-standing problems.
• In 1774, a young Polynesian man had arrived in Britain aboard HMS Adventure,... This Native islander’s life story offered a poignant allegory of first contact between England and the people of Oceania. His name was Mai.
• “I do not know why I may not keep [Tupaia] as a curiosity, as well as some of my neighbors do lions and tigers,” Banks had mused in his journal—an offhand remark that speaks volumes about the sensibilities of the patrician world in which he moved.
• the king suggested to Banks that Mai should be inoculated, at the Crown’s expense. Banks, who had himself been vaccinated when he was seventeen years old, vigorously agreed.
• The search for the Northwest Passage—a navigable waterway connecting England to the coveted markets of Asia—had long been one of the great, if quixotic, quests of English exploration. What made the proposed voyage different was that this time the search for the passage would be reversed: It would be attempted from the faraway Pacific side of the continent,
• How much could one man take of rotten food, malodorous quarters, aches to the back and joints, and indignities to the vanity and spirit? If you were James Cook or Charles Clerke, apparently a whole lot. It was a rough profession—in an era when, as the saying went, ships were made of wood, and men were made of iron.
• * John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty... He and his fellow lords presided over an institution that was the largest organization in Britain and indeed in all of Europe... he kept such fiendish hours that he would often forsake his meals, opting instead to place a piece of beef between slices of toasted bread, which is how he came to be known as the “inventor” of the sandwich.
• After the hardships Cook had already endured on the high seas, they couldn’t in good conscience overtly ask him to lead another arduous odyssey. So they had inveigled Cook, over good food and wine, cunningly setting the hook. It had worked brilliantly... Surely a measure of pure audacity fueled Cook’s decision to go out again. Based on the success of his previous adventures, he seemed to think that providence would see him through. It would be his final achievement, his valediction. He could scarcely imagine failure.
• Mai constructed an umu, an earth oven. He dug a hole, built a fire there, then partially filled it with stones. He laid the birds in the pit, wrapping them in butter-smeared paper, for want of his usual plantain leaves. He covered it all with dirt and let the mess of fowl smolder for hours. The result was scrumptious. “Nothing could be better dressed, or more savory,”
• As a friend put it, Mai “turned away from a sight so disagreeable, declaring his antipathy to eat any fish taken by so cruel a method.” (In his home islands, a religious stricture forbade the harming of worms.)
• By the end of the 1600s the French had established an enormous empire in North America that had tapped the continent’s riches—principally, its hides, furs, and fish. <> The Seven Years’ War changed everything, however. The 1763 treaty ending the war forced France to cede much of Canada,
• THE BRITISH OBSESSION with finding the Northwest Passage seemed to rise and fall on a thirty-year cycle, as though every generation of Englishmen had to discover for themselves the magnificent puzzle and its irresistible allure. It was a quest pursued by “geographical romantics,” wrote Cook biographer J. C. Beaglehole, “an illusion just as sedulously nurtured as that of the great southern continent.” Each generation had to apply its own inventions and resources and ideas
• * The eccentric Daines Barrington: written about child geniuses (an interest that was sparked by his having interviewed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart when the musician visited London as a nine-year-old prodigy)... Among his many dubious theories, Barrington maintained that there was no ice at the North Pole, because seawater cannot freeze.
• Why was Barrington so optimistic that the same calamities wouldn’t befall Cook’s Resolution as it approached the same pinched puzzles of geography from the opposite side? In Barrington’s writings, the question didn’t come up.
• Friends of Mai worried that the cantankerous critic, who had odd mannerisms and facial tics and probably suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, would dismiss or ridicule his Polynesian visitor. <> On the contrary, Johnson seemed impressed by Mai’s innate sense of etiquette. “There is so little of the savage in Omai,” Dr. Johnson asserted, although he added that this was no surprise, since Mai had “passed his time, while in England, only in the best company; so that all that he had acquired of our manners was genteel.”
• Throughout much of 1775, Mai was considered “the lion of lions,” noted Frances “Fanny” Burney, a prominent socialite and writer who would later enjoy acclaim for Evelina and other satirical novels. (She was the sister of Lieutenant James Burney, who had sailed with Cook on his second voyage and would also sign on for Cook’s third.)
• the engineers at the Deptford Dockyard had overhauled the ship and covered her hull with fresh copper sheathing attached with closely fitted nails to protect her against the bane of all wooden ships, the teredo worm (which was not a worm at all, but a species of boring mollusk).
• * Cats like the Resolution were sometimes also called barks, but the Admiralty lords seemed to think neither term possessed quite the romance or panache they were looking for in launching a grand voyage, and so they chose to formally redesignate them as “sloops.”
• * The Deptford contractors had a reputation for being corrupt even in good times, but over the spring and early summer they had been unusually busy overhauling and outfitting transport ships headed for America to put down the revolt. The Admiralty, preoccupied with the deepening troubles in the colonies, had made the Resolution a low priority.
• * That year saw the publication of the first volume of a colossal work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by a corpulent, gout-ridden Londoner named Edward Gibbon. The observations running through Gibbon’s masterpiece echoed clangorously—and were acutely topical—among English readers.
• Boswell: Now burning with the idea of joining Cook, the writer consulted his mentor, Samuel Johnson. But the ornery intellectual dissuaded his protégé from undertaking the journey.
• He had brought modest assortments of farm animals along on his previous voyages, but this time around, thanks to King George’s zoological passions, animals were to assume a major role in the whole operation.
• * He had an acid tongue, a thin skin, and a tendency to make dogmatic pronouncements that others found deeply annoying, although he was usually right. Eleven years later, Bligh would serve as captain of the HMS Bounty, which was dispatched to Tahiti on a botanical expedition, and would become the victim of perhaps the most storied mutiny in history—though Bligh and those still loyal to him would survive after he piloted an extraordinary four-thousand-mile journey across the Pacific in an open boat.
• Clerke, like many inmates, was allowed to leave during daylight hours to attend to his affairs but was required to report back to the foul bastille by dusk and lodge there each night.
• tuberculosis: By all appearances, Clerke was still a vigorous man, only thirty-five years old. He was full of hope and excitement to begin the journey—finally in command of his own ship, even if he wasn’t in command of the entire voyage. But in the tubules and sacs of his lungs, the bacilli were multiplying, and as Clerke would soon learn, one of the world’s deadliest pathogens was taking hold of him.
• * As the ship approached the equator, sunsets became curiously abrupt, as though a lamp had been snuffed out; when the sun dropped into the sea, darkness would descend with scarcely any twilight. This was because at extremely low latitudes the sun sets not at an oblique angle, but perpendicular to the horizon.
• No one could figure out what Mai’s secret was—he simply used a rod and a white fly—but he just seemed to have a sense for the water, for the play of the wind and the currents, and was particularly adept at landing sharks.
• The Royal Navy had an old and rather silly initiation rite called “ducking,” and Cook intended to carry it out. The captain gathered all hands who had never crossed the equator before—there were thirty-five in all—and offered them a choice: They must either surrender their ration of rum for some number of days or submit to an ocean immersion—
• * few of the mariners knew how to swim. One would think it a prerequisite of navy enrollment, but throughout the ranks a popular notion held that knowing how to keep oneself afloat only prolonged the agony; once thrown overboard, the thinking went, it was better to submit to the inevitable and drown quickly than to struggle and writhe in vain.
• But the French immigrants had brought something special to the mix. With this unexpected mingling of French passion and Dutch rectitude, the Cape had become renowned for its wine—especially a particular variety of sweet wine known as Constantia, which is celebrated to this day.
• “Roaring Forties,” that terrifying zone of the southern oceans where merciless Antarctic winds whip their way around the planet without landmasses to impede or divert their force. Winds of more than a hundred miles an hour are routine. Here in the so-called South Atlantic convergence zone, where the balmier waters of the Indian Ocean swirl into the cold currents welling up from the Antarctic, one finds some of the most tempestuous seas on earth, with sixty-foot waves not uncommon.
• Groping through this ghostly soup tried Cook’s nerves. He called the passage “tedious and dangerous” and was continually haunted by twin fears: that the ships would vanish from each other’s sight or, worse, that they would collide.
• Geologically, it is part of a vast underwater plateau that extends all the way from Africa; in a sense, the Kerguelen group is the bitter southern end of the African continent. Gouged by glaciers, swept by perpetual winds, seething with fog and the steam of numerous fumaroles, Grande Terre is one of the most remote places on earth.
• Near Tasmania, Bruny Island, or Lunawanna-alonnah: Cook’s men stumbled upon a different kind of shelter: The trunks of immense eucalyptus trees had been hollowed out by fire, each one leaving an enclosed circle upon the ground large enough for four or five people to gather about a clay hearth. Anderson was enchanted by the very notion: Here were people who lived inside trees, like creatures from Greek mythology.
• In his published account, Cook adopted a neutral anthropological tone, evenhanded and remarkably devoid of judgment or religiosity, jingoism or national pride: <> They approached us from the woods, without betraying any marks of fear, with the greatest confidence imaginable.
• Burney and his men scooped up some of the body parts and scurried back to their boat. They destroyed three Māori canoes but, knowing that they were overwhelmingly outnumbered and that darkness was fast approaching, did not attempt further retribution.
• * Some Māori traditions say the first wayfinder to reach New Zealand was a chiefly fisherman named Kupe, who hailed from Hawaiki, a mythic Polynesian homeland. In a creation story that bears distinct echoes of Melville’s Captain Ahab and the white whale, Kupe developed a vendetta against a giant octopus that had consistently stolen his catch within his traditional fishing grounds. Kupe, burning with rage, constructed an immense canoe and, for uncounted days, with a large crew aboard his proud vessel, pursued his eight-legged nemesis far beyond waters familiar to him.
• * The world’s largest freshwater eel—Anguilla dieffenbachii, or the longfin eel—has called New Zealand home for some eighty million years. These sometimes aggressive behemoths can grow to six feet in length and weigh nearly a hundred pounds, with a life span approaching a century. <> Until the Polynesians arrived with dogs and rats, New Zealand had no terrestrial mammals other than a small bat. It was a “land without teeth,” as biologists have described it.
• For those who had been part of Furneaux’s crew on the Adventure, this return to the scene of the incident was haunting. James Burney, who for the past three years had not been able to speak of the killings except in whispers, entered the cove with dread.
• * The Māori, on the other hand, were weirdly fond of hardtack bread, that dreary shipboard staple. It didn’t seem to matter to them how moldy, stale, or bug-infested the old biscuits might be—the Natives still relished them. But the Māori were even crazier about the blubber that some of the crewmen were boiling down from the butchered carcasses of the sea lions that had been shot in the Kerguelen Islands. The Māori, whose diet was lacking in fat, had an insatiable craving for the blubber... They drained oil from the lamps, ate candles, and even consumed the wicks.
• The process of tattooing—or tā moko, as the Māori called it—was labor-intensive and painful; the artist punctured the skin with implements made of honed albatross bone, using pigments derived from soot and fossilized resins.
• Ferdinand Magellan, one of history’s most accomplished explorers, had enmeshed himself too deeply in a local war in the Philippines—and was hacked to pieces in the surf on the island of Mactan. Cook’s policy of studied neutrality was particularly prudent in New Zealand, where it seemed to him that tribes and kinship groups were forever warring with one another.
• To sublimate the instinct to avenge the murders of his men, as Cook had done, was a sign of weakness. It was unnatural, a violation of the spiritual laws. In previous voyages, the Māori had respected Cook as a leader. Now they questioned his very essence, his mana.
• Throughout this voyage, he had repeatedly used the lash on his own sailors, often for minor infractions like drunkenness or sleeping while on duty. Veterans of his previous expeditions had noticed the change and were troubled by it: If he was no longer the benevolent commander they remembered, at least he could be consistent. Cruelty to his own men, compassion for murdering cannibals? This seeming double standard threw many of the ordinary seamen into a rage.
• * In reading his journals, one detects that he was slowly losing faith in the supposed benefits of cross-cultural contact. He was starting to realize that visiting these islanders wasn’t good for them. More and more, he doubted whether Native ways of viewing property and trade could really mesh with European ways... On this stop in New Zealand, Cook had sensed an evolution among the Māori, a restiveness and a discontent he had caught only a faint whiff of during his second voyage...  In less than a decade, through forces of disruption and dislocation that his own visits here had set in motion, the Māori were changed.
• Mai: tears that seemed to spring from more complicated emotions. As Tahiti drew nearer, his apprehensions thickened. He’d been away four years, and he had no notion how his countrymen would receive him. Would he return as a hero? A prince? An ambassador from England? Would the rarity of his recent experiences help him transcend the lowliness of his birth?
• There was something magical about red feathers; the Tahitians found them irresistible. They were emblems of the cult of Oro, talismans from nature in the hue of the gods, signifying blood and fertility. They were more precious than any delicacy or intoxicant, more precious than any tool hewn from iron.
• * Cook was astonished by how quickly the presence of feathers had skewed the broader economics that had prevailed during his first two voyages. “Not more feathers than might be got from a tomtit would purchase a hog of forty or fifty pounds,” he wrote, whereas “nails and beads, which formerly had so great a run at this island, they would not now so much as look at.”
• Spanish stolen a march in Tahiti: “We saw that our act of benevolence from its being too long deferred had lost its hour and its reward. We saw the loss of a season and an immense deal of trouble all thrown away to no purpose.”
• not the only Tahitian who had sailed to a distant world and come back. <> One of the Tahitian adventurers was located and questioned by Clerke. The young man “had imbued a good deal of that distant, formal deportment of the Spaniard,” Clerke found, and “so larded his conversation in ‘señors’ as to render it unintelligible.” He considered Peru to be a very destitute country, mainly because “there were no red feathers there.”
• * When the dumbstruck Natives began to congregate, Mai fired his pistol over their heads to clear the way. The crowds dispersed in terror. Perhaps Mai cut a chivalric figure up there, wearing his medieval helmet and plate armor in the full heat of the tropics, but there was something tragicomical about the whole display. To Rickman, he looked “like St. George going to kill the dragon.” <> For the returning hero, it was an inauspicious debut. Mai had wanted to dazzle his countrymen, to surprise and impress them, but he had merely scared them away.
• Drink now and suffer later, or abstain, here in the paradise of Tahiti, secure in the knowledge that once they reached the rigors of the polar regions, they would enjoy the warmth and comfort of alcohol. <> Cook must have couched the overture just right, for the vote was unanimous. They would conserve their grog. “It remained not under a moment’s consideration but was consented to immediately,” Cook wrote with satisfaction. He let Captain Clerke pose the same referendum to the men on the Discovery, and their verdict was the same.
• Spanish scare was a hoax. He had found no evidence of the Spanish anywhere. Cook thought the ruse had been concocted by Vaitepiha Bay residents to draw the two British ships back so they could resume trading. He sensed it was part of an intra-island jealousy—two rival coastal fiefdoms competing for access to English wealth.
• * The real problem Mai had to overcome was his wealth itself, and the covetousness it aroused, the instabilities it engendered, the desires it stirred—in a people who, before the arrival of the European explorers, were by most accounts generally content with what they had and who entertained very different ideas about property. One historian of Tahiti, writing about Mai’s riches, observed that in the Society Islands, private wealth could be compared to “a sore on a healthy body: like healing, social forces would eradicate it, and smooth it over until it vanished.”
• Mai’s predicament, John Rickman was more blunt: “Men sprung from the dregs of the people must have something more than accidental riches to recommend them to the favor of their fellow citizens.” <> Like a father who broods over a wayward son, Cook did not know what was to become of his Polynesian charge, but he did know this: Mai wasn’t going to take root on Tahiti.
• * Captain Cook was about to get his first massage—lomi lomi was what the Tahitians called it. <> “They told me,” said Cook, “they were come to cure me of the disorder that I complained of, which was a sort of rheumatic pain in one side from my hip to the foot.” The women arranged a pallet on the cabin floor and had Cook lie down in the midst of the healers. “I submitted myself to their direction,” Cook wrote warily. “As many as could get round me began to squeeze me with both hands from head to foot, but more especially the part where the pain was, till they made bones crack and a perfect mummy of my flesh.”
• Massage, he noted, is “sometimes performed by the men but more generally by the women.” Lomi lomi seemed to be a widespread healing art, and almost a form of social intercourse.
• The bull had immediately gone to work on King George’s cows, a rare collaboration between the English and the Spanish, and the mating seemed to be a complete success. But the whole operation would prove to be a bust. Scarcely a single animal from the experiment is believed to have survived on Tahiti, at least in domesticated form.
• Wherever Cook landed, he planted tidy English gardens. “The act,” argues Obeyesekere, “is primarily symbolic, supplanting the disorderly way of savage peoples with ordered landscapes on the English model. Pairs of animals are carefully set loose…to domesticate a savage land.” In Obeyesekere’s view, Cook had taken on a role very much like that of Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest—that is, an authoritarian “civilizer” who systematically colonizes a remote island and dismisses Natives as savages “given to prelogical or mystical thought that [is] fundamentally opposed to the logical and rational ways of modern man.”
• * thrown themselves into one of the islanders’ most venerable amusements: kite flying. They had gone night fishing with the local anglers, catching trevally, bonito, parrotfish, and other species in the guttering glow of torches. Many had traded names with Tahitian male friends, forming a kinship bond called the taio.
• Moorea: He noted the bizarre slabs of basalt “that rise in a variety of forms, appearing like old ruined castles or churches.” Near the summit of one of the peaks was an intriguing hole, with daylight shining through, which according to Polynesian myths had been created by the great warrior Pai, who hurled a spear all the way from Tahiti to pierce the mountain. <> Cook’s men were giddy with surprise, for here was a place possibly even lovelier than Tahiti. There was fresh water aplenty, thick stands of tropical trees
• * The ship, as Cook put it, was “pestered” and “haunted” by this “numerous tribe.” He had spars lashed to ropes that were strung from the ship’s scuttles over to dry land, creating a swinging bridge for the rats to scurry ashore. In due course, a number of them did find their way across, though not enough for Cook’s satisfaction... And thus what a delightful unwanted gift Cook had bequeathed to the unsuspecting citizens of Moorea, within a few short hours of his arrival: Rattus rattus, also known as the black rat, the ship rat, native of prehistoric Europe, perhaps the most invasive of all invasive species.
• * Cook, convinced they were lying, had his men fan out and scour the area. When the goat still didn’t turn up, he ordered every house in the village to be torched. Wholesale destruction followed—huts were gutted, crops burned, pigs and dogs slaughtered, and stores of fruits and vegetables confiscated to be consumed later aboard the ships. And this proved to be only the opening salvo of a rampage of arson and plunder.
• * Later in the day, for good measure, Cook had members of his party stalk down to the water’s edge and rip apart every canoe they could find... Canoes were transportation, but they were also art. What the horse was to the American West, the canoe was to the Society Islands. To destroy canoes was to strike at the people’s independence, their means of sustenance and of getting about, their sense of aesthetics—and, to some extent, their sense of identity, too.
• “in these depredations, Mai was the most active.” Many of Cook’s sailors wondered how Mai could treat his fellow islanders this way. “We thought it rather extraordinary,” wrote Zimmermann, “that Mai himself…executed the greater part of this destruction.”
• Mai's house: THE SALIENT REQUIREMENT in Cook’s ordered design of the structure was that it should be built without nails, or at least as few as possible. By using pegs and mortise-and-tenon joints instead of nails, Cook hoped “there might be no inducement to pull it down.”
• The arioi were an order of itinerant dancers, actors, and singer-poets... They were not permitted to have children, however, so when a child was born to an arioi woman, she either had to leave the order permanently or kill her progeny, usually through suffocation... Explorers’ reports about the phenomenon would stir horror in the imaginations of English readers and would eventually lead to a movement of missionaries, who by the early 1800s would descend upon Tahiti and her neighboring islands, determined to ban the heivas and stamp out the heathen, licentious cult of the arioi for good.
• Cook stomped and thrashed about the crowded assembly house. His face throbbed with spite, and his eyes flashed with an almost maniacal determination to hunt down the culprit. (Cook’s men were starting to make a connection between the dances of the heiva festival and their captain’s strange fits of fury. The dances, they thought, bore a distinct resemblance to the violent motions and stampings of Captain Cook when he fell into his tantrums of anger. From then on, whenever their commander lost his cool, the crew would remark that he was “throwing a heiva.”
• Cook’s floggings had become far more frequent and severe than on his first two expeditions—far more frequent and severe than the punishments William Bligh would mete out while leading his ill-fated voyage of the HMS Bounty,
• Cook declined. The cross-cultural experiment had already been done. Bringing more Polynesians to London would only seem passé. As George Gilbert put it, “The curiosity of the people of England [had] quite subsided,” and an encore visitation of Pacific islanders would merely be “a burden on the public.”
• Mai fought bravely and expertly. Employing his muskets and stores of ammunition, perhaps using his horses and armor, too, he made a decisive difference in the fight. Large numbers of the enemy were slain. The people of Huahine were victorious.
  The battle did not succeed in permanently dislodging the Bora Borans from his family land on Raiatea, but Mai had finally clashed with his enemy—just as he had said he would.
  So, in a sense, Mai accomplished precisely what he had set out to do when he boarded Tobias Furneaux’s Adventure.
• * Like so many cases of cross-cultural transplantation, Mai’s odyssey led him, in the end, to an ambiguous place. His journey served as an allegory of colonialism and its unintended consequences. England, by showing off her riches and advancements and sending Mai back with a trove of mostly meaningless treasures, had doomed him to a jumbled, deracinated existence.

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• The Hawaiian chain was the most isolated archipelago on earth, yet it was rather extraordinary that Spanish mariners had failed to find—and establish a permanent presence on—these islands long ago. For nearly 250 years, the Manila galleons, packed with spices and silks from Asia or precious metals from South American mines, had routinely sailed between the Philippines and Acapulco, passing just above or just below the latitudes of Hawai‘i.
• * Cook found it stunning to contemplate. This volcanic plug lay out in the blue bulge of the ocean 2,800 miles from Tahiti—separated by forty degrees of latitude. It had taken him five weeks to reach this place, in steady sailing, from the Society Islands. Yet its people spoke the same Polynesian tongue, or at least a related form of it.
• * Some Polynesian navigators were known to bring frigate birds along on their voyages and release them into the skies, for they knew that the frigate bird could not swim and seldom ventured more than fifty miles from land. If a released bird returned to the canoes, the Polynesians knew they were still a long way from land.
• What the Kauaians wanted most was iron. They were not at all bashful in their desire for it, and they would not be denied. From the start, their attitude seemed to be: These people have more than enough of this precious metal, so naturally they will be happy to share.
• * The Kauaians—who paddled their canoes while facing forward—watched in wonderment as the English rowers pulled at their oars while facing the stern of the boat, their torsos bending deeply with each stroke. In one of the oral history accounts, a Native man is said to have exclaimed, “They must be nursing babies, for they lean over like mothers!”
• they called it a “water squirter,” because the smoke that projected from its barrel reminded them of water shooting from a hollow tube of bamboo, or of seawater rushing, geyser-like, through a tidal blowhole—a phenomenon that was not uncommon along the rocky Kaua‘i coast. They seemed convinced that their fellow villager had been killed by some high-velocity jet of water. <> Lieutenant Williamson was known to be a hothead.
• Kaua‘i: As the fables had it, the menehune were extremely industrious, and they labored in concert, in huge numbers, to build great structures—plazas, roadways, fishponds, and aqueducts. It was said they always finished their endeavors in one long night of furious toil—if for any reason they were interrupted or delayed, they aborted the project and abandoned the site forever. They labored only in darkness, and scattered at dawn.
• Even more astonishing to Cook was the intricacy of their tapa cloth, made from thin sheaths of mulberry tree bark. The women patiently beat the bark into a finely textured material and dyed it in dazzling colors derived from charcoal, ocher, and plant pigments. The islanders used bamboo stamps to impress the cloth with elaborate designs.
• Cook’s journals and those of others on the expedition noted a martial tension, a certain uneasiness hanging in the air. Lovely as this place seemed, it was not a peaceable kingdom—as in the Society Islands, the tranquil cadence of life was punctuated by periodic spasms of warfare.
• In their journals, Cook’s and Clerke’s men frequently mention the women’s subtlety of technique. (Conversely, there are no stories passed down through Hawaiian oral history that speak of British sexual prowess.)
• Benjamin Franklin would later make a point of lobbying among his colleagues for Captain Cook and the Resolution to be granted special immunity not afforded to other British ships. Should American vessels encounter Cook anywhere on the high seas, they were to give him leeway and clemency.
• Given how little was known about the region, it made perfect sense that Jonathan Swift, in his 1726 satirical tale Gulliver’s Travels, decided to place his mythic fantasyland, Brobdingnag, in the Pacific Northwest. He said it was a realm of giant people and mammoth insects
• Drake had the cheekiness to christen all of this area “Nova Albion”—Albion was a quaint Roman name for Britain. In other words, he had proclaimed the uncharted area north of Spanish California to be “New England” some fifty years before the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock.
• if it had been daytime and the visibility crisp and clear, he probably would have been lured into the bewildering labyrinth of Puget Sound and its adjoining Strait of Georgia, with their many hundreds of coves and interconnected fingers. As with the Columbia River, it would have been another fantastic accolade of discovery for the master navigator but one that might have resulted in a months-long goose chase. It could have meant yet another year before he reached Alaska.
• * As the canoes made a slow, deliberate circuit around the ships, this dignitary stood in his vessel, stretched out his arms, and shook rattles made of clamshells and deer hooves. He began to sing an incantation, plaintive and ethereal. The Natives kept the beat of his serenade by tapping their paddles on the sides of the canoes.
  The song was so charming and sincere that Cook’s sailors decided they had to reply. Presently, two musicians broke out their French horns and blew a slow, soft tune. As the music resounded over the cove, the Mowachaht stayed silent in their canoes, seemingly dumbstruck. After the hornsmen breathed their last notes, the Mowachaht answered with another song, just as beautiful as the first. In this way, the two cultures put each other to sleep.
• as the ships’ flaws and wounds were tallied, Cook realized he would have to stay put for weeks, maybe a month, to complete the necessary work. <> Luckily, he had a forest at his fingertips, some of the finest timber on earth: healthy Sitka spruce and Douglas fir, straight as arrows and mostly devoid of knots, burls, or other imperfections.
• Nootka in the early 1900s and captured haunting sepia images of these formidable vessels. The canoes were works of art, a nearly perfect union of utility and aesthetics. Master builders had painstakingly hollowed them out from the hulks of single trees, then artisans had carved the gunwales in elaborate animal designs and filigreed the bows and sterns with mosaics of shell and human teeth. Some of the vessels were large enough to accommodate fifty paddlers.
• The women went along with the ritual scrubbings, but it seemed strange to them, Samwell thought, for “in order to render themselves agreeable to us, they had taken particular pains to daub their hair and faces well with red ochre, which to their great astonishment we took as much pains to wash off. Such are the different ideas formed by different nations of beauty and cleanliness.”
• he likened their demanding nature to the revolutionaries in Boston. According to Ledyard, one of the Mowachaht got so disgusted while negotiating with Cook that he grabbed the captain by the arm and thrust him aside, “pointing the way for him to go about his business.” Cook was astonished, recounted Ledyard, “and turning to his people with a smile mixed with admiration, exclaimed, ‘This is an American indeed!’ ”
• * Of the many ripple effects emanating from Cook’s visit here, perhaps the most consequential had to do with a single vulnerable creature: Enhydra lutris, otherwise known as the sea otter. These marine mammals, affectionate and mischievously cute, flourished here, feasting as they did on the huge populations of urchins and shellfish found throughout this extensive waterway. Sea otters appeared to lead a charmed existence, most of it spent cavorting on their backs.
  But the trait that made them so beautiful, their thick, glossy coat, was also their curse, for in certain parts of the world—Asia, especially—the pelts were considered “soft gold.” Affluent Chinese men coveted sea otter cloaks as a status symbol and would pay astronomical sums for them. The lustrous fur was soft but also resilient, and it could be brushed in any direction, a result of its incomparably high fiber count—sea otters produce upwards of six hundred thousand hairs per square inch, twice the density of the fur seal.
  During those heady days of the Manchu Dynasty, the market for pelts was becoming frenzied, akin to the tulip mania that gripped Holland in the 1630s. The potential profits staggered the imagination. Up until that time, most of the sea otter pelts that found their way into Chinese ports came from the Russian Far East and from the first, tentative Russian forays into Alaska. But stories from Cook’s visit here would lure crass armies of European and American fur hunters to Nootka and nearby locales, setting in motion a brutal industry
• * Cook the master mariner, who in 1770, on his first voyage around the world, had crashed into an underwater projection of the Great Barrier Reef. The collision caused what was surely a mortal gash; his Endeavour would have sunk but for some fast thinking on his part. He ordered the crew to hurl cannons, casks, and stone ballast overboard so he could float the ship and employed a spare sail to essentially wrap the hull’s wound—a technique known as “fothering.” Then he limped the Endeavour into a river mouth on the Australian coast to repair her injuries.
• Samwell had repeatedly noted the same qualities in Cook. He was, said Samwell, “cool and intrepid among dangers, patient and firm under difficulties and distress, fertile in expedients, and…original in all his designs.” Cook’s competence in dire situations instilled in his crew the sort of awe that can come only from the recognition that, on seas like these, one man literally holds the company’s fate in his hands.
• He could not allow himself to be enticed by every opening that presented itself, yet there always lingered the nagging possibility that he could miss something significant. It was an expedition that required perpetual vigilance cut with perpetual skepticism.
• COOK’S TWO NORTHERING ships fell in along a coast that was staggering in its beauty. The sawtooth peaks, the deep bays, the glaciers of translucent blue crunching down from the glittering heights—it was a landscape made for giants, a landscape on a scale Cook had never seen before. The ice-cold waters teemed with mighty runs of fish, the skies overhead were a chaos of birdlife, and the men frequently saw enormous whales spouting and sometimes breaching the surface.
• * Bering’s second odyssey known as the Great Northern Expedition, had happened nearly forty years earlier. Before his voyage began, he and a huge army of grunts performed an overland journey of nearly nine thousand miles, hauling mountains of material by packhorse and sledge, from St. Petersburg to the shores of the Kamchatka Peninsula, where they built their ships from scratch.
• Still named Mount St. Elias today, the peak is notable for its extreme vertical relief; it’s the second-tallest mountain in the United States, after Alaska’s Denali, and one of the tallest coastal mountains in the world. This lordly Olympus was bigger than any mountain Cook had ever seen—it was so high and broad-shouldered that it appeared to abide within its own weather system.
• To guard against the nearly constant drizzle, the Chugach wore an ingeniously designed covering made from the intestinal membranes of marine mammals stitched together with sinews. These diaphanous gut parkas, called kamleikas, were completely waterproof and featured hoods that could be drawn up around the face and neck. Midshipman Trevenen thought the Native jackets vastly superior to the smelly, cumbersome rain gear the sailors had been issued—clammy garments made of canvas duck cloth coated with linseed oil and paint.
• The tidal edge arrived in the form of a stout, frothy wave that in some places crested to more than six feet in height and, depending on conditions, might race along at speeds of more than twenty miles per hour. (Today, a subculture of surfers has figured out how to catch the wave and ride it in journeys that can last for many miles.) <> Cook could see that the hydrology of this place was exceedingly mercurial and dynamic. In fact, the inlet experiences one of the most powerful bore tides in the world and has one of North America’s most drastic tidal differentials, with a range of nearly thirty feet between ebb and flood—a tidal flux almost as pronounced as that of Nova Scotia’s famous Bay of Fundy.
• But the fogs lifted at a propitious moment, and on July 1, at a place known as Unalga Island, he saw a way through. <> Cook’s instincts must have been sharp that day. He easily could have missed it—or, upon seeing it, he easily could have mistaken it for yet another cul-de-sac. If he had, his mission might have been over for the season, for the Aleutian chain extends toward the southwest in a great thousand-mile scimitar of more than sixty windswept islands, stretching toward Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.
• the general idea of Alaska, its outline, was coming into focus. For the first time in history, on charts that would emerge from this hasty summer survey, Alaska would assume the shape and proportions we recognize today. <> Little by little, Cook was destroying the cartoonish maps of the Russians and replacing them with a respectable first draft of geographic reality.
• Having reached mainland Alaska’s western extremity and marked its coordinates with precision, he had accomplished something even more substantial, giving cartographers a measurement that would inform and refine all future maps and atlases of the world: He had determined, down to the minute, the width of North America.
• Under certain conditions in the high latitudes, sunlight could reflect off a large ice pack, illuminating the undersides of distant clouds. The phenomenon was known as iceblink. It was an unmistakable sign of ice ahead, a kind of early warning system that Inuit paddlers had long used to anticipate trouble while navigating near the floes.
• Cook thought long and hard about the mechanics of ice formation. He was beginning to question the doctrine that sea ice couldn’t freeze. An ice pack of this breadth, height, and solidity could not be explained solely as having been exhaled from a few frozen rivers.
• A man who is deified cannot live longer, and must not live longer, for his own and for other people’s sake. —GOETHE, ON LEARNING OF THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN COOK
• His intention was to cruise along Hawai‘i’s shores in the same on-again, off-again fashion, taking a clockwise direction around the island. He would chart its coastline, regularly replenishing his ships with fresh food—while keeping the women at bay.
• With seas so rough, Cook’s men were amazed at how effortlessly the Hawaiians swam about the ships, far from shore, seemingly without fear.
• Koa led Cook up the ladder of the tower. This was the place, closer to heaven, where the priests traditionally communicated with the gods. Standing up there, looking so awkward, Cook seemed both a dignitary and a captive—the reluctant protagonist in a ritual he did not understand. He didn’t know whether he had been brought up to this platform to be worshipped or sacrificed, or if this was just part of an unusually extravagant greeting. But he acquiesced, with a patient stoicism, and not a little curiosity.
• The locals still viewed Cook as Lono—at least they continued to call him that and to prostrate themselves before him every time he ventured ashore
• * The Hawaiians, excellent swimmers all, were constantly diving beneath the two ships and, with a small tool, prying out the nails from their hulls. “These people are so eager after our iron,” worried Samwell, “that they pick the sheathing nails out of the ship’s bottom. And our men pull as many as they can on the inside to give to the girls, so that between them both, was there not a strict eye kept over them, we should have the ships pulled to pieces at this place.”
• The cohabitation is between the chiefs and the most beautiful males they can procure about seventeen years old,” Ledyard wrote. “These youths follow [the chiefs] wherever they go and are as narrowly looked after as the women. They are extremely fond of them.”
• * Since the Resolution and the Discovery had anchored again here in Kealakekua Bay, four days earlier, the Natives had treated the Englishmen very differently. They were surly, suspicious, mean-spirited. The atmosphere had changed. The emotional valences of the place had flipped, as though someone had thrown an electrical switch. The people couldn’t understand why Lono had returned so soon. He was out of sync; it wasn’t his season anymore. Not only that—the real Lono wouldn’t have a broken ship, would he?
• But once the king was safely on the ship, Cook would inform him that he was under arrest. Kalani‘ōpu‘u would not be released until the stolen cutter was returned. <> In other words, Cook had decided to abduct the king of Hawai‘i for ransom.
• (Oddly, Cook’s officers, eager to blame a familiar nemesis, would later observe that the French had a hand in this violence, too—for it was remembered that the ship’s blacksmiths had fashioned the pahoas from Bougainville’s melted-down anchor. Other sources have it that the blade that did the most damage to Cook was a locally made dagger constructed from the bill of a swordfish.)
• The silence gave way to bitter recrimination. The men wanted to flog Williamson, put him in irons, have him court-martialed; others wanted to kill him. Williamson was already the most hated man on the voyage—his hot temper, fanatical ideas, and irritating personality had gotten him into trouble many times over the past three years. But what had happened this morning was beyond contempt. He had, said Zimmermann, “remained a mere spectator” to the slaughter of his countrymen.
• IN SOME PERVERSE way, Bligh may have been right: The Hawaiians, having seen the full homicidal power of musketry, cannon fire, and steel bayonets, sued for peace.
• The men were participants in what was little more than a stillborn, pro forma mission: returning to a place they dreaded, to search again for a passage that few believed existed, to honor the wishes of a deceased captain, while knowing the search would certainly kill the moribund captain who had replaced him. In what seemed an ill omen, Cook’s trusty K1 chronometer suddenly stopped working.
• John Ledyard was promptly sent to Canada to fight for the British in the waning actions of the American Revolution. He deserted, returned to his native New England, and in 1783 published an unauthorized account of his travels with Cook that became the first written work protected by copyright in the United States.