The most important of this last group was Joseph Banks, a member of the Royal Society and an immensely wealthy young man who, instead of devoting his time, as was the custom those days, to the better-class clubs in London, had elected to become a natural scientist and was already an extremely gifted and enthusiastic botanist. There was no question but that Banks had bought his way aboard the Endeavour – he was reported to have paid £10,000 – a fortune in those days – for the privilege, but Banks wasn’t along just for the fun of it. His dedication to his chosen way of life was complete as he later showed when he became President of the Royal Society, a post he held for almost half a century, during which time he was the undisputed ruler of the scientific world in Britain.

  Along with him Banks brought a Dr Carl Solander, a Swede and a famous botanist; Alexander Buchan, a landscape artist, and Sydney Parkinson, an artist who was to make pictorial recordings of all the fauna they caught; Sporing, who was loosely defined as a scientific secretary; and four servants, two of whom were negroes. Independently of them came the Royal Society’s official astronomer, Charles Green, who was to share with Cook the responsibility for the actual observation of the transit. The complement was fully made up by a goat, but this was no ordinary goat – it had already circumnavigated the world with Wallis. It’s purpose – to supply the officers with fresh milk.

  But even in this, the most lavishly equipped and best-manned expedition ever to leave England, some little thing had to go wrong, and did. The man appointed to the position of senior cook turned out to have only one leg, a considerable drawback for a man at sea. Understandably annoyed, Cook demanded that he be replaced at once. He was – by a man with one hand.

  By this time both the Admiralty and the Royal Society had studied the implications of the recently returned Wallis’s report and the Society requested of the Admiralty that the Venus transit be observed from Tahiti, a request with which the Admiralty readily agreed, partly, it may be, because Tahiti was one of the few islands in the Pacific the latitude and longitude of which were known with any degree of precision but chiefly, one suspects, because the Admiralty didn’t care where Cook went in the Pacific as long as he turned south in search of the alleged southern continent as soon as the transit had been observed and recorded.

  The Endeavour sailed from Plymouth in August, 1768. The journey south to Madeira, reached on 13 September, was quite uneventful, but the moment of arrival was sadly marred: as they were dropping anchor the master’s mate became entangled with the rope, was carried down to the bottom of the harbour and found to be dead when the rope was hauled up again. It is significant and characteristic of the times that his death did not appear to have had any markedly depressing effect on the crew. That is not to say that life was cheap in those days, it was just that death was received with a stoical acceptance of a degree unknown in our Western cultures of today. Especially for seamen voyaging to the tropics, death was an almost inevitable and inseparable part of life. A ship’s captain who made a round journey to the Pacific counted himself fortunate if he came back with seventy-five percent of his original crew still alive.

  In Madeira they took aboard considerable stores of water and wine – when one takes into account the amount of rum and wine consumed by each person daily in the Navy at that time, one marvels that the Endeavour got as far as the Isle of Wight, far less round the world – fresh beef, fresh fruit, vegetables and onions. All of those Cook assumed – and rightly – to be of major importance in the fighting of scurvy, and he insisted that his crew eat them all, in addition to the regular standby of sauerkraut. The first case of Cook administering punishment on the voyage occurred when he found two of his crew breaking his dietary regulations, in this case refusing to eat fresh meat. He had them both flogged. This may seem a severe punishment for so slight an offence, but Cook, as his crews’ health records over the next few years were to show, had every justification for his strictness: no ships of that era were ever so little bedevilled by scurvy as the ones Cook commanded.

  They crossed the equator, heading for the coast of South America. There was enough and more to keep Banks and his scientific colleagues busy. By the use of nets and guns and fishing lines they were able to catch large numbers of aquatic and aerial forms of life which were all duly brought to the Great Cabin right aft on the poop: there the scientists would spend hours every day dissecting, preserving, classifying and drawing their specimens: when the time came that Endeavour was able to make landfalls the botanists brought back so many unknown species of flora that the activity in the Great Cabin would continue from the earliest light of dawn till dusk fell.

  As the Endeavour sailed down the South American coast, Cook decided to call in at the then Portuguese settlement of Rio de Janeiro for fresh water and supplies of fresh food – it would be their last opportunity to stock up for many thousands of miles. ‘From the reception former ships have met with here,’ Cook wrote, ‘I doubt not but that we should be well received.’

  His confidence was sadly misplaced. He sent his First Lieutenant ashore in the pinnace and as soon as Hicks set foot on land he was promptly arrested. An armed guard put out from the shore and officers came aboard and questioned Cook very closely on the reason for his visit there. It became quickly very clear that neither his interrogators nor their Viceroy ashore believed for one moment that the Endeavour was a Royal Naval vessel. One finds it difficult to blame them for it would be impossible to conceive of anything less like a man-o’-war than that hulking North Sea coal-boat. They had to be buccaneers or smugglers or illicit traders or just plain spies. They regarded Cook’s King’s Commission as a forgery and were not at all amused by Cook’s explanation about the observation of the transit of Venus owing to the fact that they knew there was no such thing.

  Eventually Cook managed to get Hicks released and received permission to bring water and fresh stores aboard, an activity that was carried out in an atmosphere that ranged between armed neutrality and watchful hostility. No member of the crew, except Cook himself, was allowed ashore, although Banks and his two servants managed to make illicit visits there and collect several hundred botanical specimens.

  The unfriendly reception received in Rio coupled with the fact that adverse head winds delayed their departure meant that the intended brief visit to that port cost Captain Cook no less than twenty-four days. It is interesting to note that this normally placid – one might almost say abnormally placid – man was as capable of fury as the next man: his letters to the Admiralty reporting those events leave no room for doubt.

  They sailed on 7 December. Christmas Day was spent in an area about half way between Rio and Cape Horn and from notes made by both Cook and Banks the following day it would appear that the Endeavour’s crew did not allow the great distance that separated them from their homes and loved ones to interfere with the traditional yuletide spirit. ‘Christmas Day,’ Banks reports. ‘All good Christians, that is to say all hands, got abominably drunk so that at night there was scarce a sober man on the ship: wind, thank God, very moderate or the lord knows what would have become of us.’ Cook contented himself with merely noting: ‘Yesterday being Christmas Day the people were none of the soberest.’ As the normal daily liquid – or liquor – ration of each crew member consisted of as much small beer as he could drink and either a pint of wine or half-pint of rum or brandy one can only contemplate with awe the scenes that must have taken place aboard the Endeavour that Christmas Day in 1768.

  This was another and almost atypical aspect of Cook’s character. He could, on occasion, be a very tolerant man. He was a firm disciplinarian, but not a harsh one – even although he wasn’t above, on occasion, having a delinquent’s ears cut off for some particularly heinous offence. But when the occasion warranted it and there was no pressing danger or need for alertness, Cook was perfectly prepared to let the crew relax – in the only method they knew how – while he turned a blind eye and deaf ear to the proceedings. On one occasion indeed, they relaxed to such an extent that Cook felt constrained to put them ashore and wait patiently for two days until they were fit to resume their duties.

  To the public of his time and to generations thereafter Cook seemed a stern, remote, withdrawn man. To his officers and men he was a father-figure that they revered to just this side of idolatry. Five years later when Cook was gravely ill with a gall-bladder infection, members of the crew – of the Resolution, in this case – spoke of the atmosphere of loss and desolation that hung over the ship. When he finally did reappear on deck, pale and shaken, one diarist noted that you could see the delight in everybody’s face from the highest officer to the meanest boy aboard the ship: and it is worth observing that this was the opinion of a certain notorious marine whom Cook had regularly and repeatedly had flogged for drunkenness on duty and attempted desertions at various islands in the Pacific. Wrote the surgeon’s mate on the Resolution after Cook’s death: ‘In every situation he stood unrivalled and alone: on him all eyes were turned: he was our leading-star, which at its setting left us involved in darkness and despair.’

  As they approached Cape Horn the weather steadily deteriorated just as the temperature steadily dropped until the crew, huddled in their Fearnought jackets, were forced to take all refuge possible from the icy gales that threw the little Endeavour about as though she were a piece of drifting flotsam. Too little has been made of the sheer physical hardship that those men had to endure in ships like those in times like those. The watches were long, the work arduous. Living quarters were incredibly cramped and the staple diet of salt pork and weevily biscuits or bread beggar description. But by far the worst factor of all was the state of almost continuous near-exhaustion. Those sailing craft were seldom if ever still. They pitched and they rolled and they yawed and laboured and corkscrewed and every waking minute those cold and tired and hungry men had to brace themselves against the incessant motion of the vessel: any person who has ever spent as much as a couple of hours aboard a ship in bad weather will know how quickly the reserves of physical energy can be drained in such conditions. Sometimes the crew of the Endeavour had to put up with gales for weeks on end; sometimes they were at sea for months on end: invariably, when they arrived at the end of a voyage or the end of a leg of a voyage, they did so in a state of complete exhaustion. On one occasion, on arriving at Cape Town after a particularly appalling voyage, the crew staggered ashore – anything to get their feet on the solid earth again – then dropped down and slept by the roadside. It is little wonder that whenever they made a landfall at the end of a long voyage Captain Cook would permit his men to relax in their customary fashion and give them a few days to recover a measure of both health and strength.

  It is to be noted that the icy conditions the Endeavour was now experiencing as they approached Cape Horn occurred during the middle of January – the period of high summer in the southern hemisphere. It is further to be noted that, years later, Cook was to sail more than another unbelievable thousand miles nearer the South Pole.

  On 12 January 1769, the Endeavour was standing off the incredibly bleak desolation that is Tierra del Fuego, the island at the very south of the American continent. At Banks’ request – so that he, Banks, and his scientific colleagues could go ashore and gather botanical specimens – Cook put into an inlet that he called the Bay of Good Success. Parenthetically, he was the place-namer par excellence. He unquestionably gave more names to more places than any other person who has ever lived. Bays, inlets, rivers, promontories, capes, mountains, islands – Cook had only to clap eyes on it and it was as good as named. It does seem rather unfortunate that in doing so he saw fit to exhaust almost the entire nomenclature of the British aristocracy – Cook never mentioned his political leanings and he certainly didn’t have to either – the Lords of the Admiralty and divers influential patrons of his own, but, then, one supposes he had to get his names from somewhere. With very few exceptions, as, for instance, when a few Pacific islands reverted to their original native names, nearly all the names Cook gave have remained. It is tragically ironic that the name he gave to one of his most important discoveries, a group of islands in the North Pacific, did not remain but reverted to the original. Cook called them the Sandwich Isles, after his friend and patron Lord Sandwich. They are now known by their original name of Hawaii: it was on the beaches of Hawaii that Cook was to meet his death.

  Banks and his party went ashore and returned before evening in a high state of excitement, bearing with them scores of botanical specimens quite unknown in Europe. Two days later Banks led a party of a dozen people ashore, their destination some low peaks a few miles inland. However, the going was slow – they encountered an unexpected swamp – and they had not yet reached the mountains when the sky became overcast and it began to snow. Then Alexander Buchan, the landscape artist, had an epileptic fit – he was known to be an epileptic and why he was ever allowed aboard the Endeavour in the first place must remain forever a mystery. They made him comfortable and lit a fire to keep him warm. Banks and three others pressed on to the hills, had a botanical field-day, and then returned to where they had left the rest of the party. Buchan was much recovered so Banks decided to return to the ship immediately.

  Unfortunately, the snow now began to fall very heavily indeed, slowing up progress, and it was next morning before they arrived back aboard. During the course of the night both of Banks’ negro servants died, an occurrence due not so much to their inability to withstand cold as to the fact that, during Banks’ absence in the hills, they had disposed of the expedition’s rum supply.

  The Endeavour continued on her way through Le Maire Strait and round Cape Horn. There was none of the battling against mountainous seas usually associated with the rounding of this cape. The weather had improved dramatically, the sun shone, the seas were calm, so Cook, typically and knowing he had time in hand, made his way round at a very leisurely pace, sounding, surveying, charting, and taking very accurate fixes of latitude and longitude.

  The day of the rounding of Cape Horn was unquestionably a momentous event, a watershed in the history of the Pacific Ocean. It changed the course of Pacific history. Whether that change was to be for good or ill – most people would say ill and I would whole-heartedly agree with them – is not here relevant to the story of Cook’s voyages, except in so far that Cook himself often expressed the fear that where the white man went, the white man being epitomised by himself in the Pacific, degradation, despoliation and disaster would, whether soon or late, inevitably follow. What is certain is that from 24 January 1769, the Pacific was never to be the same again.

  Other people had been in those waters before Cook, of course. Drake had been and Quiros, but their passing had left no mark. The gallant and dashing Bougainville, the French sailor-adventurer who had slipped through the British blockade of the St Lawrence at the very time when Cook had been there, had visited Tahiti briefly and then gone on his way. Tasman, too, had touched upon those waters but that had been at the Western or Australian (then New Holland) end. Commodore Byron, Foul Weather Jack, had sailed clear across the Pacific without seeing a soul or a soul seeing him, so he hardly counted. And Wallis had been in Tahiti, but that was the only place where he had been.

  Now, for the first time, there moved into the Pacific a man who could find his way precisely and accurately to wherever he wanted to go, a man who, when he left a place, would always know exactly where he had been. Here was a man destined to scour the Pacific, to make enormously far-reaching sweeps on a scale undreamed of by any previous explorer, to discover more islands and leave the imprint of the white man on more peoples than all his predecessors put together. Here was the man, the cynics would say, who was going to open up the Pacific to the benefits and riches of modern Western civilization. Whole books have, in fact, been written roundly condemning Cook for the ever-lasting damage he was responsible for wreaking on the Pacific. Alas, merely because a man can write a book it doesn’t mean that he can’t be silly, and such writers are very silly indeed. If it hadn’t been Cook, it would have been someone else. Could anyone possibly be so naive as to imagine that if Cook had never lived that the Pacific would still be a trackless and undiscovered waste? It so happened that when it was ripe for the man, the hour and the place to come together, blind Destiny reached out and tapped Cook on the shoulder.

  The Endeavour sailed serenely north-westwards under fine conditions, a pleasant if slightly monotonous trip marred only by the disappearance of a young marine over the side. It was said that he had been caught stealing a piece of sealskin to make a purse and rather than face Cook had chosen to commit suicide. It does seem a highly unlikely tale.

  On 13 April 1769, eight months after leaving England, the Endeavour arrived in Tahiti. They arrived, astonishingly, without one man on the sick-list, without one case of scurvy, which after eight months at sea in those days was a feat just within the bounds of credibility. It was a splendid tribute to Cook’s insistence on adhering to dietary regulations. Sauerkraut was unquestionably the first line of defence against the disease. In the beginning – Cook himself relates this in his journal – he had the greatest difficulty in making his men eat this outlandish foreign dish but he solved this problem by having his officers eat it with such tremendous gusto and to the accompaniment of such loudly admiring remarks that curiosity led some of the crew to sample it, which they did in ever-increasing amounts and numbers until eventually Cook was compelled to ration it. One is slightly puzzled as to why he did not try some such form of psychology and guileful persuasion with the two men whom he had had flogged in Madeira for refusing to eat fresh meat: presumably some practical problems arose when it came to the question of flogging the entire crew.

  THREE

  CHARTING NEW ZEALAND

  It is customary, if not obligatory, I have observed, for the biographers of Captain Cook who have accompanied him as far as his first landfall of Tahiti to halt there awhile then sit back and rest for about twenty pages while they go on rhapsodising about the beauties and wonders of this sun-drenched tropical paradise, about the blue skies and bluer seas, about the white torrents gushing from forest-clad mountain slopes, about the nodding palms and golden sands (actually, they were black where Cook landed in Matavai Bay). It is certainly de rigeur to dwell at sentimental length on the golden people who inhabited this other Eden, the handsome men, the gorgeous girls, their simple natural form of life, their affectionate natures and, in short, the wholly Utopian nature of their existence.