his from the tropical Pacific to the bitter and awesome wastes of both the Arctic and the Antarctic in the most stupendous voyages of exploration in the history of mankind. But whether he liked flowers or dandled his children on his knee or gazed enraptured at the sun going down in the ocean beyond Hawaii or Tahiti we shall never know. We know he was the greatest navigator of his age or any age: it would be interesting to know if he ever got lost in the back streets of his home borough of Stepney.
To have maintained so inviolate a privacy is indeed a feat, but to have done so in spite of the fact that he left us over one million words minutely recording his day to day activities over many years amounts to an accomplishment so staggering as to defy rational comprehension. But, in his journals and logs, this is what Cook did indeed do. No famous figure of modern times has ever documented his life so thoroughly and painstakingly. But this massive documentation is detached, impersonal; Cook does not appear: it was about what he did, not what he was. Even in his private correspondence – what little of it has survived – this same iron reticence manifests itself. Only twice does he mention his wife and then only in an incidental fashion: of his two children who died in infancy or his daughter who died at the age of four, there is no authenticated instance of Cook ever having mentioned them.
His contemporaries wrote of him of course, from Walpole to Dr Johnson they all had their say, and when all their writing is over and done with we learn no more about Cook than we learn from Cook himself. Maybe they did not know him as they would have liked to know him: maybe he was reserved to the point of being unapproachable. It may even have been that they were aware that they were dealing with an already living legend who was destined for immortality. If this were the case then their task was impossible: the myth envelops the man, so cocooning its creator in the folds of his fame that it becomes virtually certain that not even the keenest eye can penetrate to the heart of the legend, a legend that will accept only the most grandiose rhetoric, the most broad and sweeping generalisations: one does not customarily discuss an immortal’s taste in cravats or whether he stopped to smell the lilac on an evening late in May.
Biographies of Cook there have been, of course, many of them. But none of them is the good and true and definitive biography of a man about whom we should like to know so much. It is very much to be doubted whether there will ever be such a biography. Most of the biographers who have tried to flesh out the skeleton of his awesome reputation have had to have recourse to varying degrees of invention or imagination while honestly trying to remain within the bounds of probability. Thus, we are told on one occasion that Mrs Cook welcomed her husband home with tearful affection after one of his marathon voyages, affection because he had been so long away, tearful because one of their children had died in his absence. Now, this is very likely: but there is nothing on record to justify such an assertion. She may, for all we know, have hit him over the head with a two-by-four. This, admittedly, is extremely unlikely. The point is that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is not impossible. Extrapolation and uninspired guesses are no substitute for historical accuracy.
It has been said that the definitive biography is only a matter of time. I don’t believe it. It has been said that if Cook’s million words are subjected to the combined scrutinies of a statistician, an analyst and psychiatrist the truth must out. That something would finally emerge one does not doubt but as the liability of statisticians, analysts and psychiatrists to error is established and notorious the mind boggles at the prospect of such error trebly compounded. Requiescat in pace. It is unthinkable that an immortal should be subjected to the processes of computerised butchery.
Far from being intended to be a definitive biography, what follows is no biography at all. A true biography is a fully-rounded portrait but there are colours missing from my palette. I do not know enough about the man: the material just is not there. This is but a brief account of his early apprenticeship to the sea, his development as a navigator and cartographer, and of his three great voyages, and this is perhaps enough to let us have an inkling of the essential Captain Cook for he was a man, as he himself confessed, to whom achievement meant all. In his last letter written to Lord Sandwich from Capetown in 1776 he said: ‘My endeavour shall not be wanting to achieve the great object of this voyage’. It never was. It was not what Cook said or thought that raised him to the ranks of the immortals: it was what he did.
Let the deeds speak for the man.
James Cook, who was to become a Post-Captain in the Royal Navy and the greatest combination of seaman, explorer, navigator and cartographer that the world has known, was born in 1728 of obscure parents in an obscure village in Yorkshire. His mother was a local girl, his father a Scot, a farm labourer. There has been considerable speculation as to which parent transmitted the seeds of genius to Cook, a speculation as singularly pointless as it is totally inconclusive as we know nothing of either of them.
After a sporadic education and a few years’ work on his father’s employer’s farm, Cook left home at the age of seventeen for the tiny seaport of Staithes. This move has been cited as the first stirrings of that restless and soaring ambition that was to take Cook to the uttermost ends of the earth. It may equally well have been that he was just fed up with the farm for it seems unlikely that a boy suffused with dreams of glory would have gone to work in a grocer’s and haberdasher’s shop, which is what Cook did.
The prospect of a lifetime behind a counter clearly appealed to Cook no more than the prospect of one behind a plough for in 1746, at the age of eighteen, he left the haberdashery trade, a life to which he was never to return, and betook himself to the sea, which was to be his home, his life and his consuming passion until his death thirty-three years later.
He was apprenticed to John and Henry Walker, shipowners, of Whitby, who specialised in the colliery trade. The ships employed for this purpose were, as one might imagine, singularly unlovely, broad-beamed and bulky, much given to wallowing in a sickening fashion in any condition short of perfect, and notoriously poor and slow and difficult sailors under all conditions. But to the owners of eighteenth-century colliers aesthetics were irrelevant, pragmatism was all: such vessels were designed solely to carry large quantities of coal in bulk and for this task they were superbly equipped.
But they were possessed of other and unlikely qualities. Despite the fact that they were designed and built along the lines of a cross between a Dutch clog and a coffin they had remarkable sea-keeping qualities and could ride out the most violent of gales although, admittedly, to the vast discomfort of their unfortunate crews. Their flat-bottomed design permitted them to be hauled ashore on suitably sandy beaches for careening. And, of course, they were capable of carrying vast quantities of provisions. So perhaps it was not after all so ludicrous that it was to be those lumbering Whitby colliers and not the Navy’s dashing frigates and cruisers that were to take Cook to the furthest ends of the earth.
Cook, then, served aboard such a vessel – the Freelove, a 450-tonner – for the first two seasons of his apprenticeship, plying the coal route between Newcastle and London, before transferring to another Walker vessel, the Three Brothers, which extended the limits of his geographical knowledge and seamanship by taking him to the west coast of England, to Ireland and to Norway.
Little is known of Cook’s professional or social life during this period. Indeed, he doesn’t appear to have had any social life whatsoever for between voyages or when vessels were laid up for the winter Cook devoted himself exclusively to the pursuit not of pleasure but of learning. This is one of the few facts of his early life that can be established without difficulty, for the Walkers – with whom Cook stayed when not at sea – and their friends were moved to record their astonishment at the long hours Cook spent in improving his knowledge of navigation, astronomy and mathematics. This was a habit that Cook was never to
