Читать книгу Captain Cook - Alistair MacLean, Alistair MacLean, John Denis - Страница 7

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 lose: he kept learning until he died.

His apprenticeship over, Cook left the Walkers, spent over two years in the East Coast and Baltic trade, then was asked by the Walker brothers to return to them and become mate of their vessel the Friendship. Cook accepted. Three years later, in 1755, he was offered the command of the Friendship. Cook declined. Instead, he joined the Royal Navy as an able seaman.

This extraordinary decision does two things: it points up a fact and raises a question. The fact is that, to have been offered a command at the age of twenty-seven, Cook must have impressed the owners with his qualities as a seaman, a navigator and a leader of men, which is perhaps not surprising when one considers the quite extraordinary lengths to which he was going to develop those already marked abilities – and that of the practice of cartography – in the years to come. But what is surprising is that he passed up the command of a merchant ship for the lowest rank of a naval vessel.

As with so many of his decisions, Cook himself has offered no explanation for this one. (Cook was an intensely secretive man – in his wanderings over the world his officers frequently complained that they never knew where they were going until they got there.) It is generally assumed that it was directly connected with the frantic re-arming taking place in Britain and France in preparation for the inevitable approach of what, the following year, was to be the beginning of the bitter and bloody Seven Years’ War: active fighting was already taking place in overseas territories, especially in North America, where Britain and France had already abandoned all pretence of diplomatic negotiations as a means of settling the question of colonial supremacy: already, although it was still nominally peace-time, the British Navy had instituted a tight blockade of the French coast to prevent further supplies of men and arms from reaching the French in Canada.

Because of a Navy that had been allowed to become rundown and depleted and because of the imminence of war, British shipyards were turning out naval vessels at an unprecedented rate. Ships need crews and the young men of that day and age were markedly reluctant to volunteer for this honour, an unwillingness that is no cause for surprise when one considers the brutal conditions of life in the Royal Navy of the mid-eighteenth century. They had to be persuaded to man those empty vessels and as recruiting posters weren’t very much in vogue at that time persuasion usually took the form of forcible abduction, by heavily-armed naval press-gangs, of any able-bodied man, drunk or sober, who was so unfortunate as to cross their path. It has been suggested that Cook volunteered so as to avoid being press-ganged, but, apart from the fact that it seems totally out of character with the man, it is incredible that a merchant navy officer – and Cook could have been a captain, had he so wished – would have been press-ganged without being released, with apologies, the moment his identity was known.

Perhaps he was a romantic who could hear the far-off sound of drums and bugles. Perhaps his patriotism was of less euphoric nature, a combination of conscience and commonsense that told him it was not only his duty but also prudent to smite the French before they smote him. Perhaps – this is the most commonly suggested explanation and an uncommonly cynical one it is too – Cook figured that with so many ships being built and with the certainty of so many men being killed in the now inevitable war, promotion was bound to be rapid. Perhaps he was just tired of the eternal coal dust. Perhaps anything. We shall never know. All that we know with certainty is that he joined the Navy on 17 June 1755, and eight days later was assigned to the Eagle, a sixty-gun ship of the line lying at Portsmouth.

The Eagle in turn was assigned to the blockade of the French coast. As he was from then on to do faithfully for the rest of his life, Cook kept a day-to-day log, but it makes for rather less than dramatic and inspirational reading. He mentions such things as watch changes, conditions of the food and drink, gives us weather reports, speaks of patrols, sighting and investigating ships, hum-drum details which after two centuries can hold no interest for us because, as ever, they tell us nothing of the man himself.

Only two things of any note occurred in his first few months on the Eagle. Within a month of joining, he had become master’s mate, indication enough of the speed with which his navigational ability, seamanship and reliability had been appreciated. Then, not long afterwards, the Eagle’s captain, an easy-going gentleman who vastly preferred the sheltered calms of Portsmouth harbour to the winter gales of the English Channel, was relieved of his command and replaced by Captain (later Sir) Hugh Palliser.

Palliser, as he was to prove, was no ordinary man. A brilliant seaman and naval tactician, held in the highest regard by his superiors, he was eventually to become Governor of Newfoundland and a Lord of the Admiralty. Even so, he might have been entirely forgotten today, his tiny niche in history obliterated by Cook’s great shadow, were it not for the fact that it was Palliser who first recognised Cook as a man of genius and destiny, who proclaimed this loud and long to all in authority who would listen and who, as his years drew in, long after Cook’s place in history was assured, was still happily proclaiming his belief in Cook’s destiny. Palliser must have been a man of quite extraordinary perception.

Cook remained on the Eagle from the summer of 1755 until the autumn of 1757 – the Seven Years’ War had begun early in 1756, but the declaration of war did no more than regularise an already existing situation. Except for occasional urgent refits – the weather in the Channel and the Bay of Biscay caused far more damage to the English men-o’-war than the French did – the Eagle spent almost all of this time blockading the French coast. It was a rather hum-drum and monotonous existence enlivened only by the first – and last – sea-fight of any importance in which Cook was to engage. In late May, 1757, they engaged a large French vessel, 1500 tons and fifty guns, off Ushant – an East Indiaman by the name of Duc d’Aquitaine. The French vessel, in a running fight lasting forty minutes, was crippled and captured: but the Eagle itself was so badly damaged that it had to return to England for repairs.

For our understanding of Cook, the significance of this period lies not in the occasional skirmishes with the enemy but in the fact that it was then that Cook polished and honed the skills, those very special skills, that were to serve him so well in the years to come. True, he was still no cartographer, his years of surveying and chart-work were yet to come: but that he had fully mastered his knowledge of ships and the sea is shown clearly by the fact that in just over two years he had advanced from able seaman to master’s mate, to boatswain and finally to master, the person in charge of the actual running of the ship and the senior non-commissioned officer on board. At the same time, he pursued his studies in navigation and mathematics (in necessary conjunction with astronomy) and as he had already been fully qualified in those subjects before he had joined the Navy the standards he had now reached must have been quite exceptional.

The mastering of those subjects was, of course, an essential prerequiste for the years in the Pacific that still lay far ahead – without them he could never have gone and the Admiralty would most certainly never have chosen him. But no less essential for the future was his exposure and conditioning to naval life itself, so different from the careless and rather slipshod way of life found aboard the colliers. Here each man was a specialist, a man trained to rely upon himself and to rely upon others, a man into whose mind it was firmly and permanently inculcated that he was a vital link in a chain and that the one unforgiveable sin, under times of stress – and Cook and his men were to undergo a much greater degree of stress in the Pacific than they had ever been subjected to in the Atlantic – was to be the one who broke that chain. Much has rightly been said about the harshness of naval discipline at the time, but overmuch misplaced emphasis has been laid on the contention that only an iron discipline could produce a highly trained crew. Only bad crews, badly officered, require this brutal kind of discipline, while good crews, good officers, all highly trained, need only the discipline that comes from within: it is clear, now and later, that this was the kind of crew Cook had in mind.

On 27 October 1757, Cook joined the Pembroke, a sixty-four gun ship, as master. It was his twenty-ninth birthday. For most of the winter his new ship carried out the blockade in the Bay of Biscay. In February, 1758, they sailed for Canada.

The war was going badly for the British on the North American continent. General Braddock’s army had been savagely handled by the French and Indians and it was considered imperative and of the utmost urgency to take the pressure off the British colonial forces in what is now the eastern seaboard of the United States by launching an attack against the French in the north, the main objective being the centre of their military power, Quebec.

There is no evidence that Cook took any active part in the first part of this operation which consisted in the reduction of the powerful fortress of Louisburg which guarded the gateway to the St Lawrence. This fortress fell to General Wolfe, who was to die the following year in the taking of Quebec, after bitter fighting and a lengthy siege. But Cook had a role to play in the Quebec campaign itself, not a major one, perhaps, but one which was essential for the success of the operation.

This took place some ten months after the surrender of Louisburg: Wolfe’s army, though victorious, had been badly mauled and had to await reinforcements from England while the Navy was glad of the opportunity to refit its ships during the winter at Halifax. But by May of 1759, advance units of the British forces had penetrated up the St Lawrence to within a few miles of Quebec.

Here they encountered a major but expected difficulty. Navigation on the river at this point becomes difficult to a degree. Up to this point normal deep-water traffic follows the northern shore, then switches across river to the south to approach the basin of Quebec itself. The stretch of water where the crossing is made is known as the Traverse and as far as river navigational hazards are concerned it can have few equals in the world: it is a confusing and highly treacherous maze of rocks and shoals and shifting sandbars, a navigator’s nightmare if ever there was one. If, that is to say, the channel through the Traverse is not accurately buoyed.

On this occasion, May 1759, it wasn’t. It had been, but the French, understandably enough, had removed every last buoy. It fell to the lot of Cook and the masters of one or two other vessels to re-chart and re-buoy the passage, a difficult and arduous task lasting several weeks, a task that was made no easier by the fact that Cook and the others worked mostly under the range of French guns, that they had to work frequently at night and that the French had the infuriating habit of coming out from shore in canoes during the hours of darkness and cutting away buoys which had to be replaced the next day – after, that is, fresh soundings had been taken.

But by June all was ready and in that month the entire British armada of over two hundred ships safely made the passage of the Traverse without a single casualty. There is little question that the bulk of the credit belonged to Cook: in official despatches he was now being referred to as ‘Master Surveyor’. As a mark of the esteem in which he was already held it may be mentioned that Wolfe consulted him about the placement of several ships before Quebec – a general seeking the advice of a man who wasn’t even an officer. But Wolfe, doubtless, recognised an expert when he saw one.

After the siege and capture of Quebec – Cook took no physical part in any of this – most of the naval vessels were sent home for a refit, including the Pembroke, but Cook had to wait another three years before he saw England again for he was transferred to the Northumberland, flagship of the commander-in-chief, Lord Colville – a certain indication that he was now regarded as the ablest master in the fleet.

For the next three years, at the personal request of Admiral Colville, Cook continued to chart, firstly, the St Lawrence and then the coast of Newfoundland. That he was eminently successful in the execution of his duties is clear from three things. In January 1761, Lord Colville directed the storekeeper ‘to pay the master of the Northumberland fifty pounds in consideration of his indefatigable industry in making himself master of the pilotage of the River Saint Lawrence’. The following year Admiral Colville sent Cook’s charts home to the Admiralty urging that they should publish them and adding: ‘From my experience of Mr Cook’s genius and capacity I think him well qualified for the work he has performed and for greater undertakings of the same kind’ – a prophetic opinion if ever there was one. Finally, Cook’s charts appeared in the North American Pilot in 1775 and were to remain the standard works of navigational reference for those waters for over a century.

Cook returned home in November 1762. In December he married a certain Elizabeth Batts. This has been the cause of much eyebrow-raising among historians over the years for whatever else Cook may have been, dashing and impetuous he was not and the thought of this steady, calm and careful man engaging in a whirlwind courtship does not find easy acceptance. On the other hand, to say that Cook wasn’t much given to talking about himself is to put the matter in a very restrained fashion indeed and for all we know to the contrary he may have known her from the time she could walk. In any event, speculation is pointless for Mrs Cook, regrettably, forms no part of the story of Captain Cook: regrettably, for to have known more about her would have given us a deeper inferential insight into Cook’s character. But we know nothing about her, just as we know nothing about any of their children. They remain shadowy and insubstantial figures, people without faces on the far periphery of Captain Cook’s life. They are only names.

The next five years of Cook’s life were comparatively uneventful, devoted in the main to endless studies and the steady increase of his already vast store of knowledge and experience. In the spring of 1763 he returned to Canada where he spent the summer surveying and charting the east coast: in the winter he returned to England where he spent the next few months working up his charts for publication. This pattern was repeated for the next four years during which he was given the command of his own schooner to help him in his work – a command, be it noted, not a commission.

It is a quite staggering reflection that when Cook left Canada for the last time in 1767, he was still a non-commissioned officer. It is also a staggering reflection on the Lords of the Admiralty of the time that, because of their innate snobbish conviction that officers and gentlemen are born and not made, Cook did not quite qualify for a commission. He had been in the despised Merchant Service, he had sailed before the mast in the Navy, he was poor and his origins were obscure. There could have been little doubt left in the Admiralty by that time that in Cook they had the greatest seaman, navigator and cartographer of the generation. But a commission? Hardly. Hardly, that was, until they realised that to send a naval vessel to circumnavigate the globe, in the greatest exploratory voyage ever undertaken, under the command of a non-commissioned officer wouldn’t be quite the thing to do. For one thing, it would redound most dreadfully upon the alleged competence of those who did hold commissions and, for another, it would not look good in the history books. So, belatedly, they made him a lieutenant.