Exhibitions 1
Blood, Sea and Ice: Three English Explorers (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich until 30 June)
Voyages into the unknown
Martin Vander Weyer
In Tahiti I once ordered wine from an ill- tempered waiter who did not notice that he had a live cockroach sitting on his shoul- der; when the carafe arrived it had a blob of old chewing gum attached to its bottom. For all its exoticism, the modern South Sea island was melancholy and run-down, depressed both by contact with the devel- oped world and by remoteness from it. How very different the place must have seemed to Captain Cook and William Hodges, his expedition artist, in 1776.
Hodges' oil-painting 'Tahiti Revisited' is My favourite image in the National Mar- itime Museum's exhibition of the lives of three English explorers — Cook, Francis Drake and the lesser-known Victorian Sir John Franklin. Heavy with foreboding, the picture has nubile girls bathing in a beauti- ful cove under the gaze of a pagan figure; in the background is a funeral bier. Cook himself is not in the picture; by the look of Hodges' square-jawed portrait of him near- by, he was not a man for dallying with nubile natives. No doubt he was busy sur- veying a rocky coastline or collecting botanical samples. Born the son of a farm labourer in what is now a suburb of Middlesborough, James Cook was a truly remarkable sailor and marine surveyor. Many of his Pacific charts have never been improved upon. As his friend Sir Hugh Palliser wrote, on a monu- ment erected to him in the less exotic setting of Chalfont St Giles, the great captain was not so fortunate as Americus to give his name to a continent'. It does indeed seem scant recognition that all he got was a strait and a mountain in New Zealand, and a clus- ter of islands in the middle of nowhere.
On the other hand, he did have the Unusual accolade, enjoyed more recently but less deservedly by the Duke of Edin- burgh, of being hailed as a Polynesian god. This happened to him in Hawaii (Palliser spells it, rather aptly, `Owhyhee') 217 years ago this week. But the glory was brief; returning ashore on St Valentine's Day to arrest a chieftain whose warriors had pinched one of his boats, Cook was over- whelmed and hacked to death.
If Cook was a wholly admirable figure, Drake was quite clearly a chateau-bottled rogue — the 'Blood' of the exhibition's title, the 'master-thief of the unknown world' according to the Spaniards, and 'my pirate' to Queen Elizabeth — who liked his Devon accent as well, we may surmise, as the cut of his cod-piece. I had forgotten, if I ever learned it as a schoolboy, that his chief part in the defeat of the Armada was to disobey Admiral Howard's orders. Instead of taking up his position at the head of the English fleet, he chose to pursue the crippled Rosario far astern of the main action — and then, in the history books, he took most of the credit for victory.
Drake, one feels, would have torpedoed the Belgrano whichever way it was sailing, especially if there was gold on board, and could well have become deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. He was a swag- gering hero, whose exploits built Britain's reputation as a sea-going power even if his post-Armada adventures to Portugal and the Caribbean ended in fiasco. One won- ders whether his famous drum — rather dimly displayed here, but supposed to emit a drumbeat whenever England is in danger of invasion from the sea — still rumbles when Spanish trawlers enter Cornish fish- ing grounds.
And then there was Sir John Franklin, whose career as an explorer was dedicated to the search for the North West Passage. Having served as midshipman under Nel- son at Copenhagen and Trafalgar. Franklin went on to lead three expeditions into the Canadian Arctic regions, serving between times as a notably benevolent governor of Tasmania. He and his wife were models of Victorian virtue, their stout qualities nicely captured by a pair of Staffordshire earthen- ware figurines of 1850. Somehow those decorative figures made me think of a coy Lady Franklin being chased down a coun- try house corridor by Harry Flashman, whilst poor old Sir John repeatedly chal- lenged the icy wastes.
That challenge got the better of him in the end. He was 59 when he set off on his last expedition, in Erebus and Terror. The two vessels were frozen into the ice from 12 September 1846 (a scene vividly painted by Francois Musin) until they were aban- doned on 22 April 1848. By then Franklin was already dead. All 129 of his men ulti- mately perished, and the disaster was never fully explained; experts have wondered whether lead poisoning from tinned provi- sions was a contributing factor. No trace was ever found of Franklin himself, but one of 40 search parties sent out by the Admi- ralty did at last find the elusive North West Passage.
The Franklin story is told with tattered gloves, moccasins, a pipe found in the ice still containing tobacco, even a morsel of meat extracted in good condition from its tin in 1926. But still, to me, it is the paint- ings — some no doubt conjured up by their artists in comfortable studios — which are most vivid.
This was the science fiction of an earlier age: ill-equipped voyagers in alien land- scapes, amid petroglyphs, ice-floes, war Chart illustrating Drake's West Indian voyage by Baptista Boazio, 1589 canoes and dastardly Spaniards. This kind of history is so much more stimulating than dates and kings or studies of social trends. But to carp, the National Maritime Museum has made an unfashionably plain and studious display of it, offering little help to the idle imagination. I am not sure whether the modern schoolboy — attuned as I suppose him to be to 'virtual reality', inter-active video and a ceaseless barrage of noise — is equipped for the effort required. I can only hope so; it is a tremendously rewarding story.
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