Cook's death
Jan Morris
The Murder of Captain James Cook Richard Hough (Macmillan £7.95) One by one the sea lays its stories upon the desk of Mr Hough the Battleship Man, and one by one he turns them into the most enjoyable maritime history being written today. Dreadnought and Potemkin, Victoria and Cam perdown, Fisher and Bligh and poor Admiral Rozhestvensky — ships and commanders alike he summons deftly back to life, generally sympathetically, always with elegance.
It is Captain Cook's turn to get the treatment now, and he is a perfect subject for it. Mr Hough's heroes are seldom straightforward. He prefers them complex or disturbing. If at first thought James Cook might not seem to qualify, this account of his last voyage soon demonstrates otherwise, and for most of its readers the Whitby navigator, massive and magnanimous on his collier quarterdeck, will never seem quite the same man again.
Original research is not generally Mr Hough's business. He is an interpreter, an explicator, and what he does so well is to show us familiar pictures under new lights. We all know, more or less, the story of Cook's death. We all have in our mind's eye that sorry cameo of scuffle on the Kaawaloa foreshore, the wild Hawaiians brandishing their clubs, the Royal Marines re-loading their muskets, while the great captain raises his hand in a last unavailing gesture of — well, of what? Remonstration, defiance, forgiveness, benediction?
Much of the old tale Mr Hough simply tells again, from the journals of those who were there : how Cook was accepted by the Hawaiians as an incarnation of their peripatetic god Orono, how• he overstayed his divine welcome and was murdered by disillusioned islanders on his return visit to Kealakekua Bay. This is the standard version, the 'Deeds That Made The Empire' account. But Mr Hough explores the causes of the tragedy from what he considers very different origins — from Cook's appointment, in fact, to command his third voyage of Pacific exploration, at the Admiralty in 1776.
I shied rather at the beginning, for its opening scene, with peeps into the mind of the Admiralty watchman on duty ( 'Perhaps he thought, as their eyes met comes perilously close to the American school of reconstructive biography. But the jejeunity does not last, the preliminaries are soon accomplished, and by Chapter Two we are away at sea at Mr Hough's habitual easy pace, on one of the most astonishing of all recorded journeys.
For Cook's last voyage (you will doubtless remember ) was to take him not only round the Cape of Good Hope to New Zealand, and then across the Pacific to the discovery of Hawaii, but also to the edge of the ice in the distant north, in a fruitless attempt to find the North-West Passage. It lasted three years, and it was studded with episodes and encounters delightful, gruesome, bizarre, terrifying, funny and pathetic.
Manned by a wonderfully varied company of seamen and savants, Cook's two ships retraced many of his previous routes through Polynesia. They returned to the Society Islands the young Tahitan chieftain Omai, who had sailed to London with him in 1775, they renewed many island associations, carnal and commercial, they made their first contact with the charming Indians of the Pacific North-West and the sociable Russian traders of the Aleutians ( 'all furs and beard', as Mr Hough describes their Governor, Erasim Gregorioff Sin Ismyloff ).
It is an amazing story in itself, but Mr Hough never forgets that his real subject is its denouement — the death of Captain cook on his second visit to the Sandwich Islands. His purpose is to show that the skirmish at Kaawaloa was not mere historical chance, but was the almost preordained result of developments in the great captain's character in the course of the adventure. Cook began it tired — vain too, Mr Hough says — and he conducted it, all in all, oddly.
For instance he was, it seems, unaccountably sluggish for a man of such legendary resolution. He made obvious navigational mistakes. The most beloved and sensitive of commanders, he was repeatedly harsh towards his men. The most meticulously curious of navigators, he did not even bother to visit the uncharted Fiji Islands, known to be only a day or two off his course.
And most important of all, though in the past he was admired for his invariable humanity towards the native peoples, this time he was often cruel, hasty and intolerant. He flogged them mercilessly for trivial thefts, or cut their ears off. He burnt and bombarded innocent settlements. He stormed ashore that fatal day in Hawaii in a vicious temper, having plunged the whole community into a virtual state of war over the theft of a single boat. No wonder, one tends to feel by page 220, the Hawaiians killed him : not at all the sentiments aroused in the old days by 'Tales of the Empire-Builders'.
But Mr Hough does it all compassionately. The book (handsomely decorated by Clare Melinsky, if marred by an unseamanlike profusion of misprints) is pure pleasure to read, and reaches a conclusion dramatic enough even for Mr Hough's record of collisions at sea, mutinies and annihilated battlefleets : namely that Captain Cook, by the end of his third voyage, was pathologically disturbed — that tumours, infections or tropical disease had actually damaged his brain, and warped his conduct.
In short, Mr Hough offers a new verdict on the murder of Captain James Cook : in a manner of speaking, selfinflicted, while the balance of the mind was disturbed. family, neighbourhood, conformity of work and conformity of leisure: a carter among carters, a laundress among laundresses and laundrymen .. . the workshop and the wine-shop recreated and repeopled on the other side of death, leaving the observer with the troubled feeling: 'if only so much concern could have been displayed earlier ... The choice of this archive, for these years, implies, and turns out to sustain, an ironic comment on the kind of history on which most ink has been spilt: the history of great events — the great, and supremely irrelevant, event here being the Great Revolution. It is not that that kind of history is absent from the box; it is that its reflections there are invariably absurd. Napoleon is in the box, because two of the dead were accidental victims of a bomb meant to kill him. The vocabulary of the Revolution is in the box, frozen into bureaucratic jargon, and sounding, in every sense, cracked: an unsuccessful attempt to identify the body of a cabman leads us for a moment to the metaphysical presence of 'Fontaine, commissaire de police de la Division de The revolutionary wars are in the box, in the form of buttons, and gaudy scraps. 'Brass or pewter buttons bearing the engraved words Republique Francaise . . furnish about the only reminder to the almost entirely apolitical population of the Basse-Geole that a Republic of sorts, and still nominally French (extensively so) was still officially in existence, not only in 1797, but indeed in 1801'.
In a splendidly characteristic passage, Professor Cobb writes: part of the historical and social imagination of anyone who reads it with attention. In mY own mind it joins with Georg Buechner's Danton's Death, which it corroborates in spirit. I have stressed the theme of implicit or explicit comment on the Revolution, because it is a principal theme of Death in Paris, and because it is the theme that most lends itself to explication in a review. But that theme by no means exhausts the wealth of the book, most of which is provided by the intelligence of the author's sympathy with the inhabitants of the box, whose lives he conjures up before us.
Failure is much commoner than success, at any period, though it has seldom been accorded even a small corner in the work of historians; it is also more endearing, and much more human. No death can ever be dismissed as banal, even if it cannot aspire to the proud luxury of a tombstone — a bold claim on the future — and death at one's own hand, a pitiable appeal for attention, an appeal quite unheard, cries out in anguish for ever.
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