As Far As Man Could Go

THE VOYAGES OF CAPTAIN COOK (384 pp.)--Edlfed by Christopher Lloyd--Chanticleer Press ($2).

Parts of Mr. Orton's ears were missing. Captain James Cook of H.M.S. Endeavour was very much upset; his ship's clerk had been grossly abused. The poor fellow had gone to bed drunk in the ordinary way, and then someone had crept into his cabin and cropped his ears. There had been no witnesses, but on circumstantial evidence Captain Cook suspended a midshipman from duty for three weeks.

The midshipman's punishment would have been much harsher if Cook had found more proof. Nonetheless, there were extenuating circumstances. The Endeavour was about 98 ft. long, and the 90 or so men aboard her had been away from home port for almost two years. It was not surprising that they sometimes got on each other's nerves. More noteworthy was the fact that, on each of his three long voyages of Pacific exploration, able, sharp-eyed Captain Cook ran the efficient, generally happy ship that he did.*

Bemusing News. Officially, the Cook expedition which left England in 1768 was purely scientific; the party had been sent into the Pacific to observe the transit of the planet Venus, thus collect data to help astronomers calculate the distance between the earth and the sun. But in fact, the Endeavour's cruise was a matter of empire. The French had just lost Canada and, with an urge to make up for it somehow, were searching for the great new continent that was still believed to lie in the South Pacific between New Zealand and South America. If there was such a continent, the British Admiralty wanted to find it first. So Captain Cook searched the South Pacific looking for the continent that wasn't there.

Yet Cook and his men did turn up their share of marvels. Europeans were amazed when they read such things as Cook's anthropological notes on Tahiti: "One amusement or custom ... I must mention, though I confess I do not expect to be believed . . . More than one half of the better sort of the inhabitants have entered into a resolution of enjoying free liberty in love . . . The men will very readily offer the young women to strangers, even their own daughters, and think it very strange if you refuse them ..." The news of islands where sex and sin seemed to have nothing to do with each other was to have a bemusing effect on poets, artists, sailors and everyday citizens for generations afterward.

On his second voyage, in 1772, Cook had two ships, the Resolution and the Adventure, and he was equipped with four of the newly invented chronometers for careful charting of the South Pacific. His crisscross track of exploration covered a distance nearly equal to a journey three times around the equator. When he reached the end of his voyage in 1775, the main outlines of the map of Oceania and Antarctica had been fixed with unprecedented accuracy.

Death on the Beach. His results made him an international figure. Although the American Revolution had begun when Cook sailed in 1776 on his third voyage, Benjamin Franklin passed the word to U.S. privateers to let the Englishman alone. The French Minister of Marine issued similar orders.

But Cook's voyage took him far from the sea lanes of the Revolutionary War. His instructions were to explore the Canadian and Alaskan coasts, looking for the Pacific end of a northwest passage. After pushing through the Bering Strait, charting as he went, Cook turned south to winter in Hawaii. He got no farther. There were disputes with the natives about pilfering. When Cook went ashore with an inadequate escort, his party was rushed and he was clubbed and stabbed to death on the beach.

James Cook, self-educated Yorkshireman, had kept up his journals to the end. Editor Lloyd, culling the choicest parts of one of the best travel books ever written, includes a passage from a letter in which the great captain tried to explain himself. Wrote Cook: "I ... had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go."

*Not every officer who sailed with Cook was able to learn this knack. Captain Bligh, whose brutality led to the Bounty mutiny some years later, was Cook's sailing master on the third expedition.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.