Reading the Blues
Tony Horwitz' Blue Latitudes is well worth cracking. This is highly entertaining, almost painfully well-researched travel writing, improvised around James Cook's three amazing exploratory voyages a while back (1768-80). I couldn't resist it when I came upon it at Powell's, that Portland, OR book mecca. Attractions for me (besides gorgeous blue cover and Bryson squib!) were resonances with two ongoing personal reading interests: Australia and environs as a result of son's study there a few years back and cousins in Adelaide and biology/exploration in the Wallace/Darwin/island biogeography vein.
This can certainly be relished as a straight travelogue. There are also plenty of insights on culture including the loss of paradise throughout widely scattered parts of the Pacific and a repeated pattern of conflict between "discoverers" and "discovered" due among other things to Cook's seeming inability to grasp that Euro-American concepts of ownership are not innate in our species. But I'm going to focus on several bits that reverberated unexpectedly with current American politics. This caught my attention:
During his brief pauses between sails, however, he'd fathered four children by Elizabeth, three of them born while he was at sea. Cook had listed his two young boys, James and Nathaniel, as a servant and a sailor aboard the Endeavour, though they were aged only five and four at the time. This was a sanctioned fiction that earned the boys several years' time toward taking an officer's exam, should they one day join the Navy. (p. 210)
Privilege has been around for a long time. The optimistic among us might hope that history could repeat itself:
Elizabeth also took comfort from her three surviving children, whom she described in a letter as 'my greatest pleasure now remaining.' Two had gone to sea very young and had risen much more quickly than their father had done a generation before. By listing Nathaniel and James on the Endeavour's muster roll when they were only four and five, Cook had hastened their naval careers.
This proved, however, no blessing. Nathaniel Cook was a fifteen-year-old midshipman when his ship went down in a hurricane off Jamaica. His older brother, James, began his naval education at the age of eleven and made commander at thirty. On a winter's night in 1794, he boarded a longboat on the south coast of England to take command of his first ship - and was later found stripped of his clothes and possessions, with a wound to his head, dead on the shore of the Isle of Wight. The longboat's crew was never discovered. (p. 436)
Cook was a God-fearing Quaker. It's interesting given the in-our-face behavior of the religious right today, ever so eager to tell others how to live, behave, and believe, to read of Cook that:
. . . he had no room for religious ritual, at least not external ritual. He couldn't bear reverends on his ships and he almost never referred to the Deity in his writing. Belief is within oneself. (p. 308)
On the other hand, there are these words, attempting to partly explain the eventual horrific failure of diplomacy that led to Cook's death, evoking images of our petulant (and still-wired and earphoned!) president:
He was not accustomed to having his intentions frustrated by any person, and had but little command over himself in his anger. (p. 415)
However, in contrast to our pathetic little cowboy wannabe, Horwitz concludes:
If there was an overriding message in his journals, it was that people, the world over, were alike in their essential nature - even if they ate their enemies, made love in public, worshipped idols, or, like Aborigines, cared not at all for material goods. No matter how strange another society might at first appear, there were almost always grounds for mutual understanding and respect.
This was a radical notion in eighteenth-century Europe. And it seemed relevant to me more than two hundred years later, at a time when so much of the world appeared perilously divided along ethnic, religious, and ideological lines.
An entertaining read on many levels. Recommended!
This can certainly be relished as a straight travelogue. There are also plenty of insights on culture including the loss of paradise throughout widely scattered parts of the Pacific and a repeated pattern of conflict between "discoverers" and "discovered" due among other things to Cook's seeming inability to grasp that Euro-American concepts of ownership are not innate in our species. But I'm going to focus on several bits that reverberated unexpectedly with current American politics. This caught my attention:
During his brief pauses between sails, however, he'd fathered four children by Elizabeth, three of them born while he was at sea. Cook had listed his two young boys, James and Nathaniel, as a servant and a sailor aboard the Endeavour, though they were aged only five and four at the time. This was a sanctioned fiction that earned the boys several years' time toward taking an officer's exam, should they one day join the Navy. (p. 210)
Privilege has been around for a long time. The optimistic among us might hope that history could repeat itself:
Elizabeth also took comfort from her three surviving children, whom she described in a letter as 'my greatest pleasure now remaining.' Two had gone to sea very young and had risen much more quickly than their father had done a generation before. By listing Nathaniel and James on the Endeavour's muster roll when they were only four and five, Cook had hastened their naval careers.
This proved, however, no blessing. Nathaniel Cook was a fifteen-year-old midshipman when his ship went down in a hurricane off Jamaica. His older brother, James, began his naval education at the age of eleven and made commander at thirty. On a winter's night in 1794, he boarded a longboat on the south coast of England to take command of his first ship - and was later found stripped of his clothes and possessions, with a wound to his head, dead on the shore of the Isle of Wight. The longboat's crew was never discovered. (p. 436)
Cook was a God-fearing Quaker. It's interesting given the in-our-face behavior of the religious right today, ever so eager to tell others how to live, behave, and believe, to read of Cook that:
. . . he had no room for religious ritual, at least not external ritual. He couldn't bear reverends on his ships and he almost never referred to the Deity in his writing. Belief is within oneself. (p. 308)
On the other hand, there are these words, attempting to partly explain the eventual horrific failure of diplomacy that led to Cook's death, evoking images of our petulant (and still-wired and earphoned!) president:
He was not accustomed to having his intentions frustrated by any person, and had but little command over himself in his anger. (p. 415)
However, in contrast to our pathetic little cowboy wannabe, Horwitz concludes:
If there was an overriding message in his journals, it was that people, the world over, were alike in their essential nature - even if they ate their enemies, made love in public, worshipped idols, or, like Aborigines, cared not at all for material goods. No matter how strange another society might at first appear, there were almost always grounds for mutual understanding and respect.
This was a radical notion in eighteenth-century Europe. And it seemed relevant to me more than two hundred years later, at a time when so much of the world appeared perilously divided along ethnic, religious, and ideological lines.
An entertaining read on many levels. Recommended!
posted by Sir Gumbo at 11:30 PM
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