After a hilarious, intrepid journey as a Civil War reenactor, Tony Horwitz thought he might settle down at his rural Virginia home and sit still awhile. After all, Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose various assignments once scattered him across the Middle East, Australia and the American South, had wandered enough.
Now, he decided, it was time to spend time with his wife and young son, Nathaniel.
That was before James Cook reentered Horwitz’s life. It happened on a lazy summer day in Virginia. Horwitz, whose wife is Australian, had picked up a copy of Cook’s journals while the couple were living in Sydney. Years later, he began perusing Cook’s chronicle of incredible discovery and exploration, a series of Pacific voyages covering more than 200,000 miles, the equivalent of circling the equator eight times.
Horwitz was hooked. He soon began plotting a similar path to Cook’s, a plan to visit many of the explorer’s discoveries and see what the modern effects were: how the people in such disparate places as Tahiti, Alaska, Tonga and Australia viewed Cook’s legacy.
The result is Blue Latitudes, a delightful discourse on matters serious (cartography, the arrival of Western civilization and customs in remote cultures) and those less so (wet T-shirt contests, beer-cooler races). As with his Civil War book, Confederates in the Attic, Horwitz blends history, telling anecdotes and a love of journalism. The effect is a breezy 480 pages, unspooled in a comfortable cadence.
Born in Yorkshire and raised in a mud-and-thatch hovel, James Cook hardly carried the pedigree of a future explorer. At the time, most of England’s national exploratory journeys were manned by the elite. A man of Cook’s social class had little chance to command a scientific mission organized by the Royal Society in 1768.
Cook, though, defied the odds. By that time a Navy officer, he carried little reputation beyond the service. Inside the Navy, Cook was considered a curiosity; despite that, he won the assignment, starting a decade-plus quest to conquer the globe. Cook’s journeys took him across the Pacific and in various other directions — Oregon, Tasmania, Tierra del Fuego, even Siberia. He died, at the hands of native inhabitants, in Hawaii in 1779.
In between his surprising ascension to command and his death, Cook charted Australia and far-flung Pacific islands. His mapmaking, in some cases, remained in use as late as the mid-1990s.
Horwitz says rereading Cook’s journals, as well as Stephen Ambrose’s account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Undaunted Courage, spurred him to propose a book detailing Cook’s legacy. It took on greater urgency as Horwitz realized that many people, Americans in particular, had only the vaguest notions of what Cook accomplished.
“Most people know nothing about him,” Horwitz says in a recent telephone interview. “He’s been a bit neglected. He’s certainly more familiar to Brits, Aussies and New Zealanders. But even in those places he’s not viewed like Lewis and Clark. He’s not a flashy figure. He’s a bit opaque.”
Initially drawn more to Cook’s journeys than the man himself, Horwitz became entranced with Cook as he learned more about him. Cook’s tragic end, his unyielding ambition and his fraying sanity during his last voyage provide a sturdy skeleton for Horwitz’s meaty narrative. Flesh-eating, too: Cook “discovered” such unknown rituals as cannibalization and tattoos during his travels. In turn, he and his men introduced devastating illness, prostitution and other Western delights to new lands.
Cook’s psyche is an interesting one. After his second voyage, he could have lived out his days in retirement with an ample sinecure and established credentials. Instead, fueled by insecurity and ambition, Cook, then in his 40s, kept exploring, enduring the lengthy, problem-plagued outings inherent in the life of a seafarer.
Throughout Blue Latitudes, Horwitz deftly bounces between the modern world and that of Cook’s time, keeping the narrative comfortably anchored.
Roger Williamson, a close friend of the author’s, lends a sense of sublime silliness. Now a rambunctious Aussie, Williamson arrived down under from Yorkshire, the hometown of, yes, Cook.
The explorer and Williamson share another trait: intense focus. In Cook’s case, that single-minded outlook meant unerring devotion to duty, to learning more about the world, and most of all, to discipline. And Williamson? Drinking, drinking, drinking and, in a pinch, drinking. Whenever matters turn too serious, Roger steps in with a quip and an appreciably unsteady hand.
And, while Horwitz insists his penchant for participatory narrative lessens with each book, it still stands above the rest of his well-crafted story. At the beginning of Blue Latitudes, he embarks on a trip from Gig Harbor, WA to Vancouver aboard a replica version of His Majesty’s Bark Endeavour, Cook’s first vessel.
It is here that Our Hero encounters vertiginous masts (the highest measuring 127 feet), close quarters (head clearance of four foot six belowdecks) and enough nausea to deplete Dramamine’s staunchest efforts. Surveying the cramped quarters, the bellowing captain and ship’s mates, the darkness, the rocky waters and other creature comforts, Horwitz conjures a perfectly polished assessment of what Cook and his men faced.
The assessment, courtesy of Samuel Johnson, is this: “Being in a ship is being in a jail with the chance of being drowned.”
This article appears in Nov 13-19, 2002.
