Counterfactual narrative is useful when it serves to lay particular emphasis upon the actual. For example, a passage such as the following has clear and logical resonance with an imagining of Cook’s life post Hawaii.
Following his safe return from the third circumnavigation, his several subsequent promotions and his eventual retirement from active service, Vice Admiral Sir James Cook RN KCB FRS was in 1793 appointed to succeed Lord Cornwallis as Governor-General of the Presidency of Fort William (Bengal) under letters patent that provided him with the additional responsibility for, and oversight of, new settlements in New South Wales, on Norfolk Island and settlements envisaged but yet to be established in Van Diemen’s Land, New Zealand and other British territories in the Pacific (for which he carried dormant commissions). His Excellency and Lady Cook, accompanied by His Excellency’s elder surviving son and namesake, who served his father as aide-de-camp, arrived at Calcutta aboard the East Indiaman Rose in November of that year.
Even if he had not become an overnight celebrity upon his return to England in 1771, Cook’s untimely death in Hawaii in February 1779, midway through that third circumnavigation, instantly catapulted him into the realm of myth. At the end of 1778, after a long voyage from the Bering Sea, the crew of Cook’s ships, the Resolution and Discovery, were at first warmly greeted by the Hawaiian Islanders.
At Kealakekua Bay they traded enthusiastically from innumerable canoes. Ashore, their ceremonies in honour of Cook were long and intricate. The women especially were a welcome, indeed abundant distraction, so much so that the decks were described as ‘a scene of Babylonian copulation and acquisitiveness’. Cook soon felt obliged to prevent the women from boarding.
Another change in these happy circumstances arose from the 18th-century English obsession with minor offences against property. Cook perceived that the Hawaiians made no distinction between bona fide trading and outright theft. They were interested in metal objects. One islander was flogged aboard Discovery for trying to steal a pair of the armourer’s tongs. Another islander succeeded where the previous one failed, and made off with the tongs. A boat was sent in hot pursuit. The question was one of principle. Events quickly span out of control. What began as scuffles ashore soon deteriorated. The islanders set about making war, not love. Then, under cover of darkness, Discovery’s cutter was stolen.
To Cook this was an outrageously provocative escalation. He went ashore and attempted with his Royal Marines to take on board a ‘friendly hostage’, King Terreeoboo, to ensure the return of the stolen vessel, but the armed islanders congregated, resisted, and suddenly Cook, who had thought that his marines’ muskets would prevail, found himself desperately outnumbered and under ferocious attack. Cook and 4 of his marines were killed while attempting to board his pinnace. He was clubbed, stabbed many times, and afterwards his body dismembered and partly burned. This was a particularly gruesome death, which horrified the British survivors who witnessed it.
It took 11 months for the news to reach London by letter from the Kamchatka Peninsula. ‘This untimely and ever to be lamented Fate of so intrepid, so able, and intelligent a Sea-Officer,’ ran his obituary in the London Gazette, ‘may justly be considered as an irreparable Loss to the Public, as well as to his Family, for in him were united every successful and amiable quality that could adorn his Profession; nor was his singular Modesty less conspicuous than his other Virtues. His successful Experiments to preserve the Healths of his Crews are well known, and his Discoveries will be an everlasting Honour to his Country.’
Into the realm of myth Cook duly migrated, and there he remained for the next 200 years – and in many minds, you could argue, for 241. Over that time there has been a Captain Cook for every purpose, for every mood, for every situation. Spy, naval officer, self-made Yorkshireman; ‘the son of an agricultural labourer’, as the old Dictionary of National Biography sniffily pointed out in 1887, who ran away to sea on the Baltic trade; quick-tempered martinet, hero, man of science, brilliant cartographer, bringer of disease, nutritionist, invalid, intruder, celebrity, and so forth.
In 1969, with the bicentenary rapidly approaching, NASA itself went so far as to draw what were regarded as obvious parallels between Neil Armstrong and James Cook, Apollo 11 and Endeavour. The famous portrait of Cook by Nathaniel Dance-Holland surely brings forth the defining element of Yorkshire grit, especially when compared with Sir Joshua Reynolds’ far softer and youthful Joseph Banks, a young man with lively intellect and the leisure with which to exercise it, both made possible by rank, privilege and £6000 a year.
Cook wears the uniform of the Royal Navy. The use of indigo to dye its officers’ cloth what for obvious reasons we now call navy blue was an adaptation that took hold in the early to mid-eighteenth century, indigo having replaced the less colourfast, locally procured English woad as the principal dyestuff. Indigo therefore carries us to a supply chain emanating either from the Honourable East India Company’s commercial operations in occupied Bombay and Calcutta, or from British possessions in the Caribbean and South Carolina, in both of which indigo was cultivated by slaves. Take your pick, but either way this significant bit of British national iconography is joined at the hip with some especially troubling private enterprise aspects of the colonial project prior to the American Revolution, and indeed after it.
Johan Zoffany’s unfinished history painting The Death of Cook (Greenwich, National Maritime Museum), once owned by the navigator’s widow Elizabeth Cook, meanwhile, took as its model Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe (Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada), a British hero who perished in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in Québec, part of a wider Anglo–French conflict in which Cook himself played a part early in his career whilst serving in Atlantic Canadian waters aboard HMS Pembroke. Thus, Cook entered the martyrology of the Royal Navy, and was in many respects also elevated into a position of imperial significance, and in due course of national significance to the many countries with which he is today associated. It seems not unreasonable to suppose that if he had survived, Cook would have risen and that, eventually retiring from active service, between them the Admiralty, Whitehall and the Honourable East India Company would have made good use of him. Who better to place in overall charge of those Pacific territories than the man who had years earlier formally taken possession of several of them?