"Captain Cook" by Frank McLynn

 A hugely detailed (exhaustingly so) biography of the explorer James Cook. While I was interested in his early life (he was late going to sea and even then he worked for a long time in the merchant marine and his transfer from mate to able-seaman in the navy was a surprising career move) and the details of how he learned his trade as a surveyor during the Canadian campaign of the Seven Years War, I had very little interest in the minute details of Cook's day by day adventures in Tahiti or Tonga or even Hawaii; at this stage less would have meant more.

It was, however, to McLynn's credit that he sees Cook as a flawed human being who represented a corrupt and flawed Royal Navy with latent imperialist and colonialist intentions and fundamentally racist attitudes. Cook rarely comes out of an encounter with Polynesians and Maoris, Australian aboriginals and Melanesians, Inuit and Siberians etc; to his utter failure to understand the opposing culture he added autocratic decision making, flogging, maiming and even shooting 'natives' without compunction; I was only surprised that it took so long for an angry 'native' mob to murder him. McLynn repeatedly compares Cook with HM Stanley who, in McLynn's own (earlier) biography, is depicted as a monster). But McLynn doesn't do hagiography, describing James Wolfe, the British general who, by taking Quebec, turned Canada from French to English, as "habitually addicted to war crimes and even genocide ... deeply unpleasant ... by any standards a war criminal." (Ch 2). He also debunks the credentials of Alexander Dalrymple who seemed to receive rather kinder treatment at the hands of his descendant William Dalrymple in his history of the East India Company, The Anarchy.

But Cook's achievements are immense. A brilliant cartographer, he mapped New Zealand and the eastern coast of Australia, he saw icebergs and almost the coast of Antarctica, he 'discovered' (to Europeans) Hawaii, he mapped the Oregon and Alaskan coast. The book alternates between descriptions of the sexual freedoms enjoyed by his sailors (but not Cook) in Tahiti and Tonga and, to a lesser extent, Hawaii, where they introduced syphilis, and the dramatic battles with the sea. 

So there's plenty of incident. But the sentences are long and the paragraphs are, at times, immense. I have always understood that a paragraph is organised around a single theme but McLynn sees them as department stores of ideas. I was repeatedly fatigued while reading this book.

The sort of biography that is brilliant for the scholar but rover-detailed and heavy-going for the general reader.

Selected quotes:

• "He insisted on doing things his way, and was obstinate, inflexible and even somewhat unpleasant." (Ch 1)
• "Great explorers are seldom outstanding human beings." (Ch 1)
• "Within six weeks of stepping ashore ... Cook had a wife." (Ch 3)
• "The arioi seemed to Cook and Banks no more than sex-obsessed strolling players ... Partly a freemasonry, partly a showbusiness organisation something like the Order of the Water Rats, partly a Polynesian version of the Eleusinian mysteries, they often ... performed on public and festive occasions, staging shows with a very strong sexual content, which were meant to point forward to the lubricious delights of Paradise." (Ch 6)
• "Yaws has the curious quality of providing immunity to syphilis." (Ch 6)
• "Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, so there are no whingers in a life-and-death maritime emergency." (Ch 7)
• "Typical eighteenth-century intellectuals, the Forsters were torn between the idealised picture of Polynesia as they would like it to be and the grim reality which they could not avoid  an almost perfect paradigm of Paradise Found and Lost." (Ch 12)
• "'No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough yo get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail with the chance of being drowned ... A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company'." (Ch 12; quoting Samuel Jonson)
• "As he grows older a man obsessed with control is likely to find the sheer contingency of the world and its stubborn and irreducible nature intolerable, which in turn generates impatience and tantrums." (Ch 13)
• "In a new version of la ronde de l'amour the women of Nomuka transmitted syphilis to comrades of the men who had originally given it to them." (Ch 13)
• "The Tahitians laid on a super-erotic heiva, of a kind that, to use a later idiom, would have made a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window." (Ch 14)
• "It is an unfortunate aspect of Cook's personality that he tended to attribute all his remarkably good luck to his own peerless seamanship and all his bad luck, in paranoid fashion, to a malign fate." (Ch 15)
• "By definition a man who wants quick results is not a careful planner." (Ch 17)

December 2022; 421 pages

Other books on travel and exploration, and other biographies of explorers, can be found on this page.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God