Part 8
The Royal Society found that there would be a transit of Venus in the year 1769, and that it would be best observed from some point in the great Southern Ocean, say Amsterdam Island or the Marquesas Group, lately discovered by the Dutch and Portuguese, and as the result of representations made to the King, an expedition was set on foot to carry out suitable persons to observe it. Of this expedition James Cook, raised from the rank of master to that of lieutenant, was placed in command. On his own recommendation the ship chosen for the purpose was the _Endeavour_, a Whitby-built craft of 370 tons, broad of bow and stern and fairly light of draft, and built for strength and endurance rather than speed.
She sailed, carrying a complement all told of eighty-five men, from Plymouth on August 26, 1768, which as Cook’s latest biographer happily remarks, was a Friday, and the starting-day of what was, all things considered, the most successful voyage of discovery ever made. Just before she sailed Captain Wallace had come back bringing the news of the discovery of Otaheite, otherwise known as Tahiti, and as this island was considered a more favourable position, Captain Cook, as we may now fairly call him, was ordered to proceed there first.
It is of course utterly out of the question to attempt any connected account even of one voyage round the world, let alone three, within such limits as these, therefore I cannot do better than let the great navigator describe his achievements, as he actually did, in three modest paragraphs:
“I endeavoured to make a direct course to Otaheite” (this was after he had crossed the Atlantic and doubled the Horn, which doubling, by the way, took thirty-three days), “and in part succeeded, but I made no discovery till I got within the Tropic, where I fell in with Lagoon Island, The Groups, Verde Island, Chain Island, and on the 13th of April arrived at Otaheite, where I remained three months, during which time the observations on the transit were taken.
“I then left it, discovered and visited the Society Islands and Ohetoroa; thence proceeded to the south till I arrived in latitude 40°22 south, longitude 147°29 east, then on the 6th of October, fell in with the east side of New Zealand.
“I continued exploring the coast of this country till the 31st of March, 1770, when I quitted it and proceeded to New Holland; and having surveyed the eastern coast of that vast country, which part had never before been visited, I passed between its northern extremity and New Guinea, and landed on the latter, touched at the island of Savu, Batavia, Cape of Good Hope, and St. Helena, and arrived in England on the 2nd of July, 1771.”
I have seldom come across such a masterpiece of eloquent simplicity as this, but then, of course, Cook’s voyages were made before the days of the lecture-exploiter and the Age of Booms. There is, however, one remark that may be made on it. What Cook calls New Holland we call Australia, and Botany Bay, the first point he touched at, is hard by Port Jackson, on the flowery shores of which now stands the lovely capital of New South Wales. Terra Incognita Australis was unknown no longer, but the days when it was to prove itself even more golden than El Dorado were yet distant nearly a hundred years.
If you would read the marvellous tale of frozen lands and seas, of the sunlit coral-islands gemming the sparkling waters as thickly as the stars stud the Heavens, of the delights of Paradise and the terrors of Nifflheim told and written by sundry members of this expedition after their return, you must go to your library and find them in the originals, for there is no space to give them here. Suffice it to say that, though somewhat prolix and diffuse, you will, if you are blessed with an intelligent taste for that kind of thing, find them more delightful reading than any of the countless romances whose writers have taken their materials out of them.
But there is one circumstance which for the honour of James Cook ought to be mentioned. The curse of sea-voyaging in those days was scurvy. Out of forty sick, nearly half of the little company, no fewer than twenty-three died, and this terrible fact set the captain thinking, with the result that he, first of all mariners, grappled with and conquered this worst of the dangers of the ocean. If he had never done anything else he would have deserved a niche in the Temple of Fame. In his second voyage round the world, which lasted three years and sixteen days, he only lost four men, three of whom died by accident and the fourth not of scurvy.
The Circumnavigator was now promoted to the rank of Commander, a modest enough reward for the achievement of the greatest work of his generation. He remained ashore just a year, probably the longest period he had ever spent on land since he first went to sea.
During this time the publication of a collection of travels started people talking about the Southern Continent again. Captain Cook had found it, but that didn’t matter. His discovery was not splendid enough by any means, so it was decided to send another expedition, this time of two ships, “to complete the discovery of the southern hemisphere” (!) and Cook sailed again in command aboard the _Resolution_ of 462 tons having for consort the _Adventure_ of 336 tons.
They sailed on July 13, 1772, and on October 30th reached Table Bay--a hundred and nine days, think of that, you who take a run out to the Cape and back again for a winter holiday! Truly the world was somewhat larger in those days.
From Cape Town they steered straight away for the South, and on December 10th they sighted for the first time the ice-fringe of what we know now to be the _true_ Terra Incognita Australis.
The landsmen on board seem to have had a dreadful time during this part of the voyage and Foster, one of the naturalists of the expedition, bewails “the gloomy uniformity with which they had slowly passed dull hours, days and months in this desolate part of the world.” What a change it must have been from the rigours and horrors of Antarctica to the paradisaical delights of Tahiti, which, after surveying the coast of New Zealand and deciding that it consisted of two islands and not one, the expedition reached on the 16th of the following August.
There is perhaps no other spot on earth which so completely fulfils one’s ideas of what Paradise ought to be as this same island of Tahiti even now, but what must it have been in those days, when white men first saw it in all the beauty and simplicity of its primeval innocence. Now, alas, it is very different, cursed by the diseases and vices of civilisation and afflicted by a cast-iron _régime_ which the people seem to think a little worse than death, since they are dying as fast as they can to get away from it.
After this again New Zealand was visited, and once more the two ships plunged into the icy solitudes of Antarctica, only to return again, baffled by the impenetrable ice-wall. From here the ships steered northwards for Easter Island and Crusoe’s Island. It is noteworthy that on the way Captain Cook, the great Medicine Man of the sailors, himself fell sick, and that, for want of anything better, “a dog was killed to make soup for him”--from which it will be seen that voyages of discovery were not exactly picnics in his time.
From Juan Fernandez he steered for the Marquesas again, once more visited New Zealand, and once more his sea-worn crews revelled in the unrestrained delights of Tahiti. Then again to the south, this time not to rest until the whole circle of the Southern hemisphere had been made without the finding of any other southern continent than the unapproachable Antarctica, and so in due course and without mishap came the Sunday morning, July 30, 1775, when the _Resolution_ and the _Adventure_, having well vindicated their names, dropped their willing anchors into the waters of Spithead.
More honours, though not of the nineteenth-century-boom order, were now most justly bestowed on the Circumnavigator. He was promoted to the rank of Post-Captain in the Navy, and made a Captain of Greenwich Hospital, a post which carried with it a home and honourable retirement for the rest of his life--of which he was the very last man in the world to avail himself. He was also elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and presented with the gold medal for his treatment of scurvy.
Captain Cook as sailor, as scientific navigator, and as explorer was now at the height of his fame. He was forty-eight years old, and had spent thirty-four years at sea, and it is no exaggeration to say that during this time he had added more geographical knowledge to the history of the world than any one had ever done before, and had probably covered a larger portion of its surface. He had at once proved and disproved the dream of the Southern Continent, and, potentially speaking, he had added enormous areas to the ever-growing realms of Greater Britain.
He might well have rested on such laurels as these, but there was more work for him to do, and he went to do it. One of the greatest questions of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, was the possibility of the North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. So far every attempt had ended in failure, and generally in disaster, but now, when men’s minds were full of the wonders Captain Cook had achieved, there arose another question: Might not a _North-East_ passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic be possible, and, if so, who better to try it than the great Circumnavigator? An expedition was promptly decided on. Captain Cook was not offered the command, as the Government probably and rightly thought he had won his laurels. But one fatal evening he dined with Lord Sandwich, the promoter of the expedition, and at table he met his old patron, Sir Hugh Palliser, and his friend, Mr. Stephens, Secretary to the Admiralty. Ostensibly the object of the dinner was to consult him as to the best leader for the new venture, but the moment the subject was broached the unquenchable passion for travel blazed up again, and the great Navigator rose to his feet and said gravely:
“My lord and gentlemen, if you will have me I will go myself.”
So was decided the fatal voyage which was destined to end a glorious and almost blameless career by an ignoble and unworthy death.
The expedition consisted of the old _Resolution_ and the _Discovery_, a vessel of three hundred tons. The voyage lasted four years and nine months, but the loss of life by sickness was only five men, of whom three were ill when they started. A good deal of the old ground was gone over, more islands were discovered, more unknown coasts surveyed. Fair Tahiti was visited once more, and the expedition, so far as its principal object was concerned, came to an end, as the search for the Southern Continent had done, in a way blocked by impenetrable barriers of ice--this time the ice of the North.
Thus turned back, they steered southward, and on December 1, 1778, they discovered Hawai, which discovery the great Navigator in his last written words somewhat strangely says, “seemed in many respects to be the most important that had hitherto been made by Europeans throughout the extent of the Pacific Ocean.”
It was here, as all the world knows, that he met his death, and the story of it is, unhappily, at sad variance with that of his life.
The one blemish on Captain Cook’s otherwise noble character was a liability to outbursts of ungovernable temper, and during these he seems to have behaved on more occasions than one in a manner almost befitting one of the old buccaneers. For instance, he would punish paltry thefts by cutting off the ears of the islanders, firing small shot at them as they swam to the shore, chasing them in boats, and ordering his men to strike and stab them with boat-hooks as they struggled out of the way. On one occasion he punished a Kanaka who had pilfered some trifle by “making two cuts upon his arm to the bone, one across and the other close below his shoulder.”
Again, at the island of Eimeo, because a goat was stolen, he landed thirty-five armed men, blockaded the island with armed boats, and burnt every house and canoe that he came across, and, as an eye-witness says, “several women and old men still remained by the houses, whose lamentations were very great, but all their tears and entreaties could not move Captain Cook to desist in the smallest degree from those cruel ravages.”
Now it was undoubtedly this anger-madness of his, combined with an equally incomprehensible act of duplicity, which cost him his life. When he returned from his attempt to find the North-East passage and landed at Hawai, he was hailed by the natives as Lono, a god who had disappeared ages before, saying that he would return in huge canoes with cocoa-nut trees for masts. Now unhappily there is no doubt that Captain Cook, for some reason or other, took advantage of this belief. Not only did he not undeceive the natives, but he permitted divine honours to be paid to him.
From personal knowledge of the Pacific Islanders I am able to say that in their pristine state they look upon deception and lying as the gravest of crimes, and usually punish them with death, and Captain Cook, with his vast experience of them, must have known this also, and therefore he must have been fully aware that the moment anything happened to show the natives that he was _not_ a god, his life would not be worth a moment’s purchase.
Shortly after this the ships sailed, and it would have been well for Cook, who had been guilty of some very high-handed acts, if he had never returned. But they came back a week afterwards to find the island under the mysterious _tabu_--which is the Kanaka equivalent for an interdict, and by far the most sacred institution known to the Polynesians. Some of his marines broke this _tabu_ in the most flagrant fashion. In revenge one of the _Discovery’s_ cutters was stolen. When anything of this sort happened Captain Cook was accustomed to inveigle a chief or two on board his ship and keep them there till the thing stolen was restored. He tried to do this with the King of Hawai, but the people suspected his design, and at the critical moment news came that a canoe had been burnt and a chief killed. The King refused to go another step, and then Captain Cook, who was armed with a hanger and a double-barrelled gun, did a terribly foolish thing for such a man to do.
He began to walk away to his boat, turning his back on the armed and angry natives. To do so was to invite certain death, and one of the warriors attacked him with his spear. He turned and shot at the man, missed him, and killed another man behind him. A shower of stones followed, and the marines fired on the natives.
Cook appears now to have seen the seriousness of the situation, and signalled to those in the boat to stop firing. While he was doing this a chief ran up and drove his spear through his body. Some accounts say that it was an iron dagger, others that he was clubbed on the head simultaneously. At any rate he staggered forward and fell face downwards in the water, on which the natives “immediately leapt in after and kept him under for a few minutes, then hauled him out upon the rocks and beat his head against them several times, so that there is no doubt but that he quickly expired.”
Such was the end of the great Circumnavigator, the greatest seaman of his time, and a man honoured wherever the science of navigation was known. It was a miserable end to such a brilliant career, miserable as was that of the great Magellan, who lost his life and the deathless honour of being the first sea-captain to sail round the world in just such a petty and ignoble squabble on the beach of a lonely islet in the Phillipines.
But though his death was ignoble, it can detract nothing from the splendour of his life’s work. He was not perfect--no great man is--and it is only the mournful truth to say that the meanest and most unlovable trait in his character was the direct and culpable cause of his death. Among sailors this is already forgotten, and they only remember him, as they are well warranted in doing, as the greatest of English mariners, and the man who conquered their most terrible enemy and their deadliest destroyer.
VII
_LORD CLIVE_,
_QUILL-DRIVER AND CONQUEROR_
VII
LORD CLIVE
It is one of the distinctions of Robert Clive to be at once the model of all bad boys and the forlorn hope of their despairing fathers. He was probably the very worst boy that ever became a really great man. Of his early youth there is absolutely nothing good to be said, saving only the fact that he was possessed of that brute, bulldog courage which thousands of English boys, whose names have never been heard beyond their native towns, have possessed in common with him.
He was idle, passionate, aggressive, not over truthful, and of a distinctly turbulent, not to say piratical disposition. For instance, he had not reached his teens before he established a sort of juvenile reign of terror in the sleepy old town of Market Drayton, which had at once the misfortune and the honour of being his birthplace.
Even the school-books have not omitted to tell us how the boy became the father of the future pirate and Empire-Maker, by organising the kindred spirits of the town into a buccaneering band, as captain of which he levied blackmail in the shape of nuts, apples, sweetmeats, and even coin of the realm on the shopkeepers.
If the tribute were punctually paid, well and good; but if one rebelled or defaulted, the odds were that he very soon had a heavy bill to pay for window-repairing, or else there would be sudden deaths in his fowl-house, or, peradventure, his errand-boy, if not an accomplice of the gang, would return prematurely from his rounds with his goods missing and undelivered, and his person in a somewhat battered and dishevelled condition.
The most respectable feat that he appears to have accomplished in these days would, after all, appear to be the climbing of the lofty church steeple, and his enjoyment on that dizzy eminence of the horror and consternation of the townsfolk. This feat was, in its way, as characteristic of the man that was to be as was his first essay in world-piracy, for later on we shall see how he reached a far more dizzy eminence than this and kept his head as few others would have done.
His school life appears to have been as unsatisfactory as his home life. He was sent to academy after academy, and at each, ushers and pedagogues struggled with him in vain--although of itself this fact was not greatly to his discredit, since the methods of alleged education in the first half of the eighteenth century were even more unnatural than they are now. Still, the fact remains that he was a hopeless dunce, self-willed and idle, and of an unlovable disposition, redeemed only by the one good quality of intrepid pluck.
One of his uncles, in a family letter, says, semi-prophetically of him: “Fighting, to which he is out of measure addicted, gives his temper such a fierceness and imperiousness that it flies out on every trifling occasion.”
It is also said that one of his schoolmasters saw signs of future greatness in the dullard of whom neither he nor any of his brethren could make even a presentable schoolboy, but this is probably a story of the “I told you so” order, possibly invented by the worthy pedagogue some time after the event. Be this, however, as it may, the fact is that in the end the last of the pedagogues seems to have thrown the job up in despair and returned him back on his father’s hands as a hopelessly hard case.
Now it so happened that in those days there was a refuge for the destitute, or perhaps it would be more correct to say the ne’er-do-well, which in these days is hardly represented by any portion of our Colonial Empire.
If there appeared to be no chance of a lad doing anything decent at home; if his parents were too poor to buy him a commission in the Army, and hadn’t interest enough to get him into the Navy, and if he were, as Clive undoubtedly was, too much of a dunce to have a chance in any other respectable profession, the last thing that could be done for him was to get him a writership in the service of the East India Company.
If this could be done, two prospects were open to him. He would die of fever in a year or two, after a hard struggle to live upon his miserable pay, or he would “shake the Pagoda Tree,” and come home a wealthy nabob, with a brick-dust complexion, a sun-dried and somewhat shrivelled conscience, and a liver perpetually on strike. As it happened, however, Robert Clive availed himself of neither of these prospects, since the mysterious Fates had a third one in store for him.
Certainly they were _very_ mysterious Fates which presided over the early fortunes of the future Conqueror of India, and upon none of their darlings have they frowned so blackly and then suddenly turned round and smiled so brightly as upon the scapegrace of Market Drayton.
To begin with, the voyage to India in those days, even for people with large means, was a weary and miserable business. Ocean greyhounds, the Suez Canal, and the Peninsular Railway, were undreamt of; and the heavy Indiamen lumbered toilfully round the Cape, across the Indian Ocean, and up the Bay of Bengal, taking their time about it--sometimes six months, sometimes a year, or more. In Clive’s case it was more, for his ship first crossed the Atlantic to the Brazils, and stopped there for some months. Here he spent all his money, and got in return a smattering of Portuguese, which he afterwards found useful.
When he eventually landed on the surf-beaten beach of Madras, he was not only penniless but in debt. The only person of influence to whom he had an introduction had left for England. His duties were both laborious and distasteful. He had no friends and was too shy and awkwardly proud to make any, and for months he was veritably a stranger in a strange land, and, to crown all, he became wretchedly ill.
How mournful he really felt his position to be, and how far the stern discipline of misery had already softened his intractable disposition, may be seen from one of his letters home, in which he says:
“I have not enjoyed one happy day since I left my native country. If I should be so far blest as to revisit it again, but more especially Manchester” (this, by the way, was his mother’s native place) “the centre of all my wishes, all that I could hope or desire for would be presented before me in one view.”
How little did the despairing lad dream as he wrote thus in some interval of his weary drudgery that when he did revisit his native land it would be as a conqueror, laurel-crowned, and hailed as one worthy to rank with the first soldiers of his age!
But, bright as his fortune was to be, he appears just now to have been doing very little to deserve it. Macaulay tells us, in that brilliant essay of his, that he behaved just as badly to his official superiors as he had done to his schoolmasters, and came several times very near to being dismissed, and at length, so heavily did sickness of body and weariness of soul lie upon him, that twice in quick succession he attempted to blow his brains out, and twice the pistol missed fire.
If those had been the days of central-fire, self-cocking revolvers, instead of flint-lock pistols, the history of Asia would have been changed, and what is now our Indian Empire would probably have been a French possession.
It will be necessary just here to quote a little history with a view to seeing how matters stood in India at the time when Clive, as it is said, flung away the second useless pistol, and, like Wallenstein, exclaimed that after all he must have been born for something great.