How navigators think: The death of captain cook revisited

Past and Present

Volumn 194, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 107-137

  Ashley, Scott ^a  

^a NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34447623420     PISSN: 00312746     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtl019     Document Type: Article

References (164)

1. Marshall Sahlins, How 'Natives' Think: About Captain Cook, For Example (Chicago, 1995).
2. The phrase was popularized as the title of the English translation of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (Paris, 1910).
3. The seminal work has been by Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd edn (New Haven, 1985),
4. and Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (New Haven, 1992);
5. also Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith (eds.), The Art of Captain Cook's Voyages, 3 vols. (New Haven, 1985-8).
6. G. E. Manwaring, My Friend the Admiral: The Life, Letters, and Journals of Rear-Admiral James Burney F.R.S. (London, 1931), 134. Manwaring prints the entries for the period 11-22 February from Burney's journal, now in the British Library, London, MS Add. 8955.
7. The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (hereafter Journals), iii, The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery, 1776-1780, 2 pts Cambridge, 1967), pt 1, 534.
8. See, for example, ibid., pp. cxlviii-cxlix.
9. A good sense of Sahlins's extensive thinking about Cook and Hawaii can be gathered from his 'Captain James Cook: Or, The Dying God', in Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, 1985),
10. and 'Captain Cook at Hawaii', Jl Polynesian Soc., xcviii (1989), as well as from How 'Natives' Think.
11. The notion that Cook was killed as part of the makahiki seems to have originated with Gavan Daws, 'Kealakekua Bay Revisited: A Note on the Death of Captain Cook', Jl Pacific Hist., iii (1968).
12. Beaglehole relied heavily on the testimony of Molesworth Phillips, lieutenant of marines, in J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (London, 1974), 670 n. 1; in the index to Sahlins, How 'Natives' Think, James King has by far the greatest number of citations from among the contemporary journalists, followed by David Samwell.
13. Frances Burney, Journals and Letters, ed. Peter Sabor and Lars E. Troide (Harmondsworth, 2001), 1608.
14. Joppien and Smith (eds.), Art of Captain Cook's Voyages, iii, The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery, 1776-1780, text, 126.
15. For Hodges' work, see Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill (eds.), William Hodges, 1744-1797: The Art of Exploration (London, 2004), esp. 126-8.
16. As well as the work of Bernard Smith already noted, see, for example, Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the idea of the South Seas (Oxford, 1995);
17. Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin Cambridge, 1997);
18. Alex Calder, Jonathan Lamb and Bridget Orr (eds.), Voyages and Beaches: Pacific Encounters, 1769-1840 (Honolulu, 1990).
19. One recent exception is Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2002), ch. 5.
20. N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London, 1986);
21. N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815 (London, 2004);
22. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge, 1987).
23. Greg Dening, Mr Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge, 1992).
24. Journals, iii/1, pp. clxxvi-ccx. Some of these manuscripts are, admittedly, only copies of others.
25. James King's Running Journal: From Petropavlovsk to the Cape of Good Hope, 22nd August 1779 to 12th April 1780', ed. Andrew David, in The Charts and Coastal Views of Captain Cook's Voyages, ed.Andrew David, iii, The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery, 1776-1780 (London, 1997).
26. For Phillips's manuscripts, see Journals, iii/1, p. clxxvi n. 1. Bligh's annotations were published by Rupert T. Gould, 'Bligh's Notes on Cook's Last Voyage', Mariners Mirror, xiv (1928);
27. the probable date of composition of these notes has been revised by Andrew David, 'Bligh's Notes on Cook's Last Voyage', Mariner's Mirror 1xvii (1981), 102, who favours 1804 over Gould's suggested date of c.1784 (Gould, 'Bligh's Notes on Cook's Last Voyage', 385).
28. Heinrich Zimmermann, Zimmermann's Captain Cook: An Account of the Third Voyage of Captain Cook around the World, 1776-1780, by Henry Zimmermann, of Wissloch, in the Palatine, trans. Elsa Michaelis and Cecil French, ed. F. W. Howay (Toronto, 1930).
29. There is a modern edition: John Ledyard's Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage, ed. James Kenneth Munford, intro. Sinclair H. Hitchings (Corvallis, 1963).
30. For a brilliant essay on Ledyard's literary qualities and learning, apparently entirely overlooked by Cook scholars, see Donald Davie, 'John Ledyard: The American Traveller and his Sentimental Journeys', Eighteenth-Century Studies, iv (1970-1).
31. David Samwell, A Narrative of the Death of Captain Cook (London, 1786), 4
32. Gould, 'Bligh's Notes on Cook's Last Voyage', 381.
33. Journals, iii/1, pp. lxxxvi-lxxxvii.
34. For the on-board tensions that developed on all three of Cook's voyages, see Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (London, 2003), esp. 130-1, 275-6, 487 n. 56.
35. Despite Rickman's curious comment that 'these gentlemen were better friends than ever during the remaining part of the voyage', this was presumably the affair between Phillips and Williamsoon: John Rickman, Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (London, 1781), 150.
36. William Griffin, ship's corporal on board the Resolution, names the duellists: Journals, iii/l, 210 n. 3. Beaglehole is therefore not quite right when he says that no one else tells of a duel at Matavai.
37. Manwaring, My Friend the Admiral, 164-5
38. Claire Harman, Fanny Burney: A Biography (London, 2000), 159-60, 270-3, 281-3
39. A. F. Pollard, 'Phillips, Molesworth (1755-1832)', revised Andrew C. F. David, in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) (hereafter ODNB.
40. Journals, iii/1, pp. lxxix-lxxxi, offers a lucid and - as far as possible - sympathetic portrait.
41. It may be superfluous to mention Geertz's seminal essay, 'Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture', in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 6-7.
42. James King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, iii, 2nd edn (London, 1785), 45-6, provided the canonical image of Cook the humanitarian.
43. But the story was circulating earlier, first being committed to print by Ledyard in 1783: John Ledyard's Journal, ed. Munford, 146.
44. See also Wilson, Island Race, ch. 2, esp. 60-2.
45. Gould. 'Bligh's Notes on Cook's Last Voyage', 382
46. John Ledyard's Journal, ed. Munford, 147-8
47. Samwell, Narrative of the Death of Captain Cook, 13-14
48. Samwell's journal, in Journals, iii/2, 1199
49. Zimmermann's Captain Cook, ed. Howay, 94
50. the account by Bayly is printed in Rupert T. Gould, 'Some Unpublished Accounts of Cook's Death', Mariner's Mirror, xiv (1928), 316
51. the accounts by Harvey and Watts are printed in Journals, iii/1, 536-7 n. 2
52. for Home's memories in old age, see George Home, Memoirs of an Aristocrat, and Reminiscences of the Emperor Napoleon (London, 1838), 305
53. for Trevenen's opinion, see A Memoir of James Trevenen, ed. Christopher Lloyd and R. C. Anderson (London, 1959), 28, 35-6.
54. Journals, iii/2, 1199, 1204-5, 1217.
55. John Ledyard's Journal, ed. Munford, 148
56. Journal's, iii/2, 1199.
57. For Williamson's journal, see National Archives, London, Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), ADM 55/117.
58. Samwell, Narrative of the Death of Captain Cook, 15
59. Journal's, iii/2, 1204-5, 1217.
60. Salmond, Trial of the Cannibal Dog, 420, speculates that Clerke also destroyed the missing last three weeks of Cook's journal at the same time.
61. Letter of Molesworth Phillips. n.d. (c. 1820?): National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 333.
62. Home, Memoirs of an Aristocrat, 305.
63. Williamson's court martial can be followed in Logs of the Great Sea Fights, 1794-1805, ed. T. Sturges Jackson, 2 vols. (London, 1899-1900), i, 309-42.
64. Found guilty of misreading a signal and of dereliction of duty, Williamson escaped the more serious charges of disaffection and cowardice. He died a year later: Gentleman's Mag., lxviii (1798), 996.
65. There is an abiding tradition in the historiography that Phillips and Williamson fought a second duel at Hawaii and came to blows at an assembly room at the Cape of Good Hope. Both stories seem to derive from unsourced anecdotes in Manwaring, My Friend the Admiral, 144 n. 1, 152-3, and I have not been able to trace their origins.
66. Journals, iii/1, 534-6.
67. For Burney, see Manwaring, My Friend the Admiral, 137
68. William Ellis, An Authentic Narrative of a Voyage Performed by Captain Cook and Captain Clerke (1782; Altenburg, 1788), 70-2
69. for Edgar's account, see Gould, 'Some Unpublished Accounts of Cook's Death', 310-11
70. Captain Cook's Final Voyage: The Journal of Midshipman George Gilbert ed. and intro. Christine Holmes (Honolulu, 1982), 106-7
71. Gore's log is in PRO, ADM 55/120
72. the anonymous journal identified as that of Law is in the British Library, MS Add. 37327
73. Rickman, Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage, 319
74. Clerke's journal is printed in Journals, iii/1, 538-9
75. for King's journal, see ibid., 556-8.
76. See Salmond, Trial of the Cannibal Dog, ch. 17, esp. 415-16, for the growing alienation between Cook and his men by the end of the third voyage.
77. Gavin Kennedy, The Death of Captain Cook (London, 1978), 91-4.
78. I owe much to this excellent book. A similar interpretation has also been advanced by Kerry Howe, 'The Death of Cook: Exercises in Explanation'. in Jonathan Lamb. Robert P. Maccubbin and David F. Morrill (eds.), The South Pacific in the Eighteenth Century: Narratives and Myths, Papers from the Ninth David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar, = Eighteenth-Century Life, xviii (1994), 199-203
79. see also Kerry Howe, 'The Making of Cook's Death', JL Pacific Hist. xxxi (1996), 109-10.
80. For a useful handlist of King's rewriting between journal and published history, see O. H. K. Spate, 'Splicing the Log at Kealakekua Bay: James King's Sleight-of-Hand', JL Pacific Hist., xix (1984).
81. King, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, iii, 44.
82. King twice mentions Williamson favourably in his journal for late 1779 and early 1780, a text noticeably lacking in references to other officers: 'James King's Running Journal', ed. David, 277-8, 298.
83. Gould, 'Bligh's Notes on Cook's Last Voyage', 381-2.
84. Journals, iii/2, 1204-5.
85. Lanyon's journal is ambiguous on the behaviour of the launch: Gould, 'Some Unpublished Accounts of Cook's Death', 308. I have been unable to consult Roberts's log, now in the Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Kennedy, Death of Captain Cook, 58, calls it 'surprisingly sparse in detail'.
86. Journals, iii/2, 1464.
87. Rickman received his only commission in February 1776 and was still listed as a lieutenant in the Navy List for 1812. Apart from Williamson, of the other lieutenants on the voyage, Gore and King officially achieved post-captain rank in October 1780, Burney in June 1782
88. Harvey gained a command in 1790. Lanyon, appointed third lieutenant of the Discovery in August 1779, did finally reach superannuated commander's rank in 1814:
89. see David Syrett and R. L. DiNardo (eds.), The Commissioned Sea Officers of the Royal Navy, 1660-1815 (Aldershot, 1994).
90. The Cook family determined the known age range of those on the ships: the captain was 50 at his death, his son Nathaniel, on board as an able seaman, was 14.
91. Rodger, Wooden World, 273-302.
92. Ellis, Authentic Narrative of a Voyage, 214, claims that rumours of the war with France had been picked up from the Russians in Kamchatka but were not confirmed until Canton.
93. James King's Running Journal', ed. David, 297.
94. Nicholas Rodger, 'Commissioned Officers' Careers in the Royal Navy, 1690-1815', Fl Maritime Research, June 2001 , 11
95. also Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 380-2.
96. Rodger, 'Commissioned Officers' Careers', 10-14.
97. Memoir of James Trevenen, ed. Lloyd and Anderson, 34-5. Lloyd and Anderson suggest that 'Mr Buller' may have been the Cornish judge Sir Francis Buller.
98. For the career of Norton, see Philip Laundy, 'Norton, Fletcher, first Baron Grantley (1716-1789)', ODNB.
99. The letter of Molesworth Phillips to Dr Burney, 27 Apr. 1832, notes that Norton gave a farewell dinner to the crews of the Resolution and Discovery in 1776 at the Gun Inn, Deptford: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, MLDOC 1303. King's own entry into the navy had been through the patronage of his Norton kinsmen: J. K. Laughton, 'King, James (bap. 1750, d. 1784)', revised Andrew C. F. David, ODNB.
100. Memoir of James Trevenen, ed. Lloyd and Anderson, 35-6.
101. Ibid., pp. xiii-xiv, 36
102. Anthony Cross, By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 5, esp. 210-18.
103. Both during the authority of Viscount Keppel as First Lord of the Admiralty (Apr. 1782-Dec. 1783). Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 354-5, 381, notes that Keppel's overtly political use of patronage made the American war the only occasion when the ending of hostilities saw a boom in promotions. Hence, even Burney's and Williamson's late successes were abnormal and probably unexpected.
104. All dates and promotions are from Syrett and DiNardo (eds.), Commissioned Sea Officers of the Royal Navy.
105. Burney's career ended in confusion and ignominy in 1785 after he was charged with disobeying orders while captain of the Bristol: Harman, Fanny Burney, 186-7.
106. Cross, By the Banks of the Neva, 204-5, estimates that around seventy British officers were recruited between 1783 and 1789
107. more volunteered, specifically worried by the prospect of a long peace. Apart from Trevenen, from Cook's third voyage Joseph Billings and John Ledyard also tried their luck in Russia: ibid., 216-18, 432 n. 229.
108. Though in his decline Clerke had seemed less able to deliver and had seemed to lack the firm impartiality of Cook, both of which factors might account for the less than wholehearted admiration he appears to have engendered: See Journals, iii/2, 1271-2, for modulated criticism from Samwell.
109. For the dying Clerke's last attempts to fulfil his role as patron, see his letter to Sir Joseph Banks, ibid., 1543.
110. Salmund, Trial of the Cannibal Dog, notes rumours of extreme antagonism between Cook and Gore on the first voyage (pp. 130-1), and quotes the openly critical comments of an obsequious Clerke to Joseph Banks in 1772 (p. 466 n. 25).
111. Bligh also sounded a discordant note amidst the chorus of generic praise bestowed on Phillips for 'rescuing' Private Jackson from the water, claiming that Jackson was less in need of a saviour than Phillips had made out: Gould, 'Bligh's Notes on Cook's Last Voyage', 380-2.
112. Salmond, Trial of the Cannibal Dog, 415, notes the effects that Cook's flogging of eleven of the seventeen marines on board the Resolution may have had on their loyalty to their captain;
113. see the statistics ibid., 435-7.
114. Watts, in Journals, iii/1, 536 n. 2
115. Harvey, ibid.;
116. King, ibid., 558
117. Samwell, ibid., iii/2, 1200.
118. Rodger, Wooden World, 24-5, 263-4.
119. Ibid., 289, for new commissions created through 'resignations'.
120. Letter of Phillips: National Library of Australia, MS 333.
121. Bruno Pappalardo, Royal Navy Lieutenants' Passing Certificates, 1691-1902, 2 vols. (Kew, 2001).
122. See Journals, iii/2, 1461-3, 1466, 1473, for most of what is known about these men.
123. The originating study is Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (London, 1982).
124. The literature on these themes is now vast, but more recent examples include Penelope J. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991);
125. Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550-1800 (Basingstoke, 1994);
126. H. R. French, 'Social Status, Localism and the "Middle Sort of People" in England, 1620-1750', Past and Present, no. 166 (Feb. 2000).
127. My figures are based on the muster books printed in Journals, iii/ 2, 1457-80, though with different results from those of Beaglehole.
128. By Daines Barrington, whose Arctic interest played an influential role in the formulation of Cook's third voyage: Beaglehole, Life of Captain James Cook, 482-4
129. Glyn Williams, Voyages of Delusion: The Search for the Northwest Passage in the Age of Reason (London, 2002), 276-9.
130. Barrington's letters describing his discovery in Mousehole of Dolly Pentreath were published by the Society of Antiquaries in Archaeologia during 1776.
131. They are reprinted in Alan M. Kent and Tim Saunders (eds.), Looking at the Mermaid: A Reader in Cornish Literature, 900-1900 (London, 2000), 306-8.
132. Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, revised edn (Harmondsworth, 1990), 42-3.
133. For the issue of local recruitment, see Rodger, Wooden World, 155-8
134. and N. A. M. Rodger, "'A Little Navy of Your Own Making": Admiral Boscawen and the Cornish Connection in the Royal Navy', in Michael Duffy (ed.), Parameters of British Naval Power, 1650-1850 (Exeter, 1992). Heavily localized recruitment seems to have been largely a wartime expedient, though we know little enough about how the crew was raised for the third voyage.
135. French, 'Social Status, Localism and the "Middle Sort of People"', 94-6.
136. Despite the criticism levelled at it, Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, 1992), continues to set the terms for much of the debate.
137. 'Provincial' culture in towns like Newscastle was of course flourishing regardless: See. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), pt 6
138. Helen Berry and Jeremy Gregory, 'Introduction', in Helen Berry and Jeremy Gregory (eds.), Creating and Consuming Culture in North-East England, 1660-1830 (Aldershot, 2004), esp. 2-4.
139. It may have been particularly difficult being an Irishman in the navy, if what Greg Dening has called the 'cliometrics of violence' during Cook's last voyage add up: Dening, Mr Bligh's Bad Language, 113-24. Of the thirty-four floggings administered to men on the Resolution with known origins, 71 per cent were to men stated to be English, 21 per cent to Irish, 6 per cent to North Americans, 3 per cent to Welsh (figures rounded up).
140. This was broadly in line with the proportions of the crews, except in the case of the Irish, who only made up 8 per cent of those with a known origin. Whether owing to stereotypes of shiftless and criminal Irish, or to real differences in cultures of work and time discipline, there was ethnic differentiation in naval punishment. Flogging figure are derived from the lists in Salmond, Trial of the Cannibal Dog, 435-7.
141. Letter of Phillips: National Library of Australia, MS 333.
142. The course of the Westminster election can be followed in Gentleman's Mag., liv (1784), 314
143. Annual Register (1784), 190-2
144. Edward Lascelles, The Life of Charles James Fox (London, 1936), 148-56.
145. The fact that Williamson first made post-captain under Viscount Keppel's tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty may be significant - Keppel was Fox's second cousin and political ally: See Ruddock Mackay, 'Keppel, Augustus, Viscount Keppel (1725-1786)', ODNB;
146. and see n. 55 above.
147. Rodger, Wooden World, 275.
148. Memoir of James Trevenen, ed. Lloyd and Anderson, 32.
149. For the political uses of 'friendship', see Shani D'Cruze, 'The Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Colchester: Independence, Social Relations and the Community Broker', in Barry and Brooks (eds.), Middling Sort of People, esp. 182
150. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001), ch. 6.
151. Ellis ruined his chances of patronage with his unauthorized book, sold to a publisher for fifty guineas; the correspondence between Ellis and Banks is published in Joppien and Smith (eds.), Art of Captain Cook's Voyages, iii, text, 232-3.
152. Journals, iii/1, p. lxxxvii.
153. For Bayly's early life, see Gentleman's Mag., lxxxi (1811), 185
154. for Harvey and Roberts, see Journals, iii/2, 1460, 1462.
155. Neither ship was unusual in the Georgian navy for being crewed by provincials: Rodger, Wooden World, 156-8
156. Linda Colley, 'Going Native, Telling Tales: Captivity, Collaborations and Empire', Past and Present, no. 168 (Aug. 2000), 185 and n. 46.
157. Wilson, Island Race, 173-4, also sees a connection between shipboard friction and the social profile of the crew.
158. Salmond, Trial of the Cannibal Dog, 309.
159. Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776-1809, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2 vols., 2nd edn (Oxford, 1951), i, 368 and n.
160. For some comments, see Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 169-79
161. Richard C. Allen, '"Remember Me to my Good Friend the Captain": James Cook and the North Yorkshire Quakers', in Glyndwr Williams (ed.), Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments (Woodbridge, 2004).
162. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, 1992);
163. Sahlins, How 'Natives' Think.
164. The quotation is from Lord Sandwich, in Rodger, Command of the Ocean 391.