moment of the fight, when Caillemot and Schomberg, his two best
captains, had been killed, and he, drawing his sword and swinging it
aloft with his wounded arm, led his trusty Dutch guards and Ulstermen
against the Irish centre. James, meanwhile, having watched the first
part of the fight on which all his fortunes depended from the safe
eminence of the Hill of Donore, had already given up for lost the
day which he had done nothing to win, and was making the best of
his way to Dublin, whence, in due course, leaving the beaten and
demoralised rabble that had once been his army to its fate, he fled
to the congenial ignominy of his safe retreat at St. Germain, and the
fostering care of his country’s worst enemy.
The Battle of the Boyne not only settled the fate of the Stuart
dynasty for good; it decided the question whether this country was to
be ruled by a feeble despotism under the patronage of France, or by
that constitutional monarchy under which Great Britain has so worthily
proved her title to be called the Mother of Free Nations, and in
winning this battle and deciding this all-important question, William
of Orange won the right to be counted among the wisest and strongest
of our Empire-Makers. The disgusted Irishmen, too, had some reason on
their side when they said to the victors after the battle: “Change
leaders, and we’ll fight you again!”
The story of his wars in those countries which have been aptly termed
the cockpit of Europe is the story of the continuation of that work
which he came to England to do; not, as has already been pointed out,
for England as a country, but for the establishment of those principles
for which the British Constitution, of which he was one of the makers,
stands. Ignorant or prejudiced critics have accused him of sacrificing
English blood and treasure to the furtherance of his own ambition. The
fact is that he employed them upon the best and most necessary work
that there was for them to do just then.
“Look at my brave English!” he said to the Elector of Bavaria one
day during the siege of Namur, while a British regiment was carrying
the outworks on one side of the city. But they were doing more than
carrying earthworks. They were fighting for the principles which their
descendants crowned with everlasting glory at Trafalgar and Waterloo.
They were showing the soldiers and generals of France, then held to
be the best in the world, the sort of stuff that they were made of,
and giving promise of future prowess that was soon to be splendidly
redeemed at Blenheim and Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet.
It was a singular war, and by all the rules of warfare the issue should
have been the reverse of what it was. But again and again William’s
wonderful genius and indomitable persistence snatched victory out of
defeat, and turned disaster into advantage, until at last the Grand
Monarch himself had to confess the power of the enemy whom he had once
thought so insignificant, and the signing of the Treaty of Ryswick left
William triumphant if somewhat dissatisfied.
The results would no doubt have been much greater if William could have
had his own way, and if the strife of parties in the British Parliament
had not so sorely crippled him. But at least he had the satisfaction
of knowing before he died that, whereas a few months before the French
men-of-war had with impunity insulted and threatened the English
coasts, and landed a small army on Irish soil, a few months afterwards
every invader had been driven from British ground, and the French fleet
almost destroyed, while the Mediterranean, on which British ships
had sailed only by sufferance, was now well on the way to becoming a
British lake.
And yet, in spite of all the triumphs that he had won over so many
difficulties and so many dangers, and in spite of the consciousness of
work well and nobly, if quietly and unostentatiously, done, William’s
last days, like those of many another man who has deserved well of the
world, were full of sorrow and suffering.
The death of his now adored queen had so shaken his mighty nature that
for some days his reason was despaired of, and there can be no doubt
but that it hastened his own end. And yet, weak and far advanced in
disease as he was when he went out for that fatal ride from Kensington
to Hampton Court, he was even then going a-hunting. The brutal Jacobite
toast: “To the little gentleman in black velvet who works underground!”
still serves to remind us of the mole-hill over which his horse
stumbled and fell, breaking his rider’s collar-bone, and inflicting the
death-wound which he had escaped on a score of battle-fields.
His death was worthy of his life, for it was the death of a brave,
patient man and a Christian gentleman. No doubt he himself would have
preferred to have died at the head of a charge, or in the thick of an
assault on a French fortress, but his destiny ordered it otherwise,
and the man who had a hundred times faced death in the most reckless
fashion for the purpose of inspiring his followers with his own courage
and enthusiasm, died quietly in his bed, leaving behind him the
greatest work ever done by an individual British sovereign, and a fame
which, but for the one dark and inexplicable blot of Glencoe, is as
fairly entitled to be called spotless as that of any man who ever sat
upon a throne and accomplished great things with such means as came to
his hand.
VI
_JAMES COOK_,
_CIRCUMNAVIGATOR_
VI
JAMES COOK
Once more I am going to ask you to take your seat with me on the ideal
equivalent of the Magic Carpet and skim across another time-gulf some
half-century wide. This time we alight on the morning of Monday, July
5, 1742, before the door of a double-fronted shop, one side of which is
devoted to the sale of groceries and the other to the drapery business.
This shop is situated in a little village on the Yorkshire coast a few
miles from Whitby, Staithes, or more exactly The Staithes, so called
from the local name for a pier or sea-wall of wood jutting out a few
feet into the German Ocean, and built partly to protect the little bay
from the North Sea rollers and partly to afford accommodation for the
fishing-boats and colliers.
The shop belongs to a substantial citizen of Staithes named Saunderson,
and this morning Mr. Saunderson is a very angry man. In fact, if we go
into the shop, which is not yet open, we shall find him with a cane
or some similar weapon in his hand, leaning behind the counter and
hitting blindly at a bed there is beneath it, shouting the while sundry
excellent maxims on the virtue of early rising, especially modified for
the benefit of apprentices.
But no response comes from the bed, and Mr. Saunderson stoops down to
make closer investigation. The bed is empty, and the fact dawns on him
that his last apprentice has followed the example of all the others
and run away to sea. It was a very common event on the Yorkshire coast
in those days, but this particular running away was destined to be a
very memorable one for the world, for the lad who, instead of being
in the bed under the counter, was just then striding rapidly away
over the fields to Whitby with one extra shirt and a jack-knife for
his sole possessions, was James Cook, a name as dear to the lovers of
the romance of travel and adventure as Robinson Crusoe, and one of
infinitely more importance in the annals of mankind.
In following his fortunes, so far as the brief limits of such a
sketch as this will permit, we shall bid a perhaps welcome adieu for
a while to the roar of guns and the shock of battle, to the blaze of
burning towns and the fierce cries ringing along the decks of captured
treasure-ships, to watch the contest of a clear head and a strong will
against those foes which may be overcome without bloodshed, although
not always without loss of life--the hidden dangers of unknown oceans
strewn with uncharted reefs and shoals lying in wait for unwary keels,
the sudden hurricanes of the Tropics, and the storms and fogs and the
floating ice-navies of the far North and South. It was these that
Captain Cook went out to fight and overcome, and in doing so to prove
eloquently that:
“Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war.”
Nevertheless there are certain points of likeness between James Cook,
Geographer and Circumnavigator, and that other Circumnavigator, Francis
Drake, Pirate and Scourge of Spain. Both began life as ship-boys,
and both rose, by sheer ability and strength of purpose, far above
their original station in life to positions of command in the service
of their country. Both were men of iron will, far-reaching design,
unshakeable self-reliance, and passionate temper, and, lastly, both
were possessed by that irresistible spirit of roving and adventure
which, when it once seizes a man, but seldom lets him rest in peace. In
short, though the vocation of one was piracy and war, and that of the
other the peaceful, but none the less adventurous service of science,
both were stamped with the supreme and essential characteristics of the
Empire-Maker.
Naturally, the world had changed a good deal by the time James Cook
started out to add so enormously to men’s knowledge of it. Spain had
fallen from her high estate and was living in slothful ease on the
dregs and lees of that strong wine which she had drunk to intoxication
in the golden days of Cortez and Pizarro. But Britain, no longer only
England, had become Great Britain, and was fast expanding into Greater
Britain. Cowley, Dampier, Clapperton and Anson had circumnavigated the
globe more than once, and people were beginning to have something like
a definite notion of how very big a place was this world which now
seems so small to us. The Imperial Idea was beginning to take hold of
men’s minds. They wanted to know, not so much how big the world was,
but what other unknown lands might be lying waiting for the discoverer,
hidden away among the vast expanses which were still an utter blank
upon the map.
The maritime nations of the world, too, and Britain, now foremost among
them, had unconsciously taken a very great stride along the pathway of
real progress, and they were beginning to grasp the higher ideal of
colonisation as distinguished from mere conquest, and to James Cook
belongs the high honour, if not of discovering, at least of first
definitely locating and in part mapping out the greatest of all the
British colonies.
Indeed, it may be said that, in sober fact, he added a whole continent
to the British Empire, and that without the striking of a single blow
or the loss of a single life in battle.
The first few years of James Cook’s seafaring life were eventless,
just as Francis Drake’s were, but for all that he, like Gloriana’s
Little Pirate, was doing that minor but no less essential part of his
life-work which was the necessary preparation for the greater. He was
doing his work first as ship’s boy, then as sailor before the mast,
then as second mate, first mate, and so on up the laborious ladder
which was to lead him in the end to an unequalled eminence among
mariners.
Thus for thirteen years he served what may be called his apprenticeship
to his life’s work; learning in the most practical of all schools,
a North Sea collier of the eighteenth century, not only the science
of seamanship in all its details, but also what was hardly less
important--that science of taking things as they came, of looking upon
hardship, privation and danger as the commonplaces of a seaman’s life,
incidents in his day’s work, as it were, and as such scarcely worth
even the mention, and hence much less worth troubling about.
A curiously instructive fact strikes one in contrasting Captain Cook’s
own account of his voyages with those of others, such as Anderson and
Gilbert, who sailed with him. They expatiate largely on the miseries
of heat and cold, ice and mist, the almost uneatable character of the
sea-fare of those days, disease among the crew, and so on; but Captain
Cook hardly ever mentions them, saving only the scurvy, of which more
hereafter.
But there was something else that James Cook had already learnt long
ago while he was yet a boy. When he was a lad of six or seven he had
been set to work on a farm belonging to a man named William Walker,
and this William had a wife named Mary who, taking a fancy to the lad,
taught him his letters and encouraged him to read, and so, without
knowing it, put into his hands the talisman which was to win his way to
future greatness. She not only aroused in him that passion for reading
which distinguished him among the sailors of his time, but she gave him
what might have been the only means of gratifying it, for not every
farm-lad and ship’s-boy of the middle of the eighteenth century had
learnt, or ever did learn, to read and write.
It may have been that James Cook’s latent ambition had never looked
beyond the possibility of becoming master of one of the vessels of
which he had been mate, and it is also possible that he might never in
reality have been anything more, but it so happened that his ship, the
_Friendship_, was lying in London river in May, 1756, and that at the
same time the war with France, which had been brewing for a year, broke
out.
As usual the Press Gang set instantly to work, and now came Cook’s
chance. He was mate of a ship, albeit only a collier brig; still he
was a thorough seaman, an excellent navigator, and, more than that, he
seems to have known something of the theory as well as the practice of
his science. These accomplishments, however, did not put him beyond the
reach of the Press Gang.
Now, in those days there were two ranks of seamen before the mast in
the King’s navy--the pressed man, who might be anything from a raw
land-lubber to an escaped convict, and the volunteer, who was probably
and usually a good sailor, if not something better, as Cook was, and
he, guided either by inspiration or deliberate resolve, eluded the
Press Gang by offering himself as a volunteer, and so in due course
took his rating as able-seaman before the mast on board his Majesty’s
frigate _Eagle_, of sixty guns, of which shortly afterwards the good
genius of his life, Sir Hugh Palliser, was appointed captain.
During the next four years there was fighting, but we have no record
of any share that Cook took in it. What we do know is that by the time
he was thirty he had risen to the rank of master of the _Mercury_, a
King’s ship which went with the fleet to the St. Lawrence at a very
critical juncture in British colonial history.
So far it would appear that he had worked himself up by sheer ability
and industry, but now his chance was to come. The river St. Lawrence at
that time had never been surveyed, and it was absolutely necessary that
soundings should be taken and the river correctly charted before the
fleet could go in and with its guns cover Wolfe’s attack on Quebec.
The all-important work was entrusted to the master of the _Mercury_,
and although the river was swarming with the canoes of hostile Indians
in the service of the French, and though he had to do his work at
night, he did it so thoroughly that not only did the fleet go in and
out again with perfect safety, but the work has needed but little
re-doing from that day to this.
Thus did James Cook, not as sailor or fighting-man, but as good mariner
and skilful workman play his first part as Empire-Maker, and in an
unostentatious fashion contribute his share towards the capture of
Quebec and the acquisition of one of the widest and fairest portions of
Greater Britain.
He was at this time, as has been said, only thirty. As regards the
outer aspect of the man he stood something over six feet, spare, hard,
and active. His face was a good one and suited to the man, broad
forehead, bright, brown, well-set eyes, yet rather small, a long,
well-shaped nose with good nostrils, a firm mouth, and full, strong
chin.
In short, his best portraits show you just the kind of man you would
expect Captain Cook to be. For the rest he was a man of iron frame,
tireless at work, resting only when it was a physical necessity, with
few friends and fewer confidants, cool of judgment save during his rare
and deplorable fits of passion, self-contained and self-reliant--just
such a sea-king, in short, as we may imagine Heaven to have
commissioned to carry the British flag three times round the world and
to the uttermost parts of the known earth, and to plant it on lands
which until then no white man’s eye had seen or foot had trodden.
In the same year Cook was promoted from the _Mercury_ to the
_Northumberland_, the Admiral’s flag-ship, and in her he came back
to England, and at St. Margaret’s Church, Barking, married Elizabeth
Batts, a young lady of great beauty and of social standing far above
that of the grocer’s apprentice and collier’s knockabout boy, but not
above that of the Master of a King’s ship. His married life lasted
some seventeen years, and of these he spent a little over four in the
enjoyment of the delights of home.
For the next four years or so he was regularly employed in surveying
and exploring work off the Atlantic coast of America, and this
of itself shows that he had already made his mark in his chosen
profession. But much greater things were now to be in store for him. It
will be remembered how Drake, when he first saw the smooth waters of
the Pacific, prayed God that He would give him life and leave to sail
an English ship on its waters. That prayer had been granted, and his
and many another English ship had crossed the great Sea of the South.
Meanwhile the realised dream of El Dorado had been replaced in men’s
minds by another, even more vast, shadowy, and splendid. This was the
dream of the Great Southern Continent, and in this imagination revelled
and ran riot. Grave scientists, too, demonstrated beyond all doubt that
there must be such a land far away to the south since how, without it
as a counterpoise to the continents of the north, was the rolling world
to be kept in equilibrium?
So they took it for granted, laid it down upon the maps, and wrote
glowing descriptions of the varieties of climate, the splendour of
scenery, the wealth of treasures and the strange peoples and animals
that it must of necessity contain. Above all, it would be a new El
Dorado which would not be under the control of Spain.
What more could men want, unless indeed it was the actual discovery of
the Terra Incognita Australis? This was the new world of which Cook was
to be the Columbus. Others had seen parts of it just as others had seen
parts of America before the great Genoese reached the West Indies, but
he was the man who was to do the work of putting its existence beyond
all doubt.
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.