Captain Cook by Alistair MacLean

Author:Alistair MacLean
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-12-16T17:00:00+00:00

SIX

THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE

At the end of this second voyage there was no doubt at all, as there had been at the end of the first one, to whom all the honour and credit belonged. Cook was the man of the hour and, in a strangely quiet way, a national hero. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was given the Copley Gold Medal for his paper on the advancement of health at sea (his stringent enforcement of the rules for combating scurvy is not actually mentioned). In all of that incredible voyage Cook had lost only one man, and that not through scurvy. He was an intimate of the Lords of the Admiralty. He was received by the king, promoted to post-captain in command of H.M.S. Kent, a seventy-four gun cruiser, then made captain at Greenwich Hospital which was the Admiralty’s way of saying that, even at the age of forty-seven, he had done more than enough and was entitled to honourable – and full-paid – retirement.

Cook himself wasn’t so sure about this sinecure. To a friend he wrote: ‘My fate drives me from one extreme to another. A few months ago the whole southern hemisphere was hardly big enough for me, and now I am going to be confined within the limits of Greenwich Hospital, which are far too small for an active mind like mine. I must confess it is a fine retreat and a pretty income, but whether I can bring myself to like ease and retirement time will show’.

Cook was needlessly concerned. His time for ease and retirement was not yet come, tragically it was never to come. Plans were already afoot for a third great voyage but not, this time, to the South Seas. While Cook was busily engaged in writing up, for publication, the journal of his second voyage – having read the botch Hawkesworth had made of his previous journal he was determined to supervise this one himself – the Admiralty were considering the possibility, advisability and wisdom of trying to force the fabled North-West Passage, a dream that had been in the minds of men for close on three centuries. The idea was, simply, that between the Atlantic and the Pacific there might exist a passage around the top of North America. Many attempts, attempts associated with names like Cabot and Frobisher and Hudson and Baffin, had been made over the years. Baffin, at the end of the previous century, had actually reached the astonishing latitude of 77˚ 45’ north – almost halfway between the Arctic Circle and the Pole, an achievement that still stood a hundred years after the time of Cook. But even he had failed to find the North-West Passage.

The Admiralty was determined to try once more. This time, however, it was intended to make a double-pronged attack. It was known that in 1742 Bering, a Swede serving in the Russian Navy, had established that a strait existed between the Asiatic mainland and the north-west tip of North America which we now call Alaska.

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