The Road to There: Mapmakers and Their Stories by Val Ross

Author:Val Ross [Ross, Val]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781770490628
Google: wYQzPXrVFRAC
Amazon: B0031TZBBK
Barnesnoble: B0031TZBBK
Goodreads: 12576226
Publisher: Tundra
Published: 2003-04-15T05:00:00+00:00

In 1775 Cook and the Resolution headed home. The People had been gone for three years and seventeen days. They had sailed 110,000 kilometers (70,000 miles), the equivalent of three times round the world. Cook was once again hailed as a hero by his men. They boasted that they would follow him anywhere — which is what they had done.

This time, Cook didn’t make the mistake of letting anyone else write about the voyage. This time, he concentrated on getting his journals ready for publication, and taking Mrs. Cook, pregnant with their sixth child, to parties in London’s high society before his next mission. For Cook was to search for a route from the Pacific to the Atlantic across the top of North America — the fabled Northwest Passage.

This time, Cook was too busy to visit the shipyards — too busy to stop the shipbuilders from cutting corners and using rotten wood. Cook’s inattention to detail would be fatal. On July 12, 1776, the Resolution and her new sister ship, the Discovery, sailed from England.

This time, Cook seemed a changed man. The People were dismayed to see their once sensible captain order men to be flogged for refusing to eat new foods. He always seemed to be angry at himself, as frequent stops to repair his leaky rotten ships reminded him of his failure to prepare properly for the voyage.

But if he was no longer the fair, reliable captain of earlier voyages, he was still skilled, brave, and lucky. Early in 1777, as they crossed the Pacific, intending to chart the west coast of North America, Cook’s men sighted a chain of stunning islands. The islanders were so astonished, it was clear that the English were the first Europeans to arrive there. Cook marked the place with the aid of his longitude watch at around 21 degrees, north, 157 degrees west.

Then the ships turned east to North America. Over most of 1778 they sailed from what is now Oregon to Alaska, past some 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) of rugged coast, searching for the western end of the Northwest Passage. Cook sailed recklessly in these uncharted lands, reaching almost as close to the North Pole as he had come to the South.

He would never know that, when approaching winter forced the ships to turn back in the Bering Strait, they were just 120 kilometers (75 miles) short of the eastward route they were seeking. The ships headed back to the beautiful islands for rest and repair, and anchored at one the local people called Owhyee — we spell it Hawaii.

The stunning horseshoe-shaped bay where the exhausted sailors dropped anchor is called Kealakekua, or “Path of the Gods.” It was the place where Hawaiian legend said that Orono, the god of abundance, would one day arrive in a white-sailed canoe. When two ships sailed into view not only at the appointed place, but at the appointed time of year — harvest time — the astonished Hawaiians went mad with joy. Thousands paddled out to greet the visitors and their tall leader, who was surely Orono himself.

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