A Cook's Tour: Tranquility not disturbed by the inequality of condition.
My last tourist fling in the UK was a long weekend in York where it rained so steadily the river breached the banks in the city. Ten years ago my flatmate at the time insisted that York was the best place to go to in the UK. My war of the roses set was incomplete. Lancaster without York, red rose without white.
So I went on the long train which is like time travel and crash course in regional accents; as we drew north the phrases became richer and less familiar to me.
I caught up with my mate O who thankfully has returned to medicine, in a new job out of London. After I'd seen her in the empty Trafalgar Square, she had been to a handful of anti-lockdown protests. Forefront of my mind was the protests back home, fraying my own sense of kiwi identity. Over some truly divine food, we unpacked again what it had all been like. I think mixed in with it all was the uncomfortable knowledge that legislation to prevent disruptive protests was before the British parliament.
Back in 2020, I watched a couple of incredible docuseries (Origins and The Pacific) that explored in detail what it had meant when Cook had come to the Pacific. So I was curious to check out the places he had come from. The town he was born in still felt small as I drove through it, the hill he used to climb indeed had great views out to sea. In his day climbing it and looking out would have been akin to standing on an overbridge in the city and watching traffic on the motorway. Its easy to imagine him standing there dreaming for a ticket out of there - classic origin story stuff. Nowdays that horizon is empty, with shipping lanes casting south and west, rather than bunny hopping round the British and Baltic coast.
I devoured podcasts as I drove round the coast to where he was basically a checkout chick as a teenager (Staithes). I felt a kinship to that, weirdly. The store he would have worked in washed out to sea years ago so I stacked up on fish and chips there and moved on to the town he learned how to sail the Colliers that he subsequently took to the end of the known white world. I get the hero worship more now. Greatness comes from and passes through incredibly ordinary places. Or perhaps, there are no ordinary places where people are.
The town he mastered his art in (Whitby) is more famous locally for Dracula and is a bit of a pilgrimage spot for goths. The statue of him there was paid for by the Australian and NZ government in the 70s. It was good to see it all in that context.
There's essentially 3 Captain Cooks - the Man himself, the Hero and the Devil - a symbol of the destruction and disease that came after him. Probably the most striking thing I learned was how he responded to a culture so uninterested in material things that subsequent explorers clocked it up to them being somehow less human, rather than following curiosity further to find out what they did treasure. What a mess.
He wrote: "From what I have said of the Natives of New-Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff &c., they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholesome Air. . . . In short they seem’d to set no Value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them; this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities."
Honestly. Why wouldn't you chase after that?
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