Cook the Navigator

Abstract

To suggest that a historian should explain Cook the Navigator to a scientific body is, if I may use scriptural language, to lay upon a grasshopper the load of a camel. At least the grasshopper, with a proper terror of scientific bodies, may feel it so. Yet Cook was neither a particularly high flight among the higher flights of mathematics—to the modern mathematician he would seem hardly to have got off the ground—nor a singularly complicated chemical equation. It should be possible for the historian, in his biographical moments, to say why Admiral Forbes, at the head of the carefully elaborate paragraphs he composed for the published account of Cook’s third voyage, should refer to the Hero as ‘The ablest and most renowned Navigator this or any country hath produced’; or why Daniel Wray, F. R. S., less sweeping and more homely in his news to the Earl of Hardwicke, F. R. S., in August 1775, should nevertheless write, ‘Cook is returned, and has resumed his seat at the Mitre. He is a right-headed unaffected man; and I have a great authority for calling him our best navigator’. (1)† The Mitre was the tavern where the Royal Society dined; and the implication is that Cook, though not yet a Fellow, dined with it; and that was unusual for a sea captain, and argues some peculiar gift or accomplishment. He was not the only right-headed unaffected man in the naval service; so what was the gift? In fact he had more than one gift. Perhaps the first of them was that he was born in the eighteenth century, which was the right century for the others to function in: it posed the right problems at the right time, put into his hands the right technical equipment for their solution, gave him the right official support. But other naval persons existed in that century and did not attain eminence; and few among them had to begin with as few advantages. I discriminate advantages from gifts. It was an advantage to have among one’s relatives an earl who knew the First Lord of the Admiralty, and Cook’s relatives included no such excellent figure; it was a gift to have—what Cook’s lieutenant James King said Cook had—a strong and perspicacious mind. Well: a strong and perspicacious mind, in the navy in the eighteenth century: not enough, but a beginning.