Captain Cook. Alistair MacLean

this occasion, May 1759, it wasn’t. It had been, but the French, understandably enough, had removed every last buoy. It fell to the lot of Cook and the masters of one or two other vessels to re-chart and re-buoy the passage, a difficult and arduous task lasting several weeks, a task that was made no easier by the fact that Cook and the others worked mostly under the range of French guns, that they had to work frequently at night and that the French had the infuriating habit of coming out from shore in canoes during the hours of darkness and cutting away buoys which had to be replaced the next day – after, that is, fresh soundings had been taken.

      But by June all was ready and in that month the entire British armada of over two hundred ships safely made the passage of the Traverse without a single casualty. There is little question that the bulk of the credit belonged to Cook: in official despatches he was now being referred to as ‘Master Surveyor’. As a mark of the esteem in which he was already held it may be mentioned that Wolfe consulted him about the placement of several ships before Quebec – a general seeking the advice of a man who wasn’t even an officer. But Wolfe, doubtless, recognised an expert when he saw one.

      After the siege and capture of Quebec – Cook took no physical part in any of this – most of the naval vessels were sent home for a refit, including the Pembroke, but Cook had to wait another three years before he saw England again for he was transferred to the Northumberland, flagship of the commander-in-chief, Lord Colville – a certain indication that he was now regarded as the ablest master in the fleet.

      For the next three years, at the personal request of Admiral Colville, Cook continued to chart, firstly, the St Lawrence and then the coast of Newfoundland. That he was eminently successful in the execution of his duties is clear from three things. In January 1761, Lord Colville directed the storekeeper ‘to pay the master of the Northumberland fifty pounds in consideration of his indefatigable industry in making himself master of the pilotage of the River Saint Lawrence’. The following year Admiral Colville sent Cook’s charts home to the Admiralty urging that they should publish them and adding: ‘From my experience of Mr Cook’s genius and capacity I think him well qualified for the work he has performed and for greater undertakings of the same kind’ – a prophetic opinion if ever there was one. Finally, Cook’s charts appeared in the North American Pilot in 1775 and were to remain the standard works of navigational reference for those waters for over a century.

      Cook returned home in November 1762. In December he married a certain Elizabeth Batts. This has been the cause of much eyebrow-raising among historians over the years for whatever else Cook may have been, dashing and impetuous he was not and the thought of this steady, calm and careful man engaging in a whirlwind courtship does not find easy acceptance. On the other hand, to say that Cook wasn’t much given to talking about himself is to put the matter in a very restrained fashion indeed and for all we know to the contrary he may have known her from the time she could walk. In any event, speculation is pointless for Mrs Cook, regrettably, forms no part of the story of Captain Cook: regrettably, for to have known more about her would have given us a deeper inferential insight into Cook’s character. But we know nothing about her, just as we know nothing about any of their children. They remain shadowy and insubstantial figures, people without faces on the far periphery of Captain Cook’s life. They are only names.

      The next five years of Cook’s life were comparatively uneventful, devoted in the main to endless studies and the steady increase of his already vast store of knowledge and experience. In the spring of 1763 he returned to Canada where he spent the summer surveying and charting the east coast: in the winter he returned to England where he spent the next few months working up his charts for publication. This pattern was repeated for the next four years during which he was given the command of his own schooner to help him in his work – a command, be it noted, not a commission.

      It is a quite staggering reflection that when Cook left Canada for the last time in 1767, he was still a non-commissioned officer. It is also a staggering reflection on the Lords of the Admiralty of the time that, because of their innate snobbish conviction that officers and gentlemen are born and not made, Cook did not quite qualify for a commission. He had been in the despised Merchant Service, he had sailed before the mast in the Navy, he was poor and his origins were obscure. There could have been little doubt left in the Admiralty by that time that in Cook they had the greatest seaman, navigator and cartographer of the generation. But a commission? Hardly. Hardly, that was, until they realised that to send a naval vessel to circumnavigate the globe, in the greatest exploratory voyage ever undertaken, under the command of a non-commissioned officer wouldn’t be quite the thing to do. For one thing, it would redound most dreadfully upon the alleged competence of those who did hold commissions and, for another, it would not look good in the history books. So, belatedly, they made him a lieutenant.