PMarione
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 Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2008 6:08 pm Post subject: Captain Cook death |
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From the Times Colonist (15 June 2008):
file:///Volumes/Macintosh_HD3/Installers/Dofus_v1_23_0%20Folder/Dofus.html
Legendary captain met his fate far from home by Jime Hume
| Quote: | After his Vancouver Island encounter, Hawaii was Capt. James Cook's last
stop
They killed him on the rocks of Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, because, some biographers say, he had proved to be mortal when he let the natives think him a god. The truth of the cause leading to the slaughter and dismemberment of Capt. James Cook in February 1779 may never be known, but the details of his death are well and accurately recorded.
The young farm boy from north Yorkshire had mapped the coast of Newfoundland; charted the way for Wolfe's victory on the Plains of Abraham; navigated the unknown oceans of the world; looked for imagined land beyond the ice of Antarctica; traded with the first citizens of what would become Vancouver Island; and pushed north beyond the Aleutians in futile search for the Northwest Passage before he died.
He was 51 and already a legend when he was hacked to death by Hawaiian warriors, his once vital organs consumed by tribal chiefs, his flesh by villagers. Some bones were later recovered to be buried in a small coffin in the deepest reaches of Kealakekua Bay.
Lt. James King describes the arrival off Cook's ship Resolution of an Hawaiian chief "with a bundle wrapped very decently and covered with a spotted cloak of black and white feathers, which we understood to be a mourning colour. On opening it we found the Captain's hands, which were well known from a remarkable cut (old wounds), the scalp, the skull, [but] wanting thigh bones and arm bones. The hands only had flesh on them and they were cut in holes and salt crammed in; the leg bones, lower jaw and feet were all that remained and had escaped the fire...."
On Feb. 22 Capt. Charles Clerke of companion ship Discovery and now commander-in-chief of the expedition committed the remains "to the deep with all the attention and honour we could possibly pay in this part of the world."
Ship's Master Thomas Edgar tells us that at five in the afternoon Cook's Resolution and the Discovery "hoisted ensigns and pendants half staff up and crossed over yards. At three quarters past the hour Resolution tolled her bell and fired 10 four pounders, half minute guns, and committed the bones of Captain Cook to the deep."
Fifteen minutes later both ships "at 6 p.m. squared yards." The third great voyage of Cook, the one that put the West and Northwest Coast of Canada on the maps of the world, was over -- although it would be October 1780 before the two ships made it home -- losing their second commander Capt. Clerke on the way to tuberculosis. They had been journeying since July 1776 -- four years and three months beyond the edge of the world.
Cook himself had been ill for much of his third voyage and several historians suggest he was losing a mental as well as a physical health battle. Official journals record some unwise command decisions -- including the one taking him back to Hawaii and his death. On occasion his once-infallible seamanship faltered, leaving officers and crew nervous in inclement weather off uncharted coastlines. He had also become more vindictive in his punishments for crimes on board ship or by natives on shore. What had been six strokes of the lash for petty theft became 12 then 24 and on at least one recorded occasion -- 36 strokes.
For officers and men who had served under Cook on earlier voyages the changes were hard to understand. He had always been austere, but he had also always -- until his third voyage -- been understanding and fair, especially toward lower ranks. That, after all, is where he came from, first as the son of a farm labourer, then as a humble deckhand when he commenced his life at sea.
He had known hardship as a child and the pain of mortality as a son and later as a father. Tombstones in All Saints churchyard at Great Ayton, north Yorkshire, carry the names of numerous siblings and his mother Grace.
A memorial to Cook at Great St. Andrew's Church, Cambridge, lists the death of Cook's 16-year-old son Nathaniel, a midshipman on HMS Thunderer, lost with all hands in a hurricane in 1780; of Hugh Cook, age 17, who died while studying at Cambridge University; of Capt. James Cook, 31, commander of HM Sloop Spitfire, lost at sea in 1874. Two babies are on the list, Joseph, one month; George, four months, and Elizabeth, four years -- plus the redoubtable Mrs. Elizabeth Cook, who lived to be 94. Mother Cook and sons James and Hugh rest beneath the middle aisle of St. Andrew's.
William Bligh, of later mutiny on the Bounty fame, and midshipman George Vancouver were with Cook when he missed the entrance to Juan de Fuca Strait and sailed past Sooke in the dark in 1778.
Fourteen years later Vancouver, by then a captain, would command his own explorations in the Pacific Northwest in 1792 and '93 -- only to find a Spanish flag flying at Nootka over a strong settlement established largely by one Don Pedro Alberni under the leadership of Juan Bodega y Quadra with a claim that the land was part of New Spain. |
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008 |
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