Article 2 - REVIEW OF "BLUE LATITUDES" August 2008 edition of First Church of The Streets

     The adventures of Captain Cook can conjure up images of adventure and intrigue for those who are tantalized by tales of discovery and history. Without the voyages of Captain James Cook, history would probably look a lot different than it does today. This British figure can really intrigue one's imagination; it did for historian Tony Horwitz. It tantalized him so much that he decided to retrace the steps of the explorer himself, to see through his own eyes something of what the explorer saw, and perhaps what his discoveries had evolved into.

     "Blue Latitudes" is the culmination of these travels, weaving journeys on the Atlantic and the Pacific, from Cook's birthplace in England to his deathbed off the Kona Coast of Hawaii. In between are other pitstops in both travelers' journeys, from the well-known, perhaps even overrun, Great Barrier Reef in Australia to the little known country of Niue, pronounced "New-way". In the spirit of trying to recapture one of the first Westerners to span the globe, Horwitz and his friend British expatriate turned Australian Roger Williamson, put thousands of miles into a pilgrimage commemorating a life of exploration.

     The subtitle, "Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before", may seem like a satiric jab toward the Star Trek series, which opens itself with the tagline "boldly going where no man has gone before". It certainly looked like some kind of gimmick to make the book sound amusing. But the author sees an analogy between the two men. Raised on Star Trek as a kid, the author believes that the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk in many ways mirrored those of Captain James Cook. Both explorers set out to find terra incognita, and both treks were intended to be missions of discovery.

     The author's intrigue with this analogy seems to have been nurtured in his adult life, when he moved from the United States to Sydney, Australia when he followed his wife to her native land. As fate would have it, Horwitz moved just miles away from where Cook and his crew became the first Europeans to visit the east coast of Australia. A visit to an antiquarian bookstore yielded a copy of Cook's journals, laying the seed for his own adventure. What would it be like to follow in the footsteps of the one who went before him? This question was the inspiration for Horwitz to set out on his own intrepid adventures.

     "Blue Latitudes" is a romping adventure that spans the globe. The one thing that Horwitz seems to do, despite deprivation and discomfort, is to make his trek seem entertaining to a reader. Whether he is being pitched about on a ferry in the Gulf of Alaska or re-enacting being on an old fashioned ship in Australia, the author gives a vivid picture of what his travels are like. In a vicarious way, he gives some inkling to what the explorer Cook might have gone through as he made his way through a world that was unknown to his side of the Atlantic. He peppers the narrative with accounts from journals of Joseph Banks, Charles Clerke, and the historian J.C. Beaglehole, the writer who set out to write the complete biography of Cook using any writings at all related to the explorer. These other perspectives lend a different way of seeing the explorer, and the adventures that he set out upon in the world.

     This book provides a detailed account of Cook's exploits without being a dry treatise of historical facts yellowed with as much age as the original diaries written by the explorers. Prior to this book, I had some general knowledge of the explorer. Recently, on a trip to the Big Island of Hawaii, I whizzed past the explorer's death site by car, but didn't stop to see it in more detail. I knew he had been killed there, and of the controversy and mystery surrounding the details of his death. But as a casual tourist that came more for the Pacific than a history lesson, I didn't really dwell on the subject too much, other than noticing that some of the best coffee I drank came from a hamlet bearing the explorer's name.

     Horwitz went there as well, but instead of being a tourist, his travels are a pilgrimage trying to put together a puzzle that had been born during Cook's killing and persisted to this day. Had the Hawaiian natives regarded him as the fertility god Lono, and if this is true, if he had reassured the native people that he was an ordinary person, would they have not killed him in some act of ritual, or feeling of betrayal? Or were they just angry at the Brits' impudence by taking the wood around the sacred sites just to rebuild their ship? If the ship had been put closer to the rocky shore, would Cook have been able to sail away to safety instead of being left, unable to swim, standing on the shore facing a hostile populace? There is no easy way to answer this question, but Horwitz tries. He absorbs himself into the landscape in a more total way than a holiday goer like myself looking for folly.

     This total immersion in his surroundings gives a depth to this travelogue that is more than just what someone sees when he goes to a new place. One can only imagine the surreal effect of going to places, seeing similarities to what history has made sacred in its details, and yet having evolved to something so different in the modern age, perhaps even seeded from the initial exploits of Cook himself leading to future travels of other Western explorers, naturalists and adventurers. Horwitz goes to the sites that Cook explored trying to get a better sense of the explorer and what he might have encountered.

     As Cook used the best in transportation of his time, Horwitz uses the best modern invention to get across the Pacific from place to place: the plane. This modern invention of the Western world, taking the author to other places which have been touched, converted, or sometimes destroyed from the wonders of the Western world, raises the question of whether or not Cook inadvertently opened a Pandora's box upon the world by his visitation. The question of whether one contaminates or contributes through meeting those in the unknown is a serious inquiry which comes up much in the author's mind. First contact is always a precarious thing, and Cook had no prime directive. Boldly going where no white man has gone before can be a tricky thing, and Horwitz, over two hundred years later, is there to record what happened afterwards.