LITMIR.BIZ

       PROLOGUE

      Shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century, a young gunner in the Royal Navy, a certain Jeremy Blyth, who had yet to sail on his first commission, made his way into an alehouse in Wapping. It was a dock-side tavern typical of its time and place, dirty, smoky, with cracked floor-boards and blackened walls and ceiling, entirely lacking in what, even in that era, passed for the more civilised amenities of life. A planked bar, a few rickety tables and chairs; that was all. Typical, too, were the customers: a mixture of seamen from both naval services, many the victims of press-gangs, many with criminal pasts, hard-drinking, hard-swearing, hard-living men inured to suffering and hardships and death, men tough and enduring and hard-bitten to a degree almost incomprehensible to those who live in a gentler and more effete age.

      Atypical, however, was the atmosphere in that ale-house. No one spoke. No one drank. The silence was accentuated by occasional sobs. The landlord, shoulders heaving, had his head buried in his forearms. So did a number of those at the tables. Some of the men were openly weeping and all seemed lost in their own private worlds of grief-stricken desolation. Blyth sat down opposite a grizzled old seaman, a grey-cheeked veteran with tears welling from sightless eyes, an untouched drink before him. Wonderingly, gently, Blyth touched him on the forearm.

      ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

      The old man looked up from the table and said angrily ‘Haven’t you heard? Haven’t you heard?’

      Blyth shook his head.

      ‘Nelson is dead.’

      Again Blyth looked slowly round the dingy room, at the men for whom the death of Nelson had left an aching void that could never be filled, then he said: ‘Thank God I never knew him.’

      It is doubtful whether any such scene occurred, or any remotely comparable, when the news of Cook’s death reached England some twenty-six years earlier. The nation mourned him, as England has always mourned the passing of its great men, its Marlboroughs, its Wellingtons, its Churchills: but it did not weep with a broken heart.

      Nelson and Cook are the two most revered names in the annals of the Royal Navy. Reverence is compounded of respect and love. Nelson was widely respected but universally loved. Cook was universally respected but he was incapable of inspiring in the minds and hearts of the public that degree of devotion and adoration that Nelson so effortlessly and inevitably aroused. But that Cook was beloved by his officers and men is beyond dispute.

      The reason for the difference lies, of course, in the natures of the two men. To love a person, a public figure, one has to be able to identify one’s self with him: to do that, one has to know him – or, at least, believe that one knows him. In so far as this was concerned, there was no difficulty at all about Nelson, a warm-hearted, outgoing extrovert whose inner thoughts and private life were as open a book as his public ones. But Cook’s inner thoughts and private life were a closed book, one of those old-fashioned books with a brass hasp that he’d locked and then thrown away the key. With the passing of the years it seems increasingly unlikely that the key will ever be found.

      We know all about Cook and we know nothing about him. We know that he was courageous, prudent, wise, indefatigable, adventurous, a born leader of men: but what he was like, what kind of individual he was personally, we have but the most remote of conceptions. We know that he took those leaking old coal-boats of his from the tropical Pacific to the bitter and awesome wastes of both the Arctic and the Antarctic in the most stupendous voyages of exploration in the history of mankind. But whether he liked flowers or dandled his children on his knee or gazed enraptured at the sun going down in the ocean beyond Hawaii or Tahiti we shall never know. We know he was the greatest navigator of his age or any age: it would be interesting to know if he ever got lost in the back streets of his home borough of Stepney.

      To have maintained so inviolate a privacy is indeed a feat, but to have done so in spite of the fact that he left us over one million words minutely recording his day to day activities over many years amounts to an accomplishment so staggering as to defy rational comprehension. But, in his journals and logs, this is what Cook did indeed do. No famous figure of modern times has ever documented his life so thoroughly and painstakingly. But this massive documentation is detached, impersonal; Cook does not appear: it was about what he did, not what he was. Even in his private correspondence

Скачать книгу