CAPTAIN COOK AND THE SOUTH PACIFIC (269 pp.)—John Gwyfher—Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).
As the sullen waters spumed in white fury along the Great Barrier Reef, steely, hidden fingers of coral dug into the bottom of the Endeavour and the hearts of every man aboard. Ordinarily, 18th century seamen panicked fast. Most of them were too superstitious to learn how to swim; they felt it would only prolong the agony of drowning. The only rule of shipwreck and death was to loot the liquor supplies and drink oneself insensible in the short time left to live.
Not so the crew of Captain Cook. Under his nerveless, hypnotic brown eyes, the men heaved 50 tons of equipment overboard, worked the pumps until they dropped, and strained mightily at the capstan so that on the second high tide, the Endeavour was pulled free. Even then the ship would have sunk to the bottom if Cook had not been canny—and humble— enough to accept a timid midshipman's suggestion that he draw a dung-and-oakum-smeared sail under the ship and over a shattered spot in the bottom. Pressure clotted the sail to the hole, and the Endeavour and her men were saved. Though the East Australia coast was only 25 miles away, Cook's wisdom, the midshipman's wit, and even the crew's will were undoubtedly sharpened by the knowledge that another ship was not likely to be coming their way for the rest of the century.
The Transit of Venus. It is the story of the first and greatest of Cook's tours which John Gwyther, a wartime Royal Navy officer, tells in Captain Cook and the South Pacific. A three-year circumnavigation of the globe (1768-71), Cook's voyage added Australia, New Zealand and a number of South Pacific isles to the then known world. Narrated by Author Gwyther with seadog relish, authority and profound professional admiration, Cook's epic journeyings have the fascination of an Odyssey from Yorkshire.
James Cook was a farmer's son, the sixth or seventh of nine—his mother was never quite sure which. A grocer's apprentice as a boy, he later manned coal barges, enlisted in the Royal Navy and worked his way up, most notably as a cartographer in Wolfe's campaign up the St. Lawrence against Quebec. Cook was 40 when he was chosen to skipper the Endeavour. By London's top scientists, the Fellows of the Royal Society and the Admiralty, he was handed a twofold mission: 1) he was to sail to Tahiti and observe the transit of Venus "over the disk of the sun"; 2) he was to search out "Terra Australis Incognita," a vast body of land presumed to extend westward from the tip of South America because it was theoretically necessary to counteract the weight of the Northern Hemisphere and so keep the world on an even keel. French explorers like Bougainville were looking for the same territory, and the idea was to claim it for George III first.
Timorodee Patoo-Patoo. The expedition had smooth sailing until it hit Tierra del Fuego. There, an overzealous scientific party of twelve, bent on collecting hundreds of new botanical specimens, got ambushed by a howling snowstorm and lost two men. The survivors staggered back to the ship after a ration of three mouthfuls of fresh vulture, "each man given his share, raw, to cook as he pleased."