Who's for lunch?

This post was first published in 2002. I wonder why it occurred to me to find this article this week? How are your retirement funds doing?

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There I was, folding laundry, half-listening to the tail end of a radio interview. My attention certainly perked up as the author described how the subject of his biography had died.

He'd been under a lot of pressure. He might have been suffering mental strain and maybe even mental disease. The ships kept breaking. It seems likely he was harsh and exploitive of the native people."

The locals became fed up with his arrogant ways. When he kidnapped their king as a ransom to get back a small boat they'd taken from him, they clubbed and stabbed him to death. They cut off his hand to send to the other English seamen as proof they'd killed him. After that the people hauled his body up a mountain to the edge of a live volcano, dug a pit, buried his corpse, and let him steam-cook three days. Then they unburied him and, well, they ate him."

The man? Captain James Cook.

Captain Cook, one of the most illustrious seafaring explorers in history, lived from 1728 to 1779. He charted much of the coast of Newfoundland. He mapped the St. Lawrence River so well that large British warships could navigate it safely, thus allowing them to "take" Quebec from the French in 1759. This, of course, profoundly influenced the boundaries and cultures of the entire northeast section of the North American continent. It's why I can't speak French, and statistically speaking, chances are you can't either.

Cook was born poor in rural England. It was almost unheard of at that time for an unlanded, uneducated man to rise to position of captain of any ship, let alone commander of three of the largest expeditions of his time. Imagine a little kid born into a foreign ghetto who somehow ends up as both astronaut and chief executive director of NASA. What Cook did was harder than that.

He started at 18 as a menial worker on colliers, coal-carrying ships off the British coast. By the time he was in his early 30's, he had joined the Royal Navy and was charting those Canadian waters, and some of his maps were still in use in the 1920's.

In the mid-1760's Britain was looking for someone to captain an expedition to the South Pacific to observe the planet Venus crossing the sun (it would help scientists calculate how far the sun is from earth). The politics of this plum assignment were so juicy it was decided to pick an unknown seaman - Captain James Cook.

Cook would lead this three-year sailing adventure (1768-1771) plus two more expeditions in the 1770’s. He kept legendary diaries that detail a new world opening up to Europeans.

He invented a method to calculate longitude. Sailors had long known how to plot north or south degrees of latitude by plotting their position against the North Star. Cook figured out how to use the sun and a chronometer (a clock with precisely counterbalanced gears) to determine how far east or west they were. This revolutionized sailing.

It was common in that time for many sailors to die (often more than half the crew) from scurvy, other sicknesses, or accidents. Cook was ruthless in his demand that sailors wash daily, air out their hammocks, and eat foods containing the vitamin C that would prevent scurvy. The two transportable foods he ordered men to eat were either "portable soup" (an unrefrigerated vegetable broth) or sauerkraut. He would flog his men to force them to eat sauerkraut. That's the only way I'd eat it, too.

One of his protégés was William Bligh (Can you say "Mutiny on the Bounty"?) Cook was not always liked, but he did gain renown and respect for bringing his men back home.

Cook captained two more expeditions to discover the "Southern Continent" and the "Northwest Passage." While searching for these regions that didn't exist, he DID bump into Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia, Alaska, and Hawaii.

Go ahead, look at a map of the world. Be impressed by how many places have "Cook" in them. Remember that these places were first sighted from a100' X 35' wooden ship jam-packed with a hundred men, crates of scientific instruments and specimens, and sauerkraut. Cook sailed his ships for months at a time through the ice packs around Antarctica -- yet never sustained serious damage to his vessels. What an amazing seafaring man.

When he arrived in Hawaii, December of 1779, the locals welcomed and provisioned him and his men. After a few weeks the ships left to resume searching for the Northwest Passage. Six days later they encountered a storm that damaged the ships, so they returned to Hawaii.

What Cook didn't take into account was how deeply he had disregarded Hawaiian society, religion, and culture. February 14, 1779, Captain Cook got cooked.

His infamy lives on in Peter Pan since Captain Cook was the inspiration for Captain Hook. Now you know why Captain Hook is missing his hand. The Hawaiians sent it to the English.

Being mighty doesn't excuse one from the obligation to act decently. Be humane -- or be lunch.

Have you seen the gifs with the penguins?