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Blue
Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony
Horwitz Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended) |
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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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South Pacific Overtures I couldn’t read more than a chapter a week
of Tony Horwitz’ book Blue
Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. Maybe it was
the concept: tracing the voyages of Captain Cook made me seasick. Maybe it
was the decadent approach Horwitz took to following the hero. Had I had as
much to drink while reading this, as Horwitz and cohorts seemed to have while
reliving Cook’s journey, I might have provided a more mellow rating. (Or
maybe my mellowness left the recommendation mild.) Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 8, “Savage
Island: The Search for Red Bananas”: Sydney
in winter was a joke by comparison, about as rugged as Los Angeles in
January. The only thing that made it uncomfortable was that houses were
drafty and uninsulated, designed for Australia’s long summers rather than the
fleeting cool months. Still, reading Cook's account of his Antarctic probes
was the literary equivalent of chewing on ice cubes. So it came as a relief
when I turned to his writings about the Pacific islands he visited between
his frigid southern sweeps. I'd always wanted to see Easter Island, having
marveled as a child at one of its astonishing stone figures in the Smithsonian
Museum. But Cook was so sick during his brief stay at Easter Island that he
barely went ashore, leaving it to his men to measure "those Colossean
Statues" and to wonder how they'd been erected. Cook also made the
island sound almost as bleak as the Antarctic seas he'd just departed.
"No Nation will ever contend for the honour of the discovery of Easter
Island as there is hardly an Island in this sea which affords less
refreshments and conveniences." Idly tracing the Resolution's path westward
across the Pacific on an old chart, my finger brushed against a flyspeck
labeled "Savage Island." I checked the index of Cook's journal. A
brief entry from June 1774 explained the atoll's intriguing name. When the
English attempted to land, islanders burst from dense woods "with the
ferocity of wild Boars," Cook wrote, hurting rocks and spears. Cook and
his men fired at their attackers, "stout well made men and naked except
their Natural parts." A footnote said that the warriors' mouths were
smeared red, as if with blood. "Seeing no good was to be got of these
people," Cook wrote, he withdrew to the boats, gave the island its
unflattering name,
and sailed off. I consulted my atlas. No mention of Savage Island.
Nothing on my globe, either. Beaglehole, as so often, came to my rescue. He
identified the island as present-day Nine. An almanac on my shelf described
Niue as "the world's smallest self-governing state." A country I'd
never heard of! Then again, a lot of Pacific islets hadn't crossed
my radar before I'd begun tracking Cook's voyages. I rang Roger on his cell
phone. He was on a business trip, peddling books to librarians in Canberra, a
much colder city than Sydney. "I'm driving through a bloody
snowstorm," he said. "Have
you ever heard of Nine?" "What?" "Knee-ooo," I repeated, guessing at the
pronunciation. "N-I-U-E." "Is that a disease? In Africa? Or is it
something I've got?" "It's a country. Cook went there. He called it
Savage Island. The natives had red teeth." "Is
it warm?" Roger asked. "Must be. It's in the middle of the South
Pacific." "Let's
go, then. Right now. I'm freezing here." The line crackled and dropped
out. The notion of just setting off appealed to me.
Following in the Endeavour's
wake had filled me with a certain wistfulness. I'd gone where Cook went, but
I couldn't share his experience. The problem wasn't simply that I traveled by jet, rather than
by wooden ship, to lands that had changed utterly since Cook's day. It was
also that I carried an image of every place I went before I got there. This
was the curse of modern travel: it was like reading a book after you've
already seen the movie adaptation. Niue seemed different. All I knew was its name and
vague coordinates, plus the few paragraphs I'd scanned in Cook's journal. I
decided to keep it that way. Traveling virtually blind to a land I hadn’t
known existed, and whose name I couldn't even pronounce, seemed as close as I
could get to the freshness of discovery I so envied in Cook's voyages. Still. I had to set there. I called a travel agent.
She hadn't heard of Niue, couldn't even find it in her computer. I rang
Qantas, Air New Zealand, Polynesian Airlines. No Niue. But a saleswoman
suggested I try Royal Tongan. "You mean NEW-ay," a reservation agent
said, correcting my pronunciation. Royal Tongan Airlines flew there once a
week, from New Zealand. "But we don't fly back," she said. ! "You mean I'm there forever?" "Not exactly. If you stay a week, there's a
flight from Niue to Tonga. You can come back from there." That was fine. I wanted to see Tonga, too. Cook
spent several months touring Tonga's many islands and liked the place so much
he named it the Friendly Archipelago. Still, a week in Niue sounded like a
lot. Given the paucity of flights, there probably wasn't much to do on the
island, perhaps not even a place to stay. I called Roger again to make sure
he wanted to blow off his job for a few weeks to see both Tonga and Niue. He
was staring out his hotel window at the swimming pool. "It looks like an iceberg," he said,
"or an 'ice island,' as Cook would call it. Count me in." "What will we do in Niue for a week?" "Drink." "What if there's no booze?" "We'll chew betel nuts. That's probably what
turned their teeth red. Either that or they were cannibals." He laughed.
"Maybe they still are. There's probably not much food. We'll be
scratching around in the sand and drinking from coconuts." We made a
pact to learn nothing more about Niue, and booked tickets on the next
available flight. IT
WAS ODDLY relaxing to set off on a trip for which you couldn't prepare. What do
you take to a desert island? Cook carried nails and beads; I packed lots of
cash, in several different currencies. During our stopover at the Auckland
airport, Roger added bottles of gin, rum, and chardonnay. "That's a
fraction of what Cook carried," he said defensively. "He had
barrels of Madeira, and we're not taking a drop of that." Then, at the
departure gate, Roger spied a man toting aboard a case of lager. "Oh no,
maybe they don't sell beer in Nine." I was struck by something else: the size of our
fellow passengers. Some were so big they could barely squeeze down the aisle
of the small jet. The man seated next to me oozed over the armrest and almost
into my lap before falling asleep. Midway through the flight, a steward handed out
customs forms for Niue. The list of prohibited goods included "handguns,
flick knives, swordsticks, etc." Swordsticks? Also banned were
"indecent goods," such as adult videotapes and magazines. Roger
groaned. "You can be sure they'll be mad Christians, every crackpot cult."
Making matters worse, our flight left early on a Monday morning and crossed
the international dateline. "So we'll have to do Sunday all over
again," Roger said. "Our Sunday and their Sunday. Not my favorite
day and I get two on the trot." There’s nothing I’ve read lately that’s
quite like Blue
Latitudes, and for that reason alone, it was worth reading. You may well
feel the same. Steve Hopkins, April 19, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the May 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Blue
Latitudes.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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