Mrs. Cook Page 10

  He would start at the nape of her neck, gently blowing aside the wisps of her hair, and making a place for his lips. He began the journey south, each vertebra rising to the moist warmth of his mouth. The long channel under which lay the reef of her backbone descended to her buttocks, two plump hillocks with a dimple either side. Elizabeth lay with her arms by her sides, and when she shifted, bent her elbows to make a pillow of her hands, James saw the shoulder blades rise up like the beginnings of angel wings.

  How often he thought of this when he was away, he told her, in the small cramped cot that was so short his legs hung over the edges. In the Canadian summer nights, in that long northern twilight after his work was done, in the gentle lull of the ship and the rain falling down, he imagined the larger bed he shared with her. As he snuffed out his lantern, the candle of home would flicker beneath his eyelids and he was with her again, the warm mist of his breath settling on her back. When she was ready, she turned to face him and their desires would meet.

  Elizabeth now knew what Becky had meant when she said it was like your bones melting, but it had not always been so. At first it was uncomfortable, more like the bolt of linen. Gradually, James’s gentle perseverance awakened Elizabeth’s pleasure. How wonderful that her body opened to him, moistening the pathway he would take. Then he lifted her into rapture and Elizabeth became a wave.

  While James was away in Canada Elizabeth’s longing for him was intense. Sometimes she felt it as an ache, like a breast heavy with milk. As she went about her tasks, she carried it inside her like a secret, but as autumn approached and the days grew shorter, yearning turned into anticipation.

  It seemed this would be the pattern of their lives, James being away for the summers and returning like a migratory bird, for the season of nesting. Each spring, when he spread his great wings and flew across the Atlantic, he left a fertilised egg in the nest. By the end of James’s fifth season in Newfoundland, there were two more little birds—Nathaniel, aged three, and, joy of joys, a baby daughter, Elizabeth.

  Their mother had settled very nicely into her new home, bought furniture, and arranged her treasures—china, embroideries, the oriental box, her cream silk wedding dress. Into the Chippendale chest of drawers she placed the marriage certificate, and the licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  Elizabeth made the acquaintance of neighbours, Mr and Mrs Honeychurch, the Shanks, the Knights and Mr and Mrs Blade. The Witherspoons on one side and the Curtises on the other. Mama and Mr Blackburn were frequent visitors, as Elizabeth was to them, although it wasn’t easy travelling with two small boys and a baby.

  For better or worse, the boys adored Mr Blackburn, or Grand-papa as he preferred. He played roughhouse games with them, pillow fights which knocked them over. They simply got up with shrill delight and yelled: ‘More!’ When they visited Shadwell, Elizabeth even tolerated Mr Blackburn’s occasional ‘damn’ or ‘blast’ in front of the boys, although back home, when she came across them standing squarely on their bed, hands on hips, having a shouting match of ‘damn and blast’ she took to the rod. ‘We’ll have no more of that below-deck language in this house, thank you very much.’ She’d even had to admonish her husband when the occasional ‘damn’, or worse, ‘bloody’ slipped out.

  Of more concern was the fact that the boys considered Mr Blackburn and James to be interchangeable, and even called Mr Blackburn ‘Papa’, though daily she showed them James’s likeness, or read parts of his letters, and told them their papa would be home soon, in the autumn, when the leaves fell off the trees. Otherwise, little ruffled the smooth waters of their domestic life. Elizabeth lived with her yearning for James, and the worry that something might happen.

  Something did happen, in the summer of 1764, an accident that James had written of, to prepare Elizabeth for the scar. A powder horn had blown up in his hand, almost severing his thumb. James had to wait hours in Noddy’s Harbour for a surgeon to arrive, watching his kerchief fill with blood. Finally a surgeon from a French fishing boat had arrived and attended to it, sewing it with stitches as neat as any seamstress’s. It was almost a month before James was recovered enough to work. ‘Still, a quicker recovery in Canada’s clean air and water than I could expect in London,’ he said when he returned home that year. The scar was long and raw, running between his thumb and forefinger, right up to the wrist.

  ‘The fairground gypsies would say you had a long life ahead of you,’ Elizabeth said as she traced her finger along the length of the scar, feeling the tensile strength of the shiny pink tissue.

  It was unusual that such an accident should occur. Elizabeth knew her husband to be a careful man, careful of himself and the men on board. He carried with him for life the habits taught by John Walker. The Grenville, compared to other ships, had fewer accidents or illnesses aboard, fewer incidents of crimes and therefore punishments. Among the seamen James had gained followers, men who would remain loyal to him, their life in his hands. And his in theirs.

  Still, whilst he was away Elizabeth tossed and turned on nights of high winds and during storms, even though she told herself the weather conditions London was experiencing couldn’t possibly stretch across the ocean to Canada. But there was one storm, in 1767, where reason agreed with sentiments.

  It was almost mid-November, the month James normally returned. He would already have left Canada, sailing into the storm, and must be nearly home. Elizabeth expected him daily. If the squalls and gales and thundering rain were this bad over their roof, she imagined them ten times worse at sea.

  Lightning cracked so hard across the sky and down to the ground that it was like a flash of broad daylight. Then followed thunder booming like a cannon, so loud Elizabeth jumped with fright. Everything shook as it had during the earthquake of 1750. Even the boys, who normally revelled in a storm and wanted to go outside and play in it, came running to the safe haven of Elizabeth’s bed.

  A day or two later there was a knock on the door. Elizabeth dreaded opening it to what, in all likelihood, was bad news. She was even more alarmed to find that it was indeed the postman, and she only finally let out breath when she saw it was a letter from James, sent from Sheerness.

  He had indeed been caught up in the storm that had swept the entire south-east coast of England. He wrote that he was all right, would be home soon, once he’d seen the Grenville safely to Deptford for repairs. What an introduction to the sea it had been for fifteen year old Isaac, James added, who had joined the navy and sailed on the Grenville this season.

  When James walked in on the fifteenth of November, Elizabeth was entertaining the Blackburns and the Curtises to Sunday dinner. The mood was high, Elizabeth full of relief and anticipation. Mr Curtis had brought to the table not gin, but bottles of good French wine. Baby Eliza lay gurgling in the crib, and Mr Blackburn dandled the boys on his knee, showing them a trick with a coin which disappeared and was then miraculously found behind the ear of first Jamie, then Nat. They paid no attention to the thicket of hair growing out of Mr Blackburn’s ears, nor did they enquire why so much should be growing there while the hair on his head grew thinner and thinner.

  Above the general merriment at the table, Elizabeth heard James enter and deposit his luggage. She broke into a smile, taking the sight of him in through every pore of her body. She rose and they greeted each other politely, with their eyes promising more in private. ‘Jamie, Nat,’ Elizabeth invited. The boys didn’t move from Mr Blackburn’s knee. ‘Boys,’ she said brightly. ‘Look, it’s Papa.’

  Mr Blackburn nudged the two off his knee.

  ‘Hello,’ said Jamie.

  ‘Papa,’ said Nat, although Elizabeth couldn’t be sure whether it was query or acknowledgment. Nevertheless, the ice was broken. James bent down level with his sons and they accepted the invitation of his open arms. ‘I believe you have a little sister Elizabeth. Would you like to show me?’

  ‘We call her Eliza,’ Jamie corrected him.

  Nat knew exactly who his father meant, and skipped
over to the crib. ‘Here!’ he said proudly, as if he’d produced the baby himself.

  James lifted his daughter out of the crib. The child took to him immediately, much to Elizabeth’s relief, and gave him one of her heart-melting smiles, with two small teeth in the middle of it. He held her carefully, so that his brass buttons wouldn’t press into her, and looked across to Elizabeth, his eyes brimming with tenderness.

  ‘Sit yourself down, James,’ Mr Blackburn interrupted, as if he were the host and James the guest instead of the other way around. He also took it upon himself to offer James some of Mr Curtis’s wine. ‘Our former enemy, but they still make a blessed good drop.’ At least he didn’t say ‘bloody’. James joined the table, taking a quaff of the proffered wine. ‘Yes, John, a blessed good drop.’

  Everyone wanted to hear about the storm. Elizabeth could see the tiredness in James’s eyes, the strain of exhaustion on his face, but now that he had weathered the storm and was home safe, it had become a story to tell. Her husband rallied and began.

  It had been a remarkably speedy sail, James aboard the Grenville, with Hugh Palliser leading in the Guernsey. They had departed St John’s on 23 October, and reached the Channel by 8 November. Then, on their way up the Thames, the great brooding wing of disaster touched the Grenville, descending in a hard storm of wind and squalls, with rain as ‘leaden as bullets’, James said. The men spent the afternoon trying to curtail the damage but by six in the evening, with darkness already fallen, the best bower parted, the ship tailed into shoalwater and struck hard. Jamie and Nat listened, eyes wide as saucers, not understanding all of it but remembering the storm and enthralled by the tale.

  The men battled fiercely but it appeared that the storm was winning, with the ship striking hard again, despite the topsail yards and cross-jack yards having been got down on deck. The ship lay down ‘upon her larboard bilge’. Elizabeth recalled the storm that night, how frightening it had seemed even from the safety of her bed. She imagined the rain beating down on James, his orders shouted into the howl of the wind.

  James continued. The gale showing no signs of abating, and to lighten the schooner, the men hove everything overboard from the deck and secured the hatchways. By midnight, with no end to the gale in sight, the crew were rowed ashore. The gale lasted through the night but by mid-morning the next day it had softened enough for assistance from Sheerness Yard to come aboard. By the afternoon the Grenville was afloat once again.

  After everyone had drunk a toast to James’s health, Nat asked: ‘What’s larboard bilge?’ James explained. Not to be outdone by his little brother, Jamie then enquired: ‘What got hoved overboard?’

  ‘Everything dispensable, including,’ James remembered, ‘an Indian canoe that Palliser was sending back to a gentleman botanist. Who knows, it may be floating up the Thames this very minute.’ Jamie and Nat looked out the back window, but of course they couldn’t even see the river from the house, let alone what might be floating on it.

  ‘Hear about our coal strike?’ asked Mr Blackburn. ‘Over wages. The price of bread soaring like a bird and the wages staying on the ground. By God, the heavers deserve a rise. Not one lump of coal unloaded in the Port of London, and to top it all off, the attorney in charge of the funds for widows and orphans helped himself to £600 of it. In debtors’ prison for his troubles. There were parades in the streets of Shadwell, four hundred odd coal heavers marching along with their shamrocks, and beating their drums.’

  ‘James doesn’t want to hear about the strike,’ said Mama.

  ‘Of course he does,’ Mr Blackburn went on. ‘There was a time when James heaved coal himself. Or shouldn’t I be mentioning it?’ Elizabeth glared at him. He had mentioned it, so why bother saying that he shouldn’t? The uncomfortable silence at the table was broken by Mr Curtis.

  ‘Wilkes threatens to return from exile in France,’ he said, obviously happy at the news. ‘He published a statement in the newspaper last month. Says he is going to put up his parliamentary candidature in the general election next spring.’

  Elizabeth glanced at her husband. They had been amused by John Wilkes’s witty attacks on the government in his weekly paper, the North Briton, and of course supported his cry for ‘liberty not joined with licentiousness’. He had a great following in Shadwell and along the riverside, but was too rakish for James’s liking, and his anti-Scottish sentiments offended James’s heritage. James knew that David Curtis was pro-Wilkes, Mr Blackburn too. Whenever James returned home he was avid for news, to catch up with what was going on in London, but Elizabeth felt the tenor of the present discussion was more suited to the coffee house than her Sunday dinner. She did not want arguments spilling over their daughter’s crib.

  Mrs Curtis and Mama must have been of the same mind because almost in unison they said it was time to get going, to leave James to his family.

  In that winter of 1767–68 James produced more than thirty charts, with sailing directions, and was glad of the extra room at Mile End devoted to his work. The trigonometrical survey of the Newfoundland west coast, for instance, was 10 feet long, on the scale of one inch to a mile. The charts were precise and scientific and, as well as coastline, showed rivers, lakes and other topographical features. In addition to the detail of pen-lines, there was blue wash, and green and brown brushwork, and the charts were as impressive and lifelike in their way as any portrait.

  While Elizabeth was busy with the children, James worked on his charts, making fair copies and preparing them for publication, consulting with Mr Larken, the engraver. His skill and confidence were ever growing and he had started giving the Newfoundland topography nomenclature. Grenville Rock was named for his ship. He transported the names of English rivers—Humber and Thames—to Newfoundland, leaving his signature on the landscape.

  James had also left his signature with the Royal Society. In Newfoundland he’d observed an eclipse of the sun, using a telescopic quadrant made by Mr John Bird, and applied his knowledge of astronomical mathematics to determine the longitude of his place of observation. On 30 April 1767, James’s account of it was delivered by Dr John Bevis to the Royal Society back in London. The account, though brief, had been tabled. Mrs Cook James Cook had come to the notice of the Royal Society, that illustrious body devoted to scientific enquiry. The name if not yet the man.

  On the first warm day of spring the boys were out in the garden seeing who could jump the furthest, Jamie marking the position with a stick, and Nat moving it to wherever took his whim. Exasperated, Jamie introduced a new element into the game. ‘Nat, this stick is England and this stick,’ he said, placing the second one at what he thought was an appropriate distance, ‘is Newfoundland. You have to jump right over without falling into the ocean.’

  ‘It’s grass, not ocean,’ Nat pointed out.

  Jamie ignored him and prepared to jump. ‘Watch me, Nat, watch.’ Finally he got his brother’s attention. ‘England then . . . Newfoundland!’ he said when he had completed his jump, landing well over the stick coastline. ‘Now you.’ He made sure his younger brother had his feet behind the stick of England. ‘When I say. One, two, three—jump!’ Nathaniel bent his knees, stuck out his elbows and jumped for all he was worth. But not far enough to land in Newfoundland. ‘You fell in the ocean,’ taunted his elder brother.

  ‘Did not.’

  ‘Did.’

  While the game dissolved in a chorus of dids and did nots, Elizabeth watched her husband gazing from the window at the now abandoned sticks. It was time for him to make the jump too.

  In preparation for the next season in Newfoundland, and with his powder horn accident in mind, James had applied to the Admiralty for a surgeon’s mate, and also for £28 for stationery, and repairs to instruments. In its meeting that April, the Board had resolved to appoint a surgeon’s mate to the Grenville and to reimburse Master Cook his expenses. But a larger, much larger, matter was discussed at the same meeting and though he did not yet know it, the name of James Cook was inextricably linke
d to those discussions. The minutes of the meeting were tabled—Master Cook was not to sail in the Grenville that year, the Admiralty making the temporary appointment of James’s assistant, Mr Lane, to the position. In the dry perfunctory style of minutes, lacking any portent, was noted the resolve to fit out a vessel for a voyage ‘to the Southward’. The sea lords had altogether different plans for James Cook.

  THE ENDEAVOUR

  The Endeavour was not fast, she was not sleek, but she had what was deemed suitable for a voyage to the South Seas—strength and capacity. She was a cat-built vessel, an ex-collier from the yards of Messrs Fishburn of Whitby, the kind of barque on which James had learnt his seacraft. Master and ship accorded perfectly.

  James had written to John Walker as soon as he had been appointed, telling John how he was to sail to the South Seas to observe the transit of Venus in a Whitby-built cat. She was 106 feet long, 29 feet 3 inches at her broadest. She’d be refitted of course, including an extra layer on the hull of boards lined with tarred felt, protection against the potentially devastating effects of the teredo worm which lived in tropical seas.

  At the beginning of May, James wrote to Joseph Banks:

  I received a note today from Mr March of the Victualling Office, wherein he desires that we will call on him on Friday morning, as he is obliged to attend at the Admiralty on Thursday. I left a line at your house yesterday, desiring to know your sentiments concerning a stove for the cabin, it being necessary the officers of Deptford Board should know how to act. If you approve of a green baize floor cloth for the great cabin, I will demand as much cloth from the Yard as will make one. As you mean to furnish the cabin well, I think you should have brass locks, and hinges to the doors, etc., this, however, will be a private affair of your own, as nothing of this kind is allowed. ——Thus far I had got with this letter when your note arrived. I think it is a good thought to take Mr Buzagio’s stove with you, as it may be very useful on many occasions. I shall go to Deptford tomorrow to give directions about the other. Whenever it is certain Dr Lynd goes with us, I beg you will let me know by the penny post. My respects to the Dr, and am, Dear Sir