CLOSE ENCOUNTERS IN WIDE-OPEN SPACES

         A Historian’s Hurdles    

         As he contemplated a fresh retelling of the saga of iconic explorer, Captain James Cook, Hampton Sides was aware he confronted three threshold challenges. Several other Cook biographers had published before him. The core of Cook’s achievements was three circumnavigations, largely overlapping in destinations and durations. And in recent years, Cook had come to be vilified, especially in Polynesia, as the personification of immoral European colonialism.   

         Sides addressed these challenges with pragmatic creativity. Instead of a duplicative biography, he’d write a dramatic travelogue. Instead of covering three expeditions, he’d focus on the final, thrilling but tragic one. As for the colonialist accusation, he’d report the facts, without “lionizing or demonizing” Cook. In Sides’s professional opinion, Cook was “an explorer and a mapmaker, not a conqueror or a colonizer.” Cross-cultural destroyers had followed in his wake, so the discoverer was being retroactively condemned as a precursor and enabler. Sides determined to cite a broad spectrum of perspectives to acknowledge this debate.

         The resulting history is educational and exhilarating. The explorer remains at the center. But Sides’s narrative surrounds his principal with thoughtful, thorough context: his crews and vessels; his itinerary and navigational know-how; his sponsors and their great-powers’ machinations; the risks and rewards of First-Contact encounters. Most gripping for me was the journals-based log of the expedition’s daily progress. A prose documentary of what it felt like to experience the unknown in the Age of Sail. 

         The Mariner-Scientist

         By the time he launched his final Pacific expedition in 1776, Captain Cook had accrued a wealth of nautical skills and experience. Gifted in math since his school days, he’d also become a seasoned astronomer. In his earliest Royal Navy tours, serving in North America, he’d earned a reputation as a brilliant cartographer. He’d made a significant contribution to Britain’s successful siege of Quebec City in the Seven Years War by charting the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River after the defending French had removed navigation buoys. He went on to survey and map the Newfoundland coastline, and later, New Zealand, eastern Australia and western Alaska. His measurements were considered so remarkably accurate that coastal mariners continued to rely on them for two hundred years.

         Cook wrote he was happiest on the wide open seas, even though, like most British officers in his era, he didn’t know how to swim. Home in Greenwich, he soon grew restless, itching for another command. Between 1768 and 1779, he spent ten-and-a-half years at sea. (Despite this chronic wanderlust, he remained happily married and fathered six children.)

         Sikes reports much about Cook’s personality, drawing on the explorer’s own journals and multiple contemporary sources. Cook was a laconic introvert, saying little and showing less. From his apprenticeship under Quakers in the merchant marine, he apparently absorbed layered values. As Sides lists them, “temperance, frugality, modesty, truthfulness, a ferocious work ethic and simplicity.” As an adult in the midst of his circumnavigations celebrity, he was a dismal failure on the London social scene; obviously uncomfortable, with no wit or small talk.

         On the water, he was a paragon of leadership. An intuitive navigator, he was decisive and calm in crises. Stern but fair to his crews, he attracted dozens of re-enlistees for his final voyage. Self-confident and courageous, on numerous occasions when encountering local indigenous populations, he’d walk alone and unarmed into the midst of armed, uneasy greeting parties. Although a loyal career naval officer, Cook never hesitated to exercise individual initiative when confronted with command challenges on the far side of the globe. Sikes quotes his assertive independence: “I believe that he who learns only how to obey orders can never be a great explorer.”

         With little education, Cook embraced and embodied Enlightenment values. Incorrigibly curious as an amateur naturalist and anthropologist, he wrote detailed accounts of local fauna and flora, Hawaiian board-surfing, Inuit kayaks and foul-weather gear. Ahead of his time, he successfully fended off the scourge of scurvy in his crews by replenishing his ships with fresh fruits and vegetables. With few racial or religious preconvictions, he tolerated his sailors’ intimate relations with Polynesian women but labored vigorously to keep infected crew-members from spreading venereal disease.

         The main inconsistency and mystery in Cook’s heroic life-story was his tragic breakdown. Contemporary sailing companions and subsequent scholars have puzzled unsuccessfully to fathom his sudden mental and emotional collapse. After a lifetime of self-control, within a few hours and even minutes, the commander committed a series of compounding misjudgments. A temper tantrum over a pilfered skiff, an armed cordon, a foiled attempt to kidnap the Hawaiian chief and a cascade of misunderstandings conflated into fatal, violent conflict.  

         The Final Voyage

         Two characteristics most impressed me about Cook’s twin vessels and their expedition: their crowding and their isolation once underway.

         HMS Resolution was a three-masted collier ship, flat-bottomed, square-sterned and 110 feet long. The accompanying Discovery was 20 feet shorter. That seemed like a lot. But within their volumes they carried 100 and 80 passengers respectively: officers and sailors, Royal Marines and artisans. The carpenters, coopers, sailmakers and blacksmiths would be essential contributors; the ships would be certain to spring leaks and suffer broken masts and spars, shredded sails and snapped or frayed ropes on the extended voyage. And except for a handful of widely scattered repair depots, the expedition would be on its own to deal with damage. In addition to humans, the ships hosted a menagerie of 50 domestic animals gifted by amateur-farmer King George III to Tahitians. Horses, cows, hogs, sheep, goats, geese, ducks and chickens must have required a lot of dedicated space and near-constant attention.

         Beyond megaphones, clanging bells and musket volleys, the two ships had no communication devices. They’d often get separated from each other by fog or storms, for days or even weeks at a time. No contact with shore settlements, much less their home base. Sikes comments pointedly that, departing from a re-provisioning layover in Capetown, South Africa, the expedition would have no further communication with England for over three years.

         Even in clear weather, the navigators were largely adlibbing. Most of the vast Pacific was uncharted. The few pre-existing coastal maps were either fanciful, incomplete or inaccurate. Cook, like Francis Drake before him, sailed right by San Francisco Bay and the mouth of the Columbia River without a clue. When probing Alaskan inlets for a through passage, he twice took a 150-mile wrong turn and had to retrace his steps.

         All progress was at the mercy of winds and currents. There were no motors, depth-finders or other powered devices. Cook’s main technological aid was the marine chronograph, a fancy name for a clock in a box. Latitude was reasonably easy to calculate from on-board by tracking the arc of the sun. But longitude, lateral location, had baffled mariners for centuries. Cook carried a new invention, a small, stabilized, accurate clock which solved this crucial problem. Set to Greenwich Mean Time, it could be consulted at noon local time when the sun was at its zenith. The number of hours and minutes’ deviation from Greenwich would correspond to the number of degrees and minutes in the earth’s lateral circumference. Calculating latitude and longitude coordinates was essential not merely for pinpointing the ships’ progress but also for recording the precise locations of newly discovered territories.

         The third voyage ended up being the longest in duration (1,548 days) and distance (30,000 miles) in European maritime history to that date. Main destinations during Cook’s command included South Africa, Tasmania, New Zealand, Tahiti, Kauai, Oregon, British Columbia, Alaska, Siberia and Hawaii.

         The Great Game

         Cook’s final voyage was a project of global geopolitics. His two prior circumnavigations had been mostly scientific: one measuring the transit of Venus to estimate the earth’s distance from the sun; the other hunting unsuccessfully for an imagined giant southern continent. Number Three was (secretly) tasked with searching for a Northwest Passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic, over the roof of North America. Britain and other European nautical powers had been trying unsuccessfully for centuries to locate this fabled through-route from east to west. The goal was quick transit for trade from Europe to Asia. This time, Cook was to probe from west to east. The secrecy was to conceal the strategic objective from rival imperial powers: France and the Netherlands but mostly Spain. (After Spanish spies in Greenwich deciphered Cook’s mission, their King in Madrid instructed his Viceroy in Mexico to intercept and capture the British explorers if they coasted Alta California. To Spain, the full Pacific was their exclusive domain.)

         The third voyage’s connections to the American Revolution were particularly interesting. The relegation of the expedition to inferior, aged vessels, and the lack of careful pre-departure outfitting were direct results of the British Admiralty’s preoccupation with mobilizing a war fleet to dispatch to Boston to contain the colonies’ expanding rebellion. More encouragingly, American Ambassador to France Benjamin Franklin, a devotee of the Enlightenment, officially instructed all his countrymen’s war craft to grant Cook’s two ships safe passage. “They are common friends to mankind.”

         Alien Encounters

         The other core component of Cook’s expedition and Sides’s history that I found most engaging was cross-cultural contact. These chance meetings were exciting and moving to read about.

         They were not colonizing invasions. Cook and his team were searching for rumored land masses or nautical throughways. They were mapping continental coastlines. With only 20 Marines on board, occupation or conquest were not on the agenda. Much less natural-resource extraction or exploitation. Most frequently, these British mariners’ priority objectives, when rowing ashore, were rest, repairs, recreation and re-provisioning.

         The resulting contacts were always reciprocally curious, often hesitant, sometimes misinterpreted, rarely confrontational. Ironically, with so much modern science fiction inspired by these maritime precedents, most of these historical connections felt strangely familiar to this reader.  

         My favorite example was Cook’s first arrival in the Hawaiian Islands. The Europeans had no inkling that the world’s most remote archipelago even existed. They thought they were sailing unimpeded from the Marquesas to North America. Five weeks and 2,800 miles out from French Polynesia, floating driftwood and seaweed clued them to a shocking surprise. For their part, the Hawaiians apparently had no knowledge of or contact with outside humans. Sides tells us that the original immigrants had lost their long-distance, round-trip navigation know-how a few centuries after first arrival about 300 AD. For a thousand years, they’d been living in total, mid-Pacific isolation. The British sailors’ recent layover in Tahiti had familiarized them with Polynesian clothing and canoes, which they thought they now recognized. They shouted out a few pidgin greetings and the floating reception committee’s eyes lit up. 

         Using recovered Kauaian oral history, Sides captures the marvel of the local fisher folk in his Prologue. They apparently interpreted the British officers’ tricorn hats as skeletal deformities. Loose shirts as flopping skin. Open pockets as small door flaps into the strangers’ inner bodies. The world would never be the same.

BREAKTHROUGHS AND BLOWBACK

         Michael Taylor’s engaging history, IMPOSSILE MONSTERS, synthesizes the explosion of science in 19^th-century Britain. His chronological narrative interweaves two strands:

• The expanding stream of discoveries in geology and paleontology, zoology and botany, natural history and evolution.
• The take-no-prisoners culture war between “the guardians of [religious] orthodoxy and the agents of [scientific] change.”

         The author has a fittingly rich and diverse background for charting a fresh course through familiar historical territory. A Northern Ireland native, he earned a Double First in History at Cambridge before continuing on there to a PhD. He then worked as a lecturer in Modern British History at Oxford. Fast out of the blocks, by his mid-thirties, he’d published three prize-winning, critically acclaimed histories.

         Among his extracurricular activities, Taylor starred on the Cambridge cricket varsity and was a member of the winning team on the BBC national quiz show, University Challenge. He gleefully confesses to have written this book as “a child of the Jurassic Park generation.”

         The Science Channel

         Taylor’s first narrative strand, 19^th-century scientific discoveries, opens with the explosion of dinosaur fossil findings: bones, teeth, exoskeletons, shells, stone impressions and other preserved remains. The author explains why British naturalists took the lead:

Although there had been fossils found in North America, Patagonia and the Low Countries, these had occurred in relative isolation and without sustained analysis. And though Paris was the global center of zoology, French rocks had not yielded many fossils. In Britain, however, there was not only a critical mass of scholarship but also an industrial interest – in quarries, canals and mines – in churning the earth that released these ancient bones. As these forces combined to foster the new disciplines of geology and paleontology, Mary Anning found the Plesiosaurus in December 1823; within a few weeks, the Oxford clergyman William Buckland had unveiled the first ‘proper’ dinosaur, the Megalosaurus; on the very same day, the surgeon Gideon Mantell announced that he had found another, which he later called the Iguanodon. At the ancient universities, in the gentlemanly societies of London, and in the capital’s dens of freethinking dissent, Britons of the late Georgian and early Victorian periods contemplated the significance of these discoveries. 

         Temporarily setting dinosaurs aside, Taylor next directs our attention to the succession of daring naturalists’ expeditions to South America, the Dutch East Indies and Australia. These multi-year penetrations collected thousands of specimens of exotic fauna and flora. Back at home, the explorers’ sustained classifications and analyses generated theorizing about the age of life on earth and evolution by natural selection. Then discoveries of Neanderthal and Gibraltar remains plus zoological research on living primates’ skeletal structures and behaviors increasingly linked humans to that evolutionary chain.

         The Establishment’s Alarm and Retrenchment

         This accelerating, empirical, scientific revisionism was soon perceived by Britain’s clerical/academic establishment as an intolerable doctrinal and institutional threat. Today, Six-Day Creation and two-by-two Ark-boarding strike most of us as metaphorical. But in Britain’s early and mid-19^th century, a literal interpretation of the Bible was non-negotiable orthodoxy. Suddenly, even without explicit secularism, every published scientific paper seemed to be implicitly challenging that received wisdom.  

         Geologists’ proposals for super-slow, incremental stratification were irreconcilable with Old-Testament Creationism. Archbishop Ussher’s biblically-derived calculation of 6,000 years for the age of the earth bore no resemblance to that epochal mineral timeframe.

         Noah’s rescue of all biblically named animals implied there were no other species left on the dock or previously extinct. So what to make of dinosaurs? Genesis’s repeated assurance that mankind was unique, separate and superior, created “in God’s own image,” left no space for Neanderthal or primate cousins. The divine Creation and perfect design of all life were implicitly threatened by emerging theories of evolutionary variations.

         Taylor emphasizes that these clerical concerns were no mere pedantic quibbles. The authorities’ intensifying resistance was as political as it was doctrinal.  The Anglican Church was the State Church, closely partnered to the British monarchy and Tory governments. The recent French Revolution had been violently anti-clerical: confiscating Church properties and treasures, prosecuting and executing high clergy for corruption, and systematically “de-christianizing” France. The alarmed British authorities were determined to deter any imitative radicalism. Their preemptive strictures and punishments were pervasive and severe. Publications deemed impious could be prosecuted for “seditious libel.” Heresy, blasphemy and sacrilege were all legally actionable.

         The theocracy was so powerful that “Dissenting” Protestants, Catholics and atheists were prohibited from sitting in Parliament, holding public office or graduating from university. Small wonder most scientists kept their hypotheses under wraps. (Including Darwin for 20 years.) Yet despite these career- and freedom-risking constraints, 19^th-century British science steadily evolved from the private pursuit of moneyed amateurs into a respected public profession. But direct public refutations of the Bible, whether serious or satiric, were playing with fire.  

         Arts and Crafts

         I enjoyed Taylor’s construction and delivery of his narrative as much as its contents. This could have been a stuffy scholastic treatise. Instead, he and his editors crafted a popular history, broadly engaging and entertaining.

         They came up with a catchy title (IMPOSSIBLE MONSTERS) and alluring subtitle (Darwin, Dinosaurs and the Battle between Science and Religion) to set the hook. Next, Taylor selected complementary cover art to illustrate that exoticism. (His Acknowledgements make clear this was an essential, deliberate, design decision.)

         He sustains this stylistic attentiveness throughout the text, presenting dense, technical material in enthusiastic layman’s prose, underpinned by unpretentious expertise and regularly spiced with droll wit.

         In this same playful spirit, the author introduces each chapter with a formal cast of characters, previewing the principals for his readers to keep them on script. Before settling in to his main 19^th-century plot, he leads with a teasing prologue, profiling Anglican Archbishop Ussher who calculated the State Church’s date of Creation (4004 BC).

         Next, on to 12-year-old fossil hunter Mary Anning, pulling Monsters from coastal cliffs. Although hugely precocious and productive, Anning was never accepted into the expanding geological ranks. Although field-proven, she was tacitly disqualified by her provincialism and gender.

         Taylor profiles male pioneers who did collaborate to advance the state of science: geologists William Buckland, Charles Lyell and Gideon Mantell; botanist Joseph Hooker; journalists George Holyoake and Charles Bradlaugh; paleontologists Othniel Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. And especially the iconic trio of unflagging naturalists, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Huxley. He highlights these argonauts’ personal trials and idiosyncrasies, not merely their intellectual contributions. (After laboring in tropical backcountry for four years collecting thousands of specimens of Amazonian flora and fauna, Wallace barely escaped drowning when his cargo ship swiftly sank from an on-board fire, taking all of his treasures to the depths. Undeterred, back in England, he worked for months reconstructing his findings from memory, a few journal notes and drawings. The results of this valiant salvage operation included several professional papers published and illustrated for London’s scientific societies, plus a full-length book on palm trees.)

         The historian underlines the catalytic influence of these scientists’ personal and professional relationships: mentors and protégés, patrons and sponsors, advocates, investors and networks.

         He dramatizes the Science vs. Religion culture war with illustrative public debates and quoted zingers from contesting champions. Especially, celebrities Thomas Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog”, and Richard Owen, condescending Church defender.

         Taylor regularly pauses his technical narrative to make sure his readers appreciate the broader societal impact of reconstructed dinosaurs. He devotes a full chapter to the molding and mounting of life-size dinosaur models at London’s 1851 Chrystal Palace Exhibition. And another to mogul Andrew Carnegie’s in-person1905 gifting to European Heads of State of American diplodocus mock-ups. (Each, 80 feet long, when assembled.)

         With comparable attentiveness, he reports, without criticism, Victorian estimates of geologic and fossil ages but then quietly appends modern updates. (As a footnote to Archbishop Ussher’s 6,000-year estimation, he reports modern scientists’ calculation of Earth Age as 4.4 billion years.)

         For my taste, the author or his editors should have deleted his Epilogue musings on modern TV and cinematic homages. These plaudits were marginally amusing but too far off-point.

         Probably most of us can empathize with Taylor’s discouragement when COVID constrictions derailed his planned research methodology. After scoping out in advance the key library archives and museum collections he’d need to visit in person, he found himself isolated by enforced lockdowns. This forced him to switch over entirely to remote searching of digital databases for a book’s worth of 19^th-century source materials (letters, news articles, drawings and photos, etc.) The ubiquitous pandemic put even history beyond reach. Fortunately, the intrepid batsman persevered.