Blue Latitudes

Horwitz, Tony. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. New York: Holt. 2002. Print.

First Sentences:

When I was thirteen, my parents bought a used sailboat, a ten-foot wooden dory that I christened Wet Dream. 

For several summers, I tacked around the waters off Cape Cod, imagining myself one of the whalers who plied Nantucket Sound in the nineteenth century.

Description:

Author Tony Horwitz has a passion for Captain James Cook, the man who circumnavigated the world in a small wooden ship at a time when "roughly a third of the world's map remained blank, or filled with fantasies: sea monsters, Patagonian giants, imaginary continents." Horwitz decided to revisit the destinations written about by Cook during his three voyages, including stops in the Arctic, Antarctic, Alaska, Hawaii, Tahiti, Terra del Fuego, and other far-flung destinations.

The result of his historical travels is Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, a rollicking voyage and encounters with the people and places of Captain Cook's travels. Using Cook's diaries for inspiration and historical background. Horwitz and his Australian friend, fellow sailor, and general lay-about Roger Williamson, fly to each of Cook's ports and wander the land looking for traces of Cook while gathering the current views about the explorer from locals.

To prepare himself for this travel, Horwitz first spent one week working as a common seaman on a replica of Cook's ship, Endeavour. This ship was currently taking a round-the-world voyage and allowing volunteers to spend time living, working, and eating as Cook's crew did in the 1700s. Even for a sailor, the experience for Horwitz was daunting from scaling masts during storms to trying to sleep in a tiny, rocking hammock. Throughout the trip, Horwitz provides us with comparisons to what Cook's men endured for years at a time on the original voyages.

Surviving this test, Horwitz and Williamson fly (rather than sail) to Cook's destinations. Horwitz is fascinated that Cook's missions were for scientific rather than personal goals. Cook had set out in 1769 to record data from the Transit of Venus celestial occurrence, search for a new continent (Australia), and seek out a Northwest Passage for ship travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. His voyages took years, weathering storms, shipwrecks, and unruly crews. Cook demonstrated his leadership time and again by making his men leave the promiscuous women and warm air of Tahiti for less desirable destinations of cannibals, cold weather, and other deprivations while also trying to communicate with Tahitians, Maoris, Hawaiians, and other natives who had never seen white men before. 

Horwitz and Williamson compare what they find at each location with entries from Cook's diaries and biographers' writings, noting the changes in population, landscape,and attitudes towards Cook. With much time on their hands between transportation, the two men are able to interview locals and historians, read original documents, and explore native customs - and drink the local brews, of course.

Blue Latitudes is a fascinating, detailed, thoroughly researched history of explorer/scientist Cook and the world and people of the late 1700s and the European Industrial Revolution. It is also a detailed commentary of the changes, both positive and negative, Cook's voyages brought to those destinations and our world today as revealed to two modern explorers.

Cook not only redrew the map of the world, creating a picture of the globe much like the one we know today; he also transformed the West's image of nature and man. 

[P.S. On a related note, the wreck of Cook's original ship Endeavour might have been discovered off the New England coast. It was intentionally sunk during the American Revolution. Here's a link to this discovery and the story of the ship's life after Cook's voyages.]

Happy reading.

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Horwitz, Tony. A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America

Horwitz sets out to reenact the adventures of the Indians, explorers, and conquerors who set foot in the New World between 1492 and 1620, the era between the discovery by Columbus and the landing of the Pilgrims.