After all the hard work outside, it's time to catch up with my reading!
Into the Blue: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before is just the sort of escape I need: Tony Horwitz, the author, follows in Cook's footsteps, and records two stories: Cook's original voyages and his own retracing of them, re-examining what has happened to the territories Cook discovered two centuries earlier.
Horwitz begins with a fine piece of reporting, as he spends a week as an ordinary seaman on board the modern replica of Cook's boat, Resolution. He vividly describes the horrors of climbing the masts to furl the sails, sleeping in a hammock, hauling on the anchor while the ship tosses and surges - thus setting the scene for Cook's far worse conditions two centuries earlier.
And he credibly explains the social background in England that lay behind Cook's first voyage to the Pacific. The privations of the crew appear all the more severe in contrast to the conditions for the one rich sponsor who was accompanying them, with a retinue of servants, in his own relatively luxurious quarters: Joseph Banks, the plant collector who would transform British horticulture. Banks's parallel accounts of the Pacific landfalls add spice to Cook's own diaries. Together the two records provide a unique insight into the psychology and motivation of explorers in the late 18th century, and - more important - into the isolated societies of exotic peoples before they first encountered Europeans.
It's a rollicking read and a sneaky work of scholarship, providing new and unexpected insights into the man who out-discovered Columbus.
