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| HMS
Resolution |
A few weeks ago we took a family
cruise to the “ABC Islands” — Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao — places we’ve been
before. In my reflective reading world, I also “went” as far as the Bering
Strait on board HMS Resolution in
Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final
Voyage of Captain James Cook. One of my personal objectives on the
trip was to read that book, which had been hibernating on my Kindle since it
was published to rave reviews. It is an unusual nonfiction choice for me, but I
downloaded it particularly for a cruise. After all, I’ve been a boater all my
life, and what better place to read such a work than while underway on a ship?
More on the book later.
A Caribbean cruise is the
one opportunity each year for our sons and their spouses to escape the frigid
Northeast — one in NYC and the other in Boston — and for us to meet up with
them and let the crew of a cruise ship (in this case, the Celebrity Silhouette)
do the piloting, the housekeeping, and the cuisine. Celebrity does a reasonably
good job, although we have noted over the years the gradual degradation of the
overall experience, as most cruise lines have abandoned refinement for the interests
of the masses. If it were not for the fact that Celebrity still maintains the
Solarium — quiet, tasteful, with its own little health restaurant for lunch — I
think our days with them would be over.
As we have been to the
ABCs before and done the obligatory tourist bit, and knowing that days in port
mean a fairly empty and very enjoyable ship, we did not intend to get off at
any of the ports. By Curaçao, however, I was ready for a long walk, so I
revisited the Queen Emma Bridge, a wooden pontoon bridge that pivots for marine
traffic, connecting neighborhoods in the capital city of Willemstad. I remember
when Ann and I last walked on that bridge some 15 years ago, after it was
refurbished. I love its floating structure and the beauty of the waters and of
Willemstad. Some views of the famed bridge from different perspectives.......
I made the mistake of
promising my family that I would learn to play Canasta on board, along with
Jonathan and Tracie, from the master Canasta purveyor — my wife Ann — who, if
not an expert, is close and a damn good teacher. My family knows my aversion to
games in general. I figure that as the hourglass runs out, it becomes even more
imperative to squeeze in everything I want to do — which for me is mostly reading,
writing, and music. “Oh,” they protested, “can’t you make an exception to play
as a family?” I relented.
Because I was Ann’s
partner, we were “winners,” and although I made a show of pretending to
understand the basics, I had a devil of a time deciphering this game. In
Canasta, you aren’t allowed to start playing your cards — from two decks, so
good luck remembering what’s been played — until you have something called a
“meld” that reaches a seemingly random number which changes every round. Watch
out for the Threes, for reasons still unknown to me. You need to build these
melds, but if you use a Wild Card (the Deuces or the Jokers), your pile becomes
“dirty,” whatever the heck that means. I kept getting Aces. Good, right? But
I’m told you want to discard Aces at a certain point. What point? I even had to
consult AI to recollect. Now is this clear enough?...
Discarding Aces in Canasta is primarily done to avoid
a severe 1,500-point penalty for holding more than two Aces at the end of a
round. It is a strategic move to clear penalty cards, signal to your partner
that you are holding a pair of Aces, or to prevent opponents from completing a
valuable Natural Aces Canasta.
I never really got past
this Ace Thing. And to make it even more “fun,” just when you think you’re
winning, someone “freezes the deck.” I think this has something to do with
Threes, but I’m too lazy now to check it out.
Still, I went along for
the ride and hope they recognize I was being a good sport. It is certainly not
fair for me to poke fun at the game, as I didn’t even get out of first grade in
my understanding. But I prefer to spend my time elsewhere. If I must play a
table game, I prefer chess — not because I am very good, but because I understand
it and, unlike most board games, it is far less subject to the vagaries of
chance.
Back to the cruise. Most
of the activity on board is centered on eating, so securing a set table for six
at dinner seemed a priority. Consequently we had a family dinner every night at
our leisure during the eight days, ranging from very good food to so-so. We
sometimes connected for other meals, but everyone largely did their own thing. We
went to one show, the only one that interested Ann and me, a Broadway revue,
which was very professional, certainly up to the standards of any regional
production if not Broadway itself.
For exercise, the kids did
the gym. I walked outside on the track, although it was blowing like hell most
days. That windy weather culminated right before returning to Ft. Lauderdale in
a monster cold front and unseasonably cold weather when we arrived.
Parting is such sorrow —
they off to catch flights back to the Northeast, and we back to our home in
Florida, which was freezing the next several days. Florida homes are not
prepared for that kind of cold, and our reverse cycle ran nearly nonstop. We
are doing this again over next Christmas and New Year’s, eleven days to more interesting
destinations in the southern Caribbean and on a newer ship, but neither the
ship nor the destinations are the point. It’s being together, and we are
grateful that our family enjoys doing this.
While underway, I keep the
navigation channel on in our room. There isn’t much detailed information there,
but heading and nautical miles traveled interest me. I’ve toured the bridges of
these big ships, and the control and navigation equipment they have — as well
as the redundancies built in — are impressive.
Most private yachts today
have miniature versions: joysticks as the helm, GPS, radar, depth finders all
synced, forward looking depth finders, bow and stern thrusters, even
stabilizers and water makers on some. When we started boating more seriously in
the 1980s, we had a compass and an early version of LORAN (radio-controlled
long-range navigation), and that was about it — and, oh yes, my wife Ann on the
bow ringing a bell in thick fog to announce our presence to other boats. For
years before GPS, we traveled the Long Island Sound and the Block Island Sound
by my charting from buoy to buoy, dead reckoning, and following our compass
while noting speed and time elapsed when visibility was impaired. From 1984, me
and my compass and not much more:
Which finally leads me
back to The Wide Wide Sea. I was able
to finish it after the cruise. I kept thinking that my early days in boating
were, in a way, not entirely different from those of 18th-century mariners with
compass bearings and dead reckoning being our main tools, though on a much
smaller scale and rarely out of sight of land in good weather. This book
chronicles James Cook’s third and final voyage. The enormity of it puts my
nautical experiences into diminished perspective.
Nowadays, on large cruise
ships, we take so much of what goes into making the voyage for granted. We
covered almost 3,000 statute miles on our recent ABC cruise. Cook’s ships
covered about 40,000 miles over those four years of his third voyage, creating
nautical charts where none had existed.
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| Map
of Cook's Third Voyage |
HMS Resolution and its companion ship, HMS Discovery, were captained by James Cook and Charles Clerke
respectively. Neither captain would return, Cook killed on the Big Island of
Hawaii and Clerke dying of consumption off the coast of Russia. Discovery was finally brought back by
the then-young William Bligh, later of HMS Bounty
fame.
The third voyage focused
on finding the Northwest Passage, sailing from England via the Cape of Good
Hope to the Pacific. It included his return to Tahiti, Tasmania, and New
Zealand, and eventually the discovery of the Hawaiian Islands. The Admiralty
issued his orders under a guise of secrecy at the very moment the American
Revolution was breaking out.
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| Mai
by Joshua Reynolds |
On the prior voyage, he had brought back a Pacific
Islander, Omai (also known as Mai), who was feted by the English during his
stay. The public believed the main goal of the third voyage was to return Omai
to his homeland. The British did not want Spain or Russia to know the true
purpose: to discover the fabled Northwest Passage and claim more territory.
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| Captain
James Cook |
Cook was true to his
mission. Imagine him navigating the waters off Alaska, reaching a dead end in
the Gulf of Alaska, weaving through the Aleutian Islands, through the Bering
Strait and into the Arctic Ocean, only to be greeted by a wall of ice. He had
to turn back, thinking he was too late in the season — better to try again he
thought the following year. Returning to warmer Pacific waters, he charted
newly encountered islands, including the Hawaiian chain, with remarkable
accuracy. He was as much an ethnographer as a navigator and discoverer. He
generally commanded the respect of the peoples he encountered (and many
Hawaiians frequently identified him as their god, Lono), as well as his crew.
It was his misreading of the natives at Kealakekua Bay on the Kona coast that
finally cost him his life. Ironically, he had sensed they had grown weary of
his ships’ presence, and Resolution
and Discovery left — only to turn
back when the mainmast of Resolution
was found to be rotten. The ship’s carpenters needed wood for repairs. Had the
mast been sound, perhaps Cook would not have met his untimely and, simply put,
gruesome death.
One of the things that
stood out in Hampton Sides’ narrative is that each ship functioned like a
self-sufficient village — with carpenters, sailmakers, surgeons, naturalists,
and even a small armed marine force. What also struck me was the navigation
technology that made such voyages possible, particularly the recently perfected
Larcum Kendall K1 chronometer, which allowed accurate determination of
longitude. That was the missing link. The sextant had long been used to
determine latitude by measuring celestial angles. Together, these tools — along
with compass bearings and speed logs — gave Cook the ability to map vast
stretches of the Pacific with astonishing precision.
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| Larcum
Kendall K1 chronometer |
The book is one of those
rare nonfiction works that reads like a gripping novel, both a sea story and a
story of island peoples, of cultural clash and of Cook’s unusual ability to
bridge those gaps, except in that final, perhaps fateful, lapse in judgment. On
my boats and numerous cruises, some across the Atlantic and one across the
Pacific, I have probably logged as many miles at sea as Cook did, but
possessing only an infinitesimal fraction of his knowledge and, I daresay,
courage. It is a remarkable tale, even for a landlubber, and Hampton Sides
makes you feel as if you are aboard, enduring the vicissitudes of long voyages,
from equatorial heat to the bone-chilling Bering Strait, facing the dangers of
the unknown and the exhilaration of discovery, trading with different cultures,
and yes, confronting the complicated and often tragic consequences of contact,
including the spread of Old World diseases Cook tried, imperfectly, to contain.
The Wide Wide Sea is fascinating and compelling reading. I will bring a renewed
awareness and respect for those pioneer mariners, and for those who design and
pilot today’s ships, on our next family cruise.
