Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

by Tony Horwitz

Overview

In an exhilarating tale of historic adventure, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Confederates in the Attic retraces the voyages of Captain James Cook, the Yorkshire farm boy who drew the map of the modern world

Captain James Cook's three epic journeys in the 18th century were the last great voyages of discovery. His ships sailed 150,000 miles, from the Artic to the Antarctic, from Tasmania to Oregon, from Easter Island to Siberia. When Cook set off for the Pacific in 1768, a third of the globe remained blank. By the time he died in Hawaii in 1779, the map of the world was substantially complete.

Tony Horwitz vividly recounts Cook's voyages and the exotic scenes the captain encountered: tropical orgies, taboo rituals, cannibal feasts, human sacrifice. He also relives Cook's adventures by following in the captain's wake to places such as Tahiti, Savage Island, and the Great Barrier Reef to discover Cook's embattled legacy in the present day. Signing on as a working crewman aboard a replica of Cook's vessel, Horwitz experiences the thrill and terror of sailing a tall ship. He also explores Cook the man: an impoverished farmboy who broke through the barriers of his class and time to become the greatest navigator in British history.

By turns harrowing and hilarious, insightful and entertaining, BLUE LATITUDES brings to life a man whose voyages helped create the 'global village' we know today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312422608
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	08/01/2003
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	5.35(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Tony Horwitz is a native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He worked for many years as a reporter, first in Indiana and then during a decade overseas in Australia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, mostly covering wars and conflicts as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. After returning to the States, he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker before becoming a full-time author.

His books include Midnight Rising, A Voyage Long and Strange, Blue Latitudes, a national and New York Times bestseller about the Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook, Baghdad Without a Map, a national bestseller about the Middle East, and Confederates in the Attic, a national and New York Times bestseller about the Civil War.

Horwitz has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He lives with his wife, Geraldine Brooks, and their son, Nathaniel, on the island of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.

Hometown:

Waterford, Virginia

Date of Birth:

1958

Date of Death:

May 27, 2019

Place of Birth:

Washington, D.C.

Place of Death:

Washington, D.C.

Education:

B.A., Brown University; M.A., Columbia University School of Journalism

Read an Excerpt

From Blue Latitudes:

I studied the application for a berth on His Majesty's Bark Endeavour. An Australian foundation had built a replica of Cook's first vessel and dispatched it around the globe in the navigator's path. At each port, the ship's professional crew took on volunteers to help sail the next leg and experience life as eighteenth-century sailors. This seemed the obvious place to start; if I was going to understand Cook's travels, I first had to understand how he traveled.

The application asked about my "qualifications and experience."

"Have you had any blue water ocean sailing experience?"

"Can you swim 50 meters fully clothed?"

"You will be required to work aloft, sometimes at night in heavy weather. Are you confident of being able to do this?"

I wasn't sure what was meant by "blue water ocean." Did it come in other colors? I'd never swum clothed; as for working aloft, I'd climbed ladders to scoop leaves from my gutter. I checked "yes" next to each question.

But the last query gave me pause. "Do you suffer from sea sickness?"

Only when I went to sea.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Distance Traveled

1. Pacific Northwest: One Week Before the Mast

2. Tahiti: Sic Transit Venus

3. To Bora-Bora: Sold a Pup

4. New Zealand: Warriors, Still

5. Botany Bay: In the Pure State of Nature

6. The Great Barrier Reef: Wrecked

7. Homeward Bound: The Hospital Ship

8. Savage Island: The Hunt for Red Bananas

9. Tonga: Where Time Begins, and Goes Back

10. North Yorkshire: A Plain, Zealous Man

11. London: Shipping Out, Again

12. Alaska: Outside Men

13. Hawaii: The Last Island

14. Kealakekua Bay: A Bad Day on Black Rock

Epilogue: A Period to His Labours

Notes on Sources

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

Editorial Reviews

Thoroughly enjoyable. No writer has better captured the heroic enigma that was Captain James Cook than Tony Horwitz in this amiable and enthralling excursion around the Pacific.” —Bill Bryson, author of In a Sunburned Country

“Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes is one of the best. . . full of humor. . . an elegant running account of Cook's exploits.” —The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

“Part history, part travelogue — and mostly just great fun. . . This is history on a global scale, and Horwitz tells it surpassingly well.” —Los Angeles Times

“A tour de force of evocative history, serious scholarship, and compelling writing.” —The Washington Post

“Part Cook biography, part travelogue, and very much a stroke of genius.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Hilarious, brainy, and balanced. . . .A trip with Horwitz is as good as it gets.” —The Charlotte Observer

“Tony Horwitz has done it again. . . Keen insight, open-mindedness and laugh-out-loud humor.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A staggering blend of historical research, character study, sociological analysis, and intriguing tales of travel.” —The Boston Globe

“Curiosity, intelligence, compassion and a sense of adventure. . . I love reading Tony Horwitz.” —Chicago Tribune

“Horwitz succeeds brilliantly in turning the English from stiff icons to flesh-and-blood human beings. The book's constant humor, honesty and judgment recall his own Confederates in the Attic and Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods.. . . This book will keep you enthralled.” —The Seattle Times

From the Publisher

The Barnes & Noble Review
Tony Horwitz (Baghdad Without a Map, One for the Road, Confederates in the Attic) is an unrivaled practitioner of how-it-should-be-done exploration and adventure writing, and his stirring chronicle of voyaging and visiting along Captain James Cook's pioneering routes will fire up landlocked readers. Cook's three voyages of the 1770s were the greatest and most challenging attempts ever undertaken to discover and map the nondum cognita (not yet known) world: the imagined Great Southern Continent, the Pacific archipelagos, and (almost an afterthought) the Northeast Passage.

Horwitz provides a rousing tale of modern-day exploration as he and his volunteer shipmates endure the rigors and hardships of the voyage on a replica of Cook's ship, calling to mind the best that adventure literature has to offer. But he does much more. With keen insight, he examines the profound impact of Cook's appearance -- unavoidably, as an advance man for British imperial and commercial interests -- on the native peoples of New Zealand, Australia, and other homelands. Along the way he provides an engrossing consideration of intrusion and memory; of change and loss of identity; of displacement and the problems of adaptation. The indigenous social and economic entities of Cook's day are long gone; Horwitz examines the degree to which the successor arrangements -- so often dominated by the United States or European powers -- have proved to be both destructive and unrewarding. He lets the locals speak, and they have much to say that's painful to hear. This book is a winner, and the excellent source notes open a welcome door to the always engaging Cook literature. Peter Skinner

bn.com

Pulitzer-winning journalist and travel-writer Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic, 1998, etc.), dogging the wake of Captain Cook, discerningly braids Cook's long-ago perceptions with his own present-day inquiries into the lands the Captain encountered. Cook made three epic voyages, sailing from Antarctica to the Arctic, from Australia to Alaska, and to many of the islands that lie between. Fascinated by the man and his accomplishments, Horwitz visits those far-flung lands where the impact of Cook's arrival was more profound and lasting than the news of the lands' existence was upon the Europeans back home. The author travels by sailboat and ferry, often in the company of his Australian chum Roger, an odd-fellow and contrarian of rare stripe who adds a comic counterpoint to Horwitz's probings into attitudes toward Cook in the places he set anchor-attitudes that run the gamut from loathing to reverence. Natives for the most part revile him, though it's a quirk of fate that the captain's logs are now helping New Zealand's Maori establish land claims. Horwitz's portraits of the lands can be dispiriting: Bora Bora on the brink of environmental collapse, Tahiti gripped by ennui, Tonga feudal with feudal squalor and ill temper. But there are also innocent Niue and vibrant Hawaii and Australia-where Cook is sooner forgotten by all concerned. Of the navigator himself, Horwitz says that "his journals allow us to chart almost every one of his steps and sails, right down the minutest degree of latitude. But [he] left us no map to his own soul." Still, he rises from these pages as a thoughtful and humane character sensitive to the men who served him and to the local populations he met, though "mutualincomprehension over notions of property and justice [plagued him] throughout his Pacific voyages" and in fact led to his death. Tandem voyages taken 200 years apart: filled with history and alive with contrasts.

Kirkus Reviews