Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

In following his fortunes, so far as the brief limits of such a sketch as this will permit, we shall bid a perhaps welcome adieu for a while to the roar of guns and the shock of battle, to the blaze of burning towns and the fierce cries ringing along the decks of captured treasure-ships, to watch the contest of a clear head and a strong will against those foes which may be overcome without bloodshed, although not always without loss of life—the hidden dangers of unknown oceans strewn with uncharted reefs and shoals lying in wait for unwary keels, the sudden hurricanes of the Tropics, and the storms and fogs and the floating ice-navies of the far North and South. It was these that Captain Cook went out to fight and overcome, and in doing so to prove eloquently that:

“Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war.”

Nevertheless there are certain points of likeness between James Cook, Geographer and Circumnavigator, and that other Circumnavigator, Francis Drake, Pirate and Scourge of Spain. Both began life as ship-boys, and both rose, by sheer ability and strength of purpose, far above their original station in life to positions of command in the service of their country. Both were men of iron will, far-reaching design, unshakeable self-reliance, and passionate temper, and, lastly, both were possessed by that irresistible spirit of roving and adventure which, when it once seizes a man, but seldom lets him rest in peace. In short, though the vocation of one was piracy and war, and that of the other the peaceful, but none the less adventurous service of science, both were stamped with the supreme and essential characteristics of the Empire-Maker.

Naturally, the world had changed a good deal by the time James Cook started out to add so enormously to men’s knowledge of it. Spain had fallen from her high estate and was living in slothful ease on the dregs and lees of that strong wine which she had drunk to intoxication in the golden days of Cortez and Pizarro. But Britain, no longer only England, had become Great Britain, and was fast expanding into Greater Britain. Cowley, Dampier, Clapperton and Anson had circumnavigated the globe more than once, and people were beginning to have something like a definite notion of how very big a place was this world which now seems so small to us. The Imperial Idea was beginning to take hold of men’s minds. They wanted to know, not so much how big the world was, but what other unknown lands might be lying waiting for the discoverer, hidden away among the vast expanses which were still an utter blank upon the map.

The maritime nations of the world, too, and Britain, now foremost among them, had unconsciously taken a very great stride along the pathway of real progress, and they were beginning to grasp the higher ideal of colonisation as distinguished from mere conquest, and to James Cook belongs the high honour, if not of discovering, at least of first definitely locating and in part mapping out the greatest of all the British colonies.

Indeed, it may be said that, in sober fact, he added a whole continent to the British Empire, and that without the striking of a single blow or the loss of a single life in battle.

The first few years of James Cook’s seafaring life were eventless, just as Francis Drake’s were, but for all that he, like Gloriana’s Little Pirate, was doing that minor but no less essential part of his life-work which was the necessary preparation for the greater. He was doing his work first as ship’s boy, then as sailor before the mast, then as second mate, first mate, and so on up the laborious ladder which was to lead him in the end to an unequalled eminence among mariners.

Thus for thirteen years he served what may be called his apprenticeship to his life’s work; learning in the most practical of all schools, a North Sea collier of the eighteenth century, not only the science of seamanship in all its details, but also what was hardly less important—that science of taking things as they came, of looking upon hardship, privation and danger as the commonplaces of a seaman’s life, incidents in his day’s work, as it were, and as such scarcely worth even the mention, and hence much less worth troubling about.

A curiously instructive fact strikes one in contrasting Captain Cook’s own account of his voyages with those of others, such as Anderson and Gilbert, who sailed with him. They expatiate largely on the miseries of heat and cold, ice and mist, the almost uneatable character of the sea-fare of those days, disease among the crew, and so on; but Captain Cook hardly ever mentions them, saving only the scurvy, of which more hereafter.

But there was something else that James Cook had already learnt long ago while he was yet a boy. When he was a lad of six or seven he had been set to work on a farm belonging to a man named William Walker, and this William had a wife named Mary who, taking a fancy to the lad, taught him his letters and encouraged him to read, and so, without knowing it, put into his hands the talisman which was to win his way to future greatness. She not only aroused in him that passion for reading which distinguished him among the sailors of his time, but she gave him what might have been the only means of gratifying it, for not every farm-lad and ship’s-boy of the middle of the eighteenth century had learnt, or ever did learn, to read and write.