Seafurrers, Page 3

  He might have had Fish enough, but could not eat ’em for want of Salt, because they occasion’d a Looseness; except Crawfish, which are there as large as our Lobsters, and very good: These he sometimes boil’d, and at other times broil’d, as he did his Goats Flesh, of which he made very good Broth, for they are not so rank as ours: he kept an Account of 500 that he kill’d while there, and caught as many more, which he mark’d on the Ear and let go.

  Juan Fernández is no longer for pit stops or castaways. The archipelago has a new identity—Juan Fernández National Park—and the island on which Selkirk was marooned a new name: Robinson Crusoe Island. Visitors can fly in, tuck into the clawless Juan Fernández lobster, go adventuring, and fly out, all in a matter of days.

  Incidentally . . .

  Did Selkirk’s story inspire Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe? Possibly. But there were other Juan Fernández survivor stories doing the rounds at the time, such as Dampier’s account of the resourceful “Moskito Indian” left there in 1681:

  This Indian lived here alone above three years, and altho’ he was several times sought after by the Spaniards, who knew he was left on the Island, yet they could never find him. He was in the Woods, hunting for Goats, when Capt.Watlin drew off his Men, and the Ship was under sail before he came back to shore. He had with him his Gun and a Knife, with a small Horn of Powder, and a few Shot; which being spent, he contrived a way by notching his Knife, to saw the Barrel of his Gun into small Pieces, wherewith he made Harpoons, Lances, Hooks and a long Knife; heating the pieces first in the fire, which he struck with his Gunflint, and a piece of the Barrel of his Gun, which he hardned; having learnt to do that among the English. The hot pieces of Iron he would hammer out and bend as he pleased with Stones, and saw them with his jagged Knife, or grind them to an Edge by long labour, and harden them to a good temper as there was occasion. All this may seem strange to those that are not acquainted with the sagacity of theIndians; but it is no more than these Moskito Men are accustomed to in their own Country, where they make their own Fishing and striking Instruments, without either Forge or Anvil; tho’ they spend a great deal of time about them.

  INCIDENT 4: Sailing into History

  “

  The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771

  Edited by J. C. Beaglehole

  [1768—September] 28. Wind rather slackend; three birds were today about the ship, a swallow, to all appearance the same as our European one, and two motacillas, about night fall one of the latter was taken; about 11 a shoal of Porpoises came about the ship, and the fisgig was soon thrown into one of them but would not hold.

  29. This morn calm; employd in drawing and describing the bird taken yesterday, calld it Motacilla avida; while the drawing was in hand it became very familiar, so much so that we had a brace made for it in hope to keep it alive; as flies were in amazing abundance onboard the ship we had no fear of plentiful supply of provision.

  30. This Morn at day break made the Island of Bonavista, one of the Cape Verde Islands: Mr Buchan employd in taking views of the land; Mr Parkinson busy in finishing the sketches made of the shark yesterday.

  This Evening the other Motacilla avida was brought to us, it differd scarce at all from the first taken, except that it was something larger; his head however gave us some good, by supplying us with near twenty specimens of ticks, which differd but little from the acarus vicinus Linn; it was however described and calld Motacilla.

  [October] 21. Trade continues. Today the cat killd our bird M. Avida who had lived with us ever since the 29th of Septr intirely on the flies which he caught for himself; he was hearty and in high health so that probably he might have livd a great while longer had fate been more kind.

  ”

  ACCORDING TO BART

  Joe should have been more careful about letting the perky little wagtail he was so fond of fly around the cabin. He would know (a) the ship was overrun with rats and (b) Cook was always recruiting seafurrers to deal with the problem. The presence of rats and able-bodied sea cats would have been hard to miss on a small Whitby collier converted for the world’s first major scientific venture at sea—to calculate the distance between the earth and the sun by measuring Venus (it would look like a little black disk from planet Earth) transiting the sun.

  That was the Royal Society of London’s mission, but not Joe’s. He was an ambitious young man of considerable wealth, with big plans and a large retinue (naturalists Daniel Solander and H. D. Spöring; landscape and natural history artists Alexander Buchan and Sydney Parkinson; assistants James Roberts and Peter Briscoe; and his two servants Thomas Richmond and George Dorlton).

  When Joe set sail for the South Seas, collector John Ellis reported to Carl Linnaeus that the £10,000 (around £550,000, or $724,699, in today’s money) of equipment he took with him included his

  fine Library of Natural History . . . all sorts of machines for catching and preserving insects; all kinds of nets, trawls, drags and hooks for coral fishing . . . a curious contrivance of a telescope, by which, put into the water, you can see the bottom to a great depth, where it is clear . . . many cases of bottles with ground stoppers, of several sizes, to preserve animals in spirits . . . several sorts of salts to surround the seeds; and wax, both beeswax and that of Myrica.

  Joe’s plan was to be the first naturalist to go plant hunting and species seeking in the South Seas.

  He was. Three years later he and Solander arrived home with a massive collection of about thirty thousand plants, shells, insects, and animals representing some three thousand species, of which thirteen hundred were wholly new to Europe’s scientists. Even if only half that number were animals or insects, that’s still a considerable number of living things meeting their end in little bottles of spirits compared with one small Motacilla meeting its “fate” because someone left the door open. Joe also introduced the stuffed kangaroo to the world.

  Incidentally . . .

  Joe Banks was on the spot when the Union Jack was hoisted and Australia (well, its east coast, called New South Wales back then) was added to the British Empire. What’s long forgotten is that he was also once known as the Father of Australia. As David Hunt wrote in his unauthorized history of Australia, Girt:

  It was Banks who first recommended that the British establish a penal colony at Botany Bay. It was Banks who influenced early British thinking on relations with Aboriginal people and advised the Crown on all matters New South Welsh during the first decades of settlement. It was Banks who instructed Matthew Flinders to circumnavigate Australia to put beyond doubt that it was a single continent. It was Banks who stole merinos from the Spanish, allowing generations of Australians to ride on the sheep’s back. And it was Banks who got the mutiny-prone William Bligh into both breadfruit and governorship, indirectly contributing to the only military coup in Australian history. Banks’ role in shaping Australia was so neglected over the years that he wasn’t recognised on an Australian stamp until 1970, and then he was only a background figure. Banks wasn’t even the first botanist to be licked and stuffed into an Australian post box, this honour falling to Sir Ferdinand Jakob Heinrich von Mueller in 1948 for his services to the macadamia nut.

  INCIDENT 5: Beating Scurvy’s Scourge

  A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, on Discovery; Performed in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779

  John Rickman, 1781

  “

  [Table Bay, Cape of Good Hope]

  On the 11th [October 1776], came to and anchored in six fathom water, where, to our great joy, we found the Resolution. . . .

  Captain Cook, with the principal officers and gentlemen belonging to the ship, came on board to bid us welcome. By them we learnt that they had been at the Cape near three weeks. . . .

  What remained for Captain Cook to do when we arrived, was chiefly to purchase live cattle for presents to Arees [i.e., Polynesian chiefs] in the South Seas; likewise live stock for the ships use; these are always the last things
provided, because it is found necessary to shorten, as much as possible, their continuance on board. . . .

  Among the cattle purchased, were four horses and mares of a delicate breed, for Omai [the Polynesian being returned to Tahiti]; several bulls and cows of the buffaloe kind, as more suitable to the tropical climates than any brought from Europe; likewise some African rams and ewes; some dogs too were purchased; cats we had plenty on board, and of goats Captain Cook purchased numbers of both sexes.

  Stored with these, the Resolution resembled the Ark, in which all the animals that were to stock the little world to which he was bound were collected; and with their provender, they occupied no small part of the ship’s stowage.

  ”

  ACCORDING TO BART

  The Resolution may have had plenty of able-bodied sea cats back in Cape Town, but all that changed at Moorea, according to Cook. “The Ship being a good [deal] pestered with rats, I hauled her within thirty yards of the Shore, being as near as the depth of water would allow.” Midshipman William Charlton “got a Hawser [a large rope] out of the Ballast Port with some Spars lash’t upon it with a desire to get some of the Rats out of the Ship, we having a Great Number of them on board.” The idea behind hawsering is that the rats would, Pied Piper–like, take to the tightrope and head for the shore. Obviously some did, maybe lots did. The locals quite reasonably responded to having ships’ rats offloaded on their island with a spot of cat snatching for pest control, to send Captain Cook a clear “don’t make your solution our problem” message. That’s why the shipboard pest-control resources were depleted, though the locals did eventually return a couple of seafurrers.

  While Cook came to an untimely end and the expedition didn’t discover a Northwest Passage around North America, they did notch up some achievements. They charted large tracts of the Pacific and Arctic coasts of North America and Russia, and no case of scurvy was reported. At a time when a long sea trip could be a death sentence, Cook’s “eat your greens” diet plan (which meant large amounts of “Sour Krout”) kept his crew free from scurvy’s scourge. And that became his legacy, at least for his men, as the musical testimonial that follows shows.

  Cook wasn’t the only fruit and veg preacher sailing the high seas, but he was the standout in getting his men to eat their greens. He was a prodigious stocker-upper of fresh supplies on every possible occasion. And he was an absolute stickler: Everyone had to eat their greens. He didn’t force-feed; he used psychology. He served Sour Kraut on Endeavour to the officers, and let the men take it or leave it. They took it—as soon as seamen see “their Superiors set a Value upon it, it becomes the finest stuff in the World,” he revealed in his Endeavour journal (1768–71).

  Captain Cook’s men certainly knew he saved their lives. Able Seaman Thomas Perry from HMS Resolution composed a celebratory song with this verse:

  We were all hearty seamen no cold did we fear

  And we have from all sickness entirely kept clear

  Thanks be to the Captain he has proved so good

  Amongst all the Islands to give us fresh food.

  Incidentally . . .

  Seafurrers don’t need to “eat their greens,” let alone dose up on Sour Kraut. Like most other mammals except guinea pigs, some bats, and most primates (sapiens included), felines make their own vitamin C, giving them a considerable nutritional advantage on long voyages over their scurvy-prone shipmates.

  INCIDENT 6: Naming Rights

  A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and

  Antarctic Regions, During the Years 1839–43

  Captain Sir James Clark Ross, 1847

  “Feb. 21 [1842]: The southerly gale continued to blow with violence during the whole of the next day, and with the thermometer at 19° [Fahrenheit] the waves, which broke over the ships, froze as they fell on the decks and rigging; by this means a heavy weight of ice accumulated about the hull and ropes which kept the crew constantly employed with axes, breaking it away; and from their exposure to the inclemency of the weather, several of them suffered severely. A remarkable circumstance occurred on board the Terror during this storm, which may help to convey a better idea of the intensity of the cold we experienced than the mere reference to the state of the thermometer. Whilst her people were engaged chopping away the thick coat of ice from her bows, which had been formed by the freezing of a portion of each wave that she plunged into, a small fish was found in the mass; it must have been dashed against the ship, and instantly frozen fast. It was carefully removed for the purpose of preservation, a sketch of it made, and its dimensions taken by Dr. Robertson, but it was unfortunately seized upon and devoured by a cat. Dr. Richardson observes [in Zoology of the Voyage], ‘that the sketch is not sufficiently detailed to show either the number or nature of the gill and fin rays, or whether the skin was scaly or not, so that even the order to which the fish belongs is uncertain, and we have introduced a copy of the design, merely to preserve a memorial of what appears to be a novel form, discovered under such peculiar circumstances.’ It was rather more than six inches in length.

  ”

  ACCORDING TO BART

  Fish makes a nice change, and it would be easy to argue that eating it was a better outcome all round than pickling it to preserve, measure, and then put it in a museum drawer to gather dust.

  Ross is rather relaxed about all this, and his would have been a good ship to serve on. After all, he’s the man who rammed his ships through the pack ice into the open water beyond and, he claimed, “discovered a land of so extensive a coastline and attaining such an altitude as to justify the appellation of a Great New Southern Continent.” All aboard were awestruck. And according to the dipping needles, they were also close to finding what they were looking for: the magnetic south pole. That’s why there are lots of “Rosses” in Antarctica—Ross Sea, Ross Ice Shelf, Ross Island, Ross Dependency—James Clark Ross got there first.

  Being first on the scene gives you naming rights. It’s not (entirely) about ego; places need names so you can put them on a map and find them again. Ross named the Admiralty Range after his sponsors (the admiralty), Cape Adare after a friend, Victoria Land after the queen, Mount Erebus (an active volcano rising 12,448 feet/3,794 meters skyward) after his ship, and Mount Terror (a smaller extinct volcano rising to 10,702 feet/3,262 meters) after the other ship in the expedition. He called the wall of ice rising 160 feet (50 meters) out of the sea and extending “as far to the east and west as the eye could discern” (thus putting an end to sailing farther south) the Great Ice Barrier, and the sea where he met the barrier McMurdo Sound, after the first lieutenant on the Terror. As for the dear departed fish, it’s nameless. No one knows what it was. But as there was none left over, it was obviously tasty.

  “Rosses” in Antarctica

  Ross was a polar pro. Discovering Antarctica was no lucky break. For seventeen of the previous twenty years, he’d been on Arctic expeditions, and had located the north magnetic pole (1831). “Be prepared” was his motto. He knew what lay ahead. He did his homework, stocked up for three years with copious quantities of food, including scurvy-beating vegetable soup, pickled cabbage, and carrots, and packed plenty of ice saws, some portable forges, warm winter kit for the crew, a small flock of sheep, and seafurrers (note the reference to “a” cat, not “the” cat) for pest control. “Few people of the present day are capable of rightly appreciating this heroic deed, this brilliant proof of human courage and energy,” reckoned explorer Roald Amundsen, no novice himself in polar parts:

  With two ponderous craft—regular “tubs” according to our ideas—these men sailed right into the heart of the pack, which all previous explorers had regarded as certain death. . . . These men were heroes—heroes in the highest sense of the word.

  Incidentally . . .

  “The cat is fain the fish to eat, but hath no will to wet her feet” is a saying that goes way back into the proverbial mists—Cat lufat visch, ac he nele his feth wete in Middle English, from the Latin Catus amat pi
scem, sed non vult tangere flumen. However, why cats? People eat plenty of fish without ever dangling a line, let alone getting their “paws” wet or going anywhere near water. They also overfish, but that’s another story. Fishing cats (Prionailurus viverrinus) aren’t afraid to get their (partially webbed) paws wet. And they do from time to time eat fish. But they are just as partial to frogs, waterfowl, mollusks, and crayfish, along with rats, mice, insects, and snakes.

  Raw fish isn’t actually ideal fare for felines despite proverbial wisdom. It contains thiaminase, an enzyme that breaks down thiamin (an essential water-soluble B vitamin) and can lead to a “head-messing” thiamin deficiency, beriberi, and an untimely end. Prevention is better than cure. Cooking kills thiaminase.

  INCIDENT 7: Collectomania

  A Landlubber’s Log of His Voyage Around Cape Horn

  Morton MacMichael III, 1883

  “

  July 25 [1879].—During the morning passed through a large fleet of nautilus, those renowned little creatures of the jelly-fish species, that spread their tiny film-like sails in delicate shades of pink and blue, and cruise about over the waves, sometimes alone or in little groups, and again, as I first saw them, in vast numbers. The sunlight playing on the thousands of rising and falling sails made a very pretty picture. We were slopping along at a lazy pace when we overtook the fleet, which was running before a gentle breeze just strong enough to suit the sailing qualities of its tiny craft, and after scoring several misses in my attempts to catch one, I succeeded at last in slipping a bucket directly beneath a beauty and hauled it aboard without disturbing it in the slightest degree. Placing the bucket on deck, I went forward to call the carpenter and show him my prize. As we started aft we saw one of the ship’s cats approach the bucket and proceed to investigate the nautilus, doubtless attracted by its fishy odor, and before we could interfere puss had captured the prize, and was scampering away with it. Another name common to the nautilus is that of Portuguese men-of-war, and this specimen promptly gave evidence of its warlike nature by stinging the cat before she had carried it across the deck, pussy dropping it with a terrified yowl, and vanishing into her sanctum, the galley, as though a dozen dogs were at her heels. During the rest of the day she sat in a corner, uttering plaintive meyows, and alternately rubbing her cheeks on the deck or scraping her swollen tongue with one of her front paws. . . .