BIOGRAPHY:IN OUR CELEBRITY culture a favourite pastime is iconoclasm. Glyn Williams, Emeritus Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London, is a debunker of commendable dignity, far above the gossip magazines of the checkout counters.
In The Death of Captain Cook, he sets forth the evidence of Captain James Cook (1728-1779) as hero and anti-hero, from the Enlightenment and colonialism to postcolonialism, with academic impartiality. Though his presentation seems as dispassionate as humanly possible, by the end of the revelations the celebrity of the foremost navigator, hydrographer and pioneer map-maker of the entire Pacific Ocean is grievously bruised.
"My interpretation of Cook breaks new ground," Williams proclaims, "as I argue that the circumstances and reporting of his death are the key to his reputation", establishing "a martyr-hero", while some people "suspected that it would have been better if the South Seas had remained unknown to Europe". Cook's achievements earned a lot of memorial statuary, but his explorations caused what Alan Moorehead called The Fatal Impacton Polynesian innocence. After Cook, perhaps the Mother Hubbard dresses were inevitable.
Cook's life was a great, ascendant success until the very end of it. Son of a Yorkshire farm labourer, he left school early to sail in colliers between Tyne and London. Even so, he was a keen student of mathematics, astronomy and cartography to prepare for navigation in the Royal Navy. In his naval career, he did so well that the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, addressing the House of Lords, described Cook as "the first navigator in Europe". Honouring his boss, Cook in turn called Hawaii the Sandwich Islands.
On the first of three epic voyages of exploration, he mapped more than 5,000 miles of previously unknown coastlines, including those of New Zealand, eastern Australia and Torres Strait. He enabled Joseph Banks, the senior botanist aboard HM Bark Endeavour, to collect 3,000 plants from the part of Australia now called Botany Bay. Though Cook was not the first European to visit Australia, Australians have venerated him above former discoverers. It was once suggested that their country should be called Cookia. The book is rich in such curious nuggets of information. William Bligh of the Bountywas one of Cook's junior officers. Marie Antoinette, when offered something to read while awaiting her execution, requested The Travels of Captain Cook. There is at present a Kapitan Cook restaurant in Gdynia, Poland.
Cook was a paradoxical figure, a severe humanitarian. He enforced discipline aboard his ships by frequent floggings, a custom of the time, but otherwise he took good care of the health of his crews. To avoid scurvy, their diet contained plenty of vitamin C. According to Dava Sobel, in her book Longitude, Cook fed them sauerkraut, for the navy had not yet prescribed limes. He also tried substituting a sugar cane concoction for the daily grog ration, but the men objected.
Cook's second expedition, Williams writes, was "one of the most comprehensive of all voyages of discovery. In his three years away, he disposed of the imagined southern continent, reached closer to the South Pole than any man before, and touched on a multitude of lands - Tahiti and New Zealand again, and for the first time Easter Island, the Marquesas, Tonga, New Caledonia and the New Hebrides. In two voyages he had drawn the modern map of the South Pacific". However, on his third voyage, in HMS Resolution, he encountered his nemesis. Hawaiians welcomed him as Lono, a god of peace and plenty, who was due to reappear that season. Cook may or may not have accepted deification. He left the island but soon returned with a broken mast in need of repair. Perhaps fallibility was considered ungodly. When he went ashore, as Williams concludes from several sources, there was "a bloody and chaotic fracas on the beach at Kealakekua Bay", resulting in Cook's death. A dramatic contemporary painting by John Webber, which is reproduced on the book's jacket, shows a native stabbing Cook in the back, as he gestures ambiguously for marines to come to his aid or to stay away.
A later engraving by Webber and Philippe de Loutherbourg, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, shows angels carrying him aloft. Instead of a musket, there is a sextant in his right hand. Saintly status was later challenged by critics who claimed that Cook was an invader whose sailors brought venereal disease to the islands. Mark Twain wrote that Cook's murder was "justifiable homicide". Professor Williams's scholarly balancing act, providing a list of recommended further reading, should make his book a valuable educational text.
• Patrick Skene Catling has published 12 novels and nine books for children
The Death of Captain Cook: A Hero Made and Unmade By Glyn Williams Profile, 197pp. £15.99