Horwitz does endure some danger and much discomfort. He spends much of his journey seasick, both on a replica of the Endeavor and on a modern ferry off Alaska. And many of the places where he touches down have become hellholes, or at least heckholes, thanks to Cook and the Europeans who followed. In Tahiti, where Cook and his crew found a fertile, temperate Eden, complete with nekkid women–they’d put out if you gave them an iron nail!–Horwitz finds Westernized squalor, complete with underage prostitutes. Cook called Niue (pronounced new-ay) Savage Island because the natives stained their mouths red with a local plant; Horwitz finds a boring, puritanical, Christianized culture which makes money on switching 900-number sex-chat calls and undercutting the Bahamas and the Caymans on the price of registering offshore businesses.
In the Aleutians, whose indigenous culture “barely survived one generation of Western contact,” an archeologist tells Horwitz he feels like part of a “toxic culture.” Lest we dismiss this as contemporary P.C. cant, Horwitz reminds us that Cook himself saw it all coming: “We debauch their Morals,” he wrote of New Zealand’s Maori in 1777, “and we interduce among them wants and… diseases which they never before knew… If anyone denies the truth of this assertion, let him tell me what the Natives of… America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.” Even the West’s archetypal adventurer doubted the excellence of his endeavor. Still, Horwitz tries to wring some optimism out of Cook’s story–if only because explorer and exploited managed to communicate. “There were almost always grounds for mutual understanding and respect.” That’s about as inconclusive as his attempts to discover what kind of guy Cook really was and whether an arrow in a museum storeroom in Sydney is really made from his shin. But in this book, not getting there is half the fun.
