The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘We seem to have some Captain Cook fans on board’
Nick Trend sets out for Vancouver Island to find the remote bay where the great explorer landed on his final voyage in 1778
Halfway to Vancouver, looking down from 39,000ft at the frozen wastes of northern Canada, you can’t help but feel for those who set out, centuries ago, in search of the elusive Northwest Passage. It is mid-June, but the sea is still frozen to the coastline and the beaches are white with snow. So many ships foundered in that ice, so many pioneers perished before Roald Amundsen finally completed a sea route from Greenland to Alaska in 1906.
The greatest of Amundsen’s predecessors was Captain Cook, who 250 years ago today set out on his first voyage of discovery in HMS Endeavour and later perished on his final mission in search of the passage. He has been a hero of mine since I was given a Ladybird book while at primary school. It told an alluring story. Cook was a farmworker’s son from Whitby who rose by merit and determination from deck hand on a North Sea collier to commanding arguably the greatest navigational triumphs in history. He twice circumnavigated the globe, conquered scurvy, wrote about the “natives” he encountered with an insight and sensitivity that belied his times, and made charts that were so accurate some remained in use for 200 years. His tragic death during his third voyage – still a source of historical controversy – tore at my eight-year-old heartstrings. I pinned a map of his three voyages on my bedroom wall and spent hours tracing the routes, trying to relate those quaintly naive pictures in the Ladybird book and some sketches by his expedition artists to the places where he landed. I even won a prize for my model of the Endeavour, grounded on the Great Barrier Reef.
And now I was en route to Vancouver Island in search of one of the most famous of those landings. In March 1778, Cook was headed north along what is now the coast of Canada on his third and final voyage, charged with finding a Northwest Passage back to the Atlantic – which would have saved ships the long, brutal struggle of rounding Cape Horn. His ship, the Resolution, was short of drinking water and badly in need of repairs, when the lookout spotted a gap in the coastline.
It was a welcoming prospect. Between the headlands was a deepwater channel into a sound scattered with densely wooded islands, with the high, jagged, snowy peaks that line the spine of Vancouver Island as the backdrop. After the long swell of the Pacific, the sea was flat calm and the Resolution was quickly besieged by canoes launched by the local Muchalaht people. It was a friendly encounter and throughout Cook’s fiveweek stay, trade – mostly furs and fish in return for iron implements – was brisk.
To repair and resupply Resolution and her sister ship Discovery, Cook choose a cove on the south side of the biggest island in the sound (which was named Bligh Island after William Bligh, his ship’s master). It was this natural harbour, sketched atmospherically by the expedition’s artist, John Webber, that I wanted to see most of all. The drawing shows the two ships in mirror-calm water of what is now called Resolution Cove. They are surrounded by canoes, Resolution’s foremast is under repair, the ships’ scientists have set up their observation tents on a rock and the carpenters are at work on the beach.
For me it represented an intriguing moment of reality, of everyday detail amid the romance of exploration. And I had a hope that something of that moment might still be recaptured more than 200 years later. Now called the malodorous interiors of the houses that were built in rows to form the main village at Friendly Cove (now Yuquot). But Webber’s sketches recorded some impressive structures built from huge sections of red cedar trees and decorated with grotesque carved faces. Very little remains of the Muchalaht material culture in Nootka Sound today, though at Yuquot there is a First Nations graveyard, and standing totems, including an ancient fallen pole on the forest floor. (When they fall they are never reerected).
A better place to see the impressive masks, totems, wood carvings, weapons and artefacts from all of the First Nation tribes of the west coast is the Museum of Anthropology (moa.ubc.ca) in Vancouver. Particularly fascinating for me were the wooden longhouses that had been reconstructed outside the galleries. They aren’t specifically Muchalaht in origin, but the structural and decorative principles are similar.