GREAT EXPLORERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 716, 2 April 1953, Page 10

GREAT EXPLORERS

CAPTAIN COOK, by Christopher ‘Lloyd; Faber and Faber. English price, 10/6. GEORGE BASS, by Keith Macrae Bowden; eoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. Australian price, 24/-.

(Reviewed by

A.

M.

NE of the pleasures of reading. about Captain James Cook is that the more you read the greater he ‘appears. Indeed, the author of this latest "Life" says, "Cook’s biographer is faced with the difficulty that his record as a'‘leader of men and as an explorer. is almost too perfect." Where can the historian "find the shadows in this personality" to enable him to paint a porttrait of a man "whose character seems altogether too good to be true"? Christopher Lloyd, a senior lecturer at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and, secretary of the Naval Records Society, does show or suggest one or two shadows on Cook’s record. Had he been a little more imaginative and patient, he might: have found the strait between Vancouver Island and Oregon, and might not have died as he did. This account of Cook’s end is full and fair, and shows

how easily a mixture of misunderstanding and misjudgment can bring disaster out of a clear sky. Cook’s fame is not thereby dimmed. As Christopher Lloyd points out, however, his genius has not been given the popular publicity it deserves. His story lies largely embedded in old _ books, which the public knows from extracts, and he himself was not communicative. I read my first connected and disentangled narrative of Cook’s life as late as 1935, in Lieutenant-Commander Gould’s. little biography. Christopher Lloyd goes further in the necessary work of. explanation. This is an admirable popular biography of Cook, fully appreciative, and well balanced between the demands of technicalities, scientific interest, and human relations. In no country should such a book receive a warmer welcome than in this, which Cook put so firmly and accurately on the map. Two points of criticism: Christopher Lloyd gives to New Caledonia the Condominium that belongs to the New Hebrides, and in implying that the natives of the New: Hebrides were much the same when the second war came as in Cook’s time, he seems to oN ee

ignore the long labours of missionaries and other Europeans in that group. It is an easy transition from James Cook to George Bass, explorer of the Australian coast, for Bass idolised Cook, and he takes the chief credit for discovering what a luckier Cook might have found, the strait between Tasmania and the mainland. Bass’s record and disposition suggest a combination of Cook and Joseph Banks. Professionally he was va doctor, but he mastered navigation and his interest in geographical and scientific exploration was insatiable, His exploration of the south-east coast of Australia in open boats was a remarkable achievement, and he had packed a great deal into life when he disappeared in the Pacific in 1803 at the age of 32. Yet this successful and personally attractive explorer has waited 150 years for a biographer. Dr. Keith Bowden fills the gep in a somewhat pedestrian literary style, and does not sieve trivial detail quite finely enough; but he has done a noteworthy piece of ‘research which gives us a clear portrait of the central figure, and throws interesting, if too often lurid, light on the very early days of New South Wales.