Blue Latitudes Quotes

“If there was an overriding message in his journals, it was that people, the world over, were alike in their essential nature—even if they ate their enemies, made love in public, worshipped idols, or, like Aborigines, cared not at all for material goods.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Cook,” the historian Bernard Smith speculates, “increasingly realised that wherever he went he was spreading the curses much more liberally than the benefits of European civilization.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“In their attitude to history, some New Zealanders resembled die-hard white Southerners in America, who enshrined Confederate leaders and symbols without acknowledging the offense this might cause to others. Sheila”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“The world of the rural poor remained what it had been for generations: a day’s walk in radius, a tight, well-trod loop between home, field, church, and, finally, a crowded family grave plot.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Seventeen evangelicals, plus five of their wives and three children, disembarked at Tahiti in 1797. Eight missionaries fled on the next boat out, to Sydney. One of the remaining missionaries married a native woman and left the church.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“London was as close to a home as the adult Cook ever had: his domestic base for the latter half of his life, and the place where he readied his ships and plotted his voyages with the Admiralty and Royal Society. It was also in London that the impact of his discoveries was most keenly felt: in science, commerce, and the arts. Cook’s achievements contributed, in no small way, to London’s becoming the headquarters of an empire that would ultimately span eleven thousand miles of the globe and rule over 400 million subjects.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“I found myself unexpectedly moved, less by the memory of Cook than by the people gathered to honor him. The British were brilliant at this sort of ceremony: sincere, stoic, and understated—nothing like cynical Australians or syrupy Americans. Watching these few dozen faces lashed by freezing rain, their breath clouding as they uttered “God Save the Queen,” I caught a glimpse of the grit and pride that had sustained Cook and his men, and that had once enabled this small, damp country to rule so much of the globe.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Even the quality in Cook that least appealed to me, his customary humorlessness, was in the Advices; they warned against “foolish jesting” and “long and frequent conversation on temporal matters” because “there is leaven therein, which, being suffered to prevail, indisposes and benumbs the soul.” Reading this, I realized how often, and usually in vain, I’d searched Cook’s journals for some leaven therein.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“I was especially struck by the book’s list of “Quaker Advices” current in northern England during Cook’s youth, which stated in part: “Keep to that which is modest, decent, plain and useful…. Be prudent in all manner of behaviour, both in public and private; avoiding all intemperance in eating and drinking…. Walk wisely and circumspectly towards all men, in a peaceable spirit…. Let our moderation and prudence, as well as truth and justice, appear to all men, and in all things, in trading and commerce, in speech and communication.” To me, this read like a blueprint of Cook’s adult character.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Reg’s attraction to Cook was entirely different from my own. While I was drawn to Cook’s restless adventuring and plunge into the unknown, Reg worshipped the man’s modesty, sense of duty, loyalty to home and country. Maybe it was good that we knew so little of Cook’s inner life. As it was, each of us could fill him up with our own longings and imagination.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“It is the production of a man, who has not had the advantage of much school education, but who has been constantly at sea from his youth; and though, with the assistance of a few good friends, he has passed through all the stations belonging to a seaman, from an apprentice boy in the coal trade, to a Post Captain in the Royal Navy, he has had no opportunity of cultivating letters. After this account of myself, the Public must not expect from me the elegance of a fine writer, or the plausibility of a professed bookmaker; but will, I hope, consider me as a plain man, zealously exerting himself in the service of his Country, and determined to give the best account he is able of his proceedings.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Cook always wrote about the livestock and seeds he left at every island. We think of him as a mariner, but he was a farm boy first, and he never lost that.” I sensed something else. Growing up on a farm, working a plow and herding stock beneath Yorkshire’s inclement skies, he would have developed an instinct for reading the weather, which served him well at sea.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Most businesses closed at noon. By Sunday morning, the capital was so quiet you could hear a coconut drop. Movie houses and bars closed for the day, fishing and swimming were prohibited, planes didn’t fly, and any contract signed on the Sabbath was considered void. “I never looked forward to Monday until I came here,” a Fijian doctor told me, settling in for a long day at the hotel snack bar, about the only place in town serving food and drink.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“He wore a lemon Nehru jacket over an ankle-length robe from under which poked heavy sandals. Very stooped, he looked much less formidable than in his portraits. Exercise, as well as illness, had diminished his stature from his Guinness World Records days. Still, at six foot three and three hundred pounds, he was very large, particularly for a man of eighty-two. As he slowly settled his bulk into the high-backed oak throne and gazed in my direction with hooded eyes, I felt as though”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Their father, meanwhile, was becoming ever more eccentric with age. He’d issued a royal decree naming as “court jester” an American Buddhist who was also entrusted with managing the country’s trust fund. The jester gambled most of the fund on America’s unregulated “viatical industry”—buying the insurance policies of elderly or terminally ill patients, in hopes they’d die while the policy was still worth more than its cost—and promptly lost $20 million U.S., or more than half the annual budget of Tonga’s government.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Tonga was even more feudal than I’d supposed. Diplomats said that it was still almost impossible for commoners to own land; most Tongans lived as tenants of the nobility. The nobles also asked for periodic “contributions” from their vassals, such as food for a daughter’s wedding. Churches made even greater demands, exacting donations that often totaled a fifth of a household’s income, and publicly announcing each family’s giving. The annual budget of the Mormon Church alone was half that of the Tongan government’s.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“In the wake of Cook’s voyages, Europeans looked to the Pacific to understand their own “primitive” past, as noble savages or barbarous heathens, depending on the writer’s perspective. Tonga in the twenty-first century offered something else: a portal into premodern Europe, with its absolute monarchy, its barons and serfs, its union of church and state. Tonga wasn’t the land where time began. It was the place where time had gone back.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Many of the women held hands, and some men locked fingers with other men. But there was no such contact between the sexes—a restraint absent in Cook’s day, when the English observed Tongans making love in public. While the Tongans had escaped colonialism, they had fervently embraced Western missionaries, Methodists and Mormons in particular.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Servants prepared the kava by chewing the plant into pulp before spitting it into bowls and adding water. Ever the diplomat and gastronomic adventurer, Cook—alone among his men—sampled the beverage. “The manner of brewing,” he dryly observed, “had quenished the thirst of every one else.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Niue had the world’s smallest phone company but the highest “penetration” on the globe, with almost every one of the island’s eight hundred households hooked up. Niue also had thousands of excess lines. It leased this surplus to Asia Pacific Telecom, which used the lines for the sort of 900 calls advertised in tabloid magazines and on late-night television. Niue Telecom was now the island’s largest generator of revenue.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“This would prove the most consequential of all Cook’s acts of possession, effectively laying the foundation for white settlement in the Pacific. But it was also the most confusing of Cook’s many land claims. He obviously hadn’t acquired the consent of the natives, as he’d been instructed to do; the few Aborigines whom Cook encountered on this northernmost bit of land, which he named Possession Island, appeared intent on opposing the English before suddenly retreating. Cook’s claim was also oddly imprecise: “a vague assertion of authority over a quite vague area,” Beaglehole writes. How far inland, for instance, did his claim to the coast extend? Cook didn’t help matters by naming this nebulous possession New South Wales. No one knows why. The east coast of Australia doesn’t bear any discernible resemblance to the Welsh shore. And why South Wales? Also, Cook’s cumbersome name already existed on the world’s map, attached to a bit of land in northern Ontario.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“This so enraged Warren that he’d sponsored an alternative Olympics in Cooktown, called the Complete Relaxation Games. Events included chair sleeping, wave watching, and synchronized drinking. The Cooktown Games even had an Olympic-style scandal. “We had to disqualify some participants in the armchair-sleeping competition because they’d been on the grog,” Warren said. “In that event, alcohol’s a performance-enhancing drug.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Rather, they’d picked up “kangaroo” from the English and guessed that it referred to all large beasts. So a word that originated with an encounter between Cook and a small clan in north Queensland traveled to England with the Endeavour, then back to Botany Bay with the First Fleet, and eventually became the universal name for Australia’s symbol.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Eric flipped through Cook’s journal to the strange incident in which native men took umbrage at the sight of captive birds and turtles. “It’s no longer true that Aborigines live at one with the land, but in those days it was so,” Eric said. “The belief was that all creatures deserve life, each have a place in the world. If a bird or kangaroo got away when you were hunting, the attitude was ‘Good on him, he’s got his rights too.’ Also, you only hunted what you needed for that day; you didn’t take more than you needed.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“He’d quizzed Aboriginal elders about stories they’d heard of Cook and his men. “At first, our people thought they were overgrown babies,” he said. Aboriginal newborns, Eric explained, are often much paler than adults. But once the Guugu Yimidhirr saw the newcomers’ power, particularly the noise and smoke from their guns, they came to believe the strangers were white spirits, or ghosts of deceased Aborigines. “Lucky for Cook, white spirits are viewed as benign,” Eric said. “If they’d been seen as dark spirits, my ancestors probably would have speared them.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“They sleep as sound in a small hovel or even in the open as the King in His Pallace on a Bed of down,” Cook later wrote of Aborigines in a letter to a Yorkshire friend. To a degree, these words also described Cook, a man who uncomplainingly endured—even enjoyed—whatever sustenance and shelter the world afforded him.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“This stubborn Enlightenment faith in firsthand observation, rather than in received opinion, extended to everything Cook did. As a navigator, he remained unswayed by “expert” theories about the existence of a southern continent. So, too, as an observer of strange lands, he suspended judgment about cannibalistic Maori or naked Aborigines whom men of superior education and social standing regarded as “brutes.” Also, having experienced class prejudice, Cook may have seen value in a life undisturbed “by the Inequality of Condition” in a way that Banks could not.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans: being wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquility which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life…. They seem’d to setno Value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them; this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“This gesture, like the rewriting of the national anthem, was a minor masterpiece of Orwellian doublethink. A metropolis that had virtually exterminated or expelled its original population, and polluted a place Cook described as a botanical paradise, could now proclaim itself a champion of Aborigines and the environment. The council had also fingered a culprit for its wrongs: Cook, the invader, yesterday’s man, to be airbrushed from public record like a disgraced Soviet commissar.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“But the most profound difference between the United States and Australia was the way in which the two countries regarded natives themselves. Americans often romanticized Indians, even as the natives were being slaughtered and dispossessed. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were calls to preserve both the American wilderness and its inhabitants before plows and guns extinguished them. Writers and artists sentimentalized Apaches and Mohicans;”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before