Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

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Overview

Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

Two centuries after James Cook's epic voyages of discovery, Tony Horwitz takes readers on a wild ride across hemispheres and centuries to recapture the Captain’s adventures and explore his embattled legacy in today’s Pacific. Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Confederates in the Attic, works as a sailor aboard a replica of Cook’s ship, meets island kings and beauty queens, and carouses the South Seas with a hilarious and disgraceful travel companion, an Aussie named Roger. He also creates a brilliant portrait of Cook: an impoverished farmboy who became the greatest navigator in British history and forever changed the lands he touched. Poignant, probing, antic, and exhilarating, Blue Latitudes brings to life a man who helped create the global village we inhabit today.

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Editorial Reviews

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The Barnes & Noble Review
Tony Horwitz (Baghdad Without a Map, One for the Road, Confederates in the Attic) is an unrivaled practitioner of how-it-should-be-done exploration and adventure writing, and his stirring chronicle of voyaging and visiting along Captain James Cook's pioneering routes will fire up landlocked readers. Cook's three voyages of the 1770s were the greatest and most challenging attempts ever undertaken to discover and map the nondum cognita (not yet known) world: the imagined Great Southern Continent, the Pacific archipelagos, and (almost an afterthought) the Northeast Passage.

Horwitz provides a rousing tale of modern-day exploration as he and his volunteer shipmates endure the rigors and hardships of the voyage on a replica of Cook's ship, calling to mind the best that adventure literature has to offer. But he does much more. With keen insight, he examines the profound impact of Cook's appearance -- unavoidably, as an advance man for British imperial and commercial interests -- on the native peoples of New Zealand, Australia, and other homelands. Along the way he provides an engrossing consideration of intrusion and memory; of change and loss of identity; of displacement and the problems of adaptation. The indigenous social and economic entities of Cook's day are long gone; Horwitz examines the degree to which the successor arrangements -- so often dominated by the United States or European powers -- have proved to be both destructive and unrewarding. He lets the locals speak, and they have much to say that's painful to hear. This book is a winner, and the excellent source notes open a welcome door to the always engaging Cook literature. Peter Skinner

From the Publisher

"Thoroughly enjoyable. No writer has better captured the heroic enigma that was Captain James Cook than Tony Horwitz in this amiable and enthralling excursion around the Pacific." —Bill Bryson, author of In a Sunburned Country

"Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes is one of the best. . . full of humor. . . an elegant running account of Cook's exploits."

—The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

"Part history, part travelogue—and mostly just great fun. . . This is history on a global scale, and Horwitz tells it surpassingly well."

—Los Angeles Times

"A tour de force of evocative history, serious scholarship, and compelling writing."

—The Washington Post

"Part Cook biography, part travelogue, and very much a stroke of genius." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Hilarious, brainy, and balanced. . . .A trip with Horwitz is as good as it gets."

—The Charlotte Observer

"Tony Horwitz has done it again. . . Keen insight, open-mindedness and laugh-out-loud humor."

—San Francisco Chronicle

"A staggering blend of historical research, character study, sociological analysis, and intriguing tales of travel." —The Boston Globe

"Curiosity, intelligence, compassion and a sense of adventure. . . I love reading Tony Horwitz."

—Chicago Tribune

"Horwitz succeeds brilliantly in turning the English from stiff icons to flesh-and-blood human beings. The book's constant humor, honesty and judgment recall his own Confederates in the Attic and Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods.. . . This book will keep you enthralled."

—The Seattle Time

Forbes

Imagine you're an editor at a book publishing firm, and a writer comes to you with the idea of traveling to Seat-tle, Tahiti, Bora Bora, New Zealand, Australia, Tonga, England, Alaska and Hawaii in search of Captain Cook, the ex-plorer who charted and helped to "discover" about a third of the planet a little over 200 years ago. He wouldn't be able to say who he was going to interview at any given place, because for the most part, he wouldn't know yet. Instead, he would take things as they came, asking strangers if they knew about Cook, and if so, what they thought of him. He'd follow one lead to another, do a lot of reading, attend some Cook-related festivities, visit some monuments and write a funny, thought-provoking travelogue cum biography of the great explorer.

I'd say no. It's a sad day for the guy who embarks on such a vague, unruly quest. It's like renting a Zil in St. Pe-tersburg and setting out to "find" Russia. But somebody at Henry Holt and Company said yes to Pulitzer-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz and by golly, they were right to do so. Who better to search for the legacy of Captain Cook than the reporter who wrote an acclaimed book about the Civil War, Confederates in the Attic, by schlepping around the South for a year interviewing reenactors? With prodigious research and a willingness to raise the subject of Captain Cook with anyone, including a drunk, a king and a girl in a wet T-shirt, Horwitz has managed to muscle a big, sloppy idea into something coherent and fun to read.

Granted, it takes him 450 pages.

He starts his journey with some frontline experience, pressing himself into service on the Endeavour, a working replica of the beamy,flat-bottomed ship Cook sailed on the first of his three voyages. Sea travel 18th-century style turns out to be as grueling and degrading as one would expect. The spaces are cramped, the officers are mean bas-tards and the work is backbreaking. Horwitz only crews for a week, which hardly compares to an eight-month passage from Plymouth to Tahiti, but he paints a vivid picture of life on that wobbly tub, plying along for months at a time with-out sight of land or a bite of fruit.

That trial endured, Horwitz heads to Australia, his base of operations for hopping to points Cook-related all over the Pacific. In alternating passages, he describes the wonders Cook found on various virgin shores, then reports on the state of each place today. One shudders to imagine the original Endeavour's arrival at Tahiti in 1769, when Cook's sex-starved, syphilitic sailors were loosed on that verdant island's girls, who were pretty, generally naked and willing to trade their favors for a nail. (Cook had a serious nail theft problem.) Hospitality doesn't come so cheap in Ta-hiti today--a rental car goes for about $100 a day and the bikini babes are standoffish. But even though the Tahiti of the 18th century is long gone, overrun by sailors, missionaries, French colonialists and tourists, Horwitz manages to find traces of the place Cook described in his journal. He sees the island's libertinism, so so shocking to the captain, on rau-cous display at a transvestite club, and he meets a group of teenagers who are as laid-back and starry-eyed as the Tahi-tians Cook met 200 years ago.

Whenever he can, Horwitz tries to create a Cook-like sense of discovery. He prepares for his visit to an island nation called Niue, a tiny speck between Tahiti and Tonga, by not learning anything about it. All he knows is that when Cook arrived there in 1774, he was confronted by an angry group of men whose mouths were stained a bloody shade of red, which compelled the captain to dub the place "Savage Island" before blowing out on the next gust.

Brief as that encounter was, Horwitz discovers, Niue's inhabitants are still trying to erase the spot it put on their reputation, particularly the widespread assumption that the red stuff was human blood. Was it, as the natives today con-tend, the smeared flesh of a local species of red banana? If so, why can't anyone show Horwitz a red banana tree? Pre-sented with a quirky little conflict like this, Horwitz is in his element. He dashes around the island asking about ba-nanas, and discovers all sorts of other secrets along the way. Niue is an offshore tax haven--just $385 a year to register a company--and despite the religiosity of its inhabitants, a major hub for telephone sex chat lines. It even has what ap-pears to be a sham medical school. To watch Horwitz, the star reporter, unravel that island like a ball of twine is pure pleasure. The Niuens are glad to see him leave.

As for his spot surveying, Horwitz finds that Captain Cook is many different things to many different people. To the Hawaiians who chopped him up and barbecued him in 1779, he was a god, and to many history buffs he still is. Yet in New Zealand, the native Maori see him as a villain, as do most natives of the places he visited. In Australia, Horwitz says Cook is being written out of history as an act of atonement to the wronged aborigines. The girl in the wet T-shirt has but a tentative grip on his character. "He'd think I was a complete lunatic," she says. Strangely enough, the man who still elicits such passion was remarkably rational and coolheaded himself, temper tantrums notwithstanding. If anything, Horwitz reveals the most about Cook by acting like Cook, exploring each place with the same energy and relentless curiosity as the man himself. A lesser writer would have gotten lost out there in the big blue, then chopped up and barbecued by book reviewers. Not Horwitz. He has one-upped Cook and made it home in one piece.
—Thomas Jackson

Bill Bryson

Blue Latitudes is thoroughly enjoyable. No writer has better captured the heroic enigma that was Captain James Cook than Tony Horwitz in this amiable and enthralling excursion around the Pacific.

Caroline Alexander

Horwitz's adventures pay illuminating tribute to the great navigator — to Captain Cook himself and to his intrepid eighteenth-century colleagues, including the improbably attractive Sir Joseph Banks. But most of all Blue Latitudes offers clear-eyed, vivid, and highly entertaining reassurance that there are still outlandish worlds to be discovered.

Nathaniel Philbrick

Blue Latitudes is a rollicking read that is also a sneaky work of scholarship, providing new and unexpected insights into the man who out-discovered Columbus. A terrific book — I inhaled it in one weekend.

Outside Magazine

Tony Horwitz has written about oddball history buffs before . . . this time he becomes one himself . . . The author sets off island-hopping across the South Pacific in the wake of Cook’s Endeavor producing some classically absurd Horwitzian scenes . . . But there are sobering moments too; Horwitz finds many islands in the grip of a fierce anticolonialism, with Cook as convenient lightning rod.

Library Journal

Journalist Horwitz, who is fascinated by James Cook and is convinced the world has underestimated his achievements, follows the explorer's three ventures into what was at that time the vast unknown. Signing on as a crew member for a Cook ship simile cruise, he experiences firsthand the life of an 18th-century sailor and becomes completely captivated with Cook's accomplishments. Subsequently, Horwitz and an Australian friend take more contemporary transportation to visit the captain's English home and the faraway places with strange sounding names that he opened to the world. The author slips easily from explaining history, Cook's personality, and life to describing his own modern-day experiences delving into Cook's past. Some details of late 1700s shipboard discipline, sexual lifestyles, and Cook's death and dismemberment are probably too grisly for most young listeners. Despite a few too many searches for and visits with the odds and ends of people (from bartenders to a king) who claim to have some affiliation with Cook, the book is interesting and educational. Daniel Gerroll is well spoken and does accents and other voices very nicely. For history and travel buffs interested in Australia, the South Pacific, and seafaring; generally recommended for adult and college collections.-Carolyn Alexander, Brigadoon Lib., Corral de Tierra, CA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Pulitzer-winning journalist and travel-writer Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic, 1998, etc.), dogging the wake of Captain Cook, discerningly braids Cook's long-ago perceptions with his own present-day inquiries into the lands the Captain encountered. Cook made three epic voyages, sailing from Antarctica to the Arctic, from Australia to Alaska, and to many of the islands that lie between. Fascinated by the man and his accomplishments, Horwitz visits those far-flung lands where the impact of Cook's arrival was more profound and lasting than the news of the lands' existence was upon the Europeans back home. The author travels by sailboat and ferry, often in the company of his Australian chum Roger, an odd-fellow and contrarian of rare stripe who adds a comic counterpoint to Horwitz's probings into attitudes toward Cook in the places he set anchor-attitudes that run the gamut from loathing to reverence. Natives for the most part revile him, though it's a quirk of fate that the captain's logs are now helping New Zealand's Maori establish land claims. Horwitz's portraits of the lands can be dispiriting: Bora Bora on the brink of environmental collapse, Tahiti gripped by ennui, Tonga feudal with feudal squalor and ill temper. But there are also innocent Niue and vibrant Hawaii and Australia-where Cook is sooner forgotten by all concerned. Of the navigator himself, Horwitz says that "his journals allow us to chart almost every one of his steps and sails, right down the minutest degree of latitude. But [he] left us no map to his own soul." Still, he rises from these pages as a thoughtful and humane character sensitive to the men who served him and to the local populations he met, though "mutualincomprehension over notions of property and justice [plagued him] throughout his Pacific voyages" and in fact led to his death. Tandem voyages taken 200 years apart: filled with history and alive with contrasts.

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Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780312422608
Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 7/2/2003
Edition description: First Edition
Edition number: 1
Pages: 496
Sales rank: 281343
Product dimensions: 5.51 (w) x 8.29 (h) x 0.96 (d)

Meet the Author

Tony Horwitz is the bestselling author of Confederates in the Attic, Baghdad Without a Map, and One for the Road. He is also a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who has worked as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and a staff writer for The New Yorker. He lives in Virginia with his wife, Geraldine Brooks, and their son, Nathaniel.

Biography

On a ferry into Beirut that had just squeaked past several rounds of Syrian cannon fire, a fellow traveler commended Tony Horwitz for being jusqu'au boutiste, or "right to the edge" -- explaining that "It mean you are very brave. And maybe very stupid." As a former Wall Street Journal reporter and current New Yorker staff writer, Horwitz has gone places most of us are either not brave -- or stupid -- enough to venture to, and returned with a collection of absorbing, affecting, often hilarious tales set in locales from the Sudan to the American South.

Horwitz's intercontinental roamings started when he married fellow reporter Geraldine Brooks and followed her to her native Australia. His first book, One for the Road, recounts his adventures hitchhiking across the Australian Outback. When Brooks got an assignment as a foreign correspondent in Cairo in 1987, Horwitz went along, looking for the kind of quirky feature stories that as a freelance writer he might sell to editors back in the States. His second book, Baghdad Without a Map, zings around the Middle East, from a qat-chewing party in Yemen to a leper colony in Sudan, from the aforementioned ferry ride to an almost equally terrifying flight on Egyptair. It was a national bestseller, praised by The New York Times Book Review as "a very funny and frequently insightful look at the world's most combustible region."

After moving to Virginia in 1993, Horwitz embarked on a different kind of travel, producing another bestseller. Confederates in the Attic describes his journey across the South and his quest to understand the impact of the Civil War on contemporary America. He meets "hardcore" reenacters who soak brass buttons in urine for just the right patina, earnest Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, drunken biker Klansmen, and even a few ordinary people who happen to live south of the Mason-Dixon line. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called the book "Good natured and generously funny: moving, chilling, and beautiful."

Horwitz then returned to world travel, this time spurred by an obsession with the eighteenth-century explorer Captain James Cook. For Blue Latitudes, Horwitz visits the islands charted by Cook, intertwining his own travel narrative with the life and writings of the once-famous captain. "Despite the historical focus, Horwitz doesn't stray too far from the encounters with everyday people that gave his previous books such zest," Publishers Weekly noted in a starred review.

Though Horwitz is the kind of breezy, pithy writer who "could make a book on elevators interesting" (The Philadelphia Inquirer), critics seem to agree that his genius is for getting to know people on his travels. Whether he's chatting with a Yemeni arms dealer, a Confederate widow or the King of Tonga, Horwitz likes "to get inside the heads of those I'm writing about by sharing their experiences," as he said in an interview on his publisher's Web site. "The same goes for history: while I wouldn't pretend that I can know what it was to be a Civil War soldier or a sailor aboard one of Cook's ships, I can try to get a better understanding of it." Those of us who aren't so jusqu'au boutiste can improve our understanding simply by turning Horwitz's highly entertaining pages.

Good To Know

The hardest part of researching Blue Latitudes, Horwitz said in a History House interview, was working aboard a replica of Cook's first ship, the Endeavour. "[It] was a challenge, to say the least, to find myself atop the 127-foot main mast, in heavy seas, trying to furl sails. It was like lifting weights while being shaken from the top of a very tall tree."

Before becoming a journalist, Horwitz worked for a pulpwood haulers' union in Mississippi. He produced a television documentary about the experience, "Mississippi Wood."

Horwitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in journalism for a Wall Street Journal series on working conditions in low-wage jobs.

His wife, Geraldine Brooks, was also a Wall Street Journal reporter before she began writing fiction. The two live in Virginia with their son, Nathaniel.

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1. Hometown:
  
  Waterford, Virginia
1. Date of Birth:
  
  1958
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Washington, D.C.
1. Education:
  
  B.A., Brown University; M.A., Columbia University School of Journalism

Read an Excerpt

From Blue Latitudes:

I studied the application for a berth on His Majesty's Bark Endeavour. An Australian foundation had built a replica of Cook's first vessel and dispatched it around the globe in the navigator's path. At each port, the ship's professional crew took on volunteers to help sail the next leg and experience life as eighteenth-century sailors. This seemed the obvious place to start; if I was going to understand Cook's travels, I first had to understand how he traveled.

The application asked about my "qualifications and experience."

"Have you had any blue water ocean sailing experience?"

"Can you swim 50 meters fully clothed?"

"You will be required to work aloft, sometimes at night in heavy weather. Are you confident of being able to do this?"

I wasn't sure what was meant by "blue water ocean." Did it come in other colors? I'd never swum clothed; as for working aloft, I'd climbed ladders to scoop leaves from my gutter. I checked "yes" next to each question.

But the last query gave me pause. "Do you suffer from sea sickness?"

Only when I went to sea.

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Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

Overview

Pick Up In Store

Available on NOOK devices and apps NOOK Devices Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 NOOK NOOK HD/HD+ Tablet NOOK NOOK Color NOOK Tablet Tablet/Phone NOOK for Windows 8 Tablet NOOK for iOS NOOK for Android NOOK Kids for iPad PC/Mac NOOK for Windows 8 NOOK for PC NOOK for Mac NOOK for Web

All Available Formats & Editions

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

More About This Book

Overview

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

From the Publisher

Forbes

Bill Bryson

Caroline Alexander

Nathaniel Philbrick

Outside Magazine

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

Biography

Good To Know

Read an Excerpt

Customer Reviews

5 Star

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1 Star

In my top 5 favorite books.

Disconnection

Perfectly Written

A voyage through past and present

Entertaining with a Buffet style

Cookaholics International

A great biography/travel log... I could not put it down

Great Author and book!!

Tallstar

Great book...quick read

Wonderful history with insight and humor

Dawn to mastiff

Masstiff

WAT DOES LATIDTIDUEE MEQN!!!!

A great romp!

Entertaining and Educational!

One great and entertaining read

Entertaining history book

Available on NOOK devices and apps

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