James Cook: The Voyages: at the British Library - by Sue Purkiss

This August, it will be 250 years since James Cook's first voyage to the southern seas. As the introduction to this exhibition states: 'In 1768 the coasts and islands of the pacific, although inhabited for thousands of years, were largely unknown to Europeans. Cook made three voyages and when the third returned to Britain in 1780 most of the blank spaces on European maps had been filled in. Cook's voyages have been celebrated, but also sometimes condemned, ever since.'

Cook's chart of Botany Bay

This points to a difficulty. If you'd looked Cook up in an encyclopaedia when I was a child, it would have told you that he was a hero, a great explorer, who discovered hitherto unknown lands. (A couple of years ago, in a fit of manic decluttering, I got rid of just such a set of encylclopaedias. If I hadn't, I'd be able to quote the appropriate entry to you. There's a lesson there...)

Now, it doesn't look quite that simple.

Cook's first voyage, with the Endeavour, was purportedly to observe the Transit of Venus (now there's a title for a book!) across the face of the sun at Tahiti (or Otaheite, as he knew it), in June 1769. But he also had secret Admiralty orders to search for land in the south Pacific, including the Great Southern Continent, if it indeed existed. If he found land, he was 'to cultivate a Friendship and Alliance' with its inhabitants, to chart its coastline and to investigate its potential in terms of trade. Further, he was 'to take possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the name of the King of Great Britain' - albeit with the consent of the inhabitants.

Cook and his ship

On that first voyage, he took with him as a naturalist the young Joseph Banks. I've written about Banks in various History Girl posts, and he features in my recent book for children about plant hunting, Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley - he was a fascinating and very influential character. He was also tall, handsome, genial, and one of those charismatic people who gets on very well with everybody - whereas Cook was more dour and introverted: they made a good team. So when it came to getting the 'consent of the inhabitants', Banks was a great help. Certainly in Otaheite he threw himself into socialising with the (mostly) welcoming inhabitants with great gusto. He became good friends with Tupaia, the chief priest of the island - so much so that Tupaia asked to accompany the Endeavour when it was time for the visitors to continue their voyage, and did so as a translator and interpreter. Tupaia also drew and painted scenes from their travels, some of which are displayed at the exhibition, alonside many other contemporary images, artefacts, letters and journals. Sadly, both Tupaia and his young son, Tayeto, died when, on the way back to England, after various adventures in Australia and New Zealand, the ship docked at Batavia for repairs: unfortunately Batavia was rife with fever, and almost half of the company, including the two Tahitians, succumbed.

And the exhibition doesn't shy away from revealing that, although Cook was indeed a great explorer who achieved an enormous amount for his country, there was another side to what he did. The lives of the people he 'discovered' were not just touched by his arrival on their shores: they were to be changed forever, even when the intentions of the explorers were good. Tupaia and his son were one example. Another concerns a later voyage, when Cook, meaning to be helpful, presented the Maoris in New Zealand with domesticated animals - sheep, pigs etc. He thought it would make life easier for them if they didn't have to hunt for their food. But the animals had a huge effect on the indigenous flora and fauna, leading to the extinction of a number of native species.

And it was Banks who suggested that Australia would be a good place for a penal colony - which on the one hand led to the creation of modern Australia, but on the other to the near-destruction of the indigenous Aborigine culture.

Tupaia's drawing of Sir Joseph Banks trading with a Maori - a piece of cloth in exchange for a lobster.

It's such a difficult subject; it's so easy to look at events at that time through 21st century eyes. (I dread to think what inhabitants of the earth in the 24th century might think of some of the things that are going on around the world at the moment.) But I think that the British Library exhibition succeeds brilliantly at celebrating Cook's achievements, while at the same time re-evaluating them to take into account the effect of his 'discoveries' on the lives of those he 'discovered'. The objects on display are interspersed with video interviews with modern descendants of those peoples, and they make sobering listening. Yet the message in the end was, I felt, a nuanced one: that, to paraphrase, we are where we are: but we must take account of how we got there, and not pretend that exploitation didn't take place: we must respect not only the 'discoverers', but also the 'discovered'. The exhibition helps towards that - not least by giving us an insight into the lives and cultures of the peoples of the southern and other seas at the time that Cook first encountered them.

You can find out more about the exhibition on the British Library website, here.

Two Centuries That Changed the World - by Ann Swinfen

I have found myself drawn to write in my novels about the period from 1500 to 1700, two centuries that changed the world. How did these changes come about? And why was the seventeenth century a period of such social, political, and religious upheaval? It seems to me that this period from 1500 to 1700 can be seen as a whole, when the western world underwent the profound change from a medieval society, in which a near universal Christianity (centred in Rome) held sway and few people looked beyond their own small communities, to the beginnings of the world we live in today.

So, what triggered these changes?

Coverdale Bible 1535

Two seemingly small changes late in the fifteenth century lit a fuse which set off explosions in the years that followed. The first was the introduction of printing to Europe. Once the craft had been mastered, books could be produced at a price affordable by many people, especially the rising middle class of merchants, professionals, and master craftsmen. Teach a man to read, and he will grow wiser. He will also start to have ideas of his own, and question those set over him to rule his religious and secular life. Translate the Bible into the vernacular and you sow the seeds of dissent, leading to the rise of many varieties of Protestantism and the religious tumult of these two centuries. Circulate political pamphlets and you feed the growing discontent of those who believe they should have a voice in how their secular lives are governed. In England in the seventeenth century this led to the killing of a king and an experiment in republican government, which was unfortunately tainted by military dictatorship.

Ortelius World Map 1564

The other change which was to have far-reaching effects was the improvement in ship-building and navigational equipment. In the late fifteenth century, ambitious sea captains, mainly from Portugal and Spain, started searching for naval routes to the East Indies, so that the West could control the trade in exotic goods which had previously been carried overland. Gradually the idea came to be accepted that the earth was round, prompting Columbus to believe he could reach this profitable area of eastern riches by sailing west, around the ‘back side’ of the globe, as it were.

Well, we all know where that led. The Americas had been discovered and the world would never be the same again.

Native American village 1585-6

As Spain and Portugal exploited South America in the sixteenth century, England took longer to realise what opportunities lay in this new-found-land, but by the end of that century English expeditions were mounted to the northern parts of the new world. It was the seventeenth century which would see the first permanent English colonies established, growing settled and prosperous by 1700. At the same time, England was exploring the possibility of a northeast passage to China and Japan, explorations which led to a new trading route to Russia and the founding of the world’s first joint stock venture, the Muscovy Company.

To people living at the time it must have been as exciting and strange as space exploration has been in our own times.

So, halfway through the period, we come to the start of the seventeenth century with this heady and volatile mix – growing literacy, an explosion of new ideas, and questions about religion and the right way to live in a rapidly changing society. No wonder it’s such a rich period to write about, though a frequently terrifying period to live through.

Preaching in the street mid 17th century

My own seventeenth century novels have their roots in fact. Flood and Betrayal are based on the real situation in the fens of East Anglia in the middle of the century. Before the Civil War, various groups of aristocratic ‘adventurers’, including the king, decided to seize the common lands in the area, drain what they saw as ‘useless’ marshland, and import foreign tenant farmers, mainly from the Low Countries. These tenants would exploit the ‘new’ farmland and pay the adventurers a massive return on their investment. We would call them not adventurers but venture capitalists.

The local people lived by fishing and farming the fields and fens held ‘in common’ (that is, by the community), managing the annual floods which washed down rich soil from the uplands. They used the rushes for thatching, basket-making, eel traps, and a dozen other products. The peat bogs provided fuel. It was a tough life, but relatively prosperous, self-sufficient, and abundant in food. When war broke out, they believed it would bring an end to the attacks on their livelihood. Far from it!

Fenland

A new breed of adventurers arose, including Cromwell and his supporters, who also viewed the fenlands as ripe for the taking. The fenlanders stood up and fought, some to the death.

As I researched the story, I discovered that women played a very large part in the resistance, often leading attacks on the drainage works, which, incidentally, were ill-judged and frequently led to disastrous floods. So unnatural did the women’s courage seem that sometimes they were accused of witchcraft, for this was the period of the notorious Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, who sent so many innocent people of the area to their deaths.

Matthew Hopkins

Deeply moved by the plight and bravery of the fenlanders, I wrote Flood as the story of one such family and village, told from the point of view of a young woman who becomes a leader of the resistance, and is herself accused of witchcraft. Some of the most unlikely-seeming incidents in the novel – such as the blasphemous baptising of a horse in the village church by a group of soldiers – are based on evidence from accounts of the period. Betrayal takes the story further, into the search for a charter granting the common lands, at a time when the Inns of Court were still reeling under the impact of the Civil War.

Pride's Purge - expulsion of Moderates from Parliament

My other seventeenth century novel, This Rough Ocean, is set at exactly the same time, but in a different part of the country and concerns a very different group of people, the young Moderate MP, John Swynfen, and his wife Anne, left to run their large estate. Last month my History Girls blog gave the background to these two different families of the 1640s. While the fenlanders were involved in massive social change in a rural area, John Swynfen was at the heart of the political upheavals that would result in permanent changes to the English parliamentary system. Just as the fenlanders’ story is based on contemporary evidence, the Swynfen story is based on letters and state papers of the period.

So, returning to the original point: Why write about this period? I believe that neither of these stories could have taken place at any earlier time. For the reasons I’ve mentioned, society underwent huge changes over these two centuries. The confidence and independence of the fenlanders arose from these changes, as did the courage of men like John, working for a new political system, and of women like Anne, taking on a man’s role and succeeding. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the old world changed for ever and the foundations of our own modern world laid.

Ann Swinfen

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http://www.annswinfen.com