Word: blunden
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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CHARCO HARBOUR by Godfrey Blunden. 401 pages. Vanguard...
These words serve as the opening to one of Godfrey Blunden's chapters. They might well be the emblem of his book. The lost works that he has sought to retrieve from oblivion are those of the crew of H.M.S. Endeavor, a fat British collier fitted out as a naval vessel and dispatched in 1768 to explore the Pacific...
...Blunden's revival technique in this historical novel is remarkably restrained. Even when dealing with the ship's celebrated Captain James Cook, he has refused all concession to the popular taste for heightening drama and homogenizing history. As a consequence, the book may be read only by Blunden's fellow countrymen in Australia-a land so new and short on history that its people tend to brood protectively over what little they have-or by students interested in Cook's voyages. But this would be a pity. Dry and slow as the book often is, Blunden...
...permissive Robinson. Cook, a brilliant, self-taught naval officer, navigator and amateur astronomer, customarily kept his Yorkshire temper and sizzling vocabulary in check. But, as revealed by his journals and the accounts of his crew, he emerges as something less than the wise and civilized commander painted by Blunden's countryman Alan Moorehead in The Fatal Impact (TIME, April 8, 1966). More Bligh than blithe, even on festive occasions Cook had a provincial prudishness about prurient talk, though he showed a fondness for admiring native women through his telescope. He insisted that his men wash, but he forbade them...
Expansion of Fact. Nearly everybody aboard who could write seems to have kept some sort of journal, scribbling away in the meridional heat like diary-addicted schoolgirls. Patiently, Blunden has stitched and embroidered it all together-Endeavor's, wreck on the Great Barrier Reef, refitting at Charco Harbour (socalled because the aborigines greeted them by shouting "Charco!"), the escape and return of a seaman named Saunders who lived with the natives for a while and discovered gold. The voyage also seems to have occasioned European man's first sight of the kangaroo (it was taken...