Word: cooks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...James Cook was a farmer's son, the sixth or seventh of nine-his mother was never quite sure which. A grocer's apprentice as a boy, he later manned coal barges, enlisted in the Royal Navy and worked his way up, most notably as a cartographer in Wolfe's campaign up the St. Lawrence against Quebec. Cook was 40 when he was chosen to skipper the Endeavour. By London's top scientists, the Fellows of the Royal Society and the Admiralty, he was handed a twofold mission: 1) he was to sail to Tahiti...
...Fuego. There, an overzealous scientific party of twelve, bent on collecting hundreds of new botanical specimens, got ambushed by a howling snowstorm and lost two men. The survivors staggered back to the ship after a ration of three mouthfuls of fresh vulture, "each man given his share, raw, to cook as he pleased...
After the icy blasts and terrors of Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn, sundrenched Tahiti, lazing in the trade winds, seemed a double paradise. The island girls proved eager for the transports, if not the transits, of Venus. To Cook's 18th century mind, it was a matter of their being noble savages "who have not even the idea of indecency" but did have early know-how: "In other countries the girls and unmarried women are supposed to be wholly ignorant of what others upon occasions may appear to know . . . but here it is just contrary. Among other diversions...
...next batch of natives, the brave and cannibalistic Maoris of New Zealand, breathed fire. In full fighting regalia, they would yell from their war canoes: "Come to us, come on shore and we will kill you all with our patoo-patoos!" While the Maoris did not brain any of Cook's men with their patoo-patoos (war clubs), Cook got rattled for a rare moment during a sudden Maori foray and ordered his men to open fire. Four of the tribesmen were killed, to the kindly Cook's lasting regret...
...strange new hopping animal, he asked the aborigines about it, was answered with the word "Kanguroo" and never learned that the word meant "I don't understand you." After the near shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef, the Endeavour was badly in need of a drydock, and Cook put in at Jakarta (then Batavia). The two-month stay salvaged the ship but wrecked the crew. Seven men died of malaria and dysentery in the fetid port, another two dozen on shipboard as the Endeavour limped her solitary way around South Africa, back to the Thames and into the history...