Word: cooks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...FATAL IMPACT, by Alan Moorehead. Writing in the wake of Captain Cook, Bougainville and other great Pacific navigators and explorers, the superbly skilled journalist-historian Alan Moorehead takes soundings of philosophic depth-savage and civilized man in confrontations unresolved to this...
Moorehead's hero is Captain James Cook, and his story deals chiefly with Cook's investigation of three very different places: Tahiti (a geographical designation that includes what are now the islands of Hawaii), Australia, about which Moorehead, himself an Australian, writes with wounding perception and Antarctica, which the 19th century almost stripped of life and in which man now lives in catacombs of perpetual ice, sustained by machines. It is with the first two regions that Moorehead deals most expertly...
Bush Belsen. To the first impact of Europe upon Australia, Moorehead gives a poignancy lacking in other accounts. If Cook embodied the best virtues-manly and intellectual-of the 18th century, and the Polynesians of the Central Pacific composed the most gracious of primitive societies, New Holland (as Australia was then called) presented a contrary confrontation: primitive man at his lowest, civilized man at his worst...
Moorehead leaves the contemporary reader aghast at the obtuseness of the British, who followed Cook's discovery with the decision to make a penal settlement of New Holland. Reason has its crimes: since the American dumping ground for Puritan and Catholic dissidents had been lost by the Revolution, it was quite sensible in London to decide that the new continent should be used for a gaol. In 1788, the year of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, civilization in the form of white slavery arrived at Cook's Botany Bay. So came about a bush Belsen, with...
...aborigines had invented neither the wheel nor the plow, nor had they imagined the whip. The same reproach had been felt before. The Tahitians had burst into tears when Cook had a thief flogged on the rigging of his ship. All these things have been written of before -Australia's natural history, Pacific exploration, and colonization. It is Moorehead's peculiar talent to keep the land, the natives and the newcomers in mind at the same time, so that what may have been regarded as mere event takes on the aspect of a moral drama. Historical journalism here...