Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [23]
Lost, too, was an idea of what the empire was like. Henceforth the belief that it was something like an extended family would not be adequate. The second incarnation of empire was a much more diverse place and it would require a different style of government and a different sense of what it was for.
On the afternoon of 21 August 1770, a small party of sailors ran their boat ashore on the beach of a largely barren island off the north coast of what we now call Australia. From a distance, they had spotted a group of naked brown men on the shore, most of them carrying spears and one with a bow and arrow. But by the time they stepped ashore, the hunters had vanished. The Endeavour, the vessel from which the tender had set off, lay a short distance offshore, having bumped her way steadily up the east coast of the enormous landmass, producing the first outline maps of the great southern continent. There had been a terrifying near-catastrophe a few weeks earlier, when the man sounding the depths below the ship’s keel had shouted ‘Seventeen fathoms’ and, before he could swing the lead again, the ship had suddenly grounded on part of what we now know as the Great Barrier Reef, tearing a hole in her bottom. The captain, James Cook, had managed to patch the boat up and was now planning a route home to Britain via the Dutch colonies in Indonesia and then around the Cape of Good Hope. Cook believed he had finally sighted a channel of clear water which bore off in the direction of the Dutch territories, but sought a higher vantage point than was available from his ship’s mast. So he climbed to the top of a hill and spied out the sea. It seemed to offer the passage to the north-west that he was looking for. And then, just before re-embarking, Cook’s men raised a pole, ran up a flag and claimed for their king the coastline of this vast new land ‘together with all the bays, harbours, rivers and islands situate upon the said coast’. Three volleys of small-arms fire and three answering volleys from the ship rang across the wilderness. Then, keen to catch the tide, the sailors clambered into their boat and pulled for the mother-ship. In their little impromptu ceremony they had effectively added a continent to the British Empire. Not that they knew quite that, for Cook gave the place no name, and most of the rest of the landmass was still to be mapped. What is remarkable is how casually it all happened. Cook himself merely noted in his journal that he had already ‘in the name of His Majesty taken possession of several places upon this coast’. Some of those who took part in the flag-planting didn’t even bother to mention it in their records of the journey.
James Cook belongs to the cadre of modestly born, determined individuals who were to carve out imperial possessions across the world, a man you could tell to do a job and be confident that he would carry it out, even if it cost him his life – as in his case it eventually did.* He seems to have been immune even to the charms of the Polynesian women with whom so many of his crewmen contracted relationships (and to whom, all too often, they gave a dose of venereal disease). A tall figure with a small head, a farmer’s complexion and a strong, beaky nose, he had been born in 1728 in a cold, two-room thatched cottage in north Yorkshire, the son of a farm labourer. By eighteen he was working on a North Sea coal-ship, and on joining the Royal Navy his exceptional navigation and charting skills earned him rapid promotion to the rank of master.
The voyages of exploration carried