Category Archives: military

by Joel | 19 September 2024 · 5:46 am

Eastern Europe Under Napoleon

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 81-83:

By 1794 France’s army numbered some 800,000, giving it a superiority of 2:1 in most engagements. After pushing intruders from French territory, French troops occupied the Low Countries and Germany west of the Rhine, areas they would hold until 1815. During these years, most of Europe fought France through seven coalitions, aimed first at the Revolution, and after 1799 at the France of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant military leader who by 1804 had created a “French Empire,” consisting of an enlarged France with vassal states in Eastern and Central Europe. These states included a new Germany (Rhine Confederation), a new Poland (Duchy of Warsaw), and for the first time ever a state of South Slavs (Illyria).

Austria was a major force in the coalitions but lost decisive battles in 1805 at Austerlitz and 1809 at Wagram and had to cede territory. Still, it never endured direct French occupation, and thus its fate differed sharply from western German areas that were ruled from Paris and saw their traditional legal and social systems revolutionized. For the first time, thanks to Napoleon, everyone in Hamburg, Bremen, and much of the Rhineland was equal before the law, peasants as well as townspeople, nobles, and churchmen, and Jews with Christians. All were free to do as they wished: to move about the map, marry, and buy or sell property. With feudal privileges abolished, for the first time these Germans, regardless of background, were citizens.

Napoleon also began revolutionizing the ancient Holy Roman Empire out of existence by compensating the moderately sized German states for territories lost to the new confederation west of the Rhine with ecclesiastical and free cities east of the Rhine. Within a few years, hundreds of tiny bishoprics, abbeys, and towns had been absorbed into Bavaria, Saxony, or Baden, a crucial step in the process of creating a simpler Germany, more susceptible to unification as a modern nation-state.

In the summer of 1804, responding to Napoleon’s self-coronation as French emperor a few months earlier, Francis proclaimed himself emperor of Austria. As a Habsburg, he remained “Roman Emperor,” but as the empire approached extinction, he wanted to ensure his status on the European stage against the Corsican upstart. The technical name for the Habsburg monarchy was now the “Austrian Empire,” but the point was not to pursue an aggressive, self-confident imperial project of the sort that animated France, Britain, or Russia. The move was instead about seeming not to stand beneath a certain standard of dynastic prestige.

The self-coronation occurred not a moment too soon, as in August 1806 Napoleon declared the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire defunct, and several princes of his Rhine Confederation seceded on August 1. Five days later a proclamation was read from the balcony of the baroque Kirche am Hof in Vienna that the empire no longer existed. In fact, the empire had long been an ineffectual league of tiny entities, unable to defend the German lands. One practical consequence was that Austria’s leadership in Germany came to an end, and indeed, Germany lost all definite political form. Though it had few effective powers of administration, the empire’s constitution had balanced rights of cities and territories and in popular understanding had come to embody the nation in ways not fully tangible.

Reports from the summer of 1806 tell us that people across the German lands were outraged that a willful foreign usurper had simply disbanded the empire. The reports reveal a previously hidden emotional attachment, reminiscent of the indignation that arose in Hungary after Joseph replaced Latin with German. Like that supposedly dead language, the Holy Roman Empire provided a basic coordinate of identity. Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s otherwise buoyant mother Katharina wrote of deep unease, as if an old friend had succumbed to terminal illness. She sensed bitterness among the people of her home city of Frankfurt. For the first time in their lives—indeed for the first time in many centuries—the empire was omitted from prayers said at church, and subtle protests broke out across the German lands. Was one now simply a Prussian or Bavarian? And if one was German, what did that mean?

Rhinelanders had welcomed Napoleon’s rule because his legal code enhanced their freedoms, yet soon sympathies began to erode. The more territory France’s emperor controlled, the less he was satisfied, and the more demands grew on his “allies” for money and soldiers. And west Germans felt humiliated by French victories over the large German states to the east. In 1806 Napoleon crushed the armies of Prussia at Jena and Auerstedt, then occupied Berlin. Two years later he forced Austria to join a continental blockade of England; and when Austria rose up the following year, he again smashed it down. The ill-fated Grand Armée that attacked Russia in 1812 was one-third German, and so were its casualties.

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by Joel | 14 September 2024 · 6:41 am

East European Communist Nationalism

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 17-19:

What Hitler, the “Bohemian corporal” (he was actually Austrian) achieved through his war was to make northern parts of Eastern Europe much simpler. With the aid of local collaborators, his regime segregated and then killed the overwhelming majority of East European Jews. But when the Red Army drove the Wehrmacht back to Vienna and Berlin in 1945, millions of Germans fled Eastern Europe as well, never to return. At the war’s conclusion, as a result of allied decisions, Polish and Czech authorities placed the remainder of Germans from Bohemia and eastern Germany in railway cars and deported them to a Germany that was much smaller than Bismarck’s Reich, let alone the Holy Roman Empire.

The most avid ethnic cleansers among the East Europeans were Polish and Czech Communists, and indeed, Communists everywhere proved enthusiastic nationalists. This is astounding for two reasons. First, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had little concern for national identity: workers had no fatherland. Nationhood was not a lasting site of human subjectivity but something ephemeral, which diminished in importance as capitalism advanced. They had little but derision for East Europeans wanting to create their own nation-states. Engels called the small peoples to Germany’s east “relics.” Czechs were destined to be “absorbed as integral portions into one or the other of those more powerful nations whose greater vitality enabled them to overcome greater obstacles.” Other “remnants of bygone Slavonian peoples” slotted for assimilation included Serbs, Croats, and Slovaks. In 1852, Engels blithely predicted that the next world war would cause entire reactionary peoples to “disappear from the face of the earth.”

Second, when the world divided into two camps, appearances suggested that there was little room for East European nationalism. By 1949, every state in the region seemed to be a miniature USSR, with the same sort of ruling Communist Party, five-year plan, economy based on heavy industry, collectivized agriculture, and socialist realism. Few Poles or Hungarians, even within the Party, doubted that the annual pageant in red of May Day reflected doctrines and practices whose nerve center was in Moscow. For the first time, millions of East Europeans learned Russian, and many became as proficient in copying Soviet reality as they could. Hundreds of thousands became “self-Sovietizers,” even holding their cigarettes the Russian way, or dressing in the militaristic style of the Bolshevik party. The Yugoslav Communists, with red stars on their caps, went so far that the Soviets tried to hold them back.

But these states were not Soviet replicas, nor were they (unlike Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Belorussia) actual parts of the Soviet Union. Beyond the façades of May Day processions in Warsaw in 1949, one saw banners in Polish, not Russian, and placards honoring Polish heroes. A few blocks from the parade route the Polish socialist state, governed by a Marxian party, was lovingly resurrecting old Warsaw, razed by the Nazis in 1944. This included rebuilding many of its churches, according to plans from the eighteenth century, with attention to the details of a saint’s halo. Bookstores across the state socialist world stocked romantic authors like Jan Kollár, but also the Polish, Hungarian, or Romanian national bards Adam Mickiewicz, Sándor Petofi, and Vasile Alecsandri; the philologists Ljudevit Gaj and Vuk Karadžić; and the ethnographer Pavel Šafárik, who had studied theology with Kollár in Jena. In Poland’s west, the state fostered the destruction of all signs of the German past, including cemeteries, and proclaimed the new territories Polish to the core, though they had been German for centuries.

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Filed under Eastern Europe, Germany, language, migration, military, nationalism, philosophy, USSR, war

by Joel | 13 September 2024 · 6:50 am

What Unites East Central Europe?

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 3-4:

What unites this dramatic and unsettling history is a band of countries that runs from the Baltic Sea down to the Adriatic and Black Seas, between the much larger, historically imperial Russia and Turkey in the east, and Prussian and Austrian Germany in the west. These small countries constitute East Central Europe, a space where more of the twentieth century happened—for good and for bad—than anywhere else on the planet.

If one seeks a simple explanation for the energies that caused this area to produce so much drama and so many new concepts, a glance at the map suggests nationalism: no other region has witnessed such frequent, radical, and violent changing of borders to make nations fit states. Two maps, one from 1800, one from 2000, tell the basic story: a shift from simplicity to complexity, from one small and three large multinational powers to more than twenty national states.

The story was carried forward by the demands of East European nationalists to control territory, demands that triggered resistance, because they contested imperial power and the European order. Since the 1820s, the work of nationalists has brought independent states into being in three stages: the first in 1878, when the Congress of Berlin produced Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Montenegro; the second, in 1919, when revolution and peace making generated Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland; and most recently, in the 1990s, when Czechoslovakia broke peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Yugoslavia fragmented violently into Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, two entities in Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. Hungary became de facto independent in 1867, when the Austrian Empire divided into Austria-Hungary; after 1920, it emerged much reduced from World War I, two-thirds of its territory going to its neighbors.

What can be debated is whether the degree of violence, especially in World War I, was necessary to break loose the nation-states that now constitute the map of Eastern Europe. Austria-Hungary was more resilient than critics gave it credit for and only began unraveling in the final year of a war that had been costly beyond any expectations. And there was little relation between intention and outcome: World War I did not begin as a war of national liberation. Yet by 1917, as the causality lists soared and any relation between intention and outcome was lost, it was interpreted to be one. It was a war for democracy—for Wilson’s national self-determination—and that helped spawn the new nation-states.

At the same time, without the cause Gavrilo Princip claimed to represent (that South Slavs should live in one state), there would have been no assassination, no Habsburg ultimatum to Serbia (which had trained Princip and supplied him with his pistol) in July 1914, and no war. Seen in rational terms, the Habsburgs’ belief that Serbia, a state of three million, represented a challenge requiring a full-scale military assault launched from their state of fifty-two million, seems one of history’s great overreactions. But Princip, the frail eighteen-year-old rejected from the Serb army for his small stature, embodied the challenge of an idea, the idea of ethnic nationalism, and the Habsburg monarchy had no response other than naked force.

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by Joel | 7 September 2024 · 5:46 am

Capt. Cook’s Americans

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle p. 345-347:

WHILE IN MACAU, Captain Gore learned the distressing news that not only was the American Revolution going badly for the English, but both France and Spain had declared war on Britain. Consequently, for the voyage home, facing the danger of seizure or attack, his two ships would remain on a war footing. The Resolution and the Discovery left Macau in January 1780, stopping briefly south of Vietnam and then in the Sunda Strait, between Sumatra and Java, not far from the seething volcano on Krakatoa. By April, the vessels were anchored in False Bay, near Cape Town. In early August, as the two ships approached England, contrary winds forced them far to the west. Gore had to make a long, awkward circuit around Ireland and over Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The vessels plied down the east coast of Britain, finally arriving in London on October 7, 1780. The Resolution had been gone from England for 1,548 days. At the time, it was believed to be the longest exploratory voyage—in terms of both miles and duration—ever undertaken on the high seas. And yet, despite the odyssey’s historic length, once again, not a single person on either ship had died of scurvy.

…

AFTER RETURNING TO London, the Americans on board the ships had to face the difficult decision whether to cast their loyalties with Britain or find their way back to their native-born colonies and take up the cause against the mother country under whose flag they had been sailing for the past four years. Because he was still a member of the Royal Marines, John Ledyard was promptly sent to Canada to fight for the British in the waning actions of the American Revolution. He deserted, returned to his native New England, and in 1783 published an unauthorized account of his travels with Cook that became the first written work protected by copyright in the United States. In 1786, not done with epic traveling, Ledyard embarked on a trek of more than six thousand miles, mostly on foot, across Europe and Russia in an attempt to reach Alaska, but he was arrested in Siberia under orders from Catherine the Great. Ledyard died in Cairo in 1788, aged thirty-seven, while preparing an expedition to search for the source of the Niger River.

Ledyard’s fellow countryman John Gore, on the other hand, had no interest in returning to the land of his birth. The Admiralty appointed him as one of the captains of the Greenwich Hospital, the same position Cook had vacated when he embarked on his final voyage. Gore served ten years at Greenwich. He was a popular figure among the old salts and died there in 1790.

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Filed under Britain, Canada, disease, migration, military, nationalism, publishing, Russia, travel, U.S., war

by Joel | 6 September 2024 · 1:43 pm

Capt. Cook’s Family

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 347-348:

ELIZABETH COOK NEVER remarried and remained a widow for fifty-six years. Sadly, she outlived all of her children, none of whom had children of their own. In October of 1780, the same month the Resolution and the Discovery returned to England, Nathaniel Cook, a midshipman serving on the HMS Thunderer, went down with more than six hundred other souls in a massive hurricane off Jamaica. He was only sixteen. Thirteen years later, in 1793, Hugh Cook perished from scarlet fever while at Cambridge, where he was studying to be an Anglican minister. Only a month after that, the eldest of the Cook boys, James, drowned near the Isle of Wight. The shock of losing her last two sons in such rapid succession proved too much for Elizabeth—it was said she spent almost three years confined to her bed.

At least, thanks to Lord Sandwich, she received a pension of £200 each year from the Admiralty, which, together with her husband’s share of the royalties from the publication of his voyage accounts, saw her into old age. “She kept her faculties to the end,” wrote Elizabeth’s cousin Canon Bennett, describing her as “a handsome and venerable lady, her white hair rolled back in ancient fashion, always dressed in black satin. She wore a ring with her husband’s hair in it, and she entertained the highest respect for his memory, measuring everything by his standard of honor and morality. Her keenest expression of disapprobation was that ‘Mr. Cook’—to her he was always Mr. Cook, not Captain—‘would never have done so.’ Like many widows of sailors, she could never sleep in high wind for thinking of the men at sea.”

Elizabeth Cook died in 1835, aged ninety-three.

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by Joel | 3 September 2024 · 9:02 am

Capt. Cook & the Americans, 1778

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 226-227:

On the other side of North America, the revolt against England had deepened into a bitter war that showed no signs of abating. At that very moment, British troops were occupying Philadelphia, while George Washington’s bedraggled army was beginning to stir from its winter quarters at Valley Forge. The war was taking on an international flavor. Shortly after the Resolution and the Discovery left the Hawaiian Islands, Benjamin Franklin and two other American commissioners had signed a treaty in Paris that intimately bound France to the rebellious colonies. With the stroke of a pen, France became the first nation to recognize the United States as a sovereign country. An outraged Britain would soon declare war on France, thus fully bringing the French into the American conflict.

Despite all of this, Benjamin Franklin would later make a point of lobbying among his colleagues for Captain Cook and the Resolution to be granted special immunity not afforded to other British ships. Should American vessels encounter Cook anywhere on the high seas, they were to give him leeway and clemency. Cook was on an assignment of transcendent importance for humanity, Franklin’s proclamation asserted, one too important to be detained by squabbles between nations. Franklin made his remarks in what he called a “passport” addressed to the captains and commanders of all American ships. In case Cook’s vessel should “happen to fall into your hands,” Franklin advised, “you should not consider her as an enemy, nor suffer any plunder to be made of the effects contained in her, nor obstruct her immediate return to England.” Americans, he said, should “treat the said Captain Cook and his people with all civility and kindness, affording them as common friends to mankind, all the assistance in your power which they may happen to stand in need of.”

The Spanish, who would soon be joining France in declaring war against England, were already well aware that Captain Cook was supposed to be somewhere in the Pacific, headed for the northwest coast of America—and they were highly displeased with England’s encroachments upon the region. They had informed officials in Mexico to keep a lookout for Cook and, if possible, to intercept and arrest him. Spanish shipwrights were constructing two new vessels—one in Mexico, another in Peru—for a voyage that aimed to halt and overtake Cook while reasserting Spanish claims in the Pacific Northwest.

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Filed under Britain, Canada, France, military, nationalism, Pacific, science, Spain, U.S., war

by Joel | 2 September 2024 · 6:22 am

Omai’s Little Pretani in Huahine

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 185-187, 191-192:

ON OCTOBER 26, when the house was nearly finished, Mai started bringing his English treasures and souvenirs ashore from the Resolution: the regiments of tin soldiers, the metal helmet and suit of armor, the mechanical Punch and Judy, the serpent jack-in-the-box, the barrel organ that could be cranked by hand. The globe of the earth, the portraits of King George and Queen Charlotte, the illustrated Bible, the “electrifying machine” that could give unsuspecting parties a jolt. The compasses and beads, the mirrors and looking glasses, the menagerie of toy animals. The kettles and crockery, the mugs and cutlery, and case after case of port wine. The saddles and bridles and horse tack. The wardrobe of English clothing—riding boots, velvet jackets, satins and linens, and numerous hats. Last but not least, the swords and cutlasses, the muskets and pistols, the fowling piece, the cartridges and pistol balls, and additional kegs of gunpowder.

Mai had wanted far more of these last items; he had originally asked for enough war implements to outfit an entire army. But Cook feared that the guns would do Mai more harm than good. “I was always of [the] opinion,” said Cook, that “he would have been better without firearms than with them.”

Mai took up residence in his new digs and seemed happy with them. The house was a piece of Britain, smelling of fresh-hewn wood, with a Latin carving over its door meant to signify that its occupant was under the protectorship of King George III: GEORGIUS TERTIUS REX. (The locals began to call that part of the island “Pretani,” and the name would stick for generations to come.) Whenever Mai left his cottage—to visit the ships or to ride his horse down the beach—he locked the front door and dropped the key in his pocket, just as he had done with the key to his apartment when he went out on strolls around London.

In the final days, as Cook and Clerke readied their ships for departure, Mai threw a succession of torchlit parties for the officers, dining under the stars beside his English house. They drank port and gorged themselves on fresh-caught fish and barbecued pork. Some of the chiefs, including the boy king Teri‘i-tari‘a, joined in the festivities, while Mai leaped among his guests, grinding his barrel organ. The Huahine people were astonished by the contraption and smiled in wonderment at the treacly mechanized melodies that issued from it.

Mai had a modest assortment of animals penned around his house—a stallion and a mare that was believed to be with foal, four sheep, a pair of ducks, a pair of rabbits, a pair of peafowl, and some cats, among other species that the Huahine people had never seen before. Mai also had a monkey—presumably he had brought it aboard while in Cape Town, but the accounts are vague on this point. The locals were delighted by the nimble creature, which they called “Hairy Man.”

On those last nights, members of Cook’s crew brought out their bagpipes, flutes, and fiddles. Mai set off fireworks, and there was much “mirth and jollity,” said Bayly. “We have nothing but good humor subsisting among us.”

…

Local lore concerning Mai is practically nonexistent, so nearly everything that is understood about him comes to us through the anecdotes of English sailors, the descriptions of English observers, and the brushstrokes of English painters. One thing is glaringly missing from the record: Mai’s own voice.

Like so many cases of cross-cultural transplantation, Mai’s odyssey led him, in the end, to an ambiguous place. His journey served as an allegory of colonialism and its unintended consequences. England, by showing off her riches and advancements and sending Mai back with a trove of mostly meaningless treasures, had doomed him to a jumbled, deracinated existence. Like the tiare apetahi flower of Raiatea, Mai, after all his travels, couldn’t take root in other soils.

Polynesian scholars recently located the spot where Mai’s house stood and where his remains were buried. It’s set back from the shore, on the outskirts of Fare. A modest yellow church called Iehova Saloma, with a corrugated roof of galvanized metal, had been built on the site. In back of the chapel, thickets of tropical trees, laden with fragrant flowers, swayed in the salt breeze.

This would have been Mai’s vista from the front door of his house, the only door in all of Polynesia that had a lock. Gazing west past the lagoon and the waves smashing on the reef, he would have had a perfect view of Raiatea, the sacred isle, a snaggy mountain on the horizon, just twenty-five miles away.

Mai had sailed around the world and back again in the hope of returning there, to build a life on the shores of his “faraway heaven.” And in his last days, there it stood, right in front of him.

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by Joel | 1 September 2024 · 6:15 am

Capt. Cook’s Cruelty, 1777

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 173-174:

Several months earlier, when Cook was passing through islands in the Tonga group, he had shown a taste for cruelty that some of his officers found both surprising and alarming. In the face of what he called the “repeated insolence” of the Natives—jackets, shoes, and a pewter basin had gone missing, as had daggers, bayonets, and muskets—Cook’s fury smoldered. On Tongatapu and its nearby atolls, he took to flogging Natives far past the daily limit of twelve lashes per man allowed by navy rules; in one instance, he had a Native whipped a sadistic seventy-two times. He cut off the ears of some of the most egregious thieves, and in at least one case, on his orders, a cross was carved into a Native man’s shoulder, all the way to the bone.

Yet Cook had never visited on anyone the kind of widespread retribution that he was now unleashing on the people of Moorea—punishing the many for the misdeeds of an individual. It seemed Cook had taken leave of his senses. The wanton destruction of the homes of people he had no proof were actually connected to the theft—this was a first. Although some of his men threw themselves into the vandalistic acts with gusto, most were appalled by the harshness of their captain’s orders. They understood Cook’s initial frustration over the theft, but his lust for retaliation had grown into something terrifyingly toxic, with no sense of proportion.

“I doubt not,” thought one lieutenant, “but Captain Cook had good reasons for carrying his punishment to these people to so great a length, but what his reasons were are yet a secret.” It was “all about such a trifle as a small goat,” wrote Midshipman George Gilbert. Cook’s reprisals “were so different from his conduct in like cases in former voyages.”

Later in the day, for good measure, Cook had members of his party stalk down to the water’s edge and rip apart every canoe they could find. This was much more than a passing insult. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of a canoe in Polynesian society—the labor and craftsmanship it entailed, the utility it provided, the livelihood it advanced. Canoes were transportation, but they were also art. What the horse was to the American West, the canoe was to the Society Islands. To destroy canoes was to strike at the people’s independence, their means of sustenance and of getting about, their sense of aesthetics—and, to some extent, their sense of identity, too.

Cook, who surely understood this, persisted through the day, and the day after that: He sent teams of men along the coast to smash up every outrigger they encountered. Some Mooreans filled their beloved vessels with heavy rocks and sunk them in the lagoon shallows, thinking this might deter Cook. It didn’t. “The Captain,” wrote Lieutenant John Rickman in horror, “ordered the canoes that were sunk to be weighed up and destroyed.”

It is extraordinary that the islanders didn’t rise in defiance and kill these white-skinned invaders. The Native weapons may have been no match for muskets, but the Mooreans outnumbered Cook’s small party by a thousandfold. They could have made quick work of the Englishmen, but for some reason they remained pacific, even as parts of their island were consumed in flames.

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by Joel | 26 August 2024 · 6:41 am

Capt. Cook & the Earl of Sandwich

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 33-34:

IN EARLY FEBRUARY of 1776, Cook received an invitation to have dinner at the London home of one of the most powerful men in England: John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty. It must have been clear by the nature and timing of the invitation that something very important was to be discussed. Cook promptly accepted and a date was set.

Lord Sandwich was a shrewd, cynical, and sometimes ruthless politician, adroit in the power games of London. He and his fellow lords presided over an institution that was the largest organization in Britain and indeed in all of Europe. But Sandwich was much more than a Machiavellian bureaucrat; he was an intellectual of sorts, interested in the science of the day, and an advocate for exploration—probably the staunchest advocate, in fact, behind Cook’s second voyage of discovery.

Sandwich was lanky and tall, with such an odd, shambling, lopsided gait that people liked to say he could walk down both sides of the street at the same time. When at the Admiralty, he was known to be a workaholic. He was, one critic said, a man of “limitless ambition to which he has sacrificed everything,” and he kept such fiendish hours that he would often forsake his meals, opting instead to place a piece of beef between slices of toasted bread, which is how he came to be known as the “inventor” of the sandwich. He was a competitive card player and gambler, and the handy snack he had devised is said to have sustained him through many a long night at the gaming table. Lord Sandwich was a man in a hurry, in other words, and so perhaps it’s fitting that he should be known for a food architecture that can be gobbled quickly—for, through his relentless advocacy of exploration and global cross-pollination, he had accelerated many a timeline.

To find relief from the general toil of his job, Lord Sandwich had cultivated a deep affection for the voyages of exploration that the Admiralty periodically supported. He was perhaps the country’s greatest admirer of James Cook, and everything that had emanated from Cook’s two expeditions to date. Sandwich had been a catalyst, a patron, a sponsor. As far as he was concerned, Cook could do no wrong.

Politically, Sandwich was the gray eminence behind the proposed expedition to North America’s “backside.” In advocating for the voyage, he had confronted considerable resistance within government circles. Mounting tensions in the American colonies had caused the Royal Navy to shift its already strained resources. In a time of imminent war, yet another expedition to the far side of the world seemed a luxury England could not afford. Yet the ever crafty Sandwich had managed to circumvent the naysayers to win official approval.

This was the voyage in which Cook “discovered” the Hawaiian Islands and named them after his sponsor.

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Filed under Britain, food, migration, military, North America, Pacific, science

by Joel | 25 August 2024 · 4:24 am

Capt. Cook’s Shipboard Hygiene

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 15-17:

DURING HIS TWO voyages, Cook had shown himself to be a benevolent though strict leader of his own men—sparing with the lash and solicitous of his crew’s happiness, comfort, and health. These should be attributes for any good naval officer, but so many ship captains of the era could be unimaginably brutal in their punishments, tyrannical in their command style, and indifferent to conditions belowdecks. The Royal Navy, it was famously said, was “manned by violence and maintained by cruelty.”

Cook, however, was a different sort of captain. He constantly experimented with schemes for shipboard hygiene and diet. He knew that prolonged dampness and darkness were eternal enemies that worked in concert and must be mercilessly fought. Many diseases killed sailors on long voyages, but most of them, Cook found, could be prevented by maintaining strict cleanliness, especially in the galley.

Germ theory was only a nascent and controversial concept among medical scientists at the time, but Cook intuitively seemed to grasp its essence. Ever at war against grime, he kept his men scrubbing the decks with soap and vinegar, and often ordered smoking fires, set in pots, to be lit deep within the ship. His perpetual campaign against cockroaches, rats, weevils, and other vermin was resourceful, almost scientific, in its approach. “To cleanliness, as well in the ship as amongst the people, enough attention cannot be paid,” Cook insisted. “The least neglect occasions a putrid and disagreeable smell below.”

Then there was the most dreaded maritime disease of all: scurvy, a ghastly disorder that was considered an almost inevitable occupational hazard of long ocean voyages. During the Age of Sail, it was generally assumed that scurvy would kill off half the crew members on any lengthy expedition. The malady’s progression was all too well known: spongy gums, fetid breath, protuberant eyes, scaly skin, a breakdown in the tissues and cells of the body, convulsions, and, eventually, death.

But amazingly, during his two odysseys, it seemed that Cook had beaten scurvy. On his second voyage, the Resolution was at sea for three years, but not a single one of his men died of the disease—or even, it seems, developed advanced symptoms. This was a historic breakthrough. He didn’t understand scurvy’s true cause, its etiology; that it resulted from a deficiency of vitamin C would not be determined until the 1930s, when scientists deduced the compound’s chemical structure.

But Cook, following his own hunches while building on a host of older theories, had put in place an astoundingly efficacious system of prevention. A Scottish surgeon named James Lind had demonstrated as far back as the 1750s that scurvy could be treated by consuming citrus fruit, but it took decades before his ideas were aggressively adopted. Building on Lind’s findings, Cook insisted that whenever possible, his sailors—accustomed to a diet of salted meat and stale biscuits—consume fresh fruits, vegetables, and greens. On the Resolution he kept some strange-sounding supplementary items on the menu as well, such as carrot marmalade, wort of malt, rob of orange, inspissated lemon juice, and a concoction known as saloop, which was steeped from the root of a common meadow plant, Orchis mascula.

…

Cook hadn’t really conquered scurvy, though—the particular lessons he’d learned through hard and patient experimentation would be unlearned and then learned again, dismissed and revived in piecemeal fashion, over the next several decades. But for now, the Admiralty viewed Cook’s apparent mastery over the disease as possibly an even more consequential achievement than proving the Southern Continent’s nonexistence. So many sons of England, so many sons of so many countries, had died of this horrible malady. It has been estimated that nearly two million European sailors perished from scurvy between 1600 and 1800. The notion that a thousand-day voyage could be undertaken without the disease’s appearance represented a radical shifting of the possibilities; it meant that His Majesty’s ships could range wider and longer, extending the reach of the Crown to the world’s most distant nooks and corners, to complete the maps of the globe.