Cassowary Crossing

AS-GOOD-AS-NEW HOLLAND – Sailing in the wake of Captain Cook

(c) David Astle

Captain Cook was an extreme tourist. He craved the edge. Not for him a package trip to Paris, a set of spoons in the showcase, a Khartoum snowdome. Seeing a blank space on the Pacific somehow chafed the man. Galled him. Inspired him. He longed to tread where no white man had trod. To test the boundaries and his nerve. To flirt with risk, and cope. His mistress was virgin territory.

To map Cook’s boyhood is to measure the seduction taking place, the captain’s slow drift towards the sea. Step by step a younger Cook moved from his parents’ landlocked farm to a haberdashery in Staithes, and finally the open water of Whitby Harbour. In those young nostrils the Channel held more allure than Chanel No 5.

Cook learnt to sail. To read currents and the compass. In record speed a kid called James graduated from apprentice on the Freelove to mate on the Friendship, from the coal-cargo biz off England to the British Navy in Quebec. By 1768 he was prepped for the trip of a lifetime, destination unknown.

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Standing on the frigid dock of Snug Cove, the wind blowing our Kathmandu woollens inside-out, we know our destination – Sydney – that’s the easy part. As extreme tourists, the mystery is more how we’ll cope en route. If we’ll survive. Whether breakfast will stay in the stomach.

Beside us stands the Endeavour, a nail-for-nail replica of Cook’s original, the same to see him coast Australia’s waters 236 years ago, and our home for the next four days – weather permitting.

Because Snug Cove isn’t snug. Every Eden trawler is awaiting the gale to die. Twofold Bay is a mess of spume and chop. A petrel tries to travel south, quitting, U-turning, disappearing. Rumours say the swell is cresting five metres beyond the harbour – would Cook go out in this? Surely a smarter idea, instead of exploring New Holland’s east coast, is Foxtel and a muggaccino.

Forty in number, we raw recruits huddle in the wind in a bid to preserve our gumption. As the Endeavour’s new crew, the brawn for the vessel’s final leg, we are nervous as pups. Blokes in the main – with six exceptions – we mill beside the gangway, awaiting orders, hours shy of imitating Cook and Co: a square-rigged voyage to Port Jackson. The whole expedition is History-lite, a $500 slug per punter to mimic the life of a miserable sea-dog, hauling sails from Eden to Sydney, and maybe score a T-shirt.

“I feel like a ten-year-old all over again,” says Fred Frost, 48, a logistics consultant from Sydney. “I’ve been jumping out of my skin all week.”

A Telstra manager, Graham Barr, 54, admits he’s an adrenalin junkie. “My normal life is 9-to-5 where you fall into the danger of getting too comfortable.” He points to the ship. “This sort of thing is good for the soul.”

One-time Wallaby, John Langford, 37, has been eager to enlist thanks to the Captain Hornblower on Channel 2. “I love those historic dramas.” The Endeavour embodies a chance to leave the couch – and reality.

Other rent-a-sailors nurse different stories. A refugee Pom called Michael was born in Whitby, where Cook first cut his nautical teeth. “My great-great-great grandfather was the Whitby harbour master,” he says, missing Cook by a heartbeat.

Michael recalls his Whitby schooldays as being coloured by the explorer. “All our school houses were named after Cook’s ships. There was Resolution and Adventure and Discovery. I was in Endeavour.”

The bell rings. The moment has come. We file up the gangway to meet a T-bar operator – snowproof jacket, dapper beard – who turns out to be Ross Matson, 44, Endeavour’s skipper.

Mattson is blunt. He calls the sea conditions “bouncy”. The wind has been clocked at 70kph at Green Cape to the south. “If we go tonight we’ll be rolling around in one big washing-machine.” The Endeavour, he reckons, is built to cope. Of us he’s less sure – the volunteer crew. “Best if we learn the ropes this evening and aim to leave tomorrow dark and early.”

“Up-end your coils!” bellows Kit Woodward, a London giant in his 50s, and leader of the mizzen watch. Already the volunteers have been broken into three groups: foremast, mainmast and mizzen. Each ‘watch’ is a team within a team, destined to work four-hour shifts from Eden to Darling Harbour. Duties include trimming sails, tugging halyards, dishwashing, helming, lookout and apparently up-ending coils.

“You’ve just stepped back into the 1700s,” says Kit with menace in his eye. After 27 years in the merchant navy, this sailor knows lubbers at a glance. He takes pleasure in barking our arses up the rigging. We clamber the shrouds to the crow’s nest (“It’s not a bleeding crow’s nest!”), to the platform known as the fighting top, 25 metres above the deck. The view – and the jargon – bring on vertigo. And thoughts of yore.

When Cook did this trip before us, he’d sailed with 94 men on board, losing almost a third to malaria, dysentery, hypothermia – plus a bloke called Flower who fell off the toilet suspended over the bow. Looping New Zealand and hugging Australia, the original bark spent 1052 days at sea, compared to our four, though at least Cook’s swabs had smokes and grog as solace. Ours is a health kick with hard labour thrown in.

This is not a leisure cruise. The phrase still sticks in my head from the papers I’d signed a month before boarding. It is hard work and you will have very little free time. So reads the fine print of extreme tourism – where emotional scars amount to souvenirs. Have you ever experienced seasickness? No, I said, knowing there’s always a first time.

Down below, bolting lasagna, I meet my fellow mizzen team. Wrinkles vary, but all eyes sparkle at the prospect of making open sea. Most of us had applied for passage via a newspaper ad, placed by the Australian National Maritime Museum. As the bark’s custodians, the Museum was seeking recruits to sail in Cook’s wake, all the way to Melbourne to coincide with the Commonwealth Games – and back again.

“What time are we casting off?” asks Danie, 49, a South African GP.
“Five o’clock,” says Katherine, 21, a Commerce/Law student form Sydney.
“Or 0500 as they prefer,” says Paul, 42, a paramedic entering the spirit.

Chris, an accountant, now better known as Number 5/Mizzen, collects the plates with a jaunty whistle. “Don’t whistle,” says a maritime scholar in a for’ard booth. “It summons disaster.”

The canteen (sorry, mess) occupies Cook’s former cargo hold. Complete with gas stove and pump toilets (sorry, heads) this galley level is nicknamed the 20th Century, a secret concession to modernity. Know where to look and you’d find other latter-day touches on board the Endeavour, such as radio, radar and twin diesel engines. That said, every other bunt and clew is faithful to the nth.

Crafted in Fremantle, the replica represents a 14-year labour of pedantry. Entrepreneur Alan Bond sponsored the project to celebrate the Bicentenary in 1988, until his empire struck a rock, and federal funds, public donation and John Singleton (among others) stepped in.

Maritime research was as painstaking as the building methods used. A bona-fide blacksmith forged the hinges. A traditional ropewalk wove the manila rigging. Instead of oak – a wood prone to borer – laminated jarrah makes up the hull, plus other native timbers more resilient to the elements. (To defray costs, some wood was harvested from an ammo factory, an old bridge and a disused nunnery.) All else around us is glorious status quo.

Before dawn, to free the ship, we haul in aft springs and bowlines – one fraction of the 29kms of ropes on deck. The wind has dropped. The chop is minimal. Dolphins hoon into view like a gang of punks, eager to crash the farewell party. They caper by the hull until the open sea, when the rocking and rolling truly begin.

Swell converts the bark into seesaw. We stagger the deck like tosspots. Soon our workforce is slashed as several volunteers contemplate the insides of a ‘happy bucket’. The sound FX are as grisly as odour-a-rama. Over the day the salt air is laced by the varietal nuances of lasagna.

“Lord Nelson had the best remedy for seasickness,” says an able seaman wearing a patch. (The patch comes care of Nicobate.) Whaaaat, comes the voice deep within the bucket. The seaman cackles. “Hug a tree.”

We slide past Tathra. Bermagui comes and goes in morning brilliance. Jim Cottier, our sea-cured navigator from the Isle of Mann, has set the course to hug the coast. Wider out, we’d be heading the wrong way on the freeway of the East Australian Current – the breakneck ride in Finding Nemo.

Before noon, the captain attracts an audience in the waist. He gives a talk on square-rigger science, how each of the 28 sails behave, and which respective rope to yank to coax what outcome. As the former master aboard the replica Bounty, Mattson is the tall-ship maestro. His hands betray a million halyards, while his extraordinary feet – and their squid tattoo – tell a kindred tale.

“My mother was born on Orkney Islands in the far north of Scotland. Not many people stay and go there – my two webbed toes are sign of inbreeding.” Cook’s successor, it seems, is a merman.

By fluke, Mattson is also an expert on Botany Bay. “I live a few blocks from Cook’s first landing place.” His house in fact is situated on Captain Cook Drive, Kurnell. As it happens, while still skippering the Bounty, Ross was home the day the replica Endeavour sailed into the bay, on April last year.

“I drove my wife down to the beach to watch the Endeavour come in. Two years ago, I’d taken the Bounty to the same spot – it’s my local turf you could say.” And what Ross saw that day was gob-smacking.

The Endeavour, under the command of maiden skipper Chris Blake, had been freed from Fremantle in 2002, sailing around the world unscathed. A master sailor, Blake has threaded the globe’s trickiest straits, only to strike trouble in Stingray Harbour, alias Botany Bay.

“There’s no room for error off Kurnell,” says Ross, who’d stood spellbound on the shore. The ship, he knew, was far too close to a rock outcrop known as Watts Reef. “I remember getting a bad feeling at the time. I said to Debra, ‘She shouldn’t be where she is…’ and crunch – the rest is history.”

Ross remembers pitying the poor bugger responsible for repairing the hull, which ended up being him – the new master – once Blake released the helm. In Garden Island dry-dock, Mattson had to remove or replace 750 wooden blocks, two bilge planks and a docking keel before the Endeavour could face the ocean again.

Sailing in a trance, time seems irrelevant living on the ship. Days and nights are measured by the bell. Ropes are pulled and wound. Bateman’s Bay is a nest of lights. Sails flap. Stars shine. Ulladulla is a flotilla of trawlers.

Sleep is what you grab, an hour here, an hour there. Every sailor owns a canvas hammock, chest-wide and coffin-narrow. In the name of thrift, the cloth had doubled as a body-bag for Cook and Co should a crewman succumb to the latest scourge.

You need to knot your hammock well, or die in the two-metre fall. Lying there in dread, precarious, the crooning of ropes acts as lullaby, the pound of the swell, the grinding of the tumblehome (the convex hull, ye infidel) as a dozen shipmates swing in reach. Stretch out a hand and you’ll touch a stubbled chin, or a foetid foot, in either direction.

Swinging in the dark, lost in the world of sound you begin to grasp the accomplishment of Cook, a bloke who sailed around the world three times, living off his wits and pickled cabbage. A farmer’s son, braver than any astronaut, who unlocked an entire continent. The extreme tourist to introduce Oceania to the west. And this ship – in essence – was his stronghold.

Come eight bells (or 0400 hours) I’m woken by a tree falling on my head. No, not a tree, but Barry, my mizzen colleague, keeling over with cramp. My bed spins; I’m airborne. We land in a heap together in the gloom, our language loud and sailor-like. Kit appears from nowhere and tells us to “harness up and proceed to the foredeck”. I have no idea what day it is.

Langford the Wallaby has likewise lost his calendar. At a full two metres the Wagga flanker is developing a crick. If shipmates aren’t bobbing their heads into buckets they’re banging their scones on the 1.4m bulkheads of the aft deck below. Next time you see a portrait of Cook, note the occupational stoop.

Natalie Moore, a Melbourne deckie in her early 20s,, splices rope by the stern. “In my real life I teach Year One kids, but after a month working on the Endeavour this is starting to feel like real life.” Her fingers are nimble. She’s dressed in salt-crusted shorts with knee-high bobbysox. Her charm bracelet boasts a Christian fish and a pewter Endeavour. “I tell my kids at school to chase their dreams – so I’d only be hypocrite if I didn’t chase my own.”

Off Jervis Bay I take the helm. Twice. My first shift as Muscle, buffeting the wheel, and later, Brains, eying the compass and barking commands. We sidestep a cargo ship. We wave at a catamaran called Time Warp. We average 4 knots with a following sea.

Pete, my watch officer, can’t help singing tunes from the disco era. The ex-carpenter is freebasing on a drug he calls Sea-Life. The fix began in 2000. “I was working on the Toaster building near the Opera House when I saw the Bounty sail past the window. It gave me gooseflesh. I put down the nail-gun and said, ‘That’s where I want to be.’

Noise on the quarterdeck distracts us. Gregor, another watch leader, catches a mahi-mahi. Brighter than a Ken Done tea-towel, the fish flaps about the tiller. To think Joseph Banks and his entourage managed to classify such a specimen in Tahiti, over two centuries ago. Fluoro gold and green, the dolphin fish amounts to everything strange about the New World. Captain Ross licks his lips. “Can’t beat sushi that wriggles in the mouth.”

Landscape unscrolls. We see the cliffs and peaks that Cook saw – and named. The nub that is Pigeon House amid Nowra’s Budawangs. We see the ember bed of Wollongong, the birthday candles of Port Kembla – a brand of ‘progress’ to smother the captain’s observation of 1770: “We see this Country in the pure state of Nature, the Industry of Man has had nothing to do with any part of it.”

Jim, our navigator, schools us in sextant reading. No fan of satellites, the Manxian gets emotional when talk of GPS (geo-positioning systems) enters the tutorial. “Anyone can do it the modern way,” he blurts, “therefore there’s no satisfaction. The old ways are the true ways.” The point is spoilt by a blipping Motorola in a sea-dog’s pocket. We must be moving into Sydney’s range.

Outside the Heads the mizzen team monkeys up the mast to unfurl the mainsail. Once upon a time in Eden the notion of going aloft was insane. But a short voyage has changed us. Now the task combines terror with routine. We throw our bodies over the yardarm and edge our paunches across the spar to unknot the ratchets, four storeys over the ocean. If only for a breath we are sailors out of time – bearded, salted, sleep-deprived – where certain chores need doing, and doing well.

We enter Port Jackson. Ferries blast us welcome. A news chopper dips its nose to investigate. Down below, on the starboard rail, Deano the ship’s carpenter primes the cannon. Instead of grapeshot he loads the barrel with three-ply toilet-paper, balled tightly to create a seal. In some new-fangled ritual we fire confetti at the Opera House, the zoo and Shane Gould the River Cat. Bang! Bang! Bang! Each target in turn answers with echoes.

(Riding high on the Melbourne outing, the museum plans further Endeavour voyages early next year. To register your interest as a possible voyage crew member, complete the form on the museum’s website at http://www.anmm.gov.au/tempex.htm#endeavour and fax it back, email endeavour@anmm.gov.au or telephone (02) 9298 3859 to leave your details.)

(Sydney Morning Herald, July 2006)