The Johnson Society (Lichfield)

History goes like this: Captain Cook discovered Australia. That's what we learned in school and that's what most people believe. Trouble is, it simply isn't true. It's not true because the Dutch recorded landing there around 1606 and had most of it mapped within the next forty years. If they could be wiped from the record, what about other visitors? What happens if the truth goes even further back into the mists of time, leaving you with only fleeting glimpses of a truth that will turn conventional history on its head?

This was my own experience when I set about writing my book on Captain Cook. It started out as a straight biography of an incredible icon but I soon crashed headlong into a hidden history that challenged everything I knew about the man who had become my hero, and everything I knew about geography, history and myself.

There are few heroes in my Discovers' Hall-Of-Fame worthier than James Cook. He discovered more of this planet than any other man, redrew the map of the world and smashed the myth of the Great Southern Continent whose riches would exceed those of Asia. From his lowly beginnings as the barefoot son of a farm-labourer, Cook rose to become a legend in his own lifetime and a mighty Colossus for the emerging British Empire. Along the way, he conquered the scurvy that killed more sailors than war ever did, scotched the idea that seawater couldn't freeze (and idea that would ultimately help to kill him), and kick-started the move towards scientific cartography. With Cook, you always knew where you were. At least, that's what I always believed. And in a way, it was this apparent perfection that had slowed me down in my trajectory to be by his side.

To be honest, when I was growing up and devouring stories about the explorers, I wanted something a little more gritty. Being worthy is one thing - eliciting passion is quite another. My heroes were the Conquistadors, Odysseus, even King Arthur - men who had some fire in their belly, fatal flaws and battles with inner demons, who would strike out into the unknown for their god, for gold - or just for the hell of it. Compared with them, Cook was a faultless but rather two-dimensional discovering machine, or at least that's what I thought until I slammed headlong into another man who was also an explorer, a man who smashed my boundaries between the personal and professional - a man who change the course of my life: a distant cousin from a bygone era: George Collingridge, artist turned warrior and then discoverer, only this time what he uncovered was not new lands but secret histories.

The story of the three of us - James, George and me - starts calmly enough at 4 o’ clock in a library on a cold, Spring afternoon. It was the kind of day that is both pleasant yet unremarkable - the kind of day one imagines a leaf-cutting ant would have in the jungle: sharp-smelling, busy but relatively uncomplicated. I had no idea that within just a few minutes, the course of my life would be irrevocably mapped out in faded ink-on-card in the library's ancient catalogue. I had been looking up a reference in the dog-eared paper index when I chanced upon my own name. Collingridge? No one in our rather large extended family had written anything that I was aware of. But there it was, in black and white, albeit now faded to a sepia brown. ‘Collingridge, George: The Discovery of Australia, 1895 (Outsized)’.

I headed immediately to the ‘outsized’ shelves. And, true to form, there it was – slumped wearily against a pile of altogether smarter books. I carefully pulled it out. The book itself was large and heavy with a dusty cover the colour of ox-blood and indented gold writing. It looked like it had lain there for a thousand years and wouldn't mind resting for a few thousand more. I laid it flat on the large, leather-topped table, opened the front cover and entered another world.

There was plate after plate of exquisitely illustrations, interleaved with pages of old-fashioned print, detailing some long and involved story of Pacific pioneers. As I leafed through the introduction, the spine yawned and stretched sleepily. Carefully, I prised open each grudging page, stunned by what was in front of me. Here was the work of another geographer, another Collingridge, but from an altogether different time and place.

Magical hand-drawn maps unfurled before my eyes. Taking a closer look, the scope of the history was broad indeed, stretching from Ptolemy and his ancient though enduring view of the world, through to dense pages on Magellan and finally, James Cook. Reading this last name made me smile - to think that this strange Collingridge had the same interests as me! I shook my head in ironic resignation: there really was nothing new under the sun…. However, by now the library preparing to close and I didn't have time to do much beyond flicking through the pages laden with text and maps; although my curiosity had been aroused, I certainly hadn't absorbed the enormity of what lay before me. For me, it was just a beautiful book about early Australia by a Collingridge who - by some Grand Coincidence - was also a geographer.

I heaved the book shut and sat for a moment in quiet reverence. Collingridges are few and far between – and those there are are soon connected; so here we were – dozing ancestor and distant descendant, resting on a table in Oxford's School of Geography. I fingered the date: 1895, yet the century that stretched between us served only to tug me closer. I filed George Collingridge under ‘Interesting Miscellaneous’. I had found my box of delights.

Ten years on, the memory of that book would still be with me. By then, I had started on my own career as an explorer, albeit on a far lesser scale than the mighty Captain Cook. My adventures had started young, learning to sail on the Cornish coast, stopping at tidal sandbars to catch shrimps in my fishing net, then slowly progressed further afield - taking part in the Aegean sea-trials of an ancient 170-oared ancient Greek Trireme, living with the Zapotec Indians of southern Mexico, climbing mountains in Africa and Indonesia or canoeing 200 miles through the Belize jungle: if there was a boundary to push, then I would push it, whether it was geographical, cultural or purely physical.

I was propelled by the desire to discover more about the world that lay before me - and it was this desire that led me into television, perhaps the most surreal world of them all. Working as a researcher, then journalist and presenter, I discovered more about life on earth than in all my years at university. Best of all, I got to the opportunity travel - to the lost cities of Sri Lanka to war-torn Somaliland and even to Star City in Russia where I trained to be cosmonaut (albeit only as a tourist). But all the while, I knew that I was never really discovering like my heroes had done; wherever I went, someone had always been there before. I had maps, I had colleagues, I had mobile phones or computers. My kind of exploring was not true discovery - but what was it that separated someone like James Cook from we mere mortals? What is that makes someone leave safety and security behind to strike out into the unknown? This question gnawed away at my mind like a hungry rat in a ship's storeroom.

At the time Cook was setting off on his first voyage of discovery, the average sailor's chances of dying before he reached home were no more than 50:50; add to that a route into uncharted waters and the odds become almost suicidal. So what potent force propels someone to do it?

Then, in an exhibition on discovery, I caught sight of a line that stilled my heart. Six boards told the life of Cook, his achievements, his disasters and his dramatic death on a beach in the island of Hawaii. I knew the story by heart and by then had read about his beloved wife, Elizabeth, burning all his letters before her death to keep something of the public hero private just for her. And then it dawned on me: for all that I thought I knew his story, I knew nothing of the inner world of Captain James Cook. My yearning for discovery now had a focus; my oceans would be libraries, my terra nova the workings of his mind.

I had wanted to write books since I was a child; I loved stories and detail and the twists and turns that made it impossible to switch off the light. After eight years of living out of a suitcase as a journalist, I was tired of the lifestyle, frustrated with the soundbite and desperate to immerse myself in something deeper than a news-package. James Cook became my passion, and then my obsession. Before long, I had given up my job to become a writer. Sloughing off the claustrophobia of a life in television, I set off across the globe to follow in the footsteps of the greatest explorer this world has ever known.

But the map of my life was about to change direction yet again. Taking a break from my researches in a Sydney museum shop, I chanced upon a book on the history of Australia. Flicking through the index, I looked for the name of Captain Cook but in an action replay from a decade before, I saw his name once more: ‘Collingridge, George, page 182’. I found the reference and to my horror read the entry:

            Although he received much vitriol at the time, it seems George Collingridge experienced a terrible injustice; in fact, his theories on
            the discovery of Australia are now gaining widespread acceptance.

Much vitriol? For what? What ‘terrible injustice’ had cast George Collingridge as a wronged man? And more worryingly - if official history claimed that Cook discovered the east coast of Australia, what had George said about the man who had brought me ten thousand miles to follow in his track? It was one thing to discover an interesting ancestor; it was quite another matter when that ancestor turned troublesome.

Now, instead of one, there were three: James, George and me. My story had become much more than just a tale of history, geography and psychological discovery; it had become a personal quest to unravel two men and the legends, myths and lies of the last three hundred years.

I soon learned that real discovery can take place on your own doorstep: I found more relatives I never knew I had, whole branches of Collingridges with their own monumental histories. George's family had lived just seven miles down the road from my own, before they emigrated to France in the 1850s where he trained to be an artist under the tuition of famous landscape painter, Camille Corot. He had become one of the foremost engravers in Europe before giving up his fame and wealth to fight against Garibaldi in the Italian Papal Army. He was decorated for bravery before returning to work for Le Monde Illustré and the London Illustrated News until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War when, according to family legend, the family fled back to London on the last train out of Paris. By the time George returned, most of his friends had been killed and his studio had been destroyed in subsequent fighting with the Communards. Although he rebuilt both his studio and his career, the glamorous world of international art had lost its allure. The young artist-cum-warrior wanted something more - a new start with fresh challenges. Early in 1879, George Collingridge stepped of the Lusitania into the New World of Australia.

Although he already had engraving work lined up - and became well-known for his illustrations of the capture of the bushranger, Ned Kelly, and his notorious ‘Kelly Gang’, George's real fame would come in an altogether different direction. Unusually for the day, George spoke at least six languages, one of which was Portuguese. Ever-interested in the history of his adoptive homeland, he started to research the tales of early explorers like Magellan, Quirós and Tasman, so when he heard that the Sydney Public Library had acquired some Sixteenth Century maps of the region, he went to take a look. In a bizarre parallel with my own shock discovery in an Oxford library, George's world was blown apart. The maps showed a strange continent called Jave la Grande - a large block of land with a familiar coastline, roughly in the place where Australia should be. Looking closer, he spotted that although the maps were allegedly French, some of the words were in Portuguese! But what did Portugal know of Australia, particularly the East Coast, two hundred and fifty years before Cook had made his discoveries?

George's own discovery led to twenty more years of painstaking research but his conclusions were not easy to swallow in that far flung but fiercely proud outpost of the British Empire: James Cook may have been the greatest explorer this world has ever known - but he didn't discover Australia! The news was decidedly unpopular, coming from a French-educated, Catholic amateur. When he published his book in 1895, the Australian universities were just gearing up with their own professional historians who taught what was considered (by them) ‘official history’ - the history of Captain Cook as the first discoverer of their continent. George was set upon as heretic, publicly denounced as a traitor and his Government contract for a schools' history book mysteriously cancelled without explanation. Facing financial ruin and social disgrace, he died in 1931 but to the last maintained his assertion that Australia had been discovered by the Portuguese and then the Spanish in the early Sixteenth Century, and that it was these discoveries - cloaked under each nation's strict Policy of Secrecy - that had led to the maps of Jave la Grande, maps that had only recently turned up in the dusty archives of European map collections.

Unwittingly, George had kick-started a controversy that would re-emerge in my own lifetime as ‘The Great Whodunit’, with official history competing with a hidden history of secret voyages, cartographic espionage and over three hundred years of suppression. Instead of clouding my love of James Cook, unpeeling the onion-layers of George's life and his own discoveries added a vital new angle to the traditional Cook Story.

In tracing George's remarkable passage, I toured once more through the familiar atmospheres of passion and ambition, the voids of knowledge and the black holes of truth. The more I learned, the more he became the foil to Cook’s trajectory – the night sky to Cook’s rising star. And, where we should have been separated by geography, history and place in society, the stories of James, George and me were now fused into one -- a tale of obsession and betrayal in the New World.

For my research, I toured the Pacific by foot, air and sea, scoured libraries and map rooms, conducted literally hundreds of interviews with those hailed Cook as hero, or George as heretic - and those who believed the reverse was true. With us both being Collingridges, it was easier to see beneath George's skin. Family traits were encoded in both our genes and there was that intensely personal yet slightly icky feeling that I knew him almost too well: learning about George - a passionate geographer, writer and devoted explorer - I was also learning about myself, confronting my own beliefs and challenging my own external and internal boundaries. It was rarely a pleasant voyage of discovery.

As for Cook, I was close to reaching inside his head - to finding out what had driven him to go (in his words) ‘further than any other man - perhaps as far as it's possible to go’ but there was still a distance between the man in the books and the man behind the myth. I asked my fellow Cookophiles, ‘Would you have liked Cook?’ Without exception, they replied that, yes, they would have respected him - but liked him….? No one knew him well enough to say.

I need to uncover the hidden third dimension of Cook the human being but that kind of research cannot be done in libraries. I needed to see what Cook had seen, to experience what he had experienced, to add meaning to his life. I travelled to his birthplace, to Whitby where he had learned to sail, to London, Plymouth, New Zealand, Australia and his deathplace in Hawaii. But still the man evaded me.

My salvation came with total immersion. Two hundred and thirty one years after Cook had sailed to Australia on board the Endeavour, I signed up as a member of voyage crew for the modern replica bark which was circumnavigating the continent. It is one thing to read of life on board his ship; it is quite another to live it.

Working in three dimensions on the tiny deck and forty metres up in the rigging, seeing the tangerine sunrise and amber sunset, feeling the crew meld into a single community, I at last began to understand the call of the sea for Captain James Cook. This was life in the raw, bathing in the elements of sun, wind and water. Here, also, was order: the captain is a king who needs no crown: his position is unassailable; his word is law. For Cook who was a no-one on land, he could rule his own world at sea.

Ironically, however, the moment of clarity came not on the deck, or even up the rigging but in the middle of the Bass Strait with nothing but emptiness on the horizon. On a perfect day, with someone on shark-watch, we had leapt over the side to go for a swim.

The freezing water snatched my breath: first the roar of contact exploded in my ears before dissolving into a fizz of tiny bursting bubbles. I opened my eyes and stared through the blue. For just a few moments, I was caught in silent, suspended animation, completely forgotten as the opposing forces of gravity and buoyancy wrestled for control of my body, before propelling me to the surface. I broke the water like a new-born child, blinded by the brightness, senses screaming and gulping for lungs-full of air. As I trod water, waiting for my turn to scramble up the rope ladder and back into the ship, I took the chance to sink back into the swell, letting its powerful arms lift me and lower me, letting myself feel the vulnerability of being alone in the water, out of sight of land, just me, the sky, the sea and some substantial planks of wood.

I stared up at the ship: she was dwarfed by the expanse of ocean that surrounded us but this tiny floating island had become the centre of our universe. In a few short weeks, its thick wooden fingers had fed our ambition, our achievements and our desire for adventure, transforming a motley assortment of people into a fully-functioning crew. We felt invincible, self-sufficient; it was easy to forget that we were floating in miles of nothingness. And so it had been for Cook. Here, on his ship, Cook controlled his world. He had status, ultimate power and the chance to win the glory denied him on land by his lowly position in the rigid social hierarchy of eighteenth century Britain. Sometimes you have to leave security to appreciate what you’ve left – and sometimes, like Cook, you have to leave your home before that home appreciates you.

Cook's death came on a Hawaiian beach when he found he could no longer control those around him; by the time I had completed my own journey of discovery, I had - like George - learned that you cannot control history, either. The archaeological evidence of early contact with Australia is there on the ground, from sixteenth century Portuguese cannons to discarded lead fishing weights. It does not diminish the legend of Cook; to a large extent, it shows what he himself was battling against: the tyranny of an English Establishment who thought its word and its rules were law. But even the mighty British Empire could not dictate the past. Men can make maps and they can write histories but the truth is absolute, enduring and cannot be erased.

Top of Captain Cook

The Johnson Society, The Birthplace Museum, Breadmarket Street,
Lichfield, Staffs. WS13 6LG
contact@lichfieldrambler.co.uk