The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - June 16, 2024


PREVIEW： Epochs #163 ｜ Captain Cook - Part II

Topics
malaria-ridden Batavia
Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Cook Banks Sidney Parkinson Alfred Russell Wallace Abel Tasman King George Admiralty Rousseau Batavia Drake
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #936 The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #938

Episode Stats


Length

20 minutes

Words per minute

158.43

Word count

3,205

Sentence count

270

Harmful content

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

14

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we look at the life of Captain James Cook, the first European navigator to circumnavigate the South Pacific Ocean, and the first man to make it to New Zealand. In doing so, he became the first person to discover the entire South Pacific coast of North America and South America, and one of the most successful navigators of all time.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So they sail quite far south, but they don't find anything, which eventually leads Cook to change course and decide to go westward towards New Zealand, which, again, they already knew about, they already knew of its existence because it had been discovered by Abel Tasman in the early 1600s.
00:00:26.960 But Cook, when he arrived there, was the first European navigator to basically circumnavigate the entire, well, both islands, and, again, putting his cartography skills on full display, drew the most pristine, detailed map of the islands and its boundaries.
00:00:48.920 And I think, isn't it, for generations it wasn't better?
00:00:52.820 Oh, yeah.
00:00:53.100 Or for, like, well, a hundred years or more?
00:00:56.500 Yeah, 150 years, something like that, yeah.
00:00:59.960 But, obviously, I'd be remiss not to mention something of the encounter with the Maoris whilst he's there.
00:01:07.260 So I think it's important to mention that the Tahitians, the Maoris, the Easter Islanders, they're all a part of the same sort of ethnic group.
00:01:17.900 They're all, they all speak a similar language.
00:01:21.420 When they came from Tahiti, they actually took one of the natives on board with them called Tupia, because Banks had become quite friendly with him and he thought it would be useful to have a translator for any of the islands they went on.
00:01:35.600 And when they got to New Zealand, it turned out that Tupia and the Maori could perfectly speak to one another.
00:01:41.520 They both spoke the Polynesian language because, obviously, that's where they come from.
00:01:46.660 The New Zealanders, the Maoris had arrived in New Zealand in about 1300, something like that, from the Polynesian islands.
00:01:54.640 But the Maori were, in many ways, like the Tahitians in the rampant thievery, or sometimes even worse. 1.00
00:02:05.280 They'd be trading and the Europeans would pass them something and then they'd just bolt and not hand over the thing that they'd obviously said they were going to trade in.
00:02:17.220 People say, sorry, just quickly say, oh, that's just their culture, was it?
00:02:21.980 Oh, they're just thieves? 1.00
00:02:22.860 Yeah, oh, they didn't understand property rights, is it that, oh, are they just cheeky bastards? 1.00
00:02:32.600 They're just thieves? 1.00
00:02:33.360 Right.
00:02:33.980 I think they did, I think they largely did understand about the idea of ownership.
00:02:39.240 You would get the general idea, right?
00:02:41.120 You would get the idea of what the Europeans expected out of you, eventually.
00:02:45.820 But this was, in the time that Cook sailed around these two islands, there was a constant pattern of, some would be very, very friendly and some would attack with spears.
00:02:56.160 So there was one occasion where they fired the muskets purposefully over their heads in order to sort of make them surrender.
00:03:04.160 And they didn't.
00:03:04.780 And the Maori came up in their canoe and just started lobbing spears and anything they had in the boat at them. 0.58
00:03:09.780 And this resulted in the Marines firing down into the, into the Maori's boat and killing a lot of them.
00:03:16.780 But as soon as three of the younger ones were taken aboard, they were just, it was like nothing had ever happened.
00:03:23.460 All of a sudden the younger ones were, oh, what's that?
00:03:25.580 And what's that?
00:03:26.280 And oh, can I have this?
00:03:27.500 And everything, like nothing had happened.
00:03:30.160 It was just a real, it's fascinating, like the behaviour of them.
00:03:34.660 It's funny, there's so many parallels with Drake's voyages, exactly the same thing.
00:03:38.620 You'd never know.
00:03:39.280 Sometimes they were extremely friendly.
00:03:41.600 They couldn't have been more welcoming and friendly.
00:03:43.620 And other times they greet you with, with spears.
00:03:46.980 And yeah, one time some, some native peoples just rode, rode their canoe out to the golden hind.
00:03:57.000 Right.
00:03:57.540 To attack it.
00:03:59.020 And Drake's like, it's a little canoe.
00:04:01.440 Yeah.
00:04:01.700 And he's like, really?
00:04:04.040 They will fire one shot, one cannon across their bow.
00:04:07.940 Okay.
00:04:08.860 So yeah, you just never knew.
00:04:10.320 No.
00:04:10.860 You just never knew if they were going to be nice or not.
00:04:13.340 But really unpredictable.
00:04:14.780 But it's that thing as well that, you know, eventually as circumnavigating New Zealand,
00:04:19.260 word would spread amongst the different tribes.
00:04:22.460 That, oh, you know, there's this big ship sailing around and it's handing out all this stuff.
00:04:26.600 And, you know, so before you knew it, like sort of a lot of the islanders knew what was,
00:04:31.600 you know, on the north and then the south, what was, what was going on.
00:04:36.000 But yeah, and as he went, they'd stick up the good old Union flag, you know, and say,
00:04:42.780 God save King George.
00:04:43.860 And they'd claim the island for Great Britain, as they did. 0.80
00:04:49.340 And there's, you know, obviously still part of the Commonwealth today.
00:04:51.960 And that's really where the story of our relationship with New Zealand began, back with Cook's Voyage.
00:04:57.320 Yeah.
00:04:57.740 Yeah.
00:04:58.020 Yeah.
00:04:58.920 Yeah.
00:04:59.480 Yeah.
00:04:59.920 I suppose one last thing to mention.
00:05:00.940 It is interesting that the Maori were sort of Polynesian Islanders that came to New Zealand,
00:05:06.520 rather than being sort of autochthonous, sort of being from New Zealand from time immemorial,
00:05:12.800 or not from Australia.
00:05:16.820 They're not, they're not Australian Aboriginals. 1.00
00:05:18.960 No.
00:05:19.540 Australian Aboriginals and Maoris are different things.
00:05:21.660 Totally.
00:05:22.220 Right.
00:05:23.380 It's just, it is interesting to sort of note that.
00:05:26.660 And that the Maori haven't been on New Zealand for, you know, like 40,000 years or anything.
00:05:32.400 It's not like that.
00:05:33.460 No.
00:05:33.660 It's interesting just to note that.
00:05:35.460 But yeah, so carry on.
00:05:37.240 Well, eventually, obviously, they parted from New Zealand and sailed over to New Holland,
00:05:45.620 or Australia, as we now know it.
00:05:48.160 And there seems to be one of those sort of rookie, normie misconceptions that Cook discovered
00:05:54.080 Australia, which isn't true.
00:05:55.820 As I said, the Dutch did. 0.91
00:05:56.900 But he was the first European to set foot on the eastern side of Australia, which obviously
00:06:03.320 has most of its famous cities, you know, Sydney and all that, which is where they first land
00:06:09.940 in Botany Bay.
00:06:11.480 Right.
00:06:11.800 Yeah.
00:06:12.080 That's the famous thing, isn't it?
00:06:13.500 Yeah.
00:06:14.160 Which obviously there's many famous paintings and pictures of, and it's a very, it's a very
00:06:18.760 iconic image in many ways.
00:06:21.320 But as regards to their first contact with the Aborigines, and as you say, they're totally 1.00
00:06:27.880 different people, their own language, their own, their own culture, in total contradiction 0.92
00:06:32.940 to the way that they, the Polynesians had greeted the Europeans, the Aborigines were just 1.00
00:06:39.900 very, didn't really think anything of it.
00:06:44.640 But they, they didn't come out in long boats like the Polynesians had and just sort of circle 1.00
00:06:50.720 the ship wanting to trade.
00:06:52.300 They kept back.
00:06:53.480 They kept to themselves.
00:06:54.720 Every now and then the men would just sort of see fires in the distance, either warning
00:06:59.200 that something was happening or, you know, just sending signals to one another.
00:07:03.260 But no one would, every now and then, of course, they'd see them in the distance.
00:07:06.580 Like, they'd see, you know, dark men with big spears, you know, in the distance, but
00:07:12.400 they wouldn't, yeah, it wasn't, it was a very cold, sort of aloof introduction.
00:07:18.780 There was not, it was very different to what they'd had thus far on the voyage.
00:07:23.040 It's interesting to say the Australian Aborigines have been on the Australian landmass for thousands
00:07:30.080 and thousands and thousands.
00:07:31.080 Tens of thousands.
00:07:31.560 Right, yeah.
00:07:32.500 Yeah.
00:07:32.720 It's actually quite odd, some of the cave paintings, some of the archaeology is odd,
00:07:37.680 how long they've been there.
00:07:38.940 Yeah.
00:07:39.380 It's like, that's some of the oldest stuff.
00:07:41.320 That's going back to some of the oldest stuff we've got in Africa.
00:07:43.500 Yeah.
00:07:43.720 Wait, how can that be?
00:07:45.180 Anyway, we won't get into that today.
00:07:47.100 But, so yeah, they, yeah, they're sort of very different.
00:07:51.800 They weren't particularly, you say, standoffish.
00:07:54.220 They weren't war-like.
00:07:55.480 No.
00:07:55.660 They're not sort of like coming out to try and kill them or anything remotely like that.
00:07:59.940 But, yeah, I suppose you mentioned New Holland, because of course, well, you've got the Spanish 1.00
00:08:08.180 and the Portuguese, but then the Dutch, I mean, there's the Dutch East Indies.
00:08:13.100 Yeah.
00:08:13.320 It's not called that anymore, is it?
00:08:14.820 But, so the Dutch largely came from the other way.
00:08:18.700 Yeah, from the Western.
00:08:20.540 Coming from the Western side.
00:08:21.800 Yeah.
00:08:23.360 And so, yeah, sort of the battle between the sort of low burn, very low burn, very low key,
00:08:30.340 very low numbers of spanning centuries of a battle between the Spanish, the Portuguese,
00:08:37.400 the Dutch and the British.
00:08:38.560 Yes.
00:08:38.820 Over dominance, over that whole massive part of the globe.
00:08:43.700 Obviously, Cook playing an important and still fairly early role in it all.
00:08:48.400 Absolutely.
00:08:49.040 So, they keep sort of sailing up the eastern coastline of Australia until eventually a major
00:08:59.420 disaster happens, but it turns out to basically be Cook's finest hour as a seaman, as a voyager
00:09:08.500 and as a captain, really, because basically the ship hits upon hard rock and coral upon
00:09:15.380 the Great Barrier Reef.
00:09:16.640 Now, obviously, the Great Barrier Reef is enormous.
00:09:19.260 It's about, I think it's like the top half of the east side of Australia.
00:09:23.920 It's a huge, and this entire labyrinth of coral, obviously, they didn't know it was there
00:09:29.300 and they have to navigate all of this, but they hit it and the endeavour starts to leak
00:09:35.940 badly.
00:09:36.940 And at that point, it's all hands on deck.
00:09:39.840 And even the gentlemen, who obviously would normally, they're just, they're there to give
00:09:44.880 orders, they didn't do any actual manual labour.
00:09:47.380 But no, all the jackets were off, all the sleeves were up and everyone was involved in pumping
00:09:51.940 the water out of the ship or throwing things overboard to get rid of weight until the tide.
00:10:00.000 Well, they were already at high tide, I think, when it happened.
00:10:04.540 So they were even, it was basically as shallow as shallow gets.
00:10:09.500 And they managed to, but eventually they managed to get enough water beneath the ship and Cook
00:10:14.580 had them row, get out the rowboats and literally row the ship away from the rock and towards land.
00:10:22.180 But it was an enormously tense, this was over the space of about 24 hours.
00:10:27.520 And when you're there, in the middle of nowhere, with one ship, no backup, in uncharted territory,
00:10:33.800 no one's coming to save you.
00:10:35.200 If your ship goes down, you're there for basically life, probably.
00:10:38.640 Yeah, you might as well be marooned forever. 0.54
00:10:41.120 Yeah, if not just drowned, right, if you don't just die there and then.
00:10:45.320 But Cook conducted it in such an orderly and calm, disciplined manner.
00:10:51.960 And he basically said that it was the finest, it was the finest crew he'd ever had in that moment.
00:11:00.420 He couldn't have been more proud of them.
00:11:02.760 So, yeah, he was, it was really something.
00:11:05.100 But that meant that they had to obviously go ashore in Australia and spend weeks repairing the ship.
00:11:12.480 You know, it's touch and go in that moment.
00:11:15.280 Yeah.
00:11:16.240 These moments sort of make a man, don't they?
00:11:18.700 How you react under pressure.
00:11:21.280 And again, Cook was able to pass with aplomb.
00:11:26.040 Yes, absolutely.
00:11:27.320 I thought I'd read from the, my second extract now, because I thought this is Cook's direct thoughts on the Aborigines.
00:11:37.280 And I just thought it was quite an interesting view for him to take when I find it in my makeshift bookmarks.
00:11:44.260 So he says,
00:11:44.620 They live in a tranquility which is not disturbed by the inequality of condition.
00:12:12.320 The earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all the necessaries of life.
00:12:17.980 They covet no magnificent houses, household stuff and others.
00:12:21.820 They live in a warm and fine climate and enjoy a very wholesome air, so that they have very little need of clothing.
00:12:28.740 And this they seem to be fully sensible of, for many of whom we give cloth to.
00:12:34.420 They left it carelessly upon the sea beach and in the woods as a thing they have had no manner of use for.
00:12:41.000 In short, they seem to set no value upon anything we gave them.
00:12:46.060 Nor would they ever part with anything of their own for any one article we could offer them.
00:12:51.120 This, in my opinion, argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessaries of life and that they have no superfluities.
00:12:59.440 So I just found that a remarkable one.
00:13:02.800 There's a hint of Rousseau's noble savage in it, I think, as well, though, which I found an interesting point of view from Cook's perspective.
00:13:11.020 There's some great accounts from Alfred Wallace, who went into the Amazon basin and found, basically, Aboriginal type people.
00:13:21.080 Basically, people living in, quite literally, the Stone Age.
00:13:24.500 Yes.
00:13:25.960 And he thought how wonderful it was, how happy they were to see their kids sort of frolicking in absolute natural freedom and things.
00:13:36.380 I personally don't buy any of that.
00:13:39.400 No.
00:13:40.800 They're backward. 1.00
00:13:41.680 I call them backward. 1.00
00:13:42.580 They've failed.
00:13:43.900 They've failed to progress.
00:13:45.840 I find it remarkable, though, that there's something within that that there is no genuine desire to progress, which I see is just such a fundamental part of human nature.
00:13:54.400 Not in, like, the progressive, you know, political sense, but just to advance things, to push, to discover, to...
00:14:01.300 To have an imagination.
00:14:02.780 Yeah.
00:14:03.460 To have a high enough IQ that you can imagine what might be better in the future and work towards it.
00:14:09.140 I don't think it's great.
00:14:10.020 I don't think it's something...
00:14:11.380 This just may get on my high horse later.
00:14:12.780 I don't think it's wonderful and beautiful that the Aborigines had as much time, essentially, as we did, and built nothing. 1.00
00:14:23.080 And then when you show them machine tools and things, precision-engineered items, they still don't even care.
00:14:29.740 They don't even realise that it's something of value.
00:14:32.640 That's not good.
00:14:34.940 That's terrible, actually.
00:14:36.620 Anyway, I'll probably get some comments about that, saying that I'm xenophobic or whatever, but I don't care.
00:14:44.680 Should be fun.
00:14:45.440 Yeah.
00:14:46.460 So, they sail...
00:14:48.260 Eventually, they get the ship repaired just to go far enough to Indonesia, and they arrive in Batavia, or modern-day Jakarta, which at that point was obviously a colony of the Dutch.
00:15:00.180 And obviously, now that they've finally arrived at another European port, Cook can pass on his notes to be sent away to the Admiralty for his research.
00:15:12.180 But one of the things that he proudly notes in it is we've not lost a single man to scurvy.
00:15:17.460 Right.
00:15:18.100 Because he'd been feeding them...
00:15:19.860 He'd been forcing them to...
00:15:22.120 Yeah, it's that thing.
00:15:23.120 You can be very...
00:15:23.660 Well, I don't like that.
00:15:24.900 I like this.
00:15:25.660 Or this is what I've always had before this on the ship.
00:15:28.140 Why are you making me eat this now?
00:15:29.540 That's not...
00:15:30.260 You know, people get picky and fussy, just like they do today.
00:15:33.240 But Cook was like, well, fine, the officers will eat it, and you'll see that we're eating it, and you'll eat it too, but I'm not having anyone dying of scurvy on this ship.
00:15:43.080 So, he proudly notes that.
00:15:44.620 But the problem is that Batavia is a horrendous, rancid, malaria-ridden place.
00:15:52.900 And in the time there, whilst they have no choice, they have no choice because the ship needs to be repaired after the incident on the Great Barrier Reef.
00:16:02.660 But that means just sitting it out in this disease-ridden cesspit for weeks and weeks, which ends up losing Cook about 30 of his crew.
00:16:12.260 So, just gone, including many of the artist, Sidney Parkinson, who it might be possible to get some of his work up on the actual display on the epoch.
00:16:25.640 But we still have some of his stuff, his drawings of the Maori and of some of the plants that he saw on the voyage and some of that.
00:16:31.820 But, yeah, just taken in the prime of his life by just having to wait in this malaria-ridden dung heap.
00:16:37.760 Yeah, it's interesting. Quite often we get told that when the Europeans visited these new places, we brought diseases with them as though it was deliberate, as though it was a type of biological warfare.
00:16:47.440 Of course it wasn't.
00:16:49.140 What very rarely gets told is the other way round.
00:16:51.540 Yeah, the East and the Americas had diseases that we got and that killed us in droves.
00:16:56.300 Yeah.
00:16:57.320 For example, just cholera.
00:16:58.920 Why was there cholera in 18th and 19th century London?
00:17:02.520 Because we brought it back from India. Thanks for that, India. 1.00
00:17:04.820 And it killed loads of us. Yeah, people from Europe would go to the Spice Islands, the Dutch East Indies, the East Indies, wherever it is.
00:17:14.820 And, yeah, die in droves because we weren't used to the diseases that were out there.
00:17:20.160 Yeah.
00:17:20.420 And the natives had some protection against.
00:17:22.760 So it went both ways.
00:17:24.080 Yeah, for sure.
00:17:25.060 100%.
00:17:25.540 Yeah.
00:17:26.220 Eventually they got the ship working again, but they were working with basically a skeleton crew because most of the crew was either dead or incapacitated.
00:17:34.820 from the illness, but eventually they managed to get themselves towards Cape Town in South Africa.
00:17:40.900 Right.
00:17:41.500 Which I won't go into it in deep detail, but at the time it was interesting.
00:17:45.380 They noted just how beautiful it was.
00:17:48.340 That the Cape Town itself was almost some great paradise that the Europeans had created down there.
00:17:54.620 That it was both magnificent in landscape, but also just, yeah, civilizationally, it was apparently a really wonderful place to be.
00:18:04.680 And then they hopped over to St. Helena, quickly to restock, and then it was back home to Britain and thus ends the first voyage.
00:18:12.020 Right.
00:18:13.300 Yeah.
00:18:13.940 That's another thing.
00:18:14.680 Even in the early 20th century, it was like the Cape was, Cape Town in South Africa was a nice place to go.
00:18:21.400 A nice port of call.
00:18:23.380 Welcome, a nice port of call.
00:18:25.660 Not so much anymore.
00:18:28.260 Yeah.
00:18:28.580 Shame.
00:18:29.560 Yeah.
00:18:30.260 So that last ends the first of the three big expeditions, right?
00:18:34.820 Absolutely, yeah.
00:18:36.420 Which obviously was a buzz back in Britain, you know, that what had been achieved.
00:18:44.220 But what's important to note is that sort of in the high social circles, Cook got very little recognition for it because Banks had been around, done the circuit, met the king and all that.
00:18:57.640 And had really just sold the whole idea to them that it was his expedition.
00:19:01.620 He'd still never really let that go.
00:19:04.000 Right.
00:19:04.200 And so, but it was one of those things.
00:19:07.140 Cook had his journal, as I obviously have, and, you know, he documented it all.
00:19:12.420 And as far as the admiralty were concerned, they were very impressed with his conduct throughout the whole journey.
00:19:18.940 And it was quickly established that there would be a second voyage.
00:19:24.300 Right.
00:19:24.520 And Banks, once again, would go on this great second voyage of his own, and Cook would, of course, be there with him.
00:19:30.440 And it's remarkable, really, because Banks and Cook, despite all that time together, would never go on the voyage ever again.
00:19:40.620 Because Banks had really let his ego get to him by this point and said, and they'd, again, they'd got two whippy cats built up.
00:19:50.300 They would become the HM Resolution and the Adventure.
00:19:57.280 To watch the full video, please become a premium member at LotusEaters.com.
00:20:01.460 Thank you.
00:20:09.120 We'll see you next time.
00:20:10.840 Bye.
00:20:11.620 Bye.
00:20:12.040 Bye.
00:20:13.120 Bye.