A Human Endeavor

CHARCO HARBOUR by Godfrey Blunden. 401 pages. Vanguard. $6.95.

For in searching thou shalt finde that the workes of many brave men are buried in oblivion . . . though part of those workes have escaped, the wracke of the rest have perished in the Gulf of time, which hath swallowed the best of many men's endeavours. --17th century Hudson Bay Explorer Luke Foxe

These words serve as the opening to one of Godfrey Blunden's chapters. They might well be the emblem of his book. The lost works that he has sought to retrieve from oblivion are those of the crew of H.M.S. Endeavor, a fat British collier fitted out as a naval vessel and dispatched in 1768 to explore the Pacific.

Blunden's revival technique in this historical novel is remarkably restrained. Even when dealing with the ship's celebrated Captain James Cook, he has refused all concession to the popular taste for heightening drama and homogenizing history. As a consequence, the book may be read only by Blunden's fellow countrymen in Australia--a land so new and short on history that its people tend to brood protectively over what little they have--or by students interested in Cook's voyages. But this would be a pity. Dry and slow as the book often is, Blunden's novel sometimes glows with absorbing incident, rare, loving knowledge, and austere beauty.

Endeavor's mission was part strategy, part science: to observe the astronomical transit of the planet Venus from Tahiti; to map coasts and islands; to collect and classify strange flora and fauna; to search for a naval base for the coming war with the American colonies, Spain and France. Manned and equipped for all this, the little ship resembled the Swiss Family Robinson afloat. It was stuffed to the gunwales with pigs and goats (for eating), cats and parrots (to break the monotony), even a hunting greyhound named Lady who was used to chase down rare specimens of game.

The father figure, however, was far from a permissive Robinson. Cook, a brilliant, self-taught naval officer, navigator and amateur astronomer, customarily kept his Yorkshire temper and sizzling vocabulary in check. But, as revealed by his journals and the accounts of his crew, he emerges as something less than the wise and civilized commander painted by Blunden's countryman Alan Moorehead in The Fatal Impact (TIME, April 8, 1966). More Bligh than blithe, even on festive occasions Cook had a provincial prudishness about prurient talk, though he showed a fondness for admiring native women through his telescope. He insisted that his men wash, but he forbade them to pray (especially when the ship was in danger, as she often was) for fear that prayer would rob them of the will to work.

Expansion of Fact. Nearly everybody aboard who could write seems to have kept some sort of journal, scribbling away in the meridional heat like diary-addicted schoolgirls. Patiently, Blunden has stitched and embroidered it all together--Endeavor's, wreck on the Great Barrier Reef, refitting at Charco Harbour (socalled because the aborigines greeted them by shouting "Charco!"), the escape and return of a seaman named Saunders who lived with the natives for a while and discovered gold. The voyage also seems to have occasioned European man's first sight of the kangaroo (it was taken to be a dog).

Where, then, is the fiction? As a historical novelist and longtime journalist (with TIME from 1951 to 1964), Blunden has always used fiction sparingly. In The Time of the Assassins, a minor classic of public ruthlessness and private pain, he interwove a steely skein of plot with a skilled foreign correspondent's firsthand knowledge of the Nazi invasion of the Ukraine. The record of Cook's long voyage has no such built-in drama. In any case, Blunden has scarcely sought to shape it into the convenient likeness of some neat parable about human endeavor, or lend it psychological unity as the inner ordeal of a man like Cook. Blunden's creation lies, rather, in the expansion of fact. Again and again, small, bare incidents, based on a few words in a journal, are lent knowledgeable shape and light and substance, until each moment of the past, powerfully caught and held in a descriptive imagination, briefly belongs to the present.

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