Special to the Reporter
British Explorer James Cook is best known for his discoveries in the South Pacific and Hawaii. However, he is less appreciated for his role in the mapping of the Northwest and the establishment of Euro-American sovereignty over the region.
Cook’s role in these consequences has everything to do with his search for the fabled Northwest Passage, contends historian and former executive director of the Washington State Historical Society, David Nicandri, who will present his research findings at the Redmond Historical Society Saturday Speaker Series at 10:30 a.m. on April 11 at the Old Redmond Schoolhouse Community Center, located at 16600 N.E. 80th St. There is a suggested $5 donation for non-members.
Featuring two dozen slides of historic maps, some more than 300 years old, Nicandri’s talk is based on research done for “Artic Ambitions: Captain Cook and the Northwest Passage,” an exhibit opening in October at the Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma.
On his third great voyage, which coincidentally began in July 1776, Cook was looking for the shortcut from Europe to Asia through Arctic waters that explorers had sought for 200 years.
His voyage changed the orientation of the Northwest Passage quest from the Atlantic to the Pacific and set the stage for later mapping — including the expedition of Lewis and Clark and the railroad survey of Washington’s first territorial governor, Isaac I. Stevens.
“The ‘literature of Cook’ is immense,” he says. “I refer not merely to the 10,000 pages of journal entries and official narratives but the voluminous secondary literature on the subject.”
Nicandri was pushed to go beyond what he saw as mostly derivative research and the traditional interpretation of Cook’s travels.
“There’s room for new perspective,” he says, “but the power of the conventional understanding of the man, especially his third voyage, is daunting.”
“The study of Cook is a logical outgrowth of my recent investigation of Lewis and Clark,” he adds. “I’ve become interested in the creation of ‘meta-narratives’ that attempt to explain the careers of explorers and how they become thickly encrusted with orthodox interpretations.”
To that effect, he says, “I’ve concluded that historians have been more kind to Meriwether Lewis than he deserved to be, and more critical of Cook than appears to be justified from my independent reading of his journals and the official accounts of his voyage as published by the British Admiralty.”
The irony that his research comes just as a Northwest Passage is opening is not lost on Nicandri, who notes the route has new relevance to mankind.
“The long elusive Northwest Passage, which drove the presence in our region of all the formative explorers — Cook, Alexander Mackenzie, Lewis and Clark — is being realized, at last, in our lifetimes,” he says, “as a function of global warming and the diminution of the Arctic ice pack.”
