Anchorage Daily News

Two hundred and thirty years ago Monday, just north of Icy Cape in the northwest corner of Alaska, Capt. James Cook jammed two dinky, sail-powered, wood-hulled, surplus freight ships into the pack ice of the Arctic Ocean. By Aug. 18, 1778, he had managed to push farther up North America's west coast than any European had ever sailed or would again for nearly half a century.

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More remarkable, he got out of there alive, coaxing his battered boats back to Hawaii for repairs.

Cook was the kind of mariner who made the words "English sailor" and "intrepid" synonymous for a couple of centuries.

He was a scientist, diplomat and explorer who traversed tens of thousands of miles, making detailed observations of hitherto uncharted chunks of the globe: the South Pacific, Australia, Hawaii and the seas surrounding Antarctica.

The third of his monumental voyages sent him to the North Pacific to seek a quick and easy route from England to China. In that quest he became the first non-Native to see Prince William Sound, Cook Inlet, Bristol Bay and Norton Sound -- or at least the first to write about them.

The British admiralty equipped him with maps of the region that were largely fiction. The most recent showed an island named "Alaschka" a short way off Siberia and hundreds of miles from a vague blob identified as North America.

In contrast, the charts made by Cook show the shape of the Alaska mainland as we know it today. They depict nearly 50 percent of the coast with great precision and outline much of the remainder with remarkably accurate guesswork.

Yet, in the vast literature about the man and his discoveries, Alaska often gets footnote treatment. To some degree, that's because his list of other accomplishments is so long. (And, arguably, because his discovery of Hawaii -- and dramatic death there -- has received so much attention.)

Anchorage attorney and former Assemblyman James Barnett recently published "Captain Cook in Alaska and the North Pacific" (Todd Communications, $26.95), replete with color maps and illustrations. He hopes it will make it easier for contemporary Alaskans to find out what the great navigator accomplished while in our neighborhood.

We met Barnett at the Captain Cook statue in Resolution Park recently and presented him with a few questions:

Q. Amazon.com lists more than 1,000 books with "Captain Cook" in the title. What does your book add to the literature?

A. Of the many books and articles about Cook, there is scant attention to the North Pacific outside of Hawaii. It is an afterthought, and yet finding the Northwest Passage was the purpose of the third voyage. My book is the first, to my knowledge, to be devoted to Alaska and the North Pacific coast of America, and also provides details about later voyages in the area.

Q. What got you interested in the subject?

A. I was raised in California and was always frustrated about the history books that traced our history to the Pilgrims, rather than the Spaniards, who named all the principal features of the state. When I moved to Alaska, my interest expanded to include other "first contact" situations on the west coast, especially the Russian conquest of Alaska. My hobby has always been early west coast history, before Americans invaded California. Cook is the preeminent explorer of the time and provided a dispassionate, reasonably accurate record of these early contacts. The early record of California is much poorer, mainly because Cook did not go to California.

Q. How long did this take you to research and write?

A. My research really began in 1993, with a trip to Europe spent entirely in libraries with original works. I did this in part to mount the 1994 exhibit at the Anchorage Museum commemorating the 200th anniversary of British Capt. George Vancouver's voyage to Cook Inlet. I also studied Australian and New Zealand sources in 1994, as well as Harvard, University of Washington and the University of California several times since then. I also have a considerable personal library on these topics -- probably 500 volumes. After (publisher) Flip Todd contacted me, it took six months of intense work to write the book.

Q. Cook kept careful records of his encounters with indigenous people. Is it your opinion that his crewmen were the first Europeans to make contact with many Native Alaskan groups?

A. In some cases, yes. He was the first to see the people in Nootka Sound (British Columbia), Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet. The Russians were already in the Aleutians and had essentially enslaved them already, and there is a good discussion about their conquest of Unalaska from Cook's perspective in the book. More important, Cook wrote in detail and dispassionately about his encounters. Expedition artist John Webber drew carefully. These are remarkable contacts that are unlike Russian or Spanish contacts prior to 1778.

Q. When he finally connected with Russian fur hunters in the Aleutians, he couldn't converse with them any more than he could with the Dena'ina of Cook Inlet. The expedition didn't have a single person who could speak Russian. Why not?

A. This was an incredible oversight. It could be explained that the British thought Cook would find the passage to Europe before reaching any Russians, or maybe they did not know how far the Russians penetrated the North Pacific from Kamchatka. The voyage instructions did not necessarily require that Cook go to Siberia (the expedition went there briefly in 1778 and more extensively after Cook's death in 1779). This is actually a major debate with Cook scholars. Some believe a more dismal explanation, i.e. the British had a pretty high view of their competence and could simply have thought carrying a Russian speaker was beneath them.

Q. It appears that he was the first non-Native to see the area of modern-day Anchorage. What did he think of this place?

A. He preceded the Russians here by several years. He was extremely disappointed with Cook Inlet; by the time he reached Fire Island he simply wanted to leave again. Thus he did a poor job exploring while here, really just doing the minimum to assure his officers there was no passage to Europe here. Nonetheless, while off Kodiak and a bit more dispassionate, he said some kind things about the area that I quoted. Vancouver criticized Cook for his errors in exploring Cook Inlet, which I also discuss.

Q. One of the most astonishing things on Cook's map, reprinted in your book, is the rough delineation of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, several hundred miles that he never actually saw. How did he manage that?

A. Cook's cartographer was (William) Bligh, among others. The expedition cartographers were used to guessing the outline of the shore when they did not see it; for example, look at the map for the area from Oregon to Sitka, which they saw only briefly through a series of storms. Cook's voyage was a "running survey" not intent on providing exact boundaries. I would credit the cartographers more than Cook on this one.

Q. The modern map inside the cover flap of the book suggests that he made it north of Point Barrow, but the official highest latitude recorded was 70 degrees, 44 minutes, south of Barrow.

A. Flip and I were a bit disappointed with the inside map. The artist took some liberties, especially with the track of the voyage, but it was too late to fix before publication. You caught one of the more troublesome parts of the map, as Cook did not reach the latitude of Barrow.

Q. The names he put on the places he passed remain in use: Bristol Bay, Norton Sound, Edgecumbe, Augustine, Turnagain. But some names were added or changed after his death. Why?

A. Vancouver actually had more to do with naming features along the coast than anyone, and he frequently incorporated Cook's names on his charts out of respect. There were two names of note that were changed after Cook left. He called Hawaii "the Sandwich Islands" and Prince William Sound "Sandwich Sound." John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, was lord of the admiralty yet a humble man and insisted that those places not be named for him. The admiralty, i.e. probably Sandwich himself, renamed them (though his family name remains today on Montague Island). Cook Inlet was named after Cook by the admiralty following his death.

Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.

JIM BARNETT will sign copies of his book "Captain Cook in Alaska and the North Pacific" and give a short Power Point presentation on the following schedule:

• 1-4 p.m. today, Borders Books and Music

• 6-8 p.m. Monday, Barnes & Noble

• 7-9 p.m. Tuesday, Title Wave Books (Midtown)

• 7-9 p.m. Oct. 1, Anchorage Museum bookstore

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