O Captain, My Captain

In 1992 my wife and I decided to conduct a personal commemoration of the bicentennial of Captain George Vancouver’s monumental survey of the British Columbia coastline. I had expected the province to be awash with celebrations that summer, but it turned out that the bicentenary slipped by almost unnoticed. Not by the Francis family though. Loading our two children into the car, we took the ferry to Nanaimo, drove across Vancouver Island to Gold River, then boarded a coastal freighter for the trip down Muchalat Inlet to our destination, the village site of Yuquot.

Known to the early explorers as Friendly Cove, Yuquot is located in a protected harbour at the southeastern end of Nootka Island. It was once a principal village of the Mowachaht people, who are a branch of the Nuu-chah-nulth nation on Vancouver Island’s west coast. In the mid 1960s, the Mowachaht moved from the site up toward Gold River to be closer to schooling, health care and jobs at the local pulp mill. A few houses and a church remained at Yuquot, where the people returned in the summer.

Yuquot is one of the most historic places in Canada. There is evidence that people were living there at the same time as the Sumerians were inventing writing and the ancient Egyptians were building their pyramids. For hundreds of years the Mowachaht of Yuquot developed their unique whaling culture. Captain James Cook and his crew arrived nearby in 1776, the first European explorers to land on the Pacific coast of Canada. Subsequently, the Spanish established themselves in a fort, claiming exclusive trading rights in the area. This claim sparked the so-called Nootka Sound Incident, which almost led to a European war. One of the objectives of Vancouver’s visit to the coast was to negotiate a resolution to this imperial quarrel. (The other was to settle once and for all whether a Northwest Passage across the top of America actually existed.)

For all these reasons, Yuquot seemed like the perfect place to pay our small homage to the man chiefly responsible for revealing to the world the coast we called our home. Had I first read Madness, Betrayal and the Lash: The Epic Voyage of Captain George Vancouver, Stephen Bown’s new biography of the captain, I might have been less enthusiastic.

George Vancouver comes down to us through history, and through the pages of Bown’s book, as a contradictory character. On the one hand, his survey of the coast is acknowledged to have been thorough and meticulous. During three long summer seasons of work, between 1792 and 1794, he added thousands of kilometres of North American shoreline to the map of the world, at the same time keeping his men and ships safe and healthy. It is much to his credit that he lost only six sailors during the entire voyage. Bown believes his expedition to be “one of a handful of truly incredible voyages in the history of seafaring.”

On the other hand, Vancouver was an inadequate commander. “Haughty, proud and insolent” was the way one officer described him. He was unstable, intemperate and extremely unpopular with his men. He practised the liberal use of corporal punishment; at least 60 of his sailors were flogged during the voyage, some more than once, which was excessive even by the standards of his time. He was given to outbursts of temper and hyperactivity, which intensified as his health deteriorated during the voyage. (Bown seems to agree with other historians who believe Vancouver was suffering from Bright’s disease, which leads to kidney failure.) He was also, for an explorer, remarkably incurious, especially about the indigenous inhabitants of the coast, a failing that extends to his biographer as well. Bown’s cursory treatment of the aboriginal people is the weakest part of his book; the extensive literature on the B.C. First Nations with whom Vancouver came into contact is almost completely ignored.

Still, dislikable as he was, one has to feel sorry for Vancouver. Certainly Bown does. First of all, he was overshadowed by the vastly more popular figure of James Cook. Vancouver served as a young midshipman on two of Cook’s Pacific voyages and he lived, and died, in the shadow of the older mariner. His accomplishments, while notable, are less dramatic. Cook was the first to discover so many things; Vancouver’s task was the close examination of what had already been discovered. Bringing home the news that a navigable western entry to the Northwest Passage did not exist was hardly the kind of “discovery” to get the British public excited.

Second, Vancouver’s timing was awful. He returned from his expedition to an England pre-occupied by the rise of Napoleon and war with France. People were more interested in naval victories than world exploration.

And third, he became embroiled in a comic-opera legal wrangle with a junior officer that left his reputation in tatters. As Bown presents him, Vancouver was a pathetic figure in his final days, bent over by illness, living in fear of his deranged tormenter, lampooned by the press and betrayed by former comrades. One cannot help but feel that his death, which came in 1798, must have brought him relief. There was nothing left for him on this side of the grass but disgrace and ridicule.

Stephen Bown does not claim to have discovered anything new about Vancouver or his expedition to the coast. Madness, Betrayal and the Lash is a brisk romp across familiar territory. Bown reviews the captain’s early career and ably sketches out the diplomatic and cartographic context of the final expedition. Well written and well paced, the book will please readers who like their history presented as old-fashioned narrative. And in the end, despite all of Vancouver’s failings, Bown is more admiring of him than not.

On the other hand, the book will disappoint those who like a more critical approach to the past. Bown does not engage with any of the current debates about the nature of early western encounters with the “New World.” His treatment of the ethnohistory is sparse and he does not consider the ways that Vancouver was culture-bound in his approach to the coast. I am aware that these are academic preoccupations and Bown is writing a popular history. Still, whether academic or popular, a history should involve itself with modern debates about its subject if it does not want to end up simply retelling the same old story in the same old way.

That said, Madness, Betrayal and the Lash is an entertaining and fair-minded presentation of the events of George Vancouver’s life. It may not be a new story, or the whole story, but it is a story that should be remembered.