In Praise of Twitter, a Continuing Series - the New Reporting

Today, I was able, via Twitter, to get an understanding of a story that I haven’t been able to find a straightforward report on in any newspaper to date. Here it is,  a thread setting out what appear to be the facts about Jeremy Corbyn and his wreath laying activities. I should point out that I have no axe to grind about Corbyn - I simply wanted to know the facts, and the Twitter format supplied them admirably, I thought:

Captain James Cook, an Exhibition at the British Library - Trip to London 3

As a half-Australian, (no, before you ask, I don’t know which half, very droll),  I was excited to go to the exhibition at the British Library about James Cook and his three voyages of discovery*. While other more prominent Australians hold a different view of Cook, I admire him enormously. I have seen the little statue to him in his native village in Yorkshire, I never fail to pay my respects to his statue near Admiralty Arch in London, I was sad when the statue of him in Sydney was graffitied and generally speaking I believe he was an outstanding product of his culture, which is also mine.

Given the culturally self-flagellating times we live in, it is unsurprising that the British Library gives a lot of prominence to the Flanagan kind of perspective cited above. Viewed through this prism, Cook’s achievements must be set against his careless colonialism, blundering into territories occupied by First Peoples whose lives were consequently never the same again. Whether, had he not come, the various First Peoples in question would have been left completely alone to continue their existences untroubled by the outside world is debatable, as is the question of whether that would have been a good thing for them. Whether the First Peoples, if they had to have people coming in from outside, might have had discoverers who ensured they had a better or worse fate subsequently is also impossible to know.

This post does not cover anywhere near all of the items included in the British Library’s exhibition, mounted to mark 250 years since James Cook's first voyage of exploration sailed out from Plymouth, nor many of the issues its curators raised. It simply contains pictures of the exhibits that I found most interesting or attractive - although the thing I found most astounding of all could not be photographed. It was a globe you could swivel, which had marked on it the route of Cook's first round-the-world journey. To think of someone two hundred and fifty years ago venturing into the empty unknown like that is breathtaking - you really do understand, looking at that dotted line snaking round a small effigy of our planet, that what Cook did was, in his time, the equivalent of interplanetary travel today. As the exhibition catalogue says:

"In 1768 the coasts and islands of the Pacific, although inhabited for thousands of years, were largely unknown to Europeans. Cook made three voyages and when the third returned to Britain in 1780 most of the blank spaces on European maps had been filled in."

That is really an astonishing achievement for one sea captain.

For those who know nothing about the man, James Cook was born in 1728 in Marton in Yorkshire, the son of a farm labourer. He learnt his skills as a navigator on ships transporting coal from Newcastle to London. In 1755, he signed on as an able seaman in the Royal Navy and served in the Seven Years War, (a conflict I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of before reading this resume of Cook's life from the British Library). He became skilled at surveying and charting coastlines and in 1759 he helped to chart the St Lawrence River ahead of a pivotal British attack on Quebec.

Here is the man himself, painted in 1776 by John Webber, the official artist on Cook's third voyage around the world:

This is one of Cook's charts of the St Lawrence, mentioned above. I found it fascinating, not because it makes any sense at all to me - I am geographically dyslexic and utterly unable to read maps of any kind - but simply because it was drawn by James Cook himself. He touched it!

In the exhibition are several wonderful drawings by Alexander Buchan, who was the official artist accompanying Cook on his first round-the-world journey, which lasted from 1768-71. This picture depicts a family group around the fire in their hut. The picture was made in 1769 in Tierra del Fuego. Cook wrote in his journal of the Tierra del Fuegan people that they encountered:

"Their huts or wigwams are built something like a beehive and open on one side where they have their fire, they are made of small sticks and cover'd with branches, long grass etc in such a manner that they are neither proof against wind, hail, rain or snow":

Alexander Buchan died of an epileptic fit and was buried at Matavai Bay on 17 April, 1769. My memory is that he was extremely young, although I have neglected to write down how young. His drawings in the exhibition are well worth seeing, for the skill they display and their charm.

This enchanting picture is of an unnamed Maori and Joseph Banks. It is the work of Tupaia, an intriguing historical figure - a Tahitian, who joined the Endeavour at the request of Joseph Banks (the extract from Joseph Banks's diary that is included on the Wikipedia page devoted to Tupaia makes rather uncomfortable reading). This is Tupaia's only known drawing of anything in New Zealand. Tupaia played a crucial role in establishing good relations between Cook's party and Maori in the first weeks in New Zealand. He was able to act as intermediary because the Maori language is a relative of Tahitian.

Sydney Parkinson took over the role of artist for the rest of the voyage during which Alexander Buchan died. There are several lovely pieces of work by him in the exhibition. The one I especially liked was this, made in 1769, showing three Maori painted paddles:

One of the main reasons I was keen to go to the exhibition was in the hope of seeing some work by George Forster, the lead character in AN Wilson's Resolution. I was not disappointed. George Forster was only 17 when he set off with Captain Cook, plus his own father, Johann Forster. George had the role of natural history artist on the journey. These are birds he saw in the Antarctic:

I thought this specimen, carted back from somewhere in the South Seas, labelled meticulously, a 250 year old dead creature, must surely inspire someone to write a new take on Flaubert's Parrot:

So as you can see I was not tempted to get too involved with the geopolitical arguments winding their ways through this fascinating exhibition, happy instead to spend my time browsing the objects and trying, through looking at them, to get some sense of what it may have been like to participate in what was one of humanity's great adventures - the discovery of new worlds.

Whatever may be levelled at him, for me James Cook remains a breathtakingly brave and rather splendid explorer, a master of seamanship and great leader of his men.

Oh and, before I forget, the exhibition also includes the first known drawing of a kangaroo by a European, (I neglected to note down who, so you will have to visit the British Library yourself if you are really keen to find out):

* Voyage 1 1768-71: James Cook's first voyage followed instructions from the Admiralty and the Royal Society to observe the Transit of Venus across the face of the sun at Tahiti in June 1769. Cook set sail on the Endeavour, a 33.3 m vessel. He carried secret orders to search for land in the South Pacific. If he found land he was "to cultivate a friendship and alliance" with its inhabitants, chart its coastline and assess its potential as a source of trying goods.
  Voyage 2 1772-75: The Admiralty's instructions for the second voyage were to sail south from the tip of Africa in search of the "Great Southern Continent". The voyage would disprove the existence of this continent. In the process, Cook would lead the first expedition to cross the Antarctic Circle
   Voyage 3 1776-80 Cook was instructed to explore the North Pacific and search for a sea passage from there to the Atlantic. During the voyage north, Cook was more active in recording the society and culture of the places he visited than he had been on earlier trips when Banks and Johann Forster had performed this task.

Why Read Science Fiction

Continuing my attempts to sort out my photographs, I found this obituary, which I remember reading with a gathering sense that nothing anyone could make up would ever be as strange as the universe itself:

The pictures have somehow come out rather unclear here. The gist is that a man called Donald Lynden Bell has died. He was an astrophysicist who predicted in 1971 that the Milky Way would contain a massive black hole, and this was subsequently proved to be so. He also argued in 1962 that the Milky Way was probably formed through the dynamic collapse of a single large gas cloud 10 billion years ago - this amazing idea still forms the basis of scientific understanding of the Milky Way's origins. Together with a group of scientists who called themselves the Seven Samurai (feeble scientists' joke - they can't be brilliant and exceptionally witty, I guess), in 1987, after observing the movement of a large number of local galaxies towards an area of space in the constellation of Centaurus, he proposed the existence of a Great Attractor, a huge, diffuse region of material some 250 million light years away. In 1994, with a group of another seven scientists, he published an article in Nature which announced the existence of a galaxy of about 300 billion stars close to our own. His final area of interest was studying Mach's principle, which claims a connection exists between local physical laws and the structure of the universe.  I learnt from the obituary what the word quasar is actually made from but, more importantly, I was awed by a reminder of the immensity of time, space and every dimension of existence and thus gained some perspective on my own tiny daily concerns.

Odds and Ends

I am trying to sort out all the photographs I've taken over the last year or so and then somehow never done anything with. Here is a selection of faintly amusing letters to various publications that I decided were worth saving - and therefore, presumably, sharing.

These ones were published by the UK Telegraph:

This one was to the LRB, which explains why, after making quite a funny point, the writer feels the need to ram his political views down the reader's throat:

This was an item from the Telegraph's Court Circular that made me wonder whether the expression 'to up sticks' has its origin in court protocol, and also made me laugh, because the idea of handing back sticks to a monarch in immensely solemn ceremonies seems especially absurd to anyone who has spent much time being handed back sticks by pet dogs:

This cartoon from the New Yorker has its protagonist asking a question I have often wanted to ask in pubs with sports broadcast on screens round the walls:

And while on the subject of dogs, (after a momentary cartoon deviation) I thought this, from the Irish Times, represented the ultimate in modern neuroticism - it's not enough to get in a panic about one's own possible mental decline; one now has to harass the poor old family pet:

They Don’t Make Them Like that Any More - Armin Vámbéry

Today in Bratislava I discovered the existence of Armin Vámbéry, a most intriguing figure. Born Herman Wamberger in Bratislava in 1832, to a very poor family, he ended up a British spy, the author of the first German-Turkish dictionary and the “spiritual father” of the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker.

The first of these pictures shows Vámbéry as a young man. He wrote later about this time in his life, when he was a student at Bratislava (then Pressburg or Pozsony) Evangelical Lyceum, “If that were possible, then every cobble stone in this beautiful city at the blue Danube could tell you about the poverty I experienced here”.

The second picture shows a telegram invitation for Vámbéry to Windsor Castle.

The third and final photograph shows Vámbéry in disguise as his alias Rashid Efendi, a Sunnite dervish. He was the first European with academic education who visited and documented the countries of West and Central Asia (1863-1864) for almost 450 years (that is, the first for almost 450 years, rather than doing it for almost 450 years, which would be truly phenomenal, rather than simply remarkable, which is what Vámbéry was):

Hidden Gems - a Trip to London 2

After Aftermath, I left Tate Britain and went to join my family at the British Library. On the way, I stopped in at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street, Mayfair.

It is easy to miss this church, as it is entered from a little square of parkland, rather than from the street itself. Built in 1844, it is a lovely Neo-Gothic oasis of quietness, highly redemptive after you have experienced ten or fifteen minutes surrounded by crowds on Oxford Street and, as a consequence, find yourself on the brink of hating the entire human race other than yourself.

The altar was designed by Pugin, he of Houses of Parliament repute - I seem to have forgotten to take a photograph of it.

At present the church houses a surprisingly compelling, recently painted photo realist Last Supper. Intriguing though it is, I thought it was in the wrong place, as the church itself is already replete with things to look at.

Mind you some people seem a bit blasé about the beauty of the surroundings - surely the fire hydrant didn't need to be dumped just there in front of an altar? And possibly that cardboard box could be put away somewhere too.

It was moving to be reminded of these two fine human beings - Father Frans van Der Lugt, murdered in Syria on 7 April, 2014 and Father Paolo All'Oglio, disappeared in Syria on 29 July, 2013: