Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Mr. Cook's Day: Feb. 14, 1835

2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/litimag/imm004

1752-6566

Geoffrey Brock,

Philippine History and Culture

His name will live forever in the remembrance of a people grateful for the services his labors have afforded to mankind in general. —Sir Joseph Banks to Mrs. James Cook, 1784 I have consumed the letters and accounts so often, and have lain so many nights in doldrums of insomnolence, waiting for sleepwinds, that my husband's final voyage has passed through tales and knowledge into the dream-fogged realm of memory, displacing that realm's natives: the Gray boy who kissed me once before consumption took him— vivid since childhood, he's nothing now but gray; my first three children, who as children died; and mother and her harsh admonishments, grown almost kind. Such lives concerned mine once, though some days I believe I burst full-grown from my husband's tricorned head, bearing his memories, which live on in me. The kettle boiling over the fire now is less real, as will be the taste of the tea— the only taste I will today allow. Today as I have done four days each year (one day for Mr. Cook, one for each son that lived to die a man) I shut me in to fast, to feast on them, on memories and dreams: blue waters blurring bluer skies. A mainsail notches both like the thin moon of his fingernail as it traced his routes for me upon this very map, a map whose marks are there because he was. I am the seer and the seen: the island, still undiscovered, aching to be known; the man with one eye closed and a glass trained on feathered hills, chafed shores, stiff palms that wave like wives at navy docks. I never have and never shall leave England, yet I have been, in sleep or waking visions, transported. Often I’m the island girl cutting through breakers in the long canoe between two men, an infant in my arms, my grass skirts flowing in the salty breeze, the floating forest rising up before us— even the shorebirds come to scrutinize these leafless trees, this strange arboreal race of men—where have their women gone? their children? And why so ghostly and so ravenous? They might have just escaped some blighted land, yet they are rich: they have loose second skins fitted with doors from which unearthly treasures emerge at intervals. Until they came we never had felt poor; they taught us that. They taught us many new economies. The only girl on deck, I bear the gaze of their whole race. And Mr. Cook looks too, but does not, cannot, know me. I see him doubly: he's my husband, his child it is that sucks at me, and yet he stands a stranger also, a man of unknown race and godlike ways—surely he is a god. We treat him as though he were, and all his men: they carry fire between their lips and sticks that spit forth bolts of thunder in their hands. We slaughter hundreds of our fattest hogs, a season's worth and more, whatever we have we give them and they take. Our women, too, we give them and they take. Sometimes I’m sitting in a palm's thatched shade with a pale god who's eyes are animal, and he begins by giving me a nail, and as I hold it to the light and bite it his mouth descends on me as he unlaces his stinking breeches, till I see his parts monstrous before me, jeweled with sores and blisters. When I try to shriek no sound comes out, but always there's the cleaver I’d stolen from the ship: I slash awake, my nightclothes wet, as if I’d caught his fever, the chambermaid regarding me with fright. (She soothes me back to sleep with a sweet song— tell me the tales that to me were so dear …) Or else I’m offered for Mr. Cook's delight, but always he rejects the gift of me, kindly though firmly. If I blush with shame it's not for having been so offered, but for having so desired he take me. Once this changed: he took me to his hut, my heart a luffed sail rattling, and we sat on mats as the sea sang outside through trees and wind, sang softly in the lustered dark, and I was young again and looked as once I did but browner, like a nut, and next to mine his leathered skin was pale, so pale! Instead of lying with me then, he questioned me about our lives and ways until we slept. When I awoke, his ship was gone. The bay was utterly bereft. When I awoke again, back to this life, the nearest water was the dirty Thames … I have outlived my husband by fifty years, and all my ill-starred progeny combined. I wait for my own time, which doesn't come, though I at least grow less and less myself and more the islander, trapped in this skin, this sunless world—like Mr. Cook's Omai, who mastered chess and was the toast of London, or Bougainville's Ahutoru, who grew to love even Parisian opera. Natives here are pale as ghosts and never would survive (it seems to me as I observe their ways) without their second skins and thunder sticks— the relics, I surmise, of some exploring god, baubles he gave them in trade for their ancestral paradise. Such gifts, though useful here, may fail to save them.