SAM NEILL: I'm here in western Canada
because Cook was here, on his third voyage.
History for me is more than just the past.
It lives with us in the present.
History makes us what we are.
Cook wanted to make history, and he did,
but perhaps not as he intended.
He's now part of the history of the Pacific,
and I'm following in his wake.
This is as far as I could possibly be away from New Zealand, from home,
and still be on the Pacific,
and yet it's strangely familiar.
It's green. It's beautiful.
And it's raining.
Cook's third, fateful voyage is perhaps the most puzzling of all,
ambitious and successful, but so many things would go wrong.
By 1776, after two voyages around the Pacific,
Cook had risen to the rank of captain,
was a Fellow of the Royal Society,
and was enjoying some measure of fame and success.
As soon as Cook got wind
of a proposed third exploratory voyage to the Pacific,
he immediately put his hand up,
turning his back on retirement and domestic bliss.
The idea of someone else taking charge of such an expedition
would have been an anathema to him.
The Pacific was his.
He had unfinished business in the north,
a secret mission, to discover the fabled North-West Passage.
A short cut from the West to the riches of the East,
an idea that obsessed 18th-century Europe.
£20,000, an extraordinary sum in those days, was on offer
for whoever discovered the route -
a glittering prize indeed.
After the Cape of Good Hope, Cook was instructed
to fix the position of these islands in the Southern Ocean,
before proceeding directly to Tahiti for supplies,
but instead, he turned his ship towards Van Diemen's Land -
present-day Tasmania.
So, why did Cook call in to Tasmania?
For grass.
The Resolution was absolutely packed with animals,
sheep, cows, horses, pigs, goats, assorted poultry,
donated by, of all people, King George III.
What is more, Cook had added to his menagerie
with more sheep and cattle at the Cape of Good Hope.
So, by the time they'd crossed the Indian Ocean after four weeks,
his floating Noah's ark was badly in need of sustenance,
and then, as now, Tasmania was a green port of call.
But the detour put Cook behind an already ambitious schedule,
to be exploring for the North-West Passage by August,
the northern summer.
It was now January, and there was a very long journey ahead.
So, what was Cook thinking, adding more mouths to feed?
But now it was on to New Zealand,
arguably his favourite place in the Pacific.
Cook arrived on 12 February, 1777.
I'm at Te Papa, which is New Zealand's national museum,
and there's a real treasure here.
It's a portrait of Cook...
..by Webber himself, who was the official painter on the third voyage.
It's one of four that Webber made, but this is particularly precious
because we know that this belonged to Elizabeth Cook,
James Cook's wife.
Poor Elizabeth Cook.
Abandoned for years on end by an absentee husband,
and if he wasn't in the dogbox at home,
he's maybe in the equivalent here.
The basement.
Cook's expeditions, like others of the time,
were in part motivated by Enlightenment thinking,
to expand knowledge of the world through discovery.
But there are conflicting attitudes towards Cook.
And for many Pacific islanders, Cook represents nothing more than, quote,
"an uninvited thieving invader".
One of the most vocal activists is here in New Zealand, Tina Ngata.
What do you think about Cook?
I think that Cook was very much a man of his time.
A man of his time, yeah.
But, you know, I... I don't think he was that spectacularly different
to other people who were involved in what's called the Age of Discovery,
but from an indigenous perspective,
it's probably known better as the Age of Genocide.
This is not a historical event to us.
This is something that's still happening to us every day.
The mentality, the entitlement,
the dispossession that we face and are still fighting every day
is really rooted in the Discovery doctrine
that said that any lands that you come across
that are not inhabited by Christians
are able to be discovered and claimed.
What's the future?
Well, I'm not going to give up any time soon.
You consider where we've come from,
we've come... we've... we've progressed.
You know, we're in a space now where we are talking about co-governance,
and you would never have been able to have that discussion
10 or 20 years ago.
When... when I see what strides have been made in my lifetime...
Mmm. But that's relative to where we've come from. (LAUGHS)
I think, you know, we... we still have a long way to go.
Queen Charlotte Sound, in the South Island,
was Cook's favourite New Zealand anchorage.
And it's also important to me.
As a child, my family came here for their first New Zealand holiday.
And this is the actual boat that we came on.
It did the mail run every day.
And...
..I loved it so much that when I got home,
I built a model of it.
Wasn't a very good model. No-one else knew what it was.
And here we are, after all these years.
We're reunited.
Previously, Cook used the sounds as a sanctuary, restocking his ships,
but this time, another reason was bringing him back.
He wanted firsthand answers to a catastrophic event
that happened without him during the second voyage.
And I'm heading to the site of the trouble
to find out what went so wrong.
The background is this.
During the second voyage, Cook's ships had been separated in a storm.
He was exploring the Southern Ocean
while his sister ship retreated to Queen Charlotte Sound,
home to a Maori chief named Kahura.
While the second ship was here,
under the hapless command of Tobias Furneaux,
10 men had been captured, killed, cooked and eaten
by the local Maori, under chief Kahura.
The Maori practice of cannibalism
had been a source of morbid curiosity for the English
ever since Cook's first visit to New Zealand.
Now they were entangled in the subject
and the crew expected Cook to take action and avenge the fallen men.
And then he does something completely unexpected -
absolutely nothing.
Not only that, he invites Kahura on board the Resolution,
and two days later, at Kahura's request,
Webber paints his portrait, and here it is.
Everyone, bar Cook, is baffled.
For husband and wife Peter and Takutai Beech,
it's a compelling story.
Peter tells me that Furneaux's sailors fouled a trade
when they took a Maori hatchet without exchanging
anything in return.
A violent altercation followed.
So Cook believes the story
and he's... he's had the same trouble with the same men in Tahiti,
so... it... it rings true to him.
Yes.
Yeah, he gave Maori the benefit of the doubt,
which goes to show what an intuitive guy that he was.
An enlightened decision? Yeah,
because he was renowned for his... his humanity.
But Maori say that if the shoe had been on the other foot,
they would have most definitely taken revenge,
and although I'm sure they were happy that he didn't,
they lost a degree of respect for him.
Can I ask you, I think there's also some suggestion...
..that...
..there was interference with the women there at the same time.
What do you think Cook should have done?
(SIGHS) It was good that he didn't do anything.
So Cook loses respect from his men. He loses respect from Maori.
So that was a win-win for both sides.
Yeah. That's right. (ALL LAUGH)
So it wasn't a loss, really. No.
(CAMERA CLICKS)
For Cook's crew, however, the whole affair WAS a loss.
They were furious the captain didn't punish Maori
for the deaths of Furneaux's sailors,
and they were not going to let him off easily.
It was always a delicate balance
keeping command of some 200 men across two ships.
The crew now mocked Cook's authority
and refused to have anything to do with the local Maori,
but I need to know more about this story.
After all, Kahura's descendants have had to live
with the taint of their ancestors being labelled cannibals
for over two centuries.
And the gross misunderstandings of kaitangata
is something they want to set right.
So I've come to the very spot where Furneaux's men met their end
to hear their side of the story.
But my understanding is that kaitangata
is... is the ingesting your enemies.
Is that... is that true?
Definitely, the... the notion of kaitangata,
it is to balance... a wrongdoing,
a very sacred ritual state,
so it could only be carried out by certain people.
You know, it wasn't an everyday occurrence.
MAN: We know what happened here on the beach,
but we shouldn't try and caricature them and say,
"Well, they were savages," because...
..it was a disciplined society,
and it was a matter of...
Life or death. Life or death.
Survival. Yeah. Yep.
Mmm. So were these blokes eaten, do you think?
These 10 men?
Our people are giving and friendly and beautiful,
but don't cross the line.
They were... they were there to defend their land.
They would have been considered an enemy.
It was like, it was a war, you know, and in... and in types of war,
there's traditions that are followed.
You know, obviously, they were killed here.
This was a cultural process, part of our natural law.
Yeah.
Cook's lack of action probably averted further violence,
but he was now on a trajectory of disharmony with his crew.
He was certainly applying the lash more frequently than before,
and later, when meat was stolen from their dwindling supply,
Cook harshly cut the rations in order to flush out the thief.
In response, the crew bonded together, refusing to eat at all,
which Cook declared as mutinous.
And mutual resentments grew.
And they still had a long way to go.
As they sailed north from New Zealand, progress was slow.
Winds were unfavourable,
and it was now even more apparent that they were well behind schedule,
so Cook announced something it's possible he'd planned all along.
They will delay the push to the North-West Passage
till the following summer.
This would mean another nine months in beguiling Polynesia,
a prospect not unwelcome to the crew.
On 24 April, 1777, Cook returned
to one of his bittersweet loves of the Pacific -
the Friendly Isles, Tonga.
This is the royal palace of the Kingdom of Tonga.
Cook attended a version of one of these.
And at these ceremonies, as best I understand it,
gifts were presented
to the powerful king at the very centre of this empire,
the Tu'i Tonga.
(CHANTING)
(SHOUTS)
(ALL SHOUT AND CHANT)
This is a very sacred and special ceremony,
and I'm very privileged to be allowed to observe it.
(SHOUTS) (MAN SHOUTS)
Cook wasn't content to observe it,
he insisted on joining in the ceremony,
much to the objection of his hosts.
Cook took off his shirt, took off his wig and let his hair flow.
His fellow officers, who were looking on, were horrified by this.
This was clearly evidence that Cook had simply gone troppo.
(MAN SHOUTS)
Tonga.
Its beauty overwhelmed him, but one thing drove him mad -
the incessant thieving.
Cook responded with increasingly severe punishments,
first flogging islanders, then cutting off their ears,
and finally cutting one man's arms to the bone.
There is a great story about this visit to the Friendly Isles.
The chiefs had laid a plan to murder Cook and his officers
and steal their guns.
While they argued about who would do the dastardly deed,
as luck would have it, the oblivious Cook
just happened to weigh anchor and sail away,
leaving the would-be assassins bickering on the beach.
Friendly Isles indeed.
From Tonga, Cook made his way to Tahiti.
(LAUGHS)
Perhaps hoping to appease his crew
after the New Zealand cannibal incident,
Cook divulged the secret mission of the North-West Passage
and promised them a share of the reward money
if they were successful finding a way through the ice.
The secret objective had come as a surprise to the crew.
(ALL LAUGH)
The stated reason for the voyage
was to return a Tahitian called Mai to his homeland.
Mai, or Omai, as he was sometimes known,
joined the second voyage and was taken back to England.
Cook didn't really care for him much initially.
He called him "a downright blackguard".
Nevertheless, during his two years in England,
because of his good looks and his charm,
he became the toast of London society.
(MEN LAUGH)
This picture is Omai, by Hodges,
and he looks just like my friend Victor.
(MEN LAUGH)
No, no, no. Fantastic.
Yeah.
Nah. Yeah.
As with so much of Cook's third voyage,
Omai's story is one of frustration.
The adulation he'd enjoyed in England
meant very little to locals on his return.
Omai's enemies stole his belongings and he was, sadly, soon forgotten.
But for decades, Omai was remembered in England,
with a play in his name,
and with this painting, by the famous portrait artist Joshua Reynolds.
Today, Pacific Island artist Michel Tuffery
has reimagined Omai's bitterness at not fitting in either world.
(SPEAKS FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
Deux.
Cook was also straddling two worlds.
He'd fallen in love with the Pacific,
but he still struggled with the nuances of its culture.
Tuffery has painted a series depicting Cook in the Pacific.
Cook here seems a changed man, and these works hint at Cook's moods,
which were becoming increasingly erratic.
10 men were killed in New Zealand and Cook did nothing,
but when one of his goats was stolen in Tahiti, he lost his mind.
He burnt a village, destroyed all the war canoes and even killed a man.
The goat was duly returned.
Cook was later remorseful, but a little too late,
and a sign of more violence to come.
Cook wrote that the unfortunate affair
"could not be more regretted on the part of the natives
"than it was on mine".
Apart from the dead man, of course, who was clearly beyond regrets.
The goat incident aside, Cook was enjoying himself,
exploring the islands, accepting Tahitian hospitality,
and horoi I te, bathing nightly in balmy waters.
But, mindful of their next destination,
the bleak regions of the Arctic,
some of his crew deserted,
and Cook resorted again to hostage-taking to get them back.
He lured high-ranking islanders to his ship and held them prisoner,
using them as powerful leverage until the runaways were returned.
Such effrontery to the local chiefs could not go unpunished,
and the locals schemed a hostage plan of their own to kidnap Cook
while at his nightly bathing spot.
But, as luck would have it, the Tahitian lover of one of the crew
alerted the English to the plot
and Cook's capture was foiled.
The deserters were handed over and, of course, flogged.
Cook was lucky once again.
But how much longer would his luck hold?
In December 1777, Cook left the good weather of the tropics behind.
While progress was satisfactory, his ship was another matter.
The Resolution was leaking like a sieve.
Before leaving London, it had been overhauled, or so they thought,
but rotten timbers and substandard caulking
were part of the "barbarous neglect" of the shonky refit.
Cook was incensed.
In the haste of departure,
the usually exacting captain hadn't been across the work.
And now, after a massive 3-month trip across the Pacific
and a further two weeks of storms along the north-west coast of Oregon,
the ship and the crew were desperate for respite.
Happily, relief was soon at hand in present-day Canada.
Cook found himself in this beautiful sound,
and it had everything that he needed.
It had timber, it had shelter, and, like everywhere, it had people.
What sort of people they were remained to be seen.
First contact was always a very tense moment.
Neither side would know if they were dealing with friend or foe,
particularly somewhere like this,
where there was no common language at all.
This was not Polynesia.
Hopefully, something would break the ice,
and something very magical happened here.
The Resolution was surrounded by canoes,
fierce-looking men on board wearing masks, rattling weapons.
These men then started to sing or chant,
and the people on the Resolution were rather taken by this.
One of the crew described it as "a sound not unpleasant".
Cook decides to return the favour.
He asks the fife and the drums to play something,
perhaps a hornpipe.
(HORNPIPE PLAYS)
The First Nations people are very taken by this
and they return with another song.
(CHANTING AND DRUMMING)
And then Cook...
..provides a finale.
He brings on, of all things, the French horns.
(FRENCH HORNS PLAY)
Imagine those sounds
in this silent place.
There's a Chinese proverb, "Every picture is worth 10,000 words."
It was therefore of paramount importance
that expeditions carried an artist,
to make a record for scientific purposes,
but also to convey to the public
the wonders of a wider world.
On this voyage, it was John Webber.
His pictures offer an extraordinary glimpse
of pre-Western contact in North America,
recording the very moment when life would change forever.
This is Resolution Cove.
And this is Webber's famous sketch.
You realise there's something very different.
There must have been a cacophony of noise.
At any one time, there were
anything up to 30 canoes circling around the ships.
People were shouting at each other.
There's a lot of noise from the beach.
But now it is just eerie silence,
only the ghosts of the once-thriving indigenous population,
the Mowachaht, who so suffered from impact.
A century after Cook,
around 90% of the Mowachaht people were gone,
wiped out by introduced diseases.
This bay, across from Cook's anchorage,
was the largest summer fishing camp of the Mowachaht.
It was once crowded with people.
Today, one man and his family remain on their traditional land.
Living self-sufficiently, theirs is a story of stubborn survival.
OK.
Jesus.
Good morning. Good morning.
I'm Sam. My name is Ghoo-Noom-Tuuk-Tomlth.
Beautiful. Sam's a bit... kind of boring compared to that.
Yeah. Yeah. (LAUGHS)
What does it mean? It means 'Spirit of the Wolf'.
'Spirit of the Wolf'. Let's go to the mainland.
Let's go. Let's go to the beach.
I'll jump on here.
(ENGINE STARTS) Hang on, Sam.
Heading for the beach with the Spirit of the Wolf.
(LAUGHS)
Thanks for coming to meet me. Oh, you're quite welcome.
(SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE)
That's beautiful.
300 years ago, there would have been how many houses here?
Here at that time was 300 people here.
Now there's one house left.
Yes. And you're in it.
Yes.
(BOTH LAUGH)
Yes. So it's great you're still here.
Why did you stay?
Yeah.
Do you ever feel lonely here?
No, I... I feel good here.
Our ancestors are taking care of us here, keeping us alive here.
They're everywhere. Everywhere. Yeah.
(SPEAKS FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
It means, "I'm right at home, surrounded by wealth."
The fish in the ocean, the deer, the bear, the elk.
That is wealth. Yes.
That's true wealth. Yeah. Yes.
You were whalers, weren't you? Yes.
Haa.
Is that the word for 'whale'? 'Haa' means 'yes'.
OK.
(BOTH LAUGH)
I want to try and get that name right, Ray. Can you help me?
Yes, I can. Come on.
(LAUGHS) Get a spare tongue. No.
Ghoo-Noom-Tuuk-Tomlth.
Koom-Toom... Koom-Toom... No.
Ghoo-Noom... Ghoo-Noom...
..Noom...
..Tuuk... ..Tuuk...
..Tomlth. ..Tomlth.
Yes. Ghoo-Noom-Tuuk-Tomlth.
Ghoo-Noom-Tuuk-Toklth.
No. Tomlth.
Ghoo-Noom-Tum-Tuuk...
Tuuk. Tum-Tuuk...
Tomlth.
(BOTH LAUGH)
Can I just call you Ray? Just call me Ray.
OK. So listen. Yes?
Cook must have really liked being here,
he must have liked the people, to call it Friendly Cove.
Yeah. They were... they're good traders.
Yes.
The Mowachaht turn out to be
the canniest traders that Cook has met yet.
He needs grass for all the livestock on board.
So he lands here at Yuquot, and they start cutting grass,
and to his complete surprise, someone comes up and makes it clear
that Cook needs to pay for the grass, which he does.
Next thing you know, there's about a dozen blokes
all asking for payment for different bits of grass.
It's as if, Cook thinks, every blade of grass has a different owner.
When Cook came here, it was packed with long houses,
the traditional communal living spaces,
but today, almost nothing of this remains.
This is one of the many reasons that Webber's drawings are so precious.
And Webber found, just like the fee for Cook's grass,
he also had to pay up for what he wanted to sketch.
After dispensing with all the metal buttons off his coat,
he produced this,
an image depicting the drying racks for salmon and sardines
and the Mowachaht cooking, flanked by their carved ancestral totem poles.
Webber also sketched a sea otter,
an animal that would become greatly prized.
I've been watching a seal play in front of me,
but I've been looking for otters.
Cook's men found themselves trading for otter pelts when they were here,
and they were astonished when they got back
at the astronomical prices they could get for these otter pelts.
The sea otter has the densest fur of any other mammal on the planet.
And this led to a sort of gold rush soon after Cook.
There were pelt wars between the British and the Americans,
and it had a devastating effect...
..and led to the near extinction of the sea otter.
But they're back now, and I'm hoping I'll see some.
Western Canada is famed for its forests,
just what the British needed - good timber for repairs.
These immense trees are actually second growth.
The ones that Cook wanted would have been three times that size.
It took a whole week to hand-saw the two huge conifers they used.
While ship maintenance was underway, Cook returned to what he loved most.
He took a small boat and a few men
to chart the little inlets all around Nootka Island.
The tensions between captain and crew immediately lifted.
One midshipman wrote, "Cook had become one of the men again."
I'm not that surprised.
A break from shipboard life and the burden of command
must have come as a welcome relief.
In addition, it's impossible not to feel your spirits lighten
in this supremely beautiful place...
..even if it's still raining.
Cook's legacy in Nootka Sound was some exquisite charts,
a legacy that would neither benefit
the Mowachaht, nor the sea otters.
I'm pleased to say I DID spot one otter before I left.
And thanks be for that.
In April 1778, a month after first arriving in Nootka,
the ship sailed out and straight into a week-long storm.
(THUNDER RUMBLES)
The sour mood of the captain had returned.
The same midshipman noted Cook "again became the despot".
It didn't bode well in the search for the North-West Passage.
1778.
Two British ships, Resolution and Discovery,
have traversed the Pacific to the remote north-west.
This is as far psychologically and geographically from Polynesia
as one can imagine.
They were now close to the 65-degree latitude
and Cook was now under instructions
to look for the entrance for the supposed North-West Passage.
If he found it, a new fast trade route would open
and untold wealth would follow.
Somewhere along the massive North American coast,
there had to be a gap that would lead to the passage.
At their first attempt at a plausible entry,
they were met by failure and aggression from the local people.
But then a second inlet presented itself.
And they found themselves travelling up this body of water here.
This - today - is now Anchorage, in Alaska.
John Gore, who was Cook's second in command,
was optimistic that this would be the one,
Cook, not so much,
and eventually, Cook realised
that with the decreasing salinity of the water
and the fact that the mountains were closing in
that this was not the North-West Passage at all,
but Gore decided that he would prevail upon Cook
to explore for another 10 days, 10 valuable summer days,
and Cook agreed.
Puzzling as to why Cook would do that.
Perhaps he was just placating his man.
But this was, of course, a dead end.
Well, it's five degrees below. It's snowing.
I'm looking for something called Resolution Park,
because we are assured that the best views possible are from here.
Well, to be perfectly honest,
I'm a little underwhelmed by the view today, but...
..maybe this plaque, or whatever it is, could...
..help us...
..see what should be there.
Well...
..Mount McKinley... (LAUGHS)
..the highest mountain in North America,
is over there.
There's a live volcano,
Mount Spurr, there,
and the wonderful Mount Susitna
is right in front of us,
but you're just gonna have to take my word for it.
(LAUGHS)
Well, it says "Captain James Cook".
But he is completely unrecognisable. (LAUGHS)
And with everything covered in snow, I'm not even sure where I am anymore.
Luckily, there's always a parking inspector.
Rich, listen. I'm... I'm... I'm so baffled.
Why is there a statue of Captain Cook here?
Well, there's a statue here because
he sailed up the inlet
with his longboats,
found out he couldn't get through, so he left.
So it was kind of a disappointment? I would think so.
Everything in his journals indicated that he was...
..he was disappointed, yes.
And yet here's a statue.
So there must have been some kind of achievement here.
Well, of course, he's an adventurer. He TRIED to do it.
That's the spirit of Alaska.
So he's... he's a hero here.
A genuine hero? Yes.
(BOTH LAUGH)
Cook's 10 days in the inlet
may not have led to the discovery of the North-West Passage,
but it did afford the opportunity for trade.
Locals paddle out to the ship in kayaks,
bartering fish and greens for metal.
They were the Dena'ina people, who still live in the Anchorage region.
Tell me a little bit about the Dena'ina people.
So the Dena'ina people are a matrilineal clan system.
And when I was working as a... a guide years ago,
a visitor told me, he said, "You know, that makes a lot of sense."
I said, "Oh, really? It makes a lot of sense? How come?"
He said, "Well...
"you always know who your mother is, but your father's questionable."
(LAUGHS)
We're coming in to the cemetery here.
So, Aaron, what... what do you make of Cook?
The Dena'ina in me sort of...
..laments a little bit about his...
..his... his arrival, but, see,
it's important to remember that it's not so much Cook in and of himself,
because he was here less than a week.
It's more what came after Cook,
first the... the Russians, hunting for sea otters in those days.
Cook doesn't land here for some reason, but he sends people ashore...
Yes. ..to take sovereignty...
Correct. That is correct. ..of this land.
So, he plants the flag, but he also, more importantly,
perhaps, buries a jar of coins,
and they claim dominion for the British Crown.
It didn't mean anything to us.
You know, what's interesting is I have no doubt
that five minutes after they took off, we went and dug it up.
But... (LAUGHS)
..when the Russians came in in the 1790s,
they completely ignored the... the... the English Crown claim.
And so it didn't... it didn't do anything.
And so, as far as English sovereignty,
it was a failure.
Failure - not something Cook wanted to contemplate.
Cook is being tested as never before. He's late in the season.
Conditions are hard and getting worse.
And for the captain and his crew, this is brutally frustrating.
Success and fortune are eluding all their efforts.
You wonder if Cook in his darkest moments was thinking,
"Perhaps my return to the Pacific was a terrible mistake."
The ships were now forced to follow the coastline west
until they could cut through a gap to the north.
Cook marvelled at the extraordinary ingenuity
of the watercraft and clothing in this part of the Pacific,
but he was not to know that, like the Polynesians in the south,
these northern Pacific peoples were also master mariners,
traversing vast tracts of ocean for hunting and trade.
I'm in the Museum of the Aleutians, probably the best place to be today,
'cause it's actually snowing outside,
and I'm completely...
..knocked out by the beauty of the artefacts here,
including this parka...
..which is not only a completely beautiful piece of clothing,
it's also entirely practical.
It's made, of all things, from seal gut,
which before the invention of Gore-Tex
was the most waterproof thing you could actually wear on the planet
that still breathed.
And it just makes me think perhaps the greatest achievement in humankind
are these small unsung civilisations,
with very little imprint.
They lived sustainably.
And if you measure success in a society
by how much leisure time you have,
these people only had to work for 15 hours a week,
and the rest of the time, they could make beautiful things.
They could make art.
Cook's time was running short, but finally, he found a way
through the Aleutian Islands
and was heading towards the Arctic Circle, on the Bering Sea.
It's a tough region, a body of water that freezes in the winter.
When Cook was here, he battled unpredictable winds
and frequent summer fog,
conditions familiar to Phil Pryzmont,
a commercial sea captain who works through all seasons.
So you live on one end of the Pacific. I'm on the other.
Mm-hm. It's a third of the planet.
And it sustains you and it sustains me in a... in a big way.
It's kind of important that we consider...
..how much we're looking after this place.
PHIL: Well, I've been a commercial fisherman a long time.
It's my entire life.
I've... I've put everything I've had into it for years and years.
It's... it's... the health of the ecology,
the health of the biomass that I fish for
is the most important thing for me.
OK.
How am I doing, Phil? Doing alright.
Today, Phil and I are looking
for the much sought after Alaskan king crab.
(SIGHS)
So, he was blown from here
right across to Siberia...
OK. ..with that prevailing wind.
Should Cook have turned back
or should he have pressed on and tried to find a North-West Passage?
Oh, I would have kept going.
Well, that's easy for Phil to say.
His fishing boat is modern, well-equipped and fast.
Whoa!
And there's no crab in it.
How big is your engine?
I've got a 3306 Cat 215-horse turbocharge.
That is a massive engine. That's gonna get you out of trouble.
Compared to what he's got, for sure. Yeah.
He's just got a few ragged, hungry Englishmen,
a bit of canvas and some rotten old...
..spars and masts.
Mm-hm.
It's almost three years at sea,
with the same crew.
And they're bored out of their minds.
Can you imagine what that's like? No.
My guys would have strangled each other.
Yeah.
I've swum in the Pacific,
I've surfed, sailed, I've flown
across the Pacific, but today,
I am skiing across the Pacific.
This is a first.
Oh...
(GROANS)
(LAUGHS)
Phil has steel boats, he has radar,
and his longest voyage would be at most two months,
and even then, his crew are ready to snap.
Cook would now need every bit of leadership he could muster
as he crossed out of the Bering Sea into the Arctic Ocean.
Oh!
His men were not built for the cold,
and the challenge of finding the North-West Passage
would test each and every one,
including Cook.
I think I'm getting the hang of this.
But retreat was not in Cook's vocabulary.
Olympic standard.
He would finish the task or die trying.
Oh, God.