Skip to main content

We're not afraid to die

 I get a lot of queries from students as well as teachers about Gordon Cook's essay prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's class 11 English course. So I thought of presenting certain salient points here. [I'm thus saving myself from having to answer too many people.]

Gordon Cook was replicating the second voyage made by Captain James Cook from 1772 to 1775. Gordon Cook is not related directly to James Cook. James Cook was married but none of his children married and none of them had children of their own. So there are no direct descendants of Captain James Cook. 

James Cook undertook three voyages all of which started from Plymouth, the same starting point of Gordon Cook too. But only the second one was for circumnavigating the globe. The missions of the other two were different. Gordon Cook intended to go round the world too in a ship similar to the one used by his role model. 

Resolution and Adventure, a painting by William Hodges

Strictly speaking, the Resolution did not start voyage from Plymouth but a small river town called Sheerness. It carried 118 people including the 20 men who had sailed earlier on Cook's first voyage. At Plymouth, it was joined by another ship called Adventure. Both the ships together set sail from Plymouth on their mission on 13 July 1772. 

Gordon and family in their ship in 1976

James Cook's 3 Voyages: Green indicates 2nd

James Cook's second voyage was commissioned by the British government with the mission of not only going round the world but also determining whether there was a great landmass (Terra Australis) lying further south of Australia. That's why you will find the route taking too many circles near Australia. 

Ile Amsterdam

Ile Amsterdam and the neighbouring Île Saint-Paul were first claimed by France in June 1843. Today they are French scientific bases just as when Gordon Cook and family sought asylum there in Jan 1977. 

What happened to the Cook family after this? The textbook tells us that some of them were badly injured and needed much medical assistance. For example, Suzanne - the 7-year-old daughter - required 6 minor surgeries to remove a recurring blood clot in her head. 
Gordon receiving Lady Swathling Award

Gordon Cook was awarded the prestigious Lady Swathling trophy by the Shipwrecked Mariner's Society for that year's 'most outstanding act of seamanship and navigation that saved the lives of everyone on board.' But Gordon never turned up to receive the award until 33 years later. The Wavewalker was repaired in Australia and the voyage that was to last three years went on for 16 years. Mary who was a teacher by profession taught Jon and Sue in the ship. Later on Sue and Jon went on to take university degrees through distance education systems. But Gordon Cook was of the opinion that he had saved them from the British education system. 

After the longer-than-planned voyage, Gordon established a bookshop in Cambridge, England, in 1993. Jonathan went on to complete 4 Masters while Suzanne did PhD in zoology. In 2013, Gordon at the age of 74 was bitten by the travel bug again and undertook another round-the-world voyage, alone this time since Mary was not in the mood to join him. But she did join him at some places on his route for a few weeks. 

I haven't been able to find out more about Gordon and his family. Anyone who has more information is requested to leave it in the comments space below. It will be your gift to a lot of students and teachers. 



Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanJuly 27, 2021 at 4:48 PM

    Hari OM
    Most interesting! I was vaguely aware of this part of recent history, but had not known of the 2nd voyage undertaking. The most recent report I could find was from May 2019 in The Telegraph with Cook still out on the waters... so one wonders if he still out there somewhere?!! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 28, 2021 at 7:35 AM

      That Telegraph article is one that I wanted to read but it keeps demanding subscription. Thanks for providing the information which i had suspected that Cook is still there somewhere in the seas.

      Delete
    2. Yamini MacLeanJuly 28, 2021 at 9:29 PM

      Hari OM
      Paywalls are tiresome - just met same with your link in next post to the article on the subject. Still - your post was sufficient! Yxx

      Delete
  2. AnonymousApril 9, 2023 at 7:59 PM

    The daughter - Sue - has published her own account of the voyage in her book “Wavewalker”, April 2023

    ReplyDelete
  3. veerAugust 11, 2025 at 4:25 PM

    perfect explainatio

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
14 comments
Read more

Nehru’s Secularism

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Narendra Modi, the present one, are diametrically opposite to each other. Take any parameter, from boorishness to sophistication or religious views, and these two men would remain poles apart. Is it Nehru’s towering presence in history that intimidates Modi into hurling ceaseless allegations against him? Today, 14 Nov, is Nehru’s birth anniversary and Modi’s tweet was uncharacteristically terse. It said, “Tributes to former Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Ji on the occasion of his birth anniversary.” Somebody posted a trenchant cartoon in the comments section.  Nehru had his flaws, no doubt. He was as human as Modi. But what made him a giant while Modi remains a dwarf – as in the cartoon above – is the way they viewed human beings. For Nehru, all human beings mattered, irrespective of their caste, creed, language, etc. His concept of secularism stands a billion notches above Modi’s Hindutva-nationalism. Nehru’s ide...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more