Captain Cook
It’s actually quite late at night, but I’ve just got home from spending An Evening with Vanessa Collingridge, and thought I’d share with those of you who didn’t make it. I have to confess that I knew little about Vanessa’s hero Captain James Cook before this evening, apart from the standard 1970′s primary school stuff. Apparently I’m not alone, though, as she commented that as many people assume she is talking and writing about Captain James Kirk (and even more amusingly Captain Hook), as the ‘greatest explorer the world has ever known’.
Peter Elliot led off in fine form, launching immediately into a diatribe against Ms Collingridge, which was a little startling, but I began to see his point – she IS a beautiful, talented, prodigious and accomplished “poly-historic castle-dweller”, who has multiple talents and gifts, while Mr Elliott, as he grumbled, rates only a few lines on Wikipedia, and I can’t even manage to finish folding the washing, let alone author several books, be a famous TV star and travel the world while polishing off a PhD and raising a family. I did cheer up a little, however, when he described us in the room as “tonight’s audience of glittering intelligentsia”.
There’s not much point in trying to record all that was said about Cook himself, but I definitely recommend getting hold of a copy of her latest book. She herself said she was trying to condense 10 years’ research into a 10 minute talk, and there was much tantalising raising of questions, but little chance to explore answers fully, even with a half hour over-run of time.
What did come through very clearly was her passion for her chosen subjects, both Cook himself, and her true love – maps. Describing herself as a “map nerd”, she said maps were truly things of wonder, art, science, history and magic. One of the first questions in the ‘Conversation’ part of the evening was about where she first developed her interest in maps, and I was really chuffed to hear that she traces it all back to the Milly Molly Mandy and Winnie the Pooh books she read as a child from the library. Those of us elderly folk who knew and loved MMM will recall that each book had at the start of it a map, and Vanessa says that as a 5 year old, the maps were even better than the stories in the books, and that she would spend hours tracing the maps and visualising the new worlds that they represented.
Regarding history, and the recording of it, she also commented that there is often a difference between the recorded history of ‘official’ groups (including nations), and the reality of actual events, but that the exciting thing to do is to explore the similarities and the differences and to understand how they arise. She also believes that human frailty and weakness are much more interesting than ‘whitewashed’ or sanitised versions of history, and that it was only when she understood that Cook was a real person with real human strengths and weaknesses that she became interested in learning more about him. She did, however, add a couple of corollaries to this statement – that retelling of personal journeys should always be grounded in the ‘forensics’ of history – and that one should always understand and be aware that by retelling a history, you become a part of that history yourself.
5 September 2008 at 10:26 am
Vanessa’s CV was something of a worry to me as well as to Peter Elliott, but she was charmingly self-deprecating. I suppose you can afford to be when you’ve trained as a cosmonaut. I know Captain Cook’s arrival was not good news for the indigenous people off the South Pacific but I’ve always admired him – there’s something so Boys Own about his story, so full of the virtues of hard work and application, then there’s the tragedy of the deaths of his six children and his own death so far from home. I hadn’t realised what a hero he was in his own day, commodified to an almost Beckhamish level, with wallpaper featuring his image and a print released after his death called “The Apotheosis of Cook” depicting him being raised to Heaven in the arms of two angels. Little details like that are dear to the hearts of the terminally trivial.
6 September 2008 at 12:33 pm
Actually, in a way, Cook’s arrival was good news. Someone would have come eventually, but having Cook come first meant that many people groups were studied sympathetically and in depth, before others came who were not so scholarly (because Cook was, above all, a scholar and scientist). The incredibly detailed reports Cook wrote have made it possible for descendants of some of the people groups he encountered to study and reconstruct the cultures of their ancestors.
Cook was a giant on so many levels — and such an unlikely giant — born poor at a time when that meant you must lack brains and guts. But he transcended the “glass ceiling” of his age and changed the world.
11 September 2009 at 2:00 pm
[...] little village map at the front of each book – which my daughter delighted in doing (author Vanessa Collingridge attributes this feature of the Milly-Molly-Mandy books to inspiring her love of [...]