Book 39 … The Wide Wide Sea: The Final Fatal Adventure of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides, published by Penguin Random House UK in 2024.

My SF reading buddy and I also read non fiction such as explorers journals and accounts. To my mind, the idea of journeys in the sailing ships of yore have a lot in common with the imaginary journeys in the spacecraft of fictional futures. Both seem equally impossible from the point of view of this modern day and age.

The Resolution, Cook’s ship, was about as long as two school-buses parked end to end. Got that from Google’s AI, a useful comparison because who knows what 110 feet 8 inches or even 33.73 meters looks like? A width of approx 35 or 11 meters, so quite a lot wider than a school bus. I don’t know how many decks.

That 110 people, sailors and scientists, stuffed themselves into a ship like the Resolution, along with all their stores, living animals, and gear to repair and and maintain the ship while underway, and make a three-year journey seems almost as impossible as some of the journeys described in science fictional accounts.

Hampton Sides wrote this account seen through an American lens. Gives a completely different flavor than when I read Australian authors writing about Cook’s first two voyages. Americans are very invested in the Captain James Cook of his third voyage from 1776 to 1780, with him killed in February 1779.

Presumably because he died in the Hawaiian Islands, now part of the US, as a result of an altercation with and or misunderstanding by the Native people there. Much is made of Cook’s supposed illness. In comparison to Cook’s fair dealings with his men and with the native people they met during the first two voyages, the worn-down 52 years old captain seemed to be a changed man in his third voyage. Many writers seem to think he had a mental illness though none that I read was game to say what they really suspected. (Altzheimers? Some other breed of dementia?)

The whole story of the third voyage was new to me. I was very hazy on where Cook met his demise, I thought maybe Tahiti. I had no idea he was the first European explorer to see the Hawaiian Archipelago. All in all, an interesting account.

A few facts that stayed with me. Captain Cook’s journeys lost men overboard, falling down the masts from great heights, killed by furious islanders, taken by sharks but he never lost a man to scurvy, a sea-going disease that was a blight of that time. More men lost their health, their teeth, and their lives from scurvy than any other cause except war. But Cook had it nailed. He forced his men to drink lemon juice and eat sauerkraut.

Book 40 … Flinders by Rob Mundle, this edition published by Hachette Australia in 2012.

This is the book I intended to read earlier in the year with Matthew Flinders’ Cat. (Book 10) I learned more about 18th century sailing in this book. The author, Rob Mundle, is a sailor himself, and also can phrase the technical detail of sailing in the past in words that a landlubber can understand. Another excellent feature is the glossary. Lol, finally learned what ‘belay that thar rope!’ means.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading about the circumnavigation of Australia, and Flinders’s other explorations from 1791 to about 1803. Interestingly, Flinders and his crews suffered from scurvy and this despite that his hero, Captain James Cook, had worked out the preventative 20 years before. I can only suspect that neither lemons nor sauerkraut were available where he took on stores.

Afterwards is when a world of bad luck hit the man. He was shipwrecked, and when finally on his way back to England to his wife, was imprisoned by the French on Mauritius for six years. He lost Trim there, and lived little more than a year or two after he reached home before dying at age 40. I admit to wondering how Mrs Flinders and their one year old daughter survived after his death.

In the book’s Notes on Sources, I learned that Flinders himself wrote a short story about Trim. A tale I will hunt up.

Book 41 … Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman, first published in 1975. This copy published in 1992 by HarperPerennial.

After the above couple of historical accounts I took a bit of time out to re-read Re-Visioning Psychology. “This is a book about soul-making,” says the author. “This is an essay …” he says. Lol, an essay of about 80,000 words going by the thickness of the book, 229 pages not counting the end notes of which there are about 30 pages of close, 8 point print.

Hillman brings Freud’s and Carl Jung’s discoveries into the 21st century. I originally started reading him to learn more about how the imagination works, the imagination that can be seen from within the mind. The metaphoric symbol system for imagination.

Not the nuts and bolts, blood-vessel and nerve bundle imagination read from the signals of an MRI machine so dearly beloved by neuroscientists. I just can’t see what I do in my mind in the machine model. And so I read people like Hillman.

I enjoy reading Re-Visioning Psychology because, although the subject is not easy, the author explains everything. And even when he sometimes uses words that can hardly be pronounced, he explains them too. You’d think this would make the work as heavy as a cement-filled balloon but no, he’ll throw in a little six word sentence where the longest word has five letters.

“Myths do not tell us how.” (P158) is that sentence. It’s about how we can live our lives. “Living one’s myth doesn’t mean simply living one myth. It means that one lives myth; it means mythical living. As I am many persons,” he says. “So I am enacting pieces of various myths. As all myths fold into each other, no single piece can be pulled out …” and described as the myth he’s living. [Had to paraphrase the last bit of the quote as the punctuation didn’t work.]

In my dreams I’ve been Artemisia, an elderly nymph, and a high priestess of the termite people. All bits of myth. And once I’ve worked out my dreams, their maybe-meaning, I can enfold the mythical entities into my real-life story. Lately I’ve been Ariadne wandering the labyrinth of life, and painting it.

Book 42 … Farmhouse by Sophie Blackall, A Lothian’s Children’s Book, first published in Aus and NZ in 2022.

I fell in love with this book while searching for another title. It was in a specials basket, which for a book is one step before being remaindered. The book cover reminded me of the intricate collage art of Jeannie Little so of course had to have a look.

It did not disappoint. It’s the story of a house on a farm and the family of a mother, father and twelve children who lived there. The children grow up and finally the last one leaves. Then animals live in the house, even a bear, and eventually the author buys it.

My granddaughter (aged 6) and I enjoyed it when she was here last, reading it through a couple of times, one after the other. Glad I saved it.

Book 43 … My Dad’s a Birdman by David Almond and illustrated by Polly Dunbar, this book began its life as a play first performed in 2003. This edition published in 2015 by Walker Books.

A kid’s book that I intended for a read-aloud book that when I got it in my hands, turned out to be unsuitable for the intended recipient. I think I sent for it to see more of the illustrator’s work. Polly Dunbar. The story is a child looking after her father with him going through some kind of mental breakdown.

Although there’s a happy outcome, I found it quite a bleak story. I imagine that as a performance, more could’ve been made of the humorous parts.