MALANG, EAST JAVA: a reflection

Malang is arguably the prettiest town in Java.

The town square with fountain. Right next to the main mosque is the main Christian church.

This small city of about one million souls nestles in the uplands of East Java, Indonesia, some 90 km south of the regional capital, Surabaya.

Even the very centre of Malang has a small-town feel to it. True, the traffic zips along Indo-style, but pedestrians move slowly, usually finding someone to chat with. It’s the kind of place you can go just to loiter, browsing the shops, hanging out in the food halls or dawdling around the town square, with its shady trees and grassed areas surrounding its central fountain and ornamental pool. In the cool of evening, this place becomes very much a family affair.

The prompt for this reverie about Malang is that right now marks (unbelievably, for me) twenty years since I went to live there. It was my first time to relocate abroad & my first teaching post, at Merdeka University. I was over forty and the move marked a sea-change in my life, when I made the great leap to another country and another culture. Below is the complex for the hospitality course where I taught – and lived, for a short while, in a room at the back of these buildings.

The culture of East Java is greatly different from my Western background: very  Javanese/Madurese, very rural, very traditional. In the more remote villages, you can still find a scene of bullock-drawn carts, fence-less housing compounds, shared ablutions at the communal well or water-trough, and a very close sense of community.

Nevertheless, Malang has plenty of modern facilities, especially for people with a bit of money to spare (but not necessarily much: a dollar can still go a long way in local terms). There are hotels, nightclubs and other attractions, including sites of historical interest within driving distance, and beautiful countryside. Within day-trip distance are some wonderful lakes and waterfalls.

“Tugu”, the monument designed by President Sukarno, with city hall in background.

Malang is something of a campus town, with a clutch of sizeable universities and any number of academies and institutes.  Having so many young people around adds to the buzz of the place.

I revisited some years ago and found the place little changed. Large swathes of suburbia still retain houses in the Dutch-colonial style, neatly kept for the most part.  Still going was the wonderful Toko Oen, a restaurant/patisserie built in

Toko Oen (Photo: kapanlagi)

1930, with its original furniture and decor still in place. I usually dined there, and they used to switch on the reading lamp at my regular table when I came in. It retains its former charm, to judge from photos. Long may it do so.

East Java in the late 1940s forms the setting for a major strand of my novel, Shadow Chase. Check it out at http://www.shadow-chase.com, where you can also find other material related to Indonesia.

THE TRANSIT OF VENUS AND JAMES COOK

As you’ve no doubt noticed in the news, the planet Venus has just made one of its rare transits across the sun, something it does every 120 years or so, when it then does it twice in eight years for good measure.

Back in 1768, Britain’s Royal Academy sponsored a bold trip to Tahiti  on the other side of the world to observe the transit and, from this, try to measure the scale of the solar system. Over six dozen observations from other points of the earth were also made, by a range of European powers.

The bloke they entrusted with this particular trip was Lieutenant James Cook, who had already distinguished himself in navigation, cartography and even war. With him went a young scientific toff, Joseph Banks.

Off they went across thousands of sea miles, to an area of the globe that was barely known or mapped, without satellite photos, GPS, speed gauges or even a very accurate clock to measure longitude (i.e. how far east or west they were), to try and land on a small island in the South Pacific discovered by Europeans only the year before.

Point Venus, from which Cook observed the transit

Once there, they were to establish rapport with the natives and set up a small observatory. Afterwards, they were to search for evidence of the fabled Unknown South Land which, so some believed, must exist to act as a counter-weight to all that land in the Northern Hemisphere.

To prevent his crew dying of scurvy, Cook insisted they eat vegies like sauerkraut and malt wort, on pain of a flogging. The same punishment applied to any jack on watch who forgot to wind up the ship’s chronometer. Cook was not shy about use of the lash, deploying it even more than Captain Bligh (who was to become master of a ship on Cook’s last voyage).

The Endeavour replica, which has just completed its own epic voyage.

Cook’s ship Endeavour arrived in Tahiti in mid 1769 and the islanders made the Britishers welcome. After the long voyage and with the novelty of their surrounds, both Cook and Banks recorded more about Tahitian matters than about Venus when she glided across the sun on 3rd June. Banks barely bothered to look at it, being preoccupied with local pals. Cook was more dutiful, recording “not a Clowd was to be seen… and the Air was perfectly clear, so that we had every advantage… in Observing the whole of the passage of the Planet Venus over the Suns disk.”

In the long run, unfortunately his and other people’s measurements were not precise enough to estimate the size of the solar system; this was not achieved until photography was available.

With this job done Endeavour proceeded to search rather randomly for the great south land, including pushing south into ice-packed seas. It then headed west; to read more about its travels thereafter, key “endeavour” into the search window at top right.

[For info in this blog, I’m indebted to NASA, Jim Cook and Joe Banks.]

Captain Cook’s Endeavour returns to Sydney

The replica of Captain Cook’s most famous ship, HMB Endeavour, sailed into Sydney Harbour yesterday after taking a year to circumnavigate Australia. ‘HMB’ stands for His Majesty’s Bark, ‘bark’ being a type of ship.

In 1768-71, Cook mapped the eastern coastline of the Australian continent. Following roughly in the wake (for certain legs of the trip) of Cook himself, Abel Tasman, Matthew Flinders, and various Dutch and French navigators, the Endeavour replica welcomed over 70,000 visitors along the way.

The Endeavour under sail – magnificent sight.

The replica, which took five years to build, was launched in 1993 and has sailed around the world twice since then. The Australian National Maritime Museum maintains it so that people of today can experience square-rigger sailing and seamanship. (The blogger’s grandfather crewed on tall ships for a living in the years around 1900.)

After being welcomed by a spectator fleet, including other tall ships, it ‘clocked’ back in to the museum dock after 13 months voyaging. A wonderful achievement! Well done, Endeavour, and all who sailed in you.

[See my earlier post in January 2012]

JAPANESE INVASION OF JAVA, 1942

On the first of March sixty years ago,  Japanese forces commenced their takeover of the vast island of Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Only a few weeks beforehand they had conquered Singapore, Britain’s “fortress”, having swept down the Malay peninsula from landing points in the north. They then proceeded to push onwards through Sumatra in the west and the Phillipine and Molucca islands in the east.

                  Japanese invasion paths to the Netherlands East Indies                    (Malaya & Singapore top left, PNG at right & Australia at bottom)

Many people attempted to escape in all kinds of craft, but Japanese air and sea power put paid to many such efforts. Luckier ones made it either to the Indian Ocean and thence (usually) to Fremantle in Western Australia, or to the large islands of Sumatra or Java. Sumatra was no real sanctuary, as Japanese invasion of it had begun at the same time. As escapees there made their way toward Java, being variously aided or betrayed by locals, the Nips were on their tails.

Also in the days before the fall of Singapore, Dutch Rear-Admiral Doorman set out with a small Allied fleet northwards from Surabaya to join the fray, but were beaten back by Japanese fighter aircraft, as the invasion of that region of the Indies had already begun. The Dutch, British and Australian craft survived for the moment, only to come to grief later, along with USS Houston & HMAS Perth.

Japanese soldiers celebrate invading the west of Java

In the western highlands of Java, a hastily put-together collection of Australian and British soldiers called Blackforce put up resistance to harry the invaders and thus aid the escape of Allied forces and Dutch civilians. They were quickly betrayed and joined the thousands of unfortunate escapees from Singapore and elsewhere as POWs in atrocious concentration camps. (This was the situation depicted in the movie Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, starring David Bowie.)

It took only eight days for the Japanese to establish beachheads at key points in the 900km-long island, securing the eastern port city of Surabaya on March 8. There was barely any resistance to speak of. It would be three and a half years before the residents were released from the Japanese yoke, and another four years before there was true peace, because of the struggle for independence by Indonesian nationalists.

Naval battle to the east of Surabaya

Here’s an extract from my novel Shadow Chase, available online now for Australian deliveries.   It is 8th March 1942, and Heleen, a Dutchwoman born in the East Indies, awaits her fate.

For Heleen Froger, the coming day was beyond prediction. Locked in her Surabaya bungalow, she was waiting for what would happen to her and little Eduard, waiting for Dirck to magically arrive home, waiting for the giant hand of God to pluck them away to safety. Safe from the Japanese.

When the Dutch troops had begun retreating in the face of the inevitable, panic had spread like contagion among the expatriate community. Heleen had felt it best to go nowhere, not without Dirck. But he – the fool! – had been off somewhere ‘doing his duty’ at some damned government office, and had then phoned to say he couldn’t make it home until late, but not to worry. Not to worry! She had fretted herself sick all through the night, at times peering through a crack in a window shutter into the darkness, as if that would make him appear. But he hadn’t appeared and then dawn had come, and with it a strange sound, a rumbly sound.

It was the sound of thousands of feet – feet in Nippon boots marching into all parts of the city. With it was a lesser noise, of little metallic creaks and clanks. Heleen had looked cautiously out and seen the source of it: bicycles! Bicycles being ridden or pushed by short, stocky men in dusty brown uniforms with old-style leggings, men in khaki cloth caps with sun-flaps over their ears and necks, men often with wispy moustaches and circular spectacles. Highly disciplined men following orders, occupying the city with virtually no resistance.

Surabaya in the 1940s

Then more waiting. Waiting all day with nothing happening, with no friends answering their phones, with government and military offices disconnected. Waiting in a state of extreme anxiety, fretting in her mind even as she played games with Eddie and pretended nothing was wrong. She half expected gunfire, screams and sounds of mayhem but, although she thought she’d heard the odd shot in the distance, all was quiet in her neighbourhood. The absence of signs of what was going on had made the tension worse. It had been worst of all when Eddie had his daytime sleep and she had nothing to do but wait in silence (the Dutch radio station had ceased broadcasting), fidgeting, fussing, praying. She had felt quite crazed by it all.

Now it was nightfall and Heleen was still waiting. Then it happened: a loud hammering on the door. Fearfully, she opened it a fraction…

[Most of the action of Shadow Chase occurs in the present day, and the events of the Pacific War and Indonesian independence struggle serve as a backdrop to what happens to some of the characters. The novel is now available at https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Chase-Coppin-Mike-ebook/dp/B01LYM3G3D/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1498136800&sr=8-9&keywords=mike+coppin or, for Aussies, at https://www.amazon.com.au/d/ebook/Shadow-Chase-Coppin-Mike/B01LYM3G3D/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498136927&sr=8-1&keywords=mike+coppin. Also available as paperback at http://www.shadow-chase.com.]

JAPANESE ATTACK ON BROOME, AUSTRALIA

When they heard a small aircraft buzz over Roebuck Bay on 2 March 1942, residents of the pearling town of Broome thought little of it.

After all, the town on the northern coast of Australia was a fueling and transit point for civilian and military aircraft, Australian, British, American and Dutch. The skies were often host to domestic flights, reconnaissance flights, and rescue flights to the East Indies and back. Flying-boats bobbed at mooring in the bay, some full of Dutch refugees, mainly women and children awaiting transit to Perth or elsewhere. The small plane disappeared.

Australian airfields attacked by the Japanese

Next morning at 9.30 am, nine more planes appeared in the distance. People noticed but at first assumed they were American planes returning from sorties. Realisation that the aircraft were in fact Japanese Zero fighters turned to panic as the enemy zoomed in on what were almost literally sitting ducks.

Only limited resistance could be mounted with no notice and, within an hour, the Zeroes had destroyed 16 flying boats in the bay and 7 aircraft on Broome airstrip, as well as doing a good deal of damage to the town and facilities. Only one Allied plane got aloft to do retaliatory damage, manned by a brave American. No operational Allied planes were left when the Zeroes departed.

Flying-boat in Roebuck Bay

Roebuck Bay was left covered with burning fuel and strong tides made rescue from the flying-boats even more difficult. Estimates of casualties range from 40 to 100, depending who’s telling the story. In any case, it is a fact that many were Dutch refugees. It is a sadly touching thing to read from the death list: Catharina aged 8, Frans 7, Elizabeth 5, Hendrik 4, Yohannes 1, “unknown Dutch child”, etc.

The first plane had of course been a Japanese reconnaissance flight. It had been launched from the island of Timor, which the Nippon forces had only just occupied. They wasted no time at all in mounting an attack on Australia. On the same day, they also attacked the small port of Wyndham, further along the coast.

Allied personnel fight back

Official censorship kept the attack secret for a while, but the leaked news eventually had a massive psychological effect on the Aussie population, especially in Western Australia, where preventive measures like blackouts and bomb shelters were stepped up.

There has long been debate about whether Japan intended to invade Australia, but the balance of probabilities is that they had no plan to do so, at least until Asia was subdued. The air-raids on Australia were most likely in order to handicap Allied ability to launch air strikes against Japanese targets, and also to damage Australian morale (like the submarine attack on Sydney Harbour).

GOOD SITES TO CHECK OUT:
For air raids on northern Australia:  http://www.ww2australia.gov.au/underattack/airraid.html
For a Dutch view: ttp://www.rnw.nl/english/article/broomes-one-day-war-australias-dutch-ww-ii-victims
For a more detailed account (with good pics): http://tinyurl.com/7hkey6y
For more on Broome: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-factsheet/broome

THE JAPANESE BOMBING OF DARWIN

19 February 1942: two hundred and forty planes from Japanese aircraft carriers – the same group that had attacked Pearl Harbour earlier – attacked the town of Darwin in the north of Australia, in the first attack ever made on the nation.

Darwin streetscape after the raid

Darwin was and is the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory, and was unready for the attack. The two raids dropped more bombs than in the Pearl Harbour raid and the damage was extensive: eleven ships (Australian and American warships, merchant vessels, a hospital ship), thirty planes, port facilities, oil storage, civic buildings and homes. Over 240 people, both military and civilian, died in the attacks; that included 91 Americans. The town was evacuated.

Timor to the north-west, Australia to the south-east

The effect on Australia’s collective psyche was deep. The young nation had always been apprehensive about its geographic isolation in the world and fearful of what it perceived as Asian hordes to its north. One news report of the time described the raids as an “attack by the yellow men.”

Defensive preparations were stepped up across the big country: bomb shelters were dug, air-raid practice intensified, and windows in cities thousands of miles to the south were blacked out at night. Fear of invasion was great, though there is no hard evidence of the Japanese wishing to occupy Australia, at least until they had conquered Asia and the Pacific. However, the precautions taken were far from unrealistic: later, Japanese midget submarines penetrated Sydney harbour, a naval vessel was sunk there and a suburb was shelled.

In the sparsely-populated north of the country, they were hit a lot more, as the Nippon forces occupied Timor, Ambon and elsewhere in the Dutch East Indies, from where they could launch air raids. Darwin was attacked another 63 times within two years, and other northern coastal towns were also raided.

USS Peary ablaze.

One of the American naval vessels stationed in Darwin for anti-submission missions, the destroyer USS Houston, was lucky to have embarked just a few days before the first raid. Alas, its was already doomed to meet its fate in the battle of  Sunda Strait at the top end of Java.

Today the event was commemorated in Darwin as it is every year. US servicemen were represented and a Japanese envoy was present (Japan needs American & Australian support in the Pacific region). Japan has previously apologised for the attack.

FALL OF SINGAPORE

In December 1941, Japanese forces were poised to sweep down the Malay Peninsula and conquer Singapore, once thought to be an invincible fortress.

LEAD-UP TO THE FALL:  In late September 1940, Germany, Italy & Japan signed a pact recognising the right of Axis powers to establish a ‘new order’ in Europe and Japan’s right to establish a ‘New Order of Greater East Asia’. Although this was before Japan was officially engaged in the Second World War, the Allies and America were worried about the Nippon Empire’s expansionary intentions, having witnessed its invasion of Manchuria, China and Korea, among other signs.

Southeast Asia (Map: Phuket Jet Tour)

During 1941, anxiety by Australia and many Britons increased about the exposed situation of Singapore and the Malay States. Eventually, Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill dispatched his nation’s newest battle- ship, the Prince of Wales, and a cruiser, the Repulse, to the island city, which they reached on 2 December. The Japanese fleet which was to attack Pearl Harbor had already set sail from its homeland a week beforehand, with the Allies unaware of its intent.

In late November 1941, military intelligence from the United States – not yet officially in the war – had warned of an imminent Japanese attack on Siam (Thailand), and in early December the U.S. gave assurance of armed support in the event of Nippon assault on British territory or the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). The Japanese shot down an Allied plane over Southeast Asian waters, but still the British refrained from retaliatory action. Then, without warning, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December, with devastating effect.

ADVANCE THROUGH MALAYA:  While American facilities were still smouldering that night, the first of 17,000 Nippon troops landed at positions near the Siam/Malaya border, while air raids on Singapore began the following dawn. It had been assumed that attack would come from the sea, so Singapore’s guns were pointed that way.  As Churchill wrote later: “It never occurred to me that… the fortress of Singapore… was not entirely fortified against an attack from northward.” Instead, the Japanese swept down through through the Malay peninsula. One key mode of transport: bicycles!

The Japanese already had a considerable naval presence in the area, so the British “Force Z” embarked with the plan of engaging enemy craft in the South China Sea. This fleet consisted of the Prince of Wales, Repulse and four destroyers but lacked sufficient air support, which the Nips had aplenty. As the fleet headed for Kuantan on Malaya’s east coast two days later, it was attacked from the air and hit by torpedo bombs. Repulse was first to sink and Prince of Wales followed. All up, 840 Force Z personnel perished.

The Prince of Wales sinking

Winston Churchill recorded later: “In all the war, I never received a more direct shock… the full horror sank in… in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific… Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.”

British and Australian troops and local militia put up a desperate defence in Malaya, but in the end were no match for the invaders. By the end of January, Allied forces had withdrawn across a narrow causeway to Singapore. While the Nips were sweeping down Malaya and even as they were vanquishing Singapore city, all kinds of people escaped or attempted to escape, mainly via the harbour, in all sorts of craft. Meantime, Japanese air and sea power had reached the area and put paid to many such efforts. Luckier ones made it either to the Indian Ocean or to the large islands of Sumatra or Java, in the Dutch East Indies.

INVASION OF SINGAPORE:  On 8 February, Nippon troops crossed onto Singapore Island and a week later were at the outskirts of the city, which was heavily bombarded, with dreadful civilian casualties. Evacuations by all manner of means, which had begun the previous month, were desperately stepped up.

However, by 15 February the British commander of Singapore, Lt. General Percival, bowed to the inevitable and surrendered. Incarceration of tens of thousands of Allied troops and civilians followed, as well as the outright slaughter of thousands of Chinese and Indians.

Of the 15,000 Aussies taken prisoner, a third had died by the end of the Pacific War in August 1945; the attrition rate for British POWs was even higher. Among the British troops were many Indians, as the sub-continent was then still colonised by Britain. It is a very sobering thing to walk among the gravestones of Changi Prison (as I’ve done) and read the ages of these victims, so many of them just plus or minus twenty years old.

British brass at the surrender (Percival far right)

Churchill was deeply affected by the fall of Singapore, though the only responsibility he would openly take was in a remark he made later about the island’s vulnerability to land attack: “Somebody should have told me sooner, and I should have asked.”

Good short YouTube videos: “WWII Fall of Singapore 1941” & “Japanese Occupation of Singapore” (among others).

SELECT SOURCES:

Carlton M, 2010, Cruiser, Hienemann, Sydney.

Charlton C, 1988, War Against Japan, Dreamweaver, Sydney.

Corfield J & Corfield R, 2012, The Fall of Singapore, Hardie Grant, Melbourne.

Ewer P, 2013, The Long Road to Changi, ABC Books, Sydney.

Holder R, 2007, The Fight for Malaya, Editions Didier Millet, Kuala Lumpur.

Lewis G, 1991, Out East in the Malay Peninsula, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia.

Marston D (ed), 2005, The Pacific War Companion, Osprey, Oxford.

McCormac C, 1954, You’ll Die in Singapore, Robert Hale, London.

Moremon J, 2002, A Bitter Fate, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra.

Morrison I, 1993, Malayan Postscript, S. Abdul Majeed, Kuala Lumpur.

Shennan M, 2000, Out in the Midday Sun, John Murray, London.

Shinozaki M, 1975, Syonan – My Story, Times Books International, Singapore.

Thompson P, 2008, Pacific Fury, Hienemann, Sydney.

Warren, A. 2002, Singapore 1942: Britain’s Great Defeat, Talisman, Sydney.

Weller G, 1943, Singapore is Silent, Harcourt, Brace & Co, New York.

Wyett J, 1996, Staff Wallah at the Fall of Singapore, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards.

For info on the invasion of the Dutch East Indies, see my post “Japanese Invasion of Java“.

The former Dutch East Indies are the setting for my novel, Shadow Chase, out now. Check it out at http://www.shadow-chase.com, where you can find other material related to Indonesia.

BEAUTIFUL BALI… plus dogs.

Bali is certainly still a beautiful place, especially if you get away from the tourist centres (and that’s easy to do). Volcanoes, gorgeous green jungle and forest, rice paddies, colourful ceremonies passing down the streets – it’s all there.

Members of my family in the grounds of Bali’s ‘mother temple’ at Mount Agung.

So too, unfortunately, are mad dogs, a perennial problem in Bali. These rabid, mangy, flea-infested creatures may be found lurking in roadways and gutters, mainly belonging to no-one and living on their wits and scraps.

My in-laws’ village is in a very pretty locale, up country where it is often cool in the mornings and evenings: perfect for going for a walk. However, you sometimes can’t go far without coming across one of these mutts, snarling at your approach. It just isn’t worth the risk of passing near them.

Our dog Dino (without rabies!)

About 150 Balinese have died of rabies bites from dogs or monkeys over the last three years. I haven’t read about tourists dying from it, though it’s just been reported in my local paper that small but significant numbers have had precautionary injections after suffering bites.

Last year, the Indonesian government embarked on a campaign of injecting as many rapid dogs as they could, which reduced but did not eradicate the problem.

The rice paddy next to our living room

I don’t know why the local police and military can’t be authorised to shoot stray dogs. It wouldn’t be too difficult for a local cop-shop to catch up with all strays in their district and despatch them – say over a period of six weeks or less. It would be a kindness to the poor brutes, with the miserable lives they lead.

Still, don’t let any of this put you off visiting Bali, so long as you have a real interest in connecting with the people and the culture. There are hardly any strays in the tourist centres (Legian, Kuta, Sanur, etc) and your stay should be a memorable one.

A procession to the main temple in our village – my son at left.

JAPANESE APOLOGY

Last week, a Japanese politician formally apologised for the Nippon bombing of Darwin, Australia’s northern regional capital, during World War Two. Senior Vice-Minister of Trade, Mr Matsushita, expressed his “feelings of deep remorse” on the 70th anniversary of the bombings, as he visited the Northern Territory.

Exploding oil storage tank, Darwin, 1942 [Wikipedia

Darwin was then little more than a small town but it was bombed 59 times over two years, doing huge damage and causing its evacuation. More than 250 people were killed, and material loss included an American destroyer and a large American troop carrier. [Google “bombing of Darwin” for more info.]

However, unlike the misrepresentation in the movie Australia (starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman), the Japanese never made a land-based invasion of Australian soil, though they did get mini submarines into Sydney Harbour.

Aboriginal artist Jack Dale’s impression of the attack on Broome. [www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions]

Other towns were bombed and/or strafed along the north coast of Australia, notably the pearling port of Broome, where the Aussies were taken completely unawares. This event plays a small passing part in my novel, Shadow Chase, which will be out in March. Google “bombing of Broome” for more info (though many say there was no bombing but ‘only’ cannon and machine-gun strafing).

Diarama in the Heroes Museum, Surabaya.

Holland apologised some time ago for damage done during different battles in Indonesia’s independence struggle, which forms the backdrop for about half the action in Shadow Chase, especially the Battle of Surabaya. The British ambassador to Indonesia apologised in 2000 for the damage this battle caused. For one version of what it was like (there are many), see “Battle of Surabaya 1945” on YouTube.

CAPTAIN COOK’S GREAT ENDEAVOUR

On Friday, a fully-functional replica of Captain Cook’s ship HMB Endeavour put out from Fremantle, a port city in the south-west of Australia, to continue her voyage around the continent.

  Passing Sydney Opera House

For the second time, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing this replica of the ship captained by James Cook on his first voyage around the world from 1768 to 1771, in which he took scientists to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti, proved New Zealand was two main islands, charted the east coast of New Holland (as Australia was known then) and claimed it for Britain, sailed though Torres Strait below New Guinea, and put in at the Dutch East Indies before returning home to England.

A great feat, especially as achieved in a clunky former collier without an accurate ship’s chronometer. The last leg of the trip, however, was a less than happy one [see story below].

Last time the replica was in Fremantle, I was able to look it over below decks. Very cramped it was, with most of the ship’s complement having to bow their heads to move around. Even the ‘state rooms’ occupied by Cook and botanist Joseph Banks were very pokey indeed. Endeavour has a barge-like shape with a very flat nose, being designed for its original function of hauling coal along the English coast.

For this voyage, the Endeavour replica set out from Sydney in April last year, retraced Cook’s journey up the eastern seaboard of Australia, passed the northern-most tip of the continent, traversed what Aussies call the Top End, then down the west coast to Fremantle.

Now she’s travelling down to and across the Southern Ocean in the wake of Abel Tasman’s trip in 1642, putting in at Tasmania and tracing Cook’s passage from there to Sydney, arriving in May. Another epic voyage, of several thousand sea miles.

I trust I’ll be able to see this remarkable craft again.

COOK IN JAVA

Leaving Torres Strait in late 1770, Cook made landfall at the Dutch port of Kupang in West Timor before heading further West. Then, skirting the southern coast of the 900km-long island of Java, he approached the Sunda Strait with his ship Endeavour terribly the worse for wear. There, he encountered a Dutch ship and caught up with the news from Europe and elsewhere.

[From georgianjunkie.wordpress.com

Up to this point he could proudly record that he had “not one man on the sick list”. This was largely due to his efforts at seeing his men had a balanced diet, with as much fresh veg as he could procure for them. However, he then sailed eastwards along the northern coast of Java to Batavia (now Jakarta), capital of the Dutch East Indies. There, officers and men tried to enjoy the facilities of city life but, one by one, many all of them contracted malaria and other ailments.

As botanist Joseph Banks recorded, the canals which were meant to flush out the city were stagnant and clogged with mud which “stinks intolerably… being chiefly formed of human ordure.” Cook contemptuously described the place as “a stinking hell-hole”.

Before long, the ship’s complement that had not suffered a single death over many thousands of sea miles began to succumb to fevers. First, two Tahitians on board died, followed by the surgeon and then four others. It took over a month to have the Endeavour repaired and provisioned, and a further eleven days to battle back through Sunda Strait.

Cook then made a decision that he would rue for a long time: he decided to put in at an island to replenish his stock of fresh food for the trip across the Indian Ocean. As it turned out, he took on more than just food – dysentery made its appearance on the ship and caused its own toll.

So, Java was not the happiest of experiences for Cook.