1994, Norton, NY, 398 pages

The early life of James Cook, a man of the same age and country as Peter Williamson, who served in the same war, and then went on to undying fame as an explorer, offers a case for the English indenture system, keeping in mind that indenture was ‘a custom of the country” not an example of top down legislation in the modern spirit of social engineering. James father had a good reputation as a dependable laborer, and wanting better for his son, arranged for an apprenticeship with a shopkeeper who was both kind and wise. This man, Sanderson, paid James a token wage for running his shop, gave him time to pursue his private studies [reading] and lodged him with his wife and children, treating him as a family member.

James was a big boy, confident and purposeful, not the kind of boy-child or dull-witted teenage son of a drunk that often fell into the power of kidnappers. No man with a whip or a stick was going to kidnap James Cook. The coastal town he worked in did have an active smuggling trade, which would have included slaving, but is no mentioned by Cook’s biographer. James was liked by the clients and was interested in the seaman’s life. Coming across a South Seas coin, he exchanged it for a same value coin of mundane variety, at which Sanderson accused him of stealing.

James then informed Sanderson that he wanted out of his indenture, and the man not only permitted this, but arranged for a position with a coal freighting captain that set him on the road to becoming a top navigator, basically going from grocer to the equivalent of a NASA commander, if NASA was interested in solar exploration. His patrons, from the grocer up to admirals, gave James every break and every opportunity they could, at the very same time that youths and men like Peter were being kidnapped, bought, sold, worked to death, whipped, and eventually murdered by Indians in the colonies.

Why?

There were no pensions, no social security, nothing for a man whose brawn and energy fails him in old age to fall back on, except for the good will of able men. It was simply prudent, that when a confident, hard working, highly intelligent and physically imposing man came along, that you give him a helping hand, trusting that he would one day return the favor, perhaps for your son or grandson, or for you, if you fell upon hard times.

The English system of indenture was open to all of the highest moral actions and all of the most wicked abuses that exist in society. Just as a society that permits private slavery contracts and the public sale and ownership of orphans, the poor, the homeless, the criminal and the impoverished guarantees that the bottom rungs of society will be occupied by the miserable, and the middle rungs by the wicked and mendacious, it also assures that good men have free reign to make way for able men, assuring that the very best men will rise above the low and the mean and through their actions facilitate the expansion of the system itself.

In Richard Hough’s biography of James Cook we are treated to the view of a remarkable life, in which a man of exceptional ability makes his own good luck from the bones of a system designed to keep him in his father’s place.