Stowaway

Newbery Prize winner Karen Hesse’s 2002 historical novel, Stowaway, uses the small real-life detail that a preteen boy stowed away on Captain James Cook’s eighteenth-century voyage around the world, imagining the life of that boy through a fictional diary. Intended for a middle-grades readership, the novel relies on the journals kept by the ship’s naturalist Joseph Banks and those kept by Cook himself to describe the three-year voyage through the eyes of a young runaway who would eventually go on to captain his own ship several decades later. The novel features ink-wash drawings by Robert Andrew Parker that add to the sea adventure mood with their watery quality.

The real Captain Cook sailed from England in the summer of 1768 on his ship, the H.M.S Endeavour. The goal of the journey was a secret mission to find and claim a heretofore-unknown continent around the South Pole. In the course of three years, the Endeavour would cross the Atlantic Ocean, round the southern tip of South America, go around Australia, chart the South Pacific, round the southern tip of Africa, and then return to England. A few weeks after the ship left port, eleven-year-old Nicholas Young was discovered stowing away. Little is actually known about him, but it is a matter of historical record that Captain Cook commissioned him into the Royal Navy and made him assistant to the ship's surgeon, that he was the first person on the ship to sight New Zealand, and that he grew up to become an Antarctic explorer. Hesse uses these details to imagine a rich inner life for Nick.

Nick grows up in a lower middle-class family, but, unusually, he learns to read and write at Reverend Smythe's school. However, because the Reverend is vicious, Nick runs away from the school, making his father deeply disappointed in his son. Nick’s father apprentices him to a butcher, who beats him so severely that Nick runs off again. This time, he convinces three sailors to hide him aboard a ship about to sail – the Endeavour. For a while, Nick hides in one of the ship’s small landing boats, the oared dinghies used to approach the shore while the ship is anchored. The cramped boat is smelly, and its waxed linen cover isn’t totally rainproof. The only people who know Nick is there are the sailors who helped him, and who sneak food and water to him for weeks until they are far enough away from land for him to emerge.



When he makes himself known, Nick is put to work on the ship, which is both thrilling and very hard, especially since the ship runs on a very strict hierarchy where the Captain is at the top, and Nick is now at the very bottom. Captain Cook seems like a reasonable and fair man, but Nick is terrorized by yet another cruel and power-hungry man: midshipman, Bootie, who immediately takes a huge disliking to Nick after being blamed for not realizing there was a stowaway. Bootie is a horrible brute, who beats Nick and overworks him. However, this time, there is nowhere to run away to, so Nick works as hard as he can.

Eventually, the ship’s botanist, Mr. Banks, takes an interest in Nick when he finds the boy can read and write. Banks and his small group of gentlemen scholars are aboard to catalog, describe, and draw every new fish and plant they come across. Through him, Nick also interacts with the ship’s surgeon, who requests the boy to become his assistant. When the Captain agrees, Nick finds himself in the crew’s good graces, since everyone respects the work of the doctor.

The voyage is exciting and full of adventures. Nick survives fierce hurricanes, comes across indigenous peoples who aggressively repel the ship, and sees amazing sea creatures for the first time. In the South Pacific, the ship stops at an island the crew calls King George's Land, but which its inhabitants call Otahiti (modern-day Tahiti). There, Nick befriends a boy his own age, someone he will never forget even after the Endeavour gets underway again.



Soon, the ship is overwhelmed by a terrible illness (actually, malaria and dysentery) that spreads from one person to another after they visit Batavia, the capital city of the Dutch East Indies. Because he is the assistant to the ship’s surgeon, Nick sees firsthand and nurses sailors who fall sick and suffer greatly. Out of a crew of almost one hundred people, only ten don’t catch the disease. More than a third of the sailors die and are buried at sea. Through this ordeal, Nick realizes that he has reserves of inner strength that he never knew were there. He comes to see himself as no longer a boy, but now a young man.

When the ship returns to England, Nick makes peace with his father, who has long been guilt-ridden for his part in making Nick run away in the first place. Nick now knows what he wants to do with his life – continue being the kind of explorer that Captain Cook has taught him to be.