So, how about that letter from Captain James Cook that’s been found in the back of someone’s picture frame?

1777 is the year in which they believe it to be written, at the end of his three-year journey to chart Australia and its environs. Of course, there being no such thing as air mail or any kind of international postal service in existence at the time, the only way for a letter to get back from a seagoing vessel was for it to be handed to a fishing boat or a passing merchant ship headed in the other direction, and to pray that it eventually reache England’s shores. Which, when you think about it, is pretty much throwing your trust into the hands and words of a stranger.

It actually worked. The letter got to England.

Now, the thing that blows me away is the fact that we couldn’t do this today. Okay, if a stranger handed me a letter and said, “Please, could you post this?”, I’d probably say, “Sure,” and drop it in the nearest box and forget about it (I know, I know, anthrax scares and fingerprints to the contrary). But if a stranger in a foreign country came up to me and said, “Please, can you carry this back to England for me?”, chances are good I’d say, “Er, no, sorry.” Chances are good, in fact, that most people would say the same thing.

The other thing which amuses me about this is that the BBC quotes someones as comparing Cook’s return to James T Kirk’s return from his five-year mission with the Enterprise. Even Tom Allen, the host of CBC Radio Two’s Music & Company, compared the miracle of the letter reaching England to an Earth-bound letter from Kirk passed to some independent starship while on a far-flung planetary mission. Star Trek is all about idealism in the future. So our views of this letter from Cook are caught between nostalgia for the past on one side, and idealism about the future on the other.

Ain’t historical (and pop cultural) parallax grand?

I’m sure future generations will use similes like, “It’s about as amazing as someone three feet high carrying a Ring of Power through the entire lands of Middle-Earth and surviving the trilogy.” Ooh, look at that; I’m twitching.