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There is a restorative power to sea swimming. Cold water washes over and around you, mindfulness for those who like their zen washed up to them in great lumps of salt water.
It’s a philosophy you’ll find ducking and diving around the Irish coastline each summer, but one that hasn’t caught on in New Zealand, alas.
Among 80 or so swimmers walking up Auckland’s North Shore recently, there were only five of us in togs.
The rest shunned their “sea-undies” for the comforting feel of neoprene, in which they glistened like seal colonies.
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For once they might have been right. Jellyfish, hundreds of them, descended on the race course. They tickled our bellies and thumped us full of venom, bright amber red lion’s mane hammering at us with each stroke.
“We didn’t use to get these” said one man, dousing himself in vinegar. “But with the seas getting warmer they’re everywhere.”
Deniers of man-made climate change decry this as total tosh, of course. To their arguments about sun bursts and tampered data, they might add the journals of Capt James Cook, who refers to the many “medusa” or “blubbers” that lit up the sea with their “luminous quality”.
But then the man who circumnavigated the world twice cannot be taken for his word on everything. As Cook jotted down his own journals on his voyage of 1772-1775, a Corkman, John Marra, was secretly writing his own below deck. And not everything he wrote was well-disposed to the captain’s account.
A wandering sailor, Marra pretended he was Danish to avoid getting press-ganged into the service while lolling about Indonesia.
His reluctance to serve is evident in the logbooks of the HMS Resolution, on which he sailed on Capt Cook's second Voyage around the world.
One of the ship’s most frequently punished sailors, he was given the lash for drunkenness, trying to abscond in a canoe, mutiny (more than once), desertion, insolence and disobeying orders. These punishments occurred most frequently in Tahiti or other tropical islands rather than at sea, with a clue for his enthusiastic insubordination given in Cook’s journal of November 3rd, 1774.
Anchored in Queen Charlotte Sound on New Zealand’s South Island, Marra left the ship to pursue “seven or eight young red painted blu-lip cannibal ladies”.
You can find this account and others in a book called Captain Cook's Discipline, although it will have to come by air mail.
It is unavailable outside New Zealand, with Marra’s own account unavailable everywhere, unless you want to fork out several thousand euro at an auction house, where a copy turns up every year or two.
You can, however, find a copy in the National Library of Ireland, where Voyage to the Southern Hemisphere is available to anyone who wants to read what it was like to sail without the benefit of health and safety codes, never mind satellite navigation.
Despite the Corkman’s insubordinate nature, Cook thought Marra a “good sailor”, a feeling that was reciprocated. Marra describes Cook as an honourable man who paid “particular attention to the health of his crew”. By evenly giving jobs to the men on board, he ensured that he “was never under the necessity of continuing the labour of any set of men beyond what their strength and their spirits could bear”.
However, Marra disagrees with Cook’s frequent optimism about sailing in the southern seas. For example, Cook writes that in their pursuit of Antarctica, “not a man was dejected or thought the danger we had yet to go through were in the least increased . . . but as cheerfully proceeded to the south or wherever I thought proper to lead them”.
The sailors though, says Marra, thought their captain was pursuing his own glory at the expense of his own men, following the course south “at the utmost peril of their lives”.
He goes further, highlighting the “hardships the sailors suffer” while “searching for land where nothing is to be seen but sea and ice”.
Marra’s book was published 18 months before Cook got his own journal to the printers, who were keen to get news of the Southern continent, Antarctica, out to an eager public.
But although Marra boasted of seeing it, he never landed on it.
That honour goes to others, including Ernest Shackleton and Tom Crean, who set themselves the task of escaping from there this month 101 years ago on their epic 15-day voyage to South Georgia.