It would be pleasant to record that on his return to England Cook found himself to be the hero of the hour. This does not seem to have been the case. As far as the general public and the Royal Society were concerned, Banks and Solander were the people who really mattered. It was they who had brought back all the evidences and proofs and souvenirs of those exotic and glamorous lands at the other end of the earth, all the trophies, all the skins of animals and birds of which the world had known nothing, fish which had never been seen before, countless numbers of unknown insects and hundreds of preserved plants unknown in Europe: it was reckoned that the unfortunate Parkinson, the natural history artist, had completed over 1,500 drawings and sketches of unknown flora and fauna before his death. And there can be no doubt that Banks and his scientists deserved all praise: under the most arduous conditions they had performed splendidly and their achievements in opening up fresh avenues in natural history have been surpassed, perhaps, only by Darwin. So it was perhaps understandable that Banks and his friends basked in the limelight while Cook was largely regarded as the person who had chauffeured them from place to place.
In addition, of course, the reception accorded them depended upon their natures. Banks, a wealthy young socialite with a host of influential friends, loved to be lionised. Cook, rather withdrawn, rather remote, a passionate defender of his own privacy, avoided the blaze of publicity wherever possible. Cook, clearly, was indifferent to popular acclaim. He had set out to achieve something, he had achieved it and that was all the reward that he would ever wish for.
But, even for Cook, it must have been extremely gratifying that what acclaim did come his way came from professionals, the only people really capable of appreciating the magnitude of his achievements. The Lords of the Admiralty, customarily a reticent and unforthcoming body when it came to bestowing a due meed of approbation, heaped upon Cook a degree of praise so extravagant that Cook must have found it slightly embarrassing. In fact, the praise only seemed to be extravagant: given Cook’s achievements, no praise could have been too high.
There can be no question but that his superiors now regarded Cook as the greatest explorer and navigator of his age. There is no question that Cook’s obscure origins and long years before the mast had been completely forgotten and that he was now one of ‘them’, an intimate and genuine friend of those who walked the corridors of naval power. But, at the same time – and this without in any way being cynical – it has to be borne in mind that Cook was now the biggest public relations asset that the Navy had had in generations and that, moreover, the extraordinary successes he had achieved redounded mightily on the perspicacity and farsightedness of those who had picked the right man for that great task – their Lordships themselves.
Such a tremendous asset as this could not be allowed to rust in disuse. Immediately after his return Cook was promoted to Commander and given the command of H.M.S. Scorpion. Clearly, the Admiralty had no intention that Cook should ever sail aboard her: it was merely a holding appointment, a device whereby Cook was retained at full pay while being free to devote himself to a vastly more important matter: preparation for a new expedition to the South Seas.
It is not quite certain who was the moving spirit or what was the prime motivation behind this second expedition. A certain degree of vagueness surrounds the inception of the idea. Some such projects appear to grow out of nothing, then become gradually, vaguely talked about, then are bruited abroad and achieve a certain degree of definition and then, suddenly, find a broad overall degree of acceptance and the idea becomes reality. Certainly, the Royal Society had a hand in it – they regarded themselves as a semi-governmental body and were a powerful force in the Establishment. Certainly, Cook himself would have been far from passive in the matter: like all great explorers, once he had savoured the joys and satisfactions of penetrating the unknown, he could never rest until he was on his way again. Certainly the leading geographers of the day, notably Alexander Dalrymple who still clung tenaciously to his idea of a Southern Continent, would have pressed for this second expedition. But one feels that the real decision-makers in this case were the Lords of the Amiralty.
Perhaps they had in mind the possibility that Cook might indeed stumble upon this mythical Southern Continent, or on some other country or island so far undiscovered, and annex it with his customary speed for the British crown: an intriguingly pleasant thought and not an impossibilty, for the southern seas was still a vast unknown: apart from the occasions when he had rounded the Horn and South Island, New Zealand, Cook had hardly once gone beyond latitude 40˚ south. It is more likely that they said to Cook, in effect, that he should embark upon another epic voyage of discovery – it wouldn’t matter particularly where he went – that would bring fresh credit and honour and glory to himself and his country and, incidentally, to their Lordships of the Admiralty.
In support of this contention it must be pointed out that Cook received no specific instructions for this second voyage, the most awesome ever undertaken. Parenthetically, it may be observed that no one would ever undertake such a voyage again for when Cook had finished with the high latitudes of the southern oceans, on this voyage that was to last over three years, there was precious little left for anyone else to discover.
There is no doubt that Cook was given complete carte blanche as to where he should go and what he should do. This can be proven. In the journal of his first voyage Cook wrote:
I hope it will not be taken amiss if I give it as my opinion that the most feasible method of making further discoveries in the South Sea is to enter by way of New Zealand, first touching at the Cape of Good Hope: from thence proceed to the southward of New Holland for Queen Charlotte Sound, where again refresh wood and water, taking care to be ready to leave that place by the latter end of September, or beginning of October at the furthest, when you would have the whole summer before you and after getting through the Strait, might, with the prevailing Westerly winds, run to the Eastward in as high a latitude as you please and if you meet with no lands would have time enough to get round Cape Horn before the summer was too far spent: but if after meeting with no Continent, and you had other objects in view, then haul to the Northward, and after visiting some islands already discovered, after which proceed with the trade winds back to the Westward in search of those before mentioned – thus the discoveries of the South Sea would be complete.
(There is some slight confusion at the beginning of this excerpt. What Cook means is that the next expedition should go to Cape Town and then directly to Cook Strait in New Zealand from where it would leave for Antarctic waters.)
As this is precisely the basic route that Cook was to follow there is no question but that the Admiralty were in total agreement with him. They also readily acceded to Cook’s two further demands: that he should have a larger vessel than the Endeavour, which he had found too cramped; and that, for safety’s sake and mutual comfort and support, a second vessel should accompany him.
As Cook had found the Endeavour, size apart, eminently suitable for his purposes, two more Whitby collier-type vessels were purchased by the Admiralty: the Marquis of Granby, 462 tons and a complement of 118 men and the Marquis of Rockingham, 350 tons and a complement of 83. On transfer to the Navy they were commissioned under the names of Drake and Raleigh; but wiser thoughts prevailed. The Spanish still had considerable pretensions in the Pacific – not to put too fine a point upon it they regarded it as their own private property – and it was felt, and rightly, that those two names might give almost as much offence to the Spanish as Drake and Raleigh had given to the Spanish almost two centuries previously. So they were re-named Resolution and Adventure.
Cook was to have as his First Lieutenant a certain Lieutenant Cooper – a relation of Cook’s old mentor Palliser – and Lieutenants Pickersgill and Clerke, both of whom had sailed with himself in the Endeavour and with Wallis in the Dolphin. They were now about to make their third circumnavigation of the world so Cook had no lack of experienced assistance. The Adventure was to be captained by a certain Tobias Furneaux, a very experienced officer who had already been around the world with Wallis. His senior lieutenants were called Shank and Kempe.
It was proposed that Banks and an entourage of scientists and servants should again join this expedition. It is variously claimed that the proposal came from the Earl of Sandwich (then First Lord), the Royal Society and Banks himself. It hardly matters: Banks, with his wealth and far-ranging connections with the establishment of the day, was an extremely influential young man and was accepted.
Alas, Banks’ long period of lionization in the very best of London society appeared to have had a considerable effect on his powers of judgment. He adopted from the outset the attitude that Cook would be little more than his, Banks’, ocean-going chauffeur and that he, Banks, would direct the voyage, both as to where they went and how long they should remain in any particular place. Moreover, he wanted to bring along a party of no less than fifteen, including a couple of horn-players for his own special edification. Finally, when he saw the Resolution, he pronounced it unfit for a gentleman to embark upon. He had the effrontery to suggest that a larger vessel be provided, a suggestion that the Admiralty, understandably enough, dismissed out of hand. He then proposed that the Great Cabin on the Resolution should be enlarged and a false deck built aft over the existing deck in order to provide him, his entourage and their masses of scientific equipment all the room they required. In this the Admiralty, astonishingly, acquiesced.
While those alterations were taking place Cook, in addition to overseeing all the preparations for the expedition and recruiting crews for the voyage, was having troubles of his own. An official version of his journals of the Endeavour was being prepared but it wasn’t Cook who was preparing them. As a simple, rough sailor it was thought that Cook was unfitted for so literary a task so a leading light of the literary establishment and crony of Dr Johnson, a certain Dr John Hawkesworth, was brought in to apply the necessary polish: he was either brought in or he wangled the commission for himself and if the latter were the case then at the fee of £6,000 for the job, a fortune in those days, it was a pretty fair piece of wangling.
Hawkesworth was a pedantic idiot with an unbridled imagination, and the end result of his labours was a travesty of what Cook had written. Cook, admittedly, was consulted freely and frequently, but Hawkesworth paid no attention to what he said, edited the journals as he saw fit, ignored Cook’s protests and gave him no opportunity to revise or edit it before publication: fortunately for Cook, he was at sea before the book was published. In the passing, it might be mentioned that a certain Dr Beaglehole brought out an unexpurgated version of Cook’s own journals some years ago. It is so incomparably better a book that it seems unlikely that anyone except a professional historian would ever take the trouble to read Hawkesworth’s book again.
At the same time, Cook was having trouble with the Royal Society who professed themselves disappointed in the results of the Venus transit. Most of their criticisms, it is true, were levelled at Green, but as Green was now dead Cook felt himself called upon to defend him and did so with such anger and such bitterness that his reply had to be omitted from the official copy of the Journal.
Meanwhile, the alterations to the Resolution had been completed. Their effects upon the stability and sea-keeping qualities of the Resolution were totally disastrous. She was so impossibly top-heavy that she was in danger of capsizing even in a relatively calm sea. Her pilot down the Thames refused to put on all sail lest she went over and said he’d be damned if he’d take her further than the Nore. Lieutenant Clerke, who shared this rather daunting experience, wrote: ‘By God, I’ll go to sea in a grog-tub, if required, or in the Resolution, as soon as you please: but must say I think her by far the most unsafe ship I ever saw or heard of’.
The Admiralty clearly thought so also for they ordered her back to dock and had all the newly added superstructure removed. It is reported that Banks, upon seeing this, ‘swore and stamped upon the wharf like a madman’, had all his gear removed, and wrote furiously to the Admiralty roundly condemning them for their action and asking that a larger ship should be provided at once. The Admiralty, clearly, had had enough of Banks, his importunities and his far from incipient delusions of grandeur, pointing out to him that this expedition was not being mounted for his sole benefit and that if he thought it was and that he was to be the director and conductor of the whole then he was gravely in error. Banks left in a huff for a private expedition to Iceland. It is interesting, however, that it did not alter the friendship that existed between Cook and himself: when Cook returned from his second voyage no one welcomed him more warmly and enthusiastically than Banks.
The scientists and artists who had departed en masse with Banks had to be replaced. The scientists were to be led by a distinguished German naturalist, John Reinhold Forster (he was of Scottish descent, hence the name), a cantankerous and petty-minded prude who complained about everything and everybody from the moment he came on board. But he was good, no doubt about that. With him was his son, George, a much more likeable character, who was to be the natural history draughtsman. A William Hodges was employed as a landscape painter, and a very successful one he proved to be, and an astronomer from the Board of Longitude, a certain William Wales who, along with Cook, was to check the efficacy of a new type of chronometer in determining longitude at sea. (Another astronomer, William Bayly, was aboard the Adventure for the same purpose.)
On 13 July, a year and a day after Cook had arrived back in the Endeavour, the Resolution and the Adventure sailed from Plymouth.
The journey south to Cape Town was comparatively uneventful. Cook lost one man overboard, while Furneaux lost a couple of midshipmen as a result of fever contracted when they made a stop at the Cape Verde Islands. (They had made an earlier stop at Madeira to pick up fresh fruit and vegetables and, of course, large stocks of Madeira wine.)
Cape Town was reached on 30 October. To Cook’s chagrin, stores that had been ordered well in advance had not yet arrived and he had to wait just over a month before sailing. While he was there he heard news of the activities of French ships in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Two vessels out from Mauritius, had allegedly discovered land due south of Mauritius – which it wasn’t – on the 48th parallel south, which it was. Two other French vessels, under a certain Marion du Fresne, had arrived in New Zealand in March 1772. In June their leader was killed by the Maoris in the Bay of Plenty and the French left for home, having named it Austral-France and having claimed it on behalf of the King of France, quite unaware that Cook had done the same thing in the name of England’s king some two years previously. But they did not circumnavigate and chart the island as Cook had done.
While in Cape Town, the Forsters met a renowned Swedish botanist, a former pupil of Linnaeus called Anders Sparrman, and they asked Cook’s permission to have him along. Cook gave his consent. It says much for the carefree attitude adopted to travel in those days that a man busily botanising in Cape Town should more or less casually step aboard a vessel which, he has been warned in advance, will not touch civilization again for at least two years.
Completely provisioned for a long stay at sea – the cargo now included a considerable amount of mixed livestock for distribution through the various Pacific islands – the two ships put to sea on 22 November. Cook’s first intention was to try to locate an island rejoicing in the odd name of Cape Circumcision. At least, Cook thought that it would be an island: it could, of course, have been a promontory of the fabled Southern Continent. It was reputed to be about 1,700 miles south of the Cape of Good Hope and had been sighted by a Captain Bouvet who was known to be a reliable observer: and it was just possible that this might be in some way connected with the recent discovery of Kerguelen’s Island which was in roughly the same latitudes but some considerable way to the east – perhaps they were both part of the Southern Continent.
Cook never did find Cape Circumcision and it is hardly to be wondered at that he failed. It does in fact exist – it is today known as Bouvet Island – but it is the tiniest imaginable spot in the immensity of the south Atlantic. For two or three weeks, in bitter weather and gale force seas, Cook quartered the area searching for this elusive place and finally came to the conclusion that it didn’t exist. It is quite clear that whatever navigational fixes Cook had been given on this island must have been wildly wrong, for there is no doubt that with the aid of the new and exceptionally accurate Kendall chronometers he had with him, Cook could have pin-pointed even the smallest island in the Atlantic with complete precision. However, Cook did not feel that his time here had been at all wasted: if nothing else he had established that no portion of the Southern Continent existed in those parts.
Even though it was then just approaching high summer in those latitudes, the cold was already severe, the men were in their Fearnoughts again, the livestock was dying because of the low temperatures and, about mid-December, the first of the icebergs put in an appearance. Cook decided to cast around once more for this elusive island and then give up the search.
Christmas Day was cold but the weather conditions were good. The crew, as Cook dryly observes, ‘were inclinable to celebrate the day in their own way, for which purpose they had been hoarding up liquor for some time, I also made some addition to their allowance … mirth and good-humour ranged throughout the ship’. John Forster’s comment – ‘savage noise and drunkenness’.
Early in January, having abandoned all hope of finding Bouvet’s land, Cook turned the ships first south-east and then south, down towards the Antarctic regions to make the first really deeply penetrating probe in search of Dalrymple’s unknown continent. There were icebergs everywhere, wondrous floating islands that reached higher than the masts of the ships, islands tinted with the most extraordinary range of pastel colours, mostly blues and greens, though some were mauve and pinkish in appearance: some of those icebergs were quite small, no larger than the ships: others were as much as two miles in diameter. Provided visibility wasn’t obscured by snow or fog, the icebergs presented no real danger as at that time of year in those high latitudes there was enough light to see by twenty-four hours a day – no danger, that is, if ships didn’t sail too close to them: as the icebergs drifted further north, the submerged parts became eaten away by the relatively warmer water and it quite often happened that, because of this under-water erosion, an iceberg would suddenly lose its stability and fall over on its side. It behoved a prudent captain to be nowhere in the vicinity when any such thing occurred.
Shortage of fresh water was now becoming a problem and the simple answer to this was to obtain it from the ice. When they encountered an ice-field made up of pieces of ice of manageable size, boats would be lowered and ice brought back to the ship – Cook mentions as much as fifteen tons having being brought aboard at one time. When melted, this ice proved to contain no salt whatsoever but it was obviously different from ordinary water inasmuch as everybody who used it was afflicted by a swelling of the glands of the throat. It was Forster’s opinion, and he was probably correct, that this was due to the fact that the ice held no trace of the free oxygen which is a constituent of normal water.
On 17 January 1773, the ships crossed the Antarctic Circle, the first vessel ever known to do so. The very next day they encountered their first field of pack-ice – that is to say, ice that has been formed by the freezing of the surface of the sea as distinct from iceberg ice which comes from glaciers on land. This pack-ice, soon stretching all the way across the horizon, became so thick as to make any further progress impossible. Cook headed north again, well enough satisfied: if Dalrymple’s Southern Continent did exist then it was steadily shrinking in size.
Early in February, Resolution and Adventure were cruising about in the relatively mild climate and warm waters of 48˚ south, searching for Kerguelen’s island. The search, and it was an intensive one, yielded nothing which, in retrospect, is less than surprising for Cook was looking in quite the wrong place. He had been given the correct latitude – 48˚ south – but the longitudinal bearings were very far out. Cook had been told that Kerguelen Island lay due south of Mauritius, and he knew that the longitude of Mauritius was 57˚ 30’ east. Kerguelen Island, in fact, is 70˚ east, so Cook was carrying out his search hundreds of miles to the westward of Kerguelen’s actual position.
The weather conditions were now extreme. There was a constant succession of violent gales from the south-west and the two Whitby colliers took fearful punishment from the great seas. In the few, the very few lulls between gales, the vessels were plagued by dense fog and it was in one such fog, on 8 February, that Resolution and Adventure lost contact with each other. For three days, as by pre-arrangement, the Resolution cruised around, firing off a signal gun at hourly intervals during the day and burning flares at night. But they failed to find the Adventure. Cook was not perturbed. He had anticipated that such a thing might well happen and had arranged a rendezvous in Queen Charlotte Sound in New Zealand. He had no worries on the score of the Adventure getting there – Tobias Furneaux was an excellent seaman and navigator.
The weather conditions were so vile that the most obvious and easiest thing for Cook to have done was to take advantage of the powerful south-westerlies and run straight for Cook Strait in New Zealand: but when Cook was bent on exploration the easy and the obvious did not exist for him. He turned the Resolution south-east and headed for polar waters again. The weather continued to be uniformly dreadful and Cook did not dare take his ship as far south as he had on 17 January (incidentally, had he been able to do so in those particular longitudes, he could well have discovered Antarctica for, in this area, part of Wilkes Land lies to the north of the Antarctic Circle).
Instead, Cook cruised – if that is the word, considering the abominable weather conditions – east for about three weeks, roughly on the 60th parallel, although on one occasion he reached 62˚ south, which took him within three hundred miles of Wilkes Land. (He had been much closer to the Antarctic continent on 17 January.) During this period no land of any kind, not even the most insignificant island was seen: there was nothing but this eternal waste of icy, storm-plagued waters. It was not until 17 March that Cook headed the Resolution north-east for New Zealand. He was well content. True, he had discovered nothing, but he had established one incontrovertible fact: wherever the Great Southern Continent – and if it did exist it was steadily becoming less great – lay, it most certainly did not lie in the southern latitudes between South Africa and New Zealand. Speaking roughly, then, Cook had established that the Southern Continent did not lie in the region of the south Indian Ocean: what he had yet to ascertain was whether or not it might lie in the South Pacific or the South Atlantic. It has to be constantly borne in mind, in order to appreciate the tremendous scope and sweep of Cook’s achievements, that no one before had ever explored the far southern waters of the Indian Ocean or the Pacific or the Atlantic. Cook was to do all three in this one stupendous voyage. And this, it should be noted, was in addition to the two sweeps he carried out through the Central Pacific itself. The first, and much the smaller of those, was still on such a scale that it would easily have encompassed a land the size of Australia. The scope of the second sweep, which was to take him from deep in the Antarctic almost to the equator, and for many thousands of miles from New Zealand to the east of Easter Island, is of such a scale as to be barely comprehensible: certainly, it was the greatest exploratory voyage of its kind ever undertaken in the Pacific.
It had been Cook’s original intention to go directly to Cook Strait and rendezvous with Furneaux in Queen Charlotte Sound, but he changed his mind and headed for the first safe and available anchorage – Dusky Sound in the south-west tip of South Island, which he’d noted on his first circumnavigation of the island. His ostensible reason was that he wanted to examine the area’s natural resources and estimate the Sound’s potential as a port. His true reason was almost certainly to allow his crew to rest and recuperate. Behind them lay a voyage of 117 days – almost four moths – during which they had seen no sight of land, four months in bitter temperatures and heavy seas. John Forster, though much given to complaint even under the best of circumstances, was probably right when he described the voyage as a series of hardships such as had never been experienced before.
Six weeks later, his crew fully relaxed and fit again, Cook sailed north for his rendezvous with Furneaux whom he found taking his ease in the beautiful and placid waters of Queen Charlotte Sound, the rigging all stripped off the Adventure in the comfortable expectation of spending a very pleasant winter in those idyllic surroundings. Furneaux, assisted by favourable and very powerful winds, had made an extremely fast passage from where he had lost contact with Cook to Tasmania – a distance of over three thousand miles – in twenty-six days. He had sailed north along the east coast of Tasmania in order to decide, once and for all, whether or not there did exist a strait between Tasmania and Australia: for some totally incomprehensible reason he and his officers decided there was no such thing, only a very deep bay. Cook accepted his word for it and was never to go and investigate for himself: he had no reason to.
To what must have been Furneaux’ considerable dismay, Cook ordered him to set about re-rigging the Adventure without delay. He had no intention of lazing away the winter in the Sound. They were there to explore and explore was what they were going to do, if for no other reason than to prove that exploration need not cease because of the advent of winter. The area he wished to explore lay to the east and north of New Zealand: by far the greater part of this area was still virgin territory for the explorer.
The Resolution and Adventure left Queen Charlotte Sound on 7 June, passed out through Cook Strait and headed more or less due east for several weeks, encountering nothing. They then turned on a more northerly course, hoping to locate Pitcairn Island, which had been discovered by Carteret in 1767, but a change of plan was forced on Cook when, on 29 July, to his great dismay, he heard from Furneaux – who was himself at that time crippled with gout – that one man had died aboard the Adventure and that twenty were seriously ill. Cook immediately went aboard and found out that not only was this the case but that many others of the crew were in a weakly condition. To Cook’s chagrin and anger, the cause was the same in every case – scurvy. The reason was simple – Furneaux just hadn’t troubled to enforce the anti-scurvy diet on which Cook had insisted. It is worth noting that, at that same time, Cook did not have one sick man aboard the Resolution.
Cook abandoned his immediate plans for exploration and laid off a course for Tahiti. The welfare of the sick crew of the Adventure was of greater importance than sighting new islands and it was essential to get them to a safe and sheltered spot with all speed and the nearest such haven Cook knew of in that part of the Pacific was Tahiti.
Cook made his second landfall off Tahiti just over a fortnight later. As he was anxious to acquire fresh supplies of vegetables and fruit as quickly as was possible, he made his first stop at Vaitepiha Bay in the south-east. It was very nearly his last stop anywhere. While they lay to outside the harbour, buying fruit from the Tahitians in their canoes, the wind dropped and a powerful current swept the Resolution in towards a coral reef, and in spite of all that Cook and his men could do it seemed inevitable that she must strike hard on the reef: but in the last few critical moments a miraculous land breeze sprang up and took her clear of the coral. Sparrman, the Swedish botanist, marvelled at the calmness and total absence of panic among Cook and his crew even when under the most severe pressure; but he was, he said, extremely shocked by Cook’s language. Another report has it that the crisis had been so severe that Cook was afterwards compelled to revive himself with brandy. It seems hardly likely.
Cook found it impossible to get any fresh meat in Vaitepiha Bay so, in company with the Adventure, he moved round the island and took up the Endeavour’s old anchorage in Matavai Bay. Cook – and the fifteen officers and men who had been with him aboard the Endeavour – received a tumultuous welcome. Old friendships were renewed and cemented and new ones made with such briskness that we find Forster, writing of their first night there, complaining bitterly that ‘A great number of women of the lowest class having been engaged by our sailors remained aboard at sunset’.
Tents were erected on the site of the former Fort Venus and the sick aboard the Adventure were carried, and cared for, there. Cook made certain that their diet included as much fruit and vegetables as they could consume and this treatment had a rapid and remarkable effect: within a month Cook judged that the Adventure’s crew were fit to put to sea again, and as he had come to Tahiti in the first place only with the intent of restoring the men to health, he was, as ever, not disposed to linger.
Moreover, he wanted to be on his way for two other pressing reasons. As in Vaitepiha, so in Matavai – there was no fresh meat obtainable: the hogs that used to roam the island in such great numbers were reduced to a few dozen only. But, Cook was told, there were plentiful supplies to be obtained in Huahine and Raiatea, two islands that Cook had visited before on his first voyage. Secondly, he was concerned with the time factor. He wanted to relocate a group of islands that had been discovered by Tasman in the middle of the previous century – Tasman had given them the names of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Middleburg – and then return to Queen Charlotte Sound in order to be ready to leave there in November for his summer sweep through the high latitudes.
Resolution and Adventure sailed at the beginning of September, fully provisioned with water, wood and as much fruit and vegetables as they could carry: they had also with them two young men to serve as interpreters, Odiddy, a man from Bora Bora, aboard the Resolution, and Omai, from Raiatea, aboard the Adventure. Again, Cook was to discover that the joy with which they came to Tahiti was sadly counter-balanced by their grief in leaving it. As before, the weeping Tahitians begged them not to go away; as before the bay was crowded with canoes crammed with lamenting Tahitians.
Their first call was at Huahine, which Cook had visited three years previously. The welcome was just as warm as it had been on the previous occasion: more importantly, they were able to obtain no fewer than three hundred hogs there so that Cook’s fresh meat and salt pork problems were over for a considerable time to come. Further supplies were obtained at Raiatea so that by the time they left the Society Isles the ships were even better provisioned than they had been when they had left England.
Cook set a course slightly south of west. On 24 September they sighted two small islands which Cook did not consider worth investigating. He named them the Hervey Islands and passed on. (They are part of a much larger group now known as the Cook Islands.) On 1 October they arrived at the first of the three islands Tasman had discovered, Middleburg – a name that has now reverted to the original Eua.
Cook and his men were the first white men the inhabitants of Eua had ever seen but in so far as the attitude of the natives were concerned, Cook and his men might have been long lost relatives. Their kindness, hospitality and friendliness were overwhelming to the extent of being unbelievable. Not even in his beloved Tahiti had Cook ever experienced anything like it in the Pacific. They were feted and dined and shown over the island. The islanders had reached, as Cook noted in his journal, a much higher state of civilisation than any other Pacific people. They were, as one crew member wrote, a beautiful people in a beautiful island. All arable land was under intensive cultivation, being squared off in neat plots with pathways intersecting them. Their houses were the most immaculate Cook had seen in the Pacific, with equally immaculate rush matting on the floors. They were a clean, healthy, happy and industrious people, generous to a fault in their trading – Cook wrote of them as being more desirous to give than to receive, a statement he had been unable to make about the natives of any other island in the Pacific. They were, the astronomer Wales wrote, the most lively, laughing creatures he had ever seen. And Cook noted, with more than mild astonishment, that not only did men and women eat together – which was forbidden in Tahiti – but the men even went to the extraordinarily gallant lengths of helping the women first.
From there they sailed to a much larger island, the one on which Tasman had landed and named Amsterdam – it has now reverted to its original name of Tongatabu. Here they received the same exceptionally friendly welcome as they had in Eua. Here they were again able to carry on a brisk trade on very advantageous terms, and here again, as in Eua, they never saw a single person carrying a weapon, although Sparrman, who appeared to be possessed of the same prudish, niggling and contentious nature as his friend Forster, did introduce a rather sour note by demanding to know why, if they were so eminently peaceful a people, did he see so many war clubs everywhere. It never occurred to Sparrman, apparently, that those clubs might have been for defensive purposes only against raiders from other islands: the islanders on Eua and Tongatabu, with their advanced and intensive systems of cultivation, were a comparatively wealthy people and must have offered a very tempting target to more impoverished tribes on neighbouring islands.
When the two ships left on 8 October, their provision holds were crammed with fruit and vegetables, while they also carried with them – live – three hundred fowls and about half that number of pigs. The thought occurs that both vessels must have sounded very like a farmyard.
Because of the wonderful hospitality they had received, Cook gave to those islands the name of the Friendly Islands but although that name is still in fairly common use today they are better – and officially – known as the Tonga Islands.
Two weeks later the ships were off Hawke’s Bay on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island, taking very severe punishment from southerly and south-west gales that were making it almost impossible for them to beat their way southwards towards Cook Strait. Eventually, the gales developed into a full-scale storm, so severe that the Adventure, an even poorer sailer than the Resolution, was blown out to sea, Cook losing contact with her on the night of 29 October. Cook managed to fight his way round Cape Palliser, the south-east tip of North Island and the entrance to Cook Strait when, to his chagrin, the wind changed to the north-west and came howling directly down through the strait, making entrance quite impossible. Cook was blown to the south-east and then south, along the east coast of South Island for such a distance that he seriously contemplated finding a harbour there instead of going to Queen Charlotte Sound. Unfortunately, he had no option – he had to rendezvous with Furneaux there, so Cook battled north against varying head-winds until he found shelter in a harbour in the Cook Strait itself, just beyond Palliser Bay at the southern end of north island. This, had he but known, would have offered some consolation for that day in May, three and a half years previously, when he had sailed by Sydney Harbour without giving it a second glance, for now, in seeking protection from the storm, he had stumbled across the splendid harbour of Port Nicholson, on which the capital of New Zealand, Wellington, now stands.
The winds moderated and on the following day the Resolution put into Queen Charlotte Sound. There was no sign of the Adventure nor did Cook expect to find her there for some little time. They waited in the sound for about three weeks during which time they learned an interesting and highly unpleasant fact: the Maoris living there, with whom Cook and his men were on good terms, were undoubtedly cannibals for, while the English were there, the local Maori war band arrived back after a raid on their enemies in nearby Admiralty Bay bearing with them an enemy body which they proceeded to cook and eat with great relish before the horrified watchers on the Resolution.
At the end of those three weeks Cook decided that he could wait no longer: to penetrate any distance at all into the polar waters he had to go at high summer or not at all and if he were to delay much longer he would be too late. Accordingly, he left a note in a bottle for Furneaux saying that after he, Cook, had returned from the polar regions he would probably make for Easter Island and then Tahiti, leaving it up to Furneaux whether to return to England or to attempt to rejoin him somewhere in the Pacific – which, when one considers the sheer immensity of the Pacific and the total absence of any suggested date, makes this a very optimistic proposal indeed.
As Furneaux makes no further appearance in Cook’s story, this appears the appropriate place to recount briefly what had happened to him. After he had been separated from the Resolution in the storm, he had been blown a considerable distance out to sea to the north and east and it had taken him some days to fight his way back to the east coast of North Island. When he did regain contact he put into Tolaga Bay – the first port that Cook had entered in New Zealand on his first voyage – for wood and water and then moved south to the rendezvous. Unfortunately, adverse winds had prevented him attempting Cook Strait until the 30 November – and Cook had left Queen Charlotte Sound on the 25th: it had been as close as that.
Furneaux anchored in Queen Charlotte Sound and spent the next two weeks carrying out repairs to the Adventure. Then on 16 December he sent a boat’s crew consisting of two officers and eight men ashore to collect what vegetables and greens they could. They did not return. A search party that set out the following day discovered that all ten had been killed and eaten by the Maoris.
Understandably sickened by this episode, Furneaux decided to return to England. He made an extremely fast passage to the Horn – it took him just over a month – and then stopped over at Cape Town before making his way back to England.
Cook, on leaving Queen Charlotte Sound, sailed south for about ten days before altering his course to the south-east: after a week on this course the first icebergs were encountered and within two or three days they stretched from horizon to horizon. The temperature fell below freezing, and the forms of heating aboard the Resolution were so primitive that it was almost as cold inside the hull of the ship as it was on the upper deck. The elder Forster, in particular – in his defence it must be said that he was suffering very severely from rheumatism – complained bitterly about the conditions of his quarters, a cabin just abaft the mainmast, where sea-water and the Polar wind could, apparently, both enter at will. Forster rejoiced when they ran into foggy weather which, combined with the numerous icebergs in the vicinity, made for a very dangerous situation indeed and one that compelled Cook to turn northwards again.
He was given very little time to rejoice for a week before Christmas the weather cleared and Cook turned the Resolution south again. On the 21 December the Resolution crossed the Antarctic Circle, only the second time this had ever been done and both times by Cook. On Christmas Day they were still heading south and the elder Forster, in his journal for that day, did not know whether to be the most upset about his own sufferings, with the ice-bound Antarctic wastes which he compares unfavourably to hell, or with ‘the execrations, oaths and curses’ that assailed him on all sides as the crew of the Resolution celebrated their Christmas in the traditional naval manner.
For the time being, even Cook had had enough. He writes: ‘Our ropes were like wires, sails like boards or plates of metal and the sheaves frozen fast in the blocks so that it required our utmost efforts to get a topsail up or down. The cold is so intense as hardly to be endured, the whole sea in a manner covered with ice, a hard gale and a thick fog. Under all these unfavourable circumstances,’ he continues in a splendid understatement, ‘it was natural for me to think of returning more to the north’. So he turned north for the warmer latitudes of the forties, and probably not before time because George Forster, the son of the elder, or complaining, Forster, says that both health and morale aboard had reached a pretty low state. His father and at least a dozen others were crippled and unable to work because of rheumatics – although his father was apparently not affected in his hands as the lamentations continued to pour forth daily in his journal: when one considers that the entire interior of the Resolution was sodden and dripping with damp and condensation it is surprising that there were not more rheumatic casualties. There was, young Forster went on, a general languor and sickly look among the crew and even Captain Cook was pale and lean, having entirely lost his appetite.
So northwards for fourteen days Captain Cook took them, but he didn’t remain north for very long. As soon as he was convinced that his crew were fit again Cook, to the elder Forster’s unbelieving consternation and total horror, turned the Resolution to the south again. When Cook had set his face to a task he was not a man to turn lightly away from it: if the southern continent was there, he was going to find it. He didn’t tell his officers and men what his destination was for the excellent reason that he didn’t know himself, but Forster, in despair, was moved to write ‘Nothing could be more dejecting than the entire ignorance of our future destination, which, without apparent reason, was constantly kept a secret to every person on the ship’.
For the third time, picking his way through the icebergs and the ice-fields, Cook took the Resolution – surely there was never a ship so aptly named – across the Antarctic Circle. Cook’s sheer icy courage marched well with the polar wastes in which he now found himself. Few captains of today, with powerfully engined and highly manoeuverable steel vessels, would care to emulate what Cook did in that highly unmaneouverable collier on that long ago January day in 1774, where he was at the mercy of every vagary of wind and current, beset by giant icebergs on every side and hardly able to trim a sail, let alone raise or lower one, because of sails sheeted in ice until they were like iron, because of ropes that were no longer ropes but ice-sheathed, giant hawsers. But this is precisely what Cook did, nor did he stop short at the Antarctic Circle.
He kept on going south for another four days and then, on 30 January 1774 he stopped. He stopped because he had to because he had run up against a solid and impassable field of pack-ice that stretched from horizon to horizon. The latitude was 71˚ 10’ south, the longitude 106˚ 34’ west. This was the furthest south point that Cook reached, the furthest south point that any person had ever reached. It is worth noting in the passing that, from that day till the present time two hundred years later, no ship ever again has penetrated as far south in that region.
Cook, in his journal, intimates that he was not sorry that the decision as to whether he should push on even further to the south had been taken out of his hands. That same sentence in his diary, certainly the most quoted sentence Cook ever wrote, gives us the most revealing – indeed the only revealing – statement that Cook ever made about himself and what drove him to embark upon that unparalleled series of explorations and discoveries. ‘I who hope ambition leads me not only further than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go, was not sorry at meeting with this interruption.’
Cook, it might be said, had rather cruel luck in not discovering Antarctica – and what a crowning triumph that would have been for a fabulous career. Even where he turned back, he was only about two hundred miles from the nearest coast. What has not been noted or remarked upon is that at Cook’s furthest south position he was considerably further south – in some cases by over three hundred miles – than approximately half of the Antarctic coastline. Between approximately longitude 170˚ east – which runs through the South Island of New Zealand – and longitude 10˚ west – which lies roughly halfway between Cape Town and the east coast of South America – a rough semi-circle of the Antarctic coastline in the high latitudes of the Indian and Atlantic oceans lies between the Antarctic Circle and latitude 70˚ south. Cook, it will be remembered, had reached a latitude of more than 71˚ south. Had he attempted this, his deepest polar penetration, in the area above outlined he would certainly, given, of course, luck with the ice pack, have reached the coast of the Antarctic continent. As it happened, Cook made his effort in the high latitudes of the Pacific where the Antarctic coast-line recedes far to the south, in some areas at least seven hundred miles further south than in the Atlantic. But whether he discovered Antarctica or not, Cook’s voyage in January 1774 still remains one of the most incredible that man has ever undertaken.
And so, having established beyond all question that Dalrymple’s fabled continent existed in neither the Indian or Pacific oceans – there still existed the remote possibility that a very much reduced continent might be found in the high latitudes of the South Atlantic – Cook, to the unspeakable relief of the elder Forster, turned the Resolution north.
There arose now in Cook’s mind the question as to what he should do next. He had accomplished, in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, virtually all he had set out to accomplish and was perfectly entitled to set out for home. The Horn was not all that far distant and he could be in the Atlantic in a few weeks. Or, if he so wished, he could refit and spend the winter in Cape Town and make another sortie into the polar regions the following summer. Neither of those courses appealed to Cook. When explorer’s fever enters the blood-stream, there is only one way the ailment can progress – it becomes steadily worse and Cook’s was now an incurable case. Except for a few uncertainly placed islands the whole of the South Pacific was still a vast unknown. What could be more obvious? What could be more suitable?
Cook summoned his officers and men – if he was going to extend their voyage by another year the least he could do would be to give them a chance to express their opinions – and outlined his proposals to them. He had it in mind, he said, to locate a land supposedly discovered by Juan Fernandez in the eastern Pacific, then make for Easter Island. (Cook had no great faith in his ability to find either. The authority for the existence and position of the first was no less than Alexander Dalrymple and Cook’s faith in Dalrymple was at its lowest ebb: Easter Island existed, no question about that, but, as Cook said, its situation was ‘so variously laid down that I have little hope of finding it’.) From there he proposed to go clear across the Pacific to the west, almost as far as the coast of Australia, following a route that no explorer had done before. Then it was his intention to go to New Zealand, recross the Pacific, be round the Horn by November and then spend the summer exploring the high latitudes of the south Atlantic before making for Cape Town and home. Put briefly, it may not sound so much. In fact it was a monumental voyage which could not be accomplished in less than eighteen months.
There were no dissenting voices: everybody, it seems, was delighted at the prospect. This seems rather difficult to explain due to the fact that to the average Royal Navy seaman, then as now, the fairest sight on earth was the gangway that led from ship to shore. Perhaps they were so relieved to be escaping from the icy embrace of Antarctica that they would willingly and cheerfully have agreed to anything. More likely, many of them had been bitten by the explorer’s bug themselves. Most likely, they were aware now that they were an elite, that they were achieving things that no men had ever achieved before and that they were in their own way making history: and those things were happening, they were well aware, because their almost idolised captain was making them happen. It is difficult to assess just what impact Cook’s personality had on his crew but clearly it was somewhere in the range between ‘great’ and ‘immense’. There was also, of course, the tremendous kudos attached to being on the Resolution: fifty years later, when some of the young men on board had become old, they had only to say ‘I sailed with Captain Cook’ and they were at once as men apart.
Juan Fernandez’s land, to nobody’s surprise, failed to materialise: to Cook’s mind, Dalrymple’s authoritative assertion that it was there and in such and such a position was a positive guarantee that it didn’t exist. On 23 February, Cook came to the conclusion that the land simply did not exist and laid off a course for where he thought Easter Island most likely to be.
It was at this point that Cook’s health gave rise to the gravest anxiety. He had been through a tremendous physical and mental strain, he had spent most of his time in the Antarctic exposed to the bitter cold on deck, and the unhealthy diet hadn’t helped. Now he had to take to bed with ‘a bilious colic’, he could retain neither food, drink nor medicines and his condition rapidly worsened from serious to critical. There seems to have been little doubt that he was suffering from an acute infection of the gall-bladder. There is no question that it was the surgeon’s – Patten, by name – devoted and constant attention that saved Cook’s life.
Cook was on deck again, but still convalescing, when Easter Island was raised on 12 March. The Resolution sailed along the coast looking for a harbour – there was none – the side of the ship lined with a crew that gazed in amazement at the massive stone statues that dotted the island, some on hill-sides, some on massive stone platforms. When a party went ashore they were to find many more of those statues lying on their sides and almost overgrown by tall grass. The natives there, who proved quite friendly, had no idea who had built the statues or when. Cook’s theory that the Polynesians were incapable of the art and mechanical engineering to carve and erect those giant statues and that they must have been the handiwork of an earlier and more advanced civilisation that has now vanished, is almost certainly correct: but the fact remains that the origin of the famous stone gods of Easter Island is still a complete mystery.
As a source of fresh provisions, Easter Island was a considerable disappointment. They couldn’t even obtain fresh water there. Cook decided to sail to the Marquesas, which had been discovered by the Spanish almost two centuries previously: he wished to establish their position, which was only vaguely known: and he hoped to find fresh food supplies. En route to the Marquesas, Cook again became ill to the extent that his life was again despaired of. But once more, devoted nursing brought him through. The Marquesas, four high, razor-backed islands, were raised on 7 April and the Resolution anchored in Vaitahu Bay in the island of Tahuata the following day.
The islanders proved to be very friendly and although fresh meat was not obtainable there was plenty of fruit and some vegetables to be had. What struck the English most forcibly – and opinion aboard seems to have been unanimous on this point – was the appearance of the Marquesans themselves. A slim and graceful people, with skins so light that the women and children could easily be mistaken for Europeans, they were the most beautiful race of people that Cook and his men had ever seen, not just in the Pacific but in the world.
Cook now set sail for what had virtually become his second home – Tahiti. On the nine-day trip there they had to sail through the Tuamotu Archipelago, a far-scattered group of coral atolls. Cook attempted to land on one of those but the natives made it plain that they wanted no part of Cook or his men so he went on his way, anchoring in Matavai Bay in Tahiti on 22 April.
They received the now standard rapturous welcome. The island, which had hardly any pigs the last time Cook had visited it, now seemed to be positively over-run with them. Cook bought so many that he had to have a pig-sty built on shore. He was now running short of trading goods but discovered an excellent substitute currency in the form of quantities of red feathers they’d picked up the previous autumn in the Friendly Islands – Cook had until then been unaware that red was the colour sacred to the Tahitian god Oro and that red feathers, which appeared to be unobtainable in Tahiti itself, were regarded as being indispensable for the performance of certain religious ceremonies.
While they were there Cook and a party of officers and scientists were privileged to witness a most extraordinary spectacle in a nearby bay where the capital, Papeete, now stands. The Tahitians were preparing for an invasion of the neighbouring island of Moorea, whose chief was in revolt against Tahiti: this was the dress rehearsal. The bay was filled from end to end with a huge fleet of double-hulled war canoes, many almost as long as the Resolution itself. Those enormously high-powered vessels had a fighting platform aft on which stood the warriors armed with spears, clubs and a plentiful supply of stones. (It is an extraordinary thing that throughout the entire Polynesian Pacific – and nowhere else in the world – stones appeared to be the preferred offensive weapon.) Including the rowers, who would presumably also fight when the need arose, there were upwards of forty warriors in each canoe. And Cook counted no fewer than 160 such canoes: in addition he counted as many again of slightly smaller canoes which he took to be supply vessels and transports.
Some reports had it that several of the canoes were so large that they contained paddlers and warriors to a number close on two hundred, and this may well have been the case. In any event, it must have been a most impressive sight to see those hundreds of canoes and thousands of warriors lined up for revue.
Cook prudently didn’t wait for the actual hostilities to commence. This time the leave-taking was especially painful for Cook told them sadly that he would never be returning to Tahiti. In point of fact he was back just over three years later.
From there they went to Huahine and Raiatea in the Society Group, islands almost as well known to them now as Tahiti was. There they provisioned and there the broken-hearted Odiddy was returned to his home. Thence they sailed west towards the Friendly Islands, passing and naming Palmerston Island, a coral atoll in the Cook Group. A few days later they came to a much larger island where the air was so thick with thrown spears and hurtling stones that it was impossible to effect a landing. Savage Island, Cook called it, as well he might, for had it not been for his own alacrity in moving to one side he would have been transfixed by a spear. Descendants of the stone-throwers maintain that their ancestors have been slandered and that the people of Niue – the original name and the one by which it is now known – are really as friendly as can be.
Cook moved on to the Friendly Islands which appeared to have the same fascination for him as did Tahiti. When he came back to these regions three years later he spent no less than three months cruising idly about these islands, seemingly unable to tear himself away. On this occasion, however, he did not delay. It was already the end of June, he wanted to round Cape Horn in November and before doing that he wished to investigate the existence of a group of islands that both Quiros and Bougainville claimed to exist about halfway between the Friendly Islands and the Australian coast.
From the Friendly – Tonga – Islands, Cook sailed the Resolution west by slightly north, just missing the Fiji Islands which lay slightly to the northward of his track. The first of the Great Cyclades, as Bougainville had named this group, an island called Maewo, was sighted on 17 July. From then on, Cook was to find himself continuously in a maze of islands – there are about eighty in all in the Great Cyclades, stretching over a distance of close on five hundred miles – chart-work in plenty for Cook to do.
They found that the Great Cyclades was the meeting place of two races, two cultures – the Polynesians and the darker-skinned and rather more negroid Melanesians. They exhibited a marked difference in temperament: uncompromising hostility to strangers appeared to be an ingrained characteristic of the Melanesian nature. When Cook effected a landing on two predominantly Melanesian Islands, Malekula and Erromanga, he was met with cold hostility which, in Erromanga, became very warm indeed when the natives tried to take possession of the Resolution’s boats. Stones were thrown, spears were used and arrows were fired: the men of the Resolution had to have recourse to their muskets to save their lives. Several natives were killed and many injured: two English seamen were wounded.
For this, characteristically, Cook blamed only themselves. He wrote sadly: ‘We enter their ports and attempt to land in a peaceable manner. If this succeeds, all is well, if not we land nevertheless and maintain our footing by the superiority of our firearms. In what other light can they first look upon us but as invaders of their country?’ This is a recurrent theme in Cook’s journals. Unlike the great majority of his fellow countrymen – come to that, fellow Europeans – he was very conscious of and sensitive to the fact that they were forcing their unwanted attentions upon people who had been perfectly happy before they came along, that they, the white men, were taking by force that which rightfully belonged to others and that in the long run the advent of the white men could only bring decay and destruction to those simple and once contented Pacific peoples – this thought does appear to have genuinely haunted Cook: paradoxically – or so it would seem – when it came to speed in annexing new territories for the crown there was no one in the exploring business who could hold a candle to Cook. But, of course, it was really no paradox, just the age-old struggle between duty and conscience.
The Polynesian element in the Great Cyclades gave Cook a rather different reception. He was badly in need of water and wood so he tried his luck at the most southerly of the major islands in the group, Tanna, the site of a still active volcano. The people there were Polynesian and although the original reception was cool, a very close friendship eventually developed, despite the fact that one of the natives was shot by a sentry for no apparent reason. If the trail of natives left dead in a large variety of Pacific islands be taken as any criterion, the marines aboard Cook’s ships appear to have been a very trigger-happy lot indeed.
The islanders of Tanna were more than eager to trade and Cook was able to stock up to his satisfaction in fresh meat – the inevitable pigs. When Cook left after what was one of his most enjoyable and pleasant stays in the Pacific – for friendliness, Cook classed them with the Tahitians and the natives of the Friendly Islands – he had two observations to make: he regarded Tanna as the most fertile island in the Pacific, a circumstance he attributed to the volcanic ash which was deposited at regular intervals over the island; he further regarded it as the most beautiful place he had ever seen. Coming from a confirmed Tahitian like Cook, this was compliment indeed.
Cook headed north to make another sweep through the Great Cyclades to complete his surveying and chart-work, then turned south for New Zealand. In Cook’s opinion Bougainville, the French explorer, had barely touched upon this group of islands whereas he, Cook, had visited all the major and many of the minor islands and had thoroughly surveyed and charted the whole, not forgetting to bestow names freely as he passed along. Cook, accordingly, thought he had a better right to it than Bougainville, re-christened it the New Hebrides and annexed it in the name of the crown. It worked – it still is predominantly British, part of an Anglo-French condominion.
They sailed steadily south till on 5 September they saw a mountainous island rising out of the sea. To the north were a series of very dangerous reefs and shoals so Cook cruised down the east coast till he found a suitable anchorage. The natives of the islands – an unknown race to Cook, not Polynesians – proved to be very hospitable and the Resolution stayed there for a week. In a land that Cook found very like Australia the inhabitants, a friendly people much given to laughter, carried on a fairly intensive form of cultivation.
During his stay Cook climbed a mountain and discovered that the island, in the shape of an enormous whale-back, was about thirty-five miles wide. When they went on their way again they were astonished at its north-south length, which was at least two hundred and fifty miles. Cook reckoned that, New Zealand apart, it must be the biggest island in the Pacific and, as usual, Cook was right. Apparently not caring for its native name of Balade, Cook changed it to New Caledonia.
On 10 October they came across a small, uninhabited but fertile island which Cook called Norfolk Island. He stopped off just long enough to annex it then carried on by the way of the west coast of North Island to Queen Charlotte Sound, where he arrived on 18 October.
Three weeks were spent there, laying in water and wood and getting the Resolution in the best possible condition before setting off on the next long leg of their journey – round Cape Horn and on to Cape Town which would be the first place where they could hope to obtain provisions. From tree-stumps that showed that a saw had been used, Cook knew that another vessel had been there. The message he’d left for Furneaux was gone. And, by using sign language and diagrammatic sketches with the Maoris, Cook was able to establish roughly the date when the Adventure had left.
Cook noted that the Maoris had changed since he had last been there, just under a year previously. Then they had been friendly, gregarious: now they were withdrawn, shy, wary. It was not until Cook arrived in Cape Town and found there a letter left for him by Furneaux and learned of the cannibal episode that he understood that the Maoris of Queen Charlotte Sound had indeed something to be wary of.
The Resolution left the Sound on 10 November, steered on a south-east course till she was about a thousand miles south of her starting point, then turned east, making a very fast passage to Cape Horn, the powerful westerlies behind her, more or less along the 55th parallel. Furneaux had gone almost exactly the same way: neither of them, it need hardly be said, encountered any trace of Dalrymple’s continent.
The trip to Cape Horn was uneventful. Cook even says it was boring. They spent the Christmas period in the Tierra del Fuego region, surveying, botanising, taking on food and water and then rounded the Horn on 29 December, moving out into the Atlantic.
Cook’s last objective now was to cross the South Atlantic in the high latitudes in what he was convinced would be the vain task of locating the land – part of the great continent of the south – which Dalrymple and other illustrious geographers maintained to be there: as far as they were concerned it had to be, they’d already drawn maps of it. So Cook moved deep into the regions of ice and bitter cold and dense blanketing fogs again. He discovered South Georgia, a bleak and barren and desolate wilderness of ice and snow, uninhabited, and totally useless for any purpose: this, of course, did not prevent Cook from going ashore and annexing it in the name of the crown. Further on he discovered an equally useless group of isles which he annexed and called the South Sandwich Islands, and, to the south of that, another desolation which he called Southern Thule.
Those apart, Cook hunted high and he hunted low, but never a trace of this land of Dalrymple, far less the great Southern Continent did he see for the reason that had been obvious to Cook for a long time now – it just wasn’t there to be seen. For a final week or two Cook searched again for Bouvet’s Cape Circumcision and failed to find it. He now intersected the track he had made over two years ago when he first crossed the Antarctic Circle. He had circumnavigated the world in latitudes so high that such a voyage had been regarded as quite impossible; and he had put the final nails in the coffin of Dalrymple’s dream, having proved, not only beyond reasonable doubt, but absolutely, that no such thing as a Southern Continent existed. Cook had been given a job, or if you like, he’d given himself a job to do and he’d done it.
It was time to go home now, if for no other reason than that there didn’t seem to be anything left for him in the southern hemisphere to explore. He reached Cape Town on 21 March where a number of repairs, chiefly to a badly damaged rudder, kept him for five weeks. It was here that he was given the letter left him by Furneaux and learnt of the tragedy that had taken place in Queen Charlotte Sound.
The Resolution’s homeward route was by St Helena, Ascension Island, and the Azores. She anchored at Spithead on 30 July 1775, three years and eighteen days after setting out on what was to be, and what still remains, as the greatest voyage of exploration in history.