Captain James Cook had the look of a disappointed man as he carried his charts and journals up the steps of the Admiralty building in London in August 1775. The son of a Yorkshire farm labourer, he had become one of the world’s great explorers. Yet he had failed to fulfil the great quest of the eighteenth century.
Cook had been instructed to find the missing continent that was said by the ancient Greeks to dominate the southern hemisphere. The so-called ‘Great South Land’ was believed to be more bountiful than the Americas. But the continent was a figment of the mapmakers’ imaginations. Cook had scoured the southern oceans for a massive continent that did not exist.
Remaining just out of sight of Cook’s ceaseless searching was the last undiscovered continent, Antarctica. Although Cook suspected that there was a sizeable land at the South Pole, he assured the Lords of the Admiralty that its ice-choked seas meant that it was not worth the risk involved in discovering and claiming it for England. Cook never imagined that his voyages in the South Seas would spark a two-century-long battle for control of those frozen wastes.
The first of Cook’s historic voyages saw him circle the globe between 1768 and 1771. Crammed aboard a small barquentine, the HMS Endeavour, was a party of scientists and artists, led by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander. Their expedition was to Tahiti, where they were to observe the transit of Venus across the sun. It was an important calculation for navigational purposes, and observations were being made in different parts of the world by French and English scientists.
That was the ostensible reason for the Endeavour’s long voyage, with the publicly announced purpose being designed to put the French and other European powers off the scent. In fact, once the scientists had completed their work in Tahiti, Cook had secret instructions to search the South Pacific for the mythical Great South Land and to claim it for England. According to Alexander Dalrymple, an influential proponent of Pacific discovery who had wanted to command the Endeavour expedition himself, the continent was about 8000 kilometres across and probably had more than fifty million inhabitants.1 If Dalrymple was right, it was a great prize indeed.
Cook was conscious that he was sailing in the wake of the French explorer Louis de Bougainville, who had left France in 1766 to look for the elusive continent.2 In 1768 two English navigators, Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret, had set sail but had also failed to find it.
The dutiful Cook did as he was instructed. After an eight-month voyage to Tahiti, he spent a further three months enjoying the delights of that tropical paradise and making the required observations. Both Wallis and Bougainville had preceded him there, and in fact both had claimed it for their respective sovereigns. Cook had to be content with being the first European to discover and claim a number of lesser islands nearby. In July 1769 he took the Endeavour southward to the area where he expected to find the world’s last remaining continent. Wallis had been instructed to do so during his voyage, but had decided against chancing his ship in the wintry conditions of the Southern Ocean. Cook soon wished that he had done likewise.
For several weeks Cook battled the strong Pacific swell, scanning the foam-flecked waves for some sign of the land that had long been marked on European maps. He saw nothing but an increasingly cold and tempestuous ocean. He might have continued on towards the Antarctic Circle, but the rough seas and low temperatures would have sorely tested the worn sails and rigging of the blunt-nosed ship as well as the good temper of the crew. Moreover, the Great South Land was meant to extend far into temperate latitudes.
Cook steered the Endeavour back to the embrace of warmer and calmer climes. His sortie south had failed to find the Great South Land and had left him without any great triumph to present upon his return. Cook made a momentous decision. Rather than heading home around Cape Horn, and landing practically empty-handed in England, he decided to continue his search by heading westward.3
Cook knew that the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had gone looking for the Great South Land and in 1642 had chanced upon the west coast of what we now know as New Zealand. Tasman had reached it by way of the south coast of mainland Australia and Tasmania. From their trading posts in the East Indies, the Dutch had previously charted the northern and western stretches of the Australian coastline, calling the land ‘New Holland’. But they thought so little of it that they had made no serious attempt to make it their own by settling it with Dutch colonists. Their attention continued to be directed further eastward, where Tasman hoped to encounter the Great South Land of European imagination. In contrast to the aridity of Australia, the Great South Land was supposed to have a temperate climate, a large population of civilised people, rich gold and silver mines, and new plants that would produce a fortune for their finders, as the spice plants of the East Indies had already done for the Dutch. Tasman thought that he may have found such a place of boundless riches when he discovered New Zealand.
At first sight, New Zealand certainly looked like it might be the place of the cartographers’ dreams. It had a temperate climate, its soils enjoyed a bountiful fertility and it was peopled by an organised society. Even though Tasman saw nothing comparable to the grand cities the Spanish had encountered in the New World, and no evidence of gold or silver among the ornaments of the native people, it still seemed possible that New Zealand could be the Great South Land. So convinced of this was Tasman that he named it Staten’s Land, believing it to be joined to a land of the same name that had been seen off the tip of South America. If true, this would mean he was on the western coast of a huge southern continent.
Tasman’s view was accepted by many European geographers for more than a century. In fact, each ‘Staten’s Land’ was an island, and they were separated by thousands of kilometres of the Pacific Ocean. Tasman might have discovered this but his inspection of New Zealand was cut short by the hostility of the Maori inhabitants, who killed four of his men when they ventured ashore to get fresh water. Hastening away from what he called Murderers’ Bay, Tasman was still content to declare his voyage a success, proclaiming he had discovered the Great South Land. However, he brought nothing back of any value to inspire the Dutch East India Company to follow up his discovery.
Still, the west coast of New Zealand was now marked on European maps, and there was no telling how far the mysterious land extended in other directions. Cook answered part of that question when he sailed south from Tahiti and failed to find the land that was meant to be there. Heading west, Cook expected to encounter the eastern coast of the land that Tasman had discovered. The health of his men and the success of his secret mission demanded that he find Staten’s Land. It would allow him to keep the dreaded scurvy at bay by restocking his ship with fresh food, water and firewood, and to determine the true nature of the land whose coastline Tasman had partially charted. Again, Cook was destined to be disappointed.
Cook was forced to abandon his assumption that New Zealand was part of a larger continent as he sailed further and further west without encountering land. Finally reaching New Zealand’s east coast and making a careful circumnavigation of its two islands, he concluded that the elusive continent must be elsewhere. Further patient investigation of the remaining blank spaces on the globe would have to be made.
Cook began by heading for the uncharted east coast of Australia, where he again completed the work of his Dutch predecessors by filling in another blank part of the eighteenth century’s maps. He had also claimed both places for England, going through the customary ceremonies of the time – raising the flag, firing a salute and marking a tree or building a cairn of stones – to show that he was the discoverer and England was now the supposed owner of the place. What the indigenous inhabitants thought of these curious ceremonies, performed by alien visitors who promptly decamped, was not recorded. There was little attempt by Cook to make them complicit in their possible dispossession.
After completing the charting of Australia’s east coast, Cook intended to continue to the seas east of New Guinea, where the Spanish explorer Pedro Fernandez de Quiros had in 1606 chanced upon the islands of the New Hebrides, which he thought were part of the missing continent. Having disproved Tasman’s assumption about New Zealand, Cook intended to test the claims of de Quiros.
His plan to pursue the Spanish chimera came to an abrupt and almost calamitous end when the Endeavour was run aground and badly holed on the Great Barrier Reef in June 1770. Cook only managed to stave off disaster by plugging the hole, pulling the ship off the reef at high tide and beaching it on the muddy bank of a tidal river on the nearby Australian coast. The close call, and the seven weeks it took to repair the hull, convinced Cook to abandon his plan to check the Spanish report and instead head directly home by way of the nearby Dutch port of Batavia (now Jakarta).
After nearly three years at sea, Cook arrived back in London in July 1771. The Endeavour was laden with thousands of strange plants, insects, birds and animals, which Banks and Solander displayed to their fellow scientists while telling tales to the king of previously unknown islands and peoples. Cook also had much to report. He had taken the Endeavour around the world in a masterly voyage that had seen him solve the lingering mystery of New Zealand and chart Australia’s eastern coastline. He had added eastern Australia to England’s growing empire, naming it New South Wales to emphasise its agricultural and pastoral possibilities. But he could see little compelling reason for England to be any more interested than Holland had been in actually buttressing its formal claim of ownership with an act of effective occupation. More importantly to Cook, these were not new discoveries. His principal discovery was a negative one: that the Great South Land did not exist in the place where cartographers had placed it for centuries. As he rather plaintively informed the Lords of the Admiralty, he had ‘faild in discovering the so much talk’d of southern Continent’, which he conceded ‘perhaps do[es] not exist’.4
Despite Cook’s lament, much of the South Pacific remained unexplored. England could not let the prize of discovering the Great South Land go to one of its imperial rivals, particularly the French. Unknown to Cook, the French explorer Jean-François-Marie de Surville had been exploring the coast of New Zealand at the same time as Cook in 1769, but he had drowned off the coast of Peru the following year with little to show for his voyage. And just prior to Cook’s return to London, the French explorer Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen-Trémarec was sent south with instructions from King Louis XV to locate the fabled continent.
In fact, Kerguelen-Trémarec thought he had found it in February 1772, when he came across a treeless and mountainous archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean, which he mistakenly believed was of continental size. So convinced was he that he did not try to circumnavigate the desolate land mass but rushed back to report his discovery to the king. Dubbing it ‘South France’, he reported that it was ‘the central mass of the Antarctic continent’ and capable of producing ‘all the crops of the Mother country’.5 Instructed to undertake a second expedition with three ships to confirm its much-vaunted value and begin its colonisation, Kerguelen-Trémarec returned with the disappointing news that his claims were woefully wrong. The isolated islands that came to bear his name were not part of a continent and were of little value. He was promptly thrown into prison for his deceptive reports.6
Although successive explorers had returned to their countries disappointed, all the voyaging had vastly expanded European knowledge of the world. By a process of elimination, large areas of ocean were now known not to contain the southern continent. Cook’s first voyage had left him with some doubt about whether the continent even existed. But the English Admiralty could not afford to have a French explorer prove that Cook’s doubts were wrong. So another English expedition was planned.
Cook was sent back with two vessels in July 1772 to make a more intensive search in the watery wastes of the Southern Ocean. This time, he would be accompanied by the irascible Prussian-born scientist Johann Forster and his son George. If there was a continent there, Cook was determined to claim it for England. And without the well-connected and high-profile Banks, the plaudits for a discovery would be his alone. With two converted Whitby colliers, the Resolution and the Adventure, Cook would again circumnavigate the world, this time going as far south as his ships and their crews could endure, venturing further than any other explorer had dared to go before.
In November 1772, Cook sailed south from Cape Town into windswept and increasingly cold seas, looking for a land that had been seen there in 1739 by Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Lozier, an officer of the French East India Company. Naming the land he saw as Cape Circoncision, Bouvet had assumed it was part of the Great South Land, although no one had managed to confirm his sighting in the intervening decades.
For much of November and December, as Cook and his officers vainly scanned the horizon for some sign of Cape Circoncision, the two vessels battled what one officer described as ‘continual hard gales of Wind & very boisterous weather’.7 As for the land, there was nothing to report. Nevertheless, the two ships plunged their way further and further south, with the continual light of the Antarctic summer helping to safeguard them from the moving ‘islands of ice’ that began to crowd the previously empty seas. When two penguins were sighted among the icebergs on 10 December, it was assumed the vessels must be close to land, but still nothing was seen.
With the ships cloaked ethereally in ice, and the coats of the sailors stiffened by the intense cold, Cook finally became the first explorer to cross into the Antarctic Circle, on 17 January 1773.8 However, the historic effort was for nought. Instead of the hoped-for continent, Cook was confronted by an ice-covered sea that blocked any further progress and imperilled his ships. Acutely conscious of the danger, and after having reached sixty-seven degrees south, Cook ordered the vessels to turn about.9 As for Bouvet’s ‘continent’, he supposed the Frenchman had mistaken an extensive, snow-covered iceberg for land.
In his persistent search for Bouvet’s reported land, Cook had unknowingly come within 120 kilometres of the Antarctic coastline. Although it was just over the horizon, the continent was too far away to be seen from even the highest vantage point of the Resolution. Had Cook turned east rather than retreating north, he and his men might have sailed sufficiently far to have seen mountains on the jutting edge of the Antarctic continent that would come to be known as Enderby Land.
Despite his disappointment at not finding Cape Circoncision, Cook remained determined to find the Great South Land in the temperate latitudes in which cartographers had long drawn it. He was mindful that searching in the high southern latitudes was only likely to find an isolated, ice-covered land that would not be of any use to England. His instructions from the Admiralty had called on him to discover and claim for the king ‘that Land or Islands of Great extent’ that was located ‘in Latitudes convenient for Navigation, and in Climates adapted to the production of Commodities useful in Commerce’.10 No one believed that the world’s remaining continent would be almost totally confined to the polar climes.
So Cook tracked to the north before heading east again across the southern reaches of the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, tacking north and south in a roller-coaster fashion to ensure that any continental-sized territory would come within sight of the watchers on his ships. Twice more he dipped towards the South Pole in desperate attempts to somehow spot the coast of the Great South Land. On the final dip, he sailed further south than anyone else had ever dared, reaching 71° 10’ S at longitude 106° 54’ W early in the morning of 30 January 1774.
Having lost contact with the Adventure in New Zealand, it was only the sailors of the Resolution who looked with trepidation on the frozen sea that stretched away to the south. Earlier, Cook had been misled into believing that he was gazing upon the snow-covered mountains of a continent, but they had turned out to be clouds on the horizon. Now there was just pack ice and locked-in icebergs, and no sign of the continent he had expected to find. Cook was finally convinced that the Great South Land, if it existed, must lie largely south of the Antarctic Circle. The Forsters thought that the missing continent might not exist even there, arguing that there was ‘little reason to suppose that there actually is any land of considerable extent in the frigid zone’.11
Whatever the truth of the matter, the discovery of the polar continent would have been some consolation to Cook, whose extensive voyaging had seen him find few wholly new discoveries. Yet he was again repelled by its protective belt of ice, having to console himself with the much lesser prize of claiming to have sailed further south than any other navigator. The young George Forster, who was more interested in scientific discovery than geographic exploration, noted with some satisfaction that ‘as it was impossible to proceed farther, we put the ship about, well satisfied with our perilous expedition, and almost persuaded that no navigator will care to come after, and much less attempt to pass beyond us’.12
Cook could not be so sanguine about the expedition being blocked by the impenetrable ice. Moreover, as he turned the ship about, one of his officers cheekily outdid him as the furthest man south by making his way carefully to the end of the ice-covered bowsprit, where he flourished his hat in the cold air and triumphantly declared, ‘Ne plus ultra!’13 With the ice now behind them, the sailors could look forward to some fresh food in the central Pacific, where they would spend the coming winter in more comfortable climes.
For Cook, who was suffering the agony of what was probably an intestinal blockage, it was disappointing to be defeated once again. Discovery of the Great South Land, even if it was too far south to be of much value, would have crowned his second voyage with a semblance of success. Now it seemed that he had little to show for his years at sea. Anxious not to be viewed as a failure, Cook explained in his journal that it would have been ‘a very dangerous enterprise’ to have attempted to find a passage through the ice. Indeed, he believed that no sane captain would ever try to do so. He tried to be satisfied with having gone ‘not only farther than any man has gone before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go’.14
To ward off any critics who might question his decision to abandon the search, Cook dismissed the idea of the much-vaunted continent being of any value if it was located further south. An explorer who dared to go further than he had done could have ‘the honour of the discovery’, wrote Cook, ‘but I will be bold to say that the world will not be benefited by it’.15 Exploiting such a continent would require ships to find their way through ‘thick fogs, snow storms, intense cold, and every other thing that can render navigation dangerous’. They would then have to confront the ‘unexpressable horrid aspect of the country, a country doomed by nature never once to feel the warmth of the sun rays, but to lie ever buried under everlasting snow and ice’. Any ports on such a coast would be ‘wholly filled up with frozen snow of a vast thickness’. It was not cowardice that kept him from the task of discovering such a coast, argued Cook, but the futility of finding a coast that ‘would have answered no end whatever’.16
With the Resolution heading back to the Pacific islands, Cook retired to his cabin to make sense of his failure to find what had never been there. Taking up his quill on 6 February 1774, he wrote that the ‘assertions and conjectures’ of all the authors who had suggested there was an undiscovered continent in the South Pacific had now been ‘intirely [sic] refuted’. Although that was an achievement of sorts, it was not likely to see him hailed as a hero in the drawing rooms of London.
The diligent navigator spent the winter in the tropics, clearing up doubts about the positions of particular islands and noting in his journal that he had ‘little expectation of making any valuable discovery’.17 This meant an additional year at sea for the sailors, as they recovered their health and the scientists studied the natural world at a succession of Pacific islands, including a further sojourn at New Zealand. Finally, Cook sailed back across the Pacific towards Cape Horn in December 1774. He harboured one last hope.
During this voyage, he would look for lands reported by earlier explorers to exist in those parts, which might yet be found to be part of the Great South Land.18 First, though, Cook called in at Staten Land, the small island off the south-eastern point of Tierra del Fuego, formerly believed to be part of a southern continent and which is now known as Isla de los Estados. Whales were in such great abundance in these seas, complained one officer, that their ‘blowing’ would ‘frequently taint the whole Atmosphere about us with the most disagreeable effluvia than can be conceiv’d’.19
Landing ashore, they found the rocky bays and inlets were crowded with fur seals, sea lions, penguins and birds of many kinds. The larger sea lions were shot and their blubber boiled down for oil, while smaller sea lions, seals, penguins and unfledged birds were clubbed to death and taken back for a shipboard feast.20 Midshipman John Elliott recalled how he confronted one sizeable male sea lion as it attempted to defend its clutch of females; Elliott walked ‘coolly up to him, firing my Musquet into his chest at 2 or 3 yards distance as he advanced, and then driving my Baynet into his Mouth’. Elliott then went with his companions amongst the female sea lions, ‘some shooting them, some knocking them on the head with Clubs – others shooting birds of different kinds, some knocking down Penguins’, which he likened to ‘a regiment of little soldiers’.21
The reports of the rich marine life would later draw sealers in their hundreds to reap an easy harvest of the lolling animals. For the present, Cook was interested in the wildlife only as meat for his crew and specimens for his scientists. His primary concern remained the sightings of a possible southern continent. If any of the old reports proved accurate, this was where real wealth was likely to be found.
One such place, to the east of Cape Horn, had been seen in 1756 by a Spanish captain, and reported as being ‘a Continent of land … full of sharp and craggy mountains’. When the Resolution reached the location of this supposed continent on 14 January 1775, Cook finally believed that he had found the object of his arduous voyaging. Misled by the ‘vast height of its Mountains’, Cook thought it must be part of a large land mass. As befitting a discovery of continental extent, he named it Georgia in honour of his king, before carefully charting its coastline and bestowing English names on its more prominent features.22
There did not seem much to recommend this place as an outpost of empire. It was bereft of inhabitants, bare of trees, beset with glaciers and rocky heights, and covered by ice and snow. It was hardly the temperate and productive Great South Land that Cook had set out to find. Nevertheless, on 17 January, after encountering a suitable bay, Cook rowed off with Johann and George Forster to investigate the new land.
Perhaps because of a glacier that was splitting off great chunks of ice, or because of the difficulty of finding a secure anchorage in the deep waters of the windswept bay, Cook decided to leave the Resolution in the open sea. He also decided not to explore the hinterland, as ‘it did not seem probable that any one would ever be benefited by the discovery’. In his journal, he described the landscape as being ‘savage and horrible: the Wild rocks raised their lofty summits till they were lost in the Clouds and the Vallies laid buried in everlasting Snow’. But there were more fur seals and elephant seals to be killed, along with penguins, ducks and other birds.23
Despite his disdain for the place, Cook believed that he had finally achieved the purpose of his voyage. He later reported to the Admiralty his initial excitement at having ‘discovered a Coast which … we judged to belong to a great Continent’.24 Accordingly, with the summer temperature barely above freezing, he proceeded to take formal possession of what one officer described as ‘this new Country (Southern Continent I hope)’.25
In his account of their time ashore, Johann Forster was more interested in the great variety of undisturbed wildlife; he described the claiming ceremony in the most cursory way: ‘The Capt took a view of the harbour & then took Possession in his Britannick Majesties Name & His Heirs for ever: hoisted a Flag on the Land, & fired 3 Volleys, and then returned on board.’ The young George Forster thought that the three volleys invested the ceremony with ‘greater weight’, although he went on to describe with a degree of derision how the ‘barren rocks re-echoed with the sound, to the utter amazement of seals and pinguins, the inhabitants of these newly discovered dominions’.26
Cook’s description of the ceremony was also rather abrupt. He omitted the details of the proclamation that he apparently read out to take possession. Cook reported only that he ‘landed in three different places, displayed our Colours and took possession of the Country in his Majestys name under a descharge of small Arms’.27 Back on board the Resolution, Cook then continued to chart the coastline, naming the bay he had just left as Possession Bay – making it one more in a long line of places around the world that he had so named.
Cook’s excitement then turned to disappointment. After he had sailed little more than 160 kilometres along the northern coastline, he rounded a point to find that the coast suddenly turned northwest, towards the point at which he had begun. It was now clear to him that the ‘continent’ was actually an island of limited extent, about 190 kilometres long and thirty-two kilometres wide.
Naming the point Cape Disappointment, and renaming Georgia as the Isle of Georgia, later to be South Georgia, it was obvious to Cook that ‘this land which we had taken to be part of a great Continent was no more than an Island of 70 leagues in Circuit’. His scattering of distinguished royal and political names along the forbidding coastline now looked almost insulting.
Cook’s disappointment was shared by his officers, one of whom wrote how he had been deceived into believing that ‘we had got hold of the Southern Continent’, only to find that ‘these pleasing dreams are reduc’d to a small Isle, and that a very poor one too’. Indeed, it was as wretched a place as they had ever seen, bleaker and more barren even than Tierra del Fuego. Ironically, this was some consolation to Cook and greatly moderated his disappointment, since a continent of such dreary desolation ‘would not be worth the discovery’.28 In fact, the island had been discovered nineteen years earlier by a Spanish merchant ship, whose captain had named it San Pedro.29
With his three-year cruise of the Southern Ocean almost over, Cook still believed that he might make a significant discovery of land. He had earlier dismissed Bouvet’s sighting of a snow-covered land south of Africa as having been an iceberg, believing that a land in that latitude could not be snow-covered in summer. However, his experience with the snow-covered Isle of Georgia now suggested that the Frenchman might have been correct. Cook decided to make a second attempt to find out, despite being tired of ‘high Southern Latitudes where nothing was to be found but ice and thick fogs’.
He steered the Resolution on a south-easterly course that would edge the ship back towards the Antarctic Circle, confident that this last part of the circumnavigation would finally see him successful. Indeed, he feared that he would ‘find more land than I should have time to explore’.30 On 31 January 1775, just eleven days after leaving the Isle of Georgia, Cook’s prediction seemed to have been vindicated.
As the Resolution probed its way through the fog-bound and ice-strewn sea, the conditions cleared sufficiently for Cook to see land just five or six kilometres ahead. Again, he thought that he might have stumbled across part of the Great South Land, but the fog and ice made it difficult to confirm. After seeing a high mountain, Cook warily kept his distance from the inhospitable coast, against which huge icebergs had run aground.
He sailed south for a time before turning north and cautiously heading along what he imagined to be a continuous coastline studded with snow-covered mountains. Not realising that he was looking at a line of islands, he named them capes and gave the southernmost one the name Southern Thule, because, at nearly sixty degrees south, it was ‘the most southern land’ yet discovered.31 Instead of charting the coast and discovering whether it was part of a continent, as he had done at the Isle of Georgia, Cook kept his distance from the frequently obscured coastline. He was not willing to risk his voyage to chase after what might be one more chimera.
Instead of heading south to chart what he surmised was the promontory of a continent extending from the South Pole, Cook turned his ship about and headed north to chart its furthest extent in that direction. After all, the British government wanted him to locate a temperate continent, not a frozen wasteland. That would also allow him to sail back in the general direction of Bouvet’s Cape Circoncision, and then on to the comforts of Cape Town and home to England.
After sailing north until the land had disappeared, Cook remained unsure whether he had found ‘a group of Islands or else a point of the Continent’. Assuming it was part of a continent, although not the temperate continent that his masters wanted him to find, Cook named it Sandwich Land, in honour of his political patron, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich. The name would also create a sense of English possession.
Cook had made no attempt, as he had done at the Isle of Georgia, to row ashore to claim ownership of the land. In Cook’s view, the place would not be an asset to the empire and was not worth the risk that making a formal claim would carry. As one of his officers observed, ‘the shores were form’d of high rocky precipices and the Bays chok’d up with Ice … so that getting a foot ashore was wholly impracticable’.32
Future explorers would find that Sandwich Land was actually several islands separated by kilometres of sea, yet Cook’s error was understandable. With visibility being poor, and with two of the islands having mountains several thousand feet high, Cook mistakenly thought the sea-ice connecting them was snow-covered land. As a result, he believed that he could be looking at ‘a point of the Continent’ that stretched all the way towards the South Pole, which he now correctly surmised was ‘the Source of most of the ice which is spread over this vast Southern Ocean’.33
Until now, Cook had assiduously followed his instructions to find the temperate Great South Land. Every likely prospect had been pursued until he was satisfied that it was not part of that missing continent. But he could only push himself and his men so far. With Cape Town beckoning and his supplies running low, and the disappointment of South Georgia fresh in his memory, he was not prepared to spend any further time on his historic quest. The happiness of the crew at this decision was shown in a song, which rejoiced that:
We are out of the cold my brave Boys do not fear
For the Cape of good Hope with good hearts we do steer
Thank God we have ranged the Globe all around
And we have likewise the south Continent found
But it being too late in the year as they say
We could stay there no longer the land to survey34
Anxious that he not be censured for failing to follow this last lead to its conclusion, Cook argued that most of the continent ‘must lay within the Polar Circle where the Sea is so pestered with ice, that the land is thereby inaccessible’. Predicting that ‘no man will ever venture farther than I have done and that the lands which may lie to the South will never be explored’, Cook pointed out that it would have been rash ‘to have risked all which had been done in the Voyage, in finding out and exploring a Coast which when done would have answered no end whatever’.35
Cook was glad to be gone from the snow-swept and fog-bound seas of Sandwich Land, describing it as ‘the most horrible Coast in the World’, while one of his officers wrote that it was ‘as wretched a Country as Nature can possibly form’.36 Cook took the Resolution towards Cape Town, but he hoped first to sight the location where Bouvet had reported land. Again failing to find the mysterious ‘Cape Circoncision’, Cook concluded once more that it must have been an iceberg. In fact, Bouvet had given the wrong location for what was later found to be a small volcanic island, now known as Bouvet Island. There was nothing left for Cook to do but proceed to Cape Town to prepare his ship and crew for the final leg of their long voyage home to England.
Cook reflected on the achievements of his voyage. He could take some comfort from having circumnavigated the South Pole, and from having crossed the Southern Ocean ‘in such a manner as to leave not the least room for the Possibility of there being a continent, unless near the Pole and out of the reach of Navigation’. His voyage, as he saw it, had put ‘a final end … to the searching after a Southern Continent, which has at times ingrossed the attention of some of the Maritime Powers for near two Centuries past and the Geographers of all ages’.37
Still, it was not the positive achievement that he had hoped for, or that the Admiralty had expected when it sent him off. Writing to the Admiralty’s secretary, Cook explained that his failure to find the continent was ‘because it does not exist in a Navigable Sea and not for want of looking after’. Anyway, continued Cook, he had done more than look for the elusive continent. He had done everything that could be done ‘to finish the exploring [of] the Southern Hemisphere’.38 That would have to be his lasting achievement.
In Cape Town, Cook heard news of other navigators, both French and Spanish, who had made minor discoveries of islands that Cook had missed. In the gentlemanly culture of the time, explorers readily acknowledged the discoveries of those who had reached particular places first. However, they still wanted to be first into print with the results of their particular voyage. So it was with Cook, who was prompted by the news of his rivals to quickly compile a comprehensive map of the latest discoveries for European audiences, so that his work would be published before those of the French and Spanish. He would also write a popular account of the voyage so that the world would not be in any doubt about his achievements. Cook was still smarting from his earlier voyage, when Joseph Banks had reaped most of the public plaudits.
Cook’s hopes were realised when his A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World was published to great acclaim in May 1777. The richly illustrated volume captivated the public’s attention, with its spectacular etchings of the Resolution being dwarfed by icebergs, and its maps showing the southerly extent of the voyage. He had circled the South Pole and lain to rest the widespread belief in the existence of a continent extending into the temperate latitudes.
If there was a continent still to be discovered, Cook surmised, it must be much further south, possibly part of the briefly sighted Sandwich Land. From his observations of icebergs, which caused him to suggest that they came from land rather than being formed at sea, Cook had deduced that the existence of a sizeable Antarctic land mass was likely. But he had not been able to confirm its discovery.
Cook was convinced that it was impossible to take a ship safely that far south, and that any continent situated there would not be worth claiming. Although he had formally laid claim to the Isle of Georgia, thinking it was part of a continent, he had not been greatly disappointed when he found that the forbidding place was only an island. An ice-bound continent could never be an asset to England, he argued. Time would prove him wrong, and it would not take long to do so.