Captain James Cook and the Search for Antarctica

By James C. Hamilton

A fascinating account of the famous explorer’s voyages through the southern Pacific and Antarctic Oceans, based on firsthand journals and logbooks.

In the mid-18th century, Captain James Cook undertook extraordinary voyages of navigation and maritime exploration to discover the Unknown Southern Continent. He accomplished and encountered much during his three voyages through the uncharted southern waters, yet his Antarctic voyages are perhaps the least studied of all his remarkable travels.

Now James Hamilton’s gripping and scholarly study brings together the stories of Cook’s Antarctic journeys into a single volume. Using Cook’s journals and the logbooks of officers who sailed with him, this volume sets his Antarctic explorations within the context of his historic voyages.

Captain James Cook and the Search for Antarctica offers fascinating insight into Cook the seaman and explorer. The exceptional navigational skills of Cook and his crew are vividly depicted as they survive foul weather across uncharted and inhospitable seas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526753588

Book preview

Introduction

There are three reasons to publish this book. Firstly, the primary purpose is to incorporate, into a single volume, a narrative and a detailed analysis of Captain James Cook’s Antarctic and sub-Antarctic navigation in the Southern Ocean. The search occurred during portions of his first, second and third voyages. Secondly, Cook’s travels to locate the Unknown Southern Continent are less studied than his Pacific travels. Nonetheless, they represent an important ‘narrowing of options’ to an eighteenth-century understanding of Terra Australis Incognita’s location. Thirdly, the timing of this study recognizes the worldwide recognition of the 250th anniversary of Cook’s voyages of navigation, geography and science during 2018–2029.

The book is intended for a general audience: for readers interested in Cook, as well as anyone studying exploration and maritime history. Notes identify the sources utilized and offer references for further reading. There is a wealth of secondary material identified in the bibliography which might stir the interest of readers to investigate aspects of Captain Cook’s remarkable story.

In reading this book we must understand that, while today we know about Antarctica’s location, its physical features and geography, only the ‘idea of’ or speculation about Terra Australis Incognita existed until Captain Cook’s voyages. The world’s maps changed through Cook’s three documented crossings of the Antarctic Circle. He completed his circumnavigation of Antarctica over the course of three summers, and he criss-crossed the vast expanse of oceans to rule out the Southern Continent’s location where others suggested it was to be found. Reading Cook’s journals, the log books of other officers and journals written by scientists who accompanied Cook on these voyages allows the modern reader to witness how he came to understand and define Antarctica and the Southern Ocean by narrowing the options for the location of a continent at the South Pole.

James Cook (b. 28 October 1728, d. 14 February 1779)¹ was one of history’s greatest navigators. His three voyages delineated the Pacific Ocean and reached into the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic Circle as well as into the Arctic Ocean and Arctic Circle. Cook’s navigation and exploration occurred in relatively small ships, powered only by wind upon sail, covering 140 degrees of Earth’s 180 degrees of latitude and travelling over 200,000 miles – eight times the Earth’s circumference and almost the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

In Cook’s era, Antarctica was known as Terra Australis Incognita, the Unknown Southern Continent. He occasionally speculated whether or not it existed at all, but usually referred to it as the Southern Continent. In 1768, at the beginning of the first voyage, the Admiralty instructed Cook that the discovery of the Southern Continent was ‘the object which you are always to have in view’. The voyages in the Southern Ocean include episodes during which Cook’s navigational skills, and those of his crew, were on display during often difficult and sometimes dangerous oceanic travels in foul weather and inhospitable, as well as mostly unknown, seas. Although the search for Antarctica was the primary purpose of Cook’s second voyage (1772–1775), travels to sub-Antarctic regions also took place during brief periods of the first voyage (1768–1771) and the third voyage (1776–1779/1780).²

Captain James Cook’s Search for Antarctica

There are four parts to the story of Cook’s search for Antarctica and his navigation in the Southern Ocean:

•During the first voyage (1768–1771), sailing in Endeavour , Cook rounded the tip of South America by sailing through the Strait of Le Maire, along the coasts of Tierra del Fuego and Staten Island, then rounding Cape Horn in January 1769. He sailed to 60° south latitude and then southsouthwest to 110° west longitude in search of the Southern Continent. Later, in August and September 1769, he sailed south-southeast of Tahiti to 40° south latitude searching for Antarctica. He found no Southern Continent ( Chapter 4 ). Cook again visited Tierra del Fuego in December 1774 on his way towards the third ‘ice-edge’ ³ part of his Antarctic circumnavigation (Chapter 10). This navigation finally ruled out the continent’s existence east of New Zealand and west of Tierra del Fuego.

•Cook circumnavigated the Southern Continent in three ‘ice-edge cruises’ during the second voyage (1772–1775). Resolution and Adventure first crossed the Antarctic Circle on 17 January 1773. After the two ships separated in early February (off Antarctica) and again in October 1773 (off New Zealand), Resolution crossed the Antarctic Circle again in December 1773 and January 1774. In each of the three crossings of the Circle, Captain Cook encountered an impenetrable ice barrier surrounding the continent, along with floating ice and icebergs (Cook’s ‘ice islands’), as well as penguins, seals, whales and many oceanic birds. Very likely he did not visually ‘see’ the continent’s land, only the ice barrier surrounding it.

•In 1775, on the third leg of his Antarctic circumnavigation, Cook discovered an uninhabited island he eventually named South Georgia (in honour of King George III, 1760–1820). Several weeks later, Resolution sailed among a series of volcanic islands he named the South Sandwich Islands, also uninhabited, and named after John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty ( Chapter 11 ). He termed the South Sandwich Islands ‘the most inhospitable coast in the world’. On several occasions, Cook also searched for Cape Circumcision, sighted by the French Captain Bouvet in 1739 and rumoured to be a tip of the Southern Continent. During portions of the second and third voyages, Cook never located the ice-covered sub-Antarctic island, some 19 square miles in size and now a territory of Norway. It may be ‘the most remote island in the world’, but it is not a tip or a cape of Antarctica. By March 1775 Cook concluded that the Southern Continent existed near the South Pole, was uninhabited, was not accessible by a navigable ocean and was of no significance for exploration or commerce (Chapters 5–11).

•In December 1776, at the beginning of the third voyage (1776–1779), sailing in Resolution and accompanied by Discovery , Cook confirmed the location of the Crozet Islands. He also sailed to Kerguelen Island, an uninhabited sub-Antarctic archipelago discovered by the French navigator Kerguelen-Trémarec in 1772 ( Chapter 13 ). During the ten-day visit he first anchored at Christmas Harbour and then sailed along part of Kerguelen’s coast to assess the territory’s value as a harbour and as a source of wood and water for future voyages, also observing its flora and fauna. He termed Kerguelen an ‘island of desolation’.

The Contributions of Cook’s Voyages to Understanding Antarctica: Navigation, Geography and Natural Science

I use ‘Antarctica’, ‘Southern Continent’ and Terra Australis Incognita as interchangeable terms. The existence of a continent at the South Pole dates to geographers and philosophers of the ancient world, including Aristotle, and was subject to speculation thereafter. Eighteenth-century geographers and hydrographers suggested Antarctica was populated by millions of people eager to trade with Great Britain. Before Cook’s voyages, depictions on maps of the Southern Continent (and unexplored areas of the western hemisphere) were usually exaggerated, imaginative white spaces, perhaps south and east of New Zealand, extending far southwards, or touching the tip of Tierra del Fuego (Chapter 2).

Cook’s voyages were not only an exploration of the unknown but are also examples of eighteenth-century navigation as well as scientific inquiry. The Admiralty directed Cook to compile detailed observations of the territories he visited. He was given specific, overall instructions for each of the three voyages, but was allowed the opportunity to use his judgement for on-the-spot situations that could not be anticipated. Cook’s remarkable, valuable journals are filled with details and his thoughts about the Southern Continent as his voyages narrowed the available options for the continent’s location. Log books of officers who travelled with Cook are further sources of information, not only about the sometimes-dangerous and challenging seamanship required, but also revealing interesting events and offering glimpses into life on the high seas. Several of James Cook’s most memorable journal quotations were written during his crossings of the Antarctic Circle: his ‘ambition to go further than anyone had done before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go’ (30 January 1774); his triumphal conclusion that ‘an end has been put’ to the search for Terra Australis Incognita, a search conducted by maritime powers for 200 years and geographers of all ages (21 February 1775); the description of snow falling on Resolution covering sail and rigging (24 December 1774); and his description of the ‘romantic views’, accompanied by ‘admiration and horror’ during sailing among ice islands (24 February 1773).

In addition to his own records of the voyages, natural scientists sailed with Cook and their journals are also a source of information, as are the observations of astronomers/mathematicians who accompanied the voyages. Artists also sailed with Cook. Their sketches and paintings provide a record of landscapes, seascapes, people and objects in the days before photography. Chapter 3 includes sketches of astronomers, scientists and artists who sailed on Cook’s voyages. Science in the eighteenth century meant ‘natural science’: anything observable, from the Earth to the stars, not made by humans. Observations of travellers to remote or sometimes exotic parts of the world were fascinating to the literate elite of Enlightenment Europe and their colleagues in North America, such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and others who contributed to the founding of the United States. This trans-Atlantic community corresponded, discussed and argued about the philosophical and scientific phenomena, issues and scholarship of their era. Historian Thomas J. Schlereth points out that the voyages of James Cook and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1729–1811) produced the most important travel literature of the age, having a significant impact on the European imagination and bringing about ‘a total geographical awareness of the whole earth’.⁴ Chapter 14 focuses on natural scientific information from Cook’s voyages, in particular testing of the marine chronometer and experimentation concerning how to control scurvy.

During the second voyage, Resolution and Adventure carried early versions of the marine chronometer, a device to accurately record time and therefore assist calculation of longitude on the high seas. Astronomers/mathematicians (as well as Cook) monitored ‘the clock’ during Cook’s second voyage. Although Cook claimed his confidence with traditional methods of sextant and nautical almanacs was such that he could accurately determine the latitude and longitude of any spot on the oceans, at the conclusion of the second voyage he commented that the marine chronometer was a reliable guide to navigation. This marks an important step in navigation technology. Making determination of longitude less difficult contributed to much safer sailing on the high seas, especially after the Scilly Isles disaster on 22 October 1707 which resulted in the loss of approximately 1,550 lives and four Royal Navy warships because of a failure to accurately calculate position, inadequate charts and faulty equipment in dangerous waters 28 miles (45km) off Cornwall’s coast.

Another scientific contribution from the voyages was Cook’s various experiments to control scurvy, which plagued long-distance sea travel. He also insisted upon maintaining a clean ship to improve the health of seamen. These experiments occurred during the search for the Southern Continent, as well as on Cook’s journeys in the Pacific and Arctic Oceans. Chapters 3 and 14 summarize his methods to combat scurvy and maintain health, which is an aspect of his service for which he was honoured. Although Captain Cook did not ‘cure scurvy’ by his efforts alone, he contributed to the overall effort, which was one of the reasons why British warships were able to remain on the high seas for extended periods of time during the worldwide eighteenth-century colonial conflicts up to and including the Napoleonic Wars. Other diseases, such as typhus, malaria and dysentery, lurked in ports such as Batavia, visited during the first voyage.

As an officer in the Royal Navy, James Cook was given explicit and secret orders by the Admiralty for each voyage. These orders will be referenced especially in Chapters 2, 4, 5 and 13, and Appendix A contains the complete text of these instructions. It was generally understood and speculated upon that Cook was sailing to the ‘South Seas’ or ‘foreign parts’. The exact purpose of each voyage was divulged by Cook only in stages to those who sailed with him and with Admiralty approval after the conclusion of the voyages. The orders were secret because other competing seafaring nations, especially France, also sent navigators in search of new lands and markets, just as Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands had done in previous centuries.

The Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge (founded 1660) contributed funds to promote the first voyage especially. It also suggested scientists to accompany Cook. Naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, who sailed with Cook on the first voyage, was the Society’s president (1778–1820). James Cook was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and was honoured in 1775 with the annual Copley Medal for his letter to the Society’s president outlining contributions to improving the health of seamen. Naturalist J.R. Forster (accompanied by his son George) was likewise recommended by the Royal Society to accompany the second voyage. Observations by natural scientists are recorded in Cook’s journals as well as in other sources. I will provide examples of scientific information gathered, particularly in Chapters 11, 13 and 14.

Cook’s sub-Antarctic and Antarctic exploration might be termed a ‘narrowing of options’ in efforts to locate the Southern Continent. His navigation in the Southern Ocean occurred during the southern hemisphere’s summer months (mostly December, January and February). At other times Admiralty orders directed Cook to more hospitable climates in the Southern Pacific and especially his favourite anchorage at Queen Charlotte Sound on the northern tip of New Zealand’s south island.

One of the challenges in writing this book is that it interrupts the broad narrative of Cook’s three voyages to focus only upon the sub-Antarctic and Antarctic portions of Cook’s travels. His first two voyages included sailing in the South Pacific as well as searching for Antarctica. The third voyage included travel to Kerguelen and also the Pacific, but the over-riding purpose was to search for the Northwest Passage. Whether in the Southern Ocean, the southern Pacific or the Arctic, Cook’s three voyages are interconnected. Therefore, attention is paid throughout the study to place navigation in the Southern Ocean within the broader context of the three voyages, both in the introductory chapters and throughout the book. Cook’s voyages followed in the wake of much earlier worldwide navigators and he also sailed with contemporary French, Spanish and other navigators. A brief examination of earlier voyages and Cook’s contemporaries is found in Chapter 2, beginning with the ‘Age of Reconnaissance’, from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth century.

Future English navigators also sailed with Cook. William Bligh (1754–1817) served as Master in Resolution during the third voyage and as such was responsible for the running of the ship. An able navigator, Bligh is also known for the breadfruit voyage to Tahiti in Bounty, during which a portion of his crew mutinied in 1789, and later as Governor of New South Wales. George Vancouver (1757– 1798) sailed in Resolution during the second voyage and in Discovery during the third voyage. Vancouver is best known for the 1791–1795 expedition to the Pacific coast of North America in Discovery and Chatham. He and a Spanish counterpart prevented the 1790 ‘Nootka Crisis’ from escalating into open warfare in 1792. Vancouver’s voyages charted, explored and named many geographical features along the coast, also sailing as far north as the southeast coast of Alaska. Isaac Smith (1752–1831), one of Cook’s cousins, at age 13 sailed as an able-bodied seaman (AB) in Grenville during one of Cook’s surveying missions to Newfoundland. In Endeavour, Smith sailed as an AB in 1768, being promoted to midshipman in 1770. In Resolution, Smith sailed as a Master’s Mate during the second voyage. He later served as captain of Royal Navy ships during conflicts with the American Colonies and the French into the 1790s, and retired as a rear admiral. Cook’s widow Elizabeth lived with the Smith family for several years.

Other explorers in addition to Cook pursued the dream of locating the Northwest Passage and/or locating the North Pole. Among these were Captain Constantine Phipps, who sailed towards the Arctic from the Atlantic Ocean in 1773 in Racehorse, accompanied by Carcass. He reached 80° 48′ north latitude and approximately 15° east longitude on 27 July. There are many similarities between Phipps’ and Cook’s voyages. Admiralty orders directed Phipps to gather scientific information and make observations on geography, hydrography, navigation, icebergs and impenetrable ice. The ships became temporarily frozen in an ice field north-north-west of Spitsbergen. Horatio Nelson (1758–1805), then a 14-yearold midshipman, sighted a polar bear. Water temperature, ice conditions and migration patterns of birds and herring were also observed and sketched. An astronomer tested ‘longitude watches’ provided by the Board of Longitude. Phipps’ ‘bomb vessels’ (used to fire mortars in combat) carried added reinforcement to the ships’ bows and keels. Heavy clothing was provided for the men.⁵ Explorer Alexander Mackenzie (1764–1820) was the first to cross Canada from east to west (1793), with overland expeditions to the Arctic Ocean (1789) and the Pacific Ocean (1792–1793). United States President Thomas Jefferson read James Cook’s account of his voyage to the Pacific Northwest. American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were aware of Cook’s exploration of the North American coast as they crossed the Louisiana Purchase to the Pacific (1804–1806). Meriwether Lewis, for example, is described as ‘an avid reader of journals of exploration, especially those about the adventures of Captain James Cook’.⁶

Cook narrowed the options concerning the location of the Southern Continent, criss-crossing vast oceanic spaces to prove where it was not located. Others followed Cook to the Southern Ocean and eventually to the South Pole. Chapter 16 considers Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic islands in the 150 years after Captain Cook. It presents a series of vignettes about those with commercial interests (sealers and whalers), as well as navigators, scientists and explorers, who followed up and extended Cook’s travels: Fabian Bellingshausen, James Weddell, James Clark Ross, Douglas Mawson, Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, as well as their associates on these often-scientific ventures. Cook paved the way for these later explorers and navigators. Their often hazardous and sometimes dramatic explorations and navigations are in a real sense an extension of Cook’s own efforts from 1768 to 1779.

An Historian’s Search for Captain James Cook

My interest in Cook is both personal and professional. My full name is James Cook Hamilton. My middle name is from my mother’s family, whose origins are in England. My Hamilton great-grandfather emigrated from south-western Scotland in the 1860s, as did James Cook’s father from south-eastern Scotland to Yorkshire in the early eighteenth century. Both were farm labourers. There is no doubt the Cook name drew my attention to James Cook, even though I live in the Upper Midwestern state of Iowa, located a thousand or more miles from any ocean. My interest in Cook was also stimulated by study of Cook biographies and journals, philately, research and publication, and travel.

Historian and Philatelist

Although I am an historian and earned BA, MA and PhD degrees in British and European History at the University of Iowa, I did not study James Cook as part of my graduate work, nor during various administrative positions thereafter. It was after my retirement in 2006 that I began reading and researching James Cook, in good part stimulated by my collection of Cook-related postage stamps. As a life-long stamp collector and philatelist, I have amassed a collection of stamps from Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as other areas related to Great Britain and the Commonwealth. In pursuing that collection I discovered Captain Cook stamps and postal history. It is anticipated that many more Cook-related stamps will be issued between 2018 and 2029 during the 250th anniversary of the three voyages, just as there were in 1968–1979, during the 200th anniversary.

There are hundreds of postage stamps relating to Cook’s voyages and hundreds more related to objects cited in his journals. A Captain Cook Society checklist of Cook stamps is available on the Society’s website.⁷ A dozen stamps from my collection are included in the colour section. Stamp collecting leads not only to a study of Cook-related events, but also to geography, maps and artefacts. The huge array of stamps issued include various portraits of Cook, his ships and several maps, as well as examples of wildlife or plants and vegetation cited in his journals. Some include paintings by artists who sailed on his voyages, such as Sydney Parkinson, William Hodges, John Webber and Henry Roberts. I exhibited Cook stamps and postal history focused on Cook as a ‘millennium traveller’, a designation given to him in issues associated with the Year 2000 as one of the most notable persons in the past thousand years.

New South Wales issued the first Captain Cook stamp in 1888, followed by the same design, in varying colours, in 1898 and 1905. Other Cook-related stamps were issued by Australia and the Australian Antarctic Territories, New Zealand and the Ross Dependency, the United Kingdom, Jersey, Ireland, the Cook Islands (Rarotonga, Aitutaki, Penrhyn Island), Norfolk Island, Niue, Tonga, Fiji, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), the Falkland Islands Dependencies, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, St Helena, Ascension Island, French Polynesia (Tahiti), French Southern and Antarctic Territories, the British Indian Ocean Territories, British Antarctic Territories, Canada and the United States, many produced during the 200th anniversary of Cook’s voyages (1968–1979). If anyone might speculate where Cook’s voyages took him, observe the stamps produced since 1888.

Other countries, with no relationship with Captain Cook’s voyages, also produced commemorative postage stamps, a diverse, curious list that includes (in part) Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, Laos, various African nations (Djibouti, Guinea Bissau, the Congo, Central Africa Empire, Gabon, Union des Comoros) or Caribbean and Central American nations (Nicaragua, Grenada, the Grenadines, Dominica), Madagascar, Albania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Umm Al-Quwain (the smallest of the Gulf States). The designs from Albania and Hungary are interesting. It is doubtful whether many of these stamps were ever utilized to move the mail, and are only aimed at attracting collectors.

Some countries issue commemorative series of historical ‘famous navigators’ or ‘famous explorers’. Cook is nearly always included, along with, for example, Leif Ericson, Marco Polo, the half-English Prince Henry the Navigator (who rarely sailed but sponsored significant voyages of exploration), Vasco da Gama, John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), Ferdinand Magellan, Henry Hudson, Jacques Cartier, Francis Drake, Christopher Columbus, Abel Tasman, Alvarado de Mendañ a, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Jules Sebastian César Dumont d’Urville and Jean Francois Le Pérouse.

Research and Publication

I am an active participant in the Captain Cook Society, which has a worldwide membership of some five hundred Cook enthusiasts. It publishes a quarterly journal, Cook’s Log, for which I also serve as editorial assistant. Cook’s Log has published over a dozen articles I submitted on Cook’s navigation in the Southern Ocean, some of which have been revised and extended for this book. I have submitted approximately twenty reviews of ‘Cook Books’ which are available on the Society’s website (www.captaincooksociety.com). The International Journal of Maritime History published my review on Cook’s 1778 Arctic voyage. I have also contributed Cook-related articles to American Philatelist and the New Carto-Philatelic Journal.

During a 2011 meeting of the Captain Cook Society in Marton, Yorkshire, I delivered a presentation on Cook as a Natural Scientist of High Southern Latitudes (Chapter 14). The site of the meeting was the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum (Stewart Park, Middlesbrough), where an urn near the entrance marks the site of Cook’s first home (likely a two-room rural labourer’s hut⁸) where he and his family lived until, at age 16, Cook relocated to Staithes and then to the commercial maritime service in Whitby. I also spent several days in Whitby, visiting exhibits at the excellent Captain Cook Museum. Over a pot of tea, Dr Sophie Forgan, Chairman of the Museum Board of Trustees, showed me documents pertaining to Captain Constantine Phipps’ 1773 voyage to the North Pole, from the Atlantic Ocean, four years prior to Cook’s exploration of the North American coast. Later, one of the most fascinating experiences of my life was a ninetyminute Esk Valley railway excursion from Whitby through the rolling, brilliant green countryside of North Yorkshire, with sheep grazing in rock-walled pastures, covering much of the distance to Middlesbrough. The trip through the North Yorkshire Moors stopped fifteen times, twice at villages associated with Cook (Marton and Great Ayton), with the next-to-final stop at James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough.

Travel

I have enjoyed the opportunity to visit a few of the many locations associated with James Cook. For example, in addition to Marton and Whitby, I observed early versions of the chronometer at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and the Guildhall Clockmakers Museum. Cook is represented through exhibits at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, which also displays his portrait by Nathaniel Dance-Holland.

During a visit to the new British Library we saw one of Cook’s handwritten journals and Robert Falcon Scott’s diary on display in the ‘Hidden Gems’ collection. My wife and I have travelled to Cook-associated locations in Australia, New Zealand, Madeira’s port of Funchal, Canada (both the St Lawrence River and the north-western coast), South America (Cape Horn, Tierra del Fuego, and the Falkland Islands, where Port Egmont was a potential but unrealized option for Cook’s voyages) and Hawai’i (Kealakekua Bay and the Hikiau Heiau temple platform). We also sailed in the Baltic Sea where Cook may have travelled before joining the Royal Navy. In addition to Anchorage, Alaska and the Cook Inlet, my wife, our daughter Celia and I visited Newport Harbour, Rhode Island, where current research is under way to determine the location of Cook’s ship Endeavour, later named Lord Sandwich, which was scuttled in the harbour along with a dozen other vessels in 1778. In September 2018 the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP) announced it had narrowed the search to two debris piles, with the likelihood that one of these is the remains of Endeavour, with developments summarized in several issues of Cook’s Log.⁹

Primary Sources and Methods of Citation or Illustration

The main primary sources utilized for this book include Captain Cook’s journals edited by J.C. Beaglehole and log books composed by various officers who sailed with Cook. Log books were accessed through the Colonial Registers and Royal Navy Log Books (CORRAL) internet site, now a database for the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis. The log books by astronomers William Wales and William Bayly were accessed online through the Papers of the Board of Longitude records at Cambridge University Library. I also utilized published journals or accounts written by Joseph Banks, J.R. Forster and George Forster, among others. Details about these sources are located in the Acknowledgements, Appendix B and the Bibliography.

In utilizing Cook’s journals I make extensive use of direct citations, allowing as far as possible to ‘let Cook speak for himself’. I retained the eighteenth-century spelling of words contained in the Beaglehole edition of Cook’s journal, providing clarification only where necessary. Rather than footnote every journal entry, which would lead to hundreds of repetitive journal or log book footnotes, I make it clear in the text the source, person and date cited. Since a good deal of the text’s narrative flows from day to day, the use of dates in the text helps keep the story in accurate context. The reader will understand the source (a journal or log book) and the date this occurred, which is all I believe to be necessary. Appendix B contains comments about the Beaglehole edition of Cook’s journals as well as an explanation of information available in log books.

Description of Native Peoples, Concepts of ‘First Discovery’ and ‘Possession’

Except for Tierra del Fuego, the Antarctic or sub-Antarctic territories visited by Cook were uninhabited. As instructed by the Admiralty, Cook (and naturalists such as Banks, the Forsters and others) recorded observations about the native Fuegians – their appearance, manner of life and livelihood, diet, living quarters, clothing, boats, tools, hunting equipment, jewellery or other art, group authority, and so on. Cook’s personal judgement was that their life was the most miserable on Earth, based on the naked (or nearly-naked) appearance of men and women in 40-degree weather (in the sub-Antarctic summer), the women huddled together shivering in sealskins, nursing a few infants, or sometimes scrunched in a small boat/canoe and charged with keeping a fire lit, with few comforts of life in their small huts. According to the visitors, the train oil (from processed blubber) rubbed on their bodies emitted a sour and foul odour. Additional observations were made in Nootka Sound and Alaska. Including these observations in this book is not meant to disparage native peoples but to provide a description of how they appeared to eighteenth-century visitors.

I expect few persons today would enjoy the living conditions pertaining in late eighteenth-century England. Similar socioeconomic observations apply to life onboard Cook’s ships. Naval historian N.A.M. Rodger points out that for a son of a gentleman or nobleman, shipboard life as an able-bodied seaman would have appeared ‘grim’. However, for a poor boy from a ‘cramped and leaky cottage, life on a snug lower deck with hot food daily, clothes and medical attention provided, lifetime employment at a substantial rate of pay, and some prospects of a pension, was probably not unbearable’. Moreover, sailors received ‘a more balanced diet’ than those who did not go to sea.¹⁰

Discovery and ‘First Discoverer’

Understanding Captain Cook as ‘first discoverer’ requires some comment. Cook’s second voyage marked the first recorded crossings of the Antarctic Circle in 1773–1774, but he never set foot on Antarctica and did not claim possession of it, concluding that there was land near the South Pole, entirely snow- and icecovered and of little value. Sealers/whalers first landed on Antarctica in the 1820s (Chapter 16).

In January 1775 Cook sighted, charted and claimed possession of an uninhabited island he named South Georgia in honour of King George III, and is credited as its first discoverer. However, merchant Anthony de la Roché likely sheltered Hamburg in a South Georgia bay in 1675 after being blown off course and failing to pass through the Strait of Le Maire, which Cook traversed with difficulty in 1769 (Chapter 4). In February 1775 Cook recorded the first discovery of a series of islands he named the South Sandwich Islands in honour of a patron, John Montagu, the First Lord of the Admiralty and the fourth Earl Sandwich (1718–1792). He also gave the Sandwich name to the Hawaiian Islands which were inhabited, with the territory then called ‘Owhyee’. He did not claim possession of Tierra del Fuego (1769 and 1774). He displayed British Colours at the Kerguelen Islands (1776), but did not claim possession of the island, acknowledging Captain Kerguelen as discoverer.

Australia, New Zealand and many South Pacific Islands, as well as the coasts of North America, including Alaska, were all inhabited when Cook visited them. In addition, other maritime nations, especially Spain and Russia, had established trading posts or claims in North American locations that were previously populated by indigenous Eskimo and Aleut peoples who migrated to Alaska, across Canada and to Greenland between three and five thousand years ago. The Danish cartographer Vitus Bering (1681–1741) sailed in the service of the Russian Tsar Peter I, the Great (1672–1725). Russia explored Alaska and the Arctic a halfcentury prior to Cook. Abel Tasman (1603–1599) was the first European to land at Tasmania and then New Zealand (1642). Tasmania is located 150 miles (240km) to the southeast off the Australian continent. The Maori arrived in New Zealand from eastern Polynesia in approximately AD 1250–1300. Australia’s aboriginal peoples arrived from Africa approximately fifty to sixty thousand years earlier. That continent was termed ‘New Holland’ in Cook’s day. Tasman also charted the northern coast of New Holland in 1644. It is suggested that Portuguese or Spanish navigators circumnavigated Australia, producing a chart of the continent, perhaps two centuries prior to Cook’s first voyage. The English navigator William Dampier (1651–1715) visited the northern tip of Queensland in 1688 and again in 1699.

In addition to being the first European to circumnavigate New Zealand (proving that it comprised two large and some smaller islands separated by a strait, later named the Cook Strait), James Cook was the first to chart the south-eastern and eastern coasts of Australia in 1770, Endeavour striking the Great Barrier Reef in June. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville sighted the Reef in 1767 during his circumnavigation (1766–1769). During his Pacific voyages Cook visited many islands, most of them already populated. He eventually realized that strong similarities, including language, existed among peoples of what is now termed ‘the Polynesian Triangle’, from New Zealand to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to Hawai’i. Furthermore, Polynesians were also accomplished seafaring peoples, guided by oceanic currents, seasons and the stars, their vessels sailing the same Pacific waters as the ships of Cook and other European navigators.

Polynesian peoples settled in the Hawaiian Islands over varying time-frames beginning as early as AD 300 to as late as the twelfth century. Cook’s arrival represented the first European discovery of Hawai’i, but he was not its ‘first discoverer’, as carved on the marker at Kealakekua Bay. Rather, Cook was the first European discoverer of the islands. Cook’s arrival at the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 marks the European discovery of islands with an existing Polynesian population. Iron was unknown to the natives but Cook observed a Spanish-style broadsword carried by a Polynesian native.

Spain considered the entire Pacific to be Spanish territory as defined by the Treaties of Tordesillas (1494) and Zaragoza (1529), papal-sanctioned agreements between Spain and Portugal. Other maritime nations, the Dutch Republic, France, England and, later, Russia, were not parties to these agreements and disregarded the pole-to-pole division of the Earth into two hemispheres. Also, in general the Spanish proved very reluctant to voluntarily release information about Pacific territories with which they came into contact, as did other maritime powers. Later eighteenth-century maritime journals (e.g. those of Cook and Bougainville) revealed new geographical perspectives to an interested public, but information released was by approval of the English or French admiralties.

Because Spanish navigators sailed extensively throughout the Pacific, historian Donald Cutter suggests it is possible that some of the Hawaiian Islands were sighted or visited in the later sixteenth century by navigators Juan Gaytan (1555) or less likely Francesco Gali (1582). Other Spanish interest in Hawai’i (and California and the Pacific Northwest coast) is associated with Spanish ‘naval pilot’ and sometime-resident of Hawai’i Francesco de Paula Marin (from 1792 to the late 1820s), based on fragmentary evidence and conjecture. An alternative explanation is that the broad sword observed by Cook arrived on the wreck of a Spanish ship which floated to a Hawaiian island.

Speculation also exists that Polynesian navigators may have sailed into the Southern Ocean, just as they sailed throughout the vast areas of the Polynesian Triangle. An oral Maori legend recounts the c. 650 AD war canoe voyage of Ui-te-Rangiora to an area of bitter cold, snow, rock-like structures (icebergs), monstrous kelp and a frozen ocean. (In 650 AD the Maori were located in eastern Polynesia, not New Zealand.) This area might be the Ross Ice Shelf reached by Cook in January 1774. The Ross Ice Shelf is some 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometres) from New Zealand. Figure 5 (Chapter 2) provides perspective on the possibility of such a voyage. Polynesian artefacts that date to the thirteenth century have been located on the sub-Antarctic Enderby Island (Auckland Islands group), some 290 miles (465 kilometres) south of New Zealand at 50° 29′ 45″ south latitude and 166° 17′ 44″ east longitude. In Cook’s era the Antarctic Circle lay at 66° 32′ south.¹¹

Possession

The Admiralty directed Cook to take possession in the name of the Crown of those unoccupied territories he discovered. If lands were already populated, he was instructed to seek agreement from the people he encountered to be subject to His Britannic Majesty, although evidence of consent is lacking. A possession ceremony was held, sometimes more than once, in such locations as Tahiti, New Zealand (Mercury Bay), Australia (the east coast which Cook named New South Wales), South Georgia, Hawai’i, portions of the North American Coast (also claimed by Charles III’s Spain) and Alaska (claimed by Catherine II’s Russia). Although Cook took possession of Tahiti, Captain Samuel Wallis named Tahiti (or Otaheite) King George Island during his 1767 visit, although Bougainville had claimed it for France in 1766. Cook never landed on the South Sandwich Islands to claim possession due to the lack of a safe anchorage, but the territory over time became administratively associated with the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and therefore part of the British Empire. Captain Kerguelen claimed Kerguelen Island for France in 1772 but it may have been sighted earlier by Portuguese mariners. This is only a partial list of those territories claimed for Great Britain by James Cook and documented by accurate coordinates.

The detailed instructions for taking possession are identified in the Admiralty instructions given to Cook at the start of each voyage. It is doubtful whether native peoples who were invited to become part of the British Crown fully understood what was being proposed (if discussions occurred, which is doubtful), or what their acceptance actually meant, so ‘possession’ meant little at the time. Actual possession and real control were exerted in later years as the ‘Second British Empire’ (1783–1860) took form, becoming the empire on which the sun never set. In Cook’s era Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and French navigated many of these same waters, also establishing varying degrees of control or influence over Pacific territories.

None of the above reduces the significance of Cook’s three voyages. It does point out the need for explanation in claiming ‘discovery’ or ‘possession’ of already inhabited territories in the vast areas of the globe which Cook first documented and charted, ranging from the Antarctic to the Arctic, from the Southern Ocean to the Arctic Ocean.

Geography, Navigation and Natural Science

In concluding his Life of Captain James Cook (1974), J.C. Beaglehole stated that Cook’s memorials are ‘geography’ and ‘navigation’. To these we could add his contributions to natural science, including experimentation on methods to control scurvy, the measures taken to improve the health of men at sea and the successful testing of the marine chronometer, as well as the wealth of information contained both in his journals and in the writings of others such as natural scientists, and the sketches and paintings made by artists during the three voyages. The search for the Southern Continent and exploration of the Southern Ocean are integral parts of all three Cook voyages. How Cook’s navigational skills guided him through the Southern Ocean in search of Terra Australis Incognita, as well as his visits to various sub-Antarctic islands, is what this book is all about.

PART 1

INTRODUCTION TO CAPTAIN COOK’S VOYAGES

Chapter 1

The Three Voyages of Captain Cook

There is reason to imagine that a continent, or land of great extent, may be found to the southward of the tract lately made by Capt. Wallis in His Majesty’s ship the Dolphin … You will also observe with accuracy the situation of such islands as you may discover in the course of your voyage that have not hitherto been discovered by any Europeans, and take possession for His Majesty and make surveys and draughts of such of them as may appear to be of consequence, without suffering yourself however to thereby diverted from the object which you are always to have in view, the discovery of the Southern Continent so often mentioned.

Admiralty Secret Instructions to Lieutenant James Cook of His Majesty’s Bark the Endeavour, 30 July 1768 [Author’s emphasis]

James Cook’s search for Antarctica occurred within the broader context of his three voyages. During the months when navigation in the Southern Ocean was difficult, Cook’s travels included vast areas of the South Pacific and, during the third voyage, the Arctic. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize aspects of the three voyages to place Cook’s Antarctic and sub-Antarctic travels within the