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.

  SIX

  THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE

  At the end of this second voyage there was no doubt at all, as there had been at the end of the first one, to whom all the honour and credit belonged. Cook was the man of the hour and, in a strangely quiet way, a national hero. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was given the Copley Gold Medal for his paper on the advancement of health at sea (his stringent enforcement of the rules for combating scurvy is not actually mentioned). In all of that incredible voyage Cook had lost only one man, and that not through scurvy. He was an intimate of the Lords of the Admiralty. He was received by the king, promoted to post-captain in command of H.M.S. Kent, a seventy-four gun cruiser, then made captain at Greenwich Hospital which was the Admiralty’s way of saying that, even at the age of forty-seven, he had done more than enough and was entitled to honourable – and full-paid – retirement.

  Cook himself wasn’t so sure about this sinecure. To a friend he wrote: ‘My fate drives me from one extreme to another. A few months ago the whole southern hemisphere was hardly big enough for me, and now I am going to be confined within the limits of Greenwich Hospital, which are far too small for an active mind like mine. I must confess it is a fine retreat and a pretty income, but whether I can bring myself to like ease and retirement time will show’.

  Cook was needlessly concerned. His time for ease and retirement was not yet come, tragically it was never to come. Plans were already afoot for a third great voyage but not, this time, to the South Seas. While Cook was busily engaged in writing up, for publication, the journal of his second voyage – having read the botch Hawkesworth had made of his previous journal he was determined to supervise this one himself – the Admiralty were considering the possibility, advisability and wisdom of trying to force the fabled North-West Passage, a dream that had been in the minds of men for close on three centuries. The idea was, simply, that between the Atlantic and the Pacific there might exist a passage around the top of North America. Many attempts, attempts associated with names like Cabot and Frobisher and Hudson and Baffin, had been made over the years. Baffin, at the end of the previous century, had actually reached the astonishing latitude of 77˚ 45’ north – almost halfway between the Arctic Circle and the Pole, an achievement that still stood a hundred years after the time of Cook. But even he had failed to find the North-West Passage.

  The Admiralty was determined to try once more. This time, however, it was intended to make a double-pronged attack. It was known that in 1742 Bering, a Swede serving in the Russian Navy, had established that a strait existed between the Asiatic mainland and the north-west tip of North America which we now call Alaska. A simultaneous attack, it was decided, would be made on the Passage, one expedition approaching from the Atlantic side while a second would approach from the Pacific side.

  The Atlantic approach would be made by the frigate Lion, commanded by Cook’s old friend Richard Pickersgill, while the Pacific end would be attempted by the Resolution and the Discovery – not the original Discovery, which was not available, but a new one, another Whitby collier which the Admiralty acquired on Cook’s recommendation.

  The question arose in the minds of the Admiralty as to who should command the Pacific expedition. Cook, of course, was the blindingly obvious choice, not just the best man but the only man, but the Admiralty, having regard to Cook’s massive achievements and the fact that they’d given him a richly-earned retirement, were markedly reluctant to approach him. Instead they hit upon what they probably regarded as the extremely ingenious and cunning plan of asking him along to a very exclusive dinner party where the other three guests were Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, Palliser, Comptroller of the Navy, and Stephens, Secretary to the Admiralty, and, once having got him there, of asking his advice as the man best fitted to command the Pacific expedition. It is perhaps superfluous to add that when Cook left the table he did so as commander of the expedition.

  As his first lieutenant, Cook had John Gore, who had been round the world with Cook in the Endeavour and with Wallis in the Dolphin, James King – also an accomplished astronomer – as second officer and a John Williamson as third. The master was a man who was to become almost as famous as Cook himself – William Bligh.

  The Discovery was commanded by Captain James Clerke, a close friend of Cook and one of the most experienced seamen of the time – he’d been round the world with Byron and twice round the world with Cook so that he was now embarking upon his fourth great voyage. It was also to be his final voyage. Like Cook, he was to leave his bones on the shores of the Pacific. His first lieutenant was a James Burney, his second a John Rickman. Among his midshipmen was a George Vancouver (who had also sailed with Cook in the Resolution) who was to become a noted explorer in his own right. Over twenty members of the expedition had already sailed with Cook, some of them twice. Among the latter was Samuel Gibson of the Marines (now a sergeant) whom Cook had had flogged for deserting the ship and taking to the hills with a native girl on their first visit to Tahiti. Clearly, Gibson was no man to bear grudges. And with them was to go Omai, a Tahitian whom Furneaux had brought back to England.

  On 12 July 1776, four years but a day from the time he had sailed on his previous voyage, Captain Cook sailed again for the Pacific. He had to sail alone, for the unfortunate Captain Clerke of the Discovery was at the time languishing in a debtor’s gaol – he had guaranteed the debts of his brother Captain John Clerke who had departed for foreign parts without settling them. He was finally released and the Discovery set sail on 1 August – hardly the most auspicious beginning for a voyage. It is believed that it was while he was in prison that Clerke contracted the tuberculosis that was eventually to kill him.

  On the way to Cape Town the Resolution stopped at Tenerife to take aboard the usual copious quantities of wine and to top up her water supplies. Here, too, she took aboard most unusual provisions – animal fodder, for the Resolution was a veritable floating farmyard well-stocked with cattle and pigs and sheep and goats, all personal presents from the king to be given to various islands in the Pacific – although taking pigs to the Pacific, which teemed with them, does seem rather like carrying coals to Newcastle.

  Cape Town was reached on 17 October. Cook immediately had ship-fitters busy re-caulking the Resolution, which had leaked so abominably, especially through the main deck, on the way down that there was scarce a man, Cook wrote, who could lie dry in his bed. When the Discovery arrived on 10 November she was found to be in as bad a condition as the Resolution: she, too, was immediately in the shipwrights’ hands.

  Cook had put the stock ashore to graze and when some of the sheep were stolen he had them replaced with Cape sheep and, clearly considering that his menagerie was not yet complete, he brought aboard rabbits and no fewer than four horses which he stabled in Omai’s cabin, which Omai apparently accepted with much willingness, for Cook, in his last ever letter to Lord Sandwich, dated 26 November 1776, wrote: ‘The taking on board of some horses has made Omai completely happy, he consented with raptures to give up his cabin to make room for them’. Still speaking of the livestock, Cook went on in one of his rare lighter moments: ‘Nothing is wanting but a few females of our own species to make the Resolution a complete ark’. It was in this same letter that Cook said, almost as if he were composing an epitaph for himself: ‘My endeavour shall not be wanting to accomplish the great object of this voyage’. Endeavour and achievement: those were the corner-stones of Cook’s life.