The two ships sailed in company on the first day of December. On the 13th he located and named a group of islands the Prince Edward Group – they had, in fact, first been seen by the Frenchman Marion du Fresne, but Cook was not going to let a trifle like that prevent him from rechristening them and annexing them for the crown. (They now belong to South Africa.) Twelve days later Cook found Kerguelen Island which had eluded him in his search for it some four years’ previously. The first island had been named by Kerguelen – Isle of Rendezvous. Cook promptly changed it to Bligh’s Cap, after his master, remarking that none but seabirds would ever rendezvous in that barren, treeless, desolate island.

  Driven along by the strong westerlies, the two vessels made excellent time and reached Van Diemen’s Land – Tasmania – on 26 January. Here they watered and took on wood and struck up some sort of acquaintanceship with the very backward aborigines who lived there – their women, Samwell, the surgeon, wrote, were the ugliest creatures that can be imagined in human shape, and if the drawings made of them by Webber, the Resolution’s official artist, are in any way representational one has to admit that it is difficult to fault Samwell’s judgment.

  The two ships sailed on the 30 January, and on 12 February arrived in New Zealand at that anchorage that was now as familiar to Cook as Matavai Bay in Tahiti – Queen Charlotte Sound. He found the Maoris there in a very apprehensive state indeed: they assumed – by their code it was inevitable – that Cook had come to take revenge for the death of the ten men from Furneaux’ Discovery. They could not understand Cook’s ‘Let bygones be bygones’ attitude and were dumbfounded when Cook, having discovered the identity of the man who had instigated the slaughter – their chief, Kahura – did not have him dispatched on the spot. Cook refused. He wrote: ‘If I had followed the advice of our pretended friends I might have extirpated the whole race, for all the people of each hamlet, or village, by turns, applied to me to destroy the others, a most striking proof of the divided state in which they live’. Instead of having him executed, Cook had his portrait painted by Webber. A classic example, indeed, of turning the other cheek: unfortunately we do not know whether this gesture had any mollifying effect on Kahura’s bloodthirsty nature.

  After a fortnight the two ships left for Tahiti. It had been Cook’s intention to proceed there by the most direct course but easterly headwinds slowed him up and kept on bearing him westwards off his course. Land was first sighted on 29 March – Mangaia, one of the islands in the Cook Group. The combination of the fierce surf and coral reefs that surrounded the island made it impossible to bring off provisions. They tried another island in the same group with the same results.

  The obtaining of fresh fodder for the livestock had now became a matter of urgency. Rather than fight his way to Tahiti against the easterlies, which might have taken weeks, Cook decided to run west to the Friendly Islands where he knew he would be welcomed and where he knew that fodder in plenty could be had. En route they stopped off at the uninhabited Palmerston Island, which Cook had discovered on his previous voyage, and obtained some scurvy grass there.

  The Resolution arrived in the Friendly Islands late in April and was to remain there – with the Discovery – until mid-July. This period in Cook’s life has given rise to considerable speculation among historians. Why, they have asked, did he not strike out for the North Pacific and try to force the Bering Strait that summer – even though it might have been rather late in the summer before he got there. The answer to that is straightforward: the Admiralty’s plan was that the attack on the North-West Passage was to be a co-ordinated one from the Atlantic and the Pacific, in the hope that the two expeditions might meet, and the date fixed for the attempt was 1778 – the following summer. The Admiralty had taken into account the possibility that Cook could well have been delayed on the outward voyage and so might have failed to make the rendezvous in the summer of 1777. In fact, Cook had made a very fast passage out and could have reached the Bering Strait that summer had he tried. But that would have been pointless: 1778 was the fixed date.

  What is puzzling about this period is that Cook, that driving restless man with the insatiable urge to see what lay over the hill, round the next corner, appeared, temporarily at least, to have lost all his old zest for exploring. He was told not once but many times of the existence of the Samoan Islands to the north and the Fiji Islands to the north-west, both of which were, in terms of Cook’s previous far-reaching sweeps across the Pacific, virtually on the door-step of the Friendly Islands. And he was told about dozens of other islands at not too great a distance from Tongatabu. Cook let them all lie and continued this seemingly aimless wandering among the enchanted isles of the Tongas. So easy-going and relaxed had Cook become that girls from the Friendly Islands lived aboard ship and drifted with them from island to island in this dream-like idyllic period.

  Like a soccer player or cricketer who has played too much, perhaps Cook had for the moment gone stale, the results of his massive labours over the years having at last caught up with him. Perhaps he was deliberately relaxing himself and his crews so that they should all be in the peak of condition when they made their assault on the Bering Strait. Perhaps it was just because he loved the Friendly Islands, which he did. Or perhaps he had the premonition that, for him, now was all the time there was going to be and he was making the most of it. We shall never know: Cook, inevitably, makes no mention in his journal of the reason for his delay.

  On 17 July, the two vessels set out for Tahiti where they arrived on 12 August. Here again Cook was to display the same puzzling inactivity, pleasantly whiling away his time with his by now old and trusted friends in Tahiti and the neighbouring Society Islands. The livestock were disembarked at Matavai Bay and Cook writes with amusement in his journal of the sensation caused among the Tahitians when he and Captain Clerke cantered across the plain on their horses, animals that the Tahitians had never seen before.

  It is, parenthetically, a matter for wonder that Clerke was able to ride a horse at all. The first signs of his consumption – tuberculosis – had appeared shortly after leaving England and the disease was now in a fairly advanced condition: although tuberculosis is readily curable today, at that time the progress of the disease was irreversible. Frequently he was so ill that he was unfit to command the Discovery. Indeed, so much had his health failed that is was suggested that he remain behind in Tahiti while Burney, his first lieutenant, took the Discovery north: but Clerke insisted on going.

  Cook does seem to have become increasingly autocratic in his dealing with the islanders. When they left Tahiti they went first to Moorea, only a dozen miles away. A goat was stolen and Cook let it be known if it were not returned forthwith he would destroy every canoe on the island, a measure that would have had a crippling effect on the island’s food supplies and economy – a rather extreme measure, one would have thought, to take to ensure the return of one goat. In point of fact, a dozen canoes were burnt before the goat was returned.

  Again, in Huahine, a sextant was stolen. The sextant was recovered and the thief apprehended. The thief was so unrepentant and insolent that Cook had his ears cut off – again, one would have thought, a punishment that somewhat exceeded the crime. In the next island they visited, Raiatea, Cook reverted to his common practice of seizing hostages. Two of his men deserted and Cook at once took prisoner the son, son-in-law and daughter of the chief of the island, a man who had always treated him with the greatest kindness and hospitality. The hostages were released when the deserters were returned. It is worth noting that Cook’s tactics roused the islanders to such a fury of resentment that they actually tried to kidnap Cook and Clerke. In retrospect – in hindsight wisdom comes easily – Cook should have taken warning from this but clearly he didn’t. Unquestionably, this policy of taking hostages worked. To us, today, it may seem a rather harsh policy and one difficult to condone, but then it has to be remembered that Cook was an eighteenth-century man dealing with a Polynesian mentality of that time that is totally alien to us. Cook was a highly intelligent man, he was the man on the spot and we cannot doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing. Besides, it is difficult to see what else he could have done.

  The two vessels sailed on 7 December. On the 22nd they crossed the equator and on the 24th they discovered a bleak and uninhabited island which Cook called Christmas Island. Cook decided to stay there for a few days – he stayed for nine – partly because fish and turtle abounded, partly to give the crews a break over the Christmas period – after having spent seven months doing nothing except virtually loaf around the Pacific one would hardly have thought that they required one.

  While they were there Cook, his second officer King, and Bayly the astronomer, went ashore to observe an eclipse of the sun to enable them to establish their exact longitude and also check on the accuracy of the chronometers. It is significant that Clerke did not accompany them: he was too ill to do so.

  The vessels continued on their way and on 18 January two mountainous islands were sighted. Cook had made his last major discovery – the Hawaiian Islands. The two islands, Niihau and Kauai, were the two westernmost of the major islands in the Hawaiian group. Cook called them the Sandwich Isles – the name of his friend, patron and First Lord, the Earl of Sandwich, is scattered far and wide across the Pacific and the Atlantic – but they are now known as the Hawaiian Islands. The major island of the group, and the most easterly, Cook did not discover until later in the year. This was the island that was to give the group its name, Hawaii itself.

  After what was now almost the standard opening gambit of shooting and killing a native without provocation, Cook established an excellent relationship with the Hawaiians. They appeared to regard him as some sort of God for as soon as he stepped on the beach they fell prostrate and remained so until Cook signalled them to rise.

  Cook found them a very attractive people. They were friendly, hospitable, did not bear arms and, compared to the average run of Polynesians, extremely honest. They pointed out to Cook another island standing to the west which they called Oahu. Cook felt he could not afford the time to explore it. It was a pity for then he would certainly have found the magnificent Pearl Harbour, where the Japanese naval air forces destroyed the United States Pacific fleet in December 1941. There too, today, stands Honolulu, the capital of the Hawaiian group.

  On 2 February the ships headed north-east for New Albion – the west coast of North America – which they reached on 6 March between the 44th and 45th parallel – near a promontory named by Cook as Cape Foul Weather (the name has remained) in view of the extremely unpleasant weather that was to occur immediately afterwards. During the next month the ships were to encounter a succession of extremely unpleasant gales which made their northwards progress very slow. Unfavourable winds made it advisable to stand well off the coast with the result that they missed both the mouth of the Columbia River and Juan de Fuca Strait, which leads up to the site of the present city of Vancouver.

  Both ships had been so severely battered since leaving Cape Foul Weather that repairs were urgent and they were fortunate enough to find a sheltered inlet called Nootka Sound which Cook assumed to be on the mainland. In fact, it is about two-thirds of the way up the west coast of Vancouver Island. This was on 30 March. There they stayed for close on four weeks – a tree had to be cut down to make a new mizzen mast for the Resolution – while Cook made the acquaintance of the natives, who, with their broad flat faces and high cheekbones were clearly not Polynesians – they were probably of Eskimo stock. They were a friendly, mild, inoffensive people which one might judge from the fact that on this occasion it wasn’t found necessary to shoot any of them.

  In sea-going condition again, the ships moved out on 26 April and turned north. The waters here are difficult and treacherous to a degree, calling for navigation of the highest order. Cook was back at the top of his form, surveying, charting and naming everything he could see, although clearly even his seemingly endless inventiveness was running out for he was beginning to repeat himself with names already used in the South Seas.

  The coast-line had been steadily tending to the west and now it ran due west – the ships were running along the southern shores of Alaska. The Resolution was now leaking so badly that Cook was compelled to find some sheltered anchorage which he did in an inlet now known as Prince William Sound. She was careened and it was found that the seams between the timbers were wide open with hardly a trace of oakum left.

  Repairs effected, they moved to the south-west round a very long promontory now known as the Kenai Peninsula. To the west of this peninsula a wide inlet stretched away to the north-east and some of the officers suggested that this might indeed be the entrance to the south-west passage. Cook had his reservations, but agreed to try it. For two hundred long miles they sailed up this inlet and not until its very end, with snow and ice covered mountains to right and left and dead ahead, did they know that what they had sailed up was a land-locked fjord.

  Back at sea again, they sailed down the three hundred mile length of the Alaskan Peninsula and then its broken-up continuation, the Aleutian Islands. They paused briefly at one of those islands, Unalaska, sailed north-east up the far side of the Alaskan Peninsula, then north-east and north into Norton Sound. It was during this passage that the chief surgeon, Anderson, died of tuberculosis: it had been proposed that he, like Captain Clerke, should have been left behind in Tahiti. It would probably have made no difference: they would have died anyway.

  At the northern end of Norton Sound lies a promontory which Cook named Cape Prince of Wales, the most westerly point of all the Americas and the nearest point to the Asiatic mainland. It was to this Asiatic mainland that Cook now sailed across the Bering Strait, anchoring in a sheltered inlet that he called the Bay of St Lawrence, paying a nice compliment to Bering who, just half a century earlier, had given the name of St Lawrence to an island just south of the Bering Strait. The natives there he found to be courteous if withdrawn and, judging by both their behaviour and their substantial housing, quite the most advanced race he had encountered anywhere in the Pacific.

  From the Bay of St Lawrence, the Resolution and the Discovery moved north through the Bering Strait, crossed the Arctic Circle then moved out into the Chukchi Sea, an arm of the Arctic Ocean. They did not move very far. Within three days – between 14 and 17 August, the temperature had fallen dramatically, the weather had sharply deteriorated and suddenly they found themselves up against an apparently solid wall of pack-ice that stretched from horizon to horizon. For a week Cook cast about with his usual determination to try to find some lead through the ice. He tried to break out by running along the northern shore of Siberia but again he was stopped by solid pack ice. The summer was almost over, if they lingered too long they might be trapped in the ice and remain there indefinitely: Cook decided to go south, winter in the Sandwich Islands (the Hawaiian Group) and try again the following summer. Indolent Cook may have appeared in the South Seas the previous year, but when there was a definite goal to be achieved he would achieve it, if it were possible for any man to do so: as he had said to Lord Sandwich, his endeavour would not be wanting to achieve the great object of the voyage.

  They re-passed the Circle and the Bering Strait and went south to Unalaska in the Aleutians where Cook deemed it prudent to put in on 2 October: the Resolution was suffering from her old troubles again, water coming in as through a sieve in the uncaulked seams between her timbers. During their three week stay there, Cook met Russian traders who obligingly filled in missing portions of his charts or pointed out existing errors in the charts he had been given: during this time, also, he got to know the Eskimos fairly well, the most peaceable and inoffensive people he reported he had ever met.

  The ships left for the Sandwich Islands on 24 October reaching them on 26 November, a voyage uneventful except for a severe gale in which the Discovery’s main tack broke, killing one man and injuring several others. They sighted the island of Maui, the second most easterly and the second largest in the group. The two ships lay to off-shore – there seemed to be no suitable anchorages – and many natives came out in their canoes carrying quantities of more than welcome fresh fruit, vegetables and, of course, the inevitable pigs. Among those who came out was a venerable old gentleman who, from the very considerable respect accorded him by the others, appeared to be someone of considerable importance: he was, in fact, the King of Hawaii.

  They moved on from Maui and a day or two later the towering, snow-topped twin peaks of Hawaii Island came into sight: both are about 13,700 feet. Cook moved slowly round the coast looking for a suitable harbour. Everywhere they went they were accompanied by large numbers of canoes, the occupants of which came aboard the ships with a total lack of fear that Cook had not experienced before in the Pacific. Their canoes, Cook noted without comment, were laden with hogs and women, the latter more willing to bestow their favours than any before encountered. Certain it is that the Hawaiians were a trusting lot. They cheerfully slept on deck at night while their canoes were towed behind the ships. Because of adverse winds it took the ships a long time to beat round the south coast of the island and start moving up the west coast. Not until 16 January was a likely anchorage seen in Kealakekua Bay. William Bligh was sent ashore to investigate and returned to pronounce the bay admirable for their purposes. There was a plentiful supply of water and two villages, Kekua and Kavarua, which would doubtless supply all their wants.

  The reception awaiting Cook and his men when they anchored their ships in Kealakekua Bay the following morning, cannot possibly, it seems certain, have had any precedent in the history of the Pacific. King, Cook’s second lieutenant, estimated that no fewer than one thousand five hundred canoes carrying at least nine thousand natives came out to meet them, hundreds more came out on surfboards, still hundreds more swam around like shoals of fish while thousands lined the shores of the bay.