At age 39, Royal Navy Lieutenant James Cook was selected to lead an important scientific voyage after coming to the attention of the Admiralty and Royal Society for his “masterly survey” of the Newfoundland coast. (Brian Lavery, The Conquest of the Ocean, p. 154).
Cook was in charge of 85 seamen and marines and a party of scientists headed by the naturalist Joseph Banks. Cook’s mission was two-fold: to observe the transit of Venus across the face of the sun due to occur in June 1769, and to carry out a detailed exploration of the Pacific in search of the reputed southern continent, the Terra Australis Nondum Cognita. If he found the continent, he was to claim it for Britain.
The expedition set out on this day in history. Cook and his crew rounded Cape Horn and continued westward, arriving in Tahiti on April 13, 1769, where he made observations on the Venus transit. The task did not end successfully, however; Lavery reports that the crew had major problems with distractions by Tahitian women, who, according to the records of one midshipman, “have agreeable features, are well proportoned, sprightly, and lascivious.” (Lavery, p. 157)
The routes of Captain James Cook’s voyages. The first voyage is shown in red, second voyage in green, and third voyage in blue. The route of Cook’s crew following his death is shown as a dashed blue line.
Cook then sailed to New Zealand, mapping the coastline, and reaching Australia on April 19, 1770. He and his crew were the first recorded Europeans to reach that continent, and as directed, Cook claimed the area for Britain.
On April 29, Cook and his crew made landfall at a place they named Botany Bay, later to become a notorious prison colony for the British.
Eventually they made it back to England on July 12, 1771. The journey was considered a great success. Not only did Britain have a lot of new land, but Banks had collected a vast number of biological specimens, many of them previously unknown to science.
Cook was attacked and killed in 1779 during his third exploratory voyage in the Pacific while attempting to kidnap the Island of Hawaii’s monarch, Kalaniʻōpuʻu, after a quarrel about an alleged theft of a boat.
Vanessa Collingridge in her book Captain Cook: The Life, Death and Legacy of History’s Greatest Explorer reported that because the islanders held Cook in esteem, they prepared his body with funerary rituals usually reserved for the chiefs and highest elders of the society. This means the body was disembowelled, baked to facilitate removal of the flesh, and the bones were carefully cleaned for preservation as religious icons. Some of Cook’s remains, thus preserved, were eventually returned to his crew for a formal burial at sea.
Official portrait of Captain James Cook
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