With such an almanac, an improved compass, and one of Newton’s new sextants as a means of quick and accurate observation of sun and moon and stars, the navigator had little need to doubt as to where he was; and maps began to show a corresponding improvement in accuracy.
“BUCCANEERS AND MANY WILD SEA-ROVERS.”
The early part of this century, as we shall see later, was the era of the buccaneers and of many wild sea-rovers whose far-wandering barks, in search of adventure, picked up much information at the expense of human lives and hard-earned property. The foremost of these was Dampier, who seems to have gone almost everywhere a ship could go, and who found out many new things, which he had the power of telling well, as to Australasia; and the strait between New Guinea and New Britain, which he discovered, is named after him. Many a commander was now cruising in those waters, however, under English and Dutch flags mainly, finding new lands and pillaging old ones—such as Roggewein, Anson, Byron, Wallis, Carteret, Bougainville, and others; and such important islands as Easter, Tahiti, Charlotte, and Gloucester groups, Pitcairn, and others, were found during the first half of this century. But now the English were to redeem their good name by sending out a government expedition, or series of expeditions, whose object was scientific discovery and the humane study of the men and resources on the other side of the world, instead of forced trade or bloody rapine. These were the three expeditions commanded by Captain James Cook, one of the most capable officers in the British navy.
The first voyage was made in 1767 for the purpose of carrying a party of astronomers and naturalists to Tahiti to observe there a transit of Venus, after which a survey was made of the then almost unknown coasts of New Zealand and Eastern Australia. The second voyage was to explore the Antarctic regions, whither the French had preceded him, as we shall see in the next chapter; and we need only say here that Cook finally disposed of the tradition of a vast terra australis—at any rate a habitable one. It is to his third voyage, then, that he principally owes his fame.
This was undertaken in pursuance of the ruling idea of his day, that a sea-route might be discovered north of the American continent, which would vastly shorten the trip from Europe to China and the Spice Islands. Others were seeking it directly by way of Baffin’s Bay, and Cook was sent to attack the problem from the Pacific side. He was given command of his old ship Resolution and a new one, Discovery, outfitted in the best possible manner, and especially guarded, in the matter of provisions, against scurvy—that dread of the old-fashioned seamen, in respect to which Cook himself had introduced such new and valuable preventives as would alone have entitled his name to grateful remembrance. He was commanded to revisit, on his way out, the South Pacific Islands; and departed from England in June, 1776, steering by way of the Cape of Good Hope, and reaching the archipelagoes in the spring of 1777, where he cruised for nearly a year. In January, 1778, he sailed north from the Friendly Islands, and a few days later hit upon a large, inhabited, unknown group of islands, whose principal one was called Hawaii by the people, but which he named Sandwich Islands, in honor of an English earl who had taken great interest in his plans. Here he spent some delightful days, and then bore away to the west coast of America, which the English still claimed under Drake’s name of New Albion, and which he struck near Puget Sound. Thence he went slowly along the coast northward until he found and penetrated the deep bay since called Cook’s Inlet. His hope that this might prove a sort of northern Straits of Magellan was quickly disappointed, and he went on into and through Bering Sea and Strait until he was stopped by the ice on the north shore of Alaska, at a point still called Icy Cape. Then he turned back, surveying both shores of the strait, and again made his way to the Sandwich Islands, where, in an unfortunate quarrel with the natives, he was killed. The Hawaiians have always said that this was the act of a ruffian among them, and that the chiefs and the best of the people never wished nor intended any harm to their visitors; and this is probably true. His executive officer took the ships back to England in October, 1780.
The voyages of this able and intelligent commander bore fruit in many ways. One was the colonization of Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand by the English, which began in 1788. Another was the voyage of Vancouver to the west coast of America in 1792, which intercepted the surveys of the Spaniards there, under Quadra and others, and enforced English possession of all the country between the Californian settlements of the Spaniards and the Russian posts in Alaska, though he curiously failed to find either Puget Sound or the Columbia River. A third direct result, and from some points of view the most important one, was the opening of a great number of the South Sea Islands to Christian missionaries.
By this time there had arisen in the New World which these voyagers had first stumbled upon, and then searched for, and afterward scrutinized so carefully, a new, composite nation, which somehow forgot that all their broad and fertile land had been given away centuries before by an old gentleman in Rome to his friends the Spaniards, and acted as though they thought it belonged to themselves; and by and by this thriving nation hoisted a starry flag of its own, and proclaimed itself the United States of America. Then, not to be behind European powers, whose navigators were enriching libraries with magnificent chronicles of scientific studies in sea-science, such as those of the French “Voyage of the Astrolabe,” the Russian narratives of Krusenstern and Kotzebue, and the English explorations of Beechey (who was accompanied by Charles Darwin), the United States sent to the Pacific a well-equipped expedition under Lieutenant (afterward Admiral) Charles Wilkes. This was gone from 1838 to 1845, surveyed the west coast of South America, wandered about Oceanica, and did its best to penetrate the icy limits of the Antarctic zone. The results were six magnificent folio volumes, containing not only the narrative of the cruise, but contributions to science by James D. Dana, Horatio Hale, John Cassin, and other men of the last generation great in American science.
