And yet, in spite of all the triumphs that he had won over so many difficulties and so many dangers, and in spite of the consciousness of work well and nobly, if quietly and unostentatiously, done, William’s last days, like those of many another man who has deserved well of the world, were full of sorrow and suffering.

The death of his now adored queen had so shaken his mighty nature that for some days his reason was despaired of, and there can be no doubt but that it hastened his own end. And yet, weak and far advanced in disease as he was when he went out for that fatal ride from Kensington to Hampton Court, he was even then going a-hunting. The brutal Jacobite toast: “To the little gentleman in black velvet who works underground!” still serves to remind us of the mole-hill over which his horse stumbled and fell, breaking his rider’s collar-bone, and inflicting the death-wound which he had escaped on a score of battle-fields.

His death was worthy of his life, for it was the death of a brave, patient man and a Christian gentleman. No doubt he himself would have preferred to have died at the head of a charge, or in the thick of an assault on a French fortress, but his destiny ordered it otherwise, and the man who had a hundred times faced death in the most reckless fashion for the purpose of inspiring his followers with his own courage and enthusiasm, died quietly in his bed, leaving behind him the greatest work ever done by an individual British sovereign, and a fame which, but for the one dark and inexplicable blot of Glencoe, is as fairly entitled to be called spotless as that of any man who ever sat upon a throne and accomplished great things with such means as came to his hand.

VI
JAMES COOK,
CIRCUMNAVIGATOR

VI
JAMES COOK

Once more I am going to ask you to take your seat with me on the ideal equivalent of the Magic Carpet and skim across another time-gulf some half-century wide. This time we alight on the morning of Monday, July 5, 1742, before the door of a double-fronted shop, one side of which is devoted to the sale of groceries and the other to the drapery business. This shop is situated in a little village on the Yorkshire coast a few miles from Whitby, Staithes, or more exactly The Staithes, so called from the local name for a pier or sea-wall of wood jutting out a few feet into the German Ocean, and built partly to protect the little bay from the North Sea rollers and partly to afford accommodation for the fishing-boats and colliers.

The shop belongs to a substantial citizen of Staithes named Saunderson, and this morning Mr. Saunderson is a very angry man. In fact, if we go into the shop, which is not yet open, we shall find him with a cane or some similar weapon in his hand, leaning behind the counter and hitting blindly at a bed there is beneath it, shouting the while sundry excellent maxims on the virtue of early rising, especially modified for the benefit of apprentices.

But no response comes from the bed, and Mr. Saunderson stoops down to make closer investigation. The bed is empty, and the fact dawns on him that his last apprentice has followed the example of all the others and run away to sea. It was a very common event on the Yorkshire coast in those days, but this particular running away was destined to be a very memorable one for the world, for the lad who, instead of being in the bed under the counter, was just then striding rapidly away over the fields to Whitby with one extra shirt and a jack-knife for his sole possessions, was James Cook, a name as dear to the lovers of the romance of travel and adventure as Robinson Crusoe, and one of infinitely more importance in the annals of mankind.