Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

If you would read the marvellous tale of frozen lands and seas, of the sunlit coral-islands gemming the sparkling waters as thickly as the stars stud the Heavens, of the delights of Paradise and the terrors of Nifflheim told and written by sundry members of this expedition after their return, you must go to your library and find them in the originals, for there is no space to give them here. Suffice it to say that, though somewhat prolix and diffuse, you will, if you are blessed with an intelligent taste for that kind of thing, find them more delightful reading than any of the countless romances whose writers have taken their materials out of them.

But there is one circumstance which for the honour of James Cook ought to be mentioned. The curse of sea-voyaging in those days was scurvy. Out of forty sick, nearly half of the little company, no fewer than twenty-three died, and this terrible fact set the captain thinking, with the result that he, first of all mariners, grappled with and conquered this worst of the dangers of the ocean. If he had never done anything else he would have deserved a niche in the Temple of Fame. In his second voyage round the world, which lasted three years and sixteen days, he only lost four men, three of whom died by accident and the fourth not of scurvy.

The Circumnavigator was now promoted to the rank of Commander, a modest enough reward for the achievement of the greatest work of his generation. He remained ashore just a year, probably the longest period he had ever spent on land since he first went to sea.

During this time the publication of a collection of travels started people talking about the Southern Continent again. Captain Cook had found it, but that didn’t matter. His discovery was not splendid enough by any means, so it was decided to send another expedition, this time of two ships, “to complete the discovery of the southern hemisphere” (!) and Cook sailed again in command aboard the Resolution of 462 tons having for consort the Adventure of 336 tons.

They sailed on July 13, 1772, and on October 30th reached Table Bay—a hundred and nine days, think of that, you who take a run out to the Cape and back again for a winter holiday! Truly the world was somewhat larger in those days.

From Cape Town they steered straight away for the South, and on December 10th they sighted for the first time the ice-fringe of what we know now to be the true Terra Incognita Australis.

The landsmen on board seem to have had a dreadful time during this part of the voyage and Foster, one of the naturalists of the expedition, bewails “the gloomy uniformity with which they had slowly passed dull hours, days and months in this desolate part of the world.” What a change it must have been from the rigours and horrors of Antarctica to the paradisaical delights of Tahiti, which, after surveying the coast of New Zealand and deciding that it consisted of two islands and not one, the expedition reached on the 16th of the following August.

There is perhaps no other spot on earth which so completely fulfils one’s ideas of what Paradise ought to be as this same island of Tahiti even now, but what must it have been in those days, when white men first saw it in all the beauty and simplicity of its primeval innocence. Now, alas, it is very different, cursed by the diseases and vices of civilisation and afflicted by a cast-iron régime which the people seem to think a little worse than death, since they are dying as fast as they can to get away from it.

After this again New Zealand was visited, and once more the two ships plunged into the icy solitudes of Antarctica, only to return again, baffled by the impenetrable ice-wall. From here the ships steered northwards for Easter Island and Crusoe’s Island. It is noteworthy that on the way Captain Cook, the great Medicine Man of the sailors, himself fell sick, and that, for want of anything better, “a dog was killed to make soup for him”—from which it will be seen that voyages of discovery were not exactly picnics in his time.

From Juan Fernandez he steered for the Marquesas again, once more visited New Zealand, and once more his sea-worn crews revelled in the unrestrained delights of Tahiti. Then again to the south, this time not to rest until the whole circle of the Southern hemisphere had been made without the finding of any other southern continent than the unapproachable Antarctica, and so in due course and without mishap came the Sunday morning, July 30, 1775, when the Resolution and the Adventure, having well vindicated their names, dropped their willing anchors into the waters of Spithead.