Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

More honours, though not of the nineteenth-century-boom order, were now most justly bestowed on the Circumnavigator. He was promoted to the rank of Post-Captain in the Navy, and made a Captain of Greenwich Hospital, a post which carried with it a home and honourable retirement for the rest of his life—of which he was the very last man in the world to avail himself. He was also elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and presented with the gold medal for his treatment of scurvy.

Captain Cook as sailor, as scientific navigator, and as explorer was now at the height of his fame. He was forty-eight years old, and had spent thirty-four years at sea, and it is no exaggeration to say that during this time he had added more geographical knowledge to the history of the world than any one had ever done before, and had probably covered a larger portion of its surface. He had at once proved and disproved the dream of the Southern Continent, and, potentially speaking, he had added enormous areas to the ever-growing realms of Greater Britain.

He might well have rested on such laurels as these, but there was more work for him to do, and he went to do it. One of the greatest questions of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, was the possibility of the North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. So far every attempt had ended in failure, and generally in disaster, but now, when men’s minds were full of the wonders Captain Cook had achieved, there arose another question: Might not a North-East passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic be possible, and, if so, who better to try it than the great Circumnavigator? An expedition was promptly decided on. Captain Cook was not offered the command, as the Government probably and rightly thought he had won his laurels. But one fatal evening he dined with Lord Sandwich, the promoter of the expedition, and at table he met his old patron, Sir Hugh Palliser, and his friend, Mr. Stephens, Secretary to the Admiralty. Ostensibly the object of the dinner was to consult him as to the best leader for the new venture, but the moment the subject was broached the unquenchable passion for travel blazed up again, and the great Navigator rose to his feet and said gravely:

“My lord and gentlemen, if you will have me I will go myself.”

So was decided the fatal voyage which was destined to end a glorious and almost blameless career by an ignoble and unworthy death.

The expedition consisted of the old Resolution and the Discovery, a vessel of three hundred tons. The voyage lasted four years and nine months, but the loss of life by sickness was only five men, of whom three were ill when they started. A good deal of the old ground was gone over, more islands were discovered, more unknown coasts surveyed. Fair Tahiti was visited once more, and the expedition, so far as its principal object was concerned, came to an end, as the search for the Southern Continent had done, in a way blocked by impenetrable barriers of ice—this time the ice of the North.

Thus turned back, they steered southward, and on December 1, 1778, they discovered Hawai, which discovery the great Navigator in his last written words somewhat strangely says, “seemed in many respects to be the most important that had hitherto been made by Europeans throughout the extent of the Pacific Ocean.”

It was here, as all the world knows, that he met his death, and the story of it is, unhappily, at sad variance with that of his life.

The one blemish on Captain Cook’s otherwise noble character was a liability to outbursts of ungovernable temper, and during these he seems to have behaved on more occasions than one in a manner almost befitting one of the old buccaneers. For instance, he would punish paltry thefts by cutting off the ears of the islanders, firing small shot at them as they swam to the shore, chasing them in boats, and ordering his men to strike and stab them with boat-hooks as they struggled out of the way. On one occasion he punished a Kanaka who had pilfered some trifle by “making two cuts upon his arm to the bone, one across and the other close below his shoulder.”

Again, at the island of Eimeo, because a goat was stolen, he landed thirty-five armed men, blockaded the island with armed boats, and burnt every house and canoe that he came across, and, as an eye-witness says, “several women and old men still remained by the houses, whose lamentations were very great, but all their tears and entreaties could not move Captain Cook to desist in the smallest degree from those cruel ravages.”