Pioneers in Australasia

by Harry Johnston

In 1740 a naval commander, George Anson, was dispatched to the Pacific to take part in that ocean in the naval war against Spain. Apparently, after rounding the extremity of South America, he was content at first to proceed up the coast of Peru and plunder the Spanish towns on the western coast of Tropical Africa. He then sailed across the Pacific with his Spanish prizes by way of the Spanish route to the Philippines, making no new discoveries on his way, but passing through the Malay Archipelago to the Cape of Good Hope. Twenty-two years afterwards a British fleet, conveying 6000 soldiers, sailed across the Indian Ocean and took possession of Manila, but failed to conquer the Philippine archipelago, owing to the bravery of the small Spanish garrison of 600 men. But when this war drew to a close, Vice-Admiral John Byron (the grandfather of Lord Byron, the poet) was sent out in the Dolphin in 1764 to explore the Pacific Ocean and make some search for the Great Southern Continent. This journey, however, like that of Lord Anson's, resulted in no gain to geographical knowledge, for he simply sailed by the northern tropical route from Mexico to the Ladrone Islands, and then came back along much the same course to South America and the Atlantic. After his return his ship, the Dolphin, together with a vessel called the Swallow, were once more dispatched to the Pacific Ocean through the Straits of Magellan, but this time under the command of Captain Samuel Wallis.

The Tahiti archipelago, which was to play such an important part as a basis for Cook's discoveries in the Pacific, had apparently been seen by the Spanish navigator de Quiros, as early as 1606, and named "Sagittaria". It was rediscovered in 1767 by Wallis on this voyage of H.M.S. Dolphin. Wallis named Tahiti Island "King George III Island", and stayed on its coasts for a month. On his north-westward journey he discovered the Marshall Islands. In the following year there arrived at Tahiti the great Bougainville, the first French explorer of the Pacific Ocean.

France, through her enterprising Norman and Breton seamen, was not slow to interest herself in Far Eastern discoveries, and in 1528 defied the Papal bull and worried the Portuguese in Malaysia, just as she followed up Spaniards and Portuguese along the east coast of the Americas. Early in the sixteenth century her mariners, following the Portuguese, had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and adventured themselves in the Indian Ocean to snatch a small share in the trade which was so jealously monopolized by the Spaniards and Portuguese. It is even said (see p. 57) that the first hint of the existence of a Great Southern Continent is due to a French navigator, le Testu, who returned in 1532 from the eastern seas with stories of a Greater Java which lay to the south of the islands of the Malay Archipelago.

But for various reasons the French slackened in their exploration of the Indian Ocean in the second half of the sixteenth century. Their interest in this direction was only revived under the great ministers of Henry IV and Louis XIII. In the first half of the seventeenth century the French laid the foundation of their future claims to Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands, and founded repeatedly chartered companies to deal with the trade of the Indian Ocean. But none of their adventurers seem to have penetrated to the Spice Islands or the Pacific until the eighteenth century. Their colonial ambitions in Africa and Asia were awakened in a great measure through the most remarkable of their kings, Louis XIV. With farsighted ambition this monarch strove to acquire special interests for France in Abyssinia (in which direction he failed), in Siam, and Cochin China; and he took advantage of his occasional alliances or friendship with the Spanish monarch to send explorers and men of science to examine the wonderful regions of South America, under the jealous rule of Spain and Portugal. One of these explorers was Frézier (Fraser), of Scottish descent, and the work which he published on his return, dealing with the southern extremity of South America, drew attention to the unoccupied Falkland Islands, known to the French as Malouines, and the Spaniards as Malvinas. This hint attracted the notice of a very remarkable Frenchman, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who had served in the French Embassy in London, and had also been an officer of the French army in Canada. In 1765 he persuaded the merchants of St. Malo, in Brittany, to fit out an expedition which should colonize the Falkland Islands. But, this archipelago being claimed by Spain, it was handed over to the Spanish authorities by Bougainville, who afterwards proceeded in command of a ship called the Boudeuse (the Sulker) to navigate the Straits of Magellan and explore the Pacific Ocean. In his westward course he touched at the Tuamotu Islands, and rediscovered the Island of Tahiti, which he called Cythère (the Island of Venus). Sailing westwards, he was probably the first explorer to discover the Samoa group, named by him the Navigators' Islands, from the bold seamanship of its Polynesian people. From Samoa he passed on to the New Hebrides, and, then directing his course due west, with the deliberate intention of searching for the Great Southern Continent, he was stopped in this search by encountering the Great Barrier Reef, which guards so much of the approach to the north-east coast of Australia from south latitude 23° to 15°. Turning off, therefore, to the north-west, he encountered and named the Louisiade archipelago of islands and islets, which is off the south-easternmost extremity of New Guinea. Instead, however, of venturing through the Torres Straits (the existence of which was then a geographical secret in possession of Spain), he turned northwards to the Solomon Islands,[66] and thence sailed past the coasts of the large island of New Ireland (now known as New Mecklenburg), and so on along the north coast of New Guinea. Rounding this great island, and directing his course southward, he arrived at the island of Buru, between the Moluccas and Celebes. Here he found himself within the sphere of Dutch influence, and after calling in at Batavia, the capital of Java, he made his way back, round the Cape of Good Hope, to St. Malo, only having lost seven out of a crew of two hundred men in this remarkable sea journey round the world.

Thus, before Cook set out on his famous journey in 1768, the position of European knowledge in regard to the Pacific Ocean and the continent and islands of Australasia was as follows: The outline of the Australian continent had been roughly traced by the Dutch (who called the land New Holland) from Cape York westwards to the southernmost point of Tasmania (which was not known to be an island); a portion of the west coast of New Zealand (the North Island and a small part of the South) had been placed on the map by Tasman, but it was not known whether this land of high mountains consisted of one or more large islands, or whether it might not even be another peninsula of a mighty southern continent; Tasman had discovered the small Tonga Islands; New Guinea was known in regard to its western and eastern extremities and a part of its north coast, but, owing to secrecy having been kept as to the existence of Torres Straits, it was also thought to be an outlying part of New Holland (Australia); New Britain and New Ireland (now Neu Pommern and New Mecklenburg) had been explored by Dampier in 1700; the Solomon Islands, Santa Cruz, and the islands of the New Hebrides group had been rediscovered by Bougainville, who had also first visited and named the Louisiade archipelago to the south-east of New Guinea. [The Solomons and the New Hebrides had been known for two centuries to the Spanish Government, and for a shorter period to Dutch navigators]. Easter Island—the easternmost of the Polynesian islands, not much more than 2000 miles from the coast of South America—had been seen by the English pirate, Captain Davis, in 1685, but was only definitely known and named, after its discovery by the Dutch navigator, Roggeveen,[67] on Easter Sunday in 1722; and was considered by some geographers in Holland and France to be an outlying point of the great southern continent: which, if this were the case, would be almost as large as Asia, and would occupy quite half the space actually covered by the Pacific Ocean. The existence of Tahiti was fully known, inasmuch as it was pitched upon by the British astronomers as being the best place in that region of the globe from which to observe the transit of Venus. The existence of the Marquezas Islands had long been established by Spanish navigators, but it is doubtful whether, before Cook started, news had been received of the sighting of the Tuamotu archipelago of islets by Bougainville, or of the Samoa group (Navigators' Islands). Most of the largest and most important of the Pacific islands remained practically or completely undiscovered. These were the Hawaii archipelago (see pp. 121-2), the Fiji Islands, the southern islands of the New Hebrides, the large island of New Caledonia, the Loyalty Islands, the groups of the Gilbert, Phoenix, and Ellice Islands, the Hervey or Cook Islands, the Tubuai or Austral Islands, besides the whole east coast and Alpine range of New Zealand, and the little Norfolk Island midway between New Zealand and New Caledonia. Finally, there were the undecided questions of the supposed connection of New Guinea with the north coast of the Australian continent, and the existence of a vast southern continent occupying much of the area of the Pacific Ocean in the South Temperate Zone. The whole of these blanks in Australasian geography were filled up and more or less accurately mapped, the vexed questions were set at rest and solved, by the great James Cook in the two voyages of discovery which he made in the years 1768-71, 1772-5, and 1776-9.

Captain James Cook, who will certainly be regarded in universal history as the foremost hero of Australasian discovery, was born on 27 October, 1728, at the little Yorkshire village of Marton, in the Cleveland district of northern Yorkshire, in a two-roomed wattle-and-clay cottage. He was the son of a farm labourer, also named James Cook and said to have been of Scottish origin. In time Cook's father rose to the position of a farm bailiff. The great James Cook, his second son, was sent to school when he was eight years old, and received the elements of a good education, especially in arithmetic. At the age of sixteen or seventeen he was bound apprentice to a grocer and haberdasher, or, more correctly, a general-store dealer, a man, in fact, who kept the principal shop in the pretty little village of Staithes, in a hollow of the cliffs 10 miles north of Whitby. This move brought Cook into close relations with a sea-faring life, as most of the customers of the shop were fishermen and smugglers. In fact, his place of business was only 300 yards from the sea waves (which now entirely cover the site of the original shop).

Evidently he did not like his work as shop apprentice, and longed to become a sailor, with the result that he was transferred as an apprentice to the employment of a coal merchant who owned or employed sailing ships to carry coals to and from Whitby. Earlier accounts of Cook's boyhood assert that he ran away to sea from the grocer-haberdasher's shop, stealing a shilling from the till as something to sustain his enterprise. There certainly was trouble about a shilling in his relations with the general-storekeeper, but it seems to have been that he saw—prophetically enough—a new South Sea shilling[68] in the till, and, fascinated with its appearance, changed it for an ordinary shilling of his own. The new bright shilling was found in his box, but his explanations apparently convinced his employer of his innocence. However, by some friendly arrangement he seems to have been relieved of his apprenticeship to the general-store dealer of Staithes, and was transferred to the employment of a Mr. John Walker, whom he served as apprentice on his ships for about three years. In between his voyages he lived at Mr. Walker's house, where he was treated very kindly and where the housekeeper gave him a table and candles in a quiet corner so that he might read and study in peace. From apprentice he became an able seaman, and at last, in the year 1752 (always working hard to acquire the science of navigation and to educate himself in every way), he became mate of a collier vessel. He was now twenty-four years of age. Three years afterwards—in 1755—Cook, as mate of the collier Friendship, found himself in the Thames on the eve of the outbreak of war between Britain and France, and determined to join the Royal Navy, which he did first as an able seaman; but, his qualities being soon discovered, he was not long afterwards rated as master's mate on board H.M.S. Eagle. Between 1755 and 1762 he was employed mainly in American waters, and distinguished himself there, not only by his gallantry in action and his many hairbreadth escapes, but by his careful surveying work round the coasts of Newfoundland.

In 1762 he returned to England and married. His married life lasted for sixteen years, but it is computed that of that sixteen he spent only about four and a half in his wife's society, chiefly at a house in Shadwell, in the eastern part of London, which he bought for her. Nevertheless they were fond of one another, and a family of six children was born to them in course of time.[69]

Between the time of his marriage and 1768 he began to make himself noteworthy by his publications of sailing directions and his work as a mathematician and astronomer; for he found the opportunity of observing a solar eclipse off the coast of North America, and described it very lucidly. Consequently, when at the instance of the Committee of the Royal Society, who were desirous that the transit of Venus across the disk of the sun should be carefully observed by competent persons from some central part of the Pacific Ocean, the British Admiralty decided to appoint James Cook to take charge of this expedition, and at the same time to make a determined search in the Central and Southern Pacific for the supposed vast southern continent, stretching from the south tropic to the South Pole. Cook, therefore, was given a commission as a lieutenant-commander, and appointed to H.M.S. Endeavour.[70] The Endeavour was a sailing vessel of only 368 tons burden, which had been constructed at Whitby and purchased by the Admiralty.

The Government entrusted to the Royal Society the sum of £4000, to spend on equipping this vessel and paying her officers and crew. Cook apparently received a clear salary of £120 a year, in addition to a special gratuity of £105 for his astronomical work, and a sustenance allowance for himself and his assistant astronomer, Mr. Green, of £120. He was also paid by the Admiralty a small "command" allowance of five shillings a day.