"King Edward the Third built in the little sanctuarie a clochard of stone and timber, and placed therein three bells, for the vse of Saint Stephen's Chappel. About the biggest bell was engrauen, or cast in the metall, these words:
'King Edward made mee thirtie thousand weight and three:
Take mee downe and wey mee, and more you shall fynd mee.'
But these bells being to be taken downe, in the raigne of King Henry the Eight, one writes vnderneath with a coal:
'But Henry the Eight will bait me of my weight.'"
If any farther extracts may interest you, they are very much at your service.
W. Sparrow Simpson, B.A.
WAS COOK THE DISCOVERER OF THE SANDWICH ISLANDS?
(Vol. viii., p. 6.)
Mr. Warden will find this question discussed by La Pérouse (English 8vo. edit., vol. ii. ch. 6.), who concludes unhesitatingly that the Sandwich group is identical with a cluster of islands discovered by the Spanish navigator Gaetan in 1542, and by him named "The King's Islands." These the Spaniard placed in the tenth, although the Sandwich Islands are near the twentieth, degree of north latitude, which La Pérouse believed was a mere clerical error. The difference in longitude, sixteen or seventeen degrees, he ascribed to the imperfect means of determination possessed by the early navigators, and to their ignorance of the currents of the Pacific.
Allowing for the mistake in latitude, the King's Islands are evidently the same as those found on some old charts, about the nineteenth and twentieth degrees of north latitude, under the names of La Mesa, Los Mayos, and La Disgraciada; which Capt. Dixon, as well as La Pérouse, sought for in vain in the longitude assigned to them. They appear to have been introduced into the
English and French charts from that found in the galleon taken by Commodore Anson, and of which a copy is given in the account of his voyage. Cook, or Lieutenant Roberts, the compiler of the charts to his third voyage, retained them; and La Pérouse was the first to erase them from the map. There can, indeed, be little doubt of their identity with the Sandwich Islands. But although Cook was not actually the first European who had visited those islands, to him rightly belongs all the glory of their discovery. Forgotten by the Spaniards, misplaced on the chart a thousand miles too far to the eastward, and unapproached for 240 years, their existence utterly unknown and unsuspected, Cook was, to all intents and purposes, their real discoverer.
C. E. Bagot.