The Life of Captain James Cook
V — Scientific Background
V
Scientific Background
The persons to be conveyed to the Southward were persons ‘intended to be sent thither to observe the Transit of Venus’; and by ‘the Southward’ is to be understood the Southern Hemisphere; and Mr Lane was to take Mr Cook's place in the Grenville because it was intended that Mr Cook should command the vessel fitted out for that purpose. We find ourselves, and Mr Cook, plunged suddenly into the middle of eighteenth-century science, or the post-Newtonian physical branch of it. Cook, we know, as he did not know, was about to begin on a series of immense voyages, which would add enormously to knowledge of the surface of the world. The primary purpose of the voyage now envisaged, however, was at once more limited and larger. It concerned the world not in itself, with all its detail of land and water, but the world in the universe. The method was to be astronomical, to determine not the latitude of a cape on an island in the north-west Atlantic, but the dimensions of the universe. Astronomy had its post-Newtonian triumphs in this century already, in between superficial geography, as it were, and the universe. Newton's theory of the shape of the earth had been confirmed by the observations to measure the arc of a meridian by the French expeditions led by La Condamine to Peru in 1735–43 and Maupertius to Lapland in 1736. French science took the lead in organising the observations with which it was hoped to mark the decade of the sixties: observations which, reaching outwards from the earth, would provide the data necessary for the calculation of the distance between the earth and the sun—which distance, in its turn, would serve as a unit for the measurement of the universe itself, as suggested by Kepler. The method for calculating the distance between the earth and the sun was the method of parallax: that is the method with which Cook, as a surveyor, was familiar, of observing angles with his theodolite at each end of his base line, and working out trigonometrically therefrom the distance to his marker. But now, though the base line might be something like the radius of the earth in length, the marker page 100 —the sun—was so far away that the parallax counted for hardly anything, and an intermediate help—a sort of observational stepping-stone—was needed. This intermediate help or point was provided by the planet Venus.
1 [In the typescript J.C.B. had noted that he was going to rewrite his explanation of the purpose of the observations of the transit. In rewriting the passage I have drawn on the knowledge of my colleague, Dr J. F. Harper. T.H.B.]
1 It seems worth quoting here the original more resounding Latin of his 1716 paper, Methodus singularis quá Solis Parallaxis sive distantia à Terra, ope Venèris intra Solem conspiciendae, tuto deteriminari poterit: ‘Ac sane vellem diversis in locis ejusdem Phaenomeni observationes à pluribus institut, tum ad majorem adstruendam ex consensu fidem, tumne Nubium interventu frustraretur singularis Spectator, eo spectaculo quod nescio an denua visuri sunt hujus & subsequentis seculi Mortales; & a quo pendet Problematis nobilissimi & aliunde inacceai solutio certa & adaequata. Curiosis igitur syderum scrutatoribus, quibus, nobis vita functis, haec observanda reservantur, iterum iterumque commendamus ut, moniti hujus nostri memores, observationi peragendae strenue totisque viribus incumbant; iisque fausta omnia exoptamus & vovemus, praeprimis ne nubili coeli importuna obscuritate exoptatissimo spectaculo priventur; utque tandem Orbium coelestitum magnitudines intra arctiores limites coercitae in eorum gloriam famamque sempiternam cedant.’—Philosophical Transactions, XXIX (1716), 460.
2 The little-known importance of Delisle is rightly emphasised in Harry Woolf, The Transits of Venus (Princeton, 1959) a volume which, however, devotes less attention to the event of 1769 than to that of 1761.
Into the Pacific Ocean: but where, in that large expanse, with which geography was so inadequately acquainted?—To some point where, for the six hours' duration of the Transit, the phenomenon would be clearly visible, well above the horizon, and the danger of interference from clouds would be minimal. This was obvious to Dr Thomas Hornsby, the professor of astronomy in the University of Oxford, when in 1765 he reminded the Royal Society of its duty; and he reviewed the discoveries recorded as having been made by Spaniards in earlier centuries. He also cast his thought beyond astronomy, and the Royal Society; he was aware that science needed more support than the Royal Society could give it; he remarked that it would be a worthy ‘object of attention to a commercial nation to make a settlement in the great Pacific Ocean.’1 His was not the only voice, in those early days after the Treaty of Paris, to utter this sentiment. Indeed it was by then a commonplace; and we may note that already in the previous year the first of a series of British vessels, a frigate commanded by Commodore Byron, late of the North American station, had sailed for the Pacific—not certainly to make a settlement but to investigate more than one matter deemed worthy of the attention of a commercial nation. In June 1766 the Council of the Society resolved to send observers to various parts of the world, though the only person mentioned by name was the Jesuit father Boscovich, professor of mathematics at Pavia, who might go to California. Then the president of the Society, the Earl of Morton, sounded the Admiralty, suggesting that naval officers who might find themselves in the southern hemisphere at the right time should be directed to take observations and make remarks; to which the Admiralty agreed.2
1 C. Hutton, J. Shaw & R. Pearson, Phil. Trans. abgd, XII (1809), 265–74.
2 Admiralty Secretary to Morton, 15 August 1766, Adm 2/540.
3 19 November 1767, Transit Committee, in Council Minutes, Vol. V, 189.
1 Royal Society Council Minutes, 18 December 1767.
2 Dalrymple to Dr Morton, 7 December 1767, R. S. Misc. Mss III, f. 14.
1 For Dalrymple's life, see Howard T. Fry, Alexander Dalrymple (1737-1808) and the Expansion of British Trade (London, 1970).
It is not certain what practical accomplishment Dalrymple had as a sailor. He thought he had a great deal, though he had served no apprenticeship and had never, in the technical sense, commanded a ship. He certainly, as we have seen, persuaded the Royal Society that he was ‘an able navigator’. When he returned to England, an intelligent man still short of his thirtieth year, he could not fail to be caught up in intelligent discussion; and two of the objects of discussion were the South Seas and the Transit of Venus. Dalrymple began, to cultivate Government and the Royal Society. Commodore Byron was back from his circumnavigation in May 1766; Captain Wallis set out on another in the following July; at the end of that month Lord Shelburne became Secretary of State for the Southern Department, and Lord Shelburne was certainly a person of high intelligence as well as high station. Dalrymple wrote to him, 24 November, a letter that might itself be called exploratory: ‘Having page 106 had five years’ experience in voyages of this kind, thro' seas unknown, and amongst people with whom we have no intercourse, I presume to think myself qualified to be usefully employed in such an under-taking. At the same time, I am not insensible, notwithstanding the instances of Dampier, Halley, etc., how foreign to rules of office it is, to form the most distant expectations, that a person may be employed in the publick Service by Sea, who has no rank in the Navy.’1 How Shelburne replied to this we do not know: perhaps he did not reply because early in 1767 we have the ambitious man trying again, through an intermediary. He had been made known by his brother Lord Hailes to Adam Smith, and Adam Smith was induced to speak for him; the subject was not now only Dalrymple, but a southern continent.
… Whether the continent exists or not may perhaps be uncertain; [wrote Smith with more caution than Dalrymple himself exhibited] but supposing it does exist, I am very certain you will never find a man fitter for discovering it, or more determined to hazard everything in order to discover it.
The terms he would ask are, first, the absolute command of the ship with the naming of all the officers, in order that he may have people who both have confidence in him and in whom he has confidence; and secondly, that in case he should lose his ship by the common course of accident before he gets into the South Sea, that the Government will undertake to give him another. These are all the terms he would insist upon.
The ship properest for such an expedition, he says, would be an old fifty-gun ship without her guns. He does not, however, insist upon this as a sine qua non, but will go in any ship with a hundred to a thousand tons. He wishes to have but one ship with a good many boats. Most expeditions of this kind have miscarried from one ship's being obliged to wait for the other, or losing time in looking out for the other.2
1 P.R.O., Chatham Papers 30/8, Vol. 31, f. 11. According to Kippis, 15–16, it was Dalrymple's idea to be given a brevet commission in the navy, as Bougainville, an army officer, had been.
2 Adam Smith to Shelburne, 12 February 1767, Atl, Carrington Ms Papers 79: 7.
Terra australis incognita, the unknown southern land—or, more hopefully, nondum cognita, not yet known but in due course to be revealed: the brief words trail a long history, are aromatic with an old romance, as of great folios in ancient libraries, compassing all philosophical and geographical knowledge, with pages and double-pages of maps whose very amplitude and pattern ravish the mind; and they present us also with one of the great illusions. It was an illusion raised by abstract thought, buttressed by fragments of discovery that seemed to fit into a likely pattern, demolished by experienced fact. There is a southern land, of course, and even now it is not fully known; but it was not this of which so many generations dreamed. The Antarctic is the fact which has survived; and Antarctica is not the provincia aurea, the golden and spicy province, the land of dye-woods and parrots and castles, the jumble of fable and misinterpretation that was piled on Greek reasoning and Marco Polo.
1 The Book of Ser Marco Polo, ed. H. Yule (3rd ed., London, 1903), II, 276.
1 This was Maximilian Transylvanus, in a letter to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Salzburg in 1522.
2 Quiros lays it down that navigation is ‘an art that does not admit of ignorance or carelessness’, and then has to go on to admit the inevitability of ignorance in matters of longitude. It is not quite true that seamen threw up their hands: they did their best with estimation or ‘dead reckoning’. For Quiros see Celsus Kelly, La Austrialia del Espiritu Santo (Cambridge, 1966), I, 50–2.
After Magellan and a few attempts, costly in men and ships, to follow his route, official Spanish enterprise in the Pacific settled down into regular trading voyages between Acapulco in Mexico and Manila on the other side of the ocean. A feasible return passage was found in the westerly winds of forty degrees north. The Spaniards, on their earlier voyages, encountered a number of the Marshall and Caroline islands, north of the equator, as well as New Guinea, but never the principal group of the northern ocean, Hawaii: they were always well south or well north of it. There were, however, three connected Spanish voyages of great endurance and some success, independent of this regular trade: all in the forty years from 1567, all based on the Peruvian port of Callao, all marked by a quite violent mingling of personal qualities and ambitions, jealousies and rebellions—a history wherein the secular passions for conquest, settlement and gold vied with the Franciscan yearning for conquista espiritual, new and noble empire founded on a peaceful Christian subjection of heathen people. These were the voyages of Alvaro de Mendaña and the pilot Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, already mentioned. The first of them was stimulated by a third man, able, energetic and ambitious—Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, who in his Peruvian studies had come on the legend of the Inca Tupic Yupanqui. This ruler, so it was said, on a voyage to the west had discovered rich islands: six hundred leagues distant they must be, thought Sarmiento, outliers of the great, and rich, continent. Some-how, for other people, they were mixed up with another legend, the one of King Solomon's Ophir, that abode of gold, now put down as an island or island-group near the East Indian Moluccas. The Viceroy of Peru was persuaded to support a voyage of discovery. He provided two ships, giving the command, however, not to the masterful Gamboa but to his own young nephew Mendaña, a man without seamanship or experience of command, but at once sweet-tempered and tenacious. He was to find the continent and settle page 111 there. The ships, built for the fine-weather Peruvian coastal passages and provisioned for a short voyage, manned by argumentative officers and mutinous crews, sailed in November 1567; they were to know starvation, the worst of hurricanes, be given up for lost; they survived and after nearly two years turned up again at Callao with two-thirds of their company safe. They had sailed outwards for eighty days, from one side of the ocean to the other, before they came to the impressive group called after their return the Solomon Islands. There they stayed six months, exploring and observing; found or made the people too hostile to permit settlement; found no gold and no continent; made no spiritual conquest; reached home in the last extremity of privation. Mendaña, at least, was eager to go again.
Not until 1595 could he do so. Official hostility and tardiness had been underlined by the Pacific incursion of Francis Drake, fruit of a theory that, once into the ocean in Magellan's track, you could outwit the Spaniards by quitting it through what we would now call a north-west passage, a strait through the northern parts of America between Pacific and Atlantic. While you were in the Pacific you might discover the continent. Drake had no talent for discovery, nor in any case could he discover what was not there; but the effect of his foray and of others, was to discourage Spanish exploration which might simply present a new attraction to pirates. Nevertheless, Mendaña did, at last, make his second voyage. He could not find his Solomon Islands again, nor could anybody else for two hundred years: so vague indeed were his ideas of longitude that he at first thought he had arrived when he sighted the Marquesas, a sort of half-way point. Coming after many weary weeks to Santa Cruz, not far short of his goal, he decided to settle there. Quarrels, native enmity, and dreadful malaria quashed the attempt; Mendaña himself died; a starving remnant was, brought over unknown seas to Manila only through the superb navigation of the chief pilot, the Portuguese seaman Quiros. It was Quiros who, undeterred, took up the mission, a mission to him evangelical as well as geographical. A man of extraordinary qualities, with something Franciscan in his spirit, he combined professional skill with a continental faith that swept him far beyond the touch of reality, that made his path both a triumphant and a dolorous one; so that in the end, foredoomed to failure as he was from the nature of things, it perhaps mattered little that he was a poor leader of men. After much travail, he sailed from Callao in December 1605—further south than Mendaña had done, then north-west through the Tuamotu archipelago, and page 112 west when he was in the latitude of Santa Cruz. If he had kept on he would have reached it: three or four degrees beyond it lay the islands of Solomon. He was diverted from an island a little short of it, the latest of a series discovered by him, to turn south, so that he fetched up at something quite different, though close, the land he called Austrialia del Espiritu Santo, the northernmost large island of the New Hebrides group; and here, he was sure, where he proclaimed the city of New Jerusalem, was the much-desired continent. Sickness, at the critical moment infirmity of purpose, unreliable subordinates, finally the cruel luck with the wind, drove him away before a settlement was made, in a vast sweep north that took him to Mexico in October 1606. The wind had parted him from the real hero of the voyage, his principal lieutenant, Luis Vaez de Torres, who made his way from Espiritu Santo to the southern coast of New Guinea, along it through the strait named after him, and so to Manila, thus solving one of the great problems of geography: New Guinea, it was clear, was the northern projection of no continent, it was insular. The solution was not bruited abroad. Quiros returned to Spain, ceaselessly and fruitlessly to importune crown and councils, with memorials and charts, for still another expedition. The Spanish effort was over. His memorials, glowing with their confident transmutation of hopes into matter of fact, spread through Europe. Quiros, who had discovered a dozen islands, became the publicist of the continent. Had he failed in his great purpose? He could hold up a light to the future.
The immediate future, however, needed no light from Spain. The next century of Pacific exploration was almost entirely in the hands of the Dutch: not quite entirely, because one must remember Dampier and the buccaneers on the fringe. The Dutch were the best cartographers of the seventeenth century; they made important advances in naval architecture; they organised a great overseas trade, and a great eastern empire. The empire was a commercial empire; their exploration was an aspect of trade. As the empire was that of the Dutch East Indies Company, so the exploration was that approved of by the Company, the value of discoveries was judged by the Company; though again one must say not entirely so. The Company, or its captains in their passages from the Cape of Good Hope to the East Indies, placed fairly solidly on the map the western coast of Australia—their New Holland—and a good part of the southern coast. Exploring the north coast, they registered its essential outline, though they were never able to decide whether that north coast was altogether continuous, nor whether New page 113 Guinea and New Holland were different countries. An easy passage into the Pacific south of New Guinea might have been of great commercial importance: indeed the first Dutch visit to Australia, that of the Duyfken, two months before Torres sailed through the strait, resulted from exploration of its possibility. There is no real reason to think that Australia had been discovered by any European before, or that the ‘Dieppe’ group of maps, to which an occasional geographer still pins his faith, had anything to do with Australia at all.1 It may be surprising that there was little tendency to identify this mass of land, set down so hugely between the Pacific and the Indian oceans, with the Terra australis incognita; but its shore-line was unpromising, its cliffs and sand-dunes called up no vision of Locac, the Dutch deemed its people poor and abject; and within less than forty years after its first sighting a Dutch seaman had circumnavigated it, without laying eyes on it—except for the island, Van Diemen's Land or Tasmania, that sits off its south-eastern, coast. This was the voyage of Abel Janszoon Tasman, a voyage aimed principally at the discovery of the continent, or—there were other objectives—a clear route to Chile and a highly-fancied trade, or the rediscovery of the Solomon Islands. Tasman, in his great round voyage, Batavia to Mauritius, south to 49° and eastward, discovered not merely Van Diemen's Land but the west coast of high surf-struck New Zealand—perhaps this was the continent?—before he turned north to Tonga, escaped the desperately dangerous fringe of Fiji, and passed along the northern coast of New Guinea into the East Indies home.—‘God be praised and thanked.’ His masters were not highly pleased with this voyage. He had not beaten up any trade.
1 The ‘Dieppe’ maps, so called from a group of cartographers at Dieppe in the sixteenth century, and particularly one referred to as as the ‘Dauphin’ map, have been held to be renderings of the Australian coast-line, and to point to Portuguese exploration. Andrew Sharp's discussion (The Discovery of Australia, Oxford, 1963, 2–14) is pretty conclusive.
We are in the eighteenth century. It was a busy century, in science and speculation and writing, in economic expansion and war, in building and art; a revolutionary century, far beyond the confines of politics and social relations. Mathematical physics and chemistry made immense steps; botany, zoology, physiology, astronomy, geography, were all in movement. The great names are thick. Science had not become part of a polite education, but it was written about, lectured upon, demonstrated, applied, made elegant. Newton was the elder prophet; innumerable followers preached. Leadbetter represents one class of them; Robertson, with his instruction of rising navigators, another. Navigation could not fail to be affected. There was an important discovery in the ascertaining of latitude—the method of ‘double altitudes’, before and after noon, which could be utilised for days when a noon sighting of the sun was impossible: we shall find double altitudes thick in the records of Cook's voyages. This was due to Cornelis Douwes of Amsterdam, who about 1749 worked out logarithmic tables for the method. Accurate results in calculation depended not merely on tables but upon accurate observation, accurate measurement, and the century was a great age of scientific and mathematical instrument makers. Hadley's octant, farther developed by Captain John Campbell into the sextant, may almost stand as its symbol, though we are not to forget the reflecting telescope, the achromatic telescope, the micrometers. We cannot forget the problem of longitudes. As the century grew, interest grew; we may almost say that excitement grew. The principle involved is plain. Longitude—to put the matter crudely—is wrapped up with time. As the earth makes its daily revolution, time alters regularly from place to place; a difference of one hour is equivalent to fifteen degrees of longitude. One can observe certain astronomical phenomena all round the world, but at different points they occur at different times. If one knows precisely at what time one of them will page 115 occur at a fixed point on the earth's surface—Greenwich, for example, or Paris—and observes the time of the same occurrence at any different point—for example again, a spot in the Burgeo Islands —then the difference in hours of time, multiplied by the number 15, will give one the longitude in degrees. As early as 1474 the German astronomer Regiomontanus, stating the principle, had put forward as a basis for calculation ‘lunar distances’—that is, the angular distance between the moon and the sun or one of a number of fixed stars. The principle remained undoubted: almost three hundred years were to elapse before the development of instruments and techniques enabled it to be put in practice. An eclipse of the sun would serve, but not for the navigator; for the sun was not eclipsed every day, and the navigator did not know the time of the eclipse at any point of departure. The best Cook could do, after observing in 1766, was to hand in his results to the mathematicians when he arrived home. Much better, some men had said, to send able mathematicians to sea, than to send the observations of seamen to able mathematicians on land; but what good would that do, when all the mathematics in the world could not tell men at sea the time at Greenwich or at Paris?
1 12 Anne, cap. 15; and see Journals II, XXXIX, n. 1.
1 For the memoir or memoirs of Buache, see Armand Rainaud, Le Centinent Austral (Paris, 1893), 412–13.
There are parallels between French and English thought on the uses of a continent, and we may note that French writings, plans and actions no less than English caused disquiet in a temporarily revived Spanish empire. For a brief while Spain was prepared to name the Pacific as a Spanish preserve as much as it was in the sixteenth century; the return of Anson in 1744 with a galleon's treasure was regarded in England much as the return of Drake in the Golden Hind had been. The Falkland Islands were regarded as a key to the Pacific, Spain accordingly would tolerate French settlement there no more than British. Yet how to keep French or British out of that ample ocean, if they were determined to get in, under the excuse either of science or of peaceful trade? There is an obvious connection between the publication in war years, 1744–8, of Dr John Campbell's second edition of ‘Harris's Voyages’, the Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca of 1705, and Anson's famous voyage; and Campbell's two thousand folio pages are a continent in themselves, his eloquence, addressed to ‘the Merchants of Great Britain’, rolls with an appropriate thunder. ‘Let us maintain Trade, and there is no doubt that Trade will maintain us. Let our past Mistakes teach us to, be wise, let our present Wants and Difficulties revive our ancient Industry.’ Let us plant, a new colony for the benefit of trade. He, wastes no time on cosmic principles, will not indulge in hypothesis, knows how far he may safely be dogmatic. ‘It is most evident, from Captain Taxman's Voyage, that New Guinea, Carpentaria, New Holland, Antony van Diemen's Land, and the countries discovered by de Qtdros, make all one Continent, from which New Zeland seems to be separated by a Streight; and, perhaps, is part of another Continent, answering to Africa, as this, of which we are now speaking, plainly does to America. This Continent reaches from the Equinoctical to 44° of South Latitude, and extends from 122° to 188° of Longitude, making indeed a very large country, but nothing like what de Quiros imagined; which shows how dangerous a thing it is to trust too much to Conjecture page 119 in such Points as these.’1 A settlement could be made in this large country; there was reason to believe all that Quiros said about ‘Gold, Silver, Pearl, Nutmegs, Mace, Ginger and Sugar-Canes, of an extraordinary Size’ that existed there; its trade would be invaluable; from it could be discovered Terra australis incognita; such a settlement would greatly increase our shipping and seamen, ‘which are the true and natural Strength of this Country, extend our naval Power, and raise the Reputation of this Nation; the most distant Prospect of which is sufficient to warm the Soul of any Man, who has the least regard for his Country, with Courage, sufficient to despise the Imputations which may be thrown upon him as a visionary Projector, for taking so much Pains upon an Affair, that can tend so little to his private Advantage.’2 However the merchants of Great Britain thought of this appeal and their private advantage, their purchases of the work made a reprint necessary in 1764, the year after peace was made, the year of the first post-war Pacific voyage; they bought innumerable volumes of collections of voyages and travels easier to handle than these, tremendous folios; they bought with eagerness edition after edition of the single volume of Anson's Voyage.
1 Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca, I, xvi.
2 ibid., 335.
On this the war, with all its ravaged provinces, was the harsh commentary. After it was over, a Scotsman, John Callander, in his Terra Australis Cognita1 even snatched the volumes of de Brasses, and gave his argument a fiercely British twist. Callander was a little cautious about the Terra australis incognita: some wise and knowing people, he conceded, took it to be merely a chimera. Yet one should not be too hasty, too peremptory: it might exist, and for the sake of science and of navigation be extremely worth the finding. Such, it appears, must have been a popular view. The volumes of voyages had done their work. Twenty years later the first biographer of Cook looked back and fully remembered ‘how much his imagination was captivated, in the more early part of his life, with the hypothesis of a southern continent. He has often dwelt upon it with rapture, and been highly delighted with the authors who contended for its existence, and displayed the mighty consequences which would result from its being discovered.’2 Of these authors, the principal one in England, who seems to have felt a rapture himself, was Alexander Dalrymple, and to Dalrymple we must now return.
1 Callander's production appeared in three volumes in Edinburgh, 1766–8. He plundered other books besides de Brosses; see Journals I, lxxxi-lxxxiii.
2 Kippis, 184.
1 Historical Collection, I, xxviii-xxix.
2 ibid., 12 ff. after 124. This odd argument is perhaps founded on something that Cook himself was later to observe, the penchant of a number of islanders for bleaching their hair with a plaster of clay.
3 ibid., xx.
1 Historical Collection, I, xvii-xviii.
1 Byron's instructions are entered in P.R.O., Adm 2/1339; their policy is examined in Journals I, Ixxxiv-lxxxvi.
2 Wallis's instructions also are in WfLO., Adm 2/1332; and see Journals I, xc ff.
3 Bougainville can be quite fully studied in J. E. Martin-Allanic, Bougainville navigateur et les découvertes de son temps (2 vols., Paris, 1964.).
All this was quite distinct from the astronomical ambitions of the Royal Society or the Academy of Sciences in Paris. Yet Dr Hornsby in 1765 had seen the possible connection between discovery, or even a settlement made by a commercial nation in the Pacific ocean, and the needs of science. The connection now became very clear. The Royal Society had been actively prosecuting its idea of a South Sea observation of the Transit of Venus. This entailed getting observers to the South Sea, which entailed the expenditure of money. The Royal Society had no money. In February 1768, therefore, the Council as its next step prepared a memorial to its patron, a document nicely calculated to appeal to a patriot king. It pointed out the importance of accurate observation for the improvement of Astronomy, ‘on which Navigation so much depends’. It pointed out that ‘several of the Great Powers in Europe, particularly the French, Spaniards, Danes and Swedes are making the proper dispositions for the Observation thereof: and the Empress of Russia has given directions for having the same observed in many different places of her extensive Dominions… . That the British Nation have been justly celebrated in the learned world, for their knowledge of Astronomy, in which they are inferior to no Nation upon Earth, Ancient or Modern; and it would cast dishonour upon them should they neglect to have correct observations made of this important phenomenon.’ The places proper for observing were detailed. The expense would amount to about £4000, ‘exclusive of the expense of the ships which must convey and return the Observers that are to be sent to the Southward of the Equinoctial Line and to the North Cape’. The Society's annual income was scarcely sufficient to carry on its necessary business. ‘The Memorialists, attentive to the true end for which they were founded by Your Majesty's Royal Predecessor, The Improvement of Natural Knowledge, conceived it to be their duty page 125 to lay their sentiments before Your Majesty with all humility, and submit the same to Your Majesty's Royal Consideration.’1
1 R.S. Council Minutes, 15 February 1768.
2 Admiralty secretary to Royal Society, 1 April 1768, Adm 2/541.
3 Kippis, 16, makes the defecate comment that Hawke ‘possessed more of the spirit of his profession that either of education or science’.
4 Dalrymple, in his later reminiscences, says that offers were made to him ‘that the instructions for the voyage should be entrusted to him, and the Officer commanding the vessel be positively ordered to follow his opinion, on the compliance with which his promotion was to depend’; but Dalrymple still refused to go, since his Cuddalore experience had taught him ‘that a divided command was incompatible with the public service in such voyages.’—‘Memoirs of Alexander Dalrymple’, European Magazine, 42 (1802), 325. It is hard to know what to make of this, except that it is meat unlikely that the Admiralty or anyone connected with it, would have made the ‘offers’ he refers to. He may have been referring to his discussions with the Royal Society.
All this is traditionally considered part of the biography of Cook. The history of Pacific exploration is part of the biography of Cook; the fact that Cook became an observer of the Transit is part of his biography; the fact that Dalrymple became a sort of natural and perpetual critic of Cook's proceedings is perhaps part of the biography of Cook, though much more of that of Dalrymple. In relation to Cook's command of the Transit voyage, however, Dalrymple's cultivation of the Royal Society, Dalrymple's vision of himself as the new Columbus, Dalrymple's conditions of command, were quite irrelevant. To the Lords of the Admiralty Dalrymple was irrelevant. For Cook, in due course, his geographical learning was both relevant and important, even though Cook was forced into becoming the most destructive critic of Dalrymple. It is difficult not to see. them as antagonists. But in 1768 there was not the slightest question of rivalry. So far as we can see from the documents, the Admiralty, having bought a ship to carry the astronomers to the South Seas, some time between 5 April and 12 April decided to take Cook temporarily from the Newfoundland survey and appoint him to her command. We may ask, why Cook?—and answer with another question:—Considering Cook's capacities and equipment, and that the voyage was also to be a voyage of discovery, was not that the most natural thing in the world? This is to rely too heavily on hindsight. Cook's capacities as a marine surveyor were known, but no one was persuaded that he was one of the principal geniuses of the age. No one could put a finger on him, and say, Here is a great sailor, here is the greatest of discoverers by sea. We do not even know that at the moment when he was appointed, the Admiralty had decided to add discovery to the more limited scientific purpose of the voyage—though with a ship in the Pacific, a further attempt at discovery would seem logical enough. Wallis had not yet returned. Had he had any success? And as this ship was to be sent into the Pacific, a considerable voyage, was it not a little strange to select for her command a mere master, whose most important previous command had been a sixty-ton schooner, or brig, with a crew of twenty? Of his predecessors, Byron was a commodore, the second son of a nobleman, had commanded line-of-battle ships; Wallis was a post-captain of eight years seniority. There were plenty of meritorious and experienced half-pay officers who would have been glad of employment: it could not be said that Mr Cook was the only man in the market. Scientific leanings, however advantageous, were not strictly page 127 necessary. It is possible, indeed, that to begin with the voyage did not rate very highly with the Lords of the Admiralty, as long as a naval officer of some sort was in charge of a naval vessel. It is possible that there were many commanders eligible. Philip Stephens, the secretary, solved the problem. A large part of his business was to know men. Certainly by now he knew Cook, and his knowledge was not confined to a paper acquaintance. He made the suggestion to the Lords; he referred them to Palliser for a supporting opinion. Palliser was prepared to lose his surveyor, glad to enlarge on his merits.1 Mr Cook was appointed. It was a remarkable event indeed.
We may look once more at its context, not merely naval. A voyage to the Pacific was a voyage to an ocean that had been criss-crossed repeatedly for two centuries—in certain directions only, and within certain limits. For certain persons it had always been the abode of an illimitable hope. As the eighteenth century moved on the hope was not less; the age of enlightenment had its own romance. But tike light that was growing was a clear one, dry, wide. It would dissipate the ancient hope. It would not destroy romance for the romantic. To say that in this decade of the 1760s science had taken control of geography and navigation would be absurd. None the less, we are at the beginning of an era in which a man gifted enough in practical ways could add the clarity of science to his own clarity of mind. For geography and navigation that meant a change of method and a change of hope.
1 Kippis, 17, note: ‘From the information of Philip Stephens, Esq: communicated by Sir Joseph Banks.’ We can probably rely on, this.