Continuing with the voyages of Captain James Cook, the second trip had much greater funding than the first and Cook had charge of two vessels, Resolution and Adventure with Cook leading from HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure captained by Tobias Furneaux. They were charged with trying to discover the supposed great southern continent then known as Terra Australis, modern day Antarctica as opposed to Australia which was called New Holland at the time. It was believed by many scientists that such a mass of land must exist, if only as the source of the icebergs. The other thing that Cook and Furneaux were to study was on behalf of the Board of Longitude. Calculating latitude, how far up or down you are in the world was relatively easy however longitude, how far round the world you are, was much more difficult and ideally needed accurate knowledge of the time back where you started and clocks and watches were highly susceptible to temperature and climate variations. Cook therefore had a watch made by Larcum Kendall which was a copy of that designed by John Harrison and alongside this a watch made by John Arnold, Ferneaux had two watches made by Arnold, these were to be tested at sea and their accuracy determined, Cook and Ferneaux duly set off in May 1772. I’ll be reading more about the search for accurate longitude in the fourth book of this months theme ‘Longitude’ by Dava Sobel.

Cook duly sailed south and spent months skirting ice fields, with the two ships becoming on the 17th January 1773 the first from Europe to cross the Antarctic Circle and the following day getting to seventy five miles from the continent itself but without spotting land due to the amount of ice between them and Antarctica. Cook describes himself as surprised that the ice they recovered from the ocean in order to replenish the ships water stocks was fresh with only a small salty coating which would soon melt off and wonders how sea water freezes without retaining salt without realising that this is proof of fresh water glaciers further south that have broken off and are simply floating past the ships. One interesting quote a few days earlier gives an idea as to how the crew were faring in the extreme cold again featuring Cook’s idiosyncratic approach to spelling.

Monday 4th January 1773: First and middle parts strong gales attended with a thick fogg, sleet and snow, all the rigging covered with ice and the air excessive cold, the crew however stand it tolerably well, each being clothed with a Fearnaught jacket, a pair of trowsers of the same, and a large cap made of canvas and baize, these together with an additional glass of brandy every morning enables them to bear the cold without flinshing.

Cook would make another trip south in December 1773 after spending time in New Zealand along with Tahiti and Tonga amongst others repairing and re-equipping his vessels, and indeed getting back with HMS Adventure as the two ships had lost one another in thick fog in February 1773. Fortunately anticipating such an occurrence there had agreed to meet at New Zealand if they parted in the Antarctic ice. This trip round the South Pacific islands enabled Cook to also reacquaint himself with people he had met on his first voyage and pass on the bad news that the islander who had accompanied Cook on that voyage had sadly died on his way from Indonesia to South Africa and had therefore never seen Europe.

The second trip in search of Antarctica was no more successful than the first and Cook became convinced that there was no great southern continent, what he did however prove was that none of the lands known and partly mapped reached down through the ice to the far south. Indeed there would be no confirmed landing on Antarctica until the Norwegians got there in 1895 but to my surprise Cook is definitely a pioneer of Antarctic exploration getting far further south than anyone else in his time, something I hadn’t realised until I read this book. I had always though of Cook sailing in warmer climes so to read the battles with ice in this volume was fascinating but by February 1774 he finally turned north again eventually arriving at Easter Island in the hope of trading for more supplies. However Easter Island was to be a disappointment, the rich fertile land described by the first European visitors, the Dutch, in 1720 had gone and the people were reduced to a subsistence existence, the population also appeared to be greatly reduced, clearly something had happened here but Cook didn’t have the time, or the inclination, to find out what as he needed supplies so headed back to Tahiti.

Cook would make a further attempt to head south in 1775, this time in the South Atlantic having passed the southern tip of South America and would briefly visit South Georgia. By this time although he still hadn’t seen land to the far south he was convinced there was something as he had realised that it was needed to be a source of the ice. He wrote on 6th February 1775:

We continued to steer to the south and SE till noon at which time we were at the Latitude of 58 degrees, 15 minutes South, Longitude 21 degrees 34 minutes West and seeing neither land nor signs of any. I concluded that what we had seen. which I named Sandwich Land was either a group of islands or else a point of the continent, for I firmly believe that there is a tract of land near the Pole, which is a source of most of the ice which is spread over this vast Southern Ocean.

From the South Atlantic Cook finally turned north and sailed back to England, arriving in July 1775. The illustrations shown above are from Tanna, in the New Hebrides, now Vanuatu including a portrait of a native islander whilst below is the map that comes with this set which folds out to quite a good size.