Death Of Cook Research Articles

Political Discussions Onboard HMS Crocodile: David Samwell, James King, and the Historical Implications for Captain Cook's Third Voyage

James King and David Samwell wrote two of the most important journals of Captain James Cook's third voyage and later produced the most important eighteenth-century publications describing the controversial circumstances of Cook's death. This article presents previously unpublished excerpts from Samwell's letters describing political discussions between the two onboard HMS Crocodile in 1781, a period during which King was revising his voyage journal toward publication as volume three of A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean. With a crew that included at least twelve Cook veterans who, according to Samwell, found ‘no small satisfaction in talking over the eventful history of our voyage’, the Crocodile may have served as crucible for arguing and reassessing the conflicting oral histories and interpretations of the third voyage: a process with potentially significant effects on King's presentation of events in A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784) and on Samwell's later response in The Death of Captain Cook (1786).

Patronage and the Pariah of Captain Cook's Third Voyage: Captain John Williamson, Sir William Jones and the Duchess of Devonshire

AbstractThe most perplexing character in the historical drama known as the ‘Death of Captain Cook’ is Lieutenant John Williamson. Reviled by contemporaries for failing to come to Cook's aid at Kealakekua Bay, he was inexplicably promoted and given command upon his return to Britain, a mystery that has led to scholarly accusations of a cover‐up at both shipboard and Admiralty levels. In uncovering patterns of command and patronage that affected Williamson's later career, this article explores the workings of interest in the Royal Navy, expands Williamson's biography and offers new insights into his role in Cook's death.

Self and Space in the Theater of Susan Glaspell

Self and Space in the Theater of Susan Glaspell

“Maui and Orphic blood”: Cook’s Death in Contemporary Maori Poetry

The interpretation of Captain James Cook's death at Kealakekua Bay in 1779 was subject to contention in the eighteenth century; admiring publicists of the navigator's imperial benevolence such as Anna Seward differed from those like William Cowper, who denounced his irreligious participation in heathen rites. (1) Assessments as to the cultural and religious implications of his end are as diverse today, with anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere arguing extendedly over whether Hawaiians really believed Cook to be the god Lono. To Obeyesekere, the idea that Hawaiians greeted Cook as a deity is an absurd imperialist illusion, while for Sahlins, the identification is necessary to understand the ritual implications of his death. (2) Nicolas Thomas and Anne Salmond have recently joined the fray, with Thomas emphasizing the extent to which societies habitually blurred the line between the divine and human, while Salmond argues that Cook was recognized either as a contemporary representative of Lonoka-Mahakihi or as the grandson of Lono-ma-I-Kanaka, in either case being saluted not as a deity but as the scion of a chiefly family. (3) Whatever their differences, all these contemporary commentators bring an anti-imperial skepticism to their judgments about Cook but none writes from a specifically perspective. In recent years, however, the Maori poet Robert Sullivan, of Nga Puhi descent resident in Hawai'i, has published two volumes dedicated to assessing Cook's career and legacy from a markedly Pacific perspective. In writing about Cook as one of the skin of the ocean (people of the Pacific) through Polynesian eyes, Sullivan's work reshapes the extant metropolitan debate. (4) As Seward's name-making Elegy on the Death of Captain Cook (1780) and Cowper's Charity (1780) bear witness, eighteenth-century poetry was a crucial aspect in developing and contesting Cook's emergence as a cultural hero. An important testimony to the salience of Sullivan's contemporary poetic contribution to the continuing historiographic and anthropological argument over his status is signaled by J. G. A. Pocock's admiring tribute to his contemporary, Allen Curnow, Aotearoa/New Zealand's leading modernist poet. In the first chapter of a recently published collection of essays, The Discovery of Islands, Pocock remarks that Curnow's verse articulated the problematic of unsettled and mobile oceanic identities and histories that would shape his own perspective as a historian: It was through the poetry of Allen Curnow that this conjunction of images and problems became in my mind a way of looking at history and living in it, when both had to be done a long sea voyage from anywhere He presented an imagination which could never be fully at home where it was, could never return to where it might have come from, and had traveled too far to fly off and live anywhere else. (5) In saluting the literary insight that enabled his own paradigm-shifting understanding of British history as archipelagic and oceanic, Pocock--who also cites Sullivan's work in his account of Maori self-representation--reminds us that poetry is not simply an object but a form of knowledge. POETRY, POSTCOLONIALISM, AND COOK Sullivan is relatively unusual in choosing poetry rather than the novel to challenge Anglo-American interpretations of Cook and the colonial histories that followed in his wake. Benedict Anderson's influential account of the way that print culture helped generate the imagined community of postcolonial nations grants the novel a privileged role in this process. (6) One of the most interesting aspects of Sullivan's work is his ability to use a wide range of poetic genres to address and constitute a pan-Pacific community, which cuts across postcontact national boundaries, while also issuing uncomfortable challenges to other groups, such as New Zealand Pakeha (settlers). (7) Equally interesting is his use of Cook's narratives in this project, for like Richard Hakluyt's collections of voyages, these texts can be read in the terms Richard Helgerson has proposed, as prose epics of the English nation. …

The Lives and Letters of an Eighteenth-Century Circle of Acquaintance by Temma Berg

514 Reviews to task fordefusingMilton's religious radicalism, Poole concludes: 'TheMilton pre sented here is again the dynamic, potentially dangerous Milton, but located against a contemporary background of countless other dynamic, potentially dangerous pro jects' (p. I95). Poole has trawled in deep waters and the catch is considerable. His assertion that 'the reading of Genesis I-3 was one of the defining acts of early modernity' isbacked up by a considerable weight of evidence and erudition (p. I95). Milton and theIdea of the Fall isone of those specialist books thatopen out to change not only theway we thinkabout Milton, but also theway we conceive of theperiod. UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW WILLY MALEY The Lives and Letters of an Eighteenth-Century Circle ofAcquaintance. By TEMMA BERG. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2006. X+295. ?50. ISBN 978-o-7546-5599-2. Iwas won over by thisbook despite itsclunkiness inplaces. It isa collection of letters from a family circlewith added friends,with the largerpartwritten in the I760s and 1770s, the rest in the I78os and I790s, and contained in a letter-book belonging to Lady Lydia Clerke (I74I-I8 I9), the central addressee (but non-writer). Some of the correspondents will be known to some readers-Charles Clerke, who took over the Resolution afterCaptain Cook's death, and who died from tuberculosis contracted in a debtors' prison; Susannah Dobson, savante, who went about in a dirty gown and man's wig cultivating high-minded friendships; and Charlotte Lennox, novelist, writer, and friendof Samuel Johnson, fromwhom there are two letters. There are thirty-one letters,organized by correspondent. Each is given an estab lishing commentary and analysis, supplying useful biographical information, also collated in an appendix, with a second appendix providing a chronology that in tegrates familial and national events. Temma Berg proposes a characterization of the letterswith reference to fiction: the firstgroup, a domestic novel ofmanners; the second, a sentimental romance. This paradigm is not theorized anywhere near enough tomake itconvincing; what itboils down toon thepage is that the firstgroup concerns aspects of the lifeof amarried woman, the second a spinster.Declaring the past tobe 'radically unknowable', Berg supplies uswith editorial emotions as a linking dynamic: she admires one letterwriter, is fascinated by another. Readers who wish forentertainment rather than instructionmay find this satisfying; others, frustrating. The critical pace finallypicks up at the end, with a fabulous pun, Post/Crypt, and ameditation on the power of epistolary texts to haunt readers thathas something to add to criticism's current interest in letters. But the book has considerable charm, and ifBerg's editorializing has literary naivety, it also shows exemplary textual care. I for one am grateful for her labour of love inmaking these letters available, and in sketching the lives of theirwriters. She articulates, sometimes touchingly, an empathy which perhaps scholars should suppress less.Many of the letters are engaging, lively, thoughtful, and thought provoking. They speak to the texture of people's lives, evoke daily preoccupations, long-term hopes and worries, and make manifest the use of ideas and discourses in fascinatingways. Moreover, from thepoint of view ofwomen's studies, Berg is right to stress these lettersas awelcome addition toour knowledge both ofwomen's writing and ofwomen's stories. The most memorable voices arewomen's-a lively niece, a pious friend, a sisterwho philosophizes-and all aremore complicated in life than in fiction.The amusing Sylvia Brathwaite, writing in the I78os amidst thewhirl of London life,brushes away 'a trainof danglers', organizes an official flirt(Harry Gre ville) to keep other men frombothering her, falls in lovewith a soldier and marries him in spite of disapproval. For once, love in a cottage has a reasonably happy ending, MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 515 and without the pining and repining of literary stereotypes. This book might not be an obvious read forscholars of theperiod, but it is a rewarding one. KING'S COLLEGE LONDON CLARE BRANT Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture. By CLARE BRANT. Basingstoke: Pal graveMacmillan. 2oo6. x+43I pp. C6o. ISBN 978-I-4039-9482-0. InEighteenth-Century Letters andBritish Culture Clare Brant has produced amagiste rial study of letters,an important and ground-breaking work. Letters are increasingly important in eighteenth-century studies...

Death in Ancient China: The Tale of One Man's Journey (review)

Reviewed by: Death in Ancient China: The Tale of One Man's Journey Mark Berkson (bio) Constance A. Cook . Death in Ancient China: The Tale of One Man's Journey. China Studies 8. Leiden: Brill, 2006. viii, 296 pp. Hardcover $125.00, ISBN 90–04–15312–8. The resting places of the dead are revealing windows into ancient cultures. The ways that a particular culture understands death, treats the dying person, and handles the corpse tell us a great deal about its values. For those of us whose understanding of ancient civilizations comes primarily through their transmitted religious and philosophical literature, a book like Constance Cook's Death in China: The Tale of One Man's Journey serves as a valuable guide to the material culture that constitutes a treasure trove of information regarding those cultures' understandings of death. The focal point of Cook's study is the tomb of Shao Tuo, an official in the Chu court who was buried in 316 B.C.E. The book is an exhaustive inventory, analysis, and interpretation of the content and layout of this tomb, with close attention paid to the texts and art found in the tomb and the arrangement of the tomb itself. Scholars must often think in generalities, and there are many books written about "the ancient Chinese." Over time, however, the people from a culture so far removed from us can begin to feel like an abstraction. One virtue of a book like this is that it focuses on a particular individual, and throughout the book we get a glimpse of the life, work, illness, and untimely death of a man in fourth century B.C.E. China through Cook's reconstruction. Through comparative reflection on other tombs and texts and by drawing on the work of sinologists and scholars of numerous aspects of ancient China (for example, philosophy, art, philology, and poetry), the book expands out from the concrete particularities of Shao Tuo's life to broader claims about the development of Chinese cosmology, conceptions and treatments of illness, and understandings of the afterlife. The book is not for the casual nonacademic reader; it is a resource for scholars of Chinese culture and history, as well as for those interested in tomb archaeology and comparative studies of death and dying. It is informative, densely packed and well organized, and it provides readers with extensive inventories, illustrations, diagrams, and charts, as well as appendixes consisting of translations of two texts found in the tomb. These appendixes contain images of the bamboo strips found in the tomb, and for those of us who do not get our hands dirty in archaeological digs, looking at these strips, with their early but usually recognizable forms of Chinese characters, brings us into contact with the power that such artifacts possess. The appendixes also provide the modern Chinese characters from the strips along with copious notes that discuss the meanings of characters and the reasons for certain translation choices. [End Page 411] One of the characteristics of Chinese tombs is the frequency with which texts were included within them. Shao Tuo's tomb contained records of his administrative duties, as well as both an inventory text detailing the contents of the tomb and a divination text, the latter detailing the many attempts by shaman-diviners to diagnose and cure the ailing official. The Chinese have a long history of keeping divination records, dating back to the Shang dynasty oracle bone inscriptions (their discovery has provided one of the most significant sources of insight into Shang culture). The divination text in Shao Tuo's tomb reveals a great deal about the religio-medical practices of the period, but the reason for the inclusion of this text, as well as the inventory text, in the tomb is unclear. Cook reviews the theories, including that the texts might have been for Shao Tuo's use in the afterlife, for use by other spirits, for the purpose of providing testimony to his merit and rank (for example, through the length of the inventory texts), and so that the texts could be separated from the world of the living and preserved. The texts could serve as talismans that...

Geology of the Lewis and Clark Trail in North Dakota

John W. Hoganson and Edward C. Murphy, 2003, Mountain Press, Missoula, USA, 247 p. (Softcover, US $18.00) ISBN: 0-87842-476-8. Two-hundred years ago, on May 14, 1804, the Corps of Discovery, led by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, 29 and 33 years-old respectively, pushed off from the bank of the Missouri River at St. Charles, Missouri, on a two-year and four-month exploration of the largely uncharted lands of the newly purchased Louisiana Territory and the unclaimed wilderness beyond the continental divide to the Pacific Ocean. Lewis and Clark followed in the wake of the explorations of the length and breadth of the Pacific Ocean by Captain James Cook, which ended 35 years earlier with Cook's death on the shore of Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii. John Hoganson and Ed Murphy's book, Geology of the Lewis and Clark Trail in North Dakota, is an insightful account of the expedition's route through North Dakota, and the landscape, surficial deposits, and bedrock that the captains described. Hoganson and Murphy are eminently qualified to write this account of the geology of the Lewis and Clark Trail in North Dakota. As geologists with the North Dakota Geological Survey, they have over 40 collective years of mapping the bedrock and surficial geology of the state. Their research for the book has been of the highest quality, and the persons with whom they consulted, and the bibliography that they assembled, are excellent. The book is divided into five parts: (1) Jefferson's vision for the expedition and his choice of Meriwether Lewis to lead the enterprise; (2) a concise yet thorough, well-illustrated discussion of the general geology of North Dakota through time, written for the layperson; (3) a section on the Missouri River that includes a discussion of the pre-glacial drainage system and the changes that glacial advances and retreats …

A Poisoning of No Substance: The Trials of Medico-Legal Proof in Mid-Victorian England

“I am innocent of poisoning Cook by strychnine.” With these words, Dr. William Palmer went to the scaffold, convicted of having perpetrated precisely the crime he denied to the last. Palmer's twelveday trial in May 1856, among the most celebrated English murder cases of the century, had received massive press attention, and his execution was no less scrutinized. Scaffold speeches being traditional opportunities for achieving closure on a case (preferably, though not exclusively, by confession and repentance), press reports devoted a good deal of space to the concerted efforts made to convince Palmer to comply with these expectations: “From the time of his sentence to the very moment when he ascended the scaffold,” one correspondent observed, “Palmer was persuaded, entreated, implored day by day, almost hour by hour, to confess his crimes, not to God, but to man.”Interrogated to the last, Palmer offered instead of closure a riddle, neither directly denying his guilt nor ratifying the grounds upon which his conviction rested. In doing so he seemed to take aim at the most contentious part of the trial, namely, the scientific evidence that had attributed the death of John Parsons Cook to strychnine poisoning. By disavowing strychnine as the agent of Cook's death, he at once repudiated the prosecution's fundamental contention and left open the possibility that, although he had been justly condemned as a murderer, his conviction was based on fallacious medico-legal grounds.Palmer's dying words became the subject of widespread concern.

Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin

1. Introduction 2. Killing the god: the afterlife of Cook's death 3. Mutineers and beachcombers 4. Missionary endeavours 5. Trade and adventure 6. 'Taking up with kanakas': Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific 7. Skin and Bones: Jack London's diseased Pacific 8. The French Pacific 9. Epilogue.

Review article: The making of cook's death

The Apotheosis of Captain Cook. European Mythmaking in the Pacific. By Gananath Obeyesekere. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992. xvi, 251 pp. ISBN 0–691–05680–3 How ‘Natives’ Think. About Captain Cook For Example. By Marshall Sahlins. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1995. 318 pp. ISBN 0–226–73368–8

Re‐Weaving the Argument: A Response to Parker

I had thought that the argument of The Apotheosis was rather well-knit, but owing to Parker's somewhat careless piece of 'knit' picking, I felt that the best response would be to reweave my argument in a more straightforward manner than that developed in my book. I will also retell in more straightforward methodological terms the thrust of my work. Once that is done, I can better frame most of Parker's criticism in an orderly argument.1 In The Apotheosis I try to step outside the particular structuralist paradigm that Marshall Sahlins deals with for reasons that will be readily apparent. The core argument of the book is in section VI (pp. 120-53) where I show that the apotheosis of the great explorer was a European construction and that it was developed initially in London and not in Hawaii. The first signs of this appear in the eulogies on Cook at his death; in letters and poetry; and in the theatre performance Ornai with its crucial scene in which Englishmen dressed as Hawaiians lament the death of their god Lono on the English stage. I show that the last is an English cultural construction that could not have come from the major journal writers because they did not make this connection. The connection was made in the official version of the voyages published 1784 and edited by Captain James King and a total outsider, Canon John Douglas, five years after Cook's death. The information about the apotheosis could not have come from some Hawaiian source either because the first ships to reach Hawaii arrived in 1786 and therefore they could not have brought news of Cook's apotheosis to England in 1784. The painting of Cook ascending to heaven escorted by Britannia and Fame is very European and indeed (I might add) influenced other European works, such as Rodin's painting on the 'apotheosis of Louis IV. The European myth totally idealised Cook portraying him as an exponent of Enlightenment values and this, I suggest, is an expression of that which is supposed to elude mythologization, namely rationality itself, the main plank of the Enlightenment credo. There were also Christian forms of the myth that went contrary to the Enlightenment one, most importantly the poet Cowper's depiction of Cook as Herod. Because he permitted himself to be apotheosized, says Cowper, God struck him dead. This version of the myth was well known in the US in the early 19th century and it went into the evangelical traditions represented in the Christian missions to Hawaii. I argue that the myth of the white explorer cum civiliser who is a god to savages is nothing new and one of its more powerful manifestations was the supposed apotheosis of Cortes (and by some accounts Columbus). That particular myth-form therefore has had a long run in European culture and consciousness and it manifests itself in shipboard gossip and narrative. Thus, when the first European visitors landed in Tahiti in 1767 during Wallis' circumnavigation, some of the crew

Susan Glaspell's Fiction: Fidelity as American Romance

Susan Glaspell's play Trifles (1916) or short story she based on it, Jury of Her Peers (1917), may be found today in almost every anthology introducing college students literature, yet it seems strange that woman who wrote nine novels and over fifty short stories, in addition fourteen plays, is still mainly known, when known at all, for short dramatic work. Feminist critics such as Christine Dymkowski and Linda Ben-Zvi, among others, are in process of resurrecting Glaspell's reputation and establishing that she is one of two most accomplished playwrights of twentieth-century America (Dymkowski 91). But although this is invaluable, attention continues be focused almost solely on Glaspell's drama, exclusion of her novels. Veronica Makowsky's recent study provides first scholarly feminist analysis of Glaspell's entire oeuvre, from her early stories her late novels, but even Makowsky appears agree with standard view, which is in my opinion not sufficiently substantiated, that Glaspell's plays are her greatest work (24). Glaspell's first novel, Glory of Conquered, was published in 1909; her second, The Visioning, in 1911; and her third, Fidelity, in 1915. In 1913 she married George Cram Cook, an idealistic, bohemian fellow lowan. They moved New York and summered in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They were both instrumental in creating Provincetown Players and in establishing group in Greenwich Village. Despite fact that she spent most of 1920s plays for Provincetown theater and did not return novel form until 1928 with Brook Evans, Glaspell considered herself writer of and, as she recalled in later autobiographical fragment, began plays because my husband forced me to (Noe 33). Later, after she and Cook had left New York for two-year sojourn in Greece, she confided in letter her mother that the theater always made it hard for me write and now I will have better chance for my own writing (Noe 49). Although her play Alison's House won Pulitzer Prize in 1931, and she served briefly as Midwest director for Federal Theatre Project in Chicago during 1934, she basically settled in Provincetown after Cook's death in Greece in 1924 and returned fiction, producing five more novels: Fugitive's Return (1929), Ambrose Holt and Family (1931), The Morning Is Near Us (1939), Norma Ashe (1942), and Judd Rankin's Daughter (1945). Not only did Glaspell regard herself primarily as fiction writer, but she was critically accepted as an American novelist of integrity and importance until mid 1930s. Many of her novels were reviewed, increasingly favorably, in New York Times. Fidelity was praised by New York Times reviewer for its convincing realism, but it was seen be romantic tale; the story of caught in mesh of law; therefore reviewer did not understand second half of novel, where love is entirely abandoned, and found it flawed for that reason (Anon.). Although Percy Hutchison, Times reviewer of Fugitive's Return, found novel uneven, he praised Glaspell as so much of an individual [that] knows in advance that novel from her pen will not be an ordinary book. John Chamberlain praised Brook Evans in 1928 Times review as a masterpiece on small scale, masterpiece because Glaspell has distilled essence from most important and character-revealing moments, and small scale because she has limited her canvas deliberately . . . focus[ing] on purely human values that remain eternal, irrespective of time or place. In 1931 he aptly described Ambrose Holt and Family as tragi-comedy of and noted Glaspell's delicately pervasive humor, which acts as perpetual astringent cutting through sentimentality. In both reviews he discussed Glaspell's idealism in her life and her work, and praised her courage and commitment as writer. …

A bibliographical essay on the territory of Hawaii, 1900–1959

Hawaii's bibliographic history dates from 11 January 1780 when the London Gazette took note of Captain James Cook's death 'At the Ifland of O'why'ee, One of a group of new difcovered Iflands ... in an affray with a numerous and tu multuous Body of the Natives'. Ever since the Islands have inspired reams of copy resulting in publicity far out of proportion to Hawaii's size, political significance, economic value, and literate history. The Hawaiian image is so powerfully ingrained that the word 'Hawaii' alone evokes a romantic South Seas Utopia. At least 50 books capitalize on this appeal by being entitled simply Hawaii. Although Hawaiian fiction and travel books are the most popular Island reading fare, there is a considerable body of literature dealing with nearly two centuries of recorded Island history. Oral genealogies and archaeological re search necessarily form the basis of our knowledge of pre-discovery Hawaii since the early Hawaiians had evolved no system of writing. The foundation for earliest Hawaiian history therefore lies in the accounts of early explorers and traders who visited the Islands.

CAPTAIN COOK'S VOYAGES: A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE FRENCH TRANSLATIONS, 1772–1800

The bibliography of Cook's voyages is both lengthy and complicated, and, in spite of their far‐reaching importance, their historical and geographical significance, and their considerable literary influence, it has never yet been attempted in its entirety. ‘L'immortel Cook’ was honoured almost as much in France as he was in England, but no satisfactory account exists of the French translations of his works. Sir Maurice Holmes's Introduction to the bibliography of Captain James Cook, R.N., London, Edwards, 1936, is excellent for the original editions, but does not attempt to include translations. Of great value, too, is the Bibliography of Captain James Cook, R.N., F.R.S., circumnavigator, published in 1928 by the Public Library of New South Wales. This is the catalogue of what must have been a remarkably fine exhibition to celebrate the bicentenary of Cook's birth, but it does not, of course, pretend to include items which were not available for display. The only other bibliography specifically devoted to Cook is the one by James Jackson prepared for the centenary of Captain Cook's death and published in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 1879. This must be used with great caution. It has the appearance of having been compiled from entries sent in by various owners and put together without sufficient examination. At all events, while it naturally contains a very large number of French editions, many of them appear twice or even three times in slightly different disguises.

Economic Adjustment of Hawaiians to European Culture

AN interesting picture of economic adjustment of a primitive people to complicated foreign civilization is reflected in the accounts of the earliest voyagers to the Hawaiian Islands. In spite of the death of Cook, the murder of Hergest and Gooch, and the Metcalf disasters, the period between 1778 and the chaotic sweeping away of the old culture was very apparently, on the whole, one of intelligent and harmonious adaptation. BARTER

A Statue to Captain Cook

THE Australians have found a hero worthy of their worship, and Capt. Cook has at length found an English-speaking people eager to take occasion to honour the memory and the work of one of the greatest of Englishmen. The mystery of the reticence of our wealthy but unwieldy Geographical Society on the occurrence of the centenary of Cook's death, still remains unsolved; they did not even send a representative to Paris, to the amazement of the enthusiastic French geographers; was the weather too rough for the gallant admiral who we believe volunteered to the indifferent Council to go to the Paris meeting? We are glad for the credit of the nation that it has not been left entirely to the foreigner to recognise the greatness of one of England's greatest navigators and discoverers. Our readers may remember that some time since a statue of Cook adorned Waterloo Place, near the Athenæum Club. The statue was admitted to have been exceedingly happy in conception, and successful in execution; it is supposed to represent the great navigator coming within the loom of the east Australian coast, which he first saw near Cape Howe, to the south of Sydney. It was for this city that the statue was designed, and it was to inaugurate the work of Mr. Woolner, that on February 25 last one of the greatest demonstrations took place that has been witnessed in Australia since the first shipload of convicts was landed at Botany Bay. When we said that Australia had found a hero, perhaps we spoke too widely, for only New South Wales as represented by Sydney, seems to have joined in the demonstration to commemorate the centenary of Cook's tragic end and the unveiling of nis statue. It seems to us a great thing for a people to have a worthy national hero, and since the days when Abraham begat Isaac, and probably long before, every nation of any note has had its hero or demigod in whom all the national virtues have been embodied, The Australians have the making of a great people among them, and while they have a right to count our gods as theirs, still no doubt they would like to have a Hengist of their own to mark a new starting-point in their history. Happily, as we have said, they have found a worthy one—one whose character is in every respect worthy of their admiration, and the principles of whose conduct, if adopted and acted upon, will help to make of them a really great people. However desirable we may think the federation of our Australian colonies to be, any advocacy of it in these pages would be out of place. Still we cannot but think that it would have been a good thing in many ways—a good thing for the colonies themselves, and conducive to cordiality among them-had they all united to do honour to one so worthy of honour in all respects, and to whom, in a sense, they are indebted for their very existence.

Captain Cook's Accuracy

Apropos of your article on the centenary of Capt. Cook's death in NATURE, vol. xix. p. 334, it may be interesting to call attention to his remarkable accuracy in determining the positions of places laid down in his charts. There is a great contrast between his accuracy and the evident carelessness of some more recent navigators. Some years ago when I was sailing in the Pacific we were one day approaching the recorded position of an island which no one on board our vessel had seen. I was conversing with the captain, and asked him whether he expected to find it in its recorded place. To this he replied: “It is sure to be there, for Capt. Cook determined its position; and although I have been now a good many years in the Pacific, I have never yet found him wrong. Had it been the United States Exploring Expedition which determined its place, I should have thought the chances just about equal as to whether it is right or wrong”.