On 17 January 1773, Cook became the first navigator known to have crossed the Antarctic Circle.
SAM NEILL
It took another hundred years after Cook crossed the Antarctic Circle for the first explorers to finally walk on this continent. Not hard to see why . . . There’s no question this is the last place on earth anyone could hope to reach. Many don’t even want to . . . but being here . . . it’s immense. It’s overwhelming and terrifyingly beautiful.
Cook recorded the moment in his journal: ‘we crossed the Antarctic Circle for at noon we were by observation four miles and a half south of it and are undoubtedly the first and only ship that ever crossed that line’.
TIM JARVIS AM, Adventurer
It was an amazing notion that there was this continent down there and he had the audacity to try and find it in the kind of vessel that he was in. He gets all the way down to seventy-one degrees south, which is further south than modern vessels typically go even today. A couple of years ago we had a steel hull vessel with nuclear power get stuck in the ice further north than Cook achieved in his flimsy thirty-three metre sail-driven vessel. It was incredible, really.
Soon after, on 8 February, the Adventure and the Resolution lost sight of each other in Turkish-bathhouse-thick fog. Cook fired his cannon into the soppy gloom but heard nothing in response other than the cracking of ice. It must have been a desolate moment, both for him and for Furneaux, who would sail on to the rendezvous point in New Zealand via a sojourn along the eastern Tasmanian coast first charted by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1642.
Cook’s ‘lifeboat’ was gone, but he pressed on. There was no improvement in the conditions the men and his boat had to endure.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
[With] all the rigging covered with ice and the air excessive cold, the crew however stand it tolerable well, each being clothed with a fearnought jacket, a pair of trousers of the same and a large cap made of canvas & baize, these together with an additional glass of brandy every morning enables them to bear the cold without flinching.
The more he saw of what lay below the Antarctic Circle, the more convinced Cook became that if there was a hidden continent in the Pacific’s southern waters, it wouldn’t be a particularly inviting place to set up shop. With the southern winter fast approaching, Cook pulled the pin. There wasn’t enough grog on earth to justify continuing. Any further exploration inside the Antarctic Circle would have to wait until summer. After 122 days at sea, his sailors were spent, and the Resolution in not much better shape. He turned the ship north and sailed for the rendezvous point in New Zealand.
SAM NEILL
[Antarctica is] still the last frontier, much as it was for Cook. And there’s a purity that is hard to find anywhere else on the planet. But for how much longer, I wonder?
*
It had been three years since Cook had seen the islands known to their Māori inhabitants as Aotearoa. He had made no secret of his affection for New Zealand on the first voyage, and in the journal entries written as he sailed once again into its waters, there’s an undertone of giddy euphoria. Or as close as Cook would ever come to being ‘giddy’, anyway.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
The weather was delightfully fair and genially warm when compared to what we had lately experienced . . . We had long and eagerly wished for the land and its vegetable productions, and therefore could not but eye the prospect before us with peculiar delight, and with emotions of joy and satisfaction.
During the first voyage, when Cook had passed the place the Māori called Tamatea on the remote south-western tip of New Zealand’s South Island, Cook had given it a new name: ‘Dusky Sound’.
SAM NEILL
[N]othing prepares you for waking up to dawn in Dusky Sound. It’s still almost as hard to get to as it was in Cook’s day, and it’s almost unchanged since the Resolution anchored here. This place is one of New Zealand’s – indeed, the world’s – great treasures.
When they sailed past on board the Endeavour, Banks had made a valiant effort to convince Cook to make a diversion and head into the Sound for a bit of a look around but he was out of luck because Cook had other things on his mind. Not to mention, the prevailing south-western winds meant the captain knew the ship could find itself locked into the fiords with no way out. The naturalist’s nose was put out of joint because he suspected that the fertile and remote fiord would offer a plethora of natural delights.
At this early stage of the second voyage, Cook still had the luxury of time, so he decided to explore the Sound he’d been forced to neglect on his previous visit to New Zealand. As the Resolution sailed into Dusky Sound in 1773 to the noise of bird song so deafening the men could hardly hear each other speak, Banks’s suspicions about the natural wealth of the region were proven correct.
In the autumn of 1773, during the six weeks the Resolution spent in the Sound, Cook directed his men to undertake essential repairs and maintenance. They cleared an acre of forest for taking astronomical observations; the stumps of trees they felled on what’s now known as Astronomer’s Point are still visible today. They cut wood for fuel. They filled casks with fresh water. They repaired torn sails and fired up a forge to mend damaged ironwork. But most importantly, they set up the one thing that every homesick Englishman needs: a brewery. All that was required was a sheltered anchorage, a running stream and some fresh greens. Although the men’s favourite tipple was rum, without a ready supply of sugar cane, they were restricted to beer.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
We also began to brew beer from the branches or leaves of a tree, which much resembles the American black-spruce. From the knowledge I had of this tree, and the similarity it bore to the spruce I judged that, with the addition of . . . juice of wort and molasses, it would make a very wholesome beer and supply the want of vegetables.
This alcohol was more than just a distraction and a diversion for the sailors. As explained by the first lieutenant, Robert Cooper, in Dusky Sound the beer was ‘intermixed with the tea plant’, being manuka, or Leptospermum scoparium. When incorporated into the brewing process, it was thought that fresh greens like manuka contributed to the fight against scurvy. The other benefit of alcoholic beverages is that they stay fresh a great deal longer than water, which has a nasty habit of stagnating. If you’ve ever fished a full water bottle out of your gym bag and taken a swig before realising that it’s been in there for a month, you can imagine what fresh water tasted like after an extended period in a wooden cask stashed in a ship’s hold.
SAM NEILL
The geography here means it’s a hard region to access. Neither Māori nor later Europeans ever made permanent settlements here. Cook saw perhaps twenty Māori at most here. His only contact was with a small extended family including an older man and a woman (who was either his daughter or young wife) and who eventually came on board. The man was intensely curious about the Resolution’s construction and muskets while the young girl struck up with a pretty midshipman. But it was a case of mistaken identity. She thought he was a girl and he thought she was flirting.
During a period of such intensive activity on land, it might seem surprising that Cook and his men encountered only twenty or so Māori in the Sound. The locals that made the biggest impact on the Resolution’s crew while they were anchored in Dusky Sound were the fiord’s avian residents, if only because the cacophony of their singing was so deafening that the sailors could barely hear themselves think.
Geographically speaking, little has altered since Cook visited in 1773. But the same can’t be said for the bird life. Cook got the extinction ball rolling when the Resolution sailed into the Sound. Sadly, it wasn’t just the two-legged mammals that found their way to shore. Rats took advantage of the situation and abandoned ship, scampering into the undergrowth where they found themselves in rodent heaven with an abundance of freshly laid eggs and vulnerable fledglings to feast upon.
SAM NEILL
Now the birds are gone, thanks to the early Europ
ean settlers who introduced rabbits then stoats to control the rabbits. The stoats made their way here to predator-free paradise. A vast forest supporting millions and millions of birds, whose eggs could be eaten with little effort. Stoats are little buggers who can also swim . . . several kilometres. So they got around.
*
With the Resolution repaired, supplies replenished and the crew rested, Cook gave orders to set sail and head north towards his favourite anchorage in the Pacific. Queen Charlotte Sound was the designated rendezvous point where Cook hoped to locate his misplaced support vessel. As the Resolution entered the Sound, its cannon were fired as Cook crossed his fingers. With what must have been tremendous relief, he heard a volley of shots in reply. Furneaux shared his commander’s relief. ‘Both ships felt an uncommon joy at our meeting after an absence of fourteen weeks,’ he wrote in his journal that evening.
From Queen Charlotte Sound, Cook and his men wisely decided to head further north to warmer climes for winter. Both ships sailed to Tahiti, then on to Tonga. But Cook hadn’t given up on Terra Australis, even if it was proving to be just as Incognita as anticipated.
In October 1773, as the southern hemisphere summer approached, the Resolution and Adventure turned towards New Zealand again, intending to pause there before resuming their mission to the Antarctic Circle. On their approach to Queen Charlotte Sound, a fierce storm whipped up mountainous seas and destructive winds, battering the two ships and pummelling the unfortunate crews. Once again, Cook lost sight of the Adventure. Furneaux’s recurring inability to keep track of his commander might have looked deliberate, if not for the fact that given what was about to transpire, the Adventure could have done with a companion ship of its own.
Left to his own devices, Furneaux dropped anchor in Ship Cove with the vain hope Cook might once again be able to track him down. Being a responsible captain, Furneaux made good use of this downtime and set his men to work replenishing stores. Ten men set off on board a small cutter in search of wild greens in Whareunga Bay, named ‘Grass Cove’ by Cook.
When the foraging sailors failed to return to the ship, a search party was dispatched. Finding a clutch of food baskets bound up on shore, the would-be rescuers cut them open. Inside was packed fresh meat and fern root, ready to roast in the hangi (pit ovens) that were smoking on the beach. The crewmen hoped against hope it was dog flesh, but a human hand tattooed ‘T.H.’ confirmed their worst fears – in Tahiti, sailor Thomas Hill had got himself a tattoo.
Horrified, the rescue party took their launch to Grass Cove. After shooting volleys of gunfire in an effort to disperse hundreds of Māori people gathered on the shore, the sailors stepped onto the beach. They were greeted by what Lieutenant James Burney described as ‘such a shocking scene of carnage & barbarity as can never be mentioned or thought of, but with horror’. Dogs were gnawing at the slain sailors’ entrails while body parts – livers, heads, eyes, hearts and lungs – were sizzling on the coals of open fires.
JOHN MARRA, crew member, Cook’s first and second voyages
The lieutenant, not thinking it safe to trust the crew in the dark, in an open boat, within reach of such cruel barbarians, ordered the canoes to be broken up and destroyed; and after carefully collecting the remains of our mangled companions, they made the best of their way from this polluted place.
The human remains were buried at sea, before the Adventure turned tail and returned to Britain, arriving home in July 1774.
Things might have turned out differently if Cook and Furneaux had managed to join forces again in Queen Charlotte Sound. As it happened, Cook had been there but left just four days before the Adventure arrived. He must have spent the rest of the voyage wondering – and, surely, worrying – about what had happened to his consort vessel. For all he knew, Furneaux and his men had ended up at the bottom of the Pacific. Although it was surely quite a relief to the generally unflappable commander to find that Furneaux had found his way back home, the grisly encounter in Grass Cove would have grim repercussions for Cook’s third voyage.
*
As Cook cut through the waves, he couldn’t have imagined the fate that lay in store for the men on the Adventure. If he had, he may well have delayed his departure. But ‘Resolution’ was more than just the name of his ship. With the onset of more clement weather, Cook headed south again, determined to put the myth of the Great Southern Continent to rest. On 30 January 1774, he reached a latitude of 71°10'S. It was the furthest south ever reached by any European voyage of exploration.
TIM JARVIS AM
You can’t really blame him for wanting to go out in search of new things and pursue his spirit of adventure. He was so driven that he couldn’t resist. I think in life you’re always trying to navigate your way through by pushing to see what’s out there. It doesn’t matter what the discipline is, you know the journey of exploration is something that we all do and sometimes not finding something teaches you something as well.
A Swedish naturalist, Anders Sparrman, and midshipman George Vancouver – who would go on to make quite a mark in North America – both claimed they were at the southernmost point of the Resolution when it got there.
Despite a close encounter with an errant iceberg, Cook pushed on. Over the course of the second voyage, Cook would cross the Antarctic Circle twice more, before he confidently reached the conclusion that the South Pacific was not hiding a large body of land. Yes, there was Antarctica, a continent that – in a journal entry written on his return journey – he would later confidently predict existed. He was certain ‘there is a tract of land near the pole, which is the source of most of the ice which is spread over this vast Southern Ocean’. But thanks to his rigorous search, Cook knew that any land at the South Pole was too small and far too cold for anyone to worry about.
Antarctica’s isolation and desolation would prove to be its greatest blessing. It is the only continent without a resident indigenous population, and no single country claims sovereignty over it. It’s one of the few places on earth that has never seen war and where the interests of science are prioritised above all else. The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 calls for it to be preserved as ‘a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science’. Maintaining that status has, until recently, been relatively easy. Few people have shown much interest in Antarctica other than scientists and those addicted to extreme sports. But with the onset of global warming, Antarctica’s climate is less daunting than it once was, and rapacious global powers are eyeing its untapped mineral wealth.
In the eighteenth century, Antarctica was the world’s greatest uncharted wilderness. Pushing through the pack ice, navigating through the fog and avoiding icebergs was about as difficult as you could get from a nautical perspective. Cook had pushed his men to the outer limits of endurance. Food was running out, and the crew was ailing. Cook himself was also suffering. Although his cast-iron constitution was a thing of legend, by the time the Resolution departed the Antarctic Circle, he was in bad shape.
It was naturalist Johann Forster who saved the day. He suspected that what Cook needed was fresh meat. At that point, the only livestock on board was Forster’s own, favourite, dog. Dog was a much sought after delicacy in Polynesia, and it had become a staple on board Cook’s ships, generally flavoured with garlic. When he returned to Europe, Forster himself championed the idea of Europeans tucking into dogs – and cats. And despite the fact that the relationship between Cook and Forster had been fairly frosty, he willingly surrendered his pet to the cooking pot. Happily, the dog didn’t die in vain: a canine casserole proved to be just the remedy Cook needed.
Feeling less peaked, Cook directed the men to turn eastwards to the outer reaches of Polynesia. On Rapa Nui, named Easter Island in 1722 by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, Cook was astounded to realise that the people living on this incredibly remote island were also Polynesian.
SAM NEILL
Recognising the inhabitants as Polynesian, Cook was astonished that the ancient seafarers made it this far east.
Today it’s thought they reached the coast of South America and back. How else to account for the sweet potato – a staple in the Polynesian diet but native to the Americas?
Cook and his men felt that they had also been to the ends of the earth. And they decided it was an occasion worth commemorating. On the first voyage, the crew of the Endeavour had been fascinated by the Polynesian tradition of tattooing. When the Resolution dropped anchor on Tahiti later in the second voyage, they got themselves a star tattoo. They were marking themselves as members of an exclusive group – a brotherhood of men who had seen and done things together that no other could understand. It was an expression of their camaraderie and evidence of their shared experience.
JOHN ROBSON, Map Librarian, University of Waikato
If your daughter brought one of Cook’s crew home to meet the family, you’d probably have been appalled. They were not necessarily the cream of the crop of English or even European manhood. They were young men, most of whom were not particularly well educated, who had been cooped up in a cold and wet ship for months at a time. But Cook did manage to win his crew’s trust. They saw him as a man who had risen from the ranks, so if he sent them up the mast to do something, they knew he himself had done it at one time. He knew it was a frightening experience. He would have built up a lot of trust that way.
As one midshipman wrote at the end of the voyage:
I will here do them the justice to say that no men could behave better, under every circumstance than they did, the same must be said of the officers; and I will add that I believe there never was a ship, where for so long a period, under such circumstances, more happiness, order and obedience was enjoyed.
As captain, Cook must be credited – in part, at least – with establishing an environment on board in which happiness and order reigned.
The Pacific Page 18