Südsee - Melanesien-Mikronesien-Polynesien

Die Pazifikreisen des James Cook im 18.Jahrhundert
By Pierre-Jérôme Coulmin - www.trimaran-geronimo.com -
James Cook may not have been born into great wealth, but he was born under a lucky star, or rather a planet, since the famous astronomer Halley had forecast the passage of Venus across the sun for 3 June 1769. This important astronomical event sent the global scientific community into turmoil. Observers with vast amounts of instruments were dispatched in all directions, from Siberia to India and California, to make measurements which would be used to calculate the definitive distance between the earth and the sun. Discovered by Royal Naval Captain Samuel Wallis a few months before the arrival of Bougainville, Tahiti seemed to offer the perfect conditions for observing the phenomenon – so why not send an expedition? Everything pointed to Captain Dalrymple of the East India Company as the obvious choice to head the expedition; everyone, that is, except the British Admiralty, who were very reluctant indeed to see a civilian take any kind of command over a naval vessel. They had their own candidate: James Cook.

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After this first voyage of discovery, Cook was to go on to command two further expeditions around the world, the last of which he never completed. In this account, we look at the first of the two complete circumnavigations made by this most pre-eminent of navigators and explorers.

Largely self-taught, it was determination that drove James Cook to acquire the scientific knowledge on which his fame would be based. This farmer’s son first went to sea at the age of 15 as a hand on a collier plying the Irish Sea. Later in his career, he came to the attention of the Admiralty through his surveys and observations of the St. Lawrence River. He had also surveyed the coasts and approaches of Canada and Newfoundland, and had, on his own initiative, made astronomical observations during the solar eclipse of August 1766. He was ideally qualified to undertake the mission of observing Venus in the Pacific, and offered the additional benefit of remarkable leadership skills.

The mission of Cook’s first voyage was to observe, discover, survey and measure, but in any event to arrive everywhere before the French, whose experience in the South Pacific was well-established. The passage of Venus, whose importance we have already seen demonstrated by Bougainville who left his astronomer Véron ashore in the Moluccas, became little more than a pretext when the Admiralty also instructed Cook to establish the insularity of New Zealand.

As his vessel, Cook chose a Whitby collier for reasons of its strong construction: he knew from experience that such ships could be relied on in harsh conditions. The Endeavour, as she was renamed, weighed 370 tons, was 35 metres long, 9 metres in the beam and had a draught of 4.5 metres. She carried 15 months’ worth of supplies, including citrus fruit, pickled cabbage and onions, as well as other foods reputed for their effective prevention of scurvy. The ship’s complement included a number of very well-equipped scientists (accompanied by their many servants), for whose convenience the maximum amount of space was reserved.

The Endeavour sailed from Plymouth on 26 August 1768, the date on which Bougainville was battling to avoid a dramatic shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef. Their first landfall was in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, much to the delight of the naturalists on board. At Rio, they were less lucky, since they had aroused the suspicions of the Portuguese governor. However, the naturalist Joseph Banks, a disciple of Linaeus, would be able to console himself at the next landfall – still in Brazil – where he would be able to botanize to his heart’s content.

Having surveyed the gloomy Falklands, the Endeavour left the Strait of Magellan for the Strait of Lemaire. An excursion on Tierra del Fuego took a dramatic turn when a group of the ship’s leading scientists attempted to scale a summit one day’s march from the mooring, losing two of its number to extreme cold and snow. Nevertheless, this harsh lesson in Antarctic climatology did not dissuade the expedition from rounding Cape Horn, which had become the preferred route since its discovery by the Dutch explorers Schouten and Lemaire in 1615.

It took many days for Cook and his 100-man crew to fight their way around the Cape, which had already earned a fearsome reputation by this time. On as many as a hundred occasions, they came close to foundering in seas of a size never before seen. As she continued to tack interminably through the Drake Strait, the Endeavour was heading south-west. The main objective in James Cook’s mind was to survey the southern continent around which so many theories had been woven.

We don’t know whether the expedition ever reached Deception Island, off Graham Land on the opposite side of the Drake Strait from Cape Horn, but if they did, they would certainly not have found the land of milk and honey. Seeing not a single rock, Cook had arrived in a place of infinite ice, and formed the rather hasty conclusion that there was no land here. That impression remained intact until the discoveries made by whalers in 1815.

The expedition resumed its route to Tahiti on a north-westerly heading that took it across the Tropic of Capricorn near the Tuamotus, which they reached in March 1769, and where they discovered several new islands and made many scientific observations.

On 11 May 1769, the Endeavour dropped anchor off Tahiti. Following in the footsteps of Wallis and Bougainville, this was the third European expedition to set foot on the island. They exchanged signs of courtesy and mutual respect with the inhabitants, but Cook took the precaution of restricting contact with the natives of what Bougainville had called Nouvelle-Cythère. In the same spirit, the captain ordered the construction of a small fort, which he named Point Venus in honour of the planet he was there to observe and, perhaps, as a tribute to the beauty of the island.

The equipment supplied by the Royal Society was installed in an enormous tripod tent, in which the central object was a magnificent clock of great complications. Everything was then ready for the long-awaited passage of Venus in front of the sun on 3 June, the observations of which would, as we have seen, be used to calculate the distance between the earth and the sun. The unfortunate Véron, left in the Moluccas by Bougainville, did not have the chance however, since the long-awaited astronomical event was masked by heavy cloud.

Cook and his companions made full use of their time on Tahiti to make observations of the island’s geography, social structures and economic potential, the hypothesis being that if they did discover the southern continent, this island could become a research base, supply point and check point for England, in rather the same way as St. Helena in the South Atlantic.

However, before they left Tahiti, they were to feel the effects of an illness which they believed to have been introduced by Bougainville’s men and which was referred to as the “French Disease”. The debate over the origins of this embarrassing complaint would never be resolved between the opposing parties on either side of the English Channel, since Captain Wallis had also landed on this island now renowned for its pernicious charms.

For the next month, the Endeavour sailed between the myriad islands to the west of Tahiti, which Cook named the Society Islands as a tribute to the noble institution which had dispatched him on these inspirational adventures.

Their attention was now fixed on the southern continent. The likely wealth of these undiscovered, and therefore unexplored, lands would soon strengthen the growing maritime power of England, as well as the prowess of its devoted servant. A fierce storm engulfed the Endeavour just before she was able to find a sheltered anchorage in New Zealand.

Would this prove to be the sought-after southern continent? Cook painstakingly circled North Island, which he mapped with considerable accuracy despite its hostile natives. He discovered and crossed the strait which still bears his name, before reaching the east coast of South Island. In fact, the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had previously sailed the west coast of the same island in 1642, which in itself was sufficient to establish that this was by no means a continent. Once again, the mythical southern continent was to dissolve into thin air, but Cook and his crew did not set off in pursuit of it until they had accurately mapped the island, many of whose natural features still bear the names of expedition members. On 31 March 1770, the Endeavour left the northern point of South Island, which has been known as Cape Farewell ever since.

With the end of his voyage in sight, Cook wanted to return by way of Cape Horn in an attempt to find out the truth about the rumour of a huge white continent and to study the winds and currents of the Drake Strait, whose provocative grandeur fascinated him. But the condition of the Endeavour required him to strike west towards New Holland (Australia), to which little thought had yet been given and which was certainly not suspected of being a continent. Previous surveys by Tasman and Dampier had described these lands as arid and desolate, but the Australia Cook discovered seemed more like a paradise for the naturalists, who were still active and influential on board, despite the inevitable effects of scurvy. They made landfall in a cove surrounded by luxuriant vegetation, which Joseph Banks named Botany Bay. The natural wealth of this area is such that it is now an Australian national park, just a few 18th century cables from Sydney.

On 10 June 1770, the Endeavour was severely damaged on a coral reef. All her ballast and canons were jettisoned, the pumps were manned by all hands, leaks were plugged and the ship limped painfully to the coast twenty-five miles distant. She was taking on water faster than the pumps could remove it and there was no alternative but to beach her. It took two months to repair her at the mouth of a river now named Endeavour. The naturalists captured a superb kangaroo as a trophy and Cook claimed possession of what he called New South Wales in the name of King George III.

With the Endeavour seaworthy once more, the expedition continued a further 1600 nautical miles north, dodging the Great Barrier Reef to cross the Torres Strait that separates Australia from New Guinea. Like many of the discovery routes established in previous centuries, this Spanish route had long been kept secret. Cook proved that New Guinea was indeed an island and observed the hostile nature of its people.

On 11 October 1770, the expedition put into Batavia. When they arrived in this unwholesome port, the general health on board was relatively good, but many of those already suffering from scurvy died from fever and malaria after their arrival. Cook quickly set sail, stopping off at Cape Town and St. Helena, before the Endeavour finally dropped anchor in Plymouth Sound on 11 June 1772.

Having taken nearly four years, this first voyage of Captain James Cook had been a huge scientific success. The observatory set up on Tahiti had produced the best possible observations. The previously very sketchy notions of coastal and topographical geography were swept away by new surveys which exploded the myth of the “Land of Quiros”, which held that New Guinea, New Zealand and Australia (whose west and south coasts had yet to be visited) were one. To say nothing of the new islands discovered and annexed along the way. The exceptional collections made by the expedition’s naturalists led to the expansion of Kew Gardens, which then assumed its role as the permanent collection of living plants from around the British Empire; an empire on which it would be many decades before the sun would finally set, and in whose expansion the discoveries of James Cook had played an indisputable role.

Cook would be the captain of three expeditions to circumnavigate the globe, each motivated by unprecedented scientific ambition. He would personally circle the world twice, to become a national hero in his own lifetime and be awarded the prestigious title of Captain. His second voyage around the world, between 1772 and 1775, saw him venture below 60° south on no less than four occasions. His observations put an end to the myth of a southern continent that was nothing more than a mass of rocks and ice. This epic journey of three years and eighteen days included a complete crossing of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and took in a huge sweep of the Pacific, using Tahiti and New Zealand as bases for exploration. It also resulted in significant progress being made in naval medicine and the calculation of longitude, helped by significant developments in marine chronometers.

As the undisputed predecessor of today’s scientific expeditions, which left his distinct stamp on the map of Oceania, James Cook was not able to complete his third circumnavigation. On this final voyage of 1776, he reached 66° North in the Bering Strait (where he met Eskimos and Indians), witnessed a human sacrifice in Tonga and was proclaimed a god in Hawaii. This was to be his last glorious title and he ended his days stabbed in the back by a native Hawaiian on 14 February 1778.

Nevertheless, his determined features still continued to cross the oceans of the world, since his likeness was carried as a figurehead by the Royal Naval vessels that were the pride of colonial Britain and her empire until the final days of the wind-powered Navy.