Overview
By the time Cook had triumphantly returned from his first voyage, he had already thought about what could be achieved on another voyage; in particular, to establish once and for all whether there was any habitable continent in the southern hemisphere. Cook’s employers obviously agreed with him, because in September 1771 the Admiralty decided on another voyage of discovery, with Cook as commander.
Cook was given the task of selecting the ships – not just one, but two. After the Endeavour’s near-disastrous grounding on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Cook wanted back-up on this voyage. He had no wish to have the ship’s company lost or permanently marooned in a similar situation. He picked out two more Whitby-built coal carriers, one bigger than the Endeavour, the other smaller. They were renamed Resolution (commanded by Cook) and Adventure (commanded by Tobias Furneaux).
Joseph Banks, the naturalist who accompanied Cook on the previous voyage, was enormously excited by news of the proposed adventure. He immediately requested permission to take another scientific party along, fifteen-strong and better equipped than the last. The Resolution was fitted out to accommodate Banks’ requirements. But when the ship was tried at sea, she was so top-heavy from all the new building that she was declared unsafe to sail. The whole lot had to come off. Banks was furious and withdrew his support and his team from the voyage.
Banks had also organised the production of special Resolution and Adventure medals for the voyage. These medals were to mark the significance of the voyage for people at home. They were also intended to be distributed to local people wherever the expedition went, to mark the visit – and as proof to other visitors that a British expedition had been there first. For expedition organisers in those days, ‘discovery’ meant keeping your eyes open for natural resources that would be useful back home – and being able to establish a claim to finding them first.
The expedition set sail in July 1772. In addition to the crews, there was an astronomer on each ship, with two naturalists and the artist, William Hodges, on the Resolution. The Admiralty made sure there were some accomplished musicians among the crew – so that the ships’ companies could reciprocate musical entertainment offered at places visited. Local music and dance had been a notable feature of visits to Pacific islands on the previous voyage.
The ships sailed via Capetown to rendezvous at Ship Cove in Queen Charlotte Sound. On the way they travelled far to the south looking for land. For weeks they voyaged through icy seas dodging icebergs. They saw no large landmass, though we know now that at one point the Resolution was only about eighty kilometres from the edge of the Antarctic continent.
After a few weeks’ stay in New Zealand, the expedition spent the southern winter travelling through the central Pacific, charting the Tuamotu, Society and Tongan islands. They headed back to ‘base’ at Ship Cove for another summer expedition into Antarctic waters. On the way, the two ships were separated in a storm and the Adventure was blown way to the north. By the time the Resolution was ready to leave Ship Cove for the south, the Adventure had still not arrived. So Cook left a note of his planned movements at the cove (in a bottle) for Furneaux and set off.
When the Adventure eventually reached Ship Cove, a boatload of its crew was killed in a disastrous encounter with the local people. Captain Furneaux found Cook's note in a bottle and decided not to prolong his voyage further. He headed home via Cape Horn.
The Resolution travelled to latitude 71º south before its progress was halted by pack ice – but there was still no land to be seen. Nobody travelled further south for fifty years. Cook then went north, back into the tropics. He touched land at Easter Island, and then travelled in a vast sweep westwards, coming across the Marquesas Islands, Niue, and the islands of Vanuatu. He then headed south charting New Caledonia and Norfolk Island on his way to Ship Cove once more. From there he went south and east to Cape Horn, then south and east again across the Atlantic, until he had crossed his outward bound track. No land of any significant size was found. He headed north for England and arrived home at the end of July in 1775. In three years of voyaging, he had lost four men, and only one of those through sickness.
The myth of the great southern continent was finally dispelled. At the same time, vast new areas of the Pacific Ocean had been charted. This voyage drew many threads of knowledge together to reveal a new picture of the world and its peoples. It came to be regarded as the greatest achievement of Cook’s career.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database (1998).