Page:Captain Cook's Journal during His First Voyage Round the World.djvu/40

xxxiv high latitudes, amongst ice, searching in vain for the illusive southern land.

Cook carried it out thoroughly. No gales, no temperatures deterred him from searching wherever the ships would safely sail, and it was only ice in dense masses that turned him back.

What his people thought of it we do not know, but the Forsters have given a piteous account of the privations and hardships of an exploration that gave them little chance of exercising their special knowledge.

Cook was better provided with instruments for the determination of longitude than before, and the ships carried four chronometric timekeepers; but the proper method of making use of them was scarcely yet realised, and the course of his voyage did not permit them to be of much service.

Mindful of his former success in combating scurvy, and making use of his experience, Cook carried with him all his former antiscorbutics, and redoubled his general precautions as to cleanliness, both of person and ship. The result was complete immunity from more than symptoms of scurvy. He was able to say, when he returned, that no man had died not only of this disease, but of any other, due to the exposures of the voyage. Three lost by accidents, and one from a complaint contracted before leaving England, were the sole losses on a voyage lasting three years, and during which the exposure to heat, cold, rain, and all the hardships of a sea life was probably never surpassed.

Leaving the Cape on November 22nd, Cook stood at once to the southward, intending to pass over a spot in latitude 54° S., where in 1739 M. Bouvet sighted land that was generally supposed to be a part of the Southern Continent, and which he had been especially directed to examine. Gales, however, drove him from his course, and to this day Bouvet's Islands (for Cook proved they could be nothing else) are doubtfully shown upon charts. Cook soon got into the ice, and fought with it and gales of wind, in snow and sleet and fog, working gradually eastwards from the longitude of the Cape for four months. The ship penetrated to 67° S. at one point, and kept as high a latitude as ice permitted everywhere, but without discovering any land. Cook found to his great joy that the ice yielded good fresh water, and replenished his water casks in this manner, without any fear of falling short. With all his power of communicating his enthusiasm to others, it may be doubted if they shared his pleasure at finding that the search in these inclement regions need not be curtailed from lack of this necessary.

At last, in the longitude of Tasmania, Cook hauled to the north-