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 crow-tending, received some little education in the village school, was at the age of twelve bound apprentice to the shopkeeper in Staithes, a fishing village about ten miles north of Whitby. After some disagreement with his master his indentures were cancelled and he was bound anew to Messrs. Walker, shipowners of Whitby, with whom he served for several years in the Newcastle, Norway, and Baltic trades. In 1755, at the beginning of the war with France, he was mate of a vessel lying in the Thames, and resolved to forestall the active press by volunteering for the king's service. He was accordingly entered as able seaman on board the Eagle of 60 guns, to the command of which ship Captain Hugh Pallisser [q. v.] was appointed in October. Pallisser, himself a Yorkshireman, took notice of his young countryman, who is said to have been also recommended to him by Mr. Osbaldeston, member for Scarborough, and four years later obtained for him a warrant as master. On 15 May 1759 Cook was appointed master of the Mercury, in which he sailed for North America, where he was employed during the operations in the St. Lawrence in surveying the channel of the river and in piloting the vessels and boats of the fleet. It is said that he furnished the admiral with an exact chart of the soundings, although it was his first essay in work of that kind. This is probably an exaggeration; but it appears certain that Cook did attract the notice of Sir Charles Saunders, and that, when Sir Charles returned to England, the senior officer, Lord Colville, appointed Cook as master of his own ship, the Northumberland. While laid up for the following winter at Halifax, Cook applied himself to the study of mathematics, with, it is said, singularly good results, and certainly attained a sound practical knowledge of astronomical navigation. In the summer of 1762, being still master of the Northumberland, he was present at the operations in Newfoundland (, Memoirs, ii. 577–81, iii. 409), and carried out a survey of the harbour of Placentia, which, on the appointment of Captain Pallisser in the following year to be governor of Newfoundland, led to Cook's being appointed ‘marine surveyor of the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.’ For the prosecution of this service he was entrusted with the command of the Grenville schooner, which he continued to hold till 1767, returning occasionally to England for the winter months, with a view to forwarding the publication of his results. These were brought out as volumes of sailing directions (4to, 1766–8), which have maintained, even to the present day, a singular reputation for exact accuracy, and give fair grounds for the belief that he might, under other circumstances, have proved himself as eminent as a surveyor as he actually did as an explorer.

Shortly after his return home the admiralty, at the instance of the Royal Society, determined to despatch an expedition to the Pacific to observe the transit of Venus, and on the refusal of Sir Edward Hawke to appoint Alexander Dalrymple [q. v.], the nominee of the Royal Society, to a naval command, Stephens, the secretary of the admiralty, brought forward Cook's name, and suggested that Pallisser should be consulted. This led to Cook's receiving a commission as lieutenant, 25 May 1768, and his being appointed to command the Endeavour for the purposes of the expedition. The Endeavour sailed from Plymouth on 25 Aug. 1768, having on board, besides the officers and ship's company, Mr. (afterwards Sir Joseph) Banks [q. v.], Dr. Solander, the botanist, Mr. Buchan, a landscape artist, who died on the voyage, and Mr. Sydney Parkinson, a painter of natural history. Cook himself was also a qualified observer.

Having touched at Madeira and Rio Janeiro and doubled Cape Horn, the Endeavour arrived on 13 April 1769 at Tahiti, where the transit was successfully observed on 3 June. On the homeward voyage six months were spent on the coast of New Zealand, which was for the first time sailed round, examined, and charted with some approach to accuracy. Further west, the whole east coast of Australia was examined in a similar way. New South Wales was so called by Cook from a fancied resemblance to the northern shores of the Bristol Channel; Botany Bay still bears the name which the naturalists of the expedition conferred on it; and further north the name of Endeavour Straits is still in evidence of the circumstances under which it was first established ‘beyond all controversy’ that New Guinea was not an outlying part of New Holland (, Voyages, iii. 660;, Voyage autour du Monde, 4to, 1771, p. 259. In the copy in the British Museum (c. 28, 1. 10) the map at p. 19 shows the Endeavour's track, drawn in by Cook himself). After a stay of more than two months at Batavia, the Endeavour pursued her voyage to the Cape of Good Hope and England, and anchored in the Downs on 12 June 1771. In her voyage of nearly three years she had lost thirty men out of a complement of eighty-five; and though such a mortality was not at that time considered excessive or even great, it must have given rise, in Cook's mind, to very