Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/239

 *

of Tinian, where Anson had been twenty years before, reaching England early in May 1766 after an absence of twenty months. The careful survey of the Straits of Magellan, which (contrary to the later judgment of Captain Cook) he prefers to rounding the Horn Islands, may be deemed the chief geographical result of Byron's expedition, that being the course almost universally adopted at the present day, especially by steamers. On the coasts of Patagonia, in the Straits, and in the Falkland Islands, Byron met with enormous quantities of penguins, quaintly described by Sir John Narborough (an earlier navigator in these parts) as "like little children standing up with white aprons on." Commodore Anson was followed in the same year by Captains Wallis and Carteret, the former of whom was the first to give any account of Otaheite (sometimes called King George's Island), and the latter to discover Pitcairn's Island, the home, till recently, of the descendants of several of the mutineers of the Bounty.

Captain James Cook, the greatest of our more modern discoverers, had in his early years undergone much hard service in the coal trade on the east coast of England. After entering the English naval service in 1755, he had greatly distinguished himself by the soundings he made of the St. Lawrence, so as to allow the English fleet to co-operate with General Wolfe against Quebec; and subsequently by his surveys of the coast of Newfoundland, during the government of Sir Hugh Palliser. In 1768 he was appointed to the command of the Endeavour, the main object in view being an observation of the transit of Venus over the sun's disk, at the best place that