Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/14

viii the general public, incorporating them with Cook's Journal, often without allusion to their author, and not unfrequently introducing into them reﬂections of his own as being those of Cook or of Banks. Fortunately the recent publication by Admiral Wharton of Cook's own Journal has helped to rectify this, for any one comparing the two narratives can have no difﬁculty in recognising the source whence Hawkesworth derived his information.

Another motive for editing Banks's Journal is to emphasise the important services which its author rendered to the expedition. It needs no reading between the lines of the great navigator's Journal, to discover his estimation of the ability of his companion, of the value of his researches, and of the importance of his active co-operation on many occasions. It was Banks who rapidly mastered the language of the Otahitans and became the interpreter of the party, and who was the investigator of the customs, habits, etc., of these and of the natives of New Zealand. It was often through his activity that the commissariat was supplied with food. He was on various occasions the thief-taker, especially in the case of his hazardous expedition for the recovery of the stolen quadrant, upon the use of which, in observing the transit of Venus across the sun's disc, the success of the expedition so greatly depended. And, above all, it is to Banks's forethought and at his own risk that an Otahitan man and boy were taken on board, through whom Banks directed, when in New Zealand, those inquiries into the customs of its inhabitants, which are the