October 27.--The birth-day of Captain Cook. James Cook was born in 1728
at the village of Marton in the North Riding of Yorkshire. His parents
were of the class of labourers. All the education he received amounted
only to English reading, writing and the elements of arithmetic. He was
then, at the age of thirteen, bound apprentice to a small shopkeeper in
the neighbouring town of Snaith, which is on the sea-coast. Here he
became so smitten with the love of a sea-life that he could not rest
till his wish was gratified; and his master was at last induced to let
him off, when he entered himself as one of the crew of a vessel engaged
in the coal trade. In this humble and laborious line of life he
continued till the breaking out of the war of 1755. He then entered the
navy, as a common seaman, of course. But now the native superiority of
the man began to assert itself; and in four years he rose to be Master
of the Mercury, one of the ships belonging to an expedition sent against
Quebec. Thus by far the most formidable of the difficulties were
overcome which he had to encounter in emerging from obscurity; he was
now on the direct road to preferment, and in a position in which his
good conduct and perseverance were sure to meet with their reward. While
stationed in this command on the coast of North America, he greatly
distinguished himself both by his skill and intrepidity as a seaman; and
he also made use of his leisure to rectify the defects of his original
education by studying mathematics and astronomy. He eventually made
himself in this way one of the most scientific naval officers of that
time. His reputation rose accordingly; and in 1768, when Government
resolved to send out the Endeavour to the South Sea to obtain an
observation of the approaching transit of Venus, Cook was selected to
command the ship. He conducted this expedition with admirable ability,
and so entirely to the public satisfaction, that, having returned home
in 1771, he was the following year appointed to proceed again to the
same regions with two ships, the Resolution and the Adventure, with the
object of endeavouring to settle the long-disputed question as to the
existence of a southern polar continent. On this voyage, in which he
circumnavigated the world, he was absent nearly three years; and
notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of climate and weather, and the
other dangers which he had encountered, he brought home, with the
exception of one, every man of the crew he had taken out with him. He
communicated to the Royal Society an account of the methods he had
adopted on this occasion for preserving the health of his men; and that
body in return elected him into their number, and voted him the Copley
gold medal as a testimony of their sense of his merits. To crown his
achievement, Captain Cook wrote the history of this expedition himself,
and wrote it admirably. In little more than a year after his return, he
sailed on his third and last voyage of discovery; the principal object
of which was to ascertain the practicability of a passage between the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans along the northern coast of America. After
having been out on this expedition nearly three years, and having
explored a vast extent of sea and coast, the great circumnavigator put
in at the island of Owhyhee on his return home; and he was there killed
in a sudden and accidental rencontre with some of the natives on the
14th of February, 1779. The late Admiral Burney, who was present on this
occasion, mentions, in a note to his History of Discoveries in the South
Sea, an anecdote which deserves to be remembered. Of the party of
marines, by whom Captain Cook was accompanied when he met his death,
four were killed along with him; “and in the hasty retreat made,” says
Burney, “after the boats had put off, one man still remained on shore,
who could not swim. His officer, Lieutenant (now Colonel) Molesworth
Phillips, of the Marines, though himself wounded at the time, seeing his
situation, jumped out of the boat, swam back to the shore, and brought
him off safe.” The author proceeds to compare this conduct of Lieutenant
Phillips with a similar act performed in 1624 by a Dutch Captain,
Cornelys de Witte, who, when a boat’s crew which he commanded was
surprised in a port on the coast of America by an ambuscade of
Spaniards, and driven to sea after four of them had been killed, seeing
one of his men left behind on the beach, boldly returned to the shore in
the face of the enemy, and took him into his boat. “This was an act of
generosity,” observes the French translator of the account of the Dutch
voyage, “worth a wound which he received in his side, and of which he
was afterwards cured.” The news of the death of Cook was received by his
countrymen, and it may be said by the world, with the feeling that one
of the great men of the age was lost; and both in his own and in foreign
nations public honours were liberally paid to his memory. In the half
century of busy and enterprising exertion in every field of activity
which has elapsed since his death, no newer name in the same department
has yet eclipsed the lustre of his, and with reference to the peculiar
character of his fame, as contrasted with that of our other renowned
seamen, it has been well and justly remarked that, “while numberless
have been our naval heroes who have sought and gained reputation at the
cannon’s mouth, and amidst the din of war, it has been the lot of Cook
to derive celebrity from less imposing, but not less important exploits,
as they tended to promote the intercourse of distant nations, and
increase the stock of useful science.”[1]
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Footnote 1:
Gorton’s Biographical Dictionary.
[Illustration: Portrait of Captain Cook.]
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