1776. THE PACIFIC OCEAN. IS[) 



might have obtained more interesting information 

 about this land than the situation alone, of which I 

 was not before entirely ignorant. * 



* Captain Cook's proceedings, as related in the remaining part 

 of this chapter, and in the next, being upon a coast newly dis- 

 covered by the French, it could not but be an object of his atten- 

 tion to trace the footsteps of the original explorers. But no 

 superiority of professional skill, nor diligence in exerting it, could 

 possibly qualify him to do this successfully, without possessing, at 

 the same time, full and authentic intelligence of all that had been 

 performed here by his predecessors in the discovery. But that 

 he was not so fortunate as to be thus sufficiently instructed, will 

 appear from the following facts, which the reader is requested to 

 attend to, before he proceeds to the perusal of this part of the 

 journal. 



How very little was known, with any precision, about the oper- 

 ations of Kerguelen, when Captain Cook sailed in 1776, may be 

 inferred from the following paragraph of his instructions : " You 

 are to proceed in search of some islands said to have been lately 

 seen by the French in the latitude of 4-8 S., and in the meridian 

 of Mauritius."* This was, barely, the amount of the very inde- 

 finite and imperfect information, which Captain Cook himself had 

 received from Baron Plettenberg at the Cape of Good Hope, in 

 November 1772 f; in the beginning of which year Kerguelen's 

 first voyage had taken place. 



The Captain, on his return homeward, in March 1775, heard, 

 a second time, something about this French discovery at the Cape, 

 where he met with Monsieur Crozet, who very obligingly commu- 

 nicated to him a chart of the southern hemisphere, wherein were 

 delineated not only his own discoveries, but also that of Captain 

 Kerguelen.^ But what little information that chart could convey, 

 was still necessarily confined to the operations of the first voyage ; 

 the chart here referred to, having been published in France in 

 1773; that is, before any intelligence could possibly be conveyed 

 from the southern hemisphere of the result of Kerguelen's second 

 visit to this new land ; which we now know happened towards the 

 close of the same year. 



Of these latter operations, the only account (if that can be 

 called an account which conveys no particular information) re- 

 ceived by Captain Cook from Monsieur Crozet was, that a later 

 voyage had been undertaken by the French, under the command of 

 Captain Kerguelen, which had ended much to the disgrace of that 

 commander. 



What Crozet had 7iot communicated to our author, and what 



* See the Instructions in the Introduction. 



f See Vol. in. p. 36. . J Vol. IV. p, 243. Vol. IV. p. 244. 



