238 cook's first voyage SEPT. 



also some of our own people. I should have re- 

 gretted the necessity of such a measure, if I had 

 been in want of the necessaries of life ; and certainly 

 it would have been highly criminal when nothing 

 was to be obtained but two or three hundred of 

 green cocoa-nuts, which would at most have pro- 

 cured us a mere transient gratification. I might 

 indeed have proceeded farther along the coast to the 

 northward and westward, in search of a place where 

 the ship might have lain so near the shore as to 

 cover the people with her guns when they landed ; 

 but this would have obviated only part of the mis- 

 chief, and though it might have secured us, would 

 probably in the very act have been fatal to the 

 natives. Besides, we had reason to think that be- 

 fore such a place would have been found, we should 

 have been carried so far to the westward, as to have 

 been obliged to go to Batavia, on the north side of 

 Java ; which I did not think so safe a passage as to 

 the south of Java, through the Straights of Sunday : 

 the ship also was so leaky that I doubted whether it 

 would not be necessary to heave her down at Batavia, 

 which was another reason for making the best of our 

 way to that place ; especially as no discovery could 

 be expected in seas which had already been navi- 

 gated, and where every coast had been laid down by 

 the Dutch geographers. The Spaniards indeed, as 

 well as the Dutch, seem to have circumnavigated all 

 the islands in New Guinea, as almost every place 

 that is distinguished in the chart has a name in both 

 languages. The charts with which I compared such 

 part of the coast as I visited, are bound up with 3, 

 French work, intitled, " Histoire des Navigations 

 auxTerres Australes," which was published in 1756, 

 and I found them tolerably exact ; yet I know not 

 by whom, nor when they were taken : and though 

 New Holland and New Guinea are in them repre- 

 sented as two distinct countries, the very history in 

 which they are bound up leaves it in doubt. I pre- 



