380 ANNUAL EEPOBT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1924 



ists, students of Linnaeus, who probably " checked up ", most of the 

 reports on animal life with which his pages are crowded. On June 

 25, 1776, Captain Cook sailed on his last voyage — an expedition fit- 

 ted out by the British Government for the chief purpose of discover- 

 ing a northwest passage from the Pacific side — to do from the west- 

 ward what Franklin and others were later to attempt from the east. 

 On Valentine's Day, 1779, he was clubbed to death by the natives of 

 Hawaii, with whom his men had an altercation — a most tragic end 

 for a man who had uniformly treated the aborigines of the lands 

 he visited with humanity and tact and with such a just regard for 

 their peculiar viewpoints. 



His accounts abound with references to the abundant faunal, 

 especially the avian, life of Polynesia. Listen, for example, to this 

 extract from his "First Voyage": "Northward from Botany Bay 

 * * * we have for some days past seen the sea birds, called boob- 

 ies, which from half an hour before sunrising to half an hour after 

 were continually passing the ship in large flights, from which it was 

 conjectured that there was a river or inlet of shallow water to the 

 southward, where they went to feed in the day, returning in the 

 evening to some islands to the northward." Of course these were 

 not Sula hassana, that exclusive Atlantic bird, but the Booby gan- 

 net — Sulu leucogastra — seen on both sides of the American Conti- 

 nents. I am morally certain that it was some descendants of these 

 same boobies that we saw as we sailed the same waters. 



For his second voyage the Government employed H. M. Barque 

 Endeavour, 370 tons, complement 84. With this equipment the 

 transit was successfully witnessed (on Tahiti) and duly reported, in 

 the Philosophical Transactions for the year 1771. 



Several designations remain to mark this adventure : Two of these 

 are, the group name. Society Islands, from the Royal Society; and 

 Point Venus, about ten miles from Papeete, where the transit was 

 observed. The British were so well pleased with Cook's part in this 

 undertaking that they placed him in command of a second expedi- 

 tion to complete the discovery of another continent that most geog- 

 raphers believed existed in the Southern Hemisphere. Two ships 

 were this time commissioned for the purpose, the Resolution, 462 

 tons, and the Adventure, 336 tons. They were well equipped and 

 liberally provided with scientific apparatus and stores. As with the 

 reports of the first voyage so is the second replete with clear descrip- 

 tions of the fauna of the islands visited. As they sailed south from 

 New Zealand, for instance, they fell in with several large islands 

 and, at last, with a quantity of loose ice. Here they saw "gray 

 albatrosses, blue peterels, pintadoes, and fulmers." Still later they 

 got two of the Antarctic petrels. " These are about the size of a 

 large pigeon ; the feathers of the head, back, and part of the upper 



