A US TRALAS/A ILL US TRA TED. 



most suitable point of view for the purpose, and the Royal Society was urgent in 

 dwelling upon the necessity for taking advantage of this opportunity to calculate for the 

 first time the distance of the earth from the sun. 



The Government was induced to make the enterprise a national one, and no time 

 was lost after its willingness was intimated to the Royal Society in April, 1768, in 



preparing the expedi- 

 tion for its work. The 

 command was first 

 offered to Dalrymple, 

 whose astronomical 

 knowledge, as well as 

 his labours in the cause 

 of South Pacific explo- 

 ration, readily distin- 

 guished him for the 

 service. But a difficulty 

 was caused by a demand 

 on his part for a brevet 

 commission as captain 

 of the vessel, and during 

 the delay which ensued 

 the Secretary to the 

 Admiralty spoke to the 

 Board of the 

 qualifications of 

 a certain master in the 

 Navy named James 

 Cook, who had already 

 distinguished himself 

 by his services. 



SIR JOSEPH BANKS. James Cook was 



born at Marton, a little 



village in that part of Yorkshire known as Cleveland, on the 2/th of October, 1728 His 

 father was an agricultural labourer of Scotch descent, afterwards a landlord's hind, and 

 subsequently a stone-mason ; his mother, of like humble origin, was a Yorkshire woman, 

 and the surroundings of the future discoverer of Eastern Australia were as rude as his 

 education was rudimentary. At the age of thirteen he was apprenticed to one Sanderson, 

 a shop-keeper in the fishing town of The Staithes, who combined the commercial func- 

 tions of draper and grocer to the sturdy fisher-folk who braved the midnight perils of 

 the German Ocean and plied their calling whilst others slept. Of course, a boy cannot 

 live within sound of the sea, and in daily intercourse with those whose bronzed faces 

 are flecked with salt crystals and whose very words give off an odour of ocean, without 

 becoming terribly discontented with a life prospect of sugar-weighing and flannel-measuring ; 

 so it was not very long before young Cook stole away between a sunset and a sunrise, 



