VOYAGE OF THE ENDEAVOUR 397 



contemptuous. It is some pleasure," he wrote on 

 the 2Oth of March, " to disprove that which only exists 

 in the opinions of theoretical writers. . . . They have 

 generally supposed that every foot of sea over which 

 they believed no ship to have passed to be land, although 

 they have little or nothing to support that opinion except 

 vague reports, many of them mentioned only as such 

 by those authors who first published them." He points 

 to the flimsy character of the historical evidence. And 

 he even writes with disrespect of the argument of physical 

 necessity. " Till we know how this globe is fixed in that 

 place, which has been since its creation assigned to it 

 in the general system, we need not be anxious to give 

 reasons how any one part of it counterbalances the rest." 



On the 1 3th of April, 1769, they came to anchor at the Tahiti, April 

 island where they were to observe the transit on the 3rd t0 " y> 

 of June. Wallis had discovered it, and had called it King 

 George III.'s Island. Bougainville had called it Cythera, 

 but had understood the natives to say that they called 

 it Taiti. Cook understood them to say Otaheite. The 

 modern geographer spells it Tahiti. The observation was 

 made with complete success on a " day perfectly clear 

 without so much as a cloud intervening " ; the only 

 trouble was that the sailors took advantage of the observers' 

 absence to purloin a great part of the nails for sinful traffic 

 with native women. 



But astronomy fills few of the glowing pages in which Kings in 

 Banks paints Otaheite. Like Bougainville he loves the Arcadia - 

 island, and all things in it ; and tremendous boyish enjoy- 

 ment combines with keenest scientific curiosity to give 

 fascination to the nightly jottings in his journal, written 

 so hastily that he feared he would scarcely understand 

 his own language when he read it again ! The island 

 was " an Arcadia of which we were going to be Kings." 

 It was not only the " very pretty girl with a fire in her 

 eyes." The men were only less delightful than the women. 

 Banks gave them classical nick-names : Lycurgus, Her- 

 cules, and Epicurus, who " ate most monstrously." They 

 in return pronounced English as they pleased. Cook 



