Alaskan peninsula, entered Bering Strait, proceeded into the Arctic 

 Ocean, and sailed northward until stopped by a boundless belt of 

 pack ice. There, at lat. 7o°44'N., Cook made up his mind that, with 

 winter approaching, it would be best to return south before 

 attempting a further assault. 



But there would be no further encounter with the polar ice for 

 James Cook. The end was at hand. Back in Hawaii the crews of the 

 Resolution and Discovery met with a magnificent reception at first; 

 the natives evidently believed Cook to be the reincarnation of one 

 of their gods. Then, unaccountably, their friendliness gave way to 

 hostility. When a ship's boat was stolen and Cook tried to retrieve 

 it by the traditional method of taking a tribal chief as hostage, the 

 plan failed to work. 



Accompanied by a party of marines. Cook had gone ashore 

 expecting no trouble. But as he and his party were trying to persuade 

 one of the native chiefs to join them aboard ship, an angry crowd 

 gathered and a fight broke out. In the confusion. Cook seemed to 

 have become separated from the others. Accounts of what happened 

 next disagree, but there is no doubt that Cook was clubbed by one 

 native and stabbed by another. When he fell face downward in the 

 water, a shrieking mob of natives then dragged him ashore and 

 hacked him to pieces. When the Resolution's guns finally cleared the 

 beach, not a trace of the captain remained. A few days later the 

 Hawaiians themselves turned over to the sorrowing British the 

 remaining fragments of their captain's body. 



Though he was only fifty at the time of his death. Cook's achieve- 

 ments might well have occupied the lifetimes of a dozen lesser men. 

 He had charted the coasts of New Zealand and eastern Australia; 

 he had fixed numerous Pacific islands on the map ; he had outlined 

 much of North America's northwestern coast. And he had de- 

 stroyed two age-old myths : there was no Southern Continent in the 

 South Pacific and there was no easy Northwest Passage Unking the 

 Pacific with the Atlantic. Cook left the Pacific looking much as we 

 know it today. Its map is his epitaph. 



Friendly Cove, Vancouver, where Cook 

 refitted during his last voyage. Some of 

 the canoes of the Nootka Indians were forty 

 feet long and seaworthy enough to venture 

 out into the Pacific for whales. 



45 



