Since everybody who visits Oceania must perforce say something about Cap- 

 tain Cook, the "Bounty" and the Southern Cross, let us refresh our memories of 

 the3e three well-worn subjects. 



Speaking of Captain Cook, I discovered that my recollections of his 

 career were not as fresh as they ought to be for one who proposed to travel 

 the quarter of the globe he so clearly described over a hundred years ago. 

 Indeed, after the accounts given in his "Voyages" one feels that very little 

 of importance has since been published touching the early history of the 

 South Seas, many of whose islands he placed on the map. Certainly, since 

 the publication of his reports we have not learned much more concerning- the 

 customs and lives of the natives. James Cook, son of a common agricultural 

 laborer, \ms born in Yorkshire, October 27, 1728. His parents tried to 

 fashion him into a haberdasher, but the lure of the ocean was too much for 

 him and them and - &n old, familiar British boy's tale — he quit the trade 

 and went to sea as a common sailor. After various adventures along the Bri- 

 tish coast and in the Baltic he volunteered as an able seaman in the Royal 

 Navy, assisted at the capture of Quebec, charted the lower St. Lawrence and 

 the shores of Newfoundland and succeeded in proving to his superiors that he 

 was no idler in his chosen profession but aspired to the highest command pos- 

 sible to a self-taught mariner. When, in the year 1768, the government, at 

 the suggestion of the Royal Society, decided to send an expedition to the 

 South Seas for the purpose of observing the transit of Venus over the sun's 

 disk, Lieut. Cook, then forty years of age and in the full possession of his 

 powers, was placed in command. From that date^the Pacific and its wonderful 

 islands became his. special domain and his accounts of his three voyages of 

 observation and discovery make fascinating reading. It must be remembered 

 that at least two of the adventures were undertaken in the company of well- 

 trained naturalists, students of Linnaeus, who probably "checked up" most of 

 the reports on animal life with which his pages are crowded. On June £5, 

 1776, Capt, Cook sailed on his last voyage - an expedition fitted out by the 

 British government for the chief purpose of discovering a Northwest passage 

 from the Pacific side - to do from the westward 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 uniformily treated the aboriginies 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 of this extract from his 

 First Voyage":- "Northward from Botany Bay *** we have for some days past, 

 seen the sea-birds, called boobies, 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 nortlward." Of course these were not Sula 

 bassana , that exclusive Atlantic bird, but the Booby Gannet - Sula 

 leucogastra - seen on both sides of the American Continents. I am morally 

 certain that it was some descendants of these same boobies that we saw as we 

 sailed the same waters. — 



