JAMES COOK 59 
“ I am very far from intending the most distant in- 
sinuation of resentment to, or dissatisfaction with, the 
worthy and brave old Officer who was at the head of the 
Admiralty when the Endeavour was purchased ; his 
ideas on the subject of discovery were clear and just 
in the only conference I ever had with him, and I have 
been told that afterwards, 4 He lamented I did not go 9 ; 
but his open, honest, unsuspecting nature, I think, ex- 
posed him to the insinuations of cunning men, who 
would have endeavoured to throw the odium on me if 
the expedition, in the mode it was proposed, had not been 
successful, and attributed all the merits, to their own 
tools. The point is not yet determined whether there 
is or is not a SOUTHERN CONTINENT? Although 
four voyages have been made under their auspices, at the 
same time I dare appeal, even to them, that I would not 
have come back in Ignorance 99 
Cook accepted the appointment with the calmness of a 
man who knows his own powers. He had climbed from 
the very lowest rung of the ladder of sea service. The 
son of a Northumbrian or Roxburghshire father and a 
Yorkshire mother, he inherited no other advantage than 
that of the sturdy character and the undemonstrative 
temperament of the borders, for his father was only a 
farm labourer and he himself ran away to sea from an 
uncongenial apprenticeship. From boy on a collier he 
worked his way up to be mate; then, to anticipate the 
press-gang, he volunteered for the Royal Navy as an 
able seaman and was promoted Master for his services 
in sounding the St. Lawrence under fire at the siege of 
Quebec, and in the survey of the Newfoundland coast. 
Self-made if ever a man was, entirely self-educated, he 
forced himself to the front by pure merit and tenacity in 
