SUMMARY OF RESULTS. 
69 
the sea. The transit of Venus across the sun’s disk was to take place on June 3, 1769, 
At the request of the Royal Society, the Government granted the “ Endeavour ” to convey 
an astronomer to one of the islands of the Pacific Ocean. Cook, with Green, an astronomer 
from the Royal Observatory, and Banks, the naturalist, started from Plymouth on August 
26, 1768, and reached Tahiti on April 12 following. After the observations had been 
taken during the transit, Cook completed the map of Tahiti (Otaheite), and within the 
subsequent twelvemonth the navigator had explored with every hydrographic detail the 
great archipelago of the Society Islands, surveyed the two islands of New Zealand, traced 
the whole eastern coast-line of New Holland for a distance of more than 1600 miles, and 
discovered Torres Strait, thus showing that Australia was an island. 
The great discoveries of Cook, by demonstrating beyond doubt that neither New 
Zealand nor New Holland formed part of an Austral continent, considerably discouraged the 
view of the existence of any southern continent. The Royal Society, wishing to solve once 
for all this important question, induced the Government to fit out a new expedition to the 
South Seas. Cook set sail again with the “ Resolution ” and “ Adventure,” accompanied 
by the naturalists Forster, father and son. In this voyage, commencing in 1772, Cook 
circumnavigated the South Sea in its highest latitudes, and crossed it in such a manner 
as to leave no room for the supposition of an Austral continent, unless at the pole. 1 2 
The great navigator in his last expedition, during which he was massacred by the 
savages of the Sandwich Islands, worthily crowned his careen During that expedition he 
surveyed and drew the general outlines of north-west America, from the point where 
the Spanish explorations and those of Drake and Bering stopped, thus showing exactly the 
region where the extremity of the American continent approaches the furthermost point 
of Asia, and pointing out the real direction in which a passage from the Atlantic to the 
Pacific was to be sought. 
It has already been noted that Hipparchus thought Ceylon a part of a southern 
continent, and that Ptolemy enclosed by his Southern Ethiopia the Indian Sea, which 
thus became a mediterranean. In the sixteenth century, when the Ptolemaic geo- 
graphical notions were revived, geographers thought they had discovered the southern 
continent in New Guinea. At the time of Cook’s embarkation people still regarded New 
Zealand as part of this great Austral land. Up to that time many learned men could 
only conceive the equilibrium of the globe by supposing the existence of a polar continent 
in the south to counterbalance the accumulation of land in the northern hemispheres 
The observations of Cook are very numerous and remarkably precise ; they are a store- 
house of data for geography, terrestrial physics, and the natural sciences. The most 
important fact to be noticed, however, is that after these voyages of the famous English 
explorer the chart of the Pacific, until then almost a blank, differed but little from that 
1 See Rainaud, Le Continent Austral, Paris 1893, p. 437. 
2 See Dalrymple, An Historical Collection of Voyages in the South Pacific, London, 1770 
