regard to the arts and conveniences of life, they seem to hold a middle place between the Australian savages and the almost civilized Otaheitans; but in the development of the moral sense they are perhaps farther advanced than either. Captain Cook pays a high compliment to the chastity of the New Caledonian females.

On the 13th of September the Resolution sailed with a design to examine the coast of New Caledonia, but such were the perils of the circuit, that the commander felt it his duty, considering the state of the vessel, and the long voyage yet before him, to leave the survey in some measure incomplete. Yet he ascertained that New Caledonia was, next to New Zealand, the largest country in the South Pacific, and that it furnishes excellent timber of the spruce pine species, well adapted for masts and spars. This discovery was valuable, for except New Zealand, he had not found an island in the South Sea where a ship could supply herself with a mast or yard, let her necessity be what it might. The first opportunity of examining these serviceable trees, the distant appearance of which had given rise to sundry conjectures, was on a small islet to the south-east, which received the appropriate designation of Isle of Pines. Another little plot of earth, presenting many new species of plants, was entitled Botany Isle, which is rather too hard upon Botany Bay. Captain Cook, like most Englishmen, betrayed a poverty in the invention of names.

Leaving the coast of New Caledonia, the Captain steered south-east, and discovered Norfolk Island; so named in honour of the noble family of Howard. It was then, and we believe is now, uninhabited, though a British colony for some years were settled or imprisoned there. It is lofty ground, abundant in fine forest trees, especially the Auracaria excelsa, or Norfolk pine. The New Zealand flax grows there luxuriantly, and the British settlers, in 1793, sent for two New Zealanders to instruct them in the method of spinning and weaving it. Unfortunately, flax-dressing in New Zealand is exclusively a female employment: the two persons carried to Norfolk Isle were both males; the one a warrior and the other a priest-and could give as little information on the clothing manufacture of their country, as could be expected from the military or clergy of Europe on the arcana of lady-like accomplishment.

From Norfolk Isle the Resolution made for New Zealand, and anchored in Ship Cove, Queen Charlotte's Sound, on the 18th of October. Little of moment occurred during this fourth visit of our commander to Poenamoo. At his first arrival he found the country deserted, and the gardens which he had planted run wild. On looking for the bottle which he had hidden when he last took leave, he found

a memorandum, signifying that Furneaux had found it, but no information concerning the subsequent fate of the Adventure. No inhabitants appeared till the 24th, and then they were shy and timid at first, but when they found that it was Cook who had arrived, "joy took the place of fear, those who had taken refuge in the woods hurried forth, leaping and shouting for ecstacy, and embracing their old acquaintances with tears of delight." There was more in their former terrors and sudden joy than Cook at that time understood. He could not but be pleased with what appeared a genuine effusion of gratitude from an overflowing heart. Yet the mysterious answers or determined ignorance of the New Zealanders whenever the Adventure was alluded to, might have awakened the suspicions of a less cautious man. The truth, which he never knew till his return to England, was this— Furneaux, who had parted company with our subject during the storms of October, 1773, arrived in Ship Cove in the beginning of December, and found the bottle and directions which his consort had left. He waited some time to refit, lay in water, &c., and was ready to sail on the 17th. Intending to weigh anchor the next morning, he sent off one of the midshipmen with a boat's crew to gather a few wild greens, the use of which his men had learned duly to appreciate. Evening came, and the boat did not return according to orders, at which Captain Furneaux was probably irate; but when morning came, and still no boat, he became alarmed, and hoisting out the launch, sent Mr. (afterwards Admiral) Burney, with another boat's crew and ten marines, in search of the missing. The fact soon appeared. The party had been surprized, massacred, and eaten. The Adventure quitted New Zealand without imitating the fearful retaliation inflicted by the French on the murderers of Marion; but when an European ship was seen in the Cove, the first impression of the natives would naturally be, that it was come to avenge the massacre. But when they found it was not Furneaux, but Cook, whom they rightly supposed to know nothing of what had taken place, they felt his presence like a great deliverance, and expressed their joy with their usual vehemence. But it was a joy which most people have felt in some degree at some time or other. Who has not grasped with sincere delight the hand of a lounger to whom he was quite indifferent, simply because the rap at the door had raised the apprehension of some feared or hated visitation; a dun, a borrower, the bearer of a challenge, or a good adviser ?

Whatever intercourse took place between Cook and the natives was answerable to this fair beginning. A chief called Pedero invested the British commander with the staff of honour, the Marshal's baton of New Zealand, and Cook dressed Pedero in an old suit of clothes, in

which he felt his consequence wonderfully enlarged. The Captain, unwearied in his endeavours to stock the island with animals, which might be useful alike to the native population, and to such Europeans as might visit or settle in this remote region, sent ashore another boar and sow. Swine are so prolific, and so easily accommodate themselves to circumstances, that a single pair, escaping for a few years in a thinly peopled country, would multiply beyond the facilities of extirpation. Nothing was seen of the poultry left on former occasions except an egg, which appeared to be new laid.

The ship being now repaired, the crew refreshed, and the astronomical observations satisfactorily performed, Captain Cook sailed from New Zealand on the 10th of November, to resume his search for the southern continent. As it is well known that the only result of this arduous, painful, protracted, but worthy and scientific pursuit was, that there is no habitable continent to be discovered; and as freezing narratives are rather dull till they reach the point of horror, we shall not accompany our navigator any longer in his sailings to and fro among the ice. We must, however, omit his spending his Christmas in Christmas Sound, on the west coast of Tierra del Fuego. Christmas, in an English imagination, is inseparably associated with cold weather and good cheer. In Tierra del Fuego it can only support the former part of its character. A more desolate place than Christmas Sound

cannot be. Yet doubtless the wanderers drank "a health to them that's far away," as many a British fire-side drank to them. Their harbour, dreary as it was, furnished geese for their Christmas dinner, and fuel to roast it. Nor are the rocks of Tierra del Fuego without their beauty. They furnished occupation for the botanists: plants, elegant or curious in conformation, rich in hue, and fragrant of odour (as mountain plants generally are) peeped out of the crannies. But the human creatures were the same ugly, half-starved, helpless generation that dwindled beside the Bay of Success. Bougainville called them Pecharas, and Cook pronounced them the most wretched beings he had ever beheld.

New Year's Day, 1775, was spent in New Year's harbour, a port in Staten Land. Some small islands in its vicinity were named New Year's Isles. Here our voyagers observed a harmony between the animal tribes, not unworthy of brief notice. The sea coast is occupied by the sea lions; the white bears possess the shore; the shags are posted on the highest cliffs; the penguins fix their quarters where there is the most easy communication with the sea; other birds retire to remoter places; but all occasionally mingle together, like poultry in a farm yard. Eagles and vultures are seen perched on the same crag

with shags, and the weaker shew no fear of the stronger. The island is thronged with life, and the living prey upon the dead.

name.

Proceeding from Staten Land, Captain Cook discovered Willis's Island, Bird's Isle, and South Georgia,-the last a land of 70 degrees compass, of which, worthless as it was, he took possession in the King's At first our navigators hailed this icy waste, where no vegetation existed but a coarse tufted grass, wild burnet, and the moss on the rocks; where not a tree was to be seen, nor a shrub big enough to make a tooth-pick; and where no animal food could be obtained but the flesh of seals and penguins, to which bullock's liver is an Apician delicacy,— as the long sought continent of golden dreams. A quaint honour to the warm-hearted old King, to affix his name to the planet most remote from the sun, and to the spot of earth least in favour with the same genial luminary.

Leaving South Georgia (after ascertaining it to be an island by sailing round it in a fog), our voyagers proceeded on their dreary adventures, and on the 31st of January fell in with an elevated coast, the most southern land that had yet been discoverd, and thence named Southern Thule, no comfortable place to be wrecked on, of which the Resolution was in no small danger, from the great western swell setting in right for the shore. Cape Bristol, Cape Montagu, Saunder's Isle, Candlemas Isles, and Sandwich's Land, were discovered by the 6th of February. The opinion of Cook was now decided, that there is a tract of land near the pole, which is the source of the ice spread over the Southern Ocean, and that it extended farthest north where the ice appeared farthest north; that is, towards the Atlantic or Indian Ocean. But such land must lie chiefly within the antarctic circle, and be for ever inaccessible. Cook, no boaster, fearlessly asserted that no man could venture further south, in seas beset with ice and fog, than he had done, without more than a risk of destruction. He therefore wisely turned his thoughts to England, and steered northward. Having formed this determination, he demanded of the officers and petty officers, in pursuance of his instructions, the log books and journals they had kept, and enjoined them never to divulge where or how far they had been, until authorized by the Lords of the Admiralty. If he expected this order to be obeyed, and that, too, when his commissioned authority should cease, he shewed less than his usual knowledge of human nature. In the passage to the Cape of Good Hope, he met first a Dutch, and then a British East-Indiaman; the former commanded by Captain Bosch, and the latter by Captain Broadly. Bosch offered our navigators sugar, arrack, and whatever else he had to spare, and Broadly gave them tea, fresh provisions, and news, which, though none of the

newest (for he was returning from China), must still have been new to them. From these vessels Cook was informed of what had befallen the Adventure after the separation. On the 22d of March he anchored in Table Bay. During the time that elapsed from his leaving the Cape of Good Hope to his return to it again, he had sailed no less than 20,000 leagues, nearly three times the equatorial circumference of the globe. While at the Cape he met with Crozet, whom he describes as a man of abilities, possessed of the true spirit of discovery.

The remainder of the homeward voyage was over familiar ground, and needs no description. Captain Cook left the Cape on the 27th of April, reached St. Helena on the 15th of May, Fernando Norhonha on the 9th of June, Fayal in the Azores on the 14th of July, Spithead on the 30th, when he landed at Portsmouth, having been absent from Britain three years and eighteen days, during which, amid all vicissitudes and hardships, he lost but four men. And thus ended Cook's second voyage. Its geographical results, though important, were chiefly negative, and therefore not of that kind on which imagination dwells delighted. He had destroyed a vision of fancy, and instead of augmenting the map with new Indies, had reduced islands to fog banks and ice shoals, and continents to inconsiderable islets and reefs of coral. He had discovered, in short, that a fifth continent was as little to be hoped for as a fifth sense. The voyage had doubtless been beneficial to navigation, to nautical astronomy, to botany, and to science in general; it had enlarged the natural history of man a little; but its happiest and fairest achievement was to shew how life and health may be preserved for years on the ocean, and how barbarians may be awed without cruelty, and conciliated without delusion.

It must have been no small satisfaction to Cook, that no change had taken place in the Admiralty Department during his absence: that the same Lords who employed his services were to dispense his reward. Lord Sandwich lost no time in recommending him to the Sovereign, and his remuneration was not delayed. On the 9th of August he was made a Post Captain, and three days after a Captain in Greenwich Hospital, a situation of dignified repose, which he had fairly earned, and in which he might honourably have sat down for the remainder of his days. His society was sought alike by the wealthy and the learned.

About the close of 1775 he was proposed a candidate for admission into the Royal Society, elected on the 29th of February, 1776, and admitted on the 7th of March, on which occasion was read a paper, addressed by Captain Cook to Sir John Pringle, President of the Royal Society, and author of a well known work on the diseases of the army, containing "An account of the method he had taken to preserve the