CAPTAIN COOK.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXX, Issue 6, 25 August 1914, Page 4

CAPTAIN COOK.

lii the course of an interesting account ■>f the Captain Cook Memorial ceremony, which took place in London Last month, the London “News” says: Perhaps only seamen ai'e likely to give Captain Cook his right measure of respect. They will know that his long voyages, curiously free of the ■ sual vivid pictures of adevntures in .inchartad seas, in which purpose was pursued with monotonous success, ire lull to modern readers because the navigator, in working out accurate surveys, took care to keep his ship on top, where it should be, and his men .veil and contented. He was not after ■adventures, but facts. The records are skill on the Admiralty charts, though 135 years old. Crozet, sneaking of the first circum-navigation of New Zealand by Cook, as another sailor on that coast, said of the survey of our own man, “I found it of an exactitude and of a thoroughness of detail which astonished me beyond all powers of expression. I doubt whether our own coasts of France have been delineated with more precision.” Could one master mariner give another a better word than that? To show what goes to make good luck and dull success, when in 1771 the second voyage was in preparation Captain Cook told the Admiralty concisely what sort of ■i ship he wanted. “The ship must not be of a great draft, but of sufficient capacity to carry a proper quantity of provisions and stores for the crew, and of such construction that she will bear to take the ground, and of such a size that she can be conveniently laid on shore if necessary. . and these qualities are to he found in North Country built ships, such as are built for the coal trade, and in none other.” He said bluntly that if other discoverers had had vessels more suitable to the purpose for which they were used there would have been, perhaps, better results. Cook was a North Country sailor, who knew from a lad what in-shore sailing required. The scientific staff of the expedition thought otherwise, and one influential member of it demanded a 40-gun frigate. There seems to have been a violent controversy at the time, and one would have thought that official tradition would have inclined to the deeper and more showy vessel. But although we hear Ijttle of Cook in this dispute, lie got the vessel he wanted, and refused to have even upper accommodation structures, because they would injure his ship’s sailing qualities. So “the gentlemen,” as Cook called them, put theii baggage ashore.