WITH CAPTAIN COOK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 775, 28 May 1954, Page 13

WITH CAPTAIN COOK

A VOYAGE AROUND THE WORLD, by Anders Sparrman; Robert Hale, English price 21/-. "APTAIN JAMES COOK was our greatest navigator and was, of course, the father of Australia and New Zealand. This reprint of a first-hand account of his second voyage is therefore of interest. It was published in Swedish as a kind of popular account many years after the voyage, but was not rendered into any of the major languages till recently. The Admiralty failed to secure the services of Sir Joseph Banks as naturalist for the second voyage and the Forsters were a poor second choice; "were pitched upon," Cook says. The Forsters, perhaps conscious of their own deficiencies, prevailed on Cook to allow them to bring the Swede Anders Sparrman at their own expense. Cook seems to have been reluctant to agree. Also he fails to mention Sparrman for almost the whole first year of the voyage, and then only to censure him under the name of Spearman. Cook probably thought him rather a fool, but did not underline it except in case of necessity. For his part Sparrman (like the Forsters in their narration) criticises the captain and the officers and bewails the malevolence of his shipmates. Posterity, however, has preferred the evidence of Captain Cook. In spite of the fact that Sparrman adds little to the account in Cook’s Journal there are here and there details of native customs elsewhere unobtainable, and some of the reports of what the sailors got up to in the islands are in rather more detail than Cook allowed

himself:

F. J.

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