nsieur de Kerguelen.

I had applied to the Chevalier de Borda whom, as I have mentioned, I
found at Teneriffe, requesting, that if he knew any thing of the island
discovered by Monsieur de Kerguelen, between the Cape of Good Hope and
New Holland, he would be so obliging as to communicate it to me.
Accordingly, just before we sailed from Santa Cruz Bay, he sent me the
following account of it, viz. "That the pilot of the Boussole, who was
in the voyage with Monsieur de Kerguelen, had given him the latitude and
longitude of a little island, which Monsieur de Kerguelen called the
Isle of Rendezvous, and which lies not far from the great island which
he saw. Latitude of the little isle, by seven observations, 48 deg. 26' S.;
longitude, by seven observations of the distance of the sun and moon,
64 deg. 57' E. from Paris," I was very sorry I had not sooner known that
there was on board the frigate at Teneriffe, an officer who had been
with Monsieur de Kerguelen, especially the pilot; because from him I
might have obtained more interesting information about this land than
the situation alone, of which I was not before entirely ignorant.[96]

[Footnote 96: Captain Cook's proceedings, as related in the remaining
part of this chapter, and in the next, being upon a coast newly
discovered by the French, it could not but be an object of his attention
to trace the footsteps of the original explorers. But no superiority of
professional skill, nor diligence in exerting it, could possibly qualify
him to do this successfully, without possessing, at the same time, full
and authentic intelligence of all that had been performed here by his
predecessors in the discovery. But that he was not so fortunate as to be
thus sufficiently instructed, will appear from the following facts,
which the reader is requested to attend to, before he proceeds to the
perusal of this part of the journal.

How very little was known, with any precision, about the operations of
Kerguelen, when Captain Cook sailed in 1776, may be inferred from the
following paragraph of his instructions:--"You are to proceed in search
of some islands said to have been lately seen by the French in the
latitude of 48 deg. S., and in the meridian of the Mauritius." This was,
barely, the amount of the very indefinite and imperfect information,
which Captain Cook himself had received from Baron Plettenberg at the
Cape of Good Hope, in November 1772; in the beginning of which year
Kergue