e of Good Hope, St Helena, Ascension, Fernando Noronha and the
Azores. The voyage (reckoning only from the Cape of Good Hope and back
to the same) had covered considerably more than 20,000 leagues, nearly
three times the equatorial circumference of the earth; it left the main
outlines of the southern portions of the globe substantially as they are
known to-day; and it showed a possibility of keeping a number of men for
years at sea without a heavy toll of lives. Cook only lost one man out
of 118 in more than 1000 days; he had conquered scurvy.

The discoverer reached Plymouth on the 25th of July 1775, and his
achievements were promptly, if meanly, rewarded. He was immediately
raised to the rank of post-captain, appointed a captain in Greenwich
hospital, and soon afterwards unanimously elected a member of the Royal
Society, from which he received the Copley gold medal for the best
experimental paper which had appeared during the year.

Cook's third and last voyage was primarily to settle the question of the
north-west passage, practically abandoned since before the middle of the
17th century, but now taken up again, as a matter of scientific
interest, by the British government. The explorer, who had volunteered
for this service, was instructed to sail first into the Pacific through
the chain of the newly discovered islands which he had recently visited,
and on reaching New Albion to proceed northward as far as latitude 65
deg. and endeavour to find a passage to the Atlantic. Several ships were
at the same time fitted out to attempt a passage on the other side from
the Atlantic to the Pacific. Sailing from the Nore on the 25th of June
1776 (Plymouth, July 12), with the "Resolution" and "Discovery," and
touching at the Cape of Good Hope, which he left on the 30th of
November, Cook next made Tasmania and thence passed on to New Zealand
and the Tonga and Society Islands, discovering on his way several of the
larger members of the Hervey or Cook Archipelago, especially Mangaia and
Aitutaki (March 30th-April 4th, 1777); some smaller isles of this group
he had already sighted on his second voyage, September 23rd, 1773. From
Tahiti, as he moved north towards the main object of his expedition, he
made a far more important discovery, or rather rediscovery, that of the
Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands, the greatest and most remarkable of the
Polynesian archipelagos (early February 1778). These had perhaps first
been seen by the Spanish