Historically High - Captain James Cook

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

James Cook is one of those explorers where upon hearing his name, you gotta take a beat and try to decide if he's a real person or if you're thinking of Captain Hook from Peter Pan or Captain Cook from Breaking Bad. But don't sleep on Jimmy cause the man knew how to quest. Starting out from humble origins cutting his teeth in the coal shipping game, he learned his way around a ship and around the water. Eventually the Royal Navy came calling and he was sent to the new world during the Seven Years War and found he had a talent for cartography. A few years of honing his skills later and James found himself charged with locating the great southern continent that balanced the hemispheres. His voyages would take him around the world several times, seeing places like Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada, both circles (Antarctic and Arctic), and many others. Compared with other explorers of his era he was on the lighter side when it came to the mistreatment of indigenous people so he's got that going for him, which is nice. Join us this week as we set sail on the high seas with Captain James Cook. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ahoy. Again, ladies and gentlemen, we're going exploring. We are going on an adventure with Captain James Cook, Captain Cook, and not Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad. And not the bill's running back. Okay, that's true as well. Different James Cook. Yes. Okay, yeah, because, yeah. Captain Cook is, as far as explorers go, on the scale of kind of importance, the guy doesn't get a lot of shine, I think,

because technically he didn't find something that they consider like, like you discovered this. He found a very unceremonious ending. Yes, he did find that. What I mean, though, is technically Australia, where he goes and he, you know, surveys and maps the eastern coast of it, that had already been discovered by the Dutch. Yeah. They actually already named it.

What was it? New Holland. New Holland, that's right. No shit. Yeah. Well, and then there also, I believe it was the same guy, had gone down, and his name must have been Tasman or Talisman, something like that. Yes, because that's where we get Tasmania, right?

Yeah. Which was previously Van Demonsland? I believe so. So it's Van Demonsland sounds Dutch, too. No, no, it was, I think. So it was demon like D-I-E-M-something, but all I think of is they see the Tasmanian devil, and I think Demons, and it actually sounds kind of cool. Like, it's Van Demonsland.

Yeah, it feels like Warner Brothers was the one. that named it. A little bit, right? Yeah. Said anybody else. But I think the one thing that's really enduring about Cook's legacy is this guy had three voyages, the first of which was the guy was throwing darts on the world. And then the second two, he was just literally a map filler.

He was the guy that filled in all of the blank spots, pretty much that we can think of on the west coast of the United States, the bearing straight all the way around hitting the subcontinent of Alaska, back over into Russia. And then somehow he goes down and he gets it so fine that he's like, yeah, I found this archipelago that I called the Sandwich Islands. We're going to cruise around in here and we're going to find the big one. Biggest island in the archipelago. Yeah.

That was how precise he was at doing what he was supposed to do. And nowadays, I think people look at him in a way that, I mean, we've had this conversation about explorers. Christopher Columbus was a big proponent of colonialism that saw a lot of people die. Cook was a finder in a reporter, but he never took part in the colonialism to the point of being an active participant. I'm not going to say that he's, he has an unceremonious ending and I'm not sad about it. Like, I don't feel that much for him. You can be, I don't think it was necessarily that he was, um,

anti-colonialism. Yeah. I think that just wasn't his thing. So when he was going someplace, it was going for an act of discovery. What happened to that place afterward was not his business. He was just simply there to go back and say,

hey, this place exists, do with it what you guys will. Absolutely. And am I going to go to bat and try to fight for cook? Ultimately, no. That's not something that you and I have ever had to deal with.

I'm not going to tell a Maori person at all that they shouldn't be bummed out about Cook. I can understand why anybody that has a heritage that goes back and touches Cook's time, why they would be pretty bummed about him. I understand that. I'm never going to argue for him at all. At the same time, I do feel like he was kind of the tip of the spear, but he was the dull tip of the spear of colonialism. Yeah, kind of, I guess. He found the body he didn't stab in and penetrate. Again, I'm not saying that any of the acts that Great Britain did after that are fine. All of it very bad. But at the same time, I don't quite know if Cook was the reason why all that happened.

Yeah, it's a situation of if it wasn't Cook, it would have been someone else, I think. And out of the multitude of explorers, colonizers that we've discussed on here, if you're putting him against that, which I think kind of is the grading scale you have to. He was very light on mistreatment of the indigenous peoples. There was still mistreatment. And the killing. Yes, and the killing. But through the lens of those other explorers, it's much more minimal with his journeys.

Well, not to mention the Australians kind of have us to blame too, because they didn't start sending the criminals down to Australia until we said, no more, sir, here in the United States. Yeah, they didn't feel the need to go find another colony until they lost the, yeah. Yeah, so it's a little on us, too bit. It's a little on cook, little on us. All right. Before we get too far into it, remember, guys, Patreon is up and going.

Get yourself some bonus content. Two bonus episodes a month where we kind of just discuss smaller topics that don't take as long. And then some fun other little bonus stuff in there for you guys to enjoy as well. Patreon.com slash historically high. all the other socials, keep commenting, five-star reviews, wherever you guys can spare them. Got anything? Let's shove off. All right.

Okay, so let's explore little Jimmy, Jimmy Cook. James Cook, Jr. Born November 7th, 1728, bet you can't guess his father's name. Ronald. Ronald James, Sr. James, Sr. and Grace were his parents. He was born in the village of Martin. the north side basically of Yorkshire, probably about as far away from Australia as an Englishman

could get. Yeah, because he's over on the place where he's at is a little bit lower than Scotland, but it's also on the northeastern side, right? I think he grew up like eight miles from the North Sea. It's right there. Yeah. So it's going to be a cold place. It's going to be a tough place to live. But again, there's no conception of a guy who was born that far away. from Australia ever being the one to chart it on the eastern side. His upbringing was a little bit different. He was the second oldest of eight children. Senior was a farm laborer from Scotland.

So the tricky thing about Scotland in England was education was taking a little bit more seriously in Scotland at the time. So he wasn't just your typical farm hand. I believe he was literate. And he was a very smart, diligent, very good worker. they end up moving to or he was working for a guy, they end up moving to a place that was the Irie farm in Great Aiton. So his dad gets basically kind of going off what you said more of an educated guy,

he gets tapped to actually be the manager of this farm. Yep. So it's like a large farm, so much so that the owner actually pays for James Jr., basically. And once we get past him growing up and everything like that, it's just going to be James Cook or Captain Cook, however we want to go about it. Or JC. Or JC.

Pays for his school and he goes for a few years. And then in 1741, which would make him 14, 13 years old, begins coming back and working for his dad. He was born the second of eight. Do you think that the farm owner paid for the first kid's school or was it just Cook? Was it just James? Was it a, was it a Isaac Newton? situation where he showed promise, and so they wanted to kind of find out what that potential was. Yeah, either that or James Sr. The guy came to James Sr. and said, hey, which one of your kids

seems to have the most hope? He's like, James Jr. He's the one that's named after me. If anyone's going to succeed, I want it to be the one named after me. There's a reason he holds my name. So yeah, he gets an education that the son of a farmhand probably would never run across back in those days. And he gets this work ethic from his father just on the farm, knowing how to work with his hands, not being afraid to roll up his sleeves. He's obviously going to be a fuzz more posh than his father is now because he's well educated in England. He also has no desire to be a farmer. Now. So I think 1745 when he's 16, he's like, well, I'm moving, I'm a man now. I'm 16. I'm moving away from home and he moves to apprentice for a grocer,

habadisher, which habadashry is just an awesome word. But habadashry is where textiles? Close. So it's where you would go to buy all of like your yarn and buttons and all that kind of stuff to do all of your sewing. Okay. Because textiles can technically be fabric and everything as well, right? I believe so.

Very interesting. Yeah, Haberdash is an awesome word. I wish that we could work that in. The place that he was in was called Stalathis, I believe, something like that. It was a fishing village. So you had these people, you had these fishermen that are coming in constantly, probably not for the habadashry side of it, but probably more for the... I mean, you lose buttons.

Fair, yeah. And I guess if you get a new patch on your uniform or something like that, you probably want to throw it on your coat. It's true. So you're going to need a little bit of thread. But James is in this. situation where he's moved to station. If you are apprenticing under a shopkeeper, you're probably going to go a little bit further than your farmhand father, right? But that's not what he wants to do. He doesn't want to be a farmer. He doesn't want to just run a till all of his life. I don't want to

be a habitasher. I got dreams, man. And those dreams are seeing these guys that are out taming the ocean on a daily basis and bringing in the catch. They're the guys that he sees down at the pub, which I'm sure being 16, there probably wasn't a rule against him being in there. He wants to be the guy that in that song, Brandy, or a fine girl, that Brandy's waiting for. He wants to be the guy that's out on the open seas. That brings her back a necklace made from the finest, you know, a chain from the south of Spain or whatever it was. You're my life. You're my love.

But my lady is the sea. Yes. Something like that. I think his lady was a sea. He hadn't met his mistress yet. And I'm sure you could probably ask him and he'd be like, yeah, my mistress is the sea after he gets married. But he ends up, there's some goofy story that I'm sure is probably not true. But it's a great story to go with Cook where he's working the till one day and a woman gives him money for something that she purchased.

And it had a newly minted coin for the Southern Ocean Company. and he was so enamored with the C that he took that coin and he put another one from his pocket in the till and then the guy that was running the store, William Sanderson. I don't think he was related to the witch Sanderson's. You don't know that. Maybe. They probably were from England. But he comes over.

He's like, whoa, did you just take that coin out of there? I saw that that woman gave you this coin and I counted up. the till and it's not in there. And JC just said, yeah, I took it. It's in my pocket, but I threw one in there. The till should still be right. It's like, why would you do that? I had never seen this coin before and I really liked it, so I swapped it out. And there was a little bit of a riff between him again. I believe that that's just a fanciful story for a guy that would become maybe one of the greatest navigators of all time. You've got to try to plant the seed or give him some type of adversity he overcame it when he was working the till regardless he lasts about 18 months before he's

like yeah so the farm thing's not for me habadash for things not for me he ends up joining the merchant navy yeah he moves to or the town that he's in being the port town and everything like that he actually meets some local ship owners that are in the coal trade they were uh friends of sanderson that's right so sanderson went ahead and helped him move to whitby and whitby was like the coal ship carrying building capital of the world yeah and i mean these are like not so much barges these are just ships that are made to haul a shit ton of weight that are traveling just down the coast so it's not like they're shipping it again they don't have trains at this point or anything like that so it's much more economical to be able to just load something up on a ship send it down

the coast to london where you're selling all that stuff and you can ship a lot more it's the same reason why overseas you see some of the ship shipping ships that they use and they're just enormous with all those containers on it. I don't know if this is a ship blasphemy when I say this, but I think seeing these colliers that he was on, they might be some of my favorite ships. They're built in a similar fashion where they're not going to blow you away with their looks, but their sturdiness and their ability to carry is unmatched. And it don't look too bad.

They also have an extreme amount of benefits because they're a flat bottom boat and not having that let's throw a dart here. Keel on the bottom. They still have a keel. The keel is the part essentially that think of it in the way I always remember the keel is the spine

and then the things that come up like the ribs. Yeah. So you still do have a keel. I think the biggest benefit of that is the way it was designed with the flat bottom. Is it allowed a lot of flexibility

in like how you could repair and your options with the ship whereas a more traditional ship that you're thinking of has that very rounded bottom. so think of it. I always kind of visualized stuff. Like Pirates of the Caribbean,

they find the Black Pearl up on the beach. It's tipped over on one side because that's how it has to sit. It can't just sit upright. A flat bottom allows you to pretty much run the thing up on the beach. You can still tip it a little bit to get up and under there, but it's going to be something to where it's much easier to get it to a place where you can repair it, which is pivotal for long journeys when you can't just pull it into a shipyard. You're not going to be able to lay it on its side,

but you're going to be able to lay it over, work on it, and then bring it back up straight. So when the ocean comes back in at high tide, it'll lift you enough to where you can basically winch yourself off back into the water. Yeah. And these colliers that they were using, I believe they said that they did a thousand trips from this northeastern part of England carrying coal. And out of the thousand trips,

it was like three or four hundred of the trips were solely to London. Yeah. that was how much they were moving. But when you're navigating the North Sea, when you're navigating the English Channel, too very inhospitable, windy, just not great areas to train in, to sail in.

It's the best training. It's the New York. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. If you can make it sailing in the English Channel in the North Sea, you can probably handle whatever else the world's going to give you.

So as an apprentice in the Merchant Navy, you're studying algebra, geometry, trigonometry, which all go into navigation, and then astronomy, which again also ties into navigation as well. You're also learning those skills because that's what someone who is in command of a ship has to know. So while he's in the merchant navy, he's learning these skills. Like you said, he's trial by fire kind of. He's in these environments that he's going close to the coast. So he's having to learn essentially how it works with like shallow draft. because that was also the flat bottom was able to go ahead and go into more or shallower areas. You know his first assigned boat's name.

Wasn't it the friendship? The free love. Similar. Okay. Friendship. There was another one that was the friendship after that. But as he's learning these skills over this three-year apprenticeship, he works in the Baltic. He ends up getting his Mariners license, I think, in 1752 when he's 24 years old.

Yep. And then that allows him to serve as a mate. which, you know, first mate, second mate, third mate, basically a mate is someone who's like a deck officer, basically someone who I guess can boss other people around to do certain tasks. I think that he also had a very good influence at this time in his life. When he was working under William Sanderson, his bed was literally underneath the counter that they would do business on. He had to sleep in the shop that he was working in where Sanderson and his family lived above that shop.

When he moves out here, he ends up moving in with one of the guys that he had met, John Walker that was his boss and they were Quakers and as Quakers they brought him into the family they kind of taught him along the lines of their beliefs and their beliefs in hard work their beliefs and kind of staying out of other people's business they were like high up in the oak game right yeah I'm sure maybe the guy who knows the guy on the Quaker Oatsbox could be John Walker it could be but it was a situation where John Walker's wife would make sure that he never went without, that he was always fed,

that he was always taken care of. And I kind of think that as we talk about later in life as he becomes a captain and he leads these journeys, I think a lot of the thought towards taking care of the people that are on the boat becomes a pretty big thing for him. I wonder if Mrs. Walker had a little thing, you know, going on. She could have. Strapping young lad here.

Yeah. And I mean, I looked at a few of the paintings that were done. And I have to believe that if you had a little bit of, painting done of you and you said yes, it was probably a pretty flattering rendition of you. Yes, you would definitely say something to have them change it if it wasn't. So maybe he touched itself up. Not a bad looking guy for an old sea salt at that point in time. So two and a half years as a mate serving again, deck officer visits Norway, the Netherlands,

like you pointed out, navigating the shallows, Irish see, the English Channel. And age 26, huge deal. he's offered off offered, he's offered the captaincy of the ship that he's been serving on. Now he's offered the friendship. Yes, he's offered the captaincy of the friendship. I couldn't believe in reading some of the places that he went to. He went up into St. Petersburg. Yeah. Which is where we talked about, oh, shit, the guy that got lost.

Hudson. Hudson, yeah. Hudson's family's company was the one that was up delivering into St. Petersburg. So he probably ran some routes that Hudson. And so it's true. That's pretty crazy. Well, how many of these guys come from the same place? Like a lot of these explorers that we talk about.

Yeah. Same time frame, though, is different. Yeah, we're talking 100 plus years off. So as he's getting used to that, you know, he's getting the experience with the Merchant Navy. He's got kind of what you think is going to be the pinnacle for a farmer's son, Captain Seva's ship. Whether it's a merchant Navy ship, whatever, you're going to be making that money. Oh, yeah.

He's like, I feel like he has this wonderlust. I think he's the biggest thing. I think the best way to describe it is he has this just lifelong wonderlust where he's looking at it and saying, if I'm the captain of this ship, this ship is only going to go to these places. All places have already been. And I'm just going to be continuing to do this. I'm never going to be able to go out and explore something new. What I am going to be able to do to see new stuff is if I join the actual Royal Navy.

And so basically it's like, hey, thanks for the offer for the friendship. but I'm actually going to go ahead and join the Royal Navy. Well, and it's a double-edged sword, right? Because if you're in this merchant navy, it doesn't matter that you're the son of a farmhand. You can rise through the ranks of the merchant navy to become a captain like he was going to be. Yeah.

But if you switch over to the Royal Navy, you're only going to be able to ascend so far because you're not from a family that's well to do. You're competing against people who already have a leg up on you based upon their pedigree. You're walking away from a meritocracy and into a... Nepotism, basically.

Yeah. So, and it's not like you get a note like, oh, hey, yeah, let me write you a note that you were going to be a captain here. You hand these over to the Royal Navy guys, and they'll be like, oh, yeah, you're going to be a captain here, too. Cross you right through. No. So you've got to kind of start back.

I'm sure you do because of your experience. You're not going to go on as just a standard semen. But you're going to step into a role that's much lower than what you had with the merchant navy. And his first posting was which the HMS Eagle, which was a 58 gun ship of the line. You know what his rank was. Was it another mate?

An able seaman. Okay, he was an able seaman. So it wasn't just a seaman. He was an able seaman. Gotcha. Which again, you're starting at the bottom of the ladder, except for this ladder is turned into a step ladder because of your cast, basically.

His first appointment, as the able seaman, as Chris just said, is on this shitty ship called the HMS Eagle. The eagle was run by a guy named Joseph Hammer. What do you mean shitty? Joseph Hammer said at the time that he believed that he had the worst crew in the Royal Navy. Okay, not the ship itself. Because this thing was like a 58 gun ship of the line. The ships of the line are the ones you think of like Man of Wars that go up and actually

fight like multi-tiered gun decks and everything. Okay, so the ship is good. It's just the people running it are dog shit. Completely inept. And you have a kid and cook who steps forward and impresses hammer enough. I want to say that they said it was like three weeks that it took him to go from an able seaman to a master's mate. It wasn't a full year. It might have been months instead of weeks.

But it was a very quick rise from just an able seaman and he separates himself out to be the master's mate. he's on the boat with a bunch of people who probably don't know what the fuck they've been enlisted the people that are working it that aren't in command positions are just people that have signed up for the navy because they have no other prospects and they have this guy come in and they're like oh you can read and do math okay you're we're gonna need you a different position yeah yeah it's it's incredible to think that his skills wouldn't translate to put him in a higher position, but he kind of makes that happen on his own. His ability to stand out brings him to a master's mate.

I can't tell you how far up the line of master's mate is. It sounds a hell of a lot better than an able seaman. But if you're the maid of the master, that feels like a pretty good deal. His first action, and part of the reason he switches over to the Royal Navy is he knows there's going to be a spot for him. Because stop me if I've said this before, or Chris and I have. talked about this before, Britain and France are starting to get into it. They're starting to get a little mouthy about what's going on.

It's been like five years. Yeah. Yeah. Britain and France are angry at each other. So there's a British buildup in this Royal Navy. And so he slides over thinking, okay, well, there's going to be some action. I'm probably going to go get to see the Americas at this point in time if I jump in the way things are trending. The first action that he ends up seeing, I believe, comes in the English Channel.

or around England. October 1755, he takes part in a basically a full-blown assault on this French warship that's already lived through a full-blown assault. It's basically limping back to shore, and they just lit this thing up. It was just like turkey shoot on this thing

to the point to where they sank it. I believe it was the next month in November, they run into another French warship and actually end up defeating them boarding the ship and as the master's mate, Cook is told to go ahead and bring it back into port. He's the one that gets to drive the French ship back in. It's pretty good for your second fighting.

They're like, also, I mean, he's capable. Ship is taking on water. What are his odds of getting back to shore with this thing? They're decent. Okay, yeah, let him do it. And if he goes down, he was just a farmhand son. We didn't put one of the good guys out there. We'll circle back and try to get the guy because they got guys men and the crew and everything.

I believe they did say the first warship that they sunk. They did take all the prisoners back to England. So I think hostilities were pretty high at this point in time to be capturing the crew. Yeah, because you're also surrendering if they're capturing your ship. You're just, yeah, you're throwing up the white flag. 1757, Cook passes his master's exams, and this qualifies him to navigate and handle a ship of the King's fleet on his own. Well, he actually, so, okay, so going back real quick, January 1756, he's actually promoted to Boson after the one that's currently serving on the HMS Eagle dies.

And a Boson is a senior petty officer or what you'd call a warrant officer. They're responsible for the deck department, whole maintenance rigging, and the general seamanship of it. So it's a pretty important job. So he's rising up the ranks even more so displaying kind of the capabilities that he has. March 7, or March 1757. this is his first actual command. He gets his first command with the ship called the cruiser with a Z. And it is a smaller like cutter, what they call a cutter, that kind of serves alongside as a support ship to the Eagle.

So I think kind of in the same way that you have larger warships, even today have like destroyers and stuff like that with them. Ships would have smaller ships that would be able to then go harass targets and things like that. I don't know if you know this being a sea guy or being a boat guy. Being a seaman. Being an amateur seaman that you are, did these cutters and these smaller boats and these frigates and different things like that, were those pretty much eliminated when they started making steel boats? Like was that solely just a wooden boat thing? No, no, no, because you have smaller metal boats.

You have a battleship, but the battleship is also accompanied by a cruiser or destroyers to protect it. But they've just changed names. They have similar functions. is their wooden counterparts. Yeah. But we didn't have like an all-iron frigate. Tactics remain kind of similar. You're just advancing the technology and the material the boat's made of.

Okay. Gotcha. So yeah, like you said, June 1757 passes the master's exams, qualifying him to operatorship of the King's Fleet. And not a moment too soon, because guess what's going on? Just popped off a year ago. We get the seven years war. 1756 to surprise, surprise, seven years later, 17. Yeah, he heads over to North America on something called the HMS Pembroke.

And the Pembroke ends up showing up a little bit later. Once they find they get over to the Americas, it turns out that Scurvy is just eating away at the people on the Pembroke. I know that Scurvy is maybe one of the nastier things that I can think of that happen. I know that your gums start to go nuts and receive. and your teeth start to rot and like you get these open sores and wounds on your body. Yeah, here you go. So scurvy is a disease caused by severe long-term deficiency of vitamin C or absorbic acid.

Leading to weakness, anemia, gum disease, poor wound healing and skin bleeding with corkscrew-shaped hairs and loose teeth being distinctive signs. The reason that this was such an issue on sea voyages is because sources of vitamin C are normally not things that in a non-refrigerated environment or controlled environment don't last very long. And there's not a lot of knowledge about what types of foods are high in vitamin C. It's kind of a trial and error thing, which Cook actually figures out because he's able to determine, well, it's not oranges and lemons and things like that, the things like sauerkraut. And there's this other stuff. It's something, something of carrot. And it is like orange peels.

that have also been fermented. It almost looks like it's making kimchi out of shit, right? Yeah, and a lot of that process of, I'm going to use the word pickling, and I know it's not the right word, but, oh, God damn it. I'm too high to think of it right now. Whatever you do to preserve it

basically brings in those acids that you're talking about that you need. While not being a complete source of vitamin C, you're still getting those absoric acid or whatever you said that was necessary into your body. Ferment. Ferment was the word that I was looking for. Okay.

So these fermented foods are great. And part of the reason why he starts to realize that they're going to need this is because when the Pembroke or Pembroke gets over to Nova Scotia, they end up having to wait and they miss out on the first siege of the French fortress at Lewisburg. Because everyone's so fucking weak from Scurvy? Because their entire crew is just wrecked by Scurvy that they end up showing up. they do get in kind of on the tail end of this French fortress attack on Lewisburg. That was Nova Scotia in 1758.

Once they end up taking this, this kind of sets up a mad dash down the St. Lawrence River to get to Quebec, because while the seven years war is happening, they're fighting in Pennsylvania in these areas down on land. If you can sneak in the back door and get down the St. Lawrence and get to the capital of French North America. that's going to be a pretty big blow. That's going to be a pretty big win if you can get that. The problem is the French knew that this was going to be probably something that was going to happen, especially after Lewisburg fell. So all of the buoys and everything that they had put down to mark like the shoals or rocks or anything like that going down the St. Lawrence River have all been taken away.

So to be able to traverse the St. Louis or St. Lawrence down to get to Quebec, it's just you're basically running a blind gauntlet. It's a crapshoot. Yeah. Yeah. So he is able to, like you said, take part in that assault. And the Penbrook is a pretty serious ship. It's a 46 to 60 gun ship. So it's definitely going to be taking part in this stuff.

After this all goes down, a meeting of the minds occurs, which will shape the rest of this guy's life. And he meets an army officer named Samuel Holland. A Dutchman named Holland. A Dutchman named Holland. And this guy is surveying and kind of something that Cook has picked up. up and really gravitated toward is actually doing like the, I guess it is surveying. What am I trying to say? Charting. Hydrographing.

So he's charting the coastlines and things like that, waterways that are coming through. And he sees this guy doing on land surveys. And they're just hitting off. They're talking shop. They're chopping it up back and forth. And he's like, well, how are you doing this? He's like, well, this is how I do it. You set up this device and you do this and this.

He's like, I do something similar, but I'm out on the boat when I do it. I'm having to kind of view this stuff, and they start kicking around ideas back and forth about how to kind of combine their skill sets or what their knowledge base is. And they develop this way of making these charts that exceed accuracy of pretty much most other charts that are being made of the day. Yeah, they said that the accuracy exceeded pretty much all of the contemporary maps that they had. Yeah. And part of the hydrographic expertise that Cook has is, he's able to look at the way that Holland is surveying the land and using like the table in front of him to write

and some of the different mechanical things that he has to be able to check distance and height of mountains and that kind of thing. And he looks down at the water, he's like, well, we already have depth sounding, which, again, sounding something different now, but I'm sure in the Navy, it's still something similar. they're probably shooting some sort of signal down into the water. But I was talking about nowadays or then?

Yeah, death sounding back then was probably, or now was probably them. Yeah, some type of like electronic distance finding, whereas it used to be probably rope with knots in it. In a lead weight. And as soon as it hit the bottom and you started pulling it up, you counted the knots. Yeah.

Seven. Yep. Fuck. Shallow. So he's able to start charting basically the floor of this river to figure out where these rocks are, to figure out where these shoals are while still graphic or while still charting basically the shoreline. The shoreline of this river. And they put this together in like a winter. Because after winter ends up happening, they float down the St. Lawrence.

They get to Quebec and they lay siege on Quebec. Which doesn't sound super impressive nowadays if you're saying something. But being able to essentially travel down river, set up your equipment, chart this thing, figure it out, and do so within the span of a few months. And at the same time, probably not get caught doing it because there's probably also patrols of the French and everything around around. It's a pretty big deal. Yeah. And not to mention, Cook played a major part in the siege of Quebec. Oh, we forgot to mention. And so when they were going after Lewisville.

Louisville or Lewisburg. The French tried the old tactic that the English used against the Spanish armada, and they lit a bunch of boats on fire and pushed them towards the English fleet. The fire ships. Cook was the man who called out the smaller boats to go grapple them and pull them away from the ship, basically saving everybody on board. Yeah. So he's not only this brilliant.

brilliant mind that's right up next to the captain explaining to him what's going on in the river. He's looking out and kind of making sure that they're safe at the same time. He ends up charting this very small bank that's on the opposite side of where the fort is in Quebec, which is actually where they landed finally and were able to go in and lay siege on the fortress from land. So he was the guy that charted basically where the only place that they could find to get up and on to land. He's like in World War II, how they'd have like the frogmen and like, the CBs go in ahead and try to chart like for the landing boats to come in where the reefs were and like of the channels that they could go in.

Yeah. Yeah. Except he's not getting his ass in the water. It's actually kind of him guessing to certain degrees of being like, I kind of think this is how it is. And it ends up working out. That's, I think, how a lot of his life goes. That's how long it is. Yeah, it's got to be like that.

Oh, and keep in mind, they're doing this all while wearing tricorn hats. That's true. Which is just hilarious to me to think of all the things that you could wear into battle to be inconspicuous. That's not one of them. If you see a tricorn hat moving through the brush, it's not going to go easy. After he ends, or after they end up landing in the fort taking all that stuff over, Cook eventually heads back to Britain. And as he's back there, I believe it was, I didn't write the date down.

After he gets back from the war, Hook comes back. He meets his eventual wife. her name was Elizabeth Bats. She was the daughter of an innkeeper. She wasn't really of means. She was kind of in that same level of society as he was. Maybe a little bit more if he's like a merchant and has an inn. Oh, now he is, yes.

Yeah, now I believe he's a little bit higher class, but he's still not a nobleman by any means. But again, when is somebody. as skilled as he is, again, this isn't a meritocracy for certain positions. As skilled as he is, he's not going to marry above his station. No, and by all accounts, I think Elizabeth was a lady who had to deal with a lot. And part of the reason why I think she knew what she was getting into was because her dad, that was an innkeeper, was an innkeeper in a village that was on the water.

Yeah, she had seen sailors coming in and out. She kind of knew, at least overhearing conversations. had to have a general idea of how long voyages were, guys talking about how long they've been away from their family. When you boil it down, the time frame that he's actually home with her is very small in comparison to when he's out actually sailing around. I want to say the number was like out of 18 years he was doing this and active.

He was home for a total like four. Yeah. And he had a system. He came home. He put a baby in her. And this man, I don't think ever had. to change a diaper a day in his life.

Well, there was one kid at a certain point that he's there for two months, the first two months. Okay. So that was when he got his diaper changing him. But other than that, she was having these children as he was away. And they would have two children during this period after the seven years war where Cook is basically, he did so well in the war that they assigned him to go back and chart the shoreline of Newfoundland. Yeah, so he spends the next five years, end of the war is 1763. So from 1763 to 1767, he's charting the coast of Newfoundland. He's injured in 1764 when a powder horn that he's holding blew up in his hand.

Blew up in his hand. A surgeon is like on board another boat. They're able to get in touch with him and actually save his hand. He recorded, I want to say, is, oh, this happens like kind of concurrent in 17th. 166 while he's doing his thing in New Fenland. Yes. But there's the recording of a solar eclipse in August of 1766, which is used to determine longitude. And this information is turned over to who else, the Royal Society.

We talk about these guys in several episodes, the Newton episode, the Charles Darwin episode. We're not talking about him now, but I know there's another episode we've also mentioned them in as well. They're getting a Patreon episode for sure. Yes. We talked about him in the... Darwin episode. No, I said Darwin. Okay, Darwin, Newton.

This one, and there's one other one I can't remember. Yeah. So the Royal Society's definitely a Patreon episode. There's no way around that. Yes, yes. I don't think there's enough for a full episode, but just maybe the roster could be a Patriot episode. Yeah, that's what I was thinking to. Yeah.

Because they're just everywhere. We just look through the Royal Society trading cards and pick out the rarest ones. August 5th, or 1766 is when he spots this. He records the, pretty accurate start and end of the solar eclipse. That information is then sent back to England. It's looked at by an English astronomer who collaborates with members of the Royal Society. They do all of the math and all of this kind of what time he started recording it,

what time it was there. They do sorcery. And yeah, so basically we're going to talk about this a little bit later. What is it, Greenwich Standard Time? Greenwich Mean Time or something like that. Greenwich Main Time is where the Prime Meridian is. where the prime meridian starts on the world. It's where...

As far as England is concerned. Yeah. Because isn't it, isn't the true one a little bit further to the west? I don't know, but I just know that if England is claiming that it's, that's the, this is the only time that it's because it only exists in there. Yeah. I'm sure the French had their own way of keeping time as well. Yeah.

It was similar, but... I could see that. But they're able to figure out this start and finish time that he had sent them and they send him over the exact longitudinal coordinates of where it was at the, the time he marks that down on the map pretty close to accurate yeah from there on and these maps that he's doing over in newfoundland they end up being used up until the 20th century they were that accurate that for the next 200 years these things were still used by mariners in a place that's basically like one big long pier yeah it's so shaped in a way to where you're in the middle

of these fishing grounds where you can kind of pull up anywhere it's just one big port And he's got his name in with the Royal Society. So if they need someone when they have an idea about like, hey, let's figure out some more astrological shit, but we have to get some guys there, his name's already going to be showing up. He's already proven himself to be a pretty exceptional navigator. And so the end of the Seven Years War basically allows Britain to start pulling a lot of those resources that they had dedicated to the war into exploration. There's still places out there in the world that haven't been snatched up. there's this rumor of this place called the, what is it, Terra Australis. So it's the great southern land.

There was a thought that the world had to be balanced in a way in which it had to have the equal amount of land mass in the northern hemisphere as in the southern hemisphere. What they had currently found in the southern hemisphere didn't match up for the northern. So they assumed there was this great southern continent, which there is, it's, you know, Antarctica. But they are like, we got to try to find this. If it's land, we got to claim it for ourselves. So there were two very stupid beliefs. And I can't say that I blame them because we have the benefit of all of the history that we've learned since then.

But there are two things where there had to be this great southern continent to balance out the northern hemisphere so we didn't just fall out of orbit. The second one is they believe, and this will come into play later, they believe that the ice caps were created by freshwater that. had flowed out of rivers and then frozen. They didn't believe that salt water could freeze. Correct. So therefore, anytime they ran into ice, there was always a belief that there had to have been a freshwater source.

A landmass somewhere providing the fresh water. Yeah. They thought it came out of rivers. The icebergs came out of rivers. Exactly. So it becomes one of these things where these misconceptions, that's almost what Cook ends up kind of modeling his career around is fixing these misconceptions.

they had. And it's not like he's going to be going into an area that people haven't been into. It's now just getting much more specific as to we need to find out what's all in here. Start looking for like smaller places anywhere we can really claim. And that's a big thing. I'm glad that Chris said that now. Whenever we say the words they discovered or they found, we're talking in an English sense. Because all of these places have been discovered and found. There's people living there already that have already discovered this. They're the first Europeans to discover this place is basically what it was specifically. And even then, not even completely. Exactly. Yeah. So Europeans were exploring the Pacific since the early 16th century. So again, that's 1500 up to 1599.

The Dutch had discovered Australia in 1606, but only the West Coast. So that's why it was also New Holland. Trade had been active in the Philippines, the Spice Isles. Definitely go back and listen to the Dutch East Indies episode because that is all to do with the Spice Isles and the Spice Trade. And then also trade was active with Mexico Because again They had been over there Spain had its holdings over in Central America And South America So there was active trade of all the shit

Being pulled out of South America And Mexico being sent overseas as well Portugal, Brazil Cape of Good Hope Everybody had their dick in the Americas Yeah and it'll come into play later But the Cape of Good Hope Isn't always a good place

To go around to go into Asia So depending on who's got residency there Exactly. Who wants to tax you? Exactly. Large parts of the Pacific, Canada, Alaska, their coastlines had been uncharted. So they know that there are even landmasses that have been discovered where parts of those have not been really claimed or maybe even explored up to that point or explored in a broad sense. Maybe they've sent fur trappers or they sent explorers, you know, Lewis and Clark style, whatever you want to say. Yeah, there was a point when Spain just kind of gave up on moving up to California coastlines charted. They got cold finally. They're like, we're not used to this. We got to head back down south. But you also have the Bering Strait and the Russians that had crossed into that area checking out all that stuff.

So we knew that Alaska was up there. It obviously wasn't Alaska at the time. I had no idea how big it was, the shape of it or anything like that. But that also lets you know, hey, is this the entryway to the Northwest Passage, just like we talked about during the Hudson episode? That's still going to be a thing they're searching for. The Brits had sent out several explorers who had returned with tales of a wondrous place, a tropical paradise called Tahiti. And also possible sightings of what they would call the great southern land, but really sightings of Australia. There's so many beliefs that when they found a piece of land there, if it was a big chunk of land like you're going to run into with the two islands of New Zealand, every time they ran into a big chunk of land, they're like, well, this could be.

it. This could just be the tip of what we need to find this great southern land. So there was always a lot of hope when land was found, which I'm sure if you're on a ship for that long, anytime you see land's a good time. Oh, yeah. And there also comes into play a time where they would find areas and half the crew would be like, oh, if we found this, we're going to have to spend the next three years charting this thing. I really don't want to be on this boat. You're doing the thing where, you know, they're going around it to see if it just connects to more land or if they're going to be able to circumnavigate it.

to establish that it's an island. And as you start to turn and you're going around it, it's just like, yes, yes. Okay, which way we're pointing now? We're going west. Okay, a couple days later, you're like, oh, shit, we're turning south. Okay, this is good.

This is either just a big fucking peninsula at the far north of this continent or we're circling this thing. We're going to be going to east here shortly. Yeah. Then back north, we're just going to circle this. And then you're just hoping because it's not a situation

where you're getting to the island and then you're just staying on the boat the entire time. You are going onto the island, picking up supplies, doing whatever you can, a lot of these scientific exploration, you know, journeys and adventure or expeditions, you have naturalists and people that are scientists of the time going in and collecting samples of animals and plants and pretty much anything and everything they can find that's new. Yeah, and Cook was kind of on the front end of this

because in 1768, the Royal Navy and the Royal Society start to talk about a little bit of a trip. because the Royal Society is bringing forth this evidence that they had from a man who popped up in our Newton episode, Edmund Holly, the guy who the comments named after. The guy who basically sent his work over to Newton and Newton explained it all to him. He was like, that's why this happens. Okay, that makes total sense. Holly had said that there's something called the transit of Venus. And the transit of Venus is Venus making a transit across the sun. and he hypothesized that if you were able to use two different points on the planet and watch this transit of Venus go across the sun, if you're able to time it in multiple different locations, you can actually figure out the distance that we are from the sun, from the earth to the sun.

It's no. No. No. Well, and let's get into the nuts and bolts of this. because Holly said that this transit happens two times in a... 100-something change year period. Yeah, it happens two times in... I want to say it's something like eight months or something in between these.

But yeah, and then there's 121 years between these. A, how in the world does Holly know that it's 121 years that this occurrence happens? And B, how are you going to time something staring into the sun? Oh, you have questions? I have no answers. So, okay, so to me, a transit, the easiest way that I can remember it, a transit is just an eclipse when the thing moving in front of the sun is too small to actually eclipse the sun. Okay. So as they're watching this, like Adam was saying, they're watching this in four stages. So they determine that, hey, if we can monitor this transit of Venus, not just in one location, but we're going to do this in multiple locations, we can then use all of the information together. see if our numbers all match up for timing and things like that. And through some type of advanced math, we're going to figure out what the latitudes are able to be. Because that was the big question of the days. How do we determine latitude?

Longitude had been figured out north to south, that kind of stuff. But latitude. It was for longitude? I thought it was so they could figure out the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Correct. But that would allow them knowing the distance between the Sun and Venus and then Venus and earth. That's why I'm saying it's, it doesn't make any sense to me because they were trying to use those distances to determine what the distances of, um, longitude would be, or I'm mixing

up latitude and long, I'm looking this out flat, flat, long. Okay, so they were trying to figure out longitude. Yep. Because they figured out latitude. They had the degrees of that. They were trying to figure out side to side east to west. And somehow watching Venus cross the sun and determining when the edge of Venus first touched the sun, then when it, it, got fully inside the sun, then when it touched the other side, and then when it moved past the other side to barely be touching it, knowing that from three different locations is going to somehow explain what degree you're at east to west. Yeah, one of these locations that they decided was going to be great was that magical land of Tahiti that Chris was talking about earlier.

There was a big push from the Royal Society pretty much from one guy that was saying, hey, we need to do this. He was a man named Joseph Banks. He was a young, botanist, kind of self-trained naturalist. He was a member of the Royal Society, and he was pushing the Royal Navy to basically make him the captain of this voyage to go down there and do this. The Royal Navy's like, what's identifying plants going to do when you're out in the middle of a swell? What is this sale called? Yeah. What is this thing called? Are you getting in, are you getting on the boat on the port or the starboard side, sir?

When you get onto land where there's plants, sure, you're captain. That's your game. But until then, we're going to need somebody who is able to actually knows how to run a ship, but also someone who's very skilled at charting and things like that, but also someone that has experience with seeing an eclipse or something similar to that. We have a guy. We know of a guy. Yeah, he's not the guy that we can use because you would need to reach captain's status

to be able to man one of these voyages and run one of these voyages. But we do have a guy who isn't a captain, so he's not going to take away from one of our main guys. He's seen a solar eclipse. He's a damn good seaman. If we can bring in Cook, we can get him through and, or he can pass his test to become, what was it, a lieutenant? Yes.

And that would allow you. So there's a difference between a captain of a ship and the commander of the ship. you can command a ship and not be a captain. So being a captain meant that you did captain a ship, but you didn't have to be a captain to command a ship. I know that's probably kind of confusing, but there was a minimal rank, I do believe, that you would have to be in order to command a ship,

which I'm guessing is either set in stone or you just have to be a higher rank of the next lowest person down to make sure you're the senior ranking officer on the ship. But your rank is high enough to be considered the ability to You're of a rank that is commiserate with being able to command a vessel or something of that nature. Yeah, so

technically, Cook's most famous voyage, he was not Captain Cook. He was Lieutenant Cook. Yes. But at the same time, when he gets on there, it doesn't matter. He's captain to everybody. He's chosen to lead this voyage. And kind of the push and pull of this

relationship between him and Banks is a very interesting one because Banks is very outspoken. I want to say that he's like 10 or 12 years younger than Cook is at this point in time. And he has that status. He has that status among people to where he's the rich kid. To me, it's that scene in, I want to say it's, fuck, I don't know if it's a Guardians of the Galaxy movie or if it's one of the Avengers where Thor comes on board the ship. And he's like, but everyone knows I'm the captain.

He's like, of course, of course you're the captain. Everyone knows. Of course. And this is just Cook telling Banks like, listen, everyone knows that yeah, yeah. He's like, as soon as we're out of sight of land, everyone's going to know who the actual captain is. As soon as you freak out the first time we get a heavy win, they're going to understand who to listen to in the situation. They need a ship. And I don't know if this was fate.

I don't know what intervened here. But the ship that was chosen was actually a merchant collier, very similar to the ones that Cook was running when he was a part of. the merchant navy. He was offered a captaincy for. Yeah. Okay. I could see how that all lines up. Yeah.

Like it's the type of ship that he had already been assigned from the merchant Navy and offered a captaincy. So like he knows how to run it. If they trusted him to run it, then obviously knows. Well, not to mention this is perfect because the collier that has all of this space to get all that precious, precious coal to where it needs to be, you can put a second deck in there and you can jam so much shit inside this boat. And I think part of this too was also him giving his input of what he knows the distance.

They at least have an idea because, again, Brits have been to Takedi. They know the distance roughly that he's going to be going. So as they're telling him this, and he's like, well, this ship, you know, I'm used to working on these ships. We know it has this type of capacity. We could rework the, you know, the innards a little bit to make more room for a crew. But from a not like endurance, but from a survivability standpoint, this is the kind of ship that's going to give us the best chance on a long voyage and be able to carry the type of stuff we're going to need for it and in the amounts that we need.

Flat bottoms are going to be great for repairs. They're going to be great to traverse shallower depths. Places where we don't know where it's going to get shallow quickly. We need that extra time to be able to say, hey, it's getting shallow. We need to turn. Yeah, or if we do need to run this thing aground, there is a chance of relaunching it. Yeah, exactly. This Collier was 105 feet long or 32 meters.

It was 29 feet wide, about 9 meters wide. It was roughly 368 tons of displacement, which is huge. In my mind, it's huge at least. The depth of hold is about 11 feet. I believe they said that the draft is how far it goes underwater. Yeah, I believe so. I think it was like 15 feet. So pretty shallow for an ocean going vessel.

Like fully loaded. Yeah. As far as to go out on the ocean and fight through these big waves, that's a pretty small ship. But this ship that they said would typically hold between like 12 to 15 guys if it was running a coal load was now packed with 73 sailors, 12 Marines, and nine scientists. God, what were they called gentlemen experimenters? Sure. I believe is what they were referred to as on the ship. They definitely did not get along with the sailors.

of the Marines. I did know that they had Marines back then, if I'm being honest. So it's Marines are essentially soldiers that are just serving on board a ship. That's their definition of it. These are normally guys that are just used to serving in the army on land. We have now just put them on a ship. Maybe during the seven years war, they were the guys, because you have your sailors. Those are the guys responsible for manning the cannons, for running all the operations on the ship. Your ships would also serve as transports to get the army and the soldiers where you needed to go. So those guys coming off the ships would be considered Marines or maybe special detachments that were more specially trained to operate on a ship like fire muskets from a ship,

something like that, I guess. So they weren't extra specially trained like Marines are now? No, no. No, I think just the term is because marine water, you're operating in a marine environment. So the only thing that you needed to become a Marine back then was just the ability to step on a ship. All right. Yeah. I get that. Um, one of these scientists. the lead naturalist Joseph Banks, not the guy that does the suits, Joseph A. Banks. Maybe my favorite guy on this ship,

unfortunately, he has a pretty unceremonies sending to. One of his artist's name was Sidney Parkinson. And the reason that he needed, I believe he had two artists that went out there with him. And the reason that he needed these guys was basically, you can't bring back all these live specimens. You can't bring back all this live floor and fauna. So if you can go out and collect it

and you can keep it in a natural enough, state to where they have enough time to be able to do renderings, drawings, drawings, paintings of these things, that was as good as a photo. It was a way that you could take everything that you had found out. It was the only thing that they could have that was akin to a photo. Yeah. Exactly. He also brought his two black servants on. Of course, a guy like Banks is going to have servants. I'm not shocked. I do believe that he also brought like his two dogs on as well, which a sea dog seems like a pretty annoying thing to have.

Oh yeah, there were greyhounds. Oh, super annoying. So, oh, you know what it was? He's like,

I can't bring this dog because this thing's got a lot of meat on it. I got to bring the dog that if anyone gets an idea of wanting to kill and eat it, they're not going to get much out of it. So it's not going to be worth it. Yeah,

I'm going to need a very sleek, lean dog. So the fuck is that thing going to run around on deck. It's a hundred and nine feet long on the boat. You're just going to let that thing. It's just running laps around. It just, it doesn't make any sense.

Or 105 feet. Along there, they had this thing packed with provisions for, what do you say? It was 18 months, something like that? Yeah. So, okay, I'll try to break this down because these numbers completely threw me for a loop. So, and what, have we named this ship yet? Well, the Collier was painted up. It was gussied up.

It was cleaned up. It was cleaned up. And it became the endeavor. Yes, the HMS endeavor. So for the 18-month provisions that would be on there, and they're expecting to need more than 18 months, but part of this is that you land on these islands, you stop in a ports at certain places, and you can re-up your supply. So this is basically just to get them where they need to go and to also take them on a long-standing voyage across open water until they can get somewhere else. 250 barrels of beer 6,000 pieces of pork

4,000 pieces of beef 9 tons of bread 5 tons of flour 3 tons of sauerkraut 1 ton of raisins various amounts of cheese peas oil sugar oatmeal

60 barrels of rum and brandy they also pack animals with them for additional meat they have horses. I think the horses were more so for riding. I want to say, maybe not so much for meat. It depends on the situation you're in.

Yeah, I guess. Cattle, sheep, goats, which we'll talk about one in particular. The goat. The goat of goats. Pigs, chickens, geese, ducks, peacocks, cast to take care of the rats, and they also brought the animals in breeding pairs. So when they would stop on an island that had enough resources to support animals living there, they would release

the breeding pairs on these places, so that way, during future voyages, people would have something to stop in and eat. And for the local populations, this was in a word bad. Yes. Because these were very invasive species that would completely throw

off the ecosystems that they were using to survive. There are only certain species on certain continents or islands on this planet, because they were brought by explorers like this and dropped off to be a food source for later explorers and when they came to colonize a place. Animals that exist on certain continents were not on those continents all the time.

And that I think every continent has several animals that were not native to that that were simply brought over. Yeah, if you wonder how pigs get into a place like Tahiti, it didn't swim. Hawaii. Why do you think pork is such a thing in Hawaii? Before we go any further on this, let's take a bathroom break. Okay. Well, hello. Listen, while we had to the restroom and get ourselves,

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If you have any recommendations, you want to get to us, just want to reach out and say hello. You can hit us up on our email at Historically High Podcast, H-I-G-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-EH-H-ROTCAT. All right. And with that said, let's get back to the good stuff. Okay, so we're set in sale. We got August 26th, 1768, H-MS-EVEVER, 73 sailors, 12 Marines, bunch of nerds ready to go find some stuff. One problem.

The captain's quarters. I mean, there's not a captain, but I would assume it would go to James, J.C. Yeah, you'd think that Cook would get the captain's quarters, seeing as he's technically the captain of the ship at this point in time. But no. Now, Joseph Banks goes ahead and kicks him out of the cabin and moves all of his shit in there. And this becomes basically the scientist quarter. slash just banks hangout.

It also does have all of the scientists staying in there as well. Yeah. So, I mean, maybe Cook. He's like, you know what? I'll go down and take the room that was supposed to be just for you. That's completely fine. You have this. I'm sure there was more of a discussion than that.

It's one of those things, though, where if you're already the nine dignified guys on here that probably don't fit in, if you're one of the guys that doesn't look like the other, or maybe sectioning yourself off to a captain's cabin away from the rest of the guys probably isn't going to ingratiate you towards the rest of the crew. If you say, hey, I don't want to sleep around you, you stink. Same time. You're saying bank saying that. Just any of the scientists.

Of course, there's going to be a rift between the guys that don't want to sleep next to you. Oh, there's going to be a rift regardless because you're sitting there and you have guys that were raised, you know, the sailors are guys that come from modest means. Yeah. Even, you know, the officers probably aren't, they're working while they're there. And then you have the scientists, which are going to be people from like banks or kind of a bank's, I guess we would say, like status or something like that. There's already going to be a rift there like socio, like a socio, what would I say?

Economic rift or like a station? Yeah, it's already going to be different. I do like the fact that the crew was pretty much on board with Cook from. in the beginning, because as you'll see, if you ever go in and, like, look at Cook's journal entries, he's the most bland guy in the world. There's no flowery language. There's no trying to puff anything up. He's speaking the same language that these sailors are because he's not one of those guys that went to preparatory school. No, he was in the merchant navy. Like, those are the guys that you're going to hear some shit from. He knows how to speak straight to these guys.

and taking from all of his knowledge that he had crossing over in the penrose and seeing everybody get scurvy, he understood that he needed a very, very healthy crew. So why we have the three tons of sourcrow, why we have the raisins, and why we have such a variety of stuff, because that was also thought to combat scurvy because different foods have different things that you need. So having like a wide variety was something that he pushed for as well. even as much to say that when they went down to Madeira, which is an island off Spain,

I believe Spain or Portugal. And they pulled in there because they were going to re-up on some of the stuff. That's also where you kind of get your first understanding of the capabilities of the ship out on the open ocean. So if you're going to need to repair something or kind of patch something up, you're going to want to do it in a place like Madeira

without having to turn around. They end up picking up more beef, chickens, 3,000 gallons of, wine, 2,000 pounds of onions, 10 tons of fresh water, and a steer to be slaughtered at a later date for fresh beef. Also, Banks goes ahead and jumps off on Madeira, Portugal, a place that they've been to a million times. And over six days, he collects 700 specimens. Of what? This is the first stop. Everybody that has come to this place has seen the shit that you're picking up. You grab that off the street. You're still in Europe, bro.

Calm down. We're not going to have enough room. Did you see all the wine we just loaded up, man? Let's calm down a little bit on the specimens. Let's wait until we get a little further out. Here, have some Vino. Chill, dude. Yeah. It's going to be a long fucking journey if this is what you're going to act like every time we stop the ship. On the way to Rio de Janeiro, which is going to be their next stop, they do the crossing the equator. We talked about this during the USS Indianapolis episode. This isn't a, it's the same kind of idea as far as

you have to create or do certain things. You must pay homage to the sea god Poseidon. Yeah, and in this case, the thing was that if you had never crossed the equator before, you had to jump into the water. You had to dunk yourself in the ocean. Which. Or there was a caveat.

There was a way, I'm not sure of the gods actually kind of like, approve this, but you were either going to jump in and submerge yourself in the ocean, or you would have your alcohol ration taken away for six days? I believe so. Okay. So as far as the alcohol ration goes, the reason they pack so much booze is because in the Imperial Navy, it says that each man gets half an Imperial Pint, which is 10 ounces,

an Imperial Pint is 20. So 10 ounces of alcohol daily, half of it at noon, the other half at 6 p.m. this is an alcohol in the sense of like, oh, hey, here's a beer. I'm going to pour you, you know, five ounces of beer. This is rum or I think the brandy was probably a little bit less used. That was more fancier. But a lot of it was rum. So you're drinking at two times a day, you are drinking five ounces of hard liquor. And probably pretty heavy proof too. Yes. I would imagine this wasn't a... That's where they would do the gunpowder test, where they would do the gunpowder and then light a little bit of the alcohol to see if it would go.

and that's where we get proof. It's proof it has this amount of alcohol in it. Really? I thought we've discussed this before. No, but that's fascinating. Yes, if it's flammable and it lights, that's the proof that it's a high enough alcohol content. That's awesome.

I just blow the fuck out of your mind right now. Okay, I'm happy. I love doing that. So, rum ration. What they would also do is they would mix the rum with fresh water to make it last a little bit longer. Like once they already had it, they went like watered down their room. This was where you get the term grog. Grog is watered down rum.

Weird. So you would have guys that were like trying to hoard their rum rations so they could just get even more shit face than taking a shot of five ounces would get you. But there was also this thought process that alcohol somehow, it wasn't like, hey, we're just going to get guys wasted on the ship twice a day. It was, this is beneficial for the health of these sailors. Yeah. I'm still trying to bring my mind back here. how's that how didn't get anything done especially the fact that you're portioning it out

you're going five at lunch and then five at night wasn't there an 11 year old kid on this is like the cabin boy or something like that and I'm sure he's not getting a rum ration but you got like 18 year old kids that are just slugging these glasses of rum also the voyage is so long you're going to have those rations two years in you brought enough rum that you're going to have 10 ounces per man

they didn't fuck around with their rum calculations can you imagine though that's like a balancing act because that also has to be something to where that puts the crew in a mindset to be a little bit easier to placate like keeps them a little bit more placid but you're walking this fine line

because one or two more ounces and then they get fucking angry and they start questioning this shit they start falling off the ship there's a million different problems and that's why they were so like strict about like no one gets to steal it no one takes any extra, no one hoards their stuff, because it would lead to instances like that.

Yeah, I don't know if you have it marked out, but there's a guy who gets like quadrupled the rum rations later on in the voyage and he drinks himself to death. There's always that chance. Two guys in the jungle do that too, remember? Yeah. Kind of a combination. So, uh, is they're leaving Madeira, they do suffer their first loss. I guess you would say, uh, one of the sailors got.

his foot tied up in one of the ropes and got yoinked overboard. So just a little PSA, if there's ever loose rope on a ship, avoid it. Yeah. It's the classic thing that happens in like some type of sailing movie where I just see the guy throw the anchor over and there's the coil of rope sitting there. And one of his feet is in the coil. And they just sit there and watch it and goes,

and then finally grabs his foot and pulls him over. Corporal punishment, very interesting approach that Cook takes because normally you would think the corporal punishment's going to be reserved for something pretty serious. The first and pretty much only major floggings that go on during this first portion of the trip is these guys get flogged for not eating their fresh beef ration for the day. Their fresh meat ration for the day. Is that fucking sauerkraut, I see, still on your plate? Oh.

Clean it. that's one of the things they hate it and I don't see how you're on a ship I understand there's other stuff to eat sourcrow probably tastes gross I don't know my palate is getting more accustomed to weird sour stuff and some of that stuff tastes really fucking good

like pickled fucking asparagus and all that kind of shit is really good yeah your taste buds usually flip about every seven years oh my god blew my fucking mind I didn't know that like a new stuff so the sourcrow is there not to be this delicious tasty treat

it's cook's way of saying, hey, I don't want all your gums bleeding and all your weak asses trying to work on this and getting sick. So you're going to eat your fucking sourcrow. And eventually it gets to the point where he's like, okay, officers, we're all eating sourcrow too because we find that if we actually eat it, then it somehow turns it into like a palatable treat or something like that. No.

And then the crew does it. If the officers are eating it, it means that it's something special. Okay. And they want whatever the officers have. Yeah. If the officers were eating dog shit, they'd be like, hmm, let's follow one of them gray hands. get into the line to get the food and they're like, what's that over there? They're like, oh, you guys wouldn't like that.

The officers, that's for the, it's sourcrow. It's for the officers. And they're like, well, no, I want some. Like, uh, I don't think you're going to like, no, give me the fucking sourcrow. All right. All right. It's like eating with a six year old, basically. 100%.

Yes. They also had, hmm, broccoli. They had a special deal here going on because they had the goat of goats on this trip with them. There were a few officers that were on this voyage that had already circumnavigated. the world, there was one very special member of this crew, and that was a goat that had already circumnavigated the world. And the reason that this goat was brought, especially on this trip, was because during the first circumventing that he went on, he never went dry, or she.

You don't want to be drinking male goats milk now that I think about it. This is a she for sure. Mail goat milk is a little sticky. You get less of it, too. But she never ran dry the entire time. So she gets loaded up. And she goes on this second circumventing of the world where you think about the entire population of England that never leaves that rock that they're sitting on there. And this goat's traveled all around the world two times and then gets to go back. The goats is a pretty big deal. But this is also something that's very important because of all the nutrients and calcium that you're getting from milk that you're able to, I'm sure, cut your tea with. So I'm not sure how this one goat was enough for all of the crew that were on board there,

but apparently she produced pretty well. Besides that, cleanliness was a major factor in this voyage. Cook told his guys that they had to basically air out their betting every fortnight. He wanted regular exercise, wanted these guys to try to stay clean. I'm sure that infection or anything like that probably wasn't even a word that they understood back then. maybe a little bit with the war and wounds and stuff like that. It was someone that they had never, like a way of going about running a ship that they had never experienced before. Scurvy was a, I think they run into this when they get to Batavia at some point.

Where someone tells them, hey, like, we usually factor in about half the crew is going to die of various diseases or scurvy. And that's just like the cost to do in business. Like, we know that. His thing was, and this is what's crazy, is nobody under. like on his like long term voyage and everything like that ever got or ever died of scurvy other things yeah scurvy other things but hey you can't fight other things with just sourcrown true can't fight malaria with sourcrown he also leaves with this note that I feel like was something of the time that actually shocked me pretty pretty deeply so that the president

of the royal society lord Morton wrote this note to cook and this is basically basically just Lord Morton talking about how he would like the Aboriginal people treated, which is interesting that he wrote this note. And I feel like it came up later because they're just going to Tahiti for this charting of Venus, basically, at this point. That's the current order that it has right now. There's going to become a situation when they're done with Tahiti that he's going to bust open. I want to say it's like Red October style where it's a little thing that he has to break open.

It's sealed. And then he sees what the new mission is. This is the Indianapolis. This is them dropping off the nuke and then heading over. So this note says, To exercise the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the natives of several lands where the ship may touch. To check the petulance of the sailors and restrain the wanton use of firearms. To have it still in the view that shedding the blood of those people is a crime of the highest nature.

They are human creatures, the work of the same omnipotent author, equally under his care with the most polished European perhaps being less offensive more entitled to his favor. They are the natural and in the strictest sense of the word the legal possessors

of the several regions they inhabit. No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country or settle among them without their voluntary consent. That was, yeah, that was the weird rule that I don't know how got how closely it got followed. But it had to be a situation where it was just like, hey, is it cool, we're here?

And they had to be like, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Conquest over such people can give no just title because they could never be the aggressors. So there was no honor in it because you would always be the dishonorable one. Yeah, that's pretty deep for these guys of this exploration era to have somebody from the Royal Society say. 1760s? Yeah, that's pretty progressive. I was pretty surprised and pretty, of course, they don't follow it.

It's good to have on paper, I guess. Yeah. No, like, totally. Like, as a rural society, we asked him not to do that. So their next stop, as we talked about earlier, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, they get there, and their boat is promptly impounded. Their boat's promptly impounded because it's a collier that was dressed up as an HMS ship that doesn't look anything like a ship. And they believe that they're all spies. They believe that they're spies that are coming down to look at the kingdom of,

Portugal. This is how like just tenuous stuff in Europe is. They have Spain and Britain have gotten into some stuff previously. So when they come down, it's kind of like, hey, did something happen from the time that we left England and Spain? Like, we're fighting now. There was always that question if something was going to happen there. And so probably not getting a ton of information, all of a sudden, this British ship that's kind of disguises something else, like a not normal British naval ship ends up showing up and they're like, so what are you guys doing here? And they're like, we're here for science. And they're like, hmm, weird.

Okay, well, come with us a little bit. And you guys, you're up north, right? You got the colonies and stuff. South America is pretty well full. We don't really need you guys down here. So there's nothing to explore because this is all ours. Like, we're going to keep going. We're going to go all the way around and then out the other side if that's cool.

They end up being allowed to leave. But it is noted that I think Cook made like some type of, of notation that he's like, just by the way, in case anyone was wondering, we could totally take this bay where Rio de Janeiro is with like six ships of the line. Yeah. So in the interest of science, if you guys want to mark this bay down, we could definitely take this. Scientifically speaking, we could take this.

And I think that's 17, we're 1760, are we 1769 now, right? Uh, yeah. Yeah, because they end up leaving. They get to Rio November 15th of 1768. they leave, what, two weeks, almost three weeks later, December 2nd, and then the ship rounds Cape Horn and heads west to Tahiti. After the Cape Horn, they end up pulling up onto, um, shit. Oh, I didn't write it down.

Is it an island? Yes. It's got a sweet name. Oh, my God. How did I not do this? because this is where the servants meet their end. Oh, yeah, this is where, okay, this is just another example of Madeira. They come inside of an island.

Banks starts getting like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, he lets them on. Teira del Fuego. Okay, that's right. Tierra del Fuego is the one that when you're going through like the Strait of Magellan, right? It's the one that's on the southern side. Yes. They don't take the Strait of Magellan on this because it's been known to be kind of tricky to navigate through it. and they end up going south all the way around Cape Horn, right?

Mm-hmm. And as they're doing that, because that island is right there, that's where Tierra del Fuego is. Banks wants to go on. He takes his servants on there and a few other guys. They end up getting stranded in a snowstorm. It starts snowing on them. Yep. And basically, they're not equipped for this.

They can't get back to the ship in time because these ships will anchor off like a mile or two miles offshore. and you're having to get road in and it's pretty involved to do this. They don't get out of the jungle. The two servants, the two black dudes end up dying, right? Dive exposure.

Dying of exposure. And then I guess the rest of his party end up living and then finding their way back to the ship. Probably because they had the two servants clothes on to. Yes. Which it's so interesting to think that they left a cold, rainy place. They went through some of the hottest water

that they were ever going to run into. And then they get down into the Antarctic area where it just gets cold as shit again and you can die from a snowstorm. Yeah. Like that's just, they're just basically bouncing in and out of the hottest and coldest places that you can think of. And they're not really prepared for cold. You would have to bring all that extra clothing too.

You would, but you're, that's the thing is they're not banking on this great southern land being a cold weather place. Yeah. At least not at first. No, not at all. Yeah, you're right. after they get through

Tierra del Fuego, their next stop is Tahiti. They arrived pretty well ahead of schedule. I want to say it was like six or seven weeks ahead of schedule. I think it was like six weeks. A guy named Sam Wallace, W-A-L-L-I-C-E, had landed and discovered, European discovered, Tahiti

in 1767. So just a few years prior, but he got back in time to be able to provide the information of where it is because it sounds like Cook didn't really have a hard time finding it. No. And they were, I want to say, it was like the third ship since the original finding of Tahiti that the British had sent down there. So by the time they get there, the Tahitians are pretty well aware that there's these... Some Guiloh?

Weird whites. Yeah, these weird Guiloh that show up on their land. That just kind of sound different. Some of them sound different from the other ones. Yeah, but once you hit Tahiti, you just see this nose shoot out of the captain's quarters. And it's Samuel Banks knows as he smells the Tahitian women. out there. He's got a real predilection. He's a young,

April 13th, is the day Joseph Banks found out a lot about himself. So April 13th, 1769, marks the arrival in Tahiti. Few things down for the mission. What Cook is going to be focused on. Prepare for the transit of Venus that's going to occur on June 3rd. Build the observatory.

Build the observatory. Basically the observatory and then a fort as well, because they're going to be staying there, like you said, like five to six weeks. Established relations with the natives, so their own friendly terms. it's not a hostile environment while they're waiting, and allow Joseph Banks to basically just do his science shit. Cook had a few hard and fast rules when it comes to establish these relationship,

and they were kind of the ground rules for trading. They were the hard and fast rules for being hard and wanting to be fast. There was to be no trading with the natives unless it was authorized by one of, I think it was like three or four people that were authorized to run these trades, or if they had special exception from Cook himself. There had to be, items being traded, there were so many caveats to this. So the main trading that would be happening would be like Cook and the command

trading with like the chiefs and everything to get permission to use certain areas of land. Cook at the beginning when he's walking around, he's going around to trees and being like, hey, we need limber. Is it okay if we cut this one down and going and pointing out trees to make sure he's not cut down like a sacred tree? They're also giving gifts.

Iron nails were a huge one because these islands don't have any type of like mineral deposits to or metallurgy to make these types of things, axes, things that they couldn't make themselves, that would be really useful. So he's building that up at the same time. You have all these other sailors that are trading stuff for sex

with the local women. Turns out iron nails for sex was a straight trade in Tahiti back then. Oh, yeah, definitely. But you had to make sure that you weren't, what am I trying to say, devaluing the other trade that Cook was doing with the chief. And the chief's looking here and you give him five iron nails and he looks over and some big,

a Tahitian chick has got 10 nails in her hand. He's going to be like, well, this isn't worth very much apparently. Look at her chest, man. You don't have that. Yeah. That's why she got 10. She got five free breast. I tell me, which trees you can cut down. But I mean, they do establish pretty decent relations. Somewhat. The locals didn't take kindly to, there was one local that didn't take kindly to one of the crewmen that took a run at his wife. And there was a domestic disturbance that went on. That guy did get. flogged. There was also... Cook was willing, like, Cook was very good about, like, policing his own guys.

Yeah, well, and I think maybe this was a little bit of that Royal Society note that might have been kicking in to be like, hey, these people are people too. And it was the other way around, too, where, because locals, you know, natives have never seen a lot of these guys. They're interested in stuff they have. They would go and just try to, like, steal something and then, like, run away. And one of the reasons why Cook wanted to do establish these relations with the chiefs is because going out and trying to find these things that they lost was never going to be successful. There were too many people. people too many places it could be hidden. Yeah. What he could rely on is he could go to the chief and be like,

hey, this was taken. Can you please get this back? And they'd be like, yeah, I can totally get this back for you. And nine times out of 10, they would be able to do so. And on that 10th time, when they weren't able to do so, they would take the chief hostage and hold him hostage until the people that stole the things would come forward and train him back to the chief. But you also had the chiefs trying to police their people. And then Cook was able to go ahead and also police his people when they were in acting right, according to his guidelines, they would be punished for it. Yeah.

I'm not trying to say that in a super benevolent way. I'm just saying, at least there is some accountability on their side as well, that they're not just able to do whatever the fuck they want. And then there was, it seemed like he had a, Cook had like a one shooting per meeting rule.

Shortly after the, Deskpot per meeting. Pretty much, yeah. So shortly after they get there, there's, one of the Tahitians ends up sneaking into camp and steals a musket, and he ends up getting shot. Get shot,

gets killed. It didn't happen often. I don't really want to shine a light and say that that's a good thing because they definitely did kill some Tahitians. They definitely will kill some Maori and some Aboriginal people. But at the same time, it was kind of like, okay, everybody gets one per meeting. If something goes funny, you're allowed to shoot one of them. If you shoot two of them, I'm going to shoot you.

But if you shoot one of them... assign the guy. He's like, is it whose turn? It's Simon's turn. Yep. Simon, you're the shooting guy. Yeah, not a great policy as far as trying to treat the locals with respect and all that. But at the same time, I would say that there was a little bit of maybe restraint. I hate the bias that we have on this because we have we have talked about so many just complete, heinous douchebags that are just indiscriminate with it. So we have to almost like, when it's just like, oh, one person per negotiation. I mean, that's pretty. admirable. It gets a cookie. You ain't getting the whole bag.

I know, but the way we have to talk about is just like, oh, it's only one. Okay. Somehow one is still good in this chart. Yes. Yeah, we get to the point to where they finally run up to needing to measure this transit of Venus. The transit proved pretty difficult with the time just based upon where the shadow is. How are you looking at the sun? I made my piece with that. No, no, I know you did, but we talked about this. Well, I'm not going to try to get too far into the weeds on it.

But, okay, we do have telescopes because at this point, Newton has already designed the telescope, right? Yep. Okay. But you still, this isn't like, hey, we're going to record this, then play it back, take out the glare, and you're able to see it. Someone has to be watching this. It's not we can just aim the telescope at the sun, and then if no one looks through, we're going to be able to do this. There's probably several people watching, and watching this little thing, travel. You're watching directly at the sun.

How are you even able to tell the little black thing in front of it was just going blind? They were like, okay, we're all going to draw straws out of these nine scientists or Banks was probably out of it. And they're like, who's going to have to look? Short straw ends up having to look. They describe it and they go about the rest of their lives with just blind spots in their eyes. Well, yeah. How do you know that it's the black spot that you're seeing is Venus and not just your vision going? Yes.

But didn't we also talk? four black spots. There's four venuses? So the problem with this somehow that it was possible to look into the sun was the shadow of Venus would get to the sun prior to the actual crossing of the planet.

So as far as the when it gets there and then when it departs the sun that they were magically looking at they're like, it's a little fuzzy. We can't really tell. You're like, no shit, it's fuzzy. You're trying to look at the sun. It got to the point where because they didn't know that it wasn't successful.

they probably had an idea where it was just kind of like, okay, did you, what do you guys think about it? They're like, that was kind of hard to see. They didn't know how much it didn't work until they got back and all three of the different readings went to go put in their information. Be like, what did you have for this time? And it was way outside the, what am I trying to say here, the margin of error that they could actually chalk it up to. So it ends up kind of being a bust as far as the information from the transit on that occasion. But love happens. because prior to actually casting off, two men go missing and attempt to hide themselves on the island with the wives that they've taken from this tribe

and instead of having to go search for the guys basically goes up to one of the chiefs and he's like, hey man, this is kind of embarrassing but we lost two of our guys. We think they're up in the hills with a couple of your women. Can you get them down? He talks to the men in the village and they're like, oh, fuck, yeah, we'll get the white guys off the island.

give us 15 minutes. They end up finding these guys marching them down to the beach. These guys get put back on the ship and are promptly have the ship flogged out of them. I can't imagine that these guys weren't sunburnt 24-7-2.

Coming from England with that fair skin down to Tahiti. But you're also working your way down and as a sailor you've probably been in a position where you've been traveling a little bit. I'm not saying that it wasn't probably a real thing. I just think as you're working your way down,

you're getting Tanner as you move moved down there. Getting a base. You're working on a base, yes. There was a designated time during the day when everyone had to lay out on the deck. Then they ring a bell, everyone turned over, and it was simply just to prevent sunburn.

Oh, that was kind of an interesting thing. So I think you had the oil. Yeah. Yeah, they were using the animal fats that they weren't allowed to eat and just slathering on themselves. Ooh, is that tallow? They did say part of the diet was,

and the sailors were pretty pissed off about this. They weren't allowed to take the ends of the bread that they were given and dipped them into the pots that had the animal fats in them because they thought, or there was a belief that the fats would actually clog something, your mineral absorption. So they weren't allowed to do that. And that was kind of like a favorite pastime, which I'm sure was probably a pretty hearty thing to be dipping bread and fat and eating.

Do we want to talk about the Earl's sandwich? I know this is getting ahead of ourselves. Not really because Banks and him were buddies. Okay. What's his real name? Did you get his real name written down? He's the Earl of Sandwich. He's the Earl of Sandwich.

This guy, there's a reason it's called a sandwich, because purportedly, this guy, one night, and he's high up in the, he's an Earl. So he got a craving one night, came down and took a piece of, like, pork or some type of meat, put it between two pieces of bread, and voila, the sandwich was born. Also say that he liked to play cards

and during his long stretches of playing, he would actually have these sandwiches brought out so he wouldn't get his hands all dirty and he could just eat them as he was playing. Such bullshit. He's the first person. I don't ruin this for me. Their mission's done.

They've ham-handedly marked this transit of Venus and now it's time for the red envelope. Okay, we're going to break it open, drum roll, all that kind of stuff. Cook. opens the sealed orders. What does it say? Find Terra Australis.

Yeah, he's going to find this massive southern continent that's supposed to counterweight the northern hemisphere. In order to do that, he kind of gets a hand because there's this local Tahitian mariner named Tupia that offers to go with them. And this might be the most fascinating thing that I learned about this. I had a pretty good idea of it, I think,

talking about the history of Australia when we did that, but the Polynesians were the greatest mariners there were. Oh, yeah. They traveled to all of these places and all these different oceans, and Tupia is going to become pretty important because he's able to understand

that most of these languages that are going to be spoken on these islands are Polynesian root in origin. It's something that's going to, especially it kicks in, I think when he realizes the most, is when they make it, because he's traveling around to these islands. And he's kind of at this point, he's going to be island hopping a little bit.

They're going to go through these things called the Society Islands. It's like Tahiti, Bora Bora. There's a couple other ones that are kind of within that same area. He's just kind of hopping between those on his way to go try to find this southern land. When he gets to, during the third voyage, when he gets to Hawaii, and there's that distance between the areas where he was out of the Society Islands and up to Hawaii. And when he gets there, Tupia is the one, is it Tupia? Or is that the different interpreter?

Omaha. Oh my. Oh my. But Omai is still speaks Polynesian is still from somewhere within that society island area and is able to communicate because of the shared certain linguistics of the Polynesian people. Cook's going to be like, holy shit. Like we sailed thousands of miles and a common people, common enough to still have the rooted language to be able to understand each other, have populated this entire swath of the Pacific. It's nuts. Yeah. Makes me jacked up to do like a Polynesian people's episode.

It's going to be so big. It's going to be awesome, but it's going to be so big. That's what I'm starting to kind of realize. Yeah. The reach that they had. There was a, I think it was a podcast that I was listening to where the guy, he was some sort of expert and he pitched the idea that it wouldn't have been out of the realm of possibility for the Polynesians to show up in England.

at some point that was just how far they could sail yeah and Tupi is the one that's kind of leading them towards all of these islands because as a former mariner this guy had been to all of these different places in this area so it wasn't

like Cook was going do south 40 degrees we're going to steam that way for three days and see if we hit something Tupi is kind of guiding him by the star navigation that he was never taught it was just something that he had to learn on his own to get to places.

Passed down during his people like this is the direction, you know, this is what you aim for at this time of year or whatever. So they set sail for terrorist, Stralis July 13th. They're claiming these other local islands, which again, the Royal Society said, hey, you probably shouldn't be doing that. But I'm going to call the Society Islands. Yeah. How about that?

We'll name them after you. You don't want us to take claim, but if we name them after you, you have to take them, right? We now know them as like French Polynesia, right? Yep. Okay. the endeavor reaches a latitude of 40 degrees after 2,000 nautical miles in finding nothing. They are down in an area where this terrorist, Stralis should be, and they are not finding anything. But the same gentleman that discovered Van Demons land or found Van Diemen's land after it was already inhabited and found New Holland after it was already inhabited had charted New Zealand as well.

So they start to head west to see if they can hit New Zealand. Which is nuts to me. We're looking at an image right now of his first voyage. So once they get around the Cape of Good Hope and South America, Cape Horn. I always mix those two up, Cape Horn. I think I said Cape of Good Hope even earlier in the episode. Cape Horn, sorry.

Wait, are we sure? Yes. Okay, Cape Horn, yes. As they go around Cape Horn, they don't just go straight west. they actually kind of go northwest before even going more northwest. And then as they kind of figure, hey, it's probably getting a little warmer here. We need to be heading a little bit more south. They kind of start working their way south again.

And they end up finding their way to New Zealand. My point being on that, New Zealand had been charted to a degree. At least they knew that it was there. But they hadn't really charted or done anything on the east coast of Australia. Yeah. And that to me is kind of weird because you're going further east to get to New Zealand. You just have to then go back the other direction and start heading north. But again, that's probably an insanely huge undertaking for long sea voyages like this.

So it sounds much easier to just say, hey, that could have been simple. Well, and if you look at the route and I'm sure we'll post these, there's definitely some jets one direction or another where it feels like it's sort of a stabbing motion trying to run into something. Their whole main goal in the way that they're traveling now is just to try to hit a big landmass. They're not going for any direct exact site. It looks like. Serpentine. Serpentine.

Pretty much. They end up reaching New Zealand, October 6th, 1769. They become the second group of Europeans to ever reach New Zealand. They land in a place called Poverty Bay. And the next day, they have some very rough encounters with the Maori. But this is where we get the first documented sighting of the Haka. This is where you get the Maori people coming out to try to scare away the Europeans that had shown up. It should have scared the fucking shit out of them.

Yeah. And they did have some cannons on the ship. I want to say they had six cannons, like six, six pound cannons. And they had a few swivel guns that were like one pounders or something that they could mount onto some of these smaller boats that they had with them. but for use in defending the ship. Didn't they keep the cannons down on the hold so it didn't counterweight the top part of the ship? Yeah, they kept it bottom heavy

so it would make it more stable, but they could bring them up because they were small enough to move. Yeah. So maybe a strike on Cook's record here in his journal, he said that these first rough encounters there were shootings of four or five locals. He didn't even take enough time to count

the exact number of locals that were shot. It goes, so it was October 6th when they got to New Zealand. Zealand, right? Yes. So the initial interactions with the Maori, the first one, one was killed. Second interaction, one killed, three wounded. Next interaction, four killed. So this, it's not good. It's not great from the start. Oh, they also did leave with a fair amount of gonorrhea from Tahiti as well. Oh, yeah. Which hilariously in Cook's journals, he doesn't chalk it up to the Tahitians of the Englishmen. he chalked it up to a Spanish boat that he traveled there before. You sons of bitches.

And it turns out it wasn't even an STD, was it? It was something else. Yeah, I don't think it was full-blown gonorrhea, but that's what they, they knew what the word was. It was close and it was gonorrhea adjacent or something that caused the same symptoms. But yeah, I don't think it was from the locals, actually. 15th, it's more native shot. But after that, the following encounters get a little bit better.

They end up pulling into Anara Bay and Talaga Bay, more peaceful. And it was more peaceful because Tupia was basically their interpreter. They traveled this 2,000 plus nautical miles that we were talking about. And then up to New Zealand, and this Polynesian root language was just close enough to where he could interpret. He also drew some pictures that are pretty funny to look at. It's like a Maori person handing them like a langestine. a lobster or something like that, and then the white man giving them something back. Turns out that the first thing that they traded with the Maori were the fabrics that they

had gotten from Tahiti. Yeah. So it wasn't even anything English that they were given them. Yes, the Tahitian blend. They were trading up. Like, they brought a paper clip down from England. Then they got themselves a pencil and then they got themselves a bike for the Maori. So at a certain point around this time, they start using grape shot in their muskets.

So instead of using a actual just solid iron muskets. musketball or whatever, they would put just little pieces of metal in there to fire out because they were less lethal. Now, Grape shot when we talked about it during the Napoleon episode, when you're finding grape shot out of a cannon, the small things are actually about the size of a musketball that you're firing out. These are basically just to scare or kind of wound. It's basically like it's a salt gun is what they think it is. It's an English salt gun. A little bit more like birdshot and shotgun shell, but because these rifles are very inefficient as far as far as. as like the force being created by the explosion,

the range on them isn't there. That's why the aiming on them isn't, you know, great. But if you were to take loose shot and put it down there, when you light that thing off and that explosion happens that propels that out, you're already losing energy by all of that being able to get through the nooks and crannies at the shot it's pushing out. So it pushes it out at less of a velocity.

I'm trying to sit here and make it sound like it's, eh, it's more humane and they're just using shotguns at this point. But I think what happened after those first encounters, he's like, we gotta stop fucking killing these people. Like, there's got to be a better way to do this. We'll just shoot them with tinier bullets. Let's get back on this one person, one shot system that we had going on before. That seems a little bit better than four or five at a time.

These groups would eventually accept this free trade. They allowed the collection of all the needed food supply from the islands. Because, again, they're stalking up on as much fresh stuff as they can to try to fight off and stave off scurvy. And they're finding new stuff that does that, like local plants and things like. that are able to provide some of this stuff that's keeping them healthier. Yeah, they have an unfortunate stop in Mercury Bay where there was another Maori that was killed after a trade dispute. Also in Mercury Bay, they map the transit of Mercury, which somehow is far less important than the transit of Venus. It's even a smaller planet. What are you doing?

Yeah, it just doesn't really seem necessary at that point. I think that might have been maybe a try to get back good with the Royal Society. Like, hey, we didn't get Venus right, but we nailed Mercury. We did two of them incorrectly. we couldn't see two of them clearly. Just so we know it's just not Venus, we also experienced the same thing with Mercury. Did find out, though,

sun's pretty hard to look at. This is where also, like, you're going to start getting horoscopes out of, like, well, we found that actually Mercury was in retrograde at this time, and so that's why the captain was feeling sad. Coke was the first astrologist. They claimed that bay, of course, because, again, we're talking about a time

when they weren't supposed to be claiming these things, as they left that bay, they cheered, they drank a bottle of wine, and then they just gave one of the Maori the bottle of wine, and apparently they said he was pretty pumped about getting an empty bottle of wine.

They said sail from the North Island after that. They almost run in, this is wild. They almost run into a French ship. They were about 50 miles away as the French ship was headed south. And the reason the friendship was headed south is probably in large part to the fact

that they just lost a fair amount of land in the seven years war, and they would like to get some land mass back for France. That boat ends up sinking. Everybody on the crew ends up drowning. Luckily, that doesn't happen to the Denver. Not having anything to do with the... No, they're just completely separate. They end up circumventing the northern...

Wow. Circumnavigating. Different word. The Northern Ireland. They proved it wasn't connected to terror... Parerastralis, January 31st, they claim Queen Charlotte's Sound in these surrounding islands in the name of King George III. So mid-January, he actually has to beach the ship for refit and maintenance.

So this is something that they have to do from time to time, and it's where they basically beach it. They try to get as much access to the hole, and they're basically like recalcing everything that they possibly can to make sure it's still watertight. They're putting tar. Yep. Putting tar all over the. the bottom of it to even make it more watertight to make it more resilient to the salt water and

everything. I'm trying to remember what else they're doing to it. I think they have to do some patching of some of the sails and everything. But yeah, they're like, you know, just the reason that he chose this type of ship is they're able to do this kind of stuff. But this is something they are going to have to do from time to time to basically just keep this thing seaworthy. Yeah. At this point in time, they're figurating these islands, just looking to see if there's any connection to New Zealand to Terra Estralis, they end up finding nothing. They do find the Cook Strait. Well, it's now known as the Cook Strait.

Yeah. It's the Strait of water between the North Island and South Island of New Zealand. I want to say it's February 7th. They depart that bay that you were sitting. What was it? Queen. The Sound. Yeah.

Queen Charlotte Sound. Queen Charlotte Sound. To circumnavigate the South Island and then also go and do the rest of the north. Because they came in at a search. point where they weren't at the very southern, southeastern tip of the island. So they went up north all the way around. Then they actually kept going. I don't believe they went through the straight.

They kept going down. They knew the straight went all the way through. And then after they got done with the south island, they went up a little bit to kind of close the circuit, I guess you would say. Yeah. At this point in time, knowing that New Zealand is south of New Holland, there's probably not a connection down there. They haven't found this great southern continent that they're looking for.

There's not enough land mass here to be considered the great southern continent. I think it took them up until March 27th to complete the survey or the circumnavigation of New Zealand. Yeah, and after that happens, then Cook goes and he sits down to his officers and he goes, all right, guys. We can head home. We've got three options here. We can head home. We can go back around Cape Horn, the same way that we came, and we can go back up that way.

we can continue traveling on. We can go up to the Cape of Good Hope. We can go around Africa and go back up that way. We will be fighting winter weather going either one of these directions by the time we get in there. That's probably not going to be great. What we can do is we can head due north and we could maybe see what's up with the eastern side of New Holland that hasn't been charted yet. Yeah. We'll head a little bit to the west at that point from where we're at right now.

Yep. And I think it was on April 19th is when the East Coast of Australia was actually spotted. Yeah, pretty crazy that the Dutch just decided to not do the East Coast. They weren't really colonizing it either. No, they just, I don't even think they made land in Australia. I think that they just spotted it and claimed it for New Holland and did a little cartography. That's ours as they just pass it. Yeah.

Pretty much. April 29th, this is when they make landfall at Botany Bay. And going ashore, they find out that these natives, surprise, surprise, are not a fan. How can you not like us? This part is so funny for me, just because you see the ego in these guys and being European and feeling like they're superior. In Botany Bay, they do run into two fairly angry Aboriginal men that are tossing spears and cook in his good nature. says, well, I'm going to load some grape shot up in my pistol. I'm going to fire this at the older man at his feet to see if I can scare him off.

He miscalculated just to fuzz with the grape shot and ended up shooting the guy in the leg, which pissed the guy off even more. And then there was a second shot that was fired up in the air where the two aboriginals just ran back into the forest. That was their first kind of major finding with the Aboriginal people that maybe they were little bit hostile. And then things take a turn because as they begin running into these other Aboriginal groups, they just want nothing to do with them. Yeah.

We're good. We're good here. They expected to walk in and be these wonderful sites to see that all these Aboriginal people wanted to hang out with and wanted to trade with and figure stuff out, like where they were from. We were like the Tahitians loved us. Uh-huh. The Maori, a little bit cold at first. the relationship was a little bit strained, but hey, we came to some good terms, we met some ones that we liked.

What's wrong with you guys? You don't like us? You won't even talk to us. Do you know where we're from? Yeah. Look at these buttons. My jacket has buttons. Interestingly enough, though, their interpreter, I can't remember his name now, didn't speak the local language. The Polynesian influence had a Well, and it's, I'm assuming because from the Australia episode, we kind of found out that they came south from Indonesia. More of an Asian ancestry than a Polynesian ancestry. Their time was pretty nuts there.

So as Chris was talking about just in Botany Bay, when they finally do get there. Banks goes ashore. He goes to shore with Parkinson and the other scholastic gentleman. He's sitting there and he's looking around and he's looking in the bay and he sees a bunch of stingrays and he's writing in his journal and he writes Stingray Bay. Botanist Bay sounds better. Botany Bay. Let's go Botany Bay with this place because this place is so green and lush and beautiful that he writes that it would be habitable for an English colony. So he still has a little bit of...

I think he said it'd be great for an English penal colony. Yeah, well, he didn't say penal yet. But he thought that this would be a pretty habitable place. I believe we talked about Botany Day. Can totally send prisoners prisoners here. Pretty heavily during the Darwin episode. I believe that was another place that Darwin went into kind of check out, look around. I think that was our first mention of Botany Bay, aside from the Australia episode, I think.

Yeah. They spent a week in Botany Bay and Banks was just collecting specimens. Oh, he's in Hog Heaven. Yeah. They were finding everything, anything and everything that they could. document they were finding at this point. June 11th, 1770 during the night as they've moved on north from Botany Bay. This is where I would say that Cook probably made the first discovery of anybody, maybe.

Because during the night on June 11th, the endeavor hits the Great Barrier Reef. Okay, there's a difference here between discovering it. and being able to go and then report what you found versus discovering it and it sinks your ship and you die and then nobody knows about it. Yeah, he might not have been the first one to discover the Great Barrier Reef. Don't think he's the first guy to run aground on the Great Barrier Reef. Definitely not. And this is that shallow hold ship that we're talking about as they're going on through the night. Cook has basically stayed up and he's watching the area. He's watching along the coast. They're trying to chart these rocks and his human depth finder that's dropping the lead weight in the rope is yelling out

numbers as he's dropping it back and it goes from I think it was like 35 to 20 to 17 to 16 and then there's just a crash yeah because the great bearer reef it extends a great distance out from the Australian coast that's where you have all of like the coral and all that kind of stuff. And this is normally where these guys are used to kind of sailing. It's like, oh, this is land. Well, we're safe out a certain distance because we don't really run into underwater shit out here. It's a pretty steep drop off. They ran into the biggest underwater shit in the world. Exactly. And they're stuck. And the longer they stay stuck, and they're at high tide, I believe right now. So that's the worst part. To get stuck somewhere on high tide is the

worst case scenario. Because that's as far as you're going to float at that point. And And as the tide starts to lower, more and more of that weight on the ship is being taken off of the water and being put directly onto those rocks and that coral. And this stuff is just shredding the bottom of this boat. And so Cook is like, okay, we need to lighten the shit out of this. So next high tide, it'll actually float us off this. So he has them unload all of the cannons. And the amount of stuff that they had, you know, dumped off and everything, I heard that first. And so I was like, how are they dumping off this amount of supplies and having anything left?

40 to 60 tons. 40 to 60 tons of stuff that they were able to lighten the load on this boat. But looking back on what they actually had here, you know, they were probably just dumping out some of their bread, also some of their wine, maybe some of the, you know, beef or something like that. But as they're unloading this stuff, you just hear, bloosh. And as they're doing this, they're also taking the lifeboats out. or not the lifeboats, but like the smaller skiffs and everything. And they have ropes and they're trying to pull this thing. They're also trying to plant an anchor, like out further to where they can then try to pull the anchor and pull themselves toward it.

Yeah, they had these just rudimentary win or winches on board to try, they were just hand driven. So by the time, high tide comes around the next time, they are able to get the boat to float. I'm sure it sounds really horrible as it continues to scrape along it until they're able to get out into deeper water. 23 hours they were stuck on the Great Barrier Reef because they were waiting for high tide again. Kind of the interesting thing that came across to me is they had to offload a bunch of other shit because they had these hand bilge pumps that were down where the hole was

and they were pumping out water. But they had to get enough displacement to if they had three feet of water that was down in the hole weighing them down, they had to get rid of three feet's worth of weight And at a certain point, I think they had a total of four feet of water that was filled up in the hold. But this was a time where officers didn't do this shit. Officers weren't down there running the building. Except for Cook.

Cook was down there with his sleeves rolled up working next to his sailors to try to make this happen. Motherfuckers, if all of us sink the same. We're all dead if this doesn't work. So I'll pitch in a little bit. So they're able to get it off and they have a hole that they're able to determine a bunch of waters coming in. So they do this thing called father. Sweet. And what they do is basically they take one of the sails and a couple of guys swim down and swim under the boat and drag this thing and then bring the ropes up on each side of the boat.

You're basically putting on a surgical mask is the way that it was described and it makes perfect sense. A surgical mask that's covered in pitch and tar and water can't penetrate. And you would get it. What happens is you would get it and on the inside of the boat because it would be slowing down the amount of water. You'd be sealing that hole and they had a weight of sealing stuff where they would have ropes that were soaked. in like pitch and tar, that they would then coil into holes. And because it was a rope, you could form it and make it into certain shapes and everything, they were able to get this thing patched up enough that they got back to a section of Australia

and ended up beaching the ship. Mouth of a river. Yep. They became the Endeavour River. Yep. They also got lucky as shit, too, because there was a giant chunk of coral that got stuck in the holes. Yes, on one of the sections that actually plugged it up as well.

There was already, they used nature's cork, basically. to limp it in there. So June 16th is when Cook is able to get the ship to a beachable spot. And because they're only able to get a certain portion or amount of the ship up on the beach, you can't get it completely out of the water because then at no point are you going to get it back in the water. Yeah. So you have a section of it that's out of the water. They can access that.

And they do as many repairs as they can take seven weeks for them to enact these repairs, enough to where they're like, okay, we have. having maybe an idea where we're at. We got to try to get to some place where we can make more extensive repairs, a dock or something like that. But this is as good as it's going to get for us to be able to get there. There's also this weird mission, I think, that you would have to have, too, because I believe shooting from the hip on this one, too, I think they said it was like 80% of the boat was made of oak. There's three different types of wood. Very hard wood, though. And different things were made out of different wood. Like the deck was made out of

of a certain type of wood because it could be lighter, but you didn't need it to be strong because it wasn't structurally holding the water getting damaged. The masts were made out of a certain type. I believe that had something to do with the fact that those masks are all one piece. So there's only certain trees that grow to the size and shape that you would be able to make a mast. And it would have to be something that has a certain amount of flex to it, not a solid hard wood. And then you're getting something that is more of a hardier wood and resist water and damage more to actually build the sides of it

in the bottom of your boat. So there's got to be a fair amount of trial and error going into the forest to try to find hard enough wood that you're going to be able to patch. You're trying to find anything you can at that point. Yeah, possibly. And then you're having to actually like shave it and plane it down and get it into planks and stuff that you're able to use, which is even nuts that, you know, you have carpenters on the ship that are doing this stuff. You have the ability to do that. It's just wild. Upon leaving, they did, they were fairly people.

peaceful with the locals the entire time. It was mostly peaceful. Nothing went wrong. That was until they were getting ready to leave and there was an overabundance of green sea turtles that the people of the area, the Aboriginal people thought of a sacred and they were just pulling these boys out of the water by the flipper and throwing them on the boat to go eat. So as they were leaving, the Aboriginal people were pretty excited to see him go. There were some gunshots that were fired at that point in time, too, to try to keep the aboriginals from going on to the boat and fucking with the turtles. Yeah.

Sea turtle fucking season. And so much of this too is because there's that language barrier that's popped up to where, I mean, what are you going to do? Just be like, oh, these guys are your gods. Miming eating, stop. Yeah. Yeah, Tupia is not any help at this point in time. He's like, I don't know.

I think they're mad about the turtles, maybe. You guys want to stop eating the fucking turtles? They seem pretty upset about it. They're so good, though. So after leaving Australia, they're able... No, no, not yet. Okay. Because after they patch it, they get the first sighting of a kangaroo.

Oh, is that when they cite it? This is the first time that Banks writes about seeing a kangaroo, and it's like the first European knowledge of these things. And the word kangaroo is just the pronunciation of like what Banks' pronunciation of it is. but the name itself is like kangaroo or something like that. How do you describe that the first time you're writing it down? I think he said that it had the agility of a hair but looked like a deer. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of like, but it went on two legs.

And how many times do you think after they saw the first one that they made an attempt to try to bring one onto the ship life? Many. There's a lot of dudes that got chaoed and kicked by a kangaroo trying to get on board. There's someone that got it right in the gut from one of those things. It did say that they ate some kangaroo while they were down there too, which I've heard. So they did get one on the boat. Pretty tasty. Well, it may not have made it to the boat before.

They probably had to dispatch it before they got a hold of it. I mean, the boat was on the bank. True. Very true. So yeah, August 3rd, they launched back and they have to now navigate through the Great Barrier Reef again. Yeah, they take it wide. So, well, they have all those little boats that are carrying the anchors that are basically, they're placing the anchors out to where they can winch themselves through this core reef to not get caught again. Which is why it takes so long for them to end up getting to Batavia.

Yeah, and it's not like it's a nice, quiet day. There's winds, swirrels. You're constantly in a fight to keep this thing where you need it to be. Yeah, you're basically going by winch power. They did say that on a few rare occasions when it was just. too sketchy to use the sails that it would blow them one way or the other, that they actually did bring out these giant

massive ores, and they rowed the endeavor out, a hundred plus foot ship. They were just rowing by hand to get them through some of these places. Just Greek tri-rimed style. Yeah. It's pretty amazing for them to get through. So yeah, it takes them quite a while.

October 13th, 1770s is when they end up rolling into Batavia, also known as, I think we called it Jakarta, was what we referred to it as during the Dutch East Indy episode. But this is Dutch controlled currently. But good thing about that, Dutchy Cindy's, at least from their perspective, is they are very used to seeing and working on ships. Well, and also we talked about it. It ain't Dutch.

It's a company that owns this area. So this isn't, this isn't England versus the Netherlands. This is England meeting up with a company to where they're not going to probably. run into any political issues. Oh, you have money? That's all you need to have. Exactly. Yeah. So it is in Batavia for two and a half months for repairs. Now, once they got it out to see the extent of the repairs, the stern damage, the rear damage. So there was a six foot length that was two and a half planks tall. So the way I, you know, when I'm looking at these ships, planks are probably what a minimum of a foot, right? Yeah, I would say, because they overlap in a

everything. So let's just say a foot. So 30 inches, 28 to 30 inches and a six foot length was ripped off. And the only thing holding it watertight, and I don't know how they plane something this thin, was an eight inch thick piece of wood that they had there that wasn't placed there by them to like repair. They didn't know about the hole, even from the inside of the ship. That was there. And then on the outside of that where they couldn't see was. this huge missing chunk. And that's what held them. Had that thing busted with that big of a... Gone. We wouldn't have heard about Coke ever again. No.

Because that thing would have gone out while they were either trying to work their way back through the reef or going up to the north of Australia. Because that's where they go. They go north of Australia between Australia and like Papua New Guinea and everything. And then as they're moving in, I want to say Jakarta is somewhere in... It's not the Philippines, right? No, it's Indonesia. Indonesia. And so that's right at the mouth right before they start entering into the Indian Ocean.

So the fact that they were able to pull in there, and from what we talked about during the Dutch East India episode, the Indian Ocean was like treacherous. She's a mean, mean mistress for sure. Yeah, so to not have that there in Batavia to repair this. Yeah, you don't hear about James Cook. No, and Cook got a little big for his bridges here because he writes a letter as soon as they get to Batavia back to England. and he's patting himself on the back. He's saying, for this entire voyage, I did not have one man get sick. Everybody on this voyage,

I mean, there were some exceptions. There was the guy that got sucked in by the rope. There was another guy that got bullied so bad. He jumped off the ship. Oh, no, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just saying he sends this day one, day two. It sounds like probably in Batavia, because this thing turns real fast.

Everybody gets malaria. Malaria doesn't give a shit about you. your letter. Malaria is not scurvy. Malaria doesn't care how healthy you've been keeping your guys when they haven't been in this jungle environment. And malaria and dysentery just wreck a pretty sizable portion of the crew. Seven people die in Batavia alone. And it's bad enough that, because they're going to have to take these guys with them to get them back, regardless if, and malaria is one of those things, doesn't it like flare up like it springs up? You have it once and then you can catch it again or it can be even more deadly.

You have symptoms that kind of go with it. I think you build up a natural immunity to it, but it also never leaves your body. So it can still cause you get sick and everything. So you can't get malaria again, but you'll be feeling it just out of nowhere. Just lingering health issues. 23 die on the way back home when they head through the Indian Ocean around Cape Horn.

Cape of Good Hope. Oh my God. I'm going to nail this one day. Cape of Cape Horn. Oh, my God. How am I not getting this? It's a 50-50 chance. You know why I know why this is so hard for me?

I can't think of an animal. This is going to sound so stupid. I can't think of an animal in South America that has horns. I think of Cape Horn because Africa itself has that little horn thing. Yeah. It also has rhinos, which have horns. Well, I believe there's also something called the Horn of Africa. There's a section that's called the Horn of Africa.

You can see it up on the map on the far left of it, up there kind of by the Middle East. Uh-huh. Okay. I'm just, it's the opposite. The Cape of Good Hope is in Africa, Cape Horn, where there are no horned animals, is going to be in South America. So they round the Cape of Good Hope is going where they end up going. But two and a half months of being here for repairs, Malarian Dissentery, when they lead, they have like 19 guys capable of actually working on the ship. Which isn't enough of a crew to where if anything goes wrong, they're going to be able to man those sails enough to keep them in.

If they're in a storm or something like that, it's going to be much more difficult to try to pull those things down or to keep them from snapping a mast or something like that. Yeah. They end up getting lucky because March 4th, 1771, they cite Africa. And 10 days later on March 14th is when they pull into Cape Town. And as they pull into Cape Town, get off the dock, kiss the land. Thank God they've made it.

And they remain there for a month. Which I'm sure their crew didn't get any bigger. they still have to load those same guys back up on to try to make it up to England. I'm not sure who was controlling Cape Horn at this point, because again, it changes hands. But unless it's the Brits, yeah, what are you pulling guys from? If the Portuguese have it, you're probably not getting them. If the Spanish have it, you're probably not getting any of them. You're not pulling them off a merchant ship.

Yeah, you may be sponsored like by the Navy or by, you know, Lord Earl of Sandwich, who I guess was actually the Lord of the Admiralty, I think is what he was. At the same time, you're not going up to an English. English worship and be like, we need 80-year guys. You're going with what you have. So they stay there. We did miss mentioning that Cook actually got malaria as well. So did Banks. Banks was able to shake it off by renting an apartment in town and quarantining and trying to feel better. Cook actually stayed in a hotel and that sweet, sweet room service probably nursed him back to health. So going back to Cape Town, they stay there. April 16th, they decided.

decided to leave for England, and they head out to St. Helene Island. We did also forget, Tupia does die of dysentery as well. Yes. So that's a bummer that Tupia goes. Also, we forgot to mention, apparently, there's this great sea tradition to where if you're out on a ship at sea during Christmas, you just get fucked up. You just get piss-ass drunk. Yeah, it wasn't just Christmas for these guys, though.

There were several occasions in which they did this. I forgot what year the Christmas was. Banks writes it in his journal And we're going to talk about it again during another one But Banks writes about it in his journal And he said that everybody on the ship was so drunk That if it wasn't a calm night They probably would have died

Because nobody was sober enough to death One of those nights, right? He drank himself to death That was the guy that was talking about Where they handed him too many rations And he just smashed it all at once But yeah Some 130 pounds soaking one guy just slamming shots of rum

30 ounces of rub You got three days rations And he just drank it all at once So St. Helene Island is also the place where they sent Napoleon, I believe, correct? It sounds familiar. So this is a English held place. And while they're at St. Helene are kind of around it, they meet up with a British convoy who's being protected by some ship of the line, English warship. And they decide, hey, you know, we don't know what the status of any of the conflicts going on in Europe are right now.

we've been away for a little while we could totally be at war with Spain or France or anything like that so we're just going to kind of hitch onto this little train where this warship can protect us and we'll sail with you guys unfortunately the ship

was slow or slower at least than the merchant ships than the warship and so they kind of got left behind I also think that's why on the map when you're looking at it for their voyage getting back they take that big ass loop from Africa and then come back up to England to try to avoid that stuff once that convoy

kind of outruns them. Yeah, and that's just it is there's a reason why eventually they're going to go back to looking for this Northwest Passage is between piracy and their hot and cold relationships with the Spanish and the Portuguese, going around Africa is just never a good idea. Yeah, it's never a given that you're going to make it through even these established trade lanes. It's going to be dependent on like sections. Like, hey, this is safe because you're coming. out of England, and we control this section. But be careful, guys, because this next run,

Spanish ships are going to be patrolling that. This next run, friendships are going to be patrolling that. So it's a crapshoot depending on who's just, you know, has vacancy or has, you know, current possession of certain areas. Well, not to mention, you're not carrying gold, but you're carrying a lot of very precious things. You're carrying a lot of maps that I'm sure the Spanish and Portuguese would be pumped about getting. And you're also denying assets. You're denying that information and that, those resources to your enemy. Yeah. Well, they still do end up making it back because on July 12th, they make their triumphant return to England.

Banks is such an asshole. He is. And before we discuss how much Banks is an asshole, let's take another bathroom break. Okay. All right, Joseph Banks, you son of a bitch. Sly, media hungry. For as much media hunger as you could get in the seven, 1770s.

Well, I mean, they're on land now. Listen, Cook ran the show when they were on the open ocean, but now that they're back on land, it's Banksy's time. Yeah, it's enough time for Banks to maybe try to rewrite this a little bit, and this wasn't the Cook voyage. This was more of the Banks voyage.

It wasn't like he was going on morning talk shows or anything like that, but any time a newspaper wanted to have an interview with Cook, he was basically singing his own praises. Unfortunately, Sidney Parkinson, his artist that he had brought, died on the way back to. He was one of the guys, I believe he actually died in Batavia. All of these beautiful pictures that he had drawn of all of this flora and fauna that he should have gotten a ton of credit for all kind of falls at the feet of Banks. Because Banks is the guy that's releasing all this information. I'm sure he mentions Parkinson a time or two.

but as far as the credit for all of these findings, Banks is just... I'm the only one alive that can take credit for it. Yeah. And not only that, he is making it sound like he led this entire thing. It wasn't just the scientific aspect of it that, you know, all these samples and specimens and whatnot. It is, oh, no, as far as everybody is concerned, like, I'm also the one that kind of captained and told us where to go and kept us alive and all that shit. Which couldn't be further further truth. I mean, what in the world did he do on water that could have saved them?

Yeah. That could have led them anywhere. He showed up and I'm sure when they got to Tahiti, he probably had a nail budget that he had to go to cook to get his allotment for the week to go bang some Tahitians. But beyond collecting investments. What the fuck, Joe? I just gave you like 10, 10 nails two days ago. They did say. I don't know.

James, fuck, James, come on, man. Have you seen them? If you've seen these women, James, I know that you have a wife. I know that she's pregnant

every time you leave poor. We're all not like you, James. He would go to these dinners. I'm doing it for science, James. All these women you think I want to do this, it's for science. You think I enjoy this? I don't.

I'm doing this. Give me the goddamn nails. I'll take him out of the boat if I have to. He's going around. all of these dinners with all of these rich elites. And he's basically explaining his findings and talking about just how great of a job that he did. He's describing the kangaroo and he's having these royalty members, basically. Oh, and the taste.

You have not lived until you've had sea turtle. You have had sea turtle while Aboriginal people yell at you. Have you ever eaten sea turtle? If you ever eaten sea turtle while they were throwing a spear? at you. Cook uses this time to go home. He goes home. He spends some time with his family.

Unfortunately, he finds out that the son that his wife was pregnant with, as he was leaving the last time, had only lived a few months. He had another daughter that had passed away to. He was four. Yeah, so this, his wife is just sitting at home dealing with these deaths and then knowing that Cook may or may not come home, he finally comes home. They're happy to rekindle their relationship. And then she has to explain that they lost two kids while he was gone on a three-year voyage.

They have two older sons, I think, that are still alive. But this is going to play into before we've been discussed the second voyage. And then, yes, there was a third after that. This guy, when they got married, he went off to do the whole charting of Newfoundland and everything like that. He came back. Then they figured out this thing to go do Tahiti and the transit and all that. Now he's back. But because of, and this goes, you know, it's a repeated thing.

throughout any of our explorer episodes, is that once you come back with positive results and all of this cool stuff, the cost and what you make off of that is, you make much more off of all of that stuff than it takes you to actually fund another expedition. So why don't we fund another expedition? That's already in the works. You guys had such success with this one. Let's roll it back. Let's run it back again. Well, also, you didn't find the second part of your mission. You didn't find terror Australis. So you're going to need to go look forward again. And at the same time, do you think he's also like, hey, we didn't actually go around all of Australia? So we don't know. Or is it a situation where because the Dutch had actually already mapped that and charted that,

they were just kind of like, no, based on the Dutch records and everything, we see that this is actually an island. You just, you know, we just have this side charted. On, Also, just based upon where they look during the second voyage, they've pretty much already marked out New Holland as not being this giant southern subcontinent, or this giant southern continent. So they're going to basically, their search parameters are going to be between Cape Horn and South America and Australia. You're also probably, they're like, you didn't go far enough south. Where did you find this? Yeah, that's definitely not far enough south to balance the world. And this one arguably, I mean, everything that he did in his first voyage, I'm going to put is his most important voyage.

The second voyage, he does something that nobody's ever done before and he does it multiple times. So these kind of concepts start 1772. I mean, just pretty much as soon as they get back and find out that they didn't find Terror Estralis. The first conception of Cook's second voyage kind of starts to take shape. He gets promoted to commander. Yep. He gets a promotion. and part of the prep for the second voyage is they've got to be looking at this and saying,

well, you guys got to run the same crew, right? You got such success. You guys all made it back. With the exception of the malaria and the dysentery, you know, you were able to keep the crew mostly alive, maybe try to avoid the malaria next time. Banks is like, oh yeah, like I'll totally go on this thing. Again, I should be the one going on it, but we're going to need to go ahead and give me a little bit more control over this thing.

I'm going to actually need, you know, where the captain's, you know, where the captain's quarter is. I'm going to need to build something on top of that, like up above it that's going to be like my laboratory in my room. They get another ship. It's the same time. It's another call year and everything. Well, this is, so they have two call years this time. Interestingly enough, did you hear the lifespan of what the endeavor went on to do? Yeah, so the endeavor ended up going to serve as a prison ship over during the American Revolution. It was a troop carrier. Troop carrier. And then it also served once it got over there as a prison ship until they had to sink it at the mouth of a river to try to like deny access to a bay or something like that or access.

Rhode Island. Road Island. Right outside of our Wampanog area. It's a full circle, man. Pretty cool. Yeah. So two new ships. Both colliers.

HMS resolution, HMS Adventure. Okay. Adventure is going to be the smaller of the ships. Resolution is going to be the larger one. Cook will actually be commanding the resolution. So as they get this and Cook now knows exactly what needs to be on this ship or how the ship needs to be fitted out to make this kind of a voyage. So he is watching every little thing that's done with this thing. He's very hands-on. And during the process of constructing this thing, they decided to

build this new little cabin for Banks, take it out for sea trials, which is really good they did, and find out this thing is super top-heavy. So the Admiralty is like, you know what, Nick's that, tear it out, we're not going to do it. Well, supposedly the whole time, Banks is telling Cook what he wants to do it. It's like, it's not going to work. And Banks goes, no, it'll be fine. He goes, okay, knock yourself out. So he goes to Sandwich. Well, Banks funded the entire refitting for his area that ends up getting teared down. That's why he got permission, because they have to go to the Lord of the Admiralty, which is like Lord or Earl Sandwich. And Sandwich and Banks had, it apparently had, you know, had good standing in their relationship and everything. And after this part gets taken off the ship,

that that was his kind of condition to do it. He's like, okay, well, fine, then I'm going to need to full captain of the expedition. I'm going to need to lead the whole thing. And sandwich is just like, nah, no. He's like, well, then I'm not going. He's like, then I guess you're not going, man. Sorry. Turn in your bag of nails. Like, you, I understand from a naturalist and from, you know, a scientific standpoint, yeah, you got a lot of stuff that you brought back. But that doesn't mean dick if you can't get to where you're going. And if we're being honest, this whole next expedition, is not about finding plant samples and animals from certain islands. It is about finding this new land,

which means most of it's going to be an exploratory mission, and for that, Cook is going to need to be in control the majority of the time. You're not the only naturalist around. You guys are a dime a dozen. We can replace you in this scenario. We got a German guy that's actually just popped up that we're actually going to throw in here if you're out.

And Banks is like, okay, I guess I'm sitting this out. I'll sit here and collect my roses with Cook out of the way. I don't got to share any of the shine. I'm the only person that can tell these stories. So I'll go ahead and stay here and live it up. Good luck finding somebody else. Yeah, Cook didn't give a shit. Cook could care less about banks.

They had a fairly decent relationship, I think. I think banks respected him. Oh, no, I don't have to stop at every third island. Oh, no. Yeah, now I don't have to have an argument every time we see a landmass for him to go collect 5,000 different species of the same thing. It's the same fucking leaf. He just pulled this one off the top and this one off the bottom, man.

Calm down. Um, yeah, they end up, the other thing that they're going to do, it's kind of this grand thing besides finding Terror Australis, is they're going to use this thing called a Larkham Kendall K1 chronometer. And I would love to explain this to you. The chronometer is very detailed in how it works. Supposedly the chronometer is basically a clock that is set to this Greenwich time. and as you take it along your journeys, this time zone, or this Greenwich time will tell you how far away you are. I believe, and again, this is just shit that I don't understand,

tried to look it up, but it just got real complicated. Every longitudinal degree is separated by 15 hours. So you can tell if you're, if it's 3.30 where you are, and it's midnight and Greenwich your X number of longitude and these things worked I mean they worked for a while until they just stopped running

but for the most part when they had these things out there as long as they kept them wound and as long as they kept them dry they were pretty effective in being able to tell the time these ships had like the most advanced of the era scientific equipment on these things were these ones at the water purification systems they actually had a way to purify

water. Like small amounts, like you're not going to be just pump and seawater, but you're able to, so in a pinch, when you're running out of fresh water, no land in sight, you can try to kind of prolong the amount of time that you have to find someplace. In the 18th century, to be able to desalinate water is a pretty cool. Yeah, you wonder what the charcoal filters, something like that. But how do you get the salt out of water? I don't know. You just explained a chronometer to me, and I was just catching butterflies over there. I don't know. I still don't know if I even explained it correctly, but. If you're really interested in chronometers, which I'm sure a majority of you guys are, go ahead and look them up. They seem pretty interesting. So they're going to switch it up a little bit on this journey. So as they, and they have to have someone captaining or commanding, sorry, the adventure. That guy's name is, oh, for Mo.

For Mo, I had it written down somewhere. I should probably remember that. E-A-U-X is the end of it. Yeah. Which sounds French. Yeah, but it wasn't. Hold on. I'm going to find it maybe for no.

Yeah. So this guy last name for no. So he's going to be running the adventure. And this isn't really a situation where Cook is playing micromanager. He has an expectation. Honestly, he's like, I'm going to take two ships just in case some shit really goes down. But I don't really feel like I need two ships. They're going to offer me two.

fuck yes, I'm going to take two ships. I can just carry more shit and if I need to pull equipment off of that one I can, whatever. Just in case one of us hits a reef again, it'll be nice to have that one go ahead. That one will always stay a few hundred yards ahead of me. The communication between two ships

at that point, the fuck you do it? Do you send it pigeons? A lantern with a little cover on it? Yeah, apparently the lantern with a little cover and it didn't work because they lose each other multiple times during this voyage. And it cook really doesn't give a shit. So they decide that they're going to, Instead of going to South America and around Cape Horn,

they are going to go down the western side of Africa, and instead of turning around the Cape of Good Hope, they're just going to keep going south. Because how are you going to find the great southern land? You're just going to go fucking south, right? Yeah, it makes sense to me. So as they're going south, they get down to a deeper, that would be latitude, correct?

Yep. deeper latitude than really anybody else has been before. To the point where they actually enter, do they enter at this point or is it later on that they actually enter what's considered the Antarctic Circle? August 1st, they hit Madeira again to load up on wine, as you will, of course. September 8th, they crossed the equator. Chris described the direction of travel that they took.

December 10th, they had reached 51 degrees latitude and had the first sighting of an iceberg. So we're getting cold. You don't think about this when you think about seeing an iceberg because most people's iceberg experience comes from Titanic. You see that iceberg. You know it's huge. You know they're huge underneath. You see that in comparison to the size of Titanic. The iceberg still looks huge. You are in now a 100, 105 foot sailboat. You got another smaller sailboat with you. And they are seeing these icebergs that are three to four times taller than this boat. and they eventually send out some smaller boats to it and everything, and they are able to chip chunks of ice off of it

and discover after melting this that it is fresh water. Might be some theory to this river. And they're bringing this back to the ship and they're melting it down. They're replenishing their water supplies. One instance, the iceberg while they're near it or the smaller boats, it starts to turn over and it almost swamps a couple of the boats. So, but again, that's the first time someone is seeing something like this really happen. They see like the shearing thing where like part of an iceberg shares off of another one.

And they're just looking around being like, one of these things could just crush the fuck out of this ship. And we're going into these. Yeah. And that's, you hit it right on the head. This is the first time that any boat has ever crossed into this Antarctic circle. and they push in as far as they can until the ice pack chases them back. They continue on, I believe it was... What's that like?

Because you're used to dodging, like, stuff on the ground. Like reefs and things like that. That you're aware of. You know what that does to a ship. When you're going in and a piece of ice is coming at you and you can't dodge it, are you just like, but it's just ice. We get snow and we know like it froze, but it's just.

just so massive that it'll just tear the it fucking sunk the titanic which was made out of steel well like what's the first time that that bumps against your ship and you just hear oh yeah i didn't even think about the first contact with one by accident and just feeling no give to it whatsoever just feeling it shift you in the water hearing a little bit of that wood grown you have to wonder too how high their suspicions were of well how deep is that iceberg go before you're it hits land. Like not knowing just how big that whole field of ice is in there. The first time they saw that thing turn over and they saw the bottom of it had to be a sobering

moment of being like, what the fuck? That's just ice. There's no soil on that thing. That's just free-floating. And look how big that is under the water. We can't get anywhere close to one of those in this ship. Yeah. Yeah.

The whole wood thing escapes me until you say it again. I'm like, okay, this is all wood. Well, like you said, the ships end up getting separated. Like there's a bunch of fog that sets in. They're not staying super close to each other, but at least within eyesight. And during either fog or storms, they end up getting separated. They try to fire off a couple of cannon blasts to, like, they'll do one every hour or something to try to see if they can hear each other. And at that point, Cook's like, listen, let's not sweat it.

I didn't really, two ships weren't that important. We have a meetup spot. It's going to be at Queen Charlotte's. New Zealand, yeah. They have a contingency plan. But that's so crazy to think of because you're just sailing now as low as you can along the Antarctic circle. And you're like, we'll just meet them in New Zealand? You're thousands of miles away.

And you're just like, they'll get there eventually, right? Yeah. They got the charts. Yeah, I showed him exactly where to go. And I'm sure there was a pretty high return rate for his crew that survived. And I also told for no exactly what to feed the guys and how to clean the. the ship and I'm sure he's following all those instructions to a tea except that he's not because for no is kind of a pussy and gets pushed around so when his guys are like hey we're not going to

eat this sourcrow or this other stuff that's going to stave off scurvy he's just like come on guys please do it and they're like no fuck you and he's like fine don't eat the sourcrow don't clean the ship when they eventually do meet up which they do cook is looking at the shape of the crew on the ship and he's like, what did you do? My boys. He's like, I gave you everything you needed to not have them turn out like this. He then, it's like, I imagine a Tom Brady situation. You have the TV 12 system that Cook has.

He knows what his chef is going to make him. And so, cook ends up once they kind of get back together in New Zealand, Cook sends over his cook, the guy that's a cook on his ship, and is like, make sure these guys are eating the food. Make sure you're serving this food. Did you hear about his cook? He dies. Cook's cook. No, he dies. Didn't he have like three fingers or something like that? That's a good cook. A little extra protein in your food. Yeah. Is that where that all came from? I'm sure it's something like, hey, go over there and make sure that they're eating correctly. We can probably run this place

on our own. Your sous chefs that are on this. I'm going to send you guys by a nutritionist. Yeah, exactly. Probably something like that. Of course, Christmas rolls around. They get pissed drunk on Christmas again. Everybody's just completely off the wall drunk.

The crew just still isn't finding anything. They travel east along 48 degree latitude, so you're even deeper into the Arctic Circle than you were at 51 degrees, and you're just chasing the ice pack. You are sailing during the day. You see that the ice pack might be 100 feet away from you. Overnight, you're going the same direction. You wake up the next day.

The ice pack's 90 feet away from you. Like it's just, it's slowly creeping in towards them still. At one point they get within, they say about 50 to 70 miles of the actual continent of Anacartan, and Ardico where they would consider it actually to be land. Land under the ice. Land under the ice, but that's not invisible distance. Yeah. And there's no way you're getting through.

through any of that ice. And they sail low. It's also just not habitable. So it doesn't matter. Yeah, the longer you stay there, the more you're at risk. Also, how do you know? I mean, these ships have been up in the English, you know, in the English Channel, up in the Baltic, up going, like you said, to St. Petersburg. So they've been up in like the North Sea. It gets fucking cold as shit. I'm sure they've run into stuff before. But you also have the consideration of like, what is the you know the water soaking into this wood and it freezes and expands and contracts and all that kind of stuff like how what does that do to your ship well the next place potentially if you don't

find terror astralis that you're going to be able to pull this thing on chore and actually work on it or see the damage it's being done is new zealand so you still have to get there to realize the damage that's been done so again they meet up in new zealand and then from new zealand they just kind of go in this search pattern out into the area between Australia, basically the South Pacific. So the area between South America and Australia just kind of becomes Cook's playground. And he sails out, they're staying for the longest time, they're staying south, they're staying south, they go north a little bit, they dip way back down south, they get kind of close to

South America and they start sailing north. They just make a loop. and then they make a loop back to New Zealand and then Cook's like, did you guys find anything? They're like, nah, and he's like, neither did I. Okay, let's head back out. So then head back out a little bit and do like half the circle

that's like half the size of the other one trying to cut through the middle. They're just trying to kind of be like, okay, let's just divide the ocean up into segments and then we'll just sail through the middle of it and see if we find anything. Yeah, and we'll keep dipping lower. We'll still keep testing the lower latitudes,

but at the same time, we're going to basically carve out like the size of what we know New Holland is now, and hopefully there's something in there. They do finally end up meeting the resolution at their meeting point in New Zealand at Charlotte's Inlet, Charlotte's Hole. They don't know what to do. Bad weather sees them leave forward on June 7th, again, still searching the South Pacific, trying to find the continent.

and eventually they just give up and head towards Tahiti. I do believe at this point in time, the resolution ends up heading back. The adventure does. The adventure heads back? Okay. Because Cook's on the resolution. Okay. Gotcha.

Yeah, when they get to Tahiti, Tahiti has changed. Yeah. The people that were in charge, it was, I believe, the Teesan Islands, it was a grouping of, like, four to five different chiefs of, like, different areas of the island or little different islands. And they had left, I want to say, like some pigs and everything for breeding. And they're like, hey, you know, just don't kill them all or don't kill any of them, like we're going to be coming back for them. And as they get there, I believe it's in the fall of 1773. New management basically is taken over across the board in Tahiti. They're not seen any of their pigs or anything like that. And it's not really the area that they

remember? No, it's, this is what cultural exchange can do to some of these places. And in a way where they almost had like their own basic kind of museums to where they would display the gifts that they were given from these explorers, because I'm sure that as soon as they found out that Tahiti was cool after Cocoa, or hit it the first time, they probably just sent as many ships down there as possible. There was plenty of exchange that was going on while Cook was off searching for this other subcontinent. Yeah. Or

he was talking up Tahiti and all the sailors were talking up Tahiti when they were in Batavia and all those guys there, Dutch or whoever they were, are just like, where's this place again? The women are what? Nails? Nails, you say. Nails you say. I got boxes and nails around here.

Brothers of blacksmith. This is perfect. I'm taking it with me. I'm taking with me. I'm not with me. Yeah. I'm going to rule this island. I'm going to live on this island. They end up picking up somebody else. They pick up a gentleman named O'May off of Reitia, I believe, is the name. I think it was off of one of the society islands. Yeah. And the reason I just remember, the reason why the adventure decides to go home is they have a very poor encounter with the Maori. Okay, so they actually made it. Oh, this was in New Zealand. Yeah, because Ferno is not good about keeping his crew under control like Cook is.

And so, yeah, the relations with the Maori and the interactions they have are very, very bad. That makes a ton of sense. But everyone has scurvy. So he's just like, Cook's like, you're no good, just fucking go. You're angry, your teeth are falling out, you're pissing off the locals. Get out of here. Oh, my, wasn't necessarily like their previous guest. Their previous guest was more of a chaka figure, sort of a land of the lost,

reference with Chaka being there. I'm not sure if Banks or Cook was Rick Marshall in this scenario. I'd like to think it was probably Banks. Banks had this feeling that if he made it back, he could show him off to basically all of his royal friends as they would show off like an exotic animal. Whereas when Omai makes it back to England, he's a rock star. Oh, my has the perfect setup to where he's going around. They actually gave him.

the smallpox vaccine. When he got back to, like, we need to keep this guy alive. Let's give him the smallpox vaccine. He's on the same level as the goat. Yeah. Yeah,

whereas the goat was generally regarded, and he was given a pension, and he was given a silver necklace or a silver collar. Yeah, the goat doesn't make, the goat doesn't go on this second voyage. He stays, I think,

with banks in his yard or something like that. Yeah, they give him basically this pasture. They put him out to pasture. And so eventually when Omai gets back to England. Huh? put her out to pass her yes her definitely not him still i don't know why i keep saying that um oh my's given like suits of armor he's given all of these animals and shit like that he's just basically treated

like royalty and he has no idea what's going on why in the hell would oh my need a suit of armor he's like it's the crazy he gets back and he's like it's the craziest thing it was me and this goat and they would just like people loved us well imagine if nails are getting you laid a full suit of armor, it's an endless supply. It's made of nails. Yeah.

Along the way, they discover South Georgia, the South Sandwich Islands, New Caledonia, the Eastern Islands. Tonga is thrown in there. They visit the Society Islands again,

a place called Marquesas, just all of these different areas that they're going around and they're spotting and they're finding. And this is, I'm sure, kind of in this search for terror Astralis, but at the same time, this is

just more of Cook being able to find shit. And what's crazy about this too is, you know, when you look at a globe and you look at it from different angles, you see other things, and you're like, oh shit, I can't believe I'm never seeing that before. So it was showing Cook's voyage

from the point of view of looking directly down onto Antarctica. Yes. He almost circumnavigates Antarctica. He almost goes the entire way around it, because after he's done going around, you know, Tahiti being kind of at war, he actually goes to Easter Island.

Pretty cool. This is where he actually sees Eastern Island, or Easter Islands, not Eastern Island. Future episode. Sails around some other islands. And after he passes Cape Horn, he actually doesn't like go back up like where Brazil is and everything like that. He just goes south and keeps going across the Atlantic at that point, the South Atlantic. and he makes for Cape Town.

So he's going Cape to Cape. Yes. He's still searching down there. At this point, once he hits that, technically speaking, he does circumnavigate Antarctica. I'm not trying to split hairs and be a real C word here, but circumnavigating around Antarctica is kind of a cheat. Why do you say that?

It's shorter. Oh, yeah. Okay, as far as circumnavigating the globe? Yeah. No, I totally understand that. what I'm saying is he's the first one technically. Yeah. To circumnavigate where he's down low enough to consider it as circumnavigating Australia.

Because he eventually, when he's heading for Cape Town, he crosses over the point where he was coming south. I do believe that they said they crossed into the Antarctic Circle on three separate occasions while they were searching. So he's the first to do it even one time, but then definitely the first to do it two and three. Smash it. Smash the record. After Cape Town, he then. goes back toward, he goes back west or northwest. And instead of just going up the African coast and heading toward London, he actually goes to these islands that are closer, kind of off Brazil.

Uh, was this lizard island or no? Uh, it's where there, there's a Portuguese fort there, I want to say. Hmm. And they had actually heard of him. They'd heard of Cook. He's world renowned. We'll talk about it during his third voyage. while they're fighting in the American Revolution,

the Revolutionary War is going on, the American troops are being told, hey, if you run into Cook, by any weird chance, if you run into Cook out there on the ocean, don't attack him, don't mess with him, sing his praises. Whatever he's doing out there

will be a boon for humanity. Don't mess with him. Yeah. So he's, at this point in time, everybody kind of knows who Cook is. If you're a navigator, if you're a seaman, anybody that goes out onto the water, I'm pretty sure that Cook is somebody who you know. So eventually for the second voyage, July 30th, 1775, they returned to England. So 1775, he is going back as stuff is getting dialed up in the colonies.

Yeah, three more years of exploration. And now these, I mean, Terra Australis just. isn't doesn't exist. It's not something. He smashed this preconceived belief that there had to be something that weighted the earth. And I know it sounds silly to us, but that's groundbreaking. Yeah. This was a belief that was held for millennia, almost, that there had to be something down there. And at this point, too, he's like, listen, I've kind of shown you guys twice. Like, yeah, there might be something down there, but ice. Yeah. There's so much ice around it, there's

no way to actually know for sure. It could just be ice, but we got fresh water off of it. So even if we have, you know, even if you want to confirm your suspicions about there being land there, which you would have to, because of the fresh water, at the same time, can't get to it. Unless you want to take dogs and sleds,

which eventually somebody does, and that's, you know, where we come to crossing the Antarctic. The guy that was actually kind of the science officer that took the place of banks. His name was Forster. The German? The German dude was named for you. Forster. And he, I believe, brought his son along with him. So when they get back, Forster basically claims to have the publication rights for the entire journey, that he's going to be the one that gets to document it. And he goes

to Lord Sandwich, Earl Sandwich, and is like, I have this and he's like, no, you don't. He's like, are you fucking nuts, man? He's like, no, get out of here. One, you're German. And two, this is Cook's show. He selected you, you know, you were the alternate because Banks didn't want to go. Because Banks didn't get his cabin. So he's prohibited essentially from publishing any of this information, but they try to get around it by having his son actually published the book. And they end up releasing it like six weeks before Cook is able to come out with his journals

and everything like that and release them to the public. Cooks do sell so much better because everyone's heard of James Cook and no one has heard of whoever fuck Forrester is or Forrester Jr. Yeah. So he ends up getting, you know, more accolades there and everything, too. He's now done it twice. Which I think up to that point probably, well, I guess the guys that have gone with him the first time, maybe. But it's a very rare achievement.

He's in rarefied error, not to mention he's the one that's captaining these voyages. So that's the first name that pops up. Yeah. Coming back with tails of pieces of ice four times taller than his ship and climbing up there and getting fresh water off of them. You're just a normal guy. He's talking about that and the tavern people like, fuck off. Yeah. Again, three years removed, he goes back to his family and just starts plugging away.

Trying to have some more kids. I'm not sure where this all comes from. Maybe you can explain it to me. Um, when he gets back, he's made a fourth captain. Why fourth captain? What, is there a second and a third? The fourth captain's like a captain in retirement, basically the rank. I think what ends up happening is, so to be considered a captain from how I understand it,

you have to captain a warship or have command of a warship. Okay. So prior to the third voyage, he gets to command a warship for a day, which makes it official that he can then be called a captain. Okay. So I'm guessing he just gets to go out on the ship. They sail around, you know, the English Channel for a little bit, turn around, come back, he's home in time for dinner, and now he's Captain James Cook. There it is. He's 47 at this time.

Yeah. he also gets made the head of the Greenwich hospital which was yeah he gets like some cushy job gives him a nice little stipend each year and everything the kind of job that were he to not do anything

else for the rest of his life he would be set up in very good standing both from a position and also financially so they're pretty much setting him up and being like hey you know this is what you've done for us this is our thanks

and everything but at the same time we still got stuff we gotta try to find. So, you know, what are you thinking? Third Voyage? And he's like, I don't know, guys. I just got home. Just knocked my wife up. And they're like, hey, man,

why don't you go find something else that hasn't been chart? He's like, oh, shit. Yeah, she'll be fine. She's been fine every other time that I've gone out. Yeah, I believe that his life was centered around sailing. I think she was the mistress.

She was the mistress. She was the mistress. and he was at home with, you know, the ocean was his, it was his, that his life, his love, his lady was the sea. Yeah, I. She's brandy. Very hard. She's brandy. Yeah.

Royal Navy comes calling. Royal Society comes calling again in 1776. It's not like the Royal Navy's doing anything else in 1776. It's not like there's anything else popping off. Oh, no. I mean, well, here's the deal, too. do you think they're looking at this and saying, okay, now it's a long shot. We're going to be able to crush these Yankees.

Like, this thing's not even going to be a little thing. American Revolution, pish-posh. We're going to be back in time for tea. But while we're at it, I mean, it's not even going to take us much to do this. We definitely can put some resources into discovering more stuff. In fact, you know what? We are so confident that nothing's going to come of this American Revolution that we're actually going to go ahead and send you on a, the next trip.

is going to be to map the coast of North America, like northern North America, Upper Canada's, and also Alaska. Find us a little Northwest Passage action going up there so we can start trading a little easier with China and stuff. Hudson tried to find the Northwest Passage from the West. Nobody had ever gone around and tried to find the Northwest Passage from behind. They didn't try to sneak up on it.

This was a bit of a Dutch rudder situation where they were trying to get up on the other side and see if they could trace the Northwest Passage back. It's a devil's three-way. North America is there in the middle, and you're trying to take it from both ends, no eye contact. Part of the other way that you could maybe hide that a little bit is O'Me's finally grown tired of being in England.

I think they're afraid that the longer O'Me stays there, the likely that he's going to die of some illness or something that he's going to catch. Yeah. So they load up. That's the mission. Yeah. It sounds like when they kind of like release it to the public, it sounds like some charitable mission.

Like when they release like an orca from SeaWorld, basically, and they're like, yeah, we're going to, you know, we're going to set it free and everything. So the mission is to return O'May home. Actually, the mission is find the Northwest Passage. But since you're going to be heading that direction anyway, before you, you know, you're going to have to go ahead and take a hard left on the east coast of Australia to start heading north. You're going by O'Me's Island anyway. just drop him off. July 8, 1776 rolls around. The resolution and the discovery are ready to go.

182 crew between them. There's 112 on the resolution and 70 on the smaller discovery. They left for Plymouth on July 8, 1776, pretty close to July 4th. By October 1776, they hit the Cape of Good Hope. Well, hold on. They run into a little bit of a snag. The guy that's supposed to be captaining. He's in debtors prison, isn't he?

HM.S. Discovery is in debtors prison. So this guy, his name was Charles Clerk. So, uh, clerk is supposed to be commanding the HMF's discovery. Cook has learned his lesson. No more guys that I have not vetted, no more guys that I don't really know that much about, commanding a ship that's going to be going with me. I need someone I can trust and clerk was the guy that he could trust. Unfortunately, clerk had a brother who had racked up a shit ton of debt. And then Clark was like, you know what? I'll vouch for him.

I'll also be responsible for paying back. I'm going to co-signed the loan. And thanks, his brother bust the fuck out of town and ends up going somewhere like in the Mediterranean or something like that, leaving Charles to basically take the heat for it. So Charles gets put into debtor's prison. And Cook goes to him and he's like,

listen, I got some gears in motion to get you out of here. What we're going to need to do is you're going to need to meet me kind of on the way. I'm going to leave the ship here. Meet me at Plymouth, I think, is where they were going to. Yeah. And so they end up getting back together. And I think it was July 12th, 1776. So we're after July 4th by a week, not a little more.

And they head out. Clark finally gets out of debtor's prison. Yeah. The ship starts to have some issues kind of early. on. I don't know if because it was another collier that they had gotten refitted, but for this third mission, it kind of felt like, I don't know, if Cook was getting a little, I don't know if complacency is the right word, but he started to kind of act a little bit bored when it came to the hands-on approach about really dialing in how this ship was supposed to be refit and constructed

and everything like that. So because he wasn't paying his close of attention, this thing, some issues that he normally would have caught aren't being caught until they actually get out on the ocean and start kind of making their way. Third Voyage cook wasn't the same guy as first voyage cook. He was a little bit more kept to himself. He spent more time in his own cabin.

The crew said that he had his good days and his bad days. He was more in corporal punishment. And I don't know if it's an age thing. There's theories that it was potentially parasites or anything like that that he could have contracted while he... Yeah, he has brain worms. Yeah, just a number of things that he could have eaten and messed him up. This could be a malaria flare up. Could have possibly been that kangaroo meat, right?

Yeah, definitely not. I'm sure he wasn't hopping around the deck. But he was just a different guy. It's a horrible fucking kangaroo joke, by the way. Thank you. You should be put in debtor's prison for that joke. Yeah, he wasn't the same guy. And I think it kind of shows more with the crew,

but it starts to rear its ugly head when they start running into locals. And the interactions start to get a little bit more harsh. And I think you know where we're going because there's not a fourth voyage of Cook. October 1776, they ran the Cape of Good Hope. December, he names Prince Ed. Rhode Island and the Kyrgynian Islands, January 1777, they mapped Tasmania. April, they return O'Mai to the Society Islands. They have a little bit of trouble setting him up.

Apparently, one of the conditions was that O'Mai was going to go back and he was going to retain his father's lands. When they get back to the islands, that's just not going to happen. They end up getting him a swath of land that he agrees to. they kind of build him his own little area. They, of course, bring back all of the stallions and all the crazy animals that he was given. I believe the suit of armor came back to. So if you saw one guy in the Society Islands walking around rocking a suit of armor, you knew it was a lie.

Hoh-and-sweat. 50 pounds of fucking steel. Some guy that was all seized up like the tin man after a rainstorm. You could hear him coming on. Here comes, oh my, great. They go back up. They hop around Tahiti for a little bit, but there's just not a whole lot

that they're doing on this side now. They returned Omai. They covered their bases as far as what they needed to do for the papers and all that kind of stuff. Then they start... Quick draw us a picture of us dropping off, O'Mai. Oh, my, smile. Now hold it for 15 minutes.

Put your suit on. Put your suit on. Give us a thumbs up. Make this all happen. January 18th, 1778, first European visitors to Hawaii. They name this archipelago, the Sandwich Islands after the Earl.

Well, we'll hold on. A little bit before that. We got some Tahitian problems. We got some issues. So, like you said, October 17th, Cape Good Hope. They go around it.

They're staying south. They go to the south of Australia, hit up New Zealand. Cook has this schedule that he's supposed to be on, but at this point, he just does not give a shit about that. He's like, listen, I've been on schedules before. If I find the Northwest Passage, no one's going to give a shit if I found it in a certain time. The only thing I'm currently trying to match as far as the schedule goes is I need to be in a certain place when summer happens. That way there's less ice, and that way I can try to navigate farther. So they end up arriving in New Zealand and they do a refit of the ships there because they just sailed them from England all the way around Africa and all the way to New Zealand. So they're doing a

refit and basically he gets in touch with some of the Maori people. And the issue, I can't believe I forgot this, with Furnos men, the one that was with the HMS adventure. So what had happened is some of Furneaux's men got into a scuffle with some of the Maori and the guys disappeared. And so Furneau ends up sending more men on to try to find them and they end up finding a village where they basically just find dismembered members of the crew. They find their cooked meat in buckets or like baskets and stuff like that. They find their hands. They find bones. They find all that kind of stuff.

And so this obviously an issue and everything. But again, that leads to some conflict with the Maori. And long story short, like we already said, for no one's of going home. So when Cook gets here during this third voyage, he ends up talking with the Maori. And they basically explain what happened. And they're like, yeah, the guys were here. And they got into a squabble because they wanted something that like some of these Maori or a Maori people had. I don't know if it was in regards to women or anything like that, but he basically

tells Cook, yeah, I mean, you know, we didn't kind of like cook some of your guys, I guess, and everything. But like, they totally had it coming because they did this and this and this. And Cook, here's this story of what happens. He's like, so are we like good and everything? And they're like, yeah, I guess we're good. Did you get a taste for human meat? Yeah, exactly. But this leads in. into the thing you were talking about where he tends to be a little bit more corporal in his punishments. And so there are instances where some stuff ends up getting stolen and whereas Cook

would have previously gone to a chief and been like, hey, I need you get this stuff back. It doesn't happen as quickly as he'd like it to. And so not only is he hard on punishments for the crew and everything like that, but the punishments for the natives for thieving become a lot more severe. At a certain point, Cook burns down about 20 homes and 20 canoes because one of the goats was taken. Two of them were taken to begin with. One of them was returned. He's like, fine, we need the other one. They're like, well, we can't get you the other one. Like, we don't know where it's at. So he burns down 20 homes and 20 canoes. This is months, months of work for these people to rebuild and that, you know, we're making these canoes and everything. So he's just,

it feels like he's just run out of, I don't even want to say patience, but he's just like he doesn't have any tolerance anymore. It's, it's been sailed out of him. He forgot about the Royal Society's decree. There's no treating these people like nature and humans. He's on his third voyage and apparently he just really doesn't give a shit. December 24th, 1777, they come to Christmas Atoll. So it's called Christmas Atoll because they discover it Christmas Eve. Makes sense. And this is south of Hawaii.

So as you can kind of see on the map, we have pulled up. As soon as he leaves New Zealand, he kind of heads west or east a little bit. And then they stop again, I think by Tahiti as well. But then they kind of loop up and start heading north again, hit Christmas Atoll, and then a little bit later January 18th, 1778. This is when we get Hawaii. First time. First time.

First time they think a European, but also at the same time, I think they think some Spanish or some Portuguese might have made it out to Hawaii as well. It also stands to reason maybe at a certain point, Japanese or Chinese ships may have gone out there as well. If Japanese ships didn't make it out there, I'd be shocked. Yeah. But this isn't the big island. This is them kind of hitting the first piece of land that they could in the archipelago.

I want to say it might have been Kauai. Was it? It might have been. They don't spend a whole lot of time there. This is kind of a quick refitting. We're going to explore this a little bit. The naturalists are going to do their thing, but we still got some traveling to do. It also kind of starts out on.

bad terms because as you know the natives are like the native hawaians are like actually kind of excited and very curious and everything like that they don't seem outwardly hostile or anything and as one of the guys is going to shore i think his name is williamson they're coming out and not swamping the boat but they're grabbing the boat to kind of pull it closer to shore to get it on shore and he freaks out and ends up shooting some native for trying to pull his boat ashore that's where they were going anyway so it's not and then you know cook is like i know we shot your guy but have you seen this axe. And he's like,

okay, yeah, okay. Yeah, give me the axe. Turns out you killed one of our expert woodchoppers. This will do nice. This will do nicely. There's some talk in some of the journals that some of the crew kept in everything that there was some possible interpretation of them seeing cook as some type of like God or deity.

That's the second time around. Okay. Yeah. Their first time around, they hit it. stop for a little bit. They got to, I mean, they're still looking for the Northwest Passage. Well, they are, but they also stay in Hawaii for five weeks the first time around. Was it? Five weeks? For refitting, probably. Yeah. And he also, because they know they're also going to be like, we found this place. We don't know when the next land we're going to get to or how,

what am I trying to say here, how conducive it's going to be to get a boat up on shore for a refit and everything. We don't know distance why, so we might as well do it while we're here. And also, we don't have like a hostile environment. They stay in Hawaii for five weeks. weeks, he told the crew, you're not having sex with any of the natives. No sex because you all have fucking STDs. And I'm not going to be responsible for spreading chlamydia and gonorrhea all over the islands. But there it is again. Like that's him trying to stand up for these natives after he was a little bit rough and tumble with the Maori. Is part of it also like a self-sor? Because all of this is technically a little, you can look at self-serving reasons for this. He's also looking at it saying

Hey, by the way, I'm sure other British people are going to come here. I just don't want to spread a bunch of venereal diseases throughout all the new British people coming over. I also don't want to be the person that has to map down that I found Hawaii, and I'll go back to the Royal Society and be like, hey, there's the Hawaiian Islands. And then every other exploratory vessel that goes there and comes back with STDs, everyone's like, fucking James Cooks, guys, were spreading all their dick germs all over the island. And now we've got an epidemic in England. There's also the thought of if they all show up down there every time afterwards and the Hawaiians just try to kill them immediately. That's going to be a bad look. Yeah.

One of the things we forgot to mention about Parkinson's, which I found pretty fascinating from the first voyage, was because he was the one that was drawing the pictures of these islanders and these natives. This is where the idea of Navymen coming back with tattoos. and tattoo. Yeah, tattoo culture kind of permeated through the Navy after witnessing the tattooing that was going on on the Maori

people. That's how they were able to determine one of for nose men was because they found a hand that had a tattoo on it. They didn't want to eat the tattoo. I guess not. Don't want to eat inked up skin. They know from experience that when they kill like another tribal

rival tribe, they don't eat the tattooed parts. It has a weird taste. Well, after Hawaii, next stop is going to be what's called New Albion, and this is in North America. February 2nd is when the crew ends up leaving. And, yeah, I mean, they're running to a point where Spain pretty much has a hold on California, right? So I don't know what charts or what mapping that they had as far as what Spain had given them. I'm sure they gave them a map saying, this is our territory. please don't. Spain didn't give him shit.

Don't come, you don't think so? No, because the Spanish also, their closest place that was like a major Spanish colony was like San Diego. Yeah, fair. They had just claimed a bunch of stuff going up up until they got, you know, how far up toward Oregon or anything. So Cook was basically told, I guess we know this is where the nearest Spanish colony or settlement. It might be a little higher. So just kind of go up and prod along the coast. Because you can see on the map, he kind of hits a point that would look like California.

maybe like Northern California. And then after that, he starts heading up north. So he's hitting all along the Oregon coast up to Washington. He gets into the area where like, it's not Vancouver Bay. Is it where Seattle? You go in and you get to Seattle. Puget Sound. Yeah.

So he's going up there as well. Yeah. Well, even after that, so they hit Northern California. Oregon, they do make land on March 6th. Then they begin the mapping process. Northern California, Oregon, all of Alaska up into the Bering Strait. And I mean, Alaska's huge. Yeah.

And they're going through and mapping all of that kind of stuff. They're mapping out all of the inlets and all of the islands along there with tremendous accuracy. Well, and how do you think, too? Like, so looking how they're going about Alaska. So when you hit, you know, Oregon, Washington, you feel like you're selling pretty dune. north. So you've got to be getting excited and saying like, oh shit, like we're going north at this point. If we keep going north, eventually we'll be able to loop around to the east. And then this is what's going to lead us around the top of the North American continent and find the Northwest

Passage. Then all of a sudden you start getting closer to Alaska and you're like, and it's forestinous west, west, we're still going. Now we're going southwest? Like, what the fuck's going on here? And you're hitting the Elysian Islands. And then all right. all of a sudden you start hitting the illusionines. And from an exploratory point of view, if you look at Alaska, it is the biggest motherfucker because it just, it's got that fucking arm that just stretches out into the Bering Strait. And as they're getting out there, they're like colder, colder, rougher, rougher. And they finally get to a point where they're like, oh, there's finally an open area where we can now head north again.

Yeah, and then they run into a giant ice pack. And that takes them into what's it called the Chukchi, sea, that's the sea that's like above Russia and Alaska is the Chichi Sea. I believe they ran into some Inuit colonies when they were up in Alaska. Yes. In the Aleutians. Cook tries penguin for the first time. Which I'm sure probably didn't do a whole lot of good for the potential bacteria

that was already eating away at his brain. Oh, it's just winter turkey. Just winter chicken. I don't see that tasting any sort of good. you've had panda before and you were surprised tender delicious panda Amanda oh god you killed one again tug

I need to get a shovel in a shitload of a lie can you pass me one of those they move up through the bearing straight which again was already prenamed the bearing straight I believe he was Russian that kind of went up and mat that area the end of bedding it

Not really good. Seems like, I don't know if I would say the accuracy was maybe better or it was pretty correct. But eventually they run into the exact same ice pack that Hudson had run into trying to go too far north. And if you can't get just from the other side. Okay. If you are trying to get this Northwest Passage and you run into this ice pack again, you can't do anything. you've got to head back down south, you're going to cross over, and they begin to start mapping the Russian coast as well.

They were also, this is where him being late and not really being on a schedule kind of came to bite him in the ass, because had he been on schedule, he was supposed to be hitting this area, going through the bearing straight up into this chichi sea in summer, when they're like, oh, I mean, what happens when it's hot out? Ice totally like the snow melts when it gets warm, so there's totally going to be not as much ice.

But they don't get far above Alaska. or Russia before they're like, yep, this isn't going to work. And it doesn't work. It's not a Northwest Passage if you're already on the western side. Yes. Trying to get back across there. It's just not going to happen. So they know that they're going to need to take another run at this,

but they need somewhere to winter. This is where they head back down. Eight straight weeks of sailing. They make it to the island landfall. January 17th, 1779. They go from frost and ice on the sails and everything like that, which that's a whole other thing too, like thinking about like a wooden ship, about like the ice clinging to the ship and adding so much more weight to it and trying to knock those chunks of ice off and like the sails carrying a bunch of weight and the rigging and all that stuff.

In bad seas, in bad water, in wind. Dangerous catch, man. And then all of a sudden you're heading a little bit further south. A little bit. And I think we touched on this during the Indianapolis episode when they were up in the Aleutians. Yeah. All of a sudden you start heading south and it starts getting warmer. And warm when you're like, oh, are we heading back for fucking Hawaii?

Are we going back? Do you think he's going to have the no sex rule this time? He wouldn't do it twice in a row, right? We're going to be there all winter. It gets a pretty nice surprise. I was absolutely shocked that this turner. I don't know if it's true. But at the same time, it's been told enough.

and this is kind of the general consensus that it shocks me. January 17th, 1779, they had traveled around the archipelago. They were looking for basically the biggest island to stop at. They choose the big island. They pull into Kiyalakua Bay. And when they get there, they happened to show up with a time that coincides with this festival called the Makiki. and the Makiki is basically the harvest festival to celebrate their god Lono and in their history in their oral history that they've passed down the god Lono had promised to return during this

festival they had spotted this boat circling the island before he ends up pulling in and it was told that Lono would do a similar type of route around the island before he pulled in. So this pale-skinned, white-haired, European, gets off the boat, and he is held up as a Hawaiian god. I just, I'm shocked. I don't see it. I don't understand it. Guilio.

Yeah. So it's Hawaii. It's the big island. It is Hawaii. This is the bay that it all goes down. I mean, if shit's going to go down. Pretty nice place to go down. Beautiful, right?

Yeah, I could definitely see that being a place that I would want to pull into. But he's given kind of this God's welcome. He's going through all of these different ceremonies as they're celebrating him and they're hoisting him up during this festival and they're treating him like a god. They end up staying there for an entire month and he's just soaking this in. And eventually they finally get kind of that clear. to say, okay, maybe the ice pack has moved a little bit. We should be able to go back up and check again.

Let's get off the island. This has been great. I'm sure once he started getting treated like a god, he's like, all right, sex rules off the table. Eventually, I think the God thing might wear off a little bit. It does. No, no, yeah. But what I'm saying is at this point when they're going to try to do the Northwest Passage again, the locals are kind of like the welcomes over.

Like God's not supposed to stay here for a month. The festival's over. You're only supposed to show up for the festival, man. And so there's kind of a feeling of like when they're leaving that time, it's kind of like the welcome's been worn out. We're going to head out again. We probably shouldn't show back up for a while. Unless something happens and, you know, a mast or something like that were to break, which requires us to go back to the island days later. Yeah.

And the Hawaiians are just like, you again, you just left. Feel like you bamboozled a little bamboozled us. You came in. The hospitality is over. You checked out of the hotel. And yeah, we're good here. You guys tried to bang their way through the big island. We've had enough.

The VD has already set in and we're already seeing the detrimental effects. There's some kind of disgusting number. I think they said that the general held belief of the population of Hawaii in the 18th century at this point in time was somewhere around like 100,000 people. And by the 19th century, it was down to like 50,000 just from the spread of disease and everything else that had happened after contact that repeatedly had. happened after this. Yeah, if they don't get you the first time, it'll be, you know, soon after. Yeah. So since the resolutions for mass breaks, they have to go back as Chris is talking about to

this very, very unhappy crowd. February 14th, so this is, I mean, we're talking, what? They stay there for a month. They're back for a day, maybe two. February 14th, Valentine's Day, one of these small boats gets stolen just, a small boat. That's what it takes for Cook to just snap.

I mean, they got like only four of them and they kind of need them. But at the same time, this isn't the type of situation that should require you to react in this way considering you've usually been able to get your ship back pretty easily. Yeah. Cook marches up

with some of his Marines to the King of Hawaii Kalaniya Sepu. Kalaniapu. In a village with hundreds and he goes in there I think with about 12 guys. Pretty stupid as soon as these locals

see what's going on. Is there, Cook is marching, the king of Hawaii back to the ship, the locals start sending the alarms. Oh yeah, he does the old standby. Guess what? I'm just going to go ahead and take your guy out to my boat until our little boat shows back up and then you can have him back. He gets a pretty quick receipt on this one.

It ends up being when he starts taking that guy, the call goes out, and they said by the time they start pulling him down to the water, they have about a thousand people there. Well, and the king also realizes what's going on and just sits down on the beach, just refuses to go any further. And his wife is going around and getting everyone being like, hey, they're taking him, they're taking him.

And I believe it was Cook, wrapped his arms around the king's chest and was lifting him up out of the sand. And the man are kind of starting to back off as they see this mob starting to surround them and maybe head back towards the boats. Somebody calls out for Cook. He turns around. And the next thing that he sees, and probably the last thing that he sees at that point in time,

is a, what was it, a shark tooth lined? So, yeah, badass club. But he gets, and again, these are going to vary because this isn't Cook's account, obviously. But it's going to be the account of people who probably aren't paying a lot of attention because the only guys that are there that survive are pretty much fighting for their lives

to get the fuck off the beach. I want to say that as he's getting the guy out, the crowd is kind of surrounding him. Cook gets stabbed. Oh, did he get stabbed first? He gets stabbed. And he's in like waist high surf at this point. They're trying to go out to the boat and push off to get the king out there.

And then after he gets stabbed, that's when the shark tooth club comes in, catches him in the head. They said he kind of like puts his hand to his head and staggers a little bit and then just goes down. And at that point, it's kind of I don't, frenzy is not the right word. It's a little bit of a Caesar-esque type thing.

Very much so, yes. And so everybody just kind of, and I mean, again, this is somebody that a few weeks ago, they were like, hey, this guy might be a God. And at this point, he's proved to be, you know, God's not going to take our king away because we got a boat from a Merni thing. So he gets pretty stabbed up quite a bit.

I think a total of four of the guys he's with end up making it into one of the boats and getting back to the ship, but they're not able to get Cook's body. No, interestingly enough, not getting Cook's body, he gets carried off

back to the village, and they give him like a ceremonial burial. Which is crazy as fuck, the process of it. It involves, like, cooking him and boiling the meat off his, because it's the bones

that essentially are what's going to be the sacred thing. And as they pretty much boil him and, get the meat off and everything like that. They take his bones and they take him to several different spots around the island. Like, I guess what you would consider almost like spots of reverence or maybe even religious type spots. And they put different parts of him.

There's like a temple in the mountains that they put part of it. And then you still have the resolution sitting out at anchor that's just like, what the fuck do we do? There's still a camp somewhere on the island, somewhere not far from this that still has a bunch of the crew that are camped out on the island. So the next guy in line, I believe, was clerk because he was the commander of the other ship. So he gets moved over to command the resolution. Someone gets bumped up from the, not adventure, but bumped up from the discovery. John Gore. John Gore gets bumped up from a position on the discovery to be the commander of that one. And instead of basically doing what the crew wants to do is like, we need to blast them with the cannons and destroy the village and all this kind of stuff,

clerk's like, yeah, we're not going to do any of that. First of all, we still have a mast that we didn't have time to repair or anything. We can try to get away, but again, like if we stay here and start starting shit with them, they're going to come out and canoes and at a certain point other people are going to die. We saw what happened to cook. Yeah. And so there does end up being some type of exchange, though, that happens, where, a few bits and pieces of Cook

are returned like a portion of his skull, a hand, and they're able to tell it's Cook's hands because it has the damage on it from when the powder horn blew up in his hand. And then a couple, I want to say maybe a leg bone. Yeah, not much. And then like something else. They got everything that they were able

to successfully pull out of the game of operation. And they buried them at sea. Water on the knee. Operation. Yeah. They get to bury him and sea. Whatever parts were left of him, they bundled up. They dropped over the edge.

They said a few words. Burial at sea is probably the most fitting thing, I would say, for him. I mean, it makes total sense, as you were talking about earlier and completely convinced me, his wife was the sea. His mistress was his wife. And I don't think he would want to go out any other way. Again, I have zero feelings towards this because he, In truth, he was the, like I said earlier, the tip of the spear of colonialism. And he had really hardened his heart towards the natives and kind of got what he deserved.

So Charles Clark takes over command, who is slowly dying of tuberculosis at this point in time. They go back up, fail to find the Northwest Passage again. They run into yet another ice pack. Clark dies of tuberculosis. Somewhere along this point in time, they find. a small Russian fleet that is able to resupply them and repair their ships. They tell the Russian fleet of the death of Cook, and I believe it takes a year and a half for that news to travel after Cook's death back to England.

They give them like a letter or something like that detailing what's happened on the journey so far. I want to say that at certain points during multiple of his, you know, different parts of different voyages, he passes off like the very first. very first voyage where they hook it with that fleet before they make their final run up to England, he gives that guy copies of his journals in case he doesn't make it. They kind of do the same thing where they're providing certain information, but they're not like, hey, or have all the charts of all the places we discovered. They're just passing on the news of what's going on with the ship and the captain. I guess it's the only way to do it. It's not like you can send

a small back across the ocean to England. You don't have another route back. You have to just kind of hand it off and hope that it makes it back. Yeah. I don't know how long these Russians were out there, but if they were hanging out in that area, they probably weren't headed to England anytime soon. Oh, yeah. We make it there all the time. England, you say we're heading for England right now. We can't read the letter.

We don't know what happened. Thankfully, they told us cook died. John Gore. They said their cook died. I said, we have other, we have many cooks. Do you want one of ours? They must have loved their cook because everyone was so sad. We'll give you, Gary.

He makes great Porsche. Don't worry about it. Yuri, morech for the sad men. They lost their cook. John Gore ends up in charge for the return home. They end up arriving August 4th, 1780 back, minus one cook unless Yuri was able to come with him. And the acclaim doesn't really hit for Cook that I think would be expected of this great explorer. he was sort of forgotten to history

until this ramp up of colonialism. When you start to see the penal colonies show up in Australia and they're using basically all these places that Cook found to go and take advantage of. And that's sort of when Cook's legacy begins to grow. That's when you see all of these statues that are put up. Can you? I think this will probably be my mind.

last thought on this, but can you imagine getting back to England? When you left, you had the colonies. When you got back, they're like, oh, cook died. They're like, so we fucking lost the new

world, man. There was shit with tea and then a declaration, and now we don't have any of that stuff. You're never going to believe the voyage we had. You're never going to believe the war we had. Yeah. Oh my God.

fight with France again? Our own people. Yeah. Our own people. But I can understand totally why Coke is such a derisive figure. I mean, there's no real way to look at it and say that he didn't, you know, set up what was going on. There's always the argument that could be made that somebody else was going to find it. At the same time, Chris and I have talked a lot about this.

We just hope that one time we will run into an experience. explorer that hits an island and it doesn't go bad for them. But it's, that would be the exception to the rule. Captain, you want us to mark that? That seemed like a beautiful island with lots of natural resources and the people were very, very nice. Should we mark that on the map? No.

I don't think so. Take off some of the cattle, leave them some beef, leaving some nails. In fact, let's just turn back and we'll just live there. That had to have happened, though. I would imagine that that happened. That's true. Yeah. That's true.

That's true. So I, yeah, somebody had to have faked their death on an island to try to get to stay there. They threw some big chunk of wood into the water. It was one of the captains. Just like what happened? We saw the villagers. They looked like they were taking him. And he kept yelling, go without me.

Just save yourselves. They're going to kill you too if you try to stay. But I understand any viewpoint did anybody. has a cook. I have kind of a neutral feeling on him. I feel like he was a phenomenal navigator. He was a phenomenal sailor. Did his discoveries turn bad? Yes. But very rarely his discovery turned good. But yeah, like someone who I, I knew that he had died in Hawaii. I didn't know the story behind that. And I didn't know anything that happened before that. I thought for me just from a cursory standpoint, Captain Cook, he went from England to Hawaii, and that's where he met his end.

I didn't know about being the third voyage. I didn't know about the other two and everything. So it's cool to kind of get down. And like you said, on the scale of explorers that we've looked at, from a standpoint of interaction with locals, minimal damage, damage nonetheless. And then what that led to and his discoveries led to caused much more than that. But people, people's together a lot of different things in history about how stuff was found and it just kind of makes sense because we did the australia episode we talked a little bit about cook showing up there we didn't get into it a whole ton talking about long bay and didn't really yeah an entire history to go through i'm sure we're going to run into something probably pretty similar with magellan when we do him because i think

he meets a pretty unceremonious ending too yeah but in the time the outcome that happened to cook was anything that was rare. It wasn't shocking for an exploratory captain such as Cook to not make it back. The way that he died certainly wasn't the norm, but you had ships that went down all the time. You didn't. What I think is the most impressive thing about Cook is that he did it for so long. Like this guy lived the life. Like it wasn't one trip that he was just like, oh, I'm good.

He did the New Finland thing. then he did the thing where he went down to Australia, then the second voyage of doing kind of a similar thing. And then the third, like someone could have just stopped after the first one, which is what you see with a lot of explorers. But he literally just lived. His entire life was about trying to find something new.

And so in that sense, like there has to be admiration for especially just the danger of going into the unknown like he did. Every time. And every time in the people that went with him. But yeah. I think that's a good way to, Another complex human.

So that's for sure. He didn't do this for fame. He didn't do it for fortune. I think he did it for himself. Yeah. He did it for that desire to explore. As much as you could. Yeah.

What pushed him away from the merchant navy life is what he wanted to do. And I think he accomplished it. I don't think he would have gone out any other way. No. Going out during an exploration is probably the best way. During one of his ramblings in his captain's cabin, someone asked him, Captain, how do you want to go out? Shark.

tooth club. Sharp tooth club. All right. You got anything else? I think we cover Cook pretty well. All right, everyone. Thanks for joining us on this episode. We'll catch you next week.

Peace. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode. If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe and like button. Follow us. If you didn't like what you heard, still hit that anyway because we'll probably cover something in the future that you do like. Please follow us on our social media. Adam, hit them with it.

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Peace.