In Our Time - Voyages of James Cook

Episode Date: December 3, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the scientific advances made in the three voyages of Captain James Cook, from 1768 to 1779. Cook's voyages astonished Europeans, bringing back detailed knowledge of the Pacific and its people, from the Antarctic to the Bering Straits. This topic is one of more than a thousand different ideas suggested by listeners in October and came from Alysoun Hodges in the UK, Fiachra O'Brolchain in Ireland, Mhairi Mackay in New Zealand, Enzo Vozzo in Australia, Jeff Radford in British Columbia and Mark Green in Alaska. With Simon Schaffer Professor of the History of Science at the University of CambridgeRebekah Higgitt Lecturer in the History of Science at the University of KentAndSophie Forgan Retired Principle Lecturer at the University of Teesside Chairman of Trustees of the Captain Cook Museum, WhitbyProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1768, a converted Collier Endeavour set out from Plymouth bound for Tahiti in the Pacific so that astronomers on board could observe the transit of Venus across the sun. Endeavour's captain was James Cook, and he had secret orders to give the other international observers the slip and head south on the voyage of Xuneration.

The scientific discoveries on this and on James Cook's second and third trips in the Pacific transformed Western Europe's knowledge of almost half the world and the people who live there, from Antarctica to the Bering Straits. We're discussing this now, as in October, we ask you, the listeners, to suggest today's topic. This one came from Alison Hodg in the UK, Foucarra Obroil Akoin in Ireland, Marie Mackay in New Zealand, Enzo Votsu in Australia, Jeff Radford in British Columbia, and Mark Green in Alaska. My thanks to them and to all of you

for sending in more than a thousand different ideas. With me to discuss the voyages of James Cook are Simon Schaffer, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge, Rebecca Higgott, lecturer in the history of science at the University of Kent, and Sophie Fulgin, retired principal lecturer at the University of Teesside

and chairman of trustees of the Captain Cook Museum in Whitby. Simon Schaffer, I've said that Cook's voyages transformed Western Europe's knowledge of half the world. Is that an overstatement? No, I think it's an extraordinarily dramatic change in knowledge of the world, in what one part of the world knew of the other. This is an encounter, after all, between two of the really great maritime civilizations of our planet, that of the North Atlantic and that of Polynesia and the South Pacific. And in those encounters, all sorts of issues about the distribution of people on the globe,

its history, its natural properties, its social life and its economy were completely changed and changed forever. Not only that, but it was the precision and reliability and in a very interesting way the security of Cook's project that I think also really drove a great deal of these transformations. Why security? What's that going to do with? So Cook's voyages demonstrated, beyond doubt, the possibility of very long-term and very long-range expeditions into what for Europeans were unimaginably remote parts of the globe. Because he lasted for years. Yes. So the first voyage, the endeavour voyage, is more than three years. it was significantly imagined back here in Britain

that the endeavour, Cook's vessel, must have either been lost or captured by the French or in some ways disappeared so that there was a real pessimism about the possibility of doing what it was that Cook and his crew had managed to do. And he was looking for a new... His secret, look for a new big continent

because I thought if he didn't find it, the world would be unbalanced. There wasn't enough materials though. There wasn't enough earth in the bottom half of the world to keep it steady. That's an ancient idea. It goes back to... But still, that was one of the reasons you're looking for it. Absolutely.

And it seemed perfectly plausible. If there are huge land masses in the northern half of the globe, there would just, so it was said by some, have to be very large land masses in the southern half of the globe in order to balance it. But there was a very considerable debate in Europe, in the 1750s and 60s about the great southern land, and that was undoubtedly one of the briefs that Cook was given on the first voyage.

Now, this voyage had many purposes, and one was astronomical. He was a good astronomer. They had scientists on board, we'll come to all that. It was an extraordinary galaxy of talent on that. Oh, galaxy, never mind. It'll all have to do. Of talent on that very small ship, which we'll come to. But they were looking for the observation.

They were observing the transit of Venus, which happened twice in every hundred years, or was due now then? Can you just briefly tell us about that? So back in 1716, the astronomer Edmund Halley had described the advantages of observing how long it takes for Venus to move across the faces of the sun as we look at the sun from Earth. And what Halley had shown is that with relatively simple geometry,

If you can time the transit of Venus across the face of the sun in two different places and you know with exquisite precision the position of those two different places, then you can work out allegedly with great accuracy how far away the Earth is from the Sun. That's called the astronomical unit. And that matters a great deal to astronomy and navigation because that number, the exact distance from the Earth to the Sun, is a fundamental parameter in calculating Nordical Almanacs and other ways of determining position at sea.

Thank you very much. Sophie Foggin, can you tell us something about James Cook's background and then his early life as a sailor? Yes, indeed. James Cook was a Yorkshireman, born in Martin, a little village in North Yorkshire, The son of an agricultural labourer who'd come south looking for work from the lowlands of Scotland. After a few years, he moved to a hamlet on the edge of the North York Mores, Great Aiton, and then on to Whitby to become an apprentice seaman. I think the important thing, though, about his background, apart from the fact that he was a Yorkshireman,

was that he had a Scottish father who was therefore educated because Scottish education was much more advanced than English. He would have been literate. And his father was, if you like a bit of a self-improver. He did well for himself. He set, as it were, an example for the young cook to do well for himself. And then, of course, he came to Whitby, where he was apprenticed to John Walker,

the Quaker master mariner, and ship owner. How old was he when he went to Whitby? He was 17, which was quite old for an apprentice. Because Whitby was a great place for training apprentices for the seas. I'm pitching your notes. Population of 5,000 people and 1,200 of them was apprentices. It must have been a real little town at the time, isn't it?

It must have been an amazing town, absolutely a wash with apprentices and young men. So, lively, yes, certainly. And what we forget, of course, is that it was one of the most important. ship-building towns in the whole of the UK, where they built lots of collier barks, the capacious coal-carrying vessels that service the coal trade. So he serves his apprenticeship, then what for the next few years? And then he continues to work for his Quaker master, Captain Walker.

He rises rapidly through the ranks to become master's mate. and then Walker offers him the captaincy of a vessel, but he says, no, I don't think I'll take it, I'll go to London and join the Royal Navy instead. So he doesn't do any sailing out of Whitby, though? Oh, he does a lot of sailing. Well, what does he do that he's sailing out of Whitby? He spends nine years going up to Newcastle,

picking up coal, taking it down to London. He goes across to the Baltic as far as St. Petersburg, loads up with Baltic stores, brings them back to London and to Whipby, and he goes round to Ireland to Dublin as well. So he's very experienced on the North Sea. Sorry, excuse me. Those are very troubled waters at that time, and he's getting nine years before the mass quite tough.

Very tough indeed. It's a very difficult sea, the North Sea, very rough, very problematic all round, and pretty infested with pirates as well. And then he joins the Royal Navy and gets involved in a war, in Canada and again he's tested in battle I think the word is. He's tested in battle.

He doesn't become a Quaker like his master but I think he imbibes a lot of Quaker principles but he's certainly tested in battle first of all in the channel and the channel approaches and then of course in the Seven Years War in Canada. Why did

the Navy, sorry, why did the Navy choose a Collier Park from Whitby? This is a boat that ships coal up and down the place, and they're going to go to the southern hemisphere. What was attractive about a collier bark? Lots of things were attractive. First of all, they're very capacious.

So you can put an extra deck in and carry enough men and stores for a voyage for two to three years. Secondly, they were extremely sturdy and reliable, and they were well known to be sturdy and reliable. Thirdly, because they're virtually flat-bottomed, They don't have to have a stave or a key to tie up to. They can just sit on the sand or the mud anywhere. And if you don't know where you're going and what conditions are going to be like,

that's an extremely useful advantage. And finally, the Navy and the Admiralty were already using collier barks. They were very familiar with their qualities. Use them as troop transports, for instance. So he got a ship out of the place in which he was brought up. He said nine years in the North Sea, and Petersburg and all that. He's been in Canada.

He's been in a war. He's well qualified. And this boat of his is called the Endeavour. And so, Rebecca, how did they choose him and how did he set about manning that ship? Well, the other thing that he was doing in North America was not just tasting war or battle,

but surveying a great deal. So he really kind of made his reputation in the Navy by showing that he could lead surveys, he could do precision observations, he could use a whole range of techniques. And he was learning those from civilians around the area, from books, from military surveyors that he was in contact with.

And that was actually proved to be an advantage in war, being able to survey the river where they were going to land troops in order to take Quebec. So he showed his ability, as an observer, but also how sort of strategically useful that kind of work could be. One of the things he also did as part of that surveying was to observe an eclipse of the sun, which sounds like a nice thing to do.

Amateur astronomers like to observe eclipses of the sun today, but he was doing that really in terms of fixing a position. So making the observation out there in North America, sending that data back to London, where it was computed by an astronomer who lived in Stoke, Newton, just outside London, was a fellow of the Royal Society called John Bevis, who used that to help calculate the longitude of where he was by the St. Lawrence River. And that allowed a very precise fix of a longitude position,

something that wouldn't have been particularly easy to do otherwise. So that gets him noticed not only by surveyors within the Royal Navy, but also by men of science within the Royal Society by other astronomers. Interesting use the word computed. How had an astronomers been preparing for this trip to Tahiti? So the transit of Venus happening in 1769 was one that the British and the Royal Society were coming out with a bit more preparation than the one they had come just before,

which was 1761, which despite Hally being the astronomer royal, being a Brit, making this call in 1716, saying we should take advantage of this observation that's going to happen, this event that's going to happen, we should take advantage of Britain having access through its navy to places overseas that will allow us to make comparative observations to get a fix on what became known as the astronomical unit. Despite all that, the British somewhat forgot about this, and it was the French, actually, who in the late 1750s and 1760 were going at it

and deciding that they ought to set out a series of expeditions to make the observation. And they sent this news to the Royal Society somewhat belatedly. realized that they could act on this too. If the French were doing it, they certainly should be. So slightly hastily, at that point, they sent out a couple of expeditions, one to St Helena, which was led by Neville Maskely, who later became Astronomer Royal, and Charles Mason, Jeremiah Dixon, ended up at the Cape of Good Hope

to make those observations before. So it was all a bit hastily done, and they certainly planned with more precision, but taking the experience of Maskeland, who was now in a position to organise these expeditions, to say what observations had and hadn't worked previously, what instruments had been successful. So they set out five, ultimately, expeditions from the British

to different places, to Norway, to Hudson's Bay, Canada, and to Tahiti. So as far as the transit of Venus goes, the Endeavour expedition was just one of a number that would feed into working out this vital measurement. They were served by a huge acceleration of development, of instruments at that time, and you could say that Endebo is carrying the latest technology on it as well. Can you just encapsulate, once again, because we've done progress about this, has been a very good book about this, why the discovery of longitude was so important?

Latitude was supposed to be quite easy. Right, yes, relatively easy to work out your position longitude, so north or south of the equator you can do by observing the sun or particular stars. working out your position in longitude was a much more difficult thing to do and obviously quite crucial to know where you are, how far east or west you can end up making decisions going 180 degrees the wrong way if you aren't quite sure where you are and you're trying to find land. Especially in the middle of these great oceans. If you're near the coasts, you can work out where you are fairly well.

And of course people did get around. People weren't forever bumping into land and shipwrecking, although the seas are always dangerous places. So there wasn't necessarily a big shift like that once you could measure longitude, but it certainly sped out the process. It made things much more assured that you would get there and come back and that you could fix places on land. You would know where the land was.

And that was always crucial. You not only want to know where you are in the middle of the sea, you also want to know where the land is and how you're going to get there. So this had been a great project, really, of the preceding half century, trying to find techniques for fixing longitude. Prices were rewarded, clocks were made. Well, the Longitude Act of 1714 was passed to offer a series of rewards for people who were coming up with ideas that would help in this process.

Now the extraordinary things I'm Javra, about this small collier, 100 feet long, you've been on one and it was packed with stuff. And it was packed with the stuff, a lot of stuff belonging to Joseph Banks, an extraordinarily rich man who was interested in botany particularly and in adventure and he took an enormous number of people with him and he insisted on his space in this small collier.

So there's another dimension here, it's the Banks thing. What was he there for? What did he achieve? Joseph Banks was extremely wealthy, Lincolnshire landowner, 15 years younger than Cook. He, perhaps not coincidentally, He had also already been on a voyage to Canada, to Newfoundland and Labrador, where Banks gathered really important experience,

not just in maritime expeditions, but also in botanising into him unknown and exotic locations. He brought on board Endeavour a really impressively substantial team, himself, a very important young Swedish naturalist, Daniel Solander, Sweden was world-held headquarters of scientific botany at the time because of the achievements of Solander's master, Carl Linnaeus. There was a Finnish naturalist and man of science, Hermann Schperring. There were two artists.

There were two of Banks' black servants from his estate. There was a secretary and so on. This was a big scientific and also, it has to be said, genteel team and it was viewed with a mixture of careful admiration and very often deep loathing by large numbers of the crew on board. They were called the experimental gentleman

because the word experimental has this wonderfully double sense. Banks, one way of thinking about what Banks was doing is that it was, as we know, extremely well, extremely common for gentlemen and aristocrats at this period to go on the grand tour. And what Banks was doing was trumping everyone in his social class by going on a grand tour around the world.

He more or less explicitly says that. The results of his work and those of his collaborators are genuinely dramatic. Thousands of new species are collected and described. Plants and animals, Bougainvillea and the kangaroo, Many drawings are made, 800 by his artist, Sydney Parkinson. And it's important to remember that when Endeavour returned to England,

it was Joseph Banks who became the celeb. It was understood in a lot of the newspapers as Banks's voyage with Captain Cook as captain. Sophie Foggan, James Cook seems to be in an exemplary. it was a lieutenant or captain that? He was a captain on the first voyage. So he's exemplary and one of the ways is he lost few men,

fewer than way below the average and how did he achieve that? He achieved that by really good ship management and a very important part of good ship management and this is something he would have learnt in Whitby too was keeping your men healthy and therefore how do you avoid the scourge of long voyages, which is scurvy,

a very unpleasant disease due, in fact, a vitamin deficiency. Cook had his own ideas about the nostrums of the day, what would prevent it, sourcrow, maltwort and so on. But he took a very wide-ranging, broad view, and above all he felt that his men should be provided with fresh food, So wherever he is, he gathers fresh food, be it scurvy grass or wild cabbage or wild celery or berries which are in season and so on. And they catch fresh fish. And he also ensures that the men eat everything.

They were punished if they wouldn't eat their sauerkraut, in fact. But he also had sauerkraut served at the officer's table until, the officers to say how delicious it was, because therefore word would spread and the sailors would think that if the officers said it was okay, it must be okay, and they would have it too. So there's a combination of shrewd psychological leadership backed by discipline and eat everything. Though he did say eating a penguin wasn't particularly pleasant. And he was very successful in this, wasn't he? He passed it on to Bly, for instance, who was on the Captain Bly, the unjustly maligned Captain Bly.

This business of feeding fresh food. Indeed. Bly had a fiddler on board so that they exercised every day. Yes. Did cook of a fiddler? I'm not sure he had a designated fiddler, but certainly there would be musical instruments, and they certainly sang sea shanties.

And there's a wonderful sea shanty, which was composed by a seaman on the second voyage, just after they crossed the Antarctic Circle, which rather nicely, if I could read, verse of it to you. I bet if you sang it really. I'm sorry, I'm not singing. Oh, come on, it's okay.

But think for Cich Antitude anyway. And this is just one verse. It's not great poetry, I have to say. But here we go. We were all hearty seamen, no cold did we fear. We have from all sickness entirely kept clear. Thanks be to the captain, he has proved so good amongst all the islands to give us fresh food.

Yes, and they wanted to sign on again, didn't they for the next fourades? They liked being with hook. They were safe and they were fed properly. Rebecca Higgott, can you tell us how successful that first voyage was scientifically? Well, so the first reason to go was the transit of Venus, and they were successful in making the observations, which not everyone was on that particular day. I'm sorry, but I'm interrupted.

But Simon's mentioned it, and now you've mentioned it, He does seem to have been extraordinarily, extraordinarily good at mapping, observing, which is all due with precision, doing things at the same time every day, by the hour, drawing it. Where did he get that from? Was it? I think, oh, there you go, Sophie knows. Ceph is waving on the right.

It's because he was a good mathematician, and he'd have learnt more than the basic maths in Whitby as an apprentice, because you find in Whitby, Apprentices Notebooks, where they're doing exercises using logarithms, trigonometry, quite complex stuff, really young. You don't pick up that sort of maths overnight. He has a huge respect for technical knowledge, and he continues to develop his maths as he goes on.

And I think he's someone who just positively enjoys that work, which you can't bargain for. But this is what he was good at doing, and interestingly, both good at the mathematics. and clearly enjoyed doing it and good at observing. And that doesn't always go together, but he was skilled in both. And he had high expectations of others around him that they would be able to pick it up too. So back to the success of the first.

Yeah, so in terms of the transit of Venus, they were successful in terms of being able to make the observation. The weather was on their side. So Cook and the other astronomer, who'd been an assistant at the Royal Observatory in Green, Charles Green made the observation and they were able to report that back to the Royal Society along with other observations that were made. It was less precise and accurate

than they either expected or clearly would of light for a number of reasons. One of which was the appearance of what's known as the black drop effect where so the transit of Venus and what you're seeing is the shadow, a black dot of Venus crossing the sun's surface and the moment that it does that

is not a clean one to observe. You can't say, and the timing of this was absolutely crucial. So they have their telescopes. They also have incredibly precise long-case cocks set up there. They take Grandfather Cox. We would not say that if there are any herologists in the room. But I guess. But incredibly precise scientific instruments,

which take an awful lot of setting up in a temporary observatory. So the timing was crucial, but as it turned out, observers didn't always agree on what the crucial moment was where contact was made between Venus and the sun. There is this sort of appearance of adhesion between the two. The nice little circle sort of bleeds out into the figure of the sun. So this kind of messed up their timings. They probably had some issues with their instruments and their accuracy. You know, when you're at sea things sometimes.

You're telling us what's gone wrong. What went right? So what went right was they made the observation. What we're right, a huge amount we've already heard from Simon, about the amount of collecting and information that is gathered on these voyages. They did an enormous amount of surveying of new places, so we haven't mentioned. They get to New Zealand, they get to the East Coast of Australia,

places that hadn't. And they do surveys, something like 5,000 miles of previously unknown coast is getting put down on charts. And with a new level of precision. And this is to do with the fact that they have new technologies for fixing longitude to go back to the. that. So what they have in particular on this voyage is access to using what's known as the lunar distance method. So this is observing the moon's motion and using predictive charts to compare

what's observed the other side of the world with what's observed elsewhere. You take one from the other in terms of the timings and that gives you a measurement of longitude. So they were able to use this for their navigation, for fixing particular spots on land to make their surveys accurate. And Cook was very impressed by this system. Can I, Simon, they also met new peoples that they didn't know. Can you tell us something a little about the new peoples, the more important, not important, more numerous new peoples they met? This, I think, was one of the most dramatic impacts on European imagination of what Cook had achieved,

which was the revelation not just of large numbers of islands precisely mapped, but their populations. it's estimated that in 1770, the population of Polynesia was something just over a million. And these were clearly master navigators with the widest possible range of different and very sophisticated cultures. Cook often remarks in his journals not just on the navigational achievements of the groups of people that he's encountering, but also on the very wide variety of social systems that he's. meets in Polynesia and eventually in southern and eastern Melanesia as well. In particular, the encounters on Tahiti in Altaireoa, New Zealand are absolutely dramatic.

These are very sophisticated, extremely complex societies, which are, as was clear to cook, possessed of great navigational skill. The key example of this, perhaps, is the priest navigator from Raiatea, near Tahiti, whose name is Tupaya, who came on board endeavor and sailed with Cook from Tahiti all the way to Java, to the Dutch colony in Java. They worked together. They made an extraordinary map of a vast area of the South Pacific, a map that covered about 3,000 miles all the away from Rapa Nui, Easter Island, to Tonga and Fiji, and which became an absolutely treasured sign

of what Polynesian navigational skill was. These were genuine revelations of other cultures and civilizations to which European scientists and men of letters then responded with a mixture of awe and puzzlement and analysis. So if we have, we comes back after, the first voyage. Banks takes the glory, but Cook is recognised for what he's done, especially these maps there. The second voyage with resolution and adventure set off in 1772, and I still looking for that southern continent. No Joseph Banks this time, can we get rid of them as quickly

as possible? Why didn't we go along? Poor Joseph Banks. He played his cards wrong. He wanted to take an even larger party of people, more luggage and so on. He felt he hadn't had enough room on the first voyage, so he asked to have the entire captain's quarters and the great cabin and so on, and put the captain's cabin and his day quarters and so on, on the deck. This construction was made. They built the captain's cabin on the deck so the banks would have the place downstairs, and they sent it out and... And it's crank, as they say, top heavy and unsafe. The Admiralty back the professional cook, not the gentleman banks.

That's a river. That's a mark for the future, isn't it? That is pretty good, really, but that's what the Navy was like. They couldn't afford to have an expensive ship, a founder, because it was unseaworthy. So Banks throws a wobbly, gets very cross, throws all his stuff out and says he's not going to go. So two other men of science have to be found at the last moment, in fact, one in particular, Johann Reinhold Forster, an extremely learned German who comes instead of banks. Yes, it's extraordinary. They're still keeping up the scientific drive in the middle of it.

And yet the big thing is looking for this continent. Rebecca, they want to put a flag on the continent. They think this massive place down there. They put a flag on and that makes the empire even bigger. They didn't find it. It wasn't there. What did they learn from the second voyage, the scientists? Well, one of the things they learned was that there probably really definitely wasn't this great big southern continent.

They didn't count Australia, is that great big southern continent? Not big enough. It didn't counterbalance the amount of massive land up in the north of the hemispheres of the Earth. So it wasn't what they had imagined Terro Australis, as it was called, might be. So Cook dips down. He reaches kind of the furthest south level. So we're getting new information about what the world's like when you're that far south, the fact that it's probably very unlikely to be inhabited because the cold doesn't seem to be going away. There's no sudden change to a balmy southern climate. But they do map other places along the way.

So again, a great deal of charting activity. We have South Georgia on the map and so on. But we have these men of science again. So not only the Reinhold Fosters, who are the naturalists on board, William Hodges, the artist. We have two astronomers, one on each of the vessels. William Wales and William Bailey, who had previously observed the transit of Venus from other locations. So experienced expeditionary astronomers. So huge amounts of data and objects and information coming back again.

And in terms of another sort of purpose for the voyage, the Board of Longitude and Neville Maskeland, who chairs the board at that period, make sure that they tack on another thing to the voyage. And that is a trial of marine timekeeper. So a marine timekeeper existed for that the British had access to at the time of the first voyage, but it was only the one. You're not going to trust that on a voyage going all around the world for several years. It is your prototype and it was in the process then of being understood, taken apart, tried, copied by other makers. So what was available by Cook's second voyage was the first copy made of what was John Harrison's H4, so his C-Watch.

that was copied by Larkham Kendall, a watch we now know as K1 after Kendall, all of these at the National Maritime Museum today. So that was now ready for trial. And Masclan was saying to the Admiralty, take this, take some of our other timekeepers, made by John Arnold, for example. Let's see how well they work. Simon, they went into the Antarctic. It's, from what I read, it's vicious waters,

it's icebergs are broken off, there's this, something the other. He did no damage. He got through the whole lot, didn't it? No, in many ways, I think, the entry of his two vessels, resolution and discovery into the Antarctic is an extraordinary navigational achievement

and was recognised as such at once. The astronomer on board, William Wales, made the most graphic and rather moving descriptions of Antarctic icebergs and the kind of bizarre optical effects that one sees in very high southern latitudes in the Antarctic summer. They were there in January and February, but it was still very, very hostile waters. After the voyage, Wales became a mathematics teacher

at the Royal Mathematical School back in London, now Christ's Hospital. amongst his students was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And it's been argued, I think, plausibly, that Coleridge would have heard from his teacher, William Wales, about what the Great Southern Waters are like, the icebergs, the ancient mariner. The strange lights, and that gets written into the ancient mariner.

Yet another cultural product of the Cook project. Could have been Christian coming back to him, but that's a different programme. Still, good, their connection. Sophie, then he was sort of semi-retired, wasn't he then? And this time he did take a lot of credit. This time, the Royal Society fated him and feasted him, and he became globally famous because...

Correct. And that's fair enough, isn't it, Simon? Yeah, fine, he came globally famous, so I can use that. Why did he go on a third voyage? This is with Resolution 1776. I think because he really didn't want to be retired. He's created a... He's promoted to post-captain.

He's given a pretty much of a... sinecure at Greenwich Hospital. But as he says to Captain Walker, who he remains in contact with in Whitby over the rest of his life, he says, can an active mind like mine be confined within these four walls? Once at sea, once an explorer, he cannot resist going on. And when in fact a dinner is thrown with Lord Sandwich and fellows of the Royal Society, society. He cannot

is saying, yes, okay, I'll go. So off he goes, and one of the things here, Rebecca, it is to see if there's a northeast passage up the Bering Strait's from the Pacific across the top. North West Passage, yes.

Very sorry. Well, northeast if you're in the Pacific. I think I'm right, because I said across from the Pacific. I think I thought you'd think of the northeast as going up over Russia rather than, but anyway, it depends. You know what we're talking about.

Simon backs me, that's fine. We know we're talking about. He's going to see if there's that pass, that elusive passage, which people have looked for before. It seems a good shortcut, and he tries to find that. Yes, so rather than going down round Cape Horn, which they had managed to fix its points and chart it much more accurately than previously on the first voyage,

but nevertheless, a long and dangerous passage race. So getting up and over, a shortcut between the Atlantic and the Pacific was something that was designed. but yes, they did not find a northwest or northeast passage through, but they did do, again, a huge amount of surveying work. So miles and miles of that coastline at the top northwest of the Pacific, which had been kind of empty space on the globe before. So if we think of what a globe looked like before Cook's voyages begin,

there was little bits of Australia that gets filled in. There was little bits, and then it sort of turns to no one's quite sure what goes on. there and again it's being filled in so this is very useful knowledge that isn't there previously and not knowing things is always as useful as knowing them and again being done with huge amounts of precision we have many many many many observers of observations being made to fix positions precisely in terms of longitude and latitude to make sure those surveys are are accurate but he didn't find that the north-east or the northwest passage so so he returned and he returned to a very dramatic death, Simon Schaffer. Can you tell us that?

Yeah, and one of the most remarkable projects of the third voyage was Cook's arrival in the Hawaiian archipelago, which he named after his patron, Lord Sandwich of the Admiralty. Hawaii had been absolutely unknown to Europeans. It's one of the most sophisticated, most powerful, most developed of Polynesian societies. Cook returned to Hawaii, the big island, from his survey of the northeastern coast of the Pacific, all the way from Oregon to Alaska. And in January of 79, his vessel begins to circumnavigate the island in a clockwise direction, looking for landing and finds one.

his landing coincided with great Hawaiian festivals, the Makahiki Festival of plentiful food and Return of the Gods, and Cook and his men are greeted extraordinarily well, and there are festivals and things go very well, and his voyage is replenished. He then sets off on resolution, and almost at once the mast breaks, it springs. So he has to return to Hawaii, to Kela Akakawa Bay, And this time the reception is extremely hostile.

Why? Because perhaps on the one hand, the timing is terrible. The Hawaiian season has changed from that of feast to war. And there's a great controversy about the way in which Cook and his men are seen by the Hawaiian population. and during the course of the return, one of Cook's small boats is stolen. Cook does what he'd done elsewhere in the Pacific, which is to lead a party onto land,

to take an eminent member of the community as hostage. He seizes the local chief. There is a fight on the beach where in February of 1779, during which Cook is killed along with several of his men. and the body is then treated ceremonially by the Hawaiians and given back to the British who bury it at sea. Sophie Foggin, how has his news of his death received around the world? With shock and sorrow, King George III even writes a note to Lord Sandwich,

First Lord of the Admiralty, saying, one cannot but regret the loss of so able a man as Captain Cook. throughout Europe there was a great deal of sadness and shock that he was killed. But it happened. It was not uncommon for captains to be lost at sea. And they appointed another one and carried on with the mission. Rebecca, can you summarise what the main changes were that Cook made? Can you do that in about 42 seconds?

Not very easily. That point is about filling in the globe. I think also making scientific work a tradition. within voyages like this for the Royal Navy. It carries on. It stops for a while during the Napoleonic Wars, but 1818, they start right off again looking for the Northwest Passage with astronomers on board, with naturalists, with artists.

So that tradition goes right on. We can think to Darwin, Huxley, beyond. And it's taken up by many other nations as well, so it's not just the British at this. And again, Cook is an inspirational heroic guiding figure for them. And finally, Simon? It is a transformation of the world. world, it had appalling effects on large populations in the Pacific as well as transformative

ones. Later effects because of diseases. Because of disease, because of conflict, because of social transformation. The population of Hawaii in 1770 was about 80,000 and by 1820 was about 8,000. And one should not forget that. But as a vision of what global exchange might be, it stays in European memory as a Memorial of triumph. Thank you very much, Simon Schaffer, Sophie Forgan and Rebecca Higgott, and thank you for suggesting that, those of you out there, including Alaska.

Next week we'll be discussing Chinese legalism, 2,000 years before Mao, at time of the First Emperor, which made all men equal before the law, even aristocrats. How about that? Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what did we not say then, Sophie? say anything about communication. I think you could talk marks for mentioning Whitby more than it's ever been mentioned on British radio on the history of the planet. So when you go back

to Whitby, they'll have a carnival in your I hope so. Well, doubted, doubted. What we didn't mention was communication. The first voyage, it's published. The charts are published. Images are published. But the

images are by Banks' artist, Parkinson, who is, of course, course, has died. So on the next voyage, they send an admiral, an aborted, appointed artist, William Hodges, and again on the third voyage, John Weber. And Cook is increasingly conscious how important the artists are. And as he says, a picture will not quite say what a thousand words will do, but he says a picture will express better than I can in words. And on the third voyage with Weber, he very much directs Weber to say, do this, do that, paint this, paint that.

So you get a fantastic record of the encounters throughout the voyage. Two things I think, I mean, we touched on, but we could expand on. I mean, one is the way in which cook, both by example and clearly by training, if one looks at the journals, produces a cader of extraordinarily expert,

navigators. I mean, this is related to what Rebecca was saying about building this into the Admiralty tradition. So if you start to look at who was on at Cook's voyages, men like George Vancouver or William Bly will, from the late 1700s onwards, keep this tradition going. I mean, these are two absolutely extraordinary navigators, Bly and Vancouver, absolutely amazing surveyors and amazing commanders who continue the project in different ways and they have James Cook inside their heads. What do we miss for Gage?

As you concerned, Rebecca. The teaching, so that, I mean, all of the things that the astronomers were doing, and one of them was to teach other officers how to use these new technologies for longitude, so the timekeepers and the lunar distance method. And through these voyages, these were proved to work

at long distance to work well together. So we find that these still very novel experimental timekeepers don't always work perfectly. They do break down or they run down and have to be restarted. But as a system alongside astronomy, so the astronomy can help you get your fix from first principles and restart the clock, check that it's going well. So as a complementary system, they are proved as a result of these voyages.

And by the 19th century, they are being used trained, officers are being trained to use them and implement them on all voyages, essentially. So it really kicks off here. But also the whole range of other kinds of observations that those astronomers are doing, which were about finding out more information. So what's the salinity of the water? What's the depth of the ocean? All of that surveying information being gathered,

information about magnetism and so on. So they have a huge amount of kit, which we didn't quite get into. So just the sheer amount of brassware and glassware. that's going out with them as well as all of the specimens coming home. So not only are all the images, but if we look in our museums today, we can see thousands of items that can be traced back to the voyages, collected not just by the naturalists,

but by other officers as well to exchange, sell, have a souvenir or to put in the British Museum. It's also very important to remember that, particularly the Polynesians, for good reasons, collected cook. They collected lots of British materials. flags, instruments, nails, metalwork and so on. When later voyagers arrive in Tahiti or in Hawaii,

they find institutions which are not that different from museums. I'd add to what Simon was saying about subsequent navigators having cook inside their head, not just British ones but also continental ones. La Perouse, for instance, Count La Perouse, took an incredibly well-equipped and lavish voyage to the Pacific, modelled himself very much on Cook, modeled his work on Cook, and of course he disappears and never comes home again.

And Cook, of course, comes home, or his ships from the third voyage, come home with their cargo of goodies. and collections and observations. A number of expeditions didn't come home. And that's another reason why Cook's name is such a surviving and important one. I think Simon Tillerson is going to come in and offer you the choice of the BBC. There are many more science and discussion programmes from Radio 4 to download for free.

Find these on the website at BBC.co.com.uk slash radio 4.