Captain James Cook: His voyages of exploration and the men that accompanied him
Other National Maritime Museum websites covering Cook's voyages:
Captain Cook Fact File
Learn more about Cook and his three voyages of exploration.
Search Station: Exploration
Choose the
Exploration
theme for images, objects and information on Cook and 18th-century exploration.
PortCities London
Discover more about Cook and maritime exploration and view images from the NMM collection.
Further resources on Cook and the voyages of exploration:
National Library of Australia
A collection of Travellers' Art - including material produced by John Webber, the artist who accompanied Cook on his third voyage around the Pacific (1776-80).
Cook & Omai: The Cult of the South Seas
The National Library of Australia's site showcases the artwork and imagery born of early exploration.
Key figures from Cook's second voyage:
J.R. (
Johann Reinhold) Forster
(1729-1798)
and his son,
Johann George Adam Forster
(1754-94
)
It was following a disagreement with Cook that Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) withdrew his scientific party from the planned second voyage. A search for another natural history team to fill the vacant positions followed. The German scientist J. R. Forster, who had become a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1772, was appointed as the expedition's naturalist. His son, George, was to accompany his father as assistant and artist.
J.R. Forster published his
Observations made during a voyage round the world on physical geography, natural history and ethic philosophy
in 1778. His son's unofficial account -
A Voyage round the world in HMS Resolution, commanded by Capt. J. Cook, during ... 1772-5
- was not subject to the same Admiralty censorship and reached the public prior to J.R. Forster's record. A discussion of the relationship between these two accounts of the voyage can be found in Rod Edmond's article for the
Journal for Maritime Research
.
The
Pitt Rivers Museum
holds a collection of some of the objects collected in the South Pacific by the Forsters, during Cook's second voyage.
Richard Pickersgill (1749-1779)
Pickersgill was Cook's third lieutenant on the second voyage. William Hodges's painting,
'View in Pickersgill Harbour, Dusky Bay, New Zealand'
depicts the anchorage which Cook named after his lieutenant.
The Maritime Art Greenwich
website has a detailed entry on the painting.
See also the entry in
John Elliott's crew list
, transcribed on this site.
William Wales (c.1734-98)
Wales was Cook's astronomer onboard the 'Resolution'. For Cook's second voyage, the Board of Longitude entrusted a new chronometer, recently completed by Larcum Kendall (K1), to Wales. Kendall's K1, a faithful copy of John Harrison's H4 prototype, was so accurate that a second method of finding longitude at sea was possible.
K1 can be seen online in the National Maritime Museum's
Search Station
.
A portrait of William Wales appears in an article published online as part of the
Journal for Maritime Research
.
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