Cook's Last Voyage, Volume III: Tahiti, the Society Islands, and the Discovery of Hawaii

August 1777. The Resolution and the Discovery anchor at last off Tahiti. James Cook brings back Omai, the Raiatean whom London had claimed for two years, laden with suits of armor, globes, and fireworks. No one on the beach pays him any attention. Then someone catches sight of his red feathers, and everything changes.

Six weeks follow, among the densest of the whole voyage. Cook attends, over two days, the sacrifice of a man on the great morai of Attahooroo, and counts forty-nine skulls at the foot of the altar. He reviews some sixty war canoes drawn up in Matavai Bay. He watches a people astonished before the first horses ever to set foot on their land. Then, at Moorea, he has houses and canoes burned over two stolen goats, and weighs for himself the price of his own harshness.

There follow the settling of Omai in his house at Huahine and the tearful farewell of the Tahitian traveler, the desertions at Raiatea where Cook holds Chief Oreo's children hostage, and the bargain at Bora Bora, where he buys back from old Opoony the anchor Bougainville had lost ten years before. Between anchorages, the surgeon William Anderson composes his long portrait of Tahiti: seasons and gardens, language and remedies, kava, arioi, atua, and kingship, one of the most complete documents the eighteenth century left on Tahitian society.

Then comes the course north, and the unknown. On Christmas Eve 1777, a deserted atoll rises out of the ocean: turtles are caught there, a solar eclipse observed, two lost sailors nearly die of thirst. Three weeks later, on the 18th of January 1778, two lands rise on the horizon and men come aboard speaking the language of Tahiti, sixteen hundred leagues away. Cook names them the Sandwich Islands. He does not yet know he will die there. The volume ends with the long run up to the coast of New Albion and the anchorage in Nootka Sound, in March 1778.

Isabelle Perol here rewrites in today's English Book III of A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (London, 1784), Cook's own journal and the essay of his naturalist William Anderson. The text is stripped of its period heaviness, but faithful to fact, to measurement, and to the seamen's own eye: no summarizing, no abridging, no commentary slipped into the narrative.

This edition adds an introduction, a set of reference matter (glossary, chronology, index, editor's note, afterword), selected passages from the original text, route maps, and original illustrations that let the reader see the course followed. Third of the six volumes devoted to James Cook's third and last voyage, in the Forgotten Travel Journals collection. Each volume can be read on its own.