Cook Towards the South Pole, Volume II: Tonga, Easter Island and the Marquesas

September 1773. The Resolution leaves the warm lagoons of the Society Islands and sets a course south, alone, in search of a continent that all of Europe believes lies crouched at the end of the world.

At the Friendly Islands, impassive chiefs receive Cook with great ceremony; in New Zealand, a severed head on the deck reveals to him the cannibalism he had refused to believe. Then the ship pushes deeper into the ice: the ice islands close in, the field ice bars the horizon, and on 30 January 1774 the navigator reaches the southernmost point ever attained by a man, 71 degrees 10 minutes south. Beyond it, there is nothing: the great southern continent does not exist.

Having sailed back toward the sun, Cook lands among the stone giants of Easter Island, returns to the Marquesas discovered two centuries earlier by Mendana, watches the review of a Tahitian war fleet of more than three hundred canoes led by admiral Towha, bids farewell to King Otoo and to the Society Islands, then pushes on to the New Hebrides, on the threshold of a land still unknown to Europeans.

This second volume covers the heart of the voyage: Books II and III of Cook's original account, from September 1773 to July 1774. This is where the voyage's double conquest is decided, the polar record that ruins two thousand years of speculation about a populated southern continent, and the densest encounter with the peoples of the Pacific, from the Friendly Islands to the New Hebrides by way of Easter Island and the Marquesas. Faced with Maori cannibalism, Cook moves from horrified disbelief to direct experience, having a piece of flesh roasted on his quarterdeck to settle the matter once and for all, a gesture that says as much about his century as about what he observes.

The second volume of the trilogy devoted to Cook's second voyage (1772-1775), part of the Forgotten Travel Journals collection, Oceania & Pacific series, this book continues the route of the previous volume, from the Society Islands to the New Hebrides; the following volume will close out the crossing of the southern Pacific up to the return to England.

The first complete modern rewriting for today's reader, making this account readable without betraying anything of the voyage. Twenty original illustrations and ten redrawn maps bring the route to life, while a set of reference tools (glossary, timeline, index, further reading, editor's note, afterword) and selected passages from the original text accompany the reading.