Cook's Last Voyage, Volume VI: Kamchatka, Canton and the Return to England

March 1779. Cook has been dead for a month on a beach in Hawaii, and the expedition's two ships turn north once more to make a final attempt at forcing the Northwest Passage.

The account is now kept by James King, twenty-nine years old, second lieutenant turned narrator. He tells of the entry into a Kamchatka bay still gripped by ice, a Russian garrison that runs out its guns believing pirates have come, and then the crossing of the peninsula by dog sledge to Bolcheretsk, where Major Behm, commander of the province, empties his storehouses for these strangers and refuses all payment. He then tells of the following summer: the pack ice, heavier than the year before, which closes off every route to the Atlantic, and Captain Clerke, worn down by consumption ever since England, who writes the verdict with a dying man's hand before passing away within sight of the coasts he longed to see again, on 22 August 1779.

The whole world still remains to be crossed on the way home. The volcanoes, the sables and the peoples of Kamchatka, which King sets down in a long ethnographic portrait; the phantom islands that old charts placed off Japan; the storms and currents that drive the ships out to sea; a sulphur island smoking in the open ocean; and then Canton at last, where the sailors discover that the otter pelts once bartered for nails are worth a fortune, and where they learn all at once that Europe has been at war for three years. Then come Pulo Condore and its untamable buffaloes, the fevers of the Sunda Strait, the stop at the Cape, and the long detour by the Orkney Islands that closes the voyage.

This book is also James King's testament: it is he who takes command of the Discovery after Clerke's death, he who negotiates the sale of the furs at Canton and draws from it, figures in hand, the outline of a new trade between America and China, and he who will write, for the Admiralty and already coughing with the illness that carried off Clerke, the official account published in London in 1784. This volume corresponds to Book VI of that original edition, from the farewell to the Sandwich Islands in March 1779 to the final anchorage in the Thames estuary on 4 October 1780, after four years, two months and twenty-two days away.

The sixth and last of six volumes devoted to James Cook's third and final voyage, in the Forgotten Travel Journals collection. Each volume stands on its own.

The first complete modern rewriting for today's reader, which makes this account readable without betraying anything of the voyage. Original illustrations and 10 redrawn maps bring the route to life, while a set of reference tools (glossary, chronology, index, editor's note, afterword and further reading) and selected passages from the original text illuminate the reading.