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The Secret History of the World 1st Edition Laura
Knight-Jadczyk Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Laura Knight-Jadczyk
ISBN(s): 9780976504108, 0976504103
Edition: 1st
File Details: PDF, 19.47 MB
Year: 2005
Language: english
The Secret History of the World
And How to Get Out Alive
Books by
Laura Knight-Jadczyk

The Wave Series

The High Strangeness of Dimensions, Densities and the Process of Alien
Abduction
Amazing Grace
9-11: The Ultimate Truth
The Secret History of
the World
And How To Get Out Alive

Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Red Pill Press

2005
! Copyright 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 Laura Knight-Jadczyk
http://www.cassiopaea.org/
All Rights Reserved
ISBN# 0-9765041-0-3

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, other
than for “fair use”, without the written consent of the author.

This book was previously published in a slightly different form under the title
Ancient Science. Sections of this volume were published on the Cassiopaea website
as early as 1995.

Printed in Canada
 Acknowledgements

Since this book is ulitmately one of synthesis, I want to thank all the great
seekers who have contributed so much to my own researches. I have tried to
acknowledge each and every one and their unique ideas throughout the text in the
footnotes, and in the bibliography. If I have missed any, my sincere apologies.
My thanks go to Henry See for being a wonderful editor and critic; to the
Quantum Future Group for support; to our readers for the questions that led to the
answers; to my children for feeding Mommy while she was writing; to my Ark for
understanding and accepting me and my passions; and to Cassiopaea, myself in the
future, for showing me that future.
 Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS V

PREFACE BY PATRICK RIVIÈRE XI

NOTE TO THE READER ABOUT THE CASSIOPAEANS XIII

FOREWORD XV

INTRODUCTION 1
LAYING THE G ROUNDWORK 1
THE SCAM OF DISTRACTION 6
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES 8
COINTELPRO AND A SCENSION 23
PRIME TIME 24
THE REAL PRIZE 25

CHAPTER 1 THE NATURE OF THE QUEST 29

THE ANCIENT SECRET SCIENCE REVEALED 29
DISJECTA MEMBRA 29
ALCHEMY AND THE ENCLAVE IN THE PYRENEES 39
A KNIGHT ON A QUEST 57
GURDJIEFF AND MOURAVIEFF 72

CHAPTER 2 THE CHEMISTRY OF ALCHEMY 87

THE LANGUAGE OF THE GODS 87
THE ANALOGY WITH BRAIN PHYSIOLOGY 89
BONDING 90
RECEPTORS 91
LIGANDS 92
SPIRITUAL D RUGS 93
ALCOHOL AND CAFFEINE 94
PLEASURE CENTERS AND DRUGS 95
viii Table of Contents

CHAPTER 3 THE QUEST OF THE PAST 109

BACK TO THE H OLY G RAIL AND LANGUAGE 109
“YOU KNOW MY METHOD. I T IS FOUNDED UPON
THE OBSERVANCE OF TRIFLES.” 114
THE TERROR OF HISTORY 117
A FEW WORDS A BOUT RADIOMETRIC DATING 119

CHAPTER 4 HYPERDIMENSIONAL REALITY 123

HYPERDIMENSIONAL SPACE — THE REALM OF THE “GODS” 123
MATHEMATICAL DIMENSIONS 126
THE MAGIC OF ABSTRACT THOUGHT 126
DIMENSIONAL THINKING IN WESTERN SPIRITUALITY 129
GETTING A HANDLE ON PSI PHENOMENA 133
EINSTEIN AND HYPERDIMENSIONAL PHYSICS 135

CHAPTER 5 WHOSE WORLD IS IT, ANYWAY? 139

THE TREE OF LIFE AND THE END OF TIME 139
A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH 142
SUMMING U P 157
INTERMIXING OF THE RACES 157
OPS AND THE BIG PICTURE 159
THE CATHARS 164

CHAPTER 6 HISTORY AND CATASTROPHE 171

THE NOAH SYNDROME 171
WHAT PLATO TELLS U S ABOUT ATLANTIS 176
THE DOUBLE CATASTROPHE: THE BROTHERS H ELIOPOLIS 182
CYCLIC CATASTROPHES 184
UNIFORMITARIANISM 188
CATASTROPHISM 190

CHAPTER 7 ANCIENT ENIGMAS 201

DINOSAURS 201
THE MYSTERY OF MALTA 216
THE JOMON PUZZLE 220
GLOBAL EVIDENCE OF ANCIENT, PRE-HISTORIC HIGH CIVILIZATIONS 223
ANCIENT FLIGHT? 224
THE N EANDERTHAL ENIGMA 227
EVIDENCE OF THE ICA STONES 230
OTHER ARTIFACTS 231
THE SUDDEN A PPEARANCE OF CRO-MAGNON 233
THE ROLE OF THE SHAMAN 239
TYING IT ALL TOGETHER 242
ORION, THE ARK AND THE HOLY GRAIL 243
Table of Contents ix

THE RELEVANCE OF ORION TO OUR SITUATION 244

FROM SCYTHIA TO CAMELOT 247

CHAPTER 8 THE CULTURE OF STONES 255

MAGIC AND MEGALITHS 255
MORRIS JESSUP AND GRAVITATIONAL NODES 258
THE DANCE OF THE H OURS 261
POSSIBLE ANTAGONISTIC POLARITIES IN ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS 264
STONE TECHNOLOGY AND T.C. LETHBRIDGE 265
STONES AND “SACRED G EOMETRY” 272
THE CORAL CASTLE AND SPINNING AIRPLANE SEATS 272
EGYPTIAN STONE V ASES 277
PYTHAGORAS AND THE BARBARIANS 279
THE DANCING GOD 283
THE LABYRINTH 290
THE SECRET OF CRETE 298

CHAPTER 9 PERCY-ING THE VEIL 305

RETURN TO CAMELOT 305
WHY PERCEVAL? 316
ARCADIA? 318
NEO, NOAH, NOË = PERSEUS 335

CHAPTER 10 WHO WROTE THE BIBLE AND WHY? 345

THE A RK OF THE COVENANT AND THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON 345
THE HOUSE OF DAVID 360
AHAB AND JEZEBEL: SOLOMON AND SHEBA? 362
THE TEN LOST TRIBES 369
THE FIRST “TORAH” AND THE FIRST “TEMPLE” 371
THE TRIBE OF DAN 382
THE FESTIVAL OF TABERNACLES 387
I’M MY O WN GRANDPA 410
SOTHIS: THE SHARP TOOTHED 426
MOSES AND A ARON 440
THE SIN OF MANASSEH: EXILE IN BABYLON 446
x Table of Contents

CHAPTER 11 TIME 467

THE CULT OF THE H EAD 467
BACK TO A TLANTIS 469
SARGON THE GREAT 475
SARGON REPRISE 487
THE GUANCHE LANGUAGE. 487
THE RISE OF SACRIFICE 489
THE SHELL GAME 501
THE END OF TIME 505

CHAPTER 12 OUT OF TIME 527

ONCE U PON A TIME 527
TIME IS ON MY SIDE 528
THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 531
THE TREE OF LIFE 544
TRANSMUTATION OF THE PERSONALITY 606

AFTERWORD 619

BIBLIOGRAPHY 681

INDEX 697
 Preface by Patrick Rivière

The Secret History of The World

This book of revolutionary importance is essential reading.

With this original work, Laura Knight-Jadczyk shares with us her prodigious
discoveries that put into question History as well as our habitual observations
concerning the myth of the “Grail”. She does this by revisiting the Bible and
comparative mythology, looking closely into parallel universes and hyperspace,
and penetrating into quantum physics, genetics, and the mysteries of the diverse
creations populating the hyperdimensions of the Cosmos.
Throughout her exposé, Laura Knight-Jadczyk refers to two powerful works of
the scientist-alchemist Fulcanelli: The Mystery of the Cathedrals and Dwellings of
the Philosophers. She applies her vast knowledge to the continuation of his work.
Thus, following in the footsteps of Fulcanelli (citing Huysmans) when he
denounces the constant lies and omissions from official History over the course of
time, Laura Knight-Jadczyk, citing numerous examples, exposes the manipulations
in the official history of ancient civilizations of which humanity is the victim. She
strives to re-establish the truth, and her answers are often enlightening.
According to Laura Knight-Jadczyk, the mysteries of the Holy Grail and the Ark
of the Temple refer to a particular, very advanced “technology” – with the aim, for
example, of teleportation and changing between space-time dimensions – a secret
and sacred science of which only a few great “Initiates” have remained custodians.
Christ Jesus was the surest guarantor of this precious legacy, and, although it
might displease Dan Brown (author of The DaVinci Code), the genealogical
lineage of the “Sangréal” (the “Sang Royal” or “Holy Blood”), is not at all as he
believes it to be! The reader of this important work by Laura Knight-Jadczyk will
realize that there are completely different conclusions to that mystery.
Her erudition cannot but impress the reader during the course of an assiduous
reading of this quite astonishing book. As to her inspiration, what can we say, and,
from whence could it come, if not the Light of the stars?

Patrick Rivière
xii Preface by Patrick Rivière

Patrick Rivière is a writer and author of numerous works that have been
published in France and that have been translated and published in many
languages. He is a specialist on the “Grail” (On the Paths of the Grail) and of
Alchemy following the path of Fulcanelli (Fulcanelli Revealed), two works soon to
be published by Red Pill Press.
 Note to the Reader About the Cassiopaeans

The term “Cassiopaeans” appears in several places in this book. While the
information contained in this book could as well be given without referring to this
term, it is better to point out the source of the inspiration. The name Cassiopaea
was given by a source contacted by LKJ in 1994 after a two year long experiment
in superluminal communication. The source identified itself by saying “we are you
in the future”. Modern physics does not provide us with practical means for this
type of communication and theories on this subject are not well developed; they
are, in fact, inconclusive and controversial.
When interpreting “we are you in the future” in an oversimplified way, we are
faced with causal paradoxes. On the other hand, from the theoretical papers
published in physics journals we can learn that, with a proper and careful
interpretation, and taking into account quantum uncertainties, communication into
the past cannot be dismissed as impossible. Improbable perhaps is the right word,
but there are many things that are improbable and yet happen. The more
improbable is a given phenomenon, the more information is carried by its
occurrence, the more we can learn by its study. That is why we did not dismiss the
“we are you in the future” as impossible and therefore ignorable. Instead we
decided to continue the “communications” as a form of a controlled experiment in
“superluminal thought transfer” – even if it was clear that the term should be
considered as a tentative indication of only one out several possible
interpretations.
The information received from this experiment is presented in the context of
broad ranging historical, scientific and other metaphysical material and offers the
clues that have led to the world view and inferences presented by us in our
numerous publications on the Web and in print. Perhaps it is only our own
“subconscious mind” that presents itself as a “source”, but even if it is so, does
that tell us more? Do we really know what “unconscious mind” is and of what is it
capable?
We sometimes ask ourselves if the Cassiopaeans are who they say they are,
because we do not take anything as unquestionable truth. We take everything with
a grain of salt, even if we consider that there is a good chance that it is truth. We
are constantly analyzing this material as well as a great quantity of other material
that comes to our attention from numerous fields of science and mysticism.
We invite the reader to share in our seeking of Truth by reading with an open,
but skeptical mind. We do not encourage “devotee-ism” nor “True Belief”. We do
encourage the seeking of Knowledge and Awareness in all fields of endeavor as
the best way to be able to discern lies from truth. The one thing we can tell the
xiv A Note to the Reader

reader is this: we work very hard, many hours a day, and have done so for many
years, to discover the “bottom line” of our existence on Earth. It is our vocation,
our quest, and our job. We constantly seek to validate and/or refine what we
understand to be either possible or probable or both. We do this in the sincere hope
that all of mankind will benefit, if not now, then at some point in one of our
probable futures.

Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Arkadiusz Jadczyk, PhD

 Foreword

I suspected something was wrong with the “facts of life” as they were presented
to me when I was a kid. Sure, I then spent a little over thirty years trying to be
“normal” and make that square peg fit the round hole, “looking for a reason to
believe.” But then there was a memorable day when I finally grew up and admitted
that maybe - just maybe - the Emperor was naked. And here it is, over twenty
years later, and now - well, now I know that not only is something rotten in
Denmark, I also know there is a dead elephant in the middle of the collective
global living room and I can never NOT see it again.
During that twenty plus years of uncovering that huge, dead critter that occupies
a central place in our reality, I was driven by the idea that I just wanted to know
what was REALLY going on in this strange world I lived in where, on the one
hand, science was moving so fast that we would soon be able to destroy our planet,
while on the other hand, the varied religions were telling us not to worry, God was
probably gonna destroy it for us and we had better believe in the “right god” or we
were toast.
How can a person live in a world where “the End of the World” is being
predicted every minute? That’s crazy!
But darned if that isn’t what just about every religion on the planet talks about!
You go to church, get scared to death in an hour and a half, warned about
hellfire and damnation, and then they pass the plate so that you can pay the high
priests to put in a good word for you with God so that maybe you won’t suffer as
much as that jerk down the street who goes to a different church! And even if you
do suffer here on earth, if you believe hard enough, and prove it by putting your
money where your faith is, at least you’ll get your reward in paradise.
This was back in 1982 when I had three small children. As a mother, I wanted to
know what to teach my children. I knew that what I had been taught to believe was
frightening. I had grown up in a time when children were regularly taught what to
do in case of an atomic bomb attack - Cuba was only 90 miles from Florida where
I was born - and at the same time, the standard religious teaching of my family -
mainstream Protestants - promoted the “suffer on Earth to get rewarded in
Heaven” routine.
I knew I had certainly suffered from the state of the world and the teachings of
my faith. I really, REALLY wanted to know if this was something that I should
pass on to my children.
When I held my babies and rocked them or looked into their sweet, innocent
faces - untroubled by the concerns of the world around, certain that Mother would
make them safe - I had to ask myself “How can I tell them these things? How can I
xvi The Secret History of the World

“break it to them” that this world into which they have been born is so frightening
and uncertain and full of traps that not only are their lives in constant danger, their
very souls may be in peril?
How could I tell that to my children???
If it was true, I HAD to tell them.
But what if it wasn’t true?
WHAT IF IT WASN’T TRUE?
I knew one thing and one thing only: I wanted more than anything in the world
to tell my children the truth, to prepare them for whatever might lie ahead of them
in their lives. And the question burned inside me: What if I told those little beings
who I loved more than my own life a LIE? What kind of a mother would I be?
What kind of “Mother Love” is that?
The End of the World is an idea, which has fascinated man for all recorded
history and perhaps beyond. In every religion, philosophy, and mystery teaching,
there are hints, allusions or outright claims to knowledge of this purported end to
man’s current status on the earth.
Some teachings say that the earth itself will cease to exist. Others proclaim that
man will cease to exist in material form; still others claim a great judgment day, in
which the wicked are wiped from the face of the planet while the “saved” are
rescued in some miraculous fashion to return and inhabit a new, heaven-like “City
of God”. The persistence of these ideas and their prevalence is centered around the
idea that man began somewhere, sometime, somehow, and will therefore come to
an end somewhere, sometime, somehow.
This assumption is born of the conscious mind’s tendency to think in linear
terms. Scientific materialism has carried this tendency to the ultimate heights:
“The world must have been born, therefore, it must die”. Also, scientific
materialism claims nothingness before birth and nothingness after death. Scientific
philosophies refer to the “accidental mechanicalness” of the universe and teach us
that the only meaning to life is no meaning at all. “Eat, drink, and be merry for
tomorrow you may die”, and then -- oblivion.
Scientifically speaking, for a long time matter and motion were accepted as the
basis of reality and, to a great extent, continue to be. Yet, in actual fact, matter and
motion are unknown quantities x and y, and are always defined by means of one
another. It is an absurdity to define one unknown by means of another! What this
means is that science defines matter as that which moves, and defines motion as
changes in matter. The “Big Bang” or Cosmic Firecracker theory is explained in
these terms. A primal atom, (matter), of incredible density “exploded” into motion.
(Where the primal atom came from, how the space it exploded into came into
being, and where the impetus for this event originated, are still on the drawing
board.) And from this event, our universe and the life within it just sort of
“accidentally” happened. Man is the “amoral end of a deadly biological
evolution”. The mind and soul are inexplicable byproducts of the struggle for
survival.
To the average person, a table, a chair, an orange, is a real object. They have
dimension -- three, to be exact - they are real. But are they? The physicist (and the
knowledgeable layperson) knows that the object is composed of atoms. And there
lies the rub! The dissected atom (quantum particles) often displays some very
Foreword xvii

disturbing properties. Who has really seen matter or force? We think we see matter
in motion, but physics has shown us that what we see is an illusion. When we try
to focus on it, a quantum particle/wave is an infinite-dimensional entity incapable
of being perceived, in that instant, as a three-dimensional body moving through
space. When we look away, the quantum particle/wave acts like a wave of pure
energy - invisible force.
So, just what is matter? What is this estate in which we find our existence? Does
the physical run out when it becomes invisible? Obviously not, as we cannot see
electricity and other forces in the universe measurable only by their effect upon
“matter”. Do these forces run out when they become undetectable by our senses or
by our instruments? Do the things we detect with the subtle mechanisms of our
mind and emotions not exist simply because we cannot see or measure them?
Science hands those questions over to religion and basically, we are told to
“believe what you like” in that area because science isn’t in the business of
describing things it cannot materially weigh or measure. There is a not-so-subtle
implication in such a view that it really doesn’t matter what a person believes
anyway because, as Danish physicist Niels Bohr put it, “There is no deep reality!”
So, for those people who have the idea that there is something “deeper”, some
“meaning” to life, if you want to put it that way, there is really only one place to
go for answers: religion, of which there are three major ones in the world today,
all of them “Monotheistic” and based, essentially, on a single religion, Judaism.
The Bible says, “In the Beginning, God created the heaven and the earth”.
Neither the Bible nor science has much to say about what happened before the
beginning. St. Augustine was once asked the question “What was God doing
before He created the world?”. The Bishop’s rejoinder: “Creating Hell for those
who ask that question!”, put a period to such inquiries. Few have asked it since.
There are, of course, various “interpretations” of the teachings of Monotheism
that exist inside and outside of the “orthodox” explanations. Some interpreters say
that the only meaning to life is in spiritual self-improvement and creating a better
future in the afterlife, or in future lives. Other interpreters say that the meaning to
life lies in working to dissolve the ego into nothingness. Among the more recent
variations is the idea that the true purpose of life is to align our “self-created
realities” so that they become as one, and thereby we may achieve a unified race,
which will either “ascend” or will survive beyond predicted cataclysms for a
thousand years before things wind down a bit into the usual state of decay.
Naturally this effect can only be initiated and maintained by a group effort at
consciousness raising. There are other ideas and combinations of ideas similar to
these -- all leading where?
Are we, in fact, an accident of evolution in an accidental universe, on a race to
nowhere except oblivion? Or, worse still, are our very minds - our belief in and
desire for knowledge of higher things - our greatest flaw? Are we damned by our
religion for asking such questions, or ridiculed by science for thinking that they
even ought to be asked? The choice seems to be between a sick joke and a
mistake.
Yet, the question must be asked: why do we live in a world in which material
extinction is a real possibility? Are we truly on the edge of an abyss, losing our
xviii The Secret History of the World

balance, preparing to fall into a hole so deep and dark that we shall never come out
of it?
There are two main theories of the future - that of a predestined future and that
of a free future. The theory of predestination asserts that every future event is the
result of past events and if we know all the past then we could know all the future.
The idea of a free future is based on quantum “probabilities”. The future is either
only partially determined or undetermined because of the varied interactions
possible at any given point. This idea of “free will” says that quite deliberate
volitional acts may bring about a subsequent change in events. Those who support
predestination say that so-called “voluntary” actions are, in fact, not, but are rather
the results of incompletely understood causes which have made them imperative
acts -- in short, nothing is accidental.
On the one hand we have “cold predestination” come what may, nothing can be
changed -- on the other hand we have a reality which is only a point on some sort
of needle named the present surrounded on all sides by the Gulf of Nonexistence -
a world which is born and dies every moment.
During those early days of asking questions outside of my “standard religious
faith”, I came across an idea put forth by P.D. Ouspensky in his book Tertium
Organum:
“At every given moment all the future of the world is predestined and existing, but
it is predestined conditionally, i.e., there must be one or another future in
accordance with the direction of events of the given moment, if no new factor
comes in. And a new factor can come in only from the side of consciousness and
the will resulting from it. In the past, what is behind us, lies not only in what was,
but also in what could have been. In the same way, in the future lies not only what
will be but also what may be.”
In other words, there was the possibility - just a suggestion, mind you - that
human beings might be able to choose something different than the future that was
obviously developing all around us. It was clear to me that such a choice could
only be made if one made an effort to “predict” the future. In other words, the only
way to know the right choice of the moment was to have some idea of the
consequences.
Of course, the “standard religions” all around us are suggesting something of
that sort all the time: their solution is that the only change human beings can make
is to “choose the right god” and believe in him strongly enough that this god will
step in and fix things right up, either by miraculously intervening in reality, or at
least hauling the good people out of the soup at some future time when they have
proved themselves AND, at the same time, making all those nasty people who bet
on the wrong horse suffer!
It was at this point that I decided that I really ought to check out all the various
religions and their “track records”, so to say in order to determine which was the
“right god”, After all, since there exists such diversity of beliefs around the globe,
the assumption is that either somebody is right, excluding all others, or that
nobody is right, including all.
With the world in an obvious mess, with every preacher in just about every
church across America passionately declaring that “The End is Nigh”, I decided
that I had better get moving on this project. After all, I had these small beings in
Foreword xix

my care and above ALL things, I wanted to tell my children the Truth as far as I
was able to determine it. And that certainly meant that I should put forth all efforts
to determine what that truth was before I gave it to them. After all, if your child
asks for bread, will you give him a stone? If he asks for fish, will you give him a
serpent? I wanted to give my children the very best I could, and that was, at the
foundation, the primary motivation for my search for the truth: Love for my
children.
You could say that Love for my babies gave me the courage to begin to look at
my own faith in a critical way, and then to search for the answers to their
questions.
And so it still is.
What this amounted to was to apply the scientific method to the study of religion
and “deeper realities” - things that went beyond the physics of materialism.
I discovered that I wasn’t the first one who had thought about doing this and so
there was certainly a large body of material to go through. And I have been doing
it in a concentrated and systematic way for over 20 years now.
The Cassiopaean Communication was only a part of this process. Looking back
on this experiment in accessing “higher consciousness” which, at that point, I only
theorized might exist, there is a lot to be said for the idea that most of what has
come “from the C’s” could very well have come from my own subconscious.
After all, I had spent nearly my whole life reading everything from history to
psychology. The phenomenon of the scientist working on a difficult problem who
then, after he has examined all the parameters, dreams of a novel way to put the
different parts together that solves the problem is well known in the history of
science. The discovery of the benzene ring is a case in point. So it isn’t too much
of a stretch to say that the material that came “from the C’s”, who clearly stated
“we are YOU in the future”, was merely a similar process.
The attentive reader may notice that most of the C’s material has to do with
history and the hidden motivations for the events in our world. These were
certainly the things that concerned me - events and choices of action and being
that could lead to a positive future or a negative future - and so, perhaps my vast
reading was sorted and assembled in novel ways by my own subconscious mind or
superconscious mind.
Be that as it may, it does not, in my opinion, at all detract from the usefulness of
the material. The discovery of the benzene ring came from a dream and led to a
breakthrough in science. And so it has seemed that the concerted effort to examine
all the parameters of reality, and then to “allow” it to sort itself and “come out” in
a novel process of reassembly, has proven very fruitful in many respects.
Ark discussed the essential nature of this approach recently in an exchange with
Robin Amis, the editor and commentator of Boris Mouravieff‘s Gnosis:
Ark to Robin Amis:
You stated that:
1) Scientific method has its limitations.
2) Knowledge should be understood in broader terms so as to include, for instance
“noetic knowledge”. In particular:
Other documents randomly have
different content
English liberties, had it not been for the fact that he was married to
the daughter of James II., and of this marriage Lord Macaulay truly
says: “His choice had been determined chiefly by political
considerations, nor did it seem likely that any strong affection would
grow up between a handsome girl of sixteen, well-disposed, indeed,
and naturally intelligent, but ignorant and simple, and a bridegroom
who, though he had not completed his twenty-eighth year, was in
constitution older than her father; whose manner was chilling, and
whose head was constantly occupied by public business or by field
sports.”
His marriage was, in short, “a marriage of convenience,” and yet,
in defiance of all the rules that are supposed to govern the most
intimate of all human relationships, it was one of the best and, in the
end, most devoted unions that history has to record. It is hardly
possible to doubt that William of Orange married Mary Stuart
because he saw with that keenly penetrating foresight of his that
such a union would strengthen him in his life-long combat with the
arch-enemy of his faith, his family, and his nation; and this enemy
was that same Louis of France who had made Charles II. his
pensioner, and was soon to make James II. his dependent.
To quote Lord Macaulay again: “He saved England, it is true, but
he never loved her, and he never obtained her love.... Whatever
patriotic feeling he had was for Holland ... yet even his affection for
the land of his birth was subordinate to another feeling which early
became supreme in his soul, which mixed itself with all his passions
and compelled him to marvellous enterprises, which supported him
when sinking under mortification, pain, sickness, and sorrow ... and
continued to animate him even while the prayer for the departing
was read at his bedside.”
It was this hatred of France and her king which nerved him to do
for the liberties of Europe and Great Britain what Francis Drake had
done for England against Philip of Spain, and in the doing of this he
won the conspicuous glory of forcing the paymaster of the two
English sovereigns whom he succeeded, to make peace with him on
equal terms; and this, too, although he lost more battles than he
won, and had to surrender more strong cities than he took.
It is comparatively easy for a conqueror to take triumph out of
victory, but it is a higher quality which patiently endures defeat and
confronts disaster, and by sheer genius wins triumph in the end. This
is what William of Orange did, and it is from this fact that he derives
his title to be ranked among the Makers of that Empire to whose
throne he came as an alien, and whose honour he restored and
upheld, as one might say, in spite of herself.
So far as England is concerned, the male line of Stuart came in
with a fool and went out with a coward. One does not even care to
imagine what would have happened if James II. had remained on
the throne; or if William of Orange, with his hereditary and deep-
rooted hatred of Louis XIV. and his policy, had not come to take his
most miserably-vacated place in the nick of time.
The sentimentality which makes such a fuss about loyalty to
persons as distinguished from loyalty to country, and the lawyer-
quibbles which occupied men’s minds in the dispute as to whether
James II. was King de facto or de jure, or both, of the country from
which he had run away like an absconding debtor, may be dismissed,
just as Harold the Saxon’s claims had been some six hundred years
before. It is merely a question of the Fit and the Unfit, and James
was Unfit.
James Stuart deserted his post as ruler of these realms because
he found himself assailed by difficulties which the most ordinary
ability ought to have overcome. William assumed the same position
in the face of difficulties which only the highest qualities of kingcraft
and statesmanship could have enabled him to successfully grapple
with. In a word, James possessed no ideal that qualified him to be a
king, much less an Empire-Maker. William did possess such an ideal,
and that is the only reason why he became King of England, vice
James Stuart, absconded.
 Next, perhaps, to Henry VII., William was the most business-like
sovereign who has occupied the British throne. With him all men and
things, all beliefs and sentiments, were subordinated to the
achievement of the one great end—the curbing of the power of
France, and consequently the furtherance of political and theological
liberty in Europe. He was, in fact, only incidentally an Empire-Maker,
although without him and without the broad and firm basis of
popular liberty and national strength which he laid down, as it were,
in the doing of his greater work, the building up of the Imperial
fabric would undoubtedly have been long delayed and seriously
impeded.
He got himself made King of Great Britain and Ireland, not
because he wanted to occupy the throne, but because from that
eminence he would be able to look the Grand Monarch more equally
in the face.
We get a luminous insight into the character of the man in his
reply to the Convention or conference of the two Houses of
Parliament which had proposed that his wife as actual and lawful
heir to the throne which her father had forsaken, should occupy it as
queen, and that he should reign by her authority as a sort of Royal
Executive.
“My lords and gentlemen,” he said, “no man can esteem a
woman more than I do the Princess, but I am so made that I cannot
think of holding anything by apron-strings, nor can I think it
reasonable to have any share in the government unless it be put in
my own person, and that for the term of my life. If you think fit to
settle it otherwise I will not oppose you, but will go back to Holland
and meddle no more in your affairs.”
That was the kind of man William of Orange was. He had come
to be a king, and a king he would be or nothing. And so king he
was, and it was not very long before he was to show how well his
self-confidence was justified. He had scarcely seated himself on the
throne before the Parliament, recognising the fact that his work was
something other than merely filling James’s place, deliberately
suggested that he should resume as King of England the hostilities
which he had begun against Louis as Stadtholder of the Netherlands,
and he on his part showed how ready he was to take up the task by
exclaiming, in one of his rare bursts of exultation, after reading the
address:
“This is the first day of my reign!”
This address, however, welcome as it was, was somewhat
belated. For more than a month before it was presented, Louis,
under the pretence of helping the runaway, whom for his own
purposes he affected to believe still lawful King of England, had
committed the gravest of all acts of war, and James had crowned the
disgrace of his flight by the infamy of heading an invasion of British
territory by foreign mercenaries. On the 12th of March, 1689, he
landed at Kinsale as enemy and invader of his own country,
convoyed by fifteen French men-of-war, and supported by 2,500
French troops.
The story of this Irish war needs no re-telling here, save in so far
as it brings out the contrast between William and James as the Fit
and the Unfit for the doing of that work which had just then got to
be done if England was not to sink back to the degrading position of
a French dependency, and if the way of future progress and Imperial
expansion was to be left open. William no sooner saw that the scene
of the fight for constitutional liberty and religious freedom had
shifted for the time being from the Low Countries to Ireland than he
sent Marshal Schomberg, who was then one of the most skilful
soldiers in Europe, with an army of sixteen thousand men to the
scene of action.
Meanwhile the heroically stubborn resistance which has won
immortal fame for the men of Londonderry had proved, not only to
James and his foreign mercenaries, but to Louis himself and all
Europe, that the struggle which was just then renewed was no mere
war of dynasties, and that something very much greater than the
mere question as to who should be king of England had got to be
decided before the trouble was over.
 James in Ireland and Louis in France stood for the already
discredited and exploded doctrine of the divine right of kings to rule
as they pleased because they were the sons of their fathers; for the
dark tyranny of Rome, now almost equally discredited; and for the
domination of Europe by the French autocracy. In Holland and
England and Germany William and his allies stood for the very
reverse of all this, so that it was not only the destinies of the United
Kingdom, but those of the greater part of the civilised world that had
to be decided, and it was by procuring through mingled victory and
defeat, confronted by powerful enemies abroad and by conspiracy
and threatened assassination at home, that the worthy descendant
of William the Silent proved his real right divine as king of these
realms and champion of those principles of which the British Empire
of to-day is the concrete expression.
It was really on the shores of an insignificant Irish stream that
William fought and won the battle of European liberty. But before he
did this he had another battle to fight, as it were, in front of his
newly-given throne.
His reign, unhappily, saw the commencement of that system of
government which an intelligent Chinese Minister to the Court of St.
James’ once described as “the election of one party to do the
business of the nation, and of another to stop them doing it.” In
other words, it was William’s fate, among all his other difficulties, to
have to contend with the bitter and usually dishonest strife of
Parliamentary parties, and so keen did this strife become after the
foreign enemy had actually landed on British soil, that he was even
then on the point of throwing up the whole business in disgust, and
going back to Holland to fight his battles out there.
What would have happened if he had done so is anything but a
pleasant subject for speculation. Happily, at the eleventh hour he
refused to acknowledge himself beaten. Sick of the strife of words
and longing for the reality of deeds, he announced his intention to
place himself at the head of the English forces in Ireland, “and with
the blessing of God Almighty endeavour to reduce that kingdom that
it may no longer be a charge to this.”
In this we may see more than the expression of a pious hope. As
statesman and soldier William had seen that Ireland was the back-
door of Great Britain, and that so long as it remained open so long
would the whole kingdom be vulnerable to foreign invasion, and so
he went to close it.
It was a strange position for any man to be placed in. He was
going to fight for everything that he held dear. He knew that if he
lost in Ireland he must lose also in England and the Netherlands, but
he was also going to fight against the father of the woman whom he
had now come to love so dearly that her death, when it happened,
came nearer to wrecking his imperial intellect than all the other trials
and troubles of his laborious and almost joyless life. He had no
feeling of personal enmity against James as he had against Louis,
and it was duty, and duty alone, which took him to the Irish war.
Almost the last words that he said to his wife concerning the enemy
whom he was about to meet on the battlefield were:
“God send that no harm may come to him!”
Mr. Traill has thus tersely summed up the condition of affairs at
this moment: “Ireland in the hands of a hostile army, the shores of
England threatened by a hostile fleet, a dangerous conspiracy only
detected on the eve of success, a formidable insurrection imminent
in the country he was leaving behind him....”
And yet, gloomy as the outlook seemed, his spirits rose as they
ever did when he saw the moment for doing instead of talking draw
near, and Bishop Burnett tells us that he said to him on the eve of
his departure: “As for me, but for one thing I should enjoy the
prospect of being on horseback and under canvas again, for I am
sure that I am fitter to direct a campaign than to manage your
Houses of Lords and Commons.”
These words were well worthy of the man who, not many days
later, quietly sat down to breakfast in the open air beside Boyne
Water, within full sight of the enemy and within easy range of their
guns. Breakfast over, he mounted his horse and was promptly fired
at. The first shot from two field-pieces which had been trained on
him and his staff killed a man and two horses. The second grazed
his shoulder and made him reel in his saddle.
“There was no need for any bullet to come nearer than that!”
was his remark on the occurrence. Certainly not many bullets have
ever come nearer to changing the history of Britain, and therefore of
the British Empire, than that one.
 MADE HIM REEL IN HIS SADDLE.

After the wound had been dressed, instead of taking the rest
which a good many strong men would have taken, this consumptive
and asthmatic invalid re-mounted his horse and remained until
nightfall in the saddle, making his dispositions for the battle of the
morrow, and attending to every detail himself. His prudent uncle and
father-in-law, apparently bent on fulfilling William’s pious wish, was
meanwhile taking very good care to keep himself out of harm’s way.
 “MEN OF ENNISKILLEN, WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR ME?” HE
CRIED.

The battle itself, which, as every one knows, was fought on the
1st of July, brought out with startling clearness the contrast between
the man who was king in his own right and the man who called
himself king because his name was James Stuart.
“Men of Enniskillen, what will you do for me?” he cried at the
critical moment of the fight, when Caillemot and Schomberg, his two
best captains, had been killed, and he, drawing his sword and
swinging it aloft with his wounded arm, led his trusty Dutch guards
and Ulstermen against the Irish centre. James, meanwhile, having
watched the first part of the fight on which all his fortunes depended
from the safe eminence of the Hill of Donore, had already given up
for lost the day which he had done nothing to win, and was making
the best of his way to Dublin, whence, in due course, leaving the
beaten and demoralised rabble that had once been his army to its
fate, he fled to the congenial ignominy of his safe retreat at St.
Germain, and the fostering care of his country’s worst enemy.
The Battle of the Boyne not only settled the fate of the Stuart
dynasty for good; it decided the question whether this country was
to be ruled by a feeble despotism under the patronage of France, or
by that constitutional monarchy under which Great Britain has so
worthily proved her title to be called the Mother of Free Nations, and
in winning this battle and deciding this all-important question,
William of Orange won the right to be counted among the wisest
and strongest of our Empire-Makers. The disgusted Irishmen, too,
had some reason on their side when they said to the victors after
the battle: “Change leaders, and we’ll fight you again!”
The story of his wars in those countries which have been aptly
termed the cockpit of Europe is the story of the continuation of that
work which he came to England to do; not, as has already been
pointed out, for England as a country, but for the establishment of
those principles for which the British Constitution, of which he was
one of the makers, stands. Ignorant or prejudiced critics have
accused him of sacrificing English blood and treasure to the
furtherance of his own ambition. The fact is that he employed them
upon the best and most necessary work that there was for them to
do just then.
“Look at my brave English!” he said to the Elector of Bavaria one
day during the siege of Namur, while a British regiment was carrying
the outworks on one side of the city. But they were doing more than
carrying earthworks. They were fighting for the principles which their
descendants crowned with everlasting glory at Trafalgar and
Waterloo. They were showing the soldiers and generals of France,
then held to be the best in the world, the sort of stuff that they were
made of, and giving promise of future prowess that was soon to be
splendidly redeemed at Blenheim and Ramillies, Oudenarde and
Malplaquet.
It was a singular war, and by all the rules of warfare the issue
should have been the reverse of what it was. But again and again
William’s wonderful genius and indomitable persistence snatched
victory out of defeat, and turned disaster into advantage, until at last
the Grand Monarch himself had to confess the power of the enemy
whom he had once thought so insignificant, and the signing of the
Treaty of Ryswick left William triumphant if somewhat dissatisfied.
The results would no doubt have been much greater if William
could have had his own way, and if the strife of parties in the British
Parliament had not so sorely crippled him. But at least he had the
satisfaction of knowing before he died that, whereas a few months
before the French men-of-war had with impunity insulted and
threatened the English coasts, and landed a small army on Irish soil,
a few months afterwards every invader had been driven from British
ground, and the French fleet almost destroyed, while the
Mediterranean, on which British ships had sailed only by sufferance,
was now well on the way to becoming a British lake.
And yet, in spite of all the triumphs that he had won over so
many difficulties and so many dangers, and in spite of the
consciousness of work well and nobly, if quietly and
unostentatiously, done, William’s last days, like those of many
another man who has deserved well of the world, were full of sorrow
and suffering.
The death of his now adored queen had so shaken his mighty
nature that for some days his reason was despaired of, and there
can be no doubt but that it hastened his own end. And yet, weak
and far advanced in disease as he was when he went out for that
fatal ride from Kensington to Hampton Court, he was even then
going a-hunting. The brutal Jacobite toast: “To the little gentleman
in black velvet who works underground!” still serves to remind us of
the mole-hill over which his horse stumbled and fell, breaking his
rider’s collar-bone, and inflicting the death-wound which he had
escaped on a score of battle-fields.
His death was worthy of his life, for it was the death of a brave,
patient man and a Christian gentleman. No doubt he himself would
have preferred to have died at the head of a charge, or in the thick
of an assault on a French fortress, but his destiny ordered it
otherwise, and the man who had a hundred times faced death in the
most reckless fashion for the purpose of inspiring his followers with
his own courage and enthusiasm, died quietly in his bed, leaving
behind him the greatest work ever done by an individual British
sovereign, and a fame which, but for the one dark and inexplicable
blot of Glencoe, is as fairly entitled to be called spotless as that of
any man who ever sat upon a throne and accomplished great things
with such means as came to his hand.
 VI
JAMES COOK,
CIRCUMNAVIGATOR
 VI

JAMES COOK

O NCE more I am going to ask you to take your seat with me on

the ideal equivalent of the Magic Carpet and skim across
another time-gulf some half-century wide. This time we alight on the
morning of Monday, July 5, 1742, before the door of a double-
fronted shop, one side of which is devoted to the sale of groceries
and the other to the drapery business. This shop is situated in a little
village on the Yorkshire coast a few miles from Whitby, Staithes, or
more exactly The Staithes, so called from the local name for a pier
or sea-wall of wood jutting out a few feet into the German Ocean,
and built partly to protect the little bay from the North Sea rollers
and partly to afford accommodation for the fishing-boats and
colliers.

The shop belongs to a substantial citizen of Staithes named

Saunderson, and this morning Mr. Saunderson is a very angry man.
In fact, if we go into the shop, which is not yet open, we shall find
him with a cane or some similar weapon in his hand, leaning behind
the counter and hitting blindly at a bed there is beneath it, shouting
the while sundry excellent maxims on the virtue of early rising,
especially modified for the benefit of apprentices.
But no response comes from the bed, and Mr. Saunderson
stoops down to make closer investigation. The bed is empty, and the
fact dawns on him that his last apprentice has followed the example
of all the others and run away to sea. It was a very common event
on the Yorkshire coast in those days, but this particular running
away was destined to be a very memorable one for the world, for
the lad who, instead of being in the bed under the counter, was just
then striding rapidly away over the fields to Whitby with one extra
shirt and a jack-knife for his sole possessions, was James Cook, a
name as dear to the lovers of the romance of travel and adventure
as Robinson Crusoe, and one of infinitely more importance in the
annals of mankind.
In following his fortunes, so far as the brief limits of such a
sketch as this will permit, we shall bid a perhaps welcome adieu for
a while to the roar of guns and the shock of battle, to the blaze of
burning towns and the fierce cries ringing along the decks of
captured treasure-ships, to watch the contest of a clear head and a
strong will against those foes which may be overcome without
bloodshed, although not always without loss of life—the hidden
dangers of unknown oceans strewn with uncharted reefs and shoals
lying in wait for unwary keels, the sudden hurricanes of the Tropics,
and the storms and fogs and the floating ice-navies of the far North
and South. It was these that Captain Cook went out to fight and
overcome, and in doing so to prove eloquently that:

“Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war.”

Nevertheless there are certain points of likeness between James

Cook, Geographer and Circumnavigator, and that other
Circumnavigator, Francis Drake, Pirate and Scourge of Spain. Both
began life as ship-boys, and both rose, by sheer ability and strength
of purpose, far above their original station in life to positions of
command in the service of their country. Both were men of iron will,
far-reaching design, unshakeable self-reliance, and passionate
temper, and, lastly, both were possessed by that irresistible spirit of
roving and adventure which, when it once seizes a man, but seldom
lets him rest in peace. In short, though the vocation of one was
piracy and war, and that of the other the peaceful, but none the less
adventurous service of science, both were stamped with the
supreme and essential characteristics of the Empire-Maker.
Naturally, the world had changed a good deal by the time James
Cook started out to add so enormously to men’s knowledge of it.
Spain had fallen from her high estate and was living in slothful ease
on the dregs and lees of that strong wine which she had drunk to
intoxication in the golden days of Cortez and Pizarro. But Britain, no
longer only England, had become Great Britain, and was fast
expanding into Greater Britain. Cowley, Dampier, Clapperton and
Anson had circumnavigated the globe more than once, and people
were beginning to have something like a definite notion of how very
big a place was this world which now seems so small to us. The
Imperial Idea was beginning to take hold of men’s minds. They
wanted to know, not so much how big the world was, but what
other unknown lands might be lying waiting for the discoverer,
hidden away among the vast expanses which were still an utter
blank upon the map.
The maritime nations of the world, too, and Britain, now
foremost among them, had unconsciously taken a very great stride
along the pathway of real progress, and they were beginning to
grasp the higher ideal of colonisation as distinguished from mere
conquest, and to James Cook belongs the high honour, if not of
discovering, at least of first definitely locating and in part mapping
out the greatest of all the British colonies.
Indeed, it may be said that, in sober fact, he added a whole
continent to the British Empire, and that without the striking of a
single blow or the loss of a single life in battle.
The first few years of James Cook’s seafaring life were eventless,
just as Francis Drake’s were, but for all that he, like Gloriana’s Little
Pirate, was doing that minor but no less essential part of his life-
work which was the necessary preparation for the greater. He was
doing his work first as ship’s boy, then as sailor before the mast,
then as second mate, first mate, and so on up the laborious ladder
which was to lead him in the end to an unequalled eminence among
mariners.
Thus for thirteen years he served what may be called his
apprenticeship to his life’s work; learning in the most practical of all
schools, a North Sea collier of the eighteenth century, not only the
science of seamanship in all its details, but also what was hardly less
important—that science of taking things as they came, of looking
upon hardship, privation and danger as the commonplaces of a
seaman’s life, incidents in his day’s work, as it were, and as such
scarcely worth even the mention, and hence much less worth
troubling about.
A curiously instructive fact strikes one in contrasting Captain
Cook’s own account of his voyages with those of others, such as
Anderson and Gilbert, who sailed with him. They expatiate largely on
the miseries of heat and cold, ice and mist, the almost uneatable
character of the sea-fare of those days, disease among the crew,
and so on; but Captain Cook hardly ever mentions them, saving only
the scurvy, of which more hereafter.
But there was something else that James Cook had already
learnt long ago while he was yet a boy. When he was a lad of six or
seven he had been set to work on a farm belonging to a man named
William Walker, and this William had a wife named Mary who, taking
a fancy to the lad, taught him his letters and encouraged him to
read, and so, without knowing it, put into his hands the talisman
which was to win his way to future greatness. She not only aroused
in him that passion for reading which distinguished him among the
sailors of his time, but she gave him what might have been the only
means of gratifying it, for not every farm-lad and ship’s-boy of the
middle of the eighteenth century had learnt, or ever did learn, to
read and write.
It may have been that James Cook’s latent ambition had never
looked beyond the possibility of becoming master of one of the
vessels of which he had been mate, and it is also possible that he
might never in reality have been anything more, but it so happened
that his ship, the Friendship, was lying in London river in May, 1756,
and that at the same time the war with France, which had been
brewing for a year, broke out.
As usual the Press Gang set instantly to work, and now came
Cook’s chance. He was mate of a ship, albeit only a collier brig; still
he was a thorough seaman, an excellent navigator, and, more than
that, he seems to have known something of the theory as well as
the practice of his science. These accomplishments, however, did not
put him beyond the reach of the Press Gang.
Now, in those days there were two ranks of seamen before the
mast in the King’s navy—the pressed man, who might be anything
from a raw land-lubber to an escaped convict, and the volunteer,
who was probably and usually a good sailor, if not something better,
as Cook was, and he, guided either by inspiration or deliberate
resolve, eluded the Press Gang by offering himself as a volunteer,
and so in due course took his rating as able-seaman before the mast
on board his Majesty’s frigate Eagle, of sixty guns, of which shortly
afterwards the good genius of his life, Sir Hugh Palliser, was
appointed captain.
During the next four years there was fighting, but we have no
record of any share that Cook took in it. What we do know is that by
the time he was thirty he had risen to the rank of master of the
Mercury, a King’s ship which went with the fleet to the St. Lawrence
at a very critical juncture in British colonial history.
So far it would appear that he had worked himself up by sheer
ability and industry, but now his chance was to come. The river St.
Lawrence at that time had never been surveyed, and it was
absolutely necessary that soundings should be taken and the river
correctly charted before the fleet could go in and with its guns cover
Wolfe’s attack on Quebec. The all-important work was entrusted to
the master of the Mercury, and although the river was swarming
with the canoes of hostile Indians in the service of the French, and
though he had to do his work at night, he did it so thoroughly that
not only did the fleet go in and out again with perfect safety, but the
work has needed but little re-doing from that day to this.
Thus did James Cook, not as sailor or fighting-man, but as good
mariner and skilful workman play his first part as Empire-Maker, and
in an unostentatious fashion contribute his share towards the
capture of Quebec and the acquisition of one of the widest and
fairest portions of Greater Britain.
 He was at this time, as has been said, only thirty. As regards the
outer aspect of the man he stood something over six feet, spare,
hard, and active. His face was a good one and suited to the man,
broad forehead, bright, brown, well-set eyes, yet rather small, a
long, well-shaped nose with good nostrils, a firm mouth, and full,
strong chin.
In short, his best portraits show you just the kind of man you
would expect Captain Cook to be. For the rest he was a man of iron
frame, tireless at work, resting only when it was a physical necessity,
with few friends and fewer confidants, cool of judgment save during
his rare and deplorable fits of passion, self-contained and self-reliant
—just such a sea-king, in short, as we may imagine Heaven to have
commissioned to carry the British flag three times round the world
and to the uttermost parts of the known earth, and to plant it on
lands which until then no white man’s eye had seen or foot had
trodden.
In the same year Cook was promoted from the Mercury to the
Northumberland, the Admiral’s flag-ship, and in her he came back to
England, and at St. Margaret’s Church, Barking, married Elizabeth
Batts, a young lady of great beauty and of social standing far above
that of the grocer’s apprentice and collier’s knockabout boy, but not
above that of the Master of a King’s ship. His married life lasted
some seventeen years, and of these he spent a little over four in the
enjoyment of the delights of home.
For the next four years or so he was regularly employed in
surveying and exploring work off the Atlantic coast of America, and
this of itself shows that he had already made his mark in his chosen
profession. But much greater things were now to be in store for him.
It will be remembered how Drake, when he first saw the smooth
waters of the Pacific, prayed God that He would give him life and
leave to sail an English ship on its waters. That prayer had been
granted, and his and many another English ship had crossed the
great Sea of the South.
 Meanwhile the realised dream of El Dorado had been replaced in
men’s minds by another, even more vast, shadowy, and splendid.
This was the dream of the Great Southern Continent, and in this
imagination revelled and ran riot. Grave scientists, too,
demonstrated beyond all doubt that there must be such a land far
away to the south since how, without it as a counterpoise to the
continents of the north, was the rolling world to be kept in
equilibrium?
So they took it for granted, laid it down upon the maps, and
wrote glowing descriptions of the varieties of climate, the splendour
of scenery, the wealth of treasures and the strange peoples and
animals that it must of necessity contain. Above all, it would be a
new El Dorado which would not be under the control of Spain.
What more could men want, unless indeed it was the actual
discovery of the Terra Incognita Australis? This was the new world of
which Cook was to be the Columbus. Others had seen parts of it just
as others had seen parts of America before the great Genoese
reached the West Indies, but he was the man who was to do the
work of putting its existence beyond all doubt.
The Royal Society found that there would be a transit of Venus
in the year 1769, and that it would be best observed from some
point in the great Southern Ocean, say Amsterdam Island or the
Marquesas Group, lately discovered by the Dutch and Portuguese,
and as the result of representations made to the King, an expedition
was set on foot to carry out suitable persons to observe it. Of this
expedition James Cook, raised from the rank of master to that of
lieutenant, was placed in command. On his own recommendation
the ship chosen for the purpose was the Endeavour, a Whitby-built
craft of 370 tons, broad of bow and stern and fairly light of draft,
and built for strength and endurance rather than speed.
She sailed, carrying a complement all told of eighty-five men,
from Plymouth on August 26, 1768, which as Cook’s latest
biographer happily remarks, was a Friday, and the starting-day of
what was, all things considered, the most successful voyage of
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