Cook's Last Voyage, Volume II

February 1777. The Resolution and the Discovery leave New Zealand, bound north. James Cook, at the height of his fame, must reach the Arctic before summer to force the Northwest Passage that Europe has been hunting for two centuries. But easterly winds set relentlessly against him, the season melts away amid endless tacking, and the captain realizes he has already lost his year. He sets a course for the Friendly Islands, determined to build up his strength there before attempting the far north the following summer.

Along the way come the first unknown lands: Mangaia and Atiu, where a handful of men very nearly remain prisoners of a crowd's curiosity, then the coral lagoon of Palmerston. There begins one of the strangest stays in the whole history of the great voyages of discovery. For two and a half months, the English are the guests of a sumptuous and closed Polynesia.

At Lifuka, a chief named Feenou lays out mountains of yams and pigs, club fights, women boxers as skilled as the men, and a dance of a hundred and five warriors that leaves the crew speechless. He is taken for the king. He is not. Then come Tongatapu and the true sovereign, the huge and placid Poulaho, the kava ceremony governed by secret laws, the empire of taboo, and the forbidden rite of the Natche, where the heir to the throne is recognized. Cook slips in bare-chested among the officiants, understanding nothing of the oath he watches being sworn.

Between reefs skimmed by night, endless petty thefts, and a kingship whose rules he never manages to grasp, the captain ends by taking the king and his chiefs hostage to recover what has been stolen from him. This second volume is the account of a man who still believes he observes everything, and whom the Pacific observes in turn: an encounter in which the Europe of the Enlightenment collides with a world order that entirely escapes it.

Isabelle Perol here rewrites in today's English Book II of A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (London, 1784), the very journal of Cook and his naturalist William Anderson. The text is stripped of its period heaviness but remains faithful to the facts, the measured tone, and the outlook of the sailors themselves. The edition adds an introduction, a complete critical apparatus (glossary, timeline, index, editor's note, afterword), route maps, and original engraved illustrations.

The second of six volumes devoted to James Cook's third and final voyage, in the Forgotten Travel Journals collection. Each volume can be read on its own.