Abstract
Cook’s First Voyage to the South Seas primarily was undertaken in order to observe the 3 June 1769 transit of Venus from Tahiti. For this purpose, two official astronomers were assigned to the Endeavour, an ex-Whitby collier. One was Charles Green and the other was none other than the commander of the vessel, Lieutenant James Cook, who therefore wore two ‘hats’ during the voyage. Following a successful transit campaign Cook sailed southwest in search of the Great Southern Continent, and eventually came upon New Zealand. As they sailed along the coast Cook and Green used astronomical observations to determine the latitude and longitude of the Endeavour, and they carefully mapped the coastline. They also anchored in what is now known as Mercury Bay in order to observe the 9 November 1769 transit of Mercury. This was the first time that scientific astronomical observations were made from New Zealand soil. By the time the Endeavour completed its circumnavigation of New Zealand Cook and Green had established that although this landmass consisted of two large mountainous islands it was not a viable candidate for the missing continent.
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Notes
- 1.
It is not surprising that King George III supported the Royal Society’s transit of Venus proposal, as he was
… the first British monarch to have studied science as part of his formal education. He was known ‘for his love of the sciences’ and had been taught physics and chemistry as a boy, holding a particular interest in scientific instruments, astronomy, the quest for longitude, botany and the work of the Royal Society. (Wulf 2012: 101; my italics).
- 2.
This section draws heavily on Orchiston 2015.
- 3.
Keir (2010) suggests that in fact Cook and Green did not derive the longitude of Mercury Bay from these observations of the transit, but rather by extrapolating from longitude values obtained before and after the transit.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following for their assistance: Dr Jonathan Betts and Dr Gloria Clifton (ex-Royal Museums, Greenwich), the late Commander Derek Howse, (Sevenoaks, England), Dr Stephen Johnston (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford), Katherine Marshall (the Royal Society, London) and the late Sir Patrick Moore (Selsey, England. I also wish to thank Gloria Clifton for reading and commenting on the first draft of this chapter, and the Museum of the History of Science, the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Society and the Scientific Instrument Collection, Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) for kindly supplying Figs. 4.14, 4.16 and 4.17.
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Orchiston, W. (2016). Astronomy on Cook’s First Voyage: Mercury Bay and Queen Charlotte Sound, 1769–1770. In: Exploring the History of New Zealand Astronomy. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 422. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22566-1_4
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