Cook's Second Voyage: Circumnavigation of Antarctica
Cook's second voyage, from 1772 to 1775, settled the question of the great southern continent by sailing round the world at the highest latitude any ship had reached. Terra Australis Incognita had been assumed since antiquity on the reasoning that the northern landmasses required a southern counterweight. The Admiralty sent Cook with two ships, the Resolution and the Adventure, to find it or to prove it did not exist. He crossed the Antarctic Circle on 17 January 1773, the first ship known to have done so, and crossed it twice more, reaching 71°10' south in January 1774 before pack ice stopped him — a latitude not exceeded for fifty years. He was probably within a hundred miles of the Antarctic coast without seeing it. He concluded that any land further south was locked in ice and worthless, which was correct and which ended two thousand years of speculation. The voyage's other achievement was medical and navigational. Cook lost not a single man to scurvy in three years, by enforcing sauerkraut, malt wort and fresh provisions at every landfall and by flogging those who refused. He also carried K1, a copy of John Harrison's marine chronometer, and used it to fix longitude to within a few miles across the Pacific — the trial that proved the method and changed navigation. He charted Tonga, Easter Island, the New Hebrides, New Caledonia and South Georgia along the way. He returned having sailed some 70,000 miles. He was elected to the Royal Society and awarded its Copley Medal for the paper on shipboard health. He was killed in Hawaii on the third voyage in 1779.
- Year: 1772 CE
- Category: Exploration
