James Cook's Second Voyage (1772-1775): The Antarctic Circle

James Cook’s second voyage (1772–1775) was a British naval expedition with the ships HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure that sailed around the world in the high southern latitudes to search for a great southern continent. Cook made the first recorded crossings of the Antarctic Circle, reached farther south than anyone before him and showed that the vast fertile land drawn on European maps did not exist. The voyage also proved that a marine chronometer could find longitude reliably at sea, and it was one of the healthiest long voyages of the age.

Background: the southern continent

Since ancient times geographers had imagined a great southern landmass, Terra Australis Incognita, to balance the continents of the north. In the 1760s writers such as the Scottish geographer Alexander Dalrymple argued that it lay in the temperate South Pacific and was rich and populous.

Cook’s first voyage had already shown that New Zealand was not part of such a continent, but large areas of the southern oceans remained unexplored. The Admiralty therefore sent Cook back with orders to circle the globe as far south as possible and settle the question.

Ships, crew and science

Cook chose two more Whitby-built colliers, renamed Resolution and Adventure. He commanded the Resolution, with about 112 men, while Tobias Furneaux commanded the Adventure. Joseph Banks, unhappy with the accommodation offered, withdrew.

His place was taken by the German naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg, with the artist William Hodges and the astronomers William Wales and William Bayly. The ships carried four chronometers: three by John Arnold and K1, a copy of John Harrison’s prize-winning H4 watch made by Larcum Kendall. Testing them was a key aim of the voyage.

Into the ice

The ships left Plymouth on 13 July 1772 and reached Cape Town before heading south into the Southern Ocean. On 17 January 1773 they crossed the Antarctic Circle, the first ships known to do so. Icebergs and fog surrounded them, and the crews melted ice for fresh water, a scene Hodges painted.

In February the ships lost contact in fog and met again in May at Queen Charlotte Sound in New Zealand. Cook then used the southern winter to visit Tahiti and the Tongan islands, which he named the Friendly Islands. In October 1773 a storm off New Zealand separated the ships for good.

Cook took the Resolution south again, crossing the Antarctic Circle in December 1773 and again in January 1774. On 30 January 1774 he reached 71°10′ South, where solid pack ice blocked the way. In his journal he wrote that ambition led him “not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go”.

Islands of the Pacific

Between the Antarctic sweeps, Cook made two long tropical circuits of the Pacific. In 1774 he called at Easter Island (Rapa Nui), where he noted that many of the great moai statues had fallen. Shortly before, Cook had been seriously ill with a stomach complaint, and his officers feared for his life. He recovered and went on to fix the positions of the Marquesas, which had not been visited by Europeans since the Spanish voyage of Álvaro de Mendaña in 1595. He returned to Tahiti and Tonga.

He then charted much of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and in September 1774 became the first European to reach New Caledonia. He also sighted Norfolk Island. After a final refit in New Zealand, he crossed the South Pacific to Tierra del Fuego and searched the South Atlantic, landing on South Georgia in January 1775 and charting part of the South Sandwich Islands.

The fate of the Adventure

Furneaux reached Queen Charlotte Sound after the second separation and missed Cook by a few days. On 17 December 1773 a boat crew of ten men sent to gather greens at Grass Cove was killed in a clash with local Māori, an event whose causes remain debated.

Furneaux sailed home by Cape Horn and reached England in July 1774, making Furneaux, who had already sailed westwards round the world with Wallis, one of the first men to circumnavigate the globe in both directions. He brought with him Mai, a young man from Ra’iātea, who became a celebrity in London and was painted by Joshua Reynolds.

Health and the chronometer

Cook was determined to prevent scurvy. He insisted on clean, dry and ventilated quarters, regular exercise and a varied diet including sauerkraut, wort made from malt, and fresh greens gathered ashore. In more than three years, the Resolution lost four men, only one of them to illness. In 1776 the Royal Society awarded Cook its Copley Medal for a paper on the health of seamen.

K1 performed superbly, gaining only a few seconds a day despite extreme cold and heat, while the Arnold chronometers proved less reliable. Wales’s careful records helped persuade the navy that chronometers, together with the lunar-distance method, made it possible to find longitude at sea. The achievement owed much to John Harrison’s H4.

Key people

James Cook (1728–1779) had been promoted to commander after his first voyage and was made post-captain on his return in 1775. The second voyage is often regarded as his finest achievement as a navigator, combining bold ice navigation with precise surveying.

Tobias Furneaux (1735–1781) had sailed with Samuel Wallis to Tahiti in 1767. His return to England in 1774 brought the first detailed news of the expedition.

Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–1798) and his son Georg Forster (1754–1794) were learned but quarrelsome naturalists who clashed with Cook and the officers. Their collections and descriptions of Pacific plants, animals and peoples were nonetheless of great value, and Georg became a leading figure of the German Enlightenment.

William Hodges (1744–1797) produced oil paintings and drawings of Pacific landscapes and the icy Southern Ocean, applying the light and atmosphere of landscape painting to scenes no European artist had seen. William Wales (c. 1734–1798), the astronomer on the Resolution, later taught mathematics at Christ’s Hospital in London.

Consequences and legacy

The voyage ended the long search for a temperate southern continent. Cook concluded that any land near the pole would be locked in ice and of no practical value, though he suspected it existed. The Antarctic mainland was first sighted in 1820.

His reports of whales and seals around South Georgia attracted sealers and whalers in the following decades, with severe consequences for those animal populations. The detailed charts, natural history collections and Hodges’s paintings greatly enlarged European knowledge of the Pacific. Georg Forster’s account, A Voyage Round the World (1777), became a classic of travel and scientific writing.

Timeline

• 1772, 13 July: The Resolution and Adventure sail from Plymouth.
• 1773, 17 January: The ships make the first recorded crossing of the Antarctic Circle.
• 1773, May: The ships reunite at Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand.
• 1773, 17 December: Ten of the Adventure’s men are killed at Grass Cove.
• 1774, 30 January: The Resolution reaches 71°10′ South, its farthest south.
• 1774, March: Cook visits Easter Island.
• 1774, September: Cook reaches New Caledonia.
• 1775, January: Cook lands on South Georgia.
• 1775, 30 July: The Resolution returns to Spithead.

Why it matters

Cook’s second voyage redrew the map of the Southern Hemisphere, removing an imaginary continent and revealing the true extent of the Southern Ocean. It also demonstrated that long voyages could be made safely and navigated precisely, setting new standards for scientific exploration.