NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Cook's I-st voyage logbooks
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2012 May 1, 14:09 -0400
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2012 May 1, 14:09 -0400
Recently someone asked about availability of the Cook I-st voyage (1768-71) logbooks on the Internet. (I think this was Antoine, but cannot find his message). Research in Purdue library shows that all but the first voyage are available electronically, and separately the Journals of Astronomical observations for the II-nd and III-d voyage. The logbook for the first voyage we only have on paper, as vol. I of the 4-volumes collection edited by Halkuyt Soc., plus a folder with maps and drawings. The introduction to the I-st volume says that complete originals of Cook's log books do not exist. The log published in the first volume is some combination of surviving records by various people. It contains very little of details of astronomical observations (usuallly the coordinates for a day, without explanation how they were obtained in each case). An exception is one series of Lunars taken from S American cost, from the known place, so it can be verified, and the derived longitude is about 1 degree off, according to the editor's footnote. I can copy this page if someone is curious, but copying the whole volume would be prohibitively time consuming:-) Perhaps it is curious to find where exactly the mistake was made, what caused it, and I believe this can be done with the technique I described in my messages on Point Venus. Alex.