The Cook voyages exerted a phenomenal effect on the public. The official accounts--all handsome editions, splendidly illustrated with exquisite engravings, all brought out with publicity and fanfare--reached out to the reader, stirring his imagination and sympathy with a vision of humankind. Yet they pled no special cause, presented no passionate argument.Misfortune met the ships as soon as they left the harbor at Unalaska. High winds from the southeast rose up to bring hail, rain, and snow and foreclosed a nearby exit from the Bering Sea. Cook was obliged to stand west and to seek an entrance into the Pacific somewhere west of Unalaska Island. On the second night out the main tack of Resolution gave way, killing seaman John McIntosh who was Clerke's valet, and severely injuring several others. Mcintosh's was the fifth death on the voyage; sailors lived close to oblivion in the age of sail. Unable to weather the island, the ships struggled east again. After four days the gale was spent, the winds shifted to the north, and the ships ran down the same narrow passage through which on June 27 they had found the Bering Sea, and so re-entered the Pacific Ocean, on October 30, 1778.Far distant places, hitherto vaguely imagined, suddenly became real. All three voyages, laced with themes of high adventure, provided images and entertainment in that age, as surely as movies and television do in ours. Furthermore, for many years people throughout Europe and America read Cook for reliable information on the entire Pacific region. His voyages were at the frontiers of science and human affairs, for they illumined all exploration and heralded the age of empire. The third voyage even surpassed the first two in breadth of materials. Never before, never until the advent of satellite photography, did so huge an area of the surface of the Earth receive such attention.
But no deed of bravery or dramatic exploit of those years gripped the public mind as did the death of Cook. Museum exhibitions of artifacts and paintings, and even the portrayal on the theater stage of island scenes associated with the tragedy, brought a sense of immediacy. In London a pantomime entitled Omai: or a Trip Round the World played to packed houses. The Paris theater in 1788 put on La Mort du Capitaine Cook, with English versions that followed at Covent Garden and provincial theaters. And that special quality that comes with deep tragedy served to heighten the somber fascination that seized the public.
Early in the voyage Discovery was such a good sailor she would easily gallop ahead, often requiring the shortening of sail until Resolution lumbered up. But Discovery was no longer the limber consort. With foresails out of commission, she sat dead in the water as the topmen struggled aloft to give her some way, and for a time she lost Resolution.
Cook set a course that would fetch up with the northeast trades, for he conjectured that the Sandwich Islands extended to the east of the ones he had seen previously. Clearing weather meant that the sailors could catch up with an accumulation of deck work: drying and stitching damaged sails, splicing new rope from old, repairing the boats, and forging iron fragments into more adzes and spikes for the coming trade. With decreasing latitudes the temperature rose, and the sailors discarded their valuable sea otter fur jackets, usually dumping them in heaps about the decks wherever they felt like it. But the officers picked up after them, and stowed the furs in barrels for the next year. A solitary shag, or cormorant, lost far out at sea, hovered forlornly over Discovery. "He appears so weary with travelling as scarcely to be able to make any way through the Air." Another gale with rain split another topsail on Resolution. One day the sailors caught sight of a tropic bird that had wandered too far north. A cosmopolitan petrel, at home over the ocean, circled inquisitively. Things were going reasonably well on both ships.
Coming in from the northeast on the morning of November 26, thirty-one days out of Unalaska Island, the sailors saw land rising from the southeast to the west. Cook stood in for the coast. This was the island of Maui, which had not been seen before. Shortly before noon the island of Molokai was sighted to the northwest. For some time Cook had been thinking about the best way to occupy the ships' personnel during the coming months until the time came for a late spring departure for the north. Three problems uppermost in his mind were to maintain a steady trade with the islands, to keep the use of firearms under strict control, and to prevent the transmission of venereal disease from his crews to the island population. As soon as canoes were seen putting off from Maui as the ships plied westward he was ready with written orders, with a copy for Clerke, so that no one on either ship would have any doubt about his intentions. Crews were called aft to have the law laid down to them.
Only authorized officers would engage in trade, and no "curiosities" would be bought without permission or until provisions were first obtained. That way the sailors would have neither glut nor scarcity, and the value of their dwindling supply of iron would be kept high. As firearms were frequently the object of thefts, no one off duty was to go ashore with firearms of any kind. No women were to board either ship "on any pretence whatever" without special permission from Cook or Clerke, no crewman known to have or even suspected of having venereal disease would be allowed ashore, and any infractions would bring severe punishment. Cook undertook every precaution he could think of in preparation for the landing which seemed imminent.1