Cliff Thornton, President, Captain Cook Society, has made some enquiries about the dividers missing from the Captain Cook Statue in Victoria, BC.¹ Chantelle Olson, Maintenance Administrative Assistant, Greater Victoria Harbour Authority, told him the statue was placed in the inner harbour of Victoria in the 1970s by a society that no longer exists. Her organization is now responsible for maintaining this statue, and they are keen to replace the dividers stolen from it a few years ago. Chantelle told us the statue had been repaired several years ago by Nathan Scott.² When I contacted him, he was able to tell me that he was asked to pull down the statue of Captain Cook about 10 or 11 years ago from its pedestal in Victoria, to give it a rejuvenation. He cleaned it and replaced the dividers in Cook’s right hand. The dividers had broken off earlier. Nathan Scott did this work, and resealed it. Nathan also told me it is a cold cast fibreglass sculpture, and, before the season was out, the dividers were broken off again. He hopes that he can repair the dividers in bronze this time, and securely mount them to the sculpture. It is a shame he cannot recast the whole statue in bronze, but I’m sure that would be more than the harbour authority can afford. According to John Tweed’s biographer,³ the original Tweed statue of Cook for Whitby was cast in bronze, as were the copies for St Kilda and Hawai`i. Does anyone know whether the copy at Anchorage is bronze or something else?  

Ian Boreham

References

1. Cook’s Log, page 28, vol. 38, no. 4 (2015).
2. Nathan Scott is a bronze sculptor and artist whose work is in public and private collections. Visit www.sculpturebynathanscott.com/
3. Capon, Nicola. John Tweed: Sculpting the Empire. Spire Books Ltd. 2013. Reviewed in Cook’s Log, page 20, vol. 36, no. 4 (2013).

Originally published in Cook's Log, page 2, volume 39, number 1 (2016).