Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
it must at the same time become a means of discovering many new
and useful branches of trade and commerce; and there is likewise
the highest probability, that some unsearched island, with which
the Eastern Seas abound, might produce the various spices, which
would greatly add to the rich returns of the Indian cargoes, and
amply repay the expenses caused by such an expedition.
1
Those words were written by a Polish scientist and traveller
who had made England his adopted country. John Reinhold Forster
was a scholar of natural history and, in the same year that he wrote
these words (1772), he embarked as naturalist on Captain Cook's
second great circumnavigation. To this we shall return. What in-
terests us immediately is the light Forster sheds on the motivation
for promoting voyages of discovery. Scientific enquiry might be the
declared objective of some of these endeavours, but national
prestige and commercial advantage were seldom absent from the
minds of their promoters.
The Spanish and Dutch explorations in the South Seas had kept
alive interest in the possible existence of a vast continent some-
where to the west of America and to the south of China. Around the
middle of the eighteenth century several writers made detailed stud-
ies of the existing accounts of Pacific voyages and put forward their
own conclusions. Dr John Campbell, a prodigiously industrious Scot-
tish author, published his monumental
Navigantium atque Itineran-
tium Bibliotheca
in 1744 and such was the demand for it that it was
reissued in parts. Campbell, who was something of a tubthumper,
urged British captains to take up the challenge of discovery before
their foreign rivals did so and thereby increase the size and com-
petence of the navy, establish valuable new colonies and enhance
national prestige. Charles de Brosses, whose
Histoires des naviga-
tions aux terres australes
appeared in 1756, had a more scientific in-
terest. He was the first to suggest that the island chains comprising
