He was born on a part of the Yorkshire coast
where Norse and Danish blood still runs thick. He had the best qualities of the Elizabethan adventurers, but much more besides. The lad who owed no education at all, so far as we know, to his poor parents, taught himself to rise to that state of life to which (pace the Warden of New College) it should please God to call him. That state was the rank of a Captain in His Majesty's Navy, commissioned by the Admiralty Board to do important survey work in the Atlantic and then nominated by the Royal Society to conduct the astronomical expedition which first took him into the Pacific in the company of men of science like Sir Joseph Banks, with whom he moved on equal intellectual terms. It would have stirred his soul and his brain to foresee the great men of-war of the Royal and the United States Navies, with aeroplanes overhead, arriving so easily at Waimea, where he set foot after many tedious months of sailing un- charted seas, never knowing what the dawn would reveal. From Waimea the ships moved to Kealakakua, the scene of his death, for a memorial service. Lon- doners can just now see at the Science Museum in South Kensington some of the charts that he drew of the coasts of Newfoundland and New Zealand.
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