HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure · Plymouth, 13 July 1772 – Spithead, 30 July 1775 The Endeavour had found no continent at 40° South, but geographers still insisted a vast southern land had to balance the continents of the north. The Admiralty sent James Cook, now a commander, to look everywhere it could be: the Resolution, 112 men, with the Adventure under Tobias Furneaux, 81 more. He also carried K1, Larcum Kendall's copy of John Harrison's sea clock. It kept his longitude for 3 years, and Cook called it his "never failing guide". From the Cape of Good Hope the ships went south into the icebergs, and on 17 January 1773 crossed the Antarctic Circle, the first ships known to have done so. On 8 February they lost each other in fog. Furneaux made for the agreed meeting place, Queen Charlotte Sound in New Zealand, by way of Tasmania. Cook searched east alone along the edge of the ice for 117 days without seeing land, rested at Dusky Sound, and found the Adventure waiting in May. Together they spent the southern winter in Tahiti, the Society Islands, where a young Raiatean named Mai joined the Adventure, and Tonga. Returning to New Zealand in October 1773, a gale separated the ships for the last time. Cook waited 3 weeks in Queen Charlotte Sound, buried a message for Furneaux, and sailed. The Adventure came in 4 days later. On 17 December a boat's crew of 10 under John Rowe, sent to gather greens at Grass Cove, was killed by Māori. Furneaux sailed home by Cape Horn and reached England a year before Cook, with Mai. Cook turned south again. He crossed the Circle a second and a third time, and on 30 January 1774 reached 71°10′ South, where solid pack ice turned him back — a record that stood until 1823. Gravely ill with what his surgeon called a bilious colic, he was fed soup made from the naturalist Johann Forster's dog. He recovered by Easter Island. The second winter took him across the whole tropical Pacific: the Marquesas, Tahiti, Tonga, the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), where a landing on Erromango ended in a fight, and New Caledonia and Norfolk Island, neither of them recorded by Europeans before. In the last summer he crossed from New Zealand to Cape Horn along 55° South, landed on South Georgia and claimed it for King George III, and found the ice-bound Sandwich Land. He came home by the Cape, St Helena and the Azores after 3 years and 18 days, with only 4 of the Resolution's men dead, 1 of them from illness. Why it matters: this voyage ended the belief in a rich southern continent. Cook wrote that there might be land near the Pole, locked in ice, and that "the world will derive no benefit from it". Antarctica itself was not seen until 1820. #CaptainCook #JamesCook #map #Adventure #History - @cunning.conquests