Turnbull Library To Bid For Cook’s Log, Journal

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29353, 4 November 1960, Page 12

Turnbull Library To Bid For Cook’s Log, Journal

(New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, November 3. The Alexander Turnbull Library will try to secure the manuscript log book and journal of Captain Cook’s first arid second voyages, which are to. be offered for sale at Christie’s, in London, at the end of the month. Another likely bidder is the Mitchell Library, Sydney. Both the Turnbull and Mitchell libraries have valuable collections of Cook material, supplemented by photostat copies of other original Cook and related material. For example, the holograph journal of the voyage of the Endeavour from 1768, until 1771, which was used by Dr. J. C. Beaglehole in the first of his four volumes planned on the great navigator and his expeditions (and which appeared in 1955), is in the Commonwealth National Library in CanberraBut a photostat copy of it is now in the Turnbull Library. Indeed, since Dr. Beaglehole began his researches, a mass of new material has been placed in that

library in custody and that will probably be augmented in time. Original Cook material in the Turnbull Library includes Cook’s own log as master’s mate of the Eagle in 1755-56: Lieutenant Hick’s log of the Endeavour bn the first voyage; the journal of Willian Bayly, astronomer, on the Adventure’s second voyage, and on the Discovery's thiid voyage. It also has manuscripts of the journal of Thomas Edgar, master of the Resolution and of the Discovery on the last voyage of 177889, and George Gilbert’s journal, on which Walter Besant is said to have drawn heavily for his “Captain Cook,” published in 1892. There is also a fragment from a journal believed to have been written by Jonathan Monkhouse, a young man who was with Cook on the Endeavour, but there is no certainty about the authorship. An exhibition held in Sydney in 1928 to commemorate the bicentenary of Cook’s birth provided ample evidence of the wealth of Cook material in the Mitchell Library, the National Library at Canberra, and the Australian Museum in Sydney, and in the collections of Sir William Dixson and Mr Justice Ferguson.

The Australian Museum owns an excellent miniature of Cook. It was purchased by the New South Wales Government in 1887, and is believed to be the work of the well-known American portrait painter, John Singleton Copley, the elder. It was originally bought from a dealer in Cork, who claimed that he had it from Mrs Cook. The Mitehell Library’s most priceless possession of the Cook period is probably the journal of Sir Joseph Banks, which has always been studied with interest by historians. In addition, there is a good deal of manuscript material which has made the Mitchell Library one of the outstanding libraries in the world for Pacific source material.