CAPTAIN COOK

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18529, 16 October 1934, Page 5

CAPTAIN COOK

GREAT AYTON COTTAGE VICTORIA’S ACQUISITION AUTHENTICITY QUESTIONED LONDON, Oct. 4. The exchange of “Captain Cook’s collage,” now in Melbourne, and a monument of Cape E-vernrd stone to mark the former site of the cottage at. Great Ayton (Yorkshire} has had an unexpected sequel. The Great, Ayton Parish Council has issued a statement, affirming that the claim that Cook lived in the cottage is small, and that it is doubtful if he visited it during his parents’ residence there. Mr. Winn, chairman of the council, stated that members of the council were strongly of the opinion Hint the “misstatement” on the monument—which said it marked the. site of Captain Cook’s cottage—should not he perpetuated. Officially, Great Avton will not take part in the ceremony of the erection of the monument.

TRANSACTION DESCRIBED AS HOAX The Daily Mail says the people of Great Ayton are discussing with great interest the question whether they have been a party’ to perpetrating a hoax on tlie Victorian Government. “1 am of opinion,” said Mr. Winn, “that the Victorian Government was ‘sold a pup.’ ” Mr. Maurice Holmes, deputy-secre-tary of the Board of Education, in a letter to the Times, endorses Great Aytou’s non-acceptance of the legend that the cottage acquired for Victoria was Captain Cook’s boyhood home. He asserts that it is incontestable that Cook lived at Great Ayton only between 1736 and 1746—-not in the village, but at Airy Holme farm, near Rosebery Topping. The cottage was built for, or by, Cook's father in 1755. says Mr. Holmes, and occupied by him and his wife until the latter’s death in 1765, and subsequently by. the father, until between 1772 and 1*775. VOYAGER’S VISITS TO FATHER Mr. Holmes asserts that the cottage was the home, not of Cook’s boyhood, but of his parents’ old age, hut the Ayton Parish Council was wrong, in suggesting that Cook never visited his parents there. Cook wrote to the Admiralty on December 14, 1771, applying for three week’s leave, in order to transact business in Yorkshire and to see his aged father. The application was granted, and' Cook visited his father at the cottage in January, 1772. namely, between his. firsthand second voyages. Rossibly he did so also before his first voyage.

Carrying in her purse a large oldstyle door key. believed to lie about 180 years old. Mrs. Arnold Dixon, of Great Ayton, Yorkshire, whose husband sold to Mr. Russell Grinnvade, of Melbourne, the home in which the parents of Captain James Cook lived in Yorkshire, arrived in Melbourne recently.

Questioned about the controversy as tD whether Captain Cook had lived in the cottage, Mrs. Dixon said she had three definite proofs that lie had been there, and had stayed there with his parents, who built it in 1755, the. date engraved on a part of the building, and which coincided with Cook’s return to London from one of his successful voyages. In Melbourne, said Mrs. Dixon, site Would receive a photograph which had been forwarded from London of a letter Cook wrote to a friend while staying in the house. “We have not contradicted a single statement,” she said. “They are so futile. We know that Cook spent two months in the house before, setting out on his last fatal voyage. The key in mv possession is the original front-door key. ’ Mrs. Dixon added that the cottage had been owned bv her husband’s family for many years. They rented it to an old couple for 2s 6d a, week, so that they might preserve it. They could have .got more money thnft the £BOO paid by Mr. Grimwnde, but they knew that it would be safe in Australia