An Account of the Voyages

In the middle of the 18th century, the knowledge of the Pacific by Europeans was still very limited, with the positions of many islands unknown and only some of the coasts of larger landmasses charted.

[1] It was followed in 1766 by the voyages of Samuel Wallis on the Dolphin and Philip Carteret on HMS Swallow, who were supposed to search the South Pacific for a southern continent.

[3] With the dual aims of observing the 1769 transit of Venus from Tahiti and searching for a southern continent, the first voyage of James Cook set out in August 1768.

[3] On board was also the botanist Joseph Banks with an entourage including naturalist Daniel Solander and the artists Alexander Buchan and Sydney Parkinson.

[19] After compiling his draft, Hawkesworth submitted it to Lord Sandwich, and it was read by other Navy personnel, who made some suggestions for correction; however, these were not incorporated.

[21] Hawkesworth obtained a legal injunction against the competing publication of Parkinson's posthumous Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, so it was delayed until after the Account appeared on 10 June 1773.

Giovanni Battista Cipriani added additional figures to Buchan's Inhabitants of the island of Tierra del Fuego, in their hut before the images were engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi.

[34] The geographer Alexander Dalrymple, a strong believer in theory of a southern continent, published a pamphlet attacking Hawkesworth and Cook, in which he complained about differences between the narrative and the charts and defended his belief in Terra australis.

[38] Georg Forster, who accompanied Cook, wrote about the scene in his book A Voyage Round the World: "Dr. Hawkesworth's account of captain Cook's first voyage round the world, in the Endeavour, had reached this island some time before; it had been eagerly perused, and several articles, relative to this settlement, were now taken notice of with great good humour and pleasant raillery.

Mrs. Skottowe, the sprightliest lady on the island, displayed to advantage her witty and satirical talents, from which there was no other escape left, than to lay the blame on the absent philosophers whose papers had been consulted.

"[39] In 2004, the literary scholar Philip Edwards, described the Account as a "laundering of the actual record of the remorseless advance into the Pacific" and criticised the way that different witnesses of the event were merged into a single voice, losing their individuality.

"[45] Another lasting legacy of Hawkesworth's Account was that his merging of the commanders into a single first-person narrator created the heroic British explorer as a literary character that would stay popular for more than 200 years.