prevention. Cleanliness of persons, bedding, clothes, and ship, were
continually enforced. All these were foreign to the sailors of the time,
and extraordinary it is that it was a man born in the lower rank of life,
and brought up in a collier, who had the sense to perceive that in these
lay the surest preventatives against this paralysing scourge.

Cook was promoted to captain--a proud position for the collier boy--and
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; perhaps even a greater distinction
for a man of his bringing up. He contributed papers on his methods of
preventing scurvy, and on the tides of the Pacific.

He also employed himself in publishing the account of his recent voyage,
the only one which he himself edited.

He was not, however, long at rest. The Admiralty wished to send an
expedition to explore the north-western coasts of North America, and to
examine the Polar Sea from the Bering Straits side, with a view of the
discovery of a north-west passage. Cook seems to have volunteered for the
command without being actually asked, and, needless to say, was at once
accepted.

In February he once more received his commission to command the
Resolution, this time accompanied by the Discovery, a vessel very similar
to the Adventure, his consort during the last voyage. Clerke, a master's
mate in the Endeavour, and second lieutenant in the Resolution, was
appointed as commander to the Discovery. He, like Cook, was fated not to
return from this third journey to the great Pacific.

Others who had sailed with Cook before were ready to accompany him, once
more to encounter privations and find new lands.