d in favour of our
worthy brother, that by a humiliating fatality, so often accompanying the
most useful discoveries, the credit of this ventilator is yet far from
being firmly established in the navy. What wonder then, if Captain Cook
being so much otherwise taken up, should not have had time to examine it,
and therefore avoided the encumbering his ship with an apparatus, he had
possibly never seen used, and of which he had at best received but a
doubtful character? Nor was he altogether unprovided with a machine for
ventilation. He had the _Wind-Sails_, though he hath not mentioned them
in his Paper, and he told me that he had found them at times very
serviceable, and particularly between the Tropics. They have the merit of
taking up little room, they require no labour in working, and the
contrivance is so simple that they can sail in no hands. But their powers
are small in comparison with those of the ventilator; they cannot be put
up in hard gales of wind, and they are of no efficacy in dead calms, when
a refreshment of the air is most wanted. Should there be any objection to
the employing both?

Such were the measures taken by our sagacious Navigator for procuring a
purity of air. It remains only to see in what manner he supplied pure
water; another article of so great moment, that the thirsty voyager, upon
his salt and putrid diet, with a short allowance of this element, and
that in a corrupted Rate, must account a plentiful provision of fresh
water to be indeed the _best of things_.

Captain Cook was not without an apparatus for distilling sea-water, and
though he could not obtain nearly so much as was expected from the
invention, yet he sometimes availed himself of it; but for the most of
his voyage he was otherwise provided. Within the Southern Tropic, in the
Pacific Ocean, he found so many islands, and those so well stored with
springs, that, as I have hinted before, he seldom was without a
sufficiency of fresh water for every useful purpose. But not satisfied
with plenty, he would have the purest; and therefore whenever an
opportunity offered, he emptied what he had taken in but a few days
before, and filled his casks anew. But was he not above four months in
his passage from the Cape of Good Hope to New Zeeland, in the frozen zone
of the South, without once seeing land? and did he not actually complete
his circumnavigation, in that high latitude, without the benefit of a
single fountain? Here was indeed a _