plan of the method he intended to pursue and forward it to Lord Sandwich
for approval.

Cook proceeded to carry out his share, and furnished Forster with a large
amount of manuscript; but the latter proved obstinately insistent in
having his own way in everything, with the result that, after submitting
two schemes to Lord Sandwich, both extremely unsatisfactory, he was
forbidden to write at all, and it was decided that Cook should complete
the whole work, and it should be revised by the Reverend John Douglas,
Canon of Windsor, afterwards Bishop of Carlisle.

FORSTER'S YARNS.

Notwithstanding the prohibition against Forster, a book was published
under his son's name, and the latter claims that he started on the voyage
with the intention of writing, took copious notes, and, excepting that he
utilised those taken by his father, the work was entirely his own. He
forgets, however, to say that a quantity of Cook's manuscripts had been
in his father's hands, and does not explain how so much of his book
corresponds with curious exactitude with that of Cook (in many cases word
for word), and how, when the papers of Cook failed to provide him with
further facts, he was obliged to rely on would-be philosophical
dissertations which it is to be hoped were not obtained from his father's
notebooks. Young Forster says that the appointment was first of all given
to his father in a spirit of pique on the part of Lord Sandwich, and then
the order forbidding him to write was made because the father had refused
to give Miss Ray, Lord Sandwich's mistress, who had admired them when on
board the ship, some birds brought home from the Cape of Good Hope as a
present to the Queen. In the end the Forsters forestalled Cook's book by
about six weeks, and as this was after Cook had left England on his last
voyage, Mr. Wales undertook the defence of the absent against the sneers
and insinuations that were plentifully given out all round. The Forsters
infer that Cook was unreliable because he suppresses mention of the
bombardment of the Loo fort at Madeira, an event which never happened;
and because he places Valparaiso (where he had never been) in the
position given on the Admiralty chart supplied to him, which proved to be
some 10 degrees out. The Master who had refused to give up his cabin was,
of course, never forgiven; and as for Mr. Wales, who had observed the
Transit of Venus at Hudson's Bay in 1769, for the Royal Society, he, poor
man, had ne