tion. For a man of his marked celebrity it
is very curious that there should be such a dearth of anecdote that it is
difficult to find anything that is unconnected with his profession. Of
his own family relations there is also little known, as Mrs. Cook,
probably esteeming the few letters she had from him as too sacred to be
seen by any other eye than her own, as the late Canon Bennett suggests,
destroyed them before her death. Still some idea of their life together,
short as it really was, notwithstanding it lasted, in name, for over
sixteen years, may be gained from the manner in which his widow always
spoke of him after his death. She always wore a ring containing a lock of
his hair, and measured everything by his standard of morality and honour.
The greatest disapprobation she could express was "Mr. Cook would never
have done so." He was always Mr. Cook to her. She kept four days each
year as solemn fasts, remaining in her own room. The days were those on
which she lost her husband and three sons, passing them in reading her
husband's Bible, prayer and meditation, and during bad weather she could
not sleep for thinking of those at sea. For her husband's sake she
befriended her nephews and nieces whom she never saw. Of her three sons,
two entered the Navy. One, Nathaniel, was lost with his ship, the
Thunderer, in a hurricane off Jamaica in 1780. The eldest, James, rose to
the rank of Commander, and in January 1794 was appointed to H.M. sloop
Spitfire. He was at Poole when he received his orders to join his ship at
Portsmouth without delay. Finding an open boat with sailors returning
from leave about to start, he joined them. It was blowing rather hard,
and nothing was ever heard of the passengers or crew, except that the
broken boat and the dead body of the unfortunate young officer, stripped
of all money and valuables, with a wound in the head, was found ashore on
the Isle of Wight. The third son, Hugh, was entered at Christ's College,
Cambridge, in 1793, but contracting scarlet fever he died on 21st
December of that year, and was buried in the church of St. Andrew the
Great, being joined by his brother James a few weeks afterwards, when the
mother was left indeed alone. She survived her husband for the long
period of fifty-six years, living at Clapham with her cousin, Admiral
Isaac Smith, and at length joined her two sons at Cambridge at the
advanced age of ninety-three.

Cook's character as given by those with whom