Title: A New, Authentic, and Complete Collection of Voyages Round the World: Undertaken and Performed by Royal Authority, Containing a New, Authentic, Entertaining, Instructive, Full, and Complete Historical Account of Captain Cook's First, Second, Third, and Last Voyages, Undertaken by Order of His Present Majesty

Description

This compilation of British navigators' accounts of their voyages around the world covers the famous voyages of Sir Francis Drake and Captain James Cook, as well as expeditions by George Anson, John Byron, Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret, and Constantine Phipps (Lord Mulgrave). In 1740-44, Anson led a three-year-and-nine-month mission that raided Spanish commerce off the coast of Peru before returning to England via the Cape of Good Hope. Byron made a voyage in 1764-65, during which he discovered the Islands of Disappointment (in present-day French Polynesia) and several smaller islands. Wallis and Carteret set out in 1766 to find a rumored, but non-existent, southern continent at 20º south latitude. Failing to find such a landmass, they went on to discover Tahiti and a number of other islands in what is now French Polynesia, before returning to England in 1769. Mulgrave was the first British Arctic explorer. In a 1773 attempt to find a passage to Asia via what some navigators speculated was an “Open Polar Sea,” he made the first scientific voyage aimed at reaching the North Pole. Sailing north from England, Mulgrave and his two ships reached the west coast of Svalbard, Norway, before being forced to turn back by pack ice.