The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1894-11-12
Quite a Collection at Sydney that
is Highly Valued.
THAT PLACE HAS A MONUMENT ALSO.
All Honor the Great Discoverer, Whose
Name is Familiar in Hawaii-They
Say that He Had a Deeply Religious
Spirit - His Memory Still lives.

The following carelG -epared
article on Captain Cook shows the
esteem in which the fearless navi-
gators memory is held down in
British Colonies. The matter is
from the Sydney Herald:
On the 18th of May, 1885, there died at
Clapham, England, certain Mrs.
Cook, aged "a, whose name is inter-
woven with the history of Australia
sia. Her husband was Captain James
Cook, who was killed by the natives
of Owyhee (Hawaii), in the Pacific
ocean, on St. Valentines Day, in the
year 1879. We, in Sydney, are fairly
familiar with the name of Captain
Cook, but to most of us he looms
through the mists of dead centuries
along with the brakes, Raleighs, DAM
piers, and other mighty men of long
ago. 1t is startling to find that his
widow died less than sixty years ago.
On the monument to Captain Cook,
which stands in Hyde Park, Sydney,
we are told the date of the birth and
of the death of the famous sailor, but
few of us realize how great was the
man. We forget that his father was
a day laborer on a Yorkshire farm,
and that when James was seventeen
years old he was apprenticed to a
grocer and haberdasher near Whitby.
The young grocer had a mighty soul,
and by sheer good conduct and pure
grit he won his way from the humble
haberdashery to one of the proudest
places in the records of British heroes.
He was one of those
Who stamped the signent of their souls SO
deep
In art and action, and whose memories
Their height like stars above our misty
ways.
The monument opposite to the Sgd
ney Museum serves to remind us of
the bravest and most unselfish sailor
men that ever sailed the sea, but the
Sydney Museum has just obtained
some pathetic memorials of his career,
of which most of our people are as yet
unaware. In the Colonial and Indian
Exhibition held in London in 1866
there were exhibited a number of
"Cook Relics" which attracted a
great amount of attention. They were
the relics of the hardy navigator who
had discovered the Society Islands,
who had declared the insularity of
New Zealand, and sailed through the
Straits now called by his name. He
had explored the then unknown
coasts of Australia for over 1000 miles,
and he had watched the transit of
Venus for the scientific men of his
own land. One of the relics was an
arrow from the Pacific Ocean, part of
which was made from the leg-bone of
the dead sailor by the savages who
murdered him. Such relic has a
lo
decidedly to the sympathies of a wan
dering race like ours, and it was no
wonder that the relies attracted a
large amount of attention in England.
The children of the English mother
are scattered all the wide world
over, and their adventures ap-
peal ever to the sympathies; ;Of the
maternal race, and our hearts respond
to the words of Rudyard Kipling:-
There dwells wife by the Northern march
And 4 wealthy wife is she;
She bI eeds breed o royin' men,
And casts them over sea.
And some they drown in deep water,
And some in sight of shore,
And word goes back to the carline wife,
And ever she sends more.
Cook discovered New Caledonia
and the Sandwich Islands and many
another place that is now well known.
He made unto himself q name that
will never die, and the relics that
have come to our Museum seem to be-
long to us of right, and seem, too,
appropriately housed in the Museum
which stands opposite to the statue of
the great navigator. The boy who
served his time on north country
collier has today right to the place
of honor in Sydney. These relics
were purchased by Sir Saul Samuel
during the Parker Administration,
and transferred to the Sydney Mu-
scum by Sir George DIbbs, and are
now open to the public during the
reign of George II. Reid, so that they
stand clear of all party lines, and yet
belong, as it were, TO all parties, as
they indeed do.
Almost the frat thing hat strikes
the eye is the bible that james Cook
used on board bis ship, from which he
read the lessons to his crew. This
book shows the man an upright, fear
less, intensely just man, with q deeply
religious spirit. He may not have
been understood in his day, but 10 the
reader of human nature these relics
have much to tell. How little his
contemporaries understood him may
be realized from two engravings which
form part of the precious relics. One
represents the fearless British sailor
fighting against the savages with his
clubbed musket. The other picture
reDreSeDts him a standing at the wat