name of Bligh’s Cap, for he said:  “I know nothing that can Rendezvous at it but fowls of the air, for it is certainly inaccessible to every other animal.”  Cook, unaware that Kerguelen had paid two visits to the place, found some difficulty in recognising the places described.  The country was very desolate, the coarse grass hardly worth cutting for the animals; no wood, but a good supply of water was obtained; and here the Christmas Day was spent on the 27th, as the 25th and 26th had been full of hard work.  A bottle was found by one of the crew containing a parchment record of the visit of the French in 1772; on the back Cook noted the names of his ships and the year of their visit, and adding a silver twopenny piece of 1772, replaced it in the bottle which was sealed with lead and hidden in a pile of stones in such a position that it could not escape the notice of any one visiting the spot.  Running along the coast to the south-east they encountered very blowy weather, and finding the land even more desolate than that at Christmas Harbour, they left on the 31st for New Zealand.  Anderson, the surgeon, on whom Cook relied for his notes on Natural History, says: 

“Perhaps no place hitherto discovered in either hemisphere under the same parallel of latitude affords so scanty a field for the naturalist as this barren spot.”

The whole catalogue of plants, including lichens, did not exceed sixteen or eighteen.

A southerly Buster.

The first part of January 1777 was foggy, and Cook says they “ran above 300 leagues in the dark.”  On the 19th a squall carried away the fore topmast and main topgallant mast, and it took the whole day to replace the first, but they had nothing suitable for the top gallant mast.  On 26th January they put into Adventure Bay, Van Diemen’s Land, and obtained a spar; Cook spoke of the timber as being good but too heavy.  A few natives were seen, but did not create a favourable impression, still Cook landed a couple of pigs in hopes to establish the breed, a hope doomed to be unsatisfied.  The Marquis de Beauvoir relates that in 1866 he saw in Adventure Bay a tree on which was cut with a knife:  Cook, 26th Jan. 1777, and he was informed it had been cut by the man himself.  They seem to have seen nothing to raise a doubt about Furneaux’s conclusion that Van Diemen’s Land formed a part of Australia, so no attempt was made to settle the question, and they sailed for New Zealand on the 30th, meeting with a “perfect storm” from the south; the thermometer rose: 

“almost in an instant from about 70 degrees to near 90 degrees, but fell again when the wind commenced, in fact the change was so rapid that there were some on board who did not notice it.”

These storms are of frequent occurrence, and are locally known as Southerly Busters.