Sunday, January 18th, 1778, Captain Cook, after seeing birds every day, and turtles, saw two islands, and the next day a third one, and canoes put off from the shore of the second island, the people speaking the language of Otaheite.  As the Englishmen proceeded, other canoes appeared, bringing with them roasted pigs and very fine potatoes.  The Captain says:  “Several small pigs were purchased for a six-penny nail, so that we again found ourselves in a land of plenty.  The natives were gentle and polite, asking whether they might sit down, whether they might spit on the deck, and the like.  An order restricting the men going ashore was issued that I might do everything in my power to prevent the importation of a fatal disease into the island, which I knew some of our men now labored under.”  Female visitors were ordered to be excluded from the ships.  Captain Cook’s journal is very explicit, and he states the particulars of the failure of his precautions.  This is a subject that has been much discussed, and there is still animosity in the controversy.  The discovery of the islands that he called the Sandwich, after his patron the Earl of Sandwich, happened in the midst of our Revolutionary war.  After Cook’s explorations for the time, he sailed in search of the supposed Northwest passage, and that enterprise appearing hopeless, returned to the summer islands, and met his fate in the following December.  Captain George Vancouver, a friend and follower of Cook, says, in his “Voyage of Discovery and Around the World.” from 1790 to 1795: 

“It should seem that the reign of George the Third had been reserved by the Great Disposer of all things for the glorious task of establishing the grand keystone to that expansive arch over which the arts and sciences should pass to the furthermost corners of the earth, for the instruction and happiness of the most lowly children of nature.  Advantages so highly beneficial to the untutored parts of the human race, and so extremely important to that large proportion of the subjects of this empire who are brought up to the sea service deserve to be justly appreciated; and it becomes of very little importance to the bulk of our society, whose enlightened humanity teaches them to entertain a lively regard for the welfare and interest of those who engage in such adventurous undertakings for the advancement of science, or for the extension of commerce, what may be the animadversions or sarcasms of those few unenlightened minds that may peevishly demand, “what beneficial consequences, if any, have followed, or are likely to follow to the discoverers, or to the discovered, to the common interests of humanity, or to the increase of useful knowledge, from all our boasted attempts to explore the distant recesses of the globe?” The learned editor (Dr. Douglas, now Bishop of Salisbury) who has so justly anticipated this injudicious remark, has, in his very comprehensive introduction to Captain Cook’s last voyage, from whence the above quotation