He might well have rested on such laurels as these, but there was more work for him to do, and he went to do it. One of the greatest questions of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, was the possibility of the North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. So far every attempt had ended in failure, and generally in disaster, but now, when men’s minds were full of the wonders Captain Cook had achieved, there arose another question: Might not a _North-East_ passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic be possible, and, if so, who better to try it than the great Circumnavigator? An expedition was promptly decided on. Captain Cook was not offered the command, as the Government probably and rightly thought he had won his laurels. But one fatal evening he dined with Lord Sandwich, the promoter of the expedition, and at table he met his old patron, Sir Hugh Palliser, and his friend, Mr. Stephens, Secretary to the Admiralty. Ostensibly the object of the dinner was to consult him as to the best leader for the new venture, but the moment the subject was broached the unquenchable passion for travel blazed up again, and the great Navigator rose to his feet and said gravely: “My lord and gentlemen, if you will have me I will go myself.” So was decided the fatal voyage which was destined to end a glorious and almost blameless career by an ignoble and unworthy death. The expedition consisted of the old _Resolution_ and the _Discovery_, a vessel of three hundred tons. The voyage lasted four years and nine months, but the loss of life by sickness was only five men, of whom three were ill when they started. A good deal of the old ground was gone over, more islands were discovered, more unknown coasts surveyed. Fair Tahiti was visited once more, and the expedition, so far as its principal object was concerned, came to an end, as the search for the Southern Continent had done, in a way blocked by impenetrable barriers of ice--this time the ice of the North. Thus turned back, they steered southward, and on December 1, 1778, they discovered Hawai, which discovery the great Navigator in his last written words somewhat strangely says, “seemed in many respects to be the most important that had hitherto been made by Europeans throughout the extent of the Pacific Ocean.” It was here, as all the world knows, that he met his death, and the story of it is, unhappily, at sad variance with that of his life.