This was undertaken in pursuance of the ruling idea of his day, that a sea-route might be discovered north of the American continent, which would vastly shorten the trip from Europe to China and the Spice Islands. Others were seeking it directly by way of Baffin’s Bay, and Cook was sent to attack the problem from the Pacific side. He was given command of his old ship _Resolution_ and a new one, _Discovery_, outfitted in the best possible manner, and especially guarded, in the matter of provisions, against scurvy—that dread of the old-fashioned seamen, in respect to which Cook himself had introduced such new and valuable preventives as would alone have entitled his name to grateful remembrance. He was commanded to revisit, on his way out, the South Pacific Islands; and departed from England in June, 1776, steering by way of the Cape of Good Hope, and reaching the archipelagoes in the spring of 1777, where he cruised for nearly a year. In January, 1778, he sailed north from the Friendly Islands, and a few days later hit upon a large, inhabited, unknown group of islands, whose principal one was called Hawaii by the people, but which he named Sandwich Islands, in honor of an English earl who had taken great interest in his plans. Here he spent some delightful days, and then bore away to the west coast of America, which the English still claimed under Drake’s name of New Albion, and which he struck near Puget Sound. Thence he went slowly along the coast northward until he found and penetrated the deep bay since called Cook’s Inlet. His hope that this might prove a sort of northern Straits of Magellan was quickly disappointed, and he went on into and through Bering Sea and Strait until he was stopped by the ice on the north shore of Alaska, at a point still called Icy Cape. Then he turned back, surveying both shores of the strait, and again made his way to the Sandwich Islands, where, in an unfortunate quarrel with the natives, he was killed. The Hawaiians have always said that this was the act of a ruffian among them, and that the chiefs and the best of the people never wished nor intended any harm to their visitors; and this is probably true. His executive officer took the ships back to England in October, 1780. The voyages of this able and intelligent commander bore fruit in many ways. One was the colonization of Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand by the English, which began in 1788. Another was the voyage of Vancouver to the west coast of America in 1792, which intercepted the surveys of the Spaniards there, under Quadra and others, and enforced English possession of all the country between the Californian settlements of the Spaniards and the Russian posts in Alaska, though he curiously failed to find either Puget Sound or the Columbia River. A third direct result, and from some points of view the most important one, was the opening of a great number of the South Sea Islands to Christian missionaries.