"One of the holes, which was big enough to have sunk us if we had had eight pumps instead of four, and had been able to keep them incessantly going, was in great measure plugged up by a fragment of the rock, which, after having made the wound, was left sticking in it; so that the water which had at first gained upon our pumps was what came in at the interstices between the stone and the edges of the hole that received it." Endeavour River, Cape Flattery, Providential Channel, and other names on the chart commemorate the accident; yet after all this trouble Cook continued his survey, sailing safely through the cluster of rocks between New Guinea and the mainland. This passage and the Barrier Reef are probably two of the most dangerous places in the world, and more vessels have been wrecked on that bit of coast between the southern end of the Barrier Reef and the Indian Ocean side of Torres Straits than on any similar stretch of coast-line anywhere. So far the voyage had been without other disaster than this, but on the way back the _Endeavour_ put into Batavia to refresh, and in a letter to the Secretary of the Admiralty, dated the 9th of May, 1771, Cook wrote:-- "That uninterrupted state of health we have all along enjoyed was, soon after our arrival at Batavia, succeeded by a general sickness, which delayed us there so much that it was the 20th of December before we were able to leave that place. We were fortunate enough to loose but few men at Batavia, but on our passage from thence to the Cape of Good Hope we had twenty-four men died, all, or most of them, of the bloody flux. This fatal disorder reign'd in the ship with such obstinacy that medicines, however skilfully administered, had not the least effect. I arrived at the Cape on the 14th of March, and quitted it again on the 14th of April, and on the 1st of May arrived at St. Helena, where I joined His Maj.'s ship _Portland_, which I found ready to sail with the convoy"; and on the 12th of July he brought up in the Downs, reporting one more death--that of Lieutenant Hicks. For his services Cook was promoted a step. His after-life and death need no mention here, and although in both his second and third voyages he touched at New Zealand and Tasmania, his connection with Australia practically ends with the _Endeavour_ voyage. But a word or two about the _Endeavour's_ officers, taken from documents recently obtained by the New South Wales Government, which perhaps contain some things new to many readers.