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Of 94 men who embarked on the expedition, only 56 lived to tell about it. Remarkably, not a man died of scurvy—the first of the achievements which, in Author Gwyther's view, set Cook apart in the annals of marine history. A devout believer in antiscorbutics (the acids which prevent scurvy), Cook would even flog a man who failed to down his tot of "inspissated juice of wort." It was about the only time Cook ever did fall back on physical punishment. In an age of Draconian discipline (lashing with the cat-o'-nine-tails, ducking, keelhauling) and brutalitarians like Captain Bligh,* Cook treated his men with humanity and fair play. Nor did his rare talents stop at shipside. His enlightened dealings with the South Pacific natives were a good century and a half ahead of his time. His maps and navigational observations on the South Pacific were so accurate that Author Gwyther found them still useful off the Great Barrier Reef as late as World War II. Cook was to go on two more voyages and be slain and dismembered by Hawaiian natives (in 1779), but not before he explained in a letter the heroic, globe spanning drive behind the modest Yorkshire mien: "[ I ] . . . had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go."
* Who served on Cook's third expedition as his sailing master, before he went on to captain the Bounty and sail into Nordhoff & Hall fiction.