Mark's Pages

"For a little over a week the Englishmen experienced no more serious problems than attempting to rid their bread of cockroaches - airing the bread on shore and smoking the ships with gunpowder and brimstone killed roaches by the hundreds, but the next day there seemed to be just as many alive in the hold - until Bayley discovered one of his sextants missing. With Mai, Cook went ashore, stormed into a crowd watching a theatrical performance, and demanded the return of the sextant, threatening reprisals more severe than those he had inflicted on Moorea if the group would not tell him where it was hidden. Mai grabbed the man he thought had stolen the instrument and threatened to stab him unless he revealed the hiding place. When the man refused to respond, Cook had him seized and confined in irons on board the Resolution. After much badgering from Mai, he told his captors where to find the sextant. A search the next morning proved that the prisoner was telling the truth, but beacuse he was, in Cook's opinion, 'a hardened Scounderal,' Cook had the man's head shaved and his ears cut off before releasing him."

— Lynn Withey, Voyages of Discovery: Captain Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific

This is the Cook of the third voyage, a very different character to the first two and far more successful voyages.