A good deal of the
trouble was owing to the then state of the law, by which the pay of and
control over a ship's company ceased upon her wreck. The law was so
amended as to enlist seamen until regularly discharged from the service by
the captain of the ship under the orders of the Admiralty.
The food of sailors and the accommodation provided for them were little,
if any, better than these things had been fifty years before--for the
matter of that than they remained for fifty years later, and to the shame
of those responsible, than the food still is in many merchant ships, for
even now occasionally we hear of cases of scurvy on shipboard--a disease
which Cook, over 120 years ago, avoided, though voyaging in such a manner
as nowadays is unknown.
But the most important change that had come to the sea service was in the
methods of finding a ship's position at sea. Hadley's sextant was in use
in 1731, Harrison's chronometer in 1762, and five years later the first
number of the _Nautical Almanac_ was published, so that when Cook sailed
longitude was no longer found by rule of thumb, and the great navigator,
more than any other man, was able to and did, prove the value of these
discoveries.
In 1764 Byron, who had been a midshipman on the _Wager_, sailed as
commodore of an expedition consisting of two ships, the _Dolphin_ and the
_Tamar_, to make discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere.
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