services at Portland were rewarded with a knighthood. He was now recognized as the leading authority on harbour construction, and his advice was sought by many of the colonial governments, especially by those of South Africa and Australia, and by the Indian government. After the Portland harbour his best-known work is the harbour of Colombo, Ceylon. He was made a K.C.M.G. in 1886. From 1884 till his death he was a member of the Suez Canal Commission, and from 1889–1891 president of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He died at Brighton on the 2nd of March 1892.
COOK, ALBERT STANBURROUGH (1853– ), American scholar, was born on the 6th of March 1853 in Montville, Morris county, New Jersey. He graduated at Rutgers College in 1872, and also studied at Göttingen and Leipzig (1877–1878), and, after spending the years 1879–1881 as associate in English at Johns Hopkins University, in London, and under Sievers at Jena, he became in 1882 professor of English in the University of California, and in 1889 professor of English language and literature in Yale University. He re-organized the teaching of English in the state of California, and edited many texts for reading in secondary schools; but he is best known for his work in Old English and in poetics. He translated, edited, and revised Sievers’ Old English Grammar (1885), edited Judith (1888), The Christ of Cynewulf (1900), Asser’s Life of King Alfred (1905), and The Dream of the Rood (1905), and prepared A First Book in Old English Grammar (1894). He also edited, with annotations, Sidney’s Defense of Poesie (1890); Shelley’s Defense of Poetry (1891); Newman’s Poetry (1891); Addison’s Criticisms on Paradise Lost (1892); The Art of Poetry (1892), being the essays of Horace, Vida and Boileau; and Leigh Hunt’s What is Poetry (1893); and published Higher Study of English (1906).
COOK, EDWARD DUTTON (1829–1883), English dramatic critic and author, was born in London on the 30th of January 1829, the son of a solicitor. He was educated at King’s College school, London, and, after four years in his father’s office, obtained a situation in the London office of a railway company, at first utilizing only his spare time in literary work, but eventually devoting himself entirely to literature. He was dramatic critic of the Pall Mall Gazette from 1867 to 1875, and of the World from 1875 till his death. He also wrote freely on art topics, and was the author of several novels. He died in London on the 11th of September 1883.
COOK, ELIZA (1818–1889), English author, was born on the 24th of December 1818, in Southwark, being the daughter of a local tradesman. She was self-taught, and began when a girl to write poetry for the Weekly Dispatch and New Monthly. In 1838 she published Melaia and other Poems, and from 1849 to 1854 conducted a paper for family reading called Eliza Cook’s Journal. She also published Jottings from my Journal (1860), and New Echoes (1864); and in 1863 she was given a civil list pension of £100 a year. As the author of a single poem, “The Old Armchair,” Eliza Cook’s name was for a generation after 1838 a household word both in England and in America, her kindly domestic sentiment making her a great favourite with the working-class and middle-class public. She died at Wimbledon on the 23rd of September 1889.
COOK, JAMES (1728–1779), English naval captain and explorer, was born on the 28th of October 1728, at Marton village, Cleveland, Yorkshire, where his father was first an agricultural labourer and then a farm bailiff. At twelve years of age he was apprenticed to a haberdasher at Staithes, near Whitby, and afterwards to Messrs Walker, shipowners, of Whitby, whom he served for years in the Norway, Baltic and Newcastle trades.
In 1755, having risen to be a mate, Cook joined the royal navy, and after four years’ service was, on the recommendation of Sir Hugh Palliser, his commander, appointed master successively of the sloop “Grampus,” of the “Garland” and of the “Solebay,” in the last of which he served in the St Lawrence. He was employed also in sounding and surveying the river, and he published a chart of the channel from Quebec to the sea. In 1762 he was present at the recapture of Newfoundland, and was employed in surveying portions of this coast (especially Placentia Harbour); in 1763, on Palliser becoming governor of Newfoundland, Cook was appointed “marine surveyor of the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador”; this office he held till 1767; and the volumes of sailing directions he now brought out (1766–1768) showed remarkable abilities. At the same time he began to make his reputation as a mathematician and astronomer by his observation of the solar eclipse of the 5th of August 1766, at one of the Burgeo Islands, near Cape Ray, and by his account of the same in the Philosophical Transactions (vol. lvii. pp. 215-216).
In 1768 Cook was appointed to conduct an expedition, suggested by the revival of geographical interest now noticeable, and resolved on by the English admiralty at the instance of the Royal Society, for observing the impending transit of Venus, and prosecuting geographical researches in the South Pacific Ocean. For these purposes he received a commission as lieutenant (May 25th), and set sail in the “Endeavour,” of 370 tons, accompanied by several men of science, including Sir Joseph Banks (August 25th). On the 13th of April 1769, he reached Tahiti, where he observed the transit on the 3rd of June. From Tahiti he sailed in quest of the great continent then supposed to exist in the South Pacific, explored the Society Islands, and thence struck to New Zealand, whose coasts he circumnavigated and examined with great care for six months, charting them for the first time with fair accuracy, and especially observing the channel (“Cook Strait”) which divided the North and South Islands. His attempts to penetrate to the interior, however, were thwarted by native hostility. From New Zealand he proceeded to “New Holland” or Australia, and surveyed with the same minuteness and accuracy the whole east coast. New South Wales he named after a supposed resemblance to Glamorganshire; Botany Bay, sighted on the 28th of April 1770, was so called by the naturalists of the expedition. On account of the hostility of the natives his discoveries here also were confined to the coast, of which he took possession for Great Britain. From Australia Cook sailed to Batavia, satisfying himself upon the way that (as Torres had first shown in 1607) New Guinea was in no way an outlying part of the greater land mass to the south.
Arriving in England, by way of the Cape of Good Hope, on the 12th of June, Cook was made a commander, and soon after was appointed to command another expedition for examining and determining once for all the question of the supposed great southern continent. With the “Resolution” of 462 tons, the “Adventure” (Captain Furneaux) of 330 tons, and 193 men, he sailed from Plymouth on the 13th of July 1772; he touched at the Cape of Good Hope, and striking thence south-east (November 22nd) passed the Antarctic Circle (January 16th, 1773), repassed the same, and made his way to New Zealand (March 26th) without discovering land. From New Zealand he resumed his “search for a continent,” working up and down across the South Pacific, and penetrating to 67° 31′ and again to 71° 10′ S., with imminent risk of destruction from floating ice, but with the satisfaction of disproving the possibility of the disputed continent in the seas south-eastward of New Zealand. He then made for Easter Island, whose exact position he determined, for the first time, with accuracy; noticing and describing the gigantic statues which Roggewein, the first discoverer of the island, had made known. In the same manner he accomplished a better determination and examination of the Marquesas, as well as of the Tonga or Friendly Islands, than had yet been made; and after a stay at Tahiti to rest and refit, crossed the central Pacific to the “New Hebrides,” as he renamed Quiros’s “Southern Land of the Holy Spirit” (a name preserved in the modern island of Espiritu Santo), called by Bougainville the “Great Cyclades” (Grandes Cyclades), whose position, extent, divisions and character were now verified as never before. Next followed the wholly new discoveries of New Caledonia, Norfolk Island, and the Isle of Pines. Another visit to New Zealand, and yet another examination of the far southern Pacific, which was crossed from west to east through the whole of its extent, from south Australia to Tierra del Fuego, were now undertaken by
