| It has been customary over the centuries during voyages of exploration for the Captain of the ship to record daily events of significance in the "Captain's Log." The above entry was made by Captain James Cook in the log of His Majesty's Bark, Endeavour, during February 1770. It reflects his amazement at seeing "mountains of strange, volcanic appearance totally unHke anything in Europe . . . " Captain Cook, during his 3-year voyage of scientific discovery in the South Pacific, was the first known explorer to view the Southern Alps in New Zealand (Syme, Ronald, The Travels of Captain Cook, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1971).
Just over two hundred years later, I too had the opportunity to view an amazing and unfamiliar scene of "mountains of strange, volcanic appearance totally unlike anything in Earth . . . " As our spaceship Endeavor circled the Moon, I stared at our spectacular landing site in the vast Apennine Mountains. But unlike Capt Cook, I had no time to record my observations in a Captain's Log. Every minute of our 12-day voyage was packed with tasks, objectives, experiments, observations, investigations, and a whole manner of activities necessary to complete the first extended scientific exploration of the Moon. As an illustration of contrasts, every 15-minute period during our 1971 voyage of Apollo 15 was comparable to a full day (24 hours) during Cook's 3-year voyage of 1768-1771. |
