He gives a full description of the measures adopted, and while giving full acknowledgment to the anti-scorbutics with which he was supplied, he is of opinion that the general sanitary precautions formed the best prevention.

Cleanliness of persons, bedding, clothes, and ship, were continually enforced.

All these were foreign to the sailors of the time, and extraordinary it is that it was a man born in the lower rank of life, and brought up in a collier, who had the sense to perceive that in these lay the surest preventatives against this paralysing scourge.
Cook was promoted to captain--a proud position for the collier boy--and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; perhaps even a greater distinction for a man of his bringing up.

He contributed papers on his methods of preventing scurvy, and on the tides of the Pacific.
He also employed himself in publishing the account of his recent voyage, the only one which he himself edited.
He was not, however, long at rest.

The Admiralty wished to send an expedition to explore the north-western coasts of North America, and to examine the Polar Sea from the Bering Straits side, with a view of the discovery of a north-west passage.