A newly discovered document: the personal memoir of a sailor on HMS Adventure on Cook's second voyage. This hitherto unrecorded 3000-word narrative of the great voyage is written in a neat hand on a large sheet of folded paper of the era, and is illustrated by a striking and attractive naïve map detailing the track of the Adventure, under the command of Captain Tobias Furneaux.

A newly discovered document: the personal memoir of a sailor on HMS Adventure on Cook's second voyage. This hitherto unrecorded 3000-word narrative of the great voyage is written in a neat hand on a large sheet of folded paper of the era, and is illustrated by a striking and attractive naïve map detailing the track of the Adventure, under the command of Captain Tobias Furneaux.

The manuscript has been the subject of considerable research in recent months and a very full report has been prepared, which we will be happy to make available upon request. In brief, the account has an immediacy and a number of first-person details that mark it out as a unique contemporary work, characterised by a sense of personal recollection.

Describing itself as an "abridgment" of a journal, the manuscript offers a concise overview of the voyage from the time the Adventure left England until they anchored at the Cape of Good Hope on the way home in March 1774: it seems very possible that the manuscript may have been composed at that point of the voyage.

We suggest, on the basis of the most recent research, that the author may have been one John Langford, a junior sailor on the Adventure. His identity would match the initials discovered picked out of the black wash in a corner of the map, while his biographical details suit the attribution, his signature from a marriage register in 1776 is a loose but good fit. This attribution is developed at length in our report.

Written in the first person plural, many smaller details are noted that vary from other accounts: for example, the coming on board of Omai is described though he is not named (where most later accounts are quick to name him); the tattooed hand of the man killed in Massacre Cove is noted as having two letters of his name, more normally stated to have been "T.H."; the hand of the murdered Jack Rowe is identified from the smallness of his fingers, not the scarring on his forefinger... Such details suggest that it is at least in part a work of personal recollection. This is supported by the idiosyncratic spelling of some landfalls ("Circumsition" for Cape Circumcision, "Matavia" for Matavai Bay).

Cook's voyage in search of the Terra Australis included the first major visit to the Antarctic, and the writer includes good details of the voyage itself, including the episode when, encountering major Antarctic ice for the first time, they boiled it in their coppers to get fresh water. He describes Furneaux going aboard Cook's Resolution to discuss retreating into lower latitudes, and of how the two ships later became separated in heavy fog. Consequently it was Furneaux and not Cook who coasted Van Diemen's Land and made landfall at Adventure Bay, several years before Cook first saw Tasmania on his third voyage; the author's brief notes on the Tasmanian landfall provide a genuine addition to that little-known moment in Australian history.

A lengthy passage describes the horrific massacre of ten sailors by Maori at Grass Cove, Queen Charlotte Sound, in December 1773. This passage is significant in providing detail of the events from the point of view of what was most likely a common sailor. What at first appears to be an odd error in the narrative shifting from first to third person in fact offers a good clue to the location of our observer, placing him on the ship's launch during the search for the cutter, and emphasising the manuscript's credentials as a genuine eyewitness account.

This tragic episode would obviously become sensational when they returned to England, and naturally anyone aboard keeping a journal attempted to describe the scene in some detail. The detail recorded here serves to distinguish the narrative and by extension the whole manuscript from any other narrative known to survive, whether original journal or printed account.

The manuscript map, centered on the South Pole and showing the southern parts of Africa and South America, as well as Tasmania, New Zealand and Tahiti, shows only the west and north coasts of Australia, strongly suggesting that it dates from a period before published details of Cook's first voyage were available, lending further credibility to the idea that it must have been composed before the end of the second voyage by someone who did not have access to Hawkesworth's official account of the first voyage (which of course was published in 1773 while the second voyage was still at sea).

It need hardly be stressed that any addition to the heavily-studied canon of original Cook voyage material is of considerable significance.