Captain James Cook
and the Naming of
Lark Harbour and York Harbour

Visitors frequently ask how our two communities received these intriguing names. Local legend has it that James Cook named the harbours after two of "his" ships. However, while it is true that Cook spent the years 1764 to 1767 surveying and charting the coasts of Newfoundland and was working in the Bay of Islands in the summer of 1767, he had charge of only one ship, the schooner Grenville. Not a naval vessel, and built and operated in Massuchusetts under the name Sally, she had been purchased by the Royal Navy for Cook's use while surveying.

HMS Lark and HMS York, after which our harbours were named, were ships of the Royal Navy's Newfoundland Squadron. To command such ships a naval commission was required, and Cook held no such commission during his years in Newfoundland: he was at that time a "sailing master". The title of captain, or commander, was reserved for commissioned officers of the Navy.

Most of the names of natural features, such as Blow-me-down Mountain, Tweed Island, Guernsey Island and Pearl Island, (these last three also named after frigates of the Newfoundland Squadron) had appeared earlier on maps drawn by Joseph Gilbert who was sailing master aboard HMS Guernsey when the British Governor of Newfoundland, Hugh Palliser, visited the Bay of Islands in 1764. Palliser, newly appointed to his responsibilities as Governor, quickly understood that reliable charts of the waters around Newfoundland would be useful tools in the Navy's defence strategy. Cook was already a capable surveyor, and it was Palliser who assigned him to the task in Newfoundland. Cook would undoubtedly have had copies of any existing charts and log notes, including Gilbert's, when he began his work, and would have incorporated into his own work the names he saw on those documents.

There is no question that Cook was sailing the waters of the Bay of Islands in 1767. Nor is there any question that his painstaking cartography facilitated the settlement of Western Newfoundland, including Lark Harbour and York Harbour, though it took another century for that to occur. His charts were so accurate and reliable that they remained in use until almost 1900. In later years, as commander of the Endeavour, he became the legendary Captain James Cook. However it is interesting to note that there is another Bay of Islands on the North Island of New Zealand. Might that name be the choice of a highly successful man looking back nostalgically on his earlier career?