Tobias Furneaux

Tobias Furneaux

Tobias Furneaux (born August 17, 1735 in Swilly , a district of Plymouth , England , † September 19, 1781 ibid) was a British explorer. He was the first person to circumnavigate the earth in both directions.

Life

Furneaux entered the Royal Navy very early on and embarked on an officer career . Between 1760 and 1763 he served in the West Indies in the Seven Years War . Between 1768 and 1769 he took part as Second Lieutenant in Samuel Walli's circumnavigation, during which Tahiti was discovered, among other things .

In 1771 Furneaux was promoted to commander . As captain of James Cook's support ship Adventure , he accompanied him on his second expedition to the South Pacific . When he was separated from Cook from February 8 to May 19, 1773, he explored and mapped the waters of northeast Tasmania . Hence the Furneaux Group today bears his name. He is also the namesake for Mount Furneaux on Cook Island in the archipelago of the South Shetland Islands, in whose discovery he was instrumental. On October 22, 1773 Furneaux lost again, and this time for good, contact with Cook and finally drove back to England alone.

Furneaux took part in the American Revolutionary War and was promoted to captain in 1775. On June 28, 1776, he commanded the Syren in their attack on Charleston , South Carolina .

literature

• Alan Villiers : Captain James Cook. Navigators and explorers. Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Hamburg 1971, ISBN 3-7822-0182-5 .