 Captain James Cook was hired by the English authorities to provide them with accurate, detailed maps of the coast so that they might better defend it, should the French try to reclaim it as theirs, and also with the hope that suitable sites for new settlements might be discovered.As many other place names on this map are quite clearly Anglicized versions of their original French names, such as "Rencontre" (ren-contra) being transformed into "Rencontre" (ren-counter), one might assume, then, that Cook's labeling of "Bay of Despair" is a literal, phonetic translation of the previous French title of "Bay d'Espoir".Bay d'Espoir is the feature location of Farley Mowat's 2006 autobiography "Bay of Spirits", in which Mowat chronicles his time living on the Southwest coast of the island of Newfoundland.