About
From the coal ports of Yorkshire to the farthest reaches of the Pacific, James Cook remade the map of the world in three voyages spanning less than a decade.
He was not born to exploration. He was born to labour — a farm labourer's son who taught himself mathematics, mastered the coal ships of the North Sea, and earned his way into the Royal Navy through demonstrated skill rather than social position. By the time the Admiralty commissioned him to observe the Transit of Venus from Tahiti in 1768, he had already become one of the finest surveyors of coastlines Britain had ever produced.
This volume follows Cook from his Yorkshire childhood through his years on the Whitby colliers, his meticulous surveys of Newfoundland, and the three Pacific voyages that brought him to New Zealand, Australia, Antarctica, the northwest coast of America, and Hawaii. It traces the science behind the expeditions, the management of men at sea across months without land, the encounters with Pacific peoples that defined and complicated his legacy, and the death at Kealakekua Bay that transformed him into a legend.
Drawing on Cook's own journals, the records of Joseph Banks, and two centuries of historical scholarship, this narrative account reconstructs one of the most methodical and consequential careers in the history of exploration — the life of a man who left almost no ocean unmapped.