James Cook

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 14th of February 1779, on a beach at Kealakekua Bay, James Cook fell among the Hawaiians he had come to know. He was a British Royal Navy officer, explorer, and cartographer, born in a Yorkshire village in 1728. He died far from it, struck down after a stolen boat and a kidnapped king turned a tense morning deadly. Cook had charted Newfoundland so precisely that the Royal Navy's own surveyors did not surpass him for a century. He had crossed the Antarctic Circle, witnessed surfing for the first time as a European, and eaten the liver of a poisonous pufferfish and lived. Between 1768 and 1779 he led three voyages across the Pacific and Southern Oceans, sailing tens of thousands of miles without losing a single ship. How did a Scottish farm labourer's son rise to command the King's fleet on the far side of the world? Why did the Hawaiians believe he was a god, and why did that belief end in spears and stones? And what did Cook himself come to think about the peoples he met, claimed, and sometimes killed?

• 2. From Shop Counter To Quarterdeck

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  In 1745, at the age of 16, James Cook walked 20 miles to the fishing village of Staithes to work as a shopboy for a grocer and haberdasher named William Sanderson. He proved unsuited to shop work. After 18 months Sanderson introduced him to two friends in the port town of Whitby, John and Henry Walker, prominent ship owners in the coal trade. The Walkers took Cook on as a merchant navy apprentice, and his first ship was a collier called the Freelove, carrying coal between the Tyne and London.

  During that apprenticeship Cook taught himself algebra, geometry, trigonometry, navigation, and astronomy, the skills needed to command a ship. After earning his mariner licence in 1752 he served as mate on the collier brig Friendship, visiting ports in Norway and the Netherlands and learning to navigate the shallows of Britain's east coast. At 26 he was offered the captaincy of the Friendship. He turned it down. On the 17th of June 1755 he joined the Royal Navy at Wapping, entering as an able seaman just as Britain expanded its fleet for the conflict that became the Seven Years' War.

  Cook rose quickly inside that war machine. Under Captain Hugh Palliser and others he served aboard the Eagle, took part in the capture of one French warship and the sinking of another in late 1755, and was unofficially promoted to boatswain after the previous one died. In June 1757 he passed his master's examinations at Trinity House, Deptford, qualifying him to navigate a ship of the King's fleet. That qualification placed him aboard the warships bound for North America, where a chance meeting would change the shape of his career.

• 3. The Mapmaker Of The St. Lawrence

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  The day after the Fortress of Louisbourg fell to the British in 1758, Cook met an army officer named Samuel Holland, who was surveying the area with a plane table. The two men connected instantly over their shared interest in surveying, and Holland taught Cook his methods. Together they drew preliminary charts of the entrance to the St. Lawrence River, with Cook writing the accompanying sailing directions. His first map to be engraved and printed showed Gaspé Bay, drawn in 1758 and published in 1759.

  The fusion of Holland's land-surveying with Cook's hydrographic skill let him produce nautical charts far more accurate than most of his time. In 1759, as James Wolfe advanced on Quebec, Cook and other masters took soundings, marked shoals, and updated charts around the city. Their work let Wolfe ferry troops across the river in a stealthy night attack, leading to victory at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

  As the war wound down, Cook was sent to chart the rugged coast of Newfoundland, where he spent five seasons. He surveyed the north-west in 1763 and 1764, the south coast between the Burin Peninsula and Cape Ray in 1765 and 1766, and the west coast in 1767, hiring local pilots to point out hidden dangers. The work was hazardous. In August 1764 a powder horn he was carrying exploded and badly injured his right hand, leaving a scar that would one day identify his remains.

  Newfoundland also revealed Cook the scientist. On the 5th of August 1766 he precisely recorded the local times of a solar eclipse and sent the results to the astronomer John Bevis, who used them to calculate the longitude difference between Newfoundland and Oxford. The findings reached the Royal Society in 1767. These hydrographic and astronomical achievements drew the eye of the Admiralty just as Britain turned its resources toward exploring the Pacific.

• 4. Hunting A Phantom Continent

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  On the 5th of May 1768, on the recommendation of Hugh Palliser, the 39-year-old Cook was chosen to lead a voyage to the south Pacific aboard HMS Endeavour, a converted merchant collier. The publicly stated goal was to observe the 1769 transit of Venus from Tahiti. Secret orders held the real objectives: to search for the hypothesised southern continent Terra Australis Incognita and to claim lands for Britain.

  The Endeavour reached Tahiti on the 13th of April 1769, where the transit was observed and where, in May, Cook's crew became the first Europeans to witness Tahitians surfing. From Tahiti the ship turned to the secret mission. It sailed to New Zealand, where Cook, aided by the Tahitian priest Tupaia, became the first European to communicate with the Māori. He then completed the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand's main islands, proving a strait separated the North and South Islands.

  Convinced no southern continent lay in those latitudes, Cook pushed west. On the 19th of April 1770 his crew sighted Point Hicks and became the first Europeans to encounter Australia's eastern coast. On the 11th of June the Endeavour ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef. Cook ordered six cannons and other weight thrown overboard, and after 27 hours the ship was hauled free, leaking badly. The crew careened her at the mouth of the Endeavour River for seven weeks of repairs. There Cook saw a kangaroo for the first time, and the naturalist Joseph Banks documented the species.

  The doubt about Terra Australis demanded a second expedition. From 1772 Cook led two ships on a vast circuit between latitudes 50 degrees south and 70 degrees south. On the 17th of January 1773 his crews became the first recorded Europeans to cross the Antarctic Circle. In January 1774 the Resolution reached her furthest south, 71 degrees 10 minutes south, before impenetrable pack ice blocked her. Cook never sighted Antarctica, but he had shown that no temperate southern landmass existed. The general consensus afterward was that Terra Australis did not exist.

• 5. The Edge Of The Ice And The North-West Passage

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  In late November 1772, sailing toward the Antarctic, Cook performed a small experiment that solved a large problem. His crew hauled blocks of ice aboard, melted them, and produced good fresh water, proving that drinking water could be drawn from sea ice. On his second and third voyages he also carried Larcum Kendall's K1 chronometer, a copy of John Harrison's H4, to test whether a timepiece could keep accurate time through a ship's violent motion and changing climates. It performed well, helping solve the longitude problem that had plagued mariners for centuries.

  The primary aim of the third voyage, begun in 1776, was to find a North-West Passage linking the north Pacific to the Atlantic. To keep that goal secret, the Admiralty announced the mission was merely to return the Polynesian Mai to Tahiti. Among the crew were the master William Bligh and the midshipman George Vancouver, names later famous in their own right.

  From Hawaii, Cook sailed to the west coast of North America. He named the Oregon Coast's Cape Foulweather after the weather that drove him south, sailed unwittingly past the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and anchored in Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island from the 29th of March to the 26th of April 1778. He then mapped the coast to the Bering Strait, identifying what became Cook Inlet in Alaska. By August 1778 he had crossed the Arctic Circle and pushed up the Alaskan coast until sea ice stopped him at 70 degrees 41 minutes north. He charted most of the north-west coastline for the first time and determined the extent of Alaska, closing the gap between earlier Russian and Spanish explorations. The passage itself remained beyond reach, blocked by the same pack ice that defeated his ships in the south.

• 6. A God At Kealakekua

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  On the 18th of January 1778, after a brief stop at Kiritimati, Cook's expedition became the first recorded Europeans to see the Hawaiian Islands. When he stepped ashore, the Hawaiians prostrated themselves before him. He named the archipelago the Sandwich Islands after the fourth Earl of Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and left pigs and seeds on Niʻihau to breed and grow, a practice he followed throughout his voyages.

  Returning in late November 1778, Cook made landfall at Kealakekua Bay on Hawaii Island, where 10,000 Hawaiians and 1,000 canoes met the ships. The Hawaiian king Kalaniʻōpuʻu treated Cook with respect, exchanged gifts and names with him, and presented him with a feathered cloak. Cook's arrival coincided with the Makahiki, a harvest festival of worship for the god Lono, and later scholars concluded that Hawaiians considered Cook to be Lono himself. Some believed the mast, sails, and rigging of the Resolution resembled sacred artefacts of the festival.

  The break came when the Resolution's foremast snapped in a gale, forcing the ships back to Kealakekua Bay for repairs. Relations had already soured. Quarrels and petty thefts multiplied, and on the 13th of February 1779 Hawaiians stole one of Cook's cutters. The next day Cook tried to recover it by kidnapping Kalaniʻōpuʻu and leading him toward the boats. The king's wife Kānekapōlei and two chiefs pleaded with him not to go, and a crowd gathered. Word arrived that a high-ranking chief had been shot across the bay, and the situation turned. Cook fired a warning shot, then killed a Hawaiian. In the fighting that followed, Cook and four marines were killed and left on the shore, along with 17 Hawaiians.

  What returned to the Resolution on the 19th of February, under a truce, was not a body but fragments: several bones, the skull, charred flesh, and the hands with skin still attached. The large scar on the right hand, from the 1764 powder horn injury, confirmed the remains were Cook's. The crew sealed them in a weighted box and buried their captain at sea. England did not learn of his death until a package carried overland from Siberia by Magnus von Behm reached London 11 months later, before the surviving crew.

• 7. Lords Of The Country

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  Before the first voyage the Royal Society advised Cook to avoid violence against indigenous people, to use lethal force only as a last resort, and afterward to explain that the British regarded them as the Lords of the Country. His Admiralty instructions told him to cultivate friendships, trade for provisions, and report on the genius, temper, disposition and number of the people he met. On first contact he often offered greetings, exchanged names and gifts, presented green boughs, or performed the hongi, the rubbing of noses, relying on his Polynesian guests Tupaia, Hitihiti, and Mai as interpreters and intermediaries.

  The reality was bloodier than the instructions. Across the three voyages at least 45 indigenous people were killed by Cook's crew, including two by Cook himself, and 15 of the crew were killed by indigenous people. The worst violence struck New Zealand on the first and second voyages and Hawaii on the third. In December 1773, while Cook was separated from him, Tobias Furneaux of the Adventure found ten of his crew killed and partially burned for cannibalism by a group of Māori. Learning of it much later, Cook refused to take revenge, writing that he had always found the Māori brave, noble, open and benevolent in disposition. Some of his crew and his own Polynesian advisers were dismayed.

  Cook's anger had a name among his men. They called his fits heivas, the Tahitian word for a public performance, and they called Cook himself Toote. He generally overlooked minor thefts but punished thefts of essential equipment with warning shots, floggings, the seizure of canoes, or by holding chiefs hostage. Taking high chiefs hostage gave the deepest offence, almost sparking violence in Tonga and Tahiti before it finally did in Hawaii.

  Cook's thinking shifted as he watched. He defended Aboriginal Australians against William Dampier's disparaging account, arguing they were happier than Europeans because they enjoyed social equality and wanted for nothing. In 1773 he questioned whether contact helped anyone at all, writing that the British debauch their morals and introduce wants and diseases that only disturb the happy tranquility the people had enjoyed. Words such as taboo and tattoo entered English from these encounters, and sailors worldwide took up the tattooing they learned in the Pacific.

• 8. The Contested Monument

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  Six years after Cook's death his widow, Elizabeth, petitioned for a coat of arms to preserve his memory on monuments and memorials. It was granted in September 1785 and remains the only known example of a posthumously granted coat of arms. Cook had married Elizabeth Batts at St Margaret's Church in Barking on the 21st of December 1762, and the couple had six children. All of them died before having children of their own, so Cook left no direct descendants.

  His reputation splintered almost at once. William Cowper and Goethe wrote tributes, and obituaries praised his humble birth and his care for crew and indigenous people. Yet his rival Alexander Dalrymple scoffed at the adulation, remarking that he could not admit of a Pope in Geography or Navigation. In Hawaii, European visitors in the following decades found Hawaiians cherishing fond memories of Cook, and in the 1830s American missionaries, alarmed to find he had been worshiped as a deity, set out to disparage him. The missionary Sheldon Dibble's early written history portrayed Cook as an idolator and a spreader of sexually transmitted diseases.

  The quarrel never settled. Around the 250th anniversary of his first voyage, memorials to Cook in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Hawaii were vandalised, with public calls for their removal. Critics such as the Native Hawaiian scholar Haunani-Kay Trask point to violent encounters, introduced diseases, and lands claimed without consent. Scholars including Robert Tombs, Nicholas Thomas, and Glyndwr Williams acknowledge those harms but argue Cook should not be blamed for colonial policies begun after his death.

  Reconciliation has its own ritual. Since 1959 the Guugu Yimithirr people near Cooktown have taken part in an annual reenactment of Cook's 1770 landing, marking the moment a local elder offered Cook a broken-tipped spear as a peace offering after a dispute over green turtles. The same hands that hold that spear each year reach back to a beach where Cook, two and a half centuries gone, is still being met for the first time.