Three Pacific voyages redrew coasts—and ended in Hawaii
Captain James Cook, born in November 1728 and killed in February 1779, led three Royal Navy Pacific and Southern Ocean expeditions between 1768 and 1779. His firsts include the earliest recorded circuit of New Zealand’s main islands and the first documented European visits to Australia’s east coast and Hawaii.
The second of eight children of a Scottish farm labourer, he was born at Marton in Yorkshire’s North Riding. At sixteen he was sent to Staithes to serve a grocer, but after eighteen months proved unsuited to the counter and moved to Whitby, where the shipowners John and Henry Walker took him on. He learned his trade hauling coal between the Tyne and London aboard the collier Freelove, qualified as a mariner in 1752 and served as mate on the Friendship. Offered her command at 26, he turned it down and enlisted as a navy seaman at Wapping on 17 June 1755.
As master of HMS Pembroke he took part in the capture of Louisbourg in 1758. The next day he met the army surveyor Samuel Holland, who taught him plane-table methods. In 1759 his soundings of the St. Lawrence helped James Wolfe ferry troops across the river by night before the victory at Quebec. He then spent five seasons charting Newfoundland in HMS Grenville, losing much use of his right hand when a powder horn exploded in 1764.
His careful timing of an eclipse of the sun on 5 August 1766 let the astronomer John Bevis work out Newfoundland’s longitude, and that blend of surveying and astronomy caught the eyes of the Admiralty and the Royal Society. On 5 May 1768, aged 39, he was chosen to command Endeavour, a converted collier with a roomy hold, a shallow draught and a hull sturdy enough to survive grounding. Aboard were 73 sailors, 12 marines, the astronomer Charles Green and the young naturalist Joseph Banks.
Sailing on 25 August 1768, he wrote his first ethnographic notes on the Haush of Tierra del Fuego and reached Tahiti on 13 April 1769 to observe the transit of Venus; his crew became the first Europeans to see surfing. Later voyages charted coasts from Easter Island to Alaska and South Georgia, until a quarrel with Native Hawaiians on his second visit in 1779 turned deadly.
Source: James Cook
