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James Cook

British naval officer
James Cook
British naval officer

October 27, 1728

Marton-in-Cleveland, England


February 14, 1779

Kealakekua, Hawaii

James Cook, (born Oct. 27, 1728, Marton-in-Cleveland, Yorkshire, Eng.—died Feb. 14, 1779, Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii) British naval captain, navigator, and explorer, who explored the seaways and coasts of Canada (1759, 1763–67) and conducted three expeditions to the Pacific Ocean (1768–71; 1772–75; 1776–79), ranging from the Antarctic ice fields to the Bering Strait and from the coasts of North America to Australia and New Zealand.

    Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

Early life.

James Cook was the son of a farmhand migrant from Scotland. While Cook was still a child, his father became the foreman on a farm in a neighbouring village. Young James early showed signs of an inquiring and able mind, and his father’s employer paid for his schooling in the village until he was 12 years old. His early teens were spent on the farm where his father worked, but a brief apprenticeship in a general store in a coastal village north of Whitby brought him in contact with ships and the sea. At the age of 18, in 1746, he was apprenticed to a well-known Quaker shipowner, John Walker of Whitby, and at 21 was rated able seaman in the Walker collier-barks—stout, seaworthy, slow 300- and 400-tonners mainly in the North Sea trade. When the ships were laid up for refitting (done by the apprentices and crews) at Whitby during the worst months of winter, Cook lived ashore and studied mathematics by night. The Whitby barks, constantly working North Sea waters off a dangerous and ill-marked lee shore, offered Cook splendid practical training: the young man who learned his seamanship there had little to fear from any other sea.

Promoted to mate in 1752, Cook was offered command of a bark three years later, after eight years at sea. Advancement of this nature opened up a career that would have satisfied most working seamen, but instead Cook volunteered as able seaman in the Royal Navy. The navy, he was sure, offered a more interesting career for the competent professional seaman, and greater opportunity than in the North Sea barks. Tall, of striking appearance, Cook almost immediately caught the attention of his superiors, and with excellent power of command, he was marked for rapid advancement.

After advancing to master’s mate, and boatswain, both noncommissioned ranks, he was made master of HMS “Pembroke” at the age of 29. During the Seven Years’ War between Great Britain and France (1756–63) he saw action in the Bay of Biscay, was given command of a captured ship, and took part in the siege of Louisburg in Nova Scotia and in the successful amphibious assault against Quebec. His charting and marking of the more difficult reaches of the St. Lawrence River contributed to the success of General Wolfe’s landing there. Based at Halifax during the winters, he mastered surveying with the plane table. Between 1763 and 1768, after the war had ended, he commanded the schooner “Grenville” while surveying the coasts of Newfoundland, sailing most of the year and working on his charts at his base in England during the winters. In 1766 he observed an eclipse of the Sun and sent the details to the Royal Society in London—an unusual activity for a noncommissioned officer, for Cook still rated only as master.

Voyages and discoveries

In 1768 the Royal Society, in conjunction with the Admiralty, was organizing the first scientific expedition to the Pacific, and the rather obscure 40-year-old James Cook was appointed commander of the expedition. Hurriedly commissioned as lieutenant, he was given a homely looking but extremely sturdy Whitby coal-hauling bark renamed HMS “Endeavour,” then four years old, of just 368 tons, and less than 98 feet long. Cook’s orders were to convey gentlemen of the Royal Society and their assistants to Tahiti to observe the transit of the planet Venus across the Sun. That done, on June 3, 1769, he was to find the southern continent, the so-called Terra Australis, which philosophers argued must exist to balance the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere. The leader of the scientists was the rich and able Joseph Banks, aged 26, who was assisted by Daniel Solander, a Swedish botanist, as well as astronomers (Cook rating as one) and artists. Cook carried an early nautical almanac and brass sextants, but no chronometer on the first voyage.

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Striking south and southwest from Tahiti, where his predecessors had sailed west and west-northwest with the favouring trade winds, Cook found and charted all of New Zealand, a difficult job that took six months. After that, instead of turning before the west winds for the homeward run around Cape Horn, he crossed the Tasman Sea westward and, on April 19, 1770, came on the southeast coast of Australia. Running north along its 2,000-mile eastern coast, surveying as he went, Cook successfully navigated Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef—since reckoned as one of the greatest navigational hazards in the world—taking the Coral Sea and the Torres Strait in his stride. Once the bark touched on a coral spur by night, but it withstood the impact and was refloated. After the “Endeavour” was grounded on the nearby Queensland coast and repaired, Cook sailed it back to England. He stopped briefly at Batavia (modern Jakarta) for supplies, and, although the crew had been remarkably healthy until then, 30 died of fever and dysentery contracted while on land. None of the crew, however, died of scurvy (a dietary disease caused by a lack of ascorbic acid and that habitually decimated the crews of ships on lengthy voyages in the 18th century). This was because, in addition to ensuring cleanliness and ventilation in the crew’s quarters, Cook insisted on an appropriate diet that included cress, sauerkraut, and a kind of orange extract. The health in which he maintained his sailors in consequence made his name a naval byword.

Back in England, he was promoted to commander and presented to King George III, and soon he began to organize another and even more ambitious voyage. The success of the expedition of Joseph Banks and his scientists (which established the useful principle of sending scientists on naval voyages—e.g., Charles Darwin in the “Beagle,” T.H. Huxley in the “Rattlesnake,” and J.D. Hooker with Sir James Ross to the Ross Sea in the Antarctic) stimulated interest not only in the discovery of new lands but in the new knowledge in many other scientific subjects. The wealth of scientifically collected material from the “Endeavour” voyage was unique. Cook was now sent out with two ships to make the first circumnavigation of and penetration into the Antarctic.

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Between July 1772 and July 1775 Cook made what ranks as one of the greatest sailing ship voyages, again with a small former Whitby ship, the “Resolution,” and a consort ship, the “Adventure.” He found no trace of Terra Australis, though he sailed beyond latitude 70° S in the Antarctic, but he successfully completed the first west–east circumnavigation in high latitudes, charted Tonga and Easter Island during the winters, and discovered New Caledonia in the Pacific and the South Sandwich Islands and South Georgia Island in the Atlantic. He showed that a real Terra Australis existed only in the landmasses of Australia, New Zealand, and whatever land might remain frozen beyond the ice rim of Antarctica. And, once again, not one of his crew died of scurvy. Back in England, he was promoted to captain at last, elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and awarded one of its highest honours, the gold Copley Medal, for a paper that he prepared on his work against scurvy.

There was yet one secret of the Pacific to be discovered: whether there existed a northwest passage around Canada and Alaska or a northeast one around Siberia, between the Atlantic and Pacific. Although the passages had long been sought in vain from Europe, it was thought that the search from the North Pacific might be successful. The man to undertake the search obviously was Cook, and in July 1776 he went off again on the Resolution, with another Whitby ship, the Discovery. This search was unsuccessful, for neither a northwest nor a northeast passage usable by sailing ships existed, and the voyage led to Cook’s death. In a brief fracas with Hawaiians over the stealing of a cutter, Cook was slain on the beach at Kealakekua by the Polynesian natives.

Cook’s voyaging left him comparatively little time for family life. Although Cook had married Elizabeth Batts in 1762, when he was 34 years old, he was at sea for more than half of their married life. The couple had six children, three of whom died in infancy. The three surviving sons, two of whom entered the navy, had all died by 1794.

Cook had set new standards of thoroughness in discovery and seamanship, in navigation, cartography, and the sea care of men, in relations with natives both friendly and hostile, and in the application of science at sea; and he had peacefully changed the map of the world more than any other single man in history.

James Cook
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