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James Cook was born in Yorkshire, 1728,
of parents not above the rank of peasantry. He was at first apprenticed to a shopkeeper; but acquiring a love for
the sea, he became a sailor. In 1755 he entered the royal navy, and four years later as sailing-master of the Mercury performed valuable services surveying the St. Lawrence River and the coast of Newfoundland. In 1768 some observations on a solar eclipse, communicated to the Royal Society, brought him into notice, and he was appointed commander of a scientific expedition to the South Seas, with the rank of lieutenant in the navy. |
During this voyage, which lasted two years he explored, the Society Islands, circumnavigated New Zealand and charted the coasts, and surveyed the whole east coast of Australia, and returned by the Cape of Good Hope to Britain in 1771.
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Soon after his return to England, in 1772 Captain Cook, now
raised to the rank of a commander in the navy, commanded a second expedition to the Pacific and Southern Oceans,
which resulted in the exploration of the southern hemisphere determined the position of Easter Island, discovered
New Caledonia, Norfolk Island and the Isle of Pines, and disproved the hypothesis of an Antarctic continent, as
then understood. On his return in 1775, he was promoted port captain, elected a fellow of the Royal Society and awarded the society's gold medal. Captain Cook's last voyage was undertaken two years later, he again set out on an expedition to ascertain the possibility of a north-west passage. On his way he discovered the Hawaiian Islands and surveyed the west coast of North America up to the Bering Straight and beyond, he discovered the Sandwich Islands, on one of which, Hawaii, he was killed by the natives, February 14, 1779. Captain Cook wrote and published a complete account of his second voyage of discovery, and an unfinished one of the third voyage, afterwards completed and published by Captain James King. |
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A replica of the Endeavour |
Captain Cooks Ship The Resolution ( 467 tons )
