James Cook (17 November 1728-14 February 1779) was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and Royal Navy captain who was the first European to discover Australia (1770) and Hawaii (1778) and to circumnavigate New Zealand (1770).
Biography[]
James Cook was born in Marton, Yorkshire, England in 1728, and he became a merchant navy apprentice for a family of Quakers in Whitby in 1745. He worked on trading ships in England and the Baltics before joining the Royal Navy in 1755, serving in the Seven Years' War and taking part in the 1758 Siege of Louisbourg before mapping Newfoundland from 1763 to 1767. In 1768, he was sent to the Pacific Ocean for a scientific voyage, leaving England on the HMS Endeavour on 26 August 1768 and arriving at Tahiti on 13 April 1769. He mapped the complete coastline of New Zealand in 1770 before reaching the southeastern coast of Australia on 19 April 1770, becoming the first European to encounter its eastern coastline. He and his crew made their landfall at a place he called "Botany Bay" for the unique specimens he and his crew encountered there, and many of his crew would go on to succumb to malaria in Batavia (Jakarta) during the return journey to England. He reached Saint Helena on 30 April 1771 and England on 12 July, with Cook publishing his journals and becoming a hero among the scientific community.
A statue of Captain Cook in London
In August 1771, Cook was promoted to commander, and, in 1772, he was commissioned to lead another expedition to the Pacific to search for a massive southern continent. On 17 January 1773, his expedition crossed the Antarctic Circle, almost encountering the mainland of Antarctica before turning back towards Tahiti to resupply his ship. He returned to New Zealand in 1774 before landing at Tonga (which he called the "Friendly Islands"), Easter Island, Norfolk Island, New Caledonia, and Vanuatu. He then swept across the South Atlantic and claimed South Georgia for Great Britain before returning to England and being promoted to post-captain. He was then reluctantly assigned to Greenwich Hospital, although he volunteered to lead a third expedition to the Northwest Passage in 1776. In 1778, while traveling north from Tahiti, he landed in Hawaii, making landfall at Waimea harbour on Kauai in January 1778. He named the islands the "Sandwich Islands" after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, the acting First Lord of the Admiralty, and he then sailed north and explored the coasts of California, Oregon, Vancouver Island, the Bering Strait of Alaska, and to the Siberian coast, before his expedition turned back towards Hawaii in September 1778.
Cook returned to Hawaii in 1779, and he and his crew arrived during the Makahiki harvest festival, leading to his deification as an incarnation of the Polynesian god Lono. After a month, the British attempted to leave, but the mast of the HMS Resolution broke, forcing the expedition to return to Kealakekua Bay for repairs. The British sailors' theft of wood from a Hawaiian burial ground led to a quarrel with the Hawaiians, who took one of Cook's small boats. Cook responded by taking King Kalaniʻopuʻu hostage with the intent of holding him for ransom. A crowd of villagers attacked Cook before he could leave with their king, striking him in the head with a club as he turned to launch his boats and stabbing him to death as he fall on his face in the surf. Four Royal Marines were also killed in the fight with the natives. However, the natives buried him with royal honors, and some of his preserved bones were returned to his crew for burial at sea.