James Cook

James Cook was born in 1728 in the village of Marton in North Yorkshire, the second child of a Scottish farm labourer and Grace Pace. His father later worked on a farm in Great Ayton, where Cook went to school; the landowner his father worked for helped pay for his education. The family did not belong to the propertied classes.

At seventeen he became an apprentice to a shopkeeper in Staithes and in 1746 to the coal trader and shipowner John Walker in Whitby. On coal ships he learned to navigate in the North Sea and around the British coast. In 1755 he turned down an offer to captain a merchant ship and joined the Royal Navy, where he began as a seaman.

During the Seven Years' War Cook took part in the capture of Louisbourg (1758) and developed an interest in surveying. In 1759 he helped sound and chart the St Lawrence River, which facilitated the British attack on Quebec. He then charted the coast of Newfoundland in 1763–1767 and recorded the solar eclipse of 1766 precisely, which drew the attention of the Royal Society.

In 1768 he set out in the Endeavour on his first voyage, commissioned by the Admiralty and with the support of the Royal Society. The stated aim was to observe the 1769 transit of Venus from Tahiti; sealed instructions told him afterwards to search for a southern continent. He charted New Zealand and in April 1770 reached the east coast of Australia, which in August 1770 he claimed for King George III.

His second voyage (1772–1775), with the Resolution and the Adventure, took him across the Antarctic Circle, the first documented crossing, and found no habitable southern continent. His third voyage (1776–1779) sought a Northwest Passage from the Pacific side; on it he visited Hawaii in 1778 as the first known European and charted parts of the North American northwest coast.

Cook lived in the age of the Enlightenment, when European states and learned societies supported scientific expeditions while also pursuing strategic and commercial interests. The 1769 transit of Venus was an international project to determine the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The search for a southern continent and a Northwest Passage also had political and economic motives.

At sea, crews were threatened by scurvy, a disease caused by a lack of vitamin C that was not yet understood in the eighteenth century. At the same time instruments improved: on his second voyage Cook used a copy of Harrison's marine chronometer to determine longitude, and his charts rested on careful measurements and soundings.

The peoples Cook met had their own political and religious traditions. Polynesian navigators had sailed the ocean for centuries; the priest and navigator Tupaia drew a chart of the islands for Cook. The Admiralty's instructions spoke of taking possession of convenient places 'with the consent of the natives'; the 1770 claim on the Australian east coast was made without consultation or treaty.

Cook's charts and journals made large parts of the Pacific, New Zealand, the Australian east coast and northwest America known in Europe. His measures for the crew's health, such as fresh food where possible, sauerkraut, malt, hygiene and ventilation, largely kept scurvy off the Resolution. Which measures actually helped has been assessed differently since; the Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal in 1776.

The voyages opened the way for British settlement. In 1788 the First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay and Port Jackson, where a penal colony was founded on the land of Aboriginal peoples, who were later severely affected by disease, violence and loss of land. In New Zealand and Hawaii, too, increasing European contact brought far-reaching changes, partly through new diseases.

Cook was killed on 14 February 1779 at Kealakekua Bay, after he had tried to take the leader Kalaniʻōpuʻu hostage in order to recover a stolen cutter. Four British marines and a number of Hawaiians also died in the fight. The Hawaiians called Cook 'Lono' and treated him with reverence; whether they regarded him as a god is assessed differently by researchers.

Cook's legacy is judged differently in Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii. Some emphasise his cartographic and scientific achievements; others point to the later colonisation and its consequences for Indigenous peoples, and statues and commemorations are debated. In 1992 the High Court of Australia, in the Mabo case, rejected the view that the land had been terra nullius at colonisation.