James Cook (October 27, 1728, Marton (Yorkshire, United Kingdom) - February 14, 1779, Hawaii) was a British navigator, explorer and cartographer. Rising to the rank of Captain of the British Royal Navy, he made three voyages to the Pacific Ocean during which he was the first European to land on the east coast of Australia, in New Caledonia (September 4, 1774) , the Sandwich Islands and Hawaii. He was also the first to circumnavigate and map Newfoundland and New Zealand.
After his service in the British Merchant Navy, he joined the Royal in 1755 during the Seven Years' War. During the siege of Quebec, he devoted himself to mapping the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, which enabled General James Wolfe to lead his decisive attack on the Plains of Abraham. The young James Cook thus attracted the attention of the Admiralty and the Royal Society at a crucial moment in his personal career and the direction of British expeditions overseas. He was then appointed Commander of the HMB Endeavor for the first of his three expeditions to the Pacific, in 1766.
Cook establishes the first precise charts of many islands and coasts. His colossal legacy can be attributed to his great seamanship, advanced skills in cartography, his courage to explore dangerous areas in order to verify the accuracy of the facts reported by others (he did not hesitate to cross the Antarctic Circle nor to approach the Great Barrier Reef), his ability to lead men in the harshest conditions as well as his ambitions, constantly seeking to exceed the instructions received from the Admiralty.
Cook died in Hawaii in 1779 during a battle with Hawaiians while commanding his third expedition.
Youth
James Cook comes from a relatively modest family, son of James Cook, a farm hand of Scottish origin and Grace, English. He was born in Marton in North Yorkshire, a town now part of Middlesbrough. He was baptized at the local church of St Curthberts Ormesby, where his name is on the baptismal register. The family, then numbering five children (the Cooks would have nine), then settled on the Airey Holme farm in Great Ayton. His father's employer funded his primary school education. At the age of 13, he began to work with his father in the management of the farm.
In 1745, then aged 16, Cook was apprenticed to a haberdasher in Staithes, a fishing village. According to legend, Cook first felt the call of the sea while looking out the window of the store. After a year and a half, William Sanderson, the owner of the business, decided that Cook was not made for trade and took him to the port of Whitby where he introduced him to John and Henry Walker, Quakers trading coal and owners of several ships. Cook was taken on as a merchant marine apprentice on their fleet. He spent the next few years coasting between the Tyne and London. At the same time, he studied algebra, trigonometry, navigation and astronomy.
After completing his three years of apprenticeship, Cook worked on merchant ships in the Baltic Sea. He rose rapidly in rank, and in 1755 was offered the command of the Friendship. However, he preferred to enlist in the Royal Navy. Britain was then preparing for the future Seven Years' War and Cook thought his career would advance faster in the navy. However, this meant starting again at the bottom of the hierarchy and it was as a simple sailor that he joined the HMS Eagle, under the command of Captain Hugh Palliser. He was quickly promoted to the rank of Master's Mate. In 1757, after two years with the Royal, he passed his master's examination allowing him to command a ship in the royal fleet.
During the Seven Years' War, James Cook took part in the siege of the city of Quebec before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. He then demonstrated a talent for topography and cartography, and mapped most of the mouth of the St. Lawrence during the siege, which allowed General Wolfe to launch his decisive attack on the Plains of Abraham. In the following years, he drew maps of the coast of Newfoundland, then the Northwest Passage (1763 - 1764), the coast between the Burin Peninsula and Cap Ray (1765 - 1764), then the west coast in 1767. During his five seasons in Newfoundland, he made the first accurate large-scale maps of the island's coasts.
At that time he wrote wanting to go
“...further than any man has gone before me, but as far as a man can go. »
Travel
First expedition (1768 - 1771)
In 1768, the Royal Society commissioned James Cook, aboard the HMB Endeavour, to explore the South Pacific Ocean with the main missions of observing the transit of Venus on June 3, 1769 and the search for a hypothetical southern continent. According to scholars, this continent would have been in the high latitudes south of this ocean, but Cook would not find out. He was also skeptical of its existence and, in his diary, compares his explorations with the testimonies reported by previous explorers.
The Endeavor was a three-masted boat of the same type that Cook had already ordered, a solid and ideal boat in terms of storage capacity as well as for its shallow draft, an essential quality for approaching the many reefs and Pacific archipelagos. After passing Cape Horn, he landed in Tahiti on April 13, 1769, where he built a small fort and an observatory in anticipation of the transit of Venus. The observation, led by Charles Green, assistant to the new Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne, was primarily intended to collect measurements to determine more accurately the distance between Venus and the Sun. Once this data is known, it would be possible to deduce the distance of the other planets, based on their orbit.
Unfortunately, the three measurements noted varied much more than the anticipated margin of error predicted. When these measurements were compared to those taken at the same time in other places, the result was not as precise as expected.
Once these observations were recorded, James Cook opened the seals which contained the instructions for the second part of his journey:to look for signs of Terra Australis, the hypothetical counterpart of Eurasia in the northern hemisphere. The Royal Society, and particularly Alexander Dalrymple, was convinced of its existence and intended to fly the Union Jack there before any other European flag. For this, we chose to use a boat which, by its small size, was unlikely to arouse suspicion, and an astronomical observation mission as cover.
However, Cook doubted the very existence of this continent. Thanks to the help of a Tahitian named Tupaia, who had in-depth knowledge of the geography of the Pacific, Cook reached New Zealand on October 6, 1769. The second European to land there after Abel Tasman in 1642, he mapped the entire New Zealand coasts with very few errors (especially on the Banks Peninsula, which he took for an island, and on Stewart Island, which he improperly attached to the South Island). He also identified the Cook Strait separating the South Island from the North Island, which Tasman had not discovered.
He then headed west towards Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) with the intention of determining if it was part of the southern continent. Strong winds, however, forced the expedition to maintain a northern route. The expedition sighted land at a place Cook named Point Hicks, between the present-day towns of Orbost and Mallacoota in the state of Victoria. Given the orientation of the coast to the southwest, Cook doubted that Van Diemen's Land was connected to it. They were actually on the southeast of the Australian mainland, officially becoming the first Europeans to spot its east coast. In 1843, the place received the name of Cape Everard, before returning to its original name of Point Hicks on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the landing.
According to the logbook, it was then April 19, 1770 at 6 a.m. In fact, Cook used the navy date notation, which ran from noon to noon. The day thus began 12 hours before the calendar day. Moreover, the difference in longitude between southeastern Australia and Great Britain implies a time difference of about 10 hours, so the accepted date today is April 20.
Cook continued his journey north along the coast, never losing sight of it to map it and name its remarkable points. After a little over a week, they entered a long but shallow fjord. After anchoring in front of a low point preceded by sand dunes which currently bears the name of Kurnell, the crew landed for the first time in Australia on April 29. Cook first baptized the fjord Stingaree Bay in allusion to the many rays seen (stingray in English). The place was later named Botanist Bay, and eventually Botany Bay because of the many new species discovered by botanists Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and Herman Spöring.
Great Britain would later choose this site to establish a first British colony there, among others on the advice of Joseph Banks. However, when Captain Arthur Phillip landed there at the head of the First Fleet in 1788, almost 18 years later, the bay and its surroundings did not turn out to be as ideal as its description had led one to hope. Phillip ordered the colony to be relocated to a natural harbor a few miles to the north, which Cook had named Port Jackson without exploring it very far. It was in this port, in a bay he named Sydney Cove, that the colony of Sydney was born.
Cook encountered aborigines on his first boarding. As the Endeavor entered the bay, the crew saw men on each coast. Around 2 p.m., they anchored near a group of six to eight houses. Two Aborigines approached the boat, ignoring the gifts Cook was offering them. A musket shot was fired above their heads, slightly wounding the older man who began to run towards the houses. He returned with other men and threw spears at the whites, without hitting any. Two more blows finished chasing them away. All the adults were gone, but Cook found several children in the houses, where he left a few beads as a sign of friendship.
The expedition set sail again heading north, still skirting the coast. On June 11, Endeavor struck a bank on the Great Barrier Reef and was seriously damaged. We spent nearly seven weeks repairing on the beach (currently in the town of Cooktown, at the mouth of the Endeavor River). During this time, Banks, Spöring and Solander took the opportunity to collect many samples of Australian flora. Contacts with the aborigines were peaceful. It was at this time that the word kangaroo first appeared in English vocabulary, transmitted by the Guugu Yimidhirr tribe. After this episode, Cook will advise against exploring new oceans with a single ship.
Once the repair was completed, the expedition resumed its journey, rounding the Cape York Peninsula before entering the Torres Strait separating Australia from New Guinea. Cook landed on Possession Island on August 22, where he claimed the entire coast he had just explored for the British Crown.
By this point in the voyage, not a single man had succumbed to scurvy, a remarkable feat for such a long expedition at the time. Indeed, convinced by a recommendation from the Royal published in 1747, Cook had introduced foods such as cabbage or lemon into the diet of his crew. It was known then that scurvy was caused by a poor diet, but the link with vitamin C deficiencies had not yet been established. For successfully preserving the health of his crew, Cook was awarded the Copley Medal in 1776.
Crossing the Torres Strait proved definitively that Australia and New Guinea were not connected. The Endeavor then docked at Savu where she spent three weeks before continuing to Batavia, capital of the Dutch East Indies, to carry out some repairs. Batavia was known to be a hotbed of malaria and before the expedition's return in 1771 several of the crew had succumbed to it and other illnesses such as dysentery, including the Tahitian Tupaia, the botanist Herman Spöring, astronomer Charles Green and illustrator Sydney Perkinson (Cook named Spörring Island, off New Zealand, after the botanist).
On the way back to Britain, Cook rounded the Cape of Good Hope and put in at Saint Helena. On June 10, 1771, Nicholas Young, who had first spotted the New Zealand coast, sighted Cape Lizard in England. The Endeavor entered the English Channel and, on June 12, anchored off Deal, in Kent. The publication of the journal of the expedition made Cook very popular within the scientific community. With the general public, it is rather Joseph Banks who collected the honors. The latter attempted to take command of the second expedition, but withdrew before departure. Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg were hired to replace him.
Second expedition (1772 - 1775)[edit]
Shortly after his return, Cook was promoted to the rank of commander before being commissioned by the Royal Society to once again travel to the southern seas in search of the southern continent. During his first voyage, Cook had demonstrated that New Zealand was not attached to any land and estimated the size of Australia. Dalrymple, supported by other members of the Society, were however still convinced of the existence of a larger continent, which must be further south.
Cook set sail aboard HMS Resolution, accompanied by Tobias Furneaux at the helm of HMS Adventure. It is equipped with a new K1 type chronometer, which will allow precise calculation of longitude. The expedition descended very far south, crossing the Antarctic Circle on January 17, 1773 and reaching the latitude of 71°10' south. Cook also discovered South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. The two boats lost sight of themselves in the Antarctic fog and Furneaux set sail for New Zealand, where he lost some of his men in a battle against the Maori before sailing back to Britain. Meanwhile, Cook continued his exploration of the Antarctic zone. He passed close to the continent without noticing it and went up to Tahiti to restock. He then dived back to the south in the hope of landing on the mythical continent, without success. He had again embarked a Tahitian, named Omai, who proved to be less familiar with the geography of the Pacific than Tupaia. The return route took him to Tonga, Easter Island, Norfolk Island, New Caledonia and Vanuatu. His report clearly concludes on the non-existence of the mythical Terra Australis.
At the end of this second voyage, Cook was promoted to the rank of captain and the Royal Society offered him an honorary retirement as an officer of the Greenwich Hospital. His notoriety had gone beyond the framework of the Admiralty:the Royal Society admitted him to its membership and awarded him the Copley Medal, Nathaniel Dance-Holland painted his portrait, the writer James Boswell invited him to his table and House of Lords called him the greatest navigator in Europe. However, he missed the sea and he prepared a third voyage in the direction of the Northwest Passage. From the Pacific, he sailed east, hoping to reach the Atlantic, while a second boat came to meet him from the opposite direction.
Third expedition (1776 - 1779)
For his final expedition, Cook was again in command of HMS Resolution while Captain Charles Clerke took command of HMS Discovery. Officially, the purpose of the trip was to bring Omai back to Tahiti, which aroused the greatest curiosity in London. The expedition first explored the Kerguelen Islands where it landed on Christmas Day 1776, then stopped in New Zealand. Once Omai returned to his family, Cook headed north and was the first European to land in the Hawaiian Islands in 1778.
Sailing then along the American continent, Cook described in his journal the Indian tribes of Vancouver Island, the coasts of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands and both sides of the Bering Strait.
Despite several attempts, the Bering Strait proved impassable because of the ice that obstructed it even in August. Growing frustrated at this failure, and possibly suffering from a stomach ailment, Cook began to exhibit irrational behavior, for example forcing his crew to eat walrus meat, which the men refused.
The expedition returned to Hawaii the following year. After eight weeks spent exploring the archipelago, Cook landed at Kealakekua Bay on what is now the Big Island, where he stayed for a month. Shortly after his departure, damage to the foremast forced him to turn back to repair it. During this second stopover, tensions arose between the natives and the British and several fights broke out. On February 14, Hawaiians stole a rowboat. Robberies being common during layovers, Cook used to hold a few hostages until the stolen goods were returned. This time, he planned to take the leader of Hawaii, Kalaniopu'u, hostage. However, an altercation broke out with the inhabitants who attacked with stones and spears. The British fired a few shots but had to fall back towards the beach. Cook was hit in the head and collapsed. The Hawaiians beat him to death and then removed his body.
Cook still enjoyed the esteem of the inhabitants of Hawaii and the chiefs kept his body (controversial hypotheses point to possible human consumption). However, the crew was able to recover some remains to bury them at sea with military honors.
Clerke took command of the expedition. He took advantage of the hospitality of a Russian port in Kamchatka to make one last unsuccessful attempt to cross the Bering Strait. Clerke died of tuberculosis (then called phthisis) in August 1779, and Lieutenant Gore took over from him for the return route by the Asian coasts, as planned by Cook. In December, the logbooks were confiscated during the stopover in Macau and Canton because of the American Revolutionary War. Gore, however, managed to hide a copy. The Resolution and the Discovery arrived in Britain on October 4, 1780. Cook's report was completed by Captain James King.
Among the advice and lessons of this trip, Cook and his second officers validated their ideas on diet to avoid scurvy, as well as the use of "bark of Peru", an equivalent of quinine.
Sailors trained by Cook
Several young officers who served under Cook also left their names in history.
* William Bligh took command of HMS Bounty in 1787, with the mission of bringing back breadfruit seedlings. This voyage was the scene of the most famous mutiny and Bligh was landed by his men on the open sea. He later became governor of New South Wales.
* George Vancouver commanded an expedition along the west coast of North America from 1791 to 1794.
* George Dixon, who took part in Cook's third expedition before commanding another.
Inheritance
Cook's twelve years of sailing in the Pacific brought enormous knowledge of the region to Europeans. He discovered several islands and accurately mapped large stretches of coastline. From his first trip, he was able to calculate his longitude precisely, which was not at all obvious at the time because it required knowing the time exactly. Cook had the help of astronomer Charles Green and used the new nautical almanac tables, based on the angle between the moon and the sun (daytime) or one of the eight brightest stars ( night) to determine the time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, which it compared to the local time determined by the altitude of the sun, moon or stars. During his second voyage, he embarked on a KT stopwatch designed by Larcum Kendal. It was a copy of the H4 watch made by John Harrison, the first instrument capable of faithfully telling the time at sea and which had been embarked on the Deptford in 1761.
Cook was accompanied by painters (Sydney Parkinson made 264 drawings before his death at the end of the first voyage, William Hodges represented many landscapes of Tahiti and Easter Island) and renowned scientists. Joseph Banks (who discovered Banksia) and Daniel Solander collected 3,000 species of plants.
Cook was the first European to establish close contact with several Pacific peoples. He concludes, with good reason, that there is a link between them, despite the thousands of miles of ocean that sometimes separate them.
Places named in honor of Cook
Several geographic sites bear Captain Cook's name in his honor, including:
* The Cook Islands, a state in Oceania associated with New Zealand.
* Mount Cook, the highest point (3754 m) in New Zealand.
* The Cook Strait between the two main islands of New Zealand.
* The Cook Glacier, the main glacier of the Kerguelen Islands.
* The "city" of Captain Cook on the island of Hawaii, near the bay where he died
* Cook's Bay in Moorea, French Polynesia