James Cook
James Cook
James Cook (1728–1779) was a British navigator and naval captain whose three Pacific voyages produced the most accurate maps of that ocean then known. The son of a farm laborer in Yorkshire, he learned seamanship on coal ships out of Whitby before joining the Royal Navy in 1755, where his careful surveys of the St. Lawrence River and Newfoundland earned him command of HMS Endeavour in 1768. On that first voyage he observed the transit of Venus at Tahiti, charted New Zealand and mapped the eastern coast of Australia. His second voyage crossed the Antarctic Circle and showed that no great habitable southern continent existed, while his attention to diet protected his crew from scurvy. On his third voyage he reached the Hawaiian Islands and charted the northwest coast of North America. He died in Hawaii in 1779 during a confrontation with islanders. His charts served navigators for generations.
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Seeking a Passage to the Pacific
For centuries explorers sought a waterway across or around North America to the Pacific. Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River, Henry Hudson explored the river and bay that bear his name, and James Cook searched the Arctic coast from the Pacific side. Sent by Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark crossed the continent overland, and Roald Amundsen became the first to sail the Northwest Passage.
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