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CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

Captain James Cook was an English sailor and explorer. He was born in 1728 and died in 1779, killed by the natives of Hawaii. The son of Yorkshire peasants, he was apprenticed to a shopkeeper, but acquiring a love of the sea became a sailor, joining the Royal Navy in 1755 and in 1759 becoming the sailing-master of the ship 'Mercury' which surveyed the St Lawrence River and the coast of Newfoundland.

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 Pacific, with the rank of lieutenant in the navy. During this expedition he successively visited Tahiti, New Zealand, discovered New South Wales, and returned by the Cape of Good Hope to Britain in 1771. 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 like the former in many interesting observations and discoveries. He returned to Britain in 1774.

Two years later he again set out on an expedition to ascertain the possibility of a north-west passage. On this voyage he explored the western coast of North America, and discovered the Sandwich Islands, on one of which, Hawaii, he was killed by the natives, on February the 14th, 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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