Captain James Cook(1728–1779)

James Cook was born on 7 November 1728 at Marton in North Yorkshire, the son of a farm labourer, and rose by sheer ability from the humblest beginnings of any great commander of his age. Apprenticed to a Whitby shipowner in the rough trade of carrying coal down the North Sea coast, he learned seamanship in the most demanding school there was, then volunteered into the Royal Navy as an ordinary sailor and rose through the ranks. In the Seven Years War he charted the St Lawrence River so accurately that the fleet could carry the army up it to take Quebec, and his surveys of the coast of Newfoundland marked him out as the finest marine cartographer in the service.

In 1768 he was given command of his first great voyage of discovery, in the Endeavour, ostensibly to observe the transit of Venus from the Pacific but also to search for the unknown southern lands. Over three years he circumnavigated and charted the whole coastline of New Zealand, proving it to be islands, and then ran the length of the eastern coast of Australia, charting it for the first time and claiming it for the crown, surviving the near-loss of his ship on the Great Barrier Reef by superb seamanship.

On his second voyage, from 1772 to 1775, he took two ships deep into the southern ocean in search of the supposed great southern continent, and in the process became the first man known to have crossed the Antarctic Circle, pushing further south than any navigator before him through ice and fog, and establishing by his sweeping tracks that no habitable southern continent of the kind long imagined existed. He charted islands across the breadth of the Pacific, fixing their positions with a new accuracy made possible by the marine chronometer he carried and tested.

His greatest service to the men who sailed with him was less famous but saved more lives than any battle. By rigorous attention to diet, cleanliness and fresh provisions, Cook all but eliminated scurvy from his crews, the disease that had for centuries killed more seamen on long voyages than storm and enemy combined, bringing his men home healthy from voyages of years where other expeditions had lost half their number. For this the Royal Society gave him its highest honour.

He was killed on 14 February 1779 in a sudden affray on a beach at Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii, on his third great voyage, while searching the northern Pacific for a passage round the top of America. He had by then charted more of the surface of the earth than any man who ever lived. The Cook name carries his memory as the labourer's son from Marton who taught the world the true shape of the Pacific, opened New Zealand and eastern Australia to the map, and conquered the scurvy that had haunted the sea.