Cook
The cook.
- Origin
- North East, England
- Famous bearer
- Captain James Cook (1728–1779), navigator
- Register
- English family
CoreHistoric reach
The seat of Cook
Seat vacantChief
No one leads the Cook community yet. When the movement opens, you can stand for its leadership, or help elect whoever does.
Current mission
No shared goal set yet. Once Cook has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.
The Cook clan is being rebuilt. Join the waiting list for the movement today, and you help decide who leads it and what it does.
Help rebuild the Cook clan →What does the Cook name mean?
Occupational, the kitchen cook. Old English cōc.
The history of Cook
Captain James Cook carried a Yorkshire line of this commonest kitchen surname to the Pacific.
Champions of the Cook name
The bearers whose lives are inseparable from this surname. Each has their own page, biography, achievements, geography, connection to the family.
Historic Places, Rebuilt
Explore the streets and seats the Cook name knew, rebuilt with AI as they stood in history.
Historic Places, Rebuilt · New
Cook's Whitby bark off the new-charted coast of Australia, the great cabin laboratory and the boats pulling for an unknown shore.
Historic Places, Rebuilt · New
St Paul's, Covent Garden and the gaslit West End, Regency London, soot-hazed and horse-drawn.
The castles of the homeland
The great strongholds of the homeland, look one up, see what it looked like in its prime, and recreate it to explore.
Windsor CastleRestored · prime 1820
Tower of LondonRestored · prime 1285
Bamburgh CastleRestored · prime 1904All castles in England → · Strongest castles in England → · Castles of Europe
Play As Your Clan
Pick any year from 500 to 1945 and any place on earth, the Cook country, or a shore no Cook ever reached. The chronicler sets the scene; the deeds are yours.
Notable bearers of the Cook name
- Captain James Cook (1728–1779), navigator
Stories of Cook
Kealakekua Bay
1779On the morning of the fourteenth of February 1779, Captain James Cook RN, on his third Pacific voyage with HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery, came ashore at Kealakekua Bay on the western coast of the island of Hawaii to retrieve a cutter stolen during the night by a chief of the bay. He had a marine guard of nine men and the intention of taking the local king, Kalaniʻōpuʻu, hostage in his cabin until the cutter was returned, a method that had worked for him in eight previous theft incidents in the Pacific. By misunderstanding, by the failure of the strategy, by the chief's reluctance and his retainers' alarm, by news that arrived on the beach at the wrong moment of a Hawaiian killed by a British boat in the next bay over, the situation collapsed. Cook was struck on the head from behind in the surf, fell on his face, and was killed by clubs and daggers in shallow water. Four marines died with him. He was forty years old. His remains were treated with the highest Hawaiian honours, the bones distributed among ranking chiefs as a man of mana, and many of them eventually returned to the Resolution in a parcel for sea-burial. The third voyage continued under Charles Clerke and made it home to Deptford on the fourth of October 1780, sixteen months after his death.
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Botany Bay, first contact
1770On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of April 1770, HMS Endeavour under Lieutenant James Cook RN brought up off the south-east coast of New Holland in a wide bay he would within the week call Sting-Ray Harbour and within the month re-name Botany Bay for the unprecedented haul of new plant specimens his botanist Joseph Banks took up its tidal flats. As he came ashore on the south side of the bay in the pinnace with Banks, Solander and a marine guard, two Gweagal warriors of the Dharawal nation stood up on the beach and showed they would not let the boat land. Cook called to them. They did not understand. He fired a musket-ball over their heads. They threw a spear at the boat. He fired small-shot at the leg of the elder warrior, who threw a second spear. The two retreated to the trees. The British landed in deserted shallows. Cook spent eight days in the bay. He went round the bay to the encampments and left presents in them. The encampments stayed empty as long as he was on the coast. The first British landfall on the eastern coast of Australia began with two spear-casts and two musket-shots and an empty beach.
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