Cook, Captain James (1728–1779)

Captain James Cook was a navigator, explorer, and cartographer whose fame is essentially due to his travels to the Pacific Ocean. His origins were humble, and he achieved his success thanks to his passion and insatiable thirst for adventure. The explorations led by him contributed enormously to the development of geographical knowledge and gave birth, in the following century, to interest in the new anthropological area of study.

After spending his childhood working in a grocery and yearning for the sea, in 1756, when the Seven Years’ War began, Cook enlisted in the Royal Navy. His map of the Saint Lawrence River played a role in the British victory in Quebec. Due to his abilities, Cook was charged with the topographic survey of the coastline and bottoms of New Scotland and Newfoundland. In 1768, Cook was sent by the Royal Society to Tahiti with the aim of having him record a rare passage of Venus across the face of the sun, but due to the lack of precise instruments, his observation could not be made in a satisfactory manner.

He then focused his attention on the exploration of the Southern Pacific Ocean to solve doubts about the supposed existence of the Terra Australis Incognita, a hypothetical continent that was imagined to be located at the southernmost part of the Earth to counterbalance the lands of the Northern Hemisphere. He reached New Zealand, mapped its coastline, and indicated the strait that separates its northern and southern islands, which have been named after him. In April 1770, Cook reached the eastern coast of Australia, where Sydney was founded.

In 1771, Cook started a new voyage. Two years later, he was the first to cross the polar Antarctic Circle. He then headed toward new islands in the Southern Pacific Ocean and reached what are now known as the Cook Islands. Despite the difficult climatic conditions, he did not hesitate to challenge the dangerous polar ice and succeeded in getting as far south as 71°11’ S and circumnavigated Antarctica without sighting it. The aim of Cook's last voyage was to get information about the existence of the Northwest Passage, a sea route through the Arctic Ocean that for centuries was supposed to be icefree, and thus to connect the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. During this expedition, he mapped the coastline of Alaska and was the first European to visit the Hawaiian islands.