What Did Captain James Cook Actually Discover on His Three Voyages?

Captain James Cook did not "discover" lands that were empty: almost everywhere he sailed, people had lived for centuries. What he did was chart them for Europe with a new level of accuracy. On three voyages between 1768 and 1779 he mapped the coastline of both main islands of New Zealand, made the first recorded European landfall on the east coast of Australia, crossed the Antarctic Circle, showed that no great southern continent lay in the temperate Pacific, and became the first recorded European to reach the Hawaiian Islands. He was killed in Hawaii in February 1779, and today his legacy is admired as seamanship and criticised as the beginning of colonisation.

A farm labourer's son from Yorkshire

Cook was born in 1728 in Marton, Yorkshire, into the family of a farm labourer. Nothing about his start pointed to the sea at first. He was apprenticed to a shopkeeper, but he soon moved to the port of Whitby and became an apprentice in the merchant navy, working on the colliers that carried coal along England's east coast. Years of work on these coal ships gave him a practical training in seamanship long before he ever commanded a navy vessel.

In 1755 he joined the Royal Navy, the step that turned a merchant sailor into a naval officer and, eventually, an explorer.

Learning to map in Canada

During the Seven Years' War Cook served at the capture of Louisbourg and helped chart the approaches to the St Lawrence River, demanding work in a difficult river. After the war he spent several seasons surveying the coast of Newfoundland. His maps were precise, and his astronomical observations caught the attention of both the Admiralty and the Royal Society. In 1762 he married Elizabeth Batts in Barking, Essex, and the couple had six children.

The first voyage: Venus, Tahiti and secret orders

Cook's first great command was HMS Endeavour, sent to the Pacific to observe the 1769 transit of Venus across the Sun. The ship left Plymouth on 26 August 1768 with 94 people on board. Among them was the wealthy botanist Joseph Banks, who paid for a team of companions including the Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander.

Endeavour reached Tahiti in April 1769, and the transit was observed on 3 June. Then Cook opened sealed orders telling him to search the South Pacific for Terra Australis, the great southern continent that European geographers believed must exist. A Tahitian priest and navigator named Tupaia volunteered to join the ship, and he became its pilot and interpreter, a reminder that Pacific knowledge guided much of the "European" exploration.

New Zealand and Australia

Cook reached New Zealand in October 1769 and spent about six months charting its coast, completing a circuit of both main islands by the end of March 1770. Sailing west, he reached the east coast of Australia and landed on 29 April 1770 at an inlet he first called Sting-Ray Harbour, then Botanist Bay, and finally Botany Bay, after the many plants Banks and Solander collected there.

On 11 June 1770 Endeavour struck the Great Barrier Reef. The crew managed to free the ship and repaired it over several weeks at the mouth of a river near today's Cooktown. It was there that the English language picked up a new word. "Kangaroo" comes from gangurru, a word in the Guugu Yimidhirr language for a grey kangaroo.

The voyage home was deadly. In Batavia, in today's Indonesia, disease killed seven members of the expedition, and 23 more died on the passage to England. Tupaia was among those who did not survive: he died of dysentery in Batavia. Cook himself went ashore in Kent on 12 July 1771.

The second voyage: ice and a better clock

From 1772 to 1775 Cook commanded HMS Resolution on a mission to settle the question of the southern continent once and for all. In January 1773 his ships crossed the Antarctic Circle, and his long sweeps through the far south showed that there was no habitable continent where geographers had placed one.

The voyage also tested a new tool. Cook carried K1, a marine chronometer made by Larcum Kendall as a copy of John Harrison's famous H4. It kept time so well that navigators could work out their longitude at sea, one of the great practical problems of the age.

Fighting scurvy

Long voyages usually killed sailors through scurvy. Cook insisted on fresh food whenever possible, gave his crew wort, and enforced hygiene such as washing and airing bedding. He wrote a paper on preventing scurvy for the Royal Society and received its Copley Medal. Ironically, his paper gave credit to wort and malt, while citrus fruit was the real remedy.

The third voyage and death in Hawaii

Cook's last voyage, from 1776, aimed to find a North-West Passage between the Pacific and the Atlantic. On the way he became the first recorded European to see the Hawaiian Islands, in 1778, and he went on to chart much of the north-west coast of North America and Alaska.

He returned to Hawaii and anchored in Kealakekua Bay. On 13 February 1779 Hawaiians took one of his boats. The next day Cook tried to recover it by taking the ruler Kalaniʻōpuʻu hostage. A crowd gathered, fighting broke out, and Cook, four marines and seventeen Hawaiians were killed. Some crew believed the Hawaiians had treated Cook as the god Lono. That idea became the subject of a famous scholarly debate, and the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere argued that Hawaiians did not see Cook as a god in the European sense.

Hero or symbol of colonisation?

Cook's voyages produced geographic and scientific knowledge that shaped exploration for decades. But for many Indigenous people in the lands he visited, he stands for the violence, disease and loss of land that followed European contact. Some historians reply that he should not be blamed for colonial policies made after his death. Around the 250th anniversary of his first voyage, several of his statues were vandalised and some people called for them to be removed. Both views can be true at the same time: he was a brilliant navigator, and his arrival changed other people's worlds for the worse.

Learn with Cook: English phrases from the sea

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to chart a course	to plan a route or plan	She charted a course for her career.
to run aground	to get stuck, to fail	The project ran aground last month.
uncharted waters	a new, unknown situation	Moving abroad felt like uncharted waters.
to learn the ropes	to learn how to do a job	He learned the ropes on coal ships.
plain sailing	easy and without problems	The trip home was not plain sailing.

Try this: Describe your first week at a new school or job in three English sentences, using "learn the ropes" and "uncharted waters".