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Cook (1776-1780)Ellis, William (d.1785). An Authentic Narrative of a Voyage Performed by Captain Cook [...]. During the Years 1776, 1777, 1778 1779 and 1780 in Search of a North-West Passage [...]. London: G. Robinson, 1782.
In 1775, the first lord of the British Admiralty called James Cook publicly the foremost navigator of Europe, but Cook's beginnings had been very modest. Cook was born in England in 1728, the son of a Scottish farm labourer. He first worked for about ten years in a store in a small fishing port and then for another ten years for a shipowner in Whitby, before joining the Royal Navy as a certificated topman in 1755. Cook spent most of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) in North American waters, where he began to demonstrate his map-making skill. In 1758 he drew a first map, that of the bay and port of Gaspé, which was deemed good enough to be published in London the following year. After that he took a very active part in drawing up the "New Chart of the River St. Lawrence", printed in 1760, which was used immediately by the navigators frequenting that difficult waterway. In 1763 the Admiralty commissioned him to draw a map of the Newfoundland coasts; it took him five years, but his surveys served as guides to sailors for close to a century. From 1768 to 1771, and again from 1772 to 1775, Cook circumnavigated the globe. These two voyages completely overturned the idea Europeans had of the South Pacific and destroyed the belief in the existence of a vast and fertile southern continent. In 1776 Cook undertook a third voyage of exploration with the aim, among other things, of searching for a Northwest Passage from the Pacific end. He reached Vancouver Island in March 1778, stayed in Nootka Bay for a month, and then sailed due north to the Bering Strait, trying in vain to follow the western coastline of the American continent: a wall of ice blocked the way east. Cook decided to spend the winter on the Hawaiian Islands, but was killed there by the Natives on February 14, 1779. Cook's last voyage of exploration finally provided a knowledge of the general outline and position of the northwest coast of North America, leaving it to George Vancouver and the Spanish explorers to fill in some of the missing details.
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