The paperback edition of this book was first published in 1995 and sold for £6.99. I picked up my copy in 2024 for £1. It follows the conventional format for a biography, beginning with the circumstances of the subject’s birth and running all the way to the aftermath of his death. That Cook has a tragic death relatively young is probably to Hough’s advantage as it prevents the book becoming overlong.

Cook is among Britain’s most celebrated sailors and explorers. This biography covers the whole of his maritime career, particularly his three Pacific voyages. Cook makes multiple visits to New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii and the Society Islands. He gets close to both the North and South Poles. A lot of the book is dedicated to Cook’s interactions with the Maoris and the many Polynesian tribes. There is a recurrent schizophrenia in the stories of these encounters – one minute the islanders will be treating Cook and his crew like gods, the next they will be plundering his vessels for anything not nailed down (and often even stealing the nails themselves). This reaches its apotheosis at Kealakekua Bay in 1779: On his first visit in January Cook is hailed as Orono, God of the Season of Abundance, and is showered with lavish praise, but when he returns in February the mood is of cold hostility and it is not long before a war breaks out which leads to his own gruesome death. Cook’s own personality charts a more linear decline from a civil, optimistic attitude on his original voyage to a cruel, irrational and vindictive one by the end. Partly this is the result of the great many infuriating setbacks suffered on that trip but there is also an analysis by a twentieth-century surgeon reckoning that Cook picked up an intestinal infection which impaired his brain function.

This book highlights how much of the world prior to Cook was still uncharted: As well as looking for new navigational passages (such as around the Arctic), Cook is also sent on a mission to prove or disprove the existence of Terra Australis Incognita, a much-fabled supercontinent in the Southern hemisphere that would have linked Australia together with Antarctica. There are also references to other scientific advances at the time, such as Cook’s own dietary and sanitary innovations to combat scurvy or the excursion to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus.

The accounts of events aboard His Majesty’s Ships Adventure, Discovery and Resolution are pieced together from those diaries and letters that survived to be archived. These include Cook’s own logs, but also those of his contemporaries Joseph Banks, William Bligh, Charles Clerke, John Gore and a host of others. As is usual with these kinds of works, we get first-hand accounts of the action and occasionally the dialogue, but the thoughts and feelings of these men can only be speculation, save the rare occasions when they speak them outright. At this period real-time communication was impossible over long distances and letters could travel no faster than the mariners themselves, so the Admiralty back in Britain would not have any meaningful understanding of what happened on these voyages until the ships completed their return journey (if they ever did at all) and gave accounts retrospectively. This also meant that sailors would be cut off from events at home for months or even years at a time. In the final chapter Hough says that James & Elizabeth Cook, having married in 1762, only spent an aggregate of four years together before his death in 1779. Most of his children rarely if ever got to see their father either. After Cook’s death, Clerke became Captain and he penned the letter back to London explaining as much. It did not arrive until 1780, by which point Clerke himself had died too and it was Gore who held command by the time the survivors got home.

I bought this book principally for my father and we read it together in short bursts over the course of a year. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in sailing, but the story is probably easier to follow and remember when taken at a faster pace.