This year is the 290th anniversary of the birth of Captain James Cook and the 250th anniversary of his First Voyage of Exploration in the ship Endeavour. Acknowledged as one of the great heroes of British history, Cook’s contribution to society and the development of knowledge goes far beyond his role in stoking Britain’s Imperial ambitions and in part explains why copies of his journals are so sought after at auction.
Quite apart from being the first sea captain to circumnavigate the globe, making first proper European contact with what was later to be known as Hawaii in the process, he named Botany Bay in New South Wales for the unique botanical specimens collected by Joseph Banks, whose researches and collections on the voyage established the foundations for Kew Gardens and the advancement of plant science.
Cook himself was instrumental in creating the first accurate and detailed maps of the Pacific Ocean, tackling the thorny issue of longitude by employing the newly published Nautical Almanac of astronomer Charles Green. He used the lunar distance method, measuring the angular distance from the moon to the sun in the day or that of eight stars at night to determine the time at Greenwich, which then allowed him to compare that to local time determined by the position of the sun, moon or stars.
All in all, Cook was a bit of a renaissance man.
