You look at a map of the Pacific Ocean today
and it feels so complete, doesn't it? The islands
are exactly where they should be. The coastlines
are, you know, defined to the meter. It's really
hard to imagine a time when that massive blue
expanse was, for Europeans at least, just a terrifying
blank space. Oh, absolutely. It was the dark
side of the moon for the 18th century. It was
this void on the charts where, you know... sea
monsters and these hypothetical continents lived.
And the sources we're diving into today, they
really focus on the man who filled in that blank
space, Captain James Cook. Right. But looking
at these logs, these journals and all the modern
analysis, our mission here isn't just to, you
know. list off a bunch of dates we really need
to strip away that powdered wig mythology yes
exactly the school textbook version where he's
just this noble explorer pointing stoically at
the horizon the reality that you find in the
source material is so much grittier i mean we
are talking about a farm laborer's son who basically
hacked the british class system taught himself
the math of the stars and then sailed a coal
ship off the edge of the known world And it's
a tragedy, too. I mean, that's the angle that
really stands out to me. You have this unbelievable
scientific brilliance just colliding head on
with the violent disruption of indigenous cultures.
Yeah. It's an adventure story for sure, but it
ends in chaos on a beach in Hawaii. It's the
ultimate collision of the Enlightenment and,
well, imperialism. We've got three massive voyages
to cover, near -death experiences on coral reefs,
secret orders from the Admiralty, the whole medical...
battle against scurvy. So let's get into the
man behind the maps, because when you look at
his start, he shouldn't have been an officer
in the Royal Navy. I mean, statistically, it
was impossible. Completely impossible. He was
born in 1728 in Yorkshire. His father was a Scottish
farm laborer. And in the rigid hierarchy of 18th
century England, James Cook was destined to plow
fields, not chart oceans. Right. If you were
born in that strata, you stayed there. End of
story. The notes mention he tried to break out
by working at a grocer shop in a little fishing
village called Stades. And apparently he absolutely
hated it. He lasted 18 months. You can just imagine,
right? Standing behind a counter, smelling the
salt air, watching the ships come and go. He
just walked out. He moves to Whitby and joins
the Merchant Navy. And that specific choice,
joining the merchant fleet in Whitby, that turns
out to be probably the single most important
factor in his survival later on. It is because
of the specific type of ships they used. The
cats. The cats. Exactly. The Whitby cats. And
these aren't the sleek, fast frigates of the
Royal Navy. These are coal haulers. They're flat
-bottomed, really wide, and incredibly strong.
Designed to carry massive tons of coal from the
Tyne down to London. So they're basically the
18th century equivalent of a dump truck. A dump
truck that could float, yes. But the key design
feature was that flat bottom. You could run them
aground on purpose or by accident, and they wouldn't
just tip over. They were built to take a beating
in the shallow North Sea. Which is a skill you
might need later. If Cook had learned to sail
on some delicate naval sloop, he probably would
have died on the Great Barrier Reef 20 years
later. No question. And while he's hauling all
this coal, he's doing something else that really
separates him from the average sailor. He is
just grinding. It's almost like a goodwill hunting
situation. By day, he's working this brutal physical
job on the coal ships, you know, hauling soot
and rigging sails. But at night... by candlelight
in this swaying cabin. He's teaching himself
algebra, geometry, trigonometry, astronomy. Wow.
That is a heavy academic load for a self -taught
sailor. It was the language of navigation. He
understood, I think, really early on that if
he wanted to be more than a deckhand, he had
to master the math. And he got so good at it
that at age 26... The owners of the coal fleet
offer him his own command. Okay, so that's the
golden ticket. Captain of a merchant ship. Good
money, stability, a career for life. And he turns
it down. In 1755, he walks away from the captaincy
to join the Royal Navy at the very bottom. An
able seaman. Why? I mean, that just seems like
a terrible career move. You're treating a captain's
salary for a hammock on a crowded lower deck?
Well, the Seven Years' War was brewing. Cook
was ambitious, and he likely calculated that
the merchant navy had a ceiling. You could make
money, sure, but you couldn't make history. The
Royal Navy, if you could survive the war, offered
glory. But it was a massive gamble. He had to
climb the ladder all over again from scratch.
But he climbed it fast. Within a couple of years,
he's a master's mate. But the real turning point
in the sources, it isn't a sea battle, is it?
It's what happens in North America during the
siege of Louisbourg in Quebec. This is where
Cook evolves from just a sailor into a scientist.
He meets an Army engineer named Samuel Holland.
And Holland is using this device called a plane
table to survey land. Okay, pause on that for
a second. What is a plane table? It's a surveying
instrument. It's for triangulation. So imagine
a drawing board mounted on a tripod. You set
it up. You say different landmarks through your
ruler. And you can draw an incredibly accurate
map of the terrain right there in the field.
So it's Army tech. Right. Sailors didn't use
it because, you know, you can't use a plane table
on a moving ship. But Cook takes a concept. He
adapts the principles. He starts mapping the
St. Lawrence River with this military -grade
precision. And this matters because the French
had removed all the navigation buoys. The British
fleet needed to get up that river to attack Quebec,
but the waters were treacherous. So Cook is out
there in the dark in a little boat, sounding
the depths, drawing the charts. And he does it
so well that the entire British fleet navigates
the river at night, surprises the French, and
takes Quebec. He didn't fire the winning shot,
but he drew the map, that made the victory possible.
And that success gets him a new gig, mapping
Newfoundland. Five years of it. Five years mapping
the jagged coast of Newfoundland. And this is
where he cements his reputation. He observes
a solar eclipse in 1766 from Newfoundland to
calculate the longitude of the island. He sends
the data to the Royal Society. And all of a sudden,
the elites in London are looking at this report
and asking, wait, who is this guy? Exactly. The
charts were so accurate that the Navy was still
using versions of them 100 years later. They
realized Cook wasn't just some rough -and -tumble
sailor. He was a mathematician. And that put
him in the prime position for the big one, the
first voyage. 1768 to 1771, the voyage of the
endeavor. And the setup here is a classic mix
of science and geopolitics. The public cover
story was astronomy. The Royal Society wanted
to send a ship to Tahiti to observe the transit
of Venus. Which is when the planet Venus passes
directly between the Earth and the Sun. Right.
It was the big science project of the 18th century.
By timing the transit from different points on
the globe, they hoped to calculate the astronomical
unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
It was crucial for navigation and astronomy.
It was basically the Apollo program of the 1700s.
But the Admiralty isn't going to fund a global
expedition just for stargazing. Never. Cook was
given a sealed packet of secret instructions.
He was ordered not to open them until the astronomical
work was done. And the real mission. Find Terra
Australis Incognita, the unknown southern continent.
We should probably explain why they even thought
this place existed. It wasn't just a random guess.
It was a theory based on balance, right? It was
a philosophical belief going back to the ancients.
They looked at the map and saw all this massive
land in the Northern Hemisphere, Europe, Asia,
North America. And they believed that for the
Earth to spin correctly, there had to be an equal
mass of land at the bottom of the world to act
as a counterweight. Otherwise, the whole planet
would just topple over. Exactly. Physics has
come a long way. It has. But that belief drove
the funding. They expected to find a continent
as rich and temperate as Europe down there. So
Cook buys a ship. And he doesn't pick a warship.
He goes back to his roots. You guys are cat.
The Earl of Pembroke, which he renames the HMS
Endeavor. And Whitby Collier. It was slow. It
was boxy. It was ugly. But he could hold enough
food for a huge crew for months. And it was shallow
drafted. Cook knew he was going into uncharted
waters. He expected to hit things. He wanted
a ship that could bounce. So they sail to Tahiti,
arriving in 1769. They set up Point Venus. And
this is where we see the first real layers of
the cultural contact story start to unfold. Oh,
it's fascinating. And it's messy. Yeah. You've
got the British building a fortified observatory.
And you have the Tahitians, who are incredibly
curious. but operate under a completely different
social code, especially about property. Right.
So the British called it theft. The Tahitians
likely saw it as exchange or just opportunity.
Exactly. The Tahitians would take iron nails,
cloth, even parts of the ship's quadrant. And
Cook's response was this mix of restraint and
coercion. When things went missing... He'd seize
the local canoes, which were vital for fishing
and transport, and hold them ransom until the
items were returned. It's a pattern that we see
again and again, leveraging superior firepower
to enforce British property law in a place where
British law doesn't exist. And then you have
the human element. The crew had been at sea for
months. Tahiti was, well, it was very welcoming.
Two Marines actually tried to desert. They ran
off into the mountains with two local women.
Cook had to take a high -ranking chief hostage
to force the Tahitians to hunt down his own.
men and bring them back. But amidst all this
tension, they pick up a passenger who becomes,
arguably, the second most important person on
the entire voyage, Tupaya. Tupaya is essential.
He was a Tahitian high priest and a master navigator.
He could map the islands of the Pacific from
memory. He joins the Endeavour and he becomes
the diplomat. When they sail to New Zealand later,
Tupaya could speak to the Maori because the languages
share a root. Without Tupaya, Cook would have
been sailing blind and deaf. So the transit is
observed, though the data was a bit fuzzy, and
they finally open the secret orders. Go south,
find the continent. They sail south into the
empty ocean, and there's nothing, just waves.
Then they turn west and they hit New Zealand.
Abel Tasman had seen it before, but Cook decides
to do the work. He's going to circumnavigate
the whole thing. He spends six months meticulously
charting the coast. He proves that New Zealand
isn't part of some massive southern continent.
It's two main islands. But the contact here,
the sources are very, very stark. It was violent.
From the very first encounter. It was a disaster.
They landed. Some Maury warriors challenged them,
which is a standard ceremonial challenge, a way
of asking friend or foe. And the British panicked
and fired. They shot several Maury dead within
the first few days. Cook even wrote in his journal
that he failed to be civil. And they also confirmed
something that really shocked the British public
when they got back home. Cannibalism. They found
clear evidence baskets of human bones, eyewitness
accounts that the Maury ate the flesh of their
enemies. It's interesting how the British reacted
to that. It became this ultimate marker of savagery
for them. Yet Cook, in his journals, he tries
to analyze it somewhat objectively as like a
war custom. He does. He tries not to moralize
too much in the moment, but it definitely hardened
the crew's attitude. They felt like they were
in a dangerous alien world. So from New Zealand,
they head west again. And on April 19th, 1770,
Lieutenant Hicks spots land. The east coast of
Australia, Point Hicks. They turn north and sail
up the coast looking for a place to land. They
choose Botany Bay. Now, the popular history often
frames this as a discovery. But when they pulled
up to the beach, there were people standing right
there telling them to leave. Two warriors from
the Gweagle clan. They stood on the rocks, brandishing
spears, shouting warnings. They were defending
their country. Cook tried to throw beads and
nails to them, but they just weren't interested.
So Cook escalates. He orders a Marine to fire
a small shot. It's basically a birdshot. It hits
one of the warriors in the legs. The warrior
runs, grabs a shield, and comes back. Cook fires
again. They eventually retreat in the British
land. It's a grim precedent. The first step onto
the continent was preceded by gunfire. They stay
for a week. Joseph Banks goes crazy collecting
plants, which is why it's called Botany Bay.
And then they push north. And this is where the
endeavor nearly becomes a coffin. The Great Barrier
Reef. They didn't know it was there. They were
sailing happily along, and then the depth dropped
from 20 fathoms to zero in minutes. Crunch. They
hit the coral at high tide. The ship is stuck
fast. The jagged coral pierces the hull. And
the tide starts to drop. This is the absolute
nightmare scenario. They are thousands of miles
from any help. If the ship breaks up, they drown
or they starve. The discipline is incredible.
There's no panic. They start lightening the ship.
They throw everything heavy overboard. Six massive
cannons, tons of iron ballast, spoiled stores,
fresh water. They're fighting for every inch
of buoyancy. And then the tide rises again. They
manage to heave the ship off the rock, but now
the water's just rushing in. The pumps can't
keep up. And this is where that coal ship training
pays off. Cook and his midshipman, Jonathan Monkhouse,
use a technique called fathering. You have to
explain this, because it sounds like some kind
of MacGyver engineering. It really is. They take
a spare sail. They sew big clumps of oakum that's
shredded rope and raw sheep's wool into the canvas.
Then they cover the whole thing in sheep dung.
Eh, gross, but okay. They haul this messy sail
under the hull of the ship. The pressure of the
water rushing into the leak sucks the sail tight
against the hull. The wool and the dung get pulled
into the cracks and plug them up. It's a giant,
disgusting band -aid. And it works. The leak
slows down enough for the pumps to manage. They
limp into the mouth of a river modern cook town
and beach the ship. They spent seven weeks there
repairing the hull. And this is where the crew
actually has time to interact with the locals,
the Gugu Yimithir people, and where they see
the strange greyhound. The kangaroo. They had
no frame of reference for an animal that hopped
like a hare but was as big as a man. It blew
their minds. But even here, where relations were
somewhat better, it all breaks down over resources.
The green turtles. The British crew started harvesting
these turtles, which were culturally significant
and controlled by the local elders. The Gugu
Yimithers were furious. They set fire to the
grass around the British camp to try and drive
them out. Cook fired his musket again. But there
is a moment of reconciliation here that feels
really important. Yes. After the shooting and
the fire, an elder approached the British. He
carried a spear with the tip broken off. It was
a clear symbol of peace. He forgave them. It
is one of the few moments of genuine cross -cultural
grace in the whole narrative. So they patch the
ship, they navigate the labyrinth of the Torres
Strait, and they head for home. But the voyage
has a sting in the tail. The stop in Batavia,
modern Jakarta. The ship was rotting, so they
had to stop for repairs in this Dutch port. But
Batavia was a malaria swamp. So they survived
the reefs and the spears, but the microbes got
them. Dysentery and malaria just tore through
the crew. Cook lost over 20 men on the voyage
home. including Tupaya and the astronomer Green.
It was a tragic end to a triumphant voyage. But
when he lands in 1771, he is a hero. The Admiralty
is thrilled. But the theorists, the guys who
believed in the southern continent, they weren't
satisfied. No. They said, okay, you found New
Zealand and Australia, but those aren't big enough.
The real continent must be further south. So
they send him back, voyage two, 1772 to 1775.
And this voyage is, from a purely navigational
standpoint, the masterpiece. He has a new ship,
the Resolution, and he has a secret weapon, the
watch. The K -1 chronometer. A replica of John
Harrison's timekeeper. We have to stress how
revolutionary this was. Before this, finding
your longitude, your position east to west, was
a nightmare of complex lunar mathematics that
could take hours to calculate and was incredibly
prone to error. And suddenly, he has a clock
that just... You kept the time of Greenwich perfectly.
By comparing local noon to Greenwich time, you
knew exactly how far you had sailed. Cook called
it his trusty friend. It allowed him to pinpoint
islands with what was, for the 18th century,
GPS -like accuracy. This is also the voyage where
he tackles the other great killer of sailors,
Scurvy. Scurvy is just terrifying. It's a vitamin
C deficiency. Your connective tissue literally
breaks down. Old wounds reopen. Your gums rot.
It killed more sailors than storms and battles
combined. And Cook loses zero men to scurvy on
this voyage. That is unheard of. It made him
famous. But here's the deep dive nuance. Cook
actually got the science wrong. Wait, what? He
cured it, but didn't know how. He threw everything
at the problem. He demanded extreme cleanliness
below decks. He forced the crew to eat fresh
greens and celery whenever they landed. But he
also force -fed them malt wort, a fermented barley
drink. He was convinced the malt was the cure.
But malt has no vitamin C. None whatsoever. It
was the fresh food and the hygiene doing all
the work. But because Cook was Cook, the Admiralty
listened to him. They mandated malt for the whole
fleet. This actually delayed the Royal Navy's
adoption of lemons and limes, the real cure,
by decades. So he was right for all the wrong
reasons. Now on this voyage, he goes south, like
really south. He crosses the Antarctic Circle,
the first human to do so. He enters the pack
ice. It's freezing, it's foggy, the sails are
stiff with ice. And he nearly hits the continent.
He gets within 75 miles of Antarctica. If the
fog had lifted for a moment, he would have seen
the ice shelf. But he hits a wall of pack ice
and has to turn back. But that failure was actually
a success. Exactly. He proved that if a southern
continent existed, it was a frozen, desolate
wasteland. It wasn't some lush paradise hiding
down there. He killed the myth of the habitable
Terra Australis. He spends the rest of the voyage
looping through the Pacific Easter Island, Tonga,
New Caledonia. But there is a dark subplot involving
the sister ship, the Adventure. Yeah, the Adventure,
commanded by Tobias Frenot, got separated in
a storm. They went to New Zealand to wait. And
while they were there, 10 of their crew were
ambushed by a Maori, killed, and eaten. That's
just horrific. And when Cook finds out... This
tells you a lot about his character at this stage.
He didn't launch a revenge mission. He argued
that the crew must have provoked the Maori, maybe
a trade gone wrong or a misunderstanding. He
refused to label the Maori as inherently evil.
He was still trying to be the rational observer.
So he returns home in 1775. He's the greatest
navigator in Europe. He gets a cushy retirement
job at Greenwich Hospital. But he just can't
sit still. The sea calls him back. In 1776, he
volunteers for the third voyage. And the goal
this time isn't the south. It's the north. The
Northwest Passage. The holy grail of trade. A
shortcut over the top of Canada to get to Asia.
But as they set off, the sources suggest something
is wrong with Cook. There is a distinct shift
in his temperament. The patience is gone. He's
volatile. He's tired. And how does that manifest
itself? In violence. On the previous voyages,
he understood that islanders taking things was
a cultural difference. Now he punishes it with
brutality. He starts ordering the burning of
houses. He orders the cropping of ears, cutting
off the ears of islanders who stole from the
ship. That sounds like a man who is completely
unraveling. It suggests burnout. or maybe a medical
issue we don't know about, but certainly a loss
of that diplomatic touch. He was reacting with
rage rather than reason. On the way to the Arctic,
they stumble upon the most significant find of
the third voyage. Hawaii. January 1778. He calls
them the Sandwich Islands. He's the first European
to see them. He notices instantly that the language
is similar to Tahiti, is part of that vast Polynesian
web. They trade, they resupply, and then they
push north to the Arctic. They chart the coast
of Oregon, Canada, Alaska. They go through the
Bering Strait and then a wall of ice, 12 feet
high, stretching from horizon to horizon. They
try to find a gap, but there is no northwest
passage for a sailing ship. It's a dead end.
Cook is frustrated. His crew is near mutiny from
the cold and the bad food. He has to turn back.
So he decides to winter in Hawaii. And this decision
leads directly to the end. They sail into Kila
Kukua Bay on the Big Island in January 1779.
And the reception they get is unlike anything
they've ever seen before. It was overwhelming.
Thousands of canoes, 10 ,000 people on the shore.
They were greeted with this intense reverence.
Which brings us to the famous Lono debate. Right.
The traditional story is that Cook arrived during
the festival of Makahiki, which honors the god
Lono. Lono was associated with peace, fertility,
and white top -of -cloth banners. Cook's ship,
with its white sails and masts, looked like the
symbols of Lono. So the Hawaiians thought he
was the god returning. That's the narrative that
anthropologist Marshall Solins argues. But other
scholars, like Gananith Obisik here, say that's
a European myth, that the Hawaiians were rational
people who saw him as a powerful chief, not a
supernatural deity. Either way, he was treated
like royalty. He was given gifts, fed, and honored.
Until they overstayed their welcome. They eventually
left, but a mast broke in a storm just a few
days later. They had to limp back to Kealakekua
Bay to fix it. But the mood had totally shifted.
The season had changed. Makahiki, the season
of peace, was over. It was now the season of
Ku, the war god. Ku's return was culturally awkward.
It was just wrong. And practically, the British
had eaten them out of house and home. The Hawaiians
were tired of feeding hundreds of sailors. Tensions
rise, theft increases, and then someone steals
a cutter, a large ship's boat. This was a critical
piece of equipment, and Cook just snaps. He decides
to use his old playbook. Yeah. Take a hostage
to get the property back. But he doesn't just
grab a local chief. He decides to kidnap the
king. Kalani Poo. It was a fatal miscalculation.
Cook marches ashore with a few Marines. He goes
to the village, wakes up the elderly king, and
tries to lead him to the ship. And the king actually
goes along with it at first. He does. But his
wife and the other chiefs step in. They plead
with him not to go. They realize that if he goes
to the ship, he might never come back. The procession
stops right on the beach. And the crowd is growing.
Thousands of people, armed with stones and clubs.
And then news arrives from down the coast. A
British sailor had shot and killed a high -ranking
chief. That's the spark. The crowd turns aggressive.
A warrior threatens off. Cook with a dagger.
Cook fires his shotgun, the barrel loaded with
small shot. It hits the warrior's shield and
does nothing. The spell is broken. He's not a
god. He's not invincible. The warrior attacks.
Cook shoots him dead with his second barrel.
But it's too late. The mob rushes. Cook is clubbed
from behind. He falls face down into the surf.
He's stabbed repeatedly. Four Marines are killed.
The rest scramble into the boats and flee. The
captain is dead. And what happens next is something
that really horrified the British. The Hawaiians
took the body. And they treated it according
to the burial rituals for a high chief. This
involved dismembering the body, removing the
flesh, and baking the bones to clean them. To
the British, this looked like desecration, like
cannibalism. But to the Hawaiians, it was the
ultimate respect. The bones held the manna, the
divine power. They wanted to keep that power.
The British eventually negotiated for the return
of the remains. And it was a grim handover. They
got back a skull, some long bones, and two hands.
They identified Cook by a scar on his hand where
a powder horn had exploded years earlier. They
buried him at sea. It's just such a violent,
chaotic end for a man who prided himself on precision
and order. So how do we assess the legacy? Because
the scientific achievement is just... It's undeniable.
It's immense. He redrew the map of the world.
He proved there was no great southern continent.
He mapped the Pacific with such accuracy that
you could navigate by his charts 150 years later.
He brought back thousands of plant species unknown
to science. But then we have to talk about the
fatal impact. The mapmaker opened the door. And
through that door came smallpox, tuberculosis,
venereal disease. Populations in Hawaii and elsewhere
were decimated by the germs the British brought
with them. And the political legacy. Cook carried
instructions to take possession with consent.
But at Possession Island in Australia, he raised
the flag and claimed the entire East Coast for
King George III while Aboriginal people were
clearly present. He never asked. He never signed
a treaty. And that act, that one moment of raising
the flag, is the legal foundation for the colonization
of Australia and the dispossession of indigenous
people that followed. Exactly. And that is why
you see statues of Cook being defaced or torn
down today. For many, he's the symbol of the
invasion. He represents the end of a way of life
that had existed for 60 ,000 years. And yet the
man himself, if you really read the journals,
he seems so conflicted. That's the paradox. He
admired the Polynesians. He wrote about their
noble traits. There's a quote that really haunts
me. He was observing the indigenous Australians
who had no clothes, no houses, very few possessions.
And the Europeans just saw them as pitiful. But
Cook wrote, they are far happier than we Europeans.
He said they lived in a tranquility that Europeans,
with all our superfluous wants, couldn't understand.
It's a stunning admission. The agent of empire
wondering if the people he is discovering are
actually better off than the civilization he
represents. He knew it was coming. He wrote,
we introduce wants and diseases which they never
before knew. He saw the destruction in his own
wake. It's just such a heavy legacy. We have
the brilliance of the navigation, the sheer physical
courage of the voyages sitting right next to
the devastation of colonization. And I think
that's the only way to view him. Not as a hero
or a villain, but as the pivot point, the moment
the world became connected, for better and, in
many ways, for worse. It leaves us with a really
difficult question, then. How do you reconcile
the brilliant navigator who sought knowledge
with the inevitable destruction that followed
in his wake? Can we celebrate the mapmaker while
mourning the lines he drew? That is the question
at the heart of the Cook legacy. A deep thought
to end on. That's our deep dive on Captain James
Cook. Thanks for listening.