![]() ![]() On land, he meets native people - Aboriginal and Aleut elders, Maori gang members, the king of Tonga - for whom Cook is alternately a heroic navigator and a villain who brought syphilis, guns, and greed to the unspoiled Pacific. At sea, aboard a replica of Cook's ship, he works atop a hundred-foot mast, sleeps in a narrow hammock, and recaptures the rum-and-lash world of eighteenth-century seafaring. Adventuring in Cook's wake, he relives the captain's journeys and explores their legacy in the farflung lands Cook opened to the West. ![]() "In Blue Latitudes, Tony Horwitz sets off on his own voyage of discovery. Yet the impoverished farmboy, who broke the bounds of social class to become Britain's greatest navigator, remains as mysterious today as the uncharted seas he sailed more than two centuries ago.". Cook explored more of the earth's surface than anyone in history - sailing from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Tahiti to Siberia, from Easter Island to the Great Barrier Reef - and introduced the West to an exotic world of taboo and tattoo, of cannibalism and ritual sex. By the time he died in 1779, during a bloody clash in Hawaii, the map of the world was substantially complete. When he embarked for the Pacific in 1768, a third of the globe remained blank. ![]() ![]() "James Cook's three epic journeys in the eighteenth century were the last great voyages of discovery. Broken link? let us search Trove, the Wayback Machine, or Google for you. ![]()
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