Captain Cook: Voyager Between Worlds

by John Gascoigne

Captain James Cook was a supreme navigator and explorer, but in many ways was also a representative of English attitudes in the eighteenth century. In his voyages he came across peoples with hugely different systems of thought, belief and culture.
Born in North Yorkshire in 1728, entered the world of the peoples of the South Pacific the gulf between the two cultures was not nearly as vast as it was a century later, when ships made of metal and powered by steam were able to expand and enforce European Empires. In their different ways both the British and the peoples of the Pacific had to battle the seas and its moods with timber vessels pwered by sail and human muscle.
John Gascoigne focuses on what happened when the two systems met, and how each side interpreted the other in terms of their own beliefs and experiences.

Genres: History

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Pete daPixie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected to read the common or garden biography, chronologic and linear through the subjects life. Instead I was met with something else altogether. John Gascoigne has produced a historical-social-political study of Cook's eighteenth century England with comparisons to his new found Pacific world. At first I found the narrative a little bit higgledy, jumping in and out of time with Cook's three voyages to the South Seas, and his death at the end of the first chapter.
The chapters each deal with their own topics, The Sea, Trade, War, Politics, Religion, Sex and Death.
Once into the flow of this book, I found it quite worth the effort. Particularly interesting on each of the topics covered are Cook and his officers memoirs of their experiences from the three voyages around the Pacific. Comparing the Aboriginal view in New Holland with the Maoris of New Zealand and the Polynesian worlds of Tonga, Tahiti, Samoa, Marquesas, Hawai'ian, Fiji, Easter and Cook Islands. Cook's third voyage also took in Nootka Sound in Alaska. Perhaps the author could have included a chapter on Science to compare technologies and include the work of the astronomers on the voyages, who observed the transit of Venus from the southern hemisphere. Nothing is mentioned in any detail in the book.
However, the socio-political study of the eighteenth century Pacific peoples is what makes this a fascinating read for me.

[Banbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a clearly written biography that sets forth not only the events of Captain Cook's life, but also the context in which he lived it. It is not a chatty biography, and it does not contain details that would give a reader a sense of Cook's private thoughts or inner life. This is not a weakness, just an observation.