Status Updates From Captain Cook’s Epic Voyage

seduced by the moonlight, cook sails straight onto a reef:

Several years later the French explorer Lieutenant Julien-Marie Crozet, while sailing along the coast of New Zealand, was in a position to judge the charts which Cook had made. Their precision, Crozet later wrote, ‘astonished me beyond all powers of expression, and I doubt much whether the charts of our own French coasts are laid down with greater precision’.

De Surville was entitled to believe that he was thousands of miles from the nearest European ship. In fact, he was less than a hundred miles, as the crow flies, from Cook’s Endeavour.

they were close but still missed each other. ah too bad.

“Of numerous questions of prose and grammar, Banks and Cook took no notice. They were content to deprive such nations as ‘england and spain’ of their capital letters. In compensation they would donate a capital letter to a word which had no right to one. Sometimes their capital letters were like leaves carried aloft by the wind and then dropped anywhere.”

this book better be good