Captain James Cook 

 In Search of a Continent 



A model of Cook's Endeavour bark. 

 A catbuilt, collier-type ship, slie was 

 capable of a speed of seven to eight knots. 



When Magellan sailed through the strait now bearing his name, 

 he saw to the south what he took to be a great land mass. Today we 

 know that land mass - Tierra del Fuego - as simply an island that 

 hugs the tip of South America. But for many years European map 

 makers showed Tierra del Fuego as part of a sprawling southern 

 continent - "Terra Australis Incognita." Pure logic, they felt, 

 required the existence of such a land mass to counterbalance the 

 land lying north of the Equator. They had imagined the Pacific 

 Ocean to be far smaller than the 10,000-mile wide, 9000-mile long 

 body of water it is. 



In the years between 15 21 and 1769 a number of explorers 

 systematically reduced the size of the mythical Great Southern 

 Continent by sailing across places where it was thought to lie. But 

 it was James Cook, an eighteenth-century English sea captain, 

 who foresaw the real southern continent - Antarctica - and, in so 

 doing, enlarged the boundaries of the Pacific. 



Cook was the first man to navigate and chart not only hundreds 

 of islands but thousands of miles of Pacific water and coast line. No 

 other man before or since Cook's time navigated such gigantic 

 expanses of unexplored water. In searching for the fabled Terra 

 Australis, Cook changed the maps of the world and revolutionized 

 the art of seamanship. 



In an age when most men could make little progress without 

 money and influence. Cook's remarkable determination enabled 

 him to rise from humble beginnings to a position of world fame. 

 He was born in an obscure Yorkshire village near Whitby on 

 October 28, 1728, and had barely learned his three Rs when he had 

 to leave school to help out on his father's farm. By the time he was 

 seventeen he was serving as an apprentice seaman on board a squat 

 little collier, the Freelove, which traded between the north and south 

 of England, and had begun an intensive study of mathematics and 

 navigation. When he finished his apprenticeship. Cook probably 

 knew more navigation than any earlier explorer of the Pacific. 



36 



