James Cook once described himself as a man “who had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had done before but as far as possible for man to go . . .” These words not only sum up his professional aspirations but also give a rare, personal glimpse of the man himself.

Cook had a piercing curiosity, but he was no visionary seafarer like his great predecessor Ferdinand Magellan. Cook was a methodical explorer with the soul of a scientist. He was born into an age when the search for scientific knowledge was as intense as the thirst for conquest had once been.

By the 1700s, England, eager to expand its empire, was sending exploring parties to all the corners of the then-known globe, and the most daring into the still unknown. The eighteenth century, the age of reason and enlightenment, required a new kind of explorer: not a rover or a plunderer, or a seeker of adventure for its own sake, but a master of navigation and seamanship. An explorer was expected to be a skilled surveyor and chart maker, with natural curiosity and a flair for command. Cook was that man.

He was born on October 27, 1728, in a two-room clay cottage in the remote Yorkshire village of Marton. His father, also named James, was a day laborer who did such odd jobs as slopping hogs. On one of his jobs, he met Grace Pace, who was eight years younger. Four months after they were married, she gave birth to their first son, John.

James, the second of eight children, was a bright youngster, so much so that his father’s employer financed his early schooling. James’s father had been promoted to foreman at the largest farm in the region. Young James, like other sons of farmers, was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps.

But James rebelled as a boy, preferring solitude to the bustle of the farm. He often wandered off to explore the wilderness around it - collecting specimens, particularly birds’ nests, which fascinated him with their intricate structure. From an early age, James Cook had a restless spirit that refused to be confined and longed to range free.

At school, his instructors saw him as a charismatic loner with “a steady adherence to his own schemes,” but also “something in his manners and deportment which attracted the reverence and respect of his companions.”

As he grew older, James worked on the farm with his father, though he quickly realized there was no future in it for him. He looked up to some of the men on the farm - including its owner, Thomas Skottowe, who was paying for his schooling - and never forgot the work ethic he learned there. But in 1745, when his formal education ended, James was ready to set out on his own path.

His father found him a job with a shopkeeper in Staithes, a tiny fishing village northwest of Whitby. He spent most days stocking shelves and weighing fish. The fishermen who came into the shop regularly told stories about their adventures in the North Sea, and young James craned his neck to listen. At night, James slept under the shop’s counter. By candlelight, he pored over books he had stacked there - on geography, astronomy, and mathematics - and dreamed about far-off realms.

The shop was close to the sea, within sight of ships sailing to and from the nearby port of Whitby, and within earshot of surf pounding the rocky shore. It was here that James developed his lifelong love of the sea, spending summers on the water and winters learning the shipwright’s craft.

Cook’s preference for seafaring was obvious to everyone. In September 1746, his employer at the shop graciously arranged for him to interview with a shipping firm owned by John and Henry Walker.

The Walkers were prominent coal shippers who ran coal-carrying vessels, called colliers, between London and the Yorkshire towns along the North Sea coast. At the time, Whitby was a coastal-trade center as well as an important shipbuilding site. Cook arrived flush and tired after hiking, with all of his belongings in a pack slung over his shoulder, about a dozen miles along a trail that skirted the rugged coastline. He rushed to the waterfront to gaze out at the armada of cargo ships - many from foreign ports with crews that came ashore speaking unfamiliar languages. From Whitby, he realized, it would be easy enough to fulfill his desire to roam.

Cook entered John Walker’s office and asked for a job. Though more than six feet tall, Cook had a fresh face and awkward innocence that worried Walker. The boy seemed a stark contrast to the hardened and weathered sailors in Walker’s outfit. Impressed by Cook’s eagerness to learn, however, Walker decided to hire him as an apprentice - though seventeen generally was considered too old to begin an apprenticeship and Cook was nearly eighteen.

Cook reported to his first ship, the collier Freelove. While docked, he learned the menial jobs assigned to all young ship hands: swabbing the deck, polishing the hull, and cleaning the latrines. He also came to grasp the names and purposes of the various ropes, knots, and sails that would be essential on the open sea. He was issued a hammock that he hung in the ship’s hold - next to those of other apprentices, with whom he was now competing for advancement.

Before the year was out, Cook was at sea on his first voyage, hauling coal along the British coast. For each of the next three years of his apprenticeship, he made at least a dozen such voyages. He transferred to another of Walker’s ships, the Three Brothers, and then others. Quickly, he learned to handle the awkward but capable colliers and sail them safely in dangerous waters. Soon he was sailing on open-ocean passages across the North Sea. When not at sea he studied math and astronomy. Cook served nine years in the North Sea trade, earning promotions to able seaman, mate, and then second-in-command of his ship for the last three years.

He learned to trust his instincts. Coastal charts were unreliable, and a seaman needed a sixth sense to protect his ship from shoals, sandbanks, and changes of current. Cook was unusually perceptive. He gained a reputation for sailing where other navigators dared not go; he seemed to know instinctively which waters were safest. His officers often said that he could smell land; he would appear suddenly on deck and alter his ship’s course when no one else was aware that there was danger of running aground.

Cook served the Walkers of Whitby so well that in 1755 he was offered command of one of their colliers - the best and largest ship in the fleet, the Friendship. But at twenty-seven years old, he wanted a change. England was mobilizing its forces in preparation for war with France, and its navy was desperate for recruits. Cook recognized the need for experienced seamen, and at the same time, saw the possibility of advancing his career at sea. He rejected Walker’s offer, saying he intended to join the Royal Navy.

In his jaunts to London, on coal business, Cook had seen Royal Navy officers - in their powdered, white wigs, polished shoes, and blue-and-gold uniforms - and their superior vessels. Walker warned Cook that an officer’s life was not as glamorous as it might seem: The ranks of the Royal Navy were filled with derelicts, pressed into service, who knew nothing about life at sea, and so were doomed to die there. Many succumbed to disease, the worst culprit being scurvy.

Walker tried other arguments. A Royal Navy officer might be at sea for years before receiving any compensation. But the best reason for staying put, Walker said, was that in Whitby, Cook would be a captain. If he joined the Royal Navy, he would be starting over as an ordinary seaman. Officers were recruited from the upper class, and groomed at a young age. But Cook craved adventure and the distant horizons that could be reached aboard the larger Royal Navy barque. “I want to make my future fortune there,” he told Walker as he walked out of his office and away from Whitby.

In the Navy

Cook enlisted as a sailor on one of King George II’s warships, the sixty-gun Eagle. The ship, first launched in 1745, was 147 feet from stern to bow and 1,130 tons, able to carry a crew of 420 men (ten times what Cook was accustomed to). Its captain, Joseph Hamar, had commanded the HMS Flamborough, protecting the coasts of British colonies in South Carolina and Georgia from the Spanish. Now his orders were to patrol the waters south of Ireland and capture French ships. Hamar sized up his crew of mostly green ship hands and decided that none were up to the task. But Cook soon proved the captain wrong.

The officers noticed that Cook looked different from the other new recruits. Besides being older, he had the weathered appearance of a true sailor - a face ruddy from exposure to the sea breeze and large, calloused hands. After testing his knowledge of the ship’s rigging, the officers realized Cook would be more useful above deck. There, he displayed an aptitude for navigation that caught the attention of Captain Hamar. Just five weeks after joining the Eagle’s crew, Cook was promoted to master’s mate - primarily responsible, under his captain, for navigating the ship and keeping the ship’s log.

The Eagle offered splendid training for a young man eager to learn the business of navigating and scientific surveying. But after just three months, Captain Hamar took the ship back to port for repairs. He was nearing retirement and kept delaying a return to battle, aggravating his superiors, and he was relieved of his command.

Cook was fortunate that the new captain, Hugh Palliser, quickly recognized Cook’s abilities and became the young man’s patron and friend. Five years older than Cook, Palliser had entered the Royal Navy in 1735, at age twelve, as a midshipman aboard the HMS Aldborough, which was commanded by his uncle. By the time he was eighteen, Palliser was a lieutenant, and five years later, was given his first command. The period between 1746 and his arrival on the Eagle was filled with the sort of danger and adventure that Cook was eager to experience.

While sailing in the West Indies in 1748, Palliser was wounded when an ammunition chest caught fire and exploded, sending shots flying that killed two other men. He returned to duty despite a lame left leg and sometimes excruciating pain. He sailed to the East Indies, and then was assigned to a ship guarding the Royal Navy dockyard at Chatham, on England’s southeast coast.

On his most recent mission to the colonies, Palliser sailed far south of the usual route. He reached as far as the Tropic of Cancer, a line of latitude about twenty-three degrees north of the Equator, a route that avoided most of the storms and turbulent waters that caused problems for ships crossing the North Sea. This confirmed his reputation as a brilliant seaman and tactician.

Captain Palliser won Cook’s immediate respect, and before long, the feeling was mutual. Palliser taught his first mate all he knew about seamanship and navigation, including the surveying and charting of coastlines and bodies of water. For Cook, the relationship with Palliser was one of the most formative of his life. Later, Palliser would play a significant role in promoting Cook’s work as a mapmaker and sponsoring his famed explorations. In return, Cook would name several of his discoveries in honor of his “worthy friend.”

In October 1755, Captain Palliser wasted no time in getting the Eagle back out to sea. War had officially broken out between England and France - later, it would become known as the Seven Years’ War - and so far, it had not gone well for the British. An expedition by General Edward Braddock to reinforce the American colonies had ended disastrously, with Braddock’s death and the French gaining momentum. In London, this news led to a public outcry over the government’s poor military preparation. Britain needed a victory, and Palliser was determined to provide one.

Patrolling the western entrance to the English Channel, separating southern England from northern France, the Eagle plunged into battle on November 15 with the French ship Espérance. It was the first action that Cook had seen since joining the Royal Navy, and he did not play a large part. But he was thrilled by the fight, which after three hours succeeded in sinking the Espérance.

The Eagle did not see battle again until a year and a half later. On May 30, 1757, as the ship turned back toward England, it encountered the fifty-gun French frigate Duc d’Aquitain off the island of Ushant. The Duc d’Aquitain was much larger than the Espérance, and its crew fought ferociously. Luckily, the Eagle was reinforced by another British ship, the sixty-gun Medway. The battle resulted in eighty of Cook’s crewmates being wounded and ten killed, while on the French crew, fifty were killed and thirty wounded before the Duc d’Aquitaine surrendered. Captain Palliser wrote in his ship’s log: “We engaged about three-quarters of an hour at point-blank range.”

The Eagle was damaged badly in the fight, but the Admiralty was pleased with the outcome. Though Cook’s role in the victory was minor, he shared in the prize money, and Palliser recommended his promotion to ship master. On June 29, 1757, Cook passed a difficult written and oral examination to earn his master’s warrant. The next morning, he was assigned to the twenty-four-gun frigate Solebay, based near Edinburgh in Scotland.

The trip overland from London to Scotland allowed Cook to stop briefly in Whitby and then Ayton – and to update his former employer, John Walker, and father on his accomplishments, which happily won their approval. But Cook served only two months on the Solebay before being transferred again.

On his twenty-ninth birthday, he joined the crew of the sixty-four-gun Pembroke as master, under Captain John Simcoe. Simcoe had a reputation for being a well-read and intellectual officer, skilled in mathematics and curious about science. He always sailed with a small library, which he made available to Cook. He encouraged Cook to read English professor Charles Leadbetter’s treatises on mathematics and astronomy. So Cook’s education continued aboard the Pembroke. But, more than a classroom, the Pembroke was a warship, and Simcoe a fighting captain.

Cook’s first mission aboard the Pembroke was to patrol the Bay of Biscay and then to blockade the western coast of France. The Pembroke was part of a fleet, under the command of Admiral Edward Boscawen, ordered to sail to North America and attack French vessels and ports in Canada in 1758. It would be the farthest that Cook had ever sailed and also his first encounter with scurvy.

By the time the Pembroke reached the British base of Halifax, Nova Scotia, twenty-six of the crew had died of scurvy. Many more were gravely ill. The Pembroke had to stay behind while the crew recovered when the rest of the fleet sailed on. Cook watched wistfully as an armada of 157 British warships left the harbor.

The fleet was to take part in the siege of Louisbourg, a fortress on the eastern tip of Nova Scotia. The English considered Louisbourg a strategic objective because it commanded the Gulf of St. Lawrence at the mouth of the river. While the French held Louisbourg, no attack on the capital of New France - the city of Quebec - was possible.

By the time the Pembroke finally sailed from Nova Scotia in June, the siege was already underway. An English infantry force had attacked the fortress at Louisbourg. A choppy sea made the landing difficult, and many soldiers drowned. Still others were slaughtered by the raking French gunfire. But the determined English refused to retreat. Luckily for the British, French reinforcements, also depleted by the spread of disease at sea, never arrived.

The Pembroke caught up to the fleet just in time to take part in the last major battle. Sailing into a dense fog, Captain Simcoe and Master Cook led an assault on two French warships, capturing one and burning the other. The next day, the French surrendered Louisbourg.

Now the only deterrent to an attack on Quebec was the St. Lawrence River, choked with shoals and dangerous reefs. Cook and the masters of a few other vessels were asked to chart a suitable route through the narrow channel. If their work proved accurate, the English fleet could sail through the channel and anchor opposite the city.

Cook had studied charts but had no experience creating them. After the fall of Louisbourg, Cook was walking on shore when he spotted an army lieutenant and engineer named Samuel Holland, seated at a surveyor’s plane table – a small, square surface mounted on a tripod - making a drawing of the coastline. Holland recognized that Cook was taking a keen interest in his work, and offered to give him lessons.

When Cook reported this to his captain, Simcoe gave his consent for the lessons and said he would join them. Captain Simcoe was ill and unable to leave his ship, so surveying lessons took place aboard the Pembroke. Holland taught Cook and Simcoe the technique of triangulation using the plane table and a device called an alidade, an eyepiece which is rotated and swiveled to measure angles and distance of objects.

Holland, a Dutchman, had emigrated from the Netherlands to England in 1754, leaving his wife behind, to try to advance his career. He had much in common with Cook; they were the same age and had similar ambitions, and both were confident and reliable. Before Louisbourg, Holland had created a map of England’s New York province that would be widely used for twenty years. But nothing he had accomplished before was as immediately critical as the survey of the St. Lawrence, which would determine the success or failure of the British invasion of Quebec.

This was extremely hazardous duty for Holland, Cook, and the other surveyors. It required them to row out in small boats - individually, unprotected, and with nothing but their surveying equipment - to gauge currents, calculate depths, and locate the sand bars and rocky shoals that might impede the larger warships. Much of the time, they made their soundings under the noses of the French, because Quebec’s main fortifications stood atop an enormous promontory that overlooked the channel. Cook went about his work calmly and efficiently, even though the threat of death or capture was literally hanging over his head.

The surveyors used French charts, captured at Louisbourg, as reference, but all were outdated or simply inaccurate. Cook’s chart would set a new mark for detail and accuracy. On it, he noted the latitude (but not longitude), scale in miles, magnetic variations, many soundings, tidal range and direction, and provided two horizontal views of the coast. Charting a suitable course took several months to complete, during which tragedy struck the Pembroke.

On May 15, 1759, Captain Simcoe, who had been sick for some time, died aboard his ship. Asked during his final, lucid moments if his body should be preserved for burial ashore, Simcoe said: “Apply your pitch to its proper purpose, keep your lead to mend the shot holes, and commit me to the deep.” Two days later, Simcoe’s body was laid to rest in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, off the coast of Anticosti Island, as the Pembroke boomed a twenty-one-gun salute.

Command of the Pembroke now passed to Captain John Wheelock, Cook’s fifth captain in four years and the one who made the least impression. In June 1759, Wheelock gave the order to sail ahead of a huge fleet - more than 100 ships - to begin the siege on Quebec.

On the Pembroke, Cook took more soundings of the channel and guided the fleet through a particularly narrow and treacherous section known as “the Traverse.” The French tried to block the passage by sending seven ships, which they set ablaze, but British sailors in longboats were able to haul the fire ships out of the fleet’s path. The Pembroke was one of the first ships to anchor at Quebec’s Île d’Orléans on June 28. Soon after, the British fleet poured soldiers onto the shore, and the battle began.

After more than six weeks of fighting, the French surrendered Quebec to the British on September 18, 1760. The victory was a major turning point in the war between England and France - and established England as the dominant power in North America. When the Seven Years’ War ended three years later, the Treaty of Paris would award Britain parts of New France, including Canada.

Cook’s role in the victory was not overlooked. On September 23, he received news that he was being promoted again, this time to master of the flagship Northumberland. Now, Cook undertook his first important piece of independent work: a detailed survey of the St. Lawrence River from Quebec to the Atlantic Ocean. Cook’s meticulous charts made earlier ones obsolete and firmly established his reputation as a skilled marine surveyor.

Winter soon set in, and pack ice began to close the mouth of the river. The British fleet had to sail away from Quebec or risk being trapped there for months. This was Cook’s first experience at navigating through icy waters, but certainly not the last.

Cook returned to the British base at Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he spent much of the next two years surveying and supervising improvements to the Navy Yard and harbor. This work included the construction of several buildings, including a mast house for shipbuilding and repairs. At night, he slept in the master’s cabin on the Northumberland, and by candlelight, continued his education. He found a Halifax bookseller who stocked “a large and curious Collection of Books, in History, Divinity, Law, Physics, Mathematics, Classics, Architecture, Navigation,” as well as maps and charts of Nova Scotia, New England, and more. So, while his crewmates were out getting drunk on rum, Cook most often was nose-deep in a book.

Though he served for three years on the Northumberland, Cook did not fight in another sea battle. On October 7, 1762, he sailed east, and nineteen days later, landed home at England for the first time in nearly five years.

“Great Encouragement to New Adventures”

Back in London, Cook was relieved of his duty to the Royal Navy. With the war winding down, England was at peace, and no longer needed so many sailors to fill its fleet. The Navy paid Cook about £300 (equal to about $70,000 today) for his four years of service. At thirty-four years old, Cook wandered the city with, for the first time in his life, full pockets and time to spare. He decided to use it to find a wife.

Just two months later, Cook married twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Batts, the daughter of a London innkeeper. He used most of his pay from the Navy to buy a three-story brick row house east of the busy heart of London. It was across the street from a pub, next door to a gin mill, and about a mile from the mighty Thames River. Briefly, love-struck Cook considered giving up his life at sea to stay close to Elizabeth. But a large part of what had drawn Elizabeth to him was his adventurous spirit and his dream - which he had told only her - of sailing farther and wider than anyone ever had. Soon, the sea was calling him again, and the house on Mile End Road became little more than a place to rest between voyages.

Elizabeth accepted her role of abandoned wife with grace and resolution. Though in eleven years of marriage, they were often apart for years at a time, their love for one another endured. James was absent, thousands of miles at sea, for the births of most of their six children. He wrote his wife many letters, which he mailed at every major port. And despite outliving him by more than six decades, Elizabeth never remarried.

The Royal Navy recalled Cook just a few months after the wedding, in the spring of 1763. After the signing of the Treaty of Paris, King George III needed a mapmaker to chart his new territories. Cook’s former captain, Lord Alexander Colville, recommended him to the Admiralty, writing: “From my experience of Mr. Cook’s genius and capacity, I think him well qualified for the work he had performed and for greater undertakings of the same kind. These Draughts being made under my own Eye I can venture to say they may be the means of directing many in the right way, but cannot mislead any.” The Admiralty was impressed with Cook’s charts and drawings from Nova Scotia, as well as his work with Samuel Holland to chart Quebec’s St. Lawrence River.

Cook was summoned and offered the handsome salary of ten shillings a day to be the king’s surveyor. It was the same salary that Hugh Palliser had been paid as captain of the Eagle. Cook’s first assignment was to map the unknown coast of Newfoundland and the nearby islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon. The islands were to be given back to France, as fishing ports, under the Treaty of Paris. Before that happened, King George wanted to know more about what he was giving up. Under the treaty, the islands could not be fortified.

In April 1763, Cook joined the crew of the Antelope, commanded by Thomas Graves, who was to be Britain’s governor of Newfoundland. Cook left Elizabeth behind, pregnant with their first child, and sailed again across the North Sea.

He arrived on the damp, fog-obscured Newfoundland coast at the beginning of June, eager to start his work. Governor Graves provided Cook with a crew and a small schooner, the Grenville, which he sailed up and down the 6,000 miles of Newfoundland coastline for the next seven months.

As winter threatened, he sailed back to England, though his work was far from done. The pack ice encroaching the harbor would make his work impossible. Besides, Cook had received the news that his wife had given birth to a son, whom she named James; he was home in time for the baptism. He returned to Newfoundland to continue his survey the following summer, once again leaving behind a pregnant Elizabeth.

His former captain Palliser was now the governor. Palliser arranged for Cook to command a series of chart-making expeditions in Labrador as well as Newfoundland. Cook was grateful for the continued employment in the Royal Navy at a time when scores of sailors were set adrift.

For five years, Cook spent the winters in England completing his charts and summers in Newfoundland. He earned a reputation as an efficient, dedicated, yet coldly scientific individual.

Though he nearly lost all use of his hand in an accident in 1764, Cook continued his chart work with precision. His charts of Newfoundland and Labrador were so accurate that they remained in use until late in the nineteenth century. Governor Palliser wrote to the secretary of the Admiralty that the publication of Cook’s charts “will be a great encouragement to new adventures in the fisheries upon these coasts.”

One of the few distractions from his survey work was an eclipse of the sun during the summer of 1766. He knew from his studies in astrology that the eclipse was due on August 5, and he waited on his schooner Grenville off the Burgeo Islands, southwest of Newfoundland. He sent a detailed report of the eclipse to London, which further enhanced his prestige as a scientist. This report caught the attention of England’s leading scientific body, the Royal Society, which now became interested in Cook. That same year, the Royal Society was planning a mission that only a seaman-scientist of Cook’s caliber could handle.