Captain James Cook: The Navigator Who Unlocked the Pacific and His Contested Legacy

The English naval commander Captain James Cook is commonly regarded as one of Europe’s greatest navigators. In three separate voyages of scientific exploration between 1768 and 1779, Cook led the first European ships into the waters of Hawai‘i, eastern Australia, and the Antarctic and Arctic Circles, and he circumnavigated the globe twice.

Early Life and Career.Born in 1728 to a farm laborer in the area of Yorkshire, Cook spent the first eighteen years of his life working on a farm. In 1746, Cook moved to the port town of Whitby and became a merchant navy apprentice. It was during this apprenticeship that Cook learned the skills necessary to navigate his own ship. In 1755, Cook volunteered for service in the Royal Navy and was quickly promoted. During his early years in the navy, Cook sailed across the Atlantic to North America and established himself as a skillful navigator and surveyor.

Engraving based on a portrait of James Cook by Nathaniel Dance-Holland, c. 1776. Cook is holding the chart he crafted of the southern hemisphere with his index finger pointing at the eastern coast of Australia (Library of Congress)

Voyages of Pacific Exploration.In 1766, the British Admiralty enlisted Cook to command a voyage of scientific exploration into the Pacific Ocean on behalf of the Royal Society of London, the primary purpose of which was to record the transit of Venus across the sun. Cook and his crew sailed the HMS Endeavour from England in late August 1768 and arrived at Tahiti in April of the following year. After observing and recording the transit, Cook set out to search the Southern Pacific Ocean for the fabled southern continent, Terra Australis. It was in the course of this secondary mission that Cook charted the entire coastline of Aotearoa (New Zealand) and eventually reached the eastern coast of Australia, making landfall in mid-April 1770. Cook sailed the Endeavour from Australia through the Torres Strait, separating Australia from the island of Timor, and on to Batavia (what is now Jakarta, the capital of the Republic of Indonesia), before returning to England in July 1771.

After his mostly successful first voyage, Cook was commissioned by the Royal Society to lead another voyage of scientific exploration in search of Terra Australis. Cook sailed the HMS Resolution from England in June 1772 and became the first ship to cross the Antarctic Circle. On this voyage, Cook and the Resolution once again visited Tahiti and New Zealand and made landfall at Tonga, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Upon his return to England in 1775, Cook’s discovery of Antarctica finally shattered European conceptions of the mythical Terra Australis.

Cook’s third, and final, voyage departed England in 1776, with the primary intention of locating a Northwest Passage around the North American continent. On this expedition, Cook commanded the HMS Discovery, sailing first to Tahiti before making the first European contact with the Hawaiian islands—which Cook named the “Sandwich Islands” after the Earl of Sandwich. From Hawai‘i, the Discovery explored the western coast of North America to the north of Alta California, making landfall on the Oregon coast and Vancouver Island, and mapping the coast northward to the Bering Strait. From there, Cook returned to Hawai‘i in 1779.

It was there in Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawai‘i that Cook and a handful of his men died as a result of a struggle with native Hawaiians when Cook and his men attempted to take the ruler of the island of Hawai‘i, Kalani‘opu‘u, hostage. The events surrounding Cook’s death and the reasons why he was killed have been the subject of serious debate among historians and anthropologists, most notably Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere. It is nevertheless clear that Cook, in his interactions with native communities, regularly misunderstood and transgressed local customs and beliefs, and this confusion and the violence that often followed were at the foundation of Cook’s death on the shores of Kealakekua Bay.

The Legacy of James Cook.The legacy of James Cook is complicated, and his significance for world history is contested. How Cook is memorialized or remembered is largely determined by the community in which he is remembered. In general, in Euro-American popular memory, Cook is celebrated as a highly skilled navigator, a patron of scientific discovery, a model of enlightened reason, and a great explorer and discoverer. However, in many Pacific Islander communities whose lands Cook visited, he is often he is remembered quite differently. Throughout the Pacific Islands, the arrival of European ships and contact with European sailors brought many new experiences and opportunities for local communities, but they also brought a host of problems, with both immediate and long-term consequences.

Indigenous populations were ravaged by a wide range of pathogens and diseases introduced by European and American ships and their crews, such as tuberculosis, influenza, typhoid fever, and smallpox, as well as sexually transmitted diseases such as venereal diseases. Islander communities across the Pacific suffered greatly as a result. In Hawai‘i, for example, in the nine months between Cook’s first visit to the islands and his return visit in 1778, venereal disease had spread throughout the islands and would have a devastating impact on the native Hawaiian population in the form of miscarriages, high infant mortality, and infertility. In addition to the introduction of infectious diseases, European exploration in the Pacific inaugurated a long history of violence, dispossession, and, eventually, Euro-American imperial control and colonial settlements. Cook’s voyages into the Pacific sparked an increased global interest in the Pacific as a space of allure and opportunity for generations of Euro-American explorers and traders. Thus, for many Pacific Islander communities, Cook is less remembered as an explorer and man of the Enlightenment than as a symbol of imperialism and a presage of the death and dispossession that would soon follow. Lance Nolde

FURTHER READING:Beaglehole, John C. 1974. The Life of Captain James Cook. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Kirch, Patrick V 2012. A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief: The Island Civilization of Ancient Hawai‘i. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Obeyeskere, Gananath. 1997. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1995. How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Salmond, Anne. 2003. The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Encounters in the South Seas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Thomas, Nicholas. 2003. Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook. New York: Penguin Putnam.