Captain Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific

Captain James Cook was not the first European to sail the Pacific, and he was not, strictly speaking, the first European to see Australia or New Zealand. He was, however, the first to chart them properly. Cook’s three voyages of 1768–1779 produced charts of the Pacific of such accuracy that they remained in use for more than a century, and the European understanding of the Pacific was, in any serious sense, a Cook creation. The Pacific that the British took in the late eighteenth century was the Pacific that Cook drew. It was also the Pacific that, having been drawn, became available for annexation.

The First Voyage: A Transit of Venus and a Continent

Cook’s first voyage, aboard HMS Endeavour between 1768 and 1771, was sponsored jointly by the British Admiralty and the Royal Society. The primary scientific objective was to observe the transit of Venus across the sun from a suitable location in the Pacific, which would help astronomers calculate the distance from the earth to the sun — the fundamental yardstick of the cosmos. Cook observed the transit from Tahiti in June 1769, having chosen the site on the recommendation of the Royal Society.

After the observation, Cook opened sealed instructions from the Admiralty ordering him to search for the supposed southern continent. He sailed south-west, beyond the reach of any previous European navigator, and on 19 April 1770 his men sighted the south-east coast of Australia. Over the following months he charted the eastern coast in extraordinary detail — Botany Bay, Port Jackson, the coast of New South Wales, the passage through the Great Barrier Reef — and on 22 August 1770, at Possession Island off the tip of Cape York, claimed the territory for Britain.

The voyage returned to England in July 1771, having circumnavigated the globe, and the charts and observations produced by Cook and his officers became a foundation of European knowledge of the Pacific. Joseph Banks, the naturalist on the voyage, brought back an enormous collection of botanical specimens that transformed European understanding of Australian and Pacific plant life. Banks used his subsequent position as de facto scientific adviser to the government to push for Australian settlement, and the 1788 establishment of the colony of New South Wales was, in a real sense, a downstream consequence of his voyage with Cook.

The Second Voyage: The Southern Ocean and the Antarctic Circle

Cook’s second voyage, aboard HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure between 1772 and 1775, was the first to circumnavigate the globe at high southern latitudes. The primary objective was to settle, once and for all, the question of the southern continent. Cook’s first voyage had not found it, but that had not been conclusive: the southern continent, if it existed, might lie further south than the Endeavour had reached.

The voyage definitively established that no habitable southern continent existed in the accessible southern latitudes. Cook crossed the Antarctic Circle for the first time on 17 January 1773, and on that same day reached a southernmost point of 71°10′S — a record for Antarctic exploration that was not broken until the early twentieth century. The voyage also visited many of the Pacific island groups, including Easter Island, the Marquesas, Tonga, and New Caledonia, producing a body of ethnographic and botanical observation that was unparalleled in European history. The naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg, who accompanied the expedition, produced a three-volume account of their observations.

The Third Voyage: The Northwest Passage and the Death in Hawaii

Cook’s third voyage, in 1776–1779, aboard HMS Resolution with HMS Discovery as consort, was primarily concerned with finding the Northwest Passage — the supposed sea route from the Pacific to the Atlantic, which would shorten the route from Britain to the rich trades of Asia. The voyage included a stop in Hawaii, which Cook named the Sandwich Islands after his patron the Earl of Sandwich, and an extensive exploration of the Pacific Northwest of North America, where Cook charted the coast from California to the Bering Strait and established the basis of British claims to the region.

The voyage ended with Cook’s death in Hawaii in February 1779. The circumstances are well known: a confrontation with Hawaiians over a stolen boat escalated, and on 14 February 1779 Cook was killed on the beach at Kealakekua Bay. The British and Hawaiian accounts of the incident have been the subject of extensive historical and anthropological study. Marshall Sahlins’s Islands of History (1985) argued that the Hawaiians understood Cook as a manifestation of the god Lono, and that his death was a ritual rather than a battle. The traditional British account, of a heroic explorer brought down by treacherous natives, has been substantially qualified by the more recent scholarship. Cook’s body was returned to Hawaii by his officers, but the exact fate of his remains has been the subject of recent research, with British and Hawaiian researchers cooperating in the 2020s to investigate the bones said to be held at the National Maritime Museum.

The Scientific Achievements of the Voyages

Cook’s voyages were notable for their scientific achievements, in part because Cook himself insisted on the scientific methods. He was one of the first captains to use a marine chronometer — the H4 instrument developed by John Harrison, copied by Larcum Kendall as K1 — to determine longitude at sea, and the accuracy of his charts was the result of careful astronomical observation. The voyages also produced important contributions to the understanding of scurvy: Cook insisted on a diet that included fresh fruit and vegetables, sauerkraut, and malt, and his crews suffered far less from the disease than the crews of comparable expeditions.

The scientific methods used on Cook’s voyages were a major innovation. The transit of Venus observation of 1769 — observed from Tahiti, from Fort Venus on the island of Tahiti — involved the Royal Society’s most prestigious astronomers, and the data they collected helped the French astronomer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle to refine the calculation of the astronomical unit. The ethnographic and botanical work of the Forsters and of Banks and Daniel Solander on the first voyage was the beginning of the systematic European study of the Pacific. The artist William Hodges, who accompanied the second voyage, produced the first coherent European visual record of the Pacific. The collections brought back to London, especially the Banks specimens, became the basis for the British Museum’s natural history collections.

The Contested Legacy

Cook’s voyages had a less benign legacy than the British imperial tradition allowed. The European contact with Pacific peoples that Cook’s voyages facilitated brought devastating diseases — venereal disease, influenza, measles — against which Pacific islanders had no immunity. The populations of Hawaii, Tahiti, and other Pacific islands declined catastrophically in the nineteenth century, and the Cook voyages are now often seen, in Pacific Island scholarship, as the opening of a period of demographic and cultural catastrophe. In New Zealand, Cook’s encounters with Māori led to an exchange of disease and ideas whose long-run consequences were devastating. The kōkōwai (red ochre) that the Māori used to mark their faces may have been the source of gonorrhoea that spread rapidly among Cook’s crew. The arrival of the British, both then and later, was not an unmixed gift.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of Cook has been transformed, in the last fifty years, by the integration of Pacific Island perspectives and by the social history of science. The older British tradition, going back to John Hawkesworth’s An Account of the Voyages (1773) and consolidated in J. C. Beaglehole’s monumental edition of Cook’s journals (the Endeavour journal appeared in 1955, the Resolution journals in 1961 and 1967), treated Cook as a heroic figure. The more recent scholarship, of which Marshall Sahlins, Gananath Obeyesekere, and Vanessa Smith are the most important representatives, has insisted on the Pacific Islanders’ agency and on the colonial context of the voyages. The Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate of the 1980s and 1990s — over whether Cook was killed because he was mistaken for the god Lono, or whether that was a post-hoc rationalisation — is the most prominent example of the field’s engagement with its subject. The current generation of Cook scholars, including Nicholas Thomas, Anne Salmond, and Matthew Rowley, has tried to integrate the European and the Pacific Islander accounts.

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