Captain Cook

Cover Type: Softcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Jacket Condition: None Issued
Publisher: Ebury Press
Publisher Place: London
Publisher Year: 2003
Edition: Reprint

Description: 470 pages. Book is in Very good condition throughout.

Publishers Description: In 1768, James Cook, on an epic sea journey that secured his place in history, discovered Australia. One hundred years later, countering cherished legends, George Collingridge dared to claim that the Portuguese had gotten to Australia first. Now VANESSA COLLINGRIDGE, his distant cousin, unravels the strange tale of historys most fascinating explorer and the man who sought to dethrone him. Collingridge charts Captain Cooks celebrated voyages: He mapped the Pacific islands, circumnavigated Antarctica, charted New Zealand, and discovered the New Hebrides and Australia, curing scurvy along the way. He was shipwrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, cruised with sails frozen amid two-hundred-foot-tall icebergs, struggled to keep his crew from losing battles with alcohol and Polynesian women, and somehow managed to stay one step ahead of competing French and Spanish explorers. Over his twenty-one years of adventure--until his murder on a beach in Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii in 1779--Cook changed the Western map of the world. Or so schoolchildren were taught. In 1883 British aristocrat George Collingridge sailed Down Under in search of adventure--and came across maps of Australia dated 1542 and 1546, drawn in northern France but based on Portuguese originals, suggesting that Cook was not the first to reach Australia. This proposal would prove Collingridges undoing--and yet it is a controversy that lives on.

ISBN: 9780091888985