Travelling in the footsteps of Captain James Cook 

The travels and explorations of the famed Captain James Cook are well-documented, but the key locations of his life and legacy on land are less widely spoken of. We follow in the footsteps of the intrepid explorer.

The great voyages of discovery of Captain James Cook are legendary—his navigational skills, his precise charting of the coastlines of Canada and Australia, and his attention to diet to prevent sailors dying of scurvy are all well-documented. His crew were the first Europeans to set foot in modern day Hawaii and his vessel the Endeavour even lent its name to a NASA Space Shuttle. He is rightly considered one of the greatest navigators and explorers of all time.

James Cook was born on October 27, 1728 in Marton-in-Cleveland, Yorkshire, England. He was the second of eight children born to James Cook (1693–1779), a Scottish farm labourer from Ednam in Roxburghshire, and his locally born wife, Grace Pace (1702–1765), from Thornaby-on-Tees. James junior was baptised on 14 November in the parish church of St Cuthbert, where his name can be seen in the church register. 

The Captain Cook Birthplace Museum (http://www.captcook-ne.co.uk) opened in Marton-in-Cleveland in 1978 – the 250th anniversary of Cook’s birth. It is housed in a purpose-built building close to the 1858 granite urn marking the site of Cook’s birthplace cottage in Stewart Park. The Museum’s collection includes around 1,500 artefacts from different world cultures, including Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, with the majority of items donated by the Aboriginal Arts Board of Australia. It also holds a collection of items relating to James Cook and his family, including personal possessions, household items and memorabilia from his voyages, as well as a plethora of natural history specimens and nautical artefacts. 

In 1736, Cook’s family moved to Aireyholme Farm at Great Ayton, where the father was employed as a hind or bailiff for Thomas Skottowe. The name Aireyholme comes from the Scandinavian or Viking word ergum, meaning high or summer pasture. Skotttowe paid for young James to attend the local Postgate’s School in Great Ayton.

As a young boy, Cook would have climbed the nearby hill, Roseberry Topping. This distinctive hill has a distinctive half-cone shape with a jagged cliff, which has led to many comparisons with the much higher Matterhorn Peak in the Swiss-Italian Alps. The iconic outline features in the logo for the nearby Teesside International Airport.

In 1741, after five years' schooling, young James began working for his father, who had by this time been promoted to farm manager. In 1745, when he was 16, Cook moved 20 miles (32 km) to the fishing village of Staithes, to be apprenticed as a shop boy to grocer and haberdasher William Sanderson—this was his first contact with the sea. As he proved unsuited to shop work, after 18 months he took off to the nearby port of Whitby, and there was introduced to friends of Sanderson, prominent local Quakers John and Henry Walker. They were shipowners in the coal trade and took Cook on as a merchant navy apprentice in their small fleet of vessels which traversed the east coast of England. 

The Captain Cook Memorial Museum in Whitby, is now in Walker's House, which belonged to Captain John Walker. Having lodged there as an apprentice, Cook returned to visit in the winter of 1771–72 after his first voyage of discovery.

Cook spent several years sailing between the Tyne and London, on colliers (cargo ships designed to carry coal) and coasters (shallow-hulled trading ships designed to traverse through reefs and unload in shallow ports). Despite his lack of formal education, he began to apply himself to the studies of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, navigation and astronomy as part of his apprenticeship. 

His three-year apprenticeship completed, Cook began working on trading ships in the Baltic Sea. After completing his apprenticeship and passing his examinations in 1752, he began working on trading ships in the Baltic Sea and progressed through the merchant navy ranks. However, in 1755, he left the Merchant Navy, and started he volunteered for service in the Royal Navy, despite having to start back at the bottom of the hierarchy. At the time Britain was re-arming for what was to become the Seven Years' War, and Cook’s obvious skills meant he advanced quickly after entering the Navy at Wapping on 17 June 1755.

Meanwhile, in 1755 the Cook family moved into a cottage in Great Ayton. In 1933 the owner of Cooks' Cottage, his parents last home, decided to sell it with the condition that the building remains in England. A bid of £800 from businessman and philanthropist Sir Russell Grimwade, beating the highest local offer of £300, tempted her to change the terms to ‘within the Empire’. The cottage was deconstructed brick by brick, packed into 253 cases and 40 barrels for shipping on board the Port Dunedin from Hull, and sent off to Melbourne, Australia. It was reassembled there and now forms a popular tourist attraction. Cuttings from ivy that adorned the house were also taken and planted when the house was re-erected. Although it is matter of debate among historians whether Cook ever lived there, he would almost certainly have visited his parents in the house. 

In June 1757 Cook formally passed his master's examinations, officially qualifying him as a specialist in navigation, at Trinity House, Deptford, qualifying him to navigate and handle a ship of the King's fleet. Today Trinity House is still the home of the official authority for lighthouses in England, Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar, as well as a maritime charity, disbursing funds for the welfare of retired seamen, the training of young cadets and the promotion of safety at sea.

Cook married Elizabeth Batts, the daughter of one of his mentors, Samuel Batts, innkeeper of the Bell Inn in Wapping. The couple wed on 21 December 1762 at St Margaret's Church, Barking, Essex. The couple had six children, all of whom died before having their own, and so Captain Cook has no direct descendants. Elizabeth outlived all of her children: James (1763–1794), Nathaniel (1764–1780, lost at sea in a hurricane in the West Indies), Elizabeth (1767–1771), Joseph (1768–1768), George (1772–1772) and Hugh (1776–1793, who died of scarlet fever while a student at Christ's College, Cambridge). The Cook family lived in the East End of London, and would have attended St Paul's Church, Shadwell, where James was baptised. The site of their first marital home at 126 Upper Shadwell, Stepney is now in the middle of a highway, and so the Stepney Historical Trust affixed a blue plaque to mark the spot was affixed to Free Trade Wharf, to commemorate his life in the area.  

One of the earliest monuments to Cook in the United Kingdom is located at The Vache, an estate near Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire, erected in 1780 by Admiral Hugh Palliser, a contemporary of Cook and one-time owner of the estate. Near his boyhood village of Great Ayton, a large obelisk was built on Easby Moor in 1827. Another monument to Cook can be found in the church of St Andrew the Great, St Andrew's Street, Cambridge, where two of his sons Hugh and James, and his widow Elizabeth are buried—Elizabeth left money in her will for the upkeep of the memorial. In London, a statue erected in his honour stands near Admiralty Arch on the south side of The Mall.

Cook’s Famous Voyages 

1768-1771: the First Voyage of Discovery

In 1766 he was commissioned as commander of HM Bark Endeavour for the first of three Pacific voyages, and in the summer of 1768 set sail for Tahiti, to record observations of the Transit of Venus. Cook charted New Zealand and the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, and demonstrated by circumnavigating New Zealand that it was not attached to a larger landmass to the south.

1772-1775: Second Voyage

In August 1771 he was promoted to the rank of commander and in 1772, he was commissioned to lead another scientific expedition on behalf of the Royal Society. In reality he had been given a secret mission—to search for the fabled continent of Terra Australis Incognita. Cook's son George was born five days before he left for his second voyage. On this voyage, he charted present-day Tonga, Easter Island, New Caledonia, the South Sandwich Islands and South Georgia, and disproved the existence of Terra Australis. In January 1773 Cook becomes the first navigator to cross the Antarctic Circle.

1776-1780: Third Voyage

His third and final great voyage of discovery began in the summer of 1776, in search of the North-West passage. They were within 50 miles of the western entrance to the passage but the impenetrable ice and extreme conditions forced them back, and they returned to Hawaii in 1779, where after the theft of one of his ship’s small cutter vessels, relations with locals soured and Cook was killed in the ensuing violence.