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What Were the Voyages of Captain James Cook?
The voyages of Captain James Cook (1728-1779) were three British Admiralty expeditions into the Pacific between 1768 and 1779 that produced the first accurate European charts of New Zealand and the eastern Australian coast, the first crossing of the Antarctic Circle, and the first sustained European contact with the Hawaiian Archipelago. Cook commanded HMS Endeavour, then HMS Resolution with HMS Adventure, then HMS Resolution with HMS Discovery; he sailed under Royal Society and Admiralty commissions; and he was killed at Kealakekua Bay on the morning of 14 February 1779 in a confrontation he himself had escalated.
The voyages survive in two registers that do not always agree. On one side sit Cook’s logs and journals, edited from the original manuscripts by the New Zealand historian John Cawte Beaglehole (1901-1971) for the Hakluyt Society in four volumes between 1955 and 1974, and the supporting papers of Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, and James King held at the British Library and State Library of New South Wales. On the other sit the Hawaiian, Māori, and Aboriginal traditions of those encounters — preserved by oral historians, by descendants of the people on those beaches, and by the anthropologist-historian Anne Salmond (born 1945) in Two Worlds (1991) and The Trial of the Cannibal Dog (2003). What follows traces the three voyages within the broader landscape of historical and archaeological mysteries, holding both registers open at once.
The First Voyage: HMS Endeavour, 1768-1771
Cook left Plymouth on 26 August 1768 in HMS Endeavour, a converted Whitby collier of three hundred and sixty-eight tons. The Royal Society had requested an expedition to observe the 3 June 1769 transit of Venus from a southern station; the Admiralty added secret instructions to search after the observation for the long-rumoured southern continent. Aboard were the wealthy gentleman-naturalist Joseph Banks (1743-1820), the Linnaean botanist Daniel Solander (1733-1782), the artist Sydney Parkinson, the astronomer Charles Green, and a Polynesian priest-navigator from Ra’iatea named Tupaia who joined the ship at Tahiti and who drew, in his own hand, a chart of seventy-four islands from which Cook copied a list of island names into his journal [1].
Tahiti and the Transit of Venus
The Endeavour anchored in Matavai Bay, Tahiti, on 13 April 1769 and remained there until July. Cook built an observatory at a point still called Point Venus and on 3 June 1769 he, Green, and Solander recorded the transit independently. The observations carried less weight than the Royal Society had hoped: a dusky shade around the planet blurred the moments of contact, and the three observers’ timings differed, in Cook’s words, “much more than could be expected.” The by-product of the three-month stay, and of the voyage as a whole, was extraordinary. By the time Endeavour returned, Banks and Solander had collected about thirty thousand specimens, including around 1,300 species new to Western science [2].
Aotearoa New Zealand and the Death of Te Maro
From Tahiti Cook sailed south and west, reaching the east coast of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand on 6 October 1769. His were the first Europeans to reach the islands since Abel Tasman’s brief visit in 1642. The first contact at Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, which Cook renamed Poverty Bay, ended in violence: on the evening of the first landing, Te Maro, a man of chiefly standing from the people now known as Ngāti Oneone, was shot and killed by the coxswain of Cook’s pinnace in what Salmond reads as probably a ritual challenge rather than an ambush, a ceremonial approach the British took for an attack [3]. Over the next six months Cook circumnavigated and charted the two main islands of Aotearoa. The Māori record of those months, preserved in oral tradition and synthesised by Salmond, shows the encounter not as discovery but as the arrival of strangers who killed when they did not understand what they were being shown.
Kamay (Botany Bay) and the Gweagal Shield
On 19 April 1770 Endeavour made the southeast coast of the Australian continent and on 29 April anchored in Kamay, the bay Cook would name Botany Bay for the richness of Banks’s and Solander’s collecting. The landing was contested. Two Gweagal men of the Dharawal nation stood on the beach to oppose the landing. Cook fired three musket shots himself; small shot struck one of the men, traditionally identified as Cooman, who took up a shield to defend himself. The British carried away about forty spears, and a shield is believed to have gone with them. A bark shield in the British Museum has long been presented as that shield and is the subject of a repatriation claim by Cooman’s descendant Rodney Kelly, though scholars have since questioned whether it is the shield taken in 1770 [4].
The Second Voyage: Resolution and Adventure, 1772-1775
The first voyage failed to settle the question of Terra Australis Incognita, the great southern continent that early modern geography assumed must balance the landmasses of the north. The Admiralty commissioned a second expedition for the explicit purpose of resolving the question. Cook was given two ships, HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure under Tobias Furneaux, and a brief to circumnavigate at the highest practicable southern latitude. He sailed from Plymouth on 13 July 1772.
The 17 January 1773 Antarctic Crossing
On 17 January 1773, just before noon at latitude sixty-six degrees thirty-six minutes south and longitude thirty-nine degrees thirty-five minutes east, Resolution and Adventure became the first ships known to have crossed the Antarctic Circle. Cook would cross the line twice more on this voyage, reaching seventy-one degrees ten minutes south on 30 January 1774 — the most southerly point any ship would reach for the next forty-nine years, until James Weddell passed it in 1823. He saw nothing but ice. Adventure had crossed the Circle with Resolution in January 1773, before fog parted the two ships that February. The result of three years of southern probing was a disciplined negative: there was no temperate Terra Australis; any land further south, Cook judged, must lie behind the ice and be wholly covered by it [5]. The conclusion ended two and a half centuries of speculative cartography.
The Pacific Detours and the Two Worlds
Between southern probings the Resolution swept north into warmer water for refit and provisioning. Cook returned to New Zealand, visited Easter Island in March 1774, charted the New Hebrides and New Caledonia, and called twice at Tahiti. The second voyage also brought Mai (called Omai in the British press), a young Ra’iatean who sailed to England with Furneaux in the Adventure, was painted by Joshua Reynolds, met George III, and became for a season the visible Polynesian face of the British encounter. Salmond’s The Trial of the Cannibal Dog takes its title from an episode of the third voyage. Returning in 1777 to the part of New Zealand where Māori led by the warrior Kahura had killed ten of Adventure’s men in 1773, Cook had Kahura’s portrait painted rather than punishing him; angry crewmen then put a sailor’s dog on mock trial for cannibalism, convicted it, killed it and ate it. Salmond treats Cook’s restraint there as a fatal turning point in his relations with his own men and with Polynesians [6].
The Third Voyage: Northwest Passage, Hawaii, and Death, 1776-1780
Cook’s third commission, signed in 1776, was to search the Pacific coast of North America for the western entrance of a Northwest Passage that the Admiralty hoped would shorten the voyage from Europe to East Asia. Cook sailed from Plymouth on 12 July 1776 in HMS Resolution, with HMS Discovery under Charles Clerke. The ships took the southern route via the Cape of Good Hope, called at Tasmania, New Zealand, Tonga, and the Society Islands, and on 18 January 1778 sighted the islands Cook named the Sandwich Islands and which their inhabitants called Hawai’i. He was the first European on record to make landfall there.
The Northwest Coast and the Bering Strait
From Hawai’i Cook turned east, made the coast of what is now Oregon in March 1778, and worked north through Nootka Sound, the Gulf of Alaska, and the Aleutian chain, charting as he went. The expedition passed through the Bering Strait in August 1778 and was turned back by pack ice at about latitude seventy degrees forty-four minutes north. The Northwest Passage, like Terra Australis before it, did not exist on the chart Cook had been sent to draw. Discovery and Resolution returned south for the winter and on 17 January 1779 anchored for the first time in Kealakekua Bay on the west coast of Hawai’i Island.
Kealakekua Bay and 14 February 1779
The arrival coincided with the closing weeks of Makahiki, the Hawaiian four-month festival of the god Lono — a season of peace, ceremony, and the suspension of war. Whether the Hawaiians who received Cook understood him as Lono returned, as a chief carrying Lono’s mana, or as something stranger and harder to place is a question scholars have argued for two centuries. Marshall Sahlins (1930-2021) read the reception as an apotheosis in Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981); Gananath Obeyesekere (born 1930) replied in The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (1992) that the apotheosis was a European myth projected onto Hawaiian agency. Salmond, in The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, offers a third reading: Hawaiian high chiefs were themselves regarded as akua, descended from gods, and both Cook and the ruling chief Kalani’ōpu’u were taken as descendants of Lono [7].
The ships left on 4 February 1779. A storm sprung the Resolution’s foremast and forced them back into the bay on 11 February. The festival was over. The mood had changed. On 13 February the Discovery’s cutter was stolen overnight; Cook decided to take Kalani’ōpu’u, ruling ali’i nui of Hawai’i Island, hostage against its return. On the morning of 14 February 1779 Cook went ashore with marines, found the chief, and was leading him to the boats when a crowd gathered and one of Cook’s men shot a Hawaiian chief named Kalimu in another part of the bay. The shore party turned to fight. Cook was clubbed on the back of the head and stabbed in the back, and fell face down at the water’s edge. Four marines died with him. His body was carried off, dismembered and partly burned, and the bones were divided among the chiefs. The remains returned to the ships on 20 and 21 February and buried at sea on the 21st were, by Lieutenant James King’s account, both hands, the skull and the scalp, and the bones of the arms and legs; the lower jaw and the feet were missing [8].
The Voyages in Two Registers
The standard European reading, established by Beaglehole’s edition and his subsequent biography The Life of Captain James Cook (1974), treats Cook as the founding figure of modern hydrographic surveying, a commander scrupulous about scurvy and crew welfare and scientifically curious. That reading is true. Copies of the charts he made of the southern Pacific were still in use in the mid-twentieth century. No man on the first voyage died of scurvy, and on the second voyage, Cook wrote, he lost only four men in three years, just one of them to sickness [9].
The Indigenous reading is harder. Cook’s voyages mapped the coasts that British, French, Russian, and American settlement would follow within a generation. New South Wales received its first convict transport in 1788, eighteen years after Endeavour anchored in Kamay; Aotearoa New Zealand was annexed in 1840; Hawai’i was unified by Kamehameha I in 1810 with weapons the post-Cook trade routes had supplied, and was annexed by the United States in 1898. The voyages did not cause those outcomes alone. They surveyed the ground on which they happened. Salmond’s account holds both readings at once, telling the voyages as encounters between explorers and islanders in which, as her publisher puts it, “amicable relations turned hostile, culminating in Cook’s violent death on the shores of Hawaii” [10].
What the Record Will Not Tell Us
Several questions remain genuinely open. Whether the Hawaiian reception of Cook in 1778 and 1779 mapped him onto Lono in the strong sense Sahlins proposed, or the weaker frame Obeyesekere and Salmond argued for, will not be settled from the existing record. Whether the death at Kealakekua was avoidable — whether a commander who had spent a decade in Polynesia might have read the change of season — is a counterfactual the journals cannot answer. Of the forty spears Cook’s men carried away from Kamay, only four are known to survive, and Trinity College, Cambridge, returned them to the La Perouse Aboriginal Community in April 2024; the conversation between the British Museum and Cooman’s descendants about the shield, whose identity is itself now questioned, is open. The voyages produced charts that stayed in use for generations, botanical collections that passed to the British Museum after Banks’s death, and a documentary record that the Hakluyt Society’s Beaglehole edition organised but did not exhaust. They also produced, on three coasts, the first sustained European look at peoples whose own histories of those weeks are only now being read beside Cook’s own.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Captain Cook’s three voyages take place?
The first voyage ran from 26 August 1768 to 13 July 1771 in HMS Endeavour. The second ran from 13 July 1772 to 30 July 1775 in HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure. The third ran from 12 July 1776 until the surviving ships returned to Britain on 4 October 1780, with Cook himself killed at Kealakekua Bay on 14 February 1779. The journals of all three voyages were edited from the original manuscripts by John Cawte Beaglehole for the Hakluyt Society in four volumes between 1955 and 1974.
Why was Cook killed at Kealakekua Bay?
Cook went ashore on the morning of 14 February 1779 with a party of marines, intending to take the ali’i nui Kalani’ōpu’u hostage against the return of a stolen ship’s cutter. A crowd gathered. In a separate part of the bay a British shot killed a Hawaiian chief named Kalimu. The shore party at the chief’s house turned to fight. Cook was clubbed and stabbed, and fell face down at the water’s edge. The death is best read, after Anne Salmond, as a cultural misreading and a violent escalation, not as an apotheosis or a martyrdom.
Did Cook discover Australia?
No. Cook was the first European to chart the eastern coast of the Australian continent, sighting Point Hicks on 19 April 1770 and anchoring in Kamay (Botany Bay) on 29 April 1770. Aboriginal Australians had lived on the continent for at least sixty thousand years; Dutch navigators had charted the western and northern coasts in the seventeenth century. The contemporary Australian historiography, supported by Tony Horwitz’s Blue Latitudes (2002), treats the 1770 visit as a contested encounter rather than a discovery.
What did Cook find in the Antarctic?
On 17 January 1773 Resolution and Adventure became the first ships known to cross the Antarctic Circle, near sixty-six degrees thirty-six minutes south. Cook crossed twice more on the second voyage, reaching seventy-one degrees ten minutes south on 30 January 1774. He saw no temperate southern continent — only pack ice — and concluded that Terra Australis Incognita as imagined by sixteenth and seventeenth century cartographers did not exist. The conclusion ended two and a half centuries of speculative southern geography.
Who was Tupaia?
Tupaia (c. 1725-1770) was a high-ranking priest-navigator from Ra’iatea who joined Endeavour in Tahiti in July 1769. He carried memorised sailing directions for an estimated seventy-four Pacific islands, drew Cook a chart that the British were unable fully to interpret, and acted as Cook’s principal interpreter and intermediary with Polynesian and Māori communities for the rest of the first voyage. He died in Batavia (modern Jakarta) in December 1770 of dysentery contracted ashore. Salmond and other historians treat him as the voyage’s hidden navigator.
Who was Joseph Banks?
Joseph Banks (1743-1820) was the wealthy English botanist who paid his own way onto Endeavour and conducted, with Daniel Solander, the first systematic European botanical survey of Polynesia and eastern Australia. The pair collected and described an estimated thirty thousand specimens representing more than a thousand new species. Banks later became President of the Royal Society for forty-one years and effectively shaped the next generation of British scientific exploration.
What is the Beaglehole edition?
The Hakluyt Society’s four-volume edition of The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, edited by John Cawte Beaglehole and published between 1955 and 1974, is the standard scholarly edition of the primary documents. It comprises Volume I (Endeavour, 1955), Volume II (Resolution and Adventure, 1961), Volume III (Resolution and Discovery, in two parts, 1967), and Volume IV (Beaglehole’s biography The Life of Captain James Cook, 1974), with a portfolio of charts and views.
How does Indigenous historiography read the voyages?
Anne Salmond’s Two Worlds (1991), Between Worlds (1997), and The Trial of the Cannibal Dog (2003), together with the work of Hawaiian, Māori, and Aboriginal scholars and oral historians, treat the voyages as encounters between two ethnographic registers in which the Pacific peoples were observers and strategists rather than passive recipients. The reading does not deny Cook’s navigational achievement; it insists that the encounters be told from both beaches at once, and that the colonial settlement that followed within a generation be named as part of the voyages’ historical effect.
Where can the voyages be studied today?
The Beaglehole edition (Hakluyt Society, 1955-1974) is the primary-source anchor. Tony Horwitz’s Blue Latitudes (2002) is the standard popular synthesis. Anne Salmond’s The Trial of the Cannibal Dog (2003) is the standard two-sided ethnographic account. Vanessa Collingridge’s Captain Cook (2003) and Richard Hough’s Captain James Cook (1994) are the standard one-volume narrative biographies. The Endeavour journal manuscript is held at the National Library of Australia in Canberra; Banks’s papers are at the British Library and the State Library of New South Wales.
Sources
- James Cook, Captain Cook’s Journal During His First Voyage Round the World Made in H.M. Bark Endeavour, 1768-71, ed. W. J. L. Wharton, Elliot Stock, London, 1893. gutenberg.org
- Emily Osterloff, Daniel Solander: a Linnaean disciple on HMS Endeavour, Natural History Museum, London. nhm.ac.uk; Cook’s journal entry for 3 June 1769 in Wharton (ed.), 1893 (see source 1).
- Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642-1772, Viking, 1991; summarized in What can we learn from the October 1769 meetings?, Gisborne Herald, 18 March 2023. nzherald.co.nz; Michael Spedding, The Turanganui River: A Brief History, Department of Conservation, October 2006. doc.govt.nz
- Steve Cannane, Rodney Kelly: Aboriginal man demands British Museum hand back shield belonging to ancestor, ABC News, 2 November 2016. abc.net.au; Maria Nugent, Works that Shaped the World: The “Gweagal” shield: Cook at Kamay (Botany Bay) 1770, Australian National University, 8 October 2020. cass.anu.edu.au; Trinity College Cambridge, Return of the Gweagal Spears to the La Perouse Aboriginal Community, 23 April 2024. trin.cam.ac.uk
- James Cook, A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, vol. 1, Strahan and Cadell, London, 1777. gutenberg.org; James Weddell, A Voyage Towards the South Pole, Performed in the Years 1822-24, Longman, London, 1827. archive.org
- David Hanlon, review of Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, American Historical Review 110(5), December 2005, p. 1512. academic.oup.com
- Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas, Allen Lane, 2003, as summarized in Death of James Cook, Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org; Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, Princeton University Press, 1992. press.princeton.edu
- James Cook and James King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784), vol. 3, King’s narrative, reprinted in The Three Voyages of Captain Cook Round the World, vol. VII, Longman, 1821. gutenberg.org
- James Cook, A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, vol. 2, Strahan and Cadell, London, 1777. gutenberg.org; Cook’s journal entry for 15 October 1770 at Batavia, with W. J. L. Wharton’s note, in Wharton (ed.), 1893 (see source 1); Second voyage of James Cook, Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
- Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Encounters in the South Seas, Yale University Press, 2003 (publisher’s description). yalebooks.yale.edu