Cook: A boy is at window watching a ship sail by in the distance… It is 1745 and Cook is 16 years old. He is apprenticed to a haberdasher in Staithes, a fishing village. And according to legend, Cook first felt the call of the sea when he looked out of the shop window. James Cook’s destiny is underway! It is in 1769 that Cook takes to sea for his first voyage around the world. The charts available to him are the same as those of Bougainville. And an idea dating back to Ptolemy is till clinging on… it is said that there is a gigantic Austral continent whose extremity reaches up into the Pacific and which is bordered by Esperitu Santo (the New Hebrides), New Zealand and Australia (New Holland) attached to New Guinea, with the whole of these coasts forming but one single land! And it is Cook who will demonstrate what is really there… Cook will carry out two further voyages between 1772 and 1779 that will take him to the two extremities of the globe. From the North Pole to the South Pole.

Also available in French: James Cook