Captain Cook - by John Gascoigne (Paperback)

About the Book

Captain James Cook was a supreme navigator and explorer. Gascoigne details what happened in Cook's voyages when he came across peoples with hugely different systems of thought, belief and culture.

Book Synopsis

Captain James Cook was a supreme navigator and explorer. Born in North Yorkshire in 1728, when Cook entered the world of the peoples of the South Pacific, the gulf between the two cultures was not nearly as vast as it was a century later, when ships made of metal and powered by steam were able to expand and enforce European Empires.

In their different ways both the English and the peoples of the Pacific had to battle the seas and its moods with timber vessels powered by sail and human muscle. Captain James Cook represented - in those places to which he voyaged - English attitudes in the eighteenth century. In his voyages he came across peoples with hugely different systems of thought and cultures. John Gascoigne explores what happened when the two systems met, and how each side interpreted the other in terms of their own beliefs and experiences.

Review Quotes

'Captain James Cook RN continues to fascinate. There must be hundreds of books that have been published about him. This is one of the better ones... An interesting and valuable new approach to an endlessly fascinating topic.'--Sanford Lakoff

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."..a valiant and interesting attempt to match the conflicting viewpoints of those about to be colonized and of those about to take over...an easy-to-read book that stimulates readers to consider matters they had previously taken for granted and to go away and look for their own answers." Parergon 26.1, 2009

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'An engaging and impressive volume ... well supported by about 45 illustrations and seven maps ... supplemented with full endnotes, an extensive bibliography and index. It is a valuable addition to the literature of social and natural sciences, exploration and naval history.' - Journal of Australian Naval History

"Captain Cook: Voyager Between Worlds makes a unique contribution in the sustained focus it gives to Cook's British social and cultural context as a way of understanding his encounters with new worlds. It is a truly evenhanded ethnohistory."-Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 42, Number 4, Summer 2009

"Gascoigne provides vivid examples of how the process of cultural conflict and accommodation worked in the Pacific in the mid-to late eighteenth century." - Journal of British Studies

"John Gascoigne ... paints a detailed and clear picture of that place and time, and, by extension, provides a keyhole onto Cook ... Academic yes, but highly readable." - The Age (Melbourne)

"Many biographies have been written about Capt. James Cook ... but Gascoigne takes a different approach in his insightful telling of Cook's story ... His perceptive analysis gives a new depth of understanding about the actual interactions between these cultures. With an extensive bibliography and endnotes; highly recommended for history and anthropological collections in academic and large public libraries." - Library Journal

"Offers an extensive reading of the voyages, drawing widely from a mixture of sources" Canadian Journal of History

"One of the great pleasures of this book is that it is elegantly written and in a style which should satisfy the general reader with an interest in the Pacific as well as Cook scholars. He confidently masters the broad literature of the voyages, the 18th-century British background and the available literature on the Pacific, showing definitively that there is still more to be said about the great 18th-century voyager and his impact." - Journal of Pacific History

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About the Author

Professor John Gascoigne was educated at the universities of Sydney, Princeton and Cambridge. He has taught in Papua New Guinea and since 1980 has been a member of the School of History, University of New South Wales. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His five previous books and other publications have dealt with the impact of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment and include a two-volume study of Joseph Banks and his world. His most recent work is The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge, 2002). Shortlisted for the 2008 NSW Premier's History Prize.