James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville

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Captain James Cook was a British explorer and navigator. Famous for three voyages in the South Pacific Ocean and the coastal waters off North America, Captain Cook was best known for his discovery of the Hawaiian Islands. James Cook was also known for:

· Contributing to the study of geography

· Mapping out parts of the world

· Improving treatment and health of sailors on long voyages to prevent scurvy.

James Cook was born in England in a rural village that is today, in the county of Yorkshire. When he was 17 years old, Cook moved to the coast where he worked as an apprentice to a merchant and ship owner. When England was preparing for war with France in 1755, James Cook joined the British Royal Navy and in two years he was the master of a warship headed for Canada.

In Canada, Cook helped an army surveyor map the territory. He was so good at his job that Cook spent the rest of the war mapping Quebec and the St. Lawrence River. At the end of the war, the British government assigned Cook the task of mapping the coast of Newfoundland.

James Cook was a skilled leader and respected naval officer. He was also interested in science, which led the Royal Navy to send him on important scientific expeditions. He was famous for three voyages around the world.

Cook’s first voyage was to Tahiti in 1769 with his ship, the Endeavor to study the planet Venus as it passed between the Earth and the Sun in order to calculate the distance from the earth to the sun. Part of his crew consisted of scientists including Charles Green, an astronomer, and Joseph Banks, a botanist. Cook was also assigned a secret mission on this voyage: to find a continent that was thought to exist somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere (Australia today). Cook and his crew were able to study the plants and people of Tahiti and make careful notes about Venus. Cook circumnavigated both the North and South islands of New Zealand. In August 1770, he discovered Australia, claimed it for Great Britain, and named the territory New South Wales. Cook and his crew spent the next six months sailing around the islands of the southern Pacific until July 1771 when the Endeavor returned to England.

His second journey would take him south of Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and to New Zealand. In July 1772, Cook left England on the Resolution accompanied by another ship, the Adventure. On January 17, 1773, Cook and his ships became the first to cross the Antarctic Circle. In January 1774, the Resolution sailed the farthest south that any ship had sailed - to the coastline of Antarctica. Cook and his ship returned to England in July 1775 having sailed 70,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean!

On December 25, 1777 Cook and his crew departed from England and went to discover an island they named Christmas Island. Three weeks later, they found another group of islands they named the Sandwich Islands. Today, those islands are called the Hawaiian Islands.

Cook and his crew continued north until the weather became too severe and forced them to head back to Hawaii. Relations between the Hawaiians and Cook’s crew were not good and the Hawaiians were not happy to see them return. When Cook and some of his men went ashore, they were killed. His crew buried him at sea and returned to England.