Captain Cook’s Voyages

James Cook’s three Pacific voyages are difficult to appreciate from a list of places. Put the routes on a map and their scale becomes much clearer. They run from Britain into the Pacific, around New Zealand and Australia, deep into the Southern Ocean and, on the final voyage, north to Alaska and the Bering Strait.

We have added the three routes to the Exploration section of wrecksite.uk Special Projects, together with a georeferenced historical chart showing Cook’s voyages. The chart can be faded over the modern basemap and each voyage can be switched on or off independently.

The first voyage

Cook left Britain in Endeavour in 1768. The expedition was sent first to Tahiti, where observations were made of the transit of Venus in June 1769. Cook then opened further Admiralty instructions directing him to search the South Pacific for the supposed southern continent.

The voyage continued to New Zealand, where Cook charted the coastline and established that the two principal islands were not part of a larger southern landmass. Endeavour then crossed the Tasman Sea and followed the east coast of Australia before returning to Britain in 1771.

It was an unusually productive surveying voyage, but the coastlines being placed on European charts were not empty or unknown places. Cook and his crew were travelling through lands and waters already known and occupied by Indigenous peoples. The maps produced by the expedition subsequently became part of a much wider expansion of British activity in the Pacific.

The second voyage

Cook returned to the Pacific in 1772, this time commanding Resolution, accompanied by Adventure. The main geographical question remained the existence of a large southern continent.

The ships pushed much further south than the first expedition. Cook crossed the Antarctic Circle and spent much of the voyage searching high southern latitudes. The resulting route is perhaps the most useful of the three to see on a world map: rather than simply crossing the Pacific, it loops repeatedly through the Southern Ocean.

By the time Resolution returned to Britain in 1775, Cook had demonstrated that the imagined temperate Terra Australis could not exist in the form shown on earlier European maps. Antarctica itself remained largely hidden behind sea ice.

The third voyage

Cook sailed again in Resolution in 1776, accompanied by Discovery. This time the main objective lay to the north: an attempt to find a navigable North-West Passage linking the Pacific and Atlantic.

The expedition crossed the Pacific and reached the Hawaiian Islands before continuing to the west coast of North America. Cook surveyed northwards through Alaskan waters and into the Bering Strait, where sea ice prevented further progress.

The ships returned to Hawaii in 1779. Cook was killed at Kealakekua Bay on 14 February during a confrontation following the attempted recovery of a stolen cutter. The expedition itself continued. Resolution and Discovery made another attempt on the Bering Strait before eventually returning to Britain in 1780.

Putting the voyages back on the chart

The historical layer used here is A general chart: exhibiting the discoveries made by Captn. James Cook in this and his two preceeding voyages; with the tracks of the ships under his command. The original image has been divided into western and eastern sheets and georeferenced so that it can be displayed over a modern Web Mercator map.

The voyage courses are separate vector routes. On the Special Projects map Endeavour represents the first voyage, while the two Resolution routes represent the second and third. Keeping them separate makes it possible to follow one expedition at a time, or display all three against the historical chart.

The interesting part is the comparison. With the chart partly transparent, eighteenth-century coastlines and place names can be read directly against the modern geography underneath. At the same time, the voyage tracks show the geographical relationship between journeys that are normally described separately.