Captain James Cook was a British explorer, cartographer, and naval officer famous for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean and to New Zealand and Australia in particular. He made detailed maps of Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific, during which he achieved the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand.
John Cawte Beaglehole was a New Zealand historian whose greatest scholastic achievement was the editing of James Cook's three journals of exploration, together with the writing of an acclaimed biography of Cook, published posthumously. He had a lifelong association with Victoria University College, which became Victoria University of Wellington, and after his death it named the archival collections after him.
HMS Endeavour was a British Royal Navy research vessel that Lieutenant James Cook commanded to Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia on his first voyage of discovery from 1768 to 1771.
HMS Resolution was a sloop of the Royal Navy, a converted merchant collier purchased by the Navy and adapted, in which Captain James Cook made his second and third voyages of exploration in the Pacific. She impressed him enough that he called her "the ship of my choice", and "the fittest for service of any I have seen".
Johann Reinhold Forster was a German Reformed pastor and naturalist. Born in Dirschau, Pomeranian Voivodeship, Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, he attended school in Dirschau and Marienwerder before being admitted at the Joachimsthalsches Gymnasium in Berlin in 1745. Skilled in classical and biblical languages, he studied theology at the University of Halle. In 1753, he became a parson at a parish just south of Danzig. He married his cousin Justina Elisabeth Nicolai in 1754, and they had seven surviving children; the oldest child was George Forster, also known as Georg.
Zachary Hicks was a Royal Navy officer, second-in-command on Lieutenant James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific and the first among Cook's crew to sight mainland Australia. A dependable officer who had risen swiftly through the ranks, Hicks conducted liaison and military duties for Cook, including command of shore parties in Rio de Janeiro and the kidnapping of a Tahitian chieftain in order to force indigenous assistance in the recovery of deserters. Hicks' quick thinking while in temporary command of HMS Endeavour also saved the lives of Cook, Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander when they were attacked by Māori in New Zealand in November 1769.
Isaac Smith (1752–1831) was a Rear Admiral in the Royal Navy and cousin of Elizabeth Cook wife of Captain James Cook, with whom he sailed on two voyages of exploration in the South Pacific. Smith was the first European to set foot in eastern Australia and the first to prepare survey maps of various Pacific islands and coastlines including Tierra del Fuego in South America.
Adventure Bay is the name of a locality, a township and a geographical feature on the eastern side of Bruny Island, Tasmania. At the 2021 census, Adventure Bay had a population of 218.
The first voyage of James Cook was a combined Royal Navy and Royal Society expedition to the south Pacific Ocean aboard HMS Endeavour, from 1768 to 1771. The aims were to observe the 1769 transit of Venus from Tahiti and to seek evidence of the postulated Terra Australis Incognita or "undiscovered southern land". It was the first of three voyages of which James Cook was the commander.
HMS Resolution was a 74-gun third rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, designed by Sir Thomas Slade and built by Adam Hayes at Deptford Dockyard and launched on 12 April 1770. The ship had a huge crew of 600 men. As one of the Royal Navy's largest ships she took part in seven major naval battles.
HMS Eagle was a 58-gun fourth rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy built at King's Yard in Harwich by John Barnard and launched in 1745.
The second voyage of James Cook, from 1772 to 1775, commissioned by the British government with advice from the Royal Society, was designed to circumnavigate the globe as far south as possible to finally determine whether there was any great southern landmass, or Terra Australis. On his first voyage, Cook had demonstrated by circumnavigating New Zealand that it was not attached to a larger landmass to the south, and he charted almost the entire eastern coastline of Australia, yet Terra Australis was believed to lie further south. Alexander Dalrymple and others of the Royal Society still believed that this massive southern continent should exist. After a delay brought about by the botanist Joseph Banks' unreasonable demands, the ships Resolution and Adventure were fitted for the voyage and set sail for the Antarctic in July 1772.
James Cook's third and final voyage was a British attempt to discover the fabled Northwest Passage between the Atlantic ocean and the Pacific coast of North America. The attempt failed and Cook was killed at Hawaii in a violent dispute with the local inhabitants.
Thomas Willis (1756-1797) was a sailor with the Second voyage of James Cook.
A Voyage Round the World is Georg Forster's report on the second voyage of the British explorer James Cook. During the preparations for Cook's voyage, the expedition's naturalist Joseph Banks had withdrawn his participation, and Georg's father, Johann Reinhold Forster, had taken his place at very short notice, with his seventeen-year-old son as his assistant. They sailed on HMS Resolution with Cook, accompanied by HMS Adventure under Tobias Furneaux. On the voyage, they circumnavigated the world, crossed the Antarctic Circle and sailed as far south as 71° 10′, discovered several Pacific islands, encountered diverse cultures and described many species of plants and animals.
Charles Irving was a Scottish naval surgeon and inventor. In 1770, he introduced a method for distillation of seawater to the Royal Navy, and was awarded the sum of £5,000 for his method in 1772. His apparatus for distilling seawater was used on the second voyage of James Cook and on the 1773 expedition by Constantine John Phipps towards the North Pole, in which Irving participated both as surgeon and as scientific collaborator of Phipps. He was later involved in British colonial enterprises in Central America that included an attempt to establish a crown colony on the Mosquito Shore, but his plans were thwarted by Spanish intervention.
Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World is Johann Reinhold Forster's systematic account of the scientific and ethnological results of the second voyage of James Cook. Forster, a former pastor who had become a Fellow of the Royal Society after writing several papers on natural history, and his son Georg had accompanied James Cook as naturalists on board of HMS Resolution. Originally, it had been planned that Forster's account should appear together with Cook's "narrative" of the voyage, but after lengthy arguments between Forster and John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Georg went ahead and published his own narrative instead in 1777, A Voyage Round the World. Observations then appeared in 1778, financed by subscriptions. It was translated into several European languages, including a German translation by Georg Forster.
A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, in His Majesty's ship, the Endeavour is a 1773 book based on the papers of Sydney Parkinson, who accompanied Joseph Banks as botanical illustrator on the first voyage of James Cook. Parkinson died at sea in 1771 on the return voyage, and the Journal was compiled by William Kenrick for Parkinson's brother Stanfield, who quarrelled with Banks about his brother's papers and belongings and attacked Banks and others in the book's preface. A legal injunction prevented the publication of the Journal until after the official account of Cook's voyage, edited by John Hawkesworth, had appeared. A second edition appeared in 1784 with explanatory remarks by John Fothergill.
An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of his Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, and successively performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Carteret, and Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, the Swallow, and the Endeavour: drawn up from the journals which were kept by the several commanders, and from the papers of Joseph Banks, Esq. is a 1773 book by John Hawkesworth about several Royal Navy voyages to the Pacific: the 1764–1766 and 1766–1768 voyages of HMS Dolphin under John Byron and Samuel Wallis, the voyage of HMS Swallow under Philip Carteret (1766–1769), as well as the 1768–1771 first voyage of James Cook on HMS Endeavour. Hawkesworth received an advance of £6,000 for editing the three volumes.
Great Britain 