Cook's Last Voyage, Volume I: The Cape of Good Hope, the Kerguelen Islands and New Zealand

February 1776. James Cook is forty-seven years old, holds an honorary post at Greenwich, and has every right never to go to sea again. He sets out once more. Two sloops are fitted out on the Thames to seek, this time by way of the Pacific, the passage Europe has been hunting for two centuries north of America. Aboard are a herd of livestock given by the king, a painter, a surgeon naturalist, and Omai, the young Raiatean whom London had claimed for two years and who must now be returned to his islands.

This first volume is the year of approach. Tenerife and its peak against the sky, the breakers of Bonavista skimmed by night, the Cape of Good Hope where a second ship is awaited and does not come, then the descent toward the ice. On Christmas Day 1776, the Resolution anchors at the head of a southern harbor covered in penguins, without a single tree or shrub: among the rocks, a sailor finds a sealed bottle proving that Frenchmen have been there before.

Then comes New Zealand, and with it a question the whole crew carries in silence. Four years earlier, ten English sailors were killed and eaten in a nearby cove. The chief who killed them comes aboard, unarmed, and stands before the captain. His own people demand his death. Omai demands it louder than anyone. What Cook decides that day says more about him than three hundred pages of soundings and bearings.

The text follows the official journal of this third voyage, published in London in 1784 by John Douglas from the captain's own notebooks, and completed throughout by the observations of the surgeon naturalist William Anderson: the flora and fauna of Kerguelen's Land, the natural history of Van Diemen's Land, then a meticulous ethnographic portrait of the people of Queen Charlotte's Sound. Two voices, two ways of seeing, one voyage.

This Volume I corresponds to Book I of the original edition: from the fitting out of the ships at Deptford in February 1776 to the departure from Queen Charlotte's Sound at the end of February 1777, with two young New Zealanders aboard, setting out to accompany Omai to his native islands. The following volumes continue the route toward Tahiti, then north to the Bering Strait, beyond the scope of this first volume.

The first complete modern rewriting for today's reader, making this account accessible without betraying anything of the voyage. Four original illustrations and four redrawn maps bring the route to life, while a set of reference materials (glossary, timeline, index, editor's note, afterword, and further reading) and selected passages from the original text illuminate the reading.