Cook Towards the South Pole, Volume I: The Antarctic Circle, New Zealand and Tahiti

July 1772, Plymouth. Two converted coal ships set sail to prove that a continent does not exist. Learned Europe has drawn it for two centuries at the bottom of its maps: vast, populated, fertile. James Cook, a laborer's son who became the finest navigator in the kingdom, receives orders to sail as close to the pole as the ice will allow, until the question falls silent.

The Resolution and the Adventure round the Cape of Good Hope, then plunge into a white world no ship had ever entered. On January 17, 1773, they cross the Antarctic Circle, a first in the history of navigation. That same evening, the field ice closes the horizon from east to west. Cook turns north, loses his companion ship in a storm, and reaches New Zealand alone after one hundred and seventeen days at sea without sighting land, without a single man lost to scurvy.

Then comes the opposite of cold: Dusky Bay and its waterfalls, Queen Charlotte's Sound and its severed head, then Tahiti, the reef narrowly cleared, King Otoo, the festivities of Huahine and Raiatea, two young islanders who come aboard for a world they cannot imagine. And, at the very end of this first volume, news that chills the captain more surely than the ice ever could: a ship has passed this way before him, and no one knows under what flag.

This second voyage of Cook's is commissioned by the Admiralty and the Royal Society to settle, once and for all, the question of the great southern continent that geographers have placed at the bottom of their maps since antiquity. On board, the astronomer William Wales keeps watch over Kendall's chronometer, while the naturalists Johann Reinhold Forster and his son George Forster describe unknown plants, shores, and peoples. By crossing the Antarctic Circle, Cook sails farther south than any ship before him, and in the same stroke demolishes two thousand years of learned speculation about a populated and fertile Terra Australis.

The other victory of this volume is a quiet one: across a full crew, not a single man dies of scurvy, the disease that had until then decimated great voyages. Sauerkraut, malt wort, and strict discipline in the shipboard diet prove their worth here, a turning point for the British navy. The first volume of the trilogy devoted to Cook's second voyage (1772-1775), part of the Forgotten Travel Journals collection, Oceania & Pacific series, this volume follows the outward journey, from Plymouth to the Society Islands; the following volumes will carry the crossing of the South Pacific through to the return to England.

This is the first complete modern rewriting for today's reader, one that makes this account readable without betraying anything of the voyage. Twenty original illustrations and ten redrawn maps bring the itinerary to life, while a set of reference materials (glossary, timeline, index, further reading, editor's note, afterword) and selected passages from the original text accompany the reading.