Tony Horwitz · 2002 · sea

Tony Horwitz's account of retracing Captain Cook's three voyages. Cook sailed a hundred and fifty thousand miles and filled in a third of the map before being killed on a Hawaiian beach. Horwitz followed him - crewing a replica bark, drinking with an Australian shipmate, and asking people in every landfall what they think of the man who found them.

1. 1
   Whitby

   Cook came out of a Yorkshire farm labourer's cottage and learned the sea in Whitby colliers - flat-bottomed, unglamorous coal ships, which is exactly why his Endeavour could be beached and repaired anywhere in the world.

2. 2
   Tahiti

   The first voyage went to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus, and the observation was a scientific disappointment - but the island was not, and Horwitz finds the encounter still being argued about by everyone involved.

3. 3
   Ship Cove

   In Queen Charlotte Sound, Cook's New Zealand base, Horwitz meets Maori for whom Cook is a navigator of genius and the beginning of everything that was taken - both views held, frequently, by the same person.

4. 4
   Botany Bay

   At Botany Bay the Endeavour's people met Aboriginal Australians who mostly wished to be left alone - and Cook's report of the place, thin as it was, brought the First Fleet eighteen years later.

5. 5
   The Great Barrier Reef

   North inside the reef the Endeavour struck coral at night and was saved by fothering a sail under the hull - seven weeks of repairs on a beach, and the closest the first voyage came to ending in the ordinary way.

6. 6
   Tonga

   In the Friendly Islands Cook was feted for weeks by chiefs who, it later emerged, had spent much of that time debating how best to kill him - and Horwitz gets the story from the present king's household.

7. 7
   Kealakekua Bay

   At Kealakekua Bay in 1779, over a stolen boat and a botched hostage-taking, Cook was clubbed and stabbed in the shallows - and Horwitz stands on the rock and finds the whole thing still unresolved two centuries on.