John Gascoigne, Captain Cook: voyager between worlds.(Book review)

John Gascoigne, Captain Cook: voyager between worlds, Hambledon Continuum, London, 2007, xvi + 288 pages; ISBN 978 1 84725 209 8.

In my university lectures on European discoverers of Australia I mistakenly used to say that J. C. Beaglehole's exhaustive 1974 biography meant that there was very little historians could add to an understanding of the most notable discoverer, Captain James Cook. Publications over the past decade, particularly by Maria Nugent, Anne Salmond and Nicholas Thomas, provided important new perspectives on both Cook as a man and, in particular, the nature of his contacts with Indigenous peoples that I and many other historians failed to anticipate. John Gascoigne's analysis of 'the interaction between the world from which Cook came and the world he encountered' (p. xiv) ,is an equally significant fresh approach.

Gascoigne was well equipped for his task. A professor of history at the University of New South Wales, his previous publications were concerned with the impact of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment and included two widely acclaimed volumes on Joseph Banks. His exhaustive research into Captain Cook covered a wide range of published and unpublished sources and took him to different parts of the world. As he notes in his preface, the 'Cook book' was 'an intermittent presence in my family for many years' (p. xvi).

The structure is thematic. Each chapter connects Cook's Yorkshire background and experiences in London and as a seaman in the Atlantic to his cultural encounters in the Pacific. The first chapter is an overview of his different worlds with subsequent chapters considering the sea, trade, war, politics, religion, sex, and death.

Cook's place of death in Hawaii, Gascoigne argues, was in many senses a long way from Cleveland in Yorkshire where he grew up, but there were links between the two. The sea was a particularly crucial connection. Eighteenth century British sailors such as Cook largely owed their employment to the growing demands of seaborne trade, an essential component of his Pacific voyages. It was also a 'powerful solvent which was to reshape the lives of the peoples of the Pacific into new forms' (p. 99). While Pacific peoples recognised the power of European weapons, these had limitations and European tactics were not always well suited to armed clashes in the Pacific.

Societies in both Europe and ...