Captain Cook
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A uniquely woven story encompassing three separate centuries and three different lives. Captain Cook, best known for his heroic voyages through the Pacific Ocean, is brought to life in vivid detail. We follow his humble beginnings as the son of a farm labourer, through his convention-shattering treatment of the indigenous groups he met on his travels, and then onto his final tragic voyage which signalled the end of his revered reputation.
One hundred years on from the death of Cook, another great man, George Collingridge begins his own adventure. He, like Cook was oblivious to the implications his journey would have. Along the way he unfolds ancient maps, secret tales and unearths hidden lands and buried treasure. He is also said to have realised that it was not Cook who discovered Australia - it was the Portugese. This firm belief was the eventual cause of his self-destruction.
Another hundred years later Vanessa Collingridge, is searching for books on her lifelong hero Captain Cook in a university library. She discovers the name of a distant cousin, George Collingridge, in a dusty card index. And so a new journey of discovery begins - in the footsteps of her hero and his nemesis.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Already published and praised in England, this first book by British columnist and news anchor Collingridge presents a new take on the life of Captain James Cook, the British explorer and navigator whose journeys led to the "discovery" of Australia and the Hawaiian islands. After becoming fascinated at an early age with Cook's 18th-century exploits, Collingridge discovered during college at Oxford that a distant cousin, George Collingridge, more than 100 years after Cook's death, had risked his reputation with a convincing claim that Cook had not been the first to reach Australia. After spending "months trawling through map-room and libraries, retracing their footsteps," the author was able to produce this engaging account that links three decades "a dance of a tango of three." Collingridge intercuts finely detailed chapters on Cook's exciting major explorations with her ancestor's more bookish investigation of newly discovered maps indicating that "the Dutch had certainly reached Australian shores at the start of the 17th century," which led to their mapping of western Australia, and that the Dutch documents were actually based on earlier maps made by the Portuguese. The author aptly achieves her stated goals of investigating Cook's real story, expanding the British version of Cook that is based on the way countries "manipulate history," and introducing a modern audience to the ongoing controversy over the Dutch-Portuguese maps.
