James Cook was born in 1736 in Yorkshire, England and apprenticed as a grocer and haberdasher as a teenager before becoming interested in the sea. He joined the merchant navy and Royal Navy, gaining experience in mathematics and navigation. Cook commanded three expeditions to the Pacific Ocean between 1768-1779, where he mapped coastlines, discovered new islands and lands, and made European contact with indigenous peoples. On his final voyage, while attempting to take a Hawaiian chief hostage, Cook was struck on the head and stabbed to death in the surf at Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii in 1779.

2. Cook was born in the village of Marton in Yorkshire, now a suburb of Middlesbrough.
He was baptised in the local church of St. Cuthber. Cook was the second of four
children of James Cook, a Scottish farm labourer from Ednam. In 1736, his family
moved to Airey Holme farm at Great Ayton, where his father's employer, Thomas
Skottowe, paid for him to attend the local school. After five years schooling, he began
work for his father, who had by now been promoted to farm manager.
Cook’s house Cook’s family

3. In 1745, when he was 16, Cook moved 20 miles
(32 km) to the fishing village of Staithes, to be
apprenticed as a shop boy to grocer and haberdasher
William Sanderson. Historians have speculated that
this is where Cook first felt the lure of the sea while
gazing out of the shop window.
After 18 months, not proving suitable for shop work,
Cook travelled to the nearby port town of Whitby to
be introduced to friends of Sanderson's.
Cook was taken on as a merchant navy apprentice in
their small fleet of vessels, plying coal along the English
coast.
As part of his apprenticeship, Cook applied himself to the
study of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, navigation and
astronomy—all skills he would need one day to command
his own ship.

4. Cook married Elizabeth Batts .The couple had six
children: James, Nathaniel , Elizabeth, Joseph , George
and Hugh.When not at sea, Cook lived in the East End of
London. He attended St Paul's Church, Shadwell, where
his son James was baptised. Cook has no direct
descendants—all his children either pre-deceased him or
died without having children of their own.
Elizabeth Batts
In June 1757 Cook passed his master's examinations at Trinity House, Deptford,
which qualified him to navigate and handle a ship of the King's fleet. He then joined
the frigate HMS Solebay as master under Captain Robert Craig.
Cook's aptitude for surveying was put to good use mapping
the jagged coast of Newfoundland in the 1760th.
His five seasons in Newfoundland produced the first large-
scale and accurate maps of the island's coasts; they also gave
Cook his mastery of practical surveying, achieved under often
adverse conditions, and brought him to the attention of the
Admiralty and Royal Society at a crucial moment both in his
career and in the direction of British overseas discovery.

6. On 29 April 1968 Cook and crew made their
first landfall on the mainland of the continent at
a place now known as the Kurnell Peninsula,
which he named Botany Bay after the unique
specimens retrieved by the botanists Joseph
Banks and Daniel Solander. It is here that James
Cook made first contact with an Aboriginal tribe
known as the Gweagal.
After his departure from Botany Bay he continued
northwards.
He returned to England via Batavia (modern
Jakarta, Indonesia), where many in his crew
succumbed to malaria, the Cape of Good Hope
and the island of Saint Helena, arriving on 12 July
1771.
Cook’s first ship Endeavour

7. Shortly after his return from the
first voyage, Cook was
promoted in August 1771, to
the rank of commander.
Then, in 1772, he was
commissioned by the Royal
Society to search for the Resolution and Adventure
hypothetical. Terra Australis.
Cook commanded HMS Resolution on this voyage, while Tobias Furneaux
commanded its companion ship, HMS Adventure. Cook's expedition
circumnavigated the globe at a very high southern latitude, becoming one of the first
to cross the Antarctic Circle on 17 January 1773. He also surveyed, mapped and
took possession for Britain of South Georgia explored by Anthony de la Roché in
1675, discovered and named Clerke Rocks and the South Sandwich Islands
("Sandwich Land").

8. On his last voyage, Cook once again commanded HMS
Resolution, while Captain Charles Clerke commanded
HMS Discovery. Ostensibly, the voyage was planned to
return Omai to Tahiti; this is what the general public
believed, as he had become a favourite curiosity in
London. Principally the purpose of the voyage was an
attempt to discover the famed Northwest Passage.
After returning Omai, Cook travelled north and in
1778 became the first European to visit the Hawaiian
Islands. In passing and after initial landfall in January
1778 at Waimea harbour, Kauai, Cook named the
archipelago the "Sandwich Islands" after the fourth Earl
of Sandwich—the acting First Lord of the Admiralty.
Cook returned to Hawaii in 1779. After sailing around the archipelago for some eight
weeks, he made landfall at Kealakekua Bay, on 'Hawaii Island' , largest island in the
Hawaiian Archipelago.

9. In 1779 at Kealakekua
Bay, some Hawaiians took
one of Cook's small boats.
Normally, as thefts were
quite common in Tahiti
and the other islands,
Cook would have taken
hostages until the stolen
articles were returned.
Indeed, he attempted to
take hostage the King of
HawaiʻiThe Hawaiians
.
prevented this, and Cook's
men had to retreat to the
beach. As Cook turned his
back to help launch the
boats, he was struck on the
head by the villagers and
then stabbed to death as
he fell on his face in the
surf. Hawaiian tradition
says that he was killed by a
chief . The Hawaiians
dragged his body away.