He finds Miss Tahiti, the roughest bar in Alaska, and the secret of the red-teethed warriors of Savage Island. Horwitz meets native peoples – Aboriginal and Aleut elders, Maori gang members, the king of Tonga – for whom Cook is alternately a heroic navigator and a villain who brought syphilis, guns and greed to the unspoiled Pacific. Into the Blue is the result, and a compelling read it is too. Perhaps, by following in Cook’s wake, I could fathom the farm boy whose ambition drove him further than any man, until it killed him on a faraway shore called Owhyhee.’ His journals recorded every detail of where he went, and what he did. What had Pacific peoples made of pale strangers appearing from the sea, and how did their descendants remember Cook now? Cook and his men were as exotic to islanders as natives seemed to the English. I also wanted to turn the spyglass around. Reading Cook’s journals, more than two years later ‘I wondered what these places were like today if any traces of Cook’s boot prints remained. He divides his time between Sydney and the US.

Tony Horwitz is an award-winning American journalist and author. Yet the impoverished farm boy, whose rise to Captain broke the bounds of Britain’s class system, remains as mysterious today as the uncharted seas he sailed in the 18th century. By the time he was killed, in a bloody clash on the island of Hawaii in 1779, the map of the world was substantially complete.Ĭook sailed from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Tahiti to Siberia, from Easter Island to the Great Barrier Reef, and introduced to the West an exotic world of taboo and tattoo, of cannibalism and ritual sex. When he first set out for the Pacific in 1968, one third of the globe was blank. The first tale certainly falls under our heading, for it covers Captain James Cook’s three explorations – the last great voyages of discovery. Well, it’s two tales of adventure, separated by over 200 years. So what is this review doing in a naval history journal? The publisher, Allen & Unwin, lists this book under the heading of ‘adventure’. Into the Blue – Boldly going where Captain Cook has gone beforeĤ80pp., maps, index, bibliog.,pb., rrp $29.95 Publication March 2003 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved) Garden Island Northern Hill and Garden TourĬaptain Cook RAN Ships None noted.Anniversary Cruise: Sydney under Japanese Attack

Royal Australian Naval Transmitting Station ACT.

Admiralty House, Garden and Fortifications.

Spectacle Island Explosives Complex NSW.

HMAS Sydney II and the HSK Kormoran Shipwreck Sites.

Tony horwitz captain cook