James Cook was born in Yorkshire in 1728 to a farming family and at 16 became a shop boy in the fishing village of Staithes, lasting about 18 months before moving to Whitby to apprentice on colliers hauling coal in the North Sea. He taught himself algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and astronomy, earned his mariner’s license, and at 26 turned down command of a merchant ship to join the Royal Navy as an able seaman in 1755. In Canada he learned plane table triangulation from army engineer Samuel Holland and combined it with hydrography, and his charts of the St. Lawrence River let General James Wolfe’s forces slip through the shoals to capture Quebec. His precise record of a solar eclipse from Newfoundland caught the Royal Society’s eye, and he led the Endeavour voyage of 1768 to 1771 to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti, carrying secret orders to seek Terra Australis and claim land.

Polynesian navigator Tupaia helped him translate in New Zealand, but Cook’s habit of taking hostages over thefts turned encounters violent. In June 1770 the Endeavour struck the Great Barrier Reef, and the crew threw six cannons overboard and fothered the hole with a sail packed with oakum, wool, and dung. Disease in Batavia then killed 30 men. On his second voyage, from 1772 to 1775, he became one of the first Europeans to cross the Antarctic Circle, missed Antarctica by about 75 miles, and disproved Terra Australis. His third voyage from 1776 found no Northwest Passage, and in Hawaii he arrived during the Makahiki festival honoring Lono. Returning with a broken foremast in the season of Ku, he tried to take King Kalaniopuu hostage over a stolen cutter and was killed in the surf at Kealakekua Bay.

• He chose a flat-bottomed Whitby collier because it could run aground or be beached for repairs without capsizing.
• The K1 chronometer, a copy of John Harrison’s design, solved longitude at sea for his second voyage.
• Strict hygiene and fresh food meant zero scurvy deaths, though he credited sweet wort and malt, and he won the Copley Medal.
• Expedition scientists killed their pet dog to make broth when an intestinal blockage left him starving.
• His remains were identified by a scar on his right hand from a powder horn explosion in Newfoundland.