Captain James Cook, RN, FRS, has been rightly called ‘the greatest explorer of his age, the greatest maritime explorer of his country in any age’. On the three expeditions which he led to the Pacific between 1768 and his death at Hawaii in 1779, his ships thrice circled the globe; he drew the modern map of the Pacific, and he was the first European seaman to circumnavigate New Zealand, to discover the east coast of Australia, to cross the Antarctic Circle, to chart the north-west coasts of America.
In this edition, prepared for the Hakluyt Society, the text has been printed from surviving holograph Journals by Cook, under the editorship of Dr J.C. Beaglehole. The work is in four volumes and this first volume deals with the voyage of the Endeavour, 1768-1771. Prefixed to it is a General Introduction on the exploration of the Pacific before Cook. The illustrations reproduce original drawings and paintings (many now published for the first time), portraits, documents and maps. This is a facsimile of the edition first published in 1955, along with the Addenda and Corrigenda published in 1968. The illustrations originally in colour are reproduced in black-and-white, the fold-outs divided to fit on separate pages, and the volume is split into two parts, A and B.