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Karl B's List: Children
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Captain James Cook was an English naval explorer whose expeditions in the 1770s charted much of the lands of the Pacific, including New Zealand, Australia and Hawaii. The son of an agricultural worker, Cook was apprenticed to shipbuilders and joined the navy in 1755.
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He became a master seaman in 1759 and spent most of the next decade surveying around Newfoundland and Labrador. He commanded the Endeavor on his first trip to the Pacific, an expedition to observe Venus for the Royal Society (1768-71). On his return trip he circumnavigated New Zealand, charted the eastern coast of Australia and returned by way of Java and the Cape of Good Hope. His second voyage to the Pacific, commanding the Resolution and the Adventure, took Cook along the northern edge of Antarctica and helped him outline the southern hemisphere; in three years (1772-75) he lost only one crew member. His third and final voyage (1776-79) was an effort to find a passage across the northern part of America. After he was forced to turn back at the Bering Strait, he reached Hawaii in January of 1779
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Cook was also issued secret orders to seek the great southern continent (“Terres Australes Incognita” or unknown lands in the south) that geographers long believed kept the world in balance. In Cook’s day, the discovery of new lands often lead to great wealth for the nation claiming those lands. His orders were secret because the Admiralty did not want Britain’s international competitors to know about this aspect of Cook’s expedition. Cook searched for Terres Australes to no avail, determining that no such great continent existed.
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