Captain Cook : A Legacy Under Fire

Collingridge , Vanessa

ISBN 10: 1585747254 / ISBN 13: 9781585747252

Published by The Lyons Press, Guilford, 2002

About this Item

An important reassessment of Cook. Illustrated with wonderful drawings by George Collinridge . Dust jacket is protected with a mylar cover .

Seller Inventory # 006624

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Captain Cook : A Legacy Under Fire
• Publisher: The Lyons Press, Guilford
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1585747254
• ISBN 13: 9781585747252
• Binding: Three Qr. Cloth , Paper Boards
• Illustrator: George Collingridge
• Edition: First Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Naval
  • British History

About this title

Synopsis

The author charts Captain Cook's legendary voyage of exploration and examines his place in history as the "discoverer" of Australia, looking at evidence that the Portuguese may have stumbled upon Australia more than a century earlier.

From the Back Cover

In 1768 James Cook, on an epic sea journey that secured his place in history, discovered Australia. One hundred years later, countering cherished legends, George Collingridge dared to claim that the Portuguese had gotten to Australia first. Now Vanessa Collingridge, his distant cousin, unravels the strange tale of history's most fascinating explorer and the man who sought to dethrone him. Collingridge charts Cook's celebrated voyages: Cook mapped the Pacific Islands, circumnavigated Antarctica, charted New Zealand, and discovered the New Hebrides and Australia, curing scurvy along the way. He was shipwrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, cruised with sails frozen solid amid two-hundred-foot-tall icebergs, struggled to keep his crew from losing battles with alcohol and Polynesian women, and somehow managed to stay one step ahead of competing French and Spanish explorers. Over his twenty-one years of adventure-until his murder on a beach in Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii in 1779-Cook changed the Western map of the world. Or so schoolchildren were taught. In 1883 British aristocrat George Collingridge sailed Down Under in search of adventure-and came across maps of Australia dated 1542 and 1546, drawn in northern France but based on Portuguese originals, suggesting that Cook was not the first to reach Australia. The proposal would prove Collingridge's undoing-and yet it is a controversy that lives on. (6 x 9 1/4, 384 pages, illustrations)