James Cook

Who is James Cook?

James Cook was a British Royal Navy captain, navigator, and cartographer who led three voyages of Pacific and polar exploration. On his second voyage (1772-1775), commanding HMS Resolution, he was tasked with settling the question of a habitable southern continent. In January 1775 he sighted and circumnavigated an ice-covered island in the far South Atlantic that whalers and sealers may have glimpsed earlier but that no one had landed on or charted. On 17 January 1775 he went ashore at a bay he named Possession Bay, raised the British flag, and formally claimed the island for Britain in the name of King George III, naming it the "Isle of Georgia" (later South Georgia). Days later he also sighted and named the South Sandwich Islands, calling the group "Sandwich Land" after his patron the Earl of Sandwich. Cook's bleak, precise journal descriptions of South Georgia's glaciers and lack of vegetation helped convince him that any southern continent, if it existed, would be a frozen wasteland of little practical value — a conclusion that shaped Antarctic exploration for the following century. He was killed in Hawaii in 1779 during his third voyage.

Sources: James Cook, ship's journal, HMS Resolution, entries of 14-17 January 1775 and 6 February 1775 · James Cook, A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World (London, 1777) · South Georgia Museum, "250 Years of Discovery: Captain Cook's Antarctic Voyage" (sgmuseum.gs)