Captain Cook: A Legacy Under Fire by Vanessa Collingridge

From the Publisher

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 Captain Cook's celebrated voyages: He 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 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.

Publishers Weekly

Already published and praised in England, this first book by British columnist and news anchor Collingridge presents a new take on the life of Captain James Cook, the British explorer and navigator whose journeys led to the "discovery" of Australia and the Hawaiian islands. After becoming fascinated at an early age with Cook's 18th-century exploits, Collingridge discovered during college at Oxford that a distant cousin, George Collingridge, more than 100 years after Cook's death, had risked his reputation with a convincing claim that Cook had not been the first to reach Australia. After spending "months trawling through map-room and libraries, retracing their footsteps," the author was able to produce this engaging account that links three decades-"a dance of a tango of three." Collingridge intercuts finely detailed chapters on Cook's exciting major explorations with her ancestor's more bookish investigation of newly discovered maps indicating that "the Dutch had certainly reached Australian shores at the start of the 17th century," which led to their mapping of western Australia, and that the Dutch documents were actually based on earlier maps made by the Portuguese. The author aptly achieves her stated goals of investigating Cook's real story, expanding the British version of Cook that is based on the way countries "manipulate history," and introducing a modern audience to the ongoing controversy over the Dutch-Portuguese maps. (Sept.) Forecast: Although it was praised in England, this excellent book's careful and deliberate account of exciting historical and psychological events may find itself competing with another Cook title, Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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