Blue Latitudes

Blue Latitudes
ISBN: 9780312422608
Publication Date: 1 August 2003

Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
Two centuries after James Cook's epic voyages of discovery, Tony Horwitz takes readers on a wild ride across hemispheres and centuries to recapture the Captain's adventures and explore his embattled legacy in today's Pacific. Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of "Confederates in the Attic," works as a sailor aboard a replica of Cook's ship, meets island kings and beauty queens, and carouses the South Seas with a hilarious and disgraceful travel companion, an Aussie named Roger. He also creates a brilliant portrait of Cook: an impoverished farmboy who became the greatest navigator in British history and forever changed the lands he touched. Poignant, probing, antic, and exhilarating, "Blue Latitudes "brings to life a man who helped create the global village we inhabit today.
Tony Horwitz is the author of "Confederates in the Attic," "Baghdad Without a Map," and "One for the Road." He is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has worked as a war correspondent for "The Wall Street Journal" and as a staff writer for "The New Yorker." He lives in Virginia with his wife, Geraldine Brooks, and their son, Nathaniel.
James Cook's three epic journeys in the eighteenth century were the last great voyages of discovery. When he embarked for the Pacific in 1768, a third of the globe remained blank. By the time he died in 1779, during a bloody clash in Hawaii, the map of the world was substantially complete. Cook explored more of the earth's surface than anyone in history--sailing from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Tahiti to Siberia, from Easter Island to the Great Barrier Reef--and introduced the West to an exotic world of taboo and tattoo, of cannibalism and ritual sex. Yet the impoverished farmboy, who broke the bounds of social class to become Britain's greatest navigator, rem...