Cook charts the Pacific
Three voyages map the Pacific accurately and bring devastating contact.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 11 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Early Modern, Holocene
James Cook's voyages from 1768 chart New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, cross the Antarctic Circle, and establish that no great southern continent exists where it had been assumed. He carries naturalists and a Harrison chronometer, and controls scurvy through diet. The Polynesian navigator Tupaia, who joined at Tahiti, drew a chart covering much of the Pacific from memory. Cook is killed in Hawaii in 1779, and the contact he opens brings disease and colonisation.