The death of Captain Cook
Subtitle: a hero made and unmade
By: Glyn Williams
Series: Profiles in history; Profiles in history (London, England)
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2008
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 197
ISBN-13: 9781861978424
Subjects: Death and burial; Explorers; Biography; Voyages around the world; History; Discovery and exploration; British; Discoveries in geography
Description: Captain Cook's enduring claim to fame is that he redrew the map of the world in three extraordinary voyages over the Pacific, north and south. The news that reached London in 1780 of his death on a beach in Hawaii the previous year was shocking and the details of that bloody and chaotic fracas had to be turned into something nobler as befitted a martyr hero. This new interpretation of Cook's life and death by a great historian of marine exploration argues that the circumstances and reporting of his death are the key to his reputation. For many years he enjoyed unparalleled status as 'the pride of his century' and in the white settlements in the Pacific as 'father of the nation'. By contrast first in Hawaii and then in the postcolonial world a different view emerged of a destructive invader, as much anti-hero as the reverse. His progress from obscurity to fame and then, for some, to infamy, is a story that has never been fully told. -- Publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: 1.; title: A Distant Death -- -- 2.; title: An Enlightenment Hero -- -- 3.; title: Cook in the Colonial Age -- -- 4.; title: Cook in a Postcolonial World.; title: A Distant Death; title: An Enlightenment Hero; title: Cook in the Colonial Age; title: Cook in a Postcolonial World.