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As a boy, Cook had been miserable, working on his father’s Yorkshire farm and in a grocery store, until he joined the Royal Navy, distinguishing himself as a pilot in time to guide General Wolfe up the St Lawrence River to capture Quebec. In August 1768, Cook, now thirty-nine, shy, impatient and quick-witted, tall and handsome, self-taught and self-driven, had been chosen by the Royal Society to command HMS Endeavour and observe the transit of Venus across the sun in Tahiti, transporting an astronomer, along with a rich young botanist called Joseph Banks, round Tierra del Fuego to the Pacific. In Tahiti he met a Polynesian navigator and priest Tupaia, a haughty refugee from Raiatea, who taught him how Polynesians had navigated the ocean, helped him map the islands, and accompanied him across the Pacific in 1770 to land on Aotearoa – which the Dutch had called New Zealand – where they encountered Maori people.

Sailing to Australia, Cook landed at what he called Stingray Bay on the eastern coast, renaming it Botany Bay in honour of Banks, who collected 30,000 samples on the trip and spotted an extraordinary animal – a kangaroo – the first sign that this continent had been isolated for many millennia. Claiming eastern Australia – New South Wales – for Britain, Cook encountered Gweagal aboriginals of the Botany Bay area, sailing ‘so near the shore as to distinguish several people upon the sea beach; they appear’d to be of a very dark or black Colour’. Unfortunately the Gweagal resisted Cook’s landing, throwing spears until they were shot at and one man injured. They did not wish to communicate. Tupaia died at Batavia on Cook’s voyage home.

On their return to London, Cook and Banks became celebrities flaunting their exploits, their 1,400 new plants including eucalyptus and acacia, and their Tahitian passenger, Omai, who was introduced to George III and painted by Joshua Reynolds. But Cook was bored at home. His thoughts roaming boundlessly, he claimed that he had travelled ‘farther than any man has been before me, but as far as I think it is possible for a man to go’ – true at the time.

In July 1776, Cook’s patron the earl of Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, commissioned a voyage on HMS Resolution and Discovery to take Omai home but really to find a north-west passage to the Pacific – and beat France.

Cook returned Omai to Tahiti, then sailed on to ‘discover’ Maui and Hawaii, which he named the Sandwich Islands. Unbeknown to the British, it was the Makahiki season, the festivities to celebrate harvest and the god Lono, one of the four primal deities, and boatloads of Hawaiians canoed out to visit the Europeans. The men wished to trade and offered pigs and fruit; the girls danced on deck singing a hula:

Where oh where

Is the hollow stemmed stick, where is it,

To make an arrow for the hawk?

Come and shoot …

A penis, a penis to be enjoyed:

Don’t stand still, come gently …

Shoot off your arrow.

The Protestant British were amazed by their sexual generosity. Never himself partaking of the Hawaiian girls (loyal to his wife at home with their six children), Cook wrote that he allowed sexual contact ‘because he could not prevent it’. But he tried to limit the spread of venereal disease from his men to the Polynesians, inspecting them and allowing only healthy ones loose on the islands. It was not understood at the time that men with STDs might be asymptomatic but still infect others, and he was agonized to see Hawaiian women with syphilitic sores.

On the Discovery, the alii-nui Kaleiopuu took off his cloak and helmet and presented them to the Englishman, who could not have known how valuable they were. But both sides were quickly disillusioned with each other: Britons had sex with women on what to the Hawaiians was holy ground, while prudish sailors were shocked to learn that Kaleiopuu kept a string of teenaged boys as his aikane (lover of the same gender) whom he liked to ejaculate on to him. When one of Cook’s officers, William Bligh,^* ordered Hawaiians to perform some tasks and tried to beat them when they refused, Cook wisely sailed away – to explore the coast of California.

On Cook’s return, his men infuriated the Hawaiians by mistakenly purloining idols for firewood. Sensing peril, he decided to emulate Cortés and kidnap King Kaleiopuu at gunpoint, but he was foiled when his wife Kanekapolei raised the alarm. In the melee, Cook shot a Hawaiian and his marines killed several more before a nobleman smashed Cook on the head with a shark-tooth mace. The Hawaiians then stabbed Cook and four marines.

While the king hid, his nephew Prince Kamehameha sent a pig as a gesture of reconciliation to the Discovery. After the British had bombarded a village, Kaleiopuu delivered Cook’s skull, scalp, feet and hands.^* The remains were buried at sea.