Born in humble North Yorkshire, he left home at the age of 17 to enlist as an apprentice on a merchant ship, before joining the Royal Navy in 1755. As a sailor at first and later as an officer in the Navy, Cook completed three lengths voyages across the Pacific, during which he discovered and claimed Australia for the English crown and circumnavigated and mapped New Zealand.
His audacity allowed him to establish the first contacts with the Maori tribes. In Tonga he was warned of the ferocity and cannibalism of the Fiji population, but that did not prevent him from visiting this archipelago, where he discovered that the Fijians were not so voracious: at least he and his men were respected. The same did not happen to him in Hawaii, where he had to take refuge for the winter of 1779 due to the impossibility of going to the Bering Strait. In a skirmish with the natives, upset at giving the English part of their provisions, he was stabbed to death after killing a Hawaiian himself.
