Join the voyage of a lifetime and the most bucket-list-worthy adventure on the high seas! Learn to sail HMB Endeavour and experience 18th century blue water sailing at its best. This magnificent tall ship will sail to and from Tasmania, New Caledonia and New Zealand in 2019. For adventure seekers and history lovers alike, the professional crew will train you in all aspects of 18th century sailing.
On October 26, Cabox Geopark in Western Newfoundland commemorated the 250th Anniversary of James Cook’s ‘Chart of the West Coast of Newfoundland’. Considered by many to be Cook’s finest map, the chart was published a year after his last survey in Eastern Canada, after being selected to command a voyage to the Pacific Ocean to witness the transit of Venus and search for the fabled southern continent.
In a world first, all three of explorer Captain James Cook’s handwritten journals from his three Pacific voyages will be on display together. The National Library of Australia’s Endeavour Journal will be joined by Cook’s two other journals, on loan from the British Library in London, to mark the 250th anniversary of the beginning of his three Pacific voyages.
Visitors to Cook and the Pacific will follow James Cook’s three remarkable Pacific voyages, and explore this spectacular region through the eyes of the British voyagers and the First Nations peoples they met. The exhibition takes visitors on a journey to the Pacific 250 years ago, with destinations including Tahiti, New Zealand, the east coast of Australia, Hawaii and even Siberia.
Sam Neill says he is fascinated with those “initial awkward, often funny, sometimes tragic first encounters” between Captain Cook, his crew, and the people they met in the Pacific.
When we think about Cook’s time in the Pacific, ‘funny’ isn’t usually the first, or even the second, word that comes to mind. But in this six-part series helmed by Neill, viewers discover the very human, and sometimes humorous, side of Cook’s three voyages to the Pacific.
Two hundred and fifty years ago today, Lieutenant James Cook sailed a 30m coal carrier named Endeavour out of Plymouth, England, plotting a course for wonder, immortality and a turquoise-edged, red-hearted paradise we’d come to call Australia. There should have been fireworks that day; angel-voiced choristers and a hundred stout men with snare drums lining the Plymouth dockyards.