Notes

James Cook was quickly promoted to lieutenant and handed a plain-looking but remarkably durable Whitby coal-pulling bark dubbed HMS Endeavour, which was just four years old at the time, weighing only 811,301 lbs (367,999 kg) and measuring less than 98 ft (30 m) in length. On the main voyage, James Cook carried an early nautical logbook and metal sextants but no chronometer.

Did you know he received an award from the Royal Society too? Cook was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society in 1776 for completing his 1772-75 voyage without losing a man to scurvy!

James Cook identified and graphed all of New Zealand, a difficult task that took a full year, after striking south and southwest from Tahiti, where his archetypes had cruised west and west-northwest with the leaning toward exchange winds. Rather than turning before the west breezes for the return trip around Cape Horn, James traversed the Tasman Sea toward the west coast and landed on the southeast bank of Australia on April 19, 1770. Cook effectively surveyed Queensland's Great Barrier Reef—since considered as one of the best navigational risks on the planet—as he ran north along its 2,000 mi (3,200 km) eastern coast, learning as he went, taking the Coral Sea and the Torres Strait with him.