by Jessica Kuzmier

Created on: September 06, 2010   Last Updated: June 02, 2011

The adventures of Captain Cook can conjure up images of adventure and intrigue for those who are tantalized by tales of discovery and history. Without the voyages of Captain James Cook, history would probably look a lot different than it does today. This British figure can really intrigue one's imagination; it did for historian Tony Horwitz. It tantalized him so much that he decided to retrace the steps of the explorer himself, to see through his own eyes something of what the explorer saw, and perhaps what his discoveries had evolved into.

     "Blue Latitudes" is the culmination of these travels, weaving journeys on the Atlantic and the Pacific, from Cook's birthplace in England to his deathbed off the Kona Coast of Hawaii. In between are other pitstops in both travelers' journeys, from the well-known, perhaps even overrun, Great Barrier Reef in Australia to the little known country of Niue, pronounced "New-way". In the spirit of trying to recapture one of the first Westerners to span the globe, Horwitz and his friend British expatriate turned Australian Roger Williamson, put thousands of miles into a pilgrimage commemorating a life of exploration.

     The subtitle, "Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before", may seem like a satiric jab toward the Star Trek series, which opens itself with the tagline "boldly going where no man has gone before". It certainly looked like some kind of gimmick to make the book sound amusing. But the author sees an analogy between the two men. Raised on Star Trek as a kid, the author believes that the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk in many ways mirrored those of Captain James Cook. Both explorers set out to find terra incognita, and both treks were intended to be missions of discovery.

     The author's intrigue with this analogy seems to have been nurtured in his adult life, when he moved from the United States to Sydney, Australia when he followed his wife to her native land. As fate would have it, Horwitz moved just miles away from where Cook and his crew became the first Europeans to visit the east coast of Australia. A visit to an antiquarian bookstore yielded a copy of Cook's journals, laying the seed for his own adventure. What would it be like to follow in the footsteps of the one who went before him? This question was the inspiration for Horwitz to set out on his own intrepid adventures.

     "Blue Latitudes" is a romping adventure

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>