Captain James Cook was a supreme navigator and explorer. Born in North Yorkshire in 1728, when Cook entered the world of the peoples of the South Pacific, the gulf between the two cultures was not nearly as vast as it was a century later, when ships made of metal and powered by steam were able to expand and enforce European Empires.

In their different ways both the English and the peoples of the Pacific had to battle the seas and its moods with timber vessels powered by sail and human muscle. Captain James Cook represented - in those places to which he voyaged - English attitudes in the eighteenth century. In his voyages he came across peoples with hugely different systems of thought and cultures. John Gascoigne explores what happened when the two systems met, and how each side interpreted the other in terms of their own beliefs and experiences.