DEATH OF CAPTAIN COOK, THE - A HERO MADE AND UNMADE

Captain Cook's enduring claim to fame is that he redrew the map of the world in three extraordinary voyages over the Pacific, north and south. The news that reached London in 1780 of his death on a beach in Hawaii the previous year was shocking and the details of that bloody and chaotic fracas had to be turned into something nobler as befitted a martyr hero.This new interpretation of Cook's life and death by a great historian of marine exploration argues that the circumstances and reporting of his death are the key to his reputation. For many years he enjoyed unparalleled status as 'the pride of his century' and in the white settlements in the Pacific as 'father of the nation'. By contrast first in Hawaii and then in the postcolonial world a different view emerged of a destructive invader, as much anti-hero as the reverse. His progress from obscurity to fame and then, for some, to infamy, is a story that has never been fully told.