Cooks three voyages of discovery which took place between 1768 & 1779 are among the most remarkable achievements in the history of exploration. Cook charted vast areas of the globe with astonishing accuracy & the voyages also made a significant contribution towards solving some of the great problems of cartography & navigation. With crews containing gifted sailors & navigators as well as botanists painters & scientists Cook provides the link between the speculative profit-hungry voyages of the Elizabethan seafarers & the scientific expeditions of the nineteenth & twentieth centuries.