Latitude & Longing

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Voyages & Ventures is a panoramic series that plunges readers into history’s most daring journeys – tales of grit, brilliance, mishap, curiosity, and sheer human audacity. Each volume brings an explorer’s world vividly to life, blending wit, drama, and scholarship into stories that reveal how profoundly travel has shaped the way we understand our planet.

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Latitude & Longing: James Cook and the Wild Pacific Chase is the unforgettable story of a man who set out to observe a simple astronomical event and ended up redrawing half the map. This is Cook’s Pacific in all its sprawling, unpredictable glory – a world of drifting icebergs, luminous atolls, thunderous surf, and cultures whose sophistication astonished every sailor who stepped ashore. With a voice that combines narrative verve with forensic historical insight, this book follows Cook from the modest fields of Yorkshire to the vast immensities of the Pacific, tracing how an apprentice coalman became the century’s most formidable navigator.

Here, the voyages unfold not as tidy textbook episodes but as lived experience. You sail with the Endeavour as it heaves off the Great Barrier Reef; you watch the Resolution claw its way toward the Antarctic Circle; you feel the sting of polar spray, the press of tropical heat, and the quiet terror of reefs lurking beneath deceptively pale water. And you witness, at every turn, the complex human encounters that made these voyages far more than a sequence of landfalls – encounters marked by curiosity, diplomacy, miscommunication, generosity, and, at times, tragedy.

This is Cook with his brilliance intact but his flaws unvarnished: the disciplined surveyor whose charts astonished Europe; the driven commander who pushed his crew to extraordinary feats; the man whose temper frayed under years of strain; the leader who inspired loyalty even as he wrestled with his own limits. Equally central are the Pacific peoples whose worlds Cook entered – navigators, farmers, chiefs, and artisans whose knowledge and traditions reshaped the expedition’s understanding of the ocean they thought they were discovering.

Sweeping, immersive, and rooted in impeccable research, Latitude & Longing offers a fresh, compelling portrait of the Pacific’s most influential – and most contested – voyages. It is a story of wonder and danger, precision and improvisation, cultural brilliance and painful missteps. Above all, it is the story of a world that became immeasurably larger because one man insisted on measuring it inch by inch.