2009 • 14' • French, English, Portuguese & German
Director(s): Gil Kebaïli • Producer(s): Grand Angle Productions • Coproducer(s): France Télévisions • Format(s): HD
A boy is at window watching a ship sail by in the distance… It is 1745 and Cook is 16 years old. He is apprenticed to a haberdasher in Staithes, a fishing village. And according to legend, Cook first felt the call of the sea when he looked out of the shop window. James Cook’s destiny is underway!
It is in 1769 that Cook takes to sea for his first voyage around the world. The charts available to him are the same as those of Bougainville. And an idea dating back to Ptolemy is till clinging on… it is said that there is a gigantic Austral continent whose extremity reaches up into the Pacific and which is bordered by Esperitu Santo (the New Hebrides), New Zealand and Australia (New Holland) attached to New Guinea, with the whole of these coasts forming but one single land! And it is Cook who will demonstrate what is really there…
Cook will carry out two further voyages between 1772 and 1779 that will take him to the two extremities of the globe. From the North Pole to the South Pole.
James Cook leaves a colossal heritage. It will be attributed to his enormous sense of seamanship, of his advanced skills at cartography, his courage in exploring dangerous regions to verify the accuracy of facts reported by others, his ability to lead men and to be concerned for the state of their health in rude conditions, in addition to his ambition and constantly seeking to go beyond instructions received from the Admiralty.
“Farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go…” James Cook.
Cook met his death on the island of Hawaii in 1779 during a battle with its inhabitants.
