![]() "These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. ![]() As a suburban kid, growing up in a decade when even the moon had been conquered, I never ceased to feel a thrill at the TV show's opening words. Though I didn't realize it at the time, I also absorbed his adventures through episodes of Star Trek. Like most Americans I grew up knowing almost nothing of Captain Cook, except what I learned in fifth-grade geography class. "More than any other person," writes historian Bernard Smith, "he helped to make the world one." ![]() His explorations opened vast new territories to the West's burgeoning economies and empires, and all that came with them: whalers, missionaries, manufactured goods, literacy, rum, guns, syphilis, smallpox.Ĭook, in sum, pioneered the voyage we are still on, for good and ill. The steam engine and spinning jenny emerged as Cook set off on his first Pacific tour Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, as Cook embarked on his last. His decade of discovery occurred on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution. ![]() For the lands and peoples Cook encountered, the impact of his voyages was far more profound, and far more destructive. ![]()
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