Mapping the Pacific and Captain Cook

By the mid-18th century, the British Admiralty and the Royal Society shared a strong interest in resolving two long-standing geographic questions: whether a large, temperate, and habitable southern continent, the hypothesized Terra Australis Incognita, existed in the South Pacific, and how accurately ships could determine longitude at sea. James Cook, a skilled self-taught navigator and cartographer who had already surveyed the coastline of Newfoundland in the 1760s, was selected to command an expedition combining scientific observation with these strategic and commercial aims.