The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook; By Hampton Side; Doubleday; 432 pp., $35.00 Tales of Cook’s exploits have fallen out of favor.

On the Big Island of Hawaii, where the waves roll into Kealakekua Bay, a white obelisk 27 feet tall looms over the shoreline. It's a tribute to the great circumnavigator Captain James Cook. It stands ...

"A lot of things started going wrong from the very beginning," historian Hampton Sides says of Cook's last voyage, which ended in the British explorer's violent death on the island of Hawaii in 1779.

When HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure set sail from Plymouth, England, in 1772, the ships were stocked for a long and grueling journey into the unknown. Provisions included 60,000 tons of biscuit, ...

A few weeks ago, the library of Cambridge’s Trinity College (home of the recently defaced Lord Balfour portrait) exhibited four ­Australian fishing spears. They are all that remain from a collection ...

“The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook” by Hampton Sides, Doubleday, 432 pages, $35. Hampton Sides is one of America’s foremost ...

The end of the story is unexpected and sudden, coming about because of misunderstanding and mistake. Yet it was the right story to finish just as the new year was climbing into the sky. Now, firmly ...

James Cook’s first voyage circumnavigated the globe in the ship Endeavour, and gave scientific members of the expedition an opportunity to collect specimens from previously unexplored habitats.

The wreck of Captain Cook’s HMS Endeavour may have finally been pinpointed, 17,000 kilometers (10,500 miles) from the country it is most famously associated with. Researchers in Rhode Island, on the ...

A rare medal from Captain Cook's second voyage of discovery has sold for £6,500. The medal, which was expected to sell for £2,000, sold for more than three times its estimate and will now form part of ...