Your Daily Penguin: The Journals of Captain Cook!

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[penelopegough]

Cook is considered a villain by many these days. I own a beautiful hardcover edition of those journals and because I live on the East Coast of Australia and have travelled the length of that coast I have read all the relevant entries. Because I visit NZ regularly I have read those entries too. It is a fascinating study. Every morning I walk out of my home and see Cook’s Mount Warning, aboriginal name Wollumbin. When I was still working and people asked me for a Cook biography I always recommended J C Beaglehole. I think it was the name! There are more readable biographies these days.

[KathleenAnnBooks]

You have a radio show now? This is what I get for being 1 year behind on watching your videos. Slowly but surely I am catching up.

[DDB]

The Australian 1970 50 cent coin is the Captain Cook coin. It's possible to obtain them even today as change. Whenever I do, I throw them in my Capt Cook jar. I have no idea why I do it ;) But sshhh dont tell anyone. It's my little secret. And yes his statues have been desecrated lately. :(

[gaildoughty]

That’s interesting: I’ve often seen The Domesday Book on lists of classics. Not for me.
But journals sound at least marginally more interesting than an ancient tax roll.

[crayonmythos]

I am very interested in reading the book (although I would rather read the hard covers I had found because they looked REALLY nice) but Captain Cook was not murdered, he was killed; you can't be murdered if you were killed for one of your men having murdered the nephew of an Ali'i chief despite the natives having stolen some of your knives the day before, you (Captain Cook) were being an asshole about fislxing your ship, in return we, just like our cousins did nearly on every island you went to, stole your stuff (knives), but they're knives, you'll live. Plus Cook was a rapist savage and marauder who slaughtered natives island after island, we Hawaiians did our cousins a service by bashing Cook's skull in and we were even civilized enough to give him a full rights Hawaiian funeral which would not have happened had the tables been turned. Knowing the British as historic legendary savages, they would have left and come back with an entire army and enslaved all of us had we killed one of Cook's crew. We lucked out and showed the British who were smart enough to know when to back off, that we mean business and Polynesians are not to be messed with.