Geoffrey Blainey

Geoffrey Blainey is an Australian historian whose wide-ranging books have examined mining, migration, transport, religion, and national history. Captain Cook’s Epic Voyage revisits the Endeavour expedition of 1768 to 1771, following Cook's astronomical work in Tahiti, Joseph Banks's natural-history collecting, the search for a southern continent, and the charting of New Zealand and Australia's eastern coast. Viking published the book in 2020 for the voyage's 250th anniversary. Blainey reshaped material from his earlier Sea of Dangers, placing Cook's journey beside the contemporary Pacific voyage of the French commander Jean de Surville. The comparison lets him approach exploration as a meeting of scientific ambition, imperial instruction, difficult navigation, and competing European ventures.