CHAPTER 1. EARLY YEARS.

James Cook, the Circumnavigator, was a native of the district of
Cleveland, Yorkshire, but of his ancestry there is now very little
satisfactory information to be obtained. Nichols, in his Topographer and
Genealogist, suggests that "James Cooke, the celebrated mariner, was
probably of common origin with the Stockton Cookes." His reason for the
suggestion being that a branch of the family possessed a crayon portrait
of some relation, which was supposed to resemble the great discoverer. He
makes no explanation of the difference in spelling of the two names, and
admits that the sailor's family was said to come from Scotland.

Dr. George Young, certainly the most reliable authority on Cook's early
years, who published a Life in 1836, went to Whitby as Vicar about 1805,
and claims to have obtained much information about his subject "through
intercourse with his relatives, friends, and acquaintances, including one
or two surviving school companions," and appears to be satisfied that
Cook was of Scotch extraction. Dr. George Johnston, a very careful
writer, states in his Natural History of the Eastern Borders, that in
1692 the father of James Thomson, the author of The Seasons, was minister
of Ednam, Roxburghshire, and a man named John Cook was one of the Elders
of the Kirk. This John Cook married, on the 19th January 1693, a woman
named Jean Duncan, by whom he had a son, James, baptised 4th March 1694,
and this child, Johnston positively asserts, was afterwards the father of
the future Captain Cook. The dates of the marriage and baptism have been
verified by the Reverend John Burleigh, minister of Ednam, and they agree
with the probable date of the birth of Cook's father, for he died in 1778
at the age of eighty-five. Owing to the loss of the church records for
some years after 1698, Mr. Burleigh is unable to trace when this James