Blue Latitudes by Horowitz

Blue Latitudes by Horowitz

In an exhilarating tale of historic adventure, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Confederates in the Attic retraces the voyages of Captain James Cook, the Yorkshire farm boy who drew the map of the modern world.

Captain James Cook's three epic journeys in the 18th century were the last great voyages of discovery. His ships sailed 150,000 miles, from the Artic to the Antarctic, from Tasmania to Oregon, from Easter Island to Siberia. When Cook set off for the Pacific in 1768, a third of the globe remained blank. By the time he died in Hawaii in 1779, the map of the world was substantially complete.

Tony Horwitz vividly recounts Cook's voyages and the exotic scenes the captain encountered: tropical orgies, taboo rituals, cannibal feasts, human sacrifice. He also relives Cook's adventures by following in the captain's wake to places such as Tahiti, Savage Island, and the Great Barrier Reef to discover Cook's embattled legacy in the present day. Signing on as a working crewman aboard a replica of Cook's vessel, Horwitz experiences the thrill and terror of sailing a tall ship. He also explores Cook the man: an impoverished farmboy who broke through the barriers of his class and time to become the greatest navigator in British history.

By turns harrowing and hilarious, insightful and entertaining, Blue Latitudes brings to life a man whose voyages helped create the 'global village' we know today.

Tony Horwitz was a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He was a native of Washington, D.C. He spent a decade as a newspaper correspondent in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, primarily reporting conflicts and violence for The Wall Street Journal. When he returned to the United States, he earned the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and worked for The New Yorker before deciding to pursue writing full-time. Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes, Baghdad Without a Map, and A Journey Long and Weird are among his national and New York Times bestsellers. In 2011, the New York Times designated Midnight Rising a Notable Book, and Library Journal named it one of the top ten books of the year.

Tony was also the president of the Society of American Historians and a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study. His wife Geraldine Brooks and their two kids Nathaniel and Bizu survive him. He died in May 2019.