Captain Cook’s first voyage – in Google Earth
Nat Waddell wrote this great post on the new Google Earth-enabled view of Captain Cook’s most well-known voyage, including his search for Terra Australis. One of Cook’s crew on his subsequent trip to Australia, navigator Matthew Flinders, produced charts of the Australian coastline that are extremely close to modern satellite-enhanced maps.
Someone who knows far more about technology than I do has gone to the trouble of taking Captain Cook’s first voyage around the world and rendering it in Google Earth – complete with a 3D graphic model of his ship, the Endeavour, readings from Cook’s journal and the sound of the waves and creaking timbers in the background.
On this day in 1769, Cook was close to the Pitcairn Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean, near do achieving his aim of reaching Tahiti in time to observe the transit of Venus in June. The Endeavour’s crew hadn’t set foot on land since Tierra del Fuego in January and the previous day, they had spotted birds of a kind that made them think they were at last approaching their destination.
On the March 24, “at about three in the morning one of the people saw or thought he saw a log…
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