Horwitz begins his re-creation of Cook's journeys by crewing on a replica of the Endeavour, Cook's first ship. He probably could have escaped had he known how to swim.
Having overstayed a welcome, he was killed by natives on a beach in Hawaii. He circumnavigated New Zealand, charted much of Australia, determined the reach of Antarctica, was the first Westerner to reach Hawaii, mapped many other Pacific islands and sailed to Alaska in search of a Northwest Passage. When he set off on the first, Horwitz notes, ''roughly a third of the world's map remained blank.'' Cook fixed that. His three voyages to the Pacific were made between 17. The son of a Yorkshire farm laborer, James Cook (1728-79) joined the British Navy in 1755 and became an officer a few years later. Tony Horwitz's ''Blue Latitudes'' is one of the best. Modern would-be adventurers overcome this obstacle by tracing the paths of early explorers, telling their stories, describing how the world has since changed and then folding everything into ''in the footsteps of'' books. One of the problems with our planet is that there is nowhere new to go.
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