Reading Richard Hough's Account of Cook's Voyages
I picked up the biography a while back, expecting another heroic tale of navigation and discovery. The first hundred pages or so still read like one. Hough does a decent job laying out Cook's early life in Marton, his apprenticeship with a Grocer in Staithes, and the decisive move into the Merchant Navy that eventually put him in the Royal Navy's pocket. The book spans Cook's entire career, from the Quebec campaign in the Seven Years' War through the three Pacific voyages. Hough was writing in the 1960s, which means he had access to some primary sources that have since been lost or relocated. That gives certain sections a weight you won't find in newer works, but it also means the analysis sometimes reflects the scholarship of its time rather than current understanding. One thing that struck me working through the text was how Hough handles the ending. Most accounts of Cook either mythologize him or reduce him to a cartoon navigator. Hough tries a middle path, showing a competent officer who was genuinely good at his job but whose reputation got inflated by later Victorian writers chasing imperial glory. The Tahiti breadfruit chapter reads pretty flat compared to the trans-Pacific crossing sections. You can tell Hough ran out of steam somewhere around the death on Kealakekua Bay.
I ran into a specific problem when cross-referencing Hough's claims about the latitude measurements during the Endeavour voyage. He cites the original log entries but doesn't always account for the systematic errors in 18th century chronometers. The discrepancy between Cook's recorded position and the actual location of certain anchorages adds up to roughly twenty nautical miles in a few cases. I worked around this by comparing Hough's narrative against the actual Log Book entries held at the National Maritime Museum, which are available on microfilm through the library catalog. The process takes about three hours to verify a single voyage section if you go through it methodically. The book has genuine strengths. Hough writes clearly, avoids the puffery that infects so many maritime biographies, and doesn't shy away from Cook's faults. The treatment of the Hawaiian contact shows a man who understood local politics reasonably well but made catastrophic errors in judgment during those final weeks. Some critics argue Hough was too sympathetic to Cook's officers, particularly Clerke and Gore, but that reads like a fair trade-off for the detail he includes about shipboard life. There are downsides worth noting. The publication date means certain historiographical debates are absent. The question of how Cook's men actually treated Pacific Island populations gets handled superficially compared to what modern anthropologists have documented. The chapter on the Western Journey feels thin, probably because Hough ran out of source material or lost interest. I wouldn't recommend this as a first introduction to Cook's career, but it works well as a supplement to newer scholarship published after the 1970s.
If you're looking for a single comprehensive account, consider pairing this with David Beers Quinn's earlier work or the more recent biographies by J.C. Beaglehole, though Beaglehole's multi-volume set will cost you considerably more in both time and money. Hough's book runs about four hundred pages and sells for around fifteen pounds in paperback, which is reasonable for the coverage it provides.
Get the Full Details
