First published in London by Ebury, 2002.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [369]-370).

Beginnings: James Cook's story -- Beginnings: George Collingridge's story -- A Taste of the Sea James Cook 1745 -- Italian Lessons George Collingridge 1867 -- 'Mr Cook's Genius and Capacity' James Cook 1755 -- 'The Happy Foresight of Mr Collingridge' George Collingridge 1870 -- The King's Surveyor James Cook 1762 -- In Search of Paradise George Collingridge 1872 -- The Surveyor's Art James Cook 1763 -- Trouble in Paradise George Collingridge 1879 -- 'To the Southwards' -- Preparations James Cook 1768 -- The Voyage of the Endeavour James Cook 1768 -- Tahiti James Cook 1769 -- The 40th Latitude James Cook 1769 -- Botany Bay James Cook 1770 -- Jave La Grande George Collingridge 1883 -- Shipwreck! James Cook 1770 -- 'A Calamitous Situation' James Cook 1770 -- 'The Immortal Banks' England 1771 -- The Dieppe Maps George Collingridge 1883 -- 'Further than Any Other Man' James Cook 1772 -- The End of The Great Southern Continent James Cook 1773 -- Terra Australis Cognita George Collingridge 1885 -- The Dinner Party James Cook 1775 -- Closing the Loop -- The Final Voyage James Cook 1776 -- The Secrets of the Maps George Collingridge 1895 -- Alaska James Cook 1778 -- Obsession and Betrayal James Cook 1779 -- Kealakekua Bay, 2001 -- The End of Ambition England 1780 -- Troublesome George Collingridge & the Ideas Revolution -- Heroes, Heretics and The Great Whodunit.

In 1768 James Cook, on an epic sea journey that secured his place in history, discovered Australia. One hundred years later, countering cherished legends, George Collingridge dared to claim that the Portuguese had gotten to Australia first. Now Vanessa Collingridge, his distant cousin, unravels the strange tale of history's most fascinating explorer and the man who sought to dethrone him.

Collingridge charts the captain's celebrated voyages: Cook mapped the Pacific islands, circumnavigated Antarctica, charted New Zealand, and discovered the New Hebrides and Australia, curing scurvy along the way. He was shipwrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, cruised with sails frozen amid two-hundred-foot-tall icebergs, struggled to keep his crew from losing battles with alcohol and Polynesian women, and somehow managed to stay one step ahead of competing French and Spanish explorers. Over his twenty-one years of adventure -- until his murder on a beach in Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii in 1779 -- Cook changed the Western map of the world.

Or so schoolchildren were taught. In 1883 British aristocrat George Collingridge sailed Down Under in search of adventure -- and came across maps of Australia dated 1542 and 1546, drawn in northern France but based on Portuguese originals, suggesting that Cook was not the first to reach Australia. The proposal would prove Collingridge's undoing -- and yet it is a controversy that lives on.