rn upside down. He was a man
whose whole life had been based and built upon Fact, not Theory. He
was a man who accepted Truth as God gave it to him, not as he had
theorized it _ought_ to be; a man who had climbed from a mud cottage to
the position of the greatest navigator in the world--had climbed on top
of facts mastered, not {176} of schoolgirl moonshine, or study-closet
theories. That man was Captain James Cook.

Cook's life presents all the contrasts of true greatness world over.
Like Peter the Great, of Russia, whose word had set in motion the
exploration of the northwest coast of America, Cook's character
consisted of elements that invariably lead to glory or ruin; often,
both. The word "impossible" was not in his vocabulary. He simply did
not recognize any limitations to what a man _might_ do, could do, would
do, if he tried; and that means, that under stress of risk or
temptation, or opposition, a man's caution goes to the winds. With
Cook, it was risk that caused ruin. With the Czar of Russia, it was
temptation.

Born at Marton, a small parish of a north riding in the county of York,
October 27, 1728, James Cook was the son of a day-laborer in an age
when manual toil was paid at the rate of a few pennies a day. There
were nine of a family. The home was a thatch-roofed mud cottage. Two
years after Cook's birth, the father was appointed bailiff, which
slightly improved family finances; but James was thirteen years of age
before it was possible to send him to school. There, the progress of
his learning was a gallop. He had a wizard-genius for figures. In
three short years he had mastered all the Ayton school could teach him.
At sixteen, his schooling was over. The father's highest ambition
seems to have been for the son to become a successful shopkeeper in one
of the small towns. The future {177} navigator was apprenticed to the
village shop; but Cook's ambitions were not to be caged behind a
counter.

Eastward rolled the North Sea. Down at Hull were heard seamen's yarns
to make the blood of a boy jump. It was 1746. The world was ringing
with tales of Bering on the Pacific, of a southern continent, which
didn't exist, of the Hudson's Bay Fur Company's illimitable domain in
the north, of La Verendrye's wonderful discoveries of an almost
boundless region westward of New France toward the uncharted Western
Sea. In a year and a half, Cook had his fill of shopkeeping. Whether
he ran away, or ha