In 1775, Capt James Cook, newly returned from his second epic voyage of discovery, wrote to his friend John Walker, the Whitby shipowner who had set the great navigator on his seagoing career:

"A few months ago the whole Southern Hemisphere was hardly big enough for me and now I am going to be confined within the limits of Greenwich Hospital.'' The Admiralty probably felt that, at 47, Cook had not only earned his retirement but was at an age when he should take it.

His new position as a 'Captain' at the Greenwich Hospital was a well-paid sinecure, with free board and lodgings.

He remarked to Walker: "It is a fine retreat and a pretty income, but whether I can bring myself to like ease and retirement time will show.'' Within months it did. Cook was invited to a small dinner at the Admiralty, whose top brass wanted his opinion on a projected voyage in search of the fabled North West Passage linking the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and who might lead it. Cook seized the moment to volunteer himself.

Accepted, he wrote to Walker: "I know not what your opinion may be. . . It is certain I have quitted an easy retirement for an Active and perhaps Dangerous voyage.'' Tragically, it proved even worse, bringing the death of Cook at the hands of Hawaiians, who had feted him as a god. In this relatively short (187 pages), and very readable account of the voyage, Peter Aughton suggests that Cook's decision to come out of retirement had perhaps been unwise.

He writes: "His approaches to the indigenous people of the Pacific were always peaceful and calculated, but by the time he reached Hawaii on his final voyage he was tired and irritated by the responsibility of too many years in office.

He did not handle the situation with his usual tact and diplomacy.'' Yet in response to the theft of a cutter, Cook resisted advice by his officers to shoot one or two natives as an example.

Instead he took a hostage, which aroused hostility. Then, some distance from Cook, a native chief was shot by Marines protecting Cook's ship.

Aughton suggests that this was the tipping point. News of the death reached the crowd before Cook, stoking its fury to an uncontrollable level.

Aughton rounds off his account with a well-considered assessment of Cook. But to this reviewer, whose boyhood home commanded much the same view as Cook's birthplace, it is irritating to read yet again of how Cook gained his love of the sea at Staithes.

He might have done. But from his early home he would see ships passing not only on the North Sea but, closer, up and down the Tees, to and from Yarm. The adventure of the sea might well have grabbed Cook before he set foot in Staithes. The first "Cook book' to acknowledge this will be a landmark indeed.