CAPTAIN COOK is prominently in the news. It is confidently believed that the wreck of his Endeavour, one of only a handful of historic ships known worldwide, has been located off Rhode Island, where she was scuttled during the American War of Independence. History books will have to be re-written. Partially they already have been. The long established belief was that, in her final phase, the ship in which Cook made the first circumnavigation of New Zealand and charted Australia’s eastern seaboard, became a French whaler, which sank in a gale near Rhode Island.

But painstaking research some time ago established that the Cook ship converted into a whaler was Endeavour’s successor, Resolution. She carried him on two further voyages, from the second of which he did not return. It is now recognised as one of history’s most astonishing coincidences that two Cook ships, both former Whitby colliers, met their end in virtually the same waters, 3,000 miles from their home port.

But what of Cook? There is an aspect of his personal history long in need of revision. It has nothing to do with the achievements that made Cook arguably the world’s best-ever navigator. Rather it is right here, amid Cook’s roots in North Yorkshire.

Cook’s fascination with the sea is almost invariably attributed to his move from the “farming country” of Marton, his birthplace, and Great Ayton, where he spent his boyhood, to Staithes. Occasionally a possibly earlier influence is acknowledged in the glimpse of the sea from the summit of Roseberry Topping, which young James Cook is sure to have climbed from his Great Ayton home. But Marton gets no credit. Yet when Cook lived there, up to the age of eight, unbroken, level countryside stretched from the hamlet to the Tees. Young Cook would see the tall ships passing up and down to Yarm. Where I grew up, just a mile or two to the east, there was a very similar view, taking in the estuary. And if you’re still sceptical let me quote Graves’ History of Cleveland (1808). This states that from Marton “the sea, generally crowded with ships, presents an interesting object”.

So Cook’s maritime leaning could well stem from his childhood. But how did the renowned explorer look back on his early years? The answer is troubling for his home-ground devotees. In scattering place names around the globe, Cook ignored, or overlooked, the scenes of his formative years. He named nowhere Marton, Great Ayton, Staithes or Ayreholme, his farmhouse home. There’s something more startling. Cook would have remained unknown but for his education, paid for at the village school by Cook’s father’s employer, Thomas Scottowe. He (Scottowe) probably recognised something exceptional in the boy. But although ‘Scottowe Sound’, or ‘Scottowe Straits’, almost suggest themselves as maritime names, Cook failed to honour his benefactor in that way or any other.

But I admire Cook as much as anyone. So let’s end positively. In his journals Cook tells us it was his “custom” on making fresh landfall to appraise the district from the nearest hill. It’s impossible not to believe that boyhood ascents of Roseberry Topping were the key to that.