I'm going to show you how great I am.

Yes, let's have mighty power.

I just want to say from the bottom of me heart, I'd like to take this chance to

apologize to absolutely nobody.

Hello, and welcome to How to Take Over the World.

This is Ben Wilson.

Today we are talking about the great British captain and explorer James Cook.

I think if I could trade places with anyone in history,

James Cook is on the short list of people whose life that I most envy. What he was able to do just sounds so unbelievably fun and adventurous and exciting.

He's widely considered the greatest sea explorer of all time.

He mapped the Pacific Ocean from Australia, New Zealand, up through the Polynesian Islands,

all the way up to the west coast of the United States, Canada, and Alaska. Many of these islands were already known

to Europeans, although many of them were not mapped. But even so, many others were completely

unknown to Europeans. Like, this is the closest you're going to get to exploring an alien planet.

For example, the Hawaiian Islands just had never been visited by Europeans before.

And so, yeah, it's just like a completely new place, new culture, new language, new customs

that he gets to see and experience and explore for the first time.

Same with the Aboriginal Australians.

Europeans had never had

contact with them before I raised the comparison of exploring an alien planet and this is because

these areas would have been totally alien to him it was terra incognita just completely different world

and I'm not the first person to make this comparison actually if you think about star trek

...