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Christmas.

Better with Pepsi Max. This is CBS, I in the world, I'm John Batcheter, visiting with Professor Nicholas Thomas.

His new book is Voyagers, The Settlement of the Pacific.

He's a professor of historical anthropology at the University of Cambridge and that's what we're doing here.

History, but near history. The mystery of Oceania begins with Captain Cook's first, second, and third voyage, present mysteries to be solved.

Professor, who was Captain Cook? Why was he in the Society Island in 1768? What was his mission?

So Cook was a naval man, but he was above all an exceptionally accomplished surveyor, and that's why the Royal Society and the Admiralty selected him in the 1760s to lead an expedition.

The ship was the endeavor.

They went to Tahiti and the core purpose, certainly the ostensible purpose was the observation

of the transit of Venus and that observation, that astronomical observation was scientifically important.

It was part of a coordinated set of observations and the Royal Society and colleagues internationally hoped to be able to measure the distance

between the Earth and the Sun. But Cook was also exploring the South Pacific because the British, among other European nations, were very interested to try and establish whether there was a great southern continent. They thought that a great southern

continent might be a previously unknown land like China or India that could be a key trading partner, a huge source of wealth.

So the expeditions were about knowledge and geographic discovery, but they were certainly also about empire

and the scope for trade and colonization.

On board was Joseph Banks, who was he and what does he leave us to know about this first voyage?

Well, Banks was very important to this voyage because it was really one of the first that was scientifically really ambitious.

The British Navy had sent out exploratory voyages before. They were typically concerned to map

coastlines and territories, but Banks was a natural historian who had a much wider range of interests in botany, animals, people, resources.

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