This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchel.

Enjoying enormously sailing with Hampton Sides and Captain James Cook with the wide, wide sea.

It's the new book, Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.

New Albion, aimed by Francis Drake.

Hampton, where is New Albion?

And what did Drake mean by naming it that, what you'd have to say, mocking term?

Mm-hmm.

Well, Sir Francis Drake had been on that side of the planet centuries before Cook

and had climbed his way up the west coast of California,

what we now call California,

and had named it New Albion because that was a quaint Latin term, a Roman term for England.

So he was basically calling it New England to thumb his nose at the Spanish, who claimed

all of the Pacific and certainly claimed the California coast.

So Cook was returning, the first Englishman to really return to this place that Drake had

been to all those years prior and to start his,

you know, search for the Northwest Passage.

His job is to start mapping the Northwest Coast of North America from about Oregon, what we call Oregon today, all the way up.

And to try to duck into every inlet, every river, every harbor, every

indentation in the hopes that one of those is going to lead all the way across Alaska or

Canada to the Atlantic Ocean. It's an insane thing when you think about the scope of his search, because we're talking

about thousands of miles of coastline that he is charting.

And he gives us really the first glimpse of what that coastline looks like.

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