During his first and second trips, while searching for the great southern continent theorized by European geographers to 'balance' the landmass in the northern hemisphere, Cook became the first European to lay eyes on New Zealand, Tonga, and a number of other South Pacific island chains. Over the next eleven years, Cook would see more of the planet than anyone before him.

In 1768, when Cook set sail on his first voyage, 'roughly a third of the world's map remained blank,' Horwitz writes. He skips Antarctica, he writes, 'because I like adventures where I encounter people, not penguins.' After a short stint as a deckhand on a modern replica of the Endeavour, the ship on which Cook did the first of his three circumnavigations, Horwitz then travels by more modern means to Tahiti, Australia, Unalaska, and Hawaii, among other places. In Blue Latitudes he again takes to the road (or the sea, in this case), to follow the wake of Captain James Cook - arguably the greatest explorer and mapmaker in history. If restlessness is congenital, Horwitz has a serious case. A former Wall Street Journal reporter and New Yorker staff writer, Horwitz has written about Australia ( One for the Road, 1988), the Middle East ( Baghdad without a Map, 1991), and the American South ( Confederates in the Attic, 1999). Near the end of Tony Horwitz's latest book, an Alaskan archaeologist speculates that 'prehistoric people who trekked out of Africa may have relied on intrepid, nervy individuals to lead the journey.' Those people may, in fact, have been genetically different: they wanted to find things, people, and places no one else had ever seen before.

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz '80 (Henry Holt, 480 pages, $26).

Blue latitudes by tony horwitz