POSEIDON’S PLAYGROUND

MUCH HAS BEEN SAID OF THE GREAT MARINER CAPTAIN COOK. LOVED AND LOATHED IN EQUAL MEASURE, HE MAPPED VAST SWATHES OF THE PACIFIC BUT IS CHARGED BY MANY FOR HERALDING THE COMING OF THE WHITE MAN, SULLYING PRISTINE LANDS IN THE PROCESS.

Several of the crew’s journals feature accounts of natives handling craft ranging from complex outrigger canoes to simple wooden bodyboards with great skill in the balmy waves of Tahiti and Hawaii. These excerpts are generally accepted as confirming these men to be the first Europeans to witness the act of surfing and have occupied many a paragraph in surfing literature. But what about Cook’s roots on England’s north east coast?

It may seem ironic, that despite Captain Cook having grown up on a coast that holds some of the finest waves in Europe, he had to travel many thousands of miles - over the course of three groundbreaking surveying and cartographic voyages – before he was to set eyes