Tony Horwitz sets off on his own voyage of discovery. Adventuring in Cook's wake, he relives the captain's journeys. At sea, aboard a replica of Cook's ship, he works atop a hundred-foot mast, and recaptures the rum-and-lash world of eighteenth-century seafaring. On land, he meets native people -- Aboriginal and Aleut elders, the king of Tonga. Throughout, Horwitz also searches for Cook the man: a restless prodigy who fled his peasant boyhood, and later the luxury of Georgian London, for the privation and peril of sailing off the edge of the map.