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All students of Cook owe an enormous debt to Beaglehole for his all-encompassing editorship.

So much so, in fact, that today it is difficult to view the subject of Cook except through Beaglehole ’ s perspective.

Some recent biographies of Cook have tended to be little else than abbreviated versions of Beaglehole.

Nevertheless, it is also clear that Beaglehole ’ s work is, by and large, a continuation of the long tradition of Cook idealization, a tradition from which post-Beaglehole scholarship has started to diverge.

For Beaglehole, Cook was a heroic figure who could do practically no wrong, and he is scathing about those contemporaries of Cook who ever ventured to criticise his hero, such as Alexander Dalrymple, the geographer, and Johann Reinhold Forster, who accompanied Cook on the second voyage.

Recent research has to some extent rehabilitated both Dalrymple and Forster.