exp

Captain James Cook was one of the world’s greatest explorers. He sailed around the world twice. He was the first European to reach Hawaii and New Zealand, and he sailed farther south than any European had ever gone.

People marvelled over the places, people, and things Cook described. Before Cook, nobody in Europe knew about penguins or kangaroos!

EARLY LIFE

Cook was born in 1728 on a farm in northern England. At the age of 18, he went to work for a shipping company. In 1755, Cook joined the British Royal Navy. His ship was sent to Canada, to make maps of land that Britain had conquered from France.

FIRST VOYAGE TO THE PACIFIC

In 1768, Cook sailed to the South Pacific Ocean, with artists and scientists. Officially, their task was to observe the planet Venus. But Britain also hoped that Cook would find a mysterious “Southern Continent” that some sailors claimed to have seen. Cook wanted to take control of it for the British king.

Cook reached New Zealand in 1770. No other European had been there. He sailed around New Zealand and then explored eastern Australia.

A SCIENTIFIC EXPLORER

Cook drew many detailed maps and kept careful records of all he had seen on his voyage. He described native peoples of the South Pacific and their cultures. His artists sketched wildlife, and his scientists collected unusual plants and animals to take back.

Cook’s careful work caused a sensation when he arrived home in Britain in 1771. No other expedition had gathered so much information, so thoroughly and scientifically.

Cook also won fame for keeping his sailors healthy. He wondered if a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables caused scurvy, a fatal disease common among sailors on long voyages. He stocked his ship with sauerkraut (pickled cabbage) and forced his crew to eat it. During stops at port, he ordered his crew to eat fresh foods. As a result, few of his sailors became seriously ill.

SECOND VOYAGE TO THE PACIFIC

From 1772 to 1775, Cook made a second voyage to the South Pacific Ocean. This time, he sailed farther south than anyone before him. He saw penguins and icebergs. He sailed all the way around Antarctica. But he found no land where people might live.

FINAL VOYAGE

In 1776, Cook set off on a third voyage. This time, Cook wanted to look for the Northwest Passage. This was a possible sea route north of Canada linking Europe and Asia. Before sailing north, he explored several islands in the Pacific. He landed in Hawaii in 1778, becoming the first European to do so.

From Hawaii, Cook sailed to North America. He was the first European to set foot on Vancouver Island off the coast of British Columbia. Throughout 1778 he explored the northwest coast of North America, but he failed to find the Northwest Passage. In 1779, Cook returned to Hawaii, where he was killed in a quarrel with natives over a stolen boat.

Where would we be without writing? There’d be no books, magazines, or newspapers. There’d be no instructions for putting together a bike or a VCR. There’d be no birthday or anniversary cards. There’d be no signs on the road to tell us where to go.
WHAT IS WRITING?
Writing is a method of communication. It uses marks that we see and understand. The marks we use to write English are the letters of the alphabet. They stand for sounds.
At a very young age, we memorize the letters of our alphabet and their sounds. Once we have done that, we can combine the marks into words and sentences. Other people can understand them. We can understand what other people have written. We also can write down our thoughts just for ourselves.
HOW DID WRITING BEGIN?
People probably began with picture writing. They didn’t always have an alphabet. In picture writing, a sign stands for an object. For example, a circle might stand for the Sun.
But a picture-writing system is difficult. There are just too many things to represent with pictures. Picture writing requires thousands of signs. In addition, pictures can’t be strung together to sound the way people speak. It’s also hard to express things like opinions and ideas with pictures.
Over time, picture writing developed into a different system. The circle that stood for Sun began to stand for the sound or syllable sun or even son. It could be used to make other words, like sunshine.
This was a good system. There are a lot fewer sounds in a language than there are objects to be represented.
Egyptian hieroglyphs are a kind of picture writing. In time, the pictures came to stand for sounds. This also happened to Chinese and many other languages. Chinese characters started out as pictures and now stand for sounds.
Egyptian hieroglyphs are among the oldest forms of writing. The earliest Egyptian writing we know of dates from about 3200 bc. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia also were writing before 3000 bc.
BIRTH OF THE ALPHABET
After signs got linked to sounds, the next big step in writing was the development of an alphabet. With an alphabet, people no longer had to guess what a picture meant. Without an alphabet, how could they tell if a picture of a bee, for example, meant the insect bee, the verb to be, or the first syllable in another word like believe?
The alphabet developed in the Middle East. The first alphabet we know about was developed by the Phoenicians who lived in what is now Lebanon. Their alphabet had 22 letters.
The Phoenician alphabet did not have letters for vowels (a, e, i, o, u). The Greeks added those letters. Our word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta.
THE ABCS
An alphabet is a clever set of letters or other symbols. Each letter represents a different sound of a language. These letters can be combined to write all the words of a language.
There are about 50 different alphabets used in the world today. They are different in the way they look and in the sounds their letters stand for. Most alphabets have between 20 and 30 letters. The English language uses the Roman alphabet. It has 26 letters.
Languages with fewer sounds require fewer letters. The sounds of the Hawaiian language, for example, are written using only 12 letters of the Roman alphabet. This alphabet has the fewest letters of any language. Other alphabets, such as Sinhalese, the alphabet of Sri Lanka, have 50 letters or more.
DO ALL LANGUAGES HAVE AN ALPHABET?
Only a few languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, do not use an alphabet.
Like other ancient languages, Chinese began as a pictographic language. Today’s written Chinese still uses thousands of symbols, or characters. To read a newspaper in Chinese, you would need to know from 3,000 to 4,000 characters!