The Squashed edition of Voyages of Discovery by Captain James Cook. Abridged from the original text to read in an hour or so. Squashed editions are precise abridgements - the original ideas, in their own words, the full beam of the book, the quotable quotes and all the famous lines, but neatly honed down to the length of a readable short story. ""Like reading the bible without all the begats"" - Prof. Jim Curtis

Captain Cook's Journals provide his own vivid first-hand account of three extraordinary expeditions. These charted the entire coast of New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, and brought back detailed descriptions of Tahiti, Tonga, and a host of until then unknown islands in the Pacific. The journals amply reveal the determination, courage and skill which enabled Cook to wrestle with the continuous dangers of uncharted seas and the problems of achieving a working relationship with the peoples whose unannounced guest he became.

This edition, abridged from the definitive four-volume collection published by the Hakluyt Society, makes Cook's inimitable personal account of his nine years of voyaging widely accessible for the first time. The selection preserves the spirit and rhythm of the full narrative, as well as Cook's idiosyncratic spelling. Philip Edwards gives an introduction to each voyage together with maps, a glossary of unusual words and indexes of people and places. A postscript offers a full assessment of the continuing controversies surrounding Cook's death.