The Last Voyage: Captain Cook's Lost Diary

In THE LAST VOYAGE, Hammond Innes imagines the private journal that Captain James Cook might have kept on the voyage that ended in his death in 1779.

While trying to find a Northwest passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Cook's ship, the Resolution, was blocked by a massive ice wall along the Bering Strait. Cook successfully freed his ship, and planned another attempt for the following summer. Cook then returned to Hawaii, where he was killed by the islanders in a skirmish over a stolen boat.

"An account to be prized by the armchair salt who likes to hear the winds moan and the timbers creak -- but only as the logs in the fireplace split." (The Saturday Review)