A portrait of James Cook in the gallery of Greenwich Hospital Credit: GSinclair Archive/Getty In February 1772, the musician and author Charles Burney held a special dinner at 42 Queen Square, his London residence. The guest of honour was Captain James Cook, who, since returning from his three-year expedition to the South Pacific the previous year, had become something of a celebrity. Burney’s primary objective that evening was to advance his son’s naval career, but, like all of London, he was eager for every detail of Cook’s voyage. Before supper, he took Cook on a tour of his library, to which he had recently added the newly published travel diaries of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, a French adventurer who had made his own, less successful, Pacific voyage in 1766.