Biography is dead Travel writing is dead History is dead. The only legitimate subject for non-fiction is the personal quest Novels used to be derided as disguised autobiography. But now, it seems, the main element in every book has to be the author.Vanessa Collingridge’s Captain Cook is a prime example of the unstoppable rise of this self-obsessed genre. This is not a biography, but “The story of the three of us – James, George and me…

where we should have been separated by geography, history and place in society, our stories were now fused into one”. “James” is the 18th-century explorer; “George” is George Collingridge, a 19th-century obsessive who set out to prove that Cook did not discover Australia “Me” is a former presenter on Tonight with Trevor McDonald. She also happens to be called Collingridge.
You can imagine how the story goes First is the author’s “own journey of discovery”. Vanessa Collingridge says she had always been drawn to James Cook. But what interested her was the flawed “man behind the myth”.Then she came across the papers of George Collingridge.

Working as an engraver in colonial Australia, Collingridge spent most of his time attempting to prove that the Portuguese reached the continent before the eminent British captain He published a scholarly work, much derided at the time. His name-descendant wants to resurrect his reputation and represent Cook as a complex, troubled man.Collingridge’s television past makes her a celebrity of sorts, further boosting the need for her own story to be the thrust behind this confused narrative The modern Collingridge is a jock. She’s done a great deal of backpacking, crewed on a leg of a replica Endeavour’s voyage around Australia, and qualified as an astronaut on Russia’s Space Tourism Programme: all incidents that wheedle their way into the narrative without any real reason for being there.Old George is a far more interesting subject. The engraver spoke seven languages fluently, a skill he turned to deciphering old maps. His research convinced him that, 250 years before Cook, the Portuguese had “discovered” Australia.

In 1895, he published his “Critical, Documentary and Historic Investigation”: The Discovery of Australia. It was designed to forge his reputation; instead, it was ridiculed. Cook was too big a legend to destroy so easily.”James, George and me” compete for space. In short, snappy chapters, a fragment of Cook’s life alternates with a fragment of George Collingridge’s, until we’re quite giddy. Then, of course, comes young Ms Collingridge’s contribution: “As for myself, I had spent months trawling through map-rooms and libraries, retracing their footsteps or trawling the internet in pursuit of my quest to explore these two explorers.”Did nobody notice she had twice used the same words in one sentence? The writing gets worse.