James Cook

From 1763 to 1767 Cook surveyed the coasts of Newfoundland and the adjoining shore of Labrador, working mostly from the schooner Grenville. A 2018 scholarly review notes that no one denies the quality of these surveys and that they were not superseded, even in part, until the 1830s.

Cook's own reports state that no dangerous case of scurvy occurred on the 1768-71 Endeavour voyage, and that on the 1772-75 Resolution voyage he lost only four men, none of them to scurvy. Kodicek and Young call the second result remarkable for its time, while noting that 31 men of the Endeavour later died of dysentery and malaria after Batavia.

On the night of 10-11 June 1770 (the two journals date it a day apart), the Endeavour struck a coral reef off north-eastern Australia. Banks's journal and Cook's own record both describe the crew throwing guns, ballast and stores overboard, laying out anchors, and later covering the leak with a sail stuffed with oakum and wool, an expedient Banks says one of the midshipmen proposed. The ship was then brought to a river mouth where she could be repaired.

The sequence, ending in a repair adopted from a junior officer's suggestion, is consistent with the profile's resourcefulness reading: improvisation with the materials and ideas at hand rather than a plan fixed in advance. Resourcefulness

On 30 January 1774, at 71 degrees 10 minutes south, the Resolution met a solid ice field. Forster recorded that it was impossible to proceed and the ship was put about; Cook wrote that going on would have been 'a dangerous and rash enterprise', and added that he, with the ambition to go as far as was possible for man, was not sorry at the interruption.

It offers one example of a risk appetite that accepted a hazardous route yet stopped at a point Cook himself judged rash; by itself it does not settle how he weighed risk elsewhere. Risk Tolerance

In 1755, after nearly a decade in the North Sea coal and Baltic trades and with command of a merchant ship reportedly on offer, Cook volunteered for the Royal Navy as an able seaman. He was made master's mate within a month and had qualified as a master by 1757; at Louisbourg in 1758 he began learning plane-table surveying from the army engineer Samuel Holland.

One reading, consistent with the profile's achievement-drive row, is that he traded a secure merchant command for a lower rating in a service that offered a path to advancement; the sources read here do not record his own reasons. Achievement Drive