THERE has been a handful of great maritime explorers and adventurers – men such as Columbus, Magellan, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake who, between them, discovered the world as we know it today.

A Yorkshireman from humble origins quite rightly has a place alongside these greats in the annals of seafaring history, however: one Captain James Cook.

Born at Marton-in-Cleveland, Yorkshire, in 1728, he went on, in his lifetime, to become a national hero – and, to succeeding generations, the stuff of legends.

“His three voyages of exploration and his work for the Admiralty when serving in Canada undoubtedly led to the discovery of more of the world than any other maritime adventurer, at any point in history,” writes local historian Alan Whitworth, in his new book Captain Cook Country Through Time.

Cook “discovered” Australia and Hawaii and made the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand – mapping the new lands he encountered on a scale never before managed.

He was killed in a fight with Hawaiians during his third voyage in the Pacific in 1779. But he left a legacy of scientific and geographical knowledge that changed our understanding of the world we lived in.

Brought up in the village of Great Ayton, to the north of the North York Moors, he famously began his training as a seaman in Whitby.

According to a long-standing Whitby tradition, he lodged as a young man in a house in Grape Lane (now the Captain Cook Memorial Museum) belonging to Quaker shipowning brothers John and Henry Walker.

In June 1755, Cook left Whitby and volunteered as an ordinary seaman in the Royal Navy. But it was in Whitby that he learned to be a seaman, and the Yorkshire seaside town will forever be associated with the great man.

Mr Whitworth’s book is not a biography of Cook. Instead, with the help of a collection of stunning old photographs, it charts the path of his life, from Marton and Great Ayton to Whitby and beyond.

Because of the wealth of photographic and other material available, much of the book focuses on Whitby and the nearby villages. It provides an unforgettable portrait of the North Yorklshire coast roughly as it would have been in Cook’s time – tall ships and all.

Of course, photography hadn’t been invented in the 1750s, so the photographs in Mr Whitworth’s book come from more than a century later. By then Whitby’s great era of shipbuilding had already come to an end. Nevertheless, the ships and the scenes pictured would all, we have little doubt, have been fairly recognisable to the great man himself.

The book runs to almost 100 pages in all. So we have room for only a few of the very best photographs here. But what photographs they are.

One, taken by Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, shows the ship Anne moored in Whitby’s upper harbour, framed by the entrance to the North Eastern Railway Company’s town station.

The detail, from the rigging to the dirty sails drooping under their own weight of canvas, is exquisite.

But there are plenty of other stunning photographs too – including one of the coal ship Diamond beached on Sandsend beach in the 1880s. The captain hadn’t been caught unawares, writes Mr Whitworth in his caption.

“Unloading coal directly from the boats was a common practice before the coming of iron steam ships and, as a consequence, locally built vessels, called ‘cats’, had a flat bottom for beaching.”

Another shows a ship moored at Dock End in about 1885. “The rotted stumps were the site of the slipway which saw the last ship to be launched down it in 1862,” writes Mr Whitworth.

A wonderful book.

• Captain Cook Country Through Time by Alan Whitworth is published by Amberley, priced £14.99.