The Fatal Impact

When Captain Cook entered the Pacific in 1769 it was a virgin ocean, pristine and savage, and its inhabitants lived a life of primeval innocence.

Seventy years later firearms, disease and alcohol had hammered away at this way of life until it crumbled before them, and where Satan had sown the Protestant missionaries reaped: the Tahitians, who had no God but Love’, came to accept the morality of an English suburb; the Australian aborigines were ousted from their fertile valleys by convict settlements; and in Antartica the prolific wildlife was jostled towards extinction by merchants and hunters.

In this book Alan Moorehead tells the tragic story of a great adventure which turned sour, in which good intentions led to disaster, corruption and annihilation. And ironically it was Cook, the greatest and most humane explorer of his day, who was to cause the fatal impact.