He traveled widely, through Italy, Austria, Spain, England, Turkey and Russia, meeting Catherine the Great, George III of England and Pope Benedict XII, not to mention Rousseau and Voltaire. Most of his income came from the grandees who admired his intelligence and wit, or—in the case of the women—sought and often received his attentions. Never married, he was engaged frequently. His lovers included courtesans, peasants, heiresses, sisters, countesses and many nuns, sometimes together. In 1776, overcome by debt, he became a secret agent for the Venetian Tribunal of Inquisitors, using the name Antonio Pratiloni and snitching on heretics to the Catholic Church while living with a local seamstress.
Tales of derring-do and romantic trysts litter the memoirs, which are the main source of information about his checkered life. Heavily censored in earlier editions, they were not published in their full unexpurgated twelve-volume form until 1960; they paint a portrait of a lovable trans-European rogue and seducer. He wrote them as an old man looking back on an adventurous life, working as the librarian to the Bohemian Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein. Casanova was never one for letting the facts stand in the way of a good tale. Some of his dates simply do not fit: people are in the wrong places and die at the wrong times, and the pseudonyms he gives his various conquests make it impossible to be certain who was who. Unreliable, self-indulgent and shameless, the memoirs are nevertheless a literary classic, a real picture of an entire epoch.
“I have lived as a philosopher,” declared Casanova on his deathbed, “and died as a Christian.” It was rather less straightforward, and rather more interesting, than that.
CAPTAIN COOK
1728–1779
Sir Hugh Palliser’s monument to Captain Cook, erected at Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, after the news of Cook’s death reached Europe
James Cook was responsible for exploring and charting boundless areas of the Pacific hitherto unknown to Europeans. A creative captain as well as a fine navigator, he devised a diet for his crews rich in vitamin C, thereby preventing the outbreaks of scurvy that usually afflicted those on long voyages. It was curiosity and ambition as well as science that drove Cook to fulfill his desire to voyage not only “farther than any man before me, but as far as I think it is possible for a man to go.”
Cook’s achievements were remarkable given his beginnings. The son of a Yorkshire farm laborer, as a lad he was apprenticed to a grocer. This did not satisfy his restless spirit, and he set off for the port of Whitby. Here he signed on to serve on a merchantman and spent a number of years sailing on colliers up and down the east coast of England. Having acquired the rudiments of navigation, in 1755 he volunteered for the Royal Navy and rose swiftly through the ranks. During the Seven Years’ War Cook achieved renown as a hydrographic surveyor, and his work charting the St. Lawrence River and the coast of Canada was critical to subsequent British victories. His surveys and sailing directions concerning Newfoundland were used for well over a century.
Cook’s observations of the solar eclipse of 1766 so impressed the Royal Society that, jointly with the Admiralty, it commissioned him to make a voyage to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus—and also to explore and claim for Britain the undiscovered southern continent known as Terra Australis. The belief in the existence of such a continent—covering not only the South Pole but also extending far to the north into the Indian Ocean and the Pacific—had been held by geographers since the time of Aristotle. Cook’s discoveries conclusively put the myth to rest: in circumnavigating New Zealand for the first time (1769), discovering Australia’s east coast (1770) and sailing through the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea, Cook showed these lands to be separate entities. But the furtherance of science was only one of Cook’s aims; he also claimed for King George III many of the lands he discovered—such as New South Wales and Hawaii (which he called the Sandwich Isles in honor of his patron, the Earl of Sandwich). During his second voyage (1772–5), he achieved the first circumnavigation of the Antarctic, and in so doing became the first person to cross the Antarctic Circle.
