Spanish navigators, but it is doubtful whether, before Cook started, news had been received of the sighting of the Tuamotu archipelago of islets by Bougainville, or of the Samoa group (Navigators' Islands). Most of the largest and most important of the Pacific islands remained practically or completely undiscovered. These were the Hawaii archipelago (see pp. 121-2), the Fiji Islands, the southern islands of the New Hebrides, the large island of New Caledonia, the Loyalty Islands, the groups of the Gilbert, Phoenix, and Ellice Islands, the Hervey or Cook Islands, the Tubuai or Austral Islands, besides the whole east coast and Alpine range of New Zealand, and the little Norfolk Island midway between New Zealand and New Caledonia. Finally, there were the undecided questions of the supposed connection of New Guinea with the north coast of the Australian continent, and the existence of a vast southern continent occupying much of the area of the Pacific Ocean in the South Temperate Zone. The whole of these blanks in Australasian geography were filled up and more or less accurately mapped, the vexed questions were set at rest and solved, by the great JAMES COOK in the two voyages of discovery which he made in the years 1768-71, 1772-5, and 1776-9. [67] Admiral Roggeveen is also thought to have first realized the separate, insular character of New Britain in 1723. Captain JAMES COOK, who will certainly be regarded in universal history as the foremost hero of Australasian discovery, was born on 27 October, 1728, at the little Yorkshire village of Marton, in the Cleveland district of northern Yorkshire, in a two-roomed wattle-and-clay cottage. He was the son of a farm labourer, also named James Cook and said to have been of Scottish origin. In time Cook's father rose to the position of a farm bailiff. The great James Cook, his second son, was sent to school when he was eight years old, and received the elements of a good education, especially in arithmetic. At the age of sixteen or seventeen he was bound apprentice to a grocer and haberdasher, or, more correctly, a general-store dealer, a man, in fact, who kept the principal shop in the pretty little village of Staithes, in a hollow of the cliffs 10 miles north of Whitby. This move brought Cook into close relations with a sea-faring life, as most of the customers of the shop were fishermen and smugglers. In fact, his place of business was only 300 yards from the sea waves (which now entirely cover the site of the original shop).