Captain Cook statues under threat as BLM campaigners add explorer to hit list
Statues in London and Whitby and a pub among 125 controversial landmarks and tributes activists want removed or renamed
3 February 2021 • 9:00pm
The statue of Captain James Cook on the south side of The Mall in London
Credit: Julian Simmonds for The Telegraph
Statues of Captain Cook are under threat after Black Lives Matter campaigners added the genocidal explorer to a national hit list.
Two statues in London and Whitby, two museums and a pub are among 125 controversial landmarks and tributes that activists want renamed or removed.
Additions to the list since the summer include Captain Cook Square, Captain Cook s Crescent, James Cook University Hospital and a Captain Cook museum, all of which are in Middlesbrough, along with the Captain Cook Memorial Museum in Whitby.
A portrait of James Cook in the gallery of Greenwich Hospital
Credit: GSinclair Archive/Getty
In February 1772, the musician and author Charles Burney held a special dinner at 42 Queen Square, his London residence. The guest of honour was Captain James Cook, who, since returning from his three-year expedition to the South Pacific the previous year, had become something of a celebrity.
Burney’s primary objective that evening was to advance his son’s naval career, but, like all of London, he was eager for every detail of Cook’s voyage. Before supper, he took Cook on a tour of his library, to which he had recently added the newly published travel diaries of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, a French adventurer who had made his own, less successful, Pacific voyage in 1766.
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